"Your footsteps."
"Very funny. Let go of my leg."
"And one of them fell on me." With my other hand I tapped at the place he had stepped on.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
He pulled harder. I squeezed harder.
"If I did, I didn't mean it."
"I thought you did mean it," I said to him. "If you swear to God and tell me again you didn't mean it, I think I might believe you."
"You a tough guy? You think so?"
"Yeah."
Other kids watched, girls too. I felt good.
"Well, I didn't mean it," he said, and stopped pulling.
"Then I think I believe you."
After that we were friends for a while.
Sammy decided one day to teach me how to fight and to show me while doing it how much better he was at boxing.
"You can't just do it on brawn, Lew."
He had a book of instructions he had read and some boxing gloves he had borrowed. I had to keep smiling at him as we laced each other up. He showed me the stance, the lead, he taught me the jab, the hook, the "uppracut."
"Okay, tiger, you showed me. Now what do we do?"
"We'll go about three minutes, rest for one, and I'll show you what you did wrong, and then we'll go another round. Remember, keep moving. No hitting in the clinches, no wrestling there either. That's not allowed. Put your left hand up, higher, keep it up and stick it out more. Otherwise I'll come right in and bop you. That's good. Let's go."
He struck a pose and danced in and out. I moved straight toward him and with my left hand pushed both his arms down easily. With my right I grabbed his face in my open glove and twisted it playfully from side to side.
"That's a clinch," he yelled. "You're not allowed to hold a face. You have to punch or do nothing. Now we break and start again. Remember, you've got to try to hit me."
He danced around faster this time, popped the side of my head with one of his jabs, and flew right back. I moved right at him again, shoved his arms down easily with one paw, and began patting him on the face lightly with my other paw. I couldn't help laughing as I looked at him. I was grinning, he was panting.
"Let's do something else," he said miserably. "This just isn't working, is it?"
I used to worry sometimes about little Sammy because he couldn't do much and liked to needle people. But he was smart and it turned out he only needled people he could tell would not get angry at him. Like me.
"Hey, Lew, how's your girlfriend with the big tits?" he would say to me during the war when I had started dating Claire and had brought her around.
"You're a clever fellow," I would tell him with a forced smile through gritted teeth. I have a nerve at one side at the back of my jaw and the side of my neck that I used to feel twitch when I was starting to boil. I would feel it in pinochle too when I had bid too high and needed every trick.
"Hey, Lew, give my regards to your wife with the big tits," he used to say after Claire and I got married. Winkler started baiting me that way too, and I couldn't crush him if I didn't crush Sammy, and I couldn't crush Sammy. He would have been my best man, but my folks wanted m
y brothers, and in my family all of us did what the other ones wanted us to.
They named me Lewis and called me Louie as though my name was Louis, and I never saw that difference until Sammy pointed it out. And even then, I still don't see much difference.
Sammy read newspapers. He liked the colored people and said they should be allowed to vote in the South and be free to live wherever they wanted to. I didn't care where they lived as long as they didn't live near me. I never really liked anyone I didn't know personally. We liked Roosevelt awhile when he became President, but that was mainly because he wasn't Herbert Hoover or another one of those Republicans or one of those hayseed anti-Semites in the South or Midwest or that Father Coughlin in Detroit. But we didn't trust him and we didn't believe him. We didn't trust banks and we didn't trust bank records and we did as much of our business as we could in cash. Even before Adolf Hitler we did not like Germans. And among the Germans who did not stand a chance in our house were German Jews. And that was even after Hitler. I grew up hearing about them.