Paul Theroux - The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro

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 looked 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.