'Thank you, but I want to get up around the Owl's Head area before sundown if I can.'
'Looking for him?'
'Yes.'
'Well, if you find him, I hope he don't eat you up, mister, because he looked hungry to me.'
Billy spoke to Washburn on the twenty-first– the first day of official summer, although the roads were already choked with tourists and he had to go all the way inland to Sheepscot before he was able to find a motel with a vacancy sign – and the Gypsies had rolled out of Boothbay Harbor on the morning of the eighth.
Thirteen days behind now.
He had a bad two days then when it seemed the Gypsies had fallen off the edge of the world. They had not been seen in Owl's Head, nor in Rockland, although both of them were prime summer tourist towns. Gas-station attendants and waitresses looked at his pictures and shook their heads. Grimly battling an urge to vomit precious calories over the rail– he had never been much of a sailor – Billy rode the inter-island ferry from Owl's Head to Vinalhaven, but the Gypsies had not been there either.
On the evening of the twenty-third he called Kirk Penschley, hoping for fresh information, and when Kirk came on the line there was a funny double click just at the moment Kirk asked: 'How are you, Billy-boy? And where are you?'
Billy hung up quickly, sweating. He had snagged the final unit in Rockland's Harborview Motel, he knew there probably wasn't another motel unit to be had between here and Bangor, but he suddenly decided he was going to move on even if it meant he ended up spending the night sleeping in the car on some pasture road. That double click. He hadn't cared for that double click at all. You sometimes heard that sound when the wire was being tapped, or when trace-back equipment was being used.
Heidi's signed the papers on you, Billy.
That's the stupidest goddamn thing I ever heard.
She signed them and Houston co-signed them.
Give me a fucking break!
Get out of here, Billy.
He left. Heidi, Houston, and possible trace-back equipment aside, it turned out to be the best thing that he could have done. As he was checking into the Bangor Ramada Inn that morning at two o'clock, he showed the desk clerk the pictures -it had become a habit by now– and the clerk nodded at once.
'Yeah, I took my girl over and got her fortune read,' he said. He picked up the photograph of Gina Lemke and rolled his eyes. 'She could really work it on out with that slingshot of hers. And she looked like she would work it-on out in a few other ways, if you know what I mean.' He shook his hand as if flicking water from the tips of his fingers. 'My girl got one look at the way I was lookin' at her and she dragged me out of there fast.' He laughed.
A moment before, Billy had been so tired that bed was all he could think about. Now he was wide– awake again, his stomach cramping with adrenaline.
'Where? Where were they? Or are they still -?'
'Nah, they're not there anymore. Parsons' is where they were, but they're gone, all right. I was by there the other day.'
'Is it a farmer's place?'
'No– it's where Parsons' Bargain Barn used to be until it burned down last year.' He cast an uneasy eye at the way Billy's sweatshirt bagged on his body, at the blades of Billy's cheekbones and the skull-like contours of Billy's face, in which the eyes burned like candleflames. 'Uh … you want to check in?'
Billy found Parsons' Bargain Barn the following morning– it was a scorched cinder-block shell in the middle of what seemed to be nine acres of deserted parking lot. He walked slowly across the crumbling macadam, heels clicking. Here were beer cans and soda cans. Here was a rind of cheese with beetles crawling in it. Here was a single shiny ball bearing. ('Hoy, Gina!' a ghostly voice called in his head). Here were the dead skins of popped balloons and here were the dead skins of two used Trojans, so similar to the balloons.
Yes, they had been here.
'I smell you, old man,' Billy whispered to the empty hull of the Bargain Barn, and the empty spaces that had been windows seemed to stare back at this scrawny scarecrowman with sallow distaste. The place looked haunted, but Billy felt no fear. The anger was back on him– he wore it like a coat. Anger at Heidi, anger at Taduz Lemke, anger at so-called friends like Kirk Penschley who were supposed to be on his side but who had turned against him. Had, or would.
It didn't matter. Even on his own, even at a hundred and thirty pounds, there was enough of him left to catch up to the old Gypsy man.
And what would happen then?
Well, they would see, wouldn't they?
'I smell you, old man,' Billy said again, and walked up to the side of the building. There was a realtor's sign there. Billy took his notebook from his back pocket and jotted down the information on it.
The realtor's name was Frank Quigley, but he insisted that Billy call him Biff. There were framed pictures of a high-school-age Biff Quigley on the walls. In most of them Biff was wearing a football helmet. On Biff's desk was a pile of bronzed dog turds, FRENCHMAN'S DRIVER'S LICENSE, the little sign beneath read.
Yes, Biff said, he had rented the space to the old Gyp with Mr Parsons' approval. 'He figured it couldn't look any worse than it does right now,' Biff Quigley said, 'and I guess he was right, at that.'
