The Paperboy

by Pete Dexter

  Yes, she knew how to handle dogs.

  I wondered if she might hold the same charity for me. I doubted it, as none of the girls at Gainesville who made a show of compassion for what went on in an animal’s head had any sympathy at all for what went on in mine, and at that time in my life, when I was unsure of everything, sympathy was the only chance I had.

  I looked back toward the place where the dog had been lying. He hadn’t been right under the tire, or even in front of it, but I wasn’t going to argue. In some way, her saying it made it so.

  “I had an eye on him,” I said.

  She nodded slowly, as if we both knew that wasn’t true, and then looked beyond me at the Moat Cafe, then up and down the street.

  “I was looking for the office of Yardley Acheman of the Miami Times,” she said.

  CHARLOTTE BLESS AND the retriever waited beside my window for Yardley Acheman and my brother to come down. I was dizzy with her perfume, and while I did not intentionally continue to compare myself sexually with this animal, it came to me then that somewhere in history, we, like dogs, were sexually aroused primarily by the sense of smell, and there are certain odors which all your life seem to call you to act on them. I was not thinking of roast turkey in the oven, which you sit down and eat, but something like gasoline, which stirred me from the first time I smelled it. But to do what? Drink? Bathe?

  Is it possible the first thing I wanted to fuck was gasoline?

  MY BROTHER AND Yardley Acheman appeared in the open door which led upstairs to their offices. Yardley sat down on the bottom step, sucking alternately at a scraped knuckle and a long-necked bottle of beer he held in the same hand, while Ward walked back to the truck to shut the rear door. He did not see Charlotte Bless until she materialized next to him as he was reaching up for the handle.

  She seemed to like appearing unannounced under your arm. He jumped at the sight of her, and then reddened as she stood still, her head slightly cocked, watching him recover. Suddenly he was doing everything too fast. Smiling, nodding, trying to close the truck.

  “I’m Charlotte Bless,” she said.

  “How do you do,” he said. She looked at him without saying another word. Whatever she had over men, she wanted to know it was there all the time.

  Ward pulled the door of the truck shut and locked it, then dropped the keys on the street. She didn’t move as he bent to retrieve them, not even a step. His face almost touched her pants. He stood up, flushed and stumbling under her gaze. Then she looked away, over to the doorway where Yardley Acheman was still sitting, drinking his beer. Handsome and remote.

  “Mr. Acheman?” she said.

  From the beginning, she liked him best.

  He stood up slowly and walked out of the shade to the truck. She extended her hand—chest high, as if she were someone just learning to shake hands—and he took it, looking her quickly up and down, taking in the appearance of her skin. He had seen her only in photographs.

  “Is this it?” she said, looking at the front of the building. Yardley Acheman looked at it too, and then back at her, as if he might be asking the same question.

  He finished what was in the bottle and set it down on the curb. “You want a beer?” he said. “We’ve got a refrigerator upstairs.”

  “I don’t drink before sundown,” she said, but she sounded like she might make an exception. She walked to the back of the van, opened the door, and came out with a stack of flat boxes that rose halfway from her hands to her chin.

  She hesitated a moment, returning to my brother and Yardley Acheman, and then, deciding something, handed them to my brother, who accepted them without asking what they were and then stood still waiting for her to tell him.

  “They’re my files,” she said, and headed back to the van. “Come on, there’s boxes of this stuff.…”

  I waited behind Yardley Acheman for my own armful of boxes to carry up the stairs to the office and saw the look on her face as she handed him his load; a quick look, something passing between them, and then she dropped the boxes into his hands—he sagged under the sudden weight—and turned back into the van for mine.

  IT WAS CHARLOTTE BLESS’S long-range ambition to become the wife of Hillary Van Wetter. That was what she pictured at the end. She acknowledged this matter-of-factly upstairs, sitting against a stack of gift boxes bearing the name of Maison Blanche Department Stores which went waist-high against the wall of my brother’s side of the office. Each of these boxes was taped shut and filled perhaps halfway to the top with several pounds of “files,” and the weight of those on top crushed the ones beneath, and the whole wall looked like a pile of forced smiles.

  Yardley Acheman sat on the other side of the room, his chair tilted back until it rested against the wall behind him, his feet crossed on the desk, drinking another beer. He was considering her in a way that suggested he hadn’t made up his mind. Or perhaps he was still getting used to her appearance. She had seemed much younger in the pictures she sent.

  No one interested in how newspaper reporters find their stories should imagine that the compass needle is reset each time out. What they find attractive doesn’t change, only where they find it.

  My brother and I leaned against the sills of the two windows in the office. The windows were open and I could smell onions, and, beneath it, her perfume.

  She sat as comfortably as if she were in her own living room. Her knees were bent almost to her head, and she was hugging her legs. “My personal feelings for Hillary aside,” she said, looking at Yardley again, “what I have come here to do is correct an injustice and free an innocent man.”

  Yardley Acheman bounced the bottle gently against his lip, not committing himself. My brother sat still and waited.

  “That is our intention, is it not?” she said.

  “You’re going to marry him,” Yardley Acheman said.

