The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro (25 page)

“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.”

“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.”