Thinner (5 page)

He had never been so afraid in his life.

Chapter Six

217

'How much weight?' Dr Houston asked. Halleck, determined to be honest now that he was actually facing the man, told him he had lost about thirty pounds in three weeks. 'Wow!' Houston said.

'Heidi's a little worried. You know how wives can be.

'She's right to be worried,' Houston said.

Michael Houston was a Fairview archetype: the Handsome Doctor with White Hair and a Malibu Tan. When you glimpsed him sitting at one of the parasol-equipped tables which surrounded the country club's outdoor bar, he looked like a younger version of Marcus Welby, MD. The poolside bar, which was called the Watering Hole, was where he and Halleck were now. Houston was wearing red golfing pants held up with a shiny white belt. His feet were dressed in white golfing shoes. His shirt was Lacoste, his watch a Rolex. He was drinking a pina colada. One of his standard witticisms was referring to them as 'penis coladas.' He and his wife had two eerily beautiful children and lived in one of the larger houses on Lantern Drive they were in walking distance of the country club, a fact of which Jenny Houston boasted when she was drunk. It meant that their house had cost well over a hundred and fifty K. Houston drove a brown Mercedes four-door. She drove a Cadillac Cimarron that looked like a Rolls-Royce with hemorrhoids. Their kids went to a private school in Westport. Fairview gossip - which was true more often than not - suggested that Michael and Jenny Houston had reached a
modus
vivendi:
he was an obsessive philanderer and she started in on the whiskey sours around three in the afternoon.
Just a typical
Fairview family,
Halleck thought, and suddenly felt tired as well as scared. He either knew these people too well or thought he did, and either way it came to the same.

He looked down at his own shiny white shoes and thought:
Who are you kidding? You wear the tribal feather.

'I want to see you in my office tomorrow,' Houston said.

'I've got a case'

'Never mind your case. This is more important. In the meantime, tell me this. Have you had any bleeding? Rectal?

Mouth?'

'No.’

'Notice any bleeding from the scalp when you comb your hair?'

'No. '

'How about sores that don't want to heal? Or scabs that fall off and just reform?'

'No.'

'Great,' Houston said. 'By the way, I carded an eightyfour today. What do you think?'

'I think it'll still be a couple of years before you make the Masters,' Billy said. Houston laughed. The waiter came. Houston ordered another penis colada. Halleck ordered a Miller.
Miller Lite,
he almost told the waiter - force of habit - and then held his tongue. He needed a light beer like he needed ... well, like he needed some rectal bleeding.

Michael Houston leaned forward. His eyes were grave and Halleck felt that fear again, like a smooth steel needle, very thin, probing at the lining of his stomach. He realized miserably that something had changed in his life, and not for the better. Not for the better at all. He was scared a lot now. Gypsy's revenge.

Houston's grave eyes were fixed on Billy's and Billy heard him say:
The chances that you have cancer are five in six,
Billy. I don't even need an X ray to tell you that. Is your will up-to-date? Are Heidi and Linda provided for adequately?

When you're a relatively young man you don't think it can happen to you, but it can. It can.
In the quiet tone of a man imparting great information, Houston asked: 'How many pallbearers does it take to bury a nigger from Harlem?'

Billy shook his head, smiling a counterfeit smile.

'Six,' Houston said. 'Four to carry the coffin and two to carry the radio.'

He laughed, and Billy Halleck went through the motions. In his mind, clearly, he saw the Gypsy man who had been waiting for him outside the Fairview courthouse. Behind the Gypsy, at the curb, in a no-parking zone, stood a huge old pickup truck with a homemade camper cap. The cap was covered with strange designs around a central painting - a not-verygood rendering of a unicorn on its knees, head bowed, before a Gypsy woman with a garland of flowers in her hands. The Gypsy man had been wearing a green twill vest, with buttons made out of silver coins. Now. watching Houston laugh at his own joke, the alligator on his shirt riding the swells of his mirth, Billy thought:
You remember much more about that guy
than you thought. You thought you only remembered his nose, but that's not true at all. You remember damn near
everything.

Children. There had been children in the cab of the old van, looking at him with depthless brown eyes, eyes that were almost black. 'Thinner,' the old man had said, and in spite of his callused flesh, his caress had been the caress of a lover.
Delaware plates,
Billy thought suddenly. His
rig had Delaware plates. And a bumper sticker, something ...
Billy's arms dimpled out in goose flesh and for one moment he thought he might scream, as he had once heard a woman scream right here when she thought her child was drowning in the pool.

