Thinner (36 page)

This story was on the front page of the Bangor
Daily News
Billy Halleck had bought that morning. He now scanned through it one final time, looked at the photograph of the apartment building where his friend had been found, then rolled the paper up and pushed it into a trashbin with the state seal of Connecticut on the side and PUT LITTER IN ITS PLACE

written on the swinging metal door.

'That is what it's all about,' he said.

'What, mister?' It was a little girl of about six with ribbons in her hair and a smear of dried chocolate on her chin. She was walking her dog.

'Nothing,' Billy said, and smiled at her.

'Marcy!' the little girl's mother called anxiously. 'Come over here!'

'Well, 'bye,' Marcy said.

'Bye, hon.' Billy watched her cross back to her mother. the small white poodle dog strutting ahead of her on its leash, toenails clicking. The girl had no more than reached her mother when the scolding began - Billy was sorry for the girl, who had reminded him of Linda when Lin was six or so, but he was also encouraged. It was one thing to have the scales tell him he had put back on eleven pounds; it was another - and better - thing to have someone treat him as a normal person again, even if the someone happened to be a six-year-old girl walking the family dog in a turnpike rest area ... a little girl who probably thought there were lots of people in the world who looked like walking gantry towers. He had spent yesterday in Northeast Harbor, not so much resting as trying to recover a sense of sanity. He would feel it coming ... and then he would look at the pie sitting atop the TV in its cheap aluminum plate and it would slip. Near dusk he had put it in the trunk of his car, and that made it a little better. After dark, when that sense of sanity and his own deep loneliness both seemed strongest, he had found his old battered address book and had called Rhoda Simonson in Westchester County. A moment or two later he had been talking to Linda, who was deliriously glad to hear from him. She had indeed found out about the
res gestae.
The chain of events leading to the discovery, as well as Billy could (or wanted to) follow it was as sordid as it was predictable. Mike Houston had told his wife. His wife had told their oldest daughter, probably while drunk. Linda and the Houston girl had had some sort of kids' fallingout the previous winter, and Samantha Houston had just about broken both legs getting to Linda to tell her that her dear old mom was trying to get her dear old dad committed to a basket-weaving factory.

'What did you say to her?' Billy asked.

'I told her to stick an umbrella up her ass,' Linda said, and Billy laughed until tears squirted out of his eyes ... but part of him felt sad, too. He had been gone not quite three weeks, and his daughter sounded as if she had aged three years. Linda had then gone directly home to ask Heidi if what Samantha Houston had said was true.

'What happened?' Billy asked.

'We had a really bad fight and then afterward I said I wanted to go back to Aunt Rhoda's and she said well, maybe that wasn't such a bad idea.'

Billy paused for a moment, and then said, 'I don't know if you need me to tell you this or not, Lin, but I'm not crazy.'

'Oh, Daddy, I know that,' she said, almost scoldingly.

'And I'm getting better. Putting on weight.'

She squealed so loudly he had to pull the telephone away from his ear.
'Are
you? Are you
really?'

'I am, really.'

'Oh, Daddy, that's
great!
That's ... Are you telling the truth? Are you
really?'

'Scout's honor,' he said, grinning.

'When are you going home?' she asked.

And Billy, who expected to leave Northeast Harbor tomorrow morning and to walk in his own front door not much later than ten o'clock tomorrow night, answered: 'It'll still be a week or so, hon. I want to put on some more weight first. I still look pretty gross.'

'Oh,' Linda said, sounding deflated. 'Oh, okay.'

'But when I come I'll call you in time for you to get there at least six hours before me,' he said. 'You can make another lasagna, like when we came back from Mohonk, and fatten me up some more.'

'Bitchin'!'
she said, laughing, and then, immediately: 'Whoops. Sorry, Daddy.'

'Forgiven,' he said. 'In the meantime, you stay right there at Rhoda's, kitten. I don't want any more yelling between you and Mom.'

