The diamond bikini - By Charles Williams Page 0,37
bring up the truck and haul the tubs back down in the woods; the leather had had enough sun for a few days. He said they might go in to town afterwards, so not to wait up.
I got scared lying on the front porch in the dark, thinking about the accident the rabbit hunters had, but I could hear Uncle Finley snoring away in the back bedroom so it wasn’t too lonesome.
* * *
When I woke up in the morning the sun was shining in my face and I could see it was going to be another fine day for fishing. Sig Freed was licking my face and I could hear Pop and Uncle Sagamore frying the baloney for breakfast back in the kitchen. I got up and raced Sig Freed down to the lake to wash up. Just as I was coming in the kitchen door I heard Uncle Sagamore say to Pop, “Reckon he must of found it, all right, and drove it clear out of the state. Heard him come in about four this morning.”
Then they seen me, and looked at each other. Uncle Sagamore started talking about the leather business.
“Sure can’t figure it out,” he says, throwing some more slices of baloney in the hot grease. “Couldn’t of followed them Gov’ment instructions no closer’n I did, and still she’s sure as hell turnin’ into soup. You reckon we just ain’t got the right kind of climate up here to make leather, Sam?”
“Well, it could be,” Pop says. “Or it might be the water. Ain’t nothing we can do, though, but just keep tryin’. Can’t give up.”
After breakfast I took Sig Freed and went up by the trailer. The doctor and Miss Harrington wasn’t up, so I went fishing. It was a nice day and I caught some more perch. Along in the afternoon I saw Miss Harrington and the doctor sitting in their chairs in front of the trailer, but when I went up there she said she didn’t want to go swimming today.
It was three days before she would go again. Then Pop give me a licking when he found out about it.
“I told you to stay away from Miss Harrington,” he says. “She’s not a well girl, and you might catch her anemia.”
It was another ten days before we got to go in again, and then I had to sneak off. And that was the day all hell busted loose.
But first there was this hullaballoo with the sheriff’s men that got everybody excited.
Nine
It started out like any other day. It was time to bring the leather out of the woods for a little more sun, so Pop and Uncle Sagamore took the truck and hauled the tubs up to the house just after breakfast. The stuff was all coming to pieces now and it smelled worse than ever. There wasn’t any breeze, either, to blow it away, so it just hung around the house something awful. It was bubbling a little, and had a thick scum, kind of brown and green, on it.
It made my eyes water, so I went out to watch Uncle Finley to get away from it. He had run clean out of boards, so he was busy pulling ‘em off one place and nailin’ ‘em on in another, just kind of patching, as Uncle Sagamore called it.
He kept muttering to hisself and wouldn’t talk, so after a while I went up towards the trailer to see what Miss Harrington was doing. She and the doctor was sitting in the canvas chairs out in front, listening to the little radio on the table. It was giving the morning news. He just grunted at me, but she went inside and got me a coke.
She was wearing a white romper suit this time, and she sure looked nice. “Do you want to go swimming this evening, Billy?” she asked me.
“I’d sure love to,” I says. “But Pop might give me another licking.”
Tell him to go fry an ice cube,” she says. “I’ll tell you what. You meet me over there about five o’clock, and we’ll go in anyway.”
Dr Severance gave her a dirty look and switched off the radio. “You stay around the trailer, like I told you. We’re not out of the woods yet.”
“Stop being such a square,” she says. “It’s been ten days.”
Just then I looked down the hill towards the house and saw Pop lying under the back end of the car like he was working on it. “I’ll see