Thinner

Chapter Eleven. The Scales of Justice

Cary had been furious – utterly furious – at being touched by the old Gypsy. He had gone to see the Raintree chief of police, Allen Chalker, the following day. Chalker was a poker-buddy, and he had been sympathetic.

The Gypsies had come to Raintree directly from Fairview, he told Cary. Chalker said he kept expecting them to leave on their own. They had already been in Raintree for five days, and usually three days was about right – just time enough for all the town's interested teenagers to have their fortunes told and for a few desperately impotent men and a like number of desperately menopausal women to creep out to the encampment under cover of darkness and buy potions and nostrums and strange, oily creams. After three days the town's interest in the strangers always waned. Chalker had finally decided they were waiting for the flea market on Sunday. It was an annual event in Raintree, and drew crowds from all four of the surrounding towns. Rather than make an issue of their continuing presence – Gypsies, he told Cary, could be as ugly as ground wasps if you poked them too hard – he decided to let them work the departing flea-market crowds. But if they weren't gone come Monday morning, he would move them along.

But there had been no need. Come Monday morning, the farm field where the Gypsies had camped was empty except for wheel ruts, empty beer and soda cans (the Gypsies apparently had no interest in Connecticut's new bottle-and-can-deposit law), the blackened remains of several small cookfires, and three or four blankets so lousy that the deputy Chalker sent out to investigate would only

poke at them with a stick – a long stick. Sometime between sundown and sunup, the Gypsies had left the field, left Raintree, left Patchin County … had, Chalker told his old poker buddy Cary Rossington, left the planet as far as he either knew or cared. And good riddance.

On Sunday afternoon the old Gypsy man had touched Cary's face; on Sunday night they had left; on Monday morning Cary had gone to Chalker to lodge a complaint (just what the legal basis of the complaint might have been, Leda Rossington didn't know); on Tuesday morning the trouble had begun. After his shower, Cary had come downstairs to the breakfast nook wearing only his bathrobe and had said: 'Look at this.'

'This' turned out to be a patch of roughened skin just a little above his solar plexus. The skin was a shade lighter than the surrounding flesh, which was an attractive coffeewith-cream shade (golf, tennis, swimming, and a UV sunlamp in the winter kept his tan unvarying). The rough patch looked yellowish to her, the way the calluses on the heels of her feet sometimes got in very dry weather. She had touched it (her voice faltered momentarily here) and then drawn her finger away quickly. The texture was rough, almost pebbly, and surprisingly hard. Armored – that was the word that had risen unbidden in her mind.

'You don't think that damned Gypsy gave me something, do you?' Cary asked worriedly. 'Ringworm or impetigo or some damned thing like that?'

'He touched your face, not your chest, dear,' Leda had replied. 'Now, get dressed quick as you can. We've got brioche. Wear the dark gray suit with the red tie and dress up Tuesday for me, will you? What a love you are.'

Two nights later he had called her into the bathroom, his voice so like a scream that she had come on the run (All our worst revelations come in the bathroom, Billy thought.) Cary was standing with his shirt off, his razor humming forgotten in one hand, his wide eyes staring into the mirror.

The patch of hard, yellowish skin had spread – it had become a blotch, a vaguely treelike shape that spread upward to the area between his nipples and downward, widening, toward his belly button. This changed flesh was raised above the normal flesh of his belly and stomach by almost an eighth of an inch, and she saw there were deep cracks running through it; several of them looked deep enough to slip the edge of a dime into. For the first time she thought he was beginning to look … well, scaly. And felt her gorge rise.

'What is it?' he nearly screamed at her. 'Leda, what is it?'

'I don't know,' she said, forcing her voice to remain calm, 'but you've got to see Michael Houston. That much is clear. Tomorrow, Cary.'

'No, not tomorrow,' he said, still staring at himself in the mirror, staring at the raised arrowhead-shaped hump of harsh yellow flesh. 'It may be better tomorrow. Day after tomorrow if it isn't better. But not tomorrow.'

