Thinner Read online

  'It was like old times, but I wasn't. I felt scared. Well, the Gypsies always scared me a little - difference was, back then I would have gone in anyway. Hell, I was a white man, wasn't I? In the old days I would have walked right up to their fire just as big as billy-be-damned and bought a drink or maybe a few joysticks - not just 'cause I wanted a drink or a toke but just in order to get a look around. But the old days made me an old man, my friend, and when an old man is scared, he don't just go on regardless, like he did when he was just learning to shave.

  'So I just stood there in the dark with the Salt Shack over on my one side and all those vans and campers and station wagons pulled up over here on my other, watching them walk back and forth in front of their fire, listening to them talk and laugh, smelling their food. And then the back of this one camper opened - it had a picture of a woman on the side, and a white horse with a horn sticking out of its head, a what-do-you-call-it .

  'Unicorn,' Billy said, and his voice seemed to come from somewhere or someone else. He knew that camper very well; he had first seen it on the day the Gypsies came to the Fairview town common.

  'Then someone got out,' Enders went on. 'Just a shadow and a red cigarette tip, but I knew who it was.' He tapped the photograph of the man in the kerchief with one pale finger. 'Him. Your pal.'

  'You're sure?'

  'He took a big drag on his butt and I saw ... that.' He pointed at what was left of Taduz Lemke's nose but did not quite touch the glossy surface of the photograph, as if touch might be to risk contamination.

  'Did you speak to him?'

  'No,' Enders said, 'but he spoke to me. I stood there in the dark and I swear to God he wasn't even looking in my direction. And he said, "You miss your wife some, Flash, eh? Ess be all right, you be wid her soon now." Then he flicked his cigarette off the end of his fingers and walked away toward the fire. I seen the hoop in his ear flash once -in the firelight, and that was all.'

  He wiped little beads of water from his chin with the cup of his hand and looked at Billy.

  'Flash was what they used to call me when I worked the penny-pitch on the pier back in the fifties, my friend, but nobody has called me that for years. I was way back in the shadows, but he saw me and he called me by my old name -what the Gypsies would call my secret name, I guess. They set a hell of a store by knowing a man's secret name.

  'Do they?' Billy asked, almost to himself.

  Timmy, the bartender, came over again. This time he spoke to Billy almost kindly ... and as though Lon Enders was not there. 'He earned the ten, buddy. Leave 'im alone. He ain't well, and this here little discussion ain't making him no weller.'

  'I'm okay, Timmy,' Enders said.

  Timmy didn't look at him. He looked at Billy Halleck instead. 'I want you to get out of here,' he said to Billy in that same reasonable, almost kind voice. 'I don't like your looks. You look like bad luck waiting for a place to happen. The beers are free. Just go.'

  Billy looked at the bartender, feeling frightened and somehow humbled. 'Okay,' he said. 'Just one more question and I'll go.' He turned to Enders. 'Where did they head for?'

  'I don't know,' Enders said at once. 'Gypsies don't leave forwarding addresses, my friend.'

  Billy's shoulders slumped.

  'But I was up when they pulled out the next morning. I don't sleep worth a shit anymore, and most of their vans and cars didn't have much in the way of mufflers. I seen them go out Highway 27 and turn north onto Route 1. My guess would be ... Rockland.' The old man fetched in a deep, shuddering sigh that made Billy lean toward him, concerned. 'Rockland or maybe Boothbay Harbor. Yes. And that's all I know, my friend, except that when he called me Flash, when he called me by my secret name, I pissed all the way down my leg into my left tennis shoe.' And Lon Enders abruptly began to cry.

  'Mister, would you leave?' Timmy asked.

  'I'm going,' Billy said, and did, pausing only to squeeze the old man's narrow, almost ethereal shoulder.

  Outside, the sun hit him like a hammer. It was midafternoon now, the sun heeling over toward the west, and when he looked to his left he saw his own shadow, as scrawny as a child's stick figure, poured on the hot white sand like ink.

  He dialed area code 203.

  They set a hell of a store by knowing a man's secret name.

  He dialed 555.

  I want you to get out of here. I don't like your looks.

  He dialed 9231, and listened to the phone begin to ring back home in Fat City.

