The diamond bikini - By Charles Williams Page 0,48

of the wall I could hear something clicking, and in a minute I figured out what it was. It was pool balls hitting each other. We was in back of a poolroom.

We sat down, she went out, and when she came back she had a big bottle and three glasses, and a bottle of coke. “That’s for you, Billy,” she says, and handed me the coke. I couldn’t figure out how she knew my name.

She poured her and Pop and Uncle Sagamore a drink and then she sat down. She looked at Uncle Sagamore, and she smiled a little and shook her head. “You’d sure never think it to look at you,” she says.

Uncle Sagamore took out his chaw of tobacco and held it in his hand while he swallowed his drink. Then he put in back in. “Has Murph come in yet?”

“He just called,” she says. “Said he’d be here in a minute.” Then she laughed. “God, I’d like to seen it.”

Just then the door opened and a man come in. It was the big dark-faced man in the baseball cap that had kept saying they couldn’t do anything to Uncle Sagamore. He grinned at us, and poured hisself a drink.

“Howdy, Murph,” Uncle Sagamore says. “Did Rodney get in all right with the load?”

Murph nodded his head. “Slick as a whistle. He was pulled off the road just the other side of Jimerson’s, and as soon as he seen the two cars of you come by he went on it and loaded up. Follered you right into town. Let’s see—two hundred quarts at a dollar twenty-five—”

“Two hundred and fifty dollars,” Uncle Sagamore says. “Did you do much bettin’?”

“Six hundred and eighty, as near as I can figure it,” Murph says. “That was includin’ five hundred from Elmo Fenton, that I reckon was Booger and Otis’s money.” He stopped and laughed. Then he went on, “Let’s see, that’s three hundred and forty apiece. Two-fifty plus three-forty—”

“Five hundred and ninety dollars,” Uncle Sagamore says.

Murph shook his head kind of slow, like he couldn’t even believe it and started pulling money out of his pockets.

“You’d sure never think it,” he says, “to look at you.”

Eleven

It wasn’t till we’d got clear home that I remembered we hadn’t took the dirty clothes to the laundry. I told Pop about it when we got out of the car.

“By golly, you’re right,” he says. “We clean forgot. Well, we’ll take ‘em tomorrow or the next day. Ain’t no great hurry.”

“It didn’t look like it did any good at all to test those jars,” I says.

Uncle Sagamore shook his head. “It’s just gettin’ to where a man can’t depend on nothin’ any more, I reckon. They sure don’t make them jars like they used to.”

“Are you going to bottle up another batch of juice to send the Gov’ment?” I asked.

Uncle Sagamore sat down on the porch and took off his shoes to think about it. “Well sir, I don’t rightly know,” he says. “Mebbe, in a couple of days. It’s just kind of disheartenin’, having the shurf’s boys break ‘em up that way.”

“I think we ought to get at it right away,” I says. “We’re wasting a lot of time when we could be making some new leather.”

“This here boy’s a go-getter, Sam,” he says to Pop. “You can see he ain’t goin’ to let no grass grow under his feet.”

When it got along towards five o’clock they had disappeared somewhere, so I didn’t have any trouble getting away to go swimming. I didn’t go up by the trailer; I went straight up along the edge of the lake. Sig Freed was with me, and he kept scaring up bullfrogs. They’d go gurk! and make one big jump and land out in the water among the lilypads and go under. You could see Sig Freed thought they was crazy. He wouldn’t even put his feet in the water hisself. Like as not, though, he just didn’t know what it was. Being born and raised in a big fancy hotel there in Aqueduct, he’d probably never seen a lake like this before.

When we got up to the swimming place on the point, Miss Harrington wasn’t there yet. I took off my levis and shirt and sat down on the log in my boxer shorts to wait for her. The lake was real pretty, kind of dark in the shade and smooth as glass. I looked across it and wondered if I could make it all the way without