Thinner Read online

  He could also see the Barton operative who had sat in this chair a few days ago, talking to Biff Quigley, telling him that a very skinny man named Bill Halleck was going to show up soon, and when he did, this was the number to call.

  This was followed by an even clearer vision: he saw himself leaping across Biff Quigley's desk, seizing the bronzed pile of dog turds in mid-leap, and then bashing Biff Quigley's head in with them. He saw this in utter, savage clarity: the skin breaking, the blood flying up in a fine spray of droplets (some of them splashing on the framed pictures), the white glimmer of bone shattering to reveal the physical texture of the man's creepy mind; then he saw himself slamming the dog turds back where they belonged - where, in a manner of speaking, they had come from.

  Quigley must have seen this - or some of it - on Billy's haggard face, for an expression of alarm appeared on his own face. He hurriedly removed his feet from his desk and his hands from behind his neck. The chair emitted its mechanical pig squeal again.

  'Now, we could talk this over' he began, and Billy saw one manicured hand straying toward the intercom.

  Billy's anger abruptly deflated, leaving him shaken and cold. He had just visualized beating the man's brains out, not in any vague way but in the mental equivalent of Technicolor and Dolby sound. And good old Biff had known he was doing it, too.

  Whatever happened to the old Bill Halleck who used to give to the United Fund and make wassail on Christmas Eve?

  His mind returned: Yeah, that was the Billy Halleck that lived in Fat City. He moved. Gone, no forwarding.

  'No need for that,' Billy said, nodding at the intercom.

  The hand jerked, then diverted to a desk drawer, as if that had been its objective all the time. Biff brought out a pack of cigarettes.

  'Wasn't even thinking of it, ha-ha. Smoke, Mr Halleck?'

  Billy took one, looked at it, and then leaned forward to get a light. One drag and he was light-headed. 'Thanks.'

  'About the two hundred, maybe I was wrong- I'

  'No - you were right,' Billy said. He had cashed three hundred dollars' worth of traveler's checks on his way over here, thinking it might be necessary to grease the skids a little - but it had never occurred to him that he might have to grease them for such a reason as this. He took out his wallet, removed four fifties, and tossed them onto Biff's desk beside the dog turds. 'You'll keep your mouth shut when Penschley calls you?'

  'Oh, yes, sir!' Biff took the money and put it into the drawer with the cigarettes. 'You know it!'

  'I hope I do,' Billy said. 'Now, tell me about the Gypsies.'

  It was short and easy to follow; the only really complicated part had been the preliminaries. The Gypsies had arrived in Bangor on June 10. Samuel Lemke, the young juggler, and a man who answered the description of Richard Crosskill had come to Biff's office. After a call to Mr Parsons and one to the Bangor chief of police, Richard Crosskill had signed a standard short-term renewable lease form - the short term in this case was specified to be twenty-four hours. Crosskill signed as secretary of the Taduz Corporation while young Lemke stood by the door of Biffs office with his muscular arms crossed.

  'And just how much silver did they cross your palm with?' Billy asked.

  Biff raised his eyebrows. 'Beg your pardon?'

  'You got two hundred from me, probably a hundred from my concerned wife and friends via the Barton op who visited you - I just wondered how much the Gypsies coughed up. You've done pretty well out of this any way you cut it, haven't you, Biff?'

  Biff said nothing for a moment. Then, without answering Billy's question, he finished his story.

  Crosskill had come back on the two following days to resign the lease agreement. On the thirteenth he arrived again, but by then Biff had had a call from the chief of police and from Parsons. The complaints from the local citizenry had begun. The chief thought it was time for the Gypsies to move on. Parsons thought the same, but he would be willing to let them stay another day or so if they wanted to up the ante a bit - say, from thirty bucks a night to fifty.

  Crosskill listened to this and shook his head. He left without speaking. On a whim, Biff had driven out to the burned-out shell of the Bargain Barn that noon. He was in time to see the Gypsy caravan pulling out.

  'They headed for the Chamberlain Bridge,' he said, 'and that's all I know. Why don't you get out of here now, Bill? To be honest, you look like an advertisement for a vacation in Biafra. Looking at you sort of gives me the creeps.'

