Sneaky People: A Novel (3 page)

“Sunday?”

Buddy was quickly derisive. “Sorry to interfere with your weekend drunk.”

“I generally goes to church,” said Clarence.

Buddy assumed this was more sarcasm. He had had enough. “Eleven it is. And don’t get fresh or you’re out of a job.” He turned briskly and returned to the office, where Jack was sitting at his, Buddy’s, desk, doing the paperwork on the sale of the phaeton, with the purchaser, now looking uneasy, on a camp chair next to him. Leo sat behind his own desk, thumbnailing tablets into his mouth from a cylinder of Tums. Seeing Buddy, he pointed through the window with his other hand.

“We’re losing business.”

“Then get out there.” Buddy took his blazer from the hatrack. “I got an appointment. If I don’t get back, you lock up.”

“What about the receipts?”

Buddy took the night-deposit key from the end of the golden chain that extended into his right pants pocket from a loop of belt. He handed it to Leo, who recoiled slightly.

“What’s eating you? You know where the bank is, and the deposit slips are in the bottom desk drawer. You see me do that every night.”

Leo swallowed hard to combat his heartburn. Buddy had never done this before in all the years he had worked for him. Leo was frightened by sudden changes of policy in any area: if his stool was discolored, for example, he was shaken to the core unless the doctor had previously warned him that a certain medication would produce that effect.

Buddy forced the key upon him. “You can’t stand to be trusted,” he said jovially.

Behind him, Jack was giving the young man a purchase agreement for signature, along with a fountain pen which he had just shaken into the wastebasket, speckling the balled paper with blue. He reversed the pen and indicated the signature-place with its butt. “Right there, Mr. Ballbacher.”

Ballbacher began to shake his head. He stood up. “See, I din’t—” He made a ghastly grin. “The facts of the case is…I ain’t got that kind of money. I bit off more than I could chew. See—”

Jack was himself grinning in a loathsome way, trying to restrain his spite.

“I
told
you, Mr.
Ball
bacher, it’s only
thirty
-five dollars down, and you didn’t make
any
objection to that, as I remember, now did you?” Jack felt like prying up the little lever on the pen and squirting ink in his imbecile face.

“See,” said Ballbacher, “I’m getting laid off.”

Buddy whirled about in one of his dance steps, came quickly to the young man, and put out his hand.

“I’m Mr. Sandifer,” said he. “That’s the name you see on the sign outside, but they call me Buddy. What do they call you?”

Ballbacher stood passively while Buddy pumped his hand.

“Dutch.”

“Say, Dutch, now we know each other, why don’t I knock off another twenty simoleons in the name of friendship?” Buddy now claimed Ballbacher’s entire right forearm, clamping it at the elbow while continuing to squeeze the hand.

“I’m real sorry, Mr.—”

“Buddy.”

“I ain’t got the money, and can’t get it.” Ballbacher shook his head doggedly. “Eyes bigger than my stomach.” He was trying to break away from Buddy now. “I got a sick wife, and my kid has a mastoid—”

“Let’s have a private conversation,” Buddy said, and by leverage on the forearm propelled Ballbacher out the front door in almost a run, though the young man was larger than he and heavily muscled. There was a physical aspect to salesmanship; some customers were best manipulated by running away from them. Ballbacher could be bullied; he admitted guilt by explaining and apologizing.

“Where you work, Dutch?”

“The foundry.”

Buddy turned him so that he looked into the sun.

“Dutch, you know what a verbal contract is?” Buddy did not wait for an answer. “That’s when you say you’re gonna buy something. You don’t have to sign anything. You just have to tell a salesman, ‘Yeah, I’ll take that phaeton.’ Yeah, that’s how it works, Dutch.”

Ballbacher stank of sweat, but Buddy hung on. “It’s the law, Dutch, and nothing you or I can do about it.”

Ballbacher frowned. “All I said was ‘O.K.’”

Buddy chortled gaily. “Same thing, Dutch. That’s what the law calls a verbal contract.” He pointed across the street. “Like you go in the Greasy Greek’s. You don’t say, ‘I’ll give you fifteen cents for a hamburger.’ You say, ‘Give me a hamburger.’” Buddy let him go suddenly and slapped his shoulder. “You say
give me
, Dutch, but you’re liable for the charge.”

