The diamond bikini Read online

  Pop was looking down the hill. “Kinda leaky for a boat, ain’t she?” he asked. “You can see all the way through her in places.”

  “Oh, that’s on account of the privies,” Uncle Sagamore says. “He’s got seven of ‘em in there now, if I ain’t lost count. You see, every time Bessie leaves me, Finley rushes out there with his pinch bar and starts tarin’ the privy apart before she’s out of sight. He gets the planks all nailed into his boat, and about that time Bessie gets over her sull an’ comes home, and I got to build a new one.”

  “Bessie leaves you?” Pop asked. “Is she gone now?”

  “Oh, sure,” Uncle Sagamore says. “Been gone a week last Sunday. She’ll be back in about twelve days now. Last couple of years she’s been stayin’ away three weeks each time. Before that she always came home in ten days.”

  “How’s that?” Pop asked.

  Uncle Sagamore scratched his leg with his toenail again and started to pucker up his lips like he was going to sail out some more tobacco juice. Booger and Otis watched him and kind of pulled back on each side like sliding doors opening. He didn’t spit for a minute and they relaxed and straightened up a little, and then he spit and they had to jerk back real fast.

  “Well, it’s like this,” Uncle Sagamore says.

  “Every once in a while, maybe twice a year, Bessie gets all galled under the britchin’ about something and starts faunchin’ around here sayin’ she’s takened all she can take, she just ain’t goin’ to put up with me no longer, ain’t nobody could live with me. Usually over some triflin’ little thing that don’t amount to a hill of beans, like I won’t wash my feet or something, but she gets all swole up like a snakebit pup and says she’s leavin’ me for good this time. So she packs her suitcase and gets her egg money and walks down to Jimerson’s which is on the party line and calls Bud Watkins that runs the taxi in town, and Bud comes after her. She gets on the bus and goes down to Glencove to stay with her Cousin Viola, the one that married Vergil Talley.

  “Well, I don’t know if you recollect Cousin Viola, but you can’t take too much of her at one time. She’s kind of delicate and refined, only she’s got this rumblin’ in her stummick, an’ every time her stummick rumbles she pats herself on the mouth with three fingers an’ says, “Excuse me.” Well, something like this all day long is bad enough, but on top of that she’s got this damn gallstone.”

  “Gallstone?” Pop asked.

  “That’s right,” Uncle Sagamore says. “Six, eight years ago she had it takened out at the hospital, an’ this fool doctor didn’t have no better sense than to tell her it was the biggest one he ever seen, outside of one somebody takened out of a giraffe. Well, Viola was all set up about that, so she brought it home with her and put it in a little jar on the mantel an’ took to tellin’ people about it. One time, Vergil says, some people’s car got stuck in the mud in front of the house an’ they couldn’t get away, an’ Viola talked about that gallstone for thirteen hours and twenty minutes without stoppin’. Man finally give Vergil the keys to the car and said he’d be back for it in the summer when the roads dried out. People took to movin’ out of the community rather than havin’ to dodge her all the time, so when Bessie’d leave me an’ go down there Viola’d be all primed and loaded for her. If Bessie was real mad at me she could hold out for ten days.”

  Uncle Sagamore stopped talking and looked at Booger and Otis. They was shifting around on the step like they couldn’t get comfortable anywhere.

  “I ain’t borin’ you boys with all this, am I?” he asked.

  “Why, no,” Booger says. “—uh—that is—” He looked kind of funny. Pale, sort of, and sweating pretty heavy. His face was all slick and white. Otis was the same way. It didn’t seem to be the smell that was bothering them, though, because they wasn’t fanning with their hats any more. They just seemed to be kind of restless.

  “Sure wouldn’t want to get tiresome an’ bore you boys,” Uncle Sagamore says. “Especially after what you done, rushin’ down here to save us from that typhoid an’ all.”

  “But how does it happen Bessie stays away three weeks now?” Pop asked. “Is Viola beginning to run down, or something?”

