The Paperboy

by Pete Dexter

  Once, when I had forgotten to collect for the week, I went back into the store and found him still standing where I’d left him, staring at her as she straightened boxes of candy bars in the case under the counter.

  She looked at me then, for an instant, and it was as if I’d brought some bad news beyond what was in my newspapers. It was possible, I think, that anytime the door opened it was bad news for her.

  I never heard her speak to the man with the burned face, and I never heard him speak to her. I assumed they were man and wife.

  I WOULD FINISH THE ROUTE before ten, park the truck, walk the six blocks home, and fall into bed with a beer and a copy of the newspaper I had been delivering all morning. Early in the afternoon, I would slip away from the stories in the paper into a jumpy sleep, full of dreams, waking up a few hours later in this, the same room where I had slept all the nights of my childhood, not knowing where I was.

  Something like that had been happening at Gainesville too, and sometimes in those moments between dreams and consciousness, when I was lost, I glimpsed myself as untied to either place.

  I would get out of bed then and walk to the city pool and swim laps. Or, when I could borrow my father’s truck—he kept his new Chrysler in the driveway and left the garage for a beloved twelve-year-old Ford pickup which he used only to go fishing—I drove north to St. Augustine and would swim out into the ocean a mile or more, until my arms and legs were dead weight, and then slowly, allowing the water to hold me up, I would turn and make my way back.

  I threw myself away and was returned intact to the beach, and in this way I was somehow saved from those moments it had taken, fresh from sleep, to recognize the room where my most private thoughts had been thought, and private courses set, for all my life. The walls of my childhood.

  You could say I was afraid to sleep.

  MY FATHER CAME HOME from the paper every evening at fifteen minutes after six, slowly pushing open the door of his black Chrysler, moving his feet onto the ground, one at a time, then lifting himself out, then turning back into the car for his newspapers. He was a heavy man then, and at the end of his day, every movement was a task unto itself. He did not love his job the way he once had.

  By 1969, he was leaving most of the newsroom business to his managing editor—a plain, square-jawed young woman with muscular legs and an embarrassing, unfocused ambition—and spent his time with the advertising department, his two-man editorial board, and preparing speeches to deliver to various journalism societies around the state.

  I remember wondering if he was getting into his editor’s knickers at lunch—if she was squeezing the energy out of him with those legs.

  MY FATHER HAD OWNED black Chryslers for as long as I could remember—a tradition that went back to simpler times when Chryslers were better cars than Pontiacs and Oldsmobiles, about as good as a Buick, and one step under the Cadillacs. A respectable car, but nothing too grand. He did not want his advertisers attaching themselves to the idea that he was making too much money.

  Dinner was at six-thirty, served by the young Negro woman who had prepared it. She cooked and cleaned and kept the house, and rarely spoke to either of us without being spoken to first. In that way, she was unlike other housemaids of the time—who took pains to ingratiate themselves with their employers—but she was an intelligent woman, and the situation spoke for itself.

  Her name was Anita Chester, and it seemed to me that she and the managing editor of my father’s newspaper were better suited to each other’s jobs.

  After dinner, I would help clear the dishes and my father would thank the maid, whose name he could not remember, and drift through the big, empty house like an old ghost, visiting the bathroom a long time, then his bedroom—where he would remove his coat and tie and shoes, and slip a bathrobe over his shirt—and finally he would settle into his favorite chair in the study with a glass of wine, his head dropping back exactly into the spot where the Vitalis he wore had turned the material dark a long time before.

  He would close his eyes a moment, and then, opening them, he would sip the drink and pick up the newspapers he had brought home and set them on his lap while he found his glasses and turned on the lamp.

  The Atlanta Constitution, the Orlando Sentinel, the St. Petersburg Times, the Daytona Beach News-Journal, the Miami Times. Half a dozen small papers from all over the state. He did not read them as much as inspect them; seeing what their front pages had that his own paper’s did not. Or perhaps it was the other way around.

  There was a rivalry at the core of the business, a race to deliver the worst news first, and when there wasn’t bad news—there was always some, of course, but I am speaking now of calamity—the competition would move in another direction.

  My father would stare at the News-Journal a long time and then look up, smiling, and hand me the paper. “They call that news judgment,” he’d say.

  As if I owned a newspaper, too, and had an opinion on what ought to be placed above the fold of the front page. As if I were the one who would take over his newspaper when it was safe for him to step aside.

  He was more respectful of the Atlanta Constitution, as he had once worked with its legendary editor, Ralph McGill. He told his stories about Ralph McGill in a good-humored but reverent way, as if Mr. McGill were in the next room listening. The stories always centered on his bravery, which demonstrated itself entirely at the keyboard of a typewriter, and his single-minded pursuit of a better South.

  It had occurred to me a long time before 1969, though, that there was something else behind my father’s admiration of Ralph McGill.

  He was famous.

  I had been around reporters all my life—my father had been one once, and he often brought his favorites home for cocktails—and I saw early on that they were hungry in a way I was not.

