The diamond bikini - By Charles Williams Page 0,81

and Miss Caroline was on the outside, their heads resting on Mrs. Home’s and Baby Collins’s shoulders. Baby Collins was wearing her romper suit, and Miss Caroline had on one of Uncle Sagamore’s shirts and a pair of his overalls with the legs rolled up. There was three empty fruit jars on the floor in front of them.

There was three tubs of something way over at the left end, and at the right end of the little room there was some funny kind of apparatus I’d never seen before. It looked like a little boiler, and it had a firebox under it with a little fire still burning in it. A piece of copper pipe come out the top of it and then bent over and went down, sort of coiled up, into a steel barrel that was full of water. There was just a short piece of it sticking out of the side of the water barrel down near the bottom, bent over a little, like a spigot. There was a thin sliver of wood stuck into the spigot, and something was dripping off the end of it into a fruit jar that was full and overflowing onto the floor.

I stared at the stovepipe that came up from the firebox under the boiler. It bent and went out over the ceiling of the kitchen. So that was the reason for the smoke coming out when there was no fire in the cookstove. They both used the same stovepipe.

I looked around at Booger and Otis and the sheriff. The sheriff was still down on his knees. He wiped the tears out of his eyes with his sleeve, and started to laugh. Then he was crying again. Booger and Otis was just standing there, shaking hands. Booger went over and stuck a finger into the jar of stuff under the spigot and tasted it. He looked at the other two and nodded, smiling from one ear to the other. Then he came back and him and Otis shook hands some more. Otis went over and got two of the six or eight jars that was sitting on the floor near the one that was overflowing. They had caps on them. He uncapped them, one at a time, and tasted the stuff that was inside. Then he nodded real solemn to Booger, and they shook hands again. Then they put their hands on each other’s shoulders and danced a jig. I never saw such crazy people.

“Gwufff,” the sheriff said. He was pointing at the tubs, and at the boiler, and at the stovepipe.

Booger and Otis reached down and took out his upper plate and turned it around and popped it back into his mouth. He didn’t even seem to notice. But when he tried to talk now, words came out.

“Boys,” he says. “Boys—” He broke down then, and started the crying and laughing stuff again.

“Those stinking tanner tubs was to keep us from smelling the mash,” Booger said. “And the smoke—well, who pays any attention to smoke coming out of a kitchen stovepipe? And that’s the reason he brought Choo-Choo Caroline in here. He knew the dawgs couldn’t get her scent over that tannery smell. It was the only safe place to hide her until he’d milked those searchers for all the money they had. And look—” he pointed at the steel water barrel—”you see he’s got gravity flow water coming in here all the time, probably from a spring somewhere up in the hill. And the outflow goes down into the lake.”

So that was the funny warm spot in the lake, I thought. And of course it was there only when this apparatus was working. I looked to see why I’d never seen the pipes under the house when I was playing around with Sig Freed, and darned if they didn’t go down right through one of the blocks the foundation timbers was sitting on. It was really clever.

“What is it?” I asked Booger.

“A still,” he says. “For making moonshine.”

The sheriff had stopped laughing and crying now, and had got up and was just standing there kind of quiet, like a man in church. “Boys,” he says, sort of whispering, “I don’t think you’ve seen the real beauty of this thing yet. Now, listen.

“What I want you to do is go out there and round up that whole crowd. All eight thousand of ‘em. Use the public address system, and don’t let anybody get away. Make ‘em all come over here