the palm of your hand, and he’ll tell you anything you
want to know about it.”
Everybody cheered Uncle Sagamore. He took hold
of the microphone and shifted his tobacco over into
the other cheek, and says, “Well sir, men, I ain’t no
hand at makin’ speeches. You all know that. I’m just
goin’ to tell you I appreciate you comin’ out to help
an’ I know you’re going to be just like me. You’re
goin’ to be right here, by hell, till that girl is found.
“Now, naturally, a man can’t look all the time. We
wouldn’t expect him to. He’s got to have a little rest
now an’ then, so there’s refreshment up here, and
entertainment for when you get tired.”
* * *
There was a big commotion up the hill then, in that
jam of cars just this side of the gate. And just as I
looked, three big hound dogs came lunging through
the last row of cars and into the open section of the
road. They was yanking along some man that had
hold of their leashes, and then they gave a big lunge
and pulled him off his feet. He slid along on his
stomach for maybe his own length before he could
get up, and when he did and I got a look at his face,
doggone if it wasn’t the sheriff. He was dusty and
sweaty and limping a little, and his face was purple.
It looked like he was cussing the dogs or something,
but they was baying and the loudspeakers was going
on with Uncle Sagamore’s speech, so you couldn’t be
sure. Behind him was another man with three more
of the big, long-eared dogs.
They come on down and hit the edge of the crowd
and began pushing their way through, being more or
less pulled along by the bloodhounds or whatever
they was. Just as they got down in front of the stage,
Uncle Sagamore looked out and saw them.
“Well sir, by golly,” he says into the microphone.
“Here’s the shurf. He’s come to help us. It’s just like I
was sayin’, men, he might be a little late gettin’ on
the job, but I knowed he wouldn’t let us down.”
The Diamond Bikini— 164
The sheriff got the dogs stopped. He looked up at
us on the stage and at the five naked girls behind us,
and he pointed at Uncle Sagamore with his mouth
open and his face as purple as a ripe plum, but you
couldn’t tell whether he was saying anything or not.
“I always said that shurf was a damn good man,”
Uncle Sagamore went on, “an’ I tell you right now
there wasn’t never the slightest doubt in my mind
that he’d come here sooner or later an’ help us out in
our hour of need. I got to admit, though, that it does
seem to me like it was kind of cheap of the shurf’s
office not to offer no more than a little old measly
five-hundred-dollar reward for that girl. I’d be the
last one in the world to find fault, but it does seem to
me they could of made it at least a thousand.”
The crowd let out another big cheer.
Uncle Sagamore finished up. “Well, I ain’t goin’ to
stand here an’ jaw at you fellers all day. You don’t
want to look at no homely old bastard like me, with
all them pretty girls up here to dance for you. So I
thank you kindly.”
He stepped away from the microphone and the man
came back. “All right, folks,” he says, “now we’ll give
you a little sample of the stupendous show you’ll see
inside the tent. So step right up and get your ticket.
Only one dollar—”
Music blared out of the loudspeaker then and we
all got down off the stage so the girls could dance. It
was real pretty to watch. They kicked their legs up
high and wiggled all over.
Men was pushing around the little stand to buy
tickets. I followed Pop and Uncle Sagamore down
towards the house. The Sheriff was shoving his way
through the crowd with the dogs, and I could see he
was trying to catch up with us. I caught Uncle
Sagamore’s arm.
“I think the sheriff wants to see you,” I says.
He stopped. “Why, sure,” he says. We was under
the big tree near Mrs. Home’s shiny trailer.
The Diamond Bikini— 165
The sheriff come up. He handed the leashes of the
three hounds to the other man to hold.
He waved his hand, sort of. “Sagamore Noonan—”
he says. He rubbed both hands across his face and
tried again. “Sagamore Noonan—” It seemed like
that was as far as he could get. He was breathing
real hard.
Uncle Sagamore leaned against the tree and
shifted his tobacco over into his other cheek real
thoughtful. “Why, yes, Shurf,” he says. “Did you want
to talk to me?”
