by Paul Theroux
My eyes still hurt from the glare of the kitchen lights, and as I strained to see, it might have seemed that I was smiling. But I was not smiling, I was terrified. I shook my head and knew I looked pitiful, and now I saw that my father had put his razor down but was holding his razor strop in his hand. It lay folded on his palm, the metal clip at one end, the narrow stitched handle at the other.
“You’re filthy,” he said, and speaking these words his face was like that of an angry yellow-faced brute in a horror comic.
Seeing what was coming, I turned away as he lifted the strop and struck at me with it, using it like a whip, slashing my shins, raising a red welt on the flesh of my skinny legs. The end of the leather strop gripped my knee and tripped me, and as I fell my father lashed at my legs, cut at me again, while my mother screamed.
I was too timid, too guilty, too afraid to cry out: I deserved my thrashing for my dirty mind.
“Get out!”
My mother was saying no, no, but I hurried outside and didn’t stop until I got into my pup tent, my heart pounding, and thinking: It doesn’t hurt that much now, at least it’s over, he won’t hit me again. I lay there not caring that I had been thrashed, but feeling that I had been punished fairly; and not hating my father but fearing him and feeling sorry for him, for he was angry that I had disappointed him. He did not know what to do.
I was so sorry—sorriest because I knew I would never change. I lost Evelyn Frisch. My mother must have said something to her parents. I was alone. That was how I wanted it. I was a sinner, and would stay that way because I wasn’t sorry. I didn’t care. I only knew that my life would be harder because of my sins and my secrets, but at least I was on my own and in the world.
III. Seeing Truman
MOST DAYS in Medford nothing happened—or the same thing happened. But the day Harry Truman’s train made a whistle stop at Medford Station, everything happened, and a lot of it to me. I told my mother I was going to see him with my friend John Burkell. She said, “Mind your p’s and q’s,” helplessly, because she couldn’t prevent me from going, even though, as she sometimes said, Burkell was a bad influence. Seeing Truman was my excuse to stay out late in the early dark of October. But the event was bigger than she was. The president’s visit made me free.
In Miss Bunker’s class that afternoon, I passed Burkell a note saying Meet me outside the gate. As he tried to sneak a note back to me, Miss Bunker said, ‘And I’ll take that.” She picked it open and read it with no expression, which meant she was angry. “Mr. Burkell, you will stay after school.”
He didn’t look like a bad influence. He was fattish and pale, with spiky sweaty hair cut in a whiffle. He tried to shock the other kids with morbid songs, but he was teased for seeming weak, for looking uncertain, pink-eyed like a rabbit, his lids crusted (“It's conjunctivitis”) from his rubbing them. He was always chewing his necktie, or else poking wax out of his ears with the wire of a twisted paper clip. “Stop doing that, Mr. Burkell.”
Burkell's mother saw me as John’s protector—the Burkells were new to Medford, where I was born. His pretty mother always hugged me, crushing the cones of her bra against my ears, when I went to their house. This pressure and the aroma of cigarette smoke and perfume made my head ring. “You’re getting so big, Andy!”
I guessed his note was saying yes to seeing Truman, and so I hung around the schoolyard after the bell. There was so much shouting and pushing—everyone high-spirited because of the president’s visit—I did not see Burkell leave. His house was on the way to the trolley line, so I stopped there. I liked seeing his mother, I liked her smell and the way she hugged me.
I thought I was early because he wasn’t at home, then I thought I might be late because he wasn’t at home. Not knowing whether to stay or go, I just stood there looking at a Hood milk truck parked in front of a Nash Rambler with whitewalls. I was half hiding against Burkell’s big hedge. The truck confused me. Milk trucks were never parked in a street but always on the move, stopping and starting, the engine running, the empties clinking, the side doors open for the milkman to jump out with his rack of bottles. This truck was locked and silent.
Creeping past Burkell’s hedge, I went up the stoop to the piazza and looked into the front window. Staring at the slanted sunlight and furniture inside, I sensed footsteps—not heard them but felt the tramping movement through my own foot soles on the wooden piazza planks, maybe Burkell’s big feet. He seldom heard his own doorbell because of his habit of poking paper clips into his ears.
