“You’re damn right he has.”
The sheriff held up his hands again. “All right. Let
me talk. You ain’t heard the half of it yet. There ain’t
no reward offered for that girl, and never has been.
You’re a bunch of suckers.”
Then Pop was climbing up on the stand.
“He’d better look out,” Murph says, real soft.
Pop was holding up his hands, and talking, but you
couldn’t hear a word he was saying because the
sheriff was drowning him out with the loudspeakers.
Then a rock flew through the air, and it just missed
Pop’s head.
“We’ll see who’s a sucker!” a man yelled in the
crowd.
Another rock went sailing past Pop.
“Murder!” Murph whispered. “Me for the timber.”
He looked like he was ready to start running.
But just then there was a big commotion at the
back of the crowd, on the downhill side, towards the
house. A man was running this way, yelling at the top
of his voice and waving something over his head. He
broke into the crowd and started shoving his way
through like a crazy man. When he got to the front he
The Diamond Bikini— 184
jumped up on the stage, still waving this thing over
his head. Pop looked at it.
Then he jumped and grabbed it out of the man’s
hand and leaped for the microphone. The sheriff just
stared, with his mouth open.
“It’s the G-string!” Pop yelled into the microphone.
He held it up so everybody could see it. “The
diamond G-string Choo-Choo was wearin’!”
The crowd let out a roar.
Pop grabbed the man by the arm and dragged him
in front of the microphone. They jostled the poor
sheriff right out of the way.
“Where’d you find it?” Pop asked. “Tell us where
you found this thing! Did you see her? Where is she?”
The man shook his head. He was all out of breath.
Then I took a good look at him, and I saw it was
Harm, the one Uncle Sagamore had talked to a while
ago. He gasped for breath, and then he says, “Right—
down below the lake—about half a mile. It was
caught—on a bush.”
The crowd roared again.
Pop held up his hands. “There you are, men! She
ain’t down there, is she? That pore, lost, terrified
girl! And now she ain’t got a single stitch on!”
I looked down at Murph. He was leaning on the
counter with his face down on his arms. When he
straightened up he shook his head with a sort of
dazed look in his eyes.
“Kid,” he says, “when you grow up, just remember
it was Murph that told you first.”
“Told me what?” I asked.
“That he’s a genius. The only real, live genius I
ever saw.”
The crowd was beginning to drown Pop out now.
“We’ll find her,” they was yelling.
Pop held up his hand for silence. The other hand
was still waving the diamond thing, “...completely
naked,” he was saying, “...nothing at all to protect
her from the chill. And as for the reward—Listen,
The Diamond Bikini— 185
men! If the shurf’s office is going to try to weasel out
of it, we’ll pay the reward ourself! Me an’ Sagamore
will pay it. And not no measly five hundred dollars,
neither. One thousand dollars to the man who finds
that girl that saved my little boy’s life.”
The crowd let out another cheer. “Send that
useless shurf home! We’ll find that girl without him.”
Uncle Sagamore came up on the stage then. They
give him a cheer. “Men,” he says into the
microphone, “I’m real proud to know you’re with us
right to the end. And don’t feel too harsh against the
shurf because he don’t want to bother to look for her
an’ because he’s too cheap to pay the reward.
Remember, he’s got other duties, like foreclosin’
mortgages, and arrestin’ people for crimes like
shootin’ craps or takin’ a drink now and then, an’ he
can’t spend a lot of time lookin’ around in a river
bottom for a young girl just because she’s lost with
no clothes on an’ so terrified she’ll probably throw
herself right in the arms of the first man that finds
her. Politicians is got a lot of other important things
on their minds, and besides this girl can’t vote,
nohow. She’s too young.”
There was another big roar from the crowd.
Uncle Sagamore went on, “Now, the daylight’s afadin’
out fast, an’ there ain’t no point in anybody
goin’ back down there in the bottom now except the
one’s that’s got flashlights and lanterns, but you stick
around here until morning an’ we’ll find her.
Somebody’ll get that thousand dollars. You can get a
little sleep in your cars, an’ there’s refreshments an’
entertainment for all. I thank you kindly, men.”
I didn’t even see the sheriff on the stage now. He
had left.
Uncle Sagamore got down, and the poor tired girls
struggled back up on the stage once more. As the
music started blaring again I saw Pop and Uncle
Sagamore going down towards the house. I ran and
caught up with them just as they got in the front
yard.
The Diamond Bikini— 186
And then the sheriff and all three of the deputies
came charging down on us as fast as they could walk.
