Sneaky People: A Novel (9 page)

Buddy raised his eyes but not his head. Silently he watched Clarence rebutton the jacket.

When this job was completed he said: “Sit down. I want to talk turkey.” Clarence remained standing, but Buddy went on anyway. “Now you been working for me for some time, and you know I’m hard but fair. I could of sent you to jail but I give you a job instead, and I believe I am right in saying that every Xmas since, I have raised your wages a dollar though you are doing the same amount of work as when you started, which ain’t never been enough to kill you. I have to tell you there are them who don’t like people of your race, but I’m not one.”

He went back of his own desk, got his chair, and rolled it, not without some difficulty from the balky wheels, to a position in front of Leo’s desk, back of which Clarence was now unbuttoning his jacket though still standing.

Within a few seconds Buddy had addressed more language to him than in all their previous association. As it happened, Clarence enjoyed fluent talk; that was why he usually spent most of Sunday in the church, the preacher and some of the elders as well being noted orators.

For his own part, Buddy was in his natural element when it came to selling a reluctant customer a bill of goods.

“You had much experience with women?”

Clarence now took a seat. He wet his lips, felt an earlobe, and clasped his hands before him.

“Some.”

Buddy indulged in a bit of levity by way of preface. “Like the fellow says, turn ’em upside down, they’re all the same.” Take any white man, you would get a smile at this, but Clarence showed no reaction. Not joking, Buddy said: “They’re a pain in the ass sometime, the best of them.”

“That’s right!” Clarence spoke with great feeling.

Buddy saw he had found a nerve. “Damn right! And when it comes to the worst, you got a living hell.”

With even greater vehemence Clarence repeated his assent. He was no stranger to woman trouble.

Buddy lifted his hand like a traffic cop. “I say a man’s got a right to respect.”

“You tell it.” Clarence was now responding as if in church. He was impressed with Buddy’s command of this subject.

“If God meant it to be the other way around,” said Buddy, “he would of given the man a hole and the lady a club between her legs.”

He unintentionally had struck Clarence’s funnybone. The ex-boxer chuckled so heartily that his good eye blurred.

Buddy brought down his hand and clapped it with the other. “By God, I hate to see a man take shit from a woman.”

Clarence blinked to clear his eye and said seriously: “It don’t hurt to take a stick to some.”

“Thing to do is not let a woman get her hooks in you to begin with. But that’s easier said than done. Maybe you got a business to build up and don’t have time to run around chasing pussy. When you’re young maybe all you want’s a nice home to go to after a hard day, with a hot supper and a pipe to smoke in your slippers.”

Clarence looked pensive.

“Say this happened to a young fella,” Buddy went on. “You could see how easy he would get the problem we was talking about.” Clarence seemed to have fallen into a coma. Buddy waved at him. “See what I’m getting at?”

Clarence’s good eye looked from right to left. He lowered his chin onto the knot of his necktie. Buddy wondered why he was trying to justify himself to a colored flunky. “Well, goddammit, yes or no? I don’t like to talk to myself.”

The ex-boxer brought his chin up and scratched it reflectively. “I don’t know if I right,” he said at last, “but you trying to deal with—” He started again, speaking very patiently: “When I come in here you was talking about killing, and now you talking about being married?”

“Sure,” said Buddy in relief. “You ever been married, Clarence?”

The car washer shook his head.

Buddy nodded. “Uh-huh. Well then, it might be hard for you to appreciate what the setup is like when it goes bad. You work hard to give a woman everything she wants, and what you get back is shit. You got things on your mind, but you can’t talk to her about them. She sits there reading a fucking book. She don’t fix her hair any more. Hell, she don’t even wash it regular, and when she does she don’t clean the fucking sink, so it don’t drain; it’s full of dirty hair and green grease! Makes you want to puke.”

Clarence could appreciate that. There was nothing as bad as a filthy woman.

“She’ll fry you an egg with the yellow hard all the way through,” Buddy went on. “Burn the toast black. She won’t shave her legs and lets them get hairy as an ape’s. She’s got no pride. She’ll let her stockings fall down to her ankles. She’s got yellow fingers from smoking, and so’s her teeth. Lets a bagful of garbage set on the sink till if you lift it the bottom falls out. You give her a shirt she’ll scorch it.”

