The Paperboy

by Pete Dexter

  No one was more afraid of embarrassment.

  Still, the story that rose from the wreckage of Flight 119 elevated Ward’s standing with the other reporters, who were honest enough to see that he had done something that they themselves might not have done—a crashed airplane, still humming with current and warm from the friction of the collision and full of fuel, how many of them would have climbed into the hole where the tail section had broken off and walked the length of the cabin in the dark?—but he would not be complimented, could not think of words to say when they came to his desk that next morning with their congratulations.

  He could not give and he could not receive, except in the course of collecting a story.

  A story had an authority of its own to my brother, and under that authority he was able to approach subjects of intimacy that he would never approach on his own.

  A WEEK AFTER THE STORY of the crash appeared on the front page of the Miami Times, Ward and Yardley Acheman were called into an office where four editors in white shirts were seated around a long table, smoking Camel cigarettes and pinching pieces of tobacco off the ends of their tongues.

  After a few minutes of desultory conversation—which Yardley Acheman was as good at as the editors, and which only made my brother uncomfortable—the lowest ranking editor in the room broke the news of the promotion: Yardley Acheman and my brother had been taken off their duties on the city desk and would work together as a team.

  It is a fundamental principle of the operation of newspapers that all decisions, particularly personnel decisions, are delivered at the most local level. Under this principle, the managing editor, for instance, never appears to tell the city editor how to use his reporters.

  If it were not for that, the reporters—who instinctively seek the highest authority—would come to the managing editor instead of the city editor to complain that their assignments were not suited to their talents or that their copy was being raped. And of the hundred reasons it’s better to be a managing editor than a city editor, avoiding discussions of raped copy is near the top of the list.

  I WAS IN ONLY my second month on the north county route when Flight 119 went down in the Everglades, and it was seven weeks later that Ward and Yardley Acheman’s next story appeared, a meticulous account of a fraternity hazing at the University of Miami which ended in a young man’s drowning in a whirlpool bath.

  As he had at the crash site, Ward went inside while Yardley Acheman kept the distance he required to preserve his larger perspective.

  Over the weeks it took to gather the story, Ward was threatened by the fraternity members and one night was attacked and beaten by half a dozen of them outside their house. He could not see who they were. When they left, he drove to the hospital and took fifteen stitches in his eyelid and was back at their front door the same evening.

  Later, his car tires were cut and his phone began to ring at all hours of the night, with no one on the other end when he answered.

  And each morning he was back, hanging over the fraternity house like the death itself. Phone calls and beatings and having tires slashed—those were not the things that frightened my brother.

  THE FRATERNITY’S LAWYER had kept his clients out of court following the drowning, and now obtained a court order prohibiting Ward and all other employees of the Miami Times from coming within a hundred yards of the house.

  Ward complied with the order, figuring the hundred yards trigonometrically and then waiting just outside the boundary two days a week, reminding them on their way to and from the fraternity house that he was still there.

  On other days, he waited outside their classrooms. He called them at the fraternity, and wrote them letters, both at home and at school. The lawyer got another court order, prohibiting calls and letters.

  But it was too late, my brother had gotten a letter back. The writer was a massive, long-haired football player named Kent de Ponce, who met Ward at his parents’ home in Coral Gables and allowed him to set a tape recorder on the table between them while they talked. I have played that tape so many times now that I hear the voices sometimes in the hum of tires on the highway.

  The football player sits so close to the machine that even his breathing is audible. He is drinking beer, and apologizing endlessly—for not speaking to Ward earlier, for his part in Ward’s beating, for drinking too many beers, for not offering Ward a beer, for standing at the side of the whirlpool and watching while a boy only a year or two younger than himself was left upside-down and kicking underwater until all the kicking stopped, and his body was twice as heavy coming out as it had been a few minutes before, when it was lifted in.

  He apologizes for these things as if it were in Ward’s hands to forgive them.

  He cries as he talks, and apologizes for that too.

  The brothers, he says—that’s what he calls the members of the fraternity, “the brothers”—were drunk and lost track of the time the pledge was underwater. They thought he was pretending to go limp. He wonders out loud if he will lose his scholarship. The football player’s nose is running and he sniffs, making spasmodic wet noises, and once a line of spit drops from his lips onto the tape recorder itself. He laughs at that, and tries, at the same time to apologize. “Jesus, I’m sorry, man.…”

  “You know, man,” he says later, changing course just once toward the end, “I don’t know if I should be doing this.…” There is a pause in the tape, as he realizes it is already done.

  When he speaks again, it is as if he is trying out an idea on Ward. “The only thing I could do now,” he says, “I could break your neck and say I thought you were a burglar.”

  The tape is quiet a long time after that, and then he says, “I apologize, man. I don’t know what I’m saying.”

  Waiting out the long pause—for as many times as I have heard the tape, I still strain for the words that end it—I think of my brother and wonder if, as he waits in the living room in Coral Gables with the football player and the prospect of violence, if he was drawn to those strange, kinetic moments before such things are decided.

