The Paperboy

by Pete Dexter

  Hillary Van Wetter moved easily to the chair, as if the shackles and handcuffs were no inconvenience, and then allowed himself to be pushed roughly down, as if he did not feel the guard’s hands on his shoulders. As if the guard did not matter to him at all.

  “Fifteen minutes,” the guard said. “No physical contact of any type, no tape recording devices, no objects of any type may be passed to the prisoner.” He paused for a moment, looking at us each in turn. “I am right outside the door.”

  Hillary Van Wetter sat in his chair and waited. He nodded once at Charlotte, but did not speak. She nodded back.

  “Mr. Van Wetter,” my brother said, “my name is Ward James.…”

  “You look like your pitcher,” he said to her.

  She smoothed her dress, a familiar gesture now, and blushed, which was not familiar at all. “Thank you, I think,” she said.

  “This is Yardley Acheman,” my brother said, but Hillary Van Wetter did not look at Yardley Acheman or my brother. He stayed on Charlotte like he was feeding.

  “These the paperboys?” he said to her.

  She nodded, and it was as if the rest of us weren’t in the room. “And what good is they going to do us?” he said.

  She looked at my brother quickly. “Save you,” she said.

  He considered us then, taking his time, his eyes resting on me for as long as they did on my brother and Yardley. Then he went back to her.

  “They can’t save themselves,” he said.

  “They can help,” she said. Her voice was smaller than it had been.

  A look of impatience passed over Yardley Acheman’s face, and he turned his head away and looked at the tiny, round window in the door; there were wires inside the glass.

  “Who they saved so far?” Hillary Van Wetter said.

  “They’re well known in Miami,” she said.

  Hillary Van Wetter turned to Yardley, examining what it took to be well known in Miami. Something that might have passed for a smile among the Van Wetters crossed his face, and then was gone.

  “So who you paperboys saved?” he said.

  Yardley Acheman looked quickly at the walls and the floor and ceiling. “Who else you got?” he said.

  And now Hillary Van Wetter did smile; it creased his face and pulled his lips back off his teeth until you could see the gums. “I like that,” he said.

  “You been to college?” he said, looking at me now. Before I’d been expelled, there weren’t three people in this world who ever asked if I went to college, and now it was happening every ten minutes. I nodded, half an inch, not wanting to go any further into it.

  It came to me suddenly that if I had been alone in the room with Hillary Van Wetter, I might have been able to explain what happened. With his criminal mentality, he could have understood it.

  “And you’d be well known in Miami also,” he said.

  “No,” I said, “I just drive the car.”

  He nodded, as if that made sense. “The getaway driver,” he said, and he laughed. And then, a long moment later: “You ever saved anybody?”

  My brother turned and looked at me now.

  “I saved somebody once,” I said.

  Hillary Van Wetter’s eyes rested on me, waiting, and I remembered the other Van Wetter’s eyes, who was dead now, as I sat behind the wheel of the Plymouth at Duncan Motors while my father signed the papers with Mr. Duncan.

  “At Daytona Beach,” I said. “I pulled a girl out of the water.”

  “He’s a swimmer,” Charlotte said, but Hillary didn’t acknowledge that. You could see it annoyed him having her talk out of turn.

  “Seemed to me,” he said a little later, “if somebody is foolish enough to get themself into water they don’t know, they deserve what they get.”

  And he did not expect an answer to that, and turned back to Charlotte, almost as if he had said it to her. She smiled at him, staring right into his eyes. The look caught, and then changed, and grew, until I was embarrassed to be there in the room.

  My brother started to say something and then stopped; his stirring did not register in Hillary Van Wetter’s face. Hillary did one thing at a time. Now he nodded at his lap, where an erection had pitched tent in his prison pants. He looked at it, and then she looked at it too. Ward began to study his nails.

  “There’s something you could do for me,” Hillary said.

  She nodded. “I wish I could,” she said in a tiny voice, and then glanced at the door.

