Clarence could hear this back in the garage, where he was prying a tire off a rim, but he was never curious about the emotional displays of persons socially remote from him.
Ralph, sitting alongside his lawnmower in the shade on the far side of the building, where the blacktop gave way to gravel, heard nothing. Unlike his father he was easily distracted by trivial phenomena. He watched a lone starling peck futilely at stones and wondered how birds fucked. He looked into the waste ground beyond the chain-link fence and developed a fantasy in which, prowling thereupon, he discovered a concrete trapdoor flush with the earth and, lifting it by means of a rusty iron ring, exposed a set of descending stairs, at the bottom of which he found an enormous gambling den full of roulette tables, raucous music, and painted trollops, unbeknownst to the upper world.
John Dillinger had busted out of jail using a gun he had modeled in wood and blackened with shoe polish, and not long afterwards one of the villains in Dick Tracy carved a pistol from an Idaho potato, darkening it with tincture of iodine, which turned blue when in contact with starch. There was one of those little eight-page dirty books that showed Dick putting the blocks to Tess Trueheart. All the famous characters looked exactly as they did in the respectable funny-papers, except their peckers and snatches were shown starting on the second page.
Ralph had never yet in all his life seen a real pussy with hair on it, and no bare tits all the way to the nipples except in photographs.
He wondered whether he had waited long enough for his father to finish the conversation with Clarence. Ralph had not possessed an accurate sense of the duration of time since suffering a bad sunburn at the age of eleven, in consequence of which he had been delirious for twenty-four hours. He picked up the clippers, which he had taken from his back pocket before sitting down so that he would not be stabbed in the spine, stood up, and heard the gravel fall clattering from his ass.
After brushing away the rest of it, he went in back and saw his father gunning the car around the corner of the building. He ran and called, but when he gained the corner Buddy had already reached the street, turned onto it, and made his getaway burning rubber.
Inside, Jack was holding the gun. After a slow start, it had been he who finally disarmed Buddy.
Leo shook his head. He felt the effects of the incident. To dispel them, he said: “This has been some day.”
Jack returned the pistol to the drawer from which Buddy had taken it. A flat pint of whiskey lay within. Jack could have used a drink, but being a schoolteacher would not dare take one except behind the closed door of his home.
“This ought to be locked,” he said. “A child might get hold of it. You know what they say: everybody gets shot with an unloaded gun.”
Hearing the nonsensical statement, Leo felt better. “But that one’s loaded,” said he.
“Would he have shot him, you think?”
“I couldn’t say,” Leo confessed. “I never saw him do anything like that before. But I never saw him take a sucker punch, either.” He paused. “The whole thing was dumb. I don’t know what’s eating Buddy. Notice he didn’t work the lot this afternoon. He stands in the garage, chewing the rag with a jigaboo.”
“Where’d he go now?” asked Jack.
Leo made a moue of certainty. “To drive it off, that’s for sure.” But he remembered that Buddy had already been preparing to leave early, before the set-to. Without thinking of the effect it might have on Jack, he said: “To get his ashes hauled.”
Jack’s sexual imagination was quite domesticated, however; he had never had a woman before the first night of his honeymoon and none but his wife since, though sometimes when they did it he had fantasies involving movie actresses—oddly enough, the nonsensual types like Irene Dunne. He naturally supposed it was Mrs. Sandifer who quenched Buddy’s fire, and he showed no astonishment.
Leo was relieved to see his thoughtless remark fall by the wayside. He never trafficked in sex gossip.
Ralph came into the office at that point, saying: “Shit, I wanted a ride home.”
“You talk like that,” Leo said disapprovingly, “and you won’t get one.” Ralph was taken aback. Leo went on, scowling: “A friend of yours told me you stank. I said, ‘Like shit!’” Then he showed his teeth, poked Ralph in the belly, and roared. Ralph joined in the laughter. Jack did not, being a schoolteacher. But he prissily loosened the knot of his washable tie and opened his collar.
Leo told Ralph: “Listen, you run up all the windows and lock all the cars, and I’ll drop you off.”
“Is it closing time already?” Ralph grimaced at what he believed another failure of his inner clock.
Though usually the steadiest of men, Leo had been made disorderly by Buddy’s unprecedented loss of control—as Clarence, no schemer, had been led by Buddy’s threats to an understanding of blackmail.
“That’s right,” Leo said recklessly. “Your dad’s decided to call it a day.” He amazed himself as well as Jack, whose eyebrows arched. Jack had earned no commission whatever, this Saturday; yet, infected by Leo’s capriciousness, he made no protest. Instead, he opened the drawer, took out the pint of Seagram’s, unscrewed the cap, and boldly poured whiskey down his throat in full view of Ralph.
Leo was hit hard by this seizing of the initiative. He did not himself imbibe.
“Hey, Ralph,” he said desperately. “You want a drink?”
Ralph said: “Sure.” He always enjoyed Leo’s badinage.
But Jack cried: “Leo!” And put the bottle away posthaste, avoiding Ralph’s eyes. Better to ride it out than to ask Ralph to say nothing. Jack knew better than to put himself at the mercy of a schoolboy. But he struck back at Leo.
“What about the receipts?”
Leo decided Jack was getting too big for his breeches: he found the question even more insolent than the drinking.
“You just let me worry about that,” said he. “You can take off now if you want.” In the absence of Buddy, Leo considered himself boss. Jack flipped his hands and went into the little washroom in the far corner; already he had begun to feel the effects of the whiskey. If he went home having earned no money and with alcohol on his breath, his wife would think the worst.
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.
chapter 2
LAVERNE’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 O
ne. 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.”