“Hmmm,” Pop says. “Seems like that ort to of mellered it some. You ain’t tried it since?”
Uncle Sagamore shook his head. “No. To tell the honest truth, I plum forgot about the daggone stuff till the boys dug it up just now—”
I looked at Booger and Otis then, and I could see they had finally made up their mind what they wanted to do about the canteen they were holding. They wanted to put it down.
They was bending their knees real slow, kind of sliding down the handle of the shovel and holding the canteen out and down so they could set it on the pile of loose dirt at the edge of the hole. You’d think it was full of gold or diamonds, the way they handled it.
But they run into trouble. The top end of the shovel handle slipped inside Booger’s jumper and started running up his right sleeve. They hung up and couldn’t go any further. They strained down with their arms and stared at the dirt like it was a jillion miles away, when actually it wasn’t any more than three inches at the most. So then in a minute they started sliding back up the handle again. But the end of it didn’t quite come out of Booger’s sleeve, so when they eased down again they wound up the same way. The whole thing looked silly to me, because anybody could see all they had to do was let go the canteen and drop it, but somehow they couldn’t figure that out. They rested a minute and went back up. They swayed one way, and then the other, with Booger kind of lifting his shoulder up and down, but he still couldn’t get the handle out of his sleeve. It was just like they was dancing together.
Uncle Sagamore got up. “Shucks, boys,” he says. “Let me give you a hand. Where’s that there rock you had? Likely if I hit her a couple good whacks on the cap—”
They’d almost reached the end of another down stroke, but when they saw him get up they just froze. Their eyes got bigger and bigger, like they was going to pop right out of their heads.
“Duh—duh—duh—” Booger says, kind of sucking in like you do when somebody splashes cold water on your back.
Uncle Sagamore reached out and took the canteen out of their hands, and started looking around for the rock. They just stood there staring at it like they couldn’t even believe they wasn’t holding it any more. It didn’t look like either one of them could move.
“Oh, here she is,” Uncle Sagamore says. He bent down and picked up the rock, where Booger had dropped it.
They moved then. They went about fifteen feet the first jump, and the shovel went flying when the handle slid out of Booger’s sleeve. They sailed into the car and it shot into reverse. It slammed back into the pile of fireplace wood by the oak tree and crumpled the right rear fender, and then it come forward in a big curve. In nothing flat it was up the hill by the wire gate, and out of sight in the trees.
Uncle Sagamore looked after them and shook his head. “Hmmm,” he says. He sat down on the pile of dirt with the canteen across his knees. Pop came over and watched him. He sort of flinched when Uncle Sagamore drew back the rock, and then grinned and shook his head.
Uncle Sagamore pounded on the cap two or three times and then twisted and it come right off. He took out his chew of tobacco, tilted the canteen back, and had a long drink. Then he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and passed the canteen to Pop.
“I kind of figgered they might be up there,” he says. “Election year, they take a real interest in whatever you’re doin’.”
“Sure looks that way,” Pop says. He took a drink. “By the way, I reckon this was the empty one?”
“Oh,” Uncle Sagamore says. He put the chew of tobacco back in and shifted it around in his cheek. “It was empty, all right. I found it down there by the slough a couple year ago. We had a real dry summer and the water got purty low, and doggone if here wasn’t that Redlands Loan Company safe stickin’ up out of it with the door blowed all to hell. Police’d been lookin’ for it for years. The slough filled up again when the fall rains started, so I reckon nobody else ever did see it.”
Pop nodded. “Well, they say it’s right touchy stuff.” Uncle Sagamore reached for the canteen. “Well, I sure wouldn’t want to fool with it, after seein’ the door of that safe. But don’t worry about it. I warshed the canteen out with branch water before I filled her.”
* THE DIAMOND BIKINI by Charles Williams, Gold Medal #S607, Sept. 1956
THREE
WELL, IT WASN’T MORE than about an hour till here come the Sheriff hisself. He was madder than a wet cat.
Pop and Uncle Sagamore had finished the stuff in the canteen and we was all lying on the front porch again when the car shot through the gate up there by the sand road and come leaping down the hill over the bumps. Somehow it stopped before it run into the oak tree, and the Sheriff bounced out. He was waving a newspaper in his hand.
