Sneaky People

  But hardly had Leo’s hamburger been slammed down before him by the Greek, who was always surly after the proper lunch hour had passed, than Leo saw with despair that the girl was mashing the last morsel of doughnut between her lips, soon to be followed by the straw issuing from the bottle of Royal Crown Cola, the last inch of fluid from the bottom of which was sucked up with the appropriate and, to Leo, aphrodisiac sound.

  He was forced to gobble his hamburger in two bites and without ketchup or even salt. The patty was grease-hot from the griddle, and Leo’s eyes exuded water. He drained his glass of milk. To make it worse, the girl then only feinted at departure, rising merely to pick her back teeth with a forefinger, then sitting down again to order another doughnut. Her first ferocious bite caused red jelly to squirt onto the countertop, the stingy Greek not providing a plate for small orders.

  Thus Leo was compelled to leave before she did. He hoped that Ralph did not make an assumption from the reference to the girl, but he was not really worried. Ralph was a dumb kind of kid, no chip off Buddy’s block, taking rather after Naomi, whom Leo respected as wife and mother but who was no great shakes in the upstairs department.

  Ralph ran the lawnmower around back and leaned the handle against the wall. He saw his father talking to Clarence inside the open garage, and entered.

  “Hi, Clarence.” He ignored his father. It was locally customary never to greet your parents in public, since you resided with and were completely dependent upon them. The reverse was not true, however, at least not with Buddy, who was given to demonstrations of conspicuous affection and pride—back-slapping, hair-rumpling, etc., which he never did at home. (“C’mere, Ralph, and meet Mr. Plage, vice-president of the Building and Loan. Fred, I’m mighty proud of this boy.”) For some reason, Ralph rarely encountered his mother when out of the house, though she issued forth from time to time, walking to the grocery each day and sometimes taking the streetcar into the city for department-store sales, though generally returning home having purchased little.

  Ralph was astonished now to hear Buddy say harshly, pointing towards the chain-link fence that separated his compound from the vacant lot in back: “Do you mind, Ralph?”

  Ralph retired around the corner of the building, not at all hurt but puzzled as to what kind of confidential business his father would have with a colored man. Had Buddy been talking elbow-to-elbow with Leo or Jack, Ralph of course would have hung back for the green light.

  Clarence on the other hand had assumed when Buddy approached him privately that his employer wanted a piece of dark meat, i.e., wanted to use him as pimp, and behind the mask of his broken nose and milky eye he secretly smirked, believing that, in the inevitable white way, Buddy was impotent and sought black therapy. Before the bout in which Mulvaney had knocked out half his vision, Clarence had seen, when they were getting into their jockstraps in the common dressing room, that his own tool was twice the size of the Irishman’s, which looked like a little chicken neck. Clarence knew nothing of Buddy’s cocksmanship and would not have believed in it whatever the evidence. Both white women Clarence had himself fucked told him that all men of their race were basically queer, and they should know, being whores.

  Jack had brought the Ford phaeton around back for Clarence to Simoniz. This was to impress the purchaser. Actually Clarence would not begin to rub the body until the financing was arranged on Monday with a loan company from which Buddy got a kickback for steering the borrower to its door.

  Clarence was rubbing the hood with his forefinger to gauge the depth of the road film when Buddy entered the garage. To do a good job with the Simoniz cleaner would take him an entire day. The buyer would probably show up after his shift let out, Monday afternoon, and expect to drive the car away. Either Clarence would not have finished or the automobile would be imperfectly cleaned and shined. Clarence, who had a sense of craft, constantly had to make decisions of this sort; and whatever the conclusion, he would be blamed, and for the same thing: being colored.

  “Hey, Clarence,” Buddy said, a bit too loudly, and then lowered his voice for the subsequent remarks. He was not as cool about arranging a murder as he would have liked to be. He did not hate Naomi; he simply wanted to be rid of her. He would have preferred to press a button, causing her to disappear instantly.

  “Hey, Clarence, what am I paying you?”

  Clarence recognized this as rhetorical and did not answer. He had his dead eye on Buddy and the other angled to inspect Buddy’s two-toned shoes.

