Sneaky People: A Novel (14 page)

“You get coffee,” Leo said stubbornly.

“But that’s only if you do business with the Walshes, like us. They take you in the office, where they got that electric percolator. But they never have cake.”

“But this,” Leo said defiantly, “was her
home
.”

Buddy opened the kitchen door onto the gloom of the hallway. “I’ll send a floral arrangement soon as they can get it here. You stay where you are. I can find my own way out.”

Leo looked at him desperately. “Say, Buddy,” he said, “I should of asked you before borrowing the gun.”

Buddy waved at him, pretending indifference. “I won’t mention it again.”

“I had to do a job,” said Leo, his eyes flickering. “I had this parrot, see, ever since I was a kid. He didn’t like women. He hated my mother, but funny, when he saw she died, he started screaming and wouldn’t stop unless the cage was covered. And even after the Walshes come and took her away, Boy still screamed if you took the cover off. So that’s no life for a bird. So he wouldn’t touch his sunflower seeds when I dosed them with rat poison, and I lived with him for years, I couldn’t bear to wring his neck or use a butcher knife, so I went over and returned that money and got your gun, and come back, and I took him outside and opened the cage door. He wouldn’t come out at first because one time I did that and opened the door and when he was on the grass I sprayed him with the hose and he was mad as hell and yelled, ‘Fire!’ which I never heard him say before nor since. Generally the only thing he said was ‘Hi, Boy’ and ‘Bum.’ So he had his eye on that pistol, which must of looked like a hose to him, and I put it in my pocket till he walked out onto the pile of dried grass Ralph stacks at the end of the yard, which I cover the flowerbeds with in the winter along with the leaves. A grasshopper walks out of it, and Boy sees it, looks down, I get the pistol out and blow his head off.”

Leo plunged his own head into his folded arms and moaned in grief.

“You can get mighty attached to a pet,” said Buddy.

Leo’s tear-stained face came up, howling: “I shouldn’t of done it! I could have given him away. I could have given him to Ralph.”

Buddy regarded this as a close call. He now observed that Leo’s real anguish was due to the loss of the parrot and not his mother. They might keep him in Greenlawn forever once they got hold of him.

“You had enough tragedies for one day,” he said, conscious of the weight of the gun in his pocket. He put his hand there so it would not swing against the doorjamb as he turned and went along the hall.

He opened the front door on four men who were mounting the porch with a large packing crate. One of the pair at the leading corners was a Walsh.

“Hi, Buddy,” said he. “Catch that screendoor, willya?”

“Hi, Roy.” Buddy did as requested, stepping aside. Howie Walsh and a colored helper had the back end.

Howie, who was younger than Roy, shook his head at the sight of the entrance. “This baby’ll never make that,” said he. The Negro seemed to echo these sentiments with a shining grin.

“It’s them screendoor hinges,” said Roy. “Buddy’s got her as far back as she’ll go, right?”

“Right,” said Buddy.

“Say, Bud, ya mind? Ask Leo for a screwdriver to get them hinges off. I’d ask him, but he’s the bereaved.”

“I’ll go, Roy,” said the white helper, a husky, tanned young fellow who worked summers as a lifeguard at the public pool.

“Wait a minute,” Buddy said, getting out his combination penknife/nail file. Holding the door with his ass, he found that the screwheads yielded to his file.

They put the box down while he worked. The colored guy began to whistle softly. “Cut that out,” Roy ordered.

When Buddy was done he jiggled the screws in his hand and said: “Plain pine box, huh?” He raised his eyebrows at Leo’s stinginess.

Roy peered within the doorway to see whether Leo was nearby, then said discreetly, within a cupped hand: “It just goes in the ground; that’s the way he figures.”

“What’s it inside, just wood full of splinters for Jesus’ sake?” asked Buddy.

Roy leaned closer to him. “She won’t be laid out in it. We’re supposed to arrange her on the couch, like she fell asleep.”

“With the
Woman’s Home Companion
in her hand,” Howie said. The Negro joined him in a snicker.

“You ain’t serious.”

“Well, the magazine is just Howie’s joke,” said Roy, bending to take his corner. “The rest is correct.” He looked up. “Hey, Leo’s here, isn’t he? I don’t want to act on my own responsibility in a matter like this. People get riled up about little details.”

