and Miss Harrington lost like we was that there wouldn’t be at least one or two of ‘em out looking for us.
I walked up to the light. “Hi, Pop,” I says, “I found my way back.”
Everybody just dropped everything they was doing and swung around with their mouths open. “Good God!” Pop says. He run over and grabbed me by the shoulders. “Are you all right, Billy? Where the hell have you been?”
“I was lost,” I says. “The rabbit hunters tried to shoot us, but we got out of the lake and run off down in the bottom and we got separated and it got dark and I lost Miss Harrington and after a while I found out I was walking in a cornfield, and—”
“Well!” Everybody let out a big sigh, and sat down. They all mopped their faces and shook their heads kind of slow, and looked real happy for a minute. Then doggone if everybody didn’t start to cuss.
Pop and Uncle Sagamore cussed the rabbit hunters, and Pop cussed me for going swimming with Miss Harrington, and Booger and Otis and Pearl cussed Pop, and the sheriff just cussed everybody kind of impartial until he happened to remember Uncle Sagamore and settled down to just cussing him.
“You’d know it,” he says, red-faced and rolling his hat around in his hands. “If there was going to be a goddam war or a hurricane or a outbreak of the bubonic plague or a revolution or a rest home for city gangsters with machine-gun battles breaking out all over the place, you’d know it’d be on Sagamore Noonan’s farm. It’s the logical place.”
He stopped and mopped his face with the sleeve of his shirt. Then he waved an arm. “All right, men. Load the condemned boat back on the condemned truck and if you’ve got all the dead gangsters in the condemned ambulance we’ll get out of this condemned place. We don’t have to drag the condemned lake now, because I guess there ain’t nobody in it.”
He sighed and shook his head, and then went on, “I mean there ain’t nobody in it we’re looking for at the moment, I’m glad we don’t have to look. I’m gettin’ old and I ain’t got much appetite for the seamy side of life any more. There just ain’t no telling, if you dragged this here peaceful lake on this peaceful little farm of Sagamore Noonan’s, how many dead bodies you’ll find, and old gangsters and gambling equipment, and pieces of old stills, and dope, and machine-guns, and brass knucks.
It was like Uncle Sagamore said, I thought, the sheriff was a real excitable man. But it looked like he was forgetting that Miss Harrington was still lost.
“But, sheriff,” I says. “We got to look for Miss Harrington. She’s still down there somewhere.”
He stopped then and stared at me. He shook his head. “That’s right. I forgot about her. I don’t know why—I mean, with nothing going on to interrupt a man’s train of thought—but never mind. You say you got separated from her?”
“Yes, sir,” I says. “About two hours ago, I reckon. And she can’t walk very well, because she hasn’t got any shoes.”
He nodded. “I know. I know. We found all your clothes. But she’s got on a bathing suit, hasn’t she?”
“Yes, sir. The diamond one. But it ain’t very warm, and there’s not much of it to keep the mosquitoes off.”
He stared at me. “Diamond one?”
I told him about it.
He didn’t say anything for a moment. He just sighed and walked over and leaned his forehead on his arms against the side of the truck, shaking his head from side to side. In the light from the lanterns I couldn’t tell if he was crying, or what. The rest of us just looked at him. Pop lit a cigar and Uncle Sagamore bit off a chaw of tobacco and looked around for a place to spit.
“If I had to grow up and be a peace officer,” the sheriff says, still with his forehead on his arms, “why couldn’t I have been born in some other county? There is other counties in this state. There’s lots of ‘em. Maybe there’s even places where they ain’t never heard of Sagamore Noonan. We got a big-city gang war. We got three dead gangsters. And now we got a cooch dancer lost in twenty thousand acres of river bottom with nothing on but a G-string.”
Booger and Otis and Pearl looked at each other, kind of frowning.