Thinner (37 page)

'Careful!' he gasped, and grabbed the pie just as it started to slide.

'God, I'm so clumsy,' she said, laughing and wiping her eyes with the corner of the apron she had put on. 'You bring me my favorite kind of pie and I almost drop it all over your sh-sh . . .' She broke down completely, leaning against his chest, sobbing. He stroked her new short hair with one hand, holding the pie on the palm of the other, prudently away from her body should she make any sudden moves.

'Billy, I'm so glad you're home,' she wept. 'And you promise you don't hate me for what I did? You promise?'

'I promise,' he said gently, stroking her hair.
She's right,
he thought.
It's still warm.
'Let's go inside, huh?'

In the kitchen she put the pie on the counter and went back to the sink.

'Aren't you going to have a piece?' Billy asked.

'Maybe when I finish these,' she said. 'You have one if you like.'

'After the dinner I put away?' he asked, and laughed.

'You're going to need all the calories you can pack in for a while.'

'This is just a case of no room in the inn,' he said. 'Do you want me to dry those for you?'

'I want you to go up and get into bed,' she told him. 'I'll be up right behind you.'

'All right.'

He went up without looking back, knowing she would be more likely to cut herself a slice of the pie if he wasn't there. But she probably wouldn't, not tonight. Tonight she would want to go to bed with him - might even want to make love with him. But he thought he knew how to discourage that. He would just go to bed naked. When she saw him ... And as far as the pie went ...

"'Fiddle-de-dee," said Scarlett, "I'll eat my pie tomorrow. Tomorrow is another day."' He laughed at the sound of his own dismal voice. He was in the bathroom by then, standing on the scales. He looked up into the mirror and in it he saw Ginelli's eyes.

The scales said he was now all the way up to 131 again, but he felt no happiness. He felt nothing at all - except tired. He was incredibly tired. He went down the hallway that now seemed so queer and unfamiliar and into the bedroom. He tripped over something in the dark and almost fell. She had changed some of the furniture around. Cut her hair, got a new blouse, rearranged the positions of the chair and the smaller of the two bedroom bureaus - but that was only the beginning of the strangeness that was now here. It had grown somehow while he was away, as if Heidi had been cursed after all, but in a much more subtle way. Was that really such a foolish idea? Billy didn't think so. Linda had sensed the strangeness and had fled from it.

Slowly he began to undress.

He lay in bed waiting for her to come up, and instead he heard noises which, although faint, were familiar enough to tell him a story. Squeak of an upper cupboard door - the one on the left, the one where they kept the dessert plates - opening. Rattle of a drawer; subtle clink of kitchen implements as she selected a knife. Billy stared into the darkness, heart thumping.

Sound of her footsteps crossing the kitchen again - she was going to the counter where she had set the pie down. He heard the board in the middle of the kitchen floor creak when she passed over it, as it had been doing for years.
What will it do to her? Made me thin. Turned Cary into something like an animal that after it was dead you'd make a
pair of shoes out of it. Turned Hopley into a human pizza. What will it do to her?

The board in the middle of the floor creaked again as

she went back across the kitchen - he could see her, the plate held in her right hand, her cigarettes and matches in her left. He could see the wedge of pie. The strawberries, the pool of dark red juice.

He listened for the faint squeak of the hinges on the dining-room door, but it didn't come. That did not really surprise him. She was standing by the counter, looking out into the side yard and eating her pie in quick, economical Heidi-bites. An old habit. He could almost hear the fork scraping the plate.

He realized he was floating away.

Going to sleep? No - impossible. Impossible for anyone to fall asleep during the commission of murder.
But he was. He was listening for the floorboard in the middle of the kitchen floor again - he would hear it when she crossed to the sink. Running water as she rinsed her plate. The sound of her circling through all the rooms, setting thermostats and turning off lights and checking the burglar-alarm lights beside the doors - all the rituals of white folks from town.

He was lying in bed listening for the floorboard, and then he was sitting at his desk in his study in the town of Big Jubilee, Arizona, where he had been practicing law for the last six years. It was as simple as that. He was living there with his daughter, and practicing enough of the sort of law he called 'corporation shit' to keep food on the table, the rest of it was Legal Aid Society stuff. They lived simple lives. The old days - two-car garage, a groundsman three days a week, property taxes of twenty-five thousand dollars a year -were long gone. He didn't miss them, and he didn't believe Lin did either. He practiced what law he did practice in town., or sometimes in Yuma or Phoenix, but that was seldom enough and they lived far enough out of Jube to get a sense of the land around them. Linda would be going to college next year, and then he might move back in -but not, he had told her, unless the emptiness started getting to him, and he didn't think it would. They had made a good life for themselves, and that was fine, that was just as fine as paint, because making a good life for you and yours was what it was all about.

There was a knock on his study door. He pushed back from his desk and turned around and Linda was standing there and Linda's nose was gone. No; not gone. It was in her right hand instead of on her face. Blood poured from the dark hole over her mouth.

'I don't understand,
Daddy,' she said in a nasal, foghorning voice. 'It just
fell
off.'

