The Paperboy

by Pete Dexter

  He put the fork back down, a piece of ham speared at the end. “I thought you were going to stick around,” he said finally. He looked quickly around the room, reminding me how empty the place would be.

  “I’m not going to Miami,” I said. “Ward’s coming here.” But he didn’t seem to hear.

  “Everybody’s leaving,” he said.

  “I’m not leaving.” I said it slowly. He looked at me as if he didn’t know who I was. “Ward’s looking into something here in Moat County,” I said. “He needs somebody to drive him around.”

  He picked up his glass and finished all the water in it. When he put it down, he was back in the room. “Why can’t he drive himself?” he said.

  I shook my head, unwilling to tell him that.

  “All I know, he and Yardley Acheman are going to be up here a few weeks.”

  “And after that?” he said.

  Anita Chester came back through the door, studied my father’s plate and his pocketknife, lying open near it, and put her hands on her hips. “You going to eat that or torture it?” she said. “I got things to do.”

  Without a word, my father picked up the full plate and handed it to her. She took it, then collected mine, then disappeared back into the kitchen. A moment later, we heard her scraping the dishes.

  “What about afterwards?” my father said again.

  I said I didn’t know.

  LATER THAT NIGHT, after he had read the papers, my father got out of his chair, walked into the kitchen, and came back with a beer and a bottle of wine. One glass. He handed the beer to me and sat down, pouring wine into the glass.

  “When I was young and first starting out in this business,” he said, “there was a copy editor I knew at the Times-Herald in New York. His name was Henry McManus from Savannah, Georgia, and he is, to this moment, the cleanest human being I ever saw in a newsroom. He got a haircut once a week, kept the sleeves of his shirt buttoned right to the wrist all day, never raised his voice.”

  My father had a drink of the wine and then looked at me to see if he’d told me this story before. I couldn’t remember if I’d heard it, but it wasn’t an old favorite from his days with Ralph McGill. My father smiled and dropped his head backwards into the chair until it rested in the spot where the upholstery was stained.

  “He labeled his glue pot so other editors wouldn’t use it, and cleaned spills off the side before they’d hardened,” he said, “that’s how neat he was.” He paused, thinking of Henry McManus’s glue pot. “And he was so revered, other editors respected his glue, and never used it even when he wasn’t there to protect it.

  “Henry was an older man,” he said, “he may have been thirty-five, which at the time seemed very old indeed, and he’d worked at a dozen newspapers. Still, he spoke to everyone, from the boss right down to the copyboys, with a respectful formality you rarely hear in a newsroom. He was fast and careful with copy, and some of us young Turks would sit in the bar across the street after we’d put the paper to bed and speculate on why he’d never become something more important.

  “He had the demeanor of an assistant managing editor, and knew the city as well as any reporter, although he hadn’t been there much more than a year. We decided, finally, that Henry McManus didn’t want to be important, and that was why he moved from paper to paper.”

  I nodded while my father drank his wine, wondering if that was the end of the story. Then he smiled again, watching as it rolled past.

  “There was an annual party at Christmas,” he said. “We went to Henry’s apartment and collected him, against his wishes. We forced a drink on him and waited in his living room until he’d showered and dressed. And on the way to the party we gave him another drink, which he took with less coercion, and then another.…”

  Anita Chester came through the living room, carrying her purse.

  “I’ll be leaving now,” she said.

  My father nodded at her, distracted, trying to keep his finger on the spot in the story. She lifted her chin half an inch and headed out of the house. The screen door slammed shut behind her. My father hated the sound of a screen door slamming.

  He paused, as if he were waiting for some pain in his chest to pass, and then picked up the narrative exactly where he had left it.

  “At the party,” he said, “Henry stood in a corner, straight as a soldier, drinking punch that someone had spiked with vodka. He spoke only when spoken to, shook hands and smiled as the bosses told their wives kind things about his work.…”

  My father paused again and finished the wine in his glass. He poured another. “And then something came over him,” he said quietly, the wonder of it still in his voice. “One minute he was standing against the wall, the next minute he was in every detail a mad dog, right down to the foaming mouth.

  “He lunged at one of the editors, and then another, getting the second by the throat. Several of us dragged him off, but he got loose—he was as strong as three of us, which was as many as could get hold of him—and tossed aside one of the wives, trying to get at her husband. She went into the punch, and that seemed to set him off in another direction and that’s when he began shouting. ‘Jews,’ ‘kikes,’ unimaginable language, howling it.…”

  My father stopped again, then slowly shook his head.

  “He never even came in for his check,” he said, “he just disappeared. Years later, I heard that he’d gone to Chicago, put six months on the copydesk, and then done the same damn thing.…”

  My father looked at me then. “He was a newspaperman,” he said, “but there’s some people who should never leave Savannah.”

  I sat dead still, wondering what he’d heard about my expulsion from Gainesville, and if he thought I was also someone who should never leave Savannah.

  WITH HIS OWN ROOTS in suburban Miami, which is to say he had no roots at all, Yardley Acheman did not arrive in Moat County carrying a great esteem for local sensibilities. Nothing looks more foolish than tradition to those who have none.

