Sneaky People: A Novel (11 page)

Without relaxing its attention, without even a tremor of tail, the parrot suddenly ejected a spurt of liquid excrement, which solidified instantly when it hit the newspapers on the cage floor, forming another oyster-colored clump with seeds, chaff, and gravel.

Leo deftly swung the machine around and rumbled across the rug towards the davenport, keeping his eyes down until the first row of orange-and-pink, octagonal segments of afghan intruded into the top of his vision. There was nothing for it now but to look up and see his mother’s mouth working.

But a sudden tension of the power cord caused him instead to turn and see he had encircled the vertical standard of the birdcage. Another inch of forward motion would have toppled it over. He had never done this before.

He switched off the motor, creating an awful silence. Boy was back on his swing, green head stolidly pulled down neckless into his sloping shoulders, eyes self-righteously closed.

Leo turned. His mother never noticed his activities unless he made a mistake while performing them. She would not have missed this error, which he was fully prepared to admit had been idiotic.

The afghan had fallen to the floor, and she was all blood from her chin to the waist of the old dressing gown. If her past hemorrhages had been only in fantasy, this one was real, and she was white-faced and dead.

Even in the throes of horror, Leo realized he must clean up here before carrying the Hoover upstairs.

A
CCORDING TO
an alphabetical scheme, Ralph and Hauser were assigned to different home rooms in high school. On the first day, after an assembly attended by the entire student body, everyone was dismissed until the following morning. The two friends found themselves in the crowd and started the familiar walk home. The high school adjoined the grade school to which they had gone for eight years.

As freshmen they were allowed one elective, and Ralph had chosen Speech. Hauser had predicted he would himself opt for Manual Training, which had been compulsory in the seventh and eighth grades, but now he announced that he too had decided on Speech.

“It’s supposed to give you poise,” said Ralph. “That comes in handy in business and I guess in whatever other field you might go into in later life.”

“Listen, Sandifer,” said Horse, “until I learn the ropes I hope you don’t try to crack me up when I have to make a speech.” He compressed his lips earnestly. “You know, like make a monkey face or give me the old—” He thumbed his nose.

Some other kids went by on bikes. One cried: “You eat it, Hauser.”

“Christ, why would I do that?” asked Ralph in amazement.

“You want to make an agreement? You won’t try to crack me up, and I won’t do it to you. O.K.?”

“It’s a deal.” They shook on it.

“Listen,” Ralph said. “I think I’ll take you up on that job, if you still mean it. I think I’ll go over there about three
P.M.
”

“Sure.” Hauser looked morose. But suddenly he brightened. “How about that brick we threw through Bigelow’s window! I bet he didn’t know whether to shit or go blind when he found that.” Without warning he rammed Ralph with his hard hip. Taken by surprise, Ralph fell against a low retaining wall at the edge of someone’s property.

“God
damn
you,” he cried as he rose. He examined the seat of his trousers. “If you’ve torn these new pants of mine—”

Across the street on the other sidewalk he saw Darlene and Doreen Montgomery, twins who were in their class, and realized Hauser had knocked him down to show off to them. They made identical grimaces. One shouted: “You think you’d grow up now you’re in high school.”

Hauser, usually so quick with a rejoinder, turned his head away, smiling foolishly and in silence. He had a crush on the twins.

When they had walked snippishly on, he said in a sickeningly sentimental voice: “Gee, I’m crazy about those cuties. Aren’t they just the
cutest
things imaginable?” He seemed to be talking to himself. “They got real good taste in clothes too. Look at them little tams on the backs of their heads.”

“You’re going crazy, Hauser,” Ralph said sourly. “I don’t know what you see in those snotty bitches.”

“Class,” said Horse. “See how clean they keep their saddle oxfords, and their skirts ain’t never wrinkled. I bet you they go to Florida again in November like they did last year, and come back with lovely suntans in the winter.”

Mrs. Montgomery was a cousin of the Flegenbaums, the brewery family. Before Prohibition they had been bootleggers. Mr. Montgomery, a sallow little man, had been given a managerial job at the beer plant, which made him well-to-do in the local context: he drove a Chrysler, and the twins sported a different outfit every schoolday. However, they were far from being the rich girls portrayed by Katharine Hepburn, with their own tennis courts and a uniformed flunky who served breakfast from silver-covered dishes; and to show you how provincial they were, once when Ralph borrowed an ascot from his father to wear inside his sports-shirt collar to hide the top of a frayed undershirt, the Montgomery twins snickered and asked if he had a throat-cold.

