Joseph O'Neill - Netherland

“Pedestal!” Rachel roared. “Pedestal!”

To revert: it’s true that I did not make inquiries into the deeper goings-on of Chuck Ramkissoon. It’s also true that Chuck was a friend, not an anthropological curiosity.

In any case, there was no need for me to conduct inquiries. Chuck was only too happy to make disclosures about himself.

He decided, for example, to let me in on his little racket.

I was rolling the outfield one hot Sunday morning when a man approached. He was an ordinary fellow in his forties, black, in sneakers and a T-shirt, and he stood around looking ill at ease. I dismounted the roller and went to him.

“Chuck there?” he said.

I took him to the hangar where Chuck was taking photographs and measurements. We couldn’t see him and were about to step out when his voice called from somewhere, “Nelson!”

They shook hands. Chuck said, “I got it right here, boy,” and from a buttock pocket he extracted a wad of bills. I watched him count off a bunch and hand them to Nelson with a great smile. Nelson was smiling, too. Chuck walked him to his car. There was a brief chat, and then the car pulled quickly away.

“Well, he seems pretty happy,” I said.

“He should be,” Chuck said.

Tony wasn’t around. It was just Chuck and me on that field. We climbed onto the roller, an ancient, peeling piece of equipment that moved on two drums filled with water. Chuck took the seat and I stood next to him on a small metal platform. The engine roared and we began to crawl toward the container shed.

Chuck shouted, “You a gambling man, Hans?” When I shook my head, he said, “Not even scratchies?”

“Maybe once or twice,” I said. I remembered rubbing a coin on a grid of silver boxes, hoping for the same dollar number to reveal itself three times in the gashes in the silver. It hadn’t, and I hadn’t cared; but the business had been sufficiently gripping to provide a clue as to why the hard-up half of New York was addicted to the experience — this being the impression I gained practically every time I had reason to step into a deli.

Presently the roller eased into the shed. We started chaining it up. Chuck said, “How about weh-weh? You ever heard of that?” Chuck and I sat down on the two chairs he kept handy. We each opened a soda and drank thirstily. “It’s an old Trinidad game,” Chuck said. The weh-weh man, also known as the banker, he explained, wrote down a number from one to thirty-six on a piece of paper, folded the paper, and deposited it at an accessible location — a shop, say, or a bar, or a street corner. “My father was a weh-weh man,” Chuck said. “He liked to pick a spot by the river. It used to be popular, that river. Maybe it still is. People would go up there to the basins where you could dive, places full of millions fish. You went up there, you cooked by the river. There was catfish, crayfish in the water, but people hardly fished. You went there to lime. One time,” Chuck digressed, “my brother Roop went off and stole a duck late, late at night. We took the duck to the river, slaughtered it, cut its head off. I remember Roop holding it up by the foot and letting the blood run off. Then we plucked it and cooked it. A white duck,” Chuck recalled. “Nobody can lay claim to a white duck.”

Once the winning number, or mark, was chosen, Chuck resumed, the runners would go out and collect the bets — which in those days might range from fifty cents to fifty TT dollars. At a fixed hour, the banker revealed, or “burst,” the mark. “Remember that guy with me at the restaurant in Manhattan? You were with the food critic.”

“McGarrell,” I said.

“That’s right,” Chuck said. “You remember his name. Anyhow, that’s how I know McGarrell. He came running down to our house to place a bet for his father. Everybody played weh-weh, even though it was illegal. I’m talking about the countryside here, miles away from Port-of-Spain or any other big town. Even my father played sometimes. Listen to this: one afternoon, it was raining heavily and we were all at home, sitting on the gallery. A one-eyed frog comes out of the rain, hopping up the step of the gallery. My father jumped.” Chuck leaped sideways, pointing at the ground. “‘Look that the frog! This is a mark for the weh-weh, boy.’ He put his hand in pocket and gave me seventy-five cents. ‘Put all this on crapaud,’ he said. And of course crapaud won.”

You chose your numbers, Chuck told me, according to what you saw around you or, especially, what you saw in your dreams. There was an art to remembering your dreams, and some people were fanatical about it. “They wake up in the middle of the night and write it down, quick, before it’s gone.” If you saw a priest or a pundit, you played parson man, number 5; or if you saw a knife or a cutlass or broken glass, anything that cut, you played centipede, number 1. “Men would lie down just to dream for weh-weh,” Chuck Ramkissoon said. “More you sleep, more you dream, my father used to say.”

Where was he going with this?

Chuck said, “After my brother died, I helped out my father a lot. I was his right-hand man. He worked in the fields, you know. The weh-weh was a sideshow. But it was where most of the money came from. People trusted him. They liked him. I learned a lot just watching him talk to them, handle them. Deo Ramkissoon.”

Chuck stood up and searched around for something. He said, “When I first began to save some money, I began to ask myself, What if I could set up a little weh-weh game here? People like to play, it reminds them of the old country. So I did. Small bets, very small bets, just for fun. I made it fun,” Chuck said. He told me that he devised an elaborate sign system tailored just for Brooklyn, with numbers corresponding to sights and scenes that daily surrounded the gamblers: a Haitian, cops making an arrest, a street fair, a game of cricket or baseball, an airplane, a graveyard, a drug dealer, a synagogue, “every kind of thing you see around here. People came to me with their dreams and I translated the dreams into numbers. People love that kind of thing. After a while,” Chuck said, “I figured out I could afford to take bigger bets. But I didn’t want to get into trouble. I stopped the small-time game and restricted myself to more serious customers. A boutique lottery, I call it. Very discreet, very select.” He wiped his hands clean of all dirt. “It isn’t just Trinis playing anymore. I get Jamaicans, Chinese. A lot of Chinese. When Abelsky joined me, the Jews became involved. They play five, ten, twenty thousand. Big bucks. It’s me they trust, not Abelsky,” Chuck said. “It’s my game. I’m the banker. I burst the mark.”

“Why would people want to play?” I said. It felt strange asking him this question, since there were plenty of other things that needed saying. “Why not just play the regular lottery? Or go to Atlantic City?”

“I give better odds,” Chuck said. He pulled out an old cricket bat and leaned it against his chair. “I provide a door-to-door service. It makes it more special. You know, people are desperate for something special.”

I understood, now, the point of my driving lessons. It gave Chuck a measure of cover, maybe even prestige, to have a respectable-looking white man chauffeuring him while he ran around collecting bets all over Brooklyn. Apparently it had not bothered him that he was putting me at risk of arrest and imprisonment.

“Door-to-door service,” I said. “Nice going, Chuck. You really had me there.”

He laughed. “Come on, you were never in any danger of anything.” He bent down with a groan and picked up a box of old cricket balls.

We walked together to the field’s center. This was how we ended each of our sessions of groundsmanship: by whacking a dozen balls to the edge of the field and studying the consistency of each sector of the field. We were making progress. The outfield was getting quicker and truer. In accordance with our routine, I took the bat and with one-handed underarm strokes scattered the balls in every direction. We circled the field together, picking up the balls dotted around the field like markers of hours. Neither of us spoke then, or ever again, about his lottery.