Thinner Read online

  'Where will you be?'

  'I'll be around,' Ginelli said and smiled. 'Watching you and watching out for the girl. If she ever sees me again before I see her, William, I ain't never going to have to change my shirt again. You understand?'

  'Yes.'

  'I'll be keeping my eye on you.'

  'Thank you,' Billy said, and was not sure just how, or how much, he meant that. He did feel gratitude to Ginelli, but it was a strange, difficult emotion, like the hate he now bore for Houston and for his wife.

  'Por nada,' Ginelli said, and shrugged. He leaned across the scat, hugged Billy, and kissed him firmly on both cheeks. 'Be tough with the old bastard, William.'

  'I will,' Billy said, smiling, and got out of the car. The dented Nova pulled away. Billy stood watching until it had disappeared around the comer at the end of the block, and then he started down the hill, swinging the bag of oranges in one hand.

  He barely noticed the little boy who, halfway up the block, abruptly turned off the sidewalk, scaled the Cowans' fence, and shot across their backyard. That night this little boy would awake screaming from a nightmare in which a shambling scarecrow with lifeless blowing hair on its skull-head bore down on him. Running down the hallway to his room, the boy's mother heard him screaming: 'It wants to make me eat oranges until I die! Eat oranges till I die! Eat till I die!'

  The park was wide and cool and green and deep. On one side, a gaggle of kids were variously climbing on the jungle gym, teeter-tottering, and whooshing down the slide. Far across the way a softball game was going on - the boys against the girls, it looked like. In between, people walked, flew kites, threw Frisbees, ate Twinkies, drank Cokes, slurped Slurpies. It was a cameo of American midsummer in the latter half of the twentieth century, and for a moment Billy warmed toward it - toward them.

  All that's lacking is the Gypsies, a voice inside him whispered, and the chill came back - a chill real enough to bring goose bumps to his arms and cause him to abruptly cross his thin arms over his reed of a chest. We ought to have the Gypsies, oughtn't we? The old station wagons with the NRA stickers on the rusty bumpers, the campers, the vans with the murals on the sides - then Samuel with his bowling pins and Gina with her slingshot. And they all came running. They always came running. To see the juggling, to try the slingshot, to hear the future, to get a potion or a lotion, to bed a girl- or at least to dream of it- to see the dogs tear at each other's guts. They always come running. Just for the strangeness of it. Sure, we need the Gypsies. We always have. Because if you don't have someone to run out of town once in a while, how are you going to know you yourself belong there? Well, they'll be along soon, right?

  'Right,' he croaked, and sat down on a bench that was almost in the shade. His legs were suddenly trembling, strengthless. He took an orange out of the bag and after some effort managed to tear it open. But now his appetite Was gone again and he could only eat a little.

  The bench was quite a distance apart from the others, and Billy attracted no undue attention, so far as he could tell - from a distance, he could have been a very thin old man taking in a little afternoon air.

  He sat, and as the shade crept up first over his shoes, then his knees; and finally puddled in his lap, an almost fantastical sense of despair overtook him - a feeling of waste and futility much darker than these innocent afternoon shadows. Things had gone too far and nothing could be taken back. Not even Ginelli, with his psychotic energy, could change what had happened. He could only make things worse.

  I should have never... Billy thought, but then whatever it was he should have never done broke up and faded out like a bad radio signal. He dozed again. He was in Fairview, a Fairview of the Living Dead. Corpses lay everywhere starvelings. Something pecked sharply at his shoulder.

  No.

  Peck!

  No!

  But it came again, peck, and peck and peck, it was the vulture with the rotting nose, of course, and he didn't want to turn his head for fear it might peck his eyes out with the black remnants of its beak. But

  (peck)

  it insisted, and he

  (!peck!peck!)

  slowly turned his head, rising out of the dream at the same time and seeing -with no real surprise that it was Taduz Lemke beside him on the bench.

  'Wake up, white man from town,' he said, and plucked sharply at Billy's sleeve again with his twisted, nicotine stained fingers. Peck! 'Your dreams are bad. They have a stink I can smell on your breath.'

  'I'm awake,' Billy said thickly.

  'You sure?' Lemke asked, with some interest.

