The Paperboy

by Pete Dexter

  I looked at him, wondering what he was doing, but his attention had strayed in the last few minutes and was now drawn to a table across the room where a couple of sailors, probably on leave from Jacksonville, were sitting with a middle-aged man who wore a bow tie. They were baby-faced boys, the sailors, one of them with a mustache.

  The man in the bow tie was paying another waitress for their drinks, taking the money, one bill at a time, from his wallet.

  THE WAITRESS LEANED over me to set the glasses on the table, brushing my cheek with her skirt. Her perfume was bitter, mingling with Charlotte’s. Ward finished his vodka before she could leave. He handed her the glass and asked for another. I had never seen my brother drink anything beyond a few beers.

  “You must be thirsty,” she said.

  He did not answer, but continued to glance from time to time at the table and the two sailors. They were drinking rose-colored daiquiris. One of the sailors looked up and caught my brother staring.

  Ward and the sailor looked at each other, and then the other sailor was looking at our table too. He picked up his glass, never taking his eyes off us, and finished everything that was in it. The hard knot in his throat moved as he swallowed.

  Charlotte saw what was going on. “For Christ’s sake,” she said, “we’re going to have a fight.” I assumed she had been around fights before, and knew what she was talking about.

  “There’s no problem,” my brother said. And he drank his next drink almost as quickly as he’d drunk the first, and ordered a third.

  “I think maybe I remember where Yardley found that builder,” Charlotte said, trying to pull him away from his drinking and staring. He nodded at her, as if he already knew they would find him. “I couldn’t concentrate today,” she said. “Emotionally, I’m wrung out.”

  Then she looked at me and shrugged. “Thinking too much about Hillary,” she said. As if I were the one who would understand.

  “What about him?” I said.

  She said, “I don’t know, he’s just been on my mind.” None of us spoke for a little while, and when I looked again the sailors were still fixed on our table. Staring at Charlotte now more than my brother or me, but it seemed they wanted us all, one way or another.

  The man with them was talking, but they had all the drinks they wanted for now and had stopped listening.

  “Maybe we ought to go somewhere else,” I said.

  Ward took his next drink off the waitress’s tray and gave her a ten-dollar bill. Then he stood up, leaving her the change, and headed off toward the bathroom.

  “He’s sociable tonight,” Charlotte said.

  I said, “He isn’t used to drinking like that.”

  She said, “Nobody’s used to drinking like that,” and we watched him pitch left and then right on his way over. The sailors had seen him staggering too, and then one of them stood up, not as tall as I’d thought, and came to the table. He stood over Charlotte, looking down her blouse.

  “Your friend got a problem with us, momma?” he said.

  The other sailor was smiling now, watching everything this one did. Somewhere along the line he had lost a front tooth.

  The man in the bow tie stopped talking, stirred by the possibility of violence.

  “Nobody’s got a problem but you, asshole,” Charlotte said.

  “It looked to me like he’s got a problem,” the sailor said, and now he looked at me.

  I shook my head. The sailor frightened me. He rested a hand on the table and leaned closer, and the table moved under his weight. He moved his face in front of mine, a foot away, then slowly turned and looked at Charlotte and smiled.

  “What do you think?” he said to her. “Your friends got a problem with me? Maybe they got a problem with each other, because, you know, they look like a couple of dick suckers. We got one over at our table too, maybe we ought to work out a trade.”

  “They’re brothers,” she said, and then, looking him over, she said, “and I think you’ve all got problems.” A moment passed and she said, “You’re all assholes.”

  Meaning men.

  It was a voice I’d heard before. She got down on one of us, she got down on us all. The sailor continued to stare at her, continued to smile. “My friend and I got a bet,” he said, “are you over fifty.”

  And he laughed at what he’d said, and then turned his head violently away and was suddenly so close to my face I couldn’t make out his features. I jumped at the motion.

  “What about that?” he said. “You think we’re assholes too?” His breath smelled of strawberries and rum.

  I did not answer.

  “You don’t say much, do you?” the sailor said. He stood up, looking us over. “One of them runs, one of them won’t talk.” He looked back at Charlotte and said, “You’re a very lucky old woman.”

  “And you’re an asshole,” she said, and finished her drink. And then, when the sailor had left the table and gone back to be with his friend and the dick sucker, she looked at me and said, “Where’s Hillary when you need him?”

  I WENT LOOKING FOR my brother. It was more what Charlotte had said than what the sailor had said, but I was suddenly ashamed, knowing that something had been taken away from me, in public, in front of her.

  I walked past their table, brushing the one who had spoken to us, but he was occupied with the third man and did not seem to notice. He was asking the man for money.

  “Come on, Freddie,” he said. “You told us we was going to have a good time.”

  In the bathroom men and women were standing at the mirror, and some of them were smoking marijuana. A woman was on her knees behind the door of a toilet stall, her shoeless feet and part of her lower legs sticking out into the room. Runs in her stockings.

  The bathroom was more crowded than the bar, and warmer. I found Ward at the far end, combing his hair in front of a mirror, a sight that struck me as humorous.

