Sneaky People: A Novel (15 page)

Putting down the carton at last, he remembered for no reason at all: “Cream was the other thing broken.” Again he blushed, remembering its thick, opaque ooze on the pavement, very like ejaculated semen in the palm of the hand.

“Listen!” he said hastily, rudely, then revised it: “I mean, you don’t have to worry, ma’am. I’ll make a special trip back to the store and get those items replaced. Five minutes, maybe less.”

She crossed her arms beneath her sumptuous breasts and smiled gorgeously, but also kindly. “I’m not worried, for gosh sake. Accidents can happen to anybody.”

Ralph just gawked helplessly at her blue eyes. He was smitten by her angelic combination of beauty and generosity.

“A penny for your thoughts,” she said at last.

Ralph emerged from his coma. “It’s nice of you not to be mad.”

She frowned amiably. “When you think how short life is, you concentrate on the real important matters and don’t cry over spilled milk.”

“Cream,” said Ralph, and regretted doing so; she might consider it a correction.

“Oh, sure!” She snapped her wrist at him and giggled marvelously. She bent to look into the box, favoring him with her golden crown. “Hey, here’s two Cokes that are still O.K. Why don’t you have one?”

Ralph was overcome.

“I’ll tell you,” she said, “I don’t use the stuff myself.” She bared her flawless teeth and tapped an incisor with a red fingernail. “I say it’s no good for the enamel. It’s got caffeine in it, and that’s acid you know.” Her expression froze for an instant. She slapped herself on the forehead. “So why am I asking you to drink it then, huh? How inconsiderate can you get?”

She was an inch or so taller than he, but in another year they would be about the same size, given his rate of growth, which had so far proved normal.

“Oh, that’s all right,” said Ralph. “I don’t drink much pop anyway. I don’t like the fizz.”

Even her grimace was enchanting. “Yeah, I know what you mean. Like beer, I never cared for it.” She brightened. “But champagne now, that’s different.”

“I never tasted it.”

“Well then, you got something to look forward to.” Her smile now was rather shy. “I’ve just had it on special occasions.”

“Like New Year’s Eve.”

“Right!” she exclaimed, as if it were a remarkable observation. She certainly could enhance a routine give and take. Ralph yearned to have a really brilliant thought that would devastate her.

Straining too hard, he said: “Coca-Cola was invented around the turn of the century by a druggist, as a kind of medicine.”

This was a mistake. Saying, “I oughtn’t hold you up. You got work to do,” she walked rapidly into the living room, her mule-heels clacking, and soon returned, bosoms in motion, with a red handbag already open. She took from within a little red change purse and plucked out a coin.

It was a quarter. “I can’t take this,” said Ralph. “With what I broke and all.”

“You’ll have to pay,” she said. “I know how bosses are. I spilled some tea once on some gingham in a dry-goods store where I worked as a kid, and I had to pay for it. So”—she pressed the quarter on him—“I’m splitting the cost of the damage with you. I can afford it better than you. So you just take it or I’ll get mad, and you don’t want to get me mad or I’m a devil.”

He simply stood there in wonderment.

She went on: “See, what I could do is say forget all about what was broken, because the Coke and the whipping cream were not for me but for my gentleman friend, and he and I won’t be seeing one another any more, and speaking of the catchup, I still got enough in the old bottle—you can always add hot water and get some more out. So you could just go back and not mention it to the boss, and we’d be even-Steven for all I cared.

“But I’m not going to do that. Why? Do you have any idea?” She turned her glorious face at an angle to her swan neck.

Ralph shook his head in adoration. He hoped she would take hours to explain, in that musical voice and exuding that fragrance, eyes sparkling and hair glowing.

“I’ll tell you,” she said. “You might call me mean, but I think nothing in the world is more important than a sense of responsibility in a man. Like it might not of been your fault for the accident, but delivering those groceries is your
responsibility
, and you want to make it good. So if I was to say forget
all
about it, I would be taking away your chance to be a man who stands for something.” She blinked dramatically. “Does that make any sense? I guess it’s pretty complicated.”

