Thinner Read online

  Billy stared at the picture as if hypnotized. There was something almost familiar about the old man, some connection his mind wasn't quite making. Then it came to him. Taduz Lemke reminded him of those old men in the Dannon yogurt commercials, the ones from Russian Georgia who smoked unfiltered cigarettes, drank popskull vodka, and lived to such staggering ages as a hundred and thirty, a hundred and fifty, a hundred and seventy. And then a line of a Jerry Jeff Walker song occurred to him, the one about Mr Bojangles: He looked at me to be the eyes of age ...

  Yes. That was what he saw in the face of Taduz Lemke - he was the very eyes of age. In those eyes Billy saw a deep knowledge that made all the twentieth century a shadow, and he trembled.

  That night when he stepped on the scales in the bathroom adjoining his wedge-shaped bedroom, he was down to 137.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The Search

  Old Orchard Beach, the waitress had said. That's the honkiest honky-tonk of them all. The desk clerk agreed.

  So did the girl in the tourist-information booth four .miles down the highway, although she refused to put it in such blatantly pejorative terms. Billy turned his rental car toward Old Orchard Beach, which was about eighteen miles south.

  Traffic slowed to a bumper-to-bumper crawl still a mile from the beach. Most of the vehicles in this parade bore Canadian license plates. A lot of them were thyroidal rec-ves which looked big enough to transport entire football teams. Most of the people Billy saw, both in the crawling traffic and walking along the sides of the road, seemed dressed in the least the law would allow and sometimes less - there were a lot of string bikinis, a lot of ball-hugger swim trunks, a lot of oiled flesh on display.

  Billy was dressed in blue jeans, an open-collared white shirt, and a sport coat. He sat behind the wheel of his car and sweltered even with the air conditioning on full. But he hadn't forgotten the way the room-service kid had looked at him. This was as undressed as he was going to get, even if he finished the day with his sneakers full of sweat puddles.

  The crawling traffic crossed salt marshes, passed two dozen lobster-and-clam shacks, and then wound through an area of summer houses that were crammed together hip to hip and shoulder to shoulder. Similarly undressed people sat on lawn furniture before most of these houses, eating, reading paperback novels, or simply watching the endless flow of traffic.

  Christ, Billy thought, how do they stand the stink of the exhaust? It occurred to him that perhaps they liked it, that perhaps that was why they were sitting here instead of on the beach, that it reminded them of home.

  Houses gave way to motels with signs reading ON PARLE FRANCAIS ICI and CANADIAN CURRENCY AT PAR AFTER $250

  and WE FEATURE MIDNITE BLUE ON CABLE and 3 MINUTES TO OCEAN BONJOUR A NOS AMIS DE LA BELLE PROVINCE!

  The motels gave way to a main drag which seemed to feature mostly cut-rate camera stores, souvenir shops, the dirty-book emporiums. Kids in cut-offs and tank tops idled up and down, some holding hands, some staring into dirty windows with a blank lack of interest, some riding on skateboards and weaving their way through knots of pedestrians with bored elan. To Billy Halleck's fascinated, dismayed eyes, everyone seemed overweight and everyone - even the skateboard kids - seemed to be eating something: a slice of pizza here, a Chipwich there, a bag of Doritos, a bag of popcorn, a cone of cotton candy. He saw a fat man in an untucked white shirt, baggy green Bermudas, and thong sandals gobbling a foot-long dog. A string of something that was either onion or sauerkraut hung from his chin. He held two more dogs between the pudgy finger of his left hand, and to Billy he looked like a stage magician displaying red rubber balls before making them disappear.

  The midway came next. A roller coaster loomed against the sky. A giant replica of a Viking boat swung back and forth in steepening semicircles while the riders strapped inside shrieked. Bells bonged and lights flashed in an arcade to Billy's left; to his right, teenagers in striped muscle shirts drove dodge-'em cars into each other. Just beyond the arcade, a young man and a young woman were kissing. Her arms were locked around his neck. One of his hands cupped her buttocks; the other held a can of Budweiser.

  Yeah, Billy thought. Yeah, this is the place. Got to be.

  He parked his car in a baking macadam lot, paid the attendant seventeen dollars for a half-day stub, transferred his wallet from his hip pocket to the inside pocket of his sport coat, and started hunting.

