Thinner (11 page)

He told her the following night that it was better; the night after that he claimed it was better still. She supposed she should have seen the lie in his eyes ... and that he was lying to himself more than he was to her. Even in his extremity, Cary had remained the same selfish son of a bitch she supposed he had always been. But it hadn't all been Cary's doing, she added sharply, still not turning back from the bar where she was now fiddling aimlessly with the glasses. She had developed her own brand of highly specialized selfishness over the years. She had wanted, needed the illusion almost as much as he had. On the third night, he had walked into their bedroom wearing only his pajama pants. His eyes were soft and hurt, stunned. She had been rereading a Dorothy Sayers mystery ~ they were, for always and ever, her favorites and it dropped from her fingers as she saw him. She would have screamed, she told Billy, but it seemed to her that all her breath was gone. And Billy had time to reflect that no human feeling was truly unique, although one might like to think so: Cary Rossington had apparently gone through the same period of self-delusion followed by shattering self-awakening that Billy had gone through himself.

Leda had seen that the hard yellow skin (the scales there was no longer any way to think of them as anything else) now covered most of Cary's chest and all of his belly. It was as ugly and thickly humped up as burn tissue. The cracks zigged and zagged every which way, deep and black, shading to a pinkish-red deep down where you most definitely did not want to look. And although you might at first think those cracks were as random as the cracks in a bomb crater, after a moment or two your helpless eye reported a different story. At each edge the hard yellow flesh rose a bit more. Scales. Not fish scales but great rough reptile scales, like those on a lizard or a 'gator or an iguana. The brown arc of his left nipple still showed; the rest of it was gone, buried, under that yellow-black carapace. The right nipple was entirely gone, and - a twisted ridge of this strange new flesh reached around and under his armpit toward his back like the grasping surfacing claw of some unthinkable monstrosity. His navel was gone. And ...

'He lowered his pajama pants,' she said. She was now working on her third drink, taking those same rapid birdlike sips. Fresh tears had begun to leak from her eyes, but that was all. 'That's when I found my voice again. I screamed at him to stop, and he did ... but not before I'd seen it was sending fingers down into his groin. It hadn't touched his penis ... at least, it hadn't yet ... but where it had advanced, his pubic hair was gone and there were just those yellow scales.

"'I thought you said it was getting better," I said.'

"'I honestly thought it was," he answered me. And the next day, he made the appointment with Houston.'

Who probably told him,
Halleck thought,
about the college kid with no brain and the old lady with the third set of teeth.
And asked if he'd like a short snort of the old brain-squirts.

A week later Rossington had been seeing the best team of dermatologists in New York. They knew immediately what was wrong with him, they said, and a regimen of 'hard-gamma' X rays had followed. The scaly flesh continued to creep and spread. It did not hurt, Rossington told her; there was a faint itching at the borders between his old skin and this horrible new invader, but that was all. The new flesh had absolutely no feeling at all. Smiling the ghastly, shocked smile that was coming to be his only expression, he told her that the other day he had lit a cigarette and crushed it out on his own stomach
... slowly.
There had been no pain, none at all

She had put her hands up to her ears and screamed at him to stop.

The dermatologists told Cary they had been a bit offcourse. What do you mean? Cary asked. You guys said
you knew.
You said you were
sure.
Well, they said, these things happen. Rarely, ha-ha,
very
rarely, but
now
we have it licked. All the tests, they said, bore this new conclusion out. A regimen of hipovites - high potency vitamins to those unfamiliar with highpriced doc talk and glandular injections had followed. At the same time this new treatment was getting under way, the first scaly patches had begun to show up on Cary's neck
...
the underside of his chin
...
and finally on his face. That was when the dermatologists finally admitted they were stumped. Only for the moment, of course. No such thing is incurable. Modern medicine
...
dietary regimen
...
and mumble-mumble
...
likewise blah-de-dah
...
Cary would no longer listen to her if she tried to talk to him about the old Gypsy, she told Halleck; once he had actually raised his hand as if to strike her
...
and she had seen the first humping and roughening of the skin in the tender webbing between the thumb and forefinger on his right hand.

