The Diamond Bikini
by
Charles Williams
1956
One
Oh, that was a fine summer, all right.
Like Pop says, farms are wholesome, and you just
naturally couldn’t find a wholesomer one than Uncle
Sagamore’s. There was a lake where you could catch
real fish, and I had a dog, and there was all the
rabbit hunters with tommy guns, and Miss
Harrington. She was real nice, and she taught me
how to swim.
Miss Harrington? Oh, she was the one with the vine
there was such a hullaballoo about. You remember. It
was in all the papers. It was a tattooed vine, with
little blue leaves, winding around her off bosom like a
path going up a hill, and it had a pink rose right in
the center. Pop raised hell with me because I didn’t
tell him about it sooner but, heck, how did I know
everybody didn’t have one? I just sort of took it for
granted the Welfare ladies had vines on theirs too,
but I never did ask one because when I was with
them I hadn’t seem Miss Harrington yet, or her vine.
But that’s all getting ahead of the story. I better
start at the beginning and tell you how we happened
to go to Uncle Sagamore’s in the first place. It was on
account of Pop getting drafted so much.
I guess it was just a bad year for being drafted. The
first time Pop got drafted was at Gulfstream Park,
The Diamond Bikini— 2
along in the winter, and then it was Pimlico, but
Aqueduct was the worst of all. We’d hardly got a
place to park the trailer and started printing when
they drafted him again. And of course the Welfare
ladies grabbed me, the way they always do.
Those Welfare ladies are funny. I don’t know why,
but no matter where they are they’re always the
same. They ask you the same old questions, and they
usually have big bosoms, and when you try to explain
how you sort of travel around to all the big cities like
Hialeah and Belmont Park, and how Pop is a turf
investment controller, and about him having so much
trouble with the draft board, they look at each other
and shake their heads and say, “Oh, how terrible!
And he’s just a child.
Well, these Welfare ladies at Aqueduct asked me
where I go to school, why Mama went away and left
Pop, and can I read and write, and so on. And when I
told ‘em, sure I could read fine they brought in this
book to try me out. And, say, that was really a swell
book too, what I could dig out of it in the month I was
with the Welfare. It was all about a kid named Tim
Hawkins and a pirate with one leg named Long John
Silver, and it was fun. I sure wish I could get hold of
it again so I could find out how they ended up. Do
you think there might be another copy of it around?
But to get back to the Welfare ladies, they just
looked at each other when they saw how much
trouble I was having with it, and said, “Uh-huh, I
thought so.”
And I was having trouble with it, sort of. It wasn’t
that there was any real tough words in it, but the
man that put it together had a funny way of writing,
spelling everything out the long way.
“Billy, you shouldn’t have told us you can read,” the
boss lady said. You can always tell which one is the
boss, because it’s odds-on she’ll have a bigger bosom
than the others. “Didn’t your father ever teach you
that little boys should always tell the truth?”
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“But, ma’am,” I says. “I can read. It’s just that this
stuff is wrote so funny. There’s too many letters in all
the words.”
“That’s ridiculous,” she says. “How could there be
too many letters in the words? Are you suggesting
that Robert Louis Stevenson didn’t know how to
spell?”
“I don’t know anything about this guy Stevenson,” I
says, “but I’m just trying to tell you this stuff is wrote
funny and nobody could make it out. Look, I’ll show
you what I mean.”
I still had my baloney sandwich in my pocket
because we’d just got to the track when the
Pinkertons drafted Pop and I remembered it was
wrapped in a sheet of yesterday’s racing form. I
hauled it out and took a bite of the baloney while I
showed ‘em.
“Now, here,” I says, pointing to it with my finger.
“Look at this. Barnyard Gate (M) 105* ch.g.3, by
Barnaby—Gates Ajar, by Frangi-Pangi. Dec. 5, TrP,
6f, 1:13 sy, 17, 111* 11, 15, 13, 89 Str’gf’l’wG AlwM,
Wo’b’g’n 119, C’r’l’ss H’s’y 112, Tr’c’le M’ffn 114.
You see? And now take a look at this workout. Fly 2
Aqu 1/2ft: 48 3/5 bg. A morning-glory and a dog, and
if you ever put ten cents on his nose even in a two
thousand claimer you got rocks in your head. He’s a
front runner and a choker and even Arcaro couldn’t
rate him off the pace and he always dies at the eighth
pole.”
They stopped me then, and there was hell to pay.