We sat down on the porch and they stopped in front
of us. I had seen the sheriff mad lots of times before,
but never like this. He pulled out his gun.
But he was only handing it to Booger. “Hold onto
it,” he says, with his voice so tight you could hardly
hear him. “Don’t let me have it. I don’t trust myself. I
ain’t never shot down an unarmed man in cold blood,
and I don’t want it on my soul.”
Uncle Sagamore shifted his tobacco over into the
other cheek and rubbed his bare feet together. He
reached down and popped the knuckles in his big
toe. “Why, shucks, Shurf,” he says. “Ain’t no call to
get all het up.”
“Billy,” the sheriff says to me painfully, ignoring
Uncle Sagamore, “you’re the only one I can get any
truth out of. Was she in that car when they left here
last night to scatter those hand bills?”
I didn’t know what he was driving at. “No,” I said.
“Of course not. How could she be? She was already
lost then.”
He shook his head. “All right,” he says to the
deputies. “They didn’t take her away, and she
couldn’t go anywhere afoot, so she’s still on this
place somewhere. Let’s go. And you too, Sagamore.
We’re going to search this place without no warrant.
You want to make trouble?”
“Why, of course not, Shurf,” Uncle Sagamore says.
“You know I’m always downright anxious to cooperate
with the law.”
He got up.
I went along too. They searched everything. They
went all through the house. They looked under the
beds and in the closets. They looked through the
barn and the corncrib and the hayloft up above it,
and in the truck shed and an old tool shed that was
down below the barn, and in Dr Severance’s trailer.
It was full dark by then and they was using
flashlights. At last there wasn’t anything left but the
The Diamond Bikini— 187
ark. We all went down there. Uncle Finley had a
lighted lantern hanging up on a plank and he was
nailing away to beat the band, up on his scaffold. It
was new boards he was using, too, so I guessed he
was still tearing down the hamburger stand.
He saw us coming and sat down on the scaffold and
pointed the hammer at us. “No sir,” he says. “Not a
one of you! I been tryin’ to make you listen for years,
but you wouldn’t. And now that it’s here, you want to
change your tune, well—”
The lantern light was glinting on his bald head. He
started to laugh, waving the hammer around to point
at all the cars.
“You see ‘em? They come from miles. Thousands of
‘em. Look at ‘em. You know why? Because the rain’s
started, that’s why. All over the world it’s rainin’ like
pourin’ water out of a boot, an’ the water’s risin’, so
they want to get aboard. Well, they’ll all drowned
every goddam one of ‘em, because they wouldn’t
listen to me. Ain’t no use you askin’. You’re wastin’
your time. And mine too. I got to have this thing
finished by daylight. You can all go to hell.”
He turned around and started hammering again.
The sheriff just sighed and shook his head, and
started shooting his flashlight beam in through the
holes in the ark’s side. He and the deputies went over
it from top to bottom.
She wasn’t in it. I couldn’t see any reason why he
thought she would be, but a lot of it I didn’t
understand by now anyway.
We walked back up by the house.
Pop and Uncle Sagamore sat down on the porch.
The sheriff and his deputies just stood there. The
smell from the tubs was bad, but everybody was too
tired and had too much on his mind to notice it any
more.
“Shurf,” Uncle Sagamore says, real sad, “this kind
of mistrust hurts my feelin’s, but I ain’t one to hold a
grudge.”
The Diamond Bikini— 188
The sheriff turned to look at him. He was too beat
to get mad any more. He turned to Booger.
“Boys,” he says, “we’re whipped. There’s only one
other slim chance. She might be in one of them cars
out—”
“Oh, no,” Booger says.
“Oh, no,” Otis says.
The other deputy didn’t say anything. He didn’t
seem to be much of a talker.
The sheriff sighed. “I know. There’s at least three
thousand of ‘em. It’ll take till daylight, and every one
of us is dead on his feet. But it’s all we got left. And if
we don’t break this thing before sunrise, hell is going
to look like a rest home. We’ll have the National
Guard in here, or we’ll have them women and be
wishin’ we did have the National Guard—or the
Marines.”
Booger shuddered. Otis shuddered. The other
deputy started to, but then decided it would take too
much effort. He just rolled a cigarette.
“All right,” they says. They turned on their
flashlights and started down towards the lower end
of the cornfield. I walked over to where I could see
them. It looked like a waste of time to me. If she was
in one of those cars she’d have been able to find her
way back by herself. The lights was like fireflies way
down there as they walked along real slow, shining
them in the cars and looking in, one by one. I thought
of the acres and acres of cars all over the place and
was sure glad I wasn’t a sheriff or a deputy.