They maneuvered the coffin through the door. “
Now what
?” said Howie as they halted in the entrance hall.

Buddy squeezed past them, saying he would get Leo. But when he reached the kitchen his employee had vanished. Where would he go in that filthy bathrobe? Through the window he got an answer: Leo was down at the end of the yard, staring at a flowerbed. It did not seem tasteful to shout, so Buddy left the house and walked to him.

“They’re here with the body.”

Leo was looking at a mound of fresh earth. “I don’t know if I ought to leave him here. Some alley cat might dig him up.”

Buddy returned to the house. “He’s out there at the grave of his fucking parrot,” he told Roy. “This thing has loosened his screws. You better go ahead. I’m gonna call Doc Klingman to give him a sedative.”

“I gotta have authorization from somebody for the arrangement of this body,” said Roy. “I can’t just dump it on the davenport.” The Negro chuckled. Dressed in dark clothing, he was hard to discern in the darkened hall now the door was closed.

“He works for you, Buddy,” said Howie. “How about it? He don’t have any relatives I know of.”

Buddy said: “Better find the living room first.”

Roy Walsh opened a door on the right, looked in, and said: “This is it.”

Buddy entered the room, which was even darker than the hall. Not only were the window shades down; the heavy opaque curtains were closed. The four men plodded in with the coffin. Buddy squinted about in search of light, but found only one lamp, a floor model with a thick shade from which hung a beaded fringe.

“Hell with this,” he said, opening the curtains and running the shade up on a window. “We can close them again when you’re done, if he wants that.”

It was an old room, wallpapered in a brown figure against a tan ground. Buddy hated dreary wallpaper. The sofa was upholstered in green plush. Above it hung two silhouettes on silver paper: George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

“Wait a minute,” said Buddy to the advancing men and removed a magazine holder from the floor just ahead of them. It held several clean copies of
The National Geographic
and a crinkled, damp-stained
Liberty
that looked as if it had been used under a flowerpot: you could see the ring.

“Catch that rocker, too, willya, Bud?” said Howie, who wanted to swing his end around. Buddy scooted it away on its runners.

They lowered the box to the carpet. Realizing the corpse would shortly be revealed, Buddy grew queasy.

Addressing Roy, he said: “You guys know your business. You don’t need me. Leo’ll be in in a minute.” He headed out.

Howie called: “Hey, Buddy.” When Buddy turned, the cover was already off the coffin; must have been on there loose, could have fallen off it if they had tripped. “I think you have to agree we did a nice job,” Howie said, smiling smugly down on the deceased.

There was nothing for it but that Buddy come back and admire. He saw a younger face than he had expected, painted in bright rouge and brighter lipstick.

Roy said, standing back, hands on hips: “What do you think?”

“I never knew the lady,” said Buddy.

“Is that a fact?”

“Not a gray hair on her head.” He could see no great resemblance to Leo. No doubt she had been a good-looker when young, with a nose that was at once delicate yet strong. “Awful lot of make-up.”

“Them was the instructions,” said Roy, reaching in to take the shoulders of the body.

At this Buddy went away again and stared at the china figures on a whatnot shelf in the corner, not turning back until the four men had lifted the dead woman out and put her on the davenport.

“Now what do you think about this afghan?” Roy asked. “Like this, maybe?” He had spread it over her lower body.

Howie said: “She wouldn’t be laying here with her shoes on.”

Roy agreed, and Howie took them off and paired them neatly on the floor at the end of the sofa.

The four men stood back and regarded the tableau. The young white helper pointed at a maroon satin cushion, the decorative kind never used practically, which lay flat on a footstool, the golden corner-tassels dangling.

“Pillow’d be nice.”

“That’s a crackerjack idea,” Roy said with verve. He fetched it and put it under her head, which had previously been mounted on the little end-bolster of low elevation, part of the upholstery.,

Buddy couldn’t get over the garish make-up job, to complete which Roy now pulled from his pocket a box of Coty powder, removed the puff, and patted the corpse’s face with it. Suddenly he handed the box to Howie and put the index finger of his freed hand under his nose to inhibit a sneeze.

“Now,” he said, stepping back, “what do you think, Buddy?” As soon as he took his finger away he sneezed anyhow.

