The Paperboy

by Pete Dexter

  On our third or fourth visit to St. Augustine, she pulled the straps off her shoulders and handed me her lotion.

  “I hate strap marks,” she said.

  It was the first time, I think, I’d ever touched her. Her skin was cool and my hand slid from her shoulders down her back, and finally stopped at the bottom of her suit, where her body divided and rose into perfect cheeks. My hand stayed in that place a moment, and then she lifted her head and looked at me, as if to ask what I thought I was doing.

  “They look so ignorant,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Strap marks. They look like white trash.”

  I put the top back on the lotion and stuck it into the sand. Without straightening up, I dropped back onto my towel. I had reached a condition, rubbing lotion over Charlotte Bless’s back, that was a spasm short of Hillary Van Wetter’s jailhouse ejaculation, which is to say you could have put a propeller on the thing and flown it.

  “You’re breathing through your mouth,” she said a few minutes later, watching me.

  “It was a long swim,” I said.

  And she smiled behind her dark glasses and turned her head away from the sun.

  “You need a girlfriend,” she said, still looking the other way. When I didn’t answer, she picked her head up again and looked around, spotting half a dozen girls sitting around a cooler of beer. They were behind us perhaps forty feet, at the border of the beach where the tall grass began. Pink toenails and radios. They looked like sorority girls to me, the way they drank their beer.

  “You ought to go over there and make friends,” she said, teasing me in some way.

  “I don’t like girls like that,” I said.

  She lowered her sunglasses on her nose and looked over them at the girls again. “I’ll bet you’d like that one in the red,” she said. I couldn’t think of a thing to say. She said, “Go over there and pick out one that bites her nails, and she’ll blow you. I promise.”

  “I don’t want anybody to blow me,” I said, and she looked at me, vaguely disappointed. I remembered what she’d written then, about Hillary Van Wetter wanting himself sucked just like a judge. An intact man.

  “It’s not that I don’t want it,” I said, making the correction, “I just don’t want any of them to do it.”

  She considered that a long time. “It’s a good thing you’re not in prison,” she said finally, bringing it back to Hillary. “You wouldn’t have any choice in there.”

  “I can take care of myself,” I said.

  She smiled and dropped her cheek back onto the towel and I got up, angry and coated in sand, and followed my cock—which for the first half of my life was always stiff and pointed in the wrong direction—back out into the water and began to swim. I was two hundred yards out, feeling strong and angry, feeling as if I were riding the very top of the water, like the flames in an oil fire, when I realized suddenly why the metaphor had suddenly come to mind. I was on fire.

  I stopped in the water and looked around, the burning feeling moving across me like air from a fan as it scans the room. A certain chill followed behind the movement, and it took my breath. Half a dozen translucent jellyfish floated just under the surface, several in front, that many more behind me in the water I had just come through.

  I lifted one of my arms, dropping deeper into the water, and saw that tentacles had broken off the jellyfish and wrapped around it, crossing over themselves like whips. The burning passed over me again; I felt distinctly cold.

  I turned and began to swim. The burning did not change as I went through the jellyfish again, but a few yards beyond them I noticed a heaviness in my arms, and then in my chest, and I thought it would sink me. I rolled over onto my back to rest and realized that something was wrong with my breathing.

  I kicked slowly, listening to the sound of the air passing through my mouth, unable to pull it deeply enough inside. I closed my eyes and kicked, thinking that I might be dying, and a long time later the water turned warm, and I knew that it was shallow and that I was not going to drown.

  When I felt the bottom, I sat down a moment, collecting myself, and then turned onto my hands and knees, crawling from the water to the beach, and then made it to my feet, dizzier than I had ever been, and walked toward Charlotte Bless, who was still lying facedown and strapless on her towel.

  It was one of the girls drinking beer near the weeds who noticed me first. I heard her say, “My God.” I looked down at myself then and understood the dimensions of the poisoning. The tentacles were embedded in my arms and legs, the skin around each of them was raised and pink. Necklaces, I thought.

