The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro

by Paul Theroux

  “They'll never catch us. They'll think it's some big murderer. They'll never think it was kids.”

  “Let's shadow him first, and then see,” I said, dreading their conviction.

  Walter said, “Chicky's right. Kill him.”

  “We can track him. We’re good at that,” I said.

  Lurking, hiding, hunting; scouring the earth for footprints, tire tracks, clues; the lore of Scouting was real and useful.

  The sky had gone gray, some of the clouds as dense as iron, as black, with streaks of red and pink between them, like hot iron that had begun to cool. And not only that, but more because the evening sky was always a mass of unrelated marvels—above the iron were vast decaying faces, tufts of pink fluff in a soup of yellow. The light in the sky was all the light there was; the woods were dark, and so was the surface of the pond at this low angle, and not even the path was clear.

  “We should head back,” I said, and started walking.

  “I don't even freakin' care,” Walter said, but from the way he said it I knew he was glad to go, a bit wobbly and gagged from puking.

  Chicky said, “We could wait till he parks his car, then cut a tree down. It falls across the road, he can't drive away, we nail him.”

  “Or dig one of those big holes and put sticks across it, and leaves and stuff, so that it looks like the ground,” I said. “He walks right in. We could say it was an accident.”

  “Or just shoot him in the nuts,” Walter said.

  Talking this way in the darkness of the woods seemed unlucky and made me nervous about bumping into a stranger, maybe that very homo. The others might have felt that way too, for although they were talking big, they held tightly to their rifles, bumping shoulders and sometimes stumbling. When we heard some cars and saw the lights of South Border Road, we walked faster and were relieved to be out of the woods.

  Chicky started across the Fellsway alone, walking stiffly to conceal his gun. He turned around and took out his comb. “Anyway, don't do anything I wouldn't do,” he said, tilting his head, raking his hair with his comb. “Or if you do, name him Chicky.”

  Walter and I turned toward Foss Street. He was silent, except for his puffing—winded and sick from the experience of having seen the man—a big boy out of breath, his whole body straining as he plodded up the hill.

  “We'll get the guy,” I said, to reassure him.

  “Who cares?” His voice stayed in his mouth and sounded awful, as though he couldn't swallow. When we got to the Fulton Street fire station at the top of the hill he said, “My mother thinks I went to church.”

  The special Saturday church of a Seventh-day Adventist made it sounded pagan and purposeless, just an empty ritual on the wrong day.

  Looking miserable, saying nothing except “See ya,” he turned and headed down Ames Street toward his house. I walked off wondering and anxious, for so much had occurred during the day and I was still not sure what it meant; sometimes such events just happened and were never repeated, but other times there were consequences, and those I feared.

  Entering my house, leaving my rifle behind the sofa on the piazza to hide later, I went into the kitchen, which was filled with light and warmth and the steamy odor of sweated meat.

  “Where have you been?” my mother said. She was standing at the stove, poking at a pot roast in a kettle.

  “Nowhere.”

  “You smell of smoke.”

  “I went for a hike. For a merit badge.”

  “Have you been playing with fire?”

  “There was a forest fire. I helped put it out.”

  “Take your shoes off—you're tracking in mud. Wash your hands and face. You're filthy. And set the table.”

  I did as I was told, but it was hard to do the right thing here at home, hard to know what to say. I felt uncomfortable and out of place in the house, in this world that was parallel to my outdoor life, as though I did not belong indoors, could not reveal anything of my real life. Only in the woods, with my gun, my wool hat pulled over my ears, did I feel free, “sure-footed,” “hawkeyed.”

  The next Scout meeting was on the following Wednesday. We gathered at St. Ray's hall and were talking and fooling until Arthur Mutch yelled at us to pipe down and to line up in patrols.

  “Close interval, dress right—dress!”

  Each boy stuck his left elbow out, making a space, and because Chicky was on my right he jabbed me hard and laughed.

  “Ten-shun!”

