Clarence could have called himself anything he wished; he possessed no identifying documents. He had never been arrested, married, licensed to drive, or enrolled with Social Security. Behind the glassine window in his imitation alligator skin wallet the identification card stayed blank.
He understood now that Buddy meant the Jew who had set fire to the store underneath his cousin’s room: the very reference Clarence had made to himself the day before. This evidence of his employer’s shrewdness caused his confidence to wither somewhat. He respectfully brought his chair back to the upright position and put his hands in his lap.
Buddy changed gears. “Clarence, you got family around here?”
“Not me.”
“You don’t live with a woman?”
“Not lately.”
“No folks at all?”
“Huh-uh.” The cousin had expected to get a reward for fingering the Jew and when rejected went downtown and in another futile exercise of vengeance tried to burglarize the offices of the insurance company, was caught, and sentenced to five to ten in the state prison.
“Ain’t you a local boy?”
“Huh-uh.” Clarence was local to noplace, having been taken as an infant from rural Mississippi, which he did not remember, to Detroit, from which as an adolescent he had run away. He was much more widely traveled than Buddy, who had never been farther than say 150 miles in any direction from his source.
Needing no more assurance, Buddy moved towards Leo’s desk, staying on the side of Clarence’s good eye.
“I’m not going to beat around the bush,” he said. “I want to get somebody taken care of.” He swiveled his head as if to loosen a stiffening neck. This movement reminded the ex-Kid Hammond of someone he had once faced in the ring, a pimple-shouldered wop who did that in the corner while waiting for Hammond to take the count of eight, which meant he was feeling the effects of the Kid’s left hand, which had been jabbing his head for two rounds. He never suspected a dumb nigger would be watching for things like that. Hammond got up and when the wop came out gave him another left. The wop came underneath with a right and knocked the Kid down and out.
Buddy put his soft white hands on the desktop and leaned at Clarence. “For keeps,” he added. Still seeing no comprehension on the dark face, he said irritably: “Shit, I mean I want someone knocked off.”
He pushed himself away and, with his chin down, strolled in a circle. He was wearing a white sports shirt with black windowpane checks and powder-blue slacks without belt loops. The waist could be adjusted by means of little straps and buckles at the sides. These were half hidden by the bulge of flesh created by this stricture. If Buddy had seen himself in a mirror at this point he might have puffed out his shirt around his middle, though that would have destroyed the sleekness with which, in front, it now swooped under the taut waistband.
Before he came all the way around he asked, inspecting the shine on his wingtip oxfords: “Am I getting through to you, Clarence?”
“Uh-huh.” This was not true. Clarence was playing for time. Throughout his life he had seen various persons get killed, generally by other individuals to whom they were related by blood, sexual connection, or friendship. But these people were all colored, and he was smart enough to reflect that Buddy would scarcely have a motive to want a Negro done away with, when he would not even sell one a car. That Buddy’s business was Jim Crow was all Clarence knew or cared to know. Just as he did not understand Buddy’s view of him, he was ignorant of Buddy’s reason for maintaining this policy: though one dollar was as green as the next, irrespective of the hand that paid it, there were white customers who might be lost if they saw a colored individual buy a more expensive automobile than they could afford, a notorious Negro practice.
If black was therefore out of the question, then Buddy was proposing that Clarence kill a white man. Clarence had once known a girl who claimed to have gone to New York and in the practice of whoring helplessly met a white man who took her out to dinner and to a show on Broadway, an experience so perverse that she returned to the provinces forthwith. “Up there they crazy.” Unlike down South, locally you were not required to give way on the sidewalk to white people, but if you were a woman you did not date one. If a man, you might even in extreme circumstances, such as private argument or race riot, shed one’s blood; but you never killed one with premeditation. It simply was not done, and Clarence had always been a stickler for custom.
Therefore he rose, shook the wrinkles from his jacket, and felt that the knot of his tie was still snug.
“I guess you ain’t looking at the man you was looking for.”
