The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro

by Paul Theroux

  “Skunk cabbage,” I said.

  Dark red and black claw-shaped bunches of the glossy plant grew in the muddy patch near a mass of rotten wood and dead grass that was pressed down and combed-looking from the weight of the snow.

  “Them others are fiddleheads,” Walter said, stopping farther on, where the mud was thicker and wetter. Ragged veils of gnats whirred over its small bubble holes. From the evaporated puddle, a slab of mud as smooth as chocolate, rose a clump of packed-together ferns, in sprays like bouquets, their coiled tops beginning to unroll and spring open. Fiddlehead was the perfect name for them.

  “Vinny eats them,” Walter said. He lifted his rifle and poked the ferns and gently parted the stalks with the muzzle.

  Chicky said, “He’d get sick. Vinny Grasso is a lying guinea wop.”

  “And you’re a pissah.”

  “Eat me, I’m a jellybean,” Chicky said.

  “Shut up,” I whispered. “Someone will hear.”

  “Fuckum,” Chicky said.

  For emphasis, he stepped over to the tight green bouquets of new ferns and scattered some in one kick, then broke the ones that remained and trampled them flat, his boots squelching the mud and burying them.

  Looking at the damage, he said, “But my nonna eats dandelions.”

  Chicky's outbursts alarmed me, because they made him sound crazy, and his threats were sudden and scary, especially when he was trying to be funny. To act tough, he sometimes punted schoolbooks and kicked them along the sidewalk. I had never before seen anyone kick a book. He’d say, “Who cares? I can hardly read anyway,” which was true, and as shocking to me as wrecking the books.

  “Give me a freakin’ weed, Andy.”

  “Coffin nails,” Walter said.

  “Who asked you?”

  “They’re wicked bad for you,” Walter said, straightening himself with confidence.

  “You’re just saying that because they’re against your religion,” Chicky said.

  Walter Herkis was a Seventh-day Adventist. He couldn’t be in our Scout troop, because Protestants weren’t allowed to be Scouts at St. Ray’s. He wanted to join our Beaver Patrol, but he would have been shocked by our Scout meetings in the church hall, the prayers especially, Father Staley—“Scaly” Staley—telling us to kneel on the varnished wood floor of the basketball court, and raising his scaly hands, and folding them, and giving a sermon, or else saying, “Let us pray.” Walter went by bus to a special school in Boston, with other Adventists. Walter could not smoke or eat meat, not even hot dogs, or tuna fish, and he was supposed to go to church on Saturday. He was playing hooky from church today, as he often did, though today was special: we were hunting the stranger.

  “They stunt your growth,” Walter said.

  “You eat it raw.” Chicky snapped his fingers. “Come on, Andy.”

  I unbuckled my knapsack and found, among the canvas pouches of bullets and the marshmallows and tonic, the crushed pack of Lucky Strikes Chicky had stolen from his brother. I shook out a cigarette for him and put the rest away.

  “Luckies,” Chicky said. He tapped the cigarette on his knuckle like an old smoker, and said, “Got a match?”

  “Your face and my ass,” Walter said.

  “Your face and the back of a bus.” I handed him a book of matches. “You want a kick in the chest to get it started?”

  Chicky lit up and puffed and wagged the match to put it out. He inhaled, sucking air with his teeth clamped shut, making slurping sounds in his cheeks. Then he plucked the cigarette from his mouth and admired it as he blew out a spray of blue smoke.

  “You're giving it a wicked lipper,” Walter said.

  “Stick it, goombah. You don't even smoke.” Chicky handed the butt to me.

  I puffed without inhaling, snuffled a little from the smoke leaking up my nose, and covered my gagging by saying, “Where was he?”

  “Not here,” Walter said, and walked ahead. Pale and freckled, taller than either Chicky or me, Walter was skinny and had long legs, his bony knees showing in his dungarees. He was such a fast runner we could not understand how the man had caught him—if he had caught him. Walter had not told us much of the story, only that we had to track the man down and find his blue Studebaker. He was round-shouldered hurrying ahead of us, and his twisted hair, his slender neck, made him look lonely.

