Thinner (6 page)

A second Fairview police cruiser pulled up, its flashers turning lazily. Oshkosh glanced at it, then glanced around at the Fairview town common with its expensive safetytested playground equipment and its band shell. Streamers of crepe still fluttered gaily from some of the budding trees; leftovers from the Easter-egg hunt the Sunday before. Oshkosh went back to his own car, which was at the head of the line. As its motor roared into life, all the other motors did likewise. Most were loud and choppy; Halleck heard a lot of missing pistons and saw a lot of blue exhaust. Oshkosh's station wagon pulled out, bellowing and farting. The others fell into line, heedless of the local traffic bound past the common and toward downtown.

'They've all got their lights on!' Linda exclaimed. 'Gorry, it's like a funeral!'

'There's two Ring-Dings left,' Heidi said briskly. 'Have one.'

'I don't want one. I'm full Daddy, are those people -?'

'You'll never have a thirty-eight-inch bust if you don't eat,' Heidi told her.

'I've decided I don't want a thirty-eight-inch bust,' Linda said, doing one of her Great Lady bits. They always knocked Halleck out. 'Asses are in these days.'

'Linda Joan
Halleck!'

'I'll have a Ring-Ding,' Halleck said.

Heidi looked at him briefly, coolly - Oh
... is that what you'll have? - and
then tossed it to him. She lit a Vantage 100. Billy ended up eating both of the Ring-Dings. Heidi smoked half a pack of cigarettes before the band concert was over, and ignored Billy's clumsy efforts to cheer her up. But she warmed up on the way home and the Gypsies were forgotten. At least, until that night.

When he went into Linda's room to kiss her good night, she asked him: 'Were the police running those guys out of town, Dad?'

Billy remembered looking at her carefully, feeling both annoyed and absurdly flattered by her question. She went to Heidi when she wanted to know how many calories were in a piece of German chocolate cake; she came to Billy for harder truths, and he sometimes felt this was not fair.

He sat on her bed, thinking that she was still very young and very sure she was on that side of the line where the good guys unquestionably stood. She could be hurt. A lie could avoid that hurt. But lies about the sort of thing that had happened that day on the Fairview common had a way of coming back to haunt the parents - Billy could very clearly remember his father telling him that masturbation would make him stutter. His father had been a good man in almost all ways, but Billy had never forgiven him that lie. Yet Linda had already run him a hard course - they had been through gays, oral sex, venereal disease, and the possibility that there was no God. It had taken having a child to teach him just how tiring honesty could be. Suddenly he thought of Ginelli. What would Ginelli tell his daughter if he was here now? You
got to keep the
undesirables out of town, sweetness. Because that is really what it's all about - just keeping the undesirables out of town.
But that was more truth than he could muster.

'Yes, I suppose they were. They were Gypsies, hon. Vagabonds.'

'Mom said they were crooks.'

'A lot of them run crooked games and tell fake fortunes. When they come to a town like Fairview, the police ask them to move on. Usually they put up a show of being mad, but they really don't mind.'

Bang! A
little flag went up inside his head. Lie # 1.

'They hand out posters or fliers saying where they'll be - usually they make a cash deal with a farmer or with someone who owns a field outside of town. After a few days they leave.'

'Why do they come at all? What do they do?'

'Well ... there are always people who want their fortunes read. And there are games of chance. Gambling. Usually they
are
crooked.'

Or maybe a fast, exotic lay,
Halleck thought. He saw the kick pleat of the girl's skirt shift again as she stepped into the van. How
would she move?
His mind answered:
Like the ocean getting ready to storm, that's how.

'Do people buy drugs from them?'

These days you don't need to buy drugs from Gypsies, dear; you can buy those in the schoolyard.

'Hashish, maybe,' he said, 'or opium.'