'Cary -'

'Hand me that Nivea cream, Leda.'

She did, and stood there a moment longer – but the sight of him smearing the white goo over that hard yellow flesh, listening to the pads of his fingers rasp over it – that was more than she could stand, and she fled back to her room. That was the first time, she told Halleck, that she had been consciously glad for the twin beds, consciously glad he wouldn't be able to turn over in his sleep and … touch her. She had lain wakeful for hours, she said, hearing the soft rasp-rasp of his fingers moving back and forth across that alien flesh.

He told her the following night that it was better; the night after that he claimed it was better still. She supposed she should have seen the lie in his eyes … and that he was lying to himself more than he was to her. Even in his extremity, Cary had remained the same selfish son of a bitch she supposed he had always been. But it hadn't all been Cary's doing, she added sharply, still not turning back from the bar where she was now fiddling aimlessly with the glasses. She had developed her own brand of highly specialized selfishness over the years. She had wanted, needed the illusion almost as much as he had.

On the third night, he had walked into their bedroom wearing only his pajama pants. His eyes were soft and hurt, stunned. She had been rereading a Dorothy Sayers mystery ~ they were, for always and ever, her favorites and it dropped from her fingers as she saw him. She would have screamed, she told Billy, but it seemed to her that all her breath was gone. And Billy had time to reflect that no human feeling was truly unique, although one might like to think so: Cary Rossington had apparently gone through the same period of self-delusion followed by shattering self-awakening that Billy had gone through himself.

Leda had seen that the hard yellow skin (the scales there was no longer any way to think of them as anything else) now covered most of Cary's chest and all of his belly. It was as ugly and thickly humped up as burn tissue. The cracks zigged and zagged every which way, deep and black, shading to a pinkish-red deep down where you most definitely did not want to look. And although you might at first think those cracks were as random as the cracks in a bomb crater, after a moment or two your helpless eye reported a different story. At each edge the hard yellow flesh rose a bit more. Scales. Not fish scales but great rough reptile scales, like those on a lizard or a 'gator or an iguana.

The brown arc of his left nipple still showed; the rest of it was gone, buried, under that yellow-black carapace. The right nipple was entirely gone, and – a twisted ridge of this strange new flesh reached around and under his armpit toward his back like the grasping surfacing claw of some unthinkable monstrosity. His navel was gone. And …

'He lowered his pajama pants,' she said. She was now working on her third drink, taking those same rapid birdlike sips. Fresh tears had begun to leak from her eyes, but that was all. 'That's when I found my voice again. I screamed at him to stop, and he did … but not before I'd seen it was sending fingers down into his groin. It hadn't touched his penis … at least, it hadn't yet … but where it had advanced, his pubic hair was gone and there were just those yellow scales.

“'I thought you said it was getting better,” I said.'

“'I honestly thought it was,” he answered me. And the next day, he made the appointment with Houston.'

Who probably told him, Halleck thought, about the college kid with no brain and the old lady with the third set of teeth. And asked if he'd like a short snort of the old brain-squirts.

A week later Rossington had been seeing the best team of dermatologists in New York. They knew immediately what was wrong with him, they said, and a regimen of 'hard-gamma' X rays had followed. The scaly flesh continued to creep and spread. It did not hurt, Rossington told her; there was a faint itching at the borders between his old skin and this horrible new invader, but that was all. The new flesh had absolutely no feeling at all. Smiling the ghastly, shocked smile that was coming to be his only expression, he told her that the other day he had lit a cigarette and crushed it out on his own stomach … slowly. There had been no pain, none at all

She had put her hands up to her ears and screamed at him to stop.