For some moments Clarence had been aware that the job for which Buddy was recruiting him was not only the murder of a white, but a white woman. This was too bizarre to provoke him into rising, as he had before, and uttering a refusal. Instead he sat there soberly and tried to understand why Buddy had picked him, though true it had been by default; but Buddy had expected the candidate would be colored. Apparently any Negro would do. Perhaps it was a compliment.

“Well sir,” he said finally, “you got a problem all right, but I just wash the cars.”

Buddy was silent for a while. Then he said: “Christ, Clarence, you could do it easy as falling off a log.” He let several seconds pass again. “How else could you make two hundred bucks all at once?”

Clarence smiled in wonderment. This man was asking him to kill his wife.

“I see,” said Buddy, “you’re beginning to like the idea.
Two hundred dollars
.”

It was the craziest proposal Clarence had ever received his life long, crazier by far than the one made by a man who came into his dressing room after a bout and represented himself as a promoter with an interest in Clarence’s career and took him to his apartment, where he handcuffed himself to a bedstead and offered Clarence ten dollars to whip his big fat white ass with a bundle of twigs tied together.

“It’d be
easy
,” said Buddy. “And you can’t get in no trouble, because I let you in myself and then afterwards give you plenty of time to get away before calling the cops.”

Clarence kept grinning.

“First thing tomorrow morning,” Buddy said, “I’ll go to the bank and get you half. You put a hundred in your pocket, and we’ll get the details down pat.”

What the ex-boxer was thinking now was that if it was so easy to kill his wife, why didn’t he do it?

“Way I figure,” said Buddy, “we make it look like burglary. You come in the outside cellar door, come up the steps, and you’re right across the hall from the bedroom.” He closed his eyes in thought. “After you got the main job out of the way, you open dresser drawers and spill stuff on the floor.”

The office door opened behind him, and Buddy almost snapped his head off his neck. It was Ralph.

“I didn’t know you’d be here. I just dropped by to get the lawnmower I left, and I saw the car. I didn’t know you were coming here on Sunday.”

“
I thought you promised
,” said Buddy in a deliberate fury, “
to keep your nose clean from now on
.”

Ralph wrinkled his nose. “Huh?”

“Since when do you open a closed door without knocking?”

Clarence stolidly closed his eyes. He had no stake in this.

“No backtalk, please,” said Buddy in a calmer voice. He pointed to the door.

“Can I use the bathroom, please?” Ralph asked, and before Buddy could decide whether this was an elaboration of the insolence he slipped into the little lavatory and locked the door.

Buddy rushed to the plywood panel and pounded upon it. “Come out of that place!” He feared Ralph would settle down for a long crap. He was answered almost immediately by the sound of the flushing mechanism. Ralph came out, buttoning the top of his fly. He was a lightning-swift pisser.

“Sorry,” he said to his father. “I didn’t know you had to go that bad.”

To save face, Buddy went inside and took a leak for himself. He had to wait a longer time than usual for his waterworks to function. He wondered whether he had been jazzing too violently of late: that could happen.

In the office Ralph said hi to Clarence.

Clarence nodded silently, then looked at the desktop, trying to discourage the expected questions about his career in the ring.

“I guess back in the old days you’d be out now doing roadwork,” said Ralph. “Even on Sunday.” Clarence shrugged. “Then back to the training camp for a big steak and half a dozen eggs. I guess Primo Carnera would eat half a dozen
steaks
. He had a glass jaw though, didn’t he? You ever fight him?”

Clarence twitched his chin.

“I guess he was dangerous if he fell on you,” said Ralph.

Clarence did not smile at the jest. He was thinking that even when he won the rare purse he could seldom afford steak for supper, let alone breakfast. He wished this kid would go away.

“He was
too
big, wasn’t he? I guess the right size is like Louis?”

Clarence avoided bars the nights on which Louis fought; he didn’t need that. Not that he meanly wanted to see him defeated by a white man, just because he, Clarence, had been half blinded by one. But neither did he childishly exult in the man’s persistent victories as if they reflected glory on him, as did the stupid janitors and shoeshine boys. What Clarence would have liked was that some other colored fighter give Joe a good beating. But when John Henry Lewis fought him, Joe knocked out John Henry in the first minute of the first round.

“I was thinking,” said Ralph, “if I got a pair of gloves, maybe you might show me a few pointers if you had the time.”

This suggestion depressed Clarence even further. He almost yearned for the return of that evil man from the toilet.

