The Paperboy

by Pete Dexter

  “Yardley found the golf course,” she said.

  And in that second, ripping Yardley’s shirt off without unbuttoning it was all for nothing.

  Yardley turned to my brother and nodded, acknowledging it, then dropped the shirt and pants on the floor. As if to say, “And this is the way you treat me.”

  “Where is it?” Ward said.

  I walked around the desk in my underpants, brushing past Charlotte, and sat in the window. A breeze I hadn’t felt before blew over my skin. She watched me a moment, then turned away, disinterested.

  “Ormond Beach,” Yardley Acheman said. He took a notepad out of his back pocket and read from what was written down. “August twentieth, 1965, six thirty-five A.M., the grounds superintendent phones the Ormond Beach Police Department to report that his greens have been vandalized; somebody’s stripped the sod in the night.”

  “Where’d you find it?” my brother said.

  Yardley Acheman shrugged, as if it were some intuitive talent he couldn’t explain.

  “He saw it in the newspaper,” Charlotte said, and for a moment I embraced the thought that the change in her was only that he had found the way to save Hillary Van Wetter. But then she looked at him again, and I knew I was wrong.

  “It was in some old clips at the Ormond Beach Satellite,” he said.

  “It was in all the papers,” she said. Charlotte was bragging on Yardley, but she did not understand that the size of his accomplishment depended on its difficulty. I folded my arms and leaned back into the window frame.

  “You talked to the man.…” Ward said.

  Yardley Acheman nodded. “Not the superintendent, he got cancer from the weed killer out there, but another guy. He remembered it because the membership voted to ask the governor to declare it a disaster area, they could get funds to replace the greens without going into their own pockets. It made all the papers.”

  “They were old,” Charlotte said. “A bunch of old men, walking around in plaid pants, still mad that somebody took their grass four years ago.” She smiled at that, and smiled at Yardley Acheman. He was handsome, all right, and something from Daytona Beach had intruded on her feelings for Hillary Van Wetter.

  Yardley Acheman walked to his desk and sat down, stepping over the shirt and pants on the floor.

  WE HAD TO SEE Hillary again, and Charlotte did not want to come along. I saw it even before she told my brother that her period had just started and she had cramps and bled too much the first day to go anywhere.

  Another woman would have just said she was coming down with a cold. “I bleed like they cut it off,” she said.

  A little later she said that the prison was beginning to depress her. “I don’t know how much longer I can go out there and see Hillary waiting to be executed.…”

  “We’ve got to ask him again,” Ward said, “about where he sold the sod.”

  “He already said he didn’t know,” she said.

  “He’s had time to think.”

  A little later, Charlotte went over the details of her menstrual cycle with my brother again. Ward stared at his hands as she explained how much she bled, and did not try to talk her into coming along. “I got to take a bottle of Midol and go to bed,” she said, and a minute later, throwing an uncertain look in the direction of Yardley Acheman, she disappeared through the door.

  “Will he talk to us without her there?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” Ward said.

  “If he won’t,” Yardley Acheman said, “fuck him. We’ll go find somebody else.…”

  But my brother, at least, didn’t want to find somebody else. He wanted Hillary Van Wetter, he wanted the story he’d begun. It didn’t have anything to do in the end with whether Hillary had killed Sheriff Call, or if he’d been fairly represented at his trial.

  At the bottom of it, my brother wanted to know what had happened and to get it down that way on paper. He wanted to have it exactly right.

  COTTON HAD BEEN PACKED into both sides of Hillary Van Wetter’s nose, the last bit of fuzz hung beneath the nostrils. It was hard to say if the swelling across the bridge was due to the cotton or the injury. His eyes were both bruised underneath, the streak of black running at similar angles on both sides, as if they had grown from the same spot.

  “Where’s my intended?” he said. It sounded as if he had a cold.

  “She didn’t feel well,” Ward said.

  It was a quiet moment.