The sheriff says, “—ffffftt—sshhh—ffffttt—”
It reminded me of when he tried to open the jar of
tannery juice and spilled it all over his clothes. It
looked like the words was all jammed up inside him
and he couldn’t get ‘em turned length-wise so they
would come out. He reached in the pocket of his coat
and brought out something. It was two things, really.
One of em was a copy of the hand bill me and Pop
had printed up, and the other was a folded
newspaper. He held the newspaper out in front of
Uncle Sagamore with one hand and started slapping
the front of it with the other, still not saying words
but just going on with that sort of wheezing. I stood
on tiptoes and craned my neck a little so I could see
the front of the paper. And doggone if it wasn’t a real
big picture of Miss Harrington. I mean Miss Caroline.
She didn’t have anything on but her diamonds, but
this time there was three patches of them. She was
posed in front of a great big fan or something that
looked like it was made out of ostrich feathers. And it
seemed like the whole first page of the paper was
about her. The headline said:
SOUGHT IN WILDS...
SCANTILY CLAD DANCER
OBJECT OF FRENZIED SEARCH
I tried to read what it said, but the way the sheriff
was waving it around and slapping it with his other
hand I couldn’t get any more than snatches of it.
“...most fantastic manhunt in history... Wild
confusion... Stampede fanned by rumors of reward...
The Diamond Bikini— 166
The already fabulous Choo-Choo Caroline, beautiful
missing witness in gangland murder
case...sweetheart of late gang leader...alleged to
have fled almost nude into swamp...”
I didn’t know what a lot of the big words meant,
but it sure looked as if everybody was interested in
her.
Uncle Sagamore took the paper out of the sheriff’s
hand and studied it. “Well sir,” he says, “that there’s
a right nice picture of her, ain’t it, Shurf?”
The sheriff took another deep breath. He rubbed
both hands up over his face and then down again,
and this time the log jam of words inside him got
straightened out and he began talking. It wasn’t loud,
or anything. He talked real calm and low, like a man
that was trying to hold his breath at the same time he
was saying words. It was more like a whisper.
“Sagamore Noonan,” he says, “if there was any
way the moral law would let me, I’d pull a gun right
here an’ kill you. I’d shoot you, an’ then I’d go
running up the road laughing like a hyena, an’ they’d
let me go. They wouldn’t do a thing to me. At the
very worse they’d just lace me up in a straitjacket or
put me in a padded cell, an’ I’d have all the rest of
my life with nothing to do but just stand there with
my head stuck out through the bars and laugh about
never being the sheriff again of a county that had you
in it.”
“Listen,” he says, still whispering. “They got all the
highway patrol cars in this end of the state out there
on that road south of town, tryin’ to untangle the
snarl. It’ll be two o’clock this afternoon before they
can get any traffic across it. That’s just the highway.
From here out to the highway, there’s four solid
miles of abandoned cars jammed bumper to bumper
in the road. They just got out and left ‘em, and took
the keys. You can’t get round ‘em, and you can’t
move ‘em without a wrecker—or twenty wreckers.
And we can’t even get the wreckers to ‘em until they
get that highway open.
The Diamond Bikini— 167
“I walked in here from two miles this side of town.
That’s the only way you can get in here, or out. The
woods is swarming with newspaper reporters and
photographers and radio news people that tried to
make it on foot and got lost.”
He took another deep breath, and went on,
“There’s whole towns as far as fifty miles from here
that ain’t got a man left in ‘em. The stores are closed.
The buses have stopped running. Construction jobs
are deserted. Whole communities is empty except for
women and the women is raving. I got relays of girls
answering the phone, tryin’ to tell people there ain’t
been any reward offered for that girl. Ain’t none of
‘em been able to stick it out more’n two hours. They
can’t stand the language.
“And now that you’ve turned this place into a
honky tonk, I never will get ‘em out of here until we
find that there girl and show ‘em she’s been found.
They wouldn’t leave, even if they could get there cars
out.”
Uncle Sagamore pursed his lips like he was going
to spit, only he didn’t, and he rubbed his chin real
thoughtful. “Well, Shurf,” he says. “That’s what we’re
all tryin’ to do, find that there girl. Why don’t we just
all pitch in together an’ look for her? We been waitin’
all day for you to get down here on the job an’ do
somethin’ about tryin’ to locate her.”
