Thinner by Richard Bachman Read Free Book Online Page B

she asked him: 'Were the police running those guys out of town, Dad?'
    Billy remembered looking at her carefully, feeling both annoyed and absurdly flattered by her question. She went to Heidi when she wanted to know how many calories were in a piece of German chocolate cake; she came to Billy for harder truths, and he sometimes felt this was not fair.
    He sat on her bed, thinking that she was still very young and very sure she was on that side of the line where the good guys unquestionably stood. She could be hurt. A lie could avoid that hurt. But lies about the sort of thing that had happened that day on the Fairview common had a way of coming back to haunt the parents - Billy could very clearly remember his father telling him that masturbation would make him stutter. His father had been a good man in almost all ways, but Billy had never forgiven him that lie. Yet Linda had already run him a hard course - they had been through gays, oral sex, venereal disease, and the possibility that there was no God. It had taken having a child to teach him just how tiring honesty could be. Suddenly he thought of Ginelli. What would Ginelli tell his daughter if he was here now? You got to keep the undesirables out of town, sweetness. Because that is really what it's all about - just keeping the undesirables out of town. But that was more truth than he could muster.
    'Yes, I suppose they were. They were Gypsies, hon. Vagabonds.'
    'Mom said they were crooks.'
    'A lot of them run crooked games and tell fake fortunes. When they come to a town like Fairview, the police ask them to move on. Usually they put up a show of being mad, but they really don't mind.'
    Bang! A little flag went up inside his head. Lie # 1.
    'They hand out posters or fliers saying where they'll be - usually they make a cash deal with a farmer or with someone who owns a field outside of town. After a few days they leave.'
    'Why do they come at all? What do they do?'
    'Well ... there are always people who want their fortunes read. And there are games of chance. Gambling. Usually they are crooked.'
    Or maybe a fast, exotic lay, Halleck thought. He saw the kick pleat of the girl's skirt shift again as she stepped into the van. How would she move? His mind answered: Like the ocean getting ready to storm, that's how.
    'Do people buy drugs from them?'
    These days you don't need to buy drugs from Gypsies, dear; you can buy those in the schoolyard.
    'Hashish, maybe,' he said, 'or opium.'
    He had come to this part of Connecticut as a teenager, and had been here ever since - in Fairview and neighboring Northport. He hadn't seen any Gypsies in almost twentyfive years .. not since he had been a kid growing up in North Carolina, when he had lost five dollars - an allowance saved up carefully over almost three months to buy his mother a birthday present - playing the wheel of fortune. They weren't supposed to allow anyone under sixteen to play, but of course if you had the coin or the long green, you could step up and put it down. Some things never changed, he reckoned, and chief among them was the old adage that when money talks, nobody walks. If asked before today, he would have shrugged and guessed that there were no more traveling Gypsy caravans. But of course the wandering breed never died out. They came in rootless and left the same way, human tumbleweeds who cut whatever deals they could and then blew out of town with dollars in their greasy wallets that had been earned on the time clocks they themselves spurned. They survived. Hitler had tried to exterminate them along with the Jews and the homosexuals, but they would outlive a thousand Hitlers, he supposed.
    'I thought the common was public property,' Linda said. 'That's what we learned in school.'
    'Well, in a way it is,' Halleck said. - '"Common" means commonly owned by the townspeople. The taxpayers.'
    Bong! Lie #2. Taxation had nothing at all to do with common land in New England, ownership of or use of. See Richards vs.