The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro

by Paul Theroux

  “What did it look like?” Chicky said.

  “He tries to grab me,” Walter said, hurrying his story. “I screams at him but there’s no one around, right? So then I starts running.”

  “What about all your stuff, and the fire?”

  “I just left it.”

  “Anyway, you escaped,” I said.

  Walter didn't say no. He frowned again and clawed his spiky hair. He said, “Then, when I was out to the road and thought it was all over, this blue Studebaker conies screeching up beside me, and it's the guy again, and he’s after me.”

  When he said that, I got a chill. I could imagine it clearly, for sometimes in my worst dreams people kept showing up, I never knew how, to scare me or accuse me.

  “Everywhere I go I sees the stupid guy.”

  Chicky said, “He’s definitely a homo.”

  Walter was silent, paler than when he had started the story, biting his lips.

  “But you told it different the first time,” Chicky said.

  “You think I’m bullshitting?”

  “Sounds like bird turd to me,” Chicky said.

  “You believe me, Andy,” Walter said in a beseeching voice.

  “Sure.” But he had told the story differently the first time. He had a gun. He had turned and threatened the man, who had fallen back and returned to his car. He had not said anything about the Sheepfold and the fire. Seeing the man again on the road, the car stopping—that was new. He was chased more the second time; he was more scared. The whole story sounded worse, which was why Chicky didn’t believe him.

  “Wait till you see his car,” Walter said. “Then you’ll believe me.”

  “Anyway, what did he want?” Chicky asked.

  “He was a homo. You know what those guys want.”

  But we had absolutely no idea, except that it was wicked and dangerous and we were unwilling. In my imagination, such a man would hold me captive in his car, all the windows rolled up, trapping me and threatening me. What he did was not anything I thought of as sex. These men were friendly at first, so that they could grab me and tie me up. In my imagining, I was gagged and blindfolded. Then he would take some of my clothes off, and something happened, something that hurt. In the end, when I was naked, he would kill me, probably stab me.

  “I don’t get it,” Chicky said. He was still impatient and overstimulated, flecks of spit in the corners of his mouth, blinking hard, his yellowish Italian face looking damp with confusion. “He was bigger than you, right? So why didn’t he just grab you?”

  “He did grab me,” Walter said. “I was fighting with him.”

  “You didn’t say that before.”

  “You didn’t give me enough time.”

  Walter was looking breathless and wretched, yanking his hair.

  “Did he touch you?” I asked.

  “I didn’t want him to,” Walter said, protesting.

  “Where did he touch you?”

  “I told you, the Sheepfold.”

  That was new. I had not seen Walter struggling at the Sheepfold, only fleeing. Now I put him back at the Sheepfold, on the ground, the man grabbing at him.

  “I mean, did he touch your nuts?”

  Walter said, “I was pushing him as hard as I could,” and as he spoke he was fighting tears.

  “I thought you ran away.”

  “I did run away. After.”

  “What else did he do?”

  “I don’t know. He was feeling my pants. He was really strong and he had this mustache and was chewing something like a cough drop. He even tried to kiss me. He was snatching my hands.”

  “Was he saying anything?”

  “Yeah. ‘Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid.’”

  “I would have shit a brick.”

  “I was wicked scared,” Walter said.

  He was quiet for a moment. His face was blotchy with red patches, he was remembering, his mouth quivering, trying to start a word.

  “How did you get away?”

  “Ran. Like I told you.”

  “You never said he touched you.”

  “I forgot that part.”

  “How could you forget that, you freakin’ banana man?”

  Walter lowered his head and said, “When I screamed out loud he got wicked worried. He tried to put his hand over my mouth. His hand was really smelly. That’s when I tried to stab him in the leg with my fork.”

  “Your fork?”

  “I was going to heat up some beans. The fork was lying there.”

  “That’s great,” Chicky said.

  I said, “I don’t get why he showed up later.”

  Walter kicked at the snow crust. This was painful, an awful story, much worse than the first time. I suspected it was true because it was messier, there was more of it, and the new parts were unpleasant.