  You look like bad luck waiting

  'Hello?' The voice, expectant and a little breathless, was not Heidi's but Linda's. Lying on his bed in his wedge-shaped hotel room, Billy closed his eyes against the sudden sting of tears. He saw her as she had been on the night he had walked her up Lantern Drive and talked to her about the accident - her old shorts, her long coltish legs.

  What are you going to say to her, Billy-boy? That you spent the day at the beach sweating out moisture, that lunch was two beers, and that in spite of a big supper which featured not one but two sirloin steaks, you lost three pounds today instead of the usual two?

  'Hello?'

  That you're bad luck waiting for a place to happen? That you're sorry you lied, but all parents do it?

  'Hello, is anyone there? Is that you, Bobby?'

  Eyes still closed, he said: 'It's Dad, Linda.'

  'Daddy?'

  'Honey, I can't talk,' he said. Because I'm almost crying. 'I'm still losing weight, but I think I've found Lemke's trail. Tell your mother that. I think I've found Lemke's trail, will you remember?'

  'Daddy, please come home!' She was crying. Billy's hand whitened on the telephone. 'I miss you and I'm not going to let her send me away anymore.'

  Dimly he could hear Heidi now: 'Lin? Is it Dad?'

  'I love you, doll,' he said. 'And I love your mother.'

  'Daddy -'

  A confusion of small sounds. Then Heidi was on the phone. 'Billy? Billy, please stop this and come home to us.'

  Billy gently hung the phone up and rolled over on the bed and put his face into his crossed arms.

  He checked out of the South Portland Sheraton the next morning and headed north on US 1, the long coastal highway which begins in Fort Kent, Maine, and ends in Key West, Florida. Rockland or maybe Boothbay Harbor, the old man in the Seven Seas had said, but Billy took no chances. He stopped at every second or third gas station on the northbound side of the road; he stopped at general stores where old men sat out front in lawn chairs, chewing toothpicks or wooden matches. He showed his pictures to everyone who would look; he swapped two one-hundred-dollar traveler's checks for two-dollar bills and passed them out like a man promoting a radio show with dubious ratings. The four photographs he showed most frequently were the girl, Gina, with her clear olive skin and her dark, promising eyes; the converted Cadillac hearse; the VW microbus with the girl and the unicorn painted on the side; Taduz Lemke.

  Like Lon Enders, people didn't want to handle that one, or even touch it.

  But they were helpful, and Billy Halleck had no trouble at all following the Gypsies up the coast. It wasn't the out-of-state plates; there were lots of out-of-state plates to be seen in Maine during the summer. It was the way the cars and vans traveled together, almost bumper to bumper; the colorful pictures on the sides; the Gypsies themselves. Most of the people Billy talked to claimed that the women or children had stolen things, but all seemed vague on just what had been stolen, and no one, so far as Billy could ascertain, had called the cops because of these supposed thefts.

  Mostly they remembered the old Gypsy with the rotting nose - if they had seen him, they remembered him most of all.

  Sitting in the Seven Seas with Lon Enders, he had been three weeks behind the Gypsies. The owner of Bob's Speedy-Serv station wasn't able to remember the day he had filled up their cars and trucks and vans, one after another, only that 'they stunk like Injuns.' Billy thought that Bob smelled pretty ripe himself but decided that saying so might be rather imprudent. T
he college kid working at the Falmouth Beverage Barn across the road from the Speedy-Serv was able to peg the day exactly -it had been June 2, his birthday, and he had been unhappy about working. The day Billy spoke to them was June 20, and he was eighteen days behind. The Gypsies had tried to find a camping place a little farther north in the Brunswick area and had been moved along. On June 4 they had camped in Boothbay Harbor. Not on the seacoast itself, of course, but they had found a farmer willing to rent them a hayfield in the Kenniston Hill area for twenty dollars a night.

  They had stayed only three days in the area - the summer season was still only getting under way, and pickings had apparently been slim. The farmer's name was Washburn. When Billy showed him the picture of Taduz Lemke he nodded and blessed himself, quickly and (Billy was convinced of this) unconsciously.