  His favorites were the most aggressive, but for all their scrambling to the scene, for all the research and investigations and prodding and cajoling and lying they did to get to their stories—they would brag about these things later—what they hated most was not to be wrong, but to be silent.

  What moved them was not to know things, but to tell them. For a little while, it made them as important as the news itself.

  And in a distant way, Ward was one of them. By that I mean only that there was something in the stories that he wanted for himself. Not that he craved celebrity.

  At home, he had been like my mother. He would sit quietly, listening to my father’s stories of floods and air show catastrophes and Ralph McGill, over and over, for as long as he cared to tell them.

  And like my mother, he tired of the stories finally—knowing he could not compete against them—and left.

  Their leavings were different, of course. He simply never came home from college, taking a series of jobs instead as a reporter, and finally arriving at the Miami Times; and she moved to California with a drama teacher from Moat County Junior College who had been a frequent contributor to the letters to the editor section of my father’s paper and a supporter of his liberal views.

  My father took his losses in stride, but while he regarded Ward’s leaving as a stage of his development—a healthy experience, as he told it, and good preparation for his eventual editorship of the Moat County Tribune—he did not hold any such hopeful theories on my mother.

  She had developed right out of his life.

  And so after dinner my father would sit in the two-story white house he had built on Macon Street, empty now except for a maid who did not love him for his public tenderness toward Negroes, and a son who did not love his profession, and he would tell his stories and inspect his papers just as he always had, coming finally to the Miami Times, which he would check cover to cover for the byline Ward James.

  On the days that he found it, he would quiet all the other, smaller things he was doing—sipping his wine, adjusting his glasses, rubbing his feet against each other—and read it carefully, sometimes twice, a smile slowly taking over his face. When he had finished
reading, he would move the paper farther away to judge the story’s placement or size, I suppose estimating my brother’s emergence into his world.

  When he had finished, and the pile of newspapers had all moved from his lap, through his hands, to a pile at his feet, he would sometimes ask if I had been swimming that afternoon, and after I told him yes or no—it was a polite question; he had no interest in it now that it wasn’t organized into competitions—he would look at his watch, stretch, and head off to bed.

  “Six-thirty comes early,” he’d say, always the same words, seeming to forget that by six-thirty I was four hours into my day. I watched him climb the stairs and then, when Ward was in the paper, I would pick up the Times and read the story he had written too.

  In the beginning, until the airliner went down, it was usually a murder or a drug arrest. It was usually the Cubans. And I would think of the books Ward had studied, the formal and serious nature of his education, and try to imagine how it must have been, at the end of years of Latin and chemistry and physics and calculus, to see that it all led up three flights of stairs in a Miami ghetto.

  Having spent some time in college myself, I imagined it was a relief.

  OF THE LAWLESS EPISODES that visited the James family in the year 1969, the most surprising to me was not my expulsion from the University of Florida but my brother’s arrest for drunk driving.

  In fact, until the Sunday he called, I was unaware that Ward drank at all. As children, he and I would sometimes sit in the kitchen before bedtime, eating cereal while my father entertained reporters in the next room—we were not allowed in there with them—listening as the pitch on the other side of the door gradually turned shrill, until all the words were shouted over other words, and the laughing was hard and vulgar, as if issued over the bodies of victims.

  My father would come through the door for ice from time to time, swinging it farther open as the party went deeper into the night and he drank more glasses of wine, pushing it so hard finally that it would slam into the wall behind, his face by now flushed and sweating, the cigarette smoke trailing him into the kitchen. And after he had mussed our hair, gotten his ice, and gone back through the door into the wall of smoke outside, Ward would slowly smooth his hair and shake his head in a way that I took to be disapproving.

  It never occurred to me that he wanted to be part of it.

  He had been pulled to the side of the road on Alligator Alley at four-thirty in the morning, a Monday morning, driving a hundred and three miles an hour through the Everglades.

  The trooper walked to the car from behind, carrying a flashlight. He leaned into the open window, the small circle of light moving here and there, stopping on the bottle between my brother’s legs, then on the case of beer in back, then on my brother’s face, then on his passenger.

  “Sir, have you been drinking?” the trooper said.

  Ward slowly turned and looked at the man sitting in the seat next to him. The other man laughed.

  The trooper asked Ward to remove himself from the car, calling him “sir” again. The door opened and Ward poured out, still holding the bottle. He took a quick swallow before he handed it over. The trooper moved back into his headlights and placed it on the trunk.

  “May I see your license, sir?” the trooper said, and my brother pulled his wallet out of his back pocket, upside down, trailing the pocket liner, and then, as he tried to open it, all his cards and money fell onto the pavement and into the wet grass at the side of the road.

  He wandered into the grass and then the swamp behind it, looking for his license and his money, and fell in the mud. The trooper ignored the sounds of Ward in the swamp, and studied his driver’s license, which he’d picked up off the ground, illuminating the particulars with his flashlight.

  A minute passed, and my brother emerged into the lights of the trooper’s car, glistening with mud.

  “Mr. James,” the trooper said, reading the name off the license, “you are under arrest.”

