The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro (24 page)

“Let's make sure they didn't tell the cop,” I said, because I was still concerned.

We went through the woods to the parking lot, just in time to see the car—three people in it—speeding down the road. We looked at the lot, the space where they had parked, and saw a dollar bill and some change.

“He must have been pulling the keys out of his pocket,” I said, “and this fell out.”

“So it's mine, because I scared him,” Chicky said, and picked it up. ‘A buck thirty.”

Back in the woods, heading home the long way, over the hill, off the path, we saw a squirrel, and chased it, throwing stones at it because a gunshot would be heard clearly so close to the road. And chasing it, the squirrel leaping from bough to bough, pushing the branches down each time he jumped, we came again to the margin of Doleful Pond, without realizing how we had got there, and losing the squirrel in the darkness.

That was when we saw the headlights, so bright the glare of them obscured the shape and color of the car.

“That's him,” Walter said.

“Bull,” Chicky said, because it was just a pair of yellow lights.

We crouched down and watched the car reverse, moving slowly, and where the road was wider, the car stopped and made a three-point turn, lighting the bushes, illuminating itself, a small blue car sitting high on its wheels, a Studebaker.

So Walter Herkis, who sometimes fibbed, was telling the truth after all. He did not gloat about being right—he didn't even seem glad that now he had us as witnesses to the blue Studebaker, the man inside. He even seemed a bit sorry and looked as though he had eaten something bad and wanted to throw up. He looked more worried than ever, even sick, which seemed like more proof that he had not been lying. And maybe the truth was even worse than he had admitted. Certainly he had been very upset and we were not quite sure what had really happened, what the man in the blue Studebaker had done to him at Doleful Pond. We asked again but this time Walter did not want to talk about it, only made the swollen pukey face again. That meant that something serious had happened.

The man had driven past us. He was not a blurry villain anymore, but a real man in a shiny car and looked strong. We had not seen his face—we were on the wrong side of the car, hiding against the pond embankment. He had driven fast, in the decisive way of a person who had finished something and wanted to get away; not on the lookout for anyone, not noticing anything, like a man in a hurry to go home, someone late.

The way the man was leaving fast seemed to make Walter angry, and he watched, growing helpless, like the man was escaping from him. Walter's eyes were glistening. He held his gun in his arms tightly as though he was cold. But he was clutching his stomach and retched, started to spew, a moment later bent over and puked into the bushes, and paused, labored a little, and splashed some more, coating the leaves with yellow slime and mucus and chewed puke.

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said, “I'd like to kill the bastard.”

“Yeah,” Chicky said. “Let's kill him.”

I did not say anything. I was retching myself, my mouth full of saliva from having watched Walter. I was also afraid of the word; and they knew it, they noticed my silence.

“Andy's chickenshit.”

“Yah. Let's get him,” I said. I could not say the word “kill” without feeling unsafe. “You all right, Herkis?”

Walter nodded. He was not all right. He was pale and pukey-looking. But he was angrier than ever, and his anger excited Chicky and touched me too. The anger gave us a purpose that was better than going out for merit badges but involved the same concentration. We had found the car, we had glimpsed the man, we had to find him again and do something. We were not Scouts, we were soldiers, we were Indians, we were men, defending ourselves.

“Kill him” was just an expression, but one that frightened me. Walter and Chicky were not so frightened of it—Walter was angry, Chicky was excited. We did not explain what killing meant, but I wanted to think it was stalking him, trapping him, not firing bullets into him.

“We'll put him out of commission,” I said, so that they would see I was on their side, because they thought of me as the sensible one, the cautious one, the chicken.

“Even if we really do kill him, no one will know,” Chicky said.

That was the way we reasoned in the woods—getting away with something made it all right. If we killed a squirrel, or started a fire, or shot bullets into a sign and no one caught us, we felt we had done nothing wrong: nothing to explain. If we found money, we kept it. “What if we discovered a dead body in the woods?” Walter had asked once, and Chicky had said, “What if it was a woman and she was bollocky!” In the woods we were conscienceless creatures, like the other live things that lurked among the trees. Even so, Chicky's excitement disturbed me—he was jabbering to Walter now—because talk of killing, even in a reckless jokey way, made me uneasy. My hesitation was not guilt, not even conscience—I was afraid of getting caught and having to face my parents' fury and shame.

“They'll never catch us. They'll think it's some big murderer. They'll never think it was kids.”

“Let's shadow him first, and then see,” I said, dreading their conviction.

Walter said, “Chicky's right. Kill him.”

“We can track him. We're good at that,” I said.

Lurking, hiding, hunting; scouring the earth for footprints, tire tracks, clues; the lore of Scouting was real and useful.

The sky had gone gray, some of the clouds as dense as iron, as black, with streaks of red and pink between them, like hot iron that had begun to cool. And not only that, but more because the evening sky was always a mass of unrelated marvels—above the iron were vast decaying faces, tufts of pink fluff in a soup of yellow. The light in the sky was all the light there was; the woods were dark, and so was the surface of the pond at this low angle, and not even the path was clear.

“We should head back,” I said, and started walking.

“I don't even freakin' care,” Walter said, but from the way he said it I knew he was glad to go, a bit wobbly and gagged from puking.

Chicky said, “We could wait till he parks his car, then cut a tree down. It falls across the road, he can't drive away, we nail him.”

“Or dig one of those big holes and put sticks across it, and leaves and stuff, so that it looks like the ground,” I said. “He walks right in. We could say it was an accident.”

“Or just shoot him in the nuts,” Walter said.

