“This is fishy.”
“All the while I was cutting the grass,” said Ralph, “I never knew there wasn’t any furniture in here.”
“No wisecracks, Ralph,” Buddy said, collecting himself. He nodded towards the davenport. “Just pay your respects quietly and leave.” He produced his wallet. “Here. Your mother and I are going to have supper out. I know at your age it bores you stiff to sit at a table in a fancy place. Here.” He gave Ralph a dollar. “Live it up in one of your teen-age dumps.”
Ralph was reminded of the two dollars he had been given on Saturday night to present to Bigelow for the broken window. His father was not aware he had subsequently worked briefly for the grocer. He had of course banked the two-dollar bill before meeting Laverne Linda Lorraine. He would repay her for the breakage with the fifty-cent piece. With the dollar he would buy her the maximum assortment of Martha Washington chocolates, in a box like a jewel case of many drawers.
He went near the davenport and looked at Leo’s mother. Under the paint and powder and what appeared to be a wig she was a whole lot older than she had appeared on first glance. She had a small hooked nose like the beak of a parrot, which was accentuated by a little cupid’s bow of lipstick below. Hauser always said if you looked at a dead body for a while you imagined it was breathing. Ralph did not stay long enough for this effect to develop.
Buddy came out of his physical quandary—peering through windows and prowling into the dining room again—and briskly preceded Ralph into the hallway, where Naomi, veil lifted, was wiping her eyes with a hankie. She could not stop giggling.
“Buddy,” she said sotto voce, “you are diabolical.”
“I can’t find Leo for the life of me,” he said. “I looked all over down here. He ain’t in the kitchen and I couldn’t see him outside. But you know what? He took all the furniture out there. It’s all over the yard.”
This information quelled Naomi’s laughter. She lowered her handkerchief and said: “How odd.”
“Ain’t it though,” said Buddy. He went along the hall, opening doors. On the first try he got a closet; on the next, the basement steps. He disappeared.
“I’ll look upstairs,” Naomi said towards the spot from which her husband had vanished.
Ralph said, with some anxiety: “I’m supposed to leave.” His mother was depositing the balled handkerchief in her black purse. “Maybe I better stay though and help find Leo.”
Naomi smiled beatifically. “I’m sure there’s some simple explanation for all of this.” She drifted towards the staircase like a dark ghost.
Ralph doubted that there was, but selfishly did not want to be involved. He had done his duty…. Yet had he discharged his responsibility, the concept that meant so much to the sainted Laverne? There was a difference. He went back to where the kitchen should have been, found it, saw that it at least was fully furnished, did not find Leo there, and went outside.
As his father had said, the yard was full of furniture, chairs, tables, and floorlamps, all upright and, in fact, in a conscious arrangement, as one could see when his vision recovered from the initial surprise: here, a complete parlor without walls; there, near the cistern, a dining room, its round table covered with a white cloth in the center of which reposed a bowl containing two wax apples, one pear, and one eternally bright-yellow banana, and at either end a white candle in a bronze holder.
When Ralph had come close enough to count the pieces of fruit, he saw Leo sitting on the cistern cover; the man had hitherto been concealed by the high back of a dining-room chair. He wore the rumpled seersucker he was usually seen in at the lot; a black band encircled the left arm just above the elbow.
“Hi, Leo,” said Ralph. “I want you to know I’m sorry.”
Leo smiled in a perfectly normal way. “Ralph, you got a good head on your shoulders. What do you think I should ask for that dining-room set?”
Ralph appraised the table and chairs. “You selling this stuff?”
“You bet,” said Leo, slapping himself on the thighs and rising. “They don’t give funerals away free, you know.”
Buddy emerged from the outside entrance to the cellar, which was the old-fashioned kind under a two-leaved horizontal hatchway.
“Could you use any of this?” Leo asked him eagerly.
Buddy pointed a finger at Leo and said sternly: “Your place is inside.”
Ralph piped up: “He’s selling this stuff.”
Buddy raised his remaining fingers to make a flat hand. “I found that floral arrangement I sent over, down cellar.”