He’s a fat man with a round face and a white mustache, and he’s got a bad set of false teeth that whistle when he’s excited, which seems to be most of the time. He come charging in through the front yard and pointed the newspaper at Uncle Sagamore.
“Ffffsss—” he says.
Uncle Sagamore seemed like he was real glad to see him. “Well sir, if’n it ain’t the Shurf,” he says. “Come on in and set.”
The Sheriff sputtered again, and then he stopped and got hold of hisself. “Sagamore Noonan, what’s this cock-and-bull story about a can of nitroglycerin?”
Uncle Sagamore stared at him. “A can of what?”
The Sheriff said four or five bad words all in a row. “That canteen them boys dug up out here—”
“Oh,” Uncle Sagamore says. He sailed out some tobacco juice. “You must mean my cordial. Didn’t they tell you about them fellers givin’ it to me?”
“They did,” the Sheriff said. “And I want to know what it was.”
“What it was?” Uncle Sagamore says. “Why, just like I told ’em. It was a cordial; one of them real fancy—”
“Where is it?” The Sheriff snapped at him. “What’d you do with it?”
“Why,” Uncle Sagamore says, “we drunk it.”
“You drunk it?”
Uncle Sagamore nodded. “We sure did. And you know somethin’, Shurf, that charcoal really done the trick. Filtered the fusel oil out of her slicker’n a whistle, and she tasted fine.”
He reached around behind him and got the canteen. “Sure wish we’d knowed you was comin’,” he said. “We’d of saved you a nip.”
The Sheriff took the empty canteen, sniffed it, and then cussed and threw it out in the yard. “All right,” he says, real cold. “The last time it was croton oil that was supposed to be whiskey, and this time it’s whiskey that’s supposed to be nitroglycerin. But I’m tellin’ you straight, Sagamore Noonan, you’re crowdin’ your luck. You try makin’ one drop of likker on this place and you’re goin’ back to the pen so fast it’ll singe your whiskers clear off.”
Uncle Sagamore looked like his feelings was hurt. “Likker? Why, Shurf, even if I’d do a low-down thing like that, I’d have better sense. It bein’ election year and all, a man was to light a cigar down there in that bottom timber, there’d be seven deppities yellin’ ‘Smoke!’ before he could put out the match.”
The Sheriff’s face got red. “Just you try something, and see what happens. Here! Take a look at this!”
He slammed the paper into Uncle Sagamore’s hand. While him and Pop was reading it, I leaned over their shoulders to see what all the fuss was about. It was the Jerome newspaper, the Blossom County Bee, and the part the Sheriff was pointing at was on the front page. There was a lot of long words I didn’t understand too well, but the headline said: A PUBLIC DISGRACE.
“Blossom County should hang its head in shame. Law enforcement is a mockery, and yet with only two days left in which to file for the Democratic Primary, the present Sheriff is unopposed for re-election. Have we run out of men? Or don’t we even want our laws enforced?
“Right now moonshine whiskey is being made in open defiance of the law within ten miles of this newspaper office. It always has been. Maybe it always
will be. During the twelve long years the present Sheriff has allegedly been trying to turn off this welling Niagara of Old Popskull, law enforcement has deteriorated from bumbling inefficiency to futility to the status of a comic opera routine. The corn continueth to give forth its juice, con games flourish, gangsters assassinate each other, and young ladies cavort among the pinoaks clad only in a few glass beads.
“We need a change in the Sheriff’s office, but how can we have one if nobody will even ask for the job? Stand up, somebody, and file. This paper will back you to the limit. But remember, time is running out. In two days it will be too late.”
Uncle Sagamore finished reading and handed the paper back to the Sheriff. “Shucks,” he says, “seems like you’re out politickin’ a mite early this year, Shurf, but there ain’t no cause to fret. You got our support. Me and Sam aim to vote for you early and late.”
The Sheriff got redder in the face. He slammed the paper on the ground and his false teeth started to whistle again.