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  My brother began to shake his head, looking for a way to explain it. Yardley Acheman moved in his chair. “She’s on the rag,” he said. Hillary turned and looked at him, the sound of his leg irons the only noise in the room.

  “The monthlies?” he said finally. He was handcuffed, and there was a guard outside the door. Yardley Acheman checked these things before he spoke again.

  “That’s what she said.”

  “Just come in and discuss it, did she?”

  Yardley nodded.

  “Pussy bi’niss, in front of paperboys,” Hillary said.

  “We ought to talk about Ormond Beach,” my brother said, but Hillary Van Wetter continued to stare at Yardley Acheman.

  “Mr. Van Wetter?”

  Finally Hillary turned away from Yardley and considered Ward. “She told you about it too?”

  For a moment no one spoke. “I’ve got to know where the sod went,” he said finally.

  “For what?”

  “I have to find the person who bought it.”

  He turned back to Yardley Acheman. “You got a smoke?” he said.

  Yardley nodded in the direction of a sign on the wall warning visitors not to give anything to inmates. “Not allowed,” he said.

  Hillary nodded. “Follow the rules,” he said, “follow the rules.…”

  Ward asked what direction Hillary and his uncle had driven from the golf course.

  Hillary closed his eyes, picturing it. “International House of Pancakes,” he said finally. “We had pancakes and ice cream.”

  “In Daytona?”

  “Must of been.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then we got paid and went home.”

  It was quiet again. “I need to find the place,” my brother said.

  “We all need something,” he said. And then he had another long look at Yardley Acheman. Yardley stared back briefly, then he turned away. He checked his watch, then the door, reminding Hillary of the guard outside.

  Hillary Van Wetter watched him, his gaze as flat as still water. He watched until Yardley got up and crossed the room and stuck an open package of cigarettes in Hillary’s shirt.

  Hillary never took his eyes off Yardley until he was back in his place by the wall. Then he nodded, slowly. You couldn’t tell if he meant to say thanks, or if everything he’d been thinking about us had been confirmed.

  “How far from the pancake house was the condominium?” Ward said.

  There was no answer.

  “What direction? It was early morning by then, right? Were you driving into the sun or away from it?”

  Hillary Van Wetter shook his head. “Overcast,” he said.

  “FUCK HIM,” Yardley said. The new rental was a Mercury with a noisy air conditioner that shook the car as it came on and off, but didn’t do much in the way of cooling. Yardley was sitting in the backseat with the windows rolled down.

  “He isn’t worth it,” he said. He was talking to my brother as if I weren’t there. He did that more often than he needed to, reminding me that I didn’t count.

  “We have to go through the building permits,” Ward said. “They were putting condos up in sixty days back then, before the building inspectors had a chance to see what they were doing, and this one would have been almost done if they were ready for a lawn.…”

  “He isn’t worth it,” Yardley said again. He pulled himself up in the seat.

  My brother said, “There can’t be more than a dozen that started construction the s
ame time, some of them might be the same builder …”

  “And then what?” Yardley Acheman said. “The guy’s going to admit he bought sod off a golf course?”

  “He might say he didn’t know it was stolen.”

  “He isn’t going to give a shit,” Yardley said. “The lawyer doesn’t give a shit, Hillary Van Wetter doesn’t give a shit.… We got too many people here, Ward, that don’t give a shit.” He thought about it, still sitting up in the seat. “The truth is, I don’t give much of a shit anymore myself.”

  Yardley stopped and considered what he’d just said, perhaps how it would sound if it somehow got back to the editors in Miami.

  “I mean, what am I supposed to write?” he said. “I picture myself at the typewriter, trying to interpret this person to the reader, and I don’t have a damn feeling in my body about him except if he wasn’t the one who opened up the sheriff, he was probably out that night fucking owls.”

  It had long been Yardley’s premise that his obligation was to interpret for the reader.

