'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.
All that's lacking is the Gypsies, a voice inside him whispered, and the chill came back – a chill real enough to bring goose bumps to his arms and cause him to abruptly cross his thin arms over his reed of a chest. We ought to have the Gypsies, oughtn't we? The old station wagons with the NRA stickers on the rusty bumpers, the campers, the vans with the murals on the sides – then Samuel with his bowling pins and Gina with her slingshot. And they all came running. They always came running. To see the juggling, to try the slingshot, to hear the future, to get a potion or a lotion, to bed a girl– or at least to dream of it– to see the dogs tear at each other's guts. They always come running. Just for the strangeness of it. Sure, we need the Gypsies. We always have. Because if you don't have someone to run out of town once in a while, how are you going to know you yourself belong there? Well, they'll be along soon, right?
'Right,' he croaked, and sat down on a bench that was almost in the shade. His legs were suddenly trembling, strengthless. He took an orange out of the bag and after some effort managed to tear it open. But now his appetite Was gone again and he could only eat a little.
The bench was quite a distance apart from the others, and Billy attracted no undue attention, so far as he could tell – from a distance, he could have been a very thin old man taking in a little afternoon air.
He sat, and as the shade crept up first over his shoes, then his knees; and finally puddled in his lap, an almost fantastical sense of despair overtook him – a feeling of waste and futility much darker than these innocent afternoon shadows. Things had gone too far and nothing could be taken back. Not even Ginelli, with his psychotic energy, could change what had happened. He could only make things worse.
I should have never… Billy thought, but then whatever it was he should have never done broke up and faded out like a bad radio signal. He dozed again. He was in Fairview, a Fairview of the Living Dead. Corpses lay everywhere starvelings. Something pecked sharply at his shoulder.
No.
Peck!
No!
But it came again, peck, and peck and peck, it was the vulture with the rotting nose, of course, and he didn't want to turn his head for fear it might peck his eyes out with the black remnants of its beak. But
(peck)
it insisted, and he
(!peck!peck!)
slowly turned his head, rising out of the dream at the same time and seeing -with no real surprise that it was Taduz Lemke beside him on the bench.
'Wake up, white man from town,' he said, and plucked sharply at Billy's sleeve again with his twisted, nicotine stained fingers. Peck! 'Your dreams are bad. They have a stink I can smell on your breath.'
'I'm awake,' Billy said thickly.
'You sure?' Lemke asked, with some interest.
'Yes.'
The old man wore a gray serge suit, double-breasted. On his feet were high-topped black shoes. What little hair he had was parted in the middle and pulled sternly backward from his forehead, which was as lined as the leather of his shoes. A gold hoop sparkled from one of his earlobes.
The rot, Billy saw, had spread – dark lines now radiated out from the ruins of his nose and across most of his runneled left cheek.
'Cancer,' Lemke said. His bright black eyes – the eyes of a bird for sure – never left Billy's face. 'You like that? It make you happy?' 'Happy' came out 'hoppy.'
'No,' Billy said. He was still trying to clean away the dregs of the dream, to hook himself into this reality. 'No, of course not.'
'Don't lie,' Lemke said. 'There is no need. It make you happy, of course it make you happy.'
'None of it makes me happy,' he said. 'I'm sick about it all. Believe me.'
'I don't believe nothing no white man from town ever told me,' Lemke said. He spoke with a hideous sort of geniality. 'But you sick, oh yeah. You think. You nastan farsk – dying from being thin. So I brought you something. It's gonna fatten you up, make you better.' His lips drew back from the black stumps of his teeth in a hideous grin. 'But only when somebody else eats it.'
Billy looked at what Lemke held on his lap and saw with a floating kind of deja vu that it was a pie in a disposable aluminum pie plate. In his mind he heard his dream self telling his dream wife: I don't want to be fat. I've decided I like being thin. You eat it.
'You look scared,' Lemke said. 'It's too late to be scared, white man from town.'
He took a pocketknife from his jacket and opened it, performing the operation with an old man's grave and studied slowness. The blade was shorter than the blade of Ginelli's pocketknife, Billy saw, but it looked sharper.