The Paperboy

by Pete Dexter

  The first policeman motioned me over into a corner of the room.

  “You know you’ve got a problem here,” he said, quietly enough so the others couldn’t hear. “What I’d suggest, it’s easier on everybody if your brother had a few drinks tonight and went for a walk down by the beach. Things like this happen down at the beach, even if you don’t see anything about it in the papers.”

  I looked at Ward, trying to figure it out.

  “It could have happened at the beach,” the cop said again. “The only thing is, in that case we didn’t catch the perpetrators.”

  The sailor was watching us carefully, as if he understood what was being decided. He was bleeding and his jaw was swollen beneath his ear. He had begun to cry.

  Charlotte was standing against a wall now with her arms folded across her chest.

  “They tried to kill him,” she said finally.

  The first policeman took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “These things happen,” he said. “I’m not telling you what to do, but these things happen.”

  The sailor groaned, slumping against the wall. The policeman with him used his nightstick across his leg, and the sailor dropped to the floor again.

  “Uh-oh,” the policeman said, “slipped again.”

  “What happens to him?” I said.

  “What do you want to happen?” the policeman said. “A lot of things can happen on the beach.”

  The sailor began to cry out loud. “We didn’t mean to hurt him like that,” he said.

  The policeman talking to me looked at the ambulance attendants, suddenly angry. “The fuck are you waiting for?” he said. “The man’s hurt.”

  I DO NOT KNOW WHAT they did to the sailor after I left the hotel room. I know he was still slumped near the door, trying to look more injured than he was, or perhaps it was simply that he knew what was ahead for him when he and the policeman were alone in the room again, and the thought of it had made him ill.

  I walked into the hallway, hearing the sounds of the stretcher’s wheels as they rolled over the carpet, my brother’s form beneath the sheet, the toes of his feet exposed at the bottom, bouncing gently. The first policeman walked with us as far as the elevator, staring from time to time at Charlotte.

  “We’ll be by the hospital,” he said, and smiled at her as the doors closed and the elevator began its drop to the basement. There was a service door there leading to the parking lot, the exit which the hotel preferred ambulance drivers use for emergencies.

  I SAT IN THE WAITING room while the doctors worked on my brother’s face. They called for a plastic surgeon, but were unable to find one willing to come in at that time of night.

  Charlotte sat with me, wide awake as I slipped in and out of sleep. She woke me once touching the swelling on my head, and again when I heard her asking one of the doctors who had come out to report on Ward’s progress if I shouldn’t be in the hospital too.

  He examined me from the doorway. “Do you need to be admitted?” he said. “We’re short eleven beds as it is.”

  “No,” I said, “I don’t think so.”

  He nodded and disappeared back into the place where they were working on Ward. “He’s going to need reconstructive surgery,” she said. I looked at her, wondering how she would know something like that. “They’re going to have to rebuild the bone structure of his face.”

  I looked away from her then; in the end she knew too many things I didn’t want to know. I felt her hand on my leg. “It doesn’t mean he won’t look right,” she said. “I’ve seen plenty of people had their faces restructured, and most of them looked just fine.”

  She squeezed my leg, trying to get me to look at her.

  “Jack,” she said, “you probably don’t know it, but you aren’t acting like yourself ever since you got conked with that bottle.”

  But it wasn’t the knock on the head that changed me, it was the sight of my brother streaked bloody and wet like a newborn baby.

  I put my hands into my face and closed my eyes. The room moved. “Jack?” she said. I shook my head, meaning I did not want to talk. I was suddenly afraid I would start crying like the sailor.

  “It isn’t as bad for a man as a girl,” she said quietly.

  “That’s something to be thankful for, right there.”

  And then for a long time neither of us spoke. She left her hand on my leg and from time to time ran her other hand over the back of my neck. Then I was sick again and stood up, her hand still on my leg, and hurried to the bathroom at the far end of the waiting room.

  I sat on my heels in front of the toilet, rocking slightly, waiting to see if the vomiting would pass. My face was cool from the spray of the flushing toilet and my arms and legs were weak and shaking. I remember thinking that I did not know how to get up.

  She came in behind me, stood at the door of the stall.

  “Are you going to be all right?” she said.

  Her voice echoed in the room. I flushed the toilet and got myself together. She bent closer and I smelled her perfume again, and then her hands were under my arms helping me up.

  I went to the sink and ran water into my hands and dropped my face into them. She stood patiently behind me, waiting until I was ready to leave.

  The door opened and an old man in a robe moved slowly to one of the urinals, using a walker. He saw her there, but he had been in the hospital a long time, and was used to urinating in front of women.

  “When your brother’s out of surgery we’ll go back to the hotel and call Yardley,” she said. “Then we can get some sleep.”

  I looked at her, trying to track what she’d said, but the words had too many meanings and went too many ways.

  I shook my head and grabbed at the sink to keep my balance. “Don’t call anybody,” I said.

  “He’s got to know,” she said. And then, a moment later, “Your father’s got to know too.… He’ll want to come down.”