Billy Halleck remembered how they had seen the Gypsies for the first time; the day they had come to Fairview. They had parked along one side of the Fairview town common, and a flock of their kids had run out onto the greensward to play. The Gypsy women stood gossiping and watching them. They were brightly dressed, but not in the peasant garb an older person might have associated with the Hollywood version of Gypsies in the thirties and forties. There were women in colorful sundresses, women in calf-length clamdigger pants, younger women in Jordache or Calvin Klein jeans. They looked bright, alive, somehow dangerous.

A young man jumped out of a VW microbus and began to juggle oversized bowling pins. EVERYONE NEEDS

SOMETHING TO BELIEVE IN, the young man's T-shirt read, AND RIGHT NOW I BELIEVE I'LL HAVE ANOTHER

BEER. Fairview children ran toward him as if drawn by a magnet, yelling excitedly. Muscles rippled under the young man's shirt, and a giant crucifix bounded up and down on his chest. Fairview mothers gathered some of the kids up and bore them away. Other mothers were not as fast. Older town children approached the Gypsy children, who stopped their play to watch them come.
Townies,
their dark eyes said.
We see townie children everywhere the roads go. We know your eyes, and your
haircuts; we know how the braces on your teeth will flash in the sun. We don't know where we'll be tomorrow, but we know
where you will be. Don't these same places and these same faces bore you? We think they do. We think that's why you always
come to hate us.

Billy, Heidi, and Linda Halleck had been there that day, two days before Halleck would strike and kill the old Gypsy woman less than a quarter of a mile from here. They had been having a picnic lunch and waiting for the first band concert of the spring to begin. Most of the others abroad on the common that day had been there for the same reason, a fact the Gypsies undoubtedly knew.

Linda had gotten up, brushing at the seat of her Levi's as if in a dream, and started toward the young man juggling the bowling pins.

'Linda, stay here!' Heidi said sharply. Her hand had gone to the collar of her sweater and was fiddling there, as it often did when she was upset. Halleck didn't think she was even aware of it.

'Why, Mom? It's a carnival, at least, I
think
it is.'

'They're Gypsies,' Heidi said. 'Keep your distance. They're all crooks.'

Linda looked at her mother, then at her dad. Billy shrugged. She stood there looking, as unaware of her wistful expression, Billy thought, as Heidi was of her hand at her collar fiddling it uneasily up against her throat and then back down again.

The young man tossed his bowling pins back into the open side door of the microbus one by one, and a smiling darkhaired girl whose beauty was almost ethereal tossed him five Indian clubs, one after another. The young man now began to juggle these, grinning, sometimes tossing one up under his arm and yelling 'Hoy!' each time he did it. An elderly man wearing Oshkosh bib overalls and a checked shirt began handing out fliers. The lovely young woman who had caught the bowling pins and tossed out the Indian clubs now jumped lightly down from the van's doorway with an easel. She set it up and Halleck thought:
She is going to exhibit bad seascapes and perhaps some pictures of President
Kennedy.
But instead of a painting, she propped a bull's eye target on the easel. Someone from inside the van tossed her a slingshot.

'Gina!' the boy juggling the Indian clubs yelled. He grinned broadly, revealing the absence of several front teeth. Linda sat down abruptly. Her concept of masculine beauty had been formed by a lifetime of network TV, and the young man's handsomeness had been spoiled for her. Heidi stopped fiddling with the collar of her cardigan. The girl flipped the slingshot to the boy. He dropped one of the clubs and began to juggle the slingshot in its place. Halleck remembered thinking
That must be almost impossible.
The boy did it two or three times, then flipped the slingshot back to her and somehow managed to pick up the club he had dropped while keeping the others in the air. There was scattered applause. Some of the locals were smiling - Billy himself was - but most of them looked wary. The girl stepped away from the target on the easel, produced some ball bearings from her breast pocket, and shot three quick bull's-eyes - plop, plop, plop. Soon she was surrounded by boys (and a few girls) clamoring for a turn. She lined them up, organizing them as quickly and efficiently as a nursery-school teacher prepares pupils for the 10:15 bathroom break. Two teenage Gypsy boys of approximately Linda's age popped out of an old LTD station wagon and began to scruff the spent ammunition out of the grass. They were alike as two peas m a pod, obviously identical twins. One wore a gold hoop in his left ear; his brother wore the mate in his right. Is
that how their mother tells them apart?
Billy thought. No one was selling anything. Quite carefully, quite obviously, no one was selling anything. There was no Madame Azonka telling the tarot.