He awoke with a start, beating at the air with his arms, trying to beat this vision away. Beside him, Heidi grunted in her sleep, turned over on her left side, and pulled the covers up over her head.

Little by little reality flowed back into him. He was back in Fairview. Bright early-morning sunshine fell through the windows. He looked across the room and saw by the digital clock on the dresser that it was 6:25. There were six red roses in a vase beside the clock.

He got out of bed, crossed the room, pulled his robe off its hook, and went down to the bathroom. He turned on the shower and hung his robe up on the back of the door, noticing that Heidi had gotten a new robe as well as a new blouse and haircut - a pretty blue one.

He stepped on the scales. He had gained another pound. He got into the shower and washed off with a thoroughness that was almost compulsive, soaping every part of his body, rinsing, and then soaping again. I'm
going
to watch
my weight, he
promised himself. After
she's gone I'm
really
going
to watch
my weight. I'm never going to get fat the
way I was again. He toweled himself off. He put on his robe and found himself standing by the closed door and looking fixedly at Heidi's new blue robe. He reached out one hand and caught a fold of nylon between his fingers. He rubbed its slickness. The robe looked new, but it also looked familiar.

She's just
gone
out and bought a robe that looks like one she owned sometime in the past,
he thought.
Human creativity
only goes so
far,
chumly - in the end, we
all
start to repeat ourselves. In the end, we're all obsessives.
Houston spoke up in his mind: It's
the people who aren't scared who die young.
Heidi:
For Christ's sake, Billy,
don't
look
at
me
that way! I can't
bear it!

Leda:
He looks like
an alligator now.
like something
that crawled out of a swamp
and put
on human clothes. Hopley: You hang around
thinking maybe this once, maybe
just
this once, there's going
to
be a
little justice
... an instant
of justice to make up
for
a
lifetime
of
crap.

Billy fingered the blue nylon and a terrible idea began to slide up into his mind. He remembered his dream. Linda at his study door. The bleeding hole in her face. This robe
...
it didn't look familiar because Heidi had once owned one that looked like it. It looked familiar because Linda owned one that looked like it right
now.
He turned around and opened a drawer to the right of the sink. Here was a brush with LINDA written along the red plastic handle.

Black hairs clung to the bristles.

Like a man in a dream he walked down the hall to her room.

Drift trade is always willing
to arrange these things, my
friend ...
that's
one of the things drift trade is for.
An asshole, William,
is a
guy who doesn't believe
what
he's seeing.
Billy Halleck pushed open the door at the end of the hallway and saw his daughter, Linda, asleep in her bed, one arm across her face. Her old teddy bear, Amos, was in the crook of her other arm.

No. Oh, no. No, no.

He hung on to the sides of the door, swaying dreamily back and forth. Whatever else he was, he was no asshole, because he saw everything: her gray suede bomber jacket hung over the back of her chair, the one Samsonite suitcase, open, spilling out a collection of jeans and shorts and blouses and underthings. He saw the Greyhound tag on the handle. And he saw more. He saw the roses beside the clock in his and Heidi's bedroom. The roses hadn't been there when he went to bed last night. No

...
Linda had brought the roses. As a peace offering. She had come home early to make up with her mother before Billy came home.

The old Gypsy with the rotting nose: No
blame, you
say. You tell
yourself and
tell
yourself and
tell yourself. But
there is
no poosh, white man from town. Everybody pays, even for things they didn't do. No poosh.
He turned then and ran for the stairs. Terror had made him double-jointed and he shambled like a sailor at sea.
No, not Linda!
his mind screamed.
Not Linda! God, please, not Linda!

Everybody pays, white man from - town - even for things they didn't do. Because that's what it's
really all
about.
What remained of the pie stood on the counter, neatly covered with Saran Wrap. Fully a quarter of it was gone. He looked at the kitchen table and saw Linda's purse there - a line of rockstar buttons had been pinned to the strap: Bruce Springsteen, John Cougar Mellancamp, Pat Benatar, Lionel Ritchie, Sting, Michael Jackson. He went to the sink.

Two plates.

Two forks.

They sat here and ate pie and made up,
he thought.
When? Right after I went to sleep? Must have been.
He heard the old Gypsy laughing and his knees buckled. He had to clutch at the counter to keep from actually falling over.

When he had some strength, he turned and crossed the kitchen, hearing the board in the middle squeak under his feet as he crossed over it.

The pie was pulsing again - up and down, up and down. Its obscene, persistent warmth had fogged the Saran Wrap. He could hear a faint squelching sound.

He opened the overhead cupboard and got himself a dessert plate, opened the drawer beneath, and got out a knife and fork.

'Why not?' he whispered, and pulled the wrapping off the pie. Now it was still again. Now it was just a strawberry pie that looked extremely tempting in spite of the earliness of the hour.

And as Heidi herself had said, he still needed all the calories he could get.

'Eat hearty,' Billy Halleck whispered in the sunny silence of the kitchen, and cut himself a piece of Gypsy pie.