  CHARLOTTE WAS TIRED, and I walked her back to her room, neither of us speaking. She kissed me on the cheek in the hall, and I went to the room Ward had gotten for me. My brother had stayed at the bar, drinking Scotch and Cokes.

  I slipped toward sleep, thinking of the sailor, imagining that I’d stood up and choked him with a headlock. I wondered what Charlotte would have thought of that, and then I could see it all clearly. She would have thought we were all assholes.

  I could have choked him, though, I was stronger than he was, and I’d known that even as I’d felt myself shaking because I was afraid.

  I thought of Ward and how quickly he’d found the sailors staring at us. I wondered what sort of thoughts went through his head when he drank.

  I lay in bed, thinking of my brother driving Yardley Acheman’s car across Alligator Alley at 103 miles an hour.

  CHARLOTTE WAS POUNDING the door, calling to me from the other side of my sleep, something in her voice I hadn’t heard before. I got out of bed in my underwear and knocked over a beer on the table, looking for the light.

  The pounding shook the room. “Jack,” she said. “Jack, get up.” A harsh whisper.

  I walked to the door in the dark, stepping into the beer I’d spilled, caught again for a moment between places, not knowing which one was real.

  I opened the door and the room flooded with light. She stood in the middle of it, wearing a terry cloth robe. Her hair was pulled away from her face and held there by a rubber band, I think, and what fell across her shoulders was tangled in a way I’d never seen it, not even driving home from Starke with the windows down. She smelled of sleep.

  It came to me that she would not like it when she took the compact out of her purse and looked in the mirror.

  “Something’s going on in Ward’s room,” she said. And I understood then, and I was awake.

  The first rooms we’d taken adjoined each other; the new one—mine—was at the far end of the hall. I went past her, and out the door.

  “I think they’re killing him,” she said behind me, trying to keep up. I turned to loo
k at her.

  “Who?”

  “The sailors,” she said. “I think it’s the sailors.”

  My foot hit a tray of dirty dishes set outside a door for room service to pick up, scattering glasses and French fries across the carpet. I slipped, started to fall, and then got myself upright again and ran in earnest.

  I lost the sound of her steps behind me, lost them in the sound of my own steps, and then suddenly realized I didn’t know one room from another. His was near the lobby, I remembered that from the night before, walking up the air-conditioned hallway in my bathing suit. I slowed, looking at doors, and thought I heard the sailors. I stopped, shaking with fear, listening.

  It was nothing hurried or sharp, just the noise of a beating, evenly spaced. Blunt. A few words between them as they worked.

  I threw myself into the door. It held, but the spot where I’d hit it splintered and took the shape of my shoulder.

  The noise inside stopped, and then was replaced by a different sound. This one coming out of Ward. It was not a moan or a cry, it was almost as if he were trying to talk.

  I backed up and hit the door again, as frightened as I have ever been. And then I heard Charlotte behind me, the catch in her breathing, the urgency of it, and as I turned to see her the door in front of me came open and one of them stood in the threshold, a bottle in his hand, blood all over the front of his shirt.

  Behind him, on the floor, was my brother. He was naked and his eye was swollen shut and he was hobbled in some way, and when he tried to push himself up off the floor a line of blood followed him up, as if it were elastic, and then pulled him back down.

  I was looking at my brother when the sailor hit me in the forehead with the bottle, and for a little while things went black.

  When the light came back, they were running toward the far end of the hall, back in the direction of the room I had left. An Exit sign glowed from the ceiling. Charlotte was chasing them up the corridor, screaming words that did not make sense to me. She stopped to pick up a plate and threw it just before they hit the exit, briefly setting off the alarm. Doors along the hallway opened a few inches and then shut.

  I got to my feet, suddenly nauseated, and walked into my brother’s room. He was still on the floor. I put my arm under his chest, feeling the blood on his skin. It was drying now and sticky, and I lifted him off the floor. I carried him like that, facedown, toward the bed. A drop of fresh blood splattered against my foot.

  The covers were torn from the bed, and one of the sheets had been ripped into smaller pieces and lay on the floor near the far chair, still tied in knots. They had used the strips of sheet to tie him. He moved in my arms and then went limp.

  I laid him carefully on the bed, first his head, which hung half a foot lower than his body, as if his neck were broken, and then the rest. He coughed and tried to speak, a wet noise that fell off his lips like the blood.

  I rolled him onto his back and saw the sweep of the beating. His teeth in front were sheared at the gums, the cartilage of his nose had been flattened and moved sideways and lay under his left eye. The eyes were both closed, swollen shut, one of them strangely out of place.

  In some unexplainable way, I knew he had lost the eye.

  There were marks over his chest and stomach, and on his arms, where he had tried to fend them off, and all around the groin. Most of these marks were red, but some—the ones where he had been stomped—were raised and dark.

  I did not know where to start.

  She came into the room a moment later and covered her mouth.

  I do not know if it was the sight of her or of my brother, or—more likely—if it was the bottle which had slammed into my forehead, but I was sick. I walked into the bathroom and drank cold water from the faucet and then threw up in the sink. When I came back into the room, she was sitting with him, holding his hand. She had not tried to clean up the blood on his face. She sat still, holding his hand, and that was as much as either of us could do.

