Sneaky People: A Novel

W
HEN
B
UDDY
S
ANDIFER
drove onto his used-car lot he saw that both Leo, his full-time salesman, and Jack, a schoolteacher who sold cars only on Saturday, had clients in hand, while several other potential customers were roaming unsupervised, opening driver’s-side doors and peering at the prices whitewashed on windshields. Buddy parked the Buick behind the concrete-block structure that housed the office at one end and at the other the garage where Clarence, a colored flunky, washed, polished, and did minor touch-ups of paint.

Wearing a ripped undershirt, old striped-suit trousers, and rubber knee-boots, Clarence now squatted at the entrance to the garage, scouring the yellowed whitewalls on a blue ’36 Plymouth convertible. His brown biceps, operated by cords visible in high relief, throbbed and glistened as he worked the Brillo pad, his head angled to bring his good eye into play. At nineteen he had done some semi-pro boxing and been accidentally half blinded by the right cross of a young Irishman who two years later was mentioned once in a city paper as among the lesser contenders for the light-heavyweight title, but, suffering a series of defeats-by-knockout immediately thereafter, vanished.

Clarence did not look up from the dripping tire; but if he had, his manner would have been polite but not subservient. Buddy had acquired his services when Clarence was caught in the act of trying to steal a car from the lot on, as luck would have it, a night when Buddy had remained late in the darkened office, spread-eagling a woman on the desk. Disengaging at the sound of a suspicious noise outside, he put away his dick and seized a pistol and flashlight from the center drawer just under her buttocks, dashed out, and found Clarence with his dark head and huge shoulders under the opened hood of a ’31 Reo.

Buddy was quite cool when armed. “Make me an offer,” said he, playing the light on the Negro.

Clarence straightened up slowly. He offered Buddy the wire with which he had been trying to jump the ignition. With stolid dignity he said: “It don’t work nohow.”

For some strange reason Buddy had a soft spot in his heart for inept men; that this one was colored was even more of a recommendation; and when his flashlight beam illuminated the sightless, milky eye, he saw a combination that gratified him in the extreme.

“You unemployed?” Buddy asked.

“Yeah.”

“Can you wash a car?”

“Yeah.”

“Show up eight o’clock in the morning and you got yourself a job. Twelve dollars a week.”

Clarence asked, but with no interest: “You going shoot me?”

“To hell with that,” said Buddy, uncocking his gun and taking it away.

That had been three years ago, and they had not had a longer conversation since. Buddy did not even learn of Clarence’s career in the ring until his son, immediately intrigued by the Negro’s fantastic musculature, found out about it. But Clarence would answer any question put to him, in the most candid and economical style, e.g., “What happened to your eye?” “Irish Mulvaney.” There was some theory around the lot, originated by Leo, that Clarence’s brain had also been damaged.

Clarence now earned fifteen dollars a week and presumably lived in Darktown, though nobody was sure about that and the local protocol nicely forbade asking any colored person where he resided or whether he was married to the woman with whom he was probably sharing his abode.

Buddy entered the office by the rear door. He removed his blazer, put it on a hanger, and hooked the wire over the topmost projection of the wooden hatrack which was otherwise empty, the salesmen wearing their jackets when working the lot. Leo today was in badly rumpled seersucker, Jack in a neat Palm Beach suit of tan. Buddy kept his hat on as an anti-sneeze measure against the brief but regular intersection, above his swivel chair, of the drafts of two revolving electric fans, one on each of the walls that flanked his desk.

Ordinarily, with customers outside, Buddy would not have lingered within, though to do so, peering through the venetian blind kept three-quarters louvered against the sun on the west-facing windows, was often a good tactic, building up in a certain type of client a false sense that he was capable of making up his own mind, thereby weakening him for the eventual assault. But today, after a lunch that was exceptionally wretched even for his wife’s cuisine, Buddy felt himself the victim, and, behind his natty facade of white flannels, baby-blue shirt, striped tie, tan-and-white shoes, and coconut straw hat with polka-dot band, he was falling into one of his moods.

