The Paperboy

by Pete Dexter

  “It isn’t done yet,” Ward said.

  “They’re going to let me loose now,” he said.

  Charlotte had begun to nod again when my brother said, “We don’t decide that.”

  For a moment the smile disappeared from Hillary’s face, but he was acting. “I know that,” he said, and then the smile reappeared, narrower than it had been before. He looked right at Charlotte and spoke to my brother. “I know your limitations,” he said, and she blushed.

  “Open your mouth a little bit,” he said to her.

  She looked at the rest of us, then back at him. She shook her head no. “That’s private,” she said, almost whispering.

  My brother said, “There’s one thing we need.”

  “What thing is that?” Still looking at her.

  Ward didn’t answer at first, and Hillary said, “What is it?” sounding suddenly angry. Never taking his eyes off her.

  “To speak with your uncle again,” Ward said.

  Hillary turned slowly back to my brother. “I expect that’s up to him,” he said.

  “It could help if you give us a letter to take to him,” my brother said.

  “A letter,” he said.

  “A note, something to tell him to trust us.”

  On that word, Hillary turned and stared at Yardley Acheman. “What do you think about that?” he said. “You think I ought to tell my uncle to trust you?”

  Yardley Acheman didn’t move. The smile spread across Hillary Van Wetter’s face again. His teeth were yellow, the whole place smelled of disinfectant. A long ways off a man yelled, and the sound was hollow as it echoed down the halls. A light shone through the small window in the door and particles of dust hung in the air.

  I stood up, wanting to move, and walked from one side of the room to the other, passing within a foot or two of Hillary’s chair. He smelled like disinfectant too. The door opened and the guard leaned in with his head.

  “No contact with the prisoner,” he said. “Do not pass on any materials, written or otherwise.”

  “Mr. Van Wetter is going to need a pen and paper,” my brother said.

  “You’ll have to see the warden,” the guard said and closed the door.

  When he was gone Hillary said, “The truth is, Tyree ain’t much of a reader anyway.”

  My brother looked at him, becoming impatient. “He’d recognize your handwriting.”

  Hillary thought it over. “Numbers,” he said. “He can read numbers.”

  “Is there something we can tell him,” Ward said, “he’d know it came from you?”

  Hillary shook his head as if he didn’t understand.

  “A story, something that happened, so he’d know you want him to talk to us.”

  “A story that happened,” Hillary thought, and he stroked his chin. The chain holding his wrists rattled once against the handcuffs and then was quiet. “There was a girl,” he said, “something happened to her.” He waited, but that seemed to be as much about it as he wanted to say.

  “What girl?” my brother said.

  “Lawrence’s wife,” he said. “A girl from out of the family, he’ll remember her.”

  “Lawrence,” my brother said, and Hillary nodded.

  “What happened to her?”

  Another pause. “Went away,” he said. He stared at his legs, studying the irons attached to his ankles.

  Ward looked toward the door. “They can’t hear what you tell us,” he said.

  “Sometimes you don’t have to hear a certain thing to know it.”

  “Prisoners talk to their attorneys in here.…”

  “Attorneys,” Hillary said, and as I watched, his mood turned dark, or perhaps was only revealed. “It comes right down to it, they can’t do nothing more than paperboys. Come right down to it, the only ones can do something in here is the man, and he can do whatever his whimsy is. They ain’t nothing to stop him.”

  In the corner, Yardley Acheman closed his eyes and dropped his head into his hands, as if he’d had as much of this as he could stand. Charlotte lit another cigarette and leaned toward Hillary, her elbow resting on her knee. He could see some of her chest.

  “Look at it this way,” Yardley Acheman said, “what do you have to lose?”

  Hillary turned slowly to the corner where Yardley was sitting.

  “What are they going to do, electrocute you twice?”

  “Shut up,” Charlotte said, and that made Yardley smile. He shook his head, as if he would never understand women, and then he shut up.

  “It doesn’t have to be about the woman,” my brother said. “Just something I can tell your uncle, he’ll know we have your confidence.…”

  “My confidence …” He played with that a little while.

  “What happened to her?” my brother said. “Lawrence’s wife …”

  Charlotte dropped the cigarette she’d just lit onto the floor and ground it out with the tip of her shoe. She didn’t want to hear what happened to Lawrence’s wife, but she said, “Tell the damn story,” and for that moment, she and Hillary already could have been married.

  “There ain’t a story, the way you tell it and somebody listens,” Hillary said. “The girl’s gone.”

  “Gone where?”

  “She was from the outside; one day she was there, the next day she was gone.”

  “Did she go back to her family?” my brother said, and Hillary began smiling again.

  “I wouldn’t think so, no sir,” he said. Hillary stared at my brother and then finally turned himself back to Charlotte, and looked at her as he spoke to Ward.

  He said, “I would think she went back whence she came.”

  He knew she had been with Yardley Acheman. He was telling her he knew.

  “Ashes to ashes,” he said. And then he smiled at her in the way he was smiling earlier. “Tell Tyree,” he said, “ashes to ashes. See what he thinks about that.”

