Rumble's business had been in the family for three generations. He had dealt with all sorts and was smart enough to quit placing orders for Miss Sink after the third time she had changed her mind.
'Good afternoon, Floyd,' Miss Sink walked right in talking loudly above the chop chop chop and rat-a-tats of machines and blasting of carbon sand and whirring of the exhaust fan and roaring of compressors.
'I guess so,' he said.
'I don't know how you stand all the dust in here.' She always said that.
'It's good for you,' he always replied. 'Same thing they use in toothpaste. All day long your teeth get cleaned. You ever see a Rumble with bad teeth?'
In part, he went down this path to distract Miss Sink. Sometimes it worked. Today it didn't.
'I guess you heard.' She moved close to confide in him.
The thirteen-hundred-pound monument hung perilously midair and Rumble thought about what a chore restoring it was going to be. All duplications of old work like that had to be chiseled by hand, and there was no way he was going to start on it while Miss Sink was within a mile of his shop. She'd decide she had finally found what she wanted. She'd know without a spark of doubt that she had to have soft white Vermont marble chiseled by hand.
He started looking through trays of stencil types, preparing to etch a Hebrew inscription on Sierra White marble while his crew lowered the damaged monument into a cart.
'You heard what they did to Jefferson Davis,' Miss Sink told him.
'I heard something about it.'
Rumble started laying out stencil types. They had to be plastic so one could see through them, but they broke all the time.
'As you know, Floyd, I'm on the board.'
'Yes, ma'am.'
The overwhelming matter that must be taken care of is how badly is the statue damaged, how do we go about restoring it and how much will it cost.'
Rumble hadn't gone into the cemetery to look yet. Nor would he bother at all unless he was offered the job.
'He paint any of the marble base or just the bronze?' Rumble inquired.
'Mostly the bronze.' Just the thought of it made her sick. 'But he did paint the top of the base to look like a basketball floor. So yes, some of the marble was involved.'
'I see. So he's standing on a basketball floor. What else?'
'Well, the worst part. He painted a basketball uniform on him, tennis shoes and the whole bit, and changed his race.'
'Sounds like we got two problems here,' Rumble said as he tossed out another broken letter and the diamond saw in a corner started cutting through stone. 'To fix the marble, I'm going to have to chisel it down and put on a new surface. As for the bronze, if we're talking about oil-based paints…" 'Oh we are,' she said. 'I could tell. Nothing spray-painted here. This was all done in thick coats with a brush.'
'We'll have to strip that down, maybe with turpentine, then refinish with a polyurethane coating so we don't get oxidation.'
'We'll study this, then,' Miss Sink announced.
'We should,' Rumble said. 'Eventually we'll have to get Jeff Davis in my shop. I can't be doing all this work on him in the middle of a public cemetery with people all over the place. Means we'll have to hoist him up with a crane and a sling, lower him in a truck.'
'I 'spect we should close the cemetery while you're doing all this,' Miss Sink said.
'During the removal, for sure. But I'd do it now anyway in case other people get ideas about other monuments. And I suggest you get security patrolling around there.'
'I'll get Lelia to take care of it.'
'In the meantime, I don't want anyone touching that statue. Now that's saying you're asking me to fix it.'
'Of course you're the one, Floyd.'
'It will take me a day or so to get it out of the cemetery, and then I don't know how long after that.'
'I guess all this is going to cost a pretty penny,' the parsimonious Miss Sink said.
'I'll' be as fair as I can be,' Rumble said.
Bubba had no intention of being fair. There had been too much trauma and disruption for him to even think about sleep, and as soon as the detective had left with lifted prints and other evidence, Bubba had returned to his shop. He had cleaned up fast and hard, anger giving him boundless energy while Half Shell bawled and bawled and ran around in circles and jumped up and down from the overturned barrel.
Bubba's karma had not been favorably inclined so far this day. He had bought a bag of large white marbles and a bottle of iridescent yellow paint. His attempts at drilling holes through the marbles were disastrous. They kept slipping out of the vise, and when he tightened the vise more, the marbles cracked. The drill bit kept sliding off, then broke. This went on and got no better until he came up with a clever idea.
At several minutes past three P.M., Honey poked her head inside the shop, a concerned expression on her face.
'Sweetie, you haven't eaten a thing all day,' she worried.
'Don't have time.'
'Sweetie, you always have time.'
'Not now.'
She spotted what was left of her favorite large pearl necklace on the workbench.
'Sweetie, what are you doing?'
She dared to venture several inches inside his shop. The pearls were loose and Bubba was widening the holes through them with a 5/64th-inch drill bit.
'Bubba? What are you doing to my pearls? My father gave me those pearls.'
'They're fake, Honey.'
Bubba threaded black string through one of the pearls and tied a tight knot. He did the same thing with another pearl and took the two lengths of string and tied them together maybe four inches below the pearls. He slowly whirled this above his head like a lasso. He liked the way it felt, and proceeded to make several more.
'Honey, you go on back inside the house,' Bubba said. 'This is something you don't need to see or tell anybody about.'
She wavered in the doorway, her eyes uneasy.
'You're not doing something sneaky, are you?' she dared to ask.
Bubba didn't reply.
'Precious, I've never known you to do anything sneaky. You've always been the most honest man I've ever met, so honest everybody's always taking advantage of you.'
'I'm meeting Smudge at his house around six and we're heading out to Suffolk.'
She knew what that meant. 'Dismal Swamp? Please don't tell me you're going there, Bubba.'
'May or may not.'
'Think of all the snakes.' She shivered.
'There's snakes everywhere, Honey,' said Bubba, who was acutely phobic of snakes and believed no one knew it. 'A man can't spend his life worrying about snakes.'
Smudge had his own workshop, which was much better organized than Bubba's and equipped with only the essentials. He had the expected table, power miter, radial-arm and band saws, a thickness planer, wood lathe, workbench and shop vacuum. Smudge wasn't fond of snakes, either, but he used common sense.
The weather had been unseasonably warm. Water moccasins might be stirring in the Dismal Swamp, meaning Smudge had no intention of hunting coons down there. Southampton County would be better, although probably not for Bubba. Smudge was at his workbench Super-Gluing a real rattlesnake rattle to the tail of a long rubber snake. He snagged the snake with a simple eagle-claw hook threaded with twenty feet of monofilament.
Chapter Twenty-One
Smudge loaded the portable dog pen on the back of his coon-hunting fully loaded VI0 Dodge Ram.
'Get in, Tree Buster,' Smudge commanded.
The open-spotted male coon hound jumped eagerly into the truck and got inside his pen. Tree Buster was born to tree coons and that's all he lived to do, that and eat. Tree Buster was a Grand Show Champ. He had a horn bawl with a lot of volume, which was the best voice a coon dog could have, unless one was hunting in the mountains, and then a higher pitch would carry better.