  If that is the heart of the attraction.

  Ward met the football player again the next day at a restaurant near his house while Yardley Acheman, working from the perimeter, made notes on the football player’s expensive shoes, his car, the houses that lined the street where his parents lived. His ten-dollar haircut.

  In the story that appeared in the paper, these details and details of the appearance and belongings of other members of the fraternity—the piece begins with a description of a parking lot full of Jeeps and Mustang convertibles—occupy a place of importance that seems, on examination, to outweigh even the details of the drowning itself. It is written as if Yardley Acheman were arguing that his view was as meaningful as the one from inside.

  There was no mention of the dead boy’s car in this story, or the neighborhood where his parents lived, or the advantages he enjoyed. He was absolved of that, and presented with a purity that is familiar to readers of newspapers, who have always been willing to disregard what they know about human nature and believe that the people written about in stories are different from the ones they know in their own lives.

  This does not include readers who have been victims themselves, of course. No one who is touched personally by such a story and then watches a newspaper report it ever trusts newspapers in the same way again.

  On the other hand, I suppose that to those who loved him, the drowned boy was pure, and, if it were left to me, I would never take whatever comfort that might be away from them for the sake of accuracy. But even though it was never written, it is still true that if it were not for his drowning, the same boy a year later surely would have stood by drunk himself while blindfolded pledges were led in, shackled, and thrown into a whirlpool full of icy water.

  Even if it wasn’t written, part of the dead boy’s story is that he wanted to be one of the bunch who drowned him.

  IT WAS EARLY in the morning of the day the fraternit
y story appeared in the newspaper that my brother and Yardley Acheman tripped a state trooper’s radar gun at 103 miles an hour on Alligator Alley as they passed into territory belonging to the Miccosukee Indians.

  They were headed, for reasons Yardley Acheman did not understand, back to the scene of the airplane crash. Ward, who was drunk, would only say it was something he wanted to check.

  BY THE TIME he walked out of jail the next morning on his own promise to appear in court and sat down in the sun on a bench in front of the courthouse to wait for Yardley Acheman—the dried mud breaking off his shoes and his face still stiff with jailhouse soap—my brother, while not famous yet, was on the way.

  Yardley Acheman arrived with his girlfriend, who was a fashion model and was driving the car because he had lost his license to a drunk driving charge too. “The phone’s been ringing off the hook all morning,” he said, ignoring the fact that my brother had just spent the night in jail. “Everybody in the world loves us.”

  He was sitting in the front seat, with the girl; my brother was in the back. She looked quickly in the mirror, as if she were worried what someone who had just come out of jail might be doing back there.

  Yardley Acheman turned in his seat, getting on his knees. His shoes left prints against the dashboard.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Right now,” he said to Ward, ignoring her, “there’s no place in the world we can’t go. Keep that in mind. We can go anywhere we want.” Then he turned back, slid closer to the girl, and dropped an arm around her shoulders as she drove. A moment or two later, he winked at Ward and moved his hand onto her breast. Anywhere we want.

  “Hey,” she said, pushing it away with her elbow, looking in the mirror again. But my brother could see that she liked Yardley Acheman, and didn’t care where he touched her, or who was there when he did it.

  Yardley, my brother told me once, had a way with the girls.

  UNROLLING THE MIAMI TIMES that Sunday afternoon, my father, still in his fishing hat, sat straight up on the chair after only a few paragraphs. Something big on the line. He leaned into it, gradually moving closer to the page, as if the print were disappearing, then turning the pages to get farther into the story. Occasionally, he stopped as he read, marking his place with his finger as he rocked back and looked at the ceiling, savoring some detail that struck him as particularly exquisite.

  When he had finished, he returned to the top of the front page, moving from there to the middle of the paper, estimating the size of the story, considering its placement, and then he read it all again.

  “This is what it’s all about,” he said finally, and set the paper down.

  I had been two hours cutting the grass that day and was on the way outside to sharpen the lawn mower before it got dark. As I left the room I saw him go into his shirt pocket for one of his pills.

  When I came back in later, the paper was lying on the footstool in front of his chair, still open to the inside pages where the story of the dead fraternity boy ended.

  I found him on the porch, sitting in an old wooden swing attached to rafters, drinking a beer. The sun was going down; Anita Chester had made dinner and left.

  “Do you drink?” he said.

  A strange question, it seemed to me, considering what had happened at Gainesville. Perhaps he meant to ask if I still drank after what had happened. “A beer, sometimes,” I said.

  “Get yourself a beer,” he said. And then, as I was heading back inside to get it, he said, “Your brother’s a newspaperman.”

  And so we sat on the porch and drank to my brother, the smell of freshly cut grass on my shoes, my father moving slightly in the swing, smiling, but also shaking his head from time to time in a troubled way, as if Ward’s sudden success in his world presented problems he hadn’t considered.