  'Yes.'

  The old man wore a gray serge suit, double-breasted. On his feet were high-topped black shoes. What little hair he had was parted in the middle and pulled sternly backward from his forehead, which was as lined as the leather of his shoes. A gold hoop sparkled from one of his earlobes.

  The rot, Billy saw, had spread - dark lines now radiated out from the ruins of his nose and across most of his runneled left cheek.

  'Cancer,' Lemke said. His bright black eyes - the eyes of a bird for sure - never left Billy's face. 'You like that? It make you happy?' 'Happy' came out 'hoppy.'

  'No,' Billy said. He was still trying to clean away the dregs of the dream, to hook himself into this reality. 'No, of course not.'

  'Don't lie,' Lemke said. 'There is no need. It make you happy, of course it make you happy.'

  'None of it makes me happy,' he said. 'I'm sick about it all. Believe me.'

  'I don't believe nothing no white man from town ever told me,' Lemke said. He spoke with a hideous sort of geniality. 'But you sick, oh yeah. You think. You nastan farsk - dying from being thin. So I brought you something. It's gonna fatten you up, make you better.' His lips drew back from the black stumps of his teeth in a hideous grin. 'But only when somebody else eats it.'

  Billy looked at what Lemke held on his lap and saw with a floating kind of deja vu that it was a pie in a disposable aluminum pie plate. In his mind he heard his dream self telling his dream wife: I don't want to be fat. I've decided I like being thin. You eat it.

  'You look scared,' Lemke said. 'It's too late to be scared, white man from town.'

  He took a pocketknife from his jacket and opened it, performing the operation with an old man's grave and studied slowness. The blade was shorter than the blade of Ginelli's pocketknife, Billy saw, but it looked sharper.

  The old man pushed the blade into the crust and then drew it across, creating a slit about three inches long. He withdrew the blade. Red droplets fell from it onto the crust. The old man wiped the blade on the sleeve of his jacket, leaving a dark red stain. Then he folded the blade and put the knife away. He hooked his misshapen thumbs over opposing sides of the pie plate and pulled gently. The slit gaped, showing a swimming viscous fluid in which dark things - strawberries, maybe -floated like clots. He relaxed his thumbs. The slit closed. He pulled at the edges of the pie plate again. The slit opened. So he continued to pull and release as he spoke. Billy was unable to look away.

  'So ... you have convinced yourself that it is ... What did you call it? A poosh. That what happened to my Susanna is no more your fault than my fault, or her fault, or God's fault. You tell yourself you can't be asked to pay for it - there is no blame, you say. It slides off you because your shoulders are broken. No blame, you say. You tell yourself and tell yourself and tell yourself. But there is no poosh, white man from town. Everybody pays, even for things they dint do. No poosh.'

  Lemke fell reflectively silent for a moment. His thumbs tensed and relaxed, tensed and relaxed. The slit in the pie opened and closed.

  'Because you won't take blame - not you, not your friends - I make you take it. I stick it on you like a sign. For my dear dead daughter that you killed I do this, and for her mother, and for her children. Then your friend comes. He poisons dogs, shoots guns in the night, uses his hands on a woman, threatens to throw acid into the faces of children. Take it off, he says - take it off and take it off and take it off. A
nd finally I say okay as long as he will podol enkelt - get out of here! Not from what he did, but from what he will do - he is crazy, this friend of yours, and he will never stop. Even my 'Gelina says she sees from his eyes he will never stop. "But we'll never stop, either," she says, and I say, "Yes we will. Yes we will stop. Because if we don't, we are crazy like the town man's friend. If we don't stop, we must think what the white man says is right - God pays back, that it's a poosh."'

  Tense and relax. Tense and relax. Open and close.

  "'Take it off," he says, and at least he don't say "Make it disappear, make it not there anymore." Because a curse is in some way like a baby.'

  His old dark thumbs pulled. The slit stretched open.

  'No one understand these things. Not me, either, but I know a little. "Curse" is your word, but Rom is better. Listen: Purpurfargade ansiktet. You know that?'

  Billy shook his head slowly, thinking the phrase had a richly dark texture.