Feeling conspicuous on the piazza, I drifted down the stairs and wandered around the house, past the side entrance and his rusted ash barrels, to the rear. The back door was open a crack, so I went in, calling out “Burkey!,” and stepped hard on the stairs as a way of announcing myself.
Then I threw a door open and saw a big naked man smoking a cigarette in the middle of the room. He had a pale body and a long loose cock and was standing in his white stockings in Burkell's bedroom.
“What are you looking at, kid?”
I had never seen Burkell’s father before and this man’s nakedness made him seem fierce. A pain shot through my belly and I almost peed. I backed away, struggling to speak.
“You don’t see nothing, right?”
The words I tried to utter gagged my mouth. I could not look at him. I saw Burkell’s cigar boxes, an orange crate, a peach basket—holders for Burkell’s yo-yos and horror comics.
“Run along, kid.”
But the white clammy skin with so much black hair on it terrified me. I was too nervous to move fast.
“You heard me. If your old man did his homework I wouldn’t be here,” the man said. “Beat it.”
As soon as I got out of the room, away from his naked body, I moved fast, feeling guilty and afraid, as though I had done something seriously wrong. The door at the side of the house swung open as I passed it and Mrs. Burkell stopped me. She was breathless, a cigarette in one hand and buttoning her flowered housecoat with the other. My mouth was open, trying to say sorry.
“Johnny’s down the station seeing the president, Andy,” she said, not listening to me. I was amazed that she wasn’t angry, and relieved that she was so nice. She didn’t hug me, though. She took a pack of Herbert Tareytons out of her housecoat pocket. A dollar bill was tucked inside the cellophane. She pressed the dollar into my hand with damp insistent fingers and held on to me. “But if you tell anyone where you got it, I'll have to call your mother. Want a Hoodsie?”
It was a sundae cup, the plump one, with a wooden spoon in a slip of paper stuck to the underside. I backed away from Mrs. Burkell but she was still explaining.
“I've been ironing,” she said, smoothing her housecoat. Her body gave off a sharp cat smell of effort that made me think she was telling the truth. ‘Aren't you going down to see Harry Truman?”
“Yup.”
“Better hurry,” she said. “Johnny’s probably already at the station.” She looked panicky and pushed me gently and said, “You’re going to be late, Andy.”
When she said that, which I understood as clearly as the man’s Beat it, I hurried off and tried not to think about what I had seen. But the cold wet Hoodsie cup in my hand reminded me of the naked man, so I stopped at the corner of Salem Street and peeled the lid off. Spooning the ice cream into my mouth so fast made my teeth ache from the coldness, and when I finished it I had an icicle in my stomach that reminded me even more of the man. I wished I had thrown it away.
I walked to the Fellsway and waited for an electric car, staring at the bed of stones and the splintered wooden ties under the shiny, fastened rails. Soon those iron rails rang and a tall tottering orange-paneled trolley car appeared at the Fulton Street curve, its upright rods shaking against the overhead wires.
“Shitface,” I heard when I dropped my dime and pushed through the turnstile.
Small worry-eyed Burkell was sitting on a smooth wooden-slatted bench at the front, the end of his necktie in his teeth. He l
ooked glad to see me, but still he seemed lost, a Drake’s cake wrapper in his hand, chewing his tie, his jacket on his lap, rubber bands on his upper arms to shorten his shirtsleeves. He took his tie out of his mouth and began biting his fingernails.
“Andy’s got a mustache,” he said.
His accusation made me afraid. I rubbed my arm across my mouth and tried not to look guilty.
“Bunker kept me after school,” he said, before I could think of a reply to his accusation. “She sees my note and goes nuts.”
“What did it say?”
“Harry stepped in the oomlah. She says it’s disrespectful. ‘How would you feel if the president saw it?’ I goes, ‘How would he see it?’ She goes, ‘I should show your mother.’ I goes, ‘She’s at work.’ She goes, ‘Impudence.’” He looked pleased with himself, gnawing his fingernail, his fingers sucked white from his nailbiting. I had no idea what Harry stepped in the oomlah meant, but I liked Burkell’s odd words. “You got chocolate gobs in the corners of your mouth.”