'I don't want to go back until you're there anyway,' she said, and he heard bedrock in her voice. Had Heidi sensed that adult bedrock in Linda? He suspected she had - it accounted for some of her desperation on the phone last night. He told Linda he loved her and rang off. Sleep came easier that second night, but the dreams were bad. In one of them he heard Ginelli in the trunk of his car, screaming to be let out. But when he opened the trunk it wasn't Ginelli but a bloody naked boy-child with the ageless eyes of Taduz Lemke and a gold hoop in one earlobe. The boy-child held gore-stained hands out to Billy. It grinned, and its teeth were silver needles.

'Purpurfargade ansiktet,'
it said in a whining, inhuman voice, and Billy had awakened, trembling, in the cold gray Atlantic-seacoast dawn.

He checked out twenty minutes later and had headed south again. He stopped at a quarter of eight for a huge country breakfast and then could eat almost none of it when he opened the newspaper he had bought in the dispenser out front.
Didn't interfere with my lunch, though,
he thought now as he walked back to the rental car.
Because putting on weight
again is
also
what it's really all about.

The pie sat on the seat beside him, pulsing, warm. He spared it a glance and then keyed the engine and backed out of the slanted parking slot. He realized that he would be home in less than an hour, and felt a strange, unpleasant emotion. He had gone twenty miles before he realized what it was: excitement.

Chapter Twenty-seven

Gypsy Pie

He parked the rental car in the driveway behind his own Buick, grabbed the Kluge bag which had been his only luggage, and started across the lawn. The white house with its bright green shutters, always a symbol of comfort and goodness and security to him, now looked strange - so strange it was really almost alien.

The white man from town lived there,
he thought,
but I'm not sure he's come home, after all - this fellow crossing the
lawn feels more like a Gypsy. A very thin Gypsy.

The front door, flanked by two graceful electric flambeaux, opened, and Heidi came out on the front stoop. She was wearing a red skirt and a sleeveless white blouse Billy couldn't remember ever having seen before. She had also gotten her hair cut very short, and for one shocked moment he thought she wasn't Heidi at all but a stranger who looked a little like her. She looked at him, face too white, eyes too dark, lips trembling. 'Billy?'

'I am,' he said, and stopped where he was.

They stood and looked at each other, Heidi with a species of wretched hope in her face, Billy with what felt like nothing at all in his - yet there must have been, because after a moment she burst out, 'For Christ's sake, Billy, don't look at me that way! I can't bear it!'

He felt a smile surface on his face - inside it felt like something dead floating to the top of a still lake, but it must have looked all right because Heidi answered it with a tentative, trembling smile of her own. Tears began to spill down her cheeks.

Oh, but you always did cry easy, Heidi,
he thought.

She started down the steps. Billy dropped the Kluge bag and walked toward her, feeling the dead smile on his face.

'What's to eat?' he asked. 'I'm starved.'

She made him a giant meal - steak, salad, a baked potato almost as big as a torpedo, fresh green beans, blueberries in cream for dessert. Billy ate all of it. Although she never came right out and said it, every movement, every gesture, and every look she gave him conveyed the same message:
Give me a second chance, Billy - please give me a second chance.
In a way, he thought this was extremely funny - funny in a way the old Gypsy would have appreciated. She had swung from refusing to accept any culpability to accepting all of it.

And little by little, as midnight approached, he sensed something else in her gestures and movements: relief. She felt that she had been forgiven. That was very fine with Billy, because Heidi thinking she was forgiven was
also
what it was all about.

She sat across from him, watching him eat, occasionally touching his wasted face, and smoking one Vantage 100 after another as he talked. He told her about how he had chased the Gypsies up the coast; about getting the photographs from Kirk Penschley; of finally catching up to the Gypsies in Bar Harbor.

At that point the truth and Billy Halleck parted company.

The dramatic confrontation he had both hoped for and dreaded hadn't gone at all as he had expected, he told Heidi. To begin with, the old man had laughed at him. They had all laughed. 'If I could have cursed you, you would be under the earth now,' the old Gypsy told him. 'You think we are magic - all you white men from town think we are magic. If we were magic, would we be driving around in old cars and vans with mufflers held up with baling wire? If we were magic, would we be sleeping in fields? This is no magic show, white man from town -this is nothing but a traveling carny. We do business with rubes who have money burning holes in their pockets, and then we move on. Now, get out of here before I put some of these young men on
you. They
know a curse - it's called the Curse of the Brass Knuckles.'