Hauser watched the girls until they turned the corner. They walked briskly, in step, their pleated skirts swinging in unison.

“They slay me, those two,” said he.

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Sandifer, I want to ask you man to man: do you think I’ve got a chance?”

“With which one?”

Hauser hung his head. “It’s weird. Either one. Both, I guess. The idea of twins is devastating. I can’t imagine one without the other. I can’t tell one from the other. I’d like to get married to them both.”

“Married? What the hell you want to get married for?”

“Why,” said Hauser, frowning, “because you fall in love.”

Ralph snorted. “You’re a fifteen-year-old kid, for Christ sake.”

“I guess you’re thirty-five.”

“When I am,” said Ralph, “I won’t be married.”

“You’ll be jacking off in some boardinghouse someplace: that’s what you’ll be doing.”

Ralph had not intended to get into this argument, but he could not endure Hauser in a sentimental phase. “I’ll be going out with movie stars!”

They had stopped walking. Hauser seized the crook of his elbow and said: “Tell me this then: suppose you had the chance to get married to Merle Oberon?”

“She’s already married. That’s no example.” He did not know this for a fact about Merle. If he came across an article about her in a newspaper or movie mag he quickly turned the page. He could not bear learning about her personal life. He wanted stars to live only on the silver screen, vanishing into a limbo between pictures. He had heard that his favorite male performer, Errol Flynn, was a big drunk and sex fiend in real life. He hated to hear that kind of information.

“By time you’re thirty-five maybe she’ll be divorced. You know movie stars.”

Ralph said stiffly: “I don’t want to talk about it. It’s ridiculous.”

Hauser jeered. “You’re afraid to admit you’re madly in love with Merle. I notice you never talk dirty about her, either. That’s what I mean, Sandifer. A man just don’t go through life fucking whores. He wants to find the girl of his dreams and settle down in a little love nest and have kids.”

“A glamorous star like Merle in a little love nest?”

“Go on,” said Hauser, throwing up his shoulder caps, “be sarcastic. You don’t hurt my feelings none. Someday when you’re an old bum, you come around my house where I’m living with Doreen—or Darlene—and we’ll give you a hot meal on the back steps.”

“O.K.,” said Ralph. “Then you come for cocktails in my New York penthouse, and be sure to wear your tuxedo because if you don’t the butler won’t let you in.”

They had reached Horse’s home, a two-story structure from which the paint was flaking. The long porch ran downhill at the north end, where a post was disintegrating from rot or termites. A blackened dump-truck sat in the twin mud tracks that constituted the driveway. Hauser’s father was a driver for the coal company.

“Oh-oh,” said Horse, seeing the truck. “The big prick is home for lunch.”

“See you,” said Ralph.

“Not if I see you first,” Horse cried without turning his head.

Buddy went to the bank as soon as it opened, poked his head into the frosted-glass cubicle of Charlie Furst, the president, and asked for the return of the erroneous night-deposit envelope.

Charlie was dunking a teabag into a china cup. “Sure, Bud,” said he. “Mary just went down to bring them up.” He hung the tiny tag over the side of the cup. “Say, I’m going to buy a new machine and if Hellman Buick won’t give me enough on the trade-in, I might come around and see you.”

“You’d do all right over there,” said Buddy. “They need your business.” Furst had approved a loan for Buddy some years before and ever since had been threatening to ask for the return of what was not that big a favor. He would expect top dollar for his car. Buddy had better friends now at the Building & Loan Society. Still, this was not the time for reluctance; he could save that until Furst showed up at the lot. “But if they don’t,” he said, “come on over and we’ll see what we can do.”

“Thirty-seven Buick four-door, clean as a whistle. You know the car. Less than fifty thousand mileage?” He was asking how much it would bring.

Buddy would not accept the question. “We’ll be glad to take a gander if it don’t work out with Hellman. But I know him to be fair.”

Furst raised his eyebrows. “I thought he was the competition.” Hellman had his own used-car lot next to his showroom.

“Charlie,” Buddy said sententiously, “I never try to succeed by knocking someone else.”