  “Oh,” Uncle Sagamore says. He sailed out some more tobacco juice, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “No. It was like this. Couple of years ago, I reckon it was, Vergil made a pretty good cotton crop, an’ they could see there was goin’ to be money ahead even after they paid off the store. But before Vergil could get in to town to buy another secondhand Buick with it, Viola sneaked off to the hospital an’ had about four hundred dollars worth of new stuff takened out on the credit. Mostly female stuff I reckon; she’d never used it much because she ain’t stopped talkin’ long enough since they got married for Vergil to get her in the family way. I don’t know why it is, but no matter how hard up a man is he ain’t goin’ to do his best with a woman that’s talkin’ five Quarts to the gallon about her goddam gallstone.

  “But, anyhow, I reckon Cousin Viola really shot the wad. Four hundred dollars worth of stuff is a lot, especially since they already got you open an’ you’re gettin’ wholesale rates after they write off the first slice or two. So if Vergil never made another good crop, she was set for life. It wasn’t that she talked any less, but just that she had more to talk about now an’ could kind of spread out over more ground. That’s the reason Bessie’s been stayin’ three weeks lately, Viola don’t hardly have to start repeatin’ herself in less than that.”

  Uncle Sagamore stopped again. You could see now that there was really something bothering Booger and Otis. Their eyes was big and kind of staring, like they hurt somewhere, and their faces was white as chalk, with big drops of sweat oozing out on their foreheads.

  Uncle Sagamore looked round at Pop. “Well sir, by golly, I get to ramblin’ on like this, looks like I never know when to stop. I just remembered Billy asked me something while ago, an’ I never did take time to answer him. What was it, now?”

  Well, I couldn’t remember anything like that, but I was beginning to learn about Uncle Sagamore. He wasn’t talking to me. He’d asked Pop, so I stayed shut up. That was safest.

  “Hmmmmm,” Pop says. “He asked you what something was, as I recall.”

  Uncle Sagamore nodded. “Sure. I recollect now. He wanted to know what croton oil was. Why you suppose he’d ask a fool thing—”

  Booger and Otis stared at him with their eyes about to pop out.

  “Croton oil?” Booger says.

  “Croton oil?” Otis says, in just the same way.

  “Kids can ask some of the damnedest questions,” Uncle Sagamore went on. “Without no reason at all.”

  He pulled a big red handkerchief out of his overall pocket and started to mop the bald spot on his head. Some kind of black powder fell out of it. He looked at it, sort of puzzled.

  “Now, how in the hell did black pepper get in my pocket?” he asked, like he was talking to hisself. “Oh, I recollect now. I spilled some when I was gettin’ breakfast. Atchooooo!”

  Some of it got in my nose and I sneezed. Then Pop sneezed. And Uncle Sagamore sneezed again.

  But Otis and Booger didn’t sneeze. It was a little peculiar, the way they acted. Their eyes kept getting bigger and bigger, with that staring sort of horror in them, and they pressed fingers under their noses and breathed in real slow through their mouths. Then they both got full of air and it seemed like they couldn’t breathe out. They clamped hands over their faces and tried to let the air escape a little at a time, kind of whining down in their throats.

  One of ‘em would say, “A-ah-ah—” like he was about to sneeze, and he would clamp his mouth and nose shut with both hands and begin to turn purple in the face, with his eyes watering and sweat running down his forehead. It would pass, and he would let a little air out, and then the other one would start to go “A-ah-ah—” and he’d go through the same thing.

  Uncle Sagamore sneezed again. “Damn that pepper, anyhow,” he says, and wave
d his handkerchief at it. It didn’t do much good except to stir up what had already settled on the floor.

  Booger and Otis grabbed their faces harder.

  Uncle Sagamore shifted his tobacco into the other side of his face. “Now, where was I?” he says. “Oh, yes. About them privies. Well, Bessie raised hell with Finley the first few times for tearin’ it down each time before she’d hardly got out of sight, but it didn’t do no good except to get her scratched off the passenger list, like I said. Finley and the Vision kind of voted her out, you might say.