“Swell from where I stand, Roy. But maybe Leo—”

“Good enough for me,” Roy said. “We got to get back. Two more bodies come in just as we were leaving: old Jack McCord and the little Hunnicut boy who died of infantile paralysis, poor little shaver. It never rains but it pours.” He looked at the box. “I’d like to leave this here, but no matter where you stick it, people fall over it. Also it gives what you call a ghoulish impression. Tell Leo we’ll be back tomorrow morning.”

The four men bent to pick up the coffin.

“See you, Bud,” said Howie, going out the door.

“Not soon, I hope,” Buddy replied. The colored guy favored him with one last grin over the shoulder.

Alone with her, Buddy looked again at Leo’s mother. She must have been real nice-looking as recently as twenty years before, when he had been seventeen. He had started out a year earlier, with a woman of forty-two.

But it was creepy to think of sex in the presence of a corpse, even one painted like a whore. Nor did he have the patience to encounter Leo again.

He went out to his car.

I
N CONTRAST
to Leo’s late mother, Laverne wore no make-up whatever, and her hair was up in curlers. She had on an old opaque slip that was more modest than most of her dresses.

“You never come this early,” she said sullenly.

“Thanks for the big welcome,” said Buddy, who on entering had clasped her from behind, hands on breasts, groin between the bulbs of her bottom, but she had coldly twisted away. He sat at the kitchen table, still brooding over the rebuff.

“I had a bad time this morning,” he said.

“Who didn’t?”

What could be her beef, with the rent paid and nothing to do but curl her hair? But he did not say this aloud. Instead he gave a simplified version of his annoyances: Leo’s mother’s death, Leo’s crackup.

“If he don’t come out of it, I need me a new salesman.”

Laverne’s curlered head did not turn. Seen from the back, her slip was sacklike, with no shape at all. Down towards the hem it bore a pointed scorch mark from the tip of an iron. Buddy put more self-pity in his voice. “As if I needed another problem.”

This brought her around. “What other problems have you got?”

There was a kind of jealousy in her question. Buddy pulled back his chin. “What’s eating you, Laverne?”

“Oh, nothing, nothing at all, Buddy. I really like sitting here day after day, waiting for you to come and get your ashes hauled and then run home.”

“Well, do you have to get foul-mouthed about it? We been through that time and time again and I explained it thoroughly. What did I just tell you yesterday?”

“To turn over so you could do it dog-style.”

Buddy flushed with repulsion. “For Christ’s sake, Laverne, come on up out of the sewer.”

She grinned bitterly. “Yesterday was Sunday, and that’s all I can recall. Saturday you said you was working on the situation. Yesterday you never referred to it. You never do refer to it unless I ask, in all these months.” She pulled a chair from under the table and plumped herself down upon it. “I’ve been thinking a lot this whole weekend.”

“I been doing more than thinking,” said Buddy, leaning earnestly across the bare enamel tabletop.

She knitted her penciled eyebrows. “Which means?”

He leaned back, as if in assurance. “You just trust me.”

She left her quizzical expression as it was.

“Listen, Laverne, I just been with a dead body. That shakes you up on a Monday before lunch. I mean, in a living room it’s real creepy, and then some. In a funeral parlor you are prepared.”

“Well, I’m among the living, Buddy, though you may not know it.”

He put on a lascivious smile. “Baby, how could I forget?” He put his hand across the table, trying to reach a tit, but she drew back.

“Buddy, I’ll be glad to give you the conclusion I arrived at,” she said coldly.

“Aw, Laverne.” He put his face in his bracketed hands, which deformed it slightly, orientalizing his eyes, and tried a bit of japery: “No tickee, no washee.” But she stayed stern, pale-faced, and in curlers. “Where’s your funnybone today?” he asked. Then: “You got anything for a sandwich?”

“Sure, Buddy, coming right up!” This was said sardonically. She rose, marched to the refrigerator, opened it, and looked inside. “We have one slice of ham sausage. We have a tomato. We have one egg.”

Buddy made a disdainful nose. “No kind of real meat?”

“We didn’t know we would be serving lunch today, sir,” Laverne said, bending to open the hydrator. “We can make a tomato sandwich with lettuce and mayonnaise.”

“That’s woman’s food,” Buddy said. “All right, fry me that egg—unless you was saving it for yourself.”

