Thinner(83)

Billy looked at him reflectively. 'No, they don't. But either way, I don't have much choice, do I?'

'No ... I don't think you do. You ready?'

Billy glanced toward the people staring at him and nodded. He'd been ready for a long time.

Halfway back to the car he said: 'Did you really do any of it for me, Richard?'

Ginelli stopped, looked at him, and smiled a little. The smile was almost vague ... but that whirling, twirling light in his eyes was sharply focused - too sharply focused for Billy to look at. He had to shift his gaze.

'Does it matter, William?'

Chapter Twenty-four. Purpurfargade Ansiktet

They were in Bangor by late afternoon. Ginelli swung the Nova into a gas station, had it filled up, and got direction from the attendant. Billy sat exhaustedly in the passenger seat. Ginelli looked at him with sharp concern when h came back.

'William, are you all right?'

'I don't know,' he said, and then reconsidered. 'No.'

'Is it your ticker again?'

'Yeah.' He thought about what Ginelli's midnight doctor had said - potassium, electrolytes ... something about how Karen Carpenter might have died. 'I ought to have something with potassium in it. Pineapple juice. Bananas. Or oranges.' His heart broke into a sudden disorganized gallop. Billy leaned back and shut his eyes and waited to see if he was going to die. At last the uproar quieted. 'A whole bag of oranges.'

There was a Shop and Save up ahead. Ginelli pulled in. 'I'll be right back, William. Hang in.'

'Sure,' Billy said vaguely, and fell into a light doze as soon as Ginelli left the car. He dreamed. In his dream he saw his house in Fairview. A vulture with a rotting beak flew down to the windowsill and peered in. From inside the house someone began to shriek.

Then someone else was shaking him roughly. Billy started awake. 'Huh!'

Ginelli leaned back and blew out breath. 'Jesus, William, don't scare me like that!'

'What are you talking about?'

'I thought you were dead, man. Here.' He put a net bag filled with navel oranges in Billy's lap. Billy plucked at the fastener with his thin fingers - fingers which now looked like white spider legs - and couldn't get it to give. Ginelli slit the bag open with his pocket knife, then cut an orange in quarters with it. Billy ate slowly at first, as one does a duty, then ravenously, seeming to rediscover his appetite for the first time in a week or more. And his disturbed heart seemed to calm down and rediscover something like its old steady beat ... although that might have only been his mind playing games with itself.

He finished the first orange and borrowed Ginelli's knife to cut a second one into pieces.

'Better?' Ginelli asked.

'Yes. A lot. When do we get to the park?'

Ginelli pulled over to the curb, and Billy saw by the sign that they were on the corner of Union Street and West Broadway -summer trees, full of foliage, murmured in a mild breeze. Dapples and shadow moved lazily on the street.

'We're here,' Ginelli said simply, and Billy felt a finger touch his backbone and then slide coldly down it. 'As close as I want to get, anyway. I would have dropped you off downtown, only you would have attracted one hell of a lot of attention walking up here.'

'Yes,' Billy said. 'Like children fainting and pregnant women having miscarriages.'

'You couldn't have made it anyway,' Ginelli said kindly. 'Anyway, it don't matter. Park's right down at the foot of this hill. Quarter of a mile. Pick a bench in the shade and wait.'

'Where will you be?'

'I'll be around,' Ginelli said and smiled. 'Watching you and watching out for the girl. If she ever sees me again before I see her, William, I ain't never going to have to change my shirt again. You understand?'

'Yes.'

'I'll be keeping my eye on you.'

'Thank you,' Billy said, and was not sure just how, or how much, he meant that. He did feel gratitude to Ginelli, but it was a strange, difficult emotion, like the hate he now bore for Houston and for his wife.

'Por nada,' Ginelli said, and shrugged. He leaned across the scat, hugged Billy, and kissed him firmly on both cheeks. 'Be tough with the old bastard, William.'

'I will,' Billy said, smiling, and got out of the car. The dented Nova pulled away. Billy stood watching until it had disappeared around the comer at the end of the block, and then he started down the hill, swinging the bag of oranges in one hand.

He barely noticed the little boy who, halfway up the block, abruptly turned off the sidewalk, scaled the Cowans' fence, and shot across their backyard. That night this little boy would awake screaming from a nightmare in which a shambling scarecrow with lifeless blowing hair on its skull-head bore down on him. Running down the hallway to his room, the boy's mother heard him screaming: 'It wants to make me eat oranges until I die! Eat oranges till I die! Eat till I die!'

The park was wide and cool and green and deep. On one side, a gaggle of kids were variously climbing on the jungle gym, teeter-tottering, and whooshing down the slide. Far across the way a softball game was going on - the boys against the girls, it looked like. In between, people walked, flew kites, threw Frisbees, ate Twinkies, drank Cokes, slurped Slurpies. It was a cameo of American midsummer in the latter half of the twentieth century, and for a moment Billy warmed toward it - toward them.