When it got along towards five o’clock they had disappeared somewhere, so I didn’t have any trouble getting away to go swimming. I didn’t go up by the trailer; I went straight up along the edge of the lake. Sig Freed was with me, and he kept scaring up bullfrogs. They’d go gurk! and make one big jump and land out in the water among the lilypads and go under. You could see Sig Freed thought they was crazy. He wouldn’t even put his feet in the water hisself. Like as not, though, he just didn’t know what it was. Being born and raised in a big fancy hotel there in Aqueduct, he’d probably never seen a lake like this before.
When we got up to the swimming place on the point, Miss Harrington wasn’t there yet. I took off my levis and shirt and sat down on the log in my boxer shorts to wait for her. The lake was real pretty, kind of dark in the shade and smooth as glass. I looked across it and wondered if I could make it all the way without help. This was the day we was going to try it. I looked at it again, though, and decided I’d better wait for her. She’d warned me lots of times not to try swimming alone till at least the end of the summer.
It was nearly half an hour before she came along. Sig Freed barked, and then I heard her sandals in the trail. She smiled at me. She had on a blue romper suit this time, and silver sandals, and her toenails was painted red. I noticed her legs was getting tanned.
‘Hello, Miss Harrington,’ I says. ‘Are we going to swim all the way across today?’
‘Sure,’ she says. ‘You can make it easy.’
She took her suit out of her handbag and went off in the bushes to change. When she came back I saw it wasn’t just her legs that was tanned; she was the same all over, and the diamonds on her bathing suit just glittered against this kind of golden colour she was.
‘You must have been sunbathing in the raw,’ I says. ‘You’re sure a pretty colour all over.’
She grinned at me and tousled my hair with her hand. ‘Look, kid. You’re seven years old, remember? Let’s keep it that way.’
We waded out in the water till it was up to her waist and looked straight across. It was about fifty yards. The trees looked cool and dim along the other side because it was all in the shadow now that the sun was going down.
‘You’ve swum this far before,’ she says, ‘in shallow water along the shore, and deep water’s not any different at all as long as you don’t get scared. So just take it slow and easy, and remember I’ll be right alongside you all the way. I’m a good swimmer; I used to be in a water ballet in Florida when I was only sixteen.’
We started out, and it was as easy as pie. I dog-paddled along and she was doing a slow crawl stroke, as she called it, right beside me. When she would roll her face up out of the water on my side she’d grin at me, so I wasn’t scared at all. And I could see the bushes hanging over the water on the other side getting closer all the time.
We was almost there. We didn’t have more than a few feet to go and I was getting ready to reach up and grab one, when all of sudden there was an awful racket cut loose behind us on the other bank and the water began to get chopped up all around us by something. It was going gug ! gug! gug! gug! And every time there’d be a gug water would fly up in a little spout like you’d throwed a rock in it. It all happened without any warning at all, and by the time I’d even figured out that the noise I was hearing over there was guns shooting real fast Miss Harrington had let out a yell and grabbed me and just pulled me under.
I’d started to yell something myself, so my mouth was open, and it got full of water. I choked, and breathed in a little before I had sense enough not to, and got water in my nose and throat. I was scared, and I started to kick and struggle trying to get back to the top, but she held me down and I could feel her kicking along like she was still swimming. We must have turned, because we went right along and didn’t run into the bushes or the bank. I could still hear the things hitting up there, but down here under the water the sound was different. They went schluck! schluck! schluck! It was funny I even noticed it, because I was scared stiff by this time and beginning to go crazy and fight at Miss Harrington.
Just then I felt some brush, and our heads came out of the water. I took a breath, and started to choke. It seemed to me it was awful quiet, and it was a second or two before I realized what it was. The guns had stopped. I sputtered and fought for my breath, and started to look around. Overhanging limbs and leaves was all around us, there in the edge of the water. I couldn’t see out across the lake at all. We stood up and started to run up onto the bank. And just then the guns cut loose again. We could hear the bullets whamming into trees a few feet off to our left. Miss Harrington grabbed my arm and dragged me. We came shooting up onto dry ground and then stumbled and rolled across some dead leaves.
