Sneaky People: A Novel (4 page)

Leo went to the short, squat safe behind Buddy’s desk. Its door was never closed, the only valuables, the checks and cash of the day, being kept within in a green metal box, locked by a key of which Buddy and Leo had examples, but not part-time employee Jack. Before leaving the lot each evening, Buddy emptied the box and prepared a deposit slip, then drove to the bank and dumped the tan envelope in the night chute. As Buddy himself had said just before the run-in with Ballbacher, Leo had seen him do this many times.

Yet having now to do it himself made Leo uneasy. He liked money but feared its physical reality. He paid all bills immediately, in cash, going in person to the Light & Power and Bell Telephone offices. His expenditures for living were modest; his invalid mother did not cost him as much as he let people assume, the doctor having long since announced that her ailments were imaginary and prescribed only sugar pills. It would have been much more expensive to keep her in a madhouse; she was harmless enough, all the more so when she believed she was dying and stayed in bed. Leo’s earnings averaged out, give or take, at thirty-five per week.

He took the cashbox from the safe and put it on Buddy’s desk, saying to Ralph: “Your dad’s still working on his first million.”

Jack could be heard urinating. Embarrassed by the sound and fearful that the schoolteacher would also fart, as some men did while so engaged, Ralph said: “I’ll lock up the cars,” and exited.

Leo found a deposit slip and, having opened the cashbox, began to record the amounts of the cashiers’ checks therein. This done, he turned to the greenbacks, some crumpled and almost black from use, others so crisp and fresh as to look bogus. His first count came to $387. Incredulous, he recounted and arrived at the even more unlikely sum of $429. He had himself made only one cash sale all day: a ’33 Ford station wagon, with sides of rotten wood, for an adjusted price of $85. Buddy, and perhaps Jack as well, must have sold several cars either under his nose or behind his back: remarkable in such a small organization.

He looked for the vouchers which should have been placed in the box along with the money for each sale, but, aside from his own for the $85, found only those for transactions by check.

Jack emerged from the toilet. Leo was about to seek his help on the problem at hand, but noticed that a glimpse of Jack’s shirttail was available in the wrong place: namely, his fly.

“Better close the barn door before the horse gets out,” he said, pointing.

Nodding in despair, the schoolteacher fastened the lower button of his suit jacket, the skirt of which was however too short to conceal the delinquency.

“My shorts and shirttail both are caught in the zipper,” said he, rolling his eyes. “Some kettle of fish.”

“Get a pliers from Clarence.”

“Say, that’s an idea,” said Jack. “I was going to sneak to the car and drive home.” He went into the garage.

Clarence saw him approaching with his fly open, and determined to hit the big fairy with a tire iron if he tried anything funny.

In the office Leo counted the cash a third time: $325. On the deposit slip he listed only the $85 he had himself collected. He put the slip, this money, and the checks into the manila envelope and closed but did not seal the flap. The remainder of the cash, rolled, went into his left pants pocket, where it exerted an interesting pressure against his genitals lodged nearby.

Ralph returned with all the car keys, each with its dirty-white tag listing the model. Leo dropped these into the bottom of an old candy box and put the box in Buddy’s wastebasket, covering it with the discarded paper.

“How come not the safe?” asked Ralph.

“They could blow it open. But nobody’d ever look here.”

Leo poked his head into the garage and saw Jack working with the pliers at his crotch. He waved the envelope. “Lock up, willya? I’m going to the bank.”

Jack distractedly agreed to that. He had his own key; he was often first to arrive on Saturday morning, eager to make the most of his day. Clarence was rolling a wire wheel, which bore a soft tire, towards the air hose out back. Nobody had told him they were closing.

“Hey, Champ,” Leo shouted. “You’re through for the day.” Clarence let the wheel fall crashing where he was and went to wash up at the hose with Lava Soap. He had never been invited to use the office lavatory; he had in fact never been inside the office.

“No dice,” said Leo when he came out the front door onto the lot and saw Ralph bringing the lawnmower around the side of the building.

“It’ll go in the trunk, Leo,” said Ralph.

“The handle won’t, and that’s illegal unless you tie on a red rag and I ain’t got one.” He pointed to his faded blue four-door ’34 Plymouth. “Get in and leave the mower here. I’m telling you, Ralph.”

