Thinner Page 19

  He lifted his left hand slowly in front of his face. Ghostly green light from the car's instrument panel spilled through the round dark hole in his palm.

  She enchanted me, all right, Billy thought, and dropped the car in Drive. He wondered with almost clinical detachment if he would be able to make it back to the Frenchman's Bay Motel.

  Somehow, he did.

  Chapter Twenty

  118

  'William? What's wrong?'

  Ginelli's voice, which had been deeply blurred with sleep and ready to be angry, was now sharp with concern. Billy had found Ginelli's home number in his address book below the one for Three Brothers. He had dialed it without much hope at all, sure it would have been changed at some point during the intervening years.

  His left hand, wrapped in a handkerchief, lay in his lap. It had turned into something like a radio station and was now broadcasting approximately fifty thousand watts of pain - the slightest movement sent it raving up his arm. Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. Images of crucifixion kept occurring to him.

  'I'm sorry to call you at home, Richard,' he said, 'and so late.'

  'Fuck that, what's wrong?'

  'Well, the immediate problem is that I've been shot through the hand with a. . .'He shifted slightly, his hand flared, and his lips peeled back over his teeth. 'with a ball bearing.'

  Silence at the other end.

  'I know how it sounds, but it's true. The woman used a slingshot.'

  'Jesus! What -' A woman's voice in the background. Ginelli spoke briefly in Italian to her and then came back on the line. 'This is no joke, William? Some whore put a ball bearing through your hand with a slingshot?'

  'I don't call people at . . .' He looked at his watch and another flare of pain raced up his arm. '. . . at three o'clock in the morning and tell jokes. I've been sitting here for the last three hours trying to wait until a more civilized hour. But the pain . . .' He laughed a little, a hurt, helpless, bewildered sound. 'The pain is very bad.'

  'Does this have to do with what you called me about before?'

  'Yes.'

  'It was Gypsies?'

  'Yes. Richard. . .'

  'Yeah? Well, I promise you one thing. They don't fuck with you anymore after this.'

  'Richard, I can't go to a doctor with this and I'm in ... I really am in a lot of pain.' Billy Halleck, Grandmaster of Understatement, he thought. 'Can you send me something? Maybe by Federal Express? Some kind of painkiller?'

  'Where are you?'

  Billy hesitated for just a moment, then shook his head a little. Everyone he trusted had decided he was crazy; he thought it very likely that his wife and his boss had gone through or soon would be going through the motions necessary to effect an involuntary committal in the state of Connecticut. Now his choices were very simple, and marvelously ironic: either trust this dope-dealing hood he hadn't seen in nearly six years, or give up completely.

  Closing his eyes, he said: 'I'm in Bar Harbor, Maine. The Frenchman's Bay Motel. Unit thirty-seven.'

  'Just a second.'

  Ginelli's voice moved away from the telephone again. Billy heard him speaking in a dim platter of Italian. He didn't open his eyes. At last Ginelli came back on the line again.

  'My wife is making a. couple of calls for me,' he said. 'You're wakin' up guys in Norwalk right now, paisan. I hope you're satisfied.'

  'You're a gentleman, Richard,' Billy said. The words came out in a guttural slur and he had to clear his throat. He felt too cold. His lips were too dry and he tried to wet them, but his tongue was dry too.

  'You be very still, my friend,' Ginelli said. The concern was back in his voice. 'You hear me? Very still. Wrap up in a blanket if you want, but that's all. You've been shot. You're in shock.'

  'No shit,' Billy said, and laughed again. 'I've been in shock for about two months now.'

  'What are you talking about?'

  'Never mind.'

  'All right. But we got to talk, William.'

  'Yes.'

  'I ... Hold on a second.' Italian, soft and faint. Halleck closed his eyes again and listened to his hand broadcast pain. After a while Ginelli came back on the phone. 'A man is going to come by with some painkiller for you. He

  'Oh, hey, Richard, that's not

  'Don't tell me my business, William, just listen. His name is Fander. He's no doctor, this guy, at least not anymore, but he's going to look at you and decide if you ought to have some antibiotics as well as the dope. He'll be there before daylight.'

