Sneaky People: A Novel (6 page)

Horse however stared at a passing car that was jammed full of colored people. Soberly he asked: “Listen, Sandifer, do you think you could jazz a coon girl?”

“What a question.”

“I’m asking you, no shit. You know Corky Barker? He went down to see his relatives in the South this summer. He says white guys fuck nigger girls all the time down there.”

“Did
he
?”

“Naw, he was scared. He said he thought it would be weird, but I know he was scared.”

“I guess it would be weird,” Ralph admitted.

“That’s because you’re a fruit.” Hauser guffawed and punched Ralph right on the bruise he had given him earlier.

“Knock it off for Christ’s sake,” said Ralph, rubbing his arm. In response Hauser gave him still another blow. “You son of a bitch,” said Ralph, squaring off, “I’m telling you.”

“Hoho,” said Hauser, hands on his hips, “you’re going to apologize. You’re not man enough to call me that.”

Hauser was the far better boxer, but Ralph could out-wrestle him. Once Ralph had got him on the ground and, scissoring his legs around the neck, applied pressure until Hauser turned maroon.

“All right,” said Ralph. “I’m sorry I said S.O.B., but if you punch me one more time we’re going to tangle.”

Hauser accepted both apology and warning, nodding his thick burr head, and shook hands.

“Fair deal.”

An illustration of why Ralph and Horse, who had little in common except an interest in sex, stayed friends: every now and then they made these gentlemen’s agreements, and Hauser was good as his word once he gave it. It occurred to Ralph that Hauser deliberately provoked him so that they could make a pact. Hauser loved rituals, as opposed to Ralph, who observed them really because he thought he should. The other thing to be said for Hauser was that he was only superficially tough. One time when they had had a real fight, a year or so before, and Hauser cut Ralph’s lip With a blow to the mouth, it was Horse burst into tears and ran away. Neither ever referred to this incident.

At length they reached Elmira’s, the local hangout. From outside it looked as if all the booths were filled with people eating potato chips and drinking Cokes, a combination that cost a dime. Ralph had made a dollar fifty that day, counting his allowance, but being rather a skinflint, had put a dollar forty into a little bank that was constructed in the form of a book, its leatherette cover inscribed, “
The Secret of Wealth
, by I.M. Rich.” A burglar presumably would not discern it among orthodox volumes.

Hauser on the other hand was a glutton and a spendthrift.

“Come on,” he said when Ralph showed signs of wanting to linger on the sidewalk. “I’m hungry.”

“You just ate.”

“Not much. My old man upsets my stomach.” Ralph had eaten with the Hausers. It was true that Horse’s father upbraided him incessantly, but without apparent effect: he devoured enormous quantities of food and had the table manners of a hog.

“I want to stay out here and see what quiff is on the street.”

“It’s all inside,” said Hauser. But Ralph was uneasy to be very near girls in a social interior; outdoors you could trail them at a distance and make derisive remarks to your male companions. Horse went into Elmira’s, however, and Ralph couldn’t very well follow girls by himself, which would be weird and perhaps interpreted as the act of a sex maniac, so he followed his friend.

Hauser threw insulting greetings at various persons as they moved along the aisle: “Pigface, Filthy Fred, Hick,” etc., and got as good as he gave: “Pimp, Jerk, Crud.” Ralph did not engage in this corny crap.

The very last booth on the right was empty. Hauser having stopped to chaff some acquaintances, Ralph took the lead; but before he could choose the back bench, from which you could watch new arrivals, Horse pushed roughly past him and claimed it.

“Goddam,” said Ralph, “you got the manners of an ape.”

Hauser good-naturedly made a monkey face and pretended to scratch fleas. Then he banged on the table with the ketchup bottle. “Service!” The Heinz label caught his eye. “Warnie Warren went to Pittsburgh this summer. They let you go through the Heinz factory and give you free pickle samples and also a pin shaped like a pickle. You can go through the Hershey factory, too, in Hershey, Pennsylvania, and they give you free chocolate. You could probably travel all over the U.S.A. and get enough free samples to live on. Like them little loaves of Wonder Bread they gave away in that booth at the fair.”

