Thinner (20 page)

Billy's heart speeded in his chest. 'Can I show you some pictures?'

'Wouldn't do any good. I didn't see them.' He looked at the ten for a moment and then called: 'Lon! Lonnie! Come over here a minute!'

One of the old men who had been sitting by the window got up and shuffled over to the bar. He was wearing gray cotton pants, a white shirt that was too big for him, and a snap-brim straw hat. Its face was weary. Only his eyes were alive. He reminded Billy of someone, and after a few moments it came to him. The old man looked like Lee Strasberg, the teacher and actor.

'This is Lon Enders,' the bartender said. 'He's got a little place just on the west of town. Same side the Salt Shack's on. Lon sees everything that goes on in Old Orchard.'

'I'm Bill Halleck.'

'Meet you,' Lon Enders said in a papery voice, and took the stool next to Billy's. He did not really seem to sit; rather, his knees appeared to buckle the moment his buttocks were poised over the cushion.

'Would you like a beer?' Billy asked.

'Can't,' the papery voice rustled, and Billy moved his head slightly to avoid the oversweet smell of Enders' breath.

'Already had my one for the day. Doctor says no more than that. Guts're screwed up. If I was a car, I'd be ready for the scrap heap.'

'Oh,' Billy said lamely.

The bartender turned away from them and began loading beer glasses into a dishwasher. Enders looked at the ten-dollar bill. Then he looked at Billy.

Halleck explained again while Enders' tired, too-shiny face looked dreamily off into the shadows of the Seven Seas and the arcade bells bonged faintly, like sounds overheard in a dream, next door.

'They was here,' he said when Billy had finished. 'They was here, all right. I hadn't seen any Gypsies in seven years or more. Hadn't seen this bunch in maybe twenty years.'

Billy's right hand squeezed the beer glass he was holding, and he had to consciously make himself relax his grip before he broke it. He set the glass down carefully on the bar.

'When? Are you sure? Do you have any idea where they might have been going? Can you -?'

Enders held up one hand - it was as white as the hand of a drowned man pulled from a well, and to Billy it seemed dimly transparent.

'Easy, my friend,' he said in his whispering voice. 'I'll tell you what I know.'

With the same conscious effort, Billy forced himself to say nothing. To just wait.

'I'll take the tenspot because you look like you can afford it, my friend,' Enders whispered. He tucked it into his shirt pocket and then pushed the thumb and forefinger of his left hand into his mouth, adjusting his upper plate. 'But I'd talk for free. Hell, when you get old you find out you'd pay someone to listen ... ask Timmy there if I can have a glass of cold water, would you? Even the one beer's too much, I reckon - it's burning what's left of my stomach something fierce - but it's hard for a man to give up all his pleasures, even when they don't pleasure him no more.'

Billy called the bartender over, and he brought Enders his ice water.

'You okay, Lon?' he asked as he put it down.

'I been better and I been worse,' Lon whispered, and picked up the glass. For a moment Billy thought it was going to prove too heavy. But the old man got it to his mouth, although some spilled on the way there.

'You want to talk to this guy?' Timmy asked.

The cold water seemed to revive Enders. He put the glass down, looked at Billy, looked back at the bartender. 'I think somebody ought to,' he said. 'He don't look as bad as me yet ... but he's getting there.'

Enders lived in a small retirees' colony on Cove Road. He said Cove Road was part of 'the real Old Orchard - the one the tips don't care about.'

'Tips?' Billy asked.

'The crowds, my friend, the crowds. Me and the wife come to this town in 1946, just after the war. Been here ever since. I learned how to turn a tip from a master Lonesome Tommy McGhee, dead these many years now. Yelled my guts out, I did, and what you hear now is all that's left.'

The chuckle, almost as faint as a breath of predawn breeze, came again.