  I heard the girls coming, but when I looked up I couldn’t see. I rubbed at my eyes and the lids were in the wrong place, swollen out beyond the bone of the brow. I tried to step again and fell.

  The sun was warm and I began to shake. “He’s having an allergic reaction,” one of them said. She came over to me, blocking out the sun, so close I could smell the beer on her breath. “Can you hear me?” she said. “We’ll get an ambulance.…”

  I felt one of the girls scrubbing my leg with sand. And then someone else had my arm and was doing the same thing.

  “I know it hurts,” said the one over me. “I’m a nurse.”

  “What’s wrong with him?” It was Charlotte’s voice.

  “He’s having an allergic reaction,” said the one who seemed to be in charge. “He must have got into some jellyfish out there.”

  One of them was still scrubbing sand into my thigh. I heard her, a long way off. “Jesus, look at this stuff.…”

  And then the one over me was talking again, calmly.

  “Can you hear me?” Her voice faded. “What’s his name?”

  “Jack,” Charlotte said, sounding timid.

  “Jack,” she said, closer again, “we’re getting an ambulance. Can you hear me?”

  The ground began to turn under me, slowly at first and then faster. “Listen, honey,” said the one in charge, “we’ve got to do something a little embarrassing here.”

  I did not try to answer, and then I felt them pulling my bathing suit off, turning it inside out as it rolled down my legs. “Just hold on,” she said, and then she stood up, the light of the sun turned everything red, and a moment later I felt a gentle trickle moving up my leg, as if one of them were washing me with a warm beer.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Charlotte said, still scared. There was no answer—these were trained nurses—but the first trickle died and then another of them blocked the sun and I felt it again, this time on my chest, moving from my stomach almost to my neck. I distinctly smelled urine.

  “Lie still,” said the one in charge. “We’ve sent for an ambulance.”

  I sat up anyway, dizzy and sick. The sting—some of it, at least—had gone out of the places where they had urinated.

  “Honey,” said the one who was in charge, “it’s on your face too. Would you rather we didn’t urinate on your face?”

  The real meaning of such a question, of course, is not in the question itself but in what it implies—that one moment you could be in perfect form, right on top of the water, riding the tops of the waves, and the next moment could be lying blind and helpless on a beach being asked if you would prefer not having strangers urinate in your face.

  “No,” I said, “don’t do that.” My lips were swollen now too, thick and stiff; the words sounded as if they were coming out of someone old.

  “What did he say?” one of them asked.

  “I think he’s out of it,” said the one in charge. Then, to someone else, “Go ahead.” And then another one of them was urinating from my shoulder down my arm all the way to my hand. I lay back down, glistening in the sun.

  “I never heard of anything like this,” Charlotte was saying.

  “He’s poisoned,” said the one in charge. “He’s poisoned and he’s having an allergic reaction.”

  “I can see he’s poisoned,” Charlotte said. “But you don’t pis
s on somebody after they’ve been bit by a snake.”

  I remember thinking, You suck on them. Which, of course, was where I came in.

  I heard the ambulance then, a long ways off. I heard voices in the siren.

  THE DOCTOR WAS OBESE, I saw that when he held open my eyelids to study the pupils. He examined my eyes with a small light, first one, then the other, then took the light away and considered my face, as if to estimate the problem for a moment in its entirety. He smelled of cigars.

  And then he dropped my eyelid and the room was dark.

  “Give me some epi,” he said.

  “How much?”

  “A vial, give me the damn vial, I’ll do it myself.…” It was a quiet moment, and then he said, “Come on, come on. If we lose this one it’s going to be embarrassing.”

  And then I felt a coolness on my chest as he washed a spot with alcohol, and then a slow, spreading sting as he pushed a needle down through it into my chest.

  I slept.