  At first he thought that the weight loss had perhaps speeded up. Everyone was looking at him. The rational part of his mind quickly assured him that it was just because of his clothes, not the way he looked inside his clothes.

  People would stare at you the same way if you showed up on this boardwalk wearing a swimsuit and a T-shirt in October, Billy. Take it easy. You're just something to look at, and down here there's plenty to look at.

  And that was certainly true. Billy saw a fat woman in a black bikini, her deeply tanned skin gleaming with oil. Her gut was prodigal, the flex of the long muscles in her thighs nearly mythic, and strangely exciting. She moved toward the wide sweep of white beach like an ocean liner, her buttocks flexing in wavelike undulations. He saw a grotesquely fat poodle dog, its curls summer-sheared, its tongue more gray than pink - hanging out listlessly, sitting in the shade of a pizza shack. He saw two fistfights. He saw a huge gull with mottled gray wings and dead black eyes swoop down and snatch a greasy doughboy from the hand of an infant in a stroller.

  Beyond all this was the bone-white crescent of Old Orchard beach, its whiteness now almost completely obscured by reclining sunbathers at just past noon on an early-summer day. But both the beach and the Atlantic beyond it seemed somehow reduced and cheapened by the erotic pulses and pauses of the midway - its snarls of people with food drying on their hands and lips and cheeks, the cry of the hucksters ('Guess your weight!' Billy heard from somewhere to his left: 'If I miss by more than five pounds, you win the dollaya choice!'), the thin screeches from the rides, the raucous rock music spilling out of the bars.

  Billy suddenly began to feel decidedly unreal - outside of himself, as if he were having one of those Fate magazine instances of astral projection. Names - Heidi, Penschley, Linda, Houston - seemed suddenly to ring false and tinny, like names made up on the spur of the moment for a bad story. He had a feeling that he could look behind things and see the lights, the cameras, the key grips, and some unimaginable 'real world.' The smell of the sea seemed overwhelmed by a smell of rotten food and salt. Sounds became distant, as if floating down a very long hallway.

  Astral projection, my ass, a dim voice pronounced. You're getting ready to have sunstroke, my friend.

  That's ridiculous. I never had a sunstroke in my life.

  Well, I guess when you lose a hundred and twenty pounds, it really fucks up your thermostat. Now are you going to get out of the sun or are you going to wind up in an emergency room somewhere giving your Blue Cross and Blue Shield number?

  'Okay, you talked me into it,' Billy mumbled, and a kid who was passing by and dumping a box of Reese's Pieces into his mouth turned and gave him a sharp look.

  There was a bar up ahead called The Seven Seas. There were two signs taped to the door. ICY COOL, read one. TERMINAL HAPPY HOUR, read the other. Billy went in.

  The Seven Seas was not only icy cool, it was blessedly quiet. A sign on the juke read SOME ASSHOLE KICKED ME LAST NIGHT AND NOW I AM OUT OF ORDER. Below this was a French translation of the same sentiment. But Billy thought from the aged look of the sign and the dust on the juke that the 'last night' in question might have been a good many years ago. There were a few patrons in the bar, mostly older men who were dressed much as Billy himself was dressed - as if for the street rather than the beach. Some were playing checkers and backgammon. Almost all were wearing hats.

  'Help you?' the bartender asked, coming over.

  'I'd like a Schooner, please.'

  'Okay.'

  The beer came. Billy drank it slowly, watching the boardwalk ebb and flow outside the windows of
the bar, listening to the murmur of the old men. He felt some of his strength - some of his sense of reality - begin to come back.

  The bartender returned. 'Hit you again?'

  'Please. And I'd like a word with you, if you have time.'

  'About what?'

  'Some people who might have been through here.'

  'Where's here? The Seas?'

  'Old Orchard.'

  The bartender laughed. 'So far as I can see, everyone in Maine and half of Canada comes through here in the summer, old son.'

  'These were Gypsies.'

  The bartender grunted and brought Billy a fresh bottle of Schooner.

  'You mean they were drift trade. Everyone who comes to Old Orchard in the summer is. The place here is a little different. Most of the guys who come in here live here year-round. The people out there . . .' He waved at the window, dismissing them with a flick of the wrist. 'Drift trade. Like you, mister.'