Enders had known everyone associated with the summer carnival that was Old Orchard, it seemed - the vendors, the pitchmen, the roustabouts, the glass-chuckers (souvenir salesmen), the dogsmen (ride mechanics), the bumpers, the carnies, the pumps and the pimps. Most of them were year-round people he had known for decades or people who returned each summer like migratory birds. They formed a stable, mostly loving community that the summer people never saw. He also knew a large portion of what the bartender had called 'drift trade.' These were the true transients, people who showed up for a week or two weeks, did some business in the feverish party-town atmosphere of Old Orchard, and then moved on again.

'And you remember them all?' Billy asked doubtfully.

'Oh, I wouldn't if they was all different from year to year,' Enders whispered, 'but that's not how drift trade is. They ain't as regular as the dogsmen and the doughthumpers, but they have a pattern too. You see this fellow who comes on the boardwalk in 1957, selling Hula Hoops off'n his arm. You see him again in 1960, selling expensive watches for three bucks apiece. His hair is maybe black instead of blond, and so he thinks people don't recognize him, and I guess the summer people don't, even if they was around in 1957, because they go right back and get rooked again. But we know him. We know the drift trade. Nothing changes but what they sell, and what they sell is always a few steps outside the law.

'The pushers, they're different. There's too many, and they are always going to jail or dying off. And the whores get old too fast to want to remember. But you wanted to talk about Gypsies. I guess they're the oldest drift trade of all, when you stop to think about it.'

Billy took his envelope of photographs from his sportcoat pocket and laid them out carefully like a pat poker hand: Gina Lemke. Samuel Lemke. Richard Crosskill. Maura Starbird.

Taduz Lemke.

'Ah!' The old man on the stool breathed in sharply when Billy put that last one down, and then he spoke directly to the photograph, cooling Billy's skin: 'Teddy, you old whoremaster!'

He looked up at Billy and smiled, but Billy Halleck was not fooled - the old man was afraid.

'I thought it was him,' he said. 'I didn't see nothing but a shape in the dark - this was three weeks ago. Nothing but a shape in the dark, but I thought ...
no, I knew ...

He fumbled the ice water to his mouth again, spilling more, this time down the front of his shirt. The cold made him gasp.

The bartender came over and favored Billy with a hostile glance. Enders held his hand up absently to show he was all right. Timmy retreated to the dishwasher again. Enders turned the photograph of Taduz Lemke. over. Written on the back was Photo taken Attleboro, Mass., mid-May 1983.

'And he hasn't aged a day since I first seen him and his friends here in the summer of 1963,' Enders finished. They had set up camp behind Herk's Salt Shack Lobster Barn on Route 27. They had stayed four days and four nights. On the fifth morning they were simply gone. Cove Road lay close by, and Enders said he had walked the half-mile the second evening the Gypsies were there (it was hard for Billy to imagine this ghostly man walking around the block, but he let it pass). He wanted to see them, he said, because they reminded him of the old days when a man could run his business if he had a business to run, and John Law stayed out of his way and let him do it.

'I stood there by the side of the road quiet awhile,' he said. 'It was the usual raree and Gypsy turnout - the more things change, the more they stay the same. It used to be all tents and now it's vans and campers and such, but what goes on inside is just the same. A woman telling fortunes. Two, three women selling powders to the ladies ... two, three men selling powders to the men. I guess they would have stayed longer, but I heard they arranged a dogfight for some rich Canucks and the state cops got wind of it.'

'Dogfight!'

'People want to bet, my friend, and drift trade is always willing to arrange the things they want to bet on - that's one of the things drift trade is for. Dogs or roosters with steel spurs or maybe even two men with these itty-bitty sharp knives that look almost like spikes, and each of 'em bites the end of a scarf, and the one who drops his end first is the loser. What the Gypsies call "a fair one."'

Enders was staring at himself in the back bar mirror at himself and through himself.

'It was like the old days, all right,' he said dreamily. 'I could smell their meat, the way they cure it, and green peppers, and that olive oil they like that smells rancid when it comes out of the can and then sweet when it's been cooked. I could hear them talking their funny language, and this
thud! thud! thud!
that was someone throwing knives at a board. Someone was cooking bread the old way, on hot stones.

'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?