Paul Theroux - The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro

Walter said, “Cigarettes are stupid. You’re going to be a shrimp.”

Chicky blew smoke into Walter’s face and said, “Know what? Dwyer got bare tit off a seventh-grader at Helen Slupski’s birthday party.”

Walter was listening closely, a Seventh-day Adventist envying us our wild life and our parties. He said, “Is she pretty?”

“She’s a dog, but she’s a tramp,” Chicky said. “Probably a nympho.”

We watched the road, the parking space, side by side, prostrate, like braves. A car pulled in: lovers, the green Chevy.

While we watched them, I said in a low voice, “This guy was banging his girlfriend up the Mystic Lakes and she clamped his dong so hard in her twot he couldn’t pull it out. It was stuck wicked shut, like in a vise. The cops found them. ‘Let’s see your license and registration.’ Then they saw what happened and took them to the hospital. My brother told me.”

“That’s a pissah,” Chicky said. “So they’re in the ambulance together and his dong is stuck inside her.”

“Sometimes your finger gets stuck in a Coke bottle,” Walter said, thinking of how it might have happened.

After a while the Chevy backed out, and with its lights on we realized that the day had gone dark, time to go home. We descended the hill, rounded the pond, and lingered where the car had been, in the tracks of all the other cars, the fishermen, the crazies, the lovers, about fifty feet from the post where the sign we had vandalized said, No Parking — Police Take No ice.

I said, “They all see that sign and stop.”

“Let’s lose it,” Chicky said. “Then they might park over there.”

“So what?”

“Easier to kill the homo,” Chicky said, and a moment later was climbing the pole and hanging on the sign, tearing it from its rusted fastenings.

“Your fingerprints are on it now,” I said.

“As if I give a shit.” Chicky walked to the edge of the pond and winged it into the water, where it skipped twice and then sank. He went back and kicked the iron pipe from its supports, shouting crazy, “I’m leaving my footprints!” He was strong and he had gotten bolder, and even his reckless talk was a worry.

The next time we went was milder, mid-April now, some lilacs and forsythia in blossom at the edge of the reservoir, and purple azaleas already starting to show. I knew their names from the flower book that Mr. Mutch had loaned me. We waited for Walter, who was later than usual. His mother had found out that he was skipping church, and forced him to go. But he was loping along with his gun when he caught up with us at the stone pillars at the entrance to the Fells.

“I took it to church,” he said. “No one even saw me.”

“That’s wicked great,” Chicky said. “I’m going to do that.”

I tried to picture it, sitting in a pew at St. Ray’s with my rifle lying under the kneeler.

“I still don’t get why you have to go to church on Saturday,” Chicky said as we walked into the woods, making our usual detour through the trees.

“Because it’s the Sabbath.”

“Bullshit,” Chicky said. “Sunday is.”

“Saturday,” Walter said. “Jews go then, too.”

“That’s why they’re Jews. You’re not a Jew, except when you’re hogging the Devil Dogs.”

“Cut it out,” I said, seeing that under Chicky’s scolding Walter was getting pink-faced and a little breathless, as he did when he was upset.

But Chicky was annoyed because we had waited most of the day for Walter, and he was so late there were only a few more hours of sunlight. Chicky had said, “Let’s go without him,” but I argued that we needed Walter — to be a team, to act together, and so that Walter would see the man’s face.

“Yeah, we don’t want to kill the wrong guy,” Chicky said.

Walter trudged ahead of us, as though compensating for being late. From the way he was silent and thoughtful, his shoes flapping, I knew that he envied us being Boy Scouts. But Scouts were forbidden by his church, like coffee and tuna fish.

“We’re supposed to be tracking,” Chicky said. “Get down low.”

“I’m a tracker,” Walter said. “No one can see me.”

We glided through the woods like wisps, like shadows, alert to all the sounds. Blue jays were chasing a squirrel, harrying the creature from tree to tree the way we might have done ourselves if we had not been so determined to conceal ourselves. We were off the path, and the dead leaves were flatter and wetter these days, not like the brittle crackling leaves of winter. We moved hunched over in silence.

More buds made the trees look denser, and the tiny bright leaves on some bushes gave the woods a newer, greener feel, hid us better and helped us feel freer. The sky was not so explicit, the boughs had begun to fill out with leaves as delicate as feathers. And a different smell, too, the crumbly brown decaying smell of warmer earth and tufts of low tiny wildflowers.

Once again, Walter pointed out some fiddleheads, the only wild plant he knew, though most of them had fanned out into ferns. The skunk cabbage was fuller and redder. Nor were the woods so silent. There were insects and some far-off frogs. We wanted to be like these dull-colored creatures and wet plants, camouflaged like the wildest things in the woods.

Because it was so late there were no horseback riders on the bridle paths, no other hikers, no dog walkers. They must have all left the woods as we had entered: the wilderness belonged to us now.

We cut around Panther's Cave, climbed the hill behind it, and kept just below the ridgeline, parallel to the trail, listening hard. The light was dimming and the sun was behind us, below the level of the treetops.

“I can’t see squat,” Chicky said. “It’s all Herkis’s fault. Fucking banana man.”

“My mother made me go,” Walter said in an urgent tearful whisper.

“Let’s hurry,” I said, hoping to calm them.

“How can we track anyone in the dark?”

“We’ll learn how,” Walter said. “Indians track people in the dark. Indians stay out all night. No one expects to be followed in the dark. We’ll get good at it. Then we’ll be invisible.”

“I have to be home for supper,” I said.

But we kept on, and the gathering darkness did not deter us, it was a challenge and a kind of cloak, a cover for us in our tracking as we crept unseen below the ridgeline.

And walking this way we made a discovery, for cresting the last hill behind Doleful Pond, in our foxhole, we saw that the water still held some daylight, the smooth surface of the pond reflecting the creamy gray of the sky.

The shore was dark, the woods were black, we saw nothing on the road. Instead of lying there whispering in the shallow trench, we made our way down the hill, as slowly and silently as we could, as though moving downstairs through many large darkened rooms of a strange house. Even so, I could hear Chicky breathing through his fat nose, and Walter’s big feet in the leaves, clumsy human sounds that made me feel friendly toward them.

Before we got to the road, Chicky said, “Look,” and swung his arm to keep us back, liking the drama of it.

At the very end of the road, the place where we had removed the No Parking sign and the iron pipe, there was a car, but so deep in the trees we could not see the color or the make.

I put my finger to my lips — no talking — and took the lead, duck-walking to the edge of the pond, where the little trail encircled it. The others followed, keeping low and still watching the car, trying to make it out. Closer, we could see it was small and compact.

“It’s the Studebaker,” Chicky said, whispering fiercely.

Walter knelt and slid the bolt of his rifle. “Let’s kill him.”