‘I can sure try,’ the sheriff says. ‘They sure must be beginning to wonder theirselves why a whole army of men ain’t been able to find a girl in a place that size.’
‘But, look,’ Otis says, with a real nasty smile. ‘We couldn’t do that. Why, they might lynch him.’
‘Oh, of course not,’ the sheriff says. ‘Hell, how could they? There’s four law officers here to protect him, and only about eight thousand of them.’
17
UNCLE SAGAMORE PURSED UP HIS lips. ‘Why, Shurf,’ he says. ‘You wouldn’t do a thing like that.’
‘Wouldn’t I?’ the sheriff says. ‘But don’t you worry. It’s our duty as law officers to protect you. And likely there ain’t more’n a few hundred of ’em got guns in their cars.’
‘Hey, wait a minute.’ It was Otis. ‘I was just by the sound truck. It’s broke down.’
The sheriff nodded. ‘I know. While Rutherford was asleep last night a bunch of the wires inside his amplifier pulled themselves loose an’ run off. But I’ll commandeer the one up at the carnival. By God, we’ll break this thing up!’
He turned around and started up towards the crowd. The deputies followed him. Pop and Uncle Sagamore looked at each other. I began to get scared. A lot of these men had been acting like they was drinking, and there was no telling what would happen.
Uncle Sagamore spit out some tobacco juice and rubbed his chin. ‘Sure is a hard-workin’ man, that shurf. It’s a downright shame, though, he’s got such a habit of goin’ off half-cocked.’
He got up and sauntered along after them. Pop went with him.
There wasn’t anything else for me to do, so I followed them. But I didn’t like the looks of it.
When I got up there Uncle Sagamore was standing at the back of the crowd, but I didn’t see Pop anywhere. When I come up behind the swarm of men I couldn’t even see the stage, so I backed off across the road by the hamburger stand. That wasn’t much better. I was still too low.
‘What’s the matter, kid?’ Murph asked.
‘I was trying to see the stage,’ I says. ‘The sheriff is going to make a speech.’
‘Oh-oh,’ he says. ‘Well, here,’ He lifted me up on the counter and we watched together. Everybody else had left to join the crowd across the road.
‘I been afraid of this,’ Murph said. ‘There’s a lot of mutterin’ already.’
The girls had been dancing awful tired, as if they couldn’t hardly pick up their feet any more. Then the music stopped and they staggered down the steps and into the tent. The man started over to take hold of the microphone. And then the sheriff climbed up on the stage. The man started to wave him off, but the sheriff said something we couldn’t hear, and showed the man something he took out of his pocket. The man scratched his head and looked like he didn’t know what to do, but then he backed away and let the sheriff have the microphone.
Now that he was over in front of it you could hear him, because it was coming out of the loudspeakers. ‘Men,’ he says, ‘I got an announcement to make.’
Men in the crowd start to whistle and yell.
‘Get down, you old fossil!’
‘Who the hell wants to look at you?’
‘Bring back them luscious peaches.’
‘Throw the old bastard out! We want girls.’
The sheriff held up his hands and kept talking, trying to drown them out. ‘Men, you’re bein’ made suckers of. You been gypped. Choo-Choo Caroline ain’t down there in that bottom. You ought to know that by now.’
‘Throw him out,’ somebody yelled. ‘We want girls.’
‘Shut up!’ somebody else shouted. ‘Let him talk.’
‘Yeah. He may be right.’
‘How about that?’
The sheriff went on, ‘There’s been eight thousand of you, or maybe more, tramplin’ over that bottom for ten hours. There ain’t a square yard of it that ain’t been walked on. If she’s down there, how come you haven’t found her?’
‘I think he’s got something there,’ one of the men called out.
‘You’re damn right he has.’
The sheriff held up his hands again. ‘All right. Let me talk. You ain’t heard half of it yet. There ain’t no reward offered for that girl, and never has been. You’re a bunch of suckers.’
Then Pop was climbing up on the stand.
‘He’d better look out,’ Murph says, real soft.