  “Fifteen, I think, and I think you’ll admit that’s fair considering I didn’t turn you over to the police that time.” Buddy saw what Clarence was looking at. “These shoes set me back twelve dollars. How you like a pair? Sure you would,” said Buddy. “Be a big jitterbug.” He pressed the end of his nose as if it were a switch. “Tell you what I need. You supply me and you got yourself a pair of these shoes.”

  When Clarence was not in his rubber boots he wore a pair of shoes that were cut open in places to ease his two corns and one bunion. He had no vanity about footgear. However he always carried a nice clean handkerchief in his back pocket. If he soiled it—which was seldom, because though his nose was broken it did not exude anything like the amount of snot of the typical white person with the inevitable sinus trouble—he luxuriously threw it away and bought another, encased in cellophane, for five cents at any drugstore, often to the visible amazement of the clerk. He now withdrew the latest and snorted dry into it. He knew how to play a nervous man like a fish.

  Buddy said: “I see the idea appeals.” He would have preferred though that Clarence had finger-covered one nostril at a time while blowing the other onto the floor and then smeared the deposit glistening across the cement with the sole of his boot. He found no utility in Negro niceties. “I’ll make this short and sweet, Clarence. I’m looking for some bird with guts, for a little job I got in mind.”

  Clarence began to suspect his easy assumption had been in error. Although he was disappointed, he was not a foolishly stubborn man. Thus he had promptly accepted the truth that Irish Mulvaney could outslug him. He extended his lower lip in deliberation and shifted his stance.

  “Now I won’t mix you up with the details, which are kind of complicated. What I want is a guy who wouldn’t have to take much of a chance to earn a nice piece of money, a real nice piece in fact.” Buddy lowered his head and leaned towards Clarence’s chest, looking from the tops of his eyes past Clarence’s chin and as it were up into his flattened nostrils, Clarence having instinctively withdrawn his lip at the movement in his direction.

  Clarence now spoke for the first time: “Money.”

  “It makes the world go round,” Buddy said, reducing some of the intensity without diluting the earnestness. He straightened up.

  “You don’t want to say how much,” Clarence stated.

  “You know the kind of guy I mean.” Neither was Buddy’s a question.

  Clarence scraped his boot. He was now figuring that Buddy wanted to start a fire that would burn up the cars for the insurance. A Jew had done that to his clothes store in Maywood, which was the proper name for the section known to whites as Darktown and to the colored population as the West Side. A number of people had lived in flats overhead as tenants of the Jew, among them a cousin of Clarence’s, and the Jew had got them out of there before setting the fire: which was reckless of him, because when the insurance inspectors came around afterwards and asked the people if they had seen anything unusual, Clarence’s cousin had said vengefully: “Just that Jew, carrying a can of gas at midnight.” The rooms upstairs had been overrun with rats and the corridor toilet was always full of shit owing to a defective flushing mechanism.

  At this moment Ralph came around the corner, and Buddy sent him away. Next, Leo poked his head through the office door, saying accusingly: “There you are.” Buddy failed to acknowledge this statement, and Leo retreated.

  “The way I’m thinking,” Clarence said suddenly, fixing Buddy with his good eye, “i
s how much leads to who.”

  Buddy did not relish being eye-pinned by the likes of Clarence, whom in other circumstances he would have stared down. Now, though, it served his needs to be subtle. The less Clarence knew, the better. Once he got hold of the thug, he would conspire to keep Clarence in the dark: surely blood, black blood at that, was not thicker than money. In addition, he and the killer would be linked by murder. Thus he didn’t want a moron who could not understand the equation.

  “Somebody tough,” Buddy said. “But somebody smart.” He meant colored-tough, because it would not take much courage to kill a woman; and darky-smart, which was to say capable of an animal shrewdness but not clever enough to match wits with the man who paid him.

  “I hears the price going up,” said Clarence, who regarded himself as neither tough nor smart but rather sensible. The cousin who informed on the Jew was smart, and his ass was generally out.

  Buddy had not intended to name a figure to Clarence, whose own fee after all was a pair of twelve-dollar shoes, but he now decided that the Negro was too stupid for jealousy.

  “I wouldn’t mind letting go of a couple hundred for a real good job. One down and the other when it’s finished.”