Nevertheless, a Fairview police car arrived soon enough, and two cops stepped out. One was Hopley, the chief of police, a roughly handsome man of about forty. Some of the action stopped, and more mothers took the opportunity the lull afforded to recapture their fascinated children and bear them away. Some of the older ones protested, and Halleck observed that some of the younger ones were in tears.

Hopley began discussing the facts of life with the Gypsy who had been doing the juggling act (his Indian clubs, painted in jaunty red and blue stripes, were now scattered around his feet) and the older Gypsy in the Oshkosh biballs. Oshkosh said something. Hopley shook his head. Then the juggler said something and began to gesticulate. As the juggler spoke, he moved closer to the patrolman who had accompanied Hopley. Now the tableau began to remind Halleck of something, and after a moment it came. It was like watching baseball players argue with the umps over a close call in a game. Oshkosh put a hand on Juggler's arm, pulling him back a step or two, and that enhanced the impression - the manager trying to keep the young hothead from getting the boot. The young man said something more. Hopley shook his head again. The young man began to shout, but the wind was wrong and Billy got only sounds, no words.

'What's happening, Mom?' Linda asked, frankly fascinated.

'Nothing, dear,' Heidi said. Suddenly she was busy wrapping things. 'Are you done eating?'

'Yes, please. Daddy, what's going on?'

For a moment it was on the tip of his tongue to say,
You're watching a classic scene, Linda. It's right up there with the
Rape of the Sabine Women. This one is called the Rousting of the Undesirables.
But Heidi's eyes were on his face, her mouth was tight, and she obviously felt this was not a time for misplaced levity. 'Not much,' he said. 'A little difference of opinion.'

In truth,
not much
was the truth - no dogs were unleashed, there were no Swinging billy clubs, no Black Maria pulled up to the edge of the common. In an almost theatrical act of defiance, Juggler shook off Oshkosh's grip, picked up his Indian clubs, and began to juggle them again. Anger had screwed up his reflexes, however, and now it was a poor show. Two of them fell to the ground almost at once. One struck his foot and some kid laughed. Hopley's partner moved forward impatiently. Hopley, not put out of countenance at all, restrained him much as Oshkosh had restrained Juggler. Hopley leaned back against an elm tree with his thumbs hooked into his wide belt, looking at nothing in particular. He said something to the other cop, and the patrolman produced a notebook from his hip pocket. He wet the ball of his thumb, opened the book, and strolled to the nearest car, a converted Cadillac hearse of early-sixties vintage. He began writing it up. He did this with great ostentation. When he had finished, he moved on to the VW microbus. Oshkosh approached Hopley and began to speak urgently. Hopley shrugged and looked away. The patrolman moved on to an old Ford sedan. Oshkosh left Hopley and went to the young man. He spoke earnestly, his hands moving in the warm spring air. For Billy Halleck the scene was losing whatever small interest it had held for him. He was beginning not to see the Gypsies, who had made the mistake of stopping in Fairview on their way from Hoot to Holler. Juggler abruptly turned and went back to the microbus, simply allowing his remaining Indian clubs to drop onto the grass (the microbus had been parked behind the pickup with the woman and the unicorn painted on the homemade camper cap). Oshkosh bent to retrieve them speaking anxiously to Hopley as he did so. Hopley shrugged again, and although Billy Halleck was in no way telepathic, he knew Hopley was enjoying this as well as he knew that he and Heidi and Linda would be having leftovers for supper.

The young woman who had been shooting ball bearings at the target tried to speak to Juggler, but he brushed by her angrily and stepped into the microbus. She stood for a moment looking at Oshkosh, whose arms were full of Indian clubs, and then she also went into the bus. Halleck could erase the others from his field of perception, but for a moment she was impossible not to see. Her hair was long and naturally wavy, not bound in any way. It fell to below her shoulder blades in a black, almost barbarous flood. Her print blouse and modestly kick-pleated skirt might have come from Sears or J. C. Penney's, but her body was exotic as that of some rare cat - a panther, a cheetah, a snow leopard. As she stepped into the van the pleat at the back of her skirt shifted for a moment and he saw the lovely line of her inner thigh. In that moment he wanted her utterly, and he saw himself on top of her in the blackest hour of the night. And that want felt very old. He looked back at Heidi and now her lips were pressed together so tightly they were white. Her eyes like dull coins. She had not seen his look, but she had seen the shift in the kick pleat, what it revealed, and understood it perfectly. The cop with the notebook stood watching until the girl was gone. Then he closed his notebook, put it back in his pocket, and rejoined Hopley. The Gypsy women were shooing their children back to the caravan. Oshkosh, his arms full of Indian clubs, approached Hopley again and said something. Hopley shook his head with finality. And that was it.