“It’s too big for the Frigidaire,” said Leo. “That’s the coolest place I could think of. Who wants to buy wilted flowers?”
“Say, Leo, did Doc Klingman drop around this afternoon?”
“No, he never—unless I was out here and didn’t hear him knock.” Leo’s eyebrows took wing. “But, say, that’s an idea. He could use some new furniture in his waiting room. And he’s into me for a couple bucks for coming and signing the death certificate.”
Buddy heel-and-toed a complete circuit of the dining table. When finished he noticed Ralph and with one shoulder gave him the high sign to leave. Leo went to the table and re-stacked the wax fruit. Looking at Ralph again, Buddy put his index finger to his temple and traced a circle.
Leo showed Ralph a paraffin apple. “When I was three or four I bit into one of these.” The very one: you could still see the tiny toothmarks.
“Say, Leo,” Buddy said impatiently, “you’ll have to excuse Ralph. He just came to pay his respects, but now he has to take French leave.”
“Say, Ralph,” said Leo, “you run into anybody who wants furniture cheap, I’d be much obliged.”
“You bet, Leo.” Wondering whether Leo was crazy, period, or like-a-fox, Ralph left.
Buddy said: “Look at it this way, Leo. If you don’t sell everything in a hurry it’s liable to rain.” He refused to believe that the man was so far gone as to reject such a modest piece of practical reason.
“Nah,” said Leo, squinting rhetorically at the sky. “Not a chance. Anyway, I got a couple tarps down cellar I can haul out if need be. But these things will go fast when the crowd gets here.” He put back the wax apple he had bitten as a three-year-old.
Buddy said: “If you don’t mind me saying so, I don’t get why you want to peddle this stuff in the first place.”
Leo’s answer was amazingly reasonable. “The only insurance I got is on me, for her. Since I made the only income, I didn’t have none on her. So I ain’t got the money to bury her.”
“For Christ’s sake,” said Buddy, “didn’t I tell you I would help out?”
“No,” said Leo, “I never borrowed a penny in my life. The old man took out a loan to buy this house and I’m still paying on it, but that ain’t personal.” He squinted at Buddy under his brushy brow, which in this expression was continuous, not separated above the nose. “You want to buy this furniture though, that’s different.”
Buddy saw the irony: Leo was blackmailing him, but unknowingly.
“How much you want?”
“Anything that’s fair.”
Buddy indulged himself: “What in the fucking hell can I do with two roomfuls of furniture?” But he was already separating, by touch, several bills from the roll of murder money in his pocket.
“I couldn’t say,” said Leo. “I’m just selling.”
“Well, I’ll make you a deal, Leo. I’ll give you fifty bucks for the whole works. But you got to get it out of the yard right now before anybody sees it.”
“Make that seventy-five,” said Leo. “That table’s solid oak, and that chair over there’s genuine horsehide and so’s the ottoman.”
Buddy said: “I’ll see you and raise you”—he removed his hand from his pocket and looked at what he held—“twenty-five. I’ll give you a hundred, Leo, if you carry this stuff, lock, stock, and barrel, back in the house where it was.”
A glowering, possibly mad expression developed on
Leo’s face. “I don’t keep nothing that ain’t mine, see?”
Buddy cried: “I got it! Stick this stuff in the basement, and tomorrow you call up the Salvation Army.”
“Sure Mike,” said Leo, stoically. “If that’s the way you want it, Buddy.”
But after a moment he went back to sit on the cistern cover, falling into a sort of coma, and Buddy had to haul the furniture to the cellar himself, wheezing and sweating. When it came to the table, he tipped it on its side and rolled it to the opening and let it fall, a leg breaking off and another splintering before it caught at an angle in the doorway below.
Damp of clothing and dirty of hands, he took upstairs the basket of flowers on which the card read: “In loving memory—Buddy and Naomi Sandifer.” Buddy placed the floral arrangement in the room with the late Mrs. Kirsch. There was still no one else there. Leo had probably neglected to send the death notice to the papers. Then again, perhaps it was merely that Leo had no friends.