Buddy walked away, forsaking Ballbacher, isolating him in the sunshine. In the nearest rank of cars a swarthy little man was opening the driver’s door of a ’31 Chevy sedan. He slammed it shut, opened it, and slammed it again.

“You’ll admit that’s a solid body,” Buddy said. The man grimaced and shrugged. “Preachers take good care of their machines,” said Buddy. “Take a look at that upholstery.”

He returned to Ballbacher, who had not moved.

“If you think I’d try to bamboozle a family man, you’re wrong,” Buddy told him. “I’m one myself. Now, you hit a run of bad luck, get laid off for a while, could happen to anybody in these days. But you got Buddy Sandifer on your side. I need your business, Dutch. I can’t afford to make enemies. One word from me down at the loan company, and they’ll give you time, Dutch, more time: time’s money, Dutch. And in time you’ll be back on your feet again.”

Ballbacher rubbed his chin and stared bovinely at Buddy. The sun did not seem to trouble him.

He said: “You say I got to buy the automobile even when I didn’t sign nothing?”

“I don’t say that, Dutch. The
law
says so.”

Ballbacher nodded, so heavily that his head stayed down as he walked towards the street.

“Just a minute, fella!” cried Buddy, not following. “You come back here.”

Ballbacher responded promptly to this order. He turned, came back, and said deliberately: “Shit on you. You’re a goddam chiseler.”

Before Buddy’s rising fists had got beyond his waist, Ballbacher struck him powerfully in the center of the chest, causing him to back-pedal furiously until he went down on the seat of his white flannels. Ballbacher did not linger to enjoy this, but walked steadily off the lot.

Buddy entered the office and, shoving Jack aside, got his .38 Police Special from the desk. Jack’s forehead receded at the appearance of the pistol. He had not seen the prelude to the show of weaponry.

But Leo had and, dropping the roll of Tums he had continued to hold as a talisman, leaped to intercede.

“I’ll kill that dicklicker,” cried Buddy, waving the gun everywhere.

“No Buddy no Buddy no no no,” said Leo, making a desperate song of it. He clasped his boss at the waist, going after the pistol with his other set of fingers. They did a nifty foxtrot between the desks.

“I’ll spoil his fucking meat,” Buddy said.

Jack was shivering in the chair.

“Jack,” said Leo urgently. “For Christ sake.” But by the time Jack got to them, Buddy has ceased to struggle except in a rhetorical or symbolic style, gesturing with the pistol and howling indiscriminately.

Clarence could hear this back in the garage, where he was prying a tire off a rim, but he was never curious about the emotional displays of persons socially remote from him.

Ralph, sitting alongside his lawnmower in the shade on the far side of the building, where the blacktop gave way to gravel, heard nothing. Unlike his father he was easily distracted by trivial phenomena. He watched a lone starling peck futilely at stones and wondered how birds fucked. He looked into the waste ground beyond the chain-link fence and developed a fantasy in which, prowling thereupon, he discovered a concrete trapdoor flush with the earth and, lifting it by means of a rusty iron ring, exposed a set of descending stairs, at the bottom of which he found an enormous gambling den full of roulette tables, raucous music, and painted trollops, unbeknownst to the upper world.

John Dillinger had busted out of jail using a gun he had modeled in wood and blackened with shoe polish, and not long afterwards one of the villains in
Dick Tracy
carved a pistol from an Idaho potato, darkening it with tincture of iodine, which turned blue when in contact with starch. There was one of those little eight-page dirty books that showed Dick putting the blocks to Tess Trueheart. All the famous characters looked exactly as they did in the respectable funny-papers, except their peckers and snatches were shown starting on the second page.

Ralph had never yet in all his life seen a real pussy with hair on it, and no bare tits all the way to the nipples except in photographs.