Pop and Uncle Sagamore went up the hill towards
the carnival; I just stayed there on the porch with Sig
Freed. I didn’t even want a hamburger. I was awful
tired, and I was scared, thinking about Miss
Harrington—I mean Miss Caroline. After a while they
came back, carrying some more money in a sack, and
a lantern. Mrs. Home was with them. She looked
tired too.
“God,” she says, “I never seen anything like it. It’s
like Dago with the fleet in.”
The Diamond Bikini— 189
They went inside the house. After a while I got up
to get away from the smell of the tubs and walked
down a little way towards Uncle Finley’s ark, to
where there was a little open space between all the
parked cars and I could look out over the lake. It was
nice down there, with all the stars shining overhead
and the loudspeaker music just far enough away to
be pretty. I laid down, still worrying about why we
couldn’t find her.
When I woke up a flashlight was shining in my face.
“Hey, Billy, you oughtn’t to be asleep on the
ground like that,” the sheriff’s voice said.
I sat up and rubbed my eyes. Sig Freed was still
there beside me. “What time is it?” I asked.
“About two in the morning,” His voice sounded like
he was ready to go to sleep on his feet. “You better
go up and get in your bed.” He went on shining his
light in cars.
I walked up to the house. There was a lamp
burning in the front room, but Pop and Uncle
Sagamore wasn’t anywhere around. So I went up to
the stand to see if I could get a hamburger. The
generator was still running, so there was lights, but
the music had stopped and there wasn’t any sign of
the girls. The other tents was closed too. A few men
was sitting around, but it looked like most of the
crowd had decided to go to sleep till morning.
There was only one plank left of the hamburger
stand. Murph was sitting on top of the icebox
smoking a cigarette and watching Uncle Finley knock
that one loose with his hammer. He looked beat too.
Uncle Finley put the plank under his arm and went
down the hill in the dark.
Murph watched him go, and then sighed and shook
his head. “God, what a day.”
“Have you got a hamburger?” I asked.
“Just one,” he says. He got up and opened the
icebox and took it out. It was already cooked and in
the bun. “I been saving it for you.”
The Diamond Bikini— 190
“Thanks, Murph,” I says. I started eating it. “Have
you seen Pop and Uncle Sagamore?”
He shook his head. “Not since before midnight.”
That was funny, I thought. I wondered where they
could have gone. I went back down to the house, still
eating the hamburger, and looked again, but they
wasn’t there anywhere. I came back and sat down on
the porch. They had just disappeared, that funny way
they had of doing sometimes, in broad daylight.
While I was sitting there somebody else came down
through the yard and I could see it was a girl. It was
La Verne.
“Have you seen Mrs. Home?” she asked me. “Or
Baby Collins?”
I told her about Mrs. Home being with Pop and
Uncle Sagamore earlier in the night. “I can’t find
them either,” I said.
“That’s funny,” she says. “They’ve been gone for
hours.”
She went back to the trailer. I went off up the hill
to look some more. They just wasn’t anywhere. After
a couple of hours of poking around every place I
could think of, I began to get scared. Miss Caroline
was gone, and now Pop and Uncle Sagamore. I didn’t
have anybody.
I went down to the barn, and then back to the
house again, and then up the hill where the sheriff
was still looking in the last bunch of cars. He hadn’t
seen them either, not for hours.
There was a little red in the east now.
I heard a commotion up by the gate, and when I
went up there a bulldozer was pushing down small
trees on the other side of the road, and a couple of
wreckers was dragging cars around. They had the
road cleared now. But where was Pop and Uncle
Sagamore?
I started back down the hill, and just after I got
past where Murph was asleep on his icebox I
happened to look at the top of the house and saw
smoke coming out of the stovepipe. They’d come
The Diamond Bikini— 191
back and was frying the baloney for breakfast! I
started to run, and when I was going through the
yard I almost crashed into Uncle Finley, coming
round the corner of the house carrying a plank.
I ran on past him and into the house.
They wasn’t there. There was nobody in the
kitchen, and no baloney frying. The stove was cold. I
lifted one of the lids and felt the ashes.
They was cold too. Maybe I was going crazy. I
stuck my head out the back door and looked up.
There was the smoke all right, coming up out of the
stovepipe. It was just like it had been that first day
we got here—smoke coming out of cold ashes.
