Sneaky People: A Novel (19 page)

At the top of his leg, the foot of which was grinding the pedal around the sprocket, his pecker instantly went rigid. Margie on the other hand went soft in attitude though not in body: he had not dreamed she was slender-firm rather than skinny-slack. His hard-on now had swelled to touch the rounded edge of her amazingly substantial butt on every downstroke of his shoe.

She tolerated this in silence. His hand seemed glued to her breast, immune to volition. There he pedaled, along Wyman Street, flagrantly yet helplessly cupping the tit of some dippy girl, to whom furthermore yet helplessly cupping the tit of some dippy girl, to whom furthermore he had never been attracted, sexually or otherwise, and he did not know if he was genuinely so now. In fact he doubted it, he who could get a bone-on from the motion of a streetcar in which he was passenger.

God only knows how long this would have continued had the front wheel not hit a pothole. His had went desperately from breast to corrugated rubber grip, made it, applied corrective measures, and his balance was regained. Hers never seemed in doubt, oddly enough, though he had withdrawn her only visible support. Her narrow back was still warmly against his chest.

The physical shock broke his moral silence.

“Let me know if another hole comes up. I can’t see through you, for Christ sake.”

“You really ought to do something about your language, Ralph,” said she. “If a person can’t express themselves without being crude—”

He stopped the bike. “All right, that’s it…Go on, get off.”

She complied. If he expected tears again he was disappointed. She frowned and made her mouth like a little old lady’s.

Ralph said: “Let me tell you something: you’re in no position to criticize.” He pedaled off to see Laverne L. Lorraine.

The remarkable feature was that when he noticed his whereabouts he saw he was already only a block or two from Myrtle, with Bigelow’s corner in sight. He had ridden across town in a benumbed state, his hand on Margie’s little knocker. On reflection he identified something sinister in her character, which he had hitherto assessed as totally dopey. To object to a little mild cussing and then put her tit in his hand and rub her ass against his dick.

Yet it was weird and repulsive to think of such a plain girl as being horny:
she had no right
. But if this were true, was not the world completely rotten? Having abandoned her, Ralph assuaged his guilt with sentimentality: think of the poor devils born with clubfeet or as Mongolian idiots. With such melancholy deliberations he swung at high speed around the corner into Myrtle Avenue. This irked some old geezer in an ancient coupe, though he was nowhere near him. Ralph ignored the angry
oo-gah
of the old-fashioned horn.

He hopped off in front of 23. On the porch sat a tremendous fat slob in an undershirt, his belly bigger than even Bigelow’s. While Ralph wheeled the bike towards the side of the house, an enormous matching woman shuffled out in carpet slippers and gave the man a glass of lemonade. They both gazed piggishly at Ralph, who favored them with the briefest of glances. He thought it amusing that a princess lived above such peasants.

But before he reached the corner the man yelled: “Hey, bud, you got a delivery for upstairs? She ain’t home.” The woman continued to stare expressionlessly from a face as wide as a pie. “She just went down the bus stop,” the man elucidated. “Don’t leave your package outside up there or some nigger might steal it. And we can’t take it here. We don’t want to be responsible.” The woman grimaced disagreeably.

Ralph ran his bike out to the street. He assumed the bus stop would be on Jackson, the nearest arterial highway, and he was right. He was still half a block away, pumping hard, when a pair of silken limbs, topped by a golden head, between which was a fabulous figure dressed in bright green, stepped onto the bus, which subsequently roared away, leaving him in a cloud of dull blue exhaust.

He was soaked with disappointment, exertion, and his horse-blanket suit. A unique sensation was provided by a stream of sweat coursing behind his knees, now that he had stopped, with straight legs, feet planted, rump raised off a sticky seat. He fanned himself with the edges of his jacket, smelling no stench in the hot body-air that emerged, though the time for that concern had passed.

Having watched the bus dwindle to a little red dot and vanish into the converging parallels of Jackson Avenue, he remounted the bicycle. There would of course be other days, but none so right as this one could have been. His aims had been so modest: to return the money for the damage, to present the candy as a bonus, then to watch the sun rise in that glorious face.

He decided to go home, get out of the damned suit, and make himself a melted-cheese sandwich in the waffle iron. The juvenile idiocy of Elmira’s would be repugnant to him at this moment.