  'I never seen an old man move as fast as that one did, and I seen him luggin' more wood stacked up than my sons could carry.' Washburn hesitated and added, 'I didn't like him. It wasn't just his nose. Hell, my own gramps had skin cancer and before it carried him off it had rotted a hole in his cheek the size of an ashtray. You could look right in there and see him chewin' his food. Well, we didn't like that, but we still liked Gramps, if you see what I mean.' Billy nodded. 'But this guy ... I didn't like him. I thought he looked like a bugger.'

  Billy thought to ask for a translation of that particular New Englandism, and then decided he didn't need one. Bugger, bugbear, bogeyman. The translation was in Farmer Washburn's eyes.

  'He is a bugger,' Billy said with great sincerity.

  'I had made up my mind to sen' 'em down the road,' he told Billy. 'Twenty bucks a night just for cleaning up some litter is a good piece of wages, but the wife was scairt of them and I was a little bit scairt of them too. So I went out that morning to give that Lemke guy the news before I could lose m'nerve, and they was already on the roll. Relieved me quite a bit.'

  'They headed north again.'

  'Ayuh, they sure did. I stood right on top of the hill there' - he pointed -'and watched 'em turn onto US 1. I watched 'em until they was out of sight, and I was some glad to see 'em go.'

  'Yes. I'll bet you were.'

  Washburn cast a critical, rather worried eye on Billy. 'You want to come up to the house and have a glass of cold buttermilk, mister? You look peaked.'

  'Thank you, but I want to get up around the Owl's Head area before sundown if I can.'

  'Looking for him?'

  'Yes.'

  'Well, if you find him, I hope he don't eat you up, mister, because he looked hungry to me.'

  Billy spoke to Washburn on the twenty-first - the first day of official summer, although the roads were already choked with tourists and he had to go all the way inland to Sheepscot before he was able to find a motel with a vacancy sign - and the Gypsies had rolled out of Boothbay Harbor on the morning of the eighth.

  Thirteen days behind now.

  He had a bad two days then when it seemed the Gypsies had fallen off the edge of the world. They had not been seen in Owl's Head, nor in Rockland, although both of them were prime summer tourist towns. Gas-station attendants and waitresses looked at his pictures and shook their heads. Grimly battling an urge to vomit precious calories over the rail - he had never been much of a sailor - Billy rode the inter-island ferry from Owl's Head to Vinalhaven, but the Gypsies had not been there either.

  On the evening of the twenty-third he called Kirk Penschley, hoping for fresh information, and when Kirk came on the line there was a funny double click just at the moment Kirk asked: 'How are you, Billy-boy? And where are you?'

  Billy hung up quickly, sweating. He had snagged the final unit in Rockland's Harborview Motel, he knew there probably wasn't another motel unit to be had between here and Bangor, but he suddenly decided he was going to move on even if it meant he ended up spending the night sleeping in the car on some pasture road. That double click. He hadn't cared for that double click at all. You sometimes heard that sound when the wire was being tapped, or when trace-back equipment was being used.

  Heidi's signed the papers on you, Billy.

  That's the stupidest goddamn thing I ever heard.

  She signed them and Houston co-signed them.

  Give me a fucking break!

  Get out of here, Billy.

  He left. Heidi, Houston, and possible trace-back equipment aside, it turned out to be the best thing that he could have done. As he was checking into the Bangor Ramada Inn that morning at two o'clock, he showed the desk clerk the pictures -it had become a habit by now - and the clerk nodded at once.

  'Yeah, I took my girl over and got her fortune read,' he said. He picked up the photograph of Gina Lemke and rolled his eyes. 'She could really work it on out with that slingshot of hers. And she looked like she would work it-on out in a few other ways, if you know what I mean.' He shook his hand as if flicking water from the tips of his fingers. 'My girl got one look at the way I was lookin' at her and she dragged me out of there fast.' He laughed.

  A moment before, Billy had been so tired that bed was all he could think about. Now he was wide - awake again, his stomach cramping with adrenaline.

  'Where? Where were they? Or are they still -?'

  'Nah, they're not there anymore. Parsons' is where they were, but they're gone, all right. I was by there the other day.'

  'Is it a farmer's place?'

  'No - it's where Parsons' Bargain Barn used to be until it burned down last year.' He cast an uneasy eye at the way Billy's sweatshirt bagged on his body, at the blades of Billy's cheekbones and the skull-like contours of Billy's face, in which the eyes burned like candleflames. 'Uh ... you want to check in?'