  Billy was still holding the cigarette, although he hadn't taken a puff since the first drag. Now he leaned forward butted it on the bronze dog turds. It fell smoldering to Biffs desk. 'To be honest,' he said to Biff, 'I feel exactly the same way about you.'

  The rage was back on him. He walked quickly out of Biff Quigley's office before it could move him in the wrong direction or make his hands speak in some terrible language they seemed to know.

  It was the twenty-fourth of June. The Gypsies had left Bangor via the Chamberlain Bridge on the thirteenth. Now he was only eleven days behind. Closer ... closer, - but still too far.

  He discovered that Route 15, which began on the Brewer side of the bridge, was known as the Bar Harbor Road. It looked as if he might be going there after all. But along the way he would speak to no more realtors and stay at no more first-class motels. If the Barton people were still ahead of him, Kirk might well have put more people on the lookout for him.

  The Gypsies had driven the forty-four miles to Ellsworth on the thirteenth, and had been granted a permit to camp on the fairgrounds for three days. Then they had crossed the Penobscot River to Bucksport, where they had stayed another three days before moving on toward the coast again.

  Billy discovered all of this on the twenty-fifth; the Gypsies had left Bucksport late on the afternoon of June 19.

  Now he was only a week behind them.

  Bar Harbor was as crazily booming as the waitress had told him it would be, and Billy thought she had also at least suggested some of the resort town's essential wrongness. The main drag ... until after Labor Day, it's a street carnival. Most of these towns are like that, but Bar Harbor is like, top end, you know? ... I used to go up there sometimes in July or August and hang out, but not anymore. I'm too old for that now.

  Me too, Billy thought, sitting on a park bench in cotton pants, a T-shirt which read BANGOR'S GOT SOUL, and a sport coat that hung straight down from the bony rack of his shoulders. He was eating an ice-cream cone and drawing too many glances.

  He was tired - he was alarmed to find that he was always tired now, unless he was in the grip of one of his rages. When he parked the car and got out this morning to begin flashing the pictures, he had experienced a moment of nightmarish deja vu as his pants began to slide down his hips - excusez-moi, he thought, as they slid down my non-hips. The pants were corduroys he had bought in the Rockland army-navy store. They had a twenty-eight-inch waist. The clerk had told him (a little nervously) that he was going to run into trouble buying off-the-rack pants pretty soon, because he was almost into the boy waist sizes now. His leg size, however, was still thirty-two, and there just weren't that many thirteen-year-olds who stood six feet, two inches tall.

  Now he sat eating a pistachio ice-cream cone, waiting for some of his strength to come back and trying to decide what was so distressing about this beautiful little town where you couldn't park your cark and where you could barely walk on the sidewalks.

  Old Orchard had been vulgar, but its vulgarity had been straightforward and somehow exhilarating; you knew the prizes to be won in the Pitch-Til-U-Win booths were junk that would fall apart immediately, that the souvenirs were junk that would fall apart at almost the exact moment you got too far away to turn around and go back and bitch until they gave you your money back. In Old Orchard many of the women were old, and almost all of them were fat. Some wore obscenely small bikinis but most wore tank suits that seemed relics of the 1950's - you felt, passing these jiggling women on the boardwalk, that those
suits were under the same terrible pressures as a submarine cruising far below her rated depth. If any of that iridescent miracle fabric gave way, fat would fly.

  The smells in the air had been pizza, ice cream, frying onions, every now and then the nervous vomit of some little kid who had stayed on the Tilt-A-Whirl too long. Most of the cars which cruised slowly up and down in the bumper-to-bumper Old Orchard traffic had been old, rusty around the bottoms of the doors, and usually too big. Many of them had been blowing oil.

  Old Orchard had been vulgar, but it had also had a certain peeling innocence that seemed missing in Bar Harbor.

