by Pete Dexter
I looked out the window and watched Charlotte park her van and cross the street to the office. She wore a yellow skirt, and her behind fit it like something dropped into the bottom of a soft sack. Yardley Acheman picked up the telephone and dialed a number. I sat still.
In the immediate aftermath of a wrestling match on the floor of my brother’s office, while I was still trying to decide if it was possible that I would come into this place someday with a shotgun, I suddenly pictured her behind pressed into the bottom of a satin bag, a green bag with drawstrings at the top, about the size of a pants pocket, or a scrotum, and imagining that, and the solid weight of the thing loaded in this way, I felt a familiar stirring, and took that as a sign that I was myself again.
“I’m calling Miami,” Yardley said.
SHE CAME INTO THE office as Yardley was telling his editor what had happened.
“He fucking tried to kill me,” he said.
She sat down on the chair near my brother’s desk and inspected herself in a mirror from her purse. One side, then the other; touching her hair, running a finger along some line beneath her eye. We were going to see Hillary again that afternoon, and she was worried about her appearance.
She closed the mirror, miserable, then looked at me for help.
“You look fine,” I said, and she studied me a moment, still welty from the jellyfish, considering the source.
“Will somebody please get him laid?” she said.
“No, right here in the office,” Yardley said into the phone. “I can’t write in an atmosphere where I don’t know when somebody’s going to go off the deep end and strangle me.…”
Charlotte took that in, noticing the scrape on Yardley’s forehead, and then took the compact back out of her purse, opened it, and looked at herself again. “Did you strangle him?” she said, checking her forehead for scrapes.
“No,” I said, “we only wrestled.”
“That’s exactly right,” Yardley said into the phone. “I don’t have to put up with this shit. Not from him, not from anybody.…”
For a moment, the room was still while Yardley listened to the editor on the other end of the phone. I could hear the voice, but not the words. When it stopped, Yardley took the phone away from his ear and spoke to my brother.
“He wants to talk to you,” he said.
“Who?” my brother said.
“Miami,” he said. He seemed irritated my brother wasn’t paying more attention. “I told you I was calling Miami.…”
Ward got up, reluctant to leave the transcript, and crossed the room to Yardley’s desk and took the phone.
“This is Ward James,” he said. He stood completely still as he listened; he could have been waiting for the correct time. Charlotte put the mirror back again and inspected Yardley Acheman while my brother listened to the phone.
“All he needs is to get laid,” she said finally.
“He needs a fucking straitjacket,” Yardley said, feeling more removed all the time from that moment he was helpless on the floor.
“He’s oversexed,” she said.
Yardley Acheman seemed to consider that, and then turned on her. “Oversexed is a forty-year-old woman that dresses up like she’s eighteen,” he said, and the room was suddenly so still I could almost make out the words coming through the receiver into my brother’s ear.
My brother broke the silence. “No,” he said into the telephone, and then hung it up. Then he walked back across the room and stared at his desk, trying to remember where he was.
“So?” Yardley Acheman said.
My brother sat down, looking for something now.
“He goes or I go,” Yardley said.
And my brother looked at him a long time and then said it again. “No.”
And in some way I did not understand, he had closed the door on it.
“If he ever touches me again …” Yardley said, but my brother wasn’t listening. Charlotte turned to me and winked.
WE WERE BACK IN the interview room with Hillary Van Wetter again that afternoon, and my brother was trying to get him to remember where he had been stealing lawns on the night Sheriff Call was killed.
“What town was it?” he said. “Can you remember the town?”
Hillary smiled at the question, and answered without taking his eyes off Charlotte Bless. “It could be a thousand places,” he said. And then, as if it had some secret meaning between himself and Charlotte, he said, “There’s lawns to be mowed and ashes to be hauled everywhere in the world.” He smiled at her and she smiled back.
Yardley Acheman, sitting against the wall, closed his eyes as if he were too tired to continue.
“Could it have been Orlando?” my brother asked. He had called police departments all over the north-central part of the state, asking about lawn thefts, and there were more of them than you would imagine, especially around Orlando.
Hillary Van Wetter thought it over. “That’s a long ways to go for a lawn,” he said finally. And then, to her, “On the other hand, sometimes the farther you reach, the sweeter the grass,” and he laughed out loud after he said it.
She moved in her chair, and then crossed her legs. Hillary leaned forward a little to look as far up her skirt as he could. Charlotte did not seem to mind.
“These boys been taking care of you?” he said to her.
She nodded, about to tell him, I think, of what had happened on the beach, of who was taking care of what, but then changed her mind.
“Everything I need,” she said.
He turned his head suddenly and stared at me, something in it clean and cold. If he hadn’t killed Sheriff Call, I knew then that he could have. “Better not be everything,” he said.
I stared back at him, feeling clean and cold myself. He either didn’t see that, or didn’t care. He turned slowly to my brother, and then to Yardley Acheman. “She’s spoken for,” he said.
“Do you have any idea at all?” my brother said. “You remember what direction you drove?”
“Going or coming?” he said, sounding interested.
“Either way,” my brother said.