  It was quiet a long time in the room, and then my brother stirred again, and this time he spoke. “Mr. Van Wetter,” he said, and the man nodded, still looking at his fiancée. “There’s some things we have to go over … about your case …”

  “Shut up,” Hillary said quietly. He stared at Charlotte and she stared at him. His nostrils seemed to swell as his breathing caught and changed. “Open your mouth,” he said to her, asking her more than telling her, and her lips came apart half an inch and her tongue wet the bottom one and then lingered just a moment in the corner.

  He nodded at her, slowly at first, and then the movement of his head was more pronounced, as if he were in a hurry, and then he closed his eyes and dropped his head over the back of his chair and shook.

  He sat completely still a moment, his eyes closed, his face calm and pink and damp, like a sleeping baby, and then a dark stain appeared on his trousers and grew across his lap onto his leg.

  I wondered if it would be like that when they electrocuted him.

  CHARLOTTE BLESS CRIED in the car on the way back. She sat in the front seat with me and rested her head against the open window, not caring now if the wind blew her hair. It was not a kind of crying you could hear, but the tears dripped off her nose and chin, and it shook her shoulders.

  It made sense to me that she would be crying; there seemed to be things to cry about, although I couldn’t have told you what any of them were.

  THE CASE AGAINST Hillary Van Wetter had taken three days to try in Moat County Court, and the transcript of that trial sat in boxes along the wall of my brother’s side of the office, marked in red ink with the numbers 11-A, 11-B, 11-C, 11-D, 11-E. The pages inside the boxes had been typed with a machine that blotted out the enclosed areas of the keys e, o, r, d, and b. The s apparently had required a harder strike than the others, and stood out on the pages like splattered mud. Whole paragraphs had been whited out and retyped, and it was impossible to make out the things that had been changed.

  Still, enough of it was unchanged.

  There was a newspaper story in these transcripts about justice in the rural South.

  And there was another newspaper story in the possibility that Sheriff Call, who had publicly killed sixteen Negroes and never been called to account for it, had met his own maker at the hands of someone who was never punished.

  The champions of social change who set the editorial course at the Miami Times, the South’s greatest newspaper, saw the beauty in that, in the irony, and it was the beauty of the story, not the injustice—there was enough of that to celebrate back in Miami—that in the end decided their commitment of money and time to Moat County.

  Yardley Acheman understood that better than my brother, I suppose, but then it was his job to see the beauty in these things. That was why he kept himself outside while my brother went in and recorded the details of ruin.

  Yardley Acheman sat at his desk now, scanning the portions of the transcript that my brother had underlined in green ink.

  The legal injury done to Hillary Van Wetter was clearly delineated in these underlined sections. The ineptitude of his attorney, Weldon Pine, was at least equaled by the ineptitude of the sheriff’s deputies who handled the evidence and the arrest. The knife and shirt which were found in Hillary Van Wetter’s kitchen sink, for instance, stained with blood, had been lost on the way back to the sheriff’s headquarters in Lately.

  The story that Hillary Van Wetter told the deputies that night—that he had been working earlier with his uncle Tyree—wa
s never investigated or explained. Hillary Van Wetter simply said it once from the witness stand and was never asked to elaborate, even on cross-examination.

  His uncle wasn’t subpoenaed, and did not attend the trial. Which is not to say that he would have appeared if he had been subpoenaed.

  To the Van Wetters, an arrest in the family was like a death. If you were gone, you were gone, and when news of that kind visited the family, they looked another way, not wanting to see it.

  YARDLEY ACHEMAN DROPPED a portion of the sheriff’s department’s arrest report on his desk and leaned back, perhaps having suddenly perceived that finding Tyree Van Wetter meant going into the wet regions of the county where the family lived, explaining newspapers to people who did not read them, who did not see how or why their lives belonged to anyone but themselves. People with knives and dogs, who hung animal skins from the trees in their yards.