Pop was holding up his hands, and talking, but you couldn’t hear a word he was saying because the sheriff was drowning him out with the loudspeakers. Then a rock flew through the air, and it just missed Pop’s head.
‘We’ll see who’s a sucker!’ a man yelled in the crowd.
Another rock went sailing past Pop.
‘Murder!’ Murph whispered. ‘Me for the timber.’ He looked like he was ready to start running.
But just then there was a big commotion at the back of the crowd, on the downhill side, towards the house. A man was running this way, yelling at the top of his voice and waving something over his head. He broke into the crowd and started shoving his way through like a crazy man. When he got to the front he jumped up on the stage, still waving this thing over his head. Pop looked at it.
Then he jumped and grabbed it out of the man’s hand and leaped for the microphone. The sheriff just stared, with his mouth open.
‘It’s the G-string!’ Pop yelled into the microphone. He held it up so everybody could see it. ‘The diamond G-string Choo-Choo was wearin’!’
The crowd let out a roar.
Pop grabbed the man by the arm and dragged him in front of the microphone. They jostled the poor sheriff right out of the way.
‘Where’d you find it?’ Pop asked. ‘Tell us where you found this thing! Did you see her? Where is she?’
The man shook his head. He was all out of breath. Then I took a good look at him, and I saw it was Harm, the one Uncle Sagamore had talked to a while ago. He gasped for breath, and then he says, ‘Right—down below the lake—about half a mile. It was caught—on a bush.’
The crowd roared again.
Pop held up his hands. ‘There you are, men! She ain’t down there, is she? That pore, lost, terrified girl! And now she ain’t got a single stitch on!’
I looked down at Murph. He was leaning on the counter with his face down on his arms. When he straightened up he shook his head with a sort of dazed look in his eyes.
‘Kid,’ he says, ‘when you grow up, just remember it was Murph that told you first.’
‘Told me what?’ I asked.
‘That he’s a genius. The only real, live genius I ever saw.’
The crowd was beginning to drown Pop out now. ‘We’ll find her,’ they was yelling.
Pop held up his hand for silence. The other hand was still waving the diamond thing. ‘… completely naked,’ he was saying. ‘… nothing at all to protect her from the chill. And as for the reward—Listen, men! If the shurf’s office is going to try to weasel out of it, we’ll pay the reward ourself! Me an’ Sagamore will pay it. And not no measley five hundred dollars, neither. One thousand dollars to the man who finds that girl that saved my little boy’s life.’
The crowd let out another big cheer. ‘Send that useless shurf home! We’ll find that girl without him.’
Uncle Sagamore came up on the stage then. They give him a cheer. ‘Men,’ he says into the microphone, ‘I’m real proud to know you’re with us right to the end. And don’t feel too harsh against the shurf because he don’t want to bother to look for her an’ because he’s too cheap to pay the reward. Remember, he’s got other duties, like foreclosin’ mortgages, and arrestin’ people for crimes like shootin’ craps or takin’ a drink now and then, an’ he can’t spend a lot of time lookin’ around in a river bottom for a young girl just because she’s lost with no clothes on an’ so terrified she’ll probably throw herself right in the arms of the first man that finds her. Politicians is got a lot of other important things on their minds, and besides this girl
can’t vote, nohow. She’s too young.’
There was another big roar from the crowd.
Uncle Sagamore went on, ‘Now, the daylight’s a-fadin’ out fast, an’ there ain’t no point in anybody goin’ back down there in the bottom now except the one’s that’s got flashlights and lanterns, but you stick around here until morning an’ we’ll find her. Somebody’ll get that thousand dollars. You can get a little sleep in your cars, an’ there’s refreshments an’ entertainment for all. I thank you kindly, men.’
I didn’t even see the sheriff on the stage now. He had left.
Uncle Sagamore got down, and the poor tired girls struggled back up on the stage once more. As the music started blaring again I saw Pop and Uncle Sagamore going down towards the house. I ran and caught up with them just as they got in the front yard.
And then the sheriff and all three of the deputies came charging down on us as fast as they could walk. We sat down on the porch and they stopped in front of us. I had seen the sheriff mad lots of times before, but never like this. He pulled out his gun.