“You—you—” the sheriff says. He was beginning to
fizz and sputter again.
“Why, shucks,” Uncle Sagamore went on. “I don’t
see nothin’ for us to do, but keep on looking. You got
lots of help. An’ it don’t seem to me like you’d want
to start raisin’ no stink about the reward. You want to
have all them people goin’ around sayin’ mebbe that
shurf don’t even care whether that there girl’s found
or not? Why, they might get real violent.”
The sheriff lunged out and caught the leashes of
the other three hounds. “Give me them dogs,” he
snarled at the man. “Let’s go.” Then he looked
around at me. “Billy, you come along and show us
where you hid in them ferns.”
The Diamond Bikini— 168
The dogs barked. They had a real deep, rumbling
sort of bark. They lunged on the leashes and almost
pulled the sheriff off his feet again.
“Damn it—” he says.
And just then there was another voice behind us.
We whirled around and Baby Collins was standing in
the door of the trailer, leaning against the door frame
with a cigarette in her hand. She was wearing a
wrap-around sort of thing made out of some lacy
black stuff you could see right through, with one bare
leg slanting a little out of the front of it.
“Hi, honey,” she says to the sheriff. “Why don’t you
tie up your dogs and come in out of the sun? We’ll
open a box of cornflakes.”
The Diamond Bikini— 169
Sixteen
The sheriff got a little darker red in the face, and
Uncle Sagamore says to Baby Collins, “I’d like to
make you acquainted with the shurf. He’s a real busy
man, though.”
“Oh,” she says. “That’s too bad. But I’m glad to
meet you, sheriff. Drop in and see us any time you’re
out this way, and bring your scrabble board.”
She smiled at all of us and went back to the trailer.
The big hounds was lunging on the leashes again,
about to pull the sheriff over, and there was so much
uproar when he finally was able to talk again you
couldn’t tell whether it was Uncle Sagamore he was
cussing or the dogs. Sig Freed got mixed up in it too.
He’d bark at the hounds and then run around in a
circle and jump up on me, just to be sure I was still
there to back him up in case they got mad. Any one
of ‘em could have swallowed him with one bite.
We started off down past the house, but all of a
sudden the sheriff stopped. “Oh, hell,” he says. “We
got to have something of hers for the dawgs to get
the scent.”
“That’s right,” the other man says. It was the first
time he’d even opened his mouth. I guess he was a
new deputy. He was a kind of sandy-haired man with
a long neck and weak blue eyes.
The Diamond Bikini— 170
The sheriff waved an arm. “Run up there to that
trailer they was livin’ in and see if you can find a pair
of her shoes, or some clothes. The trailer’s off there
somewhere in that mess of cars.”
“Hey wait,” I says. “I just remember Uncle
Sagamore had had some clothes of hers last night.
“Uncle Sagamore had—”
The whole thing happened so fast then it was like
something blowing up in your face. I think Sig Freed
was starting to leap up on me again, or was already
in the air, but anyway Pop lunged and grabbed me
and hoisted me up, and at the same time he cried,
“Did you see that? That dam’ dawg tried to bite Billy
—”
“He did?” Uncle Sagamore says. He made a lunge
at Sig Freed and waved his hat at him. “Git. Shoo!
Scat, you goddam dawg!”
Everybody was excited and yelling. The sheriff
says, “What the hell?” I tried to tell Pop that Sig
Freed wasn’t trying to bite, that he was just playing,
but his hand was over my mouth the way he was
holding me, and then he was running towards the
house with me on his shoulder, yelling, “We better
see if he broke the skin. Might have hydrophoby.”
He was cussing Sig Freed so loud all the time he
was running I couldn’t get him to understand that I
was all right, even if he hadn’t had my face pressed
against his shoulder so I couldn’t talk clear. He ran
up on the porch and went into the bedroom, and put
me down on the bed.
“Here,” he says, all excited, pulling up my pants
leg. “Let me see where it was! Doggone that dawg! I
knowed all the time you couldn’t trust him.”