'Skin
cancer!' he shouted at her. 'This is
skin
cancer,
skin
cancer,
skin
cancer! Now will you for Christ's sweet sake shut up about that old wog!'

Of course he was the one who was making at least nominal sense, she was the one who was talking in fourteenth-century absurdities
...
and yet she
knew
it had been the doing of the old Gypsy who had stepped out of the crowd at the Raintree flea market and touched Cary's face. She knew it, and in his eyes, even when he raised his hand to her that time, she saw that
he
knew it too.

He had arranged for a leave of absence with Glenn Petrie, who was shocked to hear his old friend, fellow jurist, and golf partner Cary Rossington had skin cancer.

There had followed two weeks, Leda told Halleck, that she could barely bring herself to remember or speak of. Cary had alternately slept like the dead, sometimes upstairs in their room but just as often in the big overstuffed chair ,in his den or with his head in his arms at the kitchen table. He began to drink heavily every afternoon around four. He would sit in the family room, holding the neck of a J. W. Dant whiskey bottle in one roughening, scaly hand, watching first syndicated comedy shows like
Hogan's Heroes
and
The Beverly Hillbillies,
then the local and national news, then syndicated game shows like
The Joker's Wild
and
Family Feud,
then three hours of primetime, followed by more news, followed by movies until two or three in the morning. And all the while he drank whiskey like Pepsi-Cola, straight from the bottle. On some of these nights he would cry. She would come in and observe him weeping while Warner Anderson, imprisoned inside their Sony large-screen TV, cried, 'Let's go to the videotape!' with the enthusiasm of a man inviting all his old girlfriends to go on a cruise to Aruba with him. On still, other nights - mercifully few of them - he would rave like Ahab during the last days of the
Pequod,
shambling and stumbling through the house with the whiskey bottle held in a hand that was not really a hand anymore, shouting that it was skin cancer, did she hear him, it was
fucking skin cancer
and he had gotten it from the fucking UV lamp, and he was going to sue the dirty quacks that had done this to him,
sue them right down
to the motherfucking ground,
litigate the bastards until they didn't have so much as a shit-stained pair of skivvies to stand up in. Sometimes when he was in these moods, he broke things.

'I finally realized that he was having these
...
these fits
...
on the nights after Mrs Marley came in to clean,' she said dully.

'He'd go up into the attic when she was here, you see. If she'd seen him, it would have been all over town in no time at all. It was the nights after she'd been in and he'd been up there in the dark that he felt most like an outcast, I think. Most like a freak.'

'So he's gone to the Mayo Clinic,' Billy said.

'Yes,' she said, and at last she looked at him. Her face was drunk and horrified. 'What's going to become of him, Billy?

What
can
become of him?'

Billy shook his head. He hadn't the slightest idea. Furthermore, he found he had no more urge to contemplate the question than he'd had to contemplate that famous news photograph of the South Vietnamese general shooting the supposed Vietcong collaborator in the head. In a weird way he couldn't quite understand, this was like that.

'He chartered a private plane to fly to Minnesota, did I tell you that? Because he can't bear to have people look at him. Did I tell you that, Billy?'

Billy shook his head again.

'What's going to become of him?'

'I don't know,' Halleck said, thinking:
And just by the way, what's going to become of me, Leda?

'At the end, before he finally gave up and went, both of his hands were claws. His eyes were two . . . two bright little sparks of blue inside these pitted, scaly hollows. His nose . . .' She stood up and wobbled toward him, hitting the corner of the coffee table hard enough with her leg to make it shift - She
doesn't feel it now,
Halleck thought,
but she's going to have
one hell of a painful bruise on her calf tomorrow, and if she's lucky she'll wonder where she got it, or how.
She grasped at his hand. Her eyes were great glittering pools of uncomprehending horror. She spoke with a gruesome, breathy confidentiality that prickled the skin of Billy's neck. Her breath was rank with undigested gin.

'He looks like an alligator now,' she said in what was almost an intimate whisper. 'Yes, that's what he looks like, Billy. Like something that just crawled out of a swamp and put on human clothes. It's like he's turning into an alligator, and I was glad he went.
Glad.
I think if he hadn't gone, I would have gone. Yes. Just packed a bag and
...
and . . .'