  “He was trying to tell me he was sorry.”

  “Pretending to,” I said. “He was just trying to trick you. If he had caught you, he would have killed you.”

  “He said he wanted to give me some money. Ten bucks.”

  “That’s bull for one thing,” Chicky said. “Ten bucks!”

  Walter reached in his pocket and pulled out a little ball of paper and flattened it and smoothed it: a five-dollar bill.

  “Jeez,” Chicky said.

  Five dollars was more money than we ever saw, and it could only mean that Walter, who never had money, might be telling the truth. But it was five, not ten.

  “Where’s the rest?” Chicky said.

  Walter opened a flap of his knapsack and took out a box of bullets and slid the paper drawer open, showing us the fifty tightly packed bullets. I had a little envelope of bullets for my rifle, Chicky had the same. But this was ammo.

  “Vinny sold them to me for a fin,” Walter said. “I want to find this guy and sneak up on him. And scare him like he scared me.”

  “Like how?”

  “I don't know.”

  “Kill the bastard, maybe,” Chicky said.

  “Maybe we should tell the cops,” I said, because whenever Chicky talked about killing someone it made me nervous. He had never done anything so violent, but it seemed that he was always trying to nerve himself for something that bad, and that one day he would succeed.

  “Don't be such an asshole,” Chicky said.

  His saying that worried me too, because not telling the police meant that you took illegal risks, and were somehow always on the other side, never trusting. Only suckers trusted the police.

  “And they'd take our guns away,” Chicky said.

  “The cops wouldn't even believe me.”

  What kept us from asking any more questions was that we both knew that Walter was going to cry.

  “I would have blubbered,” I said, because I could see his tears and embarrassment.

  Hearing that must have made Walter feel better, because he sniffed and wiped his nose on the sleeve of his jacket and didn't look so tearful.

  “I mean, especially if some old guy put his hands on me,” I said.

  I thought it would help some more, but it made it worse, because when I mentioned the hands Walter got tearful again.

  “I'd like to kill him,” he said in a fearful, helpless voice.

  “Let's all kill him,” Chicky said, smiling wildly.

  “I don't even care,” Walter said. “If he was standing right here I’d shoot him in the nuts.”

  Chicky loved that and started to laugh, his face growing yellower at the thought of it. When Walter saw Chicky laugh, his anger left him, and he laughed too, but harder, angrier, his whole face brightening. But there were tears in his eyes and stains of tears on his cheeks—smears of wetness and dust. He wiped his face with his arm, smearing it more, looking miserable.

  “I will,” he said. “In the nuts!”

  But the day had gone cold, and dark had come down on us without our realizing it, a dampness rising with it from the dead leaves and rotten earth, and so we headed home with night pressing on our
heads.

  3

  “There were three boys,” Father Staley was saying at the Scout meeting in the overbright church hall of St. Ray’s the following Wednesday. He was giving a sermon, one of his stories from the navy, about a captain who was trying to find the smartest boy to do a job. “Three boys” made me think of Walter, Chicky, and me, and as Father Staley spoke I saw each of us in the story.

  “The captain gave each boy a keg of nails. ‘There are five thousand nails in each keg,’ the captain said. ‘There is also a gold nail in each keg. The first one to find the gold nail will get the job.’”

  Father Staley paused and let us picture this, but the pause was too long, and when we began fidgeting after a little while Arthur Mutch, the scoutmaster, said, “I’m going to be handing out demerits!”

  “What would you do if you were in those boys’ shoes?” Father Staley said.

  “Find the freakin’ gold nail,” Chicky said, much too loud.

  “DePalma—one demerit!”

  Father Staley then explained that the first boy picked through the nails in his keg, pushing them aside, looking for the gold nail. While he was doing this, the second boy began removing one nail after another from his keg, trying to see which one was gold.

  “The third boy asked the captain for a newspaper,” Father Staley said, and paused again to enjoy our puzzlement.

  Chicky covered his mouth and muttered, ‘And he read the freakin’ newspaper while the other dinks found the gold nail.” When he looked up Arthur Mutch was staring at him.

