The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro (20 page)

“Andy, this is my father.”

“I shouldn't be here,” Burkell's father said. “I'm supposed to be at work. But, hey, it's a special day. Harry Truman in Medford! Too bad your mas at work.”

He palmed something from his vest pocket, a small bottle we called a nip, and swigged from it and smacked his lips. He was not anything like the naked man I had seen in Burkell's room. His friendliness made him seem weak and ridiculous.

“Want an ice cream?” he said, wiping his mouth.

He led the way to Brigham's, lighting a cigarette as he crossed the street. He saw that I was staring sadly at his cigarette pack—Herbert Tareyton.

“You think I'm stoopid,” he said. “You should see my brother. He walks like this!”

When we were sitting in the booth he swigged from his nip again—Four Roses. Again he saw me staring.

“Like my weskit?” he said. “Hey, hear about the boy who drank eight Cokes?”

Burkell was poking a paper clip into his ear, his red eyes fixed on something out the window, not listening to the joke. I was still guilt-ridden by what I remembered from the house.

“The funny thing is, he burped Seven-Up,” Burkell's father said. “Get it?” I stared at him thinking of the naked man. “Hear about the drunk who fell ten stories down an elevator shaft into a pile of garbage? He wipes the garbage off his face and says, ‘I said
up
.'”

I pitied this man for being silly, someone making jokes because he was lost, sitting here hiding a nip of Four Roses and chewing his lips and finishing another joke. “Rectum? Damned near killed 'im!”

“Show Andy your trick with your teeth, Dad.”

The man made a face and mouthed his dentures as though trying to swallow them, and then opened his mouth showing the dentures upside down, jammed upright like he was gnawing.

“I should be on the stage. There's one leaving any minute. Harry Truman's giving a speech at an Indian reservation. ‘I promise! I promise!' Every time he says that, the Indians go, ‘Oomlah!' When it's over the chief takes him across a field, says, 'There's been cows in this field. Don't step in any oomlah.'”

I couldn't think of anything to say. Every time I looked at Burkell's father I saw the naked man.

“What's in the paper bag?” Johnny asked his father.

“Leon K's shoes. I had them resoled.”

“My father works for a guy called Kelly,” Burkell said.

Burkell's father looked hurt. “I don't work for him, Johnny. We're partners in the franchise.”

I was embarrassed for him because I suspected he was lying—lying to two eleven-year-olds, about what? He thought he saw everything, the way jokers did; but he didn't know what I knew.

“Know what? You're a real chatterbox, kid,” he said to me, and seemed annoyed. I had the feeling he wanted to hit me, or say
Beat it.
“Didn't even finish your ice cream.”

His calling me “kid” also reminded me of the naked man in his house, and now I knew in my heart that something serious was wrong, and that he suspected I was an enemy, which was how I felt, for not laughing at his jokes and not telling him what I knew.

“I don't know what time we're having supper, Johnny.” He did a little tap dance as we left Brigham's. “Your mother's working.”

“Who'll dig the grave for the last man that dies?” Burkell sang in his low quavering haunted-house voice. We walked up the street.

I was looking at Burkell's knees again and the way the cuffs flapped against his skinny ankles and small feet.

“We could go to my house and look at comic books.”

Burkell had a stack of them in that room where the naked man had stood in his white socks.

“No one's home. My mother's at work.” His fingertips were in his mouth. “Or we could take the electric car to the rezza. Got any money?”

I showed him the dollar and paid his fare on the trolley to Elm Street. We walked in the woods and threw stones at squirrels' nests in trees and kicked along the bridle path to the reservoir. Then we walked home in the dark and no one asked me where I had been, because it was the day Truman came to Medford. But I felt burdened by what I knew and shocked by the president's pink face and loud voice.

The secret burned inside me and made me afraid. I felt responsible, and partly to blame. But I kept the secret, because if I told someone, I thought they would say it was all my fault. I was afraid of his mother and dreamed of the man, and of his father hurting me.

But I never saw his mother or father again. I knew Burkell's house as well as my own, but I was not invited there, not even on his next birthday. One day Burkell said that his mother had warned him I was a bad influence, because I told lies, as though pretending to tease me. I knew he was telling the truth.

T
HREE FIGURES
came single file over a wooded hill of the Fells carrying their rifles one-handed and keeping their heads low. They were duck-walking, hunched like Indian trackers, with the same stealth in their footfalls, toeing the mushy earth of early spring. I was one of them, the last, being careful, watching for the stranger, his black hat, his blue Studebaker. Walter Herkis and Chicky DePalma were the others. When we got to the clearing where the light slanted through the bare trees and into our squinting faces, you could see we were twelve years old.

“Where?” Chicky asked in a harsh disbelieving tone, keeping an irritated grin on his face. He had a brown birthmark like a raisin on his cheek. His hair, greasy from too much Wildroot, and his big nose and his yellowish Sicilian face made him look even more like an Indian brave.

“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.”

Walter, still chewing, staring at the ground, looked hurt, not for anything that Chicky had said but as though he was thinking about something worse.

“Come on,” I said. I had meant “Let's go,” but Walter took it to mean the story.

“It wasn't here,” he said.

“Where then?”

“I told you, wicked far.”

“Near the road?”

“No, past the Sheepfold.''

“Spot Pond? The rezza?”