  Two hundred for the black man who burned the place down, and thousands for Buddy when the insurance was paid off: the usual white deal.

  Clarence squinted. “A hundred for tough, and a hundred for smart.”

  “You could say that.” Buddy was toeing the threshold of impatience now: he had no intention of being analyzed by the likes of Clarence, in whose last statement he detected a hint of mockery.

  Clarence let him stew for a while, then said: “When?”

  “Don’t you worry about that. You just bring me the individual, get your shoes, and forget about it. Keep your nose clean, Clarence. You don’t need any more trouble.”

  This was the second reference of Buddy’s to the unsuccessful attempt to steal the car three years before, and it caused the ex-boxer to reflect that having something on another man was in itself a form of insurance. His cousin was a fool: he should have told the Jew, not the insurance people, about the midnight can of gas, threatening to tell them unless the Jew paid off. Yes, Clarence could see that now; but he was no happier for the realization.

  “When?” he repeated. “When should I bring the individual?”

  Mockery again, quoting Buddy’s very phraseology. However Buddy had let himself in for it by misinterpreting Clarence’s first “when,” which he had taken to mean When must the deed be done?

  He tightened his nuts and said: “Soon as possible.”

  “Tonight?”

  He was strengthened by Clarence’s eagerness, having something to deny now. It was not the thought of murder that threatened Buddy: it was rather the need to ask another person for anything.

  “No,” he said with satisfaction, then arbitrarily named a time: “Tomorrow, eleven A.M.”

  “Sunday?”

  Buddy was quickly derisive. “Sorry to interfere with your weekend drunk.”

  “I generally goes to church,” said Clarence.

  Buddy assumed this was more sarcasm. He had had enough. “Eleven it is. And don’t get fresh or you’re out of a job.” He turned briskly and returned to the office, where Jack was sitting at his, Buddy’s, desk, doing the paperwork on the sale of the phaeton, with the purchaser, now looking uneasy, on a camp chair next to him. Leo sat behind his own desk, thumbnailing tablets into his mouth from a cylinder of Tums. Seeing Buddy, he pointed through the window with his other hand.

  “We’re losing business.”

  “Then get out there.” Buddy took his blazer from the hatrack. “I got an appointment. If I don’t get back, you lock up.”

  “What about the receipts?”

  Buddy took the night-deposit key from the end of the golden chain that extended into his right pants pocket from a loop of belt. He handed it to Leo, who recoiled slightly.

  “What’s eating you? You know where the bank is, and the deposit slips are in the bottom desk drawer. You see me do that every night.”

  Leo swallowed hard to combat his heartburn. Buddy had never done this before in all the years he had worked for him. Leo was frightened by sudden changes of policy in any area: if his stool was discolored, for example, he was shaken to the core unless the doctor had previously warned him that a certain medication would produce that effect.

  Buddy forced the key upon him. “You can’t stand to be trusted,” he said jovially.

  Behind him, Jack was giving the young man a purchase agreement for signature, along with a fountain pen which he had just shaken into the wastebasket, speckling the balled paper with blue. He reversed the pen and indicated the signature-place with its butt. “Right there, Mr. Ballbacher.”

  Ballbacher began to shake his head. He stood up. “See, I din’t—” He made a ghastly grin. “The facts of the case is…I ain’t got that kind of money. I bit off more than I could chew. See—”

  Jack was himself grinning in a loathsome way, trying to restrain his spite.

  “I told you, Mr. Ballbacher, it’s only thirty-five dollars down, and you didn’t make any objection to that, as I remember, now did you?” Jack felt like prying up the little lever on the pen and squirting ink in his imbecile face.

  “See,” said Ballbacher, “I’m getting laid off.”

  Buddy whirled about in one of his dance steps, came quickly to the young man, and put out his hand.

  “I’m Mr. Sandifer,” said he. “That’s the name you see on the sign outside, but they call me Buddy. What do they call you?”

  Ballbacher stood passively while Buddy pumped his hand.

  “Dutch.”

  “Say, Dutch, now we know each other, why don’t I knock off another twenty simoleons in the name of friendship?” Buddy now claimed Ballbacher’s entire right forearm, clamping it at the elbow while continuing to squeeze the hand.

