Uncle Sagamore and His Girls (6 page)

Uncle Sagamore says it was the Vision that tipped him off about it, three or four years ago. It was around two o’clock in the morning when the Vision showed up there in the back bedroom and touted him, and Uncle Finley run right out in his nightshirt and grabbed a pinch-bar and started tearing down the hen-house to get boards to build the ark with. He’d been at it ever since, whenever he could get boards, and the ark was about the size of a medium house trailer now, even though it was full of holes and didn’t look much like it would float. He’s Aunt Bessie’s brother, and he’s bald-headed except for a fuzz of white hair around his ears.

We didn’t have any luck catching the gopher, so we went down in the bottom to chase rabbits, and it was after sundown when we got back. Pop and Uncle Sagamore was still sort of quiet while they fried the baloney and we had supper. I fed Sig Freed some baloney, and after a while me and Pop spread out our bedrolls and turned in. Uncle Sagamore sleeps in the front bedroom that’s next to the living room, and Uncle Finley in the back one next to the kitchen. Sig Freed curls up next to me.

There wasn’t any moon, and I could see the end of Pop’s cigar glowing in the dark. Off in the river bottom that bird was going, “
Six-furlongs-in-one-eleven, six-furlongs-in-one-eleven,
” over and over, the way he does, and right in the middle of thinking what a lot of fun it was living on a farm I went to sleep. Then the next thing I knew I was wide awake and there was an awful racket going on.

It was Sig Freed. He’s got a real deep bark for such a small dog, and he must have let out a roar with his nose against my ear. He jumped across me in the dark, and from the string of cuss words it sounded like he landed right in Pop’s face. Then he shot off the porch and up the side of the hill toward the sand road just barking up a storm. Pop was cussing a blue streak and trying to get untangled from the bedclothes, and just then Uncle Finley come tearing out the front door in his nightshirt yelling, “She’s a-comin’! Armageddon’s a-comin’!”

He slammed into Pop and they both fell down. Pop stopped cussing Sig Freed and started cussing Uncle Finley. They got untangled from each other, and Uncle Finley jumped off the porch and tore around the side of the house still whooping and hollering. “Everbody’s goin’ to drownd! She’s a frawg-strangler!”

“Goddamned old coot, it ain’t rainin’,” Pop says, real bitter, and got up. I could still hear Sig Freed going up the hill, barking to beat the band. I looked around then, and Uncle Sagamore was standing just outside the door with his shotgun in the crook of his arm. I never been able to figure out how he does that. You don’t hear him move or anything, but all of a sudden he’s just
there.

He was standing real still, listening, and Pop stopped cussing to listen too. Sig Freed sounded like he was almost up to the sand road now. And then all of a sudden he quit barking and let out a yelp like something had bit him. He went “Yip! Yip! Yip!” and you could tell he was coming back this way as fast as he could run. Uncle Sagamore stepped down off the porch with the shotgun, moving fast and silent like an Indian, but before he’d got more than a few steps we heard a car start up by the gate. He come back.

“What do you reckon it was?” I asked.

He didn’t say anything. Neither did Pop. Just then Sig Freed come running back into the yard and up the steps. I grabbed him, and he licked my face. He didn’t seem to be hurt. Whoever it was in the car must have throwed something at him and scared him, or kicked at him.

“Who do you reckon would be prowlin’ around up there this time of night?” Pop asked.

Uncle Sagamore hitched up the other gallus of his overalls, but all he said was, “Hmmm.” And then all of a sudden there was an awful hammering around behind the house and a screech like nails being pulled. We all run around that way, and here was Uncle Finley. He was still barefooted and in his nightshirt, but he’d lit a lantern and had a pinch bar and was tearing a plank off the back wall next to the kitchen door. The plank flew off with a big clatter, and he waved the pinch bar at us and yelled, “She’s a chicken-drownder!”

Uncle Sagamore took out his plug and bit off a chew. “Well sir,” he says to Pop, “it kind of makes a man nervous after a while, never knowin’ when he may wake up and find the house gone from over his head.”

“How big has that ark got to be, anyhow?” Pop asked.

“Well, I don’t rightly know, Sam. From what I can find out the Vision was kind of hazy about the specifications. He’s got the hen-house in her now, and seven privvies if I ain’t lost count, and three of Marvin Jimerson’s hawg-pens, and a wagon-bed from a pore feller that drove over here one day to do some mule-tradin’ with me. Man was real bitter about it, havin’ to ride home a-straddle of the runnin’ gear.”