He thought a moment, and then shook his head. “No,” he said. It was quiet again as he stared at Charlotte and she stared back. “There was a night in there we took the greens off a golf course,” he said.
“Where?” my brother said.
“That would have been down in Daytona, I believe,” he said. “My uncle might remember.…” He smiled, remembering something funny. “He played it once himself … golf.” The image welled up in Hillary Van Wetter and then spilled over. He held his nose and shook, laughing, from what I could tell, at the notion of his uncle on the golf course.
“You’re sure it was Daytona?” my brother asked. The question stopped Hillary’s laughing, and he stared at Ward as if he had just walked into the room uninvited.
“I was speaking of golf,” he said finally.
My brother nodded.
“I was saying my uncle played it once.” He was angry; it was hard to tell why. “I had this pitcher in my head of it,” he said, “my uncle in green pants, and then you said what you did, and cut me off.”
He looked around the room, as if he were seeing it all for the first time. “And where’s that leave me now?” he said quietly.
My brother didn’t answer.
“You paperboys so damn smart.”
“Everything’s the same as when we got here,” Ward said.
“Exactly,” Hillary Van Wetter said, slowly nodding his head. “Exactly.” He closed his eyes, trying to get it back. “It ain’t that easy to pitcher somebody you know playing golf,” he said. He didn’t seem as angry as he’d been a moment earlier.
“Sorry,” my brother said.
“Sorry is the most useless thing in the world,” he said. “A man tells me ‘sorry,’ and it just aggravates the situation.”
I imagined Thurmond Call telling Hillary Van Wetter he was sorry for stomping his cousin. I wondered if the sheriff h
ad done that, or if, in the end, he’d died without explaining anything to anybody.
I wondered how much he cared for his life; if he would have traded what was still left of it for a moment or two of humiliation on the highway in the rain. If he would have begged.
I didn’t think so, but, then, I’d only seen the sheriff in parades.
“A comical thing like that,” Hillary said a few moments later, “it don’t sound like much to you, but there ain’t nothing in here to laugh at but something that hurts.”
He turned his attention back to Charlotte then, trying to enjoy the sight of her legs disappearing up into her skirt, but that was spoiled too.
“Are you sure it was Daytona?” my brother said. He was polite to Hillary Van Wetter but he was not afraid of him.
“It don’t matter,” Hillary said a moment later.
Ward said, “If it didn’t matter, I wouldn’t bother you with it.” He paused a moment. “Are you sure it was Daytona?”
“Someplace over there. Daytona, Ormond Beach … one of them places. It was a golf course, and we took the lawn off all the greens.”
“All of them?” Yardley Acheman said.
“All we could find, walking around in the dark,” Hillary said.
“Where did you take it?” my brother said. Hillary looked at him; he didn’t seem to understand.
“Sold it,” he said finally.
“To whom?” Yardley Acheman said.
“Whom?” Hillary said. “Whom?” He reconsidered Yardley Acheman, and slowly a smile crossed his face.
“Maybe I don’t have to worry about leaving my fiancée alone with you boys after all,” he said. He looked to her, to see if she thought that was humorous. Testing her somehow.
“Where did you take it?” Ward said.
“A developer,” he said. “They pay till they bleed for golf course grass.”
“What kind of developer?”
“Condos,” he said. He looked again at Yardley Acheman, who hadn’t spoken since Hillary insulted him. “You’d like condos,” he said. “They’re full of ‘whom’ boys.…”
“Not that it’s any of your business,” Yardley said, “but for the record, I’ve got a fiancee of my own.”
A smile suddenly lit Hillary Van Wetter’s face. “What record is that?” he said.
“Where were the condominiums?” my brother said.
Hillary rubbed his eyes. “You did it again,” he said.
“Every time a thing is humorous, you want to know where something was.”
“It isn’t humorous,” my brother said evenly. “We ‘re running out of time.” And as if on a signal, the door to the room opened and a guard walked in and put his hand on Hillary Van Wetter’s shoulder.
“That’s it, boys,” he said.
Hillary stood up without looking at the guard who was holding his shoulder. It was exactly as if Hillary had decided to get up on his own. The guard’s hand went to the crook of his elbow and pulled him toward the door. Hillary did not struggle, but for a moment he held himself where he was, and neither of them moved.
“Open your mouth a little bit,” he said to Charlotte, but it was a joke this time, and he let the guard lead him out.
Yardley Acheman picked at a little piece of scab on his forehead, and in a moment it beaded blood. “This is fucked,” he said to my brother.
Ward didn’t answer.
“Hillary Van Wetter is an innocent man,” Charlotte said.
Yardley Acheman turned on her then. “Who cares?”
“Me,” she said. “That’s what I’m doing here.”
“What you’re doing here is getting your pussy wet off the idea that this guy’s going to the electric chair,” he said. And then, indicating me, he said, “You’re crazier than he is.”
Ward stood up, tired, and walked toward the door. I followed him out, and a moment later Charlotte caught up with me in the hallway.
“You all aren’t going to quit on this …” she said. Yardley Acheman was just coming out of the visitors’ room; my brother was ahead of us, waiting at the iron gate to be passed through.