The guns cut loose again on the other side. Bullets whacked into the ground behind us and some of them glanced off trees and went screaming out ahead of us like they do in Western movies. We had our faces plastered against the ground. I was still choking and sputtering, trying to get my breath.
Then the guns stopped and I heard a couple of men yelling at each other on the other side. ‘I think they got across into them trees,’ one of ’em shouted. ‘Come on.’
I spit out some leaves and dirt that was in my mouth, and says to Miss Harrington, ‘Uncle Sagamore was right. Those rabbit hunters are sure careless where they shoot. They might of hit us.’
She clapped a hand over my mouth and pulled me up against her. She was listening for something. I couldn’t hear anything except the noise we was making trying to get our breath. Then in a minute, I did. It sounded like men running through the brush on the other side of the lake.
‘How far is it to the end of the lake?’ She whispered in my ear.
She’d forgot she still had her hand over my mouth, I reckon. I squirmed a little, and she saw what the trouble was, and took it away. ‘About a hundred yards,’ I says. ‘Just around the bend there.’
‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ she says, and jumps up. She grabbed me by the arm and we started running. She couldn’t run very fast with no shoes on because things hurt her feet, but I was all right. I hadn’t had shoes on since I’d been here. She put her feet down like she was running across egg shells, and in about a hundred yards or so we fell down again and rolled into a little gully that had ferns growing all along it.
We was both still wet and leaves and twigs was sticking to our bare skin. We was out of breath. I could hear my heart beating. She held on to me real tight, with my face against her bosom, and I could feel it going up and down when she breathed. There was ferns all around and over us.
‘Don’t make a sound,’ she says, whispering.
‘Why are we running?’ I asked.
‘Shhhh! Those men are looking for us. If they find me they’ll kill me.’
‘Kill you? You mean they ain’t just rabbit hunters, like the others?’
‘The others wasn’t rabbit hunters, either. Hush,’ she says.
It was all crazy and mixed up, I thought. Why would anybody want to hurt a nice woman like Miss Harrington? I was glad the other two had had that accident. It served ’em right. Then I began to be scared. They must be coming around the lake. Suppose they found us. I began to shake.
‘Just lie still,’ she whispered. ‘They won’t find us in these ferns.’
I laid still and listened. And in a minute I could hear them moving, running through the brush somewhere towards the head of the lake. And all of a sudden there was a shot. And then three of four in a row. And then another one by itself. There was no bullets come this way, though.
We laid real quiet in the ferns. Miss Harrington turned her face a little and looked at me. Her eyes was big and blue and worried.
‘What do you reckon they’re shooting at now?’ I whispered.
‘I’m not sure,’ she says.
The sun was gone now, and it was getting shadowy out in the timber, what little of it I could see through the ferns. I wished Pop and Uncle Sagamore was there. Then we heard
a sound. It was a man walking through dead leaves somewhere between us and the lake. We couldn’t see him, though. We tried to hold our breath and listen, waiting to see if he was coming closer. At first it sounded that way and I was scared stiff, but before long we could tell the sound was dying out. He was going away.
‘Maybe it was Pop,’ I says. ‘Looking for us. Or maybe Dr. Severance.’
‘Shhhh,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t think so. They would have tried to call us.’
‘What would they want to shoot you for?’ I asked.
‘Never mind,’ she says. She put her hand over my mouth again.
In a few minutes we heard the steps coming back again. They went by not twenty yards away on the other side of us, it sounded like. Then they died out again.
Miss Harrington sucked in a shaky breath. ‘The lousy bastards,’ she says, kind of whispering.
We didn’t hear anything for a long time then. It got dark. You couldn’t see anything. I couldn’t even see Miss Harrington’s bosom, when I was laying right against it.
‘I’m scared,’ I says. ‘I wish Pop was here.’
‘I’m scared too,’ she says. ‘But not quite that bad.’
‘They couldn’t see us now,’ I told her. ‘Mebbe we can sort of sneak around and get back to the house.’
‘Do you know which way it is?’ she asked.
