Sneaky People: A Novel (13 page)

Margie tearfully stared between the bags at the sidewalk. “I insist on paying for the damages.”

With what? She carried no purse and had no visible pockets in her clothes. However, Ralph did not ask this obvious question. No use making a jerk feel worse; the result would be more jerkiness.

“Tell you what you
could
do,” said he. “You could go home and get a broom and dustpan and clean this mess up.”

“I don’t live near here.” In answer to his exasperated groan she said: “I was on my way to the library. I always go this way because I like to walk across the iron bridge and look at the water.”

Ralph merely groaned again and proceeded gingerly to place the carton upon the bike basket without dislodging the vehicle from its place of support. Succeeding in the effort, he called for the bags.

“Well, one thing I can do,” said Margie. “I can just tote these sacks for you.”

Ralph weighed the suggestion. Her company would embarrass him if he encountered acquaintances; but he had been mocked already by those boys for being overburdened as a lone hand. If she carried the bags, he could mount the seat and ride the bike, a situation of some dignity. Walking briskly behind his slow pedaling, she would be identifiable as an assistant and not a girl friend. In an emergency he could even sprint far ahead, leaving her in obscurity.

“All right,” he said. Then, as she began with the side of her shoe to scrape the largest fragment of glass towards the gutter: “Don’t do that! Cars park there.”

“Oh, yeah.” She peeped worshipfully between the bags. “Gee, you sure have a quick mind, Ralph. I’m scatterbrained I guess.”

“So I noticed.” He climbed on the bike seat.

Whenever he got too far ahead, which happened occasionally because the bags were heavy for her and she was careful to avoid further spillage, Margie cried out, and he stopped. After the first bag was disposed of, at a house seven blocks from the store, she was able to quicken her pace en route to the second destination, going indeed into an outright trot when Ralph, in mischief, turned on a burst of speed for the final fifty yards—and overshot the address, for harsh braking would have projected the carton to the pavement again.

He waited for her to come up puffing, sweating, her glasses fogged. Suddenly he felt shitty for pulling that stunt. At the first house, after receiving a lecture on balancing the box, she had held the bike while he carried the sack to the back door, waited in vain, and finally left it on the steps.

But now his conscience inspired him to say: “Go ahead, you can take it in.”

Her glasses had slipped down on the sweat of her upper nose. She stared over them, panting from the run, sweating copiously on the forehead, and clutching the bag in an attitude of endless apology.

“You mean it, Ralph?” As if he did not, she quickly opened the gate in the picket fence that surrounded this place and, having got inside, closed it firmly, speaking again only after she had got behind the barrier. “Gee, that’s nice of you.”

Ralph looked away. When he turned back he saw the dope had gone up on the
front
porch, violating the protocol of which everyone was aware, but before he could shout, the door opened and the housewife appeared. Ralph averted his eyes again and kept them so until Margie returned through the gate.

“Can’t you do anything right?”

Boldly ignoring the question, she said: “Here, this is yours.” She opened her fist, displaying exceptionally delicate slender fingers, though the palm was dirty and the nails chewed. She held a nickel.

Ralph drew back. “No, you keep it.”

“No, it’s yours!”

“You did the work. It’s only right.”

“But it’s your job,” she said with a wail. “And then I broke that junk, so here’s a nickel against it. That takes care of the Coke. I still owe for a half pint of cream and a bottle of Heinz’s catchup.”

Ralph could not help seeing the flaw in this computation. Without her aid he would not have broken the bottles and he would have put the tip in his pocket. Result: five cents ahead rather than still as much as thirty cents in the hole. Also there was a two-cent deposit on the Coke bottle. However, mean logic aside, he thought better of her than he ever had before: she meant well.

He accepted the coin in a judicious manner. “O.K. then. But the accident wasn’t all your fault by any means.” He coughed and said: “It was nice of you to help.” He put one foot on a pedal. “O.K., listen, I’ll see you around.”

She pointed at the box. “You don’t need help with that?”

“Huh-uh.”

