by Pete Dexter
WE PUT YARDLEY ACHEMAN back in the boat—he sat down facing the motor—and then pushed it into the water and got in ourselves. The woman came into my line of sight then, standing at the edge of the house for a second or two, the tip of her finger in her mouth, as if she did not want to let go of the taste of ice cream, and then there was a sound in the house, a squalling, and she looked that way and was gone. She had round shoulders and clear skin, and I wondered what she would have looked like in another place. I pulled the starter cord and the engine caught, sputtered, and then smoothed as I corrected the choke.
“Thank you,” my brother said again.
The old man nodded and his son came to the edge of the water and stood next to him. Yardley sat backwards in the boat, clutching the sides, nervous even before we pushed it off into the water.
The old man smiled at him and said, “Hold on to that boat now.”
THE RIDE BACK TO the marina was faster than the ride down had been, partly because we weren’t looking for the house in the trees along the bank, and partly because the river itself runs north, from the middle of the state to Jacksonville, where it empties into the ocean.
The engine was less erratic at the higher speed and the nose of the boat bounced against the plane of the river. There was a certain pleasure in holding the stick and in the smell of the engine and the feel of the water passing beneath my feet. Ward sat in front again, thinking about what the old man had said, in some way not satisfied with it, and Yardley held himself still, his eyes closed against nausea.
At the marina, he leaned over the side and vomited. My brother hardly seemed to notice. “The man in Ormond Beach,” he said when Yardley had finished, “did he show you his records?”
Yardley nodded, as if he knew what Ward was asking, as if the question had been asked a hundred times before. “They were right there on his desk,” he said.
“And he was sure about the date.”
“He was sure about the date.”
We left the boat and started back to the car; I could still feel the lift and fall of the water.
“He was absolutely sure,” Yardley said again, as if saying it would make it so.
Neither of them spoke again until we were back in the car and pointed toward Lately. “Did you give him the date, or did he give it to you?” Ward said.
Yardley came up in his seat to get a closer look at my brother. “What’s wrong with you?” he said.
Ward spoke more slowly. “Did you say to the man, ‘Was it August fourteenth, nineteen sixty-five,’ or did he look in his books and say the date to you?”
“What difference does it make?”
“It doesn’t feel right,” my brother said.
“Look,” Yardley said, “I’ve been doing this a long time, and I know when something doesn’t feel right as well as you do.”
“YOU KNOW THE TROUBLE with you?” Yardley Acheman said.
We were back in the office and Ward was going over some of the notes he’d made in the car after one of the early visits to Starke. He was missing some scrap paper, a word or two on it that he couldn’t remember.
Yardley was impatient to finish the story and get back to Miami. “You don’t understand that you have to let go of it to get it done,” he said.
My brother found the paper and set it carefully on his desk, uninterested in it now that it wasn’t missing.
THAT DAY OR PERHAPS the next, Yardley Acheman called an editor in Miami and reported that he was ready to write the story, but Ward would not let it go.
I am not sure how Yardley Acheman presented the situation—he did not make the call from the office, at least not while my brother and I were there—but at the end of the week a man with a beard and eyeglasses half an inch thick appeared in our doorway, knocked once, and walked in.
My brother was sitting at his desk, going over the early court proceedings again, and Yardley was on the phone with his fiancee back in Miami. My brother stood up when he saw the man with the beard, and in doing that knocked over a bottle of Dr Pepper, spilling some of it on the papers. He opened one of his drawers and found the shirt I’d borrowed from Yardley, which he’d subsequently refused to touch, and used it to blot the mess.
The editor—he was the Sunday editor, that was his title—was smiling, looking around, admiring the ambience. He went to the window and had a long stare at Lately while, on the other side of the room, Yardley Acheman was finishing up with his intended.
“Right,” he said, “I got to go. Right. Not now … tonight, I’ll call tonight. Yeah, me too, right … ”
“What’s that smell, onions?” the man from Miami said.
He was older than Yardley Acheman, perhaps forty or fifty.
He looked like he hadn’t been out of his office in a long time.
“There’s a grease shop downstairs,” Yardley said. “The whole street smells like onions.” He smelled his own arm. “It gets in your skin,” he said.
The man from Miami opened his eyes wide at the news, as if he had never heard of such a thing, then looked over to my brother. “How are we coming?” he said.
“We’re getting there,” Ward said. He had finished blotting the papers and was sitting in his chair again, not trying to do any work.
The man from Miami sat down on the chair against the wall. He looked at me a moment, not knowing what I was doing there.
“How much longer do you think it might be?”
“Not too long,” Ward said. “There’s some things here I’m not satisfied with.…”
“You think a couple of days, a week?” he said.
“Until what?” Ward said.
“Till Yardley can start writing.” He smiled, but there was an edge to it too.
My brother looked at Yardley Acheman, Yardley would not meet his eyes. “It’s hard to put a time on it,” Ward said.
“What’s left to do?”
My brother shook his head.
