Paul Theroux - The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro

“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.

“Skunk cabbage,” I said.

Dark red and black claw-shaped bunches of the glossy plant grew in the muddy patch near a mass of rotten wood and dead grass that was pressed down and combed-looking from the weight of the snow.

“Them others are fiddleheads,” Walter said, stopping farther on, where the mud was thicker and wetter. Ragged veils of gnats whirred over its small bubble holes. From the evaporated puddle, a slab of mud as smooth as chocolate, rose a clump of packed-together ferns, in sprays like bouquets, their coiled tops beginning to unroll and spring open. Fiddlehead was the perfect name for them.

“Vinny eats them,” Walter said. He lifted his rifle and poked the ferns and gently parted the stalks with the muzzle.

Chicky said, “He’d get sick. Vinny Grasso is a lying guinea wop.”

“And you’re a pissah.”

“Eat me, I’m a jellybean,” Chicky said.

“Shut up,” I whispered. “Someone will hear.”

“Fuckum,” Chicky said.

For emphasis, he stepped over to the tight green bouquets of new ferns and scattered some in one kick, then broke the ones that remained and trampled them flat, his boots squelching the mud and burying them.

Looking at the damage, he said, “But my nonna eats dandelions.”

Chicky's outbursts alarmed me, because they made him sound crazy, and his threats were sudden and scary, especially when he was trying to be funny. To act tough, he sometimes punted schoolbooks and kicked them along the sidewalk. I had never before seen anyone kick a book. He’d say, “Who cares? I can hardly read anyway,” which was true, and as shocking to me as wrecking the books.

“Give me a freakin’ weed, Andy.”

“Coffin nails,” Walter said.

“Who asked you?”

“They’re wicked bad for you,” Walter said, straightening himself with confidence.

“You’re just saying that because they’re against your religion,” Chicky said.

Walter Herkis was a Seventh-day Adventist. He couldn’t be in our Scout troop, because Protestants weren’t allowed to be Scouts at St. Ray’s. He wanted to join our Beaver Patrol, but he would have been shocked by our Scout meetings in the church hall, the prayers especially, Father Staley—“Scaly” Staley — telling us to kneel on the varnished wood floor of the basketball court, and raising his scaly hands, and folding them, and giving a sermon, or else saying, “Let us pray.” Walter went by bus to a special school in Boston, with other Adventists. Walter could not smoke or eat meat, not even hot dogs, or tuna fish, and he was supposed to go to church on Saturday. He was playing hooky from church today, as he often did, though today was special: we were hunting the stranger.

“They stunt your growth,” Walter said.

“You eat it raw.” Chicky snapped his fingers. “Come on, Andy.”

I unbuckled my knapsack and found, among the canvas pouches of bullets and the marshmallows and tonic, the crushed pack of Lucky Strikes Chicky had stolen from his brother. I shook out a cigarette for him and put the rest away.

“Luckies,” Chicky said. He tapped the cigarette on his knuckle like an old smoker, and said, “Got a match?”

“Your face and my ass,” Walter said.

“Your face and the back of a bus.” I handed him a book of matches. “You want a kick in the chest to get it started?”

Chicky lit up and puffed and wagged the match to put it out. He inhaled, sucking air with his teeth clamped shut, making slurping sounds in his cheeks. Then he plucked the cigarette from his mouth and admired it as he blew out a spray of blue smoke.

“You're giving it a wicked lipper,” Walter said.

“Stick it, goombah. You don't even smoke.” Chicky handed the butt to me.

I puffed without inhaling, snuffled a little from the smoke leaking up my nose, and covered my gagging by saying, “Where was he?”

“Not here,” Walter said, and walked ahead. Pale and freckled, taller than either Chicky or me, Walter was skinny and had long legs, his bony knees showing in his dungarees. He was such a fast runner we could not understand how the man had caught him — if he had caught him. Walter had not told us much of the story, only that we had to track the man down and find his blue Studebaker. He was round-shouldered hurrying ahead of us, and his twisted hair, his slender neck, made him look lonely.

“I don't even freakin' believe him,” Chicky said.

“Quit it,” I said. “Walter doesn't lie.”

“He's a Protestant.”

“So what?”

“It's not a sin for them to lie,” Chicky said.

We followed Walter up the hill, away from the path. We passed Wright's Tower at the top of the hill and climbed the urine-stinky stairs to the lookout: Boston — the Customs House — in one direction; the dark trees in the other. We descended and went deeper into the woods.

Even on this early-spring day, there were mud-spattered crusts of mostly melted snow, skeletal and icy from softening to slush and refreezing. The woods looked littered and untidy with the snow scraps, with driblets of ice from the recent rain in the grooved bark and boles of trees, ice enameling the sides of rocks, the old poisoned-looking leaves, curled and dead, brittle, black, thicknesses of them like soggy trash, the earth still slowly thawing, with winter lingering on top. Even so, spring was swelling, pushing from beneath, like the claws of skunk cabbage rising from the mud, and small dark buds on bush twigs, the knobs of bulbs and plants like fists thrusting up through softened soil, and the first shoots, white as noodles. The first were the hardiest, the most resistant to frost, not even green, nor tender at all, but dark and fierce, small, tight, just starting to take hold. Between the frozen silence of winter and the green of spring were these clammy weeks of mud and stink and the rags of old snow.

Walter was waiting for us at the bottom of the hill, at a cliffside and a boulder pile we called Panther’s Cave.

“Was he here?” Chicky said, glancing at the cave entrance, a damp shadow falling across it, for it was already five and would be dark soon. The portals of the cave were two upright boulders, bigger than we were, scorched and smelling of woodsmoke.

“I already told you, no.”

“Tell us the story,” Chicky said.

“Shove it up your bucket,” Walter said, and peeled the cellophane from a package of Devil Dogs.

“Fungoo,” Chicky said. “Hey, Herkis, I had dibs on them.”

“I’m hungry,” Walter said, poking a Devil Dog into his mouth, chewing hard, his voice sounding dry and cakey when he said, with his mouth full, “Anyway, you got cigarettes.”

“Give me one or I'll whack your ass.” Chicky swung his rifle by its barrel, like a bat, at Walter.

“Let’s go,” I said, because Chicky's quarreling made me uneasy and this was all a delay in the darkening woods.

“He’s a Jew,” Chicky said. “Okay, if he's scoffing the Devil Dogs, I hosey the Twinkies.” He looked hard at Walter. “Jelly belly.”

“Rotate,” Walter said, and raised his middle finger.

With his tongue against his teeth, Chicky chanted, “My friend Walter had a pimple on his belly. His mother cut it off and made it into jelly.”