I was too tired and too worried about Pop and
Uncle Sagamore to puzzle over it. I went back out on
the front porch and sat down on the step. In a few
minutes Uncle Finley came up the hill and went
around back of the house. There came a sound like
nails being pulled, and then he hurried back through
the yard with another board, headed for the ark. He
sure figured the flood was going to hit here about
sunrise, I thought. It was an odd-looking board, and I
wondered where he was getting them now. It didn’t
seem to make much difference, though.
The sheriff came down the hill looking like an old,
old man. He sat down on the step and took off his hat
and just looked down at his feet. He was whipped.
“Pop and Uncle Sagamore have just disappeared,” I
told him.
He didn’t act like he even heard me.
“Well, this is the end of everything,” he says. “I’m
finished. When they have to send in help to handle
something I couldn’t take care of myself—” He
stopped and shook his head.
I could hear the wreckers moving the cars up by
the gate, and then I saw Booger and Otis and the
other deputy coming down the hill. It was full
daylight.
The sheriff got up kind of slow and hopeless and
walked around the side of the house, like he wanted
The Diamond Bikini— 192
to be alone and didn’t want his deputies to see him
beaten down like that. Booger and Otis came on
down through the yard and just collapsed on the
steps. Nobody said anything.
Then, all of a sudden, the sheriff came flying back
around in front of the house. I could hardly believe it
was the same man. He was just scooting over the
ground. Tears was running down his cheeks and he
was making a funny sound down in his throat.
Otis and Booger sprung up. “What is it?” they
asked.
“...wug—wug—wug—” the sheriff says. He plucked
at Booger’s and Otis’s sleeves and then backed away
from them a little, pointing towards the house with
the other arm.
His mouth worked, but nothing came out except
“...ffffttt—ssssshhhhhh—“ It looked like he was
laughing, or maybe strangling, and those great big
tears kept rolling down his cheeks.
He pulled at their sleeves again and ran a little way
ahead of them, like a dog trying to get someone to
follow him. He was gasping for breath and I knew he
was trying to say something, but the words just
wouldn’t come out.
Booger and Otis looked at each other. Then Otis
shook his head and looked down at the ground,
“Damn it,” he says, like he was about to cry hisself,
“what could you expect, with all he’s been through?”
The sheriff’s upper plate fell out and he stepped on
it. He put it back in upside down and tried to close
his mouth over it. He stepped up real close to Booger
and put his left hand on Booger’s shoulder, still
holding the right one out to point at the house. It
looked like he wanted to dance. Booger started to
take a few steps with him, probably figuring it would
be better not to get him angry.
“Gwufff,” the sheriff says. He broke away from
Booger and ran back around the side of the house.
“We better get them teeth away from him before he
bites hisself,” Otis says.
The Diamond Bikini— 193
Booger frowned. “No. I think he wants us to follow
him.”
Sure, that was it. That was what he’d wanted all
along, only he just couldn’t say anything. We ran
around the house past the tubs, and into the back
yard. And there he was.
He was on his knees in the dirt with his hands
clasped together down in front of him, looking at the
rear wall of the house, or what should have been the
rear wall. He was crying like a baby.
I looked. And I never seen anything like it in my
life.
The Diamond Bikini— 194
Eighteen
It was like a stage.
Uncle Finley had pulled about ten or twelve planks
off the back of the house, and had opened up one
whole side of a hidden room nobody had ever known
was there. It was about three feet wide and ran the
full length of that back bedroom, from the kitchen
wall to this end of the house. There was no doors in
it, and no windows, but there was a trap door. That
was closed.
And there was Pop. And Uncle Sagamore. And Mrs.
Home. And Baby Collins. And Choo-Choo Caroline.
They was all sound asleep, sitting on the floor with
their backs against the other wall, facing out this
way. There was a lantern, still burning, hanging from
a nail in the wall above their heads. It looked funny,
burning that way in broad daylight. Uncle Sagamore
was in the middle. Mrs. Home and Baby Collins had
their heads dropped on his shoulders. And Pop and
Miss Caroline was on the outside, their heads resting
on Mrs. Home’s and Baby Collins’s shoulders. Baby
Collins was wearing her romper suit, and Miss
Caroline had on one of Uncle Sagamore’s shirts and a
pair of his overalls with the legs rolled up. There was
three empty fruit jars on the floor in front of them.