He had come to this part of Connecticut as a teenager, and had been here ever since - in Fairview and neighboring Northport. He hadn't seen any Gypsies in almost twentyfive years .. not since he had been a kid growing up in North Carolina, when he had lost five dollars - an allowance saved up carefully over almost three months to buy his mother a birthday present - playing the wheel of fortune. They weren't supposed to allow anyone under sixteen to play, but of course if you had the coin or the long green, you could step up and put it down. Some things never changed, he reckoned, and chief among them was the old adage that when money talks,
nobody
walks. If asked before today, he would have shrugged and guessed that there were no more traveling Gypsy caravans. But of course the wandering breed never died out. They came in rootless and left the same way, human tumbleweeds who cut whatever deals they could and then blew out of town with dollars in their greasy wallets that had been earned on the time clocks they themselves spurned. They survived. Hitler had tried to exterminate them along with the Jews and the homosexuals, but they would outlive a thousand Hitlers, he supposed.

'I thought the common was public property,' Linda said. 'That's what we learned in school.'

'Well, in a way it is,' Halleck said. - '"Common" means commonly owned by the townspeople. The taxpayers.'

Bong!
Lie #2. Taxation had nothing at all to do with common land in New England, ownership of or use of. See
Richards
vs. Jerram, New Hampshire,
or
Baker vs. Olins
(that one went back to 1835), or
...

'The taxpayers.' she said in a musing voice.

'You need a permit to use the common.'

Clang!
Lie #3. That idea had been overturned in 1931, when a bunch of poor potato farmers set up a Hooverville in the heart of Lewiston, Maine. The city had appealed to Roosevelt's Supreme Court and hadn't even gotten a hearing. That was because the Hooverites had picked Pettingill Park to camp in, and Pettingill Park happened to be common land.

'Like when the Shrine Circus comes,' he amplified.

'Why didn't the Gypsies get a permit, Dad?' She sounded sleepy now. Thank God.

'Well, maybe they forgot.'

Not a snowball's chance in hell, Lin. Not in Fairview. Not when you see the common from Lantern Drive and the country
club, not when that view is part of what you paid for, along with the private schools which teach computer programming on
banks of brand-new Apples and TRS-80's, and the relatively clean air, and the quiet at night. The Shrine Circus is okay. The
Easter-egg hunt is even better. But Gypsies? Here's your hat, what's your hurry. We know dirt when we see it. Not that we
touch it, Christ, no! We have maids and housekeepers to get rid of dirt in our houses. When it shows up on the town
common, we've got Hopley.

But those truths are not for a girl in junior high, Halleck thought. Those are truths that you learn in high school and in college. Maybe you get it from your sorority sisters, or maybe it just comes, like a shortwave transmission from outer space.
Not our kind, dear. Stay away.

'Good night, Daddy.'

'Good night, Lin.'

He had kissed her again, and left.

Rain, driven by a sudden strong gust of wind, slatted against his study window, and Halleck awoke as if from a doze.
Not
our kind, dear,
he thought again, and actually laughed in the silence. The sound made him afraid, because only loonies laughed in an empty room. Loonies did that all the time; it was what made them loony.
Not our kind.

If he had never believed it before, he believed it now.

Now that he was thinner.

Halleck watched as Houston's nurse drew one-two-three ampoules of blood from his left arm and put them into a earner like eggs in a carton. Earlier, Houston had given him three stool cards and told him to mail them in. Halleck pocketed them glumly and then bent over for the proctological, dreading the humiliation of it, as always, more than the minor discomfort. That feeling of being invaded. Fullness.

'Relax,' Houston said, snapping on the thin rubber glove. 'As long as you can't feel
both
of my hands on your shoulders, you're all right.'

He laughed heartily.

Halleck closed his eyes.

Houston saw him two days later - he had, he said, seen to it that his bloodwork was given priority. Halleck sat down in the denlike room (pictures of clipper ships on the walls, deep leather chairs, deep-pile gray rug) where Houston did his consulting. His heart was hammering hard, and he felt droplets of cold sweat nestled at each temple. I'm not
going to cry in
front of a man that tells nigger jokes,
he told himself with fierce grimness, and not for the first time. If
I have to cry, I'll drive
out of town and park the car and do it.

'Everything looks fine,' Houston said mildly.

Halleck blinked. The fear had by now rooted deep enough so that he was positive he had misheard Houston. 'What?'

