Thinner(56)

'No, thank you.' The fear was stronger now - but the anger was there too, a buzzing, pulsing tone under everything else.

'Then would you mind just sort of rambling on, mister? You're not particularly good for business.'

'No,' Billy said. 'I suppose I'm not.'

He headed back toward his car. The tiredness had left him.

That night at a quarter past nine, Billy parked his rental car on the soft shoulder of Route 37-A, which leaves Bar Harbor to the northwest. He was on top of a hill, and a sea breeze blew around him, ruffling his hair and making his loose clothes flap on his body. From behind him, carried on that breeze, came the sound of tonight's rock-'n-roll party starting to crank up in Bar Harbor.

Below him, to the right, he could see a large campfire surrounded by cars and trucks and vans. Closer in were the people - every now and then one of them strolled in front of the fire, a black cardboard cutout. He could hear conversation, occasional laughter.

He had caught up.

The old man is down there waiting for you, Billy - he knows you're here.

Yes. Yes, of course. The old man could have pulled his little band right off the edge of the world - at least, as far as Billy Halleck would have been able to tell - if he had wanted. But that hadn't been his pleasure. Instead he had taken Billy over the jumps from Old Orchard to here. That had been what he wanted.

The fear again, drifting like smoke through his hollow places ~ there were so many hollow places in him now, it seemed. But the rage was still there too.

It's what I wanted too - and I may just surprise him. The fear I'm sure he expects. The anger - that may be a surprise.

Billy looked back at the car for a moment, then shook his head. He started down the grassy side of the hill toward the fire.

Chapter Nineteen. In the Camp of the Gypsies

He paused in back of the camper with the unicorn and the maiden on the side, a narrow shadow among other shadows, but more constant than those thrown by the shifting flames. He stood there listening to their quiet conversation, the occasional burst of laughter, the pop of an exploding knot in the fire.

I can't go out there, his mind insisted with utter certainty. There was fear in this certainty, but also intertwined in it were inarticulate feelings of shame and propriety - he no more wanted to break into the concentric circles of their campfire and their talk and their privacy than he had wanted to have his pants fall down in Hilmer Boynton's courtroom. He, after all, was the offender. He was ...

Then Linda's face rose up in his mind; he heard her asking him to come home, and beginning to cry as she did.

He was the offender, yes, but he was not the only one.

The rage began to come up in him again. He clamped down on it, tried to compress it, to turn it into something a little more useful - simple sternness would be enough, he thought. Then he walked between the camper and the station wagon parked next to it, his Gucci loafers whispering in the dry timothy grass, and into their midst.

There really were concentric circles: first the rough circle of vehicles, and inside that, a circle of men and women sitting around the fire, which burned in a dug hollow surrounded by a circle of stones. Nearby, a cut branch about six feet tall had been stuck into the earth. A yellow sheet of paper. - a campfire permit, Billy supposed - was impaled on its tip.

The younger men and women sat on the flattened grass or on air mattresses. Many of the older people were sitting on lawn chairs made of tubular aluminum and woven plastic strips. Billy saw one old woman sitting propped up on pillows in a lounger, a blanket tucked around her. She was smoking a home-rolled cigarette and sticking S&H Green Stamps in a trading-stamp book.

Three dogs on the far side of the fire began to bark halfheartedly. One of the younger men looked up sharply and drew back one side of his vest, revealing a nickel-plated revolver in a shoulder holster.

'Enkelt!' one of the older men said sharply, putting his hand on the young man's hand.

'Bodde har?'

'Just det - han och Taduz!'

The young man looked toward Billy Halleck, who now stood in the midst of them, totally out of place in his baggy sport coat and city shoes. There was a look not of fear but momentary surprise and - Billy would have sworn it - compassion on his face. Then he was gone, pausing only long enough to administer a kick to one of the hounds and growl, 'Enkelt!' The hound yipped once and then they all shut up.

Gone to get the old man, Billy thought.

He looked around at them. All conversation had ceased. They regarded him with their dark Gypsy eyes and no one said a word. This is how it feels when your pants really do fall down in court, he thought, but that wasn't a bit true. Now that he was actually in front of them, the complexity of his emotions had disappeared. The fear was there, and the anger, but both idled quietly, somewhere deep inside.

And there's something else. They're not surprised to see you ... and they're not surprised at how you look, either.

Then it was true; all true. No psychological anorexia; no exotic form of cancer. Billy thought that even Michael Houston would have been convinced by those dark eyes. They knew what had happened to him. They knew why it was happening. And they knew how it would end.

They stared at each other, the Gypsies and the thin man from Fairview, Connecticut. And suddenly, for no reason at all, Billy began to grin.

The old woman with the trading stamps moaned and forked the sign of the evil eye at him.