The luxurious thought of stealing the money was infecting Leo with rudeness. Of course it was all playacting, his plan being to retain the cash only until he could account for it properly. Yet here he was, climbing behind the wheel, about to leave the lot for the weekend with a pocketful of filthy lucre for which he had made three sums, each inconsistent with the others, and he had not even queried Jack as to the missing vouchers, nor had he looked in the sales ledger in which all transactions were entered by Buddy, the first record he should have consulted for enlightenment when the cash-box proved cryptic.

Without a clue to this, Ralph wondered why his friend Leo was acting so pricky all of a sudden.

L
AVERNE’S TOP-FLOOR FLAT
, in the rear of the two-story building, was reached by an outside staircase. In his current state, Buddy did not trouble to take the giant step that would evade the fourth tread, which shrieked at the imposition of weight. Ordinarily he liked to arrive silent as a burglar and apprehend Laverne in the act of bleaching her hair with cotton balls dipped in a saucer of peroxide or washing her step-ins. Buddy delighted in the particulars of illicit domesticity, whereas in his proper home the sight of a basinful of Naomi’s slimy wet hose was greatly offensive to him.

Now however he had other needs. Gasping from the immediate climb, his skin prickly-heated from the several rushes and recessions of blood as anger alternated with shame—he had been tricked into an ineffective defense of his honor, humiliated before his employees, and not by Ballbacher, that shitheel, but by himself; made
disorderly
—aching, panting, and with a smudge on the seat of his white flannels, not covered by the tail of his blazer, he opened Laverne’s never-latched screendoor and entered her living room.

The shades were drawn against the heat even on this not hot day, and it was warmer inside than out. The room as usual had an odor that reminded him of firecracker punk, though actually it came from the incense she often burned in the belly of a little brass Buddha on the whatnot shelf alongside the hand-colored portrait photo of herself taken at the time of her confirmation: the expression slightly petulant owing to the onset of her first period, for which her mother had not prepared her; staring into the camera, her pants full of blood. Fastidious Buddy disliked such reminiscences.

“Izzat you, stinkpot?”

Buddy was in no mood to give the traditional Bronx cheer in reply. He silently went through three feet of hallway, entered the bedroom, and was struck over the head with a stuffed animal.

Laverne was plastered against the wall just inside the door, smirking, blouseless, her white-brassiered boobies looking even more tremendous than usual. Buddy retrieved the pink elephant from the floor. For an instant he considered hurling it back at her, having at the moment no stomach for accepting even a tender attack without retaliation, but as always the presence of Laverne’s aggressive flesh worked its marvelous magic.

While she stripped, he fitted the animal between the cheeks of his ass, threading its trunk between his legs to emerge in front, where he swung it in clockwise revolutions. For her part she extended and waggled her tongue, then said, in an artificially rough contralto: “I can take all you got and then some.” Causing him to drop the limp synthetic member and expose the real one, stiffened by her boast. She seized it and led him around the room as if he were a little red wagon.

In no time at all Buddy’s chagrin had decamped….

After knocking one off in the summertime, Buddy liked to stay in bed awhile, lying in his sweat, though in winter he immediately jumped up and dressed so as not to risk a chill. With two long blood-red talons, Laverne peeled the fishskin from his member and took it away.

The toilet exploded in a flush, and she returned, purple-tipped bazooms wobbling. She sat down on the edge of the bed, reached under the pink-shaded lamp, claimed the pasteboard box of Sheffields, then slid the little drawer out and plucked up one of the cigarettes. She had a lighter that was shaped like an automatic pistol: you pulled the trigger and a flame sprang up through a tiny trapdoor on top of the barrel about halfway along.

Having fired up her cigarette, Laverne said: “Did you tell her?”

Buddy spotted a piece of flaking paint on the ceiling almost directly overhead. If the roof leaked the plaster would eventually fall; that could be lethal to an occupant of the bed.

“Ralph was there.”

“Today was the day you were going to tell her.”

“Ralph sat there, eating like a horse. I don’t know where he puts it.” Buddy patted his plumpish midsection and in so doing encountered a large fluff of lint in his navel though he had showered that morning. “He stays skinny as a rail.”

Laverne nodded and spewed smoke from lips from which she had wiped the smudged color while in the bathroom disposing of the fishskin.