  'Richard, I don't know how to thank you,' Billy said. Tears were running down his cheeks; he wiped at them absently with his right hand.

  'I know you don't,' Ginelli said. 'You're not a wop. Remember, Richard: just sit still.'

  Fander arrived shortly before six o'clock. He was a little man with prematurely white hair who carried a country doctor's bag. He gazed at Billy's scrawny, emaciated body for a long moment without speaking and then carefully unwound the handkerchief from Billy's left hand. Billy had to put his other hand over his mouth to stifle a scream.

  'Raise it, please,' Fander said, and Billy did. The hand was badly swollen, the skin pulled taut and shiny. For a moment he and Fander gazed at each other through the hole in Billy's palm, which was ringed with dark blood. Fander took an odoscope from his bag and shone it through the wound. Then he turned it off.

  'Clean and neat,' he said. 'If it was a ball bearing there's much less chance of infection than there would have been with a lead slug.'

  He paused, considering.

  'Unless, of course, the girl put something on it before she fired it.'

  'What a comforting idea,' Billy croaked.

  'I'm not paid to comfort people,' Fander said coolly, especially when I'm routed out of bed at three-thirty and have to change from my pajamas into my clothes in a light plane that is bouncing around at eleven thousand feet. You say it was a steel bearing?'

  'Yes.'

  'Then you're probably all right. You can't very well soak a steel ball bearing in poison the way the Jivaro Indians soaked their wooden arrowheads in curare, and it doesn't seem likely the woman could have painted it with anything if it was all as spur-of-the-moment as you say. This should heal well, with no complications.' He took out disinfectant, gauze, an elastic bandage. 'I'm going to pack the wound and then bandage it. The packing is going to hurt like hell, but believe me when I tell you that it's going to hurt a lot more in the long run if I leave it open.'

  He cast another measuring eye on Billy - not so much the compassionate eye of a doctor, Billy thought, as the cold, appraising glance of an abortionist. 'This hand is going to be the least of your problems if you don't start eating again.'

  Billy said nothing.

  Fander looked at him a moment longer, then began packing the wound. At that point talk would have been impossible for Billy anyway; the pain-broadcasting station in his hand jumped from fifty thousand to two-hundred fifty thousand watts in one quick leap. He closed his eyes, clamped his teeth together, and waited for it to be over.

  At last it was over. He sat with his throbbing bandaged hand in his lap and watched Fander root in his bag once more.

  'All other considerations aside, your radical emaciation makes for problems when it comes to dealing with your pain. You're going to feel quite a bit more discomfort than you'd feel if your weight was normal, I'm afraid. I can't give you Darvon or Darvocet because they might put you in a coma or cause you to go into cardiac arrhythmia. How much do you weigh, Mr Halleck? A hundred and twenty-five?'

  'About that,' Billy muttered. There was a scale in the bathroom, and he had stepped on it before going out to the camp of the Gypsies - it was his own bizarre form of pep rally, he supposed. The needle had centered on 118. All the running around in the hot summer sun had helped to speed things up considerably.

  Fander nodded with a little moue of distaste. 'I'm going to give you some fairly strong Empirin. You take one single tablet. If you're not dozing off in half an hour
, and if your hand is still very, very painful, you can take another half. And you go on like that for the next three or four days.' He shook his head. 'I just flew six hundred miles to give a man a bottle of Empirin. I can't believe it. Life can be very perverse. But considering your weight, even Empirin's dangerous. It ought to be baby aspirin.'

  Fander removed another small bottle from his bag, this one unmarked.

  'Aureomycin,' he said. 'Take one by mouth every six hours. But - mark this well, Mr Halleck - if you start having diarrhea, stop the antibiotic at once. In your state, diarrhea is a lot more apt to kill you than an infection from this wound.'

  He snapped the bag shut and stood up.

  'One final piece of advice that has nothing to do with your adventures in the Maine countryside. Get some potassium tablets as soon as possible and begin taking two every day - one when you get up, one when you go to bed. You'll find them at the drugstore in the vitamin section.'

  'Why?'