  “I don't even freakin' believe him,” Chicky said.

  “Quit it,” I said. “Walter doesn't lie.”

  “He's a Protestant.”

  “So what?”

  “It's not a sin for them to lie,” Chicky said.

  We followed Walter up the hill, away from the path. We passed Wright's Tower at the top of the hill and climbed the urine-stinky stairs to the lookout: Boston—the Customs House—in one direction; the dark trees in the other. We descended and went deeper into the woods.

  Even on this early-spring day, there were mud-spattered crusts of mostly melted snow, skeletal and icy from softening to slush and refreezing. The woods looked littered and untidy with the snow scraps, with driblets of ice from the recent rain in the grooved bark and boles of trees, ice enameling the sides of rocks, the old poisoned-looking leaves, curled and dead, brittle, black, thicknesses of them like soggy trash, the earth still slowly thawing, with winter lingering on top. Even so, spring was swelling, pushing from beneath, like the claws of skunk cabbage rising from the mud, and small dark buds on bush twigs, the knobs of bulbs and plants like fists thrusting up through softened soil, and the first shoots, white as noodles. The first were the hardiest, the most resistant to frost, not even green, nor tender at all, but dark and fierce, small, tight, just starting to take hold. Between the frozen silence of winter and the green of spring were these clammy weeks of mud and stink and the rags of old snow.

  Walter was waiting for us at the bottom of the hill, at a cliffside and a boulder pile we called Panther’s Cave.

  “Was he here?” Chicky said, glancing at the cave entrance, a damp shadow falling across it, for it was already five and would be dark soon. The portals of the cave were two upright boulders, bigger than we were, scorched and smelling of woodsmoke.

  “I already told you, no.”

  “Tell us the story,” Chicky said.

  “Shove it up your bucket,” Walter said, and peeled the cellophane from a package of Devil Dogs.

  “Fungoo,” Chicky said. “Hey, Herkis, I had dibs on them.”

  “I’m hungry,” Walter said, poking a Devil Dog into his mouth, chewing hard, his voice sounding dry and cakey when he said, with his mouth full, “Anyway, you got cigarettes.”

  “Give me one or I'll whack your ass.” Chicky swung his rifle by its barrel, like a bat, at Walter.

  “Let’s go,” I said, because Chicky's quarreling made me uneasy and this was all a delay in the darkening woods.

  “He’s a Jew,” Chicky said. “Okay, if he's scoffing the Devil Dogs, I hosey the Twinkies.” He looked hard at Walter. “Jelly belly.”

  “Rotate,” Walter said, and raised his middle finger.

  With his tongue against his teeth, Chicky chanted, “My friend Walter had a pimple on his belly. His mother cut it off and made it into jelly.”

  Walter, still chewing, staring at the ground, looked hurt, not for anything that Chicky had said but as though he was thinking about something worse.

  “Come on,” I said. I had meant “Let’s go,” but Walter took it to mean the story.

  “It wasn't here,” he said.

  “Where then?”

  “I told you, wicked far.”

  “Near the road?”

  “No, past the Sheepfold.’'

  “Spot Pond? The rezza?”

  “The other one,” Walter said. He was licking fudgy flakes and frosting from his dirty knuckles. “Where you see cars sometimes.”

  “Where we shot holes in that No Parking sign?” Chicky said. Then shouted, “You had to eat all the Devil Dogs yourself, you fucking Jew bastard.”

  “Doleful
Pond,” I said. My father sometimes took me fishing there with my brother Louie. We caught small slimy fish, pickerel, hornpout, and kibbies, and removing the hook we sometimes slashed our fingers on the sharp fins.

  Doleful Pond was so far, we did not bother tracking or whispering, but started off again, walking together on the bridle path, our rifles slung by their straps on our shoulders.

  Chicky said, “Walter’s got a new girlfriend.”

  “Quit it,” Walter said.

  “Her name’s Mary Palm.”

  “At least I don’t eat fur burgers like some people I know.”

  “You gobble the hairy clam,” Chicky said. “Andy plays pocket pool.”