He mumbled, scraping his upper lip with the rake of his lower span of teeth. One wanted him to commit a murder, and the other wanted boxing lessons. Whites ran the world without knowing how to do anything for themselves.

Buddy emerged at that point and asked Ralph: “Why aren’t you in Sunday school?”

“It’s over.”

Buddy nodded. “All right, Ralph. You can run along.”

“See you, Clarence,” Ralph said and departed.

Buddy peered out the window to see if he was actually leaving. He saw Ralph run the lawnmower out to the sidewalk and then stop and rudely scratch his butt in public. That no one was around at this hour on a Sunday was neither here nor there; the gesture was loutish.

Turning, he said to Clarence: “Let’s let the details go until I pick the exact time. You might forget ’em otherwise or get to boozing and shoot your mouth off. I hope you got sense enough afterwards to keep your trap shut. They got an electric chair up at the pen…. What I figure is maybe sometime the middle of the week, but I gotta check. Sometimes her sister comes to visit and stays the night.”

He seized his chair and ran it back behind his desk. “Tomorrow you get your hundred. Bring some kinda coat and hang it in the corner of the garage. When you go home, feel in the pocket for a envelope.”

Clarence rose and buttoned his suit. Services continued all day at the Abyssinian Baptist Church, and he intended to spend the afternoon there.

It occurred to Buddy that there would be no need to give Clarence the second half of the fee. Once he had performed the job, to whom could he complain?

R
ALPH WAS JUST FINISHING
his bread pudding when he heard Horse Hauser calling “Hey, Sandifer” outside the back door.

“May I be excused?” he asked his father.

Buddy grimaced. “Isn’t that kid old enough to knock on the door like a decent human being?”

At this point Hauser shouted again, and Ralph said: “I’d better go out there or he’ll keep yelling.”

“You tell him to knock on the door from now on. I don’t want to hear any more hog-calling outside my house.”

Naomi smiled at this turn of speech. For Sunday dinner they sat at the round table in the dining room. Concealed by the mashed-potato bowl was a burn hole in the white tablecloth, made by a fallen candle some years before at the last Christmas get-together of the relatives prior to the death of Ralph’s remaining grandma, Naomi’s mother.

Ralph took his dirty dish and glass to the kitchen and went out the other exit. Hauser howled once again before he reached the door.

“Who let you out of your cage?” Ralph said, descending the back steps.

Hauser said coldly: “C’mere.” He walked over by the garage and turned to confront the attendant Ralph. “Sandifer, if you ratted on me last night, I’ll get you for it.”

“Me?”

“I’ll trim your ass, is what I’ll do.”

Ralph extended his jaw. “Any time you want to try…”

Hauser diminished the depth of his already low forehead. “Frankly,” he said with pomposity, “I thought better of you.”

“In the first place,” said Ralph, “I don’t know what you are talking about.”

“The cruiser got you.”

Ralph struck himself in the brow. “That was my father. A car suddenly pulled up, and it was my old man of all people! He didn’t recognize you, and I didn’t tell him.”

“Sure about that?” Hauser peered at him like a movie detective grilling a suspect.

Ralph had enough of this. “Look, you prick.” He poked Hauser’s chest with two knuckles. “I got you out of a jam that I had nothing to do with, so don’t come around here and give me any shit.”

This sent Horse into retreat. He backed up against the side of the garage, saying humbly: “Appreciate it, Sandifer. You’re a real good man.”

Mollified, Ralph said: “Let’s forget it. The money’s back and you’re clear.”

Hauser’s mouth sagged. “But I tell you this: I can’t ever go back to that job again. I can’t show up there tomorrow. I’d give it away for sure. That’s the way I am. I can’t hide nothing.”

Ralph sought to pass this off with a jest. “Bragging or complaining?”

“I’m serious.”

Bored, Ralph looked at the tiny tree he had planted near the garage last spring. It had been dead all summer. On the annual Arbor Day every student was given a little sapling to take home and put into the ground. Ralph’s never took root though he faithfully carried out the planting instructions on the mimeographed slip included and religiously supplied water. Hauser and most other guys used their baby trees for whip-fights or re-creations of the duels between Errol Flynn and Basil Rathbone, dropping the shredded results in the gutter.

“Well,” Ralph said, “let’s go down to Elmira’s and have a Coke or something.” He started to walk away, but Horse did not follow, so he came back. “Look, if you feel that way, why don’t you make a clean breast of it to Bigelow? After all, he’s got his money.”