L
AVERNE HAD BEEN GIVEN
to extremes throughout her adult life, going helplessly where she was blown by the gusts of chance, on the one hand; but on the other, from time to time making irrevocable decisions. At the age of sixteen, already full-breasted, hanging around a dance pavilion on the shore of a man-made lake just outside her home town, she had caught the eye of the bandleader, a thin, dapper man with patent-leather head and hairline mustache.

When dancing Laverne would maneuver her partner into a position below the bandstand from which she could keep a surveillance on the leader, who most of the time kept his back turned as his baton dominated the five musicians, but turned occasionally to charm the customers and in one out of three numbers himself soloed on saxophone or, more rarely, clarinet, and when he did might wink at Laverne, who was foxtrotting with her friend Irma Grunion.

The two girls had been going to the pavilion every night, but this being a semi-rural area, the unattached boys were mostly hicks, with a few older tinhorn sports from town who had cars, into which if you climbed, especially the rumble seat, you had to fight for your life, which is how it seemed from the ferocity of the attacks: as if they wanted rather to kill than merely rape you. The hicks though danced at arm’s length and smelled of the cloves they chewed for their breath. In the intermissions they nervously rushed away to buy pretzels and orange pop; at the end of the evening they would ride you home in the bus without a word; that is, if they had not disappeared while you were in the restroom. Many nights the girls preferred their own company.

Laverne knew herself as yet a rube, but she had a conviction that a true sophisticate neither despised nor feared women, and furthermore spoke beautifully. Therefore, when after the playing of “Goodnight, Ladies” her admirer put his little megaphone to his mouth and said: “This is Ken Canning and his Ragtime Dreamers saying a bit of a tweet-tweet, and wishing sweet dreams to you-all for always and a day,” she was ready to swoon even if he had not winked for the third time that night.

“You see that?” asked Irma as they went to the Ladies’ through the grove of trees, floored with tanbark and lighted with orange bulbs on strings, “Ken Canning winking at me? He was doing it all night. I never let on though. He’s a real masher.”

“You know that for a fact?” asked Laverne.

“By that little mustache.”

“Well, I never!” Laverne said.

“I’m keeping out of his clutches,” said Irma, who had never had much upstairs.

Luckily the restroom was crowded. When the first booth became available Laverne insisted Irma take it; and when the door closed on her friend she slipped out of the Ladies’, circled the grove, and emerged at the rear of the bandstand, from which the musicians had already departed. She groaned twice and was about to surrender to despair when a little door in the base of the stand opened and the men came out, including the one and only Ken Canning, who, the lights still burning above, saw and recognized her immediately.

He closed the door and leaned against it in his striped blazer and ice-cream pants. He put his thumb up at her and beckoned.

She had no fright or doubts. As she approached him, passing the other Ragtime Dreamers, one of them said smirkingly: “Look out. Papa spanks!” And another raked his sailor straw and cried to Ken: “Baby-rape will land you in the hoosegow.”

“Kiddo,” said Ken, lipping an unlighted cigarette, “you the one giving me them bedroom eyes from the floor all night, ain’t you?”

Laverne simpered in silence.

“Say, listen, you ever heard the gen-you-whine words to the ‘Sheik of Araby’?

She laughed through her nose, but not much, because he did remind her of Valentino.

Ken Canning said: “You got the time?” He held his cold cigarette elegantly between thumb and forefinger.

She realized she was on trial. “Gee, no I ain’t, but I could run and ask somebody.”

He leered at her and said: “You’re sure a hayseed. I got a solid gold watch right here.” He tapped his jacket at the point under which ran the waistband of his trousers. “You’re supposed to answer, ‘And I got the place,’ see?”

He had lost her somewhere. She listened extra carefully to the next. “Another one is: ‘You got the time?’ The answer is: ‘Yeah, but who’ll hold the horse?’”

“Oh, yeah, I get it.” She laughed again, but had the hollow sense of not doing well as she saw him nonchalantly light the cigarette with a match he ignited with his thumbnail and widen his nostrils to blow out a double stream of smoke. She closed her eyes and let it wash over her. As she opened them the lights went out on the bandstand above.

In the darkness Ken Canning said: “You like to jazz?”