  Billy poured the Schooner carefully down the side of his glass and then laid a ten-dollar bill on the bar. 'I'm not sure we understand each other. I'm talking about real, actual Gypsies, not tourists or summer people.'

  'Real ... Oh, you must mean those guys who were camped out by the Salt Shack.'

  Billy's heart speeded in his chest. 'Can I show you some pictures?'

  'Wouldn't do any good. I didn't see them.' He looked at the ten for a moment and then called: 'Lon! Lonnie! Come over here a minute!'

  One of the old men who had been sitting by the window got up and shuffled over to the bar. He was wearing gray cotton pants, a white shirt that was too big for him, and a snap-brim straw hat. Its face was weary. Only his eyes were alive. He reminded Billy of someone, and after a few moments it came to him. The old man looked like Lee Strasberg, the teacher and actor.

  'This is Lon Enders,' the bartender said. 'He's got a little place just on the west of town. Same side the Salt Shack's on. Lon sees everything that goes on in Old Orchard.'

  'I'm Bill Halleck.'

  'Meet you,' Lon Enders said in a papery voice, and took the stool next to Billy's. He did not really seem to sit; rather, his knees appeared to buckle the moment his buttocks were poised over the cushion.

  'Would you like a beer?' Billy asked.

  'Can't,' the papery voice rustled, and Billy moved his head slightly to avoid the oversweet smell of Enders' breath. 'Already had my one for the day. Doctor says no more than that. Guts're screwed up. If I was a car, I'd be ready for the scrap heap.'

  'Oh,' Billy said lamely.

  The bartender turned away from them and began loading beer glasses into a dishwasher. Enders looked at the ten-dollar bill. Then he looked at Billy.

  Halleck explained again while Enders' tired, too-shiny face looked dreamily off into the shadows of the Seven Seas and the arcade bells bonged faintly, like sounds overheard in a dream, next door.

  'They was here,' he said when Billy had finished. 'They was here, all right. I hadn't seen any Gypsies in seven years or more. Hadn't seen this bunch in maybe twenty years.'

  Billy's right hand squeezed the beer glass he was holding, and he had to consciously make himself relax his grip before he broke it. He set the glass down carefully on the bar.

  'When? Are you sure? Do you have any idea where they might have been going? Can you -?'

  Enders held up one hand - it was as white as the hand of a drowned man pulled from a well, and to Billy it seemed dimly transparent.

  'Easy, my friend,' he said in his whispering voice. 'I'll tell you what I know.'

  With the same conscious effort, Billy forced himself to say nothing. To just wait.

  'I'll take the tenspot because you look like you can afford it, my friend,' Enders whispered. He tucked it into his shirt pocket and then pushed the thumb and forefinger of his left hand into his mouth, adjusting his upper plate. 'But I'd talk for free. Hell, when you get old you find out you'd pay someone to listen ... ask Timmy there if I can have a glass of cold water, would you? Even the one beer's too much, I reckon - it's burning what's left of my stomach something fierce - but it's hard for a man to give up all his pleasures, even when they don't pleasure him no more.'

  Billy called the bartender over, and he brought Enders his ice water.

  'You okay, Lon?' he asked as he put it down.

  'I been better and I been worse,' Lon whispered, and picked up the glass. For a moment Billy thought it was going to prove too heavy. But the old man got it to his mouth, although some spilled on the way there.

  'You want to talk to this guy?' Timmy asked.

  The cold water seemed to revive Enders. He put the glass down, looked at Billy, looked back at the bartender. 'I think somebody ought to,' he said. 'He don't look as bad as me yet ... but he's getting there.'

  Enders lived in a small retirees' colony on Cove Road. He said Cove Road was part of 'the real Old Orchard - the one the tips don't care about.'

  'Tips?' Billy asked.

  'The crowds, my friend, the crowds. Me and the wife come to this town in 1946, just after the war. Been here ever since. I learned how to turn a tip from a master Lonesome Tommy McGhee, dead these many years now. Yelled my guts out, I did, and what you hear now is all that's left.'

  The chuckle, almost as faint as a breath of predawn breeze, came again.

