Sneaky People: A Novel (10 page)

“No, I never.”

“You wash him in tomato juice.”

“Is that a fact,” said Leo.

“Some people say milk, but they’re wrong. No soap will touch it, for sure. I don’t know about turps. But tomato juice’s the ticket.”

“Pretty expensive, I bet,” said Leo.

“Depends on the size of your dog. A fox terrier will take a whole number-ten can. Now, you got a collie, you need a lot more.”

“I bet,” said Leo, shaking his head dolefully.

“But you got to do something,” Plum said, rubbing his buttock with the back of the sickle blade. “He’ll stink so much you can’t bear him around. I never owned a dog myself. You know who told me that? A boogie. They know everything about dogs. You ever know any colored people, Leo?”

“There’s one down at the lot.”

“I’ve known quite a few in my time,” Plum said, propping one foot in a high-topped shoe onto the cistern cover alongside Leo and leaning over him in amiable menace. “I don’t mind saying I learned a lot from ’em. You know, they’ll eat carp, when nobody else will touch it. The secret is you pull out the mud vein, then you got something that tastes as good as bluegill or perch. I never eat any kind of fish myself. Life’s too short for that.”

Plum had a way of talking with special enthusiasm of things he did not do.

“What’s your favorite food?” he asked. “Steak or roast beef?”

“Roast beef, I guess.”

“Then steak, and then?”

Leo said: “Roast pork would have to come in there.”

Plum frowned. “Not ham? Covered with pineapple pieces and cloves? Man, that’s eating, for my money. Then you got sandwiches from it at night, with lots of mustard. Next morning, a big fat slice with your eggs! The ham what am, like they say.”

Leo was getting uneasy with Plum hanging over him. “That what you had for dinner, huh?”

Plum backed away and raised his eyebrows. “The fact is, we had chicken.”

“Me too.”

“I be damned,” said Plum. “That’s a coincidence for you. Like old Hoover used to say, a chicken in every pot. I read Roosevelt and Eleanor eat wieners now and again. You can’t tell what’s in a sausage though; might be a rat fell in the grinder, for God’s sake.”

Leo wrinkled his nose.

Plum said: “But you don’t think of that if you’re in a ballpark, and the hotdog guy comes around and you eat one, you want another. He laughed at this folly. “I haven’t seen a ballgame in six-seven years though.” Still smiling, he said: “How’s Sandifer these days?”

Plum did not like Buddy. Though Leo lived next door, Plum had acquired his last car at a lot in neighboring Oldenburg, where he ran a radio-repair shop.

“He’s always treated me all right.”

“Ever see his latest floozy?”

Leo made a stern mouth. “That’s none of my business, the way I see it.”

“She lives in the second-floor-back over on Myrtle, just off Chandler. I delivered a set across the street there the other day and saw him come out. Then later I see this blond head at the window.”

Leo said in a dampening tone: “We sold her a machine. He was dropping it off.”

“He drove away in a car. If he delivered one for her, who drove his over?”

“Jack did and then walked home for lunch. He lives over that way.”

Plum said: “That was four o’clock or so.”

In the first place Leo was exasperated by having to tell the lie; then to have it questioned was unfair in the extreme.

“Jack
left it there
at lunch. Buddy picked it up later.
I
picked Jack up at his house and took him back to the lot.”

Plum was not insensitive. “Don’t get me wrong, Leo. I’m not grilling you. It’s just with that bird’s reputation…”

Throughout the years Leo had always got unwanted information about Buddy’s love life by such means, and while always publicly denying its authenticity, he invariably accepted it privately as truth. The resulting tension was very unpleasant, and it was never relieved by any personal knowledge: not once had he seen Buddy in a compromising situation.

He rose from the cistern. “You sure couldn’t prove it by me.”

Plum looked kindly at him. “You know, Leo, you’ve got a clean mind. You’re too decent a human being to maybe know how rotten some people are.”