  “So now when she gets a bellyful of Cousin Viola and comes home, as soon as she gets off the bus in town she goes right over to the E.M Staggers Lumber Company and orders a bill of material for a new privy. They made up so many of ‘em now they don’t even have to figure it any more. Got a list all wrote out, right down to the last ten-penny nail, hangin’ on a hook over the manager’s desk. So they just load it on the truck an’ Bessie rides out with ‘em.”

  But I wasn’t listening to Uncle Sagamore now. I was watching Booger and Otis. They was still holding their faces like they was afraid they’d die of the pneumonia if they ever sneezed. All you could see was their eyes with that terrible staring in them. They looked at Uncle Sagamore and the end of the shotgun and then out towards the car like it was a million miles away. They couldn’t sit still at all. They’d weave back and forth and kind of shift around on the step; but it was funny, each time they shifted they went backward a little. They slid down to the next step, and then the bottom one. They stood up and started easing away like they had something on their minds and had lost interest in Uncle Sagamore’s story altogether.

  They started out slow but began gathering speed, and by the time they got to the car they was really travelling. I never did figure out how they got the doors open and shot inside that fast, but by the time they’d hit the seat the car jumped ahead, making a long, looping turn. With the tires screaming, and they was headed back up the road towards the gate.

  Uncle Sagamore looked at ‘em and sailed out some more tobacco juice. “Doggone,” he says. “I should of knowed I was borin’ them boys.”

  Just then the car hit one of those bumps and went up about three feet in the air. They must have put the brakes on while it was still off the ground, because when it hit it just slid kind of nose down, and turned crossways and stopped about half out of the road.

  The door flew open and Booger and Otis jumped out, one on each side, and started running towards the trees. They reminded me of horses coming out of a starting gate, the way they took off. Booger had to go round the car, so he was sort of left at the post, but as soon as he was clear and had racing room he went into a drive and started closing fast on Otis. Otis come on again, but Booger was laying up close to the pace now and he finally pulled into the lead by a good length and a half, and won going away. They shot into the trees.

  Uncle Sagamore scratched his leg with his big toe again. “Sure hope them boys ain’t comin’ down with that typhoid,” he says, and picked up the glass jar they had forgot to take along with them to have analyzed.

  He reached it back through the door and traded it for the other one. He handed this one to Pop. They both took a drink.

  Uncle Sagamore leaned the shotgun back against the wall and stretched. “You know,” he says, “that stuff might make a purty good remedy, at that. Even if it didn’t help a man out none with the gals, it’d sure take his mind off ‘em.”

  * * *

  Well, after Booger and Otis had come out of the trees and got back in their car and left, Uncle Sagamore backed his truck out of the shed by the barn. Him and Pop loaded the tannery tubs on it and took them off in the timber back of the cornfield.

  “Think they been in the sun long enough for now,” he says. “This leather-making is ticklish business. Got to let it age just right, part of the time up there in the sun, and then down here in the shade for a few days.”

  I wondered why they had to be clear up there beside the house just to be in the sun, but I didn’t say anything. This didn’t seem like much of a place for having your questions answered.

  Uncle Sagamore and Pop talked it over about us staying there for the summer and Uncle Sagamore said it would be fine, only we’d have to kind of provision ourselves. He said he’d been so taken up with his tannery work this spring he’d forgot to plant any garden, and the chickens always quit laying when he brought his tubs up to the house to age in the sun.

  “Oh, that’s all right,” Pop says. “We’ll run into town right now and lay in some supplies.”

  So we unhitched the trailer and left it there under the tree and started out in the car. When we passed Mr. Jimerson’s place he was lying on his back on the front porch. He waved a hand and grinned at us.

  “Guess they didn’t run over any of his hawgs this time,” Pop says.

  “Why do you suppose they’re always trying to save Uncle Sagamore from something?” I asked him.

  “Well, he’s a big taxpayer,” Pop says. “And I reckon they just like him.”

  It was about two more miles from there out to where the little road joined the highway. But just before we got there we came around a little curve and Pop slammed on the brakes and stopped. There was a car and a big, shiny, silver-and-blue house trailer pulled about halfway off the road.