  'If you continue to lose weight, you will very soon begin to experience instances of heart arrhythmia whether you take Darvon or any other drug. This sort of arrhythmia comes from radical potassium depletion in the body. It may have been what killed Karen Carpenter. Good day, Mr Halleck.'

  Fander let himself out into the first mild light of dawn.

  For a moment he only stood there looking toward the sound of the ocean, which was very clear in the stillness.

  'You really ought to get off whatever hunger strike you are on, Mr Halleck,' he said without turning around. 'In many ways the world is nothing but a pile of shit. But it can also be very beautiful.'

  He walked toward a blue Chevrolet that was idling at the side of the building and got into the backseat. The car moved off.

  'I'm trying to get off it,' Billy said to the disappearing car. 'I'm really trying.'

  He closed the door and walked slowly back to the small table beside his chair. He looked at the medicine bottles and wondered how he was going to open them one-handed.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Ginelli

  Billy ordered a large lunch sent in. He had never been less hungry in his life, but he ate all of it. When he was done he risked taking three of Fander's Empirin, reasoning that he was putting them on top of a turkey club sandwich, french fries, and a wedge of apple pie that had tasted quite a bit like stale asphalt.

  The pills hit him hard. He was aware that the pain transmitter in his hand had suddenly been reduced to a mere five thousand watts, and then he was cavorting through a feverish series of dreams. Gina danced across one of them, naked except for gold hoop earrings. Then he was crawling through a long dark culvert toward a round circle of daylight that always, maddeningly, stayed the same distance away. Something was behind him. He had a terrible feeling it was a rat. A very large rat. Then he was out of the culvert. If he had believed that would mean escape, he had been wrong - he was back in that starving Fairview. Corpses lay heaped everywhere. Yard Stevens lay sprawled in the middle of the town common, his own barber's shears driven deep into what remained of his throat. Billy's daughter leaned against a lamppost, nothing but a bunch of jointed sticks in her purple-and-white cheerleader's outfit. It was impossible to tell if she were really dead like the others or only comatose. A vulture fluttered down and landed on her shoulder. Its talons flexed once and its head darted forward. It ripped out a great swatch of her hair with its rotting beak. Bloody strands of scalp still clung to the ends, as clumps of earth cling to the roots of a plant which has been roughly pulled out of the ground. And she was not dead; Billy heard her moan, saw her hands stir weakly in her lap. No! he shrieked in this dream. He found he had the girl's slingshot in his hand. The cradle was loaded not with a ball bearing but a glass paperweight that sat on a table in the hall of the Fairview house. There was something inside the paperweight - some flaw - that looked like a blue-black thunderhead. Linda had been fascinated with it as a child. Billy fired the paperweight at the bird. It missed, and suddenly the bird turned into Taduz Lemke. A heavy thudding sound started somewhere - Billy wondered if it was his heart going into a fatal spell of arrhythmia. I never take it off, white man from town, Lemke said, and suddenly Billy was somewhere else and the thudding sound was still going on.

  He looked stupidly around the motel unit, at first thinking this was only another locale in his dreams.

  'William!' someone called from the other side of the door. 'Are you in there? Open this up or I'm gonna break it in! William! William!'

  Okay, he tried to say, and no sound came out of his mouth. His lips had dried and gummed shut. Nevertheless, he felt an overwhelming sense of relief. It was Ginelli.

  'William? Will ... Oh, fuck.' This last was in a lower I'm-talking-to-myself voice, and was followed by a thump as Ginelli threw his shoulder against the door.

  Billy got to his feet and the whole world wavered in and out of focus for a moment. He got his mouth open at last, his lips parting with a soft rip that he felt rather than heard.

  'That's okay,' he managed. 'That's okay, Richard. I'm here. I'm awake now.'

  He went across the room and opened the door.

  'Christ, William, I thought you were . .

  Ginelli broke off and stared at him, his brown eyes widening and widening until Billy thought: He's going to run. You can't look that way at anyone or anything and not take to your heels as soon as you get over the first shock of whatever it was.

  Then Ginelli kissed his right thumb, crossed himself, and said, 'Are you gonna let me in, William?'

  Ginelli had brought better medicine than Fander's Chivas. He took the bottle out of his calfskin briefcase and poured them each a stiff hooker. He touched the rim of his plastic motel tumbler to the rim of Billy's.

