The diamond bikini - By Charles Williams Page 0,24

told the sheriff, because he didn’t even know we was coming until we’d got there.

Uncle Sagamore looked up the hill to where you could just see Dr Severance’s trailer in the edge of the trees. Pop remembered then that what with that excitable sheriff talking so much he’d forgot to tell Uncle Sagamore about it. So he told him.

“Well, is that a fact? A hundred and twenty a month,” Uncle Sagamore says, aiming some tobacco juice at a grasshopper about ten feet away on the sand. He missed him a couple inches. The grasshopper went away, buzzing. Got the anemia, has she?”

“That’s right,” Pop says. “She has to eat vegetables.”

“Well sir, that’s a shame,” Uncle Sagamore says. “A young girl, and all.”

“By the way, have we got any vegetables?” Pop asked.

“Hmmm,” Uncle Sagamore says. “I reckon there’s still some of Bessie’s turnips out there if the hawgs ain’t rooted ‘em all out.”

“Well, they ought to do fine,” Pop says. “Come to think of it, whoever seen a hawg with the anemia?”

We walked up the hill towards the trailer. It was getting along late in the afternoon now and the shadows of the trees was lengthening out and it was pretty out over the lake.

Dr Severance had uncoupled the trailer from the car and set up a striped canvas shade over the door like a front porch. There was a couple of canvas chairs and a little table under it, and a portable radio on the table was playing music. It was all real nice.

Just as we walked up Dr Severance came out the door. “Hello,” he says to Pop, and Pop introduced him to Uncle Sagamore. He still had on the double-breasted suit, but he’d took off his tie and had a glass in his hand with ice and some stuff in it.

“Would you men care for a drink?” he asked.

“Why if’n it wouldn’t put you out,” Uncle Sagamore says.

He went back inside and we all hunkered down in the shade. We could hear him in the trailer clinking glasses and ice. And just then Miss Harrington came out of the door.

“Well, ho-ly hell!” Uncle Sagamore says, just the way Pop had the other time.

She had changed clothes, but this little two-piece romper outfit was just like the other one except that instead of being white it was striped like candy. She had on gold-colored sandals with a strap that went between her toes, and her toenails was all painted gold. On her wrist was a big heavy bracelet, and one ankle had a thin gold chain around it. She rattled the ice in the glass she was carrying, and leaned against the door and looked at Uncle Sagamore.

“Does he hurt somewhere?” she asked Pop.

“Oh,” Pop says. “This here is my brother Sagamore.”

“Well, I might have guessed that,” she says. There is something about the way he looks, if you know what I mean.”

Uncle Sagamore didn’t say anything. He just went on staring.

She snapped her fingers at him. “Break it up, dad,” she says. She sauntered out the door and sat down in one of the canvas chairs and crossed her legs.

“God, this is really back in the jungle,” she said.

“Fine climate, though,” Pop says. “Best place in the world for anemia.”

“Well, that’s fine,” Miss Harrington said. She brushed a gnat off her leg, and looked at Uncle Sagamore again. “If you run across anything you’re not sure about, Zeb, don’t hesitate to ask me.”

“Well sir,” Uncle Sagamore says to Pop, “I reckon this is the first time I ever met up with the anemia. You don’t suppose Bessie’d be likely to catch it?”

“I reckon not,” Pop says. “She’s probably done past the age when she’s apt to come down with it.”

Just then Dr Severance came out with the two drinks. He gave them to Pop and Uncle Sagamore and sat down in the other chair.

“Well, here’s to Miss Harrington’s recovery,” he says, and they all raised their glasses and drank.

Uncle Sagamore looked in his glass, and then says to Pop, “He must of spilled some water in it,” He fished the ice out with his fingers and threw it away.

Dr Severance fiddled with the radio dial. “I keep trying to pick up a New Orleans station,” he says. “Miss Harrington gets home-sick, and it would make her feel better to hear a familiar voice. It’s hard on a young girl, being torn away from her family and the social whirl of a big city like that, because of an