'Is that what he really called you? White man from town?'

He smiled at her. 'Yes. That's really what he called me.'

He told Heidi that he had gone back to his motel room and simply stayed there for the next two days, too deeply depressed to do more than pick at his food. On the third day - three days ago - he got onto the bathroom scales and saw that he had gained three pounds in spite of how little he had eaten.

'But when I thought it over, I saw that that was no stranger than eating everything on the table and finding out I'd
lost
three pounds,' he said. 'And having
that
idea was what finally got me out of the mental rut I'd been in. I spent another day in that motel room doing some of the hardest thinking of my life. I started to realize they could have been right at the Glassman Clinic after all. Even Michael Houston could have been at least partly right, as much as I dislike the little prick.'

'Billy . . .' She touched his arm.

'Never mind,' he said. 'I'm not going to sock him when I see him.'
Might offer him a piece of pie, though,
Billy thought, and laughed.

'Share the joke?' She gave him a puzzled little smile.

'It's nothing,' he said. 'Anyway, the problem was that Houston, those guys at the Glassman Clinic - even you, Heidi -were trying to rani it down my throat. Trying to force-feed me the truth. I just had to think it all out for myself. Simple guilt reaction, plus - I suppose - a combination of paranoid delusions and willful selfdeception. But in the end, Heidi, I was partly right, too. Maybe for all the wrong reasons, but I was partly right I said I had to see him again, and that was what turned the trick. Just not in the way I had expected. He was smaller than I remembered, he was wearing a cheap Timex watch, and he had a Brooklyn accent. He said "coise " for "curse." It was that more than anything that broke through the delusion, I think it was like hearing Tony Curtis say "Yonduh is da palace of my faddah" in that movie about the Arabian Empire. So I picked up the telephone and -'

In the parlor, the clock on the mantel began bonging musically.

'It's midnight,' he said. 'Let's go to bed. I'll help you stack the dishes in the sink.'

'No, I can do it,' she said, and then slipped her arms around him. 'I'm
glad you
came home, Billy. Go on upstairs. You must be exhausted.'

'I'm okay,' he said. 'I'll just . . .'

He suddenly snapped his fingers with the air of a man who has just remembered something.

'Almost forgot,' he said. 'I left something in the car.'

'What is it? Can't it wait until the morning?'

'Yes, but I ought to bring it in.' He smiled at her. 'It's for you.'

He went out, his heart thudding heavily in his chest. He dropped the car keys on the driveway, then thumped his head on the side of the car in his haste to pick them up. His hands were trembling so badly that he could not at first stick the key into the trunk slot.

What if it's still pulsing up and down like that?
his mind yammered.
Christ almighty, she'll run screaming when she sees
it!

He opened the trunk and when he saw nothing inside but the jack and the spare, he almost screamed himself. Then he remembered - it was on the passenger side of the front seat. He slammed the trunk down and went around in a hurry. The pie was there, and the crust was perfectly still - as he had known, really, that it would be. His hands abruptly stopped trembling.

Heidi was standing on the porch again, watching him. He crossed back to her and put the pie into her hands. He was still smiling.
I'm delivering the goods,
he thought. And delivering the goods was yet another of the many things it was all about: His smile widened.

'Voila,' he said.

'Wow!' She bent down close to the pie and sniffed. 'Strawberry pie ... my favorite!'

'I know,' Billy said, smiling.

'And still warm! Thank you!'

'I pulled off the turnpike in Stratford to get gas and the Ladies' Aid or something was having a bake sale on the lawn of the church that was right there,' he said. 'And I thought ... you know ... if you came to the door with a rolling pin or something, I'd have a peace offering.'

'Oh, Billy . . .' She was starting to cry again. She gave him an impulsive one-armed hug, holding the pie balanced on the tented fingers of her other hand the way a waiter balances a tray. As she kissed him the pie tilted. Billy felt his heart tilt in his chest and fall crazily out of rhythm.