December 20, 2010

The Diamond Bikini by Charles Williams(page 3)

The man didn’t even look around.
“Hey, you, up there!” Pop yells.
The man just went on hammering. Pop and I just
looked at each other. We got out of the car, and Sig
Freed jumped out and started running around,
stopping now and then to look up at the man and
bark.
Pop reached in and honked the horn. The man
didn’t pay any mind. In a minute he stopped
The Diamond Bikini— 14
hammering and leaned back a little to look at the
board. He shook his head and started pulling it loose
with his claw hammer. He moved it over a couple of
inches and nailed it down again.
Pop went wonk! wonk! wonk! on the horn. The man
looked at his board again, but he didn’t like it there
either and started pulling it loose once more. The
board was getting chewed up by now.
“We ain’t getting anywhere here,” Pop says,
rubbing his hand across his face. “We want to talk to
him, I guess we got to go up there.”
Pop climbed up the ladder and got on the scaffold. I
went up behind him. We could see the man from the
side here, which was a little better than not seeing
anything but his back.
He was older than Pop, and he
didn’t have any shoes on. He was wearing overalls
and a white shirt with the sleeves cut off, and he had
on a high stiff collar and a tie. The tie stuck down
inside the bib of his overalls. There was a little ring
of white hair around his head just above his ears, and
when he turned towards us his eyes made you think
of a man yelling at cars in a traffic jam. Sort of wildlike.
Only he didn’t act like he saw us.
“It’s too late,” he says, kind of shouting and waving
the hammer in Pop’s face.
“Too late for what?” Pop asks. He backed up and
bumped into me.
“No use coming around now. I tried to tell you. All
of you. But nobody’d listen. Everybody chasing the
almighty dollar and drinking and lying and
fornicating back and forth, and now it’s too late.”
“Where’s Sagamore?” Pop says, yelling in his ear.
“Whole world’s busting with sin and corruption. It’s
a-coming. I tried to tell you. Armageddon’s acoming.”
“Pop,” I says, “what’s Armaggedon?”
“I don’t know,” Pop says. “But he sure as hell ain’t
going to hear it when it gets here, unless it runs over
him.”
The Diamond Bikini— 15
Then Pop leaned over and put his mouth right
against the man’s ear and yelled, “I’m looking for
Sagamore Noonan. I’m his brother Sam.”
“It’s too late,” the man says, waving the hammer in
Pop’s face again. “I ain’t going to take none of you
sinners. You can all just drowned.”
Pop sighed and looked around at me. “I think I
know who the old skinhead is now. It’s your Aunt
Bessie’s brother Finley. Used to be a sort of jackleg
preacher. Deaf as a post. He ain’t heard hisself in
twenty years.”
“What do you suppose he’s building?” I asked.
Pop shook his head. “No telling. From the looks of
it, he must have forgot, hisself.”
He climbed down the ladder and I jumped down
after him. Just then we got another whiff of the smell
coming from up at the house.
“You suppose something is dead up there?” I asked.
Pop looked up towards the house, then I looked.
We didn’t see any sign of anybody. “Maybe it’s one of
his mules,” he says.
The man up on the scaffold was still hammering
away and muttering to hisself when we got in the car
and drove back up the hill. Pop eased up real careful
and stopped the car and trailer under the big tree in
front of the house while we got ready to hold our
noses. But when we got out it seemed like there was
a little breath of air blowing up from the lake behind
us, and we didn’t smell anything. Not at first.
It was real quiet. It was so still you could hear your
breath going in and out. I liked it fine, because it was
so different from all the noise around big cities like
Aqueduct. I looked around. The front yard was bare
dirt, beat down flat and smooth, and there was a
walk marked off with square brown bottles set in the
ground. The front door in the middle of the porch
was open, but we didn’t see anybody inside. There
was still a little smoke coming out of the stovepipe,
but not as much as there had been at first.
“Hello!” Pop called out. “Hello, Sagamore!”
The Diamond Bikini— 16
Nobody answered.
“Why don’t we just go in?” I asked.
Pop shook his head. “No. We might surprise him.”
“Ain’t it all right to surprise people?”
“Maybe some people,” Pop says. “But not
Sagamore.”
“Well,” I says, “I don’t think there’s anybody here.”
Pop looked around, real puzzled. “Well, you’d think
Bessie would be, anyway—oh, sweet Jesus!” He
grabbed his nose and started fanning the air with his
hat.
I began to choke too. “Pop,” I says, “it’s coming
from over there. You see all them tubs, over there by
the well?”
He waved an arm. “See if you can get close enough
to find out what’s in ‘em.”
After you’d had a whiff or two you got a little used