  He stepped off the bus in Thorn shirtless, his dark, curly hair falling almost to his shoulders, carrying an upright Underwood typewriter. It must have weighed twenty pounds. My brother was the next passenger out. The town was used to long hair, of course—it was 1969—but no one had ever seen a man climbing off the Trailways bus carrying a typewriter before, and even Hal Sharpley, Thorn’s acknowledged hobo, moved away from him when he sat down on Hal’s bench to tie his boots.

  Yardley Acheman was shorter than my brother, and louder, and interrupted my father’s stories at dinner with his own stories, which were not as good and had no polish. I was oddly offended by that—not that he’d cut my father short, but by the dismissive nature of the intrusion. It was as if the thousands of hours my brother and I had spent sitting at the dinner table politely listening to stories we’d heard hadn’t been necessary.

  He drank beer after beer, long after my father had excused himself and gone to bed, and smelled of it the next morning on the way to Lately. I had borrowed one of my father’s delivery trucks, and it was a slow drive. A road crew was repaving a four-mile section of highway just outside Thorn, and from time to time, Yardley Acheman looked out the window and glimpsed something of the place—the wide, brown river or an old trailer park hidden in the pines or a small colony of shacks where citrus farmers kept Jamaicans during the harvesting season.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said. “Je-sus Christ.”

  He turned on the radio, punched in the stations, one after another, then turned the radio off. He put his feet on the dashboard.

  “Je-sus Christ.”

  Ward sat between us, his feet straddling the gearshift, and he was staring at the countryside too. It would not have been impossible, judging his expression, for my brother to have been thinking Jesus Christ himself. He hadn’t been home in a long time, and it was different to him now.

  MY BROTHER AND Yardley Acheman took two rooms at the Prescott Hotel in Lately and paid in advance for the month. Mrs. Prescott, who had
run the place alone since her husband died unexpectedly the previous summer, stood still and smiled politely as Yardley signed in—without being offered the register—and then she studied the signature a long time, as if there was something in it that might have informed her whether or not to take a chance on the young men who had just come in the door.

  “Is there a problem?” Yardley said, too loud for the room.

  She was startled, and looked up from her register, smiled, and then shook her head. “Only the two of you are staying,” she said, looking quickly at me.

  “Only the two of us,” my brother said.

  She nodded, and stared again at the signature. “My husband always checked our guests in.…”

  “Is there a problem?” Yardley said again. “If there’s a problem, lady, we can go somewhere else.”

  “No,” she said, taking the credit card that he’d dropped on the desk, “it’s just that my husband always checked in the guests. I’m not used to where things are yet.…”

  Yardley Acheman stared at the woman while she looked for the American Express machine and then ran his credit card through it twice—putting it in upside down the first time. Her fingers shook under his gaze.

  She gave them two rooms on the second floor, sharing a bath. The rooms smelled damp, and the linoleum floor in the bath was warped near the tub and had began to curl where it met the wall. There was a window above the radiator which was sealed with paint and would not open even when Yardley Acheman climbed up on the radiator for leverage to force it.

  “We’ll get her to fix this,” he said to no one in particular. Ward and I looked at each other a moment, and then Ward turned and walked into his room.

  There was an ancient brass bed against the far wall in there, above it a copy of the Lord’s Prayer hung in a frame. The paint all around the Lord’s Prayer had blistered and peeled and broken, as if the battle for good and evil had been fought on that spot.

  A floor fan sat in a corner opposite the door, and a smaller fan sat on the bureau.

  Ward opened his suitcase, then the drawers in the bureau. He studied them a moment, then went back into the bathroom and wet a towel. Yardley Acheman was still kneeling on the radiator, pounding on the window now, trying to get it to open. The noise carried everywhere in the house, something I realized a moment before Mrs. Prescott appeared, flushed and slightly out of breath, and knocked carefully on the open door behind us.

  “Is everything all right?” she said.

  Yardley Acheman stopped pounding and turned to her, still holding on to the window frame, and stared until she retreated a step and was back out in the hall.

  “He was trying to open the window,” my brother said.

  “I’m afraid that window doesn’t open,” she said, so quietly we could hardly make out the words. “The windows in your room open.”

  Yardley Acheman slowly climbed down, the ridges of the radiator impressed into the knees of his pants.

  “It’s a window,” he said, “it’ll open.”

  She smiled, looking at nobody in the room, and shook her head. “It never has,” she said, and then she was gone.

  My brother went back into his room and cleaned the drawers with the towel, coming back into the bathroom twice to rinse out the dirt. Yardley Acheman left the window and followed him in, sitting on the bed, watching him work.

  “She’s supposed to do that,” he said. “I don’t care where the hotel is, you aren’t supposed to clean up the room before you can use it. That’s the whole idea of hotels.…”

  Yardley Acheman hadn’t opened the drawers in his own room. His things were still in two large, expensive, leather suitcases, dropped in the middle of the floor. He had set his typewriter on an unreliable-looking table near the window, which was covered by a sun-bleached shade. Filtered through the shade, the light outside turned the room yellow.