Leo entered the office at this point. He was wire-haired, anxious, hook-nosed, and his last name was Kirsch, and he was thought by some for these reasons to be a Jew; but he claimed to be of straight German descent and called himself a Lutheran though going to church only on the principal holidays.

He went to his own desk, sat down behind it, found a newspaper, and began to read the classified section, to which it was already opened. Buddy’s sneeze startled him.

“I didn’t spot you,” he said. “You’re quiet as a mouse. Sounds like you’re coming down with something. You look pretty peaked too.” In sympathy he whipped a handkerchief from his pocket and snorted into it. “Get a Benzedrine inhaler,” he said as his nose emerged. “It shrinks the sinuses.”

Leo always had a ready suggestion. He saw life for other people as a collection of immediate problems for which simple solutions were available.

“What you got?” asked Buddy, meaning the combination of customer and deal, because what Leo was of course doing was killing time until he could return to the lot and tell the client that he had talked the boss into reducing the price another twenty-five dollars. If that did not suffice, he might return again—perhaps, with a difficult nut to crack, three times—until he had at last reached the basic price which Buddy established for each car and below which no profit would remain. It was not necessary to consult Buddy at any time during this sequence, the schedule for which was longstanding.

“The thirty-five V-eight,” said Leo. “The one with the skins.” The other Ford, same year, same dark blue, still had a little tread on the tires. It was also priced the same as the one for which Leo had a buyer, had better paint, and the safety glass in the windshield had not yellowed as much. But secretly it was a worse automobile: the clutch slipped and the brake linings were a distant memory. Leo’s customer had sense.

He characterized him as “a rube, with his ball ‘n’ chain.” Buddy had in fact noticed the middle-aged couple as he drove in: the man wearing a light-gray hat with a narrow black band and a striped shirt buttoned at the collar without a tie; the woman, a hairnet.

After a while, Leo returned to the lot, but he had miscalculated: the hicks were gone. Jack was talking confidentially to a low-browed young man in a sports shirt with the tails hanging out, alongside a ’37 Ford phaeton of which the top was badly worn. But for the local sootfall it would have been displayed in good weather with the canvas furled.

Seeing Leo, Jack angled a finger at him and said to the customer: “Mr. Kirsch will bear me out.”

Leo began automatically to nod in support of whatever point Jack was making, and to look sober but unworried. He seldom smiled at a customer; unlike Buddy, he did not have the light touch. Jack however wore a bright grin. He was a large man and had certain effeminate ways though married and with three kids.

“I was just telling Mr. Ballbacher the phaeton’s an excellent compromise between a convertible and a family car. He’s a family man, like me.” Jack always got this information in. Cruel friends in his boyhood had called him a sissy, and it happened occasionally that persons on the other end of the phone thought they were talking to his wife, or if at the office to a stenographer. But he was perfectly normal. He was a better-than-fair bowler and could drink as much brew as the next man, though being a schoolteacher he could not afford to be seen doing it in public.

“And,” said Leo, continuing earnestly to nod, “you won’t find a cleaner model than this here.”

“Top is shot to hell,” said the young man, flattening his nose shrewdly.

“Last you another year,” said Leo. “Then you replace it for a few bucks. Why not? Anyway, you won’t have it up much in good weather.” He patted Ballbacher’s shoulder. The young man wore a Hawaiian-figured shirt and let the ends hang out to conceal the beginnings of a beerbelly. He probably worked in the local pencil factory. When he walked around front and knelt and poked judiciously, meaninglessly, at the grille, in which were stuck some dead leaves from bygone autumns, Leo asked Jack: “ Where’d my hayseeds go?”

Jack simpered guiltily. Here Leo was helping him, and yet he hadn’t noticed Leo’s clients. He felt like a twerp. Therefore he lied. “Said they’d be back in an hour.”

“They all say that,” Leo noted cynically.

Ballbacher prized a chewing-gum wrapper from the grille. “Clark’s Teaberry,” he said. Next he peered at the hood and felt it. “Lotta road film. How’s the paint underneath?”

“Just wait till the nigger gets through with it,” said Leo. “We’d be willing to throw in a Simoniz on this one.”

