The Paperboy

by Pete Dexter

  “Weldon Pine is a respected and beloved man,” he said. “You do not earn that overnight.”

  I didn’t argue with him, understanding that he was talking of himself as much as Mr. Pine. I ate my dinner, he sipped at his wine. An unopened copy of the Daytona Beach News-Journal lay on the table next to his arm, but he had forgotten it was there. He was joyless.

  “Do you see much of this Yardley Acheman?” he said.

  I nodded, my mouth was full of food.

  “He’s older, right?”

  “He’s older than Ward,” I said.

  “What, thirty-five, forty?”

  “Maybe thirty-five, I don’t know.”

  My father weighed that, and then finished what was in his glass. “What was he doing all that time before they put them together?” he said. “He’s been at the Times a long while.”

  “I don’t know what he does now,” I said. “Ward’s doing all the work. I think Yardley’s supposed to be the writer.”

  My father nodded. It made sense to him that one of them would do the work and the other one would be the writer. He stood up and went to the refrigerator and poured another glass of wine. “You wonder who’s supposed to be in charge,” he said after he sat back down.

  He said it as if one of them had gotten the other one lost.

  MR. PINE DECIDED he did not want us visiting his client again. “I believe it’s time to leave the man have his privacy,” he said, pained but kind.

  “Mr. Pine,” my brother began, “Mr. Acheman and I have a considerable amount of work left to do, work that is in Mr. Van Wetter’s interests.”

  The old man sighed. “I’ve done the work,” he said. “The appeals been filed and rejected.” He paused, as if the weight were too heavy. “With all due respect, gentlemen, there isn’t a thing your newspaper can do for the man that I couldn’t. His options been exhausted, and it don’t do him any favors to raise his expectations.”

  “You haven’t seen him one time since the trial,” Charlotte Bless said. It was the first time she had spoken to Mr. Pine without being spoken to first, and the insult crossed his face as if he’d been slapped.

  “The fiancée,” he said.

  She stood up, and moved to his desk. “What I am,” she said, “is the only damn one in this room that cares what happens to Hillary Van Wetter.”

  He looked at her, taking in her clothes and demeanor, dismissing them and her all in one glance. “Vulgarities do not flatter a woman,” he said.

  “There are areas left to be explored,” my brother said.

  Weldon Pine turned the same look on him. “Is that your legal opinion, Mr. James?” he said.

  “I’ve got a legal opinion for you,” Yardley Acheman said quietly. “Hillary Van Wetter was entitled to a competent defense.”

  “You don’t know one thing about this person,” the old man said. “You been in this world five minutes.”

  And then he stood up and walked to the door and held it open. Slowly, my brother began to nod.

  “All right,” he said. “If we could just ask you a few questions …”

  “What for?”

  “For the newspaper.”

  The old man shook his head. “No comment. That’s my answer, no comment.” He pointed at the open door.

  “You already commented,” Yardley Acheman said.

  “Everything you’ve said to us since we met is a comment.”

  “Not for the newspaper,” he said. “I am putting you on notice that anything I said was only informational, an effort to be helpful. Not for attribution of any sort. You are on notice.…”

  He seemed to get weaker the longer he went on.

  “In fairness,” my brother said, ignoring what he’d said, “I’d like to give you the chance to answer the questions.” He had them written down inside his notebook. The old man stood at the open door, torn between wanting us out and wanting to hear the questions. In the quiet, my brother began to read.

  “Why was the prosecutor in Mr. Van Wetter’s case never called to account for the missing weapon?” he said.

  The old man stood still, waiting.

  “Why was the prosecutor in Mr. Van Wetter’s case never called to account for the missing bloodstained clothing?”

  Weldon Pine stared across the room as if across a great distance. As if he were watching a dark sky rolling in.

  “What efforts,” my brother said, “did you make to locate Mr. Van Wetter’s uncle, Tyree Van Wetter?”

  The old man looked away from my brother then, taking in each of us around the room.

  “What efforts did you make to ascertain Mr. Van Wetter’s whereabouts on the night Sheriff Call was murdered?”

  The old man watched the storm coming in, and then, helpless against it, he suddenly slipped through the door, as if stepping inside his house to wait it out. My brother continued to ask his last questions in Weldon Pine’s absence.

  “What efforts did you make,” he said, “to secure a change of venue for Mr. Van Wetter’s trial?”

  Later in the afternoon, Mr. Pine reconsidered. His secretary called my brother and said that he was welcome to see Hillary Van Wetter again.

  Ward went alone into the prison, and was back in the car in ten minutes, carrying Hillary’s signed request for a change of attorneys in his shirt pocket. Without Charlotte in the room, Ward said, Hillary was a more reasonable man.

  EARLY THE FOLLOWING WEEK, an Orlando attorney on retainer to the Miami Times filed a form with the court and became Hillary Van Wetter’s attorney of record, replacing Weldon Pine.

  Weldon Pine was informed of this action by mail, and appeared in the doorway of my brother’s office on a Friday afternoon, his shirtsleeves buttoned at the wrist, pale and damp with sweat, holding the notification in his hand.