Furst held his cup over the metal wastebasket and plucked out the dripping teabag, which however he did not discard but rather tucked onto the saucer for later use. He was a middle-aged man of no great local popularity, having had to foreclose mortgages on various people during the Depression.

“That’s a real manly attitude,” said he.

Buddy gave him a one-fingered salute and went to the last teller’s window, which was unattended. Through the bars he saw that Mary Wentworth had brought the night deposits up from the basement in a Werk Soap carton, which she was now emptying onto her desk.

He called to her, and she came to the window. Mary was a widow in her late thirties. Her trunk was slender but she had a plump face and a large round behind. Recently she had taken to hennaing her brown hair, no doubt because of the arrival of some gray.

After hearing Buddy’s problem in sullen silence, she returned to her desk, found the envelope, and brought it to him. “I never thought
you’d
make a mistake,” she said sourly and went back to work.

“Obliged, Mary,” said Buddy. It had been Mary he was pronging in the office that night when Clarence tried to steal a car. She had come originally to the lot to sell her late husband’s automobile, which she could not drive, and anyway she was in grievous need of money, her uninsured spouse having left her with two children and no profession. Buddy gave her more for the old Hupmobile than he could ever sell it for, and he also made her a gift of his tool for several months until her gratitude became obnoxious. She of course called it love, but Buddy knew it was rather that she had been badly in need of confidence. He had done a lot for her, even put in the good word with Charlie Furst that got her hired at the bank; but since he had turned off the sex, all she had for him was the peevishness of the spurned.

Now you take Laverne: he sensed a potential ferocity in her, which perhaps she herself was not aware of. He believed she might kill him if he ever rejected her. In the throes of her passion he often felt as if she might tear his dick out at the roots. Afterwards he was sometimes strangely disappointed to find it still in place, though having in his late frenzy been obsessed with its imminent disappearance. Buddy had looked all his life, without realizing it, for a woman who overwhelmed, even terrified him when fucking and then climbed out of bed, hunger satiated, to display an equable temperament.

When he reached the lot and parked behind the office he saw Clarence in the garage. He waved the envelope at him, but the one-eyed Negro did not seem to get the significance of the gesture. Around front, Buddy had to unlock the door. Leo was rarely known to be late, but his tardiness now served Buddy’s ends.

Buddy opened the envelope and shook its contents out upon his desk. He saw immediately that the murder fund was not included, but took a while to accept that fact, counting and recounting and examining the deposit slip. Then he went to the safe and took out and unlocked the cashbox, though he knew the effort would be fruitless.

But there, secured by a rubber band, were the bills. Buddy thumbed their edges reflectively, but did not count them. Were it not for the rubber band, he might have assumed that somehow he had overlooked the money the day before when he had searched the box. But he understood immediately that, having no matching sales slips for this sum, Leo had brought it back. But when?

Leaving the money where it was, he locked the box and replaced it in the safe. He unlocked the door to the garage and saw Clarence, who was prying at the thread of his rubber boot with a screwdriver.

“Leo been in here?”

“No,” said Clarence.

Buddy closed the door and went to look out front. It was rare to see a customer this early on a Monday morning. He and Leo generally used the time to reconsider prices on cars that had been around for a while without attracting much interest. Then after Clarence cleaned the old figures off the windshields, Leo would whitewash the new ones on, making certain flourishes, such as long tails on the digits that permitted and underlining special bargain prices or following them with one or more exclamation marks.

As it happened, the morning proved more profitable than most Mondays before noon. A Methodist minister, who had been given a hundred dollars to purchase a replacement for his ’29 Ford, bought a ’31 LaSalle that had been on the lot for months, did not try to jew Buddy down, accepted the offer of twenty-five dollars for his old car, and drove off oblivious to the blue smoke pouring from the tailpipe.

Buddy was about to get into the old A-model and drive it back for Clarence’s cleanup when he heard footsteps behind him. He turned and saw Ballbacher.

Before he had time to react, the young man spoke: “I want to buy a Ford phaeton if you got one.”

He showed no recognition of Buddy whatever. He was some kind of nut.

Buddy stared at him for a moment and then said: “Well, we ain’t got one.”

Ballbacher’s square face was suddenly segmented by a grin. He pulled a handful of greenbacks from his pants pocket. “I got the cash right here.”