  I AWOKE IN A dark room. A wedge of light from the door lay across the floor, and the sheet covering me from the chest down glowed a faint green from the heart monitor at the side of the bed. There was a needle in the back of my hand, connected to a bottle of liquid suspended overhead. The green, uneven line of the heart monitor reflected more distinctly in that.

  I blinked and my eyes felt thick and unfamiliar, but were no longer swollen shut. They were dry, though, and they stung. I sat up a little in bed and knew I was all right.

  “Jack?”

  My brother was sitting in the darkest part of the room, in a chair beneath the heart monitor where little of the light from it or the door reached. He was wearing a white shirt and a tie; his bus ticket was stuck into his shirt pocket. I saw the word Trailways. In the darkness, his face was hollow. I was chilled and began to shake.

  “Jesus, it’s cold,” I said.

  He stood up and came to the side of the bed. In a moment, I felt the weight of a blanket, and, a moment behind that, the warmth. “The doctor said you might have another allergic reaction,” he said. “They’ve got you hooked up to something here to keep you from going into shock.”

  I felt another chill. “I got pretty sick,” I said.

  Ward nodded, the monitor dancing in his eyes, and then he looked away. I was chilled again—the cold seemed to be coming from the bottle overhead—and when it passed, I was profoundly, unaccountably sad. It was as if I had fainted from some bad piece of news and was just coming back now, where it was waiting. The sadness lay over me like the blanket and gathered in my throat, and without warning I was suddenly blinking tears. Ward saw them, and for a moment he seemed about to touch me. I think he wanted to, but in the end he turned and sat back down on the chair.

  “You had a bad time of it,” he said in the dark. “That takes a lot out of you.”

  “Not too much,” I said. And that was true, but it had done something else, and I didn’t have a word for it. My brother didn’t have the words either, and we sat listening to the sound of the machine monitoring my heart.

  THERE WAS A PICTURE of the emergency room doctor on the front page of the St. Augustine Record on the morning I got out of the hospital. It was above the fold, where you could see it as you passed the honor box. He was posed outside the emergency room entrance, his coat straining at the buttons, a cigar between his teeth. Smiling.

  Charlotte had come over to pick me up, bringing clean clothes and a razor and a comb. She waited while I showered and dressed, and then took my arm as we walked through the door. She was still holding it when I saw the picture and stopped.

  “What is it?” she said.

  Above the doctor’s picture, across the top of the page, was the headline FAST ACTION SAVES THORN MAN AT BEACH.

  “What’s wrong now?” she said.

  I did not open the paper until we were in the van and moving.

  Five nursing students from Jacksonville and the emergency staff of St. Johns County Hospital combined Wednesday to save the life of a 19-year-old member of the University of Florida’s swimming team who suffered an allergic reaction to jellyfish bites while swimming in the ocean.

  “Those girls deserve most of the credit,” said Dr. William Polk. “Mr. [Jack]James [the victim] was a very lucky young man that they happened to be on the beach.”

  I closed the paper and closed my eyes. Charlotte stopped at a traffic light. “What?” she said. And when I didn’t answer, she put her hand on my leg, just above the knee, and left it there. “Are you sick?”

  “How did they know I was on the swimming team?” I said.

  “They came to the hospital,” she said.

  “You told them?”

  She watched the traffic light, leaving her hand on my leg. “It seemed germane,” she said.

  I shook my head, more aware now of the weight of the newspaper on my leg than her hand next to it. She patted my leg and moved her hand back to the wheel. “You shouldn’t read in the car,” she said. “It makes you carsick.”

  A few miles farther west, I opened the paper and looked at the picture of the doctor again. I could smell the cigar, and the sweet, greasy odor that came off him in the intensive care room when he dropped in to see how I was doing. He was one of those doctors who also function as local characters—and consider themselves, and all their odors, beloved.

  The students apparently saved Mr. James by urinating over the many areas of his body which were attacked.