Buddy raised his eyes but not his head. Silently he watched Clarence rebutton the jacket.
When this job was completed he said: “Sit down. I want to talk turkey.” Clarence remained standing, but Buddy went on anyway. “Now you been working for me for some time, and you know I’m hard but fair. I could of sent you to jail but I give you a job instead, and I believe I am right in saying that every Xmas since, I have raised your wages a dollar though you are doing the same amount of work as when you started, which ain’t never been enough to kill you. I have to tell you there are them who don’t like people of your race, but I’m not one.”
He went back of his own desk, got his chair, and rolled it, not without some difficulty from the balky wheels, to a position in front of Leo’s desk, back of which Clarence was now unbuttoning his jacket though still standing.
Within a few seconds Buddy had addressed more language to him than in all their previous association. As it happened, Clarence enjoyed fluent talk; that was why he usually spent most of Sunday in the church, the preacher and some of the elders as well being noted orators.
For his own part, Buddy was in his natural element when it came to selling a reluctant customer a bill of goods.
“You had much experience with women?”
Clarence now took a seat. He wet his lips, felt an earlobe, and clasped his hands before him.
“Some.”
Buddy indulged in a bit of levity by way of preface. “Like the fellow says, turn ’em upside down, they’re all the same.” Take any white man, you would get a smile at this, but Clarence showed no reaction. Not joking, Buddy said: “They’re a pain in the ass sometime, the best of them.”
“That’s right!” Clarence spoke with great feeling.
Buddy saw he had found a nerve. “Damn right! And when it comes to the worst, you got a living hell.”
With even greater vehemence Clarence repeated his assent. He was no stranger to woman trouble.
Buddy lifted his hand like a traffic cop. “I say a man’s got a right to respect.”
“You tell it.” Clarence was now responding as if in church. He was impressed with Buddy’s command of this subject.
“If God meant it to be the other way around,” said Buddy, “he would of given the man a hole and the lady a club between her legs.”
He unintentionally had struck Clarence’s funnybone. The ex-boxer chuckled so heartily that his good eye blurred.
Buddy brought down his hand and clapped it with the other. “By God, I hate to see a man take shit from a woman.”
Clarence blinked to clear his eye and said seriously: “It don’t hurt to take a stick to some.”
“Thing to do is not let a woman get her hooks in you to begin with. But that’s easier said than done. Maybe you got a business to build up and don’t have time to run around chasing pussy. When you’re young maybe all you want’s a nice home to go to after a hard day, with a hot supper and a pipe to smoke in your slippers.”
Clarence looked pensive.
“Say this happened to a young fella,” Buddy went on. “You could see how easy he would get the problem we was talking about.” Clarence seemed to have fallen into a coma. Buddy waved at him. “See what I’m getting at?”
Clarence’s good eye looked from right to left. He lowered his chin onto the knot of his necktie. Buddy wondered why he was trying to jus
tify himself to a colored flunky. “Well, goddammit, yes or no? I don’t like to talk to myself.”
The ex-boxer brought his chin up and scratched it reflectively. “I don’t know if I right,” he said at last, “but you trying to deal with—” He started again, speaking very patiently: “When I come in here you was talking about killing, and now you talking about being married?”
“Sure,” said Buddy in relief. “You ever been married, Clarence?”
The car washer shook his head.
Buddy nodded. “Uh-huh. Well then, it might be hard for you to appreciate what the setup is like when it goes bad. You work hard to give a woman everything she wants, and what you get back is shit. You got things on your mind, but you can’t talk to her about them. She sits there reading a fucking book. She don’t fix her hair any more. Hell, she don’t even wash it regular, and when she does she don’t clean the fucking sink, so it don’t drain; it’s full of dirty hair and green grease! Makes you want to puke.”
Clarence could appreciate that. There was nothing as bad as a filthy woman.