He leaned back in his swivel chair, his eyes crawling ceaselessly over Billy's face, measuring the gap between Billy's collar and Billy's neck, the way the front of Billy's shirt hung in folds like a flag on a still day. He laced his hands behind his head, rocked back in his office chair, and put his feet up on his desk beside the bronzed turds.
'Not that it isn't priced to sell, you understand. That's prime industrial land out there, and sooner or later someone with some vision is going to make himself one hell of a deal. Yessir, one hell of a -'
'When did the Gypsies leave, Biff?'
Biff Quigley removed his hands from behind his head and sat forward. His chair made a noise like a mechanical pig– Squoink! 'Mind telling me why you want to know?'
Billy Halleck's lips– they were thinner too now, and higher, so that they never quite met – drew back in a grin of frightening intensity and unearthly boniness. 'Yes, Biff, I mind.'
Biff recoiled for a moment, and then he nodded and leaned back in his chair again. His Quoddy mocs came down on his desk again. One crossed over the other and tapped thoughtfully at the turds.
'That's fine, Bill. A man's business ought to be his own. A man's reasons ought to be his own.'
'Good,' Billy said. He felt the rage coming back and was grappling with it. Getting mad at this disgusting man with his Quoddy mocs and his crude ethnic slurs and his blowdried Jay-Cees haircut wasn't going to do him any good. 'Then since we agree -'
'But it's still going to cost you two hundred bucks.'
'What?' Billy's mouth dropped open. For a moment his anger was so great he was simply unable to move at all or to say anything else. This was probably just as well for Biff Quigley, because if Billy could have moved, Billy would have leapt upon him. His self-control had also lost quite a bit of weight over the last two months.
'Not the information I give you,' Biff Quigley said. 'That's a freebie. The two hundred's for the information I won't give them.'
'Won't . . . give . . who?' Billy managed.
'Your wife,' Biff said, 'and your doctor, and a man who says he works for an outfit called Barton Detective Services.'
Billy saw everything in a flash. Things weren't as bad as his paranoid mind had imagined; they were even worse. Heidi and Mike Houston had gone to Kirk Penschley and had convinced him that Billy Halleck was mad. Penschley was still using the Barton agency to track the Gypsies, but now they were all like astronomers looking for Saturn only so they could study Titan– or bring Titan back to the Glassman Clinic.
He could also see the Barton operative who had sat in this chair a few days ago, talking to Biff Quigley, telling him that a very skinny man named Bill Halleck was going to show up soon, and when he did, this was the number to call.
This was followed by an even clearer vision: he saw himself leaping across Biff Quigley's desk, seizing the bronzed pile of dog turds in mid-leap, and then bashing Biff Quigley's head in with them. He saw this in utter, savage clarity: the skin breaking, the blood flying up in a fine spray of droplets (some of them splashing on the framed pictures), the white glimmer of bone shattering to reveal the physical texture of the man's creepy mind; then he saw himself slamming the dog turds back where they belonged– where, in a manner of speaking, they had come from.
Quigley must have seen this– or some of it – on Billy's haggard face, for an expression of alarm appeared on his own face. He hurriedly removed his feet from his desk and his hands from behind his neck. The chair emitted its mechanical pig squeal again.
'Now, we could talk this over' he began, and Billy saw one manicured hand straying toward the intercom.
Billy's anger abruptly deflated, leaving him shaken and cold. He had just visualized beating the man's brains out, not in any vague way but in the mental equivalent of Technicolor and Dolby sound. And good old Biff had known he was doing it, too.
Whatever happened to the old Bill Halleck who used to give to the United Fund and make wassail on Christmas Eve?
His mind returned: Yeah, that was the Billy Halleck that lived in Fat City. He moved. Gone, no forwarding.
'No need for that,' Billy said, nodding at the intercom.
The hand jerked, then diverted to a desk drawer, as if that had been its objective all the time. Biff brought out a pack of cigarettes.
'Wasn't even thinking of it, ha-ha. Smoke, Mr Halleck?'
Billy took one, looked at it, and then leaned forward to get a light. One drag and he was light-headed. 'Thanks.'
'About the two hundred, maybe I was wrong– I'
'No– you were right,' Billy said. He had cashed three hundred dollars' worth of traveler's checks on his way over here, thinking it might be necessary to grease the skids a little – but it had never occurred to him that he might have to grease them for such a reason as this. He took out his wallet, removed four fifties, and tossed them onto Biff's desk beside the dog turds. 'You'll keep your mouth shut when Penschley calls you?'
'Oh, yes, sir!' Biff took the money and put it into the drawer with the cigarettes. 'You know it!'
'I hope I do,' Billy said. 'Now, tell me about the Gypsies.'