But he was only handing it to Booger. ‘Hold onto it,’ he says, with his voice so tight you could hardly hear him. ‘Don’t let me have it. I don’t trust myself. I ain’t never shot down an unarmed man in cold blood, and I don’t want it on my soul.’
Uncle Sagamore shifted his tobacco over into the other cheek and rubbed his bare feet together. He reached down and popped the knuckles in his big toe. ‘Why, shucks, Shurf,’ he says. ‘Ain’t no call to get all het up.’
‘Billy,’ the sheriff says to me painfully, ignoring Uncle Sagamore, ‘you’re the only one I can get any truth out of. Was she in that car when they left here last night to scatter those hand bills?’
I didn’t know what he was driving at. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Of course not. How could she be? She was already lost then.’
He shook his head. ‘All right,’ he says to the deputies. ‘They didn’t take her away, and she couldn’t go anywhere afoot, so she’s still on this place somewhere. Let’s go. And you too, Sagamore. We’re going to search this place without no warrant. You want to make trouble?’
‘Why, of course not, Shurf,’ Uncle Sagamore says. ‘You know I’m always downright anxious to co-operate with the law.’
He got up.
I went along, too. They searched everything. They went all through the house. They looked under the beds and in the closets. They looked through the barn and the corncrib and the hayloft up above it, and in the truck shed and an old tool shed that was down below the barn, and in Dr. Severance’s trailer.
It was full dark by then and they was using flashlights. At last there wasn’t anything left but the ark. We all went down there. Uncle Finley had a lighted lantern hanging up on a plank and he was nailing away to beat the band, up on his scaffold. It was new boards he was using, too, so I guessed he was still tearing down the hamburger stand.
He saw us coming and sat down on the scaffold and pointed the hammer at us. ‘No sir,’ he says. ‘Not a one of you! I been tryin’ to make you listen for years, but you wouldn’t. And now that it’s here, you want to change your tune, well—’
The lantern light was glinting on his bald head. He started to laugh, waving the hammer around to point at all the cars.
‘You see ’em? They come from miles. Thousands of ’em. Look at ’em, You know why? Because the rain’s started, that’s why. All over the world it’s rainin’ like pourin’ water out of a boot, an’ the water’s risin’, so they want to get aboard. Well, they’ll all drowned, every goddam one of ’em, because they wouldn’t listen to me. Ain’t no use you askin’. You’re wastin’ your time. And mine too. I got to have this thing finished by daylight. You can all go to hell.’
He turned around and started hammering again.
The sheriff just sighed and shook his head, and started shooting his flashlight beam in through the holes in the ark’s side. He and the deputies went over it from top to bottom.
She wasn’t in it. I couldn’t see any reason why he thought she would be, but a lot of it I didn’t understand by now anyway.
We walked back up by the house.
Pop and Uncle Sagamore sat down on the porch. The sheriff and his deputies just stood there. The smell from the tubs was bad, but everybody was too tired and had too much on his mind to notice it any more.
‘Shurf,’ Uncle Sagamore says, real sad, ‘this kind of mistrust hurts my feelin’s, but I ain’t one to hold a grudge.’
The sheriff just looked at him. He was too beat to get mad any more. He turned to Booger.
‘Boys,’ he says, ‘we’re whipped. There’s only one other slim chance. She might be in one of them cars out—’
‘Oh, no,’ Booger says.
‘Oh, no,’ Otis says.
The other deputy didn’t say anything. He didn’t seem to be much of a talker.
The sheriff sighed. ‘I know. There’s at least three thousand of ’em, It’ll take till daylight, and every one of us is dead on his feet. But it’s all we got left. And if we don’t break this thing before sunrise, hell is going to look like a rest home. We’ll have the National Guard in here, or we’ll have them women and be wishin’ we did have the National Guard—or the Marines.’
Booger shuddered. Otis shuddered. The other deputy started to, but then decided it would take too much effort. He just rolled a cigarette.
