The Diamond Bikini (11 page)

It was a regular madhouse. That awful smell hit everybody at the same time and they started to choke and sputter and run for the door, but there was so many standing in it and in the hall outside they couldn’t get through. They piled up like water piling up behind a dam. Everybody was yelling and pushing. Then the smell started to flow out through the door and people in the hall yelled and began running down the stairs. In a minute the log jam in the door broke and they all shot through at once.

Everybody, that is, but the sheriff. And of course me and Pop and Uncle Sagamore. The sheriff just stood there with his feet in a puddle of tannery juice. Papers was all over the floor, soaking up the juice, where somebody had knocked over one of the steel cabinets and spilled it open. The stuff had really spattered, like it had pressure behind it. It was on the typewriters and the desk and the walls. There was even a little dripping off the ceiling. A few drops fell on the sheriff’s bald head, going,
spat, spat, spat
. I held my nose and watched him. It was sort of odd, the way he acted.

He didn’t seem to notice the smell. He just looked around real slow, and then he put his hands up over his face, and bowed his head like he was praying. In a minute he took his hands away and looked at Uncle Sagamore. His face was purple, like a cooked beet. He walked over, real slow, and stopped in front of Uncle Sagamore. His hands came up and made gestures like he was talking, and his mouth worked, but nothing came out.

Uncle Sagamore reached in his pocket and took out his plug of tobacco. He rubbed it on the leg of his overalls to clean it, and bit off a chew. He worked it around from one position to the other one, then he says, “Shurf, ain’t you got no spittoons in here?”

The sheriff’s face was purple all the way down his neck now. His mouth went on working, but still there wasn’t a sound coming out. His hands made little gestures, and with his mouth opening and closing like that it was just like watching a movie when something has happened to the sound part and the picture is still going on without it.

“Yes sir, Sam,” Uncle Sagamore says, “it’s just downright unthoughtful, that’s what it is. They drag a man in here an’ arrest him without no cause at all, an’ they ain’t even got a spittoon in the place so’s he can spit. It kind of takes the heart out of a man, workin’ from daylight to dark tryin’ to scratch out a livin’ an’ pay his taxes so he can support all these goddam politicians.” He shook his head and stopped, like he’d just give up.

“It is sort of unconsiderate of ‘em,” Pop says, and nods his head. He lit a cigar.

Him and Uncle Sagamore started towards the door. I followed them. The sheriff turned and watched us, and then he walked real slow back to the desk. He still hadn’t been able to say a word. It was like he was all clogged up inside.

Uncle Sagamore stopped in the door and looked at him. “Shucks,” he says, “ain’t no use holdin’ hard feelin’s.”

A little sound was coming out of the sheriff now. It was something like, “—ffift—ssssshhhh—ffffft—”

“Hell, Shurf,” Uncle Sagamore says, “the whole thing was just a little misunderstanding an’ I reckon I can overlook it. Matter of fact, if you want me to I won’t let on to nobody it even happened. We’ll just keep it a secret.”

The sheriff reached in the box and took out the last jar of the tannery juice. He held it in his hand for a minute, looking at it. Then he just drew back his arm real slow and deliberate and slammed it against the wall.

We all went out. It sure was a relief to get out in the fresh air. We got in the car, but we didn’t go home right away. Pop stopped at the grocery store and bought six pounds of baloney and some cigars. Everybody on the street was talking about the tannery juice, and they kept staring at Uncle Sagamore. He didn’t seem to notice.

When we left the store we drove out in the edge of town where there was a sawmill and some railroad tracks. Uncle Sagamore showed Pop where to turn, and he drove into an alley and along it until we was in somebody’s back yard.

“What are we going to do now?” I asked Pop when he stopped under a big chinaberry tree.

“Visit a friend of your Uncle Sagamore’s,” he says.

Uncle Sagamore rapped four times on the door and in a minute a big woman with red hair opened it. She was wearing a kimono. She has cold blue eyes and looked like she could be plenty mean if she wanted to, but she smiled when she saw us and let us in. We followed her in through the kitchen and into another room and off to the right of it. It was kind of like a parlor, even if it was in the back of the house.

Somewhere on the other side of the wall I could hear something clicking, and in a minute I figured out what it was. It was pool balls hitting each other. We was in back of a poolroom.

We sat down, she went out, and when she came back she had a big bottle and three glasses, and a bottle of coke. “That’s for you, Billy,” she says, and handed me the coke. I couldn’t figure out how she knew my name.

She poured her and Pop and Uncle Sagamore a drink and then she sat down. She looked at Uncle Sagamore, and she smiled a little and shook her head. “You’d sure never think it to look at you,” she says.