  Billy found Parsons' Bargain Barn the following morning - it was a scorched cinder-block shell in the middle of what seemed to be nine acres of deserted parking lot. He walked slowly across the crumbling macadam, heels clicking. Here were beer cans and soda cans. Here was a rind of cheese with beetles crawling in it. Here was a single shiny ball bearing. ('Hoy, Gina!' a ghostly voice called in his head). Here were the dead skins of popped balloons and here were the dead skins of two used Trojans, so similar to the balloons.

  Yes, they had been here.

  'I smell you, old man,' Billy whispered to the empty hull of the Bargain Barn, and the empty spaces that had been windows seemed to stare back at this scrawny scarecrowman with sallow distaste. The place looked haunted, but Billy felt no fear. The anger was back on him - he wore it like a coat. Anger at Heidi, anger at Taduz Lemke, anger at so-called friends like Kirk Penschley who were supposed to be on his side but who had turned against him. Had, or would.

  It didn't matter. Even on his own, even at a hundred and thirty pounds, there was enough of him left to catch up to the old Gypsy man.

  And what would happen then?

  Well, they would see, wouldn't they?

  'I smell you, old man,' Billy said again, and walked up to the side of the building. There was a realtor's sign there. Billy took his notebook from his back pocket and jotted down the information on it.

  The realtor's name was Frank Quigley, but he insisted that Billy call him Biff. There were framed pictures of a high-school-age Biff Quigley on the walls. In most of them Biff was wearing a football helmet. On Biff's desk was a pile of bronzed dog turds, FRENCHMAN'S DRIVER'S LICENSE, the little sign beneath read.

  Yes, Biff said, he had rented the space to the old Gyp with Mr Parsons' approval. 'He figured it couldn't look any worse than it does right now,' Biff Quigley said, 'and I guess he was right, at that.'

  He leaned back in his swivel chair, his eyes crawling ceaselessly over Billy's face, measuring the gap between Billy's collar and Billy's neck, the way the front of Billy's shirt hung in folds like a flag on a still day. He laced his hands behind his head, rocked back in his office chair, and put his feet up on his desk beside the bronzed turds.

  'Not that it isn't priced to sell, you understand. That's prime industrial land out there, and sooner or later someone with some vi
sion is going to make himself one hell of a deal. Yessir, one hell of a -'

  'When did the Gypsies leave, Biff?'

  Biff Quigley removed his hands from behind his head and sat forward. His chair made a noise like a mechanical pig - Squoink! 'Mind telling me why you want to know?'

  Billy Halleck's lips - they were thinner too now, and higher, so that they never quite met - drew back in a grin of frightening intensity and unearthly boniness. 'Yes, Biff, I mind.'

  Biff recoiled for a moment, and then he nodded and leaned back in his chair again. His Quoddy mocs came down on his desk again. One crossed over the other and tapped thoughtfully at the turds.

  'That's fine, Bill. A man's business ought to be his own. A man's reasons ought to be his own.'

  'Good,' Billy said. He felt the rage coming back and was grappling with it. Getting mad at this disgusting man with his Quoddy mocs and his crude ethnic slurs and his blowdried Jay-Cees haircut wasn't going to do him any good. 'Then since we agree -'

  'But it's still going to cost you two hundred bucks.'

  'What?' Billy's mouth dropped open. For a moment his anger was so great he was simply unable to move at all or to say anything else. This was probably just as well for Biff Quigley, because if Billy could have moved, Billy would have leapt upon him. His self-control had also lost quite a bit of weight over the last two months.

  'Not the information I give you,' Biff Quigley said. 'That's a freebie. The two hundred's for the information I won't give them.'

  'Won't . . . give . . who?' Billy managed.

  'Your wife,' Biff said, 'and your doctor, and a man who says he works for an outfit called Barton Detective Services.'

  Billy saw everything in a flash. Things weren't as bad as his paranoid mind had imagined; they were even worse. Heidi and Mike Houston had gone to Kirk Penschley and had convinced him that Billy Halleck was mad. Penschley was still using the Barton agency to track the Gypsies, but now they were all like astronomers looking for Saturn only so they could study Titan - or bring Titan back to the Glassman Clinic.