  The air conditioner kicked in again and the engine sagged under the weight. “If the contractors are local, it won’t take more than a couple of days,” Ward said.

  Yardley Acheman dropped back into his seat. “I can’t write what I don’t feel.”

  My brother nodded, as if he agreed with that. “You want to go back down to Daytona,” he said, “or you want me to do it this time?”

  Yardley Acheman shook his head. “What I want, we fold the tent on this guy,” he said, “go find something fresh to do back in Miami.…”

  Ward smiled politely, as if that were a joke. I suppose he’d heard the same thing from him before. A newspaper story, like anything else, is more attractive from a distance, when it first comes to you, than it is when you get in close and agonize over the details.

  Which I presume is how Yardley got in the habit of keeping himself at a distance.

  AT HOME THAT NIGHT, I told my father that Yardley Acheman wanted to quit. Anita Chester was still in the house, doing some late cleaning, and we were sitting on the porch.

  “Hit a dead end, did you?” he said, having a sip of his wine. He set the glass on the uneven boards of the floor next to his chair. It sat at an angle, the wine closer to the lip on one side than the other.

  “No, it isn’t that. Ward’s still working.”

  My father thought it over. “Your brother’s a damn good newspaperman,” he said finally, “but he doesn’t know everything yet.” He stretched his arms over his head and yawned. The sound of the vacuum cleaner came through the window to his study. There was no light left in the sky; it must have been ten o’clock. I wondered why he hadn’t just told her to go home. She had children to put to bed.

  “Ward knows what he’s doing,” I said. I hadn’t told my father about the visit to the Van Wetters’ home in the wetlands. It was the kind of story he would have liked—at least it was the kind he liked to tell—but there was some residual exhaustion from that day left inside me, and I was not up to taking it on again yet.

  In some way, telling a true story puts you back into it.

  My father nodded his head. “He knows how to get stories,” he said, “but what he doesn’t appreciate fully is that the stories go into a newspaper, and the newspaper goes out into a community.”

  The sound of the vacuum stopped, and he looked quickly in that direction and at the same time reached for his glass. “She’s been late every day this week,” he said, and then, softening, “I hope she isn’t having some sort of trouble at home.”

  His hand touched the glass and it rocked a moment, then fell, three or four inches onto the floor, and shattered. He stared at it, and then slowly reached for the bottle, which was half empty on the other side of the chair.

  “She have children of her own?” he said. “I can’t remember? …”

  “A couple of them,” I said. “Six and nine.”

  He picked up the bottle and held it to the light, as if to read the label. “I hope they aren’t sick,” he said.

  She came through the screen door a moment later, carrying her purse and her working shoes, wearing white tennis shoes that came up over her ankles. She always walked home. Tonight she was in more of a hurry than usual.

  “Good evening, Mr. James,” she said, heading for the steps.

  “Good evening,” he said, and then, before she reached the steps, he said, “I wonder would you mind taking an extra minute. I smashed a wineglass over here.…” She stopped in her tracks for a long moment, then turned without a word and went back into the house for a broom.

  “I hope she isn’t having trouble with those children,” he said.

  WARD WAS WAITING ON the sidewalk alone outside the rooming house in the morning. He got into the car and slammed the door, a departure of sorts, as we were brought up not to slam the Chrysler’s doors. “No Yardley?” I said.

  He took his time answering. “He’s an adult,” he said finally, but I knew he didn’t want Yardley out sleeping with local girls. It made him furious. He was still dependent on the town for his story, and did not want to poison the source.

  There was something else too. Ward had certain standards of virtue, which he kept to himself, but which were always at work. I didn’t know anything then about how many girls he had slept with himself, but I had never seen him with a girl of his own and assumed he would not sleep with one casually. He didn’t even like being in the room while anyone talked about sexual matters, particularly Charlotte Bless, who talked about sexual matters constantly.