  Chicky let the cigarette die. He lit it again and finished it, puffing it to a small butt, less than an inch, tweezing it between his fingertips. “Look,” he said, and pinched the ashy tip off and began tearing at the paper and loose tobacco. He peeled the paper and flaked the tobacco and scattered it.

  “That’s called fieldstripping. My cousin showed me how. He was in the navy in Japan. He brought back this wicked nice jacket with a dragon on the back. I’m going in the navy.”

  “The navy gets the gravy, but the army gets the beans,” Walter said. “That’s true, you know. The food in the navy is really good.”

  “I bet you’ve never seen one, Andy.”

  “One what?”

  “Twot.”

  It was true, but I shrugged in a worldly way, as though the question was irrelevant.

  “I’ve seen billions of them,” Walter said. “My mother’s always charging around the house bollocky.”

  “That doesn’t count,” Chicky said. “She’s too old.”

  “I saw my cousin’s,” Walter said. Though he sounded as if he was breathless from the memory, it was really from climbing the path, beating the twiggy bushes aside, kicking the snow crusts with his wet shoes. “She was bollocky. She didn’t even know I was looking at her.” He measured with his cold reddened hands. “It was yay big. It even had some hair on it.”

  “Like you’d know what to do with it.”

  “I didn’t have any Trojans,” Walter said.

  “As if they make them that small.”

  “Anyway, I wouldn’t bang my cousin without a rubber.”

  “She must be a nympho.”

  “She’s a virgin.”

  “So are you,” Chicky said.

  A silence entrapped us with the truth: we were each of us virgins. We knew nothing except the wild talk.

  “You Jew bastard, why did you eat all the Devil Dogs?”

  “Hungry,” Walter said. “This kid I know at school says to me, A girl doesn’t have to get pregnant. After she gets banged she can just piss it out—piss out all the sperm.’”

  Another silence and the crunching of dead leaves as we walked, each of us considering this, trying to imagine the process.

  “What a shit-for-brains,” Chicky said. “It’s impossible.”

  Though none of us knew why. In fact, it seemed logical.

  “I would have known what to do with your cousin,” Chicky said.

  “Sure. Every day and twice on Sunday.”

  “Anyway, what’s her name?”

  “Cheryl.”

  “Headlights?”

  Walter nodded and said, “She even wears a boulder holder.”

  Chicky said, “I’d say, ‘Hey, Cheryl,’ and then do like the four Roman emperors. Seize ’er. Squeeze ’er. Pump ’er. Dump ’er.”

  “Did you really see her knobs?” I asked, and thought what heaven it would be to behold such a miracle.

  “Yeah,” Walter said. “We was sitting on the glider, on her piazza. I was going to feel her up.”

  “I would have,” Chicky said, “'cause I’m in the Four-F Club. Find 'em, feel 'em, fuck 'em, and forget 'em.”

  Now the woods ahead were indistinct, though there was still light in the sky. The great thing about being in the woods at this hour was that there was rarely anyone else around: the woods were ours, and we were free in them. We walked on, into the thickening shadows.

  Walter said, “Look, a toad.”

  The thing had been startled from the path and hopped next to a crumbling log. Chicky kicked it, saying, “Bastards give you warts.”

  The stunned toad looked bug-eyed and feeble as it made a low heavy hop.

  “Stand back,” Chicky said. He worked the pump on his Winchester and shot it, the first rifle shot of the day, a startling sound, so loud it was unfamiliar, echoing as though there was a wall at the far end of the woods. “Shoot him between the eyes.”

  Walter and I started firing, Walter with his single-shot Remington, me with my Mossberg, tearing its body open, its belly ripping like the thin rubber on a small squeeze toy. As it flopped forward, Walter shot its blunt head, and burst it, then Chicky booted the ragged corpse into the leaves.

  “Beaver Patrol to the rescue,” Chicky said in a singsong voice, making a monkey face.

  Farther on, Walter said, “Cheezit.”

  Two riders on horses trotted down the bridle path toward us as we scampered behind some rocks and flattened ourselves on the ground. They were women, in round riding caps and tweed jackets and tight pants and black boots. Unseen by the mounted women, we watched them go by, moving off in the last light of day.

  “Think they heard the guns?” I said. We were nagged by the fear of our guns being taken away.