  Yardley Acheman looked up from the magazine in his lap, stared at the old attorney a minute, then went back to his reading. Weldon Pine walked in, uninvited, and had a look around. He seemed huge. My brother replaced some papers he’d taken from two boxes behind him and stood up. We were raised to be respectful of our elders.

  “Mr. Pine,” he said.

  The old man didn’t answer at first; he was still taking in the room and the furniture and the three people in it. Charlotte was not there that afternoon; she had gone to Jacksonville to buy a dress.

  “I have practiced the law more years than you been alive,” Weldon Pine said slowly, speaking to us all. “I have been a good friend to the court.”

  He came in another step or two, the fan on the floor blew the papers he was holding back over his hand.

  “I defended every type of criminal personality there is, and until yesterday afternoon …” He paused, taking a moment to reflect on the moment the papers had arrived. “ … no client, no court, no judge has ever asked me to remove myself from a case.” His voice had begun to shake.

  “That is an amazing statistic,” Yardley Acheman said, still looking at his magazine.

  The old man considered him again, considered us all. The only noise in the room was the fan.

  “And now,” he said, “people that don’t know who I am are saying I don’t know how to do my job.” My brother stood by the corner of his desk and waited for the rest, but the old man seemed out of things to say.

  “Nobody has to know,” Yardley Acheman said, closing the magazine and sitting back in his chair. “It’s only as public as you make it.”

  The old man waited. The fan moved across the room, ruffling the papers in his hand again.

  “In forty-six years, this never happened once.…”

  Yardley Acheman shrugged. “People change attorneys all the time.”

  “They don’t change Weldon Pine,” the old man said.

  Yardley said, “Who’s going to know?” He looked quickly at my brother, and then said, “We don’t need a lot of people poking around into Hillary Van Wetter’s business right now, so unless you want to raise hell about it in court …”

  “I want
to keep hold of what’s mine,” the old man snapped. “I worked for it all my life.”

  “We don’t want what’s yours,” Yardley Acheman said.

  “There is nothing you have that we want.”

  The old man looked at the papers in his hand, and then, without changing expression, dropped them on the floor. He turned and walked out without another word.

  His footsteps on the stairs were unsure; I pictured his death grip on the handrail. “Nothing to worry about,” Yardley said.

  My brother got up and went to the window to watch Weldon Pine walk to his car.

  “We’ve still got it all to ourselves,” Yardley said. My brother did not answer. “Take my word for it, the man is not going to contest this in court. He doesn’t want to paste it in his scrapbook that he’s incompetent.”

  “You never know,” Ward said. “He seems hard-headed.…”

  Yardley Acheman said, “He isn’t that kind of hard-headed, not when it threatens him.”

  YARDLEY ACHEMAN WAS RIGHT about Weldon Pine.

  He was often right about people, as he always expected the worst. The request for new counsel went uncontested by Mr. Pine, and was routinely accepted by the court, and Hillary Van Wetter changed lawyers without public notice. Weldon Pine absorbed the insult privately and went back to work as the most beloved lawyer in Moat County, believing his unfortunate association with us and Hillary Van Wetter was a closed matter.

  I sometimes wonder, looking back on his long and fruitful association with the black side of human nature, what he could have been thinking.

  DURING THESE INITIAL WEEKS in Lately, there was not much for me to do. I picked up my brother and Yardley Acheman at the Prescott Hotel in the morning and delivered them back to the Prescott at night. If records were needed from the courthouse—Ward had begun looking into both the sheriff’s and the state’s attorney’s budgets—or books from the library, I would get them. I drove Ward to the scene of Sheriff Call’s killing half a dozen times, and often we went from there to the dirt road which led back into the wetlands where the Van Wetters lived. We never saw their houses, although he had some intuitive sense of where they were. Perhaps they had been pointed out to him from the river, back in the days when my father was still trying to turn us into bass fishermen.

  On the days we stayed in the office, it was my job to go for sandwiches and keep the refrigerator stocked with Busch beer, which Yardley Acheman began drinking before lunch.

  He did not have much to do either.

  The beer made Yardley moody, and some afternoons, when it had taken him the wrong way, he would call his fiancée in Miami and confess that he was incapable of fidelity. A discussion would follow, as if the failings of Yardley Acheman’s character could be changed by debate, and about five minutes later he would begin asking the girl why she was crying, and then she would hang up on him, and he would look at the phone a moment before he dropped it back into the receiver, and then walk over to the refrigerator and get another beer.

  “Women …” he would say.

  Some afternoons I drank beer with him, some afternoons I didn’t.

  Later in the day, he would call her again and initiate a conversation pertaining to the details of their upcoming wedding. It was his way of making up. What the bridesmaids would wear, who would be invited to the reception, who would come to the ceremony itself. The girl came from a Palm Beach family and her wedding plans were conceived in the context of a grand social event.

  Yardley had no objections to her family or her family’s money, but arguments did develop over the vows they were writing together, and before long he was exasperated again, insisting on minutiae that no man I had ever met except Yardley Acheman would have an opinion on anyway, and then a few minutes later he would be asking her again why she was crying.