‘Sure,’ I says. I pointed. ‘That way.’
We stood up and looked around, and I wasn’t so sure. It was all pitch-black, and one direction was just like another.
‘Least I think it’s that way,’ I says. ‘The lake should be right over there.’
We started out walking real slow and feeling our way, trying not to make any noise. But we kept bumping into trees and limbs. Miss Harrington hurt her feet, stepping on things.
‘Damn it,’ she says. ‘By God, this is one for the book. This is the most. Wandering around in a crummy jungle in a G-string, with no shoes.’
‘What’s a G-string?’ I asked.
‘Nothing,’ she says. ‘Or next to it. Ouch! Goddam the crummy limbs, anyway!’
We went on. We didn’t find the lake. Even if we got to it, I thought, the only way we’d know was when we walked off in it, it was so dark. Pretty soon I knew we was going the wrong way, or maybe just going around in a big circle.
And pretty soon me and Miss Harrington got separated in the dark.
‘Where are you?’ I called out.
‘Over here,’ she says.
I tried to tell by where her voice was coming from, and started that way. But then the next time she sounded further away in another direction.
‘Billy,’ she was saying. ‘Billy, where are you?’
Then in a few minutes I couldn’t hear her at all. ‘Miss Harrington,’ I yelled, and didn’t get any answer. I was lost. And she was lost too. There was no telling which way we had been going. I got real scared and started to cry, and then I tried to run. I slammed into a tree trunk and it knocked me down. For a few minutes I just laid there and bawled like a little kid.
I didn’t even have Sig Freed, and it reminded me that maybe he was lost too. There wasn’t even any telling how much timber country there was down here, and maybe they never would find me or Miss Harrington.
After a while I got up and walked some more. I didn’t have any idea where I was any more, or how long it had been since I’d got lost from Miss Harrington. It must have been two hours, anyway, I thought. I started to cry again, thinking about her, and just walked along with tears running down my face. Then after a while something struck me as peculiar. I wasn’t running into trees any more. The stuff I was in was in rows, and it was smaller. I felt it. It was cornstalks. I must be in Uncle Sagamore’s cornfield, and that was right behind the house. I stopped crying and started to run, right straight up one of the rows, feeling the long leaves brushing against me on both sides, and when I popped out of the end of it there was the house with a light burning in it.
And that wasn’t all. There was a light down at the edge of the lake by Uncle Finley’s ark, and a couple of cars and an ambulance and a truck, and there was six or seven men milling around. The light was coming from gasoline lanterns they was carrying. I cut down that way, still running, but I give out of breath before I got there and had to slow down to a walk.
As I came up I could see some of the men was ones I knew. There was the sheriff and Booger and Otis and Pearl. Booger and Pearl was helping another man load a stretcher into the ambulance. Uncle Sagamore and Otis and Pop was trying to unload a rowboat off the truck. It dropped, and everybody cussed. The sheriff was just standing around cussing to anybody that would listen.
I thought it was sure funny with me and Miss Harrington lost like we was that there wouldn’t be at least one or two of ’em out looking for us.
I walked up to the lights. ‘Hi, Pop,’ I says, ‘I found my way back.’
Everybody just dropped everything they was doing and swung around with their mouth open. ‘Good God!’ Pop says. He run over and grabbed me by the shoulders. ‘Are you all right, Billy? Where the hell have you been?’
‘I was lost,’ I says. ‘The rabbit hunters tried to shoot us, but we got out of the lake and run off down in the bottom and we got separated and it got dark and I lost Miss Harrington and after a while I found out I was walking in a cornfield, and—’
‘Well!’ Everybody let out a big sigh, and sat down. They all mopped their faces and shook their heads kind of slow, and looked real happy for a minute. Then doggone if everybody didn’t start to cuss.
Pop and Uncle Sagamore cussed the rabbit hunters, and Pop cussed me for going swimming with Miss Harrington, and Booger and Otis and Pearl cussed Pop, and the sheriff just cussed everybody kind of impartial until he happened to remember Uncle Sagamore and settled down to just cussing him.