“We thank you very much,” said Laverne, “but we aren’t eating, ourself, because we just weighed ourself and found we was too fat from sitting home here alone all the time with nothing to do but chew candy.”

“All right, all right, I feel the needle. Now just be a good girl and fix that egg.”

For the first time ever, she fried it hard all the way through, Naomi-style, and the toast that clutched it was butterless and burned almost black. Buddy’s mouth felt as if full of dust.

“You wouldn’t have a Coke?”

“No, I wouldn’t. The order hasn’t come yet.” She sat across from him again. Now her expression was blank. This was worse, given her passionate nature, than anger, which in time he could always convert into lust.

“Well, some coffee then, Laverne?” On the sibilant a tiny fragment of desiccated toast flew from his lips. “
Excuse
me,” he said loftily, plucking it up.

Like Leo, Laverne had some breakfast coffee still in the pot. Unlike him, she heated it until an unpleasant odor told Buddy it was boiling. Meanwhile she was running water in the sink, as if in impatience to wash the dish on which she had served him the sandwich—which was furthermore a saucer, not a plate. Buddy hated that kind of error, which signified the inattention of the server. Incredulously he watched her compound it: she lifted the saucer, blew the crumbs from it, and put the coffee cup into its well.

Buddy lowered his half-eaten sandwich to the table, pushed his chair back, and stood up. Consulting his watch, he said: “Gee, I forgot nobody’s at the lot. I better get back pronto.” This was a bluff-calling test. Laverne ordinarily whined if he stayed less than an hour. Nor was there precedent for a visit of whatever length in which he did not plow her within, say, fifteen minutes after arriving.

Now, though, she stood in her old petticoat, holding the marble-enameled coffeepot in one hand and the cup in the other, and said in a tone of eminent reason: “You better do that.”

“Yeah, I better,” said Buddy and waited for her to surrender. She returned the coffeepot to the stove and put the cup and saucer in the standing water of the sink. She wrung out the string dishcloth and with it swept the crumbs from the tabletop into her free palm. She picked up the garbage from his egg sandwich and went to the trashcan and pedaled its top open.

This was unbearable. “For Christ’s sake, Laverne,” said Buddy in disbelieving exasperation.

Laverne dropped the rubbish in the can and wiped her hand with the wet gray rag. After the top came down with a clang, she said: “If you was thinking of pussy for dessert, you can forget it.”

Buddy let the screendoor slam and thundered down the outside stairs. It was monstrously unfair that he should have to suffer this treatment only now that he had hired a killer. She had caused no real trouble in all the months he had done nothing. As usual when he was the victim of an injustice Buddy soon felt defenseless, and in this case he couldn’t go to Laverne for succor, as he had done when felled by Ballbacher’s sucker punch.

As he got into the car he had wild, desperate thoughts of calling Mary Wentworth at the bank, ordering her to meet him after work, perhaps sodomizing her brutally on his desk; or lying in wait at the corner on which Grace Plum de-boarded from the bus and getting blown as he drove home. Though ordinarily Buddy deplored deviate acts as ends in themselves, he now needed ardently to defile some female while at the same time not violating his vow never to make love to anyone but Laverne. Even if she now revealed a unique nastiness, he was still so crazy about that woman that he would have gone back upstairs and kissed her ass had he thought she would thereby be mollified.

With his understanding of the female sex, he knew however that such a move would be useless at this time. Women operated on the principle: Sin in haste, repent at leisure. Left to cool her heels, Laverne would develop a usable shame; regret would stimulate her appetite, and his answering magnanimity would ignite her. Two-three days without cock would put her at the limits of her endurance. Indeed, he loved her so much—despite her current mood—that were it not a subtle kindness he could not have submitted her to this cruel denial.

Ralph was on one of his earlier deliveries when his father drove out of the neighborhood by another street. And for once their routes did not coincide. Neither his father nor his mother knew he had gone to apply for the job at Bigelow’s. He might in fact not tell them for days. For example, they were utterly ignorant that he had tried caddying at the outset of the summer. For no special reason, unless it was an instinctual or hereditary strain of paranoia, of which he was unconscious, Ralph played his cards close to his chest. For their parts, his parents had never been snoops.

