Thinner

Chapter Three. Mohonk

It was their third night at Mohonk and they had just finished making love. it was the sixth time in three days, a giddy change from their usual sedate twice-a-week pace. Billy lay beside her, liking the feel of her heat, liking the smell of her perfume – Anais Anais – mixed with her clean sweat and the smell of their sex. For a moment the thought made a hideous cross-connection and he was seeing the Gypsy woman in the moment before the Olds struck her. For a moment he heard a bottle of Perrier shattering. Then the vision was gone.

He rolled toward his wife and hugged her tight.

She hugged him back one-armed and slipped her free hand up his thigh. 'You know,' she said, 'if I come my brains out one more time, I'm not going to have any brains left.'

'It's a myth,' Billy said, grinning.

'That you can come your brains out?'

'Nah. That's the truth. The myth is that you lose those brain cells forever. The ones you come out always grow back.'

'Yeah, you say, you say.'

She snuggled more comfortably against him. Her hand wandered up from his thigh, touched his penis lightly and lovingly, toyed with the thatch of his pubic hair (last year he'd been sadly astounded to see the first threads of gray down there in what his father had called Adam's thicket), and then slid up the foothill of his lower belly.

She sat up suddenly on her elbows, startling him a little. He hadn't been asleep, but he had been drifting toward it.

'You really have lost weight!'

'Huh!'

'Billy Halleck, you're skinnier!'

He slapped his belly, which he sometimes called the House That Budweiser Built, and laughed. 'Not much. I still look like the world's only seven-months-pregnant man.'

'You're still big, but not as big as you were. I know. I can tell. When did you weigh yourself last?'

He cast his mind back. It had been the morning Canley had settled. He had been down to 246. 'I told you I'd lost three pounds, remember?'

'Well, you weigh yourself again first thing in the morning,' she said:

'No scales in the bathroom,' Halleck said comfortably.

'You're kidding.'

'Nope. Mohonk's a civilized place.'

'We'll find one.'

He was beginning to drift again. 'If you want, sure.'

'I want.'

She had been a good wife, he thought. At odd times over the last five years, since the steady weight gain had really started to show, he had announced diets and/or physical-fitness programs. The diets had been marked by a lot of cheating. A hot dog or two in the early afternoon to supplement the yogurt lunch, or maybe a hastily gobbled hamburger or two on a Saturday afternoon, while Heidi was out at an auction or a yard sale. Once or twice he had even stooped to the hideous hot sandwiches available at the little convenience store a mile down the road – the meat in these sandwiches usually looked like toasted skin grafts once the microwave had had its way with them, and yet he could never remember throwing away a portion uneaten. He liked his beer, all right, that was a given, but even more than that, he liked to eat. Dover sole in one of New York's finer restaurants was great, but if he was sitting up and watching the Mets on TV, a bag of Doritos with some clam dip on the side would do.

The physical-fitness programs would last maybe a week, and then his work schedule would interfere, or he would simply lose interest. In the basement a set of weights sat brooding in a corner, gathering cobwebs and rust. They seemed to reproach him every time he went down. He tried not to look at them.

So he would suck in his gut even more than usual and announce boldly to Heidi that he had lost twelve pounds and was down to 236. And she would nod and tell him that she was very glad, of course she could see the difference, and all the time she would know, because she saw the empty Doritos bag (or bags) in the trash. And since Connecticut had adopted a returnable bottle-and-can law, the empties in the pantry had become a source of guilt almost as; great as the unused weights.

She saw him when he was sleeping; even worse, she saw him when he was peeing. You couldn't suck in your gut when you were taking a piss. He had tried and it just wasn't possible. She knew he had lost three pounds, four at most. You could fool your wife about another woman – at least for a while – but not about your weight. A woman who bore that weight from time to time in the night knew what you weighed. But she smiled and said Of course you look better, dear. Part of it was maybe not so admirable it kept him quiet about her cigarettes – but he was not fooled into believing that was all of it, or even most of it. It was a way of letting him keep his self-respect.

'Billy?'

'What?' Jerked back from sleep a second time, he glanced over at her, a little amused, a little irritated.

'Do you feel quite well?'

'I feel fine. What's this “do-you-feel-quite-well” stuff?'

'Well … sometimes … they say an unplanned weight loss can be a sign of something.'

'I feel great. And if you don't let me go to sleep, I'll prove it by jumping your bones again.'

'Go ahead.'

He groaned. She laughed. Soon enough they slept. And in his dream, he and Heidi were coming back from the Shop 'n Save, only he knew it was a dream this time, he knew what was going to happen and he wanted to tell her to stop what she was doing, that he had to concentrate all his attention on his driving because pretty soon an old Gypsy woman was going to dart out from between two parked cars – from between a yellow Subaru and a dark green Firebird, to be exact – and this old woman was going to have a child's five-and-dime plastic barrettes in her graying grizzled hair and she was not going to be looking anywhere but straight ahead. He wanted to tell Heidi that this was his chance to take it all back, to change it, to make it right.

But he couldn't speak. The pleasure woke again at the touch of her fingers, playful at first, then more serious (his penis stiffened as he slept and he turned his head slightly at the metallic clicking sound of his zipper going down notch by notch); the pleasure mixed uneasily with a feeling of terrible inevitability. Now he saw the yellow Subaru ahead, parked behind the green Firebird with the white racing stripe. And from between them a flash of pagan color brighter and more vital than any paint job sprayed on in Detroit or the Toyota Village. He tried to scream Quit it, Heidi. It's her. – I'm going to kill her again if you don't quit it! Please, God, no! Please, good Christ, no!