  No one replied. Walter said, “They must be rich.”

  We watched them rocking and swaying back and forth in their saddles, chucking their boot heels against the horses’ bellies.

  “Women get horny riding horses,” Chicky said.

  “That’s bull.”

  “They get hot,” Chicky said. “Them two broads are so freakin’ horny.”

  We were still lying on the ground, watching the long swaying tails, the twitching flesh of the horses’ high hindquarters, the women’s packed buttocks and wide-apart legs.

  “I’ve got a bonah,” Walter said.

  The women rode off, unaware that three armed boys lay hidden, watching them from the margin of the bridle path, excited by the snorting horses, the stamping of hooves in the cinders.

  “Tell us the story again,” I said.

  2

  Walter clawed his damp spiky hair and sighed, having to repeat himself. He said in a mumbling way, “I’m walking along the path near where we found the ripped-up magazines that day.”

  “Doleful Pond,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Walter said. “Where you see cars sometimes and you wonder how did they get there?”

  “They’re watching the submarine races,” Chicky said. He began to snap a narrow comb through his greasy hair.

  But I was thinking about the magazines, how they had been torn to pieces, but even so, they were easy to put together. Each fragment was a part of a naked woman, and some pieces were so big there was a whole naked woman, the white of a smooth body so clear, almost luminous, or pale as sausage casing, breasts like balloons. They had seemed like witches to me, powerful and pretty, smiling sinners, representing all that was forbidden.

  As Walter talked I saw everything in black and white, because the past was always black and white, as the television was in black and white; because of right and wrong, no in-between. Also black and white because of the weather, for in early spring the green was blackish, the trees were dark, the stones and big boulders were white, the ground bare except for the patches of snow that lay like torn scraps and muddied sheets, black and white rags all over the woods.

  “I’m walking past this blue Studebaker and I didn’t know this old guy was in it until he says, 'Hey, kid,' and reaches out the window. I looks over—he's smiling with these yellow teeth, and as I walks away I hear the door open.”

  “Why didn't you take off?”

  Walter could run faster than either Chicky or me, but he was slower-witted, so he did not always know when to run.

  “I almost shit a brick because
he scared me. I didn't know what to do. I just kept walking, to show I didn’t really care.”

  I knew the pond and the road there, so I could easily see Walter marching stiffly away from the blue Studebaker, his little head, his skinny neck, his spiky uncombed hair, his baggy pants and scuffed shoes; trying so hard not to look scared, he moved like a puppet.

  “I thought he was supposed to have a bonah,” Chicky said.

  “That was later,” Walter said.

  “When he chased you?” I asked.

  “No. I looks back and he's in the car, so I kept going. I knew he wouldn’t drive on the path. There’s a sign, the one we blasted with our guns. There’s a gate. He couldn’t get through.”

  “Which path?”

  “To the Sheepfold, like I said. I was going up there to build a fire and get warm.”

  “What about your gun?”

  “I didn’t bring it.”

  “You said you did.”

  “No sah.”

  “Yes sah.”

  “My sister hid it, to be a pain.”

  Chicky said, “You said you aimed your gun at him and he freaked.”

  “Knife. I had my hunting knife, so that I could make wood shavings to start the fire. I had it in my belt, in the sheath. I pulled it out as I was walking up the path, in case he chased me.”

  “You said ‘gun’ before. Didn’t he, Andy?”

  “I don’t remember,” I said. Truly, I didn’t. All I could recall was the blue car, the old man, his black golf cap, Walter being pestered.

  “You told the story different before,” Chicky said. “You said you saw him in the woods.”

  “You didn’t let me get to that part,” Walter said in a wronged, pleading voice, his eyes glistening so much I felt sorry for him. More softly he said, “So I’m at the Sheepfold. There’s nobody around. I whittle a stick and get some shavings. I try to start a fire, and I’m kneeling down and blowing on the sparks and I hear something.”

  “What?”

  “How do I know? Twigs. But I look around and the old guy is standing right behind me. He followed me somehow. He’s saying, ‘Hey, kid.’ His fly is open. That’s when he had the bonah.”