  'Happier days than these,' he said. 'How's that?'

  'That's just fine,' Billy said, and knocked the shot off in one big swallow. After the explosion of fire in his stomach had subsided to a glow, he excused himself and went into the bathroom. He didn't need to use the toilet, but he did not want Ginelli to see him cry.

  'What did he do to you?' Ginelli asked. 'Did he poison your food?'

  Billy began to laugh. It was the first good laugh in a long time. He sat down in his chair again and laughed until more tears rolled down his cheeks.

  'I love you, Richard,' he said when the laughter had tapered off to chuckles and a few shrill giggles. 'Everyone else, including my wife, thinks I'm crazy. The last time you saw me I was forty pounds overweight and now I look like I'm trying out for the part of the scarecrow in the remake of The Wizard of Oz and the first thing out of your mouth is "Did he poison your food?"'

  Ginelli waved away both Billy's half-hysterical laughter and the compliment with the same impatience. Billy thought, Ike and Mike, they think alike, Lemke and Ginelli, too. When it comes to vengeance and countervengeance, they have no sense of humor.

  'Well? Did he?'

  'I suppose that he did. In a way, he did.'

  'How much weight have you lost?'

  Billy's eyes strayed to the wall-sized mirror across the room. He remembered reading - in a John D. MacDonald novel, he thought - that every modem motel room in America seems filled with mirrors, although most of those rooms are used by overweight businessmen who have no interest in looking at themselves in an undressed state. Its state wag very much the opposite of overweight, but he could understand the antimirror sentiment. He supposed it was his face - no, not just his face, his whole head which had thrown such a fright into Richard. The size of his skull had remained the same, and the result was that his head perched atop his disappearing body like the hideously oversize head of a giant sunflower.

  I never take it off you, white man from town, he heard Lemke say.

  'How much weight, William?' Ginelli repeated. His voice was calm, gentle even, but his eyes sparkled in an odd, clear way. Billy had never seen a man's eyes sparkle in quite that way, and it made him a little nervous.

  'When this began - when I came out of the courtho
use and the old man touched me - I weighed two hundred and fifty pounds. This morning I weighed in at a hundred and sixteen just before lunch. That's what ... a hundred and thirty-four pounds?'

  'Jesus and Mary and Joseph the carpenter from Brooklyn Heights,' Ginelli whispered, and crossed himself again. 'He touched you?'

  This is where he walks out - this is where they all walk out, Billy thought, and for one wild second he thought of simply lying, of making up some mad story of systematic food poisoning. But if there had ever been a time for lying, it was gone now. And if Ginelli walked, Billy would walk with him, at least as far as Ginelli's car. He would open the door for him and thank him very much for coming. He would do it because Ginelli had listened when Billy called in the middle of the night, and sent his rather peculiar version of a doctor, and then come himself. But mostly he would perform those courtesies because Ginelli's eyes had widened like that when Billy opened the door, and he still hadn't run away.

  So you tell him the truth. He says the only things he believes in are guns and money, and that's probably the truth, but you tell him the truth because that's the only way you can ever pay back a guy like him.

  He touched you? Ginelli had asked, and although that was only a second ago it seemed much longer in Billy's scared, confused mind. Now he said what was the hardest thing for him to say. 'He didn't just touch me, Richard. He cursed me.'

  He waited for that rather mad sparkle to die out of Ginelli's eyes. He waited for Ginelli to glance at his watch, hop to his feet, and grab his briefcase. Time sure has a way of flying, doesn't it? I'd love to stay and talk over this curse business with you, William, but I've got a hotplate of veal marsala waiting for me back at the Brothers, and ...

  The sparkle didn't die and Ginelli didn't get up. He crossed his legs, neatened the crease, brought out a package of Camel cigarettes, and lit one.

  'Tell me everything,' he said.

  Billy Halleck told Ginelli everything. When he was done, there were four Camel butts in the ashtray. Ginelli was looking fixedly at Billy, as if hypnotized. A long silence spun out. It was uncomfortable, and Billy wanted to break it, but he didn't know how. He seemed to have used up all of his words.