Thinner(14)

'Why do they come at all? What do they do?'

'Well ... there are always people who want their fortunes read. And there are games of chance. Gambling. Usually they are crooked.'

Or maybe a fast, exotic lay, Halleck thought. He saw the kick pleat of the girl's skirt shift again as she stepped into the van. How would she move? His mind answered: Like the ocean getting ready to storm, that's how.

'Do people buy drugs from them?'

These days you don't need to buy drugs from Gypsies, dear; you can buy those in the schoolyard.

'Hashish, maybe,' he said, 'or opium.'

He had come to this part of Connecticut as a teenager, and had been here ever since - in Fairview and neighboring Northport. He hadn't seen any Gypsies in almost twentyfive years .. not since he had been a kid growing up in North Carolina, when he had lost five dollars - an allowance saved up carefully over almost three months to buy his mother a birthday present - playing the wheel of fortune. They weren't supposed to allow anyone under sixteen to play, but of course if you had the coin or the long green, you could step up and put it down. Some things never changed, he reckoned, and chief among them was the old adage that when money talks, nobody walks. If asked before today, he would have shrugged and guessed that there were no more traveling Gypsy caravans. But of course the wandering breed never died out. They came in rootless and left the same way, human tumbleweeds who cut whatever deals they could and then blew out of town with dollars in their greasy wallets that had been earned on the time clocks they themselves spurned. They survived. Hitler had tried to exterminate them along with the Jews and the homosexuals, but they would outlive a thousand Hitlers, he supposed.

'I thought the common was public property,' Linda said. 'That's what we learned in school.'

'Well, in a way it is,' Halleck said. - '"Common" means commonly owned by the townspeople. The taxpayers.'

Bong! Lie #2. Taxation had nothing at all to do with common land in New England, ownership of or use of. See Richards vs. Jerram, New Hampshire, or Baker vs. Olins (that one went back to 1835), or ...

'The taxpayers.' she said in a musing voice.

'You need a permit to use the common.'

Clang! Lie #3. That idea had been overturned in 1931, when a bunch of poor potato farmers set up a Hooverville in the heart of Lewiston, Maine. The city had appealed to Roosevelt's Supreme Court and hadn't even gotten a hearing. That was because the Hooverites had picked Pettingill Park to camp in, and Pettingill Park happened to be common land.

'Like when the Shrine Circus comes,' he amplified.

'Why didn't the Gypsies get a permit, Dad?' She sounded sleepy now. Thank God.

'Well, maybe they forgot.'

Not a snowball's chance in hell, Lin. Not in Fairview. Not when you see the common from Lantern Drive and the country club, not when that view is part of what you paid for, along with the private schools which teach computer programming on banks of brand-new Apples and TRS-80's, and the relatively clean air, and the quiet at night. The Shrine Circus is okay. The Easter-egg hunt is even better. But Gypsies? Here's your hat, what's your hurry. We know dirt when we see it. Not that we touch it, Christ, no! We have maids and housekeepers to get rid of dirt in our houses. When it shows up on the town common, we've got Hopley.

But those truths are not for a girl in junior high, Halleck thought. Those are truths that you learn in high school and in college. Maybe you get it from your sorority sisters, or maybe it just comes, like a shortwave transmission from outer space. Not our kind, dear. Stay away.

'Good night, Daddy.'

'Good night, Lin.'

He had kissed her again, and left.

Rain, driven by a sudden strong gust of wind, slatted against his study window, and Halleck awoke as if from a doze. Not our kind, dear, he thought again, and actually laughed in the silence. The sound made him afraid, because only loonies laughed in an empty room. Loonies did that all the time; it was what made them loony.

Not our kind.

If he had never believed it before, he believed it now.

Now that he was thinner.

Halleck watched as Houston's nurse drew one-two-three ampoules of blood from his left arm and put them into a earner like eggs in a carton. Earlier, Houston had given him three stool cards and told him to mail them in. Halleck pocketed them glumly and then bent over for the proctological, dreading the humiliation of it, as always, more than the minor discomfort. That feeling of being invaded. Fullness.

'Relax,' Houston said, snapping on the thin rubber glove. 'As long as you can't feel both of my hands on your shoulders, you're all right.'

He laughed heartily.

Halleck closed his eyes.

Houston saw him two days later - he had, he said, seen to it that his bloodwork was given priority. Halleck sat down in the denlike room (pictures of clipper ships on the walls, deep leather chairs, deep-pile gray rug) where Houston did his consulting. His heart was hammering hard, and he felt droplets of cold sweat nestled at each temple. I'm not going to cry in front of a man that tells nigger jokes, he told himself with fierce grimness, and not for the first time. If I have to cry, I'll drive out of town and park the car and do it.

'Everything looks fine,' Houston said mildly.

Halleck blinked. The fear had by now rooted deep enough so that he was positive he had misheard Houston. 'What?'