But the figure stepped out between the two cars. Halleck was trying to get his foot off the gas pedal and put it on the brake, but it seemed to be stuck right where it was, held down with a dreadful, irrevocable firmness. The Krazy Glue of inevitability, he thought wildly, trying to turn the wheel, but the wheel wouldn't turn, either. The wheel was locked and blocked. So he tried to brace himself for the crash and then the Gypsy's head turned and it wasn't the old woman, oh no, huh-uh, it was the Gypsy man with the rotted nose. Only now his eyes were gone. In the instant before the Olds struck him and bore him under, Halleck saw the empty, staring sockets. The old Gypsy man's lips spread in an obscene grin – an ancient crescent below the rotted horror of his nose.

Then: Thud/thud.

One hand flailing limply above the Olds's hood, heavily wrinkled, dressed in pagan rings of beaten metal. Three drops of blood splattered the windshield. Halleck was vaguely aware that Heidi's hand had clenched agonizingly on his erection, retaining the orgasm that shock had brought on, creating a sudden dreadful pleasure-pain … And he heard the Gypsy's whisper from somewhere underneath him, drifting up through the carpeted floor of the expensive car, muffled but clear enough: 'Thinner.'

He came awake with a jerk, turned toward the window, and almost screamed. The moon was a brilliant crescent above the Adirondacks, and for a moment he thought it was the old. Gypsy man, his head cocked slightly to the side, peering into their window, his eyes two brilliant stars in the blackness of the sky over upstate New York, his grin lit somehow from within, the light spilling out cold like the fight from a mason jar filled with August fireflies, cold like the swamp-fellas he had sometimes seen as a boy in North Carolina – old, cold light, a moon in the shape of an ancient grin, one which contemplates revenge.

Billy drew in a shaky breath, closed his eyes tight, then opened them again. The moon was just the moon again. He lay down and was asleep three minutes later.

The new day was bright and clear, and Halleck finally gave in and agreed to climb the Labyrinth Trail with his wife. Mohonk's grounds were laced with hiking trails, rated from easy to extremely difficult. Labyrinth was rated 'moderate,' and on their honeymoon he and Heidi had climbed it twice. He remembered how much pleasure that had given him – working his way up the steep defiles with Heidi right behind him, laughing and telling him to hurry up, slowpoke. He remembered worming through one of the narrow, cavelike passages in the rock, and whispering ominously to his new wife, 'Do you feel the ground shaking?' when they were in the narrowest part. It had been narrow, but she had still managed to give his butt a pretty good swat.

Halleck would admit to himself (but never, never to Heidi) that it was those narrow passages through the rock that worried him now. On their honeymoon he had been slim and trim, only a kid, still in good shape from summers spent on a logging crew in western Massachusetts. Now he was sixteen years older and a lot heavier. And, as jolly old Dr Houston had so kindly informed him, he was entering heart-attack country. The idea of having a heart attack halfway up the mountain was uncomfortable but still fairly remote; what seemed more possible to him was getting stuck in one of those narrow stone throats through which the trail snaked on its way to the top. He could remember that they'd had to crawl in at least four places.

He didn't want to get stuck in one of those places.

Or … how's this, gang? Ole Billy Halleck gets stuck in one of those dark crawly places and then has a heart attack! Heyyyy! Two for the price of one!

But he finally agreed to give it a try, if she would agree to go on by herself if he was simply not in good enough shape to make it to the top. And if they could go down to New Paltz first so he could buy some sneakers. Heidi agreed willingly to both stipulations.

In town, Halleck found that 'sneakers' had become declasse. No one would even admit to remembering the word. He bought a pair of dandy green-and-silver Nike walking-and-climbing shoes and was quietly delighted at how good they felt on his feet. That led to the realization that he hadn't owned a pair of canvas shoes in … Five years? Six? It seemed impossible, but there it was.

Heidi admired them and told him again that he certainly did look as if he had lost weight. Outside the shoe store was a penny weighing machine, one of those that advertises *YOUR WATE AND FATE.' Halleck hadn't seen one since he was a kid.

'Hop up, hero,' Heidi said. 'I've got a penny.'

Halleck held back for a moment, obscurely nervous.

'Come on, hurry up. I want to see how much you've lost.'

'Heidi, those things don't weigh true, you know that.'

'A ballpark figure's all I want. Come on, Billy – don't be a poop.'

He reluctantly gave her the package containing his new shoes and stepped up on the scale. She put a penny in. There was a clunk and then two curved silvery metal panels drew back. Behind the top one was his wate; behind the lower one, the machine's idea of his fate. Halleck drew in a harsh, surprised breath.

'I knew it!' Heidi was saying beside him. There was a kind of doubtful wonder in her voice, as if she was not sure if she should feel happiness or fear or wonder. 'I knew you were thinner!'

If she had heard his own harsh gasp, Halleck thought later, she no doubt thought it was because of the number at which the scale had red-lined – even with all his clothes on, and his Swiss army knife in the pocket of his corduroy pants, even with a hearty Mohonk breakfast in his belly, that line was centered neatly at 232. He had lost fourteen pounds since the day Canley had settled out of court.

But it wasn't his wate that had made him gasp; it was his fate. The lower panel had not slid aside to reveal

FINANCIAL MATTERS WILL SOON IMPROVE or OLD FRIENDS WILL VISIT or DO NOT MAKE IMPORTANT DECISION HASTILY.

It had revealed a single black word: 'THINNER.'