“It sounds to me like you’re ready now and just don’t know it.” The man from Miami paused and then he said, “I was the same way. I never wanted to let go of a story; I suppose that’s how you end up in an office.” He smiled at that, as if his own shortcomings amused him.
“I’m not comfortable yet,” Ward said.
“I appreciate that,” said the man from Miami. “It means you’re a good reporter, it means you’re cautious. But from what Yardley’s told me, it looks like things have turned up as black-and-white as you ever find them.”
“I don’t know,” Ward said.
“I know you don’t,” said the man from Miami. “But the thing is, you could stay here the rest of your life and still never be sure of every little detail. That isn’t our job. Our job is to get as much of it right as we can, and get it in the newspaper.”
Ward didn’t say a thing.
“You’re too valuable to be sitting out here in the middle of nowhere,” he said. “There’s other stories to write.”
“I don’t think this one’s finished,” Ward said.
“Yardley’s satisfied,” he said. Yardley Acheman nodded from behind his desk. “He’s the one who’s got to write it.”
The air was suddenly heavy with the smell of onions. Things had been decided outside this room, away from my brother, and there was nothing he could do about it. He rubbed his eyes as if he had not slept in a long time and then looked at me. He seemed to be asking for help. I did not know how to help him, I did not even know how to start.
“It isn’t finished,” he said again.
“It’s going to take Yardley a while to write,” the man said. His voice was reasonable and friendly. “You do what you need to do and he’ll do what he needs to do, and one way or another, we’ll get this thing in the paper.”
And my brother didn’t say anything more to the man from Miami, even when he told a story about the days when he was a reporter himself and how he had gotten so close to a story that he finally couldn’t write it.
“That story,” he said qui
etly, “won me the Pulitzer Prize.”
The prize was the proof that he was right about my brother’s story, and about anything else that came up, and he allowed a few seconds for the weight of his accomplishment to sink in. Then he said, “And if it wasn’t for an editor kicking my ass to put it on paper, I’d probably still be sitting at my desk at the Broward County bureau of the Miami Times, trying to get it written.”
The man patted Ward on the shoulder when he left, and then three of us were alone in the room.
“I just thought we needed a fresh perspective,” Yardley Acheman said. “I didn’t know he was going to come up here and start telling us what to do.”
Ward nodded and stood up. He collected all the notes on his desk, all the transcripts and depositions, and walked across the room to Yardley Acheman and dropped them in front of him. He looked back at me a moment—I didn’t know if he wanted me to come with him or leave him alone—and then walked out the door.
I stood up to follow him, and Yardley Acheman said something to me, thinking I would repeat it to Ward. “It had to be done,” he said.
It occurred to me then that I had been in Lately too long. I had spent too much time staring at the people who lived here and too much time staring at Hillary Van Wetter in the visitors’ room at Starke, and too much time staring at Charlotte Bless.
When I stared at something long enough, the lines blurred and I could no longer see it for what it was. One thing became another.
MY FATHER WAS RELIEVED at the news that Yardley Acheman was finally writing the story.
“So now it’s time for Mr. Acheman to go to work,” were the words he said, but my father didn’t care if Yardley Acheman worked or not. He was satisfied that my brother had finished poking through Moat County.
“They’ll be going back to Miami to write it,” he said, asking me the question.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“There’s no reason to stay up here,” he said.
We were eating fried chicken and boiled potatoes, and he was into his second bottle of wine. My father watched me, his lips against the rim of the glass, waiting for me to agree with him, as if my agreement would make it so.
I found myself thinking of an afternoon not long after my mother left, my father walking into the kitchen while Anita Chester was boiling potatoes for dinner. He’d drunk three bottles of red wine, a glass at a time, and he put a fork into the boiling water, pulled out a whole, soft potato, and stuck it that way—whole—into his mouth.
He reeled backwards across the kitchen, reaching into his mouth, trying to take it out, falling across the table first and then through the screen door into the backyard.
Anita Chester followed him out, carrying a spatula, and stood over him in the yard. Unable to get the potato out, he finally chewed and swallowed it. “Mr. Ward,” she said, “have you lost your mind?”
He looked up at her through tearing eyes, beginning to cough, and nodded that he had. She stared a moment longer and then turned and walked back into the house, as if rich white men confessed to her all the time.
I looked at him now and thought of him on his back in the yard. “Unless I miss my guess, Mr. Acheman isn’t going to want to stay in Lately one hour longer than he has to,” he said.
And that was true, but it was also true that he would stay in Lately if Ward did. He could not write a story without someone there to lead him through the parts that could be checked. He had no interest in facts. It was a shortcoming for a newspaperman, I suppose, but he never saw it himself.
To see certain things, you have to be lying on your back with tears in your eyes and a scalding potato in your mouth.
It’s possible, I think, that you have to be hurt to see anything at all.
“Ward wants to satisfy himself about some things before he leaves,” I said.
“I thought the story was ready to write.”
My father refilled his glass. “It’s ready to go or it isn’t,” he said.
I had not told him about the argument between Ward and Yardley Acheman, or about the visit from the Sunday editor from Miami. It seemed to me it was something Ward ought to tell him himself if he wanted him to know.