  Yardley Acheman pushed his feet against the edge of his desk until his head touched the wall behind his chair. He could have been posing for a photograph.

  “I think we’ve got enough without the uncle,” he said.

  My brother looked up at him, waiting. Yardley Acheman began to nod, as if they were arguing. “We could write around the uncle,” he said. “We could get away with that.”

  My brother shook his head. He was not inclined to ignore what was inconvenient. He was not that kind of reporter. He wanted things clean.

  “All we’ve got to substantiate here is reasonable doubt,” Yardley Acheman said, sounding whiny. “We get into too much detail, it ruins the narrative flow.”

  “Let’s see where it goes,” my brother said, and went back to his work.

  ACCORDING TO THE REGULATIONS of the Florida state prison system, prisoners waiting to be executed could receive visitors who were not of their immediate families only with the permission of their attorneys.

  And so to visit Hillary Van Wetter again, we had to go back to Weldon Pine, who was less accommodating now that he understood the Miami Times’s only interest in his career was the trial and conviction of the most famous client he ever had.

  He left us waiting outside his office for an hour, and then opened the door, looked at us, and turned back inside, expecting us to follow him in.

  He sat down behind his desk and looked at his watch. His wrist was as thick as a leg. “I don’t see good intentions in this,” he said. “Building up a man’s hopes …”

  He turned to Charlotte suddenly and said, “Young lady, you are an attractive girl with your whole life ahead of you.…”

  He stopped and my brother spoke. “We need to talk to him again,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “He said he was working with his uncle.”

  Weldon Pine laughed out loud. “What was he out working on at night, Mr. Reporter?” he said. “You think I didn’t ask him that? You know what he said?” The old attorney shook his head. “You come all the way up here to find out what Hillary and his uncle was working on, you wasted your time and everybody else’s.”

  The air conditioner in the window shook and changed pitch.

  “We need to talk to him again,” my brother said.

  Weldon Pine thought it over and then lit a cigarette and picked up the telephone on his desk and told his secretary to get him the state prison.

  “I ought to charge you people by the damn hour,” he said.

  “I’D LIKE TO FOCUS your attention to the night Sheriff Call was killed,” my brother said.

  Hillary Van Wetter was sitting in manacles, staring at Charlotte. She was wearing a pair of blue jeans and a shirt that she’d tied in a knot just under her breasts.

  She had changed her hair twice on the ride from Lately, pulling it back into a ponytail once and then, a few miles later, disengaging the clasp holding it together and allowing it to fall more naturally across her shoulders. She checked herself that way in the rearview mirror and then took a can of hair spray out of her purse and went over it in small, circular motions, still looking in the mirror, until it glistened.

  An hour later, I could still taste hair spray.

  “Where’s your dress?” he said.

  She looked down at herself, surprised.

  “Mr. Van Wetter,” my brother said, “we only have fifteen minutes.…”

  Hillary Van Wetter turned to him then. “Paperboy,” he said, “I wisht you’d quit talking to me about time. It’s depressing.”

  “You testified in court you’d been working with your uncle.”

  “I did, did I?” he said, and turned back to her. “Everybody in this place wears pants,” he said. “I like a dress.”

  He fixed his attention for a moment on Yardley Acheman, who was sitting near the door and had been watching Charlotte, trying her on for size in some way until Hillary Van Wetter caught him at it. Something about the room or Hillary stirred Yardley’s interest in her.

  Charlotte nodded at Hillary and smiled, doing both those things slowly, drawing his attention away from Yardley Acheman.

  “There ain’t no point to come see me looking like that,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and he looked away.

  In the silence that followed my brother said, “What kind of work were you doing?”

  Hillary Van Wetter looked at him without answering.

  “What were you out doing at night?” my brother said.

  Hillary shook his head.

  “Lawn work,” he said finally.

  Yardley Acheman sat up in his chair. “As in grass?” A smile played at the corners of his mouth. “Where?”

