The sheriff jerked his head around and stared at us.
“Oh, no!” he says, like he hurt somewhere. “Oh,
Jesus, no! Not two of you! Not two Noonans in the
same county. God wouldn’t do that to anybody. I’ll—
I’ll—” He choked all up.
“Sam,” Uncle Sagamore went on, “the shurf here is
kind of worried about his men. Seems like they’ve
started sneakin’ off to drink croton oil on the sly, like
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a baby stuffin’ beans up his nose, and he’s afraid the
voters’ll get wind of it. But I was just tellin’ him he
ain’t got a thing to worry about as far as we’re
concerned. We can keep a secret as well as anybody
in the county.”
“We sure can,” Pop says. “Nobody’ll ever find it out
from us. But ain’t that kind of a funny thing for ‘em to
want to do?”
“Well, sir,” Uncle Sagamore says, “we’re not in no
position to judge, Sam. We’re not in politics. Ain’t no
way we can rightly tell what kind of a strain a man
might be under, settin’ there every day with all that
responsibility. Why, a strain like that could get so
bad after a while a man might even start to think
about gettin’ out of politics and goin’ to work, though
offhand I can’t seem to recollect of a case of one ever
crackin’ up quite as bad as that.”
The sheriff was getting a little purple around the
face now. He kept trying to talk, but it was mainly
just sputter, like steam pushing up the lid of a coffee
pot. “Sagamore Noonan!” he yells, “I—I—”
Uncle Sagamore didn’t even seem to hear him. He
just shifted his tobacco over on the other side and
shook his head sort of sad. “Politics is hard on a man,
Sam,” he says. “It always puts me in mind of Bessie’s
cousin, Peebles. Peebles was a dep’ty shurf for a long
time, till he begin to grow this here sort of mildew on
his hunkers. Just regular mildew, like you see on a
pone of bread that’s gone stale. It was a real puzzling
thing, and they couldn’t figure it out at all.
“Well sir, it went on like that for quite a spell, with
Peebles goin’ to the doctor every week or so to have
this mildew scraped off his butt, but they never could
figure out what caused it, till one day the doctor
happened to be goin’ by the courthouse durin’ office
hours an’ he’d seen what it was. Seems like they’d
put in one of them new-fangled sprinklin’ systems on
the lawn, and the edge of one of the sprays, by golly,
reached over just to the edge of Peebles’s settin’
place on the step. Well, they got to inquirin’ around,
and found out that Peebles had been home sick the
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day they’d put in the sprinkler and tried it out, and
they’d forgot to allow for him. So he’d been settin’
there all these months with his tail in that spray of
water.”
The sheriff seemed to get hold of hisself at last. His
face was still purple, but he got real quiet. He
reached down for his handkerchief and mopped his
face sort of slow and deliberate; then he took a deep
breath and put the handkerchief in his pocket and
walked over in front of Uncle Sagamore like a man
that was holding onto hisself real hard to keep from
blowing up like a stick of dynamite. He began
talking.
“Sagamore Noonan,” he says, real quiet, but still
taking those deep breaths, “when the voters elected
me sheriff for the first time ten years ago I promised
‘em I was going to make this county a decent place to
live by puttin’ you so far back in the pen it’d cost you
eight dollars to send a postcard out to the front gate.
When they re-elected me six years ago, and then
again two years ago, I promised ‘em the same thing.
They knew I was honestly tryin’, and they believed
me. They had patience, because they knew what I
was up against.
“I’m still tryin’. And some day I’m going to do it.
Some day I’m going to get enough evidence on you to
send you up the river so far your grandchildren will
be old men when you get back, and we can hold up
our heads around here and look the rest of the state
in the face.
“Sometimes I’m tempted to quit, to just throw up
the job and sell my home and go somewhere else and
start over, but then I get to thinkin’ about all the
other poor people in this county who’d have to stay
here and go on putting up with you because they
can’t sell out and leave, so I stick it out and keep
trying. It’s an obligation, I reckon. I just can’t
abandon all these defenseless people to you.