Uncle Sagamore shifted his tobacco over in his other cheek and puckered up his mouth kind of thoughtful. “You know, Sam,” he says to Pop, “that there’s the cruel thing about politics. A man just ain’t got no security. He don’t never know when he may lose out in election and have to do somethin’ desperate, like goin’ to work for a livin’—”
The Sheriff went on swelling up. It looked like he was going to bust, but then he got his teeth to making words at last. “All right, you just go on bein’ smart, Noonan!” he yelled. “I’ve warned you.” He said four or five bad words, kicked at the newspaper, and stomped back to his car. It dusted up the hill and out of sight in the trees by the gate.
“You reckon anybody’ll run against him?” Pop asked.
“I don’t think it’s hardly likely, Sam,” Uncle Sagamore says. “Ain’t nobody else really wants the job, and as long as things stays quiet for the next few days he ort to be all right.”
But it seems like it didn’t work out that way. It was the very next day when this other thing happened, the one that really started all the election ruckus.
I was down by the lake around ten that morning trying to catch some crawfish, when Pop yelled and said he was going to town. We had to buy some more hog lard to fry the baloney in. We left our car, and all three of us went in Uncle Sagamore’s truck. Uncle Sagamore didn’t bother to change clothes, or put on his shoes, and Pop was dressed in the Levis and cowboy boots and straw sombrero that he always wore around the tracks when his business name was Stablehand Noonan.
By the sand road it’s about four miles over the hills and through the timber till you get out on the highway, and from there it’s five miles to town. Jerome’s kind of a pretty little place, sort of peaceful and quiet after you’ve been used to big cities like Hialeah and Belmont Park. Most of the stores are around the square, where the courthouse is, and there’s trees, and a couple of old cannons left over from some war or other.
Uncle Sagamore had to put some gas in the truck, so before we got in the middle of town he pulled into a filling station on the corner. There was another car parked in the driveway, a snazzy-looking convertible with the top down. There was a real pretty woman in it, a kind of young woman with long, shoulder-length hair the color of vanilla ice cream. She looked like she was waiting for the driver to come back from somewhere.
Two men came out of the little office to wait on us. One was little and dark, and the other was a big, chunky guy with curly red hair and a cocky grin on his face. His white cap was slanted way over on the side of his head. Uncle Sagamore got out and his bare feet went whusk, whusk, whusk, on the concrete driveway.
“Reckon I’ll have three dollars worth of the cheap kind,” he says.
“Yes, sir,” the chesty one said, and then turned his head and winked at his partner. I guess he thought Uncle Sagamore looked kind of silly without any shoes on and one overall leg rolled up higher than the other.
Pop got out, and him and Uncle Sagamore went over by the water cooler. Around at the side of the truck the two men was putting the hose in and starting the pump, and I heard the chesty one say, “Get a load of that old peckerwood. Oh, brother.”
“Ain’t he something?” the other one says.
“Say, you know what? Here’s where I unload a couple of them cheap recaps we got stuck with.”
“Aw, hell, Curly—them things? You can’t hope to sell them.”
“You don’t think so? You just watch and see how a real promoter works.”
I got out and went over to the coke machine. Pop give me a dime and I dropped it in. And just then a man come out of the rest room, a big, easy-moving man with a smooth, brown-complected face and gray eyes that looked like he was thinking of something funny. It was Murph. He always looked that way, the same as he always wears a baseball cap. He runs a pool hall, and he’s a big friend of Uncle Sagamore’s. It was him that told me that Uncle Sagamore was the only real genius he’d ever met—whatever a genius is.
“Hi, men,” he says to Pop and Uncle Sagamore, and shook hands with them. “Come over to the car and meet a friend of mine.”
We walked over to the convertible and Murph says, “Honey, these are the Noonan boys, Sagamore and Sam. Boys, meet Miss Malone.”
She looked at them and grinned. “Goody, Princeton men,” she says. “Hello, boys.”
“Howdy,” Pop and Uncle Sagamore said.
I took a drink of my coke, and told Uncle Sagamore about the man wanting to sell him some tires.
“Well sir, is that a fact?” he says.
“I guess so,” I said. “He said he was going to unload ’em on you, so that must have been what he meant, wasn’t it?”
Him and Pop looked at each other. He pursed up his lips and studied about it. “Why, I’d reckon so. Wouldn’t you, Sam?”
