The Paperboy

by Pete Dexter

Twenty-four, twenty-five.

  The child had not cried.

  “This was outside,” my brother said. The woman stared at the hammer, but did not touch it. The beating went on, but the only sounds were the strap against the boy’s body and a labored breathing that I took to be the man’s.

  It stopped for a moment and my brother said, “I was wondering if you might be able to tell us how to find Tyree Van Wetter’s place.”

  It started again then, and a tiny tremor passed over her bottom lip; passed and was gone. My brother took out his wallet and began looking for his business card. “My name is Ward James,” he said, putting the card on the counter next to the hammer. When she didn’t look, he pushed it a little closer.

  “I am trying to locate someone who can substantiate Hillary Van Wetter’s whereabouts on the evening he is supposed to have killed Sheriff Call.”

  No answer.

  “Mr. Van Wetter has told me,” my brother said, “that he was with his uncle Tyree.…”

  The strokes reached forty, then forty-one. They were coming slower now, as if the man was wearing out. “I suppose he would be another generation removed from you,” my brother said. “Your grandfather, or great-uncle … ”

  The beating stopped completely for the second time, then began again.

  “You want something?” she said. It wasn’t rude, but she was asking us to leave. “You got to buy something, or you can’t stay.” She glanced back in the direction of the curtains.

  My brother picked up a pack of Camel cigarettes and handed the woman a dollar. He didn’t smoke.

  She rang up sixty cents on the cash register, the drawer bell sounding exactly as the fiftieth crack filled the room and then receded, leaving the place quiet. She stood still, with the drawer still open, until the strap fell again. Lost in it.

  She picked the change out of the drawer; the coins in there were not separated into bins but tossed randomly together wherever there was space.

  “I saw Hillary yesterday,” my brother said.

  She did not seem to hear. Another stroke landed, and then a low, sustained howl started somewhere inside the building, you could not tell where, and grew as it changed pitch—a dog’s sound—until it filled the place, and all of us in it. The tremor crossed the woman’s lip again, and this time it did not stop there but shook her chin too, and then I saw the light from the window collected in her eyes, and then she was crying, without noise. The beating had stopped with the wail; fifty-four strokes; and the woman cried that it was finally over.

  The man’s voice came from behind the curtain. “Now you go find them pants and put them on,” he said. The curtain moved and the man with the burned face came through it. He was flushed and bare-chested, the sweat glistening on his stomach. He looked at us, and then at her. I could tell that beating the boy had made him want to fuck her.

  “My name is Ward James,” my brother said. “I am with the Miami Times.…”

  “Store’s closed,” the man said.

  “I was looking for Tyree Van Wetter.”

  The man walked to the door and opened it, waiting for us to leave. “I’m not with the courts,” my brother said. “This is about Hillary.”

  The man nodded and waited for us to get out. He looked quickly at the woman, blaming her for our being in the store. My brother waited, not moving, and finally the man shook his head.

  “They ain’t here,” he said, “either one of them.”

  “I know they’re not here,” my brother said, staying where he was.

  I remembered an afternoon then, outside the Paramount movie theater in Thorn. A kid named Roger Bowen with a ducktail haircut and a pack of cigarettes rolled into the sleeve of his T-shirt danced a foot in front of Ward, leaning into his face. He moved his arms like wings and made chicken noises while his friends laughed. I’d tugged at Ward’s sleeve; he wouldn’t move.

  Roger Bowen died the following year crossing the railroad tracks in front of a train, and on the afternoon I remembered, the theater manager finally came out and chased him and his friends away for being white trash.

  Or perhaps it was because we were the children of William Ward James, and were in some way protected.

  “I’m trying to locate Tyree Van Wetter,” my brother said again.

  The man at the door reconsidered him and then smiled, the kind of smile that leads to something else, and shook his head. “I said the store’s closed.” His voice had turned polite, and I knew something bad was in the works.