“You’re going to do it, though, right, Buddy? You’re gonna find the occasion. You promised.”

“You got my word on it.”

“I don’t know, Bud,” said Laverne. “You been saying that since the Year One. What would you do if I cut off the nookie supply?”

She made this threat periodically. As usual, Buddy dismissed it with levity.

“I’d just have to whip my willie by hand,” said he. He raised himself on the near elbow and, pivoting, swung his legs to the floor on the far side of the bed.

With his back to her, he said soberly: “Look, baby—”

“You’re not gonna do it, are you, Buddy? You’re not ever going to do it.”

“I been working on it. You don’t know how hard—”

“And you can’t do it.”

“No, no,” said Buddy. “You ain’t got it straight. You don’t know what I mean, kid.” He adjusted his tool, which was still shrinking inside the foreskin. “I been thinking for a long time. Some things are hard to put into words.”

Suddenly he twisted around. “Where would she go if I dumped her?”

Laverne continued to stare at him. He put a hand on her shoulder cap. “I’m working on an idea.” Laverne of course knew nothing of his plan to have Naomi killed. It was not the sort of thing you could reveal even to its beneficiary. “You know I love you, baby. But I wanna do right by all concerned: that’s the kind of monkey I am. Besides, I don’t have any grounds on her, so she’d have to be the one who files against me, and how would that look for the business if it gets messy? And I don’t relish the thought of bringing you into it, getting you smeared with filth.”

Buddy got up and walked off the woolly bedside rug. He stole a look to see how Laverne was taking this and saw that the cigarette had fallen from the slot of the undersized ashtray and was burning the surface of the night table. He went to put it out and saw several other scars on the varnish. The pink satin shade on the lamp had separated here and there from the top ring of wire. He tried the switch.

“Hey, the bulb is out.”

“I don’t go in the grocery store any more, Buddy. They give me funny looks.”

To forestall the expansion of this statement, he said quickly: “Oh screw them, Laverne. You should care about some little pissants in dirty aprons. Besides, I told you to order by phone.”

“Yeah, great, so that delivery boy wants more than a nickel, I can tell you.”

Buddy turned from the table and peered down at the dark roots in her scalp. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“He hangs around,” cried Laverne. “He thinks I’m a fast one, Buddy.”

“That little punk!” Buddy thrust his lightly haired chest out beyond his belly. “I’ll hand him his head.” He punched a fist into a palm. “I’ll sour his milk.”

“He wouldn’t do it if you was here.”

“What’s he do?”

“It’s the way he looks. He don’t have respect.”

Buddy walked to the foot of the bed and put a hand on either upright of the bedstead and leaned in.

“Look,” he said. “This thing is driving me wild too. All I want is a life with you. Is that too much to ask? We got a right to happiness!” He took a deep breath and felt the area of soreness where Ballacher had struck him.

“The way you talked back then, it was so simple.”

“It wasn’t that long ago.”

“Well,” said Laverne, “it was March and here we are at the beginning of September.”

“I thought at first we’d just have a few laughs, and then this thing hit me like a ton of bricks. I can name the exact minute—”

“When the band played ‘Always’ at the Palm Terrace,” said Laverne. “‘That refers to us, baby,’ you said. ‘Not for just an hour, not for just a day, not for just a year, but always.’ I want a whole life with you, sweetheart, all of you, all the time.”

Buddy also recalled that shortly thereafter he felt an alien hand on his shoulder, opened his eyes, and saw, partly through Laverne’s hair, the figure of the bouncer, who said: “House rule. No intimacies on the dance floor.” And those pricks collected a dollar cover charge per person.

“I wasn’t talking through my hat then,” he said, “and I have not changed since.”

Leo was going to take Ralph home before driving to the bank, though the latter was much nearer the lot than the Sandifer house, but at the crucial turn he suddenly altered his plan, wheeled to the right, and went along Philathea Street in a southerly direction.

“I got to drop this off,” said he, taking his hand from the black gearshift knob and tapping the fat brown envelope on the seat between them. “It’s full of mazuma, and I don’t want to get stuck up.”

“Did anybody ever knock over this bank? Baby Face Nelson or Homer Van Meter or one of those guys?”

