Thinner

Chapter Twenty

'William? What's wrong?'

Ginelli's voice, which had been deeply blurred with sleep and ready to be angry, was now sharp with concern. Billy had found Ginelli's home number in his address book below the one for Three Brothers. He had dialed it without much hope at all, sure it would have been changed at some point during the intervening years.

His left hand, wrapped in a handkerchief, lay in his lap. It had turned into something like a radio station and was now broadcasting approximately fifty thousand watts of pain – the slightest movement sent it raving up his arm. Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. Images of crucifixion kept occurring to him.

'I'm sorry to call you at home, Richard,' he said, 'and so late.'

'Fuck that, what's wrong?'

'Well, the immediate problem is that I've been shot through the hand with a. . .'He shifted slightly, his hand flared, and his lips peeled back over his teeth. 'with a ball bearing.'

Silence at the other end.

'I know how it sounds, but it's true. The woman used a slingshot.'

'Jesus! What -' A woman's voice in the background. Ginelli spoke briefly in Italian to her and then came back on the line. 'This is no joke, William? Some whore put a ball bearing through your hand with a slingshot?'

'I don't call people at . . .' He looked at his watch and another flare of pain raced up his arm. '. . . at three o'clock in the morning and tell jokes. I've been sitting here for the last three hours trying to wait until a more civilized hour. But the pain . . .' He laughed a little, a hurt, helpless, bewildered sound. 'The pain is very bad.'

'Does this have to do with what you called me about before?'

'Yes.'

'It was Gypsies?'

'Yes. Richard. . .'

'Yeah? Well, I promise you one thing. They don't fuck with you anymore after this.'

'Richard, I can't go to a doctor with this and I'm in … I really am in a lot of pain.' Billy Halleck, Grandmaster of Understatement, he thought. 'Can you send me something? Maybe by Federal Express? Some kind of painkiller?'

'Where are you?'

Billy hesitated for just a moment, then shook his head a little. Everyone he trusted had decided he was crazy; he thought it very likely that his wife and his boss had gone through or soon would be going through the motions necessary to effect an involuntary committal in the state of Connecticut. Now his choices were very simple, and marvelously ironic: either trust this dope-dealing hood he hadn't seen in nearly six years, or give up completely.

Closing his eyes, he said: 'I'm in Bar Harbor, Maine. The Frenchman's Bay Motel. Unit thirty-seven.'

'Just a second.'

Ginelli's voice moved away from the telephone again. Billy heard him speaking in a dim platter of Italian. He didn't open his eyes. At last Ginelli came back on the line again.

'My wife is making a. couple of calls for me,' he said. 'You're wakin' up guys in Norwalk right now, paisan. I hope you're satisfied.'

'You're a gentleman, Richard,' Billy said. The words came out in a guttural slur and he had to clear his throat. He felt too cold. His lips were too dry and he tried to wet them, but his tongue was dry too.

'You be very still, my friend,' Ginelli said. The concern was back in his voice. 'You hear me? Very still. Wrap up in a blanket if you want, but that's all. You've been shot. You're in shock.'

'No shit,' Billy said, and laughed again. 'I've been in shock for about two months now.'

'What are you talking about?'

'Never mind.'

'All right. But we got to talk, William.'

'Yes.'

'I … Hold on a second.' Italian, soft and faint. Halleck closed his eyes again and listened to his hand broadcast pain. After a while Ginelli came back on the phone. 'A man is going to come by with some painkiller for you. He

'Oh, hey, Richard, that's not

'Don't tell me my business, William, just listen. His name is Fander. He's no doctor, this guy, at least not anymore, but he's going to look at you and decide if you ought to have some antibiotics as well as the dope. He'll be there before daylight.'

'Richard, I don't know how to thank you,' Billy said. Tears were running down his cheeks; he wiped at them absently with his right hand.

'I know you don't,' Ginelli said. 'You're not a wop. Remember, Richard: just sit still.'

Fander arrived shortly before six o'clock. He was a little man with prematurely white hair who carried a country doctor's bag. He gazed at Billy's scrawny, emaciated body for a long moment without speaking and then carefully unwound the handkerchief from Billy's left hand. Billy had to put his other hand over his mouth to stifle a scream.