“Pop,” I says, “for the love of Pete, I been trying to
tell you. He didn’t bite me. He didn’t even try. He
was just playing.”
He stared at me with his mouth open. “Oh,” he
says. He took out his handkerchief then and mopped
his face. “Whew! Sure give me a scare, anyway.
You’re sure you’re all right!”
The Diamond Bikini— 171
“Of course,” I says. I got up off the bed.
“I could have swore he nipped at you,” Pop says,
like he still could believe it.
“We better get back,” I says. “The sheriff wants me
to go with him to start the dogs on the trail.”
“Sure,” he says. “They’re gone now to see if they
can find something of hers for the scent.”
“That was what I was going to tell him, when you
grabbed me,” I says. “Uncle Sagamore had some of
her clothes.”
“Oh,” Pop says. He frowned kind of thoughtful. “I
don’t know whether I’d tell him that or not. Course, I
suppose it’d be all right—No, I expect we’d better
not.”
“Well?” I asked. “What’s wrong with that?”
“Well,” he says, “she’s lost, you see, and Dr
Severance has been shot, so in a way everything in
that trailer has been impounded by the Gov’ment and
nobody’s supposed to touch anything until the estate
has been settled. It’s kind of legal stuff you wouldn’t
understand very well. Of course, it’s all right for the
shurf to go in there, but not us. Uncle Sagamore put
the stuff back, of course, when he didn’t find her, but
it might be a good idea not to say anything about it.”
“Oh,” I says. “Well, I won’t mention it.”
We went back out. Uncle Sagamore and the sheriff
had come down close to the front yard and was
waiting. The smell from the tubs was pretty bad
there, and the sheriff was fanning the air with his
hat. In a minute the other deputy came back. He had
that pair of gold sandals of Miss Harrington’s—I
mean Miss Caroline’s.
Me and the sheriff and the deputy started down
below the lake with them holding on to the dogs’
leashes. When we got around on the lower side of it
in the timber there was men everywhere, still
looking.
“I don’t know how the hell a dawg could foller
nothin’ in this trampled-up mess,” the sheriff says,
The Diamond Bikini— 172
real bitter. “Help! Hah! We’ll be the rest of the fall
roundin’ up the lost hunters, after we locate her.”
We went on up through the woods until we was
across from the place where we swum, and I showed
the sheriff where we climbed out of the water while
they was shooting at us. From there it was only a
little way through the timber to the little gully with
the ferns growing around it. For a wonder, there
wasn’t anybody else around, and the ferns hadn’t
been trampled on. You could still see the broken one
where we had hid.
“You see?” I says. “Right there.”
“Good,” the sheriff says. “I’m glad somebody
around this place is a decent, intelligent, common,
ordinary, co-operatin’ human being. You’re all right,
Billy.”
Being back here on the spot reminded me of how
we’d listened to the other gangsters going by in the
leaves while we was hid. I told the sheriff about it.
“So there must have been three of them,” I said.
“Maybe the other one’s still down there, or else he
got away.”
He shook his head. “No. He didn’t get away. We
found the car out there on the road last night and
nabbed him when he showed up. So far he ain’t said
a word, so we don’t know whether he got her or not,
but the fact you say you heard him makes your story
check out.”
“You—you reckon he shot her, Sheriff?” I asked.
He frowned, kind of thoughtful. “No. I don’t think
so. I’m pretty sure she’s still alive.”
“It sure looks like they’d have found her by this
time,” I says.
“Yeah,” he said. “Don’t it?”
We went over to where the deputy was holding the
dogs, and the sheriff let each one of them smell the
pair of sandals. They whined a little and looked real
interested. Then the sheriff put the sandals inside his
shirt and let the dogs over close to where we had laid
in the ferns. They whined some more and pulled hard
The Diamond Bikini— 173
to get over to it. They went snuff! snuff! snuff! with
their noses close to the ground, and when the sheriff
and the deputy unstrapped the leashes they went
swarming all over the gully, eager and excited as
anything, and then one of them let out this big
booming bark and started down the hill swinging
back and forth with his nose close to the ground and
his ears flapping. The others followed him.