  “I’m real sorry, Mr.—”

  “Buddy.”

  “I ain’t got the money, and can’t get it.” Ballbacher shook his head doggedly. “Eyes bigger than my stomach.” He was trying to break away from Buddy now. “I got a sick wife, and my kid has a mastoid—”

  “Let’s have a private conversation,” Buddy said, and by leverage on the forearm propelled Ballbacher out the front door in almost a run, though the young man was larger than he and heavily muscled. There was a physical aspect to salesmanship; some customers were best manipulated by running away from them. Ballbacher could be bullied; he admitted guilt by explaining and apologizing.

  “Where you work, Dutch?”

  “The foundry.”

  Buddy turned him so that he looked into the sun.

  “Dutch, you know what a verbal contract is?” Buddy did not wait for an answer. “That’s when you say you’re gonna buy something. You don’t have to sign anything. You just have to tell a salesman, ‘Yeah, I’ll take that phaeton.’ Yeah, that’s how it works, Dutch.”

  Ballbacher stank of sweat, but Buddy hung on. “It’s the law, Dutch, and nothing you or I can do about it.”

  Ballbacher frowned. “All I said was ‘O.K.’”

  Buddy chortled gaily. “Same thing, Dutch. That’s what the law calls a verbal contract.” He pointed across the street. “Like you go in the Greasy Greek’s. You don’t say, ‘I’ll give you fifteen cents for a hamburger.’ You say, ‘Give me a hamburger.’” Buddy let him go suddenly and slapped his shoulder. “You say give me, Dutch, but you’re liable for the charge.”

  Buddy walked away, forsaking Ballbacher, isolating him in the sunshine. In the nearest rank of cars a swarthy little man was opening the driver’s door of a ’31 Chevy sedan. He slammed it shut, opened it, and slammed it again.

  “You’ll admit that’s a solid body,” Buddy said. The man grimaced and shrugged. “Preachers take good care of their machines,” said Buddy. “Take a look at that upholstery.”

  He returned to Ballbacher, who had not moved.

&n
bsp; “If you think I’d try to bamboozle a family man, you’re wrong,” Buddy told him. “I’m one myself. Now, you hit a run of bad luck, get laid off for a while, could happen to anybody in these days. But you got Buddy Sandifer on your side. I need your business, Dutch. I can’t afford to make enemies. One word from me down at the loan company, and they’ll give you time, Dutch, more time: time’s money, Dutch. And in time you’ll be back on your feet again.”

  Ballbacher rubbed his chin and stared bovinely at Buddy. The sun did not seem to trouble him.

  He said: “You say I got to buy the automobile even when I didn’t sign nothing?”

  “I don’t say that, Dutch. The law says so.”

  Ballbacher nodded, so heavily that his head stayed down as he walked towards the street.

  “Just a minute, fella!” cried Buddy, not following. “You come back here.”

  Ballbacher responded promptly to this order. He turned, came back, and said deliberately: “Shit on you. You’re a goddam chiseler.”

  Before Buddy’s rising fists had got beyond his waist, Ballbacher struck him powerfully in the center of the chest, causing him to back-pedal furiously until he went down on the seat of his white flannels. Ballbacher did not linger to enjoy this, but walked steadily off the lot.

  Buddy entered the office and, shoving Jack aside, got his .38 Police Special from the desk. Jack’s forehead receded at the appearance of the pistol. He had not seen the prelude to the show of weaponry.

  But Leo had and, dropping the roll of Tums he had continued to hold as a talisman, leaped to intercede.

  “I’ll kill that dicklicker,” cried Buddy, waving the gun everywhere.

  “No Buddy no Buddy no no no,” said Leo, making a desperate song of it. He clasped his boss at the waist, going after the pistol with his other set of fingers. They did a nifty foxtrot between the desks.

  “I’ll spoil his fucking meat,” Buddy said.

  Jack was shivering in the chair.

  “Jack,” said Leo urgently. “For Christ sake.” But by the time Jack got to them, Buddy has ceased to struggle except in a rhetorical or symbolic style, gesturing with the pistol and howling indiscriminately.