Sneaky People: A Novel (28 page)

Ralph thought: If she was raped, I know where my father keeps his pistol. But then she did not look disheveled. In fact her hair was clean, brushed, and shining. She was also wearing lipstick that had not been smeared until she pressed her face against his sports shirt, leaving, when he pulled away slightly, a big red blotch.

He noticed another novelty, and wondered that it had taken him so long: she was not wearing her glasses. But there was not that much difference: she had not suddenly become Jane Wyman.

He asked: “Where’s your specs? Don’t you need them any more?” Which in fact was what he always wondered about the Jane Wyman character; gorgeous, true, but blind.

“I took them off!” she wailed. “I don’t want to see any more awful things.”

He took her hand and began to walk.

At the corner she had recovered sufficiently to say: “Aren’t you going to ask?”

“I’m asking.”

She shuddered dramatically and said: “I can’t tell. It’s too horrible.”

“Then don’t.”

She stopped and said indignantly: “You men are all alike. If it was a woman, you’d sing another tune.”

“Margie, I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about.” Those big tits he saw under the streetlamp couldn’t be her own.

“That terrible man you were with the other day, coming out of the Greek’s. I mean, he was there and so was I, but he left first and you were talking to him when I came out. Remember?”

“Oh, yeah, Leo. He’s not terrible. He’s a nice guy. Works for my father. His mother just died. Funny you should mention him. I was just over there. He had her laid out on a sofa. That was weird, I grant you, but you can’t shoot him for that.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” said Margie, who furthermore seemed to be wearing some orangey pancake make-up like an older woman; it darkened her complexion but did hide the discolorations left by acne. “I was on my way here, peacefully walking along the street, passing some old house down on Hickory, when I suddenly heard a kind of hissing, you know, ‘Pssst!…Pssst!’ It was getting dark but the streetlights hadn’t come on yet, and there was some rustling noise in a bush. So I stopped and looked, and then this man, this awful man, all of a sudden steps out from behind a bush and says, ‘Hi, girlie,’ And it was that Leo.”

“Yeah,” said Ralph, “he’s been acting peculiarly all day. He’s really upset by the death of his mother--which I guess is reasonable.”

“He was stark naked,” said Margie.

“Wow,” said Ralph. “I didn’t suspect he was that far gone.”

“He was all covered with hair, like an animal.”

“Did he do anything else?”

“No, he ran back in the house when I screamed.”

Ralph shook his head. “Poor devil. He showed me a wax apple he bit when he was a baby.”

Margie reared back, hands on hips. “
Poor Leo
! He’s a criminal!”

“Well, I wouldn’t say that,” said Ralph. “He is under pressure.”

“Ralph Sandifer! Are you going to tell me you don’t intend to do anything?”

“What could I do?”

“Ask him for an apology.”

Ralph’s voice rose to a higher pitch than hers: “An apology?”

“Well, am I or am I not your girl?”

Ralph took the crook of her elbow and started to walk her again. “Let me explain something, Margie. That wasn’t personal, see. Leo’s gone off his rocker.”

“If I was a man I’d give him a good horsewhipping.”

“That wouldn’t do any good. He’s not responsible for his actions, you see. He’s more to be pitied than censored, like the fella says.”

“That’s an easy out. Neither is an ax-murderer.”

He sensed it would be useless to continue the argument. He might even sour her against himself if he did. Therefore he said, after a pause: “I guess you’re right at that. Tell you what I’ll do: I’ll get hold of him tomorrow and by God, unless he apologizes, I’ll beat him within an inch of his life.”

Margie pulled him against her. She was amazingly strong for such a small girl. “Don’t do anything foolish, Ralph. He may be dangerous.”

Ralph could handle women, yet they often bewildered him. The next thing that Margie did was to lead him across the street into the park. Under a tree that kept dropping seeds that had a funny, not unpleasant stink, he kissed her with closed lips. She forced her tongue into his mouth and pressed her hard belly against his erection. He went into the bodice of her dress and with some difficulty among all the straps there, though with no resistance from her, he found that her breasts were indeed padded with what felt like toilet paper. He could toy there at will, but when, ablaze, he reached down and started up under her skirt, she pulled away and slapped at his face.

“If you want that, try Imogene Clevenger!”

Ralph kissed her again. “Maybe I’m in love with you.”

“Then try to act like it,” said she, pulling her clothes in order.

“I apologize.”

“Accepted,” said she. “It might interest you to know I’ve been crazy about you since the seventh grade. But I have my self-respect.”

“And you’ve certainly got a right to it,” said Ralph. “Come on, I’ll walk you home.”

The journey proved longer than anticipated, Margie turning out to be a monologist on inconsequential subjects--spats with her mother about the possible indecency of flaming lipsticks and nail polishes; thefts by her brother, twelve going on thirteen, from her supposedly secret cache of Mars bars; the ten-o’clock curfew imposed by her father and piously defended by her as “strict but fair”--family stories of the type in which Ralph himself never dealt and which he found tedious to hear unless told by Horse Hauser, whose examples were disgraceful, violent, hilarious. It seemed better taste to an outsider if a family was mocked by one of its members than if represented humorlessly.

When they finally reached her neighborhood, well beyond Bigelow’s store in a westerly direction though not apparently bordering Darktown--he was somewhat disoriented by night and by her presence--Margie announced she was just about home, stepped behind a curbside tree, and beckoned to Ralph to join her.

Nodding at the nearest bungalow, he asked: “That your house?”

“Up the street.” She gestured vaguely.

No doubt her folks, who emerged as puritanical in her long-winded account, were not supposed to know she was out with a boy without permission. But Ralph believed parents were quite right to take precautions against the Lester Hausers of the world. At the proper time he must go to Mr. Heppelmeier, Margie’s father, shake hands, and introduce himself. He must get a haircut and shine his shoes, so that his clean-cut, hard-working character would be evident.