“They got it!” the sheriff yelled. “They got the
scent.”
They disappeared downhill in the trees. We could
hear their baying and tell which way they was going,
so we ran along after them. The sheriff was pretty
lame from that long walk out from town, so he had a
hard time keeping up. In a minute we caught sight of
them again, crossing a little open space. Four other
men was chasing after them then. They was pointing
and yelling.
“Hey, Joe,” one of them shouted. “Come on. Them
dawgs is on the trail. They’ll lead us to her.”
Two more men came charging out of the bushes
and took out after the rest. More kept coming. Every
time we’d catch sight of the dogs there’d be a bigger
crowd after them. We began to drop behind, but we
could tell by the trampling and crashing through the
brush ahead that there was a whole army of them up
ahead of us trying to keep up with the dogs. The
uproar got further and further away, going down
towards the bottom.
The sheriff had to stop and rest. He sat down on a
stump and pulled out the big red handkerchief to
mop his face. He sighed and shook his head. “You
just don’t know what it can do to you,” he says to the
deputy, real bitter and discouraged. “I mean, waking
up in the dead of night with the cold sweat on you,
wondering what the hell he’ll do next. And the awful
part of it is even after you’ve found out, you ain’t
going to be able to pin it on him. All you can do is go
around and sort of pick up the pieces. He ain’t done a
lick of work in forty years that I know of; he’s got
The Diamond Bikini— 174
plenty of time to plan these things so he’s two moves
ahead of you all the time.
“Now you take this one. He knows perfectly well I
can’t order that carnival out of here—even if it could
get out, which it can’t because the road’s clogged
with abandoned cars—which he also knew would
happen. He knows I can’t order it out and break up
this thing because it’s got a permit to operate in this
county. So while the whole damn state’s in a uproar
over a naked cooch dancer that probably ain’t even
down here, he’s drawin’ a fat rake-off from the
hamburgers and dancing girls and wheels-of-fortune
and the floozies, beside selling moonshine to ‘em at
New York prices and charging them a dollar to park
their cars into a solid snarl.
“And now, you mark my words, before it’s over
there’ll be something else, too—like maybe a big
mudhole suddenly developing in the road and when
they do get the road clear everybody will get stuck
and have to be pulled out at two dollars a head.”
“Sheriff,” I says, “you mean you still don’t think
Miss Caroline was with me?”
He took off his hat and mopped his head again. “I
don’t really know what I think any more, Billy,” he
says. “I do believe you’re telling the truth, in spite of
your handicap of being a member of the Noonan
family. I believe she was with you, but where she is
now I wouldn’t even try to guess. Do you hear them
dawgs?”
“Yes,” I says. “Sounds like they’re pretty far over
there.”
He nodded. “They’re about two miles away, and
still going across the bottom. That girl was
barefooted, and she couldn’t have walked three
hundred yards, but before the day’s over you’re
going to find out the dawgs has followed her trail
somewhere around eighteen to twenty miles, back
and forth across this bottom. There’ll be three or four
thousand men following ‘em, and every time they
double back up past the carnival a fresh bunch of
tired ones will drop off the rest and pay a dollar to
The Diamond Bikini— 175
watch the belly dancers, and eat hamburgers that’ll
get smaller and smaller and have more and more
oatmeal in them and will be selling for a dollar and a
half by sundown. I been through all this before. Not
this particular one, mind you, but with the same
Sagamore Noonan touches.”
I kind of liked the sheriff, but it seemed to me like
he was too excitable and he did too much griping
about Uncle Sagamore. I couldn’t see anything
wrong with him trying to get as many people as he
could down here to look for Miss Caroline. I was
worried about her, and I didn’t think we ought to be
just sitting here when she still hadn’t been found.
“Hadn’t we better start after the dogs again?” I
says. “They’re still barking like they’re on the trail,
and they’ll have to catch up with her sooner or later.”
“You don’t have to follow bloodhounds that close,”
he says. “You just listen to see which way they’re
going. I think they’re beginning to swing now, so
they’ll be back up this way before long. My guess is
they’ll go through the edge of that cornfield up there
behind the house.”
