The diamond bikini - By Charles Williams Page 0,78
on his scaffold. It was new boards he was using, too, so I guessed he was still tearing down the hamburger stand.
He saw us coming and sat down on the scaffold and pointed the hammer at us. “No sir,” he says. “Not a one of you! I been tryin’ to make you listen for years, but you wouldn’t. And now that it’s here, you want to change your tune, well—”
The lantern light was glinting on his bald head. He started to laugh, waving the hammer around to point at all the cars.
“You see ‘em? They come from miles. Thousands of ‘em. Look at ‘em. You know why? Because the rain’s started, that’s why. All over the world it’s rainin’ like pourin’ water out of a boot, an’ the water’s risin’, so they want to get aboard. Well, they’ll all drowned every goddam one of ‘em, because they wouldn’t listen to me. Ain’t no use you askin’. You’re wastin’ your time. And mine too. I got to have this thing finished by daylight. You can all go to hell.”
He turned around and started hammering again.
The sheriff just sighed and shook his head, and started shooting his flashlight beam in through the holes in the ark’s side. He and the deputies went over it from top to bottom.
She wasn’t in it. I couldn’t see any reason why he thought she would be, but a lot of it I didn’t understand by now anyway.
We walked back up by the house.
Pop and Uncle Sagamore sat down on the porch. The sheriff and his deputies just stood there. The smell from the tubs was bad, but everybody was too tired and had too much on his mind to notice it any more.
“Shurf,” Uncle Sagamore says, real sad, “this kind of mistrust hurts my feelin’s, but I ain’t one to hold a grudge.”
The sheriff turned to look at him. He was too beat to get mad any more. He turned to Booger.
“Boys,” he says, “we’re whipped. There’s only one other slim chance. She might be in one of them cars out—”
“Oh, no,” Booger says.
“Oh, no,” Otis says.
The other deputy didn’t say anything. He didn’t seem to be much of a talker.
The sheriff sighed. “I know. There’s at least three thousand of ‘em. It’ll take till daylight, and every one of us is dead on his feet. But it’s all we got left. And if we don’t break this thing before sunrise, hell is going to look like a rest home. We’ll have the National Guard in here, or we’ll have them women and be wishin’ we did have the National Guard—or the Marines.”
Booger shuddered. Otis shuddered. The other deputy started to, but then decided it would take too much effort. He just rolled a cigarette.
“All right,” they says. They turned on their flashlights and started down towards the lower end of the cornfield. I walked over to where I could see them. It looked like a waste of time to me. If she was in one of those cars she’d have been able to find her way back by herself. The lights was like fireflies way down there as they walked along real slow, shining them in the cars and looking in, one by one. I thought of the acres and acres of cars all over the place and was sure glad I wasn’t a sheriff or a deputy.
Pop and Uncle Sagamore went up the hill towards the carnival; I just stayed there on the porch with Sig Freed. I didn’t even want a hamburger. I was awful tired, and I was scared, thinking about Miss Harrington—I mean Miss Caroline. After a while they came back, carrying some more money in a sack, and a lantern. Mrs. Home was with them. She looked tired too.
“God,” she says, “I never seen anything like it. It’s like Dago with the fleet in.”
They went inside the house. After a while I got up to get away from the smell of the tubs and walked down a little way towards Uncle Finley’s ark, to where there was a little open space between all the parked cars and I could look out over the lake. It was nice down there, with all the stars shining overhead and the loudspeaker music just far enough away to be pretty. I laid down, still worrying about why we couldn’t find her.
When I woke up a flashlight was shining in my face.
“Hey, Billy, you oughtn’t to be asleep on the ground like that,” the sheriff’s