  “The plane crash,” he said, “that could have been blind luck.…” I looked at him a moment, not understanding at first that he was talking about the newspaper account, not the accident itself. “But this thing with the boy in the fraternity … it’s a Pulitzer. This could be the proudest moment of my life.”

  He stopped himself, as if to reconsider it all from another angle, and a few minutes later said, “I wonder who this Yardley Acheman is.”

  THE FOLLOWING SUNDAY, I cut the grass again. If I didn’t cut the grass on Sunday, my father would return from the river in the afternoon and go straight into the garage, without comment, and pull out the lawn mower—a hand-powered machine with rusted blades and bald tires—and begin to push it back and forth across the yard, a small supply of nitroglycerin in his shirt pocket against the onset of angina.

  Before I came home, he hired one of the children from the neighborhood to do it, but with one of his own sons in the house, it embarrassed him to be seen spending the money.

  I was in the backyard with this machine when Ward called. I left the grass, picking up a beer as I passed the refrigerator, and answered the phone. It took a moment to recognize his voice. I hadn’t spoken to him since I left Gainesville, and there was something oddly reserved in the way he addressed me now, as if he were as worried as my father that I had gone crazy. That was at the center of things that spring, that I’d cracked.

  But it was hard to know what Ward was thinking; he had always held himself behind the door to answer.

  He had no talent for conversation, had never found a way to say the things he felt. It was as if even ordinary gestures—a smile, a turn of his head—didn’t fit, perhaps were too imprecise for the exact, literal nature of his mind. He kept himself at a distance that no one could cross.

  “How are things in the city?” I said.

  And for ten seconds it was as if someone had cut the line.

  “Good,” he said, finally. And then, after another pause, “You’re not swimming today?”

  “No.”

  In the silence that followed, I caught a sudden reflection of what had happened in Gainesville, things changing one morning in the pool when the noise began to bounce off the walls and ceiling in a way that I could not follow back to the source.… How can I tell you this? I was terrifed that there was no source. That I was scattered, no longer intact.

  The swimming coach, a Hungarian immigrant who had been wounded in the Russian invasion, pulled me out of practice ten minutes later and rapped on my forehead as if it were a screen door, and told me I had talent but would never amount to anything until I learned to commit myself to the swim. Commit everything to the swim.

  “I’ll get W.W.,” I said, which is what my father—William Ward James—was called by everyone except Anita Chester, who called him Mr. James, and old friends who called him “World War.”

  But that was from a different time and a different place.

  “Wait a minute,” Ward said.

  I waited, afraid he was going to ask about Gainesville. Moments passed.

  “How are you doing?”

  “It’s going all right.”

  “W.W. said he’s got you running the north county route.”

  “Six days a week.”

  The Moat County Tribune had no Sunday edition. My father had tried it for eight months a few years before, and nearly lost the paper.

  “You want a job?” he said quietly.

  “Is it driving a truck?”

  “No,” he said, “not a truck.”

  The line went quiet again.

  “A car,” he said finally.

  “Whose car?”

  “I don’t know, a rental …” Something left hanging.

  “You don’t need me to drive a rental, Ward,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said, “I do.”

  I AM NOT SURE my father had a clock on it—he had worked each day for the next day most of his life, which is the fundamental rhythm of the news business, and he was happiest measuring his time in daily editions and unhappiest when he had to think further ahead, as the economics of the business required—but it was clear to me from early on that he meant for Ward to take ov
er his newspaper.

  His vision of this moment—a ceremony of some kind, surely—stayed constant, I think, even as all things around him changed.

  He had always accommodated change, but kept this moment of his rewarding apart from that; perfect, unblemished, like the shapes of the things in his stories.

  And it never seemed to me, until my brother called from Miami to ask if I would take a job as his driver, that I appeared in my father’s grand reward ceremony at all. No more, at least, than in a place toward the front of the spectators, where I might stand with my mother and her new husband to witness the celebration.

  But when I mentioned over supper later in the week that Ward had offered me a job which did not involve getting out of bed at two-thirty in the morning, my father, without realizing he had done it, set his fork down beside his plate and gazed past me and out the window. I remembered the look from the year my mother left.

  He took out his pocketknife and opened the blade, testing its sharpness with the flat of his thumb. Then, just as absently, he went into his pocket for a heart pill. He had been doing more of that lately; sometimes it was hard to tell what made him happy.

  Anita Chester came through the door a moment later, looked at the cooling food on my father’s plate, then at the glaze over his eyes.

  “Is something wrong with your meal, Mr. James?” she said.

  “It’s fine,” he said, still looking out the window.

  The heart pill had already made him more comfortable.

  “Then eat it,” she said, and went back into the kitchen.

  He picked up his fork, reluctant to disobey her, and glanced down at the plate. Okra, black-eyed peas, pieces of ham, all lying together in a congealing pile. She took home what we didn’t eat. He touched it, breaking the seal, and steam from inside came off the plate into his face and fogged his glasses.