  Mr. Mutch led us in the Scout oath while Father Staley stood at the side. After the oath, Scaly led us in a prayer, the same prayer as always: “Let us pray. Dear Lord, help us to be worthy of your love...”

  “At ease,” Mr. Mutch said afterward. He lectured us a little on obedience and how we had a duty to behave with respect. Then he nodded to Father Staley, who held up one finger to get our attention and said, “This, too, is a house of God.” Then Mr. Mutch told us to meet in patrols and that he would be coming around to check on us.

  The leader of the Beaver Patrol was an Eagle Scout named Corny Kelliher, a redheaded thirteen-year-old with freckles and spaces between his teeth. He hated camping but was good at arithmetic and hobbies: he had a ham radio and knew Morse code and raised tropical fish. He wore a sash stitched with merit badges, twenty or more. He had gone out west to the Jamboree by train and had showed us snapshots he had taken of Pikes Peak and Grand Coulee Dam.

  Corny said, “So let’s talk about what Scouting activities we’ve been doing. How about you, Andy?”

  “Learning about tracking,” I said.

  “Can you identify any animal prints?”

  “Yup. Bear. Deer. Muskrat.”

  “How can you tell a muskrat track?”

  “Drags its tail between its footprints and leaves a line.”

  “How do you know if the prints are fresh?”

  I didn’t know, so I said, “If they’re kind of wet?”

  Corny said, “No. But if they have snow inside them, then you know that they’re not fresh, because it snowed after the animal left them.”

  “What about in the summer when there’s no snow?”

  I liked asking him outdoor questions because he was always indoors.

  “The prints are soft,” he said. “What else did you do?”

  Chased a squirrel. Saw a man with a fishhook in his thumb. Got yelled at by him. Found some dirty pictures and rubbers. Quarreled with some people. Found a buck and change. Tracked down a homo’s car.

  But I said, “Hiked. Identified some plants. Skunk cabbage and stuff.”

  Saturdays were for tracking. We went back again, we could only go that day, but we went with the same dedication. We were small, we were not strong, so we valued cunning and skill and made being small our asset. If we could not come face to face with the enemy, we would find him, shadow him, then make a move on him. We whispered, we tiptoed, we wore dark clothes, we avoided stepping on things that made noise, stayed off the path, moved from big tree to big tree keeping our rifles pointed down, used hand signals. We were trackers, we were stalkers, we were scarcely visible.

  Our stakeout spot was a grassy overlook near the big smooth boulder above Doleful Pond, in a natural trench like a foxhole, sluiced by a gully wash. There we lay in the speckled leaf shadow and watched the bridle path where cars—lovers, fishermen, crazies with girlie magazines—sometimes parked. We got to know them, the ones who cuddled in the back seat and tossed rubbers out the window, the fishermen who stayed until dark, the loners who tore up the magazines.

  “I’m cold. Let’s start a fire,” Chicky said one Saturday.

  “No. They’ll see the smoke.”

  “Who made you the chief?” Chicky said, and lit a cigarette, and warmed his hands with it. He was becoming an expert smoker and boasted of the nicotine stains on his fingers.

  Walter said, “Cigarettes are stupid. You’re going to be a shrimp.”

  Chicky blew smoke into Walter’s face and said, “Know what? Dwyer got bare tit off
a seventh-grader at Helen Slupski’s birthday party.”

  Walter was listening closely, a Seventh-day Adventist envying us our wild life and our parties. He said, “Is she pretty?”

  “She’s a dog, but she’s a tramp,” Chicky said. “Probably a nympho.”

  We watched the road, the parking space, side by side, prostrate, like braves. A car pulled in: lovers, the green Chevy.

  While we watched them, I said in a low voice, “This guy was banging his girlfriend up the Mystic Lakes and she clamped his dong so hard in her twot he couldn’t pull it out. It was stuck wicked shut, like in a vise. The cops found them. ‘Let’s see your license and registration.’ Then they saw what happened and took them to the hospital. My brother told me.”