‘You’d know it,’ he says, red-faced and rolling his hat around in his hands. ‘If there was going to be a goddam war or a hurricane or a outbreak of the bubonic plague or a revolution or a rest home for city gangsters with machine-gun battles breaking out all over the place, you’d know it’d be on Sagamore Noonan’s farm. It’s the logical place.’
He stopped and mopped his face with the sleeve of his shirt. Then he waved an arm. ‘All right, men. Load the condemned boat back on the condemned truck and if you’ve got all the dead gangsters in the condemned ambulance we’ll get out of this condemned place. We don’t have to drag the condemned lake now, because I guess there ain’t anybody in it.’
He sighed and shook his head, and then went on, ‘I mean there ain’t anybody in it we’re looking for at the moment, I’m glad we don’t have to look. I’m gettin’ old and I ain’t got much appetite for the seamy side of life any more. There just ain’t no telling, if you dragged this here peaceful little lake on this peaceful little farm of Sagamore Noonan’s, how many dead bodies you’d find, and old gangsters and gambling equipment, and pieces of old stills, and dope, and machine-guns, and brass knucks.’
It was like Uncle Sagamore said, I thought, the sheriff was a real excitable man. But it looked like he was forgetting that Miss Harrington was still lost.
‘But, sheriff,’ I says. ‘We got to look for Miss Harrington. She’s still down there somewhere.’
He stopped then and stared at me. He shook his head. ‘That’s right. I forgot about her. I don’t know why—I mean, with nothing going on to interrupt a man’s train of thought—but never mind. You say you got separated from her?’
‘Yes, sir,’ I says. ‘About two hours ago, I reckon. And she can’t walk very well, because she hasn’t got any shoes.’
He nodded. ‘I know. I know. We found all your clothes. But she’s got on a bathing suit, hasn’t she?’
‘Yes, sir. The diamond one. But it ain’t very warm, and there’s not much of it to keep the mosquitoes off.’
He stared at me. ‘Diamond one?’
I told him about it.
He didn’t say anything for a moment. He ju
st sighed and walked over and leaned his forehead on his arms against the side of the truck, shaking his head from side to side. In the light from the lanterns I couldn’t tell if he was crying, or what. The rest of us just looked at him. Pop lit a cigar and Uncle Sagamore bit off a chaw of tobacco and looked around for a place to spit.
‘If I had to grow up and be a peace officer,’ the sheriff says, still with his forehead on his arms, ‘why couldn’t I have been born in some other county? There is other counties in this state. There’s lots of ’em, Maybe there’s even places where they ain’t never heard of Sagamore Noonan. We got a big-city gang war. We got three dead gangsters. And now we got a cooch dancer lost in twenty thousand acres of river bottom with nothing on but a G-string.’
Booger and Otis and Pearl looked at each other, kind of frowning. Then the same idea seemed to hit all of ’em at once. They jumped up and started to say something, but just then the sheriff jumped too like something had bit him. He whirled around and looked at Pop and Uncle Sagamore.
‘Describe this girl again,’ he snaps. ‘What’d you say she looked like?’
‘Hmmmmm,’ Pop says. ‘A real doll. About five-six, I reckon. Hundred and twenty pounds, or thereabouts. Black hair, blue eyes. Mebbe twenty-one or twenty-two years old, and built sort of—’
The sheriff was real excited. ‘And did she have a vine tattooed on one of her—uh—’
Pop took the cigar out of his mouth and stared at him. ‘Now, how the hell would I know what she’s got tattooed on her?’
‘Hah!’ the sheriff snorts. Then he whirled around to me. ‘Billy, you was swimming with—’
‘Why, of course she has,’ I says. ‘Hasn’t everybody?’
The sheriff and his three men says all at the same time, ‘Choo-Choo Caroline!’
‘Right here in this county all the time,’ Otis says.
‘And now she’s lost in the river bottom,’ Booger says. ‘At night.’
Otis mopped his face with his handkerchief. ‘In just a G-string,’ he says.
Pop looked from one to the other. ‘Who,’ he asked, ‘is Choo-Choo Caroline?’