The Paperboy

by Pete Dexter

  I have spent most of my life keeping the truth from my father, and I suppose he has spent most of his in the same pursuit.

  THE NEXT MORNING my brother worried out loud about the story Yardley Acheman was writing in Lately. I took that as a sign of recovery, and told him that Moat County would survive anything the Miami Times might do to it in print.

  We did not talk about the other story—the one the policeman wrote in his report. I did not mention that I worried at the prospect of ever seeing Yardley and Charlotte in the same room again. She had lied for my brother once, but you could not count on her to maintain it, one day to the next.

  She brought fresh-cut flowers that morning and the next, but as my brother’s condition improved she lost interest, and by the time my father finally arrived in Daytona Beach, she was planning her trip back to Lately.

  “I can do more good up there,” she said.

  “You’ll be in the way,” I said.

  “If I am, they’ll say so. I don’t have any clean clothes here anyway.”

  In the end, I agreed to take her back.

  She and my father crossed paths in the hospital waiting room, Charlotte heading one way, my father heading the other. He was dressed in a suit, she was wearing the same clothes she’d had on the night Ward was beaten. I began to introduce them, but my father was diverted by a patient coming through on a stretcher and looked past her, afraid now of what he would see when he went farther into the hospital.

  “WELL, YOU DON’T LOOK so bad,” he said.

  It was something he had prepared himself to say no matter what condition Ward was in. In fact, the swelling had receded in some of the places Ward was hurt, but his bottom lip had become infected, and left him almost unable to speak.

  My brother nodded at him, then looked at me. I did not know if he wanted me to leave or to stay. Charlotte’s flowers stood at both ends of the one chest of drawers in the room, beginning to fade, and my father pushed them aside and sat down. He did not go near the chair beside the bed.

  “I tried to call your mother.…” His voice disappeared, and he looked at my brother more carefully. “Did they catch them?” he said to me.

  I shook my head. “There’s been a lot of it down by the beach,” I said. For some reason, it seemed necessary to repeat the policeman’s exact words, to say it the same way it had been said to me. My father nodded, imagining the carnage at the beach.

  “How long before they’ll let you out of here?” he said, speaking again to Ward. There was a heartiness to his voice that was planned and unnatural, part of the costume for the visit.

  Ward shrugged, looking around the room for help. It was hard to watch them together; it was hard to leave them alone. “They’ll do some more surgery the day after tomorrow,” I said. “They’ll have a better idea then of how much longer.”

  “I can tell you the Times is worried,” my father said. “I talked to my friend Larson there, and they’re wondering what they’ll do for news while you’re getting better.”

  He would have liked to have told Ward that the Moat County Tribune couldn’t get along without him, I think. It would have seemed more personal than the Miami Times.

  My brother nodded at that and tried a smile. His lips hurt him, though, and his face moved only a little and then stopped. It was characteristic of my father that on seeing his oldest son lying in the intensive care unit of the hospital, beaten half to death, coming face-to-face with that thing he feared most, he would talk about going back to work.

  Having been in the business of shorthand all his life—of using certain words to evade other words that are easier or more politely left unsaid—he could not find any words at all when it mattered.

  My brother understood that and forgave him, and hoped, I suppose, that he would be forgiven in return. And perhaps that was what happened.

  “They miss you at work,” he said.

  MY FATHER AND I had dinner that night at his hotel, and he spoke infrequently, once to ask which newspapers Ward would want in the morning. After he had gone to his room for the evening I drove Charlotte back to Lately, arriving at her apartment at one in the morning, having to shake her awake.

  “Jesus,” she said, “was I snoring?”

  I was tired in ways that had nothing to do with sleep. It occurred to me, sitting in the car with her, that I had been trying to hold too many things together that were meant to fall apart.

  She was looking at herself in a compact, touching her face here and there with lipstick or an eyebrow pencil. In all the time I knew her, she never went from one place to another without looking at herself in a mirror. She had turned on the light overhead, and it cast shadows across the dashboard of the car.

  “What do you want with him?” I said.

  She leaned over and looked at me a moment, the light falling across her hair and face. “What do you think, I’ve still got something going on with Yardley?” she said.

  I didn’t answer, and a moment later she patted me on the leg and then turned in her seat and opened the door.

  “The things you don’t know, for a smart kid,” she said, and then she closed the door and was gone.

  I FOUND YARDLEY ACHEMAN and the editor from Miami the next morning, both sitting at Ward’s desk in the little office over the Moat Cafe. Ward’s notes and his files were open all around them, on the desk and on the floor. In the center of the desk was a typewriter with a piece of paper in the carriage.

  The editor’s sleeves were rolled almost to his elbows and he wore a tie loosed at the neck. Yardley also wore a tie. There were no beer bottles in sight.

  I walked in without knocking, and judging Yardley’s expression, I was not welcome. The man from Miami had no idea who I was. He was not good at faces.

  Yardley looked at me, then his eyes went back to the typewriter. “How’s he doing?” he said, and typed for a moment or two and then stopped, as if he were taking it all down, and waiting now for my answer.

  “He tried to call,” I said, and looked at the telephones. Both of them had been taken off the hook.

  “Tell him everything’s all right,” Yardley Acheman said. “He doesn’t have to worry.”

  “He’d like to see the story,” I said.

  Yardley went back to typing. “Tell you what. Let me write the fucking story, Jack, then we can all read it,” he said.

  “He doesn’t want to read it in the newspaper,” I said. “He wants to read it before it goes in.”

  The man from Miami seemed to have put it together, who I was. “We’ve got a real time problem right now,” he said. “We’re trying to get this thing ready for Sunday.”