He wondered whether he had waited long enough for his father to finish the conversation with Clarence. Ralph had not possessed an accurate sense of the duration of time since suffering a bad sunburn at the age of eleven, in consequence of which he had been delirious for twenty-four hours. He picked up the clippers, which he had taken from his back pocket before sitting down so that he would not be stabbed in the spine, stood up, and heard the gravel fall clattering from his ass.

After brushing away the rest of it, he went in back and saw his father gunning the car around the corner of the building. He ran and called, but when he gained the corner Buddy had already reached the street, turned onto it, and made his getaway burning rubber.

Inside, Jack was holding the gun. After a slow start, it had been he who finally disarmed Buddy.

Leo shook his head. He felt the effects of the incident. To dispel them, he said: “This has been some day.”

Jack returned the pistol to the drawer from which Buddy had taken it. A flat pint of whiskey lay within. Jack could have used a drink, but being a schoolteacher would not dare take one except behind the closed door of his home.

“This ought to be locked,” he said. “A child might get hold of it. You know what they say: everybody gets shot with an unloaded gun.”

Hearing the nonsensical statement, Leo felt better. “But that one’s loaded,” said he.

“Would he have shot him, you think?”

“I couldn’t say,” Leo confessed. “I never saw him do anything like that before. But I never saw him take a sucker punch, either.” He paused. “The whole thing was dumb. I don’t know what’s eating Buddy. Notice he didn’t work the lot this afternoon. He stands in the garage, chewing the rag with a jigaboo.”

“Where’d he go now?” asked Jack.

Leo made a moue of certainty. “To drive it off, that’s for sure.” But he remembered that Buddy had already been preparing to leave early, before the set-to. Without thinking of the effect it might have on Jack, he said: “To get his ashes hauled.”

Jack’s sexual imagination was quite domesticated, however; he had never had a woman before the first night of his honeymoon and none but his wife since, though sometimes when they did it he had fantasies involving movie actresses—oddly enough, the nonsensual types like Irene Dunne. He naturally supposed it was Mrs. Sandifer who quenched Buddy’s fire, and he showed no astonishment.

Leo was relieved to see his thoughtless remark fall by the wayside. He never trafficked in sex gossip.

Ralph came into the office at that point, saying: “Shit, I wanted a ride home.”

“You talk like that,” Leo said disapprovingly, “and you won’t get one.” Ralph was taken aback. Leo went on, scowling: “A friend of yours told me you stank. I said, ‘Like shit!’” Then he showed his teeth, poked Ralph in the belly, and roared. Ralph joined in the laughter. Jack did not, being a schoolteacher. But he prissily loosened the knot of his washable tie and opened his collar.

Leo told Ralph: “Listen, you run up all the windows and lock all the cars, and I’ll drop you off.”

“Is it closing time already?” Ralph grimaced at what he believed another failure of his inner clock.

Though usually the steadiest of men, Leo had been made disorderly by Buddy’s unprecedented loss of control—as Clarence, no schemer, had been led by Buddy’s threats to an understanding of blackmail.

“That’s right,” Leo said recklessly. “Your dad’s decided to call it a day.” He amazed himself as well as Jack, whose eyebrows arched. Jack had earned no commission whatever, this Saturday; yet, infected by Leo’s capriciousness, he made no protest. Instead, he opened the drawer, took out the pint of Seagram’s, unscrewed the cap, and boldly poured whiskey down his throat in full view of Ralph.

Leo was hit hard by this seizing of the initiative. He did not himself imbibe.

“Hey, Ralph,” he said desperately. “You want a drink?”

Ralph said: “Sure.” He always enjoyed Leo’s badinage.

But Jack cried: “Leo!” And put the bottle away posthaste, avoiding Ralph’s eyes. Better to ride it out than to ask Ralph to say nothing. Jack knew better than to put himself at the mercy of a schoolboy. But he struck back at Leo.

“What about the receipts?”

Leo decided Jack was getting too big for his breeches: he found the question even more insolent than the drinking.

“You just let me worry about that,” said he. “You can take off now if you want.” In the absence of Buddy, Leo considered himself boss. Jack flipped his hands and went into the little washroom in the far corner; already he had begun to feel the effects of the whiskey. If he went home having earned no money and with alcohol on his breath, his wife would think the worst.