Well, it took ten minutes or so to convince Uncle Finley it was a false alarm and the world wasn’t ending yet, and by the time we all got back in bed we’d forgot what had started the uproar in the first place. But I remembered it later.

It was around two o’clock in the afternoon and I was fishing for red perch off the end of a log that stuck out in the lake. It was still and hot and the water was like a big piece of glass. And then I heard the noise of an airplane.

It was a small one, and it wasn’t very high. It come on over, and then doggone if there wasn’t a whole bunch of papers fluttering back from it like somebody’d throwed them out. The plane went on out of sight, but the papers swirled around and started drifting down. The whole thing sure looked funny to me, so I threw down the fishing pole and took out after ’em to see what they was. Sig Freed barked and ran with me.

They fluttered and turned over real lazy in the air, but they was coming down pretty straight because there wasn’t any wind, and I could see they was going to land in the cornfield that’s between the back of the house and the timber that goes down toward the big river bottom. I got there just as they begin falling in among the cornstalks, and I ran along the rows gathering them up.

They was printed handbills, and there was three different colors of ’em—pink, blue, and white. I squatted down on a corn row to see what they said, and doggone if they wasn’t about Curly Minifee.

All the pink ones said, in real big print:

HAD ENOUGH?

VOTE FOR LAW ENFORCEMENT

ELECT J. L. (CURLY) MINIFEE

Signed: (Minifee for Sheriff Committee)

The blue ones said, in even bigger print:

MINIFEE’S YOUR MAN!!!!

MINIFEE FOR LAW AND ORDER!!!!

MINIFEE FOR SHERIFF!!!!

But the white ones was the longest. They had a lot of printing on them, and it took me a while to read it all:

“Folks, don’t bother to read this—

—
if
you’d rather have comedy than law enforcement.

—
if
you really want the county flooded all the time with rotgut moonshine.

—
if
you think gangsters and gang wars are good publicity for Blossom County.

—
if
you like con games, gambling, and crooks, and being fleeced out of your hard-earned money.

“And if you do read it, but feel that anybody who’d put a stop to all this good clean fun is just an old sorehead and a grouch, for Heaven’s sake don’t vote for Curly Minifee. He hasn’t got any sense of humor at all, folks, and he’d probably break up the whole show by taking a lot of these smart-aleck crooks out of circulation and putting them behind bars. We wouldn’t want that, would we? Think what a dull place Blossom County would be if you could leave a paved street lying out in front of your house all night and still find it there in the morning, or if your school-age children had to go all the way to Memphis or New Orleans to find out what a naked belly-dancer looks like. There’s no telling where this could lead. Why, people might quit laughing at us all over the State and making jokes about “Blossom County tea.”

“But on the other hand, if you’re fed up with twelve years of futility and inefficiency in the Sheriff’s office and want a man that can handle the job, vote for Curly Minifee.

“Curly Minifee is a simple, straight-forward man, folks, and he gives you a simple, straight-forward platform:

PUT MINIFEE IN OFFICE AND PUT THE CROOKS IN JAIL

Signed: (Minifee for Sheriff Committee.)”

It sure seemed like he was dead set on getting to be Sheriff. Must cost a lot of money, I thought, to hire an airplane to go around dropping these papers out. I grabbed them up and started running toward the house. Pop and Uncle Sagamore might like to read ’em too.

B
UT THEY ALREADY HAD
some. When I come tearing around the house, Murph’s convertible was parked under the oak tree in the front yard. He must have drove up while I was down in the cornfield. Pop and Uncle Sagamore was standing by the car reading a bunch of the sheets I reckon he’d brought out from town. They all looked real serious.

“Hey, I’ve got some too,” I says. “Mine fell out of the airplane.”

Nobody paid any attention. “From what I can find out,” Murph says, “he was already thinking about running, even before it happened. That just clinched it.”

“You think he might win?” Pop asked.

Murph lit a cigarette. “No use kidding ourselves. He’s got better than an even-money chance right now, and it’s still ten days to the election. The newspaper’s behind him, and the Merchant’s Association, and the League of Women Voters. The whole county’ll be knee-deep in these circulars before sundown, and he’s already sold his filling station and bought a sound truck.”