  “The boy spread the newspaper on the floor and dumped the whole keg of nails onto it, all five thousand of them,” Father Staley said. “He saw the gold nail at once. He picked it up and then funneled the nails back into the keg. And he got the job. What lesson does that teach us?”

  We said nothing. We had no idea, though I saw the story clearly: the wooden kegs, the boys, the glittering gold nail in the pile of iron ones.

  “Sometimes you have to take drastic action,” Father Staley said. “And sometimes, to save your soul...”

  As soon as he uttered those words, save your soul, I stopped listening, and so did Chicky, because afterward, when we were in our circle of folding chairs, the patrol meeting, Chicky said, “What was the point of that freakin’ story?”

  Arthur Mutch approached us and glared at Chicky and said, “Beaver Patrol, at ease.” Then, to me, “What merit badge are you going up for, Andy?”

  “Camping,” I said.

  “What have you done about it?”

  “Took a hike last Saturday.”

  “Name some of the essentials you had in your pack?”

  Mossberg .22, twelve bullets, Hostess cream-filled cupcakes, bottle of tonic, stolen pack of Lucky Strikes, book of matches. But I said, “First aid kit. Flashlight. Canvas tarp. Some rope. Canteen. Pencil and paper. And some apples.”

  “I think you forgot something.”

  Since none of what I had told him was true, it was easy to remember the missing item required by the badge for a hike. “Um, compass.”

  “Good,” Mr. Mutch said. “Engage in any activities?”

  Killed a toad, chased a squirrel, spied on some women getting horny on horseback, listened to Walter Herkis's story of being molested by a man in a blue Studebaker. But I said, “Knot-tying. Cooking. Tracking.”

  Tracking was not a lie: we had headed toward Doleful Pond with Walter before it got too dark to go farther.

  “What did you cook?”

  “Beans and franks. And afterward we doused the fire and made sure the coals were out.”

  More lies, but once—months before—I had done just that, and I considered that it counted.

  “What knots and what did you use them for?”

  “Sheepshank for shortening the rope. Half hitch. Square knot. Propped up the tarp with them to make a shelter.”

  “Know the bowline yet?” Mr. Mutch asked.

  “I’m trying.”

  Behind me, a voice—Father Staley’s—said, “I think I can help you with that, Andy.”

  “Thank you, Father.”

  Mr. Mutch, satisfied with me, turning to Chicky, said, “DePalma, what badge are you going out for?”

  “Civics.” Chicky blinked, and as his yellow face grew pale his brown birthmark got darker.

  “Civics? DePalma, tell me, what is a bicameral legislature?”

  Chicky twisted his face, to show he was thinking hard, and said nothing. His fists were pressed in panic against his legs.

  “You don’t know, do you?”

  Chicky shook his head, his springy curls glistening with Wild-root. No, he didn’t know. Chicky could barely read.

  “How many merit badges have you earned, DePalma?”

  Chicky muttered something inaudible.

  “Louder, please.”

  “None,” Chicky said in a hoarse humiliated voice.

  “You’re still a Tenderfoot after a year and a half in the Scouts,” Arthur Mutch said.

  Father Staley said, “Try a little harder, son. Do some homework.”

  “I could go out for car maintenance, Father, but do they have a badge for it? No.”

  “Any other ideas?” Father Staley said.

  “Maybe Indian Lore.” Chicky’s eyes were shining with shame and anger. “Maybe Camping.”

  “What makes you think you can earn them?”

  “I went on a hike with Andy.”

  “And did you cook franks and beans, too?”

  “Yes, Father. And capacol’. Guinea sausages.”

  “Well, that’s a start.”

  Father Staley stepped over to me and smiled and lifted my chin with his hand, saying, “You pick up the lame and the halt, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know, Father.”

  He looked pleased, having asked me a question I could not answer; and he followed Mr. Mutch to the next patrol group.

  Under his breath, Chicky said, ‘“How many merit badges have you earned?’ Mutch is an asshole.”

