Thinner (33 page)

'Are you saying God is on your side?' she asked him, her voice so thick the words were almost unintelligible. 'Is that what I hear you saying? You should burn in hell for such! blasphemy. Are we hyenas? If we are, it was people like your friend who made us so, My great-grandfather says there
are
no curses, only mirrors you hold up to the souls of men and women.'

'Get out,' he said. 'We can't talk. We can't even hear each other.'

'That's right.'

She opened the door and got out. As he pulled away she screamed:
'Your friend is a pig and he'll die thin!'

'But I don't think you will,' Ginelli said.

'What do you mean?'

Ginelli looked at his watch. It was after three o'clock. 'Tell you in the car,' he said. 'You've got an appointment at seven o'clock.'

Billy felt that sharp, hollow needle of fear in his belly again. 'With him?'

'That's right. Let's go.'

As Billy got to his feet there was another arrhythmic episode this the longest one yet. He closed his eyes and grasped at his chest, What remained of his chest. Ginelli grabbed him. 'William, are you okay?'

He looked in the mirror and saw Ginelli holding a grotesque sideshow freak in flapping clothes. The arrhythmia passed and was replaced by an even more familiar sensation - that milky, curdled rage that was directed at the old man
...
and at Heidi.

'I'm okay,' he said. 'Where are we going,?

'Bangor,' Ginelli said.

Chapter Twenty-three

The Transcript

They took the Nova. Both things Ginelli had told him about it were true - it smelled quite strongly of cow manure, and it ate the road between Northeast Harbor and Bangor in great swallows. Genelli stopped around four to pick up a huge basket of steamer clams. They parked at a roadside rest area and divided them, along with a six-pack of beer. The two or three family groups at the picnic tables got a look at Billy Halleck and moved as far away as possible. While they ate, Ginelli finished his story. It didn't take long.

'I was back in the John Tree room by eleven o'clock last night,' he said. 'I could have gotten there quicker, maybe, but I did a few loops and figure-eights and turn-backs just to make sure no one was behind me.

'Once I was in the room, I called New York and sent a fellow out to the telephone I gave the girl the number for. I told him to take a tape deck and a steno plug with him - the kind of gadget reporters use to do phone interviews. I didn't want to have to rely on hearsay, William, if you can dig that. I told him to call me back with the tape as soon as she hung up.

'I disinfected the cuts she put in me while I waited for the call-back. I'm not gonna say she had hydrophobia or anything like that, William, but there was so much hate in her, you know.'

'I know,' Billy said, and thought grimly: I
really do know. Because I'm gaining. In that one way, I'm gaining.
The call had come at a quarter past twelve. Closing his eyes and pressing the fingers of his left hand against his forehead, Ginelli was able to give Billy an almost exact recitation of how the playback had gone.
Ginelli's Man:
Hello.

Gina Lemke:
Do you work for the man I saw tonight?

Ginelli's Man:
Yes, you could say that.

Gina:
Tell him my great-grandfather says

Ginelli's Man: I
got a steno plug on this. I mean, you are being taped. I will play it back for the man you mentioned. So
Gina: You
can do that?

Ginelli's Man:
Yes. So you are talking to him now, in a way of speaking.
Gina:
All right. My great-grandfather says he will take it off. I tell him he is crazy, worse, that he is wrong, but he is firm. He says there can be no more hurting and no more fear for his people - he will take it off. But he needs to meet with Halleck. He can't take it off unless he does. At seven o'clock tomorrow evening my great-grandfather will be in Bangor. There is a park between two streets Union and Hammond. He will be there sitting on a bench. He will be alone. So you win, big man - you win,
mi hela po klockan.
Have your pig friend in Fairmont Park, Bangor, tonight at seven.
Ginelli's Man:
That's all?

Gina:
Yes, except tell him I hope his cock turns black and falls off.

Ginelli's Man:
You're telling him yourself, sister. But you wouldn't be if you knew who you was telling.
Gina:
And fuck you, too.

Ginelli's Man:
You
should call back here at two, to see if there's an answer.
Gina:
I'll
call.

'She hung up,' Ginelli said. He dumped the empty clam shells in a litter basket, came back, and added with no pity at all:

'My guy said it sounded like she was crying all through it.'

