Read The Diamond Bikini for Free Online

right between Booger and Otis, and landed ka-splott in the yard.
    “No,” he says. “Only when he runs out of boards. Things is kind of slow right now, since he used up the last privy, but he manages to keep busy with a little patchin’ here and there.”
    We all looked at Uncle Finley.
    “Just what’s he building, anyway?” Pop asked.
    “A boat,” Uncle Sagamore says.
    “Boat?”
    Uncle Sagamore nodded. “That’s right. The way Finley figures, it’s goin’ to start rainin’ like pourin’ water out of a boot any day now. And when the day comes he’s goin’ to go sailin’ off like a bug on a whiteoak chip and the rest of us sinful bastards is going to be drowned. He thought for a while of maybe takin’ Bessie along, being she’s his sister, but after she raised so much hell about the privies, he finally told her he’d takened it up with the Vision and the Vision says the hell with her, let her drowned like the rest of us.”
    “What kind of a vision is this?” Pop asked.
    I was sort of wishing he wouldn’t keep asking about it, so we could maybe get off the porch and away from that smell, but it seemed like he was anxious to hear about it now and Uncle Sagamore was real anxious for all of us to stay there so he’d have somebody to talk to. Anyway, that’s the way it looked, so I didn’t say anything about wanting to move. Sig Freed was the only one that was comfortable. He went way off up the hill and laid down under a bush.
    Well, not the only one. Uncle Sagamore seemed to be comfortable enough too. He stretched a little and scratched one leg with the big toenail on his other foot, and moved his tobacco into the other cheek.
    “The Vision?” he says. “Oh, Finley seen it one night about four years ago, as near as I can recollect. Me and Bessie was asleep in the front room when he come a-tearin’ through the house in his nightshirt like somebody’d jabbed him in the butt with a bull nettle and says as how this Vision had told him he’d better not lose no time because the end of the world was due any minute. So he runs out in the back yard with a pinch bar and starts tearin’ down the hen house to get boards to make this boat with. It was only about two o’clock in the morning, and there was a regular damn madhouse with all them chickens squawkin’ and tryin’ to figure out what’s goin’ on, and Bessie yellin’ at Finley to go on back to bed. I didn’t get hardly no rest at all.”

Four
    “And he’s been building her ever since?” Pop asked.
    “Off and on,” Uncle Sagamore says. “Dependin’ on the supply of boards. After he used up the hen house and the shed I used to keep the truck in, he started to tear down the house, but we finally got him talked out of that. So then he starts driftin’ around to the neighbors, pickin’ up any boards that wasn’t nailed down too tight. He tore down Marvin Jimerson’s hawg pen so many times Marvin finally got a court order agin him and says if he has to chase them hawgs one more time he’s comin’ up here and shoot Finley right in the tail with a charge of rock salt, he don’t care if Finley did used to be a preacher and was the one that baptized Miz Jimerson. Says come to think of it, she takened the pneumonia when he baptized her anyhow.”
    Pop was looking down the hill. “Kinda leaky for a boat, ain’t she?” he asked. “You can see all the way through her in places.”
    “Oh, that’s on account of the privies,” Uncle Sagamore says. “He’s got seven of ‘em in there now, if I ain’t lost count. You see, every time Bessie leaves me, Finley rushes out there with his pinch bar and starts tarin’ the privy apart before she’s out of sight. He gets the planks all nailed into his boat, and about that time Bessie gets over her sull an’ comes home, and I got to build a new one.”
    “Bessie leaves you?” Pop asked. “Is she gone now?”
    “Oh, sure,” Uncle Sagamore says. “Been gone a week last Sunday. She’ll be