The Diamond Bikini by Charles Williams(page 4)

“Yeah, but what are we going to do? Sagamore
ain’t here. He’s probably been drafted. Nobody
around here except that old squirrel down there
The Diamond Bikini— 19
hammering boards together. Nowhere else around
here we can go.”
Right behind us somebody said, “Howdy, Sam.”
We whirled around, and there was a man standing
in the front door, leaning against the jamb with a
shotgun hanging in the crook of his arm. I just stared
at him. I couldn’t figure out how he’d got there. The
house had been empty less than a minute ago. And
we hadn’t heard a sound.

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.

The Diamond Bikini by Charles Williams(page 2)

The uniformed man followed him, squeezing his
way through the cars and getting redder in the face
all the time. “Here, nice doggie,” he says. “Here, Sig
Freed. Nice Sig Freed. I’ll kick your teeth in, you
dumb sausage bastard.”
But Sig Freed turned and ran down the middle of
the street towards us and the next thing I knew he
was under our car. The traffic was beginning to move
a little now and the people behind us was blowing
their horns and calling Pop a knucklehead, and I was
afraid Pop would start up with him under there, so I
jumped out and crawled in after him. He grinned at
me, and yawned, and licked me on the face.

The Diamond Bikini by Charles Williams(page 1)

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,