Sneaky People: A Novel Read Free Page A

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,”