The address crayoned on the side of the carton was, cryptically, 23-B Myrtle; no name accompanied it. Ralph found the street, and he found the number but not the supernumerary letter on a big, old, gray, square house with almost no yard: the kind of place that looked as if it would be populated with residents to match. He removed the box, lowered the bike to the grassy strip above the curb, there being no nearby pole or tree, and went around the corner of the building, at which point the concrete path gave way to loose gravel. There he also came upon his “23-B” in unpainted zinc figures affixed to the post of an outside stairway.

With a simultaneous inflation of his chest, he hefted the carton onto his right shoulder and, securing it with one hand and a flattened ear, he ascended to the top landing, where he did not knock but called through the screendoor: “Bigelow’s delivery!”

There was no response from within. Given the current angle of the sun, the light of which was detained by the crosshatching of the screen, much of which was clogged with soot, he could see nothing of the interior.

The carton having begun to hurt his ear and shoulder, he lowered it to the boards of the landing. As his head was rising he saw the bottom of the screendoor swing towards him, and he slid the box away from its projected route. Still bent, he saw upon the threshold a pair of those ladies’ slippers called “mules,” of pink satin with fuzzy pompoms on the toes. The ankles above them were blue-white as skim milk, as were the shins and so on to the beginning of the swell of calf. At this point bare flesh was succeeded by more pink fuzz, now along the hem of what in the Sears, Roebuck catalogue, that classic sourcebook for masturbatory images, was called a negligee. The body of this garment was of a pink satin one shade darker than that of the mules, which were perhaps faded.

Ralph looked only as far as the belt, but he was conscious, through his upper peripheral vision, of two substantial bulges just above and flanking the loose, slippery satin knot.

He lifted the carton in both hands and propped it, Bigelow-style, against his midsection, though skinny as he was he had no shelf there. With an automatic smile he looked then at her face, and saw the sexiest woman he had ever laid eyes on—bright yellow curls and sky-blue eyes fringed with enormous lashes, cheeks of rose and lips of flame.

“Hi,” she said. “You’re a new one.”

Only those remarkable eyes could have kept his own glance from falling to her fantastic breasts, which now his lower peripheral sight told him were unconfined behind the negligee, and he was dying to see whether there were nipple bumps on the sleek satin.

He nodded and mumbled, and adjusted his burden, which caused the remaining bottles to clink, reminding him of the breakage.

“See, I had a little accident—it actually wasn’t my fault—” But suddenly, standing there before the muzzles of those breasts, he understood it would be unmanly to blame Margie. Deserve it though she did in one sense, in another her error could be seen as arising from her attraction to him. He might himself, with this fascinating woman, commit some disgrace for the same motive. The world could use more tolerance.

“What really happened was: a couple of things in your order got busted somehow.” His eyes disappeared into his forehead. “Let’s see now, a Coke and catchup and…” He had forgotten the third item.

With her free hand she gestured to him to enter. “You’re letting the flies in.” She gave him room, but not much, and as he stepped across the threshold, compressing himself so strenuously that had he been carrying a bag and not a box he would have crushed it, his forearm slid along and over not one but both warm, weighty, sleek-surfaced, superficially yielding yet immanently dominant, massive but lyrical extrusions of bosom. He wore a short-sleeved summer shirt.

The accident he had anticipated, and forgiven himself for by exploiting Margie’s example, happened at this point: his sneaker was imprisoned briefly at the threshold, perhaps fouled on the rubber stair tread often encountered in such a place, its lip curled to trap and trip the unwary toe. In freeing his foot Ralph projected himself forward with a violence which, after the liberation of the sneaker, was too much for his equilibrium.

So as not to fall, he ran right across the living room, reaching the entrance of the hallway before he gained his balance. He did not however drop the carton.

She was chuckling behind him.

“Sorry,” said he, coming back with the blood roaring in his ears. “I better get rid of this before anything else happens.”

“Right in here, on the table,” said she. Her satin back led him to the kitchen. Owing to the carton, he could not see the swell of her behind. He was conscious for the first time, though it had been everywhere throughout, of her sense-reeling scent: not that of known flowers, but a compound of fragrances from imaginary jungles, gaudy fruits deliquescing into syrup, the mating odors of fur-bearing animals, along with the sophisticated essences poured from cut-glass decanters into crystal balloons and sipped with closed eyes by tuxedo-clad epicures.