  MY BROTHER AND YARDLEY ACHEMAN got in the backseat again on the ride to Lately, Charlotte was in front with me. She’d said good-bye to Hillary when the guard came for him and hadn’t spoken since. She hadn’t even waited at the car door for someone to open it.

  “Ashes to ashes,” Yardley said, “what a subtle guy.”

  It was humid, and the air conditioner was dripping on Charlotte’s shoes. She was staring straight ahead, as if she were fixed on something a long ways down the road.

  “What is that supposed to mean?” she said, sounding tired.

  “Worst case,” Yardley said, “they ate her.”

  Charlotte put a cigarette in her lips and punched in the lighter on the dashboard. After it popped back out, Yardley Acheman said, “Not that it makes any difference.”

  Charlotte turned suddenly and stared at him over the seat back. Her shirt pressed against her side and took the shape of her breast. “Will you shut up?” she said.

  “You don’t mind, we’re trying to figure something out back here,” Yardley Acheman said, and he sounded hurt, the same tone he took when he argued with his fiancee on the telephone. “Trying to save your intended from the state of Florida’s electric chair.”

  “Ashes to ashes doesn’t mean they killed a girl,” Charlotte said, and she was furious, “it’s biblical.”

  Yardley laughed out loud.

  She turned back around, disgusted with everyone in the car. “Hillary was right about you,” she said, meaning that for all of us. “You’ve got no empathy.”

  “Hillary said that?” Yardley was playing with her now.

  “In so many words.” And then she closed her eyes, exhausted. “Everybody in the world isn’t stupid, Yardley,” she said. “And even if that was true, it wouldn’t make them any smarter, working for the Miami Times.”

  Yardley laughed again, and she seemed discouraged.

  “You see right there, that’s what I’m talking about,” she said. “I’d rather have one compassionate person on my side than all of you put together.”

  Yardley was laughing again; fe
eding off her.

  “I’ll tell you something else,” she said, “I’d feel sorry for your fiancée, but I think you deserve each other.”

  WE HAD TO GO BACK into the wetlands. Yardley did not want to come along, and pretended he’d hurt his ankle. “I can write it without going out there,” he said, but my brother shook his head.

  “You better come,” he said.

  “I sprained my ankle.”

  “You need to see it,” Ward said, and in the end Yardley gave in, his limp becoming more exaggerated as we got to the marina where we rented the boat. Even Ward did not want to try walking back in.

  We followed the west bank of the river, moving slowly, looking for the television antenna in the tree line. The boat was powered by a small outboard which coughed and stopped at low speeds, and I sat at the throttle nursing the choke to keep it going. There was something in the quiet when the engine quit that none of us liked.

  Yardley Acheman was in front, holding on to the sides with both hands. My brother sat in the middle, studying the shoreline. World War had taken us fishing on this part of the river when we were young, pointing out the cabins in the trees and recalling the stories he knew of the people who lived in them, the Van Wetters, who in his stories were pioneers. And those stories, along with the color of the water and the smell of the air and the vegetation along the bank, were married in me to the sight of a river bass slapping the bottom of the boat, sometimes leaving its blood on our legs.

  And to the sight of a dozen bass a foot or two under water, hanging from a single piece of nylon cord hung over the side, some of them still alive, their white bellies glowing through the brown water.

  My father did not make fishermen of his sons, and by the time I was ten or eleven, he had stopped trying.

  It seemed to me that we had come too far down the river.

  “We must have missed it,” I said, and began a slow circle back into the current.

  “A little farther,” Ward said.

  I said we were too far south.

  “Keep on a little farther,” he said, and looked at his watch. I did not like to be told where to steer the boat, but Ward had a good compass in his head, and mine always told me to circle.

  Still, it seemed to me that matters of the water, and driving, were my area.

  Yardley Acheman turned around without letting go of the sides. “We’re lost, right?”

  Ward didn’t answer him.

  I steered in closer to the shoreline and the boat moved in the shadows of the trees growing out of the water. Some of the branches were so low I could have touched them without standing up. The last time my father took me fishing, a moccasin dropped out of one of those branches onto the floor of the boat, and he grabbed it by the tail while I was still realizing what it was, and tossed it into the air. The snake straightened to its full length, wheeling through the sky, and my father stood in the rocking boat, watching it, gradually smiling as he realized what he had done.

  “Don’t tell your mother,” he said, but it was the first thing out of his mouth when he saw her at home.

  WE SAW THE CHICKEN before we saw the antenna. It was tethered by one leg to a stake not far from the water’s edge, left there as bait. The other chickens kept their distance. I took us in to the shore and lifted the engine out of the water a moment before we landed. I got out and pulled our boat next to the one already in the yard. Yardley waited until I’d stopped to get out, holding on to the sides until both his feet were down on solid ground.

  My brother walked ahead, around to the front of the place, carrying a picnic cooler. He set the cooler on the porch and knocked on the door. “Mr. Van Wetter?”

  The door opened before he could knock again, and the young man who had been there before stood in the doorway, looking at us. First my brother, then me, then Yardley Acheman. He spent longer on Yardley than either of us.

  “Is your father in?” Ward said.

