Thinner

Chapter Twenty-seven. Gypsy Pie

He parked the rental car in the driveway behind his own Buick, grabbed the Kluge bag which had been his only luggage, and started across the lawn. The white house with its bright green shutters, always a symbol of comfort and goodness and security to him, now looked strange – so strange it was really almost alien.

The white man from town lived there, he thought, but I'm not sure he's come home, after all – this fellow crossing the lawn feels more like a Gypsy. A very thin Gypsy.

The front door, flanked by two graceful electric flambeaux, opened, and Heidi came out on the front stoop. She was wearing a red skirt and a sleeveless white blouse Billy couldn't remember ever having seen before. She had also gotten her hair cut very short, and for one shocked moment he thought she wasn't Heidi at all but a stranger who looked a little like her.

She looked at him, face too white, eyes too dark, lips trembling. 'Billy?'

'I am,' he said, and stopped where he was.

They stood and looked at each other, Heidi with a species of wretched hope in her face, Billy with what felt like nothing at all in his – yet there must have been, because after a moment she burst out, 'For Christ's sake, Billy, don't look at me that way! I can't bear it!'

He felt a smile surface on his face – inside it felt like something dead floating to the top of a still lake, but it must have looked all right because Heidi answered it with a tentative, trembling smile of her own. Tears began to spill down her cheeks.

Oh, but you always did cry easy, Heidi, he thought.

She started down the steps. Billy dropped the Kluge bag and walked toward her, feeling the dead smile on his face.

'What's to eat?' he asked. 'I'm starved.'

She made him a giant meal – steak, salad, a baked potato almost as big as a torpedo, fresh green beans, blueberries in cream for dessert. Billy ate all of it. Although she never came right out and said it, every movement, every gesture, and every look she gave him conveyed the same message: Give me a second chance, Billy – please give me a second chance. In a way, he thought this was extremely funny – funny in a way the old Gypsy would have appreciated. She had swung from refusing to accept any culpability to accepting all of it.

And little by little, as midnight approached, he sensed something else in her gestures and movements: relief. She felt that she had been forgiven. That was very fine with Billy, because Heidi thinking she was forgiven was also what it was all about.

She sat across from him, watching him eat, occasionally touching his wasted face, and smoking one Vantage 100 after another as he talked. He told her about how he had chased the Gypsies up the coast; about getting the photographs from Kirk Penschley; of finally catching up to the Gypsies in Bar Harbor.

At that point the truth and Billy Halleck parted company.

The dramatic confrontation he had both hoped for and dreaded hadn't gone at all as he had expected, he told Heidi. To begin with, the old man had laughed at him. They had all laughed. 'If I could have cursed you, you would be under the earth now,' the old Gypsy told him. 'You think we are magic – all you white men from town think we are magic. If we were magic, would we be driving around in old cars and vans with mufflers held up with baling wire? If we were magic, would we be sleeping in fields? This is no magic show, white man from town -this is nothing but a traveling carny. We do business with rubes who have money burning holes in their pockets, and then we move on. Now, get out of here before I put some of these young men on you. They know a curse – it's called the Curse of the Brass Knuckles.'

'Is that what he really called you? White man from town?'

He smiled at her. 'Yes. That's really what he called me.'

He told Heidi that he had gone back to his motel room and simply stayed there for the next two days, too deeply depressed to do more than pick at his food. On the third day – three days ago – he got onto the bathroom scales and saw that he had gained three pounds in spite of how little he had eaten.

'But when I thought it over, I saw that that was no stranger than eating everything on the table and finding out I'd lost three pounds,' he said. 'And having that idea was what finally got me out of the mental rut I'd been in. I spent another day in that motel room doing some of the hardest thinking of my life. I started to realize they could have been right at the Glassman Clinic after all. Even Michael Houston could have been at least partly right, as much as I dislike the little prick.'

'Billy . . .' She touched his arm.

'Never mind,' he said. 'I'm not going to sock him when I see him.' Might offer him a piece of pie, though, Billy thought, and laughed.

'Share the joke?' She gave him a puzzled little smile.