  “Who would know where to find him?” my brother said.

  The man shook his head. “Tyree? He’s got family all around here, up and down the river.”

  “You’re his family,” my brother said.

  The man shook his head. “Ain’t the same bunch,” he said. And then, nodding to the woman behind the counter, he said, “She was one of them, but she married into my side of the family.” It was a joke between them, one that wasn’t funny to her.

  “Jack, please …”

  He looked at her a moment, suddenly angry, and then, just as suddenly, he seemed to give in.

  “Honeymoon Lane,” he said.

  My brother walked past the man and out of the store. I hurried to get out with him, and the moment I was clear the door closed. I heard a bolt slide on the other side.

  My brother got into the car and sat in the heat, thinking, without opening his window. I turned on the air conditioner and looked at him to see where we were going. He was still a moment, staring at his hands, then looked back at the store.

  I drove the car out of the parking lot slowly, and turning toward the road I saw the boy again, still naked, standing behind the store, something draped from his hand. He moved his arm in a long arc, and the movement gave shape to the thing in his hands, and I saw it was a pair of pants. He let go of the pants at the top of the arc, and they floated up into the air and landed on the roof, one leg dangling over, as if trying to crawl the rest of the way up.

  He stared at the pants a moment, making sure they would stay, then turned, and squatted, and began pounding the bare dirt with his fist.

  “They shouldn’t beat him like that,” my brother said.

  A MILE NORTH OF the store we turned east onto a baked dirt road identified as Honeymoon Lane by a sign that had been dented and perforated by shotgun pellets. There was marsh grass on either side of the road, and, a mile or two farther, where it turned wet, there was a long stand of trees. Insects crawled over the windshield of the car, trying to get in.

  Honeymoon Lane itself lay ahead like rough water. It rose and fell a foot or more in a regulated pattern, and then, in some places, dropped more than that, banging the car’s undercarriage onto the ground. I slowed, but it did nothing to improve the ride. I was beginning to feel nauseous.

  Ward looked out the window.

  “If people live back here, they don’t take this road in and out,” I said.

  “If they come out,” he said.

  The road quit a dozen feet from standing water, and a path led off into the trees. The trees were thicker than they’d looked from the highway; the path resembled a tunnel.

  “Last stop,” I said, and turned off the engine.

  He got out and started into the trees, and I followed him in. It was shaded there, and cool, and the trunks of the trees were covered with moss, some of them eight or ten feet around. They grew in eroding soil, their roots visible for yards.

  Between the trees, the ground dropped away and was covered by water. River water, warm and brown. Reeds grew in some places, in other, deeper places, there were none.

  Mosquitoes moved over the water in clouds and made a humming noise that was electric, a deeper sound than they make close to your ear. I slapped at one in my hair and the movement seemed to draw others, and a moment later they were everywhere, even in my nose and mouth.

  I brushed them off my arms and head, and then, looking at Ward, I saw a dozen of them had set down on his face. He didn’t seem to notice they wer
e there.

  We walked along the edge of the water for a hundred yards, and then took a narrow stretch of raised ground farther east, deeper into the trees. We turned north again, on a kind of peninsula, and the texture of the earth was softer, and our shoes made sucking noises as we walked. The car was long out of sight, and although I have a certain sense of direction, I was not sure, left alone, that I could have found my way out.

  “There’s a boat landing here somewhere,” Ward said. His voice carried clearly, and seemed to come from the trees behind me, although he was a few yards ahead.

  I looked for a boat landing. “Where?” The sound of my own voice startled me.

  He stared into the trees without answering, trying, I think, to remember exactly how the shoreline looked from the river. It had been ten years at least since he’d been out there on a boat.

  Farther ahead, a dead tree had fallen across the path, one end still hinged to the base of the trunk, the other resting in the water. A moccasin as thick as my wrist lay on it near the water, the same color as the wet, rotting trunk.