The dermatologists told Cary they had been a bit offcourse. What do you mean? Cary asked. You guys said you knew. You said you were sure. Well, they said, these things happen. Rarely, ha-ha, very rarely, but now we have it licked. All the tests, they said, bore this new conclusion out. A regimen of hipovites – high potency vitamins to those unfamiliar with high-priced doc talk and glandular injections had followed. At the same time this new treatment was getting under way, the first scaly patches had begun to show up on Cary's neck … the underside of his chin … and finally on his face. That was when the dermatologists finally admitted they were stumped. Only for the moment, of course. No such thing is incurable. Modern medicine … dietary regimen … and mumble-mumble … likewise blah-de-dah …

Cary would no longer listen to her if she tried to talk to him about the old Gypsy, she told Halleck; once he had actually raised his hand as if to strike her … and she had seen the first humping and roughening of the skin in the tender webbing between the thumb and forefinger on his right hand.

'Skin cancer!' he shouted at her. 'This is skin cancer, skin cancer, skin cancer! Now will you for Christ's sweet sake shut up about that old wog!'

Of course he was the one who was making at least nominal sense, she was the one who was talking in fourteenth-century absurdities … and yet she knew it had been the doing of the old Gypsy who had stepped out of the crowd at the Raintree flea market and touched Cary's face. She knew it, and in his eyes, even when he raised his hand to her that time, she saw that he knew it too.

He had arranged for a leave of absence with Glenn Petrie, who was shocked to hear his old friend, fellow jurist, and golf partner Cary Rossington had skin cancer.

There had followed two weeks, Leda told Halleck, that she could barely bring herself to remember or speak of. Cary had alternately slept like the dead, sometimes upstairs in their room but just as often in the big overstuffed chair ,in his den or with his head in his arms at the kitchen table. He began to drink heavily every afternoon around four. He would sit in the family room, holding the neck of a J. W. Dant whiskey bottle in one roughening, scaly hand, watching first syndicated comedy shows like Hogan's Heroes and The Beverly Hillbillies, then the local and national news, then syndicated game shows like The Joker's Wild and Family Feud, then three hours of primetime, followed by more news, followed by movies until two or three in the morning. And all the while he drank whiskey like Pepsi-Cola, straight from the bottle.

On some of these nights he would cry. She would come in and observe him weeping while Warner Anderson, imprisoned inside their Sony large-screen TV, cried, 'Let's go to the videotape!' with the enthusiasm of a man inviting all his old girlfriends to go on a cruise to Aruba with him. On still, other nights – mercifully few of them – he would rave like Ahab during the last days of the Pequod, shambling and stumbling through the house with the whiskey bottle held in a hand that was not really a hand anymore, shouting that it was skin cancer, did she hear him, it was fucking skin cancer and he had gotten it from the fucking UV lamp, and he was going to sue the dirty quacks that had done this to him, sue them right down to the motherfucking ground, litigate the bastards until they didn't have so much as a shit-stained pair of skivvies to stand up in. Sometimes when he was in these moods, he broke things.

'I finally realized that he was having these … these fits … on the nights after Mrs Marley came in to clean,' she said dully. 'He'd go up into the attic when she was here, you see. If she'd seen him, it would have been all over town in no time at all. It was the nights after she'd been in and he'd been up there in the dark that he felt most like an outcast, I think. Most like a freak.'

'So he's gone to the Mayo Clinic,' Billy said.

'Yes,' she said, and at last she looked at him. Her face was drunk and horrified. 'What's going to become of him, Billy? What can become of him?'

Billy shook his head. He hadn't the slightest idea. Furthermore, he found he had no more urge to contemplate the question than he'd had to contemplate that famous news photograph of the South Vietnamese general shooting the supposed Vietcong collaborator in the head. In a weird way he couldn't quite understand, this was like that.

'He chartered a private plane to fly to Minnesota, did I tell you that? Because he can't bear to have people look at him. Did I tell you that, Billy?'

Billy shook his head again.

'What's going to become of him?'

'I don't know,' Halleck said, thinking: And just by the way, what's going to become of me, Leda?

'At the end, before he finally gave up and went, both of his hands were claws. His eyes were two . . . two bright little sparks of blue inside these pitted, scaly hollows. His nose . . .' She stood up and wobbled toward him, hitting the corner of the coffee table hard enough with her leg to make it shift – She doesn't feel it now, Halleck thought, but she's going to have one hell of a painful bruise on her calf tomorrow, and if she's lucky she'll wonder where she got it, or how.