Plum had embarrassed himself by making this statement, he whose usual role was to relate facts with which he had no personal connection to someone for whom they had no use. “I have to take the little lady for a spin,” he said abruptly, turned, and lumbered towards home.

Leo was touched by Plum’s opinion, but wondered whether the theory held water. He actually knew a great deal of dirt, though he never sought it out nor did he pass it on. For example, he knew what had inspired Plum’s bias against Buddy. Dave Hunnicut, who owned the Flying Red Horse station, had told Leo that in 1937 Buddy had put the blocks to Plum’s wife. “She’s a nympho,” said Hunnicut, leaning close and giving Leo the benefit of his halitosis.

Leo rarely saw Grace Plum though she lived next door. She worked in a beauty shop in the city, taking an early streetcar every morning. At Xmas time, according to Plum, she got a lot of nice gifts from her clients, some of whom were well-to-do. Unless it rained, Plum always took her for a ride of a Sunday afternoon. Sometimes they would stop for a game of Tom Thumb golf, then get grilled-bratwurst sandwiches at the cafe nearby and bring them home for supper. That was all Leo knew about the Plums’ home life, and it was rather more than he knew about the Sandifers’.

Leo’s period of recreation having reached its end, he got up from the cistern and headed inside to vacuum the house from top to bottom. For a few precious hours the roar of the old Hoover would obscure his mother’s sounds. At the back steps he lifted the lid of the garbage can and dropped in the rotogravure section, the only part of the paper that he did not preserve for the basement collection which would in time be sold to the junk dealer.

The picture of What’s-her-name and her tinfoil ball fell face down upon the broken eggshells and the blackened starfish of a banana skin. Leo was ruthless after he had had his way with a girl.

He crept quietly along the hall to the closet which held the vacuum cleaner, hoping to get it out and running before his presence was detected. Nevertheless the parrot heard him cross a loose floorboard and screeched: “Bum!” He waited for his mother’s ax to fall, but apparently she was still dozing on the weight of her enormous dinner, at which she had devoured the entire chicken except the drumstick he had served himself, three helpings of noodles, two of pie. She ate like a laborer, spent most of her day on sofa or bed, and still had the figure of a young girl. Perhaps her nocturnal vomiting provided the answer.

Leo had equipped the vacuum with an extension cord which, added to the long wire that unwrapped from the hooks on the handle, gave him twenty feet to play with, so that he could plug it into a hall socket and enter the living room with the machine already whirring and nod and smile while his mother’s mouth worked inaudibly. Before the development of this technique he had been at her mercy; he did not have the stomach to throw the switch once she had begun to talk. Though, in truth, it was all the same to her whether she could be heard or not.

She had been a different woman when his father was alive. His father had been the talker. Funny, Leo had no precise memory of what his father had talked about, but it was always good-natured and often accompanied by a finger in the area of his bellybutton, followed by a little popping vibration of his father’s lips. His father would also address him with joke names like “Schnickelfritz” or “Buster Brown,” and sometimes from no other motive than high spirits give him a penny for jawbreakers. Leo usually salted these coins away, but he would come around with his tongue stuck in his cheek and say something so his father could suggest: “Better finish the candy before trying to bejabber.”

In those days his mother did all the housework. Sometimes she would take a moment in the late afternoon just before supper to pedal a roll through the player piano, though she never sang. She was up in the morning before everybody else, and stayed up at night until all were in bed. She knitted mufflers, crocheted doilies, canned every variety of fruit and vegetable, and baked all the bread and cake they ate. In the spring she cleaned the wallpaper of every room in the house with that pink putty that soon turned black. When repapering was called for, she did that as well, first soaking the old layer with a sponge and then stripping the plaster bare with a triangular scraper. She would set up a pasting rig like a professional, boards across sawhorses, shoot the roll along it, mark, cut, and slap on the flour-and-water mix with the big white-bristled brush; then climb the stepladder and drop the segment along the wall. On the finished job you could not see where the patterns joined unless you went right up to the seams.