  “The boy’s arms and legs were covered with stings,” Dr. Polk said, “as well as his back and chest, buttocks, genitals and face.”

  “Dear Jesus,” I said, and closed the paper again.

  “I told you not to read in the car,” she said.

  THAT WASN’T ALL.

  The story of my being saved at the beach by nursing students who urinated on me was noticed by an editor at the Associated Press office in Orlando who condensed it into six paragraphs and added it to the day’s national wire stories. In this form, it went out over the Associated Press wire service to the offices of fifteen hundred newspapers across the United States and Canada, where other editors trimmed it for reasons of length and taste, put a humorous headline over the top, and ran it as a sort of antidote to the bad news of the day.

  HOME REMEDY SAVES BEACHED SWIMMER.

  That particular headline, while not the most embarrassing one I saw, was the most memorable, running, as it did, in my own father’s newspaper. I do not know if my father saw the headline or the story before it ran. It was not the sort of story that would ordinarily be brought to his attention, although if his managing editor had noticed my name, she would have come to him for permission before running it.

  It was brought to my attention by Yardley Acheman. I walked into the office the morning following my release from the hospital and he said, “Congratulations, Jack, you made the paper.”

  “I know.”

  I crossed the room to the window to sit down. I was tired of Yardley Acheman and tired of waiting around the office for my brother to finish what he was doing. I was thinking that if I had to be in the newspaper business, I’d rather go back to driving a truck.

  “Not just St. Augustine,” he said, smiling at me now, and then he picked up the Moat County Tribune.

  “Home remedy,” he said, and handed me the paper.

  I walked over and took the paper out of his hand, and then I turned to my brother, who had laid the entire trial transcript across his desk and on the floor that morning as if he were drying the pages, and stared at him until he looked up.

  “What’s he trying to do to me?” I said, meaning the old man.

  “It’s called the newspaper business,” Yardley Acheman said, behind me. My brother blinked, still caught somewhere in the transcript of Hillary Van Wetter’s trial, and the next thing Yardley Acheman said—I don’t remember what it was, only his presumption that he could put himself into the middle of the private matters of my family—I turned and threw the newspaper in his face.


  And then he stood up and came around the desk furious, a little speck of white spit coming off his lips, pointing his finger at my face, and I remember the look of bewilderment that replaced the other expression when I pushed his finger aside and grabbed his hair, and then his neck. He had no strength at all. And then I had him in a headlock on the floor, and I squeezed his head until all the noise coming out of it stopped, and then I noticed Ward bending over me, completely calm, a foot or two away, telling me to let him go.

  “Jack,” he said, “c’mon, you’re going to mess everything up.”

  “Everything’s already messed up,” I said, and I was crying.

  He said, “I’m talking about the papers,” and turned around to remind me that he had arranged them across the floor. A moment passed, and I let go of Yardley Acheman’s head, hearing a popping sound either in his head or my arm, and then leaned back against the wall and caught my breath.

  Yardley Acheman got to his feet. His ears were bright red, and a patch of his skin over his eyebrows was scraped. He was shaking. “You are fucking crazy,” he said. Then he looked at my brother. “I want him out of here.” Ward didn’t answer.

  “He’s a time bomb,” Yardley Acheman said. “The next thing, he’ll be in here with a shotgun.”

  My brother looked at him, up and down. “He’s all right now,” he said quietly.

  “He goes or I go.”

  My brother went back to his desk and found his place in the transcript of the trial. I thought about what Yardley had said, thinking he was probably wrong about the shotgun, and then I thought about my father, wondering if he had seen the story before it ran, and then realized it was something I would never ask him. I did not want to be lectured on the price we pay for freedom of the press.

  “Did you understand what I said, Ward?” Yardley was back behind his desk now, calmer, rubbing at his ears. The scraped place on his forehead was more defined than it had been, it had raised and turned faintly blue at the edges. “I want him completely the fuck out of here, do you understand?”

  My brother gave no sign that he understood any such thing.