They just wouldn’t believe I was reading it. I told ‘em
it was all right there, as plain as the nose on their
face, that Barnyard Gate was a three-year-old
chestnut gelding and had never won a race, and that
he was by Barnaby out of Gates Ajar, by Frangi-
Pangi, and that the last time he’d run he’d gone off at
about 17-to-1 in a six-furlong Maiden Allowance at
Tropical Park on December 5th with George
Stringfellow up and carrying 111 pounds with the
apprentice allowance claimed. The track was sloppy
and the winner’s time was 1 minute and 13 seconds,
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and Barnyard Gate led at the start, at the half, and
going into the stretch, and then had folded and come
in eighth by nine lengths, and that the first three
horses had been Woebegone, Careless Hussy, and
Treacle Muffin. I told ‘em they was the ones didn’t
know how to read, and they said, “Well I never!
That did it. They said a boy that the only thing he
could read was the racing form was a disgrace to the
American way of life and they was going to court and
have me taken away from Pop and put in a Home. I
didn’t like it, of course, but there wasn’t anything I
could do about it and I just had to wait for Pop to get
out of the draft.
Well, they kept me at the Home for about a month,
and they was real nice to me. They even let me have
the Treasure Island book to read, and I got so worked
up about it I couldn’t lay it down. It was slow going at
first, what with this guy’s long-winded way of
padding the words out, but after a while I worked out
a kind of system that I’d squint my eyes and sort of
weed out all the extra letters and I did a little better.
I was half-way through it and getting more excited all
the time when Pop came back from the draft. There
was a sort of meeting, with some of the Welfare
ladies and the superintendent of the Home and some
strange men I didn’t know, and they was all going at
it hot and heavy, with Pop telling ‘em how he was a
turf investment counselor by trade and there wasn’t
anything wrong with that, and who did they think
they was, trying to take his boy away from him?
I was trying to sneak a few lines of the book, just in
case they took it away from me, and I says to Pop,
“Do you know about this Long John Silver?”
“I never heard of him,” he says. “Probably some
dog running in claimers.”
Well, they jumped all over him then, and that’s
when he remembered about Uncle Sagamore’s farm.
We was going down there, he said; there wasn’t
nothing like wholesome farm life for a boy. And
there’s one thing about Pop, he’s a talker. When he’s
selling the sheets he can talk the ear off a sucker.
The Diamond Bikini— 5
Clients, Pop calls ‘em. I could see him beginning to
get hold of this idea about Uncle Sagamore’s farm,
and he really started to warm up.
“Why,” he says, “just think of all our great men that
got their start on a farm, men like Lincoln and
General Thomas E. Lee and Grover Whalen and
William Wadsworth Hawthorne and Addie Arcaro.
Why, just think what it’ll be like, with ducks to feed
and eggs to gather, and watermelons, and cows to
milk, and horses to ride—” Pop stopped there and
kind of coughed a little and backed up.
“No. Come to think of it, there ain’t a horse on the
place. I remember now my brother Sagamore always
said he wouldn’t have one around if you give it to
him. He’s got mules galore, but no horses. He hates
horses. Gentlemen, can you think of a more
downright wholesome place for a growing boy than a
farm like that?” Pop began to get tears in his eyes,
just thinking how wholesome it was going to be.
Well, the way it turned out there was a lot more
palaver but they finally agreed with Pop about the
farm and said I could go. But they warned him if he
ever got in any more trouble around New York they’d
take me away for keeps. I thought this was kind of
funny, because we’d never been in New York, but I
didn’t say anything.
We went back and got the car and trailer and
started out, but we got mixed up in traffic and so
turned around we didn’t know where we was.
Aqueduct is a lot bigger than Hialeah or Pimlico and
it’s got so many streets you could drive around in it
until you starved to death and never find your way
out. Pretty soon we was stalled in a traffic jam on a
street that had a lot of big hotels with carpets and
colored canvas tents running out the front doors and
across the sidewalk, and Pop yelled at a man
standing under one of these tents. The man was
dressed up in a fancy uniform with a lot of red and
gold on it.
“What street is this?” Pop asks.
“Park Avenue,” the man says, kind of snooty.
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“Well,” Pop asks him, “how do you get over to
Jersey?”
The man just stared at him and said, “Who’d want
to?” and then went on looking at his fingernails.
“That’s the trouble with this goddam place,” Pop
says to me. “What do you want to go anywhere for?
You’re already here.”
Just then another man in a uniform with a
monkey’s hat on his head come out of the door
leading a dog on a leather strap. It was the longest
dog I ever saw in my life, with real short legs, and his
belly dragged when he come down the steps. The
man with the red and gold uniform puffed up and got
red in the face, but he took the leather strap anyway,
and started down the street with the dog. But just
then the dog give a big leap and jerked the strap out
of his hand and ran out in the street in the middle of
all the cars.
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