'It's nothing,' he said. 'Anyway, the problem was that Houston, those guys at the Glassman Clinic – even you, Heidi -were trying to rani it down my throat. Trying to force-feed me the truth. I just had to think it all out for myself. Simple guilt reaction, plus – I suppose – a combination of paranoid delusions and willful selfdeception. But in the end, Heidi, I was partly right, too. Maybe for all the wrong reasons, but I was partly right I said I had to see him again, and that was what turned the trick. Just not in the way I had expected. He was smaller than I remembered, he was wearing a cheap Timex watch, and he had a Brooklyn accent. He said "coise " for "curse." It was that more than anything that broke through the delusion, I think – it was like hearing Tony Curtis say "Yonduh is da palace of my faddah" in that movie about the Arabian Empire. So I picked up the telephone and -'

In the parlor, the clock on the mantel began bonging musically.

'It's midnight,' he said. 'Let's go to bed. I'll help you stack the dishes in the sink.'

'No, I can do it,' she said, and then slipped her arms around him. 'I'm glad you came home, Billy. Go on upstairs. You must be exhausted.'

'I'm okay,' he said. 'I'll just . . .'

He suddenly snapped his fingers with the air of a man who has just remembered something.

'Almost forgot,' he said. 'I left something in the car.'

'What is it? Can't it wait until the morning?'

'Yes, but I ought to bring it in.' He smiled at her. 'It's for you.'

He went out, his heart thudding heavily in his chest. He dropped the car keys on the driveway, then thumped his head on the side of the car in his haste to pick them up. His hands were trembling so badly that he could not at first stick the key into the trunk slot.

What if it's still pulsing up and down like that? his mind yammered. Christ almighty, she'll run screaming when she sees it!

He opened the trunk and when he saw nothing inside but the jack and the spare, he almost screamed himself. Then he remembered – it was on the passenger side of the front seat. He slammed the trunk down and went around in a hurry. The pie was there, and the crust was perfectly still – as he had known, really, that it would be.

His hands abruptly stopped trembling.

Heidi was standing on the porch again, watching him. He crossed back to her and put the pie into her hands. He was still smiling. I'm delivering the goods, he thought. And delivering the goods was yet another of the many things it was all about: His smile widened.

'Voila,' he said.

'Wow!' She bent down close to the pie and sniffed. 'Strawberry pie … my favorite!'

'I know,' Billy said, smiling.

'And still warm! Thank you!'

'I pulled off the turnpike in Stratford to get gas and the Ladies' Aid or something was having a bake sale on the lawn of the church that was right there,' he said. 'And I thought … you know … if you came to the door with a rolling pin or something, I'd have a peace offering.'

'Oh, Billy . . .' She was starting to cry again. She gave him an impulsive one-armed hug, holding the pie balanced on the tented fingers of her other hand the way a waiter balances a tray. As she kissed him the pie tilted. Billy felt his heart tilt in his chest and fall crazily out of rhythm.

'Careful!' he gasped, and grabbed the pie just as it started to slide.

'God, I'm so clumsy,' she said, laughing and wiping her eyes with the corner of the apron she had put on. 'You bring me my favorite kind of pie and I almost drop it all over your sh-sh . . .' She broke down completely, leaning against his chest, sobbing. He stroked her new short hair with one hand, holding the pie on the palm of the other, prudently away from her body should she make any sudden moves.

'Billy, I'm so glad you're home,' she wept. 'And you promise you don't hate me for what I did? You promise?'

'I promise,' he said gently, stroking her hair. She's right, he thought. It's still warm. 'Let's go inside, huh?'

In the kitchen she put the pie on the counter and went back to the sink.

'Aren't you going to have a piece?' Billy asked.

'Maybe when I finish these,' she said. 'You have one if you like.'

'After the dinner I put away?' he asked, and laughed.

'You're going to need all the calories you can pack in for a while.'

'This is just a case of no room in the inn,' he said. 'Do you want me to dry those for you?'

'I want you to go up and get into bed,' she told him. 'I'll be up right behind you.'

'All right.'

He went up without looking back, knowing she would be more likely to cut herself a slice of the pie if he wasn't there. But she probably wouldn't, not tonight. Tonight she would want to go to bed with him – might even want to make love with him. But he thought he knew how to discourage that. He would just go to bed naked. When she saw him …

And as far as the pie went …

“'Fiddle-de-dee,” said Scarlett, “I'll eat my pie tomorrow. Tomorrow is another day.”' He laughed at the sound of his own dismal voice. He was in the bathroom by then, standing on the scales. He looked up into the mirror and in it he saw Ginelli's eyes.