Well, we waited. And sure enough, it wasn’t but
about half an hour before we could hear them and
the whole army of men that was following them go
crashing through the underbrush and timber about a
furlong off to the right of us. We went over there just
in time to get a glimpse of the dogs, and then we was
running along in a swarm of men. The dogs went up
the hill and then, by golly, it was just like the sheriff
had said. They cut along the edge of the cornfield,
down back of the barn, and then headed out across
the bottom again.
The sheriff looked furious, but him and the deputy
started back down that way. Several hundred of the
men didn’t, though. They broke away and started up
through the cars in the cornfield, headed for the
carnival and the hot-dog stand. I was hungry too, so I
called Sig Freed and we went along behind them.
There was a terrific crowd up by the stand now,
and you couldn’t hardly get near the carnival. The
The Diamond Bikini— 176
loudspeakers was blaring and the five girls was
dancing on the stage. All the other tents had big
swarms around them too. Everywhere you looked
there was men.
Murph and his two men was so tired they could
hardly move. Murph handed me a hamburger when I
finally got up close to the counter. Sure enough, the
meat in it was a lot smaller than the one I’d got at
noon.
“That ‘ll-be-one-dollar-fifty-no-they-haven’t-foundher,”
he says.
“Pop’ll pay you,” I told him.
He looked at me. “Oh,” he says. “I’m getting
punchy, kid. I didn’t even recognize you.”
I didn’t see Pop and Uncle Sagamore anywhere,
but there was so many men around it would be hard
to see them. I tried to watch the girls dancing, but
everywhere I stood there was a bunch of tall men in
front of me craning to see, theirselves, and anyway
they went back inside the tent in a few minutes and
the people started buying tickets for the inside show.
I tried to get one too, and told the man Pop would
pay him.
“Kid,” he says, “come back in fifteen years with a
dollar, and I’ll let you in. It’s a promise.” He looked
tired too, and his voice was hoarse.
I started to turn away, and then he tossed me fifty
cents. “Here, kid,” he says. “Go over to the shooting
gallery and shoot a round.”
I finally managed to squeeze my way in there, and I
shot fifty cents worth at the little targets travelling
across the back of the gallery on a moving belt. I
didn’t hit much. When the money was gone I started
looking for Pop and Uncle Sagamore. They didn’t
seem to be up here anywhere, so I went down to the
house. The smell from the tubs hit me in the front
yard, as bad as ever, or worse, and that reminded me
we never had bottled up any more of the juice to
send to the government to have analyzed. Well,
maybe, we’d get around to it when Miss Caroline was
found and all this uproar died down.
The Diamond Bikini— 177
That made me wonder if we would find her. There
just wasn’t any use kidding ourselves any longer; she
had been lost nearly twenty-four hours now, and it
looked more and more all the time like something
bad had happened to her. Maybe that last gangster
had shot her and put her body in one of the sloughs
down there. That made me feel sick, and I was about
ready to cry when I went in the house.
Pop and Uncle Sagamore was there in the front
bedroom with the door closed, counting another
bunch of money out of a flour sack. It was all over the
bed.
“They haven’t found her yet, Pop,” I says.
He nodded. “I know. But they will; you just wait.
Hell they can’t help it—look at how many of them is
looking.”
“I know. Something must have happened to her.”
He slapped me on the back. “No sir, you just buck
up. I got a feeling Miss Caroline’s perfectly all right.”
Uncle Sagamore took the sack of money after it
was all counted and went out with it somewhere.
When he came back we went out on the front porch.
We could see Uncle Finley down there on top of the
ark, hammering away to beat the band.
“He must figure the rain’s already started,” Pop
says. “All these cars showing up around here.”
“I reckon so,” Uncle Sagamore says. “Oh. There’s
Harm. I got to talk to him a minute.”
He went up beyond the front yard a little and
caught up with a tall skinny man wearing khaki pants
and shirt and no hat. He had a bald spot almost like
Uncle Sagamore’s. They talked together for a few
minutes and then Uncle Sagamore came back and sat
down.
