The diamond bikini - By Charles Williams Page 0,60
under the tree in front, and beyond it was the four cars the searchers had come in. But there wasn’t anybody around. I walked up to the sound truck, and the man in it was asleep. I wondered where Pop and Uncle Sagamore had gone. Then I decided maybe they’d gone down in the bottom to help look for Miss Harrington. Not Harrington, I thought. Caroline. I ought to get used to calling her by her right name. Then I wondered if I’d ever see her again. Maybe they never would find her. That scared me, and I thought, sure, what the heck, of course they’ll find her.
I just remembered we hadn’t had any supper last night, so after I went down to the lake to wash up, I started a fire in the stove to fry some baloney. While I was putting the lids back on it, Uncle Finley came out of his room, putting on his tie and tucking the end of it inside the bib of his overalls.
“Where’s everybody at?” he asked, giving me a hard stare like maybe I’d ate ‘em or something.
“I don’t know,” I says. I went on slicing baloney and putting it in the pan.
“Off a-lookin’ for that there cooch dancer,” he says. “Everybody up to devilment, all the time.” He stopped and looked at me. “I heard tell she ain’t got no clothes on.”
“Well, she ain’t got much,” I says. “The mosquitoes is probably chewed her something fierce.”
“Hmmmmph,” he says. “The way I heered it she ain’t got on a stitch. Shameless hussy, you ain’t seen her around, have you?”
“No sir,” I says. Uncle Finley always scared me a little. He looked like a man shouting at something nobody else could see.
“Well, she’s a-goin’ to drowned, as sure as hell,” he says.
“She won’t neither drowned,” I says. “She’s a good swimmer.”
“Hmmmmph,” he says. He sat down at the end of the table with his knife sticking up in one hand and the fork in the other, waiting for the baloney. When it was fried, I put it on the table and we both ate.
There was a sound then like a truck or something up on the hill by the wire gate. We went out through the front door to look up that way. Uncle Finley was in the lead, and when he got to the door leading out onto the porch, he stopped for a second and stared like he’d seen a miracle.
“Lumber!” he shouted.
He made one big leap and landed clear out in the yard, and started running, still shouting, “Lumber!” at every other jump. I looked up that way to see what it was had excited him that way. I couldn’t hardly believe my eyes.
There was a truck, all right, coming down from the direction of the gate, and I could see it was stacked with lumber, but it was the trucks behind it I was staring at. There was three of them right behind the one with the lumber, and while I was looking another one came into sight. They was yellow trucks, and they had big signs painted on them. They was piled high with what looked like canvas tents folded up.
“Come on,” I yelled to Sig Freed, and we started up there on the run.
We scooted past the sound truck, and then I saw Pop was up there. He was walking along beside the front one of the yellow trucks, and he motioned for them to pull off in an open place beside the ruts about a hundred yards away. He waved for the one with the lumber to pull off on the other side.
The one with the lumber stopped, but Uncle Finley was already there, and before the man could even get out he ran around back and pulled off a board about twenty feet long and started running down the hill towards the ark, dragging the board after him.
“Hey,” the men in the truck yelled, and took out after him. One of them got hold of the end of the board and started trying to take it away from him.
The other one yelled at Pop, “Who’s this crazy old bastard? Tell him to leave this lumber alone.”
Pop was telling the drivers of the yellow trucks where to park. He looked around and waved a hand. That’s just Finley. Let him have the plank and he won’t bother you no more. He’ll be all day nailing it up.”