The diamond bikini - By Charles Williams Page 0,58

“They’re goin’ to need all the help they can get, an’ that’s a fact,” he says. “By the way, here’s one of the hand bills.”

Uncle Sagamore struck a match and read it. “Hmmm,” he says. “Sure got a nice ring to it. Matter of fact, I reckon you better get everybody lined up an’ tell ‘em to be here by daylight, before you throw many of them things around. Might not even get in, if they don’t hurry.”

“Can I go with you, Pop?” I asked.

They both turned around like they’d forgot I was there. “Say,” Pop says, “you go on up there and unroll your bed and get some sleep.”

“But Pop—”

“You do like I tell you. And don’t you go off down in that bottom any more. I’ll bring you some jaw-breakers.”

“All right,” I says. I went back and sat down on the step with Sig Freed. Pop and Uncle Sagamore talked for about five minutes more and then Pop drove off. Uncle Sagamore came back down through the yard, leading the mule. He sat down on the step next to me to rest for a minute.

“You might as well go to bed,” he says. “Ain’t no use you stayin’ up.”

Just then Uncle Finley came tearing out through the door in his nightshirt. He was barefooted, and his bald head was shining in the lamplight coming through the window.

“What’s that there awful racket?” he yells. “How’s a man goin’ to get any sleep, with all that bellerin’ an’ screechin’?”

Uncle Sagamore spit real careful and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Why, that there’s just the shurf’s sound truck, Finley,” he says. “Ain’t nothin’ to get excited about. Seems like there’s a nakid cooch dancer wanderin’ around out there an’ he’s tryin’ to toll her in.”

“I knowed it,” Uncle Finley says. “Just what you’d expect around this here place. Nothin’ but sin. Everybody’s goin’ to drowned. Cooch dancers runnin’ in an’ out of the bushes a-shakin’ theirselves at people, an’ horns a-honkin’ all hours of the day an’ night so decent people can’t sleep. It’s a comin’. The day’s a comin’, an’ it ain’t going” to be long. You’re gonna see ‘em come pourin’ in here beggin’ to be let aboard, but I ain’t going to take ‘em. Not a one.”

“Well sir,” Uncle Sagamore says, “that sure is rough on the rest of us, but if that’s the way you and the vision got her figured, I reckon that’s the way it’s got to be. If it was me, though, doggone if I wouldn’t try to squeeze over and make room for that there cooch dancer, anyway. She wouldn’t take up much space, an’ she could sit in your lap.”

Uncle Finley says, “Hmmmmmph!” and went back in the house.

Uncle Sagamore got on his mule and went back around the house towards the bottom. The sound truck went on playing music, and every once in a while the man would talk into the microphone. “This way, Miss Caroline. Follow the sound.”

Then there would be another record.

I stretched out on my bedroll and tried to get some sleep, but the loudspeaker made so much noise I didn’t have any luck. I got to worrying about Miss Harrington, down there all alone and scared, with her feet sore and the mosquitoes biting her, and that didn’t help any either. But I’d promised Pop I wouldn’t go back and look for her any more tonight, so I didn’t. I would of gone anyway in spite of the promise, if I’d thought it would do any good but I didn’t see how I could find her if over twenty men couldn’t.

It was funny, I thought, that I kept calling her Miss Harrington even after the sheriff said her name was Choo-Choo Caroline. I wondered what a cooch dancer was, and what a material witness was, but I figured there wasn’t either one of ‘em very bad, even if the police had been looking for her. It must have been that Dr Severance had been hiding her from those gangsters so they couldn’t shoot her. I felt sorry about him.

I must have dozed off after a while, but when I woke up it was still dark. Sig Freed was lying beside me on the bedroll, and he was growling. Somebody was coming around the corner of the house. I looked at Pop’s bedroll to see if he had come back yet, but it was empty. The man walked on through the front yard and