The diamond bikini - By Charles Williams Page 0,79

voice said.

I sat up and rubbed my eyes. Sig Freed was still there beside me. “What time is it?” I asked.

“About two in the morning,” His voice sounded like he was ready to go to sleep on his feet. “You better go up and get in your bed.” He went on shining his light in cars.

I walked up to the house. There was a lamp burning in the front room, but Pop and Uncle Sagamore wasn’t anywhere around. So I went up to the stand to see if I could get a hamburger. The generator was still running, so there was lights, but the music had stopped and there wasn’t any sign of the girls. The other tents was closed too. A few men was sitting around, but it looked like most of the crowd had decided to go to sleep till morning.

There was only one plank left of the hamburger stand. Murph was sitting on top of the icebox smoking a cigarette and watching Uncle Finley knock that one loose with his hammer. He looked beat too. Uncle Finley put the plank under his arm and went down the hill in the dark.

Murph watched him go, and then sighed and shook his head. “God, what a day.”

“Have you got a hamburger?” I asked.

“Just one,” he says. He got up and opened the icebox and took it out. It was already cooked and in the bun. “I been saving it for you.”

“Thanks, Murph,” I says. I started eating it. “Have you seen Pop and Uncle Sagamore?”

He shook his head. “Not since before midnight.”

That was funny, I thought. I wondered where they could have gone. I went back down to the house, still eating the hamburger, and looked again, but they wasn’t there anywhere. I came back and sat down on the porch. They had just disappeared, that funny way they had of doing sometimes, in broad daylight. While I was sitting there somebody else came down through the yard and I could see it was a girl. It was La Verne.

“Have you seen Mrs. Home?” she asked me. “Or Baby Collins?”

I told her about Mrs. Home being with Pop and Uncle Sagamore earlier in the night. “I can’t find them either,” I said.

“That’s funny,” she says. “They’ve been gone for hours.”

She went back to the trailer. I went off up the hill to look some more. They just wasn’t anywhere. After a couple of hours of poking around every place I could think of, I began to get scared. Miss Caroline was gone, and now Pop and Uncle Sagamore. I didn’t have anybody.

I went down to the barn, and then back to the house again, and then up the hill where the sheriff was still looking in the last bunch of cars. He hadn’t seen them either, not for hours.

There was a little red in the east now.

I heard a commotion up by the gate, and when I went up there a bulldozer was pushing down small trees on the other side of the road, and a couple of wreckers was dragging cars around. They had the road cleared now. But where was Pop and Uncle Sagamore?

I started back down the hill, and just after I got past where Murph was asleep on his icebox I happened to look at the top of the house and saw smoke coming out of the stovepipe. They’d come back and was frying the baloney for breakfast! I started to run, and when I was going through the yard I almost crashed into Uncle Finley, coming round the corner of the house carrying a plank.

I ran on past him and into the house.

They wasn’t there. There was nobody in the kitchen, and no baloney frying. The stove was cold. I lifted one of the lids and felt the ashes.

They was cold too. Maybe I was going crazy. I stuck my head out the back door and looked up. There was the smoke all right, coming up out of the stovepipe. It was just like it had been that first day we got here—smoke coming out of cold ashes.

I was too tired and too worried about Pop and Uncle Sagamore to puzzle over it. I went back out on the front porch and sat down on the step. In a few minutes Uncle Finley came up the hill and went around back of the house. There came a sound like nails being pulled, and then he hurried back through the yard with another board, headed