Buddy was wrong by one. As he left the house, Jack was ascending the stairs, wearing a properly doleful expression and carrying a bunch of weedy flowers, no doubt home-grown, wrapped in a cone of wet newspaper.
He insisted on giving Buddy a shake with an ink-imprinted, damp hand. “The wife couldn’t make it,” said he. “The two-year-old came down with the grippe, vomiting all over the place.” Rolling his eyes, he said: “So maybe you could take a raincheck on that stopping in for coffee.”
Buddy tossed his chin to the side. “Say, Jack, what would you think about coming on with me full time?”
Jack moved his Adam’s apple. “Gee, Mr.—”
Buddy leaned in. “Just between you, me, and the gatepost, Leo’s gone a little batty. He might have to be put away.”
“Oh,” said Jack, “isn’t it just the shock? He’s got a awfully good head on his shoulders.”
“Do me a favor,” Buddy said. “Don’t mention to him what I just mentioned to you.”
Jack quickly widened his eyes in a sissified style. He angled his head knowingly and then asked: “Is that Mrs. Sandifer I saw sitting in the car?”
“Probably,” said Buddy, and went down the steps. He glanced at the Plum house. Grace never got home till well after six, given the hour’s bus ride from downtown. If she was getting cock from somebody, it might run as late as ten, as it did in the old days when he fed it to her. According to her, her old man never even looked at her crossways.
He avoided looking at Naomi, sitting in the car, as he went by way of the trunk to reach the driver’s side. Buddy never used the front route, around the hood, not even when the engine was at rest; he was far too paranoid. Nor did he lie on his stomach in the presence of a woman, displaying an unprotected spine. Even with Laverne this was true.
Naomi could not drive, her only male habit being one he did not practice: smoking. Though the windows were open, front and rear, on this breezeless evening the air inside the car was poison-blue. He fanned the door several times before climbing in.
Naomi’s veil was lowered again, the cigarette going in and out just beneath it.
“Leo’s completely cracked,” Buddy said.
“He always seemed very level-headed to me,” said Naomi.
“Those,” said Buddy, letting out the clutch, “are the type who go to pieces first. Now, take me, I fly off the handle once in a while, I know, but it does take the pressure off.”
Naomi sent some smoke towards him. “Is that true?” she asked. “How odd. I’ve never seen you do that.”
“I guess I don’t always let on,” said Buddy. “I blow up in private.”
Naomi murmured indistinctly behind the veil. With her it was not control but simply a character incapable of any feeling at all.
“You got supper waiting?” He knew better.
“Chipped beef won’t take a minute,” she said. “And I’ll warm a can of limas.”
“I’ll tell you, Nay. We ought to get the taste of that experience out of our mouths. What say we put on the feedbag at Wong’s Gardens?”
In the early years they had dined there on signal occasions like anniversaries, and the day-after-holidays, but when business had got better and Buddy acquired a concomitant taste for roadhouses with cocktail lounges, steaks smothered in mushrooms, and dance bands, Naomi in her dreary way remained enmired in an addiction to chicken chow mein. They had not therefore been to Wong’s for ages. It was an appropriate locus for their last meal together.
Naomi stared at him through her veil. “Well, it is an extravagance…”
Once again Buddy wondered, as he had for eons, whether her bland exterior, now concealed altogether, was a mask for corrosive sarcasm. And once again he decided it was not: it was humanly impossible to pose as a drone for so many years. Wong’s special four-course meal, from egg-drop soup to almond cookie or pineapple slice, was priced at thirty-five cents, and Naomi never even glanced at the a la carte, resorting to which anyway you would be hard put to exceed a dollar’s worth of food unless you gluttonized wildly on both lobster and squab. Whereas Buddy had never gone anywhere with Laverne without spending a minimum of three bucks for food alone, with more for the drinks. Laverne could run up a dollar tab at a fish-sandwhich take-out place, with extra orders of french fries and cole slaw, a jar of sweet pickles, not to mention several packages of those round cheese crackers stuck together with peanut-butter putty, which she ate in the car going home. Entering a movie, she invariably stopped at the lobby machines and bought fifteen-twenty cents’ worth of chocolates kisses, Milk Duds, and candy-covered licorice pellets.