  Pop looked at it. We could get by it all right, but it was a funny place to meet a big trailer like that because this road didn’t go anywhere except to some farms like Uncle Sagamore’s back towards the river bottom. And there was nobody in the car.

  “They must be lost,” Pop says.

  We got out and walked around it. The doors was closed and the curtains was pulled tight across the windows. We didn’t hear anybody. It was quiet and peaceful there in the pine trees, except once in a while we could hear a car go past on the highway just around the next bend.

  It was funny. The car and the trailer seemed to be all right, and they wasn’t stuck in the sand or anything. It just looked like somebody had pulled it in here and then gone off and left it. We couldn’t figure it out.

  Then we saw the man.

  He was down the road at the next bend, but he was off a little to one side, in the trees. His back was to us, but he was standing real still among the trunks, watching the highway.

  “Must be waiting for somebody,” Pop says.

  Just then the man turned his head and saw us standing beside the trailer. He whirled around and started running towards us along the road. In spite of how hot it was, he had on a double-breasted flannel suit and was wearing a Panama hat and tan-and-white shoes. He kept watching us while he ran.

  “What the hell are you looking for?” he barked at Pop when he came up.

  Pop leaned against the side of our car. “Why, we was just passin’ and thought maybe you was in trouble, or something,” he says.

  The man looked us over. Pop was dressed the way he always was around the tracks, in levis and old scuffed-up cowboy boots and a straw sombrero. It gives the clients, as Pop calls ‘em, confidence to know the man they’re dealing with is connected with a big gamble. In fact, that’s the way he got his business name. Stablehand Noonan, he prints on top of the sheets. Anyway, when the man sized us up a little it seemed to give him confidence too, because he kind of cooled off.

  “Oh,” he says. “No. No trouble. I just stopped to cool off the motor.”

  He lit a cigarette and kept on watching us like he was thinking of something. He was dark complected and had real cold blue eyes and a slim black moustache. His hair was black under the Panama hat. You could see he was hot inside that double-breasted flannel coat, and it looked funny out here among the pine trees. He carried his left arm a little awkward, out from his body somewhat, and when he raised his hands to light the cigarette the coat opened a crack at the top and I saw a narrow leather strap running across his chest. I figured he was wearing some kind of a brace. Maybe he’d had the polio.

  “You live around here?” he asked
Pop.

  Pop nodded. “Back up the road a piece. Me and my brother own a big cotton plantation. You figure on visitin’ back in that direction? Kinfolks, I mean?”

  The man’s eyes got narrow, like he was thinking. “Not exactly,” he says. “To tell you the truth, I was looking for a spot to camp for a few months. Some place where it was quiet and kinda off the beaten track, and a man wouldn’t be bothered too much by the tourists.”

  I could see Pop beginning to think too. “Kind of a out-of-the-way place, you mean? Where you could sort of get away from the highway noise, an’ just lay around, and maybe fish, without nobody to bother you?”

  “That’s it,” the man says. “You know of a spot like that around here?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” Pop says. “My brother Sagamore and me might be able to rent you a little campground. We got a lake there, and lots of trees, but the place is kind of hard to get to and nobody ever goes in there.”

  The man’s face lit up. “That sound fine,” he says.

  “No traffic at all,” Pop says. “It’s on a dead-end road. You alone?”

  Well, not exactly,” the man says. I noticed that all the time he was talking he kept looking around every few seconds to watch that bend of the road. “I’ve got my niece with me.”

  “Niece?” Pop asked.

  The man nodded. “Let’s get out of this hot sun.” He moved out of the road and we all went over and squatted down in the shade of the pine trees on the other side of the trailer. He faced so he could watch towards the highway.

  He took another drag on his cigarette and tossed it away, and nodded towards the trailer. “Maybe I better introduce myself,” he says. “I’m Dr Severance. I’m a specialist in nervous disorders and anemia. My niece, Miss Harrington, is in there. It’s on her account I’m looking for a secluded place to camp. She’s an invalid, and under my care. She needs a long rest, in quiet surroundings.”