  “As long as it’s with another adult,” I said, preparing him for the inevitable day when I’d arrive for work late and sticky too. He turned to look at me. “Somebody over eighteen,” I said, thinking he’d misunderstood what I’d said, and then realizing, even as I said it, that I’d missed the point. And half a second later, the point came home.

  Yardley was with Charlotte.

  We drove in silence, mutually outraged, to Moat Street and climbed the stairs to the office.

  The van appeared beneath the window just after eleven o’clock. The passenger door opened first and Yardley came out, holding a beer, and then waited for Charlotte, who came around from the other side. I studied her carefully, looking for some sign of self-loathing. He put his hand in the middle of her back when she was close enough to touch, left it there a moment and then, as she moved past him toward the door leading inside, he patted her behind. They were a long time making it up the stairs.

  I did not look at either of them when they came in, and Ward stared at the papers on his desk. They came inside the door and stopped.

  “Uh-oh,” Yardley said, “I think Mom and Dad have been waiting up.” She laughed at that, a nervous laugh. Yardley drained the beer in his hand, went to the cooler and found a fresh one.

  “You sure you won’t have one?” he said to her. “Nothing tastes as good as a beer in the morning, before you’re supposed to have it.”

  “I’m fine,” she said, and I didn’t care for the way she said it. She was not just speaking of being fine without a can of Busch beer.

  Yardley Acheman walked to his side of the office and sat down. He leaned back, holding the beer on his stomach, and put his feet on the desk. He looked at my brother and burped. Ward did not look up. Charlotte crossed the room to the window, leaned into my line of vision and said, “Good morning.”

  I thought I could smell Yardley Acheman on her.

  “Good morning,” I said. I tried not to forgive her.

  “What I was thinking,” Yardley said to my brother, “I might take one more crack at finding this condominium guy they sold the lawn to after all.” He looked at Charlotte, and I saw it was something they’d decided before they got to the office.

  “We could go back down to Daytona, spend a couple of days knocking on doors.”

  Ward nodded but didn’t answer. Yardley Acheman said, “It probably won’t work, but we’re not doing any good around here.”

&nbs
p; Another looked passed between them, she seemed about to laugh. My brother’s face had flushed, as if he were embarrassed.

  “I thought we might as well go today.”

  YARDLEY’S FIANCEE CALLED late in the afternoon, after they were gone. Ward had stepped outside to visit the bathroom on the main floor of the building, and I picked up the phone only after I realized it was going to ring until I did.

  I told her Yardley was in Daytona Beach on business. She said he’d just been in Daytona on business. “I guess he didn’t finish,” I said, and gave her the number of the motel he’d written on the notepad on his desk when he’d called for reservations.

  She took the number and then repeated it back to me twice, to be sure it was right. “I know he’s a great reporter,” she said, “but sometimes I wish he wasn’t so devoted to his work.”

  CHARLOTTE AND YARDLEY ACHEMAN stayed in Daytona Beach four days. They took separate rooms at a motel on the beach, but Yardley was never in his room when his fiancée called, not even at night. She would call me in the morning, to be reassured that he was not doing dangerous work.

  I wondered at the things he told her.

  WARD AND I WENT to the sheriff’s office, which occupied the second floor of the county courthouse. The cells were in the basement, some of them with barred windows which looked out over the town of Lately at grass level.

  We had been there before to look at the report of Hillary’s arrest, and knew what to expect. The deputies would not speak to anyone from the Miami Times, knowing the paper’s liberal slant, and referred all inquiries to the departmental spokesman, a smiling, white-haired man named Sam Ellison who had once been a deputy himself.

  Mr. Ellison was retired from active duty, and worked mornings at the department, Tuesday through Friday, even though the department did not need to be spoken for nearly that often. He did not seem happy to find visitors waiting for him outside his office door.

  “The Times,” Mr. Ellison said. He had seen us in this same hallway the last time we were at the courthouse, but had not spoken to us because it was four minutes after twelve. The sheriff’s public information office closed at noon, Tuesday through Friday.