‘All right,’ they says. They turned on their flashlights and started down towards the lower end of the cornfield. I walked over to where I could see them. It looked like a waste of time to me. If she was in one of those cars she’d have been able to find her way back by herself. The lights was like fireflies way down there as they walked along real slow, shining them in the cars and looking in, one by one. I thought of the acres and acres of cars all over the place and was sure glad I wasn’t a sheriff or a deputy.
Pop and Uncle Sagamore went up the hill towards the carnival; I just stayed there on the porch with Sig Freed. I didn’t even want a hamburger. I was awful tired, and I was scared, thinking about Miss Harrington—I mean Miss Caroline. After a while they came back, carrying some more money in a sack, and a lantern. Mrs. Horne was with them. She looked tired too.
‘God,’ she says, ‘I never saw anything like it. It’s like Dago with the fleet in.’
They went inside the house. After a while I got up to get away from the smell of the tubs and walked down a little way towards Uncle Finley’s ark, to where there was a little open space between all the parked cars and I could look out over the lake. It was nice down there, with all the stars shining overhead and the loudspeaker music just far enough away to be pretty. I laid down, still worrying about why we couldn’t find her.
When I woke up a flashlight was shining in my face.
‘Hey, Billy, you oughtn’t to be asleep on the ground like that,’ the sheriff’s voice said.
I sat up and rubbed my eyes. Sig Freed was still there beside me. ‘What time is it?’ I asked.
‘About two in the morning.’ His voice sounded like he was ready to go to sleep on his feet. ‘You better go up and get in your bed.’ He went on shining his light in cars.
I walked up to the house. There was a lamp burning in the front room, but Pop and Uncle Sagamore wasn’t anywhere around. So I went up to the stand to see if I could get a hamburger. The generator was still running, so there was lights, but the music had stopped and there wasn’t any sign of the girls. The other tents was closed too. A few men was sitting around, but it looked like most of the crowd had decided to go to sleep till morning.
There was only one plank left of the hamburger stand. Murph was sitting on top of the icebox smoking a cigarette and watching Uncle Finley knock that one loose with his hammer. He looked beat too. Uncle Finley put the plank under his arm and went down the hill in the dark.
Murph watched him go, and then he sighed and shook his head. ‘God, what a day.’
‘Have you got a hamburger?’ I asked.
‘Just one,’ he says. He got up and opened the icebox and took it out. It was already cooked and in the bun. ‘I been saving it for you.’
‘Thanks, Murph,’ I says. I started eating it. ‘Have you seen Pop and Uncle Sagamore?’
He shook his head. ‘Not since before midnight.’
That was funny, I thought. I wondered where they could have gone. I went back down to the house, still eating the hamburger, and looked again, but they wasn’t there anywhere. I came back and sat down on the porch. They had just disappeared, that funny way they had of doing sometimes, in broad daylight. While I was sitting there somebody else came down through the yard and I could see it was a girl. It was La Verne.
‘Have you seen Mrs. Horne?’ she asked me. ‘Or Baby Collins?
I told her about Mrs. Horne being with Pop and Uncle Sagamore earlier in the night. ‘I can’t find them, either,’ I said.
‘That’s funny,’ she says. ‘They’ve been gone for hours.’
She went back to the trailer. I went off up the hill to look some more. They just wasn’t anywhere. After a couple of hours of poking around every place I could think of, I began to get scared. Miss Caroline was gone, and now Pop and Uncle Sagamore. I didn’t have anybody.
I went down to the barn, and then back to the house again, and then up the hill where the sheriff was still looking in the last bunch of cars. He hadn’t seen them either, not for hours.
There was a little red in the east now.
I heard a commotion up by the gate, and when I went up there a bulldozer was pushing down small trees on the other side of the road, and couple of wreckers was dragging cars around. They had the road cleared out now. But where was Pop and Uncle Sagamore?
I started back down the hill, and just after I got past where Murph was asleep on his icebox I happened to look at the top of the house and saw smoke was coming out of the stovepipe. They’d come back and was frying the baloney for breakfast! I started to run, and when I was going through the yard I almost crashed into Uncle Finley, coming around the corner of the house carrying a plank.
I ran on past him and into the house.