She grasped at his hand. Her eyes were great glittering pools of uncomprehending horror. She spoke with a gruesome, breathy confidentiality that prickled the skin of Billy's neck. Her breath was rank with undigested gin.

'He looks like an alligator now,' she said in what was almost an intimate whisper. 'Yes, that's what he looks like, Billy. Like something that just crawled out of a swamp and put on human clothes. It's like he's turning into an alligator, and I was glad he went. Glad. I think if he hadn't gone, I would have gone. Yes. Just packed a bag and … and . . .'

She was leaning closer and closer, and Billy stood up suddenly, unable to stand any more of this. Leda Rossington rocked back on her heels and Halleck just barely managed to catch her by the shoulders … he had also drunk too much, it seemed. If he had missed her, she might very well have brained herself on the same glass-topped, brass-bound coffee table (Trifles, $587 plus mailing) on which she had struck her leg … only instead of waking up with a bruise, she could have waked up dead. Looking into her half-mad eyes, Billy wondered if she might not welcome death.

'Leda, I have to go.'

'Of course,' she said. 'Just came for the straight dope, didn't you, Billy dear?'

'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I'm sorry about everything that's happened. Please believe me.' And, insanely, he heard himself adding: 'When you talk to Cary, give him my best.'

'He's hard to talk to now,' she said remotely. 'It's happening inside his mouth, you see. It's thickening his gums, plating his tongue. I can talk to him, but everything he says to me – all of his replies – come out in grunts.'

He was backing into the hall, backing away from her, wanting to be free of her soft, relentlessly cultured tones, needing to be free of her gruesome, glittering eyes.

'He really is,' she said. 'Turning into an alligator, I mean. I expect that before long they may have to put him in a tank … they may have to keep his skin wet.' Tears leaked from her raw eyes, and Billy saw she was dribbling gin from her canted martini glass onto her shoes.

'Good night, Leda,' he whispered.

'Why, Billy? Why did you have to hit the old woman? Why did you have to bring this on Cary and me? Why?'

'Leda -'

'Come back in a couple of weeks,' she said, still advancing as Billy groped madly behind him for the knob of the front door, holding on to his polite smile by a huge act of will. 'Come back and let me have a look at you when you've lost another forty or fifty pounds. I'll laugh … and laugh … and laugh.'

He found the knob. He turned it. The cool air struck his flushed and overheated skin like a benison.

'Good night, Leda. I'm sorry . . .'

'Save your sorry!' she screamed, and threw her martini glass at him. It struck the doorjamb to Billy's right and shattered. 'Why did you have to hit her, you bastard? Why did you have to bring it on all of us? Why? Why? Why?'

Halleck made it to the corner of Park Lane and Lantern Drive and then collapsed onto the bench inside the bus shelter, shivering as if with ague, his throat and stomach sour with acid indigestion, his head buzzing with gin.

He thought: I hit her and killed her and now I'm losing weight and I can't stop. Cary Rossington conducted the hearing, he let me off without so much as a tap on the wrist, and Cary's in the Mayo Clinic. He's in the Mayo Clinic, and if you believe his wife, he looks like a fugitive from Maurice Sendak's Alligators All Around. Who else was in on it? Who else was involved in a way that the old Gypsy Might have decided called for revenge?

He thought of the two cops, rousting the Gypsies when they came into town … when they had presumed to start doing their Gypsy tricks on the town common. One of them had just been a spear-carrier, of course. Just a patrol-car jockey following …

Following orders.

Whose orders? Why, the police chiefs orders, of course. Duncan Hopley's orders.

The Gypsies had been rousted because they had no permit to perform on the common. But of course they would have understood that the message was somewhat broader than that. If you wanted Gypsy folk out, there were plenty of ordinances. Vagrancy. Public nuisance.

Spitting on the sidewalk. You name it.