The scales said he was now all the way up to 131 again, but he felt no happiness. He felt nothing at all – except tired. He was incredibly tired. He went down the hallway that now seemed so queer and unfamiliar and into the bedroom. He tripped over something in the dark and almost fell. She had changed some of the furniture around. Cut her hair, got a new blouse, rearranged the positions of the chair and the smaller of the two bedroom bureaus – but that was only the beginning of the strangeness that was now here. It had grown somehow while he was away, as if Heidi had been cursed after all, but in a much more subtle way. Was that really such a foolish idea? Billy didn't think so. Linda had sensed the strangeness and had fled from it.

Slowly he began to undress.

He lay in bed waiting for her to come up, and instead he heard noises which, although faint, were familiar enough to tell him a story. Squeak of an upper cupboard door – the one on the left, the one where they kept the dessert plates – opening. Rattle of a drawer; subtle clink of kitchen implements as she selected a knife.

Billy stared into the darkness, heart thumping.

Sound of her footsteps crossing the kitchen again – she was going to the counter where she had set the pie down. He heard the board in the middle of the kitchen floor creak when she passed over it, as it had been doing for years.

What will it do to her? Made me thin. Turned Cary into something like an animal that after it was dead you'd make a pair of shoes out of it. Turned Hopley into a human pizza. What will it do to her?

The board in the middle of the floor creaked again as

she went back across the kitchen – he could see her, the plate held in her right hand, her cigarettes and matches in her left. He could see the wedge of pie. The strawberries, the pool of dark red juice.

He listened for the faint squeak of the hinges on the dining-room door, but it didn't come. That did not really surprise him. She was standing by the counter, looking out into the side yard and eating her pie in quick, economical Heidi-bites. An old habit. He could almost hear the fork scraping the plate.

He realized he was floating away.

Going to sleep? No – impossible. Impossible for anyone to fall asleep during the commission of murder.

But he was. He was listening for the floorboard in the middle of the kitchen floor again – he would hear it when she crossed to the sink. Running water as she rinsed her plate. The sound of her circling through all the rooms, setting thermostats and turning off lights and checking the burglar-alarm lights beside the doors – all the rituals of white folks from town.

He was lying in bed listening for the floorboard, and then he was sitting at his desk in his study in the town of Big Jubilee, Arizona, where he had been practicing law for the last six years. It was as simple as that. He was living there with his daughter, and practicing enough of the sort of law he called 'corporation shit' to keep food on the table, the rest of it was Legal Aid Society stuff. They lived simple lives. The old days – two-car garage, a groundsman three days a week, property taxes of twenty-five thousand dollars a year -were long gone. He didn't miss them, and he didn't believe Lin did either. He practiced what law he did practice in town., or sometimes in Yuma or Phoenix, but that was seldom enough and they lived far enough out of Jube to get a sense of the land around them. Linda would be going to college next year, and then he might move back in -but not, he had told her, unless the emptiness started getting to him, and he didn't think it would.

They had made a good life for themselves, and that was fine, that was just as fine as paint, because making a good life for you and yours was what it was all about.

There was a knock on his study door. He pushed back from his desk and turned around and Linda was standing there and Linda's nose was gone. No; not gone. It was in her right hand instead of on her face. Blood poured from the dark hole over her mouth.

'I don't understand, Daddy,' she said in a nasal, foghorning voice. 'It just fell off.'

He awoke with a start, beating at the air with his arms, trying to beat this vision away. Beside him, Heidi grunted in her sleep, turned over on her left side, and pulled the covers up over her head.

Little by little reality flowed back into him. He was back in Fairview. Bright early-morning sunshine fell through the windows. He looked across the room and saw by the digital clock on the dresser that it was 6:25. There were six red roses in a vase beside the clock.

He got out of bed, crossed the room, pulled his robe off its hook, and went down to the bathroom. He turned on the shower and hung his robe up on the back of the door, noticing that Heidi had gotten a new robe as well as a new blouse and haircut – a pretty blue one.