Uncle Sagamore took out his chaw of tobacco and held it in his hand while he swallowed his drink. Then he put in back in. “Has Murph come in yet?”

“He just called,” she says. “Said he’d be here in a minute.” Then she laughed. “God, I’d like to seen it.”

Just then the door opened and a man come in. It was the big dark-faced man in the baseball cap that had kept saying they couldn’t do anything to Uncle Sagamore. He grinned at us, and poured hisself a drink.

“Howdy, Murph,” Uncle Sagamore says. “Did Rodney get in all right with the load?”

Murph nodded his head. “Slick as a whistle. He was pulled off the road just the other side of Jimerson’s, and as soon as he seen the two cars of you come by he went on it and loaded up. Follered you right into town. Let’s see—two hundred quarts at a dollar twenty-five—”

“Two hundred and fifty dollars,” Uncle Sagamore says. “Did you do much bettin’?”

“Six hundred and eighty, as near as I can figure it,” Murph says. “That was includin’ five hundred from Elmo Fenton, that I reckon was Booger and Otis’s money.” He stopped and laughed. Then he went on, “Let’s see, that’s three hundred and forty apiece. Two-fifty plus three-forty—”

“Five hundred and ninety dollars,” Uncle Sagamore says.

Murph shook his head kind of slow, like he couldn’t even believe it and started pulling money out of his pockets.

“You’d sure never think it,” he says, “to look at you.”

It wasn’t till we’d got clear home that I remembered we hadn’t took the dirty clothes to the laundry. I told Pop about it when we got out of the car.

“By golly, you’re right,” he says. “We clean forgot. Well, we’ll take ‘em tomorrow or the next day. Ain’t no great hurry.”

“It didn’t look like it did any good at all to test those jars,” I says.

Uncle Sagamore shook his head. “It’s just gettin’ to where a man can’t depend on nothin’ any more, I reckon. They sure don’t make them jars like they used to.”

“Are you going to bottle up another batch of juice to send the Gov’ment?” I asked.

Uncle Sagamore sat down on the porch and took off his shoes to think about it. “Well sir, I don’t rightly know,” he says. “Mebbe, in a couple of days. It’s just kind of disheartenin’, having the shurf’s boys break ‘em up that way.”

“I think we ought to get at it right away,” I says. “We’re wasting a lot of time when we could be making some new leather.”

“This here boy’s a go-getter, Sam,” he says to Pop. “You can see he ain’t goin’ to let no grass grow under his feet.”

When it got along towards five o’clock they had disappeared somewhere, so I didn’t have any trouble getting away to go swimming. I didn’t go up by the trailer; I went straight up along the edge of the lake. Sig Freed was with me, and he kept scaring up bullfrogs. They’d go
gurk!
and make one big jump and land out in the water among the lilypads and go under. You could see Sig Freed thought they was crazy. He wouldn’t even put his feet in the water hisself. Like as not, though, he just didn’t know what it was. Being born and raised in a big fancy hotel there in Aqueduct, he’d probably never seen a lake like this before.

When we got up to the swimming place on the point, Miss Harrington wasn’t there yet. I took off my levis and shirt and sat down on the log in my boxer shorts to wait for her. The lake was real pretty, kind of dark in the shade and smooth as glass. I looked across it and wondered if I could make it all the way without help. This was the day we was going to try it. I looked at it again, though, and decided I’d better wait for her. She’d warned me lots of times not to try swimming alone till at least the end of the summer.

It was nearly half an hour before she came along. Sig Freed barked, and then I heard her sandals in the trail. She smiled at me. She had on a blue romper suit this time, and silver sandals, and her toenails were painted red. I noticed her legs was getting tanned.

“Hello, Miss Harrington,” I says. “Are we going to swim all the way across today?”

“Sure,” she says. “You can make it easy.”

She took her suit out of her handbag and went off in the bushes to change. When she came back I saw it wasn’t just her legs that was tanned; she was the same all over, and the diamonds on her bathing suit just glittered against this kind of golden color she was.

“You must have been sunbathing in the raw,” I says. “You’re sure a pretty color all over.”

She grinned at me and tousled my hair with her hand. “Look, kid. You’re seven years old, remember? Let’s keep it that way.”

We waded out in the water till it was up to her waist and looked straight across. It was about fifty yards. The trees looked cool and dim along the other side because it was all in the shadow now that the sun was going down.