  Hillary Van Wetter turned to Charlotte again before he answered him, staring at her until she crossed her arms, covering herself against him. “It ain’t that hard to find,” he said.

  Then, without changing anything, he was speaking to her. “You wear a dress next time, hear?” he said.

  “All right,” she said quietly.

  “I need to find your uncle,” my brother said.

  Hillary Van Wetter stood up, the chain connecting his leg irons dropping onto the bare floor. “Yessir, well, good luck on that,” he said, and then he started toward the door, walking like a man whose trousers have dropped around his feet, without another look at Charlotte.

  “Where is he?” my brother said.

  Hillary walked to the door to be let out.

  “Mr. Van Wetter? Can you tell me how to get to his place?”

  He turned and looked at my brother again. “You got a boat, paperboy?”

  My brother shook his head.

  “Then I can’t tell you how to get there.”

  And then the guard opened the door. “You entitled to another seven minutes,” he said.

  Hillary Van Wetter shuffled past him and out of the room. “I been visited as many minutes today as I can stand,” he said.

  SHE SAT IN THE CORNER of the backseat on the way back, where I couldn’t see her in the mirror. Yardley Acheman was back there too, and he lit two cigarettes and gave one to her.

  She took it the same way it was offered, without a word, and when she drew the smoke into her lungs, I could hear the catching in her breath.

  “Tell me something, will you?” Yardley Acheman said. “What do you want with them?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “All these boys on death row, writing all those letters,” he said. “What do you want?”

  “I want to help them,” she said, and he laughed out loud.

  EACH NIGHT AFTER WORK I drove back to Thorn and my father’s house, always thinking of Charlotte Bless. You may have seen dogs rolling on something dead in the grass, wanting the scent in their coats. That was the way I wanted her.

  I saw myself in competition with Hillary Van Wetter. I was taller and in better shape and had better teeth, and I wanted her as much even if I had yet to ejaculate in my pants just sitting with her in a room.

  The Chrysler was always in the driveway when I got home. My father was preoccupied with things at
his newspaper, and he often walked away from the car with the keys in the ignition and the door wide open. To someone approaching the house, it would resemble an emergency.

  It was dark this particular night, and the small dome light inside had attracted insects. I felt them as I reached in to take the keys out of his ignition, like cold ashes, all over my arm. Dinner was over and my father was sitting in his chair, a glass of wine on the table next to him, going through his papers.

  “I believe she left you a plate in the oven,” he said, not remembering Anita Chester’s name.

  He followed me into the kitchen, bringing his wine, to watch me eat.

  “How is Mr. Van Wetter?” he asked, making a small joke.

  I said I didn’t know, and that was the truth.

  “Still innocent?”

  I shook my head, and that was the truth too. And then my father sat still and waited, as he often did these days, and in the waiting I found myself talking. It was a reporter’s trick, I’d seen Ward use it on the attorney Weldon Pine.

  I told him what Ward and Yardley Acheman had done that day, what they had said in their office. Much of it was about Mr. Pine and his defense of Hillary Van Wetter. Weldon Pine and my father were casual friends, sharing a prominence in Moat County society.

  “The man’s reputed to be the best lawyer in the state,” he said, and I shook my head, as if I didn’t understand any of it either. But I had seen enough of what was inside the boxes holding the trial transcript now to know that he hadn’t done much to help Hillary Van Wetter.

  He made no issue of the knife and bloody clothes that the sheriff’s department had taken from the kitchen and then lost on the way back to Lately. He hadn’t found Hillary’s uncle; there was no sign that he’d even tried.

  “It might be,” my father said, “that Weldon Pine knew what he was doing.”

  “It doesn’t look like he did anything,” I said.

  And then, in the long moments that followed, I realized that my father hadn’t done anything either. His paper had covered the trial without reference to Sheriff Call’s record of violence against the Negroes of Moat County. While the sheriff had been alive, my father had fought him as hard as he could, but on his death even the Tribune’s routine plea for a convicted killer’s life was never issued.