He stepped on the scales. He had gained another pound. He got into the shower and washed off with a thoroughness that was almost compulsive, soaping every part of his body, rinsing, and then soaping again. I'm going to watch my weight, he promised himself. After she's gone I'm really going to watch my weight. I'm never going to get fat the way I was again.

He toweled himself off. He put on his robe and found himself standing by the closed door and looking fixedly at Heidi's new blue robe. He reached out one hand and caught a fold of nylon between his fingers. He rubbed its slickness. The robe looked new, but it also looked familiar.

She's just gone out and bought a robe that looks like one she owned sometime in the past, he thought. Human creativity only goes so far, chumly – in the end, we all start to repeat ourselves. In the end, we're all obsessives.

Houston spoke up in his mind: It's the people who aren't scared who die young.

Heidi: For Christ's sake, Billy, don't look at me that way! I can't bear it!

Leda: He looks like an alligator now. like something that crawled out of a swamp and put on human clothes.

Hopley: You hang around thinking maybe this once, maybe just this once, there's going to be a little justice … an instant of justice to make up for a lifetime of crap.

Billy fingered the blue nylon and a terrible idea began to slide up into his mind. He remembered his dream. Linda at his study door. The bleeding hole in her face. This robe … it didn't look familiar because Heidi had once owned one that looked like it. It looked familiar because Linda owned one that looked like it right now.

He turned around and opened a drawer to the right of the sink. Here was a brush with LINDA written along the red plastic handle.

Black hairs clung to the bristles.

Like a man in a dream he walked down the hall to her room.

Drift trade is always willing to arrange these things, my friend … that's one of the things drift trade is for.

An asshole, William, is a guy who doesn't believe what he's seeing.

Billy Halleck pushed open the door at the end of the hallway and saw his daughter, Linda, asleep in her bed, one arm across her face. Her old teddy bear, Amos, was in the crook of her other arm.

No. Oh, no. No, no.

He hung on to the sides of the door, swaying dreamily back and forth. Whatever else he was, he was no asshole, because he saw everything: her gray suede bomber jacket hung over the back of her chair, the one Samsonite suitcase, open, spilling out a collection of jeans and shorts and blouses and underthings. He saw the Greyhound tag on the handle. And he saw more. He saw the roses beside the clock in his and Heidi's bedroom. The roses hadn't been there when he went to bed last night. No … Linda had brought the roses. As a peace offering. She had come home early to make up with her mother before Billy came home.

The old Gypsy with the rotting nose: No blame, you say. You tell yourself and tell yourself and tell yourself. But there is no poosh, white man from town. Everybody pays, even for things they didn't do. No poosh.

He turned then and ran for the stairs. Terror had made him double-jointed and he shambled like a sailor at sea.

No, not Linda! his mind screamed. Not Linda! God, please, not Linda!

Everybody pays, white man from – town – even for things they didn't do. Because that's what it's really all about.

What remained of the pie stood on the counter, neatly covered with Saran Wrap. Fully a quarter of it was gone. He looked at the kitchen table and saw Linda's purse there – a line of rockstar buttons had been pinned to the strap: Bruce Springsteen, John Cougar Mellancamp, Pat Benatar, Lionel Ritchie, Sting, Michael Jackson.

He went to the sink.

Two plates.

Two forks.

They sat here and ate pie and made up, he thought. When? Right after I went to sleep? Must have been.

He heard the old Gypsy laughing and his knees buckled. He had to clutch at the counter to keep from actually falling over.

When he had some strength, he turned and crossed the kitchen, hearing the board in the middle squeak under his feet as he crossed over it.

The pie was pulsing again – up and down, up and down. Its obscene, persistent warmth had fogged the Saran Wrap. He could hear a faint squelching sound.

He opened the overhead cupboard and got himself a dessert plate, opened the drawer beneath, and got out a knife and fork.

'Why not?' he whispered, and pulled the wrapping off the pie. Now it was still again. Now it was just a strawberry pie that looked extremely tempting in spite of the earliness of the hour.

And as Heidi herself had said, he still needed all the calories he could get.

'Eat hearty,' Billy Halleck whispered in the sunny silence of the kitchen, and cut himself a piece of Gypsy pie.