“You’ve swum this far before,” she says, “in shallow water along the shore, and deep water’s not any different at all as long as you don’t get scared. So just take it slow and easy, and remember I’ll be right alongside you all the way. I’m a good swimmer; I used to be in a water ballet in Florida when I was only sixteen.”

We started out, and it was as easy as pie. I dog-paddled along and she was doing a slow crawl stroke, as she called it, right beside me. When she would roll her face up out of water on my side she’d grin at me, so I wasn’t scared at all. And I could see the bushes hanging over the water on the other side getting closer all the time.

We was almost there. We didn’t have more than a few feet to go and I was getting ready to reach up and grab one, when all of a sudden there was an awful racket cut loose behind us on the other bank and the water began to get chopped up all around us by something. It was going
gug! gug! gug! gug!
And every time there’d be a
gug
water would fly up in a little spout like you’d throwed a rock in it. It all happened without any warning at all, and by the time I’d even figured out that the noise I was hearing over there was guns shooting real fast Miss Harrington had let out a yell and grabbed me and just pulled me under.

I’d started to yell something myself, so my mouth was open, and it got full of water. I choked, and breathed in a little before I had sense enough not to, and got water in my nose and throat. I was scared, and I started to kick and struggle trying to get back to the top, but she held me down and I could feel her kicking along like she was still swimming. We must have turned, because we went right along and didn’t run into the bushes or the bank. I could still hear the things hitting up there, but down here under the water the sound was different. They went
schluck! schluck! schluck!
It was funny I even noticed it, because I was scared stiff by this time and beginning to go crazy and fight at Miss Harrington.

Just then I felt some brush, and our heads came out of the water. I took a breath, and started to choke. It seemed to me it was awful quiet, and it was a second or two before I realized what it was. The guns had stopped. I sputtered and fought for my breath, and started to look around. Overhanging limbs and leaves was all around us, there in the edge of the water. I couldn’t see out across the lake at all. We stood up and started to run up onto the bank. And just then the guns cut loose again. We could hear the bullets whamming into the trees a few feet off to our left. Miss Harrington grabbed my arm and dragged me. We came shooting up onto dry ground and then stumbled and rolled across some dead leaves.

The guns cut loose again on the other side. Bullets whacked into the ground behind us and some of them glanced off trees and went screaming out ahead of us like they do in Western movies. We had our faces plastered against the ground. I was still choking and sputtering, trying to get my breath.

Then the guns stopped and I heard a couple of men yelling at each other on the other side. “I think they got across into them trees,” one of ‘em shouted. “Come on.”

I spit out some leaves and dirt that was in my mouth, and says to Miss Harrington, “Uncle Sagamore was right. Those rabbit hunters are sure careless where they shoot. They might of hit us.”

She clapped a hand over my mouth and pulled me up against her. She was listening for something. I couldn’t hear anything except the noise we was making trying to get our breath. Then in a minute, I did. It sounded like men running through the brush on the other side of the lake.

“How far is it to the end of the lake?” She whispered in my ear.

She’d forgot she still had her hand over my mouth, I reckon. I squirmed a little, and she saw what the trouble was, and took it away. “About a hundred yards,” I says. “Just around the bend there.”

“We’ve got to get out of here,” she says, and jumps up. She grabbed me by the arm and we started running. She couldn’t run very fast with no shoes on because things hurt her feet, but I was all right. I hadn’t had shoes on since I’d been here. She put her feet down like she was running across egg shells, and in about a hundred yards or so we fell down again and rolled into a little gully that had ferns growing all along it.

We was both still wet and leaves and twigs was sticking to our bare skin. We was out of breath. I could hear my heart beating. She held on to me real tight, with my face against her bosom, and I could feel it going up and down when she breathed. There was ferns all around and over us.

“Don’t make a sound,” she says, whispering.

“Why are we running?” I asked.

“Shhhh! Those men are looking for us. If they find me they’ll kill me.”

“Kill you? You mean they ain’t rabbit hunters, like the others?”

“The others wasn’t rabbit hunters, either. Hush,” she says.

It was all crazy and mixed up, I thought. Why would anybody want to hurt a nice woman like Miss Harrington? I was glad the other two had had that accident. It served ‘em right. Then I began to be scared. They must be coming around the lake. Suppose they found us. I began to shake.

“Just be still,” she whispered. “They won’t find us in these ferns.”

I laid still and listened. And in a minute I could hear them moving, running through the brush somewhere towards the head of the lake. And all of a sudden there was a shot. And then three or four in a row. And then another one by itself. There was no bullets come this way, though.

We laid real quiet in the ferns. Miss Harrington turned her face a little and looked at me. Her eyes was big and blue and worried.

