Sneaky People: A Novel Read Free

curled.
    Several persons were roaming the lot unattended, Jack no doubt being still inside the office with the buyer of the phaeton and Buddy not having appeared. This annoyed Leo, even though it gave him an opportunity to make up for the theoretical commission he had lost, because in so doing he would be disqualifying himself as a victim of injustice. He was also suffering from heartburn acquired at the Greek’s, where he had seated himself at the far end of the counter so that, pretending to keep an eye on the lot across the street, he could ogle the girl, who sat on the first stool inside the door ravenously devouring a jelly doughnut. At 2:30 P.M. nobody occupied the intervening seats.
    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