She was leaning closer and closer, and Billy stood up suddenly, unable to stand any more of this. Leda Rossington rocked back on her heels and Halleck just barely managed to catch her by the shoulders
...
he had also drunk too much, it seemed. If he had missed her, she might very well have brained herself on the same glass-topped, brass-bound coffee table (Trifles, $587 plus mailing) on which she had struck her leg
...
only instead of waking up with a bruise, she could have waked up dead. Looking into her half-mad eyes, Billy wondered if she might not welcome death.

'Leda, I have to go.'

'Of course,' she said. 'Just came for the straight dope, didn't you, Billy dear?'

'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I'm sorry about everything that's happened. Please believe me.' And, insanely, he heard himself adding: 'When you talk to Cary, give him my best.'

'He's hard to talk to now,' she said remotely. 'It's happening inside his mouth, you see. It's thickening his gums, plating his tongue. I can talk to him, but everything he says to me - all of his replies - come out in grunts.'

He was backing into the hall, backing away from her, wanting to be free of her soft, relentlessly cultured tones, needing to be free of her gruesome, glittering eyes.

'He really is,' she said. 'Turning into an alligator, I mean. I expect that before long they may have to put him in a tank
...
they may have to keep his skin wet.' Tears leaked from her raw eyes, and Billy saw she was dribbling gin from her canted martini glass onto her shoes.

'Good night, Leda,' he whispered.

'Why, Billy? Why did you have to hit the old woman? Why did you have to bring this on Cary and me? Why?'

'Leda -'

'Come back in a couple of weeks,' she said, still advancing as Billy groped madly behind him for the knob of the front door, holding on to his polite smile by a huge act of will. 'Come back and let me have a look at you when you've lost another forty or fifty pounds. I'll laugh ... and laugh ... and laugh.'

He found the knob. He turned it. The cool air struck his flushed and overheated skin like a benison.

'Good night, Leda. I'm sorry . . .'

'Save your sorry!'
she screamed, and threw her martini glass at him. It struck the doorjamb to Billy's right and shattered.

'Why did you have to hit her, you bastard? Why did you have to bring it on all of us? Why? Why?
Why?'

Halleck made it to the corner of Park Lane and Lantern Drive and then collapsed onto the bench inside the bus shelter, shivering as if with ague, his throat and stomach sour with acid indigestion, his head buzzing with gin. He thought: I
hit her and killed her and now I'm losing weight and I can't stop. Cary Rossington conducted the hearing,
he let me
off
without so much as a tap on the wrist, and Cary's in the Mayo Clinic. He's in the Mayo Clinic, and if you
believe his wife, he looks like a fugitive from Maurice Sendak's
Alligators All Around.
Who else was in on it? Who else was
involved in a way that the old Gypsy Might have decided called for revenge?

He thought of the two cops, rousting the Gypsies when they came into town ... when they had presumed to start doing their Gypsy tricks on the town common. One of them had just been a spear-carrier, of course. Just a patrol-car jockey following ...

Following orders.

Whose orders? Why, the police chiefs orders, of course. Duncan Hopley's orders. The Gypsies had been rousted because they had no permit to perform on the common. But of course they would have understood that the message was somewhat broader than that. If you wanted Gypsy folk out, there were plenty of ordinances. Vagrancy. Public nuisance.

Spitting on the sidewalk. You name it.

The Gypsies had made a deal with a fanner out on the west side of town, a sour old man named Arncaster. There was always a farm, always a sour old farmer, and the Gypsies always found him.
Their noses have been trained to smell out guys
like Arncaster,
Billy thought now as he sat on the bench listening to the first droplets of spring rain strike the bus shelter's roof. Simple evolution.
All it takes is two thousand years of being moved along. You talk to a few people; maybe Madame
Azonka does a free reading or two. You sniff for the name of the fellow in town who owns land but owes money, the fellow
who has no great love for the town or for town ordinances, the guy who posts his apple orchards during hunting season out
of pure orneriness - because he'd rather let the deer have his apples than let the hunters have the deer. You sniff for the
name and you always find it, because there's always at least one Arncaster in the richest towns, and sometimes there are two
or three to choose among.