“See, I don’t have anything to do. I was going to the library, but I forgot my card. I could carry in that box for you, and the tip would be all yours.” She pushed the glasses up her nose.

“Thanks,” said Ralph, “but this is my first day on the job. I’ve got to make time, and I’m behind schedule right now.” She looked so woeful that he tarried another moment. “I got it. Why not go see your pal Imogene Clevenger?” The suggestion also gave him an opportunity to pronounce that name, the magic of which had returned after the progress in which his spiteful feelings of Saturday night had given way by next morning to a conviction that Lester Hauser had surely lied about her.

“She’s no pal of mine! The other night she went off with that awful sailor.”

Ralph squashed his testicles against the forward projection of the bicycle seat; there was some rotten pleasure in that. He said feebly: “That old guy?”

“He’s immoral too. He drinks like a fish.” Margie put her grubby hand to her mouth. “I’m sorry, Ralph. I forgot Horace is your best friend.”

“Lester is only his brother. You don’t have to like brothers of friends.” Ralph added pompously, impersonally: “You don’t even have to like friends of friends. Frankly, I can’t stand your friend Imogene.

“I just hate her,” Margie cried enthusiastically. “I don’t intend to ever see her again.”

“Yeah,” he said curtly. “See you.” He took off at a speed that threatened to throw the box back over the handlebars.

All the shades in Leo’s house were pulled down, but there was no black wreath on the front door. Buddy opened the screen and knocked on the wood. The door had a window of clear glass, but it was hung with inside curtains through which nothing could be seen of the interior. Buddy had his eye there nevertheless, trying to look within, when the curtains parted at the bottom of the pane and Leo’s face appeared.

Though below Buddy’s level, and given Leo’s hysteria on the telephone, it looked normal enough. Buddy flashed his well-known grin. Leo’s heavy eyebrows came up though his head stayed low. The curtains closed and the door opened.

Leo wore an ancient spinach-green bathrobe, spotted with food stains. Taking the bit in his teeth, Buddy boldly pushed in without waiting for an invitation. The hallway was dark and had a queer odor.

Buddy began to talk with energy. “Gee, Leo, you give me quite a scare. You were talking so screwball on the phone, I figured you had gone haywire, but here I find you safe and sound, old son, and that sure takes a load off.” For effect he rolled his eyes, looking at nothing, and said: “Gee, what a nice place you’ve got here. I don’t believe I been inside in all these years. Well, sir…” He reached at Leo as if to touch him but did not, wanting no part of that filthy robe. “So I come over right away, anyhow.”

Leo closed the door and stood silently between it and Buddy, with the only available light behind him. Buddy could hardly see his face.

“Tell me I did the right thing,” said Buddy. “Have you got trouble?” He was astonished to hear his voice quaver and realized he was frightened. He needed a response; this gloomy dump was getting under his skin.

Leo spoke somberly. “It’s early. I’m not dressed yet.”

“Oh,” said Buddy with no conscious irony, “I thought it was noon, Leo.”

“She’ll be on view at four.”

Whatever that meant. Buddy had momentarily forgotten Leo’s grief on the phone, being obsessed with his missing gun.

“Listen, Leo,” he began, “I looked all over the office for that—” And then he remembered. “Good gravy, was I right when I asked about your dear mom?”

Leo lowered his head and his shoulders heaved.

“My sincere condolences,” said Buddy. “I never had the good fortune to know that fine lady, but I know what she meant to you, Leo. You have to walk the harsh road of life alone now.” He clapped his shoulder. “But at least you got a friend in Buddy Sandifer. Anything I can do, you name it.”

Leo’s head came up. “Excuse me. I ain’t being much of a host. I’ll give you some coffee.”

Anything to get out of that hall. Buddy followed his employee along the passageway to the rear. The farther they went, the feebler the light. But at last Leo opened a door that turned out to be the entrance to the kitchen.