  I stepped over the trunk, blind to what was lying on the other side. My brother stopped again. There was water in front of him, perhaps fifty feet of it, and beyond that the ground rose into an island, a yard higher than it was here.

  Standing still, he had sunk to his ankles in the mud.

  “There’s a house in there,” he said.

  I didn’t see a house, but then I’d been watching for snakes.

  “How do you know that?” I said. I wanted to turn around and go back to the car. I slapped my arm, killing two mosquitoes at once. One of them full of blood. The noise seemed to hang in the trees, unable to get out.

  “What else would it be?” he said.

  “What else would what be?”

  He pointed into the trees, and I saw it then, a dark, familiar shape barely visible against the lines of the branches. A television antenna. A crow screamed, and when I looked, another inch or two of my brother had sunk into the mud.

  “You’re sinking,” I said.

  He studied the problem, buried to his ankles in mud, and then slowly pulled his feet out. His feet came out, his shoes stayed.

  Water filled the holes his feet had left, and when he reached down to retrieve his shoes, he couldn’t find them. Brown wing tips lost to the mud.

  My thoughts turned to quicksand.

  Ward’s arm went into the mud halfway to the elbow. “It’s some kind of suction,” he said. He stood back up, his hand black, and looked at the soft earth and then the water. He said, “There must be an underground current.”

  I looked at the water too, but nothing in it moved.

  “What I think,” he said, still looking around, “the whole thing is eroded underneath.” He looked at me a moment and smiled. “I think it’s all floating.”

  I heard something behind me drop into the water, and turned to look at the fallen tree we’d crossed a few minutes before. The moccasin was gone. Ward lifted one foot and then the other, taking off his socks and sticking them in the front pockets of his trousers, and began wading across to the island. I studied the water a long time before I took off my own shoes and socks, rolled up my pants legs, and followed him in.

  The bottom was cool and soft and came up between my toes. A few feet ahead Ward was in up to his waist. “Are you sinking or has it gotten deeper?” I said.

  He stopped for a minute to consider that. “It’s hard to say,” he said finally, and then moved ahead. A moment later I dropped into the same hole and the mud was colder underfoot but more solid. Ward had reached the other side, and was using the low branch of a tree to pull himself up onto the bank. He struggled, half out of the water, his weight changing the equation as he emerged. His arms shook with the effort, and I arrived under him just before he fell back in, and put my hand on his behind and pushed him up.

  And doing that, I sank deeper into the bottom, and when I pulled myself out I was caked in it to the knees. I stood where I was while Ward caught his breath. I was surprised that he wasn’t stronger—he had always seemed stronger—and that the few moments he hung between ground and the water had used him up. The thought crossed my mind that he was sick.

  The narrow spot of cleared ground that we were on was not much bigger than a closet, not really enough room for us both. The underbrush leading farther in was thick, and there was no trail here.

  “There’s got to be another way in and out,” I said.

  “Maybe we can find it when we leave.”

  He nodded, his hands on his knees, still catching his breath. I noticed the mosquitoes had no interest in my feet, which were now covered with mud. My shirt stuck to my skin. Ward stood up, looking pale. “You want to go back?” I said.

  A moment passed and he said, “What’s the point of that?”

  And then he turned and pushed away the undergrowth and branches with his hands, and slowly made his way through.

  He was awkward in everything he did now, the branches came at him from unexpected angles. He stumbled once, then stopped to inspect a cut on his foot.

  Still, he pushed into the trees toward the antenna. A broken branch caught his sleeve and tore his shirt, and, turning to loosen himself, a smaller branch slapped him in the eye. He stopped, holding it, and when he let go it had begun to swell. Tears ran from the corner as if he were crying.

  I walked past him and took the lead, holding the branches until he was through them, making sure there was nothing unexpected waiting to hit him in the other eye. It did not seem impossible that I would have to lead him back to the car blind, and within a few minutes he was in fact tearing from both eyes. No one was ever more out of place than Ward was here, and yet he pressed through, starting to sneeze. It occurred to me that it didn’t matter that he was no good at this; what mattered was that he was willing to do it.