  “We’re engaged,” she said. I looked quickly at her hands, trying to decide which of the rings might have come from Hillary Van Wetter. The one on her index finger had a baby’s tooth for a stone.

  Yardley Acheman looked at my brother.

  “It doesn’t change anything,” she said. The room was quiet. “What does it change?”

  My brother stirred, and the movement drew her attention. He seemed ready to speak, but then something caught, and he stopped.

  “Mr. Acheman?” she said. She leaned forward, showing more of her chest. He tapped the bottle against his lip, thinking it over.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  CHARLOTTE BLESS FIRST laid eyes on Hillary Van Wetter in a UPI picture which appeared on the front page of a four-day-old copy of the New Orleans Times-Picayune which had been left on a lunch table at work.

  He was handcuffed in the picture and being led up the Moat County Courthouse steps in Lately, accused of the murder of Sheriff Thurmond Call.

  She was sitting in the employees’ cafeteria at the main branch of the New Orleans Post Office, on Loyola Street. The paper was lying on the table, gutted of its sports section and then discarded, stained with dried red beans and rice. She wiped off the food and studied the picture, which was out of register but still captured a certain intensity in the expression of the blond man standing between two moonfaced sheriff’s deputies, and found herself pulled to his side.

  Judging from her other killers, whose files she brought along with Hillary Van Wetter’s in the Volkswagen, she had a tender spot for blonds.

  She read the story beneath the picture—it was only a few paragraphs, mostly recounting the career of Sheriff Call—and then, as her lunch break was ending, she tore the picture and the story out of the paper and put it in her pocket. You could do that in the cafeteria; on the floor it was a felony, and there were dark windows in the ceiling where supervisors sat, watching the letter sorters for just that kind of criminal behavior.

  Charlotte Bless’s previous ambition had been to end her career with the New Orleans Post Office as one of the supervisors behind the dark windows. It fit her,
and she had decided early to turn down any promotions that were offered beyond it.

  That night she wrote him her first letter, an airy, five-page note telling him exactly how she stumbled across his picture, and about her position at the post office and the food on the table that nobody ever cleaned up, and her “quandary,” in the middle of other people’s mess, that an orderly, cleanshaven man like Hillary Van Wetter had gotten himself into a situation like this in the first place.

  She made a carbon copy of the letter, and put it into a box that she marked H.V.W.

  While he wasn’t the first murderer she had written to, he was the first one who had used a knife. “If it were myself,” she wrote at the very end, striking an odd tone of familiarity, “I am sure that, having sufficient provocation to kill, I would also opt for the intimacy of the blade.”

  The letter brought no response.

  In her next letter, she wrote that she understood he was early in his legal journey—those were the words she used—and still too distracted to observe normal social discourse. “Being the photogenic person you are,” she added, “I am sure you are receiving more letters than you have time to sort out.”

  FOR THE NEXT FIVE MONTHS, Charlotte visited the New Orleans Public Library every afternoon after work, and not only pored over the pages of the Times-Picayune and the States-Item, neither of which carried much news from beyond Louisiana, for some mention of Hillary Van Wetter, but the Atlanta Constitution, the Miami Times, and the Tampa Times too. As the story cooled, she found Hillary Van Wetter and Sheriff Call mentioned less often, but later, during the trial itself, she was rewarded with daily reports, and she cut these out of the papers, along with each picture of Hillary Van Wetter that appeared, even when it was a file picture which she already had.

  She also cut out pictures of Sheriff Call and the prosecutor and the defense attorney and the two jurors who were interviewed and photographed after the verdict. Sometimes she looked at these pictures in the morning, when she woke up worrying about Hillary; it comforted her to compare them to him. She had turned down men with those same soft faces all her life.

  She removed the pictures from the newspapers at a small table hidden from the front counter, using a pair of rounded cuticle scissors that left the borders of the emptied frames frayed. She felt guilty stealing the pictures, and once dropped a note in the suggestion box that said the place could use a better security system, and referred the library to the dark windows in the ceiling at the post office.

  At home, she pasted the stories and pictures against typing paper, and laid the paper flat on the bottom of the box marked H.V.W. When it was half full, she started another.

  All the while, she was writing Hillary Van Wetter every week at the county jail—long, wandering letters full of descriptions of the post office and the people who worked there, of the noises that came through the wall of her apartment in the Quarter at night, of the way he had appeared to her in a story or picture she’d seen. She asked questions but never asked him to write back with the answers. It was too early in things to push.

  The other killers she’d chosen had been anxious and faithful correspondents from the first letter, even before she’d sent them her picture, but in the end there was a sameness to their letters that deadened her interest. She still sent them all perfunctory cards at holidays, but neglected to even open some of the thicker envelopes that arrived with identification numbers for return addresses. They were all the same, full of legalese and stories of forgetful lawyers and prison routines and sexual longings; promises of sex that would last days and months.

  Worse yet, the ones who read books were always quoting dead philosophers. Mostly Germans.

  Nothing about the crimes themselves. Not a word about the victims or the rooms where the killings happened. No glimpse of that. It was as if the single exciting thing about them had never happened.

