Thinner

Chapter Twenty-five

'Where are you?' Heidi's voice was angry, scared, tired. Billy was not particularly surprised to find he felt nothing at all for that voice anymore – not even curiosity.

'It doesn't matter,' he said. 'I'm coming home.'

'He sees the light! Thank God! He finally sees the light! Will you be flying into La Guardia or Kennedy? I'll pick you up.'

'I'll be driving,' Billy said. He paused. 'I want you to call Mike Houston, Heidi, and tell him you've changed your mind about the res gestae.'

'The what? Billy, what … ?' But he could tell by the sudden change in her tone that she knew exactly what he was talking about – it was the scared tone of a kid who has been caught filching candy, and he suddenly lost all patience with her.

'The involuntary committal order,' he said. 'In the trade it's sometimes known as the Loonybin Writ. I've taken care of the business I had and I'll be happy to check in wherever you two want me to – the Glassman Clinic, the New Jersey Goat Gland Center, the Midwestern College of Acupuncture. But if I get grabbed by the cops when I get to Connecticut and end up in the Norwalk state asylum, you're going to be a very sorry woman, Heidi.'

She was crying. 'We only did what we thought was best for you, Billy. Someday you'll see that.'

Inside his head Lemke spoke up. Nothing is Your fault … there are reasons … you have friends. He shook it off, but before he did, goose flesh had crawled up his arms and the sides of his neck to his face.

'Just . . .' He paused, hearing Ginelli in his head this time. Just take it off. Take it off. William Halleck says take it off.

The hand. The hand on the seat. Wide gold ring on the second finger, red stone – maybe a ruby. Fine black hair growing between the second and third knuckles. Ginelli's hand.

Billy swallowed. There was an audible click in his throat.

'Just have that paper declared null and void,' he said.

'All right,' she said quickly, and then, returned obsessively to the justification: 'We only … I only did what I thought … Billy, you were getting so thin – talking so crazy . . .'

'Okay.'

'You sound as if you hate me,' she said, and began crying again.

'Don't be silly,' he said – which was not precisely a denial. His voice was quieter now. 'Where's Linda? Is she there?'

'No, she's gone back to Rhoda's for a few days. She's … well, she's very upset by all of this.'

I bet, he thought. She had been at Rhoda's before, then had come home. He knew, because he had spoken to her on the phone. Now she was gone again, and something in Heidi's phrasing made him think that this time it had been Lin's idea to go. Did she find out that you and good old Mike Houston were in ' the process of getting her father declared insane, Heidi? Is that what happened? But it didn't really matter. Linda was gone, that was the important thing.

His eyes strayed to the pie, which he had placed on top of the TV in his Northeast Harbor motel room. The crust still pulsed slowly up and down, like a loathsome heart. It was important that his daughter got nowhere near that thing. It was dangerous.

'It would be best for her to stay there until we have our problems worked out,' he said.

On the other end of the line, Heidi burst into loud sobs. Billy asked her what was wrong.

'You're wrong – you sound so cold.'

'I'll warm up,' he said. 'Don't worry.'

There was a moment when he could hear her swallowing back the sobs and trying to get herself under control. He waited for this to happen with neither patience nor impatience; he really felt nothing at all. The blast of horror which had swept through him when he realized the thing on the seat was Ginelli's hand -that was really the last strong emotion he had felt tonight. Except for the queer laughing fit that had come on him a bit later, of course.

'What kind of shape are you in?' she asked finally.

'There's been some improvement. I'm up to a hundred and twenty-two.'

She drew in her breath. 'That's six pounds less than you weighed when you left!'

'It's also six pounds more than when I weighed myself yesterday morning,' he said mildly.

'Billy … I want you to know that we can work all of this out. Really, we can. The most important thing is to get you well, and then we'll talk. If we have to talk with someone else … someone like a marriage counselor … well, I'm game if you are. It's just that we … we. . .'

Oh, Christ, she's going to start bawling again, he thought, and was shocked and amused – both in a very dim sort of way -at his own callousness. And then she said something that struck him as peculiarly touching, and for just a moment he regained a sense of the old Heidi … and with it, the old Billy Halleck.

