Thinner

'No. '

'How about sores that don't want to heal? Or scabs that fall off and just reform?'

'No.'

'Great,' Houston said. 'By the way, I carded an eightyfour today. What do you think?'

'I think it'll still be a couple of years before you make the Masters,' Billy said.

Houston laughed. The waiter came. Houston ordered another penis colada. Halleck ordered a Miller. Miller Lite, he almost told the waiter – force of habit – and then held his tongue. He needed a light beer like he needed … well, like he needed some rectal bleeding.

Michael Houston leaned forward. His eyes were grave and Halleck felt that fear again, like a smooth steel needle, very thin, probing at the lining of his stomach. He realized miserably that something had changed in his life, and not for the better. Not for the better at all. He was scared a lot now. Gypsy's revenge.

Houston's grave eyes were fixed on Billy's and Billy heard him say: The chances that you have cancer are five in six, Billy. I don't even need an X ray to tell you that. Is your will up-to-date? Are Heidi and Linda provided for adequately? When you're a relatively young man you don't think it can happen to you, but it can. It can.

In the quiet tone of a man imparting great information, Houston asked: 'How many pallbearers does it take to bury a nigger from Harlem?'

Billy shook his head, smiling a counterfeit smile.

'Six,' Houston said. 'Four to carry the coffin and two to carry the radio.'

He laughed, and Billy Halleck went through the motions. In his mind, clearly, he saw the Gypsy man who had been waiting for him outside the Fairview courthouse. Behind the Gypsy, at the curb, in a no-parking zone, stood a huge old pickup truck with a homemade camper cap. The cap was covered with strange designs around a central painting – a not-very-good rendering of a unicorn on its knees, head bowed, before a Gypsy woman with a garland of flowers in her hands. The Gypsy man had been wearing a green twill vest, with buttons made out of silver coins. Now. watching Houston laugh at his own joke, the alligator on his shirt riding the swells of his mirth, Billy thought: You remember much more about that guy than you thought. You thought you only remembered his nose, but that's not true at all. You remember damn near everything.

Children. There had been children in the cab of the old van, looking at him with depthless brown eyes, eyes that were almost black. 'Thi

Delaware plates, Billy thought suddenly. His rig had Delaware plates. And a bumper sticker, something …

Billy's arms dimpled out in goose flesh and for one moment he thought he might scream, as he had once heard a woman scream right here when she thought her child was drowning in the pool.

Billy Halleck remembered how they had seen the Gypsies for the first time; the day they had come to Fairview.

They had parked along one side of the Fairview town common, and a flock of their kids had run out onto the greensward to play. The Gypsy women stood gossiping and watching them. They were brightly dressed, but not in the peasant garb an older person might have associated with the Hollywood version of Gypsies in the thirties and forties. There were women in colorful sundresses, women in calf-length clamdigger pants, younger women in Jordache or Calvin Klein jeans. They looked bright, alive, somehow dangerous.

A young man jumped out of a VW microbus and began to juggle oversized bowling pins. EVERYONE NEEDS SOMETHING TO BELIEVE IN, the young man's T-shirt read, AND RIGHT NOW I BELIEVE I'LL HAVE ANOTHER BEER. Fairview children ran toward him as if drawn by a magnet, yelling excitedly. Muscles rippled under the young man's shirt, and a giant crucifix bounded up and down on his chest. Fairview mothers gathered some of the kids up and bore them away. Other mothers were not as fast. Older town children approached the Gypsy children, who stopped their play to watch them come. Townies, their dark eyes said. We see townie children everywhere the roads go. We know your eyes, and your haircuts; we know how the braces on your teeth will flash in the sun. We don't know where we'll be tomorrow, but we know where you will be. Don't these same places and these same faces bore you? We think they do. We think that's why you always come to hate us.

Billy, Heidi, and Linda Halleck had been there that day, two days before Halleck would strike and kill the old Gypsy woman less than a quarter of a mile from here. They had been having a picnic lunch and waiting for the first band concert of the spring to begin. Most of the others abroad on the common that day had been there for the same reason, a fact the Gypsies undoubtedly knew.

Linda had gotten up, brushing at the seat of her Levi's as if in a dream, and started toward the young man juggling the bowling pins.

'Linda, stay here!' Heidi said sharply. Her hand had gone to the collar of her sweater and was fiddling there, as it often did when she was upset. Halleck didn't think she was even aware of it.

'Why, Mom? It's a carnival, at least, I think it is.'

'They're Gypsies,' Heidi said. 'Keep your distance. They're all crooks.'

Linda looked at her mother, then at her dad. Billy shrugged. She stood there looking, as unaware of her wistful expression, Billy thought, as Heidi was of her hand at her collar fiddling it uneasily up against her throat and then back down again.

The young man tossed his bowling pins back into the open side door of the microbus one by one, and a smiling dark-haired girl whose beauty was almost ethereal tossed him five Indian clubs, one after another. The young man now began to juggle these, gri

An elderly man wearing Oshkosh bib overalls and a checked shirt began handing out fliers. The lovely young woman who had caught the bowling pins and tossed out the Indian clubs now jumped lightly down from the van's doorway with an easel. She set it up and Halleck thought: She is going to exhibit bad seascapes and perhaps some pictures of President Ke

'Gina!' the boy juggling the Indian clubs yelled. He gri

The girl flipped the slingshot to the boy. He dropped one of the clubs and began to juggle the slingshot in its place. Halleck remembered thinking That must be almost impossible. The boy did it two or three times, then flipped the slingshot back to her and somehow managed to pick up the club he had dropped while keeping the others in the air. There was scattered applause. Some of the locals were smiling – Billy himself was – but most of them looked wary.

The girl stepped away from the target on the easel, produced some ball bearings from her breast pocket, and shot three quick bull's-eyes – plop, plop, plop. Soon she was surrounded by boys (and a few girls) clamoring for a turn. She lined them up, organizing them as quickly and efficiently as a nursery-school teacher prepares pupils for the 10:15 bathroom break. Two teenage Gypsy boys of approximately Linda's age popped out of an old LTD station wagon and began to scruff the spent ammunition out of the grass. They were alike as two peas m a pod, obviously identical twins. One wore a gold hoop in his left ear; his brother wore the mate in his right. Is that how their mother tells them apart? Billy thought.

No one was selling anything. Quite carefully, quite obviously, no one was selling anything. There was no Madame Azonka telling the tarot.