“It ain’t just a job. It’s gone beyond that. I went
into the Treasurer’s office the other day and told ‘em
they didn’t have to issue my pay-checks any more till
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I freed the county of you, and that if the people didn’t
re-elect me two years from this fall I’d go on servin’
for nothing, right along with the new sheriff, till we
got the evidence on you to put you away and we
wouldn’t be ashamed to bring innocent children into
a world where you was running around loose.
“And now that I find out there ain’t only you, that
there’s two of you here on this one farm with decent,
God-fearin’ people livin’ all around you, I’m almost
tempted to call the Governor and have him declare
martial law. There must be something on the statute
books to protect the citizens from you without havin’
to go to court with evidence of any one particular
crime.”
“It’s like I was tellin’ you, Sam,” Uncle Sagamore
says. “This shurf is a real fine man, aside from being
a little inclined to get all het up over triflin’ little
things that don’t amount to a hill of beans. Reckon
he’s got the high blood pressure. An’ then, too, it
must be kind of trying, havin’ your men sneakin’
around Pokin’ beans up their noses when you ain’t
lookin’.”
No,” Pop says. “They wasn’t poking beans up their
nose. They were drinking croton oil remember?”
“Oh, sure,” Uncle Sagamore says. “It was croton
oil, wasn’t it?”
The sheriff brought both hands up and rubbed ‘em
across his face, and he didn’t say anything for a
minute. He breathed kind of slow and heavy, but
when he took his hands away he was still quiet.
“While I’m out here,” he says to Uncle Sagamore,
“I’m going to have a look in your barn. We been
gettin’ reports from various towns that you been
doing a little shopping here and there.”
“Why, sure, Shurf,” Uncle Sagamore says. “Help
yourself, I’m always kind of proud when I done a
little shopping. The way I see it, it shows good
management when a man can have a little money left
over to buy something for hisself after he’s fed all the
goddam politicians he’s got lyin’ in his lap.”
“Come on!” the sheriff says, real cold.
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The barn was made out of logs, with split shingles
for a roof. Inside there was some stalls for the mules.
It was kind of dim, and smelled nice, just like the
stables at a race track. In one corner there was a
corncrib with a little door made out of planks.
We all stopped, and the sheriff went over and
opened the corncrib door, “Well, well,” he says,
Ebbing his hands together. “Just like I thought.”
I couldn’t see past him very well, but it looked like
a lot of sacks of something or other piled up five or
six feet high.
“Sure is a lot of awful sweet mule feed,” the sheriff
says. He started counting, pointing with his finger
and moving his lips. Uncle Sagamore leaned against
the wall and sailed out some tobacco juice.
The sheriff finished counting. He turned around
and looked at Uncle Sagamore, and he seemed to feel
a lot better. “Ninety sacks,” he says. “That’s about
the way we heard it. That was quite a little shopping
you did, here and there.”
“Well, you know how it is,” Uncle Sagamore says.
“A man’s workin’ eighteen, twenty hours a day, he
don’t get to town very often.”
“You mind lettin’ me know what you’re aiming to
do with all of it?” the sheriff asked. “Stories like that
interest me.”
“Why, no. Not at all, Shurf,” Uncle Sagamore says.
“You see, when Sam here wrote me he was comin’ to
visit a spell this summer and was bringin’ his boy, I
figured I ort to lay in a little sweetnin’. You know how
boys is. They got a sweet tooth.”
“Nine thousand pounds of sugar?” the sheriff
asked. “They must figure on staying several weeks.
Ain’t you afraid that much’d be bad for his teeth?”
Uncle Sagamore snapped his fingers. “Well sir,” he
says, “you know, I never thought of that.”
The sheriff’s face started to get purple again.
Uncle Sagamore shook his head, kind of sad.