'Raise it, please,' Fander said, and Billy did. The hand was badly swollen, the skin pulled taut and shiny. For a moment he and Fander gazed at each other through the hole in Billy's palm, which was ringed with dark blood. Fander took an odoscope from his bag and shone it through the wound. Then he turned it off.

'Clean and neat,' he said. 'If it was a ball bearing there's much less chance of infection than there would have been with a lead slug.'

He paused, considering.

'Unless, of course, the girl put something on it before she fired it.'

'What a comforting idea,' Billy croaked.

'I'm not paid to comfort people,' Fander said coolly, especially when I'm routed out of bed at three-thirty and have to change from my pajamas into my clothes in a light plane that is bouncing around at eleven thousand feet. You say it was a steel bearing?'

'Yes.'

'Then you're probably all right. You can't very well soak a steel ball bearing in poison the way the Jivaro Indians soaked their wooden arrowheads in curare, and it doesn't seem likely the woman could have painted it with anything if it was all as spur-of-the-moment as you say. This should heal well, with no complications.' He took out disinfectant, gauze, an elastic bandage. 'I'm going to pack the wound and then bandage it. The packing is going to hurt like hell, but believe me when I tell you that it's going to hurt a lot more in the long run if I leave it open.'

He cast another measuring eye on Billy – not so much the compassionate eye of a doctor, Billy thought, as the cold, appraising glance of an abortionist. 'This hand is going to be the least of your problems if you don't start eating again.'

Billy said nothing.

Fander looked at him a moment longer, then began packing the wound. At that point talk would have been impossible for Billy anyway; the pain-broadcasting station in his hand jumped from fifty thousand to two-hundred fifty thousand watts in one quick leap. He closed his eyes, clamped his teeth together, and waited for it to be over.

At last it was over. He sat with his throbbing bandaged hand in his lap and watched Fander root in his bag once more.

'All other considerations aside, your radical emaciation makes for problems when it comes to dealing with your pain. You're going to feel quite a bit more discomfort than you'd feel if your weight was normal, I'm afraid. I can't give you Darvon or Darvocet because they might put you in a coma or cause you to go into cardiac arrhythmia. How much do you weigh, Mr Halleck? A hundred and twenty-five?'

'About that,' Billy muttered. There was a scale in the bathroom, and he had stepped on it before going out to the camp of the Gypsies – it was his own bizarre form of pep rally, he supposed. The needle had centered on 118. All the running around in the hot summer sun had helped to speed things up considerably.

Fander nodded with a little moue of distaste. 'I'm going to give you some fairly strong Empirin. You take one single tablet. If you're not dozing off in half an hour, and if your hand is still very, very painful, you can take another half. And you go on like that for the next three or four days.' He shook his head. 'I just flew six hundred miles to give a man a bottle of Empirin. I can't believe it. Life can be very perverse. But considering your weight, even Empirin's dangerous. It ought to be baby aspirin.'

Fander removed another small bottle from his bag, this one unmarked.

'Aureomycin,' he said. 'Take one by mouth every six hours. But – mark this well, Mr Halleck – if you start having diarrhea, stop the antibiotic at once. In your state, diarrhea is a lot more apt to kill you than an infection from this wound.'

He snapped the bag shut and stood up.

'One final piece of advice that has nothing to do with your adventures in the Maine countryside. Get some potassium tablets as soon as possible and begin taking two every day – one when you get up, one when you go to bed. You'll find them at the drugstore in the vitamin section.'

'Why?'

'If you continue to lose weight, you will very soon begin to experience instances of heart arrhythmia whether you take Darvon or any other drug. This sort of arrhythmia comes from radical potassium depletion in the body. It may have been what killed Karen Carpenter. Good day, Mr Halleck.'

Fander let himself out into the first mild light of dawn.

For a moment he only stood there looking toward the sound of the ocean, which was very clear in the stillness.

'You really ought to get off whatever hunger strike you are on, Mr Halleck,' he said without turning around. 'In many ways the world is nothing but a pile of shit. But it can also be very beautiful.'

He walked toward a blue Chevrolet that was idling at the side of the building and got into the backseat. The car moved off.

'I'm trying to get off it,' Billy said to the disappearing car. 'I'm really trying.'

He closed the door and walked slowly back to the small table beside his chair. He looked at the medicine bottles and wondered how he was going to open them one-handed.