'I'll give up smoking, if you want,' she said.

Billy looked at the pie on the TV. Its crust pulsed slowly. Up and down, up and down. He thought about how dark it had been when the old Gypsy man slit it open. About the half-disclosed lumps that might have been all the physical woes of mankind or just strawberries. He thought about his blood, pouring out of the wound in his hand and into the pie. He thought about Ginelli. The moment of warmth passed.

'You better not,' he said. 'When you quit smoking, you get fat.'

Later, he lay on top of the made bed with his hands crossed behind his neck, looking up into the darkness. It was a quarter to one in the morning, but he had never felt less like sleeping. It was only now, in the dark, that some disjointed memory of the time between finding Ginelli's hand on the seat of the Nova and finding himself in this room and on the phone to his wife began to come back to him.

There was a sound in the darkened room.

No.

But there was. A sound like breathing.

No, it's your imagination.

But it wasn't imagination; that was Heidi's scripture, not William Halleck's. He knew better than to believe some things were just his imagination. If he hadn't before he did now. The crust moved, like a rind of white skin over living flesh; and even now, six hours after Lemke had given it to him, he knew that if he touched the aluminum plate, he would find it was warm.

'purpurfargade ansiktet,' he murmured in the dark, and the sound was like an incantation.

When he saw the hand, he only saw it. When he realized half a second later what he was looking at, he screamed and lurched away from it. The movement caused the hand to rock first one way and then the other – it looked as if Billy had asked how it was and it was replying with a comme ci, comme !pa gesture. Two of the ball bearings slipped out of it and rolled down to the crack between the bench and the back of the seat.

Billy screamed again, palms shoved against the shelf of jaw under his chin, fingernails pressed into his lower lip, eyes huge and wet. His heart set up a large weak clamor in his chest, and he realized that the pie was tipping to the right. It was within an ace of falling to the Nova's floorboards and shattering.

He grabbed it and righted it. The arrhythmia in his chest eased; he could breathe again. And that coldness Heidi would later hear in his voice began to steal over him. Ginelli was probably dead – no, on second thought, strike the probably. What had he said? If she ever sees me again before I see her, William, I ain't never going to have to change my shirt again.

Say it aloud, then.

No, he didn't want to do that. He didn't want to do that, and he didn't want to look at the hand again. So he did both.

'Ginelli's dead,' he said. He paused, and then, because that seemed to make it a little better: 'Ginelli's dead and there's nothing I can do about it. Except get the fuck out of here before a cop . . .'

He looked at the steering wheel and saw that the key was in the ignition. The hick's keyring, which displayed a picture of Olivia Newton John in a sweatband, dangled .from a piece of rawhide. He supposed the girl, Gina, might well have returned the key to the ignition when she delivered the hand – she had taken care of Ginelli, but would not presume to break whatever promises her greatgrandfather might have made to Ginelli's friend, the fabled white man from town. The key was for him. It suddenly occurred to him that Ginelli had taken a car key from one dead man's pocket; now the girl had almost surely done the same thing. But the thought brought no. chill.

His mind was very cold now. He welcomed the coldness.

He got out of the Nova, set the pie carefully on the floor, crossed to the driver's side, and got in. When he sat down, Ginelli's hand made that grisly seesawing gesture again. Billy opened the glove compartment and found a very old map of Maine inside. He unfolded it and put it over the hand. Then he started the Nova and drove down Union Street.

He had been driving almost five minutes when he realized he was going the wrong way – west instead of east. But by then he could see McDonald's golden arches up ahead in the deepening twilight. His stomach grumbled. Billy turned in and stopped at the drive-through intercom.

'Welcome to McDonald's,' the voice inside the speaker said. 'May I take your order?'

'Yes, please – I'd like three Big Macs, two large orders of french fries, and a coffee milkshake.'

Just like the old days, he thought, and smiled. Gobble it all in the car, get rid of the trash, and don't tell Heidi when you get home.

'Would you like any dessert with that?'

