Paul Theroux - Mr. Bones - Twenty Stories

As I left, holding the box with a clip-on handle, a wooden cylinder with wire hooked through it, the woman said, “Don’t listen to Grumpy. Your father’s a great guy. Tell him Vie was asking for him. Violet.”

Maybe that was his other side, a ladies’ man and a traveler, a man of the world now down on his luck as a widower and the father of a sulky teenager. But if so, that did not make him forgiving. It made him more suspicious. He knew what a boy was capable of, and was overprotective. He was puritanical and hated any kind of foolery — loud music and loud talk, mentions of girls, of sunny frivolous places like California or Florida, any sort of indiscipline.

But that woman Vie knew something about my father that I didn’t, and this idea that he was concealing a part of his life made me dawdle in the errand, in my own concealment.

I cut through South Station and bought a jelly donut. The woman at the counter wearing a white apron and white cap lifted the donut with tongs from the tray and dropped it into a small bag.

“Ten cents,” she said, and I gave her the dime. As I stepped away, a man with a mean face leaned over and said, “Give me that.” He looked like a gargoyle, and his smell and his ugliness made him seem violent.

Handing over the bag, I held on to the shoebox and hurried out of the station as though I’d done something wrong. I went up State Street, walking fast, until I got to Milk Street. I had the sense that the man might be following me. I went into Goodspeed’s bookstore. The old woman at the desk said, “You can’t bring any parcels in here.”

Near the corner of Milk and Washington I stopped at a shop that sold knives and cameras. I knew the shop. There was always someone, usually two or three men, looking at the window display of knives — all sorts of hunting knives, wide blades, jagged blades, shiny, bone handles, bowie knives, Buck knives, Swiss Army knives — and in the adjoining window the cameras were set out, all sizes.

A grinning man in a long coat and glasses said, “Hey, look at that camera, how small it is. That one down there.”

Like a toy, a tiny camera, propped on a small box with a tiny red roll of film.

“You could get some swell pictures with that. Fit in the palm of your hand,” the man said. “Take it anywhere.”

I said, “I guess so. It’s really small. Maybe German.”

He put his face near mine as the man had done in South Station, demanding my donut. “I took some pictures of my roommate when he was bollocky.” The man was smiling horribly and making a face, and he dislodged his glasses. He pushed them back into place with his dirty thumb.

But I was backing away. I said, “That’s okay.”

“I could take a picture of you bollocky,” he said. “Wanna let me?”

“No thanks.”

“You’re probably too shy.”

“No. It’s not that. I just don’t want to.”

I walked quickly away into the sidewalk crowd and ducked past Raymond’s department store. I crossed Washington Street and hurried up Brewer, lingered in front of the joke shop, then to Tremont, up Park to the black soldiers memorial and Hooker’s statue, and down Beacon. Just as I approached Scollay Square, five black boys, big and small, came toward me, filling the sidewalk.

My heart was beating fast as I hurried through traffic to the other side of the street, and I kept walking until I got to the Old Howard theater. Ever since leaving the shoe warehouse I’d been escaping, and it seemed strange that, trying to avoid trouble, I’d found myself here. I had come here with Eddie Springer one Saturday six months before. I’d bumped into him on another errand.

Eddie knew the corners of Boston and all the shortcuts. He had shown me the knife shop and Raymond’s and the joke shop; my father had shown me the memorial to the black regiment and Hooker’s statue and the Union Oyster House. Between my father and Eddie, Boston had no secrets for me.

It was all exteriors, though. I never went into any stores. What was the point? I had no money, I was afraid of being confronted. But Eddie knew all the stores, and had even been inside the Old Howard and seen a burlesque show and repeated the jokes. A stripper said to a heckler, “Meet me in my dressing room. If I’m late, start without me,” which made Eddie laugh so hard he didn’t notice that I had not understood.

We had come this way in the winter, this same route, from South Station toward the Common, then via Scollay Square — a detour — and along Cambridge Street to the back slope of Beacon Hill.

When I realized that in this afternoon escape I was retracing that winter walk with Eddie, through the same streets, making the same stops, I felt safer. I knew that I could make my way onward to North Station and Sullivan Square to the electric cars, to bring the box of shoes back to my father.

Eddie was a hero to me for his being so confident and for knowing Boston, which was like knowing the world. He had a girlfriend. We’d stopped to see her. He’d introduced me to her — Paige.

As on that day with Eddie, I had nothing to do and nowhere to go on this summer afternoon of hot sidewalks and sharp smells and strangers, the air of the city thick with humidity under a heavy gray sky. It all stank pleasantly of wickedness, and if I’d known anything of sensuality I would have recognized it as sensual. But I was fifteen, small for my age, soon to enter my sophomore year of high school. Away from my house I was not sure who I was; it was as though I was walking the streets searching for a self.

Eddie was three years older than me, a neighbor who was kind to me because he knew my mother was dead. He smoked, he drank beer, he had this girlfriend Paige, and it seemed that the farther I walked down the back slope of Beacon Hill the more I resembled him. I remembered Paige: blond, small — her smallness made me bolder. She had blue eyes and a lovely smile and didn’t say much. Eddie claimed she was an Indian, from Veazie, Maine, on the river, and he said she was a dancer.

“You like her.”

“She’s action.” Saying that, he believed he’d told me everything.

I wished he were with me now. These days, when I was alone, I had no self, nothing to put forward, no idea that I dared express, no voice, nothing but the bravado I’d learned from Eddie, even his sayings. “Eyes like pinwheels,” he used to say. Or “She’s easy,” as he said of Paige. I had no self at all.

I remembered Paige clearly. She had a broad, blankish face, but kindly eyes. She listened and responded with her eyes. Her smallness made her seem girlish, but she was older than Eddie and much older than me, twenty-something. She seemed strong — experienced and sure of herself. She had no airs, she was friendly, though she didn’t say much.

“She’s action” was a sly way of describing her — something unspoken. But when I’d been with her I felt I was in the presence of an adult who liked me. She had treated me as an equal and had not mentioned that she was eight or ten years older. I think that Eddie took me to meet her to introduce me to a life remote from mine and to show me what a man of the world he was. Being with him, I felt that I was learning how to be a man of the world.

I liked the idea that she looked demure and patient — solid and reassuring, small and close to the ground, the ideal of motherhood. But deep down she was wild, her other self hidden, to be awakened by Eddie, who described her howling when he made love to her.

“She knows a few tricks,” he said. “And so do I.”

Paige lived alone in a basement on the other side of Beacon Hill, not an apartment but one large room, the kitchen at the back wall, a double bed to the right, some heavily upholstered chairs near the front door.