'Everything looks fine,' Houston repeated. 'We can do some more tests if you want, Billy, but I don't see the point right now. Your blood looks better than it has at your last two physicals, as a matter of fact. Cholesterol is down, same with the triglycerides. You've lost some more weight - the nurse got you at two-seventeen this morning - but what can I say? You're still almost thirty pounds over your optimum weight, and I don't want you to lose sight of that, but . He grinned. 'I'd sure like to know your secret.'

'I don't have one,' Halleck said. He felt both confused and tremendously relieved - the way he had felt on a couple of occasions in college when he had passed tests for which he was unprepared.

'We'll hold judgment in abeyance until we get the results on your Hayman-Reichling Series.'

'My what?'

'The shit cards,' Houston said, and then laughed heartily. 'Something might show up there, but really, Billy, the lab ran twenty-three different tests on your blood, and they all look good. That's persuasive.'

Halleck let out a long, shaky sigh. 'I was scared,' he said.

'It's the people who aren't who die young,' Houston replied. He opened his desk drawer and took out a bottle with a small spoon dangling from the cap by a chain. The spoon's handle, Halleck saw, was in the shape of the Statue of Liberty.

'Tootsweet?'

Halleck shook his head. He was content, however, to sit where he was, with his hands faced together on his belly - on his
diminished
belly - and watch as Fairview's most successful family practitioner snorted coke first up one nostril and then up the other. He put the little bottle back in his desk and took out another bottle and package of Q-tips. He dipped a Q-tip in the bottle and then rammed it up his nose.

'Distilled water,' he said. 'Got to protect the sinuses.'

And he tipped Halleck a wink.

He's probably treated babies for pneumonia with that shit running around in his head,
Halleck thought, but the thought had no real power. Right now he couldn't help liking Houston a little, because Houston had given him good news. Right now all he wanted in the world was to sit here with his hands laced across his diminished belly and explore the depth of his shaky relief, to try it out like a new bicycle, or test-drive it like a new car. It occurred to him that when he walked out of Houston's office he was probably going to feel almost newborn. A director filming the scene might well want to put
Thus Spake
Zarathustra
on the soundtrack. This thought made Halleck first grin, hen laugh aloud.

'Share the funny,' Houston said. 'In this sad world we need all the funnies we can get, Billy-boy.' He sniffed loudly and then lubricated his nostrils with a fresh Q-tip.

'Nothing,' Halleck said. 'It's just
...
I was scared, you know. I was already dealing with the big C. Trying to.'

'Well, you may have to, 'Houston said, 'but not this year. I don't need to see the lab results on the Hayman-Reichling cards to tell you that. Cancer's got a look. At least when it's already gobbled up thirty pounds, it does.'

'But I've been eating as much as ever. I told Heidi I'd been exercising more, and I have, a little, but she said you couldn't lose thirty pounds just by beefing up your exercise regimen. She said you'd just make hard fat.'

'That's not true at all. The most recent tests have showed exercise is much more important than diet. But for a guy who is

-who was - as overweight as you were, she's got a point. You take a fatty who radically increases his level of exercise, and what the guy usually gets is the booby prize - a good solid class-two thrombosis. Not enough to kill you, just enough to make sure you're never going to walk around all eighteen holes again or ride the big roller coaster at Seven Flags Over Georgia.'

Billy thought the cocaine was making Houston talkative.

'You don't understand it,' he said. 'I don't understand it, either. But in this business I see a lot of things I don't understand. A friend of mine who's a neurosurgeon in the city called me in to look at some extraordinary cranial X rays about three years ago. A male student at George Washington University came in to see him because he was having blinding headaches. They sounded like typical migraines to my colleague - the kid fit the personality type to a tee - but you don't want to screw around with that sort of thing because headaches like that are symptomatic of cranial brain tumors even if the patient isn't having phantom olfactory referents -smells like shit, or rotten fruit, or old popcorn, or whatever. So my buddy took a full X-ray series, gave the kid an EEG, sent him to the hospital to have a cerebral axial tomography. Know what they found out?'

Halleck shook his head.

'They found out that the kid, who had stood third in his high-school class and who had been on the dean's list every semester at George Washington University, had almost no brain at all. There was a single twist of cortical tissue running up through the center of his skull - on the X rays my colleague showed me, it looked for all the world like a macrame drape-pull