'Sure. A cherry pie.' He looked at the spread-out map beside him. He was pretty sure the small bulge just west of Augusta was Ginelli's ring. A wave of faintness washed through him. 'And a box of McDonaldland cookies for my friend,' he said, and laughed.

The voice read his order back to him and then finished, 'Your order comes to six-ninety, sir. Please drive through.'

'You bet,' Billy said. 'That's what it's all about, isn't it? Just driving through and trying to pick up your order.' He laughed again. He felt simultaneously very fine and like vomiting.

The girl handed him two warm white bags through the pickup window. Billy paid her, received his change, and drove on. He paused at the end of the building and picked up the old road map with the hand inside it. He folded the sides of the map under, reached out the open window, and deposited it in a trash barrel. On top of the barrel, a plastic Ronald McDonald danced with a plastic Grimace. Written on the swinging door of the trash barrel were the words

PUT LITTER IN ITS PLACE.

'That's what it's all about, too,' Billy said. He was rubbing his hand on his leg and laughing. 'Just trying to put litter in its place … and keep it there.'

This time he turned east on Union Street, heading in the direction of Bar Harbor. He went on laughing. For a while he thought he would never be able to stop – that he would just go on laughing until the day he died.

Because someone might have noticed him giving the Nova what a lawyer colleague of Billy's had once called 'a fingerprint massage' if he had done it in a relatively public place – the courtyard of the Bar Harbor Motor Inn, for instance – Billy pulled into a deserted roadside rest area about forty miles east of Bangor to do the job. He did not intend to be connected with this car in any way if he could help it. He got out, took off his sport coat, folded the buttons in, and then carefully wiped down every surface he could remember touching and every one he might have touched.

The No Vacancy light was on in front of the motor inn's office and there was only one empty parking space that Billy could see. It was in front of a dark unit, and he had little doubt that he was looking at Ginelli's John Tree room.

He slid the Nova into the space, took out his handkerchief and wiped both the wheel and the gearshift. He got the pie. He opened the door and wiped off the inside handle. He put his handkerchief back in his pocket, got out of the car, and pushed the door with his butt to close it. Then he looked around. A tired-looking mother was squabbling with a child who looked even more tired than she; two old men stood outside the office, talking. He saw no one else, sensed no one looking at him. He heard TV's inside motel rooms and, from town, barroom rock 'n' roll cranking up as Bar Harbor's summer denizens prepared to party hearty.

Billy crossed the forecourt, walked downtown, and followed his ears to the sound of the loudest rock band. The bar was called the Salty Dog, and as Billy had hoped, there were cabs -three of them, waiting for the lame, the halt, and the drunk -parked outside. Billy spoke to one of the drivers, and for fifteen dollars the cabbie was delighted to run Billy over to Northeast Harbor.

'I see you got y'lunch,' the cabbie said as Billy got in.

'Or somebody's,' Billy replied, and laughed. 'Because that's really what it's all about, isn't it? Just trying to make sure somebody gets their lunch.'

The cabbie looked dubiously at him in the rearview mirror for a moment, then shrugged. 'Whatever you say, my friend -you're paying the tab.'

A half-hour after that he had been on the phone to Heidi.

Now he lay here and listened to something breathe in the dark -something that looked like a pie but which was really a child he and that old man had created together.

Gina, he thought, almost randomly. Where is she? 'Don't hurt her' – that's what I told Ginelli. But I think if I could lay my hands on her, I'd hurt her myself … hurt her plenty, for what she did to Richard. Her hand? I'd leave that old man her head … I'd stuff her mouth full of ball bearings and leave him the head. And that's why it's a good thing I don't know where to lay my hands on her, because no one knows exactly how things like this get started; they argue about that and they finally lose the truth altogether if it's inconvenient, but everybody knows how they keep on keeping on: they take one, we take one, then they take two, and we take three … they shoot up an airport so we blow a school … and blood runs in the gutters. Because that's what it's really all about, isn't it? Blood in the gutters. Blood …

Billy slept without knowing he slept; his thoughts simply merged into a series of ghastly, twisted dreams. In some of these he killed and in some he was killed, but in all of them something breathed and pulsed, and he could never see that something because it was inside himself.