“I could easier cut my throat. No, I’m finished.” He looked accusingly at Ralph. “I don’t get no allowance like you, Sandifer. My old man don’t give me the sweat off his balls.”

“I only get fifty cents, and I work damn hard for that.” Nevertheless, Horse made him feel guilty. “If you want to cut grass, you could take over some of my customers to tide you over. Like Leo Kirsch. You can have Leo. Or I got an idea: we could become partners and split all profits. With two of us, we could mow a lawn in half the time. We could take on more customers, and both of us would make at least as much as I do alone. Then when the fall settles in, we’ll rake leaves, and shovel snow in the wintertime. Maybe wash windows for spring housecleaning.”

Hauser was sneering. “Maybe you like nigger work, but it’s not for me.”

Ralph was miffed. “Well, you wanted my advice.”

Hauser made his mouth into an O. “Since when? I came over here to do
you
a favor, Sandifer. There ain’t nothing you can do for me.”

“Screw you.”

“Now you’re being childish,” said Horse. “What I wanted to tell you was Bigelow will need a new delivery boy, and you can be it if you go over there after school tomorrow.”

“You serious? You giving it up?”

“I told you I was. You calling me a liar?”

Ralph looked at his feet. “Nice of you, Hauser.”

“It beats cutting grass. I generally raked in three, maybe three and a half a week. He pays two-fifty, and then sometimes you get tips or they let you keep the deposit on the returned bottles. And you get stuff at Christmas, though not always money. Get a rear basket for your bike, along with the front one you already got, so you can take a couple sacks at the same time. It’s two hours a day, and four on Saturday afternoon. If you ain’t delivering he will want you to carry stock up from the cellar, but I always took it easy on that. Told him I was ruptured.”

“I might just go over there,” Ralph said. “I was thinking of going out for football, but I’m too light.”

“Yeah,” said Hauser, who though husky had little interest in sports. “At Christmastime you generally get something from most of them. Maybe a little hard candy at least.” He spoke sadly.

“I guess you’ll miss it,” said Ralph. “Sorry how it worked out.”

Hauser suddenly stared at him in defiance. “Don’t bleed at the asshole for me. I’ll get by all right. I got what it takes.”

“Come on,” Ralph said expansively. “Let’s go down to Elmira’s. It’s on me.”

“Jesus,” said Horse. “I never thought I’d see the day when you’d spring for anything. Bet the moths will fly out when you open your pocketbook.”

Ralph was happy to see that Horse had regained his pride in spite of all. He had despised the hysterical figure of the night before.

After a dinner of stewed chicken and noodles, and an apple pie he had timed so it would come fresh and hot to the table, where his mother ate one stout wedge, and then another, with alternate forkings of rat-trap cheese, Leo let the dishes soak in the sink and took his long leisurely postprandial defecation while reading the newspaper supplement called
This Week
. He used the basement facility, which was situated within a compartment of rough boards in the corner near the coal bin. His mother never came down cellar, so he left the door open. When he looked up from the paper he had a view of the furnace and beyond it the standing pool of water that had leaked through the concrete-block walls during the last rainstorm: beneath it was a clogged drain.

He had left the undeposited money on his dressertop all night while he slept more soundly than usual, not for once being awakened by his mother’s midnight retching. When he awakened in the morning and dressed, returning the small change and keys to his pants pockets, he saw the bills, which the night’s rest had caused to straighten from a wad into a sloppy pile. He felt a certain resentment, as if they had been forced upon him against his will. He took the stack by one end and slapped it irritably upon the dresser, raising some dust. It was housecleaning day.

After he had prepared and delivered to her bed his mother’s breakfast of four soft-boiled eggs broken over fragments of toast and crumbled bacon, a mug of hot water and lemon for her bowels, he went into his room, rolled the bills tightly again, and put them into his pocket. They were still there, in the pants that now lay around his ankles as he sat upon the commode.

He did not consciously think of them, yet it was they that distracted him from the articles in
This Week
, of which he had read two as well as a page of jokes with so little attention that he could not have described the subjects thereof or have retold the jokes as it was his practice to do on Mondays to customers at the lot. Leo had to get his material from such sources; he did not have Buddy’s talent for original wit.