They walked back to the truck and stood watching the two men. The dark one was cleaning the windshield. Curly finished putting in the gas, and then come whipping around the front of the truck. “Yes, sir,” he says to Uncle Sagamore. “Now, how about me checking your tires?”
“Why, if’n it wouldn’t put you out none,” Uncle Sagamore says.
Murph leaned against the side of the convertible and watched them real interested. He was smiling and shaking his head.
“Come on, let’s go,” Miss Malone said. “Aren’t we ready?”
“Relax,” he told her. “I want to see this.”
“What?” she asked.
“The kitten’s going to bite the tom-cat.”
Curly grabbed the air hose and squatted down by the front wheel. He started to take off the valve cap, and then he looked real sharp at the tire. He give a soft whistle and looked again, and then at the other front tire. His face got serious.
“Somethin’ seem to be the trouble?” Uncle Sagamore asked.
“Oh,” Curly says. “Uh—no. I reckon not. This tire just seemed a little baldheaded. Probably seen a lot of miles, ain’t she?”
“Hmmm,” Uncle Sagamore says. “I reckon she has, at that.”
“You know,” Curly said then, “we got a couple of high-quality recaps a feller ordered and never did pick up. Could sure make you a price on ’em.”
Uncle Sagamore shuffled his feet. “Didn’t reckon on no tahrs.”
“We’re practically givin’ ’em away,” Curly said. He went on looking at the one on the wheel, still shaking his head.
Uncle Sagamore scratched his leg with the big toe of his other foot. He took his leather purse out of his pocket, unsnapped the catch, and looked inside. He pulled out a big wad of bills and peered at them, and then shook his head, looking ashamed about it.
“Jest don’t see how I could do her,” he says. “To tell the truth, I wasn’t studyin’ about no tahrs till I gathered the crop.”
“Well, sure, I know exactly how you feel,” Curly says, real friendly. He stood up and grinned and clapped Uncle Sagamore on the back. “Matter of fact, there’s probably a lot of miles in ’em yet.”
>
“I’m proud to hear you say it,” Uncle Sagamore says. “I sure wouldn’t want to have no trouble with ’em.”
“Forget it,” Curly says. “Tires can fool you. Like I was saying to Jack the other day—” He stopped all of a sudden and his face got real sad. He turned away and started fiddling with the catch on the hood to make sure it was fastened.
“Uh—what was that?” Uncle Sagamore asked.
Curly kind of sighed, and shook his head. “Oh,” he says. “It wasn’t nothing, really. Just Jack, this old friend of mine. Jack McClanahan. I wouldn’t want to bother you with it.”
“Why,” Uncle Sagamore says, “if there’s ere thing we could do—”
“I appreciate that,” Curly said. “It’s sure nice of you. But—I mean—it ain’t as if anybody could do anything for him. Jack’s dead. He was killed just last week.”
“Well sir,” Uncle Sagamore says. “I’m sorry to hear that. Ain’t it a awful thing, Sam?”
Pop nodded his head. “It just saddens a man, somethin’ like that.”
“How did it happen?” Uncle Sagamore asked. “I mean, if you don’t mind talkin’ about it?”
“Oh, it’s all right,” Curly says. He was trying hard to be brave about it. “It was an accident. Talking about them recaps was what reminded me of it, I guess. You see, they was ordered for him. We got ’em in on a Thursday, and I called him—” He stopped and turned away again, like it was all just too much for him.
“Uh—what happened?” Uncle Sagamore asked.
“Oh,” Curly says. “Well like I said, I called him, and he said he’d come in the first thing Friday morning so we could take off the old tires and put on the new ones. And Thursday night he had a blowout. He was doing about sixty, I guess. One of those old tires just blew all to hell; the car turned over and he went out through the windshield.”
Uncle Sagamore give a mournful shake of the head. “Well sir, it just makes a man wonder.”
Curly looked down and went on fiddling with the catch on the hood. “Cut his juggler vein,” he says in a quiet voice. “He bled to death. When they found him he was lyin’ right beside the car without another scratch on him except that juggler vein, and he was as bleached out and white as a Sunday shirt.”