Charles Williams The Diamond Bikini (1956) (pdf)

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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.
The Diamond Bikini 139
Fifteen
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 sheriffs 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
The Diamond Bikini 140
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
The Diamond Bikini 141
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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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