I licked them, tasting the sweetness that reminded me again of my fright at his house.
He said, “Let’s get off at the car barns and walk.”
I looked down at his weak bony knees showing where the texture of his corduroys was worn flat. His tie was a chewed rag. Above his head was a Learn to Draw at Home sign. The hanging leather hand-straps swung together as the trolley car made the curve at the car barns.
The folding rear doors of the trolley opened and we got off, stumbling at the long drop from the running board to the gravelly trackside.
Walking up Riverside Avenue to Medford Square, Burkell began chanting slowly, “Who’ll dig the grave for the last man that dies?”
Other people on the sidewalk gathered around us and bore us along in their excitement, heading for the station.
“The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms play pinochle upon your snout.”
Burkell winced as he recited in an impish way, to get their attention and defy them, as though expecting someone to say, Quit it, kid. But no one took any notice of his teasing, and Burkell went back to chewing his tie.
The great crowd of people, mostly men, was outside the station, all over the tracks and in the street, for the train had already stopped and someone on it was giving a speech. We were small enough to make our way through pant legs to the front of the crowd. A group of men, too many to fit, were standing on the back platform of the last car, one of them shouting, an angry-faced man in a felt hat, shaking his fist. It was the president.
“Because of these phony Republicans!” he cried out, looking as though he meant it and was very angry.
He was a live version of the pale black-and-white pictures I had seen, so pink and physical I was too fascinated watching him to listen to what he was saying. He was smaller than I had imagined and his anger made him seem fearsome.
Burkell said, “Hey, there’s my old man.”
His saying that startled me, and I didn’t want to see the man, but Burkell called out to him and I glanced up and saw an older rounder man than the one I expected. He wore a snap-brim hat and looked like a fatter version of Burkell, the same plump cheeks, turned from smiling at the president to smiling at us. In a striped vest and shiny suit and smoking a cigarette, he looked overdressed and comical and had the same slack smile as his son. Under his arm was a loaf-sized brown paper bag.
“Johnny,” the man said. He was pleased to see him. “Harry’s giving them hell!”
But at that moment there was applause and Truman waved and the whistle blew. The train pulled away, leaving a space of light and silence, a void where the president had been. We were still standing on the railway track, but awkwardly now, for the crowd had thinned. I thought; The men are here, the women at home, smoking.
“Who’s your friend?”
“Andy, this is my father.”
“I shouldn’t be here,” Burkell’s father said. “I’m supposed to be at work. But, hey, it’s a special day. Harry Truman in Medford! Too bad your mas at work.”
He palmed something from his vest pocket, a small bottle we called a nip, and swigged from it and smacked his lips. He was not anything like the naked man I had seen in Burkell’s room. His friendliness made him seem weak and ridiculous.
“Want an ice cream?” he said, wiping his mouth.
He led the way to Brigham’s, lighting a cigarette as he crossed the street. He saw that I was staring sadly at his cigarette pack—Herbert Tareyton.
“You think I’m stoopid,” he said. “You should see my brother. He walks like this!”
When we were sitting in the booth he swigged from his nip again—Four Roses. Again he saw me staring.
“Like my weskit?” he said. “Hey, hear about the boy who drank eight Cokes?”
Burkell was poking a paper clip into his ear, his red eyes fixed on something out the window, not listening to the joke. I was still guilt-ridden by what I remembered from the house.
“The funny thing is, he burped Seven-Up,” Burkell’s father said. “Get it?” I stared at him thinking of the naked man. “Hear about the drunk who fell ten stories down an elevator shaft into a pile of garbage? He wipes the garbage off his face and says, ‘I said up.’”
I pitied this man for being silly, someone making jokes because he was lost, sitting here hiding a nip of Four Roses and chewing his lips and finishing another joke. “Rectum? Damned near killed ’im!”
“Show Andy your trick with your teeth, Dad.”