Finally he gave up, flushed the toilet, went out, and looked at the water on the floor. It had dwindled somewhat in recent days owing to evaporation, leaving a white ring to mark the circumference of the original collection. The wall nearby was stained with damp. He suspected the tree roots again had broken through the drainpipe that ran between the cellar and the sewer under the street, but to have a plumber verify that with his “snake” would cost at least a dollar and a half and to have him grind the pipe free might go as high as five dollars. And the water did no harm where it was.

Leo toiled up the steep steps, which took more effort than usual; the money seemed to weigh him down. He emerged into the kitchen and gazed negligently at the sinkful of soapy water and dishes. Normally he would deal with that before going outside, in good weather, or to his room in bad, and having his session with the young girls in the rotogravure section. Today however, in a renegade mood, he continued past the sink and through the dining room into what his mother called the parlor. As usual she was lying there on the davenport.

“Hi, Boy,” said the parrot, then leaped from the perch to the wire wall of the cage, turned itself upside down, and began slowly to descend with fastidious claws. Leo inserted his index finger through the wires, and Boy halted his downward progress to rub the side of his beak against it. But had Leo rubbed Boy, the bird would have nipped him. Boy, a tyrant, had to take the initiative. Leo respected that, however, as a note of pride on the part of a totally dependent creature who furthermore lived in a prison. He could not have tolerated an obsequious pet.

He had not looked directly at his mother, who no doubt would speak soon enough, in complaint or with some importunity. He kept his shoulders stiff as he claimed the rotogravure section and walked from the room. Only when he reached the back door did he relax, yet he could hardly believe he had got away scot-free. Perhaps she had fallen asleep. As he turned the key in the door he kept locked against tramps, he heard the horrible gurgling cough for which she had been noted for years and which the doctors said issued from no organic cause. He plunged onto the back steps to escape its vile sound, walked across the lawn that Ralph had mowed the day before, and sat on the cracked wooden cover of the disused cistern under a large old elm that had been dying for years of the blight but so slowly that half of it was still in leaf—luckily, the half that shaded the cistern.

Leo lived in the old part of town. His next-door neighbor’s garage had been converted from a barn. When Leo was a boy his father had kept chickens in a henhouse, now gone, at the bottom of the property, which extended for about a hundred fifty feet, beyond which was empty land full of the goldenrod and ragweed that tormented the asthmatic.

Instead of perusing his favorite section, with its pictures in brown monochrome, Leo let it fall from his slack hand and told himself uncompromisingly that tomorrow morning he must return the money to the cashbox in the safe. If he did this before Buddy reached the lot, the explanation, if required, would be simple. He had deposited precisely the amount for which there were sales records; he had left in the box that for which there were none.

Having made the decision, Leo was almost overwhelmed by a sense of well-being. He rose from his seat as if inflated, bent to retrieve the roto section, sat down again, and leafed through it. No bathing beauties were therein; it was too late in the season. But there was a picture of a thin, lank-haired girl in a tartan skirt and saddle oxfords, holding a sphere about the size of a coconut, with a caption that read: “Thelma Wilhelm, Washburn freshman, shows ten-pound ball of tinfoil she’s been collecting since 1936. When it reaches basketball size, says the fifteen-year-old, she’ll sell it, giving proceeds to Community Chest.”

A pity he had sold his own tinfoil ball to the junkman. He could otherwise have offered it to Thelma to incorporate into hers. Leo adored the earnest good will of young girls.

Dear Miss Wilhelm: Under separate cover please find my contribution to your worthy efforts in behalf of charity. You are a fine, upstanding young person. I trust you do not smoke tho, and you get your cigarette foil from father, uncle, etc., and other adults. A Friend

The thought of Thelma opening the package with a little chirp of pleasure, and cupping his silver ball in her slender white hands on which the nails were all chewed, was very erotic to Leo.

He sat there on the cistern cover, enjoying a nonphysical orgasm that violated no laws, and when he heard a shout from behind, his reaction was guiltless.

He turned and saw Jim Plum, his neighbor, waving at him with a sickle. He waved back with the roto section. On that encouragement, Plum came over. He was a medium-sized man, but lumbered when he walked as if he were much heavier.

“How you doin’, fella?” he asked.

“I can’t complain,” said Leo.

“Smell the skunk last night?”

“Can’t say I did.”

“Dog must of got after him. Ever had a dog that got sprayed by a skunk?” Plum was a genial man whose questions however had a certain belligerency about them. He toyed with the sickle as if he might give Leo a taste of it unless he got the expected answer.