Paul Theroux - The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro

“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 Medford. 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.

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.