Ralph felt faint. Her intelligence and moral character were comparable to her heavenly beauty.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “It makes a whole lot of sense.” He nodded so vigorously he felt a catch in his nape.

She extended her hand. “Let’s shake on it. Put ’er there, partner.”

Her hand was no larger than his, but warmer, softer, and with more strength; his own was happily helpless.

“You going to be regular or is it just for today?” she asked. “Frankly, I never have much cared for that kid Horace. He’s an example of what I’m talking about. Now when he breaks something, he never comes clean like you; he tries to sneak it past me.”

With a disloyalty that could be called divine—considering the deed he had performed for Hauser on Saturday night—Ralph said: “He’s not much of a guy. I got his job.”

“Well,” said she, “since we’ll be seeing each other a lot, my name’s Laverne.”

“I’m pleased to meet you, Miss Laverne.”

“No, that’s my
first
name, unless you’re talking like a colored person from
Gone with the Wind
. My last name’s Lorraine, and my middle is Linda, all L’s, but I wish you would call me just Laverne. We’re just plain folks here.” Her giggle was like the ringing of a silver bell.

“Mine’s Ralph.”

“Hi, Ralph.”

“The whole thing’s Ralph V. Sandifer.” He shrugged. “The middle’s actually Virgil. My dad was stuck with that for a first name, but he doesn’t use it, either, except for legal matters.” Noticing her queer look, he assumed that he had somehow offended her, given her great moral sensitivity, with this kind-of-apology. “I guess names don’t matter really.” But hers did, magnificently: Laverne Linda Lorraine was a song in itself.

She walked briskly to the sink and clattered things there. Whatever the reason, she had, he saw definitely, enough of him at the moment.

He said: “I have to get back to work.”

She made no response. But as he reached the doorway she asked: “That your dad who’s got the car lot?”

He turned and saw her more beautiful than ever. Now, despite her coloring, she looked dark, vulnerable, tragic in fact, with shadowed eyes like Merle Oberon’s. Of what exquisite variations she was capable! Laverne Linda Lorraine, I love you with all my being. But what he said was merely: “Yes.”

“It’s not your uncle or anything like that?”

“No.” He fled in a disorder of feeling.

When he got to the curb he discovered his bicycle had been stolen.

Buddy brooded resentfully for the rest of the afternoon, which he spent sitting in the office behind the closed door, ignoring the customers, if such there were, outside. Few cars sold themselves. Only one person breached his privacy. This fellow entered without knocking. He was young, with steel-rimmed glasses and a smirk.

“Hey,” he said brashly, “you know that thirty-seven Chevy two-door of yours—they got one in better condition at Loewenfels’, down on the Milltown Pike near the infirmary—for fifty dollars less.”

“Then you go over and scoop it up, fella.”

The young man’s smirk grew broader. “Oh, yeah? I figured we could do a little negotiating.”

“Take a look at the rubber on that baby.”

“The muffler’s rusted out, and the paint on the hood is shot: engine heat’s faded it.”

“I know the car,” Buddy said frostily. “You wanna make a quick deal, I’ll go down twenty-five.”

“I’m going to take another look at Loewenfels’,” said the guy. He hesitated at the door, waiting in three-quarter profile, one shoulder high, for another offer, but it being in Buddy’s psychological interest, which was predominant at the moment, to deny him, he heard nothing further, and left.

Buddy had the feeling that things were coming to a head. His decision, made as usual on impulse, to let Laverne stew in her own juice for a few days was in retrospect seen as impracticable, like an unenforceable law such as that, still on the books in some states, forbidding unorthodox sex practices even by spouses.

Already he felt a growing pressure in his groin. Unless his testes were regularly evacuated they became the seat of his central nervous system and sent throughout his body venomous communications in the forms of neuralgia, dyspepsia, and a twitching of the inner eyelid, maddening though not visible to others.