“Oh gee, yeah,” she said enthusiastically. She lived for dance music.

His cigarette ember flared from a hearty in-draught, briefly lighting his long upper lip and the fine line of clipped hair thereupon. He took her hand as darkness fell over him again. “Don’t trip and break your leg.” He opened the door to the cellar and led her down three concrete steps. “Don’t fall over the trap drum.”

He had long wiry fingers. Laverne was in an immaterial state. She did not believe he had taken her underground for a private recital of jazz music, but neither did she expect to find his naked male thing in her hand, as suddenly it was. She had expected he would kiss her and she would let him; then feel her and she would resist a little, but soon relent, because unlike the rumble-seat sheiks he would be deft and graceful and stylish at it.

And for whatever else happened after that, she would not be responsible. Laverne was not a carnal girl. Her sexual fantasies were cloudy, perfumed, and musically accompanied but not physically detailed. She had decided to give herself to Ken Canning, in whatever degree he wanted her.

Instead,
he
presented himself to
her
, and she knew not what to do with him, or rather with the gristle-handle to which he was presumably attached. He had let her go altogether by now.

“Squeeze,” said he. “That’s my love muscle.”

Suddenly his falling pants shot past her hand, the belt buckle dealing her knuckles a painful blow. She let go.

“C’mon, baby,” said he, finding her fingers and putting them back on his knobbed protuberance. “Drop your bloomers.”

She went up under her skirt. He moved somewhere in the dark.

“Over here,” said he. She searched for him and bumped into the bass drum with a clang of the attached cymbals. He swore. She found him against the wall, at some kind of bench, on which he ordered her to sit and lift her legs. When she had carried out this command, he bent and drove his spike into her flesh. This was what Christ had suffered: the path of the pain was cruciform, going into all four limbs.

Emerging from this single thrust, Ken Canning entered her no more. Indeed, he went away altogether, and with the clink of belt buckle and rustle of fabric he could be heard to reassume his trousers: he had taken off nothing else.

Was he done with her? She decided against asking him. She felt in the place where he had been, and it was wet. What had been pain was now merely an ache. She rose and, squatting, holding her skirt away from the blood, searched the floor for the undergarment. Not finding it, she fell to her knees and explored deliberately on the cold concrete. Eventually she encountered his trousered legs.

“Hell fire,” said he in irritation. “It’s too late for a toot on the skin flute. Lay off!”

“I’m looking for my bloomers.”

“Yeah,” said Ken Canning. “It’s like this, tootsie. I keep them for a souvenir, you know? I wear ’em for pocket handkerchiefs, see. You come out tomorrow night and you’ll see ’em in my breast pocket. Give you a thrill, me up there onna stage and all.” He chuckled. “Fun is when some tomato is down there dancing with her hubby, and she and I know I got her step-ins in my pocket.”

“Sure,” said Laverne, getting up. “That’s okey-dokey.”

“You don’t happen to be married, do yuh?” asked Ken Canning in the darkness.

“I never even done it before,” said Laverne.

“No lie?” said Ken. “Well, I’m a monkey’s uncle. You are a spunky one. You are O.K., kid.”

All summer Ken retained a soft spot in his heart for Laverne and every once in a while he would take her under the bandstand and slip it to her. She was gratified to know that she was of some use to the glamorous bandleader. On the nights he did not use her and either took some other girl or woman to the bandstand cellar or left with the Dreamers, laughing and smoking, immediately after the performance, she would go towards the bus stop but on a circuitous route that took her through the parking lot, and now if some fellow invited her into his automobile she usually accepted and charged him for it: one dollar. Occasionally she was bargained down to seventy-five or even fifty cents but not below. If offered two bits she had a wisecrack waiting: “I ain’t no barbershop.”

By Labor Day her monthly was several weeks overdue, and Ken Canning told her that night, in the shadow of the bandstand, “Kiddo, I picked up a dose someplace. I’d figure it was you but you was cherry when we met, so I doubt you are spreading it around just yet. I’d like to jazz you for old times’ sake but the cannon’s full of rust.” He stuck out his hand and said: “We’re leaving for Chi tomorrow early, where we got a engagement at a ritzy club in the big time, but you’re a real nice kid and you gave some great laughs out here in the sticks.”