  “That’s a pissah,” Chicky said. “So they’re in the ambulance together and his dong is stuck inside her.”

  “Sometimes your finger gets stuck in a Coke bottle,” Walter said, thinking of how it might have happened.

  After a while the Chevy backed out, and with its lights on we realized that the day had gone dark, time to go home. We descended the hill, rounded the pond, and lingered where the car had been, in the tracks of all the other cars, the fishermen, the crazies, the lovers, about fifty feet from the post where the sign we had vandalized said, No Parking—Police Take No ice.

  I said, “They all see that sign and stop.”

  “Let’s lose it,” Chicky said. “Then they might park over there.”

  “So what?”

  “Easier to kill the homo,” Chicky said, and a moment later was climbing the pole and hanging on the sign, tearing it from its rusted fastenings.

  “Your fingerprints are on it now,” I said.

  “As if I give a shit.” Chicky walked to the edge of the pond and winged it into the water, where it skipped twice and then sank. He went back and kicked the iron pipe from its supports, shouting crazy, “I’m leaving my footprints!” He was strong and he had gotten bolder, and even his reckless talk was a worry.

  The next time we went was milder, mid-April now, some lilacs and forsythia in blossom at the edge of the reservoir, and purple azaleas already starting to show. I knew their names from the flower book that Mr. Mutch had loaned me. We waited for Walter, who was later than usual. His mother had found out that he was skipping church, and forced him to go. But he was loping along with his gun when he caught up with us at the stone pillars at the entrance to the Fells.

  “I took it to church,” he said. “No one even saw me.”

  “That’s wicked great,” Chicky said. “I’m going to do that.”

  I tried to picture it, sitting in a pew at St. Ray’s with my rifle lying under the kneeler.

  “I still don’t get why you have to go to church on Saturday,” Chicky said as we walked into the woods, making our usual detour through the trees.

  “Because it’s the Sabbath.”

  “Bullshit,” Chicky said. “Sunday is.”

  “Saturday,” Walter said. “Jews go then, too.”

  “That’s why they’re Jews. You’re not a Jew, except when you’re hogging the Devil Dogs.”

  “Cut it out,” I said, seeing that under Chicky’s scolding Walter was getting pink-faced and a little breathless, as he did when he was upset.

  But Chicky was annoyed because we had waited most of the day for Walter, and he was so late there were only a few more hours of sunlight. Chicky had said, “Let’s go without him,” but I argued that we needed Walter—to be a team, to act together, and so that Walter would see the man’s face.

  “Yeah, we don’t want to kill the wrong guy,” Chicky said.

  Walter trudged ahead of us, as though compensating for being late. From the way he was silent and thoughtful, his shoes flapping, I knew that he envied us being Boy Scouts. But Scouts were forbidden by his church, like coffee and tuna fish.

  “We’re supposed to be tracking,” Chicky said. “Get down low.”

  “I’m a tracker,” Walter said. “No one can see me.”

  We glided through the woods like wisps, like shadows, alert to all the sounds. Blue jays were chasing a squirrel, harrying the creature from tree to tree the way we might have done ourselves if we had not been so determined to conceal ourselves. We were off the path, and the dead leaves were flatter and wetter these days, not like the brittle crackling leaves of winter. We moved hunched over in silence.

  More buds made the trees look denser, and the tiny bright leaves on some bushes gave the woods a newer, greener feel, hid us better and helped us feel freer. The sky was not so explicit, the boughs had begun to fill out with leaves as delicate as feathers. And a different smell, too, the crumbly brown decaying smell of warmer earth and tufts of low tiny wildflowers.

  Once again, Walter pointed out some fiddleheads, the only wild plant he knew, though most of them had fanned out into ferns. The skunk cabbage was fuller and redder. Nor were the woods so silent. There were insects and some far-off frogs. We wanted to be like these dull-colored creatures and wet plants, camouflaged like the wildest things in the woods.