The man made a face and mouthed his dentures as though trying to swallow them, and then opened his mouth showing the dentures upside down, jammed upright like he was gnawing.
“I should be on the stage. There’s one leaving any minute. Harry Truman’s giving a speech at an Indian reservation. ‘I promise! I promise!’ Every time he says that, the Indians go, ‘Oomlah!’ When it’s over the chief takes him across a field, says, 'There’s been cows in this field. Don’t step in any oomlah.'”
I couldn’t think of anything to say. Every time I looked at Burkell’s father I saw the naked man.
“What’s in the paper bag?” Johnny asked his father.
“Leon K’s shoes. I had them resoled.”
“My father works for a guy called Kelly,” Burkell said.
Burkell’s father looked hurt. “I don’t work for him, Johnny. We’re partners in the franchise.”
I was embarrassed for him because I suspected he was lying—lying to two eleven-year-olds, about what? He thought he saw everything, the way jokers did; but he didn’t know what I knew.
“Know what? You’re a real chatterbox, kid,” he said to me, and seemed annoyed. I had the feeling he wanted to hit me, or say Beat it. “Didn’t even finish your ice cream.”
His calling me “kid” also reminded me of the naked man in his house, and now I knew in my heart that something serious was wrong, and that he suspected I was an enemy, which was how I felt, for not laughing at his jokes and not telling him what I knew.
“I don’t know what time we’re having supper, Johnny.” He did a little tap dance as we left Brigham’s. “Your mother’s working.”
“Who'll dig the grave for the last man that dies?” Burkell sang in his low quavering haunted-house voice. We walked up the street.
I was looking at Burkell's knees again and the way the cuffs flapped against his skinny ankles and small feet.
“We could go to my house and look at comic books.”
Burkell had a stack of them in that room where the naked man had stood in his white socks.
“No one’s home. My mother’s at work.” His fingertips were in his mouth. “Or we could take the electric car to the rezza. Got any money?”
I showed him the dollar and paid his fare on the trolley to Elm Street. We walked in the woods and threw stones at squirrels’ nests in trees and kicked along the bridle path to the reservoir. Then we walked home in the dark and no one asked me where I had been, because it was the day Truman came to Med
ford. But I felt burdened by what I knew and shocked by the president’s pink face and loud voice.
The secret burned inside me and made me afraid. I felt responsible, and partly to blame. But I kept the secret, because if I told someone, I thought they would say it was all my fault. I was afraid of his mother and dreamed of the man, and of his father hurting me.
But I never saw his mother or father again. I knew Burkell’s house as well as my own, but I was not invited there, not even on his next birthday. One day Burkell said that his mother had warned him I was a bad influence, because I told lies, as though pretending to tease me. I knew he was telling the truth.
IV. Scouting for Boys
1
THREE FIGURES came single file over a wooded hill of the Fells carrying their rifles one-handed and keeping their heads low. They were duck-walking, hunched like Indian trackers, with the same stealth in their footfalls, toeing the mushy earth of early spring. I was one of them, the last, being careful, watching for the stranger, his black hat, his blue Studebaker. Walter Herkis and Chicky DePalma were the others. When we got to the clearing where the light slanted through the bare trees and into our squinting faces, you could see we were twelve years old.
“Where?” Chicky asked in a harsh disbelieving tone, keeping an irritated grin on his face. He had a brown birthmark like a raisin on his cheek. His hair, greasy from too much Wildroot, and his big nose and his yellowish Sicilian face made him look even more like an Indian brave.
“Wicked far,” Walter said. Worry settled on his scrubbed features whenever he was asked anything about the incident. He motioned with the muzzle of his gun. “Up by the pond.”
Walter's saying it was far made us slow our pace, though we still kept off the path. When one of us stepped on a dry twig and snapped it, someone else said, “Watch it,” because in the movies the snapping of a twig always betrayed a person's position to strangers. We wanted to be silent and invisible. We were not three boys, we were trackers, we were Indians. Certain words, such as “sure-footed” and “hawk-eyed,” made us self-conscious.