Thinner(11)

He looked down at his own shiny white shoes and thought: Who are you kidding? You wear the tribal feather.

'I want to see you in my office tomorrow,' Houston said.

'I've got a case'

'Never mind your case. This is more important. In the meantime, tell me this. Have you had any bleeding? Rectal? Mouth?'

'No.*

'Notice any bleeding from the scalp when you comb your hair?'

'No. '

'How about sores that don't want to heal? Or scabs that fall off and just reform?'

'No.'

'Great,' Houston said. 'By the way, I carded an eightyfour today. What do you think?'

'I think it'll still be a couple of years before you make the Masters,' Billy said.

Houston laughed. The waiter came. Houston ordered another penis colada. Halleck ordered a Miller. Miller Lite, he almost told the waiter - force of habit - and then held his tongue. He needed a light beer like he needed ... well, like he needed some rectal bleeding.

Michael Houston leaned forward. His eyes were grave and Halleck felt that fear again, like a smooth steel needle, very thin, probing at the lining of his stomach. He realized miserably that something had changed in his life, and not for the better. Not for the better at all. He was scared a lot now. Gypsy's revenge.

Houston's grave eyes were fixed on Billy's and Billy heard him say: The chances that you have cancer are five in six, Billy. I don't even need an X ray to tell you that. Is your will up-to-date? Are Heidi and Linda provided for adequately? When you're a relatively young man you don't think it can happen to you, but it can. It can.

In the quiet tone of a man imparting great information, Houston asked: 'How many pallbearers does it take to bury a nigger from Harlem?'

Billy shook his head, smiling a counterfeit smile.

'Six,' Houston said. 'Four to carry the coffin and two to carry the radio.'

He laughed, and Billy Halleck went through the motions. In his mind, clearly, he saw the Gypsy man who had been waiting for him outside the Fairview courthouse. Behind the Gypsy, at the curb, in a no-parking zone, stood a huge old pickup truck with a homemade camper cap. The cap was covered with strange designs around a central painting - a not-very-good rendering of a unicorn on its knees, head bowed, before a Gypsy woman with a garland of flowers in her hands. The Gypsy man had been wearing a green twill vest, with buttons made out of silver coins. Now. watching Houston laugh at his own joke, the alligator on his shirt riding the swells of his mirth, Billy thought: You remember much more about that guy than you thought. You thought you only remembered his nose, but that's not true at all. You remember damn near everything.

Children. There had been children in the cab of the old van, looking at him with depthless brown eyes, eyes that were almost black. 'Thinner,' the old man had said, and in spite of his callused flesh, his caress had been the caress of a lover.

Delaware plates, Billy thought suddenly. His rig had Delaware plates. And a bumper sticker, something ...

Billy's arms dimpled out in goose flesh and for one moment he thought he might scream, as he had once heard a woman scream right here when she thought her child was drowning in the pool.

Billy Halleck remembered how they had seen the Gypsies for the first time; the day they had come to Fairview.

They had parked along one side of the Fairview town common, and a flock of their kids had run out onto the greensward to play. The Gypsy women stood gossiping and watching them. They were brightly dressed, but not in the peasant garb an older person might have associated with the Hollywood version of Gypsies in the thirties and forties. There were women in colorful sundresses, women in calf-length clamdigger pants, younger women in Jordache or Calvin Klein jeans. They looked bright, alive, somehow dangerous.

A young man jumped out of a VW microbus and began to juggle oversized bowling pins. EVERYONE NEEDS SOMETHING TO BELIEVE IN, the young man's T-shirt read, AND RIGHT NOW I BELIEVE I'LL HAVE ANOTHER BEER. Fairview children ran toward him as if drawn by a magnet, yelling excitedly. Muscles rippled under the young man's shirt, and a giant crucifix bounded up and down on his chest. Fairview mothers gathered some of the kids up and bore them away. Other mothers were not as fast. Older town children approached the Gypsy children, who stopped their play to watch them come. Townies, their dark eyes said. We see townie children everywhere the roads go. We know your eyes, and your haircuts; we know how the braces on your teeth will flash in the sun. We don't know where we'll be tomorrow, but we know where you will be. Don't these same places and these same faces bore you? We think they do. We think that's why you always come to hate us.

Billy, Heidi, and Linda Halleck had been there that day, two days before Halleck would strike and kill the old Gypsy woman less than a quarter of a mile from here. They had been having a picnic lunch and waiting for the first band concert of the spring to begin. Most of the others abroad on the common that day had been there for the same reason, a fact the Gypsies undoubtedly knew.

Linda had gotten up, brushing at the seat of her Levi's as if in a dream, and started toward the young man juggling the bowling pins.

'Linda, stay here!' Heidi said sharply. Her hand had gone to the collar of her sweater and was fiddling there, as it often did when she was upset. Halleck didn't think she was even aware of it.

'Why, Mom? It's a carnival, at least, I think it is.'