They shook hands, and Laverne didn’t bother with the information that it must have been he who was responsible for her being pregnant, because unless the fellows in cars had rubbers she made them finish outside in a handkerchief: theirs, if they had one. Ken went down the cellar steps for the last time, alone, and closed the door. Laverne meandered around the grove and, finding a bench, sat down upon it and wept. She would miss his stylish ways. He was a real Beau Brummell, a Gay Lothario, a Casanova, and a sheik wrapped up in one, and he was leaving to become a big muckety-muck in the Windy City.

She sat there nursing her broken heart, with a view of the deserted and darkened bandstand. At length Ken Canning came out of the cellar with a girl who in the moonlight looked like Irma Grunion, with whom her friendship had cooled after that initial slip-giving of July, but who often since, tonight included, had been her companion.

By the time Laverne reached the parking lot, the only vehicle remaining was the long touring car labeled K
EN CANNING AND HIS RAGTIME DREAMERS
. The drums were strapped to a luggage rack on the rear bumper, and the Dreamers sat inside. Ken, whom she was following at a distance, handed in his saxophone case, then climbed behind the wheel and drove away.

The last bus had gone too, taking Irma, if it was she. Laverne had to walk five miles home in her thin dancing pumps, and lost a heel en route. Her father, a railroad switchman who had to work all Labor Day, sat in the kitchen glowering over a tumbler of the hooch for which he paid the bootleggers most of his wages.

“You’re up late,” she said, trying in spite of everything to be nice.

“And you’re a goddam little hoor,” said he in his lousy brogue, the ugly, red-faced, heavy-eyebrowed, stupid Mick. Luckily her mother descended from Polish nobility, which was where Laverne got her own good looks, though her hair had begun to darken after she got her first monthlies at twelve and a half.

When she began to swell, Laverne ran away to Indianapolis and worked at a lunchroom in a bus station, not returning to the sale of herself until after her miscarriage. Throughout the subsequent decade she moved from city to city alternating between jobs concerned with food and drink on the one hand and prostitution on the other. She changed her name from Hogan to Lorraine and was often a platinum blonde. She remained in love with the idea of Ken Canning though on reflection she had identified the weakness of the man himself, which was a lack of faith in his own principles. He had every right to jazz Irma Grunion, but pretending he had the clap was a moral failure.

Every Saturday in the confessional booth, Laverne herself pretended to the priest that the worst of her sins were only “impure thoughts,” but, one, she was a woman; two, she never had a moment’s personal pleasure from the sexual employment of crotch, behind, mouth, or hand; and three, God saw everything you did anyway, so why go over it all again with the man on the other side of the grille, who being sexless by definition was immune to her God-given talents?

Laverne had never met a man she couldn’t get up. But periodically she became bored with providing miracle cures for the impotence that remained a prevalent plague in the land, and went to serve foot-long hotdogs and fried fish, generally at roadside establishments where you got a changing clientele, and she always kept her faculties keen for the apprehension of another Ken Canning, whom she would never find in the practice of her other profession, he being a taker and not a buyer.

In the spring of ’38 she became the third waitress hired by the first local example of the scheme imported from California: an asphalted area into which persons drove and parked and were served sandwiches on a tray that cunningly hooked over the window of their machine. This place was called a drive-in cafe, and what Laverne did was known as being a carhop. She wore an overseas cap in royal blue, a red monkey jacket with white piping over a high-necked white jersey blouse, a white pleated skirt to the midpoint of her thighs, and white calf-length boots of patent leather: like the getup of a drum majorette, cute but anywhere from five to ten years too young for her, as she who had no false vanity recognized. Her upper legs had got beefy while her calves had developed cords; her brassiere, with the weight it supported, left marks on her back that could still be seen on Sunday night after twenty-four hours out of harness, she no longer emerging into the world on the Lord’s day, not even to go to Mass, which omission she dutifully confessed on Saturday just before reporting for work and atoned for with the prescribed number of reverent salutations to the virgin mother of Christ, with whom she secretly felt a common cause that no priest, being male, could ever understand, Laverne having taken a thousand cocks and never been touched by any, while Mary had accepted none. With such a consideration, Laverne no longer even included “impure thoughts” in her roster of peccancies.