  “Don’t call anybody,” I said again.

  “You have to.”

  “Let me think,” I said.

  She found a Life Saver in her purse and put it into my mouth, and then took my arm and led me out of the bathroom to wait for the doctors to come out of the operating room and give us their assessment of the damage my brother had suffered.

  AT SIX IN THE MORNING, Ward was moved from surgery to the recovery room. He lay in the room alone, although it was built to accommodate half a dozen patients. The room was cool, and the nurse covered his chest and arms with an extra blanket, being careful not to tear loose the tubes that ran from the bottles overhead into his arm.

  He was conscious, she said, but he was tired and he did not move when I stood beside him and touched his shoulder. I spoke his name.

  There was no answer, and I looked at the nurse again. She came to his side, reaching beneath the blanket for his wrist, counted the beats of his heart, his breathing; she checked the lines leading from the bottles into his arm to make sure they were dripping at the proper speed.

  She looked at her watch, then at my brother. “He was under anesthesia a long time,” she said. “Sometimes they don’t start back up all at once.”

  She picked up the chart at the foot of his bed, entered his statistics, and headed for her other patients.

  AT THE HOTEL, she took me by the hand and led me to her room. I lay on her bed, kicking off my shoes and my pants, and she lay down next to me. A little later, she pulled me into her neck, holding me there, faintly rocking.

  “Tell me if you feel sick,” she said.

  I burrowed myself into her, smelling her familiar perfume right against her skin, a different odor this close.

  I was surprised at the weight of her breasts against my chest.

  I did not move again until the middle of the afternoon.

  I WOKE UP ALONE. The door that connected this room to Ward’s was open, and she was in there, packing his things into his bag. She had showered and washed her hair and put on her makeup. I stood in the doorway, watc
hing her from behind. I swayed on my feet, and she turned, as if drawn to the movement.

  “I called Yardley,” she said.

  I walked in and sat down on the bed. The sheets had not been changed and they were stiff in places with dried blood. “He had to know,” she said.

  I sat looking at the sheets, trying to decide what that changed. I could not make any of it stay in one place long enough to see it.

  “He had to know,” she said again, as if we were arguing.

  “What did you tell him?”

  She studied me a moment, and gradually I realized she was looking at my forehead. “They shouldn’t have let you out of the hospital,” she said.

  I touched it with the tips of my fingers, pushed slightly into it, and felt the push straight through to the back of my head. My forehead was softer than it had been before and it bulged, as if it were growing a head of its own.

  “A crack like that, you could have died.”

  “What did you tell Yardley?”

  The phone rang and she picked it up. “Don’t tell him anything else,” I said, but it was only the front desk, asking if we intended to stay an extra day. She threatened to sue the hotel if we were bothered again and hung up.

  “I told him Ward took a walk out on the beach,” she said. “I told him the policeman said it happens all the time.”

  A moment passed, I tried to make those words a sentence, to find a beginning and an end and the meaning.

  “What did he say?”

  “Yardley? He said he was working.”

  I looked at her, waiting. She liked to make you wait, even when she was feeling sorry for you. “He asked if Ward was going to make it, and when I said yes, he said he was in the middle of writing and couldn’t leave.”

  I saw that he’d believed her, because if he’d thought that Ward had compromised himself in a hotel room, he would have been on the way to the hospital.

  That was Yardley Acheman’s nature, and it was better that he was sitting in Lately writing his story about Hillary Van Wetter and Moat County than in Daytona Beach, putting together what had happened to Ward. He was not the sort of person to leave hurtful things alone.

  She crossed the room and kissed me quickly on the cheek, smelling of soap and shampoo. I wondered how I smelled to her.

  “He’ll be down after he finishes Hillary’s story,” she said. “Maybe next week.”

  “I don’t think Ward’s going to be able to work for a while,” I said.

  “That man from the newspaper is still there, and he’s checking it as they go along, instead of Ward … ”

  I smiled at her and the things she didn’t know about the newspaper business, and about my brother and Yardley Acheman. “Yardley doesn’t know it well enough to write it alone,” I said finally.

  “That’s not the way it sounded,” she said, and I got up and went into the bathroom and stood for a long time in the shower, and decided again that nothing Yardley Acheman did with the story about Hillary Van Wetter mattered. My only interest was to keep him removed from what had happened in Daytona Beach. And as I was thinking that, I came back to something else that had been going through my head, something which was there even the night before as I was following the ambulance attendants down the corridor of the hotel.

  I didn’t know if Ward would lend himself to the story that he was walking along the beach. I was not sure he could lie.

  I SAT BESIDE HIM in the hospital all the next day. He had suffered a fracture of the skull, and for that reason could not be given pain relievers. Charlotte came and went, leaving flowers, medical opinions. If her estimation of my brother had changed because of the hotel beating, it didn’t show. To her, it was exactly as if he had been attacked walking along the beach at night.

  It was not that simple for me, although I understood that Ward hadn’t changed, that the change was in the way I saw him.