The Gypsies had made a deal with a fanner out on the west side of town, a sour old man named Arncaster. There was always a farm, always a sour old farmer, and the Gypsies always found him. Their noses have been trained to smell out guys like Arncaster, Billy thought now as he sat on the bench listening to the first droplets of spring rain strike the bus shelter's roof. Simple evolution. All it takes is two thousand years of being moved along. You talk to a few people; maybe Madame Azonka does a free reading or two. You sniff for the name of the fellow in town who owns land but owes money, the fellow who has no great love for the town or for town ordinances, the guy who posts his apple orchards during hunting season out of pure orneriness – because he'd rather let the deer have his apples than let the hunters have the deer. You sniff for the name and you always find it, because there's always at least one Arncaster in the richest towns, and sometimes there are two or three to choose among.

They parked their cars and campers in a circle, just as their ancestors had drawn their wagons and handcarts into a circle two hundred, four hundred, eight hundred years before them. They obtained a fire permit, and at night there was talk and laughter and undoubtedly a bottle or two passed from hand to hand.

All of this, Halleck thought, would have been acceptable to Hopley. It was the way things were-done. Those who wanted to buy some of whatever the gypsies were selling could drive out the West Fairview Road to the Arncaster place; at least it was out of sight, and the Arncaster place was something of an eyesore to begin with – the farms the Gypsies found always were. And soon they would move on to Raintree or Westport, and from thence out of view and thought.

Except that, after the accident, after the old Gypsy man had made a nuisance of himself by turning up on the courthouse steps and touching Billy Halleck, 'the way things were done' was no longer good enough.

Hopley had given the Gypsies two days, Halleck remembered, and when they showed no signs of moving along, he had moved them along. First Jim Roberts had revoked their Are permit. Although there had been heavy showers every day for the previous week, Roberts told them that the fire danger had suddenly gone way, way up. Sorry. And by the way, they wanted to remember that the same regulations which controlled campfires and cook-fires also applied to propane stoves, charcoal fires, and brazier fires.

Next, of course, Hopley would have gone around to visit a number of local businesses where Lars Arncaster had a credit line – a line of credit that was usually overextended. These would have included the hardware store, the feed-and-grain store on Raintree Road, the Farmers' Co-Op in Fairview Village, and Normie's Sunoco. Hopley might also have gone to visit Zachary Marchant at the Connecticut Union Bank … the bank that held Amcaster's mortgage.

All part of the job. Have a cup of coffee with this one, a spot of lunch with that one – perhaps something as simple as a couple of franks and lemonades purchased at Dave's Dog Wagon – a bottle of beer with the other one. And by sundown of the following day, everyone with a claim cheek on a little piece of Lars Arncaster's ass had given him a call, mentioning how really good it would be to have those damned Gypsies out of town . . how really grateful everyone would be.

The result was just what Duncan Hopley had known it would be. Arncaster went to the Gypsies, refunded the balance of whatever sum they had agreed upon for rent, and had undoubtedly turned a deaf ear to any protests they might have made (Halleck was thinking specifically of the young man with the bowling pins, who apparently had not as yet comprehended the immutability of his station in life). It wasn't as if the Gypsies had a signed lease that would stand up in court.

Sober, Arncaster might have told them they were just lucky he was an honest man and had refunded them the unused portion of what they had paid. Drunk – Arncaster was a three-six-packs-a-night man – he might have been slightly more expansive. There were forces in town that wanted the Gypsies gone, he might have told them.

Pressure had been brought to bear, pressure that a poor dirt farmer like Lars Arncaster simply couldn't stand against. Particularly when half the so-called 'good people' in town had the knife out for him to begin with.

Not that any of the Gypsies (with the possible exception of Juggler, Billy thought) would need a chapter-and-verse rendition.

Billy got up and walked slowly back home through a cold, drifting rain. There was a light burning in the bedroom; Heidi, waiting up for him.

Not the patrol-car jockey; no need for revenge there. Not Arncaster; he had seen a chance for five hundred dollars cash money and had sent them on their way because he'd had to do so.

