The diamond bikini - By Charles Williams Page 0,15
says. “He asked you what something was, as I recall.”
Uncle Sagamore nodded. “Sure. I recollect now. He wanted to know what croton oil was. Why you suppose he’d ask a fool thing—”
Booger and Otis stared at him with their eyes about to pop out.
“Croton oil?” Booger says.
“Croton oil?” Otis says, in just the same way.
“Kids can ask some of the damnedest questions,” Uncle Sagamore went on. “Without no reason at all.”
He pulled a big red handkerchief out of his overall pocket and started to mop the bald spot on his head. Some kind of black powder fell out of it. He looked at it, sort of puzzled.
“Now, how in the hell did black pepper get in my pocket?” he asked, like he was talking to hisself. “Oh, I recollect now. I spilled some when I was gettin’ breakfast. Atchooooo!”
Some of it got in my nose and I sneezed. Then Pop sneezed. And Uncle Sagamore sneezed again.
But Otis and Booger didn’t sneeze. It was a little peculiar, the way they acted. Their eyes kept getting bigger and bigger, with that staring sort of horror in them, and they pressed fingers under their noses and breathed in real slow through their mouths. Then they both got full of air and it seemed like they couldn’t breathe out. They clamped hands over their faces and tried to let the air escape a little at a time, kind of whining down in their throats.
One of ‘em would say, “A-ah-ah—” like he was about to sneeze, and he would clamp his mouth and nose shut with both hands and begin to turn purple in the face, with his eyes watering and sweat running down his forehead. It would pass, and he would let a little air out, and then the other one would start to go “A-ah-ah—” and he’d go through the same thing.
Uncle Sagamore sneezed again. “Damn that pepper, anyhow,” he says, and waved his handkerchief at it. It didn’t do much good except to stir up what had already settled on the floor.
Booger and Otis grabbed their faces harder.
Uncle Sagamore shifted his tobacco into the other side of his face. “Now, where was I?” he says. “Oh, yes. About them privies. Well, Bessie raised hell with Finley the first few times for tearin’ it down each time before she’d hardly got out of sight, but it didn’t do no good except to get her scratched off the passenger list, like I said. Finley and the Vision kind of voted her out, you might say.
“So now when she gets a bellyful of Cousin Viola and comes home, as soon as she gets off the bus in town she goes right over to the E.M Staggers Lumber Company and orders a bill of material for a new privy. They made up so many of ‘em now they don’t even have to figure it any more. Got a list all wrote out, right down to the last ten-penny nail, hangin’ on a hook over the manager’s desk. So they just load it on the truck an’ Bessie rides out with ‘em.”
But I wasn’t listening to Uncle Sagamore now. I was watching Booger and Otis. They was still holding their faces like they was afraid they’d die of the pneumonia if they ever sneezed. All you could see was their eyes with that terrible staring in them. They looked at Uncle Sagamore and the end of the shotgun and then out towards the car like it was a million miles away. They couldn’t sit still at all. They’d weave back and forth and kind of shift around on the step; but it was funny, each time they shifted they went backward a little. They slid down to the next step, and then the bottom one. They stood up and started easing away like they had something on their minds and had lost interest in Uncle Sagamore’s story altogether.
They started out slow but began gathering speed, and by the time they got to the car they was really travelling. I never did figure out how they got the doors open and shot inside that fast, but by the time they’d hit the seat the car jumped ahead, making a long, looping turn. With the tires screaming, and they was headed back up the road towards the gate.
Uncle Sagamore looked at ‘em and sailed out some more tobacco juice. “Doggone,” he says. “I should of knowed I was borin’ them boys.”