“Hmmm,” Uncle Sagamore says. He pursed up his lips and sailed out some tobacco juice. It landed
ka-splott
about ten feet away, and he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “He sounds like a reg’lar go-getter.”

Murph nodded. “He is. And he’s no dope; they say he’s slippery as an eel. You kind of caught him off guard there before, because he didn’t recognize you.”

Just then we heard music. We all looked up the hill, and here come a panel truck in through the gate at the sand road. It looked like a one-car parade. It was painted red and white, and had big signs fastened to the sides and two loudspeakers on top. It drove on down and stopped just above where we was. The two signs on this side was wood frames and white cloth with big red letters painted on them.

MINIFEE FOR SHERIFF!!

PUT MINIFEE IN OFFICE AND PUT THECROOKS IN JAIL!!

We all stared. The music stopped and the man opened the door and got out. It was Curly. He was bareheaded and had on a white suit and a red string tie. The breast pocket of his coat was stuffed with cigars, and he had that big, cocky grin on his face.

“Howdy, men,” he says, real friendly. “Have a cigar.”

He grabbed a handful out of the box on the seat, but just then Sig Freed seemed to notice him for the first time. He’d been lying there in the shade of the oak tree kind of grinning at everybody, but all of a sudden he let out a real mad bark and shot right under the convertible and headed for Curly. He didn’t try to bite, but his back hair was bristled up and he went on barking like he was calling Curly every name a dog could think of. It sure was odd; he was usually pretty friendly with folks. Uncle Sagamore pursed up his lips, and him and Pop looked at each other.

Curly just grinned. “Well, looks like I done lost the weenie-dog vote right off the bat,” he says.

I grabbed Sig Freed and calmed him down a little, but he kept watching Curly and muttering about it. Curly passed out cigars to Pop and Murph and Uncle Sagamore, and leaned his arm on the windshield of the convertible.

“Men,” he says, confidential-like, “the first thing a candidate runnin’ for office has to do is line up the backin’ of the real upstandin’ citizens of the community, so that’s the reason I’ve come right to you to start off my campaign—” He stopped then and looked at Pop. “By the way, I’m sure happy to see your back has got all right.”

“Oh, it was just a little catch,” Pop says. “Straightened up in no time at all.”

“Well, that’s just fine,” Curly says, real happy about it. “Now, to get back to politics—I don’t aim to run my campaign by knockin’ my opponent, but we got to face facts, men. You ain’t gettin’ the police co-operation you deserve. Your tax money’s bein’ wasted by incompetent men. There’s crooks abroad in this county that ought to be sent up the river so far it’d take nine dollars worth of stamps to mail ’em a postcard, but the Sheriff we got now ain’t able to handle the job. And do you know why?”

“Hmmm,” Uncle Sagamore says. “I reckon we ain’t give it much thought, to be honest about it, but we’d sure be happy to hear what’s wrong.”

“Well, the truth of the matter,” Curly says, “is that the Sheriff’s Department is behind the times. They got no trained men, and no modern scientific equipment. Now, I hate to say this, but did you know in that whole office they ain’t even got a Duckworth Sniffalyzer? Or a man that knows how to operate one?”

“No!” Pop says. “Is that a fact?”

Curly nodded. “I’m sorry to say it is, men. I checked just this morning, and they never even heard of it.”

“Well sir, it just disheartens a man,” Uncle Sagamore says. “You reckon if you was elected, you might be able to send off and get one?”

“Why, it just happens,” Curly said, “I got one right with me. And I’d be glad to demonstrate how it works.”

Uncle Sagamore brightened right up then. “You see,” he says to Pop. “Things is sure goin’ to be different when we get a new Shurf around here.”

Curly went over and got the Sniffalyzer out of the back of the truck. It was a shiny metal box with a carrying handle, and it had a sort of snout in front and a pair of earphones that plugged in.
GEIGER COUNTER
, it says on the side. Likely that was the name of the company that made ’em. Pop and Murph and Uncle Sagamore watched real interested while Curly turned on the switch. Little clicking sounds begin to come out of the earphones.

“Well sir, she sure looks like a pee-dinger of a machine,” Uncle Sagamore says. “Uh—just what does she do when she’s a-sniffalyzin’?”