Paul Theroux - The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro

“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?”

“So you’re a wise guy, too. I’m going to tell the cops about your guns. Them are illegal, you know.”

What I had told him was in the First Aid merit badge handbook, three stages in removing a hook: push, snip, pull. Snip it with pliers, the handbook said, but he did not want to hear it. The hook in his thumb looked just like the one in the picture illustrating the hook-removal technique.

“Where’s the emergency people?” he said angrily. “Where’s the fire station?”

“And you need a tetanus shot for tetanus toxoid,” I said, to irritate him, because he refused to do what the book told him to do.

“You could get lockjaw.”

“Another wise guy,” the man said, and stooped and groaned and gathered up his fishing tackle with his left hand — I could see a pair of the right kind of needle-nose pliers in the tackle box. He held up his right hand like a policeman signaling to stop traffic, his fingers spread out, his thumb hooked.

“This hurts like hell — it’s throbbing,” he said. ‘As if you give a shit!”

And he threw his tackle box and rod into the back seat and reversed down the narrow road, the car bouncing.

“Getting POed makes your heart beat faster,” I said. “The poison spreads.”

“He’s not even supposed to drive here, the stupid bastard,” Chicky said. He mocked the man, saying, “It’s thrawbing!”

“This is where the other guy was,” Walter said.

“The homo?” Chicky said.

Walter sucked on his lips, probably so they would not quiver and show how upset he was, and we looked at him, feeling sorry for him, standing on the spot where the strange man in the blue Studebaker had — what? — fooled around with him. No one said anything for a while.

“Other people come parking here,” Chicky said at last. “Submarine races.”

About twenty feet from where the fisherman had parked his car there was a barrier gate, just a horizontal steel pipe, hinged to a post on one side and padlocked to one on the other. Above it, the sign with our bullet holes in it, No Parking — Police Take Notice. Chicky unsheathed his hunting knife and shinned up the pole and scraped away at the t, so that it said, Police Take No ice.

“Bastards,” he said.

Farther along the shore of the pond, in the water, beyond a scooped-out embankment, there were scraps of paper curling and bobbing beneath the surface. Making sure the fisherman was gone, we put our guns down and broke off branches from the low bushes. We stood at the edge and used these, dragging the branches, to fish up the fragments of paper. The women in the torn pages were alone, some sitting or lying down, some in bathtubs, half hidden in a froth of bubbles, heavy breasts and dark nipples. We knew these dripping pages were from girlie magazines, ripped squarely in large pieces. On one was a large breast, on another a bare leg, a shoulder, the woman’s head: bouffant hair, big lips, black-and-white photographs of naked women. They seemed much wickeder soaking wet.