  And my brother, who, as far as I know, had never in his life asked another human being for a thing that was not his, stood on the road, swaying, and said, “Sir, I would be proud to wear your hat.”

  THE MAN IN THE CAR with my brother that night was also a reporter at the Miami Times. His name was Yardley Acheman, and to the reporters and editors who worked in the newsroom with them, Yardley Acheman and my brother were exact opposites.

  Exact opposites.

  Some of the Times editors held the opinion that the differences between them accounted for their success, that it was keen management to know that opposites often generated a certain chemistry—they liked the idea of chemistry, these editors, the idea of magic—which the Miami Times had been wise enough to stir, and which had produced an investigative team of more potency than the individual ingredients would indicate was possible.

  A perfect match, they said. Exact opposites.

  And perhaps they were right, although it doesn’t seem to me that people can be opposites, exact or otherwise—what, after all, is the opposite of six feet tall? Of being required in ninth grade to memorize the periodic table and never forgetting it? Of foot odor?

  Still, people are different, and Ward and Yardley Acheman were more different than most.

  It is my understanding that before the editors of the Miami Times first designed to throw him together with my brother to cover a plane crash in the Everglades—an arrangement more of chance and convenience than the chemists at the Times cared to admit later—Yardley Acheman was just another sulking and lazy reporter on the city desk whose name rarely appeared over stories in the newspaper because the editors who ran the desk weren’t inclined to go through the long process of talking him into writing anything in which he had no personal interest.

  On the other hand, when Yardley Acheman found a subject of interest, he was considered something of a literary genius. The editors agreed on that, and many of them held literary ambitions of their own. They all knew writing when they saw it; that was their job.

  Between events of personal interest, however, Yardley Acheman would sit at his desk in the most distant corner of the city room, visiting an endless stream of girls and bookies on the telephone, trying to talk the new ones into giving him a chance, trying to talk the old ones into leaving him alone.

  He was handsome in a spoiled way, a pretty boy, and it seemed to give him access to anything he wanted. It was often difficult for him to fit all his social engagements into his calendar.

  The editors knew what Yardley Acheman was doing on the telephone, but all newspapers carry some sort of dead weight—reporters who do not want to be reporters, editors who care more for their titles than their jobs—and, as these things go, Yardley Acheman was less trouble than most. He considered other reporters, who did not possess his literary grace, beneath him, and was consequently never the sort of dead weight who became an agitator for the guild.

  A guild agitator was a different kind of burden to bear, and the people who ran the paper were more inclined to relieve themselves of it.

  Something happened to Yardley Acheman, however, on the evening that he and Ward were chosen—without forethought or ceremony, from the evidence, but because they were the only two unoccupied reporters in the room—to go to the wreckage of Flight 119, which had left its runway at Miami International Airport, stayed airborne two minutes and forty seconds, and then crashed into the Everglades, killing everyone aboard.

  Yardley Acheman found his vocation in that night’s carnage, in the enormity of the collision of 140 human beings and their sheet metal tube into the soft mud of the swamp, the enormity of the tearing—he became flush with the telling of it, with the cataloging of details; with the accumulative weight of their meaning.

  It was like riding a bicycle, he got it all at once.

  But Yardley Acheman, of course, had not amassed the details by himself. The most tearing of them had come from my brother, who had waded through the mud into the plane while Yardley kept outside, wh
ere, horrifying as the accident was, there were other places to look; room, as he would often say, to consider the larger perspective.

  For his part, Ward walked the length of the tube, from the place in back where the tail section had broken off to the pilot’s compartment, brushing mosquitoes off his face, counting the dead still in the plane, recording their positions, and through them the terrible velocity of impact.

  By coincidence, the entire Dade County air rescue machinery had been sent to a smaller crash—a private plane—an hour earlier that night, and for more than thirty minutes Ward and Yardley Acheman had the disaster to themselves.

  The plane yawed and settled as Ward made his way to the front; the only other sounds were those of the swamp itself.

  A day later, subscribers to the Miami Times would hear those sounds too, and see, in the darkened cabin, parts of bodies still strapped to their seats.

  And while careful readers might have noticed that the account of the sights and sounds carried a personal tone which alluded to matters beyond the accident itself, there was enough weight in the details to overcome it.

  LIKE YARDLEY ACHEMAN, my brother kept apart from the gossip and flow of the newsroom.

  Even after the success of the airliner story, Ward would not be brought into the lives of the other reporters. He kept his desk spotless and neat, and checked facts compulsively; he worked hours beyond his scheduled quitting time and did not fill out requests for overtime pay.

  All of this was misunderstood and resented by the reporters who witnessed it, who did not know that when he wasn’t on a story, my brother was incapable of asking for anything.

  It was assumed in the newsroom that Ward had gotten his job through his father’s influence, and while I do not know if that was true—editors and publishers regularly hire each other’s children, and I am not sure my father, for all his ethical posturing, was above that—I am sure that Ward was unaware of it. He would have never risked the embarrassment.