  Yardley hated to be edited—newspaper stories or wedding vows, it was all the same insult.

  On the days I was drinking beer too, I would sit in the window and openly watch, listen to his end of the conversations, wondering what sort of disfigurement the woman had that would make her still willing to marry him after his behavior on the telephone.

  I had almost no experience with women then, and it had not occurred to me yet that some of them were as pathetic as any of us.

  On days when I wasn’t drinking, I found something to do in the office while Yardley Acheman and his fiancée were fighting it out. I would straighten the boxes against the wall or sweep the floor. My brother sat at his desk, making notes on the papers in front of him, and occasionally—when the argument got too poisonous—he would pick up his own telephone and make a call, removing himself from what was going on in the room.

  But while Yardley Acheman’s love entanglements embarrassed my brother, and embarrassed me when I was not drinking, they did not embarrass Yardley Acheman at all, and after she hung up on him, he would always offer some comment that seemed to invite us into the argument.

  “What is the broad thinking?”

  IT IS A FAIR representation of the situation to say that at this time there were four people at work, one way or another, at something only one of them could do. My brother needed to have the story all in his head before he could see where it went, and the rest of us were only waiting until he was ready.

  My own most pressing business was not driving the car or running errands, but keeping Charlotte Bless away from the office. Ward and Yardley Acheman needed her accessible for meetings with Hillary Van Wetter—Hillary had made it clear that he had no use whatsoever for us without her—but her visits to the office were tedious, circular, and, at times, close to evangelical in nature.

  It was Charlotte’s habit to drop in after lunch, blowing through the doorway smelling of perfume in some new dress or another, calling us to our purpose, the saving of an innocent life. She did not wear jeans again after Hillary Van Wetter walked out of the room during our second visit, not even to the office over the Moat Cafe.

  It began with the same breathless question, every day.

  “Anything new?”

  There was never anything new, at least not in the way that she meant it. The governor did not call to pronounce Hillary innocent, and my brother worked his way through the documents again more slowly, collecting bits and pieces as he came to them, and then moving it all ahead to whatever was next, as if he were sweeping a floor.

  “We’ve got to hurry this up,” she would say, going to the window. “Every night Hillary Van Wetter lies in that prison is a night off his life.”

  Once, after she’d said that, Yardley Acheman asked Charlotte if she had thought of writing a country western song about it, but more often he simply refused to acknowledge that she was in the room, although she was clearly addressing herself to him more than my brother or me. She seemed to think he was in charge.

  When Charlotte started talking about the nights Hillary Van Wetter was losing in prison, it was time for me to take her away. If I didn’t, she would begin walking around the room, looking into the boxes of files or the papers on my brother’s desk, and every paper she touched was a starting point for a review of the case.

  It could take half an hour to wait her out, and beyond the distraction itself, my brother did not like the papers touched after he laid them down. A kind of indexing was always going on in his head, and he needed things to lie still and undisturbed to accomplish it.

  On the other hand, the papers—many of them, anyway—belonged to Charlotte, and he could not find a way to tell her to leave them alone. She was as childish in many ways as Yardley Acheman, and she had staked first claim to Hillary Van Wetter, and would not subordinate herself in the matter of saving his life to lawyers, reporters, or anyone else. I suppose she was afraid of losing him entirely.

  IT WAS MY INTENTION to save Charlotte Bless from drowning in the ocean.

  I had no plan to make it necessary, but I daydreamed of saving her, and of her gratitude at having been lifted, terrified, from the ocean and set down in the warm, sa
fe sand of the beach. I thought of the texture of her skin when she was wet, and of the jumpy feel of her muscles when she was helpless and panicked.

  But I could barely get her into the water.

  Two or three afternoons a week, she would go with me to the beach at St. Augustine, but she went to tan her legs for Hillary, and got into the water only to cool off. And even then it was only knee deep, always keeping one hand on top of the straw hat she wore to protect her face and neck.

  She seemed vaguely interested in my swimming, but had no interest in learning herself.

  And so we would drive to St. Augustine and park the car and walk down to the beach, and I would take off my shirt and pants and swim straight out, conscious of my form, as if that mattered to her, and she would lay a towel across the hot sand, and then undress—we wore our suits underneath our clothes—and lie down, turn on her radio, and cover her face with the straw hat.

  When I came back, I would drop into the sand next to her, out of breath, and study the lines of her body. Her skin was barely puffy against the elastic of her suit, there was no flesh hanging off her when she turned to lie on her stomach.

  Her suit was one-piece, cut deeply in back to the exact spot where the line separating her buttocks began. It fit her cheeks as if it had melted over them, riding down into the crack. There was no angle of her bottom that did not strike me as beautiful, and lying in the sand next to her, feeling my breath against my arm, I would also feel the growing weight of my erection, and then I would roll onto my stomach too, so that she wouldn’t see the effect she had on me.

  I had a sense that she would feel betrayed.

  No, I didn’t know anything about women at all.