Elmira herself, a tall and buxom middle-aged woman who either dyed her hair red or wore a wig—there was an argument about this—came to take their orders. She nodded grimly at the ketchup bottle and said: “You break that and you bought it.”

Hauser put the bottle down and fished a dollar bill from his pants pocket. Narrowing his eyes and speaking in what he thought was an imitation of George Raft, he said: “Baby, there’s a lot more where this came from. I could buy and sell this joint.”

Elmira neatly plucked the bill from his fingers. She said: “I’ll settle for you paying your tab.”

Horse howled. “Me?”

“Yes, you, hotshot. You owe me something from last week, remember?”

“You’re some Jew,” Hauser said. “If you was a man your name would be Izzy.”

Elmira snorted. She never smiled but was a good-hearted soul who put a lot of kids on the cuff, and also was a soft touch for people collecting for various projects and causes: glee club, Community Chest, sandlot ball teams, etc. It was said her husband had been sent to the pen for bootlegging during Prohibition. Perhaps because of this Elmira was herself a teetotaler, and if she caught a kid with a pint of wine she banned him from her place for life.

“Hi, Ralph,” she said, dismissing Hauser with her nose.

“Hi, Elmira.”

“Say,” she said, “I was thinking of getting a little machine for myself. I was thinking of coming around and seeing your dad.”

“He’d certainly be glad to see you,” Ralph said. “I know that.”

“What I was thinking, it’s the end of summer now and the prices will probably go down.”

Ralph nodded judiciously. “They might, at that.”

“You tell him I’m in the market for a good buy, a little coupe maybe. I ain’t driven in years though. Years back, the late mister had a little flivver. I could drive that real good, but they’ve changed since, I hear. You used to shift gears with your feet in those days.”

“Old Doc Klingman,” Horse said, “still drives a Model T.”

“I wouldn’t call that old sawbones if I was dying from hydrophobia,” said Elmira. She took their orders: a bowl of chips and a Coke for Ralph, and for Hauser a chocolate malted and a banana split.

“You’re gonna get a potgut one of these days,” said Ralph when Elmira had gone. Horse’s father had a big beerbelly.

“Naw,” said Hauser. “Everything I eat turns to shit.” He took something from his pocket. “Hey, look.” He showed Ralph a little tin of Between the Acts miniature cigars.

“If you light up in here Elmira will throw you out,” Ralph said.

Hauser opened the box and, shielding it from the aisle with one hand, displayed the contents: a coiled rubber.

“New or used?”

“Brand-new Sheik,” said Hauser, closing the tin and putting it away. “Stole it from my father’s chiffonier. He keeps ’em under his socks. He’s got a fuck-book there, too:
Maggie ‘n’ Jiggs
.”

Ralph spoke disparagingly. “He’ll kill you.” But the sight of the rubber inflamed him all the same, as did ladies’ underwear when seen on a clothesline, unless it belonged to close female relatives.

“Naw,” said Hauser. “He don’t count ’em.”

Ralph sneered and went into his tough idiom: “You ain’t got no use for it, except to put it on when you beat your meat.”

Hauser looked dramatically smug, turning his mouth down and raising his eyebrows. “The hell you say.”

Ralph got a lump in his throat. He cleared it. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

“Screw you, Hauser.”

Their orders came and Hauser plunged into his, alternately slurping malted through the straws and shoveling into his mouth heaps of banana, three flavors of ice cream, chopped nuts, maraschino cherry, whipped cream, and butterscotch sauce.

Munching his spartan potato chips, Ralph grimaced and said: “Jesus, you make me sick.”

“Make you sicker if you saw the nookie I’m smelling,” said Horse, his mouth full of multicolored glop.