  He had made his way through a crashed airplane, after all, while Yardley Acheman, who slept with women regularly, found his reasons to stay outside. He’d returned to the fraternity house at the University of Miami the same night they had beaten him, he had walked into the Van Wetters’ camp in the heart of the wetlands near the river. And none of that was recast because one night in Daytona Beach he craved sailors.

  “Listen,” I said, and then could not think of the words. The room was quiet a long time, I wondered if he was still listening.

  “Listen, I don’t care what you were doing with those guys, it doesn’t matter to me.”

  He moved his head slowly, rolling it across his pillow until he was looking at me through the slit in the tissue around the eye that was not bandaged.

  “How bad is it?” he said. His voice was dry, and I could barely make out the words.

  “Pretty bad,” I said.

  He waited, blinking.

  “You’re going to need more surgery, to reconstruct your face.”

  He nodded, as if he already knew that. “It’s like the ocean.” He lifted his hand from beneath the sheet and moved it over a series of small waves. He smiled then, showing a black crust inside his mouth. “We should go swimming,” he said.

  His hand dropped and a moment later his breathing was deep and dry and regular and I knew he had fallen asleep.

  His eyes opened the moment I stood up, on the way out to find a drink of water. I settled back in my seat and said, “The police caught them. Did you know that?”

  He shook his head no, uninterested.

  “They beat one of them up, I don’t know about the other one. I think they’ve had trouble with sailors before.”

  My brother had no investment in what happened to the men who nearly killed him. “They either had to let them go,” I said, “or the whole thing would have ended up in the newspapers.”

  It was quiet in the room, and then someplace down the hall a woman screamed.

  “When you were hurt in the ocean … ” he said finally, and then he stopped, as if he couldn’t find the frame for what was next. Or as if his throat was so dry he had lost his voice.

  “You want me to get you a Coke?” I said.

  He shook his head no.

  “When you were hurt in the ocean,” he said again, “was it like this?”

  I said I didn’t know. “It was bad, though. I think it’s always bad when you come close to dying.”

  “It’s a strain,” he said, and smiled again. There were a few teeth left in back. His lips were swollen and he barely opened them to speak. “Did you feel like crying?” he said a little later.

  I stared at him a moment, remembering it.

  “Not when it was going on,” he said, and the words were stripped bare, “but afterward, when it was over. Did it make you weep?”

  “Yes, that’s what it does to you,” I said.

  He nodded his head, and in a moment his unbandaged eye shone with tears, and when he blinked they ran over and down his cheek.

  “There is something sad about almost dying,” I said. “It comes to you later.”

  And tied together in this way, Ward and I, for a little while that afternoon, were as close as we would ever be.

  I DID NOT TELL WARD until the next morning that Yardley Acheman was continuing alone with the story. Ward had showered before I came in, but because of the stitches he could not wash the blood out of his hair.

  He looked better, though, and even with his face half covered in bandages, he seemed more himself. The swelling was down, for one thing, and I could see more of his good eye.

  He would not cry again at the sadness we’d spoken of, although I know from experience that the feeling itself does not disappear because you give in to it. He had cried once, though, and I suppose that was as much of it as he was allowed.

  “Yardley Acheman is going ahead with it,” I said.

  Ward was drinking a Coke through a straw, taking little sips. He put the bottle on the table which bridged the bed and dropped his head back into the pillow.

  “The editor’s
with him, and they’re writing it,” I said. My brother lay still, thinking, jumpy with apprehension.

  “What difference does it make?” I said a little later. “It’s a story in a newspaper.”

  He didn’t seem to hear.

  “They don’t know what happened at the hotel,” I said, thinking that might have been on his mind. “They know you’re in the hospital, that’s all.…” I stopped there, not wanting to enunciate the thing they didn’t know, not wanting to say it out loud.

  “The police said you were out walking along the beach,” I said. “That’s what they wrote in the report.”

  My brother blinked, he understood the reasons.

  “Tell them to bring it down, so I can see it,” he said, meaning the story.

  “I’ll tell them.”

  He nodded his head. “It would be good if I could see it,” he said. And then he closed his eye and went to sleep.

  I CALLED THE NUMBER in Lately half a dozen times; it was never answered. I called my father in Thorn and told him that Ward had been hurt. “He was walking out along the beach,” I said.

  “How bad is it?” he said.

  “Not too bad, but he’s going to need some teeth and a little surgery to fix his cheeks.”

  It was quiet.

  “Did they use weapons?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, “he was kicked.…” I paused, trying to hear the way it would sound to him. “He’s going to be all right.”

  “Is he talking?”

  “A little. It’s not easy, though. He’s got a mouth full of stitches.”

  The line went quiet again; I could see him going into his shirt pocket for one of the tiny pills he kept there, setting it carefully under his tongue. “He’s going to be all right,” I said again.

  “I could be there tonight,” he said.

  I told him it would be better to wait a day or two, until Ward felt more like company.

  I knew that my brother wouldn’t want to see him now. I could not think of a way to say those words, though, and so I said only that it would be a good idea to wait until he could wash his hair to visit.