In her day she never had the electrically powered instrument now wielded by Leo. His mother did the job with a carpet sweeper, and better than he, as she had been a better cook, a better housekeeper all around; indeed a better person until his father had fallen off the roof, because she had a job commensurate with her talents and interests.

Whereas Leo had felt misplaced all his life. What was he doing selling used cars? He was no extrovert like Buddy, and his interest in money was rather in saving what he had than in making more, the reverse of the salesman’s proper mystique.

While vacuuming each Sunday, Leo simultaneously carried out the accumulation of trash from his soul, cleaning it for another week of balanced existence. Why was his sex life confined exclusively to writing imaginary notes to schoolgirls? Why did he have no friends and furthermore feel no need to have any? Why was he without hobbies and avocations? For he was aware, from articles in
This Week
as well as the attitudes of such associates as Jack his co-worker and Plum the neighbor, that the way he lived might seem restricted, even bleak, to others; to some who were not aware that he supported his mother, perhaps even downright odd. But if you had no friends, there were fewer persons to speculate on such matters.

If you had short-lived, fantasy relationships with females, you spent no time or money; and if they were with teen-aged girls, the make-believe was not rich enough to distract you from reality. Leo feared the consequences of even imagining an association with, say, a Grace Plum, in whose large breasts and deep hips one might disappear as if in quicksand. Therefore he sensibly averted his eyes when he saw her come out to sunbathe attired in shorts and halter.

As to hobbies, he had scarcely enough leisure in which to perform his tasks.

This left, to last, what was always the first question of his Sunday stocktaking: his job. True, he was by nature no salesman, but at least since he had worked for Buddy he had been offering for sale a product that customers were in the market for, else they would not have come on the lot. Previously, in the worst years of the Depression, after being laid off as clerk at the coal company, a job he had had since dropping out of school, he was forced to go from door to door with the kind of merchandise nobody sought of their own volition: a one-volume encyclopedia, then a line of shoddy brushes in imitation of Fuller, and finally the real Realsilk hosiery, a product that was decent enough but required calling on housewives with an intimate item when they were home alone. No doubt Buddy would have made a bundle at this, as well as an enormous commission in flesh, but Leo preferred the hostile women who slammed the door in his face to those who did not even open it.

Finally, there was security in working for Buddy. Their personalities were compatible. At the rare moments when Buddy’s control failed, as in the incident with Ballbacher—which was unprecedented in the appearance of the gun—Leo’s own gift came into play. Had Ballbacher been his own customer, of course, no trouble would have arisen. One problem Leo could handle beautifully was the last-minute loss of nerve by a certain type of client. When Ballbacher had hesitated, Leo would have taken the initiative in negation, denied him the pen and the purchase agreement, and made a display of compassionate superiority. “Let’s look at something else that’s not too rich for your blood.” This might have led to a lesser sale or none at all, but it might also have stung the man’s pride in a subtle way, suggesting that in considering a car he could not afford
he
had been the fraud, and not the salesman.

…All this while Leo had been methodically vacuuming the hallway, with its long, dun-colored runner that was worn through to the backing along the center line. Reaching its end, he ran the machine across the bare patch of floor between hall and living room, from which it evoked a thunderous reverberation. Across the faded maroon-and-blue carpet he steered for the area under the parrot’s cage, with its week’s collection of the sunflower seeds, whole, fragmented, or husks, either dropped by Boy with his insouciant eating habits or flung out deliberately. He seemed to enjoy the machine and always clung to the near bars, head cocked to watch its progress below; though if Leo bumped the standard that supported his abode, Boy would beat his wings and squawk shrilly enough to be heard above the motor.

Boy was supposed to be about the same age as Leo, according to the old lady who had given him the bird when he was fifteen. Despite the parrot’s manifest affection for him, Leo sometimes looked at the merciless yellow eye and wondered how they both would fare if Boy were five feet eight and he were a tiny man behind bars.