“What do you reckon they’re shooting at now?” I whispered.

“I’m not sure,” she says.

The sun was gone now, and it was getting shadowy out in the timber, what little of it I could see through the ferns. I wished Pop and Uncle Sagamore was there. Then we heard a sound. It was a man walking through dead leaves somewhere between us and the lake. We couldn’t see him, though. We tried to hold our breath and listen, waiting to see if he was coming closer. At first it sounded that way and I was scared stiff, but before long we could tell the sound was dying out. He was going away.

“Maybe it was Pop,” I says. “Looking for us. Or maybe Dr Severance.”

“Shhhh,” she whispered. “I don’t think so. They would have tried to call us.”

“What would they want to shoot you for?” I asked.

“Never mind,” she says. She put her hand over my mouth again.

In a few minutes we heard the steps coming back again. They went by not twenty yards away on the other side of us, it sounded like. Then they died out again.

Miss Harrington sucked in a shaky breath. “The lousy bastards,” she says, kind of whispering.

We didn’t hear anything for a long time then. It got dark. You couldn’t see anything. I couldn’t even see Miss Harrington’s bosom, when I was lying right against it.

“I’m scared,” I says. “I wish Pop was here.”

“I’m scared too,” she says. “But not quite that bad.”

“They couldn’t see us now,” I told her. “Mebbe we can sort of sneak around and get back to the house.”

“Do you know which way it is?” she asked.

“Sure,” I says. I pointed. “That way.”

We stood up and looked around, and I wasn’t so sure. It was all pitch-black, and one direction was like another.

“Least I think it’s that way,” I says. “The lake should be right over there.”

We started out walking real slow and feeling our way, trying not to make any noise. But we kept bumping into trees and limbs. Miss Harrington hurt her feet, stepping on things.

“Damn it,” she says. “By God, this is one for the book. This is the most. Wandering round in a crummy jungle in a G-string and no shoes.”

“What’s a G-string?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she says. “Or next to it. Ouch! Goddam the crummy limbs, anyway!”

We went on. We didn’t find the lake. Even if we got to it, I thought, the only way we’d know was when we walked off in it, it was so dark. Pretty soon I knew we was going the wrong way, or maybe just going around in a big circle.

And pretty soon me and Miss Harrington got separated in the dark.

“Where are you?” I called out.

“Over here,” she says.

I tried to tell by where her voice was coming from, and started that way. But then the next time she sounded further away in another direction. “Billy,” she was saying. “Billy, where are you?”

Then in a few minutes I couldn’t hear her at all. “Miss Harrington,” I yelled, and didn’t get any answer. I was lost. And she was lost too. There was no telling which way we had been going. I got real scared and started to cry, and then I tried to run. I slammed into a tree trunk and it knocked me down. For a few minutes I just laid there and bawled like a little kid.

I didn’t even have Sig Freed, and it reminded me that maybe he was lost too. There wasn’t even any telling how much timber country there was down here, and maybe they would never find me or Miss Harrington.

After a while I got up and walked some more. I didn’t have any idea where I was any more, or how long it had been since I’d got lost from Miss Harrington. It must have been two hours, anyway, I thought. I started to cry again, thinking about her, and just walked along with tears running down my face. Then after a while something struck me as peculiar. I wasn’t running into trees any more.. The stuff I was in was in rows, and it was smaller. I felt it. It was cornstalks. I must be in Uncle Sagamore’s cornfield, and that was right behind the house. I stopped crying and started to run, right straight up one of the rows, feeling the long leaves brushing against me on both sides, and when I popped out of the end of it there was the house with a light burning in it.

And that wasn’t all. There was a light down at the edge of the lake by Uncle Finley’s ark, and a couple of cars and an ambulance and a truck, and there was six or seven men milling around. The light was coming from gasoline lanterns they was carrying. I cut down that way, still running, but I give out of breath before I got there and had to slow down to a walk.

As I came up I could see some of the men was ones I knew. There was the sheriff and Booger and Otis and Pearl. Booger and Pearl was helping another man load a stretcher into the ambulance. Uncle Sagamore and Otis and Pop was trying to unload a rowboat off the truck. It dropped, and everybody cussed. The sheriff was just standing around cussing to anybody that would listen.

I thought it was sure funny with me and Miss Harrington lost like we was that there wouldn’t be at least one or two of ‘em out looking for us.

I walked up to the light. “Hi, Pop,” I says, “I found my way back.”

Everybody just dropped everything they was doing and swung around with their mouths open. “Good God!” Pop says. He run over and grabbed me by the shoulders. “Are you all right, Billy? Where the hell have you been?”