Thinner - Stephen King [123]
The front door, flanked by two graceful electric flambeaux, opened, and Heidi came out on the front stoop. She was wearing a red skirt and a sleeveless white blouse Billy couldn't remember ever having seen before. She had also gotten her hair cut very short, and for one shocked moment he thought she wasn't Heidi at all but a stranger who looked a little like her.
She looked at him, face too white, eyes too dark, lips trembling. 'Billy?'
'I am,' he said, and stopped where he was.
They stood and looked at each other, Heidi with a species of wretched hope in her face, Billy with what felt like nothing at all in his - yet there must have been, because after a moment she burst out, 'For Christ's sake, Billy, don't look at me that way! I can't bear it!'
He felt a smile surface on his face - inside it felt like something dead floating to the top of a still lake, but it must have looked all right because Heidi answered it with a tentative, trembling smile of her own. Tears began to spill down her cheeks.
Oh, but you always did cry easy, Heidi, he thought.
She started down the steps. Billy dropped the Kluge bag and walked toward her, feeling the dead smile on his face.
'What's to eat?' he asked. 'I'm starved.'
She made him a giant meal - steak, salad, a baked potato almost as big as a torpedo, fresh green beans, blueberries in cream for dessert. Billy ate all of it. Although she never came right out and said it, every movement, every gesture, and every look she gave him conveyed the same message: Give me a second chance, Billy - please give me a second chance. In a way, he thought this was extremely funny - funny in a way the old Gypsy would have appreciated. She had swung from refusing to accept any culpability to accepting all of it.
And little by little, as midnight approached, he sensed something else in her gestures and movements: relief. She felt that she had been forgiven. That was very fine with Billy, because Heidi thinking she was forgiven was also what it was all about.
She sat across from him, watching him eat, occasionally touching his wasted face, and smoking one Vantage 100 after another as he talked. He told her about how he had chased the Gypsies up the coast; about getting the photographs from Kirk Penschley; of finally catching up to the Gypsies in Bar Harbor.
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