Thinner(91)

At that point the truth and Billy Halleck parted company.

The dramatic confrontation he had both hoped for and dreaded hadn't gone at all as he had expected, he told Heidi. To begin with, the old man had laughed at him. They had all laughed. 'If I could have cursed you, you would be under the earth now,' the old Gypsy told him. 'You think we are magic - all you white men from town think we are magic. If we were magic, would we be driving around in old cars and vans with mufflers held up with baling wire? If we were magic, would we be sleeping in fields? This is no magic show, white man from town -this is nothing but a traveling carny. We do business with rubes who have money burning holes in their pockets, and then we move on. Now, get out of here before I put some of these young men on you. They know a curse - it's called the Curse of the Brass Knuckles.'

'Is that what he really called you? White man from town?'

He smiled at her. 'Yes. That's really what he called me.'

He told Heidi that he had gone back to his motel room and simply stayed there for the next two days, too deeply depressed to do more than pick at his food. On the third day - three days ago - he got onto the bathroom scales and saw that he had gained three pounds in spite of how little he had eaten.

'But when I thought it over, I saw that that was no stranger than eating everything on the table and finding out I'd lost three pounds,' he said. 'And having that idea was what finally got me out of the mental rut I'd been in. I spent another day in that motel room doing some of the hardest thinking of my life. I started to realize they could have been right at the Glassman Clinic after all. Even Michael Houston could have been at least partly right, as much as I dislike the little prick.'

'Billy . . .' She touched his arm.

'Never mind,' he said. 'I'm not going to sock him when I see him.' Might offer him a piece of pie, though, Billy thought, and laughed.

'Share the joke?' She gave him a puzzled little smile.

'It's nothing,' he said. 'Anyway, the problem was that Houston, those guys at the Glassman Clinic - even you, Heidi -were trying to rani it down my throat. Trying to force-feed me the truth. I just had to think it all out for myself. Simple guilt reaction, plus - I suppose - a combination of paranoid delusions and willful selfdeception. But in the end, Heidi, I was partly right, too. Maybe for all the wrong reasons, but I was partly right I said I had to see him again, and that was what turned the trick. Just not in the way I had expected. He was smaller than I remembered, he was wearing a cheap Timex watch, and he had a Brooklyn accent. He said "coise " for "curse." It was that more than anything that broke through the delusion, I think - it was like hearing Tony Curtis say "Yonduh is da palace of my faddah" in that movie about the Arabian Empire. So I picked up the telephone and -'

In the parlor, the clock on the mantel began bonging musically.

'It's midnight,' he said. 'Let's go to bed. I'll help you stack the dishes in the sink.'

'No, I can do it,' she said, and then slipped her arms around him. 'I'm glad you came home, Billy. Go on upstairs. You must be exhausted.'

'I'm okay,' he said. 'I'll just . . .'

He suddenly snapped his fingers with the air of a man who has just remembered something.

'Almost forgot,' he said. 'I left something in the car.'

'What is it? Can't it wait until the morning?'

'Yes, but I ought to bring it in.' He smiled at her. 'It's for you.'

He went out, his heart thudding heavily in his chest. He dropped the car keys on the driveway, then thumped his head on the side of the car in his haste to pick them up. His hands were trembling so badly that he could not at first stick the key into the trunk slot.

What if it's still pulsing up and down like that? his mind yammered. Christ almighty, she'll run screaming when she sees it!

He opened the trunk and when he saw nothing inside but the jack and the spare, he almost screamed himself. Then he remembered - it was on the passenger side of the front seat. He slammed the trunk down and went around in a hurry. The pie was there, and the crust was perfectly still - as he had known, really, that it would be.

His hands abruptly stopped trembling.

Heidi was standing on the porch again, watching him. He crossed back to her and put the pie into her hands. He was still smiling. I'm delivering the goods, he thought. And delivering the goods was yet another of the many things it was all about: His smile widened.

'Voila,' he said.

'Wow!' She bent down close to the pie and sniffed. 'Strawberry pie ... my favorite!'

'I know,' Billy said, smiling.

'And still warm! Thank you!'

'I pulled off the turnpike in Stratford to get gas and the Ladies' Aid or something was having a bake sale on the lawn of the church that was right there,' he said. 'And I thought ... you know ... if you came to the door with a rolling pin or something, I'd have a peace offering.'

'Oh, Billy . . .' She was starting to cry again. She gave him an impulsive one-armed hug, holding the pie balanced on the tented fingers of her other hand the way a waiter balances a tray. As she kissed him the pie tilted. Billy felt his heart tilt in his chest and fall crazily out of rhythm.

'Careful!' he gasped, and grabbed the pie just as it started to slide.