Buddy felt a rush of well-being. “Swell place, Leo, real swell.” The room looked spotless; the linoleum had such a high sheen that Buddy walked gingerly. “Shame to track up this fresh polish,” said he, keeping his heels in the air. He took a seat at the oilcloth-covered table and observed that even the ketchup bottle there was crustless around the cap though not new.

Leo himself though was a mess in the light: unshaven, uncombed, and with yellow egg on the bosom of the robe.

“Must be hell for you,” Buddy said compassionately. “If the insurance don’t cover the arrangements, you just say the word and I’ll help out.”

Though he had been crazy on the phone and abstracted thus far in person, Leo now reassumed the personality he had always displayed at the lot. “That’s mighty white of you, Buddy.” Yet the contrast between his appearance and his sudden reasonable manner was bizarre.

Buddy watched him go to the stove and get the coffeepot, already filled and presumably warm. However, after Leo had poured him a cup, brought the milk bottle from the Frigidaire, and indicated the sugar bowl, he found the coffee stone-cold.

“Walsh’s is making the arrangements, I guess?” Buddy asked, naming the best-known of the local funeral homes. When they bought their new hearse, the Walsh brothers got a better deal from Buddy for the old one than if they had used it as trade-in. Buddy felt a superstitious need to oblige morticians. Then he made a nice profit from the eight college boys who bought it in common and decorated the panels with comic slogans like “Life goes from bed to hearse.”

Leo nodded. But then, just as Buddy had thought he was back to normal, he stirred his own cold coffee with a dirty forefinger. He narrowed his reddened eyes. “You take me for a fool, don’t you?”

“What the devil,” said Buddy.

“Hoho, I got you figured out.”

If fool there was, it was Buddy, for coming here. “Let’s not start that nutsy stuff again, Leo.” He shot his hand into the air. “Reason I came, if you wanna hear it, is my gun is missing from the office. I thought the crazy way you was talking, you might of taken it to do away with yourself.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Leo said, leaning back in his chair and smiling grandly.

Buddy pushed his cup away and rose. “In view of your recent loss, I won’t get into a argument with you. But I’ll say this, Leo: I wish you’d ask the doc for a bromide or something. You need rest. You had a shock, nothing to be ashamed of—”

Leo took the pistol from a pocket of his bathrobe. Just as Buddy’s heart collided with his tonsils, however, Leo reversed the weapon and pushed it butt-first across the tablecloth.

Buddy seized the gun and dropped it into his jacket. He breathed deeply. “Much obliged, Leo. Now, whyn’t you try to get some rest before going down the funeral home? Take a shot of Nervine if you got any or at least a couple aspirin.”

The man was cracked, but without his gun he was harmless. If Leo stayed in this state after his mother was under ground, Buddy planned to see old Doc Klingman on the matter. Maybe Leo could use a term in Greenlawn, the local nut hatch. When Buddy was twelve he found his own mother had been there for the two months following his birth. Few families went without a relative, if only an in-law’s cousin, who was, had been, or would be in Greenlawn; it was no disgrace.

Leo said stolidly: “The Walsh boys are bringing her here. She wanted to be laid out in the living room. I couldn’t never count how many times she told me that. She didn’t go down the business district in maybe fifteen years, and definitely did not want to break her record when she was dead. Course, they had to take her down there for embalming; no way to get around that.”

“Got to honor the wishes of the departed,” said Buddy. “There used to be a lot of that when I was a kid: laying-out in the home of the deceased. That thing seemed to go out with the horse. I for one don’t know why. It’s kinda nice.”

“Well, it’s homey,” said Leo. He looked and sounded normal again, and Buddy would have loved to know why he took the pistol, but did not dare ask and perhaps set him off again.

“Gee,” said Buddy. “It’s quick, ain’t it? I gather she passed away yesterday some time.”

Leo brightened. “Walsh’s didn’t have any other bodies on hand. I guess that was lucky anyway.”

Buddy said: “Now, Leo, you get some rest like I said.”

“I got to make a lot of coffee and get some cake at the bakery.”

“For pity sake, Leo, people don’t come to laying-outs for the refreshments. You don’t get none if the body is laid out at the funeral home.”