  The man in the door moved to one side and the old man appeared, naked below the waist. “Y’all brought reenforcements,” he said, looking at Yardley. Yardley would not meet his eyes. He looked around the yard instead and found himself staring at the alligator skins drying on the clothes line.

  “This is my associate Yardley Acheman,” my brother said. “He is also with the newspaper.”

  The old man stepped out onto the porch. His balls hung like an old dog’s. My brother took off the top of the cooler.

  “He’s pretty, ain’t he?” the old man said.

  “Ice cream,” Ward said, and the old man looked inside and then cocked his head as if to reconsider us, “strawberry and vanilla.”

  “You want what you want, don’t you?” the old man said.

  “Yessir,” my brother said. He took out one of the cartons and handed it to the old man, then took out the other and offered it to the man still standing in the door. When he didn’t take it, Ward set it back in the cooler. The old man opened the carton and looked at the ice cream.

  “Go get us some spoons,” he said.

  The man leaned back into the house and shouted, “Hattie, get some clothes on and bring us spoons,” and then resumed his posture in the door.

  “My associate talked to a man down in Ormond Beach,” my brother said.

  The younger man reconsidered the strawberry when the woman came out with the spoons, ate most of it and then passed the dripping container on to her. She did not speak once.

  The old man was eating the vanilla, sitting on the ground, still naked below the waist. “That so?” he said.

  “Yessir,” my brother said. “He recognized a picture of Hillary, had it written down in his books when he bought the sod from him.”

  The old man nodded and stuck his spoon into the ice cream. “That was convenient,” he said.

  The woman’s chin was sticky with ice cream, and there were specks of dirt in it. She wiped at her mouth with the back of her wrist.

  “He said there were two of you,” my brother said.

  “You didn’t show him no picture of me, did you?”

  “I don’t have a picture of you.”

  “That’s right,” the old man said. “That’s right.”

  “But it was you, wasn’t it?” Ward said.

  The old man smiled, not unkindly. “You want what you want, I’ll say that.” Then he looked up at Yardley, who was sitting on the step holding his ankle. “You hurt yourself on my property?” he said.

  Yardley Acheman shook his head no. “It was before,” he said.

  “Good,” the old man said. “You ain’t going to get a lawyer and change your mind.…”

  “It isn’t that bad,” Yardley said.

  “I didn’t think so,” the old man said.

  “You were with Hillary?” my brother asked.

  “Hillary’s in prison,” the old man said.

  “Not for that,” Ward said. “He’s there for murder. If Thurmond Call was killed the night you two were in Ormond Beach stealing sod off the golf course …”

  The woman brushed the hair back off her face and glanced quickly at her husband, then at the old man. I wondered if she belonged to them both.

  “Let me ask you something,” the old man said. “You in prison, how much difference does it make what you’re in there for?”

  “The statute of limitations …”

  “You told me about your statues,” the old man said.

  “What about this man that owns the golf course?”

  My brother smiled at the question, as if he were relieved. “He was insured. You can’t have a golf course without insurance. It’s a long time ago, and he can’t do anything about it anyway.”

  “He could come looking for me,” the old man said. He glanced quickly at his son. “He could come looking for my family.”

  “It’s a lot of years,” Ward said. “He wouldn’t do that.”

  “I would,” the old man said.

  The woman set the carton of strawberry on the ground. The old man took one las
t spoonful of the vanilla and handed her that carton too.

  “It’s your nephew’s life,” my brother said. “If we’re going to do something, we have to do it.”

  “You push too hard,” the old man said, not accusing him, just an observation.

  “I don’t know any other way to act.” Ward said, and the apology in those words was not lost on the old man. He looked at Ward and smiled.

  “We’re all born a certain way, aren’t we?”

  The other man moved forward a little, blocking his wife from Yardley’s view, and bore into him with his eyes. Yardley rolled down his sock to inspect his ankle. The old man leaned back and laced his fingers over his stomach.

  “You don’t talk,” he said to me. “I can’t decide out how you ended up with these two.”

  “We’re brothers,” I said, indicating Ward. Making sure he knew which one I meant.

  The old man smiled at that and addressed Ward again. “They’s always family hiding somewhere in the shadows, isn’t there?”

  Ward did not answer.

  “I was with him,” the old man said suddenly. “Dropped him off at home, the next time I went over there, he was in county jail for cutting open Sheriff Call.”

  It was quiet again, and then Ward said, “Thank you.” He thought a moment and said, “What time would you—”

  The old man interrupted him. “I’ve said as much about it as I’m going to,” he said. “This is as far as I go.”

  He meant it, and there was nothing more to say. We stood up; the old man stood up with us. The other man sat where he was, glaring at Yardley Acheman.

  “He didn’t hurt himself that night, did he?” Ward said.

  The old man closed his eyes, trying to remember. “Not that I remember,” he said. “I sliced a toe half off, myself, trying to work in the dark.”

  “It bled?”

  The old man looked at Ward as if he didn’t understand the question. “Shit yes, it bled,” he said. “We’re mammals.”

  “You go to a hospital?”

  The old man began to nod. “Just go in, the middle of the night, covered with dirt and tell them I cut myself in my sleep.…”