The Diamond Bikini (15 page)

Murph shook his head kind of slow, and lettered the sign. “Hamburgers $1.00.” “Like I always say,” he says, “you’d never think it to look at you.”

We started on down to the house, with Uncle Sagamore carrying the flour sack. The shiny house trailer was parked off to the left. A big blonde woman with a lot of bracelets and a real red mouth was standing outside the door of it. She waved at Pop.

Pop says to Uncle Sagamore, “Come on over. I’d like to make you acquainted with Mrs. Home. She’s sort of travelin’ around the country with her nieces.”

We went over. “Hiya, boys,” Mrs. Home says. Her hair was real smooth and shiny and about the color of butter and it was in little waves like the grain in a piece of wood. “I reckon this is Sagamore, and this must be Billy, huh?”

“Well sir, I’m real proud to know you,” Uncle Sagamore says. “Sam told me about meetin’ up with you last night, an’ how you’d kind of worked out a dicker.”

“Dicker?” she says, and laughs. “I was grabbed and stabbed for a flat ten per cent of the gross. You boys are really operators. But I guess it’ll be worth it; I ain’t seen this many men in one place since me and the girls was up at the atom project. Come on in and meet ‘em. They’re negative types.” She laughed again.

Pop looked at me. “Billy, you better run on to the—”

Mrs. Home waved a hand and her bracelets clanked. “Oh, what the hell, let him come in. Nobody’s working yet. You want him to grow up to be a sissy?”

We went in. The living-room of the trailer had long sofas on each side, and there was white slats over the windows. There was a nice rug on the floor and all along the walls there was big pictures of girls without much clothes on. A radio was playing, and two girls was sitting on one of the sofas. One had red hair and the other kind of a silvery color, and they both was wearing romper suits like Miss Harrington’s, only maybe a little skimpier. They was real pretty. You could see Pop and Uncle Sagamore thought they was nice.

Mrs. Home introduced us all. “These is my nieces,” she says. “The platinum job is Baby Collins, and the redheaded number’s La Verne.”

“Hi, honey,” Baby Collins said to Pop. “You’re kind of cute in a gruesome sort of way. Wanna buy me a drink?”

“Relax, girls,” Mrs. Home says. “These types are the Noonan boys. The customers will begin to show up later. Where’s Francine?”

“In the sack,” La Verne says, and yawns. She picked up a magazine and started to look at the pictures. “Let me know if a live one shows up.”

“I was just listening to the radio,” Mrs. Horne says. “The news is full of it. They say it’s the biggest stampede since the Klondike gold rush.”

“Well sir, by golly,” Uncle Sagamore says. “That’s fine.”

“Oh, I knew it was a natural as soon as I saw those hand bills you was throwing around,” she says. “Which one of you boys wrote that?”

“I did,” Pop says.

“Well,” she says, “if you don’t get an Oscar for it you been gypped. What time you expect the first wave of shock troops will begin to drift back from the boondocks?”

“Likely in a couple of hours,” Uncle Sagamore said. “It’s kind of hot, tiresome work, lookin’ for somebody in a swamp. Especially if you got no way of knowin’ if she’s been found yet.”

“You got an information center set up?” she asked.

Pop nodded. “The carnival’s got a big public address system.”

“Well,” she says, “you boys don’t miss a bet. That’s all I got to say.”

We went down to the house, and Pop and Uncle Sagamore counted the money in the flour sack, and then Uncle Sagamore went off with it somewhere. The smell from the tubs was pretty bad, because there wasn’t any breeze to carry it away. It was after ten o’clock now and sunny and hot. The sheriff’s sound truck wasn’t making any noise, and then I remembered it hadn’t made any since I woke up. I wondered if the man was still asleep, but when I looked up that way he seemed to be working on the equipment, like there was something wrong with it. The whole place was real quiet except for Uncle Finley’s hammering away down at the ark, and the only thing that was changed was that it was just covered solid with acres and acres of cars. And then, of course, there was the carnival. But I hadn’t had time to look into that yet.