Ballbacher was impressed. “Just wax, or cleaner and wax?”

“The works.”

Jack looked at the arm of his Palm Beach suit. There was an ugly smudge on it. He had leaned against more than one car, and while Clarence dusted them all every morning, by noon they were covered with soot.

Leo realized he was doing Jack’s work, making a sale for which Jack would get the commission. He saw a young girl in halter and baggy shorts enter the lunch counter across the street.

“I’m going to the Greek’s,” he told Jack. “I didn’t get time to eat lunch yet.”

Without warning, Ballbacher suddenly announced that he would take the Ford phaeton at the windshield price, $599, and Jack with soft elation led him into the office to do the paperwork.

Buddy’s hat was there, but Buddy was not. He had gone through the side door into the garage, in search of Clarence, whom he had decided to consult on the subject of killing his wife, whose name was Naomi. He had thought about this for ever so long, but not with any detail.

People were always slaughtering each other in Darktown. True, all parties to the killing were colored, which made it a different ballgame, but there must be certain general rules. What Buddy was actually thinking was that Clarence, though incompetent himself, might provide him with a murderer: surely he had some shiftless criminal pal or cousin who would cut his own mother’s throat for a fee.

Ralph, Buddy’s fifteen-year-old son and only child, had offered to help his mother dry the luncheon dishes, but hardly had he picked up the towel when he saw through the kitchen window that Alice Diefenbaker, a pudgy sixteen-year-old who lived next door, had come out and sat down on the top step of the back porch, her kneecaps as high as her plump milk fund, and her two fat hams, divided by the strained crotch of underpants, shamelessly visible. Her eyes were so pale that at this distance they looked like the empty circles of Little Orphan Annie.

“Be right back,” Ralph told his mother, whose arms were up to the elbow in dishwater. He walked smartly to the bathroom, where behind the closed door and with closed eyes he masturbated.

Afterwards he felt the usual degradation and washed his hands several times as if they had been covered with tar. When he returned to the kitchen, he looked out again at Alice Diefenbaker and recognized her as a big fat ugly slob, and wondered at his recent action. He was prepared to deal with the dishes now, but he had apparently been gone longer than he realized, for the plates were dry and stacked on the drainboard, and his mother was gone.

He went down to the basement to get the lawnmower and found his mother there, filling one of the stationary tubs with household laundry.

“Well,” said he, swinging the long handle around so that the blades would not engage while the wheels turned. He trundled the mower to the door that led to the outside stairs. “I guess I’ll go to work.”

“And a good job you’ll do too,” said his mother. Nobody else’s talked quite like that: almost English, sometimes reminding him of Merle Oberon, though there was no physical resemblance. His mother was skinny and usually wore a housedress; she kept her brown hair in a bun. She never gave him any trouble.

He proceeded to cut two yards that afternoon: one belonged to an old lady named Mrs. Heffelfinger who lived alone, and the other to Leo Kirsch, who worked for his father. The latter was about a mile and a half from home and a half mile from the used-car lot. Although the early September day was no scorcher, Ralph was piss-sweaty from all the walking and pushing. Not being crazy to take the longer route home, he decided to go to the lot, where perhaps he could catch a ride with one of the salesmen on a demonstration drive, or maybe wait until his father was finished, talking meanwhile with Clarence and perhaps helping him wash or wax a car.

He had also to collect his fee from Leo, Leo’s mother being some kind of invalid who stayed inside with the blinds drawn and you never saw her throughout the entire job.

While rolling the lawnmower along the sidewalks, Ralph suddenly got a hard-on for no reason at all, which was to say, not thinking of girls, and until it went away, which it did after one block of mental discipline, he had to walk in a kind of duck fashion so as to minimize the bulge in his chino pants. The penis was the strangest of all human organs, except perhaps the nose. In a sex book which a friend named Horse Hauser spirited out of his father’s sock drawer, the ejaculation was compared to the sneeze as being inevitable of conclusion after it had once got started. In the same book, written by a medical doctor, they found the assertion that in some women the pubic hair had been known to grow to the
knees
, and they imagined it as a fantastic beard, hanging down.