Duncan Hopley?

Hopley, maybe. A strong maybe, Billy amended. In one way Hopley was just another species of trained dog whose most urgent directives were aimed at preserving Fairview's well-oiled status quo. But Billy doubted if the old Gypsy man would be disposed to take such a bloodlessly sociological view of things, and not just because Hopley had rousted them so efficiently following the hearing. Rousting was one thing. They were used to that. Hopley's failure to investigate the accident which had taken the old woman's life …

Ah, that was something else, wasn't it?

Failure to investigate? Hell, Billy, don't make me laugh. Failure to investigate is a sin of omission. What Hopley did was to throw as much dirt as he could over any possible culpability. Beginning with the conspicuous lack of a breathalyzer test. It was a cover-up on general principles. You know it, and Cary Rossington knew it too.

The wind was picking up and the rain was harder now. He could see it cratering the puddles in the street. The water had a queer polished look under the amber highsecurity streetlamps that lined Lantern Drive. Overhead, branches moaned and creaked in the wind, and Billy Halleck looked up uneasily.

I ought to go see Duncan Hopley.

Something glimmered – something that might have been the spark of an idea. Then he thought of Leda Rossington's drugged, horrified face … he thought of Leda saying He's hard to talk to now … it's happening inside his mouth, you see … everything he says to me comes out in grunts.

Not tonight. He'd had enough for tonight.

'Where did you go, Billy?'

She was in bed, lying in a pool of light thrown by the reading lamp. Now she laid her book aside on the coverlet, looked at him, and Billy saw the dark brown hollows under her eyes. Those brown hollows did not exactly overwhelm him with pity . . . at least, not tonight.

For just a moment he thought of saying: I went to see Cary Rossington, but since he was gone I ended up having a few drinks with his wife – the kind of drinks the Green Giant must have when he's on a toot. And you'll never guess what she told me, Heidi, dear. Cary Rossington, who grabbed your tit once at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve, is turning into an alligator. When he finally dies, they can turn him into a brand-new product: Here Come de Judge Pocketbooks.

'Nowhere,' he said. 'Just out. Walking. Thinking.'

'You smell like you fell into the juniper bushes on your way home.'

'I guess I did, in a manner of speaking. Only it was Andy's Pub I actually fell into.'

'How many did you have?'

'A couple.'

'It smells more like five.'

'Heidi, are you cross-examining me?'

'No, honey. But I wish you wouldn't worry so much. Those doctors will probably find out what's wrong when they do the metabolic series.'

Halleck grunted.

She turned her earnest, scared face toward him. 'I just thank God it isn't cancer.'

He thought – and almost said – that it must be nice for her to be on the outside; it must be nice to be able to see gradations of the horror. He didn't say it, but some of what he felt must have shown on his face, because her expression of tired misery intensified.

'I'm sorry,' she said. 'It just … it seems hard to say anything that isn't the wrong thing.'

You know it, babe, he thought, and the hate flashed up again, hot and sour. On top of the gin, it made him feel both depressed and physically ill. It receded, leaving shame in its wake. Cary's skin was changing into God knew what, something fit only to be seen in a circus-sideshow tent. Duncan Hopley might be just fine, or something even worse might be waiting for Billy there. Hell, losing weight wasn't so bad, was it?

He undressed, careful to turn off her reading lamp first, and took Heidi in his arms. She was stiff against him at first. Then, just when he began to think it was going to be no good, she softened. He heard the sob she tried to swallow back and thought unhappily that if all the storybooks were right, that there was nobility to be found in adversity and character to be built in tribulation, then he was doing a piss-poor job of both finding and building.

'Heidi, I'm sorry,' he said.

'If I could only do something,' she sobbed. 'If I could only do something, Billy, you know?'

'You can,' he said, and touched her breast.

They made love. He began thinking, This one is for her, and discovered it had been for himself after all; instead of seeing Leda Rossington's haunted face and shocked, glittering eyes in the darkness, he was able to sleep.

The next morning, the scale registered 176.