My father drank half of what was in the glass and relaxed. “So what do you think?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“About the business,” he said. “You’ve had a look, what do you think?”
“I don’t think much one way or the other.”
“It’s better than driving a truck.”
I said, “It’s better than loading one.”
And he looked at me and smiled. “We all have our own speed,” he said, meaning, I supposed, that Ward had never been expelled from the University of Florida.
“One way or another, we do things when we’re ready.” He thought about something else for a moment, then looked at me and smiled again. A kind of peace had settled over him with the last bottle of wine. “Don’t be so serious about everything, Jack,” he said. “Your turn will come.”
I said, “I do things when I have to,” and that made him laugh, and I laughed with him. I’d had a few glasses of wine myself.
“Sometimes,” he said, fondly, as if he were remembering a story, “the only way you find out you’re ready is that when you have to be, you are.”
I had another drink of the wine, and felt peaceful myself. “Can I tell you something?” I said.
“Anything.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
And that made him laugh too. “I’m talking about you,” he said. “I’m talking about you.”
But he wasn’t.
He was still talking about handing his newspaper over to Ward.
WE WENT TO DAYTONA BEACH, Ward and I and Charlotte. Yard-ley stayed in Lately with the Sunday editor to begin his writing. Ward told them he was going down for a look at the golf course, but his intention was to find Yardley’s contractor for himself.
Yardley Acheman’s interest, of course, was in the flow of his stories, in interpreting events, in exposing hypocrisy wherever he saw it, which is to say that it was not impossible that he had never found the builder at all. That he’d seen what he needed and made it up.
WE STAYED AT A HOTEL on the beach—my brother and I shared a room, Charlotte took another—and I lay awake and restless for an hour after Ward had fallen asleep, and finally got out of bed, being careful not to wake him because it was after midnight, and walked through the lobby and out onto the beach, passing the drunks and the lovers, almost stepping on a boy and a girl wrapped around each other, naked on a blanket.
She held on to his neck, holding him inside her, and followed me with her eyes as I passed.
An open bottle of liquor was stuck into the sand.
I swam out into the ocean. It was calm and the moon lay ahead of me on the water, and it was endless. I swam a long time and never felt the familiar weight of my arms and legs which signaled I was getting tired. I thought of the girl on the beach, holding on to the boy’s neck in the dark, her cheek pressed into the side of his head as he worked himself in and out, watching me.
I would have liked someone to hold on to myself.
I had a thought then about my brother, and the way in which we were different. He would not have ached over a girl he had only glimpsed a moment, lying with someone else in the sand. There was nothing in Ward that attached itself easily. And then I was suddenly chilled, as if the thought had done it, and I stopped—there was nothing to prove that night, nothing to exhaust—and rolled over onto my back so that I could watch the moon as I swam back to Daytona Beach.
Why had he attached himself to Yardley Acheman?
I CAME OUT OF the water shaking like a man with his finger in the light socket, and could not stop even when I got under the blankets back at the hotel. I got up finally and stood under hot water in the shower.
When I came out of the bathroom his eyes were open, and he could not go back to sleep. From my e
arliest memories, Ward was a light sleeper.
WARD SPENT THE NEXT DAY trying to find the builder. I drove him from county offices to building sites, exhausting the contractors one by one who had been building condominiums in August of 1965.
At the end of the day he had not found the builder, and while it was possible that such a builder was no longer operating under the same name—several of the ones he found listed in the county’s building permits could not be accounted for—or had left the business, such a possibility presented the question of how Yardley Acheman, who had no interest in facts and no talent for research, had found him when my brother couldn’t.
Charlotte was no help, remembering only that she had other things on her mind at the time. “Handsome men are the worst,” she said.
WE STOPPED LOOKING late in the afternoon and went back to the hotel. At the desk, Ward paid for another room and gave me the key, without mentioning that I’d kept him up the night before.
A band was playing in the hotel bar that night, and the restaurant, which was adjacent to the bar, filled up with smoke and music and noise and people from the other room as we ate. I studied the girls carefully, looking for the one from the beach.
Charlotte was bored with Daytona Beach and the newspaper business, and wanted to go back to Lately. “How much is all this going to help him?” she said, speaking of Hillary.
My brother said, “It would help if we could find the man who bought the sod.”
“Yardley already found him,” she said, but it didn’t sound as if she believed that either.
She put a cigarette into her lips and dropped her face into her hands to light the match, her hair falling over her hands, dangerously close to the flame. I have set my own hair on fire in restaurants, bending over a candle on the table, and it makes a horrible smell.
“We need to find him again,” Ward said.
“Shit,” she said. She was tired of stolen sod and contractors and of us, and she was tired of Yardley Acheman, but in a different way.
The cocktail waitress arrived after we’d eaten. She was dressed in a ruffled blouse and a black skirt that did not quite cover the bottom of her panties. I ordered a beer, Charlotte ordered a Cuba libre—pronouncing Cuba the way it is pronounced by the Cubans—and my brother, who did not ordinarily have a drink in bars, asked for a vodka and Coke.