“She’ll fry you an egg with the yellow hard all the way through,” Buddy went on. “Burn the toast black. She won’t shave her legs and lets them get hairy as an ape’s. She’s got no pride. She’ll let her stockings fall down to her ankles. She’s got yellow fingers from smoking, and so’s her teeth. Lets a bagful of garbage set on the sink till if you lift it the bottom falls out. You give her a shirt she’ll scorch it.”
For some moments Clarence had been aware that the job for which Buddy was recruiting him was not only the murder of a white, but a white woman. This was too bizarre to provoke him into rising, as he had before, and uttering a refusal. Instead he sat there soberly and tried to understand why Buddy had picked him, though true it had been by default; but Buddy had expected the candidate would be colored. Apparently any Negro would do. Perhaps it was a compliment.
“Well sir,” he said finally, “you got a problem all right, but I just wash the cars.”
Buddy was silent for a while. Then he said: “Christ, Clarence, you could do it easy as falling off a log.” He let several seconds pass again. “How else could you make two hundred bucks all at once?”
Clarence smiled in wonderment. This man was asking him to kill his wife.
“I see,” said Buddy, “you’re beginning to like the idea. Two hundred dollars.”
It was the craziest proposal Clarence had ever received his life long, crazier by far than the one made by a man who came into his dressing room after a bout and represented himself as a promoter with an interest in Clarence’s career and took him to his apartment, where he handcuffed himself to a bedstead and offered Clarence ten dollars to whip his big fat white ass with a bundle of twigs tied together.
“It’d be easy,” said Buddy. “And you can’t get in no trouble, because I let you in myself and then afterwards give you plenty of time to get away before calling the cops.”
Clarence kept grinning.
“First thing tomorrow morning,” Buddy said, “I’ll go to the bank and get you half. You put a hundred in your pocket, and we’ll get the details down pat.”
What the ex-boxer was thinking now was that if it was so easy to kill his wife, why didn’t he do it?
“Way I figure,” said Buddy, “we make it look like burglary. You come in the outside cellar door, come up the steps, and you’re right across the hall from the bedroom.” He closed his eyes in thought. “After you got the main job out of the way, you open dresser drawers and spill stuff on the floor.”
The office door opened behind him, and Buddy almost snapped his head off his neck. It was Ralph.
“I didn’t know you’d be here. I just dropped by to get the lawnmower I left, and I saw the car. I didn’t know you were coming here on Sunday.”
“I thought you promised,” said Buddy in a deliberate fury, “to keep your nose clean from now on.”
Ralph wrinkled his nose. “Huh?”
“Since when do you open a closed door without knocking?”
Clarence stolidly closed his eyes. He had no stake in this.
“No backtalk, please,” said Buddy in a calmer voice. He pointed to the door.
“Can I use the bathroom, please?” Ralph asked, and before Buddy could decide whether this was an elaboration of the insolence he slipped into the little lavatory and locked the door.
Buddy rushed to the plywood panel and pounded upon it. “Come out of that place!” He feared Ralph would settle down for a long crap. He was answered almost immediately by the sound of the flushing mechanism. Ralph came out, buttoning the top of his fly. He was a lightning-swift pisser.
“Sorry,” he said to his father. “I didn’t know you had to go that bad.”
To save face, Buddy went inside and took a leak for himself. He had to wait a longer time than usual for his waterworks to function. He wondered whether he had been jazzing too violently of late: that could happen.
In the office Ralph said hi to Clarence.
Clarence nodded silently, then looked at the desktop, trying to discourage the expected questions about his career in the ring.
“I guess back in the old days you’d be out now doing roadwork,” said Ralph. “Even on Sunday.” Clarence shrugged. “Then back to the training camp for a big steak and half a dozen eggs. I guess Primo Carnera would eat half a dozen steaks. He had a glass jaw though, didn’t he? You ever fight him?”
Clarence twitched his chin.
“I guess he was dangerous if he fell on you,” said Ralph.
