Thinner(50)

'I stood there by the side of the road quiet awhile,' he said. 'It was the usual raree and Gypsy turnout - the more things change, the more they stay the same. It used to be all tents and now it's vans and campers and such, but what goes on inside is just the same. A woman telling fortunes. Two, three women selling powders to the ladies ... two, three men selling powders to the men. I guess they would have stayed longer, but I heard they arranged a dogfight for some rich Canucks and the state cops got wind of it.'

'Dogfight!'

'People want to bet, my friend, and drift trade is always willing to arrange the things they want to bet on - that's one of the things drift trade is for. Dogs or roosters with steel spurs or maybe even two men with these itty-bitty sharp knives that look almost like spikes, and each of 'em bites the end of a scarf, and the one who drops his end first is the loser. What the Gypsies call "a fair one."'

Enders was staring at himself in the back bar mirror at himself and through himself.

'It was like the old days, all right,' he said dreamily. 'I could smell their meat, the way they cure it, and green peppers, and that olive oil they like that smells rancid when it comes out of the can and then sweet when it's been cooked. I could hear them talking their funny language, and this thud! thud! thud! that was someone throwing knives at a board. Someone was cooking bread the old way, on hot stones.

'It was like old times, but I wasn't. I felt scared. Well, the Gypsies always scared me a little - difference was, back then I would have gone in anyway. Hell, I was a white man, wasn't I? In the old days I would have walked right up to their fire just as big as billy-be-damned and bought a drink or maybe a few joysticks - not just 'cause I wanted a drink or a toke but just in order to get a look around. But the old days made me an old man, my friend, and when an old man is scared, he don't just go on regardless, like he did when he was just learning to shave.

'So I just stood there in the dark with the Salt Shack over on my one side and all those vans and campers and station wagons pulled up over here on my other, watching them walk back and forth in front of their fire, listening to them talk and laugh, smelling their food. And then the back of this one camper opened - it had a picture of a woman on the side, and a white horse with a horn sticking out of its head, a what-do-you-call-it .

'Unicorn,' Billy said, and his voice seemed to come from somewhere or someone else. He knew that camper very well; he had first seen it on the day the Gypsies came to the Fairview town common.

'Then someone got out,' Enders went on. 'Just a shadow and a red cigarette tip, but I knew who it was.' He tapped the photograph of the man in the kerchief with one pale finger. 'Him. Your pal.'

'You're sure?'

'He took a big drag on his butt and I saw ... that.' He pointed at what was left of Taduz Lemke's nose but did not quite touch the glossy surface of the photograph, as if touch might be to risk contamination.

'Did you speak to him?'

'No,' Enders said, 'but he spoke to me. I stood there in the dark and I swear to God he wasn't even looking in my direction. And he said, "You miss your wife some, Flash, eh? Ess be all right, you be wid her soon now." Then he flicked his cigarette off the end of his fingers and walked away toward the fire. I seen the hoop in his ear flash once -in the firelight, and that was all.'

He wiped little beads of water from his chin with the cup of his hand and looked at Billy.

'Flash was what they used to call me when I worked the penny-pitch on the pier back in the fifties, my friend, but nobody has called me that for years. I was way back in the shadows, but he saw me and he called me by my old name -what the Gypsies would call my secret name, I guess. They set a hell of a store by knowing a man's secret name.

'Do they?' Billy asked, almost to himself.

Timmy, the bartender, came over again. This time he spoke to Billy almost kindly ... and as though Lon Enders was not there. 'He earned the ten, buddy. Leave 'im alone. He ain't well, and this here little discussion ain't making him no weller.'

'I'm okay, Timmy,' Enders said.

Timmy didn't look at him. He looked at Billy Halleck instead. 'I want you to get out of here,' he said to Billy in that same reasonable, almost kind voice. 'I don't like your looks. You look like bad luck waiting for a place to happen. The beers are free. Just go.'

Billy looked at the bartender, feeling frightened and somehow humbled. 'Okay,' he said. 'Just one more question and I'll go.' He turned to Enders. 'Where did they head for?'

'I don't know,' Enders said at once. 'Gypsies don't leave forwarding addresses, my friend.'

Billy's shoulders slumped.

'But I was up when they pulled out the next morning. I don't sleep worth a shit anymore, and most of their vans and cars didn't have much in the way of mufflers. I seen them go out Highway 27 and turn north onto Route 1. My guess would be ... Rockland.' The old man fetched in a deep, shuddering sigh that made Billy lean toward him, concerned. 'Rockland or maybe Boothbay Harbor. Yes. And that's all I know, my friend, except that when he called me Flash, when he called me by my secret name, I pissed all the way down my leg into my left tennis shoe.' And Lon Enders abruptly began to cry.

'Mister, would you leave?' Timmy asked.

'I'm going,' Billy said, and did, pausing only to squeeze the old man's narrow, almost ethereal shoulder.