I just couldn’t figure out why they hadn’t found Miss Harrington. Pop said that judging from the amount of money they’d took in for parking, and figuring two men to a car and allowing for cars that was stopped back on the road, there must be between seven and eight thousand men looking for her right now. There wasn’t hardly any of them up around the house and cars, either. They was all still down there looking.

Then I remembered the sheriff had said he was going to be back around ten and that he wanted me to show him where we’d hid in the ferns. It was funny he hadn’t come, I thought. Everybody else in this end of the state must be down there trying to find her, and he hadn’t even come back. I called Sig Freed and we went down that way, skirting along the lower side of the lake. Once we got out in the timber it was just crawling with men. They was running ever which way and yelling to each other to ask if she’d been found yet. Some of them was sitting down on logs, like they was tired out already, and a few was drifting up towards the house.

It just didn’t seem to make any sense, I thought. If the whole bottom was as full of men as this hillside was, they would have found a lost marble by this time. It worried me, because the only way I could figure it was that something had happened to her. Otherwise she would have heard the racket and yelled at one of the men where she was, even if she couldn’t walk any more.

It must have been nearly noon when I got back to the house. There was quite a few of the searchers up there by that time. They was up the hill from the house, mostly, on account of the smell from the tubs. Uncle Sagamore and pop was walking around, talking to them. I asked him for a dollar to buy a hamburger.

“Murph will give you one,” he says. “Just go on up and ask him.”

I went up to the stand. There was a big crowd of men around it now. They was complaining about the prices, but they was buying hamburgers. Everybody was asking whether she had been found or not. Murph and the two other men was telling them no, and making hamburgers as fast as they could. I finally squeezed through to get to the counter. Murph saw me after a while and give me a hamburger and a bottle of coke. I went across the road to see how the carnival was coming along.

There was a lot of men there too. The place was beginning to swarm with the ones coming back from the bottom. I pushed through the crowd and I could see there was five tents altogether, but there still wasn’t any rides. No Ferris wheel or merry-go-round, or anything. There was this big tent in the middle, the one that had the sort of stage out in front and the sign that said, “Girls! Girls! Girls!” The others was a shooting gallery and a toss-the-hoop, and a couple of wheels of fortune.

I was just about to go look for Pop and see if he’d give me some money for the shooting gallery, when a man got up on the stage. There was a microphone on a stand in the middle of it, and he walked over to it and whistled. The big loudspeakers on both sides of the stage went,
Wheet! Wheet!
Then five girls come out of the doorway of the tent and up the steps of the stage. They lined up behind the man. They was real pretty, and didn’t have hardly anything on in the way of clothes.

“Ladies and Gentlemen,” the man with the microphone started to say, but there was so much racket he had to stop.

Everybody around me was yelling. Some of ‘em was shouting, “Hooray! Bring on the girls!” and “Shut up and let ‘em dance!” But some more was yelling, “Hey, what the hell is this? What about Choo-Choo?”

“The whole thing looks like a fake,” another man yelled.

“I bet she ain’t even been here,” somebody else says.

The uproar was getting real bad now. And then suddenly Pop was up on the stage beside the man with the microphone. He eased the man out of the way and started talking.

“Men,” he says, “I been asked to make an announcement. I’m Sam Noonan, an’ it was my little boy Billy that was with Miss Caroline when them gangsters attacked her. She saved his life, men.”

They kept yelling.

“The hell with that.”

“Where is she now? How come we can’t find her?”

“What kind of sellout is this, anyway?”

“It’s a racket.”

“Get outta the way, you jerk, so we can see the girls.”

“Shut up and let him talk. Maybe we’ll find something out.”