  Because it was so late there were no horseback riders on the bridle paths, no other hikers, no dog walkers. They must have all left the woods as we had entered: the wilderness belonged to us now.

  We cut around Panther's Cave, climbed the hill behind it, and kept just below the ridgeline, parallel to the trail, listening hard. The light was dimming and the sun was behind us, below the level of the treetops.

  “I can’t see squat,” Chicky said. “It’s all Herkis’s fault. Fucking banana man.”

  “My mother made me go,” Walter said in an urgent tearful whisper.

  “Let’s hurry,” I said, hoping to calm them.

  “How can we track anyone in the dark?”

  “We’ll learn how,” Walter said. “Indians track people in the dark. Indians stay out all night. No one expects to be followed in the dark. We’ll get good at it. Then we’ll be invisible.”

  “I have to be home for supper,” I said.

  But we kept on, and the gathering darkness did not deter us, it was a challenge and a kind of cloak, a cover for us in our tracking as we crept unseen below the ridgeline.

  And walking this way we made a discovery, for cresting the last hill behind Doleful Pond, in our foxhole, we saw that the water still held some daylight, the smooth surface of the pond reflecting the creamy gray of the sky.

  The shore was dark, the woods were black, we saw nothing on the road. Instead of lying there whispering in the shallow trench, we made our way down the hill, as slowly and silently as we could, as though moving downstairs through many large darkened rooms of a strange house. Even so, I could hear Chicky breathing through his fat nose, and Walter’s big feet in the leaves, clumsy human sounds that made me feel friendly toward them.

  Before we got to the road, Chicky said, “Look,” and swung his arm to keep us back, liking the drama of it.

  At the very end of the road, the place where we had removed the No Parking sign and the iron pipe, there was a car, but so deep in the trees we could not see the color or the make.

  I put my finger to my lips—no talking—and took the lead, duck-walking to the edge of the pond, where the little trail encircled it. The others followed, keeping low and still watching the car, trying to make it out. Closer, we could see it was small and compact.

  “It’s the Studebaker,” Chicky said, whispering fiercely.

  Walter knelt and slid the bolt of his rifle. “Let’s kill him.”

  “Yeah,” Chicky said. He too knelt and fumbled with his gun.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. I could not think of any way of stopping them, nor could I put my worry into words. We had bullets, we had our guns, only mine was not loaded: the other guns were cocked. In the darkness of Doleful Pond, having achieved our objective, there was nothing to stop us. We had made a trap for the man by removing the sign and the barrier, and our work was even more effective than we had planned, for the car was almost hidden in the nar
row gullet of the road.

  “We’ll surround him,” Chicky said. “We’ll just gang up and shoot from all sides. He won’t have a chance.”

  I felt sickening panic and wanted to vomit. Until that moment it had been unreal, just a game of pursuit, Indian tracking, and I had enjoyed it. But we had succeeded too well and now I dreaded that we would have to go through with it. I saw in this reckless act the end of my useful life.

  “Maybe he’s not inside.”

  The car was dark. I hoped it was empty.

  “My mother’s going to kill me if I’m late,” I said.

  “Andy’s chickening out.” Chicky’s vicious gloating made him sound psycho.

  I was afraid. I thought: If I do this, my life is over. I also thought: I cannot chicken out, I can’t retreat.

  “We should call the cops.”

  “They won’t do anything,” Walter said.

  “Just take our guns away!” Chicky said.

  The car moved, not visibly but we heard it, the distinct sound of a spring, the squeak of metal under the chassis, as though it was settling slightly into the road, for there was another accompanying sound, the crunch of cinders in the wheel track from the tires. A weight had shifted in the car.

  That sound stiffened us and made us listen. The next sound was louder, not from the springs but the crank-creak of a door handle, and with it a light came on inside the car, the overhead bulb.

  We saw the man’s face briefly as he turned to get out of the car and, as he left the door open, the light stayed on. Another shape barely bulked in the front seat—it could have been a bundle, or a big dog, or a boy’s head. There came a spattering sound, like gravel on glass.