  My brother finished cleaning the drawers, then placed his clothes in them carefully, organizing areas of socks and underwear and shirts in exactly the way we had been taught to at home by our mother. He closed the drawers slowly, not to disturb his things from the places he had left them, then put his suitcases in the closet.

  Yardley Acheman watched all this from the bed. “You know, Jack,” he said, more to Ward than to me, “there’s a rumor going around that your brother’s compulsive.”

  He was the sort of person who was comfortable offering a good-natured insult if there was someone else there to help absorb the reaction. He was also the sort of person who was comfortable with the fashionable psychological syndromes of the day, which he read about in the life-style sections of news magazines.

  My brother looked at him, realizing the remark was intended as a joke, and slowly smiled. An unnatural smile, as if he had to stop a moment and remember the mechanics of how one was made.

  On the way out, we passed the little apartment downstairs where Mrs. Prescott lived. The door was open, and she was sitting inside, wishing she’d never let us in.

  LATER THAT DAY, my brother and Yardley Acheman set up an office in a large second-story room over the Moat Cafe, at the east end of town. At some time in the recent past an effort had been made to change the appearance of the roof of the building to resemble a castle’s, an attraction for tourists who came through on their way to and from the great beaches to the south. This remodeling was commissioned in spite of the fact that the café and the street and the county itself had nothing to do with castles but were all named for Luther Moat, a slave trader who had once owned the land which the town occupies.

  The transformation of the Moat Cafe into a castle was abandoned perhaps halfway through, and the single finished area—a tower whose roofline resembled a dunce cap—had created a small room upstairs which the building’s owner had rented to the Miami Times over the telephone for thirty dollars a month. The place smelled of cooked onions for as long as we were there.

  My brother and Yardley Acheman brought in two heavy wooden desks purchased from the Moat County School Board and scarred with initials in a hundred places, two wooden chairs whose casters fell off whenever they were moved, a small refrigerator, and a leather davenport. All of it fit into perhaps one fourth of the truck, and had slid from the spot near the door where they’d left it (you cannot tell reporters how to load a truck; the way they look at it, if truck loaders are so damn smart, why aren’t they reporters themselves?) all the way to the back, where the load had slammed into the wall, making a noise that was comparable to backing the truck into the loading station, something I had done on my first day of work at the Tribune.

  They carried the stuff upstairs themselves, scuffing their knuckles as they negotiated the turn at the landing, taking paint off the walls as they went up. Knocking the top off an ornamental post which anchored the banister. Yardley swearing all the way.

  I was a spectator for this show—the bottom half of it, anyway—as I stayed with the truck, which was parked in front of the cafe’s door.

  Neither Yardley Acheman nor my brother had done any physical work in his adult life, and they would arrive at the narrow door carrying the couch, for instance, before they saw they couldn’t bring it in sideways. I would have helped, but the truck was parked in a loading zone—to my certain knowledge the only loading zone in Lately—and my brother wanted me to stay with it in case someone needed to get in and load.

  Onions, I suppose.

  He did not want to alienate the café owners or the police or the general population, as much of what he would do in Lately hinged on how he and Yardley Acheman were received.

  Growing up in the county, my brother understood that anything foreign, even something harmless or barely noticeable—which he and Yardley Acheman were not—became an irritant on touch. Coming up from the south end of the county counted for nothing.

  You were local or you weren’t.

  CHARLOTTE BLESS ARRIVED in Lately as my brother and Yardley Acheman were negotiating the second desk up the staircase. I had been sitting in the
loading zone watching for deliveries so long that a panting retriever of some kind had dropped into the shade of the truck to lie down.

  She came in a rusted-out Volkswagen van with Louisiana license plates. The van had recently received a coat of house paint, and appeared from the east, catching my attention from a quarter mile away as the sun reflected off the flat glass windshield as she crossed the railroad tracks.

  A block away, she slipped into the left side of the street and then slowed and finally parked, our faces no more than five feet apart when she stopped. Her side of the windshield was tinted blue. She stayed there a moment, staring at me until I looked away, and then climbed out. She wore jeans and a work shirt tucked into a tight belt, and as she left the truck she smoothed the shirt over her stomach and breasts and tossed her head in a way that evened the fall of her hair across her back.

  She passed in front of my windshield without looking at me again, and then was out of view. A moment later she was back, her face just below my elbow, which was resting in the open window.

  “Is that your dog?” she said.

  The current shot through me six directions at once. I hadn’t heard her return, and after one long, parting look at the rise of her bottom as it moved out of sight, I’d closed my eyes, trying to hold on to the picture of it as long as I could. The dog was standing next to her, looking up with his mouth open and his tail wagging, as if he expected something good was about to drop out of her pocket.

  “No, ma’am,” I said. I looked at him and then back at her. This close, she was perhaps twenty years older than she’d looked climbing out of her Volkswagen. Her skin was harder, and creased where it disappeared into her collar. I took heart from these imperfections, imagining that they made me more suitable. I had no idea who she was.

  “He was lying right under your tire,” she said, and I felt the accusation. She reached down and touched the animal’s head, a ring on every finger of her hand. The dog came up slowly then, encircled her leg with his legs, and she pushed him down just as slowly, prying him off just as he started to pump.