  Here so many things were the exact reverse of Old Orchard that Billy felt a little as if he had stepped through the looking glass - there were few old women and apparently no fat women; hardly any women wearing bathing suits. The Bar Harbor uniform seemed to be tennis dress and white sneakers or faded jeans, rugby shirts, and boatniks. Billy saw few old cars and even fewer American cars. Most were Saabs, Volvos, Datsuns, BMW's, Hondas. All of them had bumper stickers saying things like SPLIT WOOD, NOT ATOMS and U.S. OUT OF EL SALVADOR and LEGALIZE THE WEED. The bike people were here too - they wove in and out of the slowly moving downtown throngs on expensive tenspeeds, wearing polarized sunglasses and sun visors, flashing their orthodontically perfect smiles and listening to Sony Walkmen. Below town, in the harbor itself, a forest of masts grew - not the thick, dull-colored masts of working boats, but the slim white ones of sailboats that would be drydocked after Labor Day.

  The people hanging out in Bar Harbor were young, brainy, fashionably liberal, and rich. They also partied all night long, apparently. Billy had phoned ahead to make a reservation at the Frenchman's Bay Motel and had lain awake until the small hours of the morning listening to conflicting rock music pouring from six or eight different bars. The tally of wrecked cars and traffic violations mostly DWI's - in the local paper was impressive and a little disheartening.

  Billy watched a Frisbee fly over the crowds in their preppy clothes and thought: You want to know why this place and these people depress you? I'll tell you. They are studying to live in places like Fairview, that's why. They'll finish school, get married to women who will conclude their first affairs and rounds of analysis at roughly the same time, and settle down on the Lantern Drives of America. There they will wear red pants when they play golf, and each and every New Year's Eve will be the occasion of much tit-grabbing.

  'Yeah, that's depressing, all right,' he muttered, and a couple passing by looked at him strangely.

  They're still here.

  Yes. They were still here. The thought was so natural, so positive, that it was neither surprising nor particularly exciting. He had been a week behind them - they could be up in the Maritimes by now or halfway down the coast again; their previous pattern suggested they would be gone by now, and certainly Bar Harbor, where even the souvenir shops looked like expensive East Side auction rooms, was a little too tony to put up with a raggle-taggle band of Gypsies for long. All very true. Except they were still here, and he knew it.

  'Old man, I smell you,' he whispered.

  Of course you smell him. You are supposed to.

  That thought caused a moment's unease. Then he got up, tossed the remainder of his cone into a trash barrel, and walked back to the ice-cream vendor. The vendor did not seem particularly pleased to see Billy returning.

  'I wonder if you could help me,' Billy said.

  'No, man, I really don't think so,' the vendor said, and Billy saw the revulsion in his eyes.

  'You might be surprised.' Billy felt a sense of deep calm and predestination - not deja vu but real predestination. The ice-cream vendor wanted to turn away, but Billy held him with his own eyes - he found he was capable of that now, as if he himself had become some sort of supernatural creature. He took out the packet of photographs - it was now rumpled and sweat-stained. He dealt out the familiar tarot hand of images, lining them up along the counter of the man's booth.

  The vendor looked at them, and Billy felt no surprise at the recognition in the man's eyes, no pleasure - only that faint fear, like pain waiting to happen when the local anesthetic wears off. There was a clear salt tang in the air, and gulls were crying over the harbor.

  'This guy,' the ice-cream vendor said, staring fascinated at the photograph of Taduz Lemke. 'This guy - what a spook!'

  'Are they still around?'

  'Yeah,' the ice-cream vendor said. 'Yeah, I think they are. The cops kicked 'em out of town the second day, but they were able to rent a field from a farmer in Tecknor that's one town inland from here. I've seen them around. The cops have gotten to the point where they're writing 'em up for broken taillights and stuff like that. You'd think they'd take the hint.'

  'Thank you.' He began to collect his pictures again.

  'You want another ice cream?'

  'No, thank you.' The fear was stronger now - but the anger was there too, a buzzing, pulsing tone under everything else.

  'Then would you mind just sort of rambling on, mister? You're not particularly good for business.'

  'No,' Billy said. 'I suppose I'm not.'

  He headed back toward his car. The tiredness had left him.