The Diamond Bikini— 195
There was three tubs of something way over at the
left end, and at the right end of the little room there
was some funny kind of apparatus I’d never seen
before. It looked like a little boiler, and it had a
firebox under it with a little fire still burning in it. A
piece of copper pipe come out the top of it and then
bent over and went down, sort of coiled up, into a
steel barrel that was full of water. There was just a
short piece of it sticking out of the side of the water
barrel down near the bottom, bent over a little, like a
spigot. There was a thin sliver of wood stuck into the
spigot, and something was dripping off the end of it
into a fruit jar that was full and overflowing onto the
floor.
I stared at the stovepipe that came up from the
firebox under the boiler. It bent and went out over
the ceiling of the kitchen. So that was the reason for
the smoke coming out when there was no fire in the
cookstove. They both used the same stovepipe.
I looked around at Booger and Otis and the sheriff.
The sheriff was still down on his knees. He wiped the
tears out of his eyes with his sleeve, and started to
laugh. Then he was crying again. Booger and Otis
was just standing there, shaking hands. Booger went
over and stuck a finger into the jar of stuff under the
spigot and tasted it. He looked at the other two and
nodded, smiling from one ear to the other. Then he
came back and him and Otis shook hands some more.
Otis went over and got two of the six or eight jars
that was sitting on the floor near the one that was
overflowing. They had caps on them. He uncapped
them, one at a time, and tasted the stuff that was
inside. Then he nodded real solemn to Booger, and
they shook hands again. Then they put their hands on
each other’s shoulders and danced a jig. I never saw
such crazy people.
“Gwufff,” the sheriff said. He was pointing at the
tubs, and at the boiler, and at the stovepipe.
Booger and Otis reached down and took out his
upper plate and turned it around and popped it back
into his mouth. He didn’t even seem to notice. But
when he tried to talk now, words came out.
The Diamond Bikini— 196
“Boys,” he says. “Boys—” He broke down then, and
started the crying and laughing stuff again.
“Those stinking tanner tubs was to keep us from
smelling the mash,” Booger said. “And the smoke—
well, who pays any attention to smoke coming out of
a kitchen stovepipe? And that’s the reason he
brought Choo-Choo Caroline in here. He knew the
dawgs couldn’t get her scent over that tannery smell.
It was the only safe place to hide her until he’d
milked those searchers for all the money they had.
And look—” he pointed at the steel water barrel
—”you see he’s got gravity flow water coming in here
all the time, probably from a spring somewhere up in
the hill. And the outflow goes down into the lake.”
So that was the funny warm spot in the lake, I
thought. And of course it was there only when this
apparatus was working. I looked to see why I’d never
seen the pipes under the house when I was playing
around with Sig Freed, and darned if they didn’t go
down right through one of the blocks the foundation
timbers was sitting on. It was really clever.
“What is it?” I asked Booger.
“A still,” he says. “For making moonshine.”
The sheriff had stopped laughing and crying now,
and had got up and was just standing there kind of
quiet, like a man in church. “Boys,” he says, sort of
whispering, “I don’t think you’ve seen the real beauty
of this thing yet. Now, listen.
“What I want you to do is go out there and round
up that whole crowd. All eight thousand of ‘em. Use
the public address system, and don’t let anybody get
away. Make ‘em all come over here and see this.
They can come around that side of the house, pass
along here, and go back around the corner. Every
man in the county is out here, so besides the still and
the mash and the moonshine, we’re going to have
eight thousand eyewitnesses.”
Booger frowned. And then he says, “But, wait. You
can’t do that. You’ll have plenty of witnesses, but you
won’t never be able to have a jury, because they’ll be
disqualified.”
The Diamond Bikini— 197
The sheriff shook his head, real gentle. “Boys, I told
you you didn’t see the real beauty of it. Sure, all the
men are out here. But how about the women?”
Booger’s and Otis’s jaw fell open.
I thought the sheriff was going to break down and
cry again. He started to choke up, and tears was
running down his cheeks, but he was smiling. “You
see, boys? You see? There won’t be nobody eligible
for jury duty but them women. The ones that would
lynch him if they could get their hands on him right
now. The wives of the men he’s been selling rotgut to
and cleanin’ out in crap games for twenty years.”
Booger and Otis stared at him like Uncle Finley
seeing the Vision. “I never heard anything as
beautiful in my life,” Booger says, real soft.
The sheriff nodded. “All right, boys. Round ‘em up.
But do me a little favor, first. Give me ten minutes
here, completely alone. I’m getting along in years,
and I won’t never have another moment like this. I
just want to stand here and look at him settin’ there
asleep between his mash tubs and his still. It’ll be
something to take into my old age with me.”
They left.
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