“Well,” said Margie, leaning against the tree, hands behind her. She wore a thin, superior smile in the light from the streetlamp just across from them. “In the morning I am always grouchy, so if we see each other before class tomorrow, be prepared. But I’ll be in my usual good mood by noon, so I can meet you in the cafeteria. Go there as soon as you can after the bell and get a table for us before they’re gone. I might be a little late, because I generally have some things to discuss with the teacher. If so, just wait--no, if they’ve got cheese fondue and carrot-‘n’-raisin salad, get a tray for me. And milk, and layer cake. Not pie. Don’t get pigs in a blanket though. Stew is O.K., or chicken a la king--”

Ralph said quietly: “I go home at noon. I live only three blocks from school.”

“Well,
I
don’t,” said Margie. “I live way over here. It’s too far to go home, and I don’t like to eat by myself. It’s not fair.”

He threw up his hands. “What can I do about it? I can’t afford to pay for lunch every day.”

“I didn’t mean for you to buy mine!” she cried. However, he suspected her excessive indignation was due precisely to the fading of that hope. “Besides, you’ve got all those jobs of yours. What do you do with your money?”

“I don’t make that much,” said Ralph. “And what I make, I don’t mind telling you I salt away.”

Margie quizzically closed her lips in the center, but opened them slightly on either side to show the tips of her canines. It was a sort of trick expression, which Ralph would have been hard put to characterize, except that it made her look about forty.

“What do you salt it away
for
? Maybe you’re just stingy.”

She hit the target. He knew himself for a miser. Looking at the sum in his savings book, with the flanking interest payments in red--money born magically, not by work but from the copulation of one dollar with the next in the dark vaults of the bank--he enjoyed a swelling erection of soul. But he would have assumed that as his girl she could admire and not condemn that passion.

“Oh yeah?” said he. “Maybe I’m saving up for a ticket to New York. I’m not staying in this tank town forever.”

That threw a scare into her. She brought her hands across her stomach and said feebly: “You’re only fifteen.”

“I didn’t say it would be tomorrow. It’s just something I’m keeping in mind.”

“You’re sure ambitious, Ralph…I’m sorry I said you were stingy. I guess one day you’ll just think I’m some hick. You’ll drive through here in a limousine and won’t even recognize me.” She looked as if she might cry; though, true, without her glasses she tended to look that way anyhow. He much preferred her when she was being vulnerable and not critical or demanding. However, he had begun to suspect that her quick changes of style were not altogether involuntary, that she would take as much as she could get after trying for all. He must stay on guard at all times. She was indeed a worthy opponent. Her yielding was valuable in that it represented a resistance momentarily overcome but not destroyed: it would be back to keep him keen.

Therefore he did not give her elaborate reassurances now. He did not say that his fortune consisted of $19.77 and that he would need at least a hundred before moving East. He said merely: “There’ll be a lot of water under the dam before that happens.”

He placed his hands not on her shoulders but on the rough, cold bark of the tree just above them, leaned forward at the waist, and kissed her partially opened mouth with his own closed lips. Result: no bone-on.

She tried to pull him closer but failed. She sensibly accepted the situation, as he had known she would.

“I might walk you home after school tomorrow,” he said in compensation.

“Ralph,” said she, dropping her arms from his neck, “there’s something I have to tell you.” Her back still against the tree, she moved around to the shadowed side of the trunk. He too, feeling stranded, got out of the light. “My brother comes home the same way. So what that means is if he sees us he will find out who you are, and tell.”

“So?”

“So, my father doesn’t like your father.”

“For heaven’s sakes, why not?” asked Ralph, who had never heard his own father speak ill of anyone.

“Don’t ask me,” said Margie. “He just hates his guts. He’d never buy a used car from him, that I know.”

“What’s your father do?”

“He’s a bookkeeper at Universal Playing Card.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Look, Ralph, that shouldn’t make any difference with us. Did you ever see
Romeo and Juliet
, with Norma Shearer?”

He shook his head. “Leslie Howard was in that, wasn’t he? I like Englishmen like Errol Flynn and even Ronald Colman in an action part, but Leslie Howard’s sort of a sissy.”

“Their parents had a feud, so they had to meet on the sly,” said Margie. “I saw that when I was about twelve. My mother took me. She likes love stories, the sadder the better. I didn’t understand it all, but it was sad. We both cried.”

“Maybe we’ll have to read it in English,” said Ralph. “I’m not looking forward to it, I’ll say that. I don’t go much for poetry. I prefer modern writings: adventure, stuff like that. Also history, about real people and events.”

He wanted to get off the subject of their fathers, but Margie wouldn’t let it go: “So we’ve got to watch our P’s and Q’s.” He detected a certain excitement in her voice. “If my father knows about you, he’ll slay me. So if you call me at home and I’m not there or if I’m taking a bath, just say ‘Ralph.’ If they ask ‘Ralph who,’ make up another last name, and I’ll know it’s you and call back soon as I can.”

Ralph was himself appalled at the thought of such a sneaky association. Besides, if their fathers were on the outs, it might be because his had caught hers in some criminal enterprise: for example, fiddling with the books he kept for the playing-card company.

“Better forget about the telephone altogether,” he advised her. “
Your
name might be mud at my house too.” Having recaptured the initiative, he decided to escape before her next offensive. “See you in school.”

Margie refused to say goodbye, holding him there with her silence. Maybe she wanted to be kissed again, but he was determined not to be aroused.

“Well, I guess I’ll say so long,” said he, resting one gym shoe on its snub toe and lifting a hand into the light outside the shadow. “I better get on my way.”

“I think it’s because my father thinks your father was fooling around with my mother,” said Margie at last.