“Let’s go whole hog for a change,” said Buddy. “We owe it to ourselves.” He shook his head. “The last person I would think It of was leo”
Naomi pushed up her veil and left it there. “I have a confession to make, Buddy.” He felt a slight chill for no special reason beyond his instinctive fear of revelations, even such harmless ones as Naomi was likely to make.
“I never did go in to look at his mother,” said she. “I could see no point in it if he wasn’t there.”
Buddy snorted in relief. “You didn’t miss much.”
Ralph had stopped at the drugstone and bought the box of candy, through alas the super-duper size was not in stock and the largest available was the thirty-nine center, Which however did have a red bow of satin ribbon under tight cellphane.
His route took him past Elmira’s and there, leaning against the outer wall of the high-school hangout, he saw his bicycle. Ralph was enraged at the boldness of the thief. Thrusting the candy box, in its green paper bag, as far as it would go into the cavity below his left shoulder, he prepared to enter the shop and confront the malefactor. Even in his anger he was able to reflect that finding the bike here meant no colored youth had stolen it, given the exclusion of Negroes from Elmara’s this relived him, because he was scared of them.
Just as he reached the door however, Margie emerged.
“God,” she said, “there you are! God, I’ve been looking everyplace for you.”
“Don’t bother me now,” said Ralph. “For pity sake. Just get out of my way when the fur flies.”
Oblivious to his purpose, she continued to block him. “I guess I was stupid. I found your bike laying on the curb over on Myrtle. When you didn’t show up after a long time I figured you forgot it or some kids hooked it and left it there or something, so I took it back to Bigelow’s but they said you didn’t work there any more, so I took it to your house but nobody was home so I came here thinking you might—”
“Oh for Christ sake,” said Ralph, “put a lid on it, will you? I might have known. You damn sap.” She put a hand to her frozen face and backed up. “Why don’t you let me alone? Who asked you, anyway?” He pursued her until her back met the wall. “Lucky I didn’t report it to the cops, or you’d have gone to jail.”
But once again he was relieved, this time of the responsibility to tangle with a boy who would have had to be tough and fearless to flaunt stolen property. The matter of h
is own possible cowardice in the clinch was now a dead issue. He had but a cowering, wretched girl to condemn, and could do it in perfect conscience.
Ignoble fellow that he was. “Oh, hell,” said he instead, “don’t act like you’re being murdered. Can’t you see I’m kidding?” She peeped through her hands. He made a grotesque grin and pointed to it. “See?” She sniffled. He stuck out his tongue and crossed his eyes. She giggled and wiped her nose on her wrist.
“I knew you had it all the time,” said he.
“I don’t think you did.”
“I didn’t report it, did I?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, I don’t intend to argue about it,” Ralph said with fake huffiness. If they continued to stand there, somebody he knew would show up and think she was his girl, and his saintly decency would be rewarded with humiliation.
“Look, I got an appointment.” He put the package in the basket and seized the bike.
Now that she had eluded punishment, she had no shame whatever. “I don’t suppose you could give me a ride?”
“You’re right. The answer is no, nix, nothing doing.”
“I mean, just as far as where you turn off.”
“You know something, Margie? You’ve got an awful lot of gall.” But what could you do with somebody who regarded that as a compliment, grinning proudly?
“All right,” he groaned, nodding at the crossbar. “Climb on. But watch it when we go over the creek. I might throw you in.”
“Better not. I can’t swim.”
“Somehow I knew that,” said Ralph.
“You’d just have to save me.”
“Don’t I know it.”
“But,” said she, settling her bottom on the bar and putting one damp hand over his on the rubber handle grip, “it would make you feel real big.”
Burdened with this threatening knowledge of what she had on him, as well as her physical weight on the bike, and yet with a sense that he was doing the right thing in supporting them both, he shoved off. The effort reminded him immediately that he still wore the heavy suit, from which he had been distracted by his mission since leaving Leo’s house.