  The thing he was good at was born of a lack of talent. He did not need grace to push ahead.

  He stopped for a moment and wiped at his eyes, using the bottom of his shirt. The mosquitoes moved off his face, then resettled even before he was finished. I whacked the back of my neck and the jolt carried straight through my head. “I’m beating the shit out of myself here,” I said. I did not bother to speak softly now; there was no chance we had not been overheard already, if there was someone to hear us.

  Ward blew his nose into his shirtsleeve and tried to clear his vision, closing his eyes and wiping the lids with his fingers. “It isn’t much farther,” he said, and a minute later I heard the chickens.

  THE HOUSE SAT ON cement blocks at the far end of the clearing. Dozens of chickens hunted under it and over the bare ground of the yard for bits of food; a rooster sat on a pile of shingles.

  Beyond the shingles, a nylon line had been rigged, leading from the corner of the main house to the single tree still standing in the yard. Half a dozen alligator skins hung from the line, none of them more than four or five feet long. There was a tree stump not far away where they did the skinning. An ax and some knives had been left there, two of them stuck into the stump itself, the rest on the ground and on a four-legged metal stool nearby.

  My brother walked slowly across the yard; one of the chickens crossed his path and dropped feathers hurrying out of the way. The house itself was prefabricated; I had seen hundreds like it in developments outside Jacksonville and Orlando. It had one story with a pitched roof and a large picture window in front, where the living room would be. Ranch style, the real estate people called it.

  I wondered if it had been hard to steal.

  Half of the front of the place had been covered with aluminum siding, the rest left in shingles like the ones in the pile. An outboard Evinrude lay in pieces on a blanket in the carport; the tools used to take it apart lay among them.

  My brother walked to the front door and pushed the doorbell. He and I looked at each other a moment, waited, and he knocked. Nothing moved. He took a few steps back and looked at the roof, one end to the other. It
was covered with tarpaper which was torn here and there, exposing the wood underneath. Chicken droppings were everywhere.

  He went back to the door and knocked again. He called out Tyree Van Wetter’s name.

  I had moved to the side of the house, and from there I saw the inlet behind it. A small boat had been left upside down in the backyard. The yard itself was wet and grassless, a strip of dirt no more than ten feet wide that sloped from the house to the water.

  My brother’s voice carried out over the water and bounced back. “Mr. Van Wetter … I am here to ask you about your nephew Hillary.”

  I walked back around to the front. “There’s nobody home,” I said. My brother looked at the house, undecided.

  He knocked again, much louder this time. “Tyree Van Wetter?”

  The chickens resumed their search of the yard, as if we were of no consequence. My brother sat down on the step leading to the front door and began unplugging the mud between his toes with a stick. I sat down next to him. The step was warm from the sun. I smelled tar, probably from the roof. I looked at my brother, waiting to see what he intended to do.

  “Let’s give it a little while,” he said.

  I watched him clean his feet. “You know,” I said, “this might be somebody’s fishing cabin.”

  He was studying one of his toes. “No,” he said, “it’s the right place, I think.” And then he said, “Someone’s in the house. I heard them.”

  We sat on the porch and waited. The sun moved, and the house took more of it for a shadow. The place began to feel cooler.

  “I’m sorry about what happened with Yardley,” I said, sometime later.

  He was staring at one of his feet; it had been a long time since either of us had spoken. I had not heard anything from inside the house. He frowned, I couldn’t tell why.

  “Nobody was hurt,” he said.

  “He acted hurt.”

  “Yardley thinks he’s protected,” he said. “ ‘You can’t do this to me, I’m with the Miami Times.…’ ” Hearing the words, he began to smile. Ward knew that no such protection existed. He had no misunderstanding about that.