And they couldn’t get out of the road anywhere back the other way for at least a hundred yards. There was solid pine trees on both sides, plus Uncle Sagamore’s wire fence along this edge of it. I looked up that way, and it was just jammed with cars, bumper to bumper. They was going slow because each car had to give Uncle Sagamore a dollar, and that jammed them up behind. Some of them was honking their horns, and men was yelling, wanting to know what the trouble was.
Just as I walked up alongside Uncle Sagamore the car making the turn stopped, but the driver didn’t hold out a dollar. He was a big red-faced man with a white moustache and there was another man in the front seat with him.
The man driving jerked his head at the sign and then shouted at Uncle Sagamore. “You think I’m going to pay a dollar to park out here in the country? You’re nuts.”
The other man in the seat jabbed him with his elbow, and whispers, “Shhhh! Hush, you dam’ fool. That’s Sagamore Noonan.” He was a real skinny man with a big Adam’s apple that kept on going up and down when he talked.
“I don’t give a goddam who he is,” the red-faced one says. “I ain’t going to pay no dollar to park.”
Cars behind was beginning to blow their horns at the delay. Somebody stuck his head out back down the line. “Hey, what the hell’s the matter with you guys up there? You want ‘em to find her before we get there?”
“Shut up!” The red-faced one shouted. “This here bandit’s tryin’ to hold us up.”
Uncle Sagamore spit and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, real thoughtful. Then he reached down by the gate post for something. By golly, it was his shotgun. I hadn’t seen it before. He hefted it once and slid the safety catch back and forth, and then leaned on the car window with it across his arm. The end of the barrel was sticking right in the big man’s face. Only his face wasn’t red now. It was white, and getting whiter by the second. Big drops of sweat collected on his forehead.
Uncle Sagamore cocked his ear around a little by turning his head like a deaf person, and says, “How was that again? Them horns back there was makin’ so much noise I didn’t quite catch what you was sayin’.”
“Oh,” the big man says. “Oh, I was—unjust sayin’ I sure hope we find that there girl.” He took a dollar bill out of his pocket and reached it out real careful like it might blow up in his face.
Uncle Sagamore took it and waved for him to go on. Cars kept right on coming. I never saw money pouring into anything like the dollars pouring into his flour sack. It was just like a two-dollar window on Saturday. Sometimes a man would give him a five or a ten, and Uncle Sagamore would just reach down inside the sack and come out with a wad of ones as big as a hat to count out the change. Then he’d stuff the rest back in, along with the five or the ten. Silver coins went right in the sack along with the paper money.
One or two more started to give him an argument, so he just kept the shotgun in the crook of his arm. It saved picking it up each time, and it seemed like it also cut down on the arguments a lot too. There was no way the cars could back up, if they didn’t want to pay, because they was bumper to bumper way back as far as you could see, and there wasn’t room to turn around. So they just had to come on in, and when they did they had to pay. I could see Uncle Sagamore was going to make a fortune if this lasted very long. The sack was already beginning to bulge and rattle at the bottom.
In nearly all the cars somebody would stick his head out as they came through, and ask, “They found her yet?”
For a while Uncle Sagamore would say, “No. Not yet.” Then he took to just saying, “No.” And finally he quit even that and just shook his head.
A truck come through carrying ice and tubs and cases of pop and a big icebox and a stove. The man driving it was Murph. Uncle Sagamore waved him on through without the dollar, and says, “They’re buildin’ the stand down there now across from the carnival.”
Murph nodded. “Looks like a good crowd.”
Murph drove on in. I could see there wasn’t any chance of talking to Uncle Sagamore as long as he was busy raking in money like that so I ran down the hill alongside the truck. It pulled up on the left-hand side of the road where they had unloaded the lumber. This was near Dr Severance’s trailer, and there wasn’t many trees from here on down to the house, about a hundred yards. Right across the road they was putting up the carnival tents. They had one of those big ones partly up now, and there was a raised ticket stand and a little stage out in front that had a big sign over it that said “Girls! Girls! Girls!” It didn’t look like they had a Ferris wheel or even a merry-go-round, though.
Murph stopped the truck and got out. The whole place was in an uproar now and it sounded and looked like a big day at a race track. You’d think it was the Preakness, or something. Cars was whizzing on down the hill and past the house, out into the cornfield. Men was shouting and struggling with the tents over there, and now a bunch of girls was beginning to come out of one of the trailers, all dressed in romper suits. The two men that had unloaded the lumber was trying to nail together what looked like a hot-dog stand out of it.
They had the outline of it started, up about two planks high nailed to 2-by-4’s at the corners, but every time they’d pick up a board and start to nail it up, turning their back on the lumber pile, Uncle Finley would swoop down and grab a plank and light out for the ark. They’d have to drop theirs and chase him and rassle it away from him.
Murph lit a cigarette and looked around. “Good God,” he says. “What a boar’s nest. Be ten thousand people here by noon, the way they’re pouring in.”