“Ward isn’t going to quit,” I said, “and he’s the only one that matters.”
THERE WAS AN ACCIDENT that night on the highway, a couple of bikers from Orlando met a station wagon from Michigan, head-on, and the highway patrol was hours clearing the mess.
My father was still in his chair when I came in, the pile of newspapers sifted across the floor at his feet.
He was drinking a bottle of wine, which he’d set on the table next to him. Before my mother left, he’d leave the bottle in the kitchen and make the trip back and forth; he didn’t like to sit still and drink, believing that was a signal of addiction, and that getting up and walking to the kitchen was a sign the other way. He always looked for signs of things, and not the things themselves.
“You’re late,” he said, looking at his watch.
“There was a big one out on the highway,” I said.
“Local people?”
“No,” I said, “bikers and tourists.”
He dropped his arm and picked up the glass. He studied my face, and then my arms. “How are the bites?”
“Stings,” I said. “They’re all right.”
“Stings,” he said, and seemed to let that settle. He had drunk most of the bottle, and it had begun to show.
“They hurt much?”
I shook my head and walked into the kitchen and got a beer. Then I heard the door swing open behind me and he came in and sat down heavily at the table. He set his glass and the bottle in front of him. “That must have been a hairy situation,” he said.
I sat down at the table too; there was no place else to go. I didn’t know if it had been hairy or not; it was removed, like a story I’d read about someone else.
“This time of year,” he said, “I understand jellyfish are common in this part of Florida.” I took a drink of the beer, nodded. “You have to respect the ocean,” he said a minute or two later.
To my knowledge, my father had never been in the ocean in his life. He liked the river. When I was six or seven, before my mother left for California, he would let me squirt him with the hose after he’d washed the truck, and that was the only time I remember seeing him wet. He stared at his glass, a speck of something black floating an inch below the surface. He picked it up and drank it anyway, and the speck was stuck to his lip when he finished. He looked at his watch.
“Working into the night,” he said, “that’s when you wear out, start to make mistakes.”
It seemed to me that he wanted to know how my brother was doing. “Ward doesn’t get worn out the way other people do,” I said.
My father smiled, looking like an old man. “Everybody wears out,” he said. “Sometimes it’s because they don’t know when to quit. Like racehorses, if there wasn’t somebody there to stop them, they’d run themselves to death.”
In some way it seemed possible, Ward running himself to death. My father filled his glass again and stared a moment at the bottle, as if he were confused at the amount he saw inside.
“They had a shark attack up in Jacksonville,” he said.
IN THE MORNING, Yardley Acheman loaded his suitcase and a cooler of iced beer into Charlotte’s van, and then climbed in behind it, headed for Daytona Beach to find the golf course Hillary and Tyree Van Wetter had vandalized on the night Sheriff Call was killed.
Yardley Acheman had been complaining for weeks of heat and boredom and the lack of good restaurants in Moat County, but now, leaving the place, he wasn’t appreciably happier.
He did not speak to Charlotte as he got in; did not, in fact, acknowledge her at all. He settled into the passenger seat, set his sunglasses on his nose, and folded his arms over his chest.
Charlotte smiled at me and forced the van into gear, and then rode off into the early sun, trailing black smoke from a tear in the exhaust system.
WARD SPENT HALF AN HOUR that morning studying a naviga
tional map of the river, and then we went looking for Uncle Tyree. We went to the store along the highway first where I had delivered ten papers each morning all through the winter and spring. There was a naked child playing in the driveway, squatted over something shiny in the dirt—perhaps a flattened can or a piece of glass—pounding on it with a hammer.
He looked up at the sound of the car, dropped the hammer, and ran inside when we stopped.
“This isn’t going to do you any good,” I said.
Ward nodded, and then opened his door anyway and got out. I sat still a moment before I followed him, not wanting to go in there again.
My brother picked up the hammer and carried it with him to the front door. I locked the car doors and watched him step inside.
Ward was standing in front of the counter when I came in, still holding the hammer. The place was dark and hot, a black spider sat in the jar of beef jerky sitting next to the cash register.
A voice came out of the back. “Where’s your pants?” A man’s voice, there was no answer. “I askt you a question, mister. Where’s your pants?”
There was no answer. My brother looked around at the shelves. Cookies, candy, flour, tobacco, sugar, Hostess cup-cakes—none of it in any order I could see, it was stacked in the shelves as it arrived, I suppose, put wherever there was an open spot.
There was another voice in back now, a woman’s.
“Jack,” she said, almost softly, just that word, and for a moment I thought someone was speaking to me.
And then she came through the curtains, the woman with the beautiful skin, and saw us standing in her store, and at the same time I heard the sound of a strap hitting flesh.
“Where’s your pants?” the man said again, sounding more angry now, and the question was followed by another smack, and then another, and another.
The woman moved to her place behind the counter, expressionless, waiting. There was nothing to indicate she remembered who I was. The beating in the back room continued, and I realized I was counting the strokes; the number twenty-two was in my head.
Ward put the hammer on the wooden counter in front of the woman and smiled.