to it and you could breathe without choking, so I
walked over towards the well. It was off beyond the
end of the porch. There was a clothes line strung up
between two posts, and the tubs was sitting in the
sun just this side of it. There was six of ‘em,
washtubs, strung out in a row along the side of the
house. When I got up close I had to hold my nose
again.
There was something in ‘em, all right. I couldn’t
make it out at first. It looked like sort of brownish
water with some scum and old thick bubbles floating
on top. Then I saw there was something underneath
the surface. I got a stick and poked around inside
until I could fish part of it up. It was a cowhide. The
hair was slipping off it. When I dropped it back, the
whole mess bubbled. It was awful.
I looked at the other washtubs and they was all the
same. I yelled and told Pop. He come over, still
waving his hat in front of his face. Sig Freed had run
under the house and was whimpering.
Pop took a look when I fished one up again, and
nodded his head. “Just tanning some cowhides,” he
says, like he wasn’t too surprised.
The Diamond Bikini— 17
“Is Uncle Sagamore in the tannery business?” I
asked.
Pop looked like he was thinking about something.
“What’s that? Oh. Not that I ever heard of. Maybe it’s
sort of a sideline.”
“But what’s he got ‘em up against the house for?
I’d think he’d put ‘em about two miles away.”
“Well, I don’t know,” Pop says. “Maybe he’s just
trying to aggravate Bessie, or something. Anyway, I
wouldn’t ask him about it, if I was you. Sagamore’s
sort of peculiar about people asking questions. So
when we find him, just kind of ignore the whole
thing.”
I started to ask him how you was going to ignore
anything as powerful as them tubs, but then I didn’t.
When it comes to answering a lot of questions, Pop
never figures to be laying up close to the pace
hisself. Maybe it runs in the family.
I went on around the house, looking for Uncle
Sagamore. The sun was straight overhead now, and it
was hot. I could hear some kind of bug yakking it up
in the trees. I was walking along the bare ground at
the back of the house when I thought I heard
somebody moving inside. I stopped and listened, but
didn’t hear it any more, only that bug buzzing away
down the hill.
The kitchen door was open. I walked up on the
step, which was a block cut out of a big log, and
looked inside. I didn’t see anybody, so I went on in.
Sig Freed jumped up on the block and come in after
me. There was a cook-stove in one corner, and a
table with oilcloth on it, and some chairs.
I noticed a pot sitting on the stove, and went over
and lifted the lid, thinking there might be something
to eat in it. There was. They was white, and looked
like boiled potatoes. I got a spoon off the table and
dug a piece out of one. It wasn’t a potato, though. It
tasted more like a rutabaga. And it was stone cold. It
wasn’t very good.
There was a door on the left side of the kitchen,
and one straight ahead, going into the front. I looked
The Diamond Bikini— 18
in the room on the left. There was a bed in it, but it
was kind of a storeroom.
Some sacks of sugar was sitting on the floor, and
there was a lot of old harness and clothes hanging
along the walls. I came out and started to go into the
room in front of the kitchen, when I stopped,
remembering something that was funny. It was that
white rutabaga. It was cold, but the pot was on a
stove with a fire in it.
I went back and looked in the pot again. Then I felt
the top of the stove. It was cold too. But I’d seen
smoke coming out of the pipe. I stepped back out in
the yard and looked up. By golly, there wasn’t any
smoke now. But there had been. I was sure of that.
I went back in the kitchen, still trying to figure it
out, and raised one of the stove lids and put my hand
down on the ashes in the firebox. They was as cold as
the rutabaga. There sure was some funny things
happened around Uncle Sagamore’s, I thought.
I could hear Pop yelling hello again, and then
calling me, so I went into the front room. It was the
living-room. There was a big mud fireplace on the
right, with a shotgun lying on some forked sticks up
above the mantel. Most of the chairs had bottoms
wove out of strips of cowhide with the hair still on.
Besides the door that went out on to the front porch
there was another one on the left that went into
another bedroom. I looked in there before I went out.
There was nobody in it. The whole house was empty.
When I stepped out on the porch the smell hit me
again. It seemed to be worse there than anywhere
else. I ran down the steps and out by the car. Pop
was there, still fanning the air with his hat and
cussing bitter and disgusted like.
“Why in hell didn’t I have sense enough to go to
Narragansett Park?” he says.
“Aw, Pop,” I says. “I like it here. Except for the
smell.”

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