Ralph refused to be lured into the trap, knowing Hauser had far less patience than he with a story.

He turned and looked at a portion of the room he could see without cracking his neck. Sure enough, across and one booth behind that which was lateral with his own, there sat Imogene Clevenger, facing the door, so that he saw the back of her blond bob, a round of cheek, a tip of nose, and, through the inverted V made by her trunk and the arm elbowed on the tabletop, a swell of sweatered breast. She was with another girl—as always with the good-lookers, a beast who had pimples and wore glasses.

This latter person reacted immediately to Ralph’s stare, which had passed over and rejected her with the speed of light. She smiled and waved. It was that Margie he had run into in the afternoon with Leo, across from the lot. Ralph feebly returned the wave and turned back.

Hauser said: “Boy, you know the dogs.”

“Should I be nasty?” Ralph hated being back on the defensive.

Hauser wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, though a container of napkins was right there. He had already finished the entire order. “Like I always say,” said he, “with the ugly ones you put an American flag over their head and fuck for Old Glory.”

“She ain’t got much of a body either.”

Suddenly Hauser pulled several paper napkins all at once from the chromium holder and scrubbed his sticky hands. “Hey, Sandifer,” he said in a low, confidential voice, “you want to hear about this whore I found or not?”

Ralph’s stomach joined his testicles.

Horse leaned into the table. “Swear you won’t spread it around?”

“Not me.”

“Only you and me in on it, O.K.?”

“Scout’s honor.”

“You know that grocery I deliver for? I never told you this before, on account of I knew you would say I was full of shit—”

Ralph groaned in relief. He had actually thought Hauser
had
found a whore and would expect him to do something about it. “You mean that big blonde you claim gives you the eye?”

Hauser leaned back and pursed his lips. “Oh, I did tell you?”

“Only about a hundred times.”

Hauser’s wide face came across the table again. “Well, how about this then: I saw her pussy today.”

The anxiety rushed back. Ralph let some Coke exhaust its effervescence on his palate.

“She showed it to you?”

“Let’s put it this way: she sure knew I was looking at it. She had this kimono on, and it was open, and she was sitting on the couch, and you could see right up between her legs, and there was her big hairy twat.”

Ralph sneered again. “That was accidental, for God’s sake.”

“So why didn’t she close up when I was looking, I ask you?” Hauser answered himself: “She’s a whore, that’s why. Who else is dressed like that, at home in the middle of the day? She don’t go out to work and she ain’t married.”

“How do you know?”

“I never see no husband around there.”

“Well,” said Ralph, “her husband would be out to work when you delivered, wouldn’t he? Whereas is she was a whore, there’d
be
guys around.” Ralph figured this out for himself. He had never seen a “whore” in his life.

“The guys come at night, you asshole,” said Hauser.

“How’d you know? You ain’t seen ’em.”

“I don’t have to. That’s just the way whores work.”

“The voice of experience,” Ralph said scornfully.

“Lester told me,” said Hauser. Lester was his older brother, a sailor who occasionally came home on leave.

“Lester’s a big whoremaster?”

“Not him,” said Horse. “He don’t have to pay for it. Girls put out for him left and right. He says it’s a pretty poor man who has to buy his poongtang. Old Lester sees a girl he likes and goes right up to her and says let’s fuck.”

Ralph shook his head. “He must get slugged a lot.”

Hauser howled. “You’d be surprised at all the ass he gets.”

You could never tell with Horse what was a joke or just a lie. Ralph couldn’t imagine a decent girl even going on a date with Lester Hauser, who had big ears and an undershot jaw and old acne craters on his cheeks. He was bowlegged in his uniform and his sailor hat was always soiled around the bottom with sweat, dirt, and hair oil.

Hauser reached into his pocket and came out with a handful of dollar bills. “Lookie here,” he said, “and I got a few more where they came from.”

“What’d you do?” asked Ralph. “Rob a bank?”

Hauser leered. “I got my sources. How much are you carrying?”