It was nearly sundown now, and up there in the big
swarm of men around the carnival they was hanging
some electric lights on tree limbs and over the stage
in front of the girl tent. I guess there was a generator
on one of the trucks.
The Diamond Bikini— 178
Just then the sheriff and the new deputy and
Booger came around the corner of the house. They
was really beat down. Booger had red rims around
his eyes and a stubble of beard, and his clothes was
dusty and sweat-stained. The sheriff was limping and
his clothes was in about as bad a shape as Booger’s.
“Set and rest a spell, men,” Uncle Sagamore says.
“You look kind of done in. Any luck yet?”
Booger and the new deputy sat down, just kind of
collapsing on the steps. The sheriff stood there,
swaying a little on his feet and staring real cold at
Uncle Sagamore.
“No luck yet,” he says. “But we expect to find her
any minute now. The dawgs is making their fourth
trip across the bottom, hot on her trail. As near as I
can figger, that adds up to about seventeen miles.
She was barefooted and hadn’t even been off
pavement before in her life, so it stands to reason she
couldn’t be very far ahead of ‘em now.”
Uncle Sagamore scratched his leg with his toenail.
“Well sir, it would sure seem like it.”
The sheriff nodded. “Unless, of course, she’s
stretched out into a real hard run. You got to take
that into consideration; she’s only been going twentyfour
hours. And after she wore off the tender part of
her feet, say up about half-way to her knees, they
might quit bothering her and she could make better
time.”
Uncle Sagamore nodded too, with his lips pursed
up. “She sure is a puzzling thing, all right, Shurf. For
the life of me I just can’t figure it out.”
The sheriff exploded then. He stuck a finger right
in Uncle Sagamore’s face and yelled, with his face
purple. “Sagamore Noonan! Where is that girl?”
Uncle Sagamore looked at him in surprise. “Why,
Shurf, how would I know? Ain’t I been looking for her
myself practically night and day?”
Before the sheriff could say anything else,
somebody called him from up near the edge of the
crowd. We all looked up that way, and it was Otis. He
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came limping down through the yard, and he looked
about as done in as the others. His eyes was red like
he hadn’t had any sleep, and he hadn’t shaved.
The sheriff rubbed his hands across his face and
says to Otis, “How’s it going out there?”
Otis kind of collapsed on the steps too. “Well,” he
says, “they got the highway clear, with road blocks
set up so no more hunters can get through to clog it
up again. There’s three wreckers and a bulldozer
workin’ on the road now, movin’ the cars out of it
where they can an’ dozin’ a path around where they
can’t. They’re half-way in from the highway, and
likely the whole road’ll be open by midnight.
Somebody ran over the last one of Marvin Jimerson’s
hawgs, though, just a while ago, and he’s filed suit
against the county.”
“How’s things in town?” the sheriff asked.
Otis shook his head. “About the same. Women is
picketing the courthouse. The PTA, the Women’s
Club, and the League of Women Voters held a
combined mass meetin’ in the high school and
they’re goin’ to wire the governor to send the
National Guard if you don’t get these men out of here
by mornin’. A few of the reporters has found their
way back to town on foot, and word’s got out about
the belly dancers and the carnival and the girls, so
there was some talk at the meetin’ of charterin’ a
helicopter to bring a delegation out here, but there
wasn’t enough money in the treasuries.
“The road blocks is going to try to hold back the
car-loads of women as soon as word comes through
the road’s clear into here, but they won’t be able to
hold ‘em long if there ain’t signs of this breakin’ up
by morning.” And if them women get in here I’m
sailin’ right out across that bottom on foot and I ain’t
goin’ to stop this side of the West Coast.”
The sheriff shuddered. “Well, men, you got any
ideas for gettin’ ‘em out of here? If we tell ‘em that,
most of ‘em will be afraid to go home. They’ll figure
that since they’re goin’ to be in the dawghouse
anyway they might as well live her up as long as they
The Diamond Bikini— 180
can. There ain’t no hope of findin’ that girl so we can
convince ‘em it’s all over. She ain’t really down in the
bottom—” He stopped then and his eyes got real
hard. Then he went on, looking at Uncle Sagamore.