  That night at a quarter past nine, Billy parked his rental car on the soft shoulder of Route 37-A, which leaves Bar Harbor to the northwest. He was on top of a hill, and a sea breeze blew around him, ruffling his hair and making his loose clothes flap on his body. From behind him, carried on that breeze, came the sound of tonight's rock-'n-roll party starting to crank up in Bar Harbor.

  Below him, to the right, he could see a large campfire surrounded by cars and trucks and vans. Closer in were the people - every now and then one of them strolled in front of the fire, a black cardboard cutout. He could hear conversation, occasional laughter.

  He had caught up.

  The old man is down there waiting for you, Billy - he knows you're here.

  Yes. Yes, of course. The old man could have pulled his little band right off the edge of the world - at least, as far as Billy Halleck would have been able to tell - if he had wanted. But that hadn't been his pleasure. Instead he had taken Billy over the jumps from Old Orchard to here. That had been what he wanted.

  The fear again, drifting like smoke through his hollow places ~ there were so many hollow places in him now, it seemed. But the rage was still there too.

  It's what I wanted too - and I may just surprise him. The fear I'm sure he expects. The anger - that may be a surprise.

  Billy looked back at the car for a moment, then shook his head. He started down the grassy side of the hill toward the fire.

  Chapter Nineteen

  In the Camp of the Gypsies

  He paused in back of the camper with the unicorn and the maiden on the side, a narrow shadow among other shadows, but more constant than those thrown by the shifting flames. He stood there listening to their quiet conversation, the occasional burst of laughter, the pop of an exploding knot in the fire.

  I can't go out there, his mind insisted with utter certainty. There was fear in this certainty, but also intertwined in it were inarticulate feelings of shame and propriety - he no more wanted to break into the concentric circles of their campfire and their talk and their privacy than he had wanted to have his pants fall down in Hilmer Boynton's courtroom. He, after all, was the offender. He was ...

  Then Linda's face rose up in his mind; he heard her asking him to come home, and beginning to cry as she did.

  He was the offender, yes, but he was not the only one.

  The rage began to come up in him again. He clamped down on it, tried to compress it, to turn it into something a little more useful - simple sternness would be enough, he thought. Then he walked between the camper and the station wagon parked next to it, his Gucci loafers whispering in the dry timothy grass, and into their midst.

  There really were concentric circles: first the rough circle of vehicles, and inside that, a circle of men and women sitting around the fire, which
burned in a dug hollow surrounded by a circle of stones. Nearby, a cut branch about six feet tall had been stuck into the earth. A yellow sheet of paper. - a campfire permit, Billy supposed - was impaled on its tip.

  The younger men and women sat on the flattened grass or on air mattresses. Many of the older people were sitting on lawn chairs made of tubular aluminum and woven plastic strips. Billy saw one old woman sitting propped up on pillows in a lounger, a blanket tucked around her. She was smoking a home-rolled cigarette and sticking S&H Green Stamps in a trading-stamp book.

  Three dogs on the far side of the fire began to bark halfheartedly. One of the younger men looked up sharply and drew back one side of his vest, revealing a nickel-plated revolver in a shoulder holster.

  'Enkelt!' one of the older men said sharply, putting his hand on the young man's hand.

  'Bodde har?'

  'Just det - han och Taduz!'

  The young man looked toward Billy Halleck, who now stood in the midst of them, totally out of place in his baggy sport coat and city shoes. There was a look not of fear but momentary surprise and - Billy would have sworn it - compassion on his face. Then he was gone, pausing only long enough to administer a kick to one of the hounds and growl, 'Enkelt!' The hound yipped once and then they all shut up.

  Gone to get the old man, Billy thought.

  He looked around at them. All conversation had ceased. They regarded him with their dark Gypsy eyes and no one said a word. This is how it feels when your pants really do fall down in court, he thought, but that wasn't a bit true. Now that he was actually in front of them, the complexity of his emotions had disappeared. The fear was there, and the anger, but both idled quietly, somewhere deep inside.

  And there's something else. They're not surprised to see you ... and they're not surprised at how you look, either.

  Then it was true; all true. No psychological anorexia; no exotic form of cancer. Billy thought that even Michael Houston would have been convinced by those dark eyes. They knew what had happened to him. They knew why it was happening. And they knew how it would end.