Clarence did not smile at the jest. He was thinking that even when he won the rare purse he could seldom afford steak for supper, let alone breakfast. He wished this kid would go away.
“He was too big, wasn’t he? I guess the right size is like Louis?”
Clarence avoided bars the nights on which Louis fought; he didn’t need that. Not that he meanly wanted to see him defeated by a white man, just because he, Clarence, had been half blinded by one. But neither did he childishly exult in the man’s persistent victories as if they reflected glory on him, as did the stupid janitors and shoeshine boys. What Clarence would have liked was that some other colored fighter give Joe a good beating. But when John Henry Lewis fought him, Joe knocked out John Henry in the first minute of the first round.
“I was thinking,” said Ralph, “if I got a pair of gloves, maybe you might show me a few pointers if you had the time.”
This suggestion depressed Clarence even further. He almost yearned for the return of that evil man from the toilet.
He mumbled, scraping his upper lip with the rake of his lower span of teeth. One wanted him to commit a murder, and the other wanted boxing lessons. Whites ran the world without knowing how to do anything for themselves.
Buddy emerged at that point and asked Ralph: “Why aren’t you in Sunday school?”
“It’s over.”
Buddy nodded. “All right, Ralph. You can run along.”
“See you, Clarence,” Ralph said and departed.
Buddy peered out the window to see if he was actually leaving. He saw Ralph run the lawnmower out to the sidewalk and then stop and rudely scratch his butt in public. That no one was around at this hour on a Sunday was neither here nor there; the gesture was loutish.
Turning, he said to Clarence: “Let’s let the details go until I pick the exact time. You might forget ’em otherwise or get to boozing and shoot your mouth off. I hope you got sense enough afterwards to keep your trap shut. They got an electric chair up at the pen…. What I figure is maybe sometime the middle of the week, but I gotta check. Sometimes her sister comes to visit and stays the night.”
He seized his chair and ran it back behind his desk. “Tomorrow you get your hundred. Bring some kinda coat and hang it in the corner of the garage. When you go home, feel in the pocket for a envelope.”
Clarence rose and buttoned his suit. Services continued all day at the Abyssinian Baptist Church, and he intended to spend the aft
ernoon there.
It occurred to Buddy that there would be no need to give Clarence the second half of the fee. Once he had performed the job, to whom could he complain?
chapter 6
RALPH WAS JUST FINISHING his bread pudding when he heard Horse Hauser calling “Hey, Sandifer” outside the back door.
“May I be excused?” he asked his father.
Buddy grimaced. “Isn’t that kid old enough to knock on the door like a decent human being?”
At this point Hauser shouted again, and Ralph said: “I’d better go out there or he’ll keep yelling.”
“You tell him to knock on the door from now on. I don’t want to hear any more hog-calling outside my house.”
Naomi smiled at this turn of speech. For Sunday dinner they sat at the round table in the dining room. Concealed by the mashed-potato bowl was a burn hole in the white tablecloth, made by a fallen candle some years before at the last Christmas get-together of the relatives prior to the death of Ralph’s remaining grandma, Naomi’s mother.
Ralph took his dirty dish and glass to the kitchen and went out the other exit. Hauser howled once again before he reached the door.
“Who let you out of your cage?” Ralph said, descending the back steps.
Hauser said coldly: “C’mere.” He walked over by the garage and turned to confront the attendant Ralph. “Sandifer, if you ratted on me last night, I’ll get you for it.”
“Me?”
“I’ll trim your ass, is what I’ll do.”
Ralph extended his jaw. “Any time you want to try…”
Hauser diminished the depth of his already low forehead. “Frankly,” he said with pomposity, “I thought better of you.”
“In the first place,” said Ralph, “I don’t know what you are talking about.”
“The cruiser got you.”
Ralph struck himself in the brow. “That was my father. A car suddenly pulled up, and it was my old man of all people! He didn’t recognize you, and I didn’t tell him.”
“Sure about that?” Hauser peered at him like a movie detective grilling a suspect.