  Enders had known everyone associated with the summer carnival that was Old Orchard, it seemed - the vendors, the pitchmen, the roustabouts, the glass-chuckers (souvenir salesmen), the dogsmen (ride mechanics), the bumpers, the carnies, the pumps and the pimps. Most of them were year-round people he had known for decades or people who returned each summer like migratory birds. They formed a stable, mostly loving community that the summer people never saw.

  He also knew a large portion of what the bartender had called 'drift trade.' These were the true transients, people who showed up for a week or two weeks, did some business in the feverish party-town atmosphere of Old Orchard, and then moved on again.

  'And you remember them all?' Billy asked doubtfully.

  'Oh, I wouldn't if they was all different from year to year,' Enders whispered, 'but that's not how drift trade is. They ain't as regular as the dogsmen and the doughthumpers, but they have a pattern too. You see this fellow who comes on the boardwalk in 1957, selling Hula Hoops off'n his arm. You see him again in 1960, selling expensive watches for three bucks apiece. His hair is maybe black instead of blond, and so he thinks people don't recognize him, and I guess the summer people don't, even if they was around in 1957, because they go right back and get rooked again. But we know him. We know the drift trade. Nothing changes but what they sell, and what they sell is always a few steps outside the law.

  'The pushers, they're different. There's too many, and they are always going to jail or dying off. And the whores get old too fast to want to remember. But you wanted to talk about Gypsies. I guess they're the oldest drift trade of all, when you stop to think about it.'

  Billy took his envelope of photographs from his sportcoat pocket and laid them out carefully like a pat poker hand: Gina Lemke. Samuel Lemke. Richard Crosskill. Maura Starbird.

  Taduz Lemke.

  'Ah!' The old man on the stool breathed in sharply when Billy put that last one down, and then he spoke directly to the photograph, cooling Billy's skin: 'Teddy, you old whoremaster!'

  He looked up at Billy and smiled, but Billy Halleck was not fooled - the old man was afraid.

  'I thought it was him,' he said. 'I didn't see nothing but a shape in the dark - this was three weeks ago. Nothing but a shape in the dark, but I thought ... no, I knew ...

  He fumbled the ice water to his mouth again, spilling more, this time down the front of his shirt. The cold made him gasp.

  The bartender came over and favored Billy with a hostile glance. Enders held his hand up absently to show he was all right. Timmy retreated to the dishwasher again. Enders turned the photograph of Taduz Lemke. over. Written on the back was Photo taken Attleboro, Mass., mid-May 1983.

  'And he has
n't aged a day since I first seen him and his friends here in the summer of 1963,' Enders finished.

  They had set up camp behind Herk's Salt Shack Lobster Barn on Route 27. They had stayed four days and four nights. On the fifth morning they were simply gone. Cove Road lay close by, and Enders said he had walked the half-mile the second evening the Gypsies were there (it was hard for Billy to imagine this ghostly man walking around the block, but he let it pass). He wanted to see them, he said, because they reminded him of the old days when a man could run his business if he had a business to run, and John Law stayed out of his way and let him do it.

  'I stood there by the side of the road quiet awhile,' he said. 'It was the usual raree and Gypsy turnout - the more things change, the more they stay the same. It used to be all tents and now it's vans and campers and such, but what goes on inside is just the same. A woman telling fortunes. Two, three women selling powders to the ladies ... two, three men selling powders to the men. I guess they would have stayed longer, but I heard they arranged a dogfight for some rich Canucks and the state cops got wind of it.'

  'Dogfight!'

  'People want to bet, my friend, and drift trade is always willing to arrange the things they want to bet on - that's one of the things drift trade is for. Dogs or roosters with steel spurs or maybe even two men with these itty-bitty sharp knives that look almost like spikes, and each of 'em bites the end of a scarf, and the one who drops his end first is the loser. What the Gypsies call "a fair one."'

  Enders was staring at himself in the back bar mirror at himself and through himself.

  'It was like the old days, all right,' he said dreamily. 'I could smell their meat, the way they cure it, and green peppers, and that olive oil they like that smells rancid when it comes out of the can and then sweet when it's been cooked. I could hear them talking their funny language, and this thud! thud! thud! that was someone throwing knives at a board. Someone was cooking bread the old way, on hot stones.