Uncle Sagamore and His Girls Read Online Free PDF Page B

from there it’s five miles to town. Jerome’s kind of a pretty little place, sort of peaceful and quiet after you’ve been used to big cities like Hialeah and Belmont Park. Most of the stores are around the square, where the courthouse is, and there’s trees, and a couple of old cannons left over from some war or other.
    Uncle Sagamore had to put some gas in the truck, so before we got in the middle of town he pulled into a filling station on the corner. There was another car parked in the driveway, a snazzy-looking convertible with the top down. There was a real pretty woman in it, a kind of young woman with long, shoulder-length hair the color of vanilla ice cream. She looked like she was waiting for the driver to come back from somewhere.
    Two men came out of the little office to wait on us. One was little and dark, and the other was a big, chunky guy with curly red hair and a cocky grin on his face. His white cap was slanted way over on the side of his head. Uncle Sagamore got out and his bare feet went whusk, whusk, whusk, on the concrete driveway.
    “Reckon I’ll have three dollars worth of the cheap kind,” he says.
    “Yes, sir, ” the chesty one said, and then turned his head and winked at his partner. I guess he thought Uncle Sagamore looked kind of silly without any shoes on and one overall leg rolled up higher than the other.
    Pop got out, and him and Uncle Sagamore went over by the water cooler. Around at the side of the truck the two men was putting the hose in and starting the pump, and I heard the chesty one say, “Get a load of that old peckerwood. Oh, brother.”
    “Ain’t he something?” the other one says.
    “Say, you know what? Here’s where I unload a couple of them cheap recaps we got stuck with.”
    “Aw, hell, Curly—them things? You can’t hope to sell them.”
    “You don’t think so? You just watch and see how a real promoter works.”
    I got out and went over to the coke machine. Pop give me a dime and I dropped it in. And just then a man come out of the rest room, a big, easy-moving man with a smooth, brown-complected face and gray eyes that looked like he was thinking of something funny. It was Murph. He always looked that way, the same as he always wears a baseball cap. He runs a pool hall, and he’s a big friend of Uncle Sagamore’s. It was him that told me that Uncle Sagamore was the only real genius he’d ever met—whatever a genius is.
    “Hi, men,” he says to Pop and Uncle Sagamore, and shook hands with them. “Come over to the car and meet a friend of mine.”
    We walked over to the convertible and Murph says, “Honey, these are the Noonan boys, Sagamore and Sam. Boys, meet Miss Malone.”
    She looked at them and grinned. “Goody, Princeton men,” she says. “Hello, boys.”
    “Howdy,” Pop and Uncle Sagamore said.
    I took a drink of my coke, and told Uncle Sagamore about the man wanting to sell him some tires.
    “Well sir, is that a fact?” he says.
    “I guess so,” I said. “He said he was going to unload ’em on you, so that must have been what he meant, wasn’t it?”
    Him and Pop looked at each other. He pursed up his lips and studied about it. “Why, I’d reckon so. Wouldn’t you, Sam?”
    They walked back to the truck and stood watching the two men. The dark one was cleaning the windshield. Curly finished putting in the gas, and then come whipping around the front of the truck. “Yes, sir, ” he says to Uncle Sagamore. “Now, how about me checking your tires?”
    “Why, if’n it wouldn’t put you out none,” Uncle Sagamore says.
    Murph leaned against the side of the convertible and watched them real interested. He was smiling and shaking his head.
    “Come on, let’s go,” Miss Malone said. “Aren’t we ready?”
    “Relax,” he told her. “I want to see this.”
    “What?” she asked.
    “The kitten’s going to bite the tom-cat.”
    Curly grabbed the air hose and squatted down by the front wheel. He started to take off the