  “You’ll get millions.”

  “I’d get one if they had car maintenance, engine repair, some shit like that,” Chicky said. He stood, hunched over and discouraged. “I got gatz.”

  As Chicky said gatz, Father Staley, at the front of the hall, said, “Let us pray,” and blessed himself slowly, using the tips of his scaly fingers, “in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost...”

  Another Saturday, Walter Herkis walking ahead through the woods, his Remington under his arm. He had told his mother that he was going to church but instead sneaked off and met us on South Border Road, and we had entered the woods obliquely, skirting the small reservoir and dashing through the trees. Walter did not want us to see his face, because he felt he had not been brave. But he was brave. Whatever the man had done, Walter had at least fought him. He had lost, but he was stronger and faster than me, which worried me. In the same position, I would have been in deeper trouble.

  But Chicky said, “Maybe he’s shitting us.”

  I wanted to say, If that was so, why was Walter looking so sad and angry—why so silent, why was he walking that way, why had he cried at the end of his story?

  I said, “I don’t know. We’ll track the guy down and see.”

  “It’s stupid that there isn’t a car maintenance merit badge.”

  “Boy Scouts don’t have cars, Chicky.”

  “I can start my brother’s Ford. He lets me rev it. I know how to change the plugs.” He was kicking through the leaves, glancing around. “Look, a chipmunk. Let’s kill it.”

  He chased it, and shot, and missed, and then complained that it was too small to hit.

  The woods were full of wonders, full of occurrences that only happened in the woods. Some people parked at the edges, but they didn’t walk far from their cars; others used the bridle paths; no one but us wandered the woods—or if they did, we never saw them. We hiked beyond the roar of traffic on the Fellsway. Past Panther’s Cave, all we heard were
birds chirping, the rustle of squirrels, and the wind in the boughs up top.

  There were still snow scraps this second week, but wetter ones; more fiddleheads, redder skunk cabbage, bigger buds. We looked closely at them, as self-conscious Scouts and woodsmen, and we took pains to hide ourselves from anyone on the path. That was why, near Doleful Pond on this next hike, we avoided a fisherman who was fussing with his rod and line on the shore, slashing it like a whip.

  “Is that the homo?” Chicky asked.

  “No,” Walter said.

  Nor was there a blue Studebaker parked behind him, but rather an old black Pontiac; still, because we had rifles, we kept to the bushes by the side of the pond.

  “Hey, you kids, is there a fire station around here?” As he spoke he was holding his fishing rod.

  Somehow the man had seen us. He had asked a pervert’s question: perverts often pretended to be in trouble. Once a pervert had said to Chicky, “There’s a rock under my car. Help me get it out.”

  A rock under my car was just a lie to get his hands on Chicky, but Chicky had run away. This question about a fire station made us speed up and shoulder our rifles so that he could see we were armed and dangerous.

  “He’s waving something at us,” Chicky said under his breath.

  The fisherman had put his rod down and was waving his spread-apart hand. He said, “Hooked my thumb!”

  He showed us his thumb, and it was true—a dark wire stuck out of the meaty part of his thumb muscle, like the loop on a Christmas ornament. I was thinking: Maybe a man would deliberately stick a hook into his thumb in order to look helpless, so that he could trap a boy.

  “What do you kids think you’re doing with those guns?” he said. He just glanced at our guns but he went on frowning at the embedded hook.

  “Boy Scouts,” I said. “We’re allowed.”

  “I was a Boy Scout. I never learned how to use a gun.”

  “Hey, did you learn how to use a fishing rod?” Chicky said.

  “What are you, a wise guy?”

  “Because, hey, you hooked your thumb—don’t look at me,” Chicky said.

  “It’s not funny, I need to get this fucking thing out.” He wiggled the hook and winced and swore again.

  I said, “You can’t pull it out, because of the barb. You’re supposed to push the hook in deeper, and twist it to get the barb through the skin, so it sticks out. Then you snip off the barb and you can just slip the smooth part out. Got any pliers?”