“But maybe if I could make ‘em understand they
been homswoggled by this crooked old wart hog
here, and gypped into spendin’ their money and
getting theirselves in the dawghouse with their wives
—”
“You reckon you could make ‘em see it?” Booger
asked, showing a little interest for the first time.
“I can sure try,” the sheriff says. “They sure must
be beginning to wonder theirselves why a whole
army of men ain’t been able to find a girl in a place
that size.”
“But, look,” Otis says, with a real nasty smile. “We
couldn’t do that. They might lynch him.”
“Oh, of course not,” the sheriff says. “Hell, how
could they? There’s four law officers here to protect
him, and only about eight thousand of them.”
The Diamond Bikini— 181
Seventeen
Uncle Sagamore pursed his lips. “Why, Shurf,” he
says. “You wouldn’t do a thing like that.”
“Wouldn’t I?” the sheriff says. “But don’t you
worry. It’s our duty as law officers to protect you.
And likely there ain’t more’n a few hundred of ‘em
got guns in their cars.”
“Hey, wait a minute.” It was Otis. “I was just by the
sound truck. It’s broke down.”
The sheriff nodded. “I know. While Rutherford was
asleep last night a bunch of wires inside his amplifier
pulled themselves loose an’ run off. But I’ll
commandeer the one up at the carnival. By God, we’ll
break this thing up!”
He turned around and started up towards the
crowd. The deputies followed him. Pop and Uncle
Sagamore looked at each other. I began to get
scared. A lot of these men had been acting like they
was drinking, and there was no telling what would
happen.
Uncle Sagamore spit out some tobacco juice and
rubbed his chin. “Sure is a hard-workin’ man, that
shurf. It’s a downright shame, though, he’s got such
a habit of goin’ off half-cocked.”
The Diamond Bikini— 182
He got up and sauntered along after them. Pop
went with him.
There wasn’t anything else for me to do, so I
followed them. But I didn’t like the looks of it.
When I got up there Uncle Sagamore was standing
at the back of the crowd, but I didn’t see Pop
anywhere. When I come up behind the swarm of men
I couldn’t even see the stage, so I backed off across
the road by the hamburger stand. That wasn’t much
better. I was still too low.
“What’s the matter, kid?” Murph asked.
“I was trying to see the stage,” I says. “The sheriff
is going to make a speech.”
“Oh-oh,” he says. “Well, here,” He lifted me up on
the counter and we watched together. Everybody
else had left to join the crowd across the road.
“I been afraid of this,” Murph said. “There’s a lot of
mutterin’ already.”
The girls had been dancing awful tired, as if they
couldn’t hardly pick up their feet any more. Then the
music stopped and they staggered down the steps
and into the tent. The man started over to take hold
of the microphone. And then the sheriff climbed up
on stage. The man started to wave him off, but the
sheriff said something we couldn’t hear, and showed
the man something he took out of his pocket. The
man scratched his head and looked like he didn’t
know what to do, but then backed away and let the
sheriff have the microphone.
Now that he was over in front of it you could hear
him, because it was coming out of the loudspeakers.
“Men,” he says, “I got an announcement to make.”
Men in the crowd started to whistle and yell.
“Get down, you old fossil!”
“Who the hell wants to look at you?”
“Bring back them luscious peaches.”
“Throw the old bastard out! We want girls.”
The sheriff held up his hands and kept talking,
trying to drown them out. “Men, you’re bein’ made
The Diamond Bikini— 183
suckers of. You been gypped. Choo-Choo Caroline
ain’t down in that bottom. You ought to know that by
now.”
“Throw him out,” somebody yelled. “We want
girls.”
“Shut up!” somebody else shouted. “Let him talk.”
“Yeah, he may be right.”
“How about that?”
The sheriff went on, “There’s been eight thousand
of you, or maybe more, tramplin’ over that bottom for
ten hours. There ain’t a square yard of it that ain’t
been walked on. If she’s down there, how come you
haven’t found her?”
“I think he’s got something there,” one of the men
called out.
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