Paul Theroux - The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro

“Yeah,” Chicky said. He too knelt and fumbled with his gun.

“Wait a minute,” I said. I could not think of any way of stopping them, nor could I put my worry into words. We had bullets, we had our guns, only mine was not loaded: the other guns were cocked. In the darkness of Doleful Pond, having achieved our objective, there was nothing to stop us. We had made a trap for the man by removing the sign and the barrier, and our work was even more effective than we had planned, for the car was almost hidden in the narrow gullet of the road.

“We’ll surround him,” Chicky said. “We’ll just gang up and shoot from all sides. He won’t have a chance.”

I felt sickening panic and wanted to vomit. Until that moment it had been unreal, just a game of pursuit, Indian tracking, and I had enjoyed it. But we had succeeded too well and now I dreaded that we would have to go through with it. I saw in this reckless act the end of my useful life.

“Maybe he’s not inside.”

The car was dark. I hoped it was empty.

“My mother’s going to kill me if I’m late,” I said.

“Andy’s chickening out.” Chicky’s vicious gloating made him sound psycho.

I was afraid. I thought: If I do this, my life is over. I also thought: I cannot chicken out, I can’t retreat.

“We should call the cops.”

“They won’t do anything,” Walter said.

“Just take our guns away!” Chicky said.

The car moved, not visibly but we heard it, the distinct sound of a spring, the squeak of metal under the chassis, as though it was settling slightly into the road, for there was another accompanying sound, the crunch of cinders in the wheel track from the tires. A weight had shifted in the car.

That sound stiffened us and made us listen. The next sound was louder, not from the springs but the crank-creak of a door handle, and with it a light came on inside the car, the overhead bulb.

We saw the man’s face briefly as he turned to get out of the car and, as he left the door open, the light stayed on. Another shape barely bulked in the front seat — it could have been a bundle, or a big dog, or a boy’s head. There came a spattering sound, like gravel on glass.

“He’s taking a leak,” Chicky said.

“Shoot him in the nuts,” Walter said in a husky sobbing voice. “Shoot the bastard.”

“Hold it,” Chicky said, and I knew what he was thinking.

The man was not a blurry villain anymore. He was a real person, and that was much worse. He wore a black golf cap and buttoned to his neck a shapeless coat that looked greasy, the way gabardine darkens in winter. Slipping back into the car, he flung out his arm to yank the door and we got another look: big nose, small chin, a pinched mouth, and a face that was so pale his mustache was more visible, a trimmed one. He looked like a salesman in the way he was so neat, like someone who put himself in charge and smiled and tried to sell you something.

When the light went off, Walter raised his rifle, and Chicky pushed it down hard, saying, “Quit it.”

I thought the man might hear, but the door was closed, the engine had started, the gearshift was being jiggled and jammed into reverse. The brake lights reddened our faces.

“We can’t do it now,” I said. I was giggling, but still panicky.

“I’m gonna,” Walter said, and tried to snatch his rifle from Chicky’s grasp.

“Tell him, Chicky.”

“Freakin’ Scaly,” Chicky said.

The relief I felt for our not having shot him was joyous, a kind of hilarity, a light like a candle flame leaping in my body making me feel like a small boy again. In my guts I knew that if you killed someone, you died yourself.

In the woods we were free to do anything we liked. We knew from what we saw — the torn-up pictures, the tossed-away magazines, the used Trojans, the bullet-riddled signs, the women on horseback, even the fisherman with the hook in his thumb — that other people felt that way, too. We could make our own rules. We thought of the woods as a wilderness. It was ours, it was anyone’s, it was why we went there, and why Father Staley went there. No one looked for you there, and if they did, they probably wouldn’t find you: you could be invisible in the woods.

But we were Scouts, we were trackers, we could find someone if we wanted. We had found the man who had bothered Walter, maybe molested him, though I did not have any clear idea of what “molested” meant, other than probably touched his pecker. “He tried to kiss me” didn’t mean much. We talked wildly of sex all the time, but none of us had yet kissed a girl.

Walter would not tell us what the man had done. Whenever he tried he shook and stammered and got blotchy, pink-cheeked and flustered, and sometimes so mad he began talking about killing the man.

But the man was Father Staley. We could not explain how important that man was; how we could not even think about harming him. On the way home that night, walking at the edge of the woods among the low bushes, so that none of the passing cars would see our guns, Walter was upset.

“Stop crying, Herkis,” Chicky said.

“I’m not crying.”

“What’s wrong then?”

“What’s wrong is, I saw him. That was the same guy. You thought I was lying. I was telling the truth!”

He was screeching so loud he sounded like his sister Dottie, who was almost his age and had the same pink cheeks and pale skin.

“I don’t get what you’re saying,” Chicky said.

“I saw the freakin’ homo!” Walter said.

What he seemed to be saying was that by seeing the man, he remembered everything that had happened. That had upset him all over again.

“We’ll get him, don’t worry,” I said. But I was glad the moment had passed, that none of us had fired our guns at Father Staley. The woods were free but we would have been arrested for killing a Catholic priest, and would have been disgraced and been sent to jail forever. It could have gone horribly wrong, for at that point our pretending had become real — pretending to be Indian trackers, pretending to be hunters and avengers, following the tracks, carrying guns. We had talked about what we would do when we found the man, but I hoped it was just talk, that We’re Indian trackers was the same as Let’s kill him and Shoot him in the nuts —words we said to ourselves for the thrill of it.

Chicky would have shot if it hadn’t been Scaly; Walter had wanted to fire, and was angry we hadn’t let him.

“You both chickened out,” Walter said. He sang off-key, “Chickenshit — it makes the grass grow green!”

“We’ll do something,” Chicky said. “Something wicked awful.”

“No sah. You’re chicken because he’s supposed to be a priest. You actually know the guy.”

Thinking of a priest as “a guy” was hard for us, because he was a man of God, powerful and holy. Because Chicky and I were Catholics, and Father Staley was a priest, we felt responsible for him. It gave Walter another reason to dislike Catholics. We knew that the Seventh-day Adventists said bad things about Catholics, just as Catholics said, “This is the True Church. Protestants are sinners. They’re not going to Heaven,” and “Jews are Christ killers.”

“He’s a homo,” Walter said.

That hurt, but it was true.

“He’s a Percy, he’s a pervert,” Walter said. “He was trying to make me into a homo.”

“He’s still a priest,” Chicky said. “He’s chaplain to our Boy Scout troop.”

“Big deal.”

“It is a big deal. We can’t shoot him,” Chicky said. It sounded strange to hear Chicky being solemn and responsible, his close-set eyes, his yellow skin, his big nose, his picking at his birthmark as he spoke. “But we can do something. Beaver Patrol to the rescue.”