'Christ Jesus,' Billy muttered.

'Anyway, I had my guy put the steno plug back on the phone and I recorded a message for him to play back to her when she called at two. It went like this. "Hello, Gina.

This is Special Agent Stoner. I have your message. It sounds like a go. My friend William will come to the park at seven o'clock this evening. He will be alone, but I will be watching. Your people will be watching too, I imagine. That's fine. Let us both watch and let neither of us get in the way of what goes on between the two of them. If anything happens to my friend, you will pay a high price.'

'And that was it?'

'Yes. That was it.'

'The old man caved in.'

'I think
he caved in. It could still be a trap, you know.' Ginelli looked at him soberly. 'They know I'll be watching. They may have decided to kill you where I can see it, as revenge on me, and then take their chances with what happens next.'

'They're killing me anyway,' Billy said.

Or the girl could take it into her he had to do it on her own. She's mad, William. People don't always do what they're told when they're mad.'

Billy looked at him reflectively. 'No, they don't. But either way, I don't have much choice, do I?'

'No ... I don't think you do. You ready?'

Billy glanced toward the people staring at him and nodded. He'd been ready for a long time. Halfway back to the car he said: 'Did you really do any of it for me, Richard?'

Ginelli stopped, looked at him, and smiled a little. The smile was almost vague ... but that whirling, twirling light in his eyes was sharply focused - too sharply focused for Billy to look at. He had to shift his gaze.

'Does it matter, William?'

Chapter Twenty-four

Purpurfargade Ansiktet

They were in Bangor by late afternoon. Ginelli swung the Nova into a gas station, had it filled up, and got direction from the attendant. Billy sat exhaustedly in the passenger seat. Ginelli looked at him with sharp concern when h came back.

'William, are you all right?'

'I don't know,' he said, and then reconsidered. 'No.'

'Is it your ticker again?'

'Yeah.' He thought about what Ginelli's midnight doctor had said - potassium, electrolytes ... something about how Karen Carpenter might have died. 'I ought to have something with potassium in it. Pineapple juice. Bananas. Or oranges.' His heart broke into a sudden disorganized gallop. Billy leaned back and shut his eyes and waited to see if he was going to die. At last the uproar quieted. 'A whole bag of oranges.'

There was a Shop and Save up ahead. Ginelli pulled in. 'I'll be right back, William. Hang in.'

'Sure,' Billy said vaguely, and fell into a light doze as soon as Ginelli left the car. He dreamed. In his dream he saw his house in Fairview. A vulture with a rotting beak flew down to the windowsill and peered in. From inside the house someone began to shriek.

Then someone else was shaking him roughly. Billy started awake. 'Huh!'

Ginelli leaned back and blew out breath. 'Jesus, William, don't scare me like that!'

'What are you talking about?'

'I thought you were dead, man. Here.' He put a net bag filled with navel oranges in Billy's lap. Billy plucked at the fastener with his thin fingers - fingers which now looked like white spider legs - and couldn't get it to give. Ginelli slit the bag open with his pocket knife, then cut an orange in quarters with it. Billy ate slowly at first, as one does a duty, then ravenously, seeming to rediscover his appetite for the first time in a week or more. And his disturbed heart seemed to calm down and rediscover something like its old steady beat ... although that might have only been his mind playing games with itself.

He finished the first orange and borrowed Ginelli's knife to cut a second one into pieces.

'Better?' Ginelli asked.

'Yes. A lot. When do we get to the park?'

Ginelli pulled over to the curb, and Billy saw by the sign that they were on the corner of Union Street and West Broadway -summer trees, full of foliage, murmured in a mild breeze. Dapples and shadow moved lazily on the street.

'We're here,' Ginelli said simply, and Billy felt a finger touch his backbone and then slide coldly down it. 'As close as I want to get, anyway. I would have dropped you off downtown, only you would have attracted one hell of a lot of attention walking up here.'

'Yes,' Billy said. 'Like children fainting and pregnant women having miscarriages.'

'You couldn't have made it anyway,' Ginelli said kindly. 'Anyway, it don't matter. Park's right down at the foot of this hill. Quarter of a mile. Pick a bench in the shade and wait.'

'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.'