  'It mean something like "Child of the night-flowers." Is like to get a child who is varsel - changeling. Gypsies say varsel is always found under lilies or nightshade, which blooms at night. This way of saying is better because curse is a thing. What you have is not a thing. What you have is alive.'

  'Yes,' Billy said. 'It's inside, isn't it! It's inside, eating me.'

  'Inside? Outside?' Lemke shrugged. 'Everywhere. This thing - urpurfargade ansiktet - you bring it into the world like a baby. Only it grows strong faster than a baby, and you can't kill it because you can't see it - only you can see what it does.'

  The thumbs relaxed. The slit closed. A dark red rivulet trickled across the mild topography of the pie crust.

  'This curse ... you dekent felt o gard da borg. Be to it like a father. You still want to be rid of it?'

  Billy nodded.

  'You still believe in the poosh?'

  'Yes.' It was only a croak.

  The old Gypsy man with the rotting nose smiled. The black lines of rot under his left cheek dipped and wavered. The park was nearly empty now. The sun was nearing the horizon. The shadows covered them. Suddenly the knife was in Lemke's hand again, the blade out.

  He's going to stab me, Billy thought dreamily. Going to stab me in the heart and run away with his strawberry pie under his arm.

  'Unwrap your hand,' Lemke said.

  Billy looked down.

  'Yes - where she shot you.'

  Billy pulled the clamps out of the elastic bandage and slowly unwrapped it. Underneath, his hand looked too white, fishlike. In contrast, the edges of the wound were dark, dark red - a liverish color. The same color as those things inside his pie, Billy thought. The strawberries. Or whatever they are. And the wound had lost its almost perfect circularity as the edges puffed together. Now it looked like ...

  Like a slit, Billy thought, his eyes drifting back to the pie.

  Lemke handed Billy the knife.

  How do I know you haven't coated this blade with curare or cyanide or D-Con Rat-Prufe? he thought about asking, and then didn't. Ginelli was the reason. Ginelli and the Curse of the White Man from Town.

  The pocketknife's worn bone handle fitted comfortably into his hand.

  'If you want to be rid of the purpurfargade ansiktet, first you give it to the pie ... and then you give the pie with the curse-child inside it to someone else. But it has to be soon, or it come back on you double. You understand?'

  'Yes,' Billy said.

  'Then do it if you will,' Lemke said. His thumbs tightened again. The darkish slit in the pie crust spread open.

  Billy hesitated, but only for a second - then his daughter's face rose in his mind. For a moment he saw her with all the clarity of a good photograph, looking back at him over her shoulder, laughing, her pom-poms held in her hands like big silly purple-and-white fruits.

  You're wrong about the push, old man, he thought. Heidi for Linda. My wife for my daughter. That's the push.

  He pushed the blade of Taduz Lemke's knife into the hole in his hand. The scab broke open easily. Blood spattered into the slit in the pie. He was dimly aware that Lemke was speaking very rapidly in Rom, his black eyes never leaving Billy's white, gaunt face.

  Billy turned the knife in the wound, watching as its puffy lips parted and it regained its former circularity. Now the blood came faster. He felt no pain.

  'Enkelt! Enough.'

  Lemke plucked the knife from his hand. Billy suddenly felt as if he had no strength at all. He collapsed back against the park bench, feeling wretchedly nauseated, wretchedly empty - the way a woman who has just given birth must feel, he imagined. Then he looked down at his hand and saw that the bleeding had already stopped.

  No - that's impossible.

  He looked at the pie in Lemke's lap and saw something else that was impossible - only this time the impossibility happened before his eyes. The old man's thumbs relaxed, the slit closed again ... and then there simply was no slit. The crust was unbroken except for two small steam vents in the exact center. Where the slit had been was something like a zigzag wrinkle in the crust.

  He looked back at his hand and saw no blood, no scab, no open flesh. The wound there had now healed completely, leaving only a short white scar - it also zigzagged, crossing lifeand heartlines like a lightning bolt.

  'This is yours, white man from town,' Lemke said, and he put the pie in Billy's lap. His first, almost ungovernable impulse was to dump it off, to get rid. of it the way he would have gotten rid of a large spider someone had dropped in his lap. The pie was loathsomely warm, and it seemed to pulse inside its cheap aluminum plate like something alive.