  Still, she hadn’t given up on them completely—she still liked to think of them at night, imprisoned in six different states, staring at her picture in the half light of their cells, the place completely quiet except for their hard breathing and their rattling cots.

  With Hillary Van Wetter, however, she realized that she was looking for something more substantial than her ordinary killers could offer.

  She wanted someone less compromised, and after Hillary was convicted—that was how she was addressing him then, “Dear Hillary”—and sent to death row at Starke, she sent him her picture, and autographed it: “For Hillary Van Wetter, an intact man. Warmest regards, Charlotte.”

  Coming across that same phrase—“an intact man”—in the accompanying letter, I thought suddenly of my Hungarian coach at the University of Florida. Commit everything to the swim.

  She knew the picture flattered her, but thought of it, in the whole, as honest. It fairly represented her features, and if it softened and smoothed her skin, it had also showed nothing of her body, which, even in critical moments, she could not fault.

  And if she knew when she sent the picture that she would at some point appear in front of Hillary Van Wetter not precisely as advertised, it wasn’t a deception on the order of, say, the cover of a TV dinner, which promised peas the color of green crayons that turned out to be gray.

  She was not gray peas.

  Eight days after she sent the picture, a letter arrived from Starke, Florida:

  Dear Miss Charlotte Bless,

  Thank you for writing your letter to me about my innocents. I am working on some things in that direction myself. Would you have a picture that showed more of yourself so I could see what I am talking about.

  Truly,

  Hillary Van Wetter, 39269

  P.O. Box 747

  Starke, Florida

  She read the words and could hear his voice. No evasions, no lawyer jargon, no bragging. He was purer than her other killers, but she had sensed that from the start. Uncompromised by jail and attorneys, an intact man.

  And even acknowledging a certain misunderstanding at the center of her developing romance with Hillary Van Wetter, no one who ever met Hillary in person could say that Charlotte Bless entirely missed the point.

  THERE WERE, by actual count, forty-one boxes of “evidence” that Charlotte Bless had accumulated over four years. Newspaper clippings, letters to and from Hillary Van Wetter as well as half a dozen other convicted killers, transcripts of the trial and the two appeals which followed, brief biographies of all eleven judges who had become involved in the case.

  There were several newspaper reports on famous murder cases the same judges had been involved in before, along with a list of miscarriages of justice which had occurred at the hands of Sheriff Thurmond Call over the last fifteen years of his administration.

  And through all the boxes, there was a kind of running diary, mingled with the other “evidence,” which not only argued with rulings and pressed alternate theories of the killing, but contained Charlotte Bless’s most intimate sexual thoughts over the entire period of the case.

  In one paragraph she analyzed Judge Waylan Lord’s death sentencing patterns, and in the next she noted that all the killers who had written her except Hillary Van Wetter wanted to press their mouths into her vagina and even the crack of her behind. Hillary had no such desire, which she considered “psychological proof” of his innocence.

  He wanted to be sucked himself, like a judge.

  YARDLEY ACHEMAN AND my brother stayed in their office every day for a week, reading everything inside the boxes of evidence. Ward opened each box first, numbered it, and then examined what was inside, making notes as he went. When he had finished with a box, he turned it over to Yardley Acheman, who went through faster, and without notes, stopping occasionally to read something out loud.

  “Listen to this,” he said, “she’s talking about blowing him through the bars of the cell with all the prisoners watching, and then, wait … ” He stopped for a moment, finding the place. “Yes, right here … ‘I would suck his shaft, if it comes to that, as
they strap on the electrodes, to hold him in my mouth as he comes and goes.… ’ ”

  He looked at my brother, smiling, and then, getting no reaction, he looked at me. “I don’t think she’s thought that all the way through,” he said.

  Ward was back studying the pages spread out across his desk.

  “If nothing else comes of all this,” Yardley said, “we’ve got a strange story here about a girl who falls in love with killers.…”

  My brother looked up again, about to open another of the boxes which, with all the others, held every private thought and craving that had come into Charlotte Bless’s head since 1965, and which she had turned over to him and Yardley Acheman on blind faith and out of love for her fiancé, whom she had yet to meet.

  “We didn’t make any promises,” Yardley said.

  Ward struggled with it a moment, then, without a word, went back to the box. The betrayal was built in; it was in the boxes when she turned them over, in the grain of the story, and in the grain of the business.

  “SO,” SHE SHOUTED, “you’re smart. Why aren’t you in college?” Her window was open and the wind lifted her hair off the seat behind her, blowing it into the corners of her mouth.

  “We could turn on the air conditioner,” I said, but probably not loud enough to be heard over the wind. I moved my hand toward the dashboard, trying to remember how it worked.

  She stopped me, touching my arm, shaking her head no, and her hair was free in the air and turned red as it crossed the sun, which was hanging just over the horizon.

  “I like real air,” she said, and I nodded, and a moment later my own hair slapped into my eyes, making them fill with tears. “So why aren’t you in college?” she said.

  I rolled my window halfway up, and the beating wasn’t as bad. “I was,” I said.