In this condition in the old days he would have gone instantly to the nearest woman and relieved himself inside her. He could not be resisted when under the force of this need, though several times it had happened that his partner, met but an hour earlier in one roadhouse and under the assumption she was being taken to another, interpreted as rape his assault on her in the parking lot—but dropped the charges long before his climax, which invariably succeeded two or even three of hers.

Such a measure was unthinkable now. A latecomer to monogamy, like all converts Buddy was a zealot. He could not abstain from Laverne, and he could not do otherwise with any other female.

To boot, in the area of his profession he was as it were emasculated by Leo’s defection: strange but true. By cracking up, Leo had stolen his thunder, had become the romantic, the focus of concern and attention. Leo might come out of it once his mother had been buried; but his potentiality for disorderliness under stress would not be forgotten. In a word, Leo, previously the soul of reliability, could never be trusted again.

Buddy seized the phone, called the authoress of all his ills, and listened hatefully to her pretentious announcement.

“Naomi Sandifer speaking. Hello.”

“Say, Nay,” Buddy said. “Leo Kirsch’s mom passed away yesterday. She’s laid out at his house. We better look in there about five-thirty, so hold the supper.”

“How dreadful,” said Naomi. “I gather it was unexpected.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Buddy said with an unusual display of open impatience. “You didn’t know the lady.”

“Still—”

Before she could make some fucking philosophical statement about death, Buddy said: “I got business to do, and I’m all alone here, but I’ll get away by five and pick you up.”

“I’ll be here.”

You could count on that. She would throw on a shapeless dress, powder her face sloppily, with a spill on the collar, and be ready. You never had to wait on the bathroom because of her: insufficient compensation for the embarrassment of escorting her into the world, if Leo’s living room could be called public.

“Okey-doke,” said Buddy and was about to hang up when he was halted by an unpremeditated thought. “Say, is Gladys coming this week?”

Her sister, who lived about ten miles away, was wont to visit Naomi once or twice a month, by bus. If the matter of departure escaped her mind until evening, she often stayed overnight. Despite Buddy’s business, her husband, a limp mailman, owned no car, but would take no favors from his brother-in-law. She was two years older than Naomi, freckled and sinewy, athletic in appearance and in action as well, had played volleyball in high school and nowadays bowled on some team of neighborhood women. She had by her own admission never come close to having a child, for reasons undisclosed. She was one of the few females with whom Buddy had had social contact and yet never thought about in positive sexual terms, Gladys being more masculine than her husband, against whom Buddy also had the moral bias of the self-made man when contemplating a Civil Service malingerer.

“There’s a coincidence,” said Naomi, with her meaningless enthusiasm over a banal event. “She had intended to come today, but won’t be able to because of some breakdown, I believe, in the plumbing.”

Under stern control, Buddy converted his emotion into exaggerated sympathy. “Gee, that’s too bad.”

“Oh,” said Naomi, who was always vivified by an expression of regret, “it’s not a tragedy.”

“Huh,” said Buddy.

“It’s not life-or-death, by any means,” Naomi said.

Buddy hung up, went to the safe, then found a blank envelope in his desk and put the money therein. This sequence had been brisk, but he entered the garage in a dreamy fashion. Clarence was not in evidence. Probably he was out on the lot dusting the merchandise. Buddy put the envelope in the inside breast pocket of the old jacket, the lining of which was so frayed that towards the tail it hung in ribbons.

He headed back to the office, now in a saunter. He re-assumed his seat behind the desk. Unbeknown to himself, he began to work his face in a manner that looked to his employee Jack, who had heard about Leo’s loss at the gas station and come to the lot and opened the office door at this moment, like an epileptic fit. Being a devotee of first-aid tips in newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets given away free at drugstores, Jack knew the danger was that the subject would swallow his own tongue, and he loped towards Buddy, flexing en route the index finger he must thrust down his employer’s throat.