It was short and easy to follow; the only really complicated part had been the preliminaries. The Gypsies had arrived in Bangor on June 10. Samuel Lemke, the young juggler, and a man who answered the description of Richard Crosskill had come to Biff's office. After a call to Mr Parsons and one to the Bangor chief of police, Richard Crosskill had signed a standard short-term renewable lease form– the short term in this case was specified to be twenty-four hours. Crosskill signed as secretary of the Taduz Corporation while young Lemke stood by the door of Biffs office with his muscular arms crossed.
'And just how much silver did they cross your palm with?' Billy asked.
Biff raised his eyebrows. 'Beg your pardon?'
'You got two hundred from me, probably a hundred from my concerned wife and friends via the Barton op who visited you– I just wondered how much the Gypsies coughed up. You've done pretty well out of this any way you cut it, haven't you, Biff?'
Biff said nothing for a moment. Then, without answering Billy's question, he finished his story.
Crosskill had come back on the two following days to resign the lease agreement. On the thirteenth he arrived again, but by then Biff had had a call from the chief of police and from Parsons. The complaints from the local citizenry had begun. The chief thought it was time for the Gypsies to move on. Parsons thought the same, but he would be willing to let them stay another day or so if they wanted to up the ante a bit– say, from thirty bucks a night to fifty.
Crosskill listened to this and shook his head. He left without speaking. On a whim, Biff had driven out to the burned-out shell of the Bargain Barn that noon. He was in time to see the Gypsy caravan pulling out.
'They headed for the Chamberlain Bridge,' he said, 'and that's all I know. Why don't you get out of here now, Bill? To be honest, you look like an advertisement for a vacation in Biafra. Looking at you sort of gives me the creeps.'
Billy was still holding the cigarette, although he hadn't taken a puff since the first drag. Now he leaned forward butted it on the bronze dog turds. It fell smoldering to Biffs desk. 'To be honest,' he said to Biff, 'I feel exactly the same way about you.'
The rage was back on him. He walked quickly out of Biff Quigley's office before it could move him in the wrong direction or make his hands speak in some terrible language they seemed to know.
It was the twenty-fourth of June. The Gypsies had left Bangor via the Chamberlain Bridge on the thirteenth. Now he was only eleven days behind. Closer… closer, – but still too far.
He discovered that Route 15, which began on the Brewer side of the bridge, was known as the Bar Harbor Road. It looked as if he might be going there after all. But along the way he would speak to no more realtors and stay at no more first-class motels. If the Barton people were still ahead of him, Kirk might well have put more people on the lookout for him.
The Gypsies had driven the forty-four miles to Ellsworth on the thirteenth, and had been granted a permit to camp on the fairgrounds for three days. Then they had crossed the Penobscot River to Bucksport, where they had stayed another three days before moving on toward the coast again.
Billy discovered all of this on the twenty-fifth; the Gypsies had left Bucksport late on the afternoon of June 19.
Now he was only a week behind them.
Bar Harbor was as crazily booming as the waitress had told him it would be, and Billy thought she had also at least suggested some of the resort town's essential wrongness. The main drag… until after Labor Day, it's a street carnival. Most of these towns are like that, but Bar Harbor is like, top end, you know? … I used to go up there sometimes in July or August and hang out, but not anymore. I'm too old for that now.
Me too, Billy thought, sitting on a park bench in cotton pants, a T-shirt which read BANGOR'S GOT SOUL, and a sport coat that hung straight down from the bony rack of his shoulders. He was eating an ice-cream cone and drawing too many glances.
He was tired– he was alarmed to find that he was always tired now, unless he was in the grip of one of his rages. When he parked the car and got out this morning to begin flashing the pictures, he had experienced a moment of nightmarish deja vu as his pants began to slide down his hips – excusez-moi, he thought, as they slid down my non-hips. The pants were corduroys he had bought in the Rockland army-navy store. They had a twenty-eight-inch waist. The clerk had told him (a little nervously) that he was going to run into trouble buying off-the-rack pants pretty soon, because he was almost into the boy waist sizes now. His leg size, however, was still thirty-two, and there just weren't that many thirteen-year-olds who stood six feet, two inches tall.
Now he sat eating a pistachio ice-cream cone, waiting for some of his strength to come back and trying to decide what was so distressing about this beautiful little town where you couldn't park your cark and where you could barely walk on the sidewalks.
Old Orchard had been vulgar, but its vulgarity had been straightforward and somehow exhilarating; you knew the prizes to be won in the Pitch-Til-U-Win booths were junk that would fall apart immediately, that the souvenirs were junk that would fall apart at almost the exact moment you got too far away to turn around and go back and bitch until they gave you your money back. In Old Orchard many of the women were old, and almost all of them were fat. Some wore obscenely small bikinis but most wore tank suits that seemed relics of the 1950's– you felt, passing these jiggling women on the boardwalk, that those suits were under the same terrible pressures as a submarine cruising far below her rated depth. If any of that iridescent miracle fabric gave way, fat would fly.