They sure ought to find her,” I says.
“What?” he asked. “Oh. Sure. Hell, there won’t even be room for her down in that bottom in another two hours, unless she sits on somebody’s shoulder.”
The two men come up with the plank and put it back on the pile. Uncle Finley stood off a little ways and watched them.
“Shake it up, you guys,” Murph says. “We got to get in operation here so we can feed all them hungry heroes when they come up out of the bottom.”
“Well, how the hell can we get anything done,” one of them says, “with that old crack-pot stealing the planks faster than we can nail ‘em up? What the hell’s the matter with him, anyway?”
“I don’t know,” Murph says. “Mebbe he thinks he s a termite. He started lifting the tubs down and breaking up ice in them for the bottles of pop.
Then he looked across the road to where the girls that had come out of the trailer was standing around lighting cigarettes and waving at the men going by in cars. “Hmmmm,” he says. “Not a bad-looking bunch of pigs he rounded up. They ought to pull ‘em in. You know, kid, I’ve seem some operators in my day, but he’s the most.”
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“Who else? Your Uncle Sagamore. Don’t ever let that bare-footed act of his fool you, kid; he’s a genius. The only real, honest-to-God genius I ever saw. I’ve watched him operate a long time now, and he’s got the touch. There ain’t no use trying to develop it; you got to be born with it. Barnum couldn’t have handled this thing any better than Sagamore’s done it.”
“Well,” I says, “he was a little afraid the sheriff wasn’t using enough men to look for her.”
He looked at me and shook his head. “You can say that again,” he says. “By the way, you haven’t seen the sheriff lately, have you?”
“No,” I says. “He went back to town last night. But I reckon he’ll be along pretty soon.”
“Well, he may be having a little trouble getting in here. I expect there’s quite a bit of traf—Hey, you old bastard, come back here with that board.”
Murph dropped the chunk of ice and took off down the hill after Uncle Finley.
* * *
I looked around for Pop. I finally spotted him clown the hill between the house and the barn, and he was really busy. The cornfield was jam-packed with cars now and they was beginning to overflow up around the barn and the back of the house, so Po
p was trying to direct them where to park. Most of the drivers didn’t pay much attention, though. They’d just go on as far ahead as they could, until they was up against the car ahead, and then they’d stop and everybody would jump out and head for the timber. It was an awful snarl, and I wondered how they would ever get out when they wanted to go home.
Then they started parking downhill towards the lake and around Uncle Finley’s ark and filling that part up. Pop managed to keep the front yard clear and a little stretch each side of the road up the hill past where they was putting the hot-dog stand and the carnival. I backed up towards the gate, watching the rest of the space fill up. It was just like filling the neck of a bottle. He jammed ‘em in on both sides of the road clear out to the trees and then solid in the road itself until the last cars was just turning in at the gate and stopping. The last two that paid was only half-way through the gate from there back up the road as far as I could see, they was still bumper to bumper. The whole thing had stopped now, of course, so the horns started blowing. That went on for two or three minutes, and then the men started jumping out and coming ahead on foot. They came through the gate, some of them, and others just climbed through the fence and headed down through the trees towards the river bottom.
I came in as Pop went over by Uncle Sagamore and leaned on the fence post and took off his hat. He mopped his face and neck with his handkerchief. “Whew!” he says.
Uncle Sagamore put down the flour sack. It was bulging half-way to the top with money. “Feel kind of wore out myself,” he says. He took out his tobacco and rubbed it on his overall leg and bit off a chew. “But it looks like a man’s just got to keep hustlin’ night and day to keep ahead of the game, with the Gov’ment takin’ nearly everything he can make. Right sizeable crowd, ain’t it?”
“Must be around three thousand cars,” Pop says. “Well, there ain’t no use stayin’ around here no more. You couldn’t get another car in here if you greased it. Let’s go meet the folks an’ see if they’re gettin’ set up all right. The first wave of tired ones will be comin’ back out of the bottom pretty soon, an’ we got to be ready for ‘em.”
We walked down the hill, squeezing between cars until we got to the place where the hot-dog stand was. They had it just about finished now. Anyway, they had used up all the planks. There was spaces in it here and there, and I guess that was the ones Uncle Finley had beat them to. There was a counter along the front of it. Inside they had set up the stove and icebox, and the tubs was full of pop. Murph was starting to paint a sign.
“How much do you reckon we ought to charge for hamburgers?” he asked Uncle Sagamore.
Uncle Sagamore spit and rubbed his chin with his hand. “Well sir,” he says. That there’s a kind of hard question to answer offhand. Ordinarily I’d say a hamburger was worth about two bits. But on the other hand if you been walkin’ around in a river bottom for five or six hours an’ ain’t got no lunch with you, an’ then you find it’s a nine-mile walk to the nearest restaurant, I reckon you wouldn’t say a dollar was too much, would you?”
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.”
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 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 th
e 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.