Talking this way in the darkness of the woods seemed unlucky and made me nervous about bumping into a stranger, maybe that very homo. The others might have felt that way too,
for although they were talking big, they held tightly to their rifles, bumping shoulders and sometimes stumbling. When we heard some cars and saw the lights of South Border Road, we walked faster and were relieved to be out of the woods.

Chicky started across the Fellsway alone, walking stiffly to conceal his gun. He turned around and took out his comb. “Anyway, don't do anything I wouldn't do,” he said, tilting his head, raking his hair with his comb. “Or if you do, name him Chicky.”

Walter and I turned toward Foss Street. He was silent, except for his puffing—winded and sick from the experience of having seen the man—a big boy out of breath, his whole body straining as he plodded up the hill.

“We'll get the guy,” I said, to reassure him.

“Who cares?” His voice stayed in his mouth and sounded awful, as though he couldn't swallow. When we got to the Fulton Street fire station at the top of the hill he said, “My mother thinks I went to church.”

The special Saturday church of a Seventh-day Adventist made it sounded pagan and purposeless, just an empty ritual on the wrong day.

Looking miserable, saying nothing except “See ya,” he turned and headed down Ames Street toward his house. I walked off wondering and anxious, for so much had occurred during the day and I was still not sure what it meant; sometimes such events just happened and were never repeated, but other times there were consequences, and those I feared.

Entering my house, leaving my rifle behind the sofa on the piazza to hide later, I went into the kitchen, which was filled with light and warmth and the steamy odor of sweated meat.

“Where have you been?” my mother said. She was standing at the stove, poking at a pot roast in a kettle.

“Nowhere.”

“You smell of smoke.”

“I went for a hike. For a merit badge.”

“Have you been playing with fire?”

“There was a forest fire. I helped put it out.”

“Take your shoes off—you're tracking in mud. Wash your hands and face. You're filthy. And set the table.”

I did as I was told, but it was hard to do the right thing here at home, hard to know what to say. I felt uncomfortable and out of place in the house, in this world that was parallel to my outdoor life, as though I did not belong indoors, could not reveal anything of my real life. Only in the woods, with my gun, my wool hat pulled over my ears, did I feel free, “sure-footed,” “hawkeyed.”

The next Scout meeting was on the following Wednesday. We gathered at St. Ray's hall and were talking and fooling until Arthur Mutch yelled at us to pipe down and to line up in patrols.

“Close interval, dress right—dress!”

Each boy stuck his left elbow out, making a space, and because Chicky was on my right he jabbed me hard and laughed.

“Ten-shun!”

Mr. Mutch led us in the Scout oath while Father Staley stood at the side. After the oath, Scaly led us in a prayer, the same prayer as always: “Let us pray. Dear Lord, help us to be worthy of your love...”

“At ease,” Mr. Mutch said afterward. He lectured us a little on obedience and how we had a duty to behave with respect. Then he nodded to Father Staley, who held up one finger to get our attention and said, “This, too, is a house of God.” Then Mr. Mutch told us to meet in patrols and that he would be coming around to check on us.

The leader of the Beaver Patrol was an Eagle Scout named Corny Kelliher, a redheaded thirteen-year-old with freckles and spaces between his teeth. He hated camping but was good at arithmetic and hobbies: he had a ham radio and knew Morse code and raised tropical fish. He wore a sash stitched with merit badges, twenty or more. He had gone out west to the Jamboree by train and had showed us snapshots he had taken of Pikes Peak and Grand Coulee Dam.

Corny said, “So let's talk about what Scouting activities we've been doing. How about you, Andy?”

“Learning about tracking,” I said.

“Can you identify any animal prints?”

“Yup. Bear. Deer. Muskrat.”

“How can you tell a muskrat track?”

“Drags its tail between its footprints and leaves a line.”

“How do you know if the prints are fresh?”

I didn't know, so I said, “If they're kind of wet?”

Corny said, “No. But if they have snow inside them, then you know that they're not fresh, because it snowed after the animal left them.”

“What about in the summer when there's no snow?”

I liked asking him outdoor questions because he was always indoors.

“The prints are soft,” he said. “What else did you do?”

Chased a squirrel. Saw a man with a fishhook in his thumb. Got yelled at by him. Found some dirty pictures and rubbers. Quarreled with some people. Found a buck and change. Tracked down a homo's car.

But I said, “Hiked. Identified some plants. Skunk cabbage and stuff.”

 

Saturdays were for tracking. We went back again, we could only go that day, but we went with the same dedication. We were small, we were not strong, so we valued cunning and skill and made being small our asset. If we could not come face to face with the enemy, we would find him, shadow him, then make a move on him. We whispered, we tiptoed, we wore dark clothes, we avoided stepping on things that made noise, stayed off the path, moved from big tree to big tree keeping our rifles pointed down, used hand signals. We were trackers, we were stalkers, we were scarcely visible.

Our stakeout spot was a grassy overlook near the big smooth boulder above Doleful Pond, in a natural trench like a foxhole, sluiced by a gully wash. There we lay in the speckled leaf shadow and watched the bridle path where cars—lovers, fishermen, crazies with girlie magazines—sometimes parked. We got to know them, the ones who cuddled in the back seat and tossed rubbers out the window, the fishermen who stayed until dark, the loners who tore up the magazines.

“I'm cold. Let's start a fire,” Chicky said one Saturday.

“No. They'll see the smoke.”

“Who made you the chief?” Chicky said, and lit a cigarette, and warmed his hands with it. He was becoming an expert smoker and boasted of the nicotine stains on his fingers.

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.”