Thinner(47)
Here was the elderly man who had been handing out fliers -Richard Crosskill. Other Crosskills were named. Stanchfields. Starbirds. More Lemkes. And then ... near the bottom ...
It was him. The eyes, caught in twin nets of wrinkles, were dark and level and filled with clear intelligence. A kerchief was drawn over his head and knotted beside the left cheek. A cigarette was tucked into the deeply cracked lips. The nose was a wet and open horror, festering and terrible.
Billy stared at the picture as if hypnotized. There was something almost familiar about the old man, some connection his mind wasn't quite making. Then it came to him. Taduz Lemke reminded him of those old men in the Dannon yogurt commercials, the ones from Russian Georgia who smoked unfiltered cigarettes, drank popskull vodka, and lived to such staggering ages as a hundred and thirty, a hundred and fifty, a hundred and seventy. And then a line of a Jerry Jeff Walker song occurred to him, the one about Mr Bojangles: He looked at me to be the eyes of age ...
Yes. That was what he saw in the face of Taduz Lemke - he was the very eyes of age. In those eyes Billy saw a deep knowledge that made all the twentieth century a shadow, and he trembled.
That night when he stepped on the scales in the bathroom adjoining his wedge-shaped bedroom, he was down to 137.
Chapter Eighteen. The Search
Old Orchard Beach, the waitress had said. That's the honkiest honky-tonk of them all. The desk clerk agreed.
So did the girl in the tourist-information booth four .miles down the highway, although she refused to put it in such blatantly pejorative terms. Billy turned his rental car toward Old Orchard Beach, which was about eighteen miles south.
Traffic slowed to a bumper-to-bumper crawl still a mile from the beach. Most of the vehicles in this parade bore Canadian license plates. A lot of them were thyroidal rec-ves which looked big enough to transport entire football teams. Most of the people Billy saw, both in the crawling traffic and walking along the sides of the road, seemed dressed in the least the law would allow and sometimes less - there were a lot of string bikinis, a lot of ball-hugger swim trunks, a lot of oiled flesh on display.
Billy was dressed in blue jeans, an open-collared white shirt, and a sport coat. He sat behind the wheel of his car and sweltered even with the air conditioning on full. But he hadn't forgotten the way the room-service kid had looked at him. This was as undressed as he was going to get, even if he finished the day with his sneakers full of sweat puddles.
The crawling traffic crossed salt marshes, passed two dozen lobster-and-clam shacks, and then wound through an area of summer houses that were crammed together hip to hip and shoulder to shoulder. Similarly undressed people sat on lawn furniture before most of these houses, eating, reading paperback novels, or simply watching the endless flow of traffic.
Christ, Billy thought, how do they stand the stink of the exhaust? It occurred to him that perhaps they liked it, that perhaps that was why they were sitting here instead of on the beach, that it reminded them of home.
Houses gave way to motels with signs reading ON PARLE FRANCAIS ICI and CANADIAN CURRENCY AT PAR AFTER $250
and WE FEATURE MIDNITE BLUE ON CABLE and 3 MINUTES TO OCEAN BONJOUR A NOS AMIS DE LA BELLE PROVINCE!
The motels gave way to a main drag which seemed to feature mostly cut-rate camera stores, souvenir shops, the dirty-book emporiums. Kids in cut-offs and tank tops idled up and down, some holding hands, some staring into dirty windows with a blank lack of interest, some riding on skateboards and weaving their way through knots of pedestrians with bored elan. To Billy Halleck's fascinated, dismayed eyes, everyone seemed overweight and everyone - even the skateboard kids - seemed to be eating something: a slice of pizza here, a Chipwich there, a bag of Doritos, a bag of popcorn, a cone of cotton candy. He saw a fat man in an untucked white shirt, baggy green Bermudas, and thong sandals gobbling a foot-long dog. A string of something that was either onion or sauerkraut hung from his chin. He held two more dogs between the pudgy finger of his left hand, and to Billy he looked like a stage magician displaying red rubber balls before making them disappear.
The midway came next. A roller coaster loomed against the sky. A giant replica of a Viking boat swung back and forth in steepening semicircles while the riders strapped inside shrieked. Bells bonged and lights flashed in an arcade to Billy's left; to his right, teenagers in striped muscle shirts drove dodge-'em cars into each other. Just beyond the arcade, a young man and a young woman were kissing. Her arms were locked around his neck. One of his hands cupped her bu**ocks; the other held a can of Budweiser.
Yeah, Billy thought. Yeah, this is the place. Got to be.
He parked his car in a baking macadam lot, paid the attendant seventeen dollars for a half-day stub, transferred his wallet from his hip pocket to the inside pocket of his sport coat, and started hunting.
At first he thought that the weight loss had perhaps speeded up. Everyone was looking at him. The rational part of his mind quickly assured him that it was just because of his clothes, not the way he looked inside his clothes.
People would stare at you the same way if you showed up on this boardwalk wearing a swimsuit and a T-shirt in October, Billy. Take it easy. You're just something to look at, and down here there's plenty to look at.
And that was certainly true. Billy saw a fat woman in a black bikini, her deeply tanned skin gleaming with oil. Her gut was prodigal, the flex of the long muscles in her thighs nearly mythic, and strangely exciting. She moved toward the wide sweep of white beach like an ocean liner, her bu**ocks flexing in wavelike undulations. He saw a grotesquely fat poodle dog, its curls summer-sheared, its tongue more gray than pink - hanging out listlessly, sitting in the shade of a pizza shack. He saw two fistfights. He saw a huge gull with mottled gray wings and dead black eyes swoop down and snatch a greasy doughboy from the hand of an infant in a stroller.