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.
The old man pushed the blade into the crust and then drew it across, creating a slit about three inches long. He withdrew the blade. Red droplets fell from it onto the crust. The old man wiped the blade on the sleeve of his jacket, leaving a dark red stain. Then he folded the blade and put the knife away. He hooked his misshapen thumbs over opposing sides of the pie plate and pulled gently. The slit gaped, showing a swimming viscous fluid in which dark things – strawberries, maybe -floated like clots. He relaxed his thumbs. The slit closed. He pulled at the edges of the pie plate again. The slit opened. So he continued to pull and release as he spoke. Billy was unable to look away.
'So … you have convinced yourself that it is … What did you call it? A poosh. That what happened to my Susanna is no more your fault than my fault, or her fault, or God's fault. You tell yourself you can't be asked to pay for it – there is no blame, you say. It slides off you because your shoulders are broken. No blame, you say. You tell yourself and tell yourself and tell yourself. But there is no poosh, white man from town. Everybody pays, even for things they dint do. No poosh.'
Lemke fell reflectively silent for a moment. His thumbs tensed and relaxed, tensed and relaxed. The slit in the pie opened and closed.
'Because you won't take blame – not you, not your friends – I make you take it. I stick it on you like a sign. For my dear dead daughter that you killed I do this, and for her mother, and for her children. Then your friend comes. He poisons dogs, shoots guns in the night, uses his hands on a woman, threatens to throw acid into the faces of children. Take it off, he says – take it off and take it off and take it off. And finally I say okay as long as he will podol enkelt – get out of here! Not from what he did, but from what he will do – he is crazy, this friend of yours, and he will never stop. Even my 'Gelina says she sees from his eyes he will never stop. “But we'll never stop, either,” she says, and I say, “Yes we will. Yes we will stop. Because if we don't, we are crazy like the town man's friend. If we don't stop, we must think what the white man says is right – God pays back, that it's a poosh.”'
Tense and relax. Tense and relax. Open and close.
“'Take it off,” he says, and at least he don't say “Make it disappear, make it not there anymore.” Because a curse is in some way like a baby.'
His old dark thumbs pulled. The slit stretched open.
'No one understand these things. Not me, either, but I know a little. “Curse” is your word, but Rom is better. Listen: Purpurfargade ansiktet. You know that?'
Billy shook his head slowly, thinking the phrase had a richly dark texture.
'It mean something like “Child of the night-flowers.” Is like to get a child who is varsel – changeling. Gypsies say varsel is always found under lilies or nightshade, which blooms at night. This way of saying is better because curse is a thing. What you have is not a thing. What you have is alive.'
'Yes,' Billy said. 'It's inside, isn't it! It's inside, eating me.'
'Inside? Outside?' Lemke shrugged. 'Everywhere. This thing – urpurfargade ansiktet – you bring it into the world like a baby. Only it grows strong faster than a baby, and you can't kill it because you can't see it – only you can see what it does.'
The thumbs relaxed. The slit closed. A dark red rivulet trickled across the mild topography of the pie crust.
'This curse … you dekent felt o gard da borg. Be to it like a father. You still want to be rid of it?'
Billy nodded.
'You still believe in the poosh?'
'Yes.' It was only a croak.
The old Gypsy man with the rotting nose smiled. The black lines of rot under his left cheek dipped and wavered. The park was nearly empty now. The sun was nearing the horizon. The shadows covered them. Suddenly the knife was in Lemke's hand again, the blade out.
He's going to stab me, Billy thought dreamily. Going to stab me in the heart and run away with his strawberry pie under his arm.
'Unwrap your hand,' Lemke said.
Billy looked down.
'Yes – where she shot you.'
Billy pulled the clamps out of the elastic bandage and slowly unwrapped it. Underneath, his hand looked too white, fishlike. In contrast, the edges of the wound were dark, dark red – a liverish color. The same color as those things inside his pie, Billy thought. The strawberries. Or whatever they are. And the wound had lost its almost perfect circularity as the edges puffed together. Now it looked like …