“You’d of heard about it if they did,” said Leo, sucking his teeth.

“Anybody ever pick the lock of the night deposit?”

“Wouldn’t do them any good. You can’t reach down to the basement.”

“What about a long wire?” Ralph asked. “With a hook on the end of it.”

Leo found himself enjoying this juvenile conversation. It postponed the moment at which he must decide what to do about the money in his pocket.

“There’s a swinging shelf or door inside, at the top of the chute, sort of,” he said. “It swings down but not the other way, so if you was pulling something up it would close and you would run up against it, more or less.” He punched Ralph’s bony knee. “You got to think up a better way to make your bundle.”

“Yeah, cutting grass,” said Ralph, and made a face. He thought with annoyance of the lawnmower still down at the lot.

Leo pulled in to the curb, scraping the sidewalls of the tires with a horrible sound. “Here,” he said, taking the key ring from the pocket of his seersucker jacket. “You make the deposit.” His voice assumed a nasty edge. “You’re the son and heir. It’ll all be yours someday anyhow.”

That is, if Buddy didn’t blow it all on his chippies. Leo was intoxicating himself with resentment, as a faint-hearted man gulps alcohol in preparation for an approach on a woman guarded by taboo: race, loyalty, or law. The moment lay at hand. He could still add the diverted cash to the contents of the envelope, correct the slip, punctiliously initialing the changes, seal the flap, and present the package to Ralph for deposit. But to do so, he must once again count the stack of money which in each of the three previous tallies had emerged with a different total from the last.

As it happened, Ralph took the decision from him, seizing key and envelope, and in a trice the boy had crossed the sidewalk to the bronze trapdoor and only his fumbling at the lock gave Leo time to shout from the window.

“Seal that envelope! The flap is open.”

The stickum tasted slightly of menthol. Ralph pressed the envelope against the smooth yellow brick of the bank’s wall and fingered the flap down. He unlocked the entrance to the chute and dropped the envelope within, not seeing the hinged barrier of which Leo spoke. Depositing money in this fashion was like dropping crap into a toilet: down the sewer, never to be seen again in its current form. “Did you ever realize,” Horse Hauser once asked, “how much dissolved shit is in the oceans of the world?”

Leo said nothing en route to Ralph’s house, though his lips moved from time to time as if he were sucking on a Sen-Sen. One long black hair grew from his right ear. A lot of adult guys let things like that go: nose-shrubbery, hickeys, etc. As yet Ralph had good skin, but he was eternally vigilant for pimples. Several kids in his class were acned like the surface of the moon, and many had blossoms on their cheeks. Candy was said to bring these out on girls; on boys, jacking off. Ralph always inspected his face carefully after yanking his crank.

At the conclusion of the sloppy U-turn that brought the car before the Sandifer house, this time about a yard from the curb—for an auto salesman, he was a lousy driver—Leo finally spoke.

“How’s your mom these days?”

“Swell,” said Ralph.

“I ain’t seen her in a coon’s age.”

“Well, she’s always there.” Ralph opened the door and stepped over the running board, to which he had some ritualistic aversion, onto the paved square that interrupted the continuous strip of grass.

Leo was about to move off when Ralph turned and came back. He stuck his head through the window. “I forgot to say thanks for the lift.”

“I thought I had a flat or something,” said Leo. “Don’t mention it, sport.” He liked nice manners in a boy.

With the money in his pocket, Leo postponed going home. He wandered around town in his car. After the second tour of the business district, he went across the railroad tracks and then followed the creek for a mile, passing the dairy, the ice plant, and a siding full of boxcars. Through the open door of one of the last he saw two hoboes. He exchanged bleak stares with them. The life of the road held no allure for Leo: coffee in a can, going to the toilet in a field, getting rousted by the railroad cops, would outweigh the romantic rewards if any.

Though in the earlier Depression years many ruined millionaires, unemployed executives, and forgotten war heroes were alleged to have become bindlestiffs, the tramps you saw locally had low foreheads and if refused a doorstep meal could turn surly unless you had or pretended to have superior force. Leo did not own an animal, yet he had posted on his gate a sign reading:
BEWARE OF DOG
. Kids pulled it down the next Halloween, having it in for him because he would not contribute to the trash drive by which they hoped to raise money for softball sweaters.