  Lemke stood up and looked down at him. 'You feel better?' he asked.

  Billy realized that aside from the way he felt about the thing he was holding in his lap, he did. The weakness had passed. His heart was beating normally.

  'A little,' he said cautiously.

  Lemke nodded. 'You take weight now. But in a week, maybe two, you start to fall back. Only this time you fall back and there won't be no stopping it. Unless you find someone to eat that.'

  'Yes.'

  Lemke's eyes didn't waver. 'You sure?'

  'Yes, yes!' Billy cried.

  'I feel a little sorry for you,' Lemke said. 'Not much, but a little. Once you might have been pokol - strong. Now your shoulders are broken. Nothing is your fault ... there are reasons ... you have friends.' He smiled mirthlessly. 'Why not eat your own pie, white man from town? You die, but you die strong.'

  'Get out of here,' Billy said. 'I don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about. Our business is done, that's all I know.'

  'Yes. Our business is done.' His glance shifted briefly to the pie, then back to Billy's face. 'Be careful who eats the meal that was meant for you,' he said, and walked away. Halfway down one of the jogging paths, he turned back. It was the last time Billy ever saw his incredibly ancient, incredibly weary face. 'No poosh, white man from town,' Taduz Lemke said. 'Not never.' He turned and walked away.

  Billy sat on the park bench and watched him until he was gone.

  When Lemke had disappeared into the evening, Billy got up and started back the way he had come. He had walked twenty paces before he realized he had forgotten something. He went back to the bench, his face dazed and serious, eyes opaque, and got his pie. It was still warm and it still pulsed, but these things sickened him less now. He supposed a man could get used to anything, given sufficient incentive.

  He started back toward Union Street.

  Halfway up the hill to the place where Ginelli had let him off, he saw the blue Nova parked at the curb. And by then he knew the curse really was gone.

  He was still horribly weak, and every now and then his heart skittered in his chest (like a man who has stepped in something greasy, he thought), but it was gone, just the same - and now that it was, he knew exactly what Lemke had meant when he said a curse was a living thing, something like a blind, irrational child that had been inside him, feeding off him. Purpurfargade ansiktet. Gone now.
>
  But he could feel the pie he carried throbbing very slowly in his hands, and when he looked down at it he could see the crust pulsing rhythmically. And the cheap aluminum pie plate held its dim heat. It's sleeping, he thought, and shuddered. He felt like a man carrying a sleeping devil.

  The Nova stood at the curb on its jacked back wheels, its nose pointing down. The parking lights were on.

  'It's over,' Billy said, opening the passenger door and getting in. 'It's ov . . .'

  That was when he saw Ginelli wasn't in the car. At least, not very much of him. Because of the deepening shadows he didn't see that he had come within an inch of sitting on Ginelli's severed hand until a moment later. It was a disembodied fist trailing red gobbets of flesh onto the Nova's faded seat cover from the ragged wrist, a disembodied fist filled with ball bearings.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  122

  'Where are you?' Heidi's voice was angry, scared, tired. Billy was not particularly surprised to find he felt nothing at all for that voice anymore - not even curiosity.

  'It doesn't matter,' he said. 'I'm coming home.'

  'He sees the light! Thank God! He finally sees the light! Will you be flying into La Guardia or Kennedy? I'll pick you up.'

  'I'll be driving,' Billy said. He paused. 'I want you to call Mike Houston, Heidi, and tell him you've changed your mind about the res gestae.'

  'The what? Billy, what ... ?' But he could tell by the sudden change in her tone that she knew exactly what he was talking about - it was the scared tone of a kid who has been caught filching candy, and he suddenly lost all patience with her.

  'The involuntary committal order,' he said. 'In the trade it's sometimes known as the Loonybin Writ. I've taken care of the business I had and I'll be happy to check in wherever you two want me to - the Glassman Clinic, the New Jersey Goat Gland Center, the Midwestern College of Acupuncture. But if I get grabbed by the cops when I get to Connecticut and end up in the Norwalk state asylum, you're going to be a very sorry woman, Heidi.'