Pop held up his hands for them to be quiet. “Just listen for a minute and I can answer all your questions. You read in the papers and heard on the radio how they been looking for her in twenty-three states because she was a witness in a big murder in New Orleans, an’ how she was hiding out right here on this farm. Of course, we didn’t even know who she was until the day the gangsters got her an’ opened up on her an’ my son Billy.” The noise was dying down now.

Somebody yelled, “Let him talk.”

Pop kind of gulped, like he had a catch in his throat. “Well sir, men,” he went on. That there girl, Miss Choo-Choo Caroline, is lost right here on this farm somewhere—and men, she saved my son’s life. I want her found, so I can thank her.” He kind of broke down then, and had to wait a minute before he could go on.

“What she done, men, was the bravest thing I ever heard of in my life. But wait a minute, everybody. Wait a minute. I see my son down there in the crowd right now, and I’m goin’ to let him tell you in his own words. Billy, will you come up here? Make way there, men, and let him through.”

I gulped down the last of my hamburger and started towards the stage. Everybody moved aside to let me through. When I got to it, Pop leaned down and caught my hands to lift me up, and there I was right in front of everybody. He put an arm across my shoulders. The crowd let out a cheer.

“Now, son,” he says, pulling me over in front of the microphone and lowering it a little, “I want you to tell everybody out there what a heroic thing that girl done, savin’ your life, an’ how much you think of her.”

I started out. I told ‘em how we was swimming and how the water suddenly started getting chewed up all around us with that noise the guns was making on the other bank. And when I was telling how she caught me by the neck and pulled me under the water and towed us along till we was under the bushes, I looked around and doggone if Pop wasn’t crying. He was trying to hold back the tears, kind of gulping like he was swallowing something too big for his throat, and then at last he had to haul out his handkerchief and dab at his eyes. When I finished up everybody was cheering and waving their hats.

“We’ll find her, Billy,” they yelled.

Pop took hold of the microphone again, and had to clear his throat a couple of times before he could talk. “There you are, men,” he says. “That’s the kind of girl Miss Choo-Choo Caroline is. Besides bein’ one of the most beautiful women that ever lived, she’s one of the bravest. An’ now she’s been lost down there in that wild river bottom for over eighteen hours with hardly a stitch of clothes on, nor nothin’ but that little patch of diamond-covered ribbon half the size of your hand, with the mosquitoes bitin’ her all over that lovely body an’ brambles scratchin’ her on the legs, an’ nothin’ to keep the night chill off. We got to find her, men. We just got to find her.”

The crowd let out a big roar then. It was getting bigger all the time. Then I saw Uncle Sagamore coming up on the stage.

Pop went on. “An’ now here’s my brother Sagamore, that’s in charge of the search. He’s been up all night without a wink of sleep, goin’ back and forth across that bottom tryin’ to find her. And he ain’t goin’ to give up as long as there’s a breath left in his body. He knows the river bottom like you know the palm of your hand, and he’ll tell you anything you want to know about it.”

Everybody cheered Uncle Sagamore. He took hold of the microphone and shifted his tobacco over into the other cheek, and says, “Well sir, men, I ain’t no hand at makin’ speeches. You all know that. I’m just goin’ to tell you I appreciate you comin’ out to help an’ I know you’re going to be just like me. You’re goin’ to be right here, by hell, till that girl is found.

“Now, naturally, a man can’t look all the time. We wouldn’t expect him to. He’s got to have a little rest now an’ then, so there’s refreshment up here, and entertainment for when you get tired.”

There was a big commotion up the hill then, in that jam of cars just this side of the gate. And just as I looked, three big hound dogs came lunging through the last row of cars and into the open section of the road. They was yanking along some man that had hold of their leashes, and then they gave a big lunge and pulled him off his feet. He slid along on his stomach for maybe his own length before he could get up, and when he did and I got a look at his face, doggone if it wasn’t the sheriff. He was dusty and sweaty and limping a little, and his face was purple. It looked like he was cussing the dogs or something, but they was baying and the loudspeakers was going on with Uncle Sagamore’s speech, so you couldn’t be sure. Behind him was another man with three more of the big, long-eared dogs.