  “I called the front desk,” she said. “The ambulance ought to be here soon.”

  I picked up what was left of the sheet off the floor and covered him. “What happened?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I heard it through the wall, one of them screaming, your brother begging them … ”

  “Begging them?”

  “Begging,” she said again, “just begging.”

  He stirred under the sheet, and turned his head on the pillow.

  “It must have lasted a long time,” I said, and a moment later my eyes teared, and then the room began to spin. I went back into the bathroom and drank more water from the tap. I looked at myself in the mirror, and the place where I’d taken the bottle was swelling up into my hairline.

  Then I stepped back into the room itself, and the place was somehow museumlike. Scattered furniture and bedclothes, blood soaking into the carpet. Something had happened, but it was quiet now, completely still. My brother’s head rolled toward the far wall, and I could no longer see his face.

  “They’ll be here any minute,” she said. I didn’t know which one of us she was talking to.

  “How long did it last?” I said. I could not dislodge the picture of my brother begging.

  “Not too long,” she said.

  I needed to know it hadn’t been long.

  The curtains were torn off the windows, and I noticed there were lights in the parking lot. Some of them belonged to the police. My brother stirred again—it was as if he could not stay still—and his head moved back until I could see his expression. I don’t know how with all the damage. Something strained, then relaxed.

  “Any minute,” she said.

  I thought of trying to dress him, to make what had happened here look like something that was not as bad.

  THE POLICE CAUGHT ONE of the sailors in the parking lot, hiding in the backseat of a car that belonged to the man who had been with them in the bar. The other sailor had run out to the beach, and the police had chased him a minute or two and then given up, knowing they could get his name from the one they had.

  “Mr. James,” one of the policemen said to my brother, “Mr. Olson here says you lured him and his friend up into your hotel room and tried to engage them in sexual activity.”

  Mr. Olson was the sailor who had come to the table. He was standing between the policemen in the doorway, his hands were cuffed behind him.

  “Mr. James?” the policeman said. There were ambulance attendants in the room, but neither of them had touched Ward. He was still naked.

  “This asshole and his friend followed him out of the bar,” Charlotte said.

  The sailor looked at her quickly and said, “That’s a goddamn lie,” and the policeman standing at the door, who’d had trouble with sailors who came down from Jacksonville before, hit the sailor with his nightstick, catching him just under the ear. The sailor dropped to his knees, holding his head.

  Charlotte smiled.

  “We didn’t follow the faggot anywhere,” the sailor said. “He invited us to his room.”

  The first policeman looked at my brother in a sad way. “Is that true, Mr. James?” he said. “Are you a faggot?”

  “He’s no faggot,” I said, looking at the sailor.

  “Who are you?” the policeman said.

  “Another one,” said the sailor. And then the sailor laughed, but he looked at me strangely, as if something were out of place. I turned to the policeman. “I’m his brother,” I said.

  The policeman nodded. “So what’s he doing naked?”

  “It’s his room, maybe he was taking a shower. Maybe he was in bed.”

  The sailor laughed again, and got to his feet. There was dried blood in the hair on the back of his wrists.

  “I hate this,” one of the ambulance attendants said. We all looked at him and waited, but that was as much as he intended to say. The other attendant stood looking at Ward, frowning.

  “So what are we going to do?” the first policeman said to me. I sa
w Ward’s flesh had risen tiny bumps along his arms, and I took the blanket off the floor and covered him with it.

  “If you don’t need us,” the ambulance attendant said to the policeman, “we got a head-on out on the highway.”

  He looked at Ward quickly, then at the policeman who did not like sailors. “He’s all right,” he said, “he just got beat up.”

  Charlotte wiped at the blood still leaking from my brother’s nose, and then at the creases that were his eyes.

  “Get everybody’s name,” she said.

  The policeman who did not like sailors rolled his eyes.

  “The guy’s a faggot,” said the sailor, and the policeman hit him again, flush on the chin, and he fell against the door, his hands still cuffed behind him, dropping his face in such a way that it seemed as if he were trying to pick up his jaw with his teeth.

  “Uh-oh,” said the cop who didn’t like sailors. “This one fell down.”

  “We got to go,” said the ambulance driver, but he was afraid to leave without permission. He was waiting for someone to say it was all right.

  “You saw that,” said the sailor, but there was something wrong with his speech. He sounded as if he were begging now too.

  The ambulance driver shook his head. “I didn’t see nothing, I didn’t hear nothing.” He turned again to the policeman. “What do you want us to do?” he said.

  The policeman looked at me.

  “He’s hurt,” I said.

  The sailor moaned, and seemed to be suffering. The first policeman picked him up from behind, using the collar of his shirt, and set him against the wall to wait.

  “Don’t move,” he said.

  “I didn’t do nothing,” said the sailor, but he was afraid now and stayed where he was against the wall. He started to speak again and the policeman near him slapped his face so hard his nose began to bleed.