The smells in the air had been pizza, ice cream, frying onions, every now and then the nervous vomit of some little kid who had stayed on the Tilt-A-Whirl too long. Most of the cars which cruised slowly up and down in the bumper-to-bumper Old Orchard traffic had been old, rusty around the bottoms of the doors, and usually too big. Many of them had been blowing oil.
Old Orchard had been vulgar, but it had also had a certain peeling innocence that seemed missing in Bar Harbor.
Here so many things were the exact reverse of Old Orchard that Billy felt a little as if he had stepped through the looking glass– there were few old women and apparently no fat women; hardly any women wearing bathing suits. The Bar Harbor uniform seemed to be tennis dress and white sneakers or faded jeans, rugby shirts, and boatniks. Billy saw few old cars and even fewer American cars. Most were Saabs, Volvos, Datsuns, BMW's, Hondas. All of them had bumper stickers saying things like SPLIT WOOD, NOT ATOMS and U.S. OUT OF EL SALVADOR and LEGALIZE THE WEED. The bike people were here too – they wove in and out of the slowly moving downtown throngs on expensive tenspeeds, wearing polarized sunglasses and sun visors, flashing their orthodontically perfect smiles and listening to Sony Walkmen. Below town, in the harbor itself, a forest of masts grew – not the thick, dull-colored masts of working boats, but the slim white ones of sailboats that would be drydocked after Labor Day.
The people hanging out in Bar Harbor were young, brainy, fashionably liberal, and rich. They also partied all night long, apparently. Billy had phoned ahead to make a reservation at the Frenchman's Bay Motel and had lain awake until the small hours of the morning listening to conflicting rock music pouring from six or eight different bars. The tally of wrecked cars and traffic violations mostly DWI's– in the local paper was impressive and a little disheartening.
Billy watched a Frisbee fly over the crowds in their preppy clothes and thought: You want to know why this place and these people depress you? I'll tell you. They are studying to live in places like Fairview, that's why. They'll finish school, get married to women who will conclude their first affairs and rounds of analysis at roughly the same time, and settle down on the Lantern Drives of America. There they will wear red pants when they play golf, and each and every New Year's Eve will be the occasion of much tit-grabbing.
'Yeah, that's depressing, all right,' he muttered, and a couple passing by looked at him strangely.
They're still here.
Yes. They were still here. The thought was so natural, so positive, that it was neither surprising nor particularly exciting. He had been a week behind them– they could be up in the Maritimes by now or halfway down the coast again; their previous pattern suggested they would be gone by now, and certainly Bar Harbor, where even the souvenir shops looked like expensive East Side auction rooms, was a little too tony to put up with a raggle-taggle band of Gypsies for long. All very true. Except they were still here, and he knew it.
'Old man, I smell you,' he whispered.
Of course you smell him. You are supposed to.
That thought caused a moment's unease. Then he got up, tossed the remainder of his cone into a trash barrel, and walked back to the ice-cream vendor. The vendor did not seem particularly pleased to see Billy returning.
'I wonder if you could help me,' Billy said.
'No, man, I really don't think so,' the vendor said, and Billy saw the revulsion in his eyes.
'You might be surprised.' Billy felt a sense of deep calm and predestination– not deja vu but real predestination. The ice-cream vendor wanted to turn away, but Billy held him with his own eyes – he found he was capable of that now, as if he himself had become some sort of supernatural creature. He took out the packet of photographs – it was now rumpled and sweat-stained. He dealt out the familiar tarot hand of images, lining them up along the counter of the man's booth.
The vendor looked at them, and Billy felt no surprise at the recognition in the man's eyes, no pleasure– only that faint fear, like pain waiting to happen when the local anesthetic wears off. There was a clear salt tang in the air, and gulls were crying over the harbor.
'This guy,' the ice-cream vendor said, staring fascinated at the photograph of Taduz Lemke. 'This guy– what a spook!'
'Are they still around?'
'Yeah,' the ice-cream vendor said. 'Yeah, I think they are. The cops kicked 'em out of town the second day, but they were able to rent a field from a farmer in Tecknor that's one town inland from here. I've seen them around. The cops have gotten to the point where they're writing 'em up for broken taillights and stuff like that. You'd think they'd take the hint.'
'Thank you.' He began to collect his pictures again.
'You want another ice cream?'
'No, thank you.' The fear was stronger now– but the anger was there too, a buzzing, pulsing tone under everything else.
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