They come on down and hit the edge of the crowd and began pushing their way through, being more or less pulled along by the bloodhounds or whatever they was. Just as they got down in front of the stage, Uncle Sagamore looked out and saw them.

“Well sir, by golly,” he says into the microphone. “Here’s the shurf. He’s come to help us. It’s just like I was sayin’, men, he might be a little late gettin’ on the job, but I knowed he wouldn’t let us down.”

The sheriff got the dogs stopped. He looked up at us on the stage and at the five naked girls behind us, and he pointed at Uncle Sagamore with his mouth open and his face as purple as a ripe plum, but you couldn’t tell whether he was saying anything or not.

“I always said that shurf was a damn good man,” Uncle Sagamore went on, “an’ I tell you right now there wasn’t never the slightest doubt in my mind that he’d come here sooner or later an’ help us out in our hour of need. I got to admit, though, that it does seem to me like it was kind of cheap of the shurf’s office not to offer no more than a little old measly five-hundred-dollar reward for that girl. I’d be the last one in the world to find fault, but it does seem to me they could of made it at least a thousand.”

The crowd let out another big cheer.

Uncle Sagamore finished up. “Well, I ain’t goin’ to stand here an’ jaw at you fellers all day. You don’t want to look at no homely old bastard like me, with all them pretty girls up here to dance for you. So I thank you kindly.”

He stepped away from the microphone and the man came back. “All right, folks,” he says, “now we’ll give you a little sample of the stupendous show you’ll see inside the tent. So step right up and get your ticket. Only one dollar—”

Music blared out of the loudspeaker then and we all got down off the stage so the girls could dance. It was real pretty to watch. They kicked their legs up high and wiggled all over.

Men was pushing around the little stand to buy tickets. I followed Pop and Uncle Sagamore down towards the house. The Sheriff was shoving his way through the crowd with the dogs, and I could see he was trying to catch up with us. I caught Uncle Sagamore’s arm.

“I think the sheriff wants to see you,” I says.

He stopped. “Why, sure,” he says. We was under the big tree near Mrs. Home’s shiny trailer.

The sheriff come up. He handed the leashes of the three hounds to the other man to hold.

He waved his hand, sort of. “Sagamore Noonan—” he says. He rubbed both hands across his face and tried again. “Sagamore Noonan—” It seemed like that was as far as he could get. He was breathing real hard.

Uncle Sagamore leaned against the tree and shifted his tobacco over into his other cheek real thoughtful. “Why, yes, Shurf,” he says. “Did you want to talk to me?”

The sheriff says, “—ffffftt—sshhh—ffffttt—”

It reminded me of when he tried to open the jar of tannery juice and spilled it all over his clothes. It looked like the words was all jammed up inside him and he couldn’t get ‘em turned length-wise so they would come out. He reached in the pocket of his coat and brought out something. It was two things, really. One of em was a copy of the hand bill me and Pop had printed up, and the other was a folded newspaper. He held the newspaper out in front of Uncle Sagamore with one hand and started slapping the front of it with the other, still not saying words but just going on with that sort of wheezing. I stood on tiptoes and craned my neck a little so I could see the front of the paper. And doggone if it wasn’t a real big picture of Miss Harrington. I mean Miss Caroline. She didn’t have anything on but her diamonds, but this time there was three patches of them. She was posed in front of a great big fan or something that looked like it was made out of ostrich feathers. And it seemed like the whole first page of the paper was about her. The headline said:

I tried to read what it said, but the way the sheriff was waving it around and slapping it with his other hand I couldn’t get any more than snatches of it.
“...most fantastic manhunt in history... Wild confusion... Stampede fanned by rumors of reward... The already fabulous Choo-Choo Caroline, beautiful missing witness in gangland murder case...sweetheart of late gang leader...alleged to have fled almost nude into swamp...”