“Imagine that,” he says. “Sure looks like the joke’s on
me, buyin’ all that sugar for nothin’.”
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Six
We walked back to the car. The sheriff opened the
door and started to get in. “Well, you just go right
ahead bein’ smart, Sagamore Noonan,” he says.
“Sooner or later you’re going to laugh on the other
side of your face. It’s here on this land, and we’re
goin’ to find it. It ain’t goin’ to be so funny then.”
“Why, did you lose something, Shurf?” Uncle
Sagamore asked. “You should have told me. Anyway,
me an’ Sam can help, you just let us know. And don’t
you fret none about us tellin’ anybody your men’s
started drinkin’ croton oil. You can depend on us.”
The sheriff said a bad cuss word and got in and
slammed the door. The car jumped ahead and made a
big turn and then went bucking up the hill. It seemed
like him and his men was always in a hurry. I thought
it wasn’t any wonder they kept running over Mr.
Jimerson’s hogs.
I wondered why Uncle Sagamore had bought all
that sugar, but I figured there wasn’t any use asking
him. Maybe I could ask Pop about it later. He might
know. But I was sure he hadn’t bought it on account
of us, like he told the sheriff, because he didn’t even
know we was coming until we’d got there.
Uncle Sagamore looked up the hill to where you
could just see Dr Severance’s trailer in the edge of
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the trees. Pop remembered then that what with that
excitable sheriff talking so much he’d forgot to tell
Uncle Sagamore about it. So he told him.
“Well, is that a fact? A hundred and twenty a
month,” Uncle Sagamore says, aiming some tobacco
juice at a grasshopper about ten feet away on the
sand. He missed him a couple inches. The
grasshopper went away, buzzing. Got the anemia,
has she?”
“That’s right,” Pop says. “She has to eat
vegetables.”
“Well sir, that’s a shame,” Uncle Sagamore says. “A
young girl, and all.”
“By the way, have we got any vegetables?” Pop
asked.
“Hmmm,” Uncle Sagamore says. “I reckon there’s
still some of Bessie’s turnips out there if the hawgs
ain’t rooted ‘em all out.”
“Well, they ought to do fine,” Pop says. “Come to
think of it, whoever seen a hawg with the anemia?”
We walked up the hill towards the trailer. It was
getting along late in the afternoon now and the
shadows of the trees was lengthening out and it was
pretty out over the lake.
Dr Severance had uncoupled the trailer from the
car and set up a striped canvas shade over the door
like a front porch. There was a couple of canvas
chairs and a little table under it, and a portable radio
on the table was playing music. It was all real nice.
Just as we walked up Dr Severance came out the
door. “Hello,” he says to Pop, and Pop introduced
him to Uncle Sagamore. He still had on the doublebreasted
suit, but he’d took off his tie and had a glass
in his hand with ice and some stuff in it.
“Would you men care for a drink?” he asked.
“Why if’n it wouldn’t put you out,” Uncle Sagamore
says.
He went back inside and we all hunkered down in
the shade. We could hear him in the trailer clinking
The Diamond Bikini— 58
glasses and ice. And just then Miss Harrington came
out of the door.
“Well, ho-ly hell!” Uncle Sagamore says, just the
way Pop had the other time.
She had changed clothes, but this little two-piece
romper outfit was just like the other one except that
instead of being white it was striped like candy. She
had on gold-colored sandals with a strap that went
between her toes, and her toenails was all painted
gold. On her wrist was a big heavy bracelet, and one
ankle had a thin gold chain around it. She rattled the
ice in the glass she was carrying, and leaned against
the door and looked at Uncle Sagamore.
“Does he hurt somewhere?” she asked Pop.
“Oh,” Pop says. “This here is my brother
Sagamore.”
“Well, I might have guessed that,” she says. There
is something about the way he looks, if you know
what I mean.”
Uncle Sagamore didn’t say anything. He just went
on staring.
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