  I stood still, and Yardley went on with his typing. “These are the most organized, thorough notes I’ve ever seen,” the man said. “If it weren’t for that, we wouldn’t have a chance.” Thinking I would take that back to my brother.

  “Why does it have to be in the paper Sunday?” I said.

  Yardley Acheman threw the editor a tired look but continued to work. The editor smiled again. “There always comes a time,” he said, sounding patient, “when you’ve got to push the thing out the door. It’s hard to let go, but you’ve got to do it or else you’d never get anything done.”

  I thought of the weeks Yardley Acheman had spent in Lately, getting nothing done.

  “Beyond that,” the editor said, “there’s a man on death row. Time’s running out on him, and it doesn’t do him or us any good if he’s executed before this situation can be corrected.”

  I stood still a moment, wanting to argue issues I didn’t know anything about. “Ward ought to look at it first,” I said finally. “It’s his story.”

  “John,” Yardley Acheman said to the editor, “I’ve got to have some quiet.” He was the only newspaper reporter I ever met who could not write unless it was quiet. The editor moved then, putting his hand in the middle of my back, smiling, heading me toward the door.

  “If anything comes up we need his help, we’ll call him at
the hospital,” he said. “And as soon as this thing’s finished, we’ll send him a carbon copy.…”

  We had reached the door, where he had stopped and was waiting now for me to leave.

  “It’s his story,” I said again. “He wants to read it before it goes in the paper.”

  “He can read it,” the editor said, and put his hand on my back again.

  “First,” I said. “He can read it first.…”

  Yardley looked up again from his typewriter, impatient for me to leave. The editor only smiled. “At the first opportunity,” he said. “We’ll have it sent to the hospital directly.”

  I stepped through the doorway, unsure of what the editor had promised. “Before it runs,” I said.

  “As soon as humanly possible,” he said, and he shut the door.

  I RETURNED TO DAYTONA at night. It was late and warm and the highway was empty except for an occasional tandem loaded with oranges blowing past on the way to the processing plants north, rocking the car.

  It was palmetto season, and in the glare of the trucks’ headlights, the spatter of dead insects across the windshield made it impossible to see, and I could only hold the steering wheel steady and trust that there was a road beyond the glare.

  IN THE MORNING, my brother went back into surgery and was there most of the day. I had lunch with my father at the hospital cafeteria and he remarked a number of times that the food was better there than it had been in the army.

  “This isn’t bad,” he said, and inspected a piece of chicken on his fork. “That girl that cleans and cooks for me … ” He shook his head. “Ward’s probably eating better than I am.” Ward, of course, was taking his meals through a straw.

  My father looked at his watch every few minutes. The doctors had said they could not predict how long the reconstruction of Ward’s sinuses would take until they got inside and saw the damage.

  “You should go home,” I said.

  “Not yet.”

  We went from the cafeteria back to my brother’s hospital room and waited. The air in the room seemed stale, even with the windows open, and about three in the afternoon I became conscious of a problem with my breathing. I did not seem to be getting the air deeply enough into my lungs.

  My father was sitting in a corner, reading one of the papers he had brought for Ward, and we had not spoken more than a few sentences since lunch. I stood up and walked to the window, wanting air. He looked up from the paper.

  “If you want to get out of here for a little while, go for a swim,” he said, “I can hold down the fort.”

  I looked at the clock on the wall and promised to be back in two hours. He nodded, telling me there was no reason for us both to wait, vaguely disappointed at the same time that I would leave the place with my brother still in surgery.

  “I’ll be back by six,” I said, giving myself a little more than the two hours.

  “No hurry,” he said, and I left the window and started out the door. “He probably won’t feel much like company afterward anyway.”

  I went to the ocean and drove the rental car out onto the beach and headed north until there were no sunbathers. I took off my clothes in the car and swam for perhaps half an hour, straight out and back, not far enough to feel tired, and not far enough to get away from the hospital.

  I came out of the water and lay on the sand, letting it press into my chest and legs and arms and my cheek, lying there with my mouth so close to it that little grains stirred as I breathed, and for a little while I slept.

  THE DOCTORS HAD FINISHED with Ward. He was lying in a recovery room again, his face more elaborately bandaged than it had been before, and he was drained, completely spent. My father looked at me from the chair beside the bed. We did not speak. Every ten minutes a nurse came in to record Ward’s vital signs, which were ordinary enough, or at least were nothing that she didn’t expect.

  She spoke to him slowly, as you would speak to a child. “Would you like a sip of water?”

  He nodded, and she lifted the cup to his lips and then took it away. “Just a little,” she said, and then left the room. I refilled the cup and put it in his hand and he drank what was in it.

  “That might make him sick,” my father said, but it didn’t seem to me that he had a claim on my brother’s care.

  Ward’s good eye wandered the recovery room, resting here or there on his bare toes or the bottle which hung overhead, then moving on, stunned. He did not look at either of us.

  My father said he remembered having his appendix removed and the sickness afterwards. He did not seem to appreciate the difference between illness and violence, or that the recoveries were not the same process.

  Ward did not speak to us that evening, and barely spoke the next day. But once, when my father left the room to call his newspaper, my brother’s head finally rolled in my direction and he stared at me a moment and then said, “Jack, something went wrong.”

  “Nothing went wrong,” I said. “I talked to the doctors.” There was a long, empty moment.

  He closed his unbandaged eye and breathed deeply, in and out, until he seemed to have fallen asleep, and then, without opening his eye, he told me the doctors hadn’t given him enough anesthetic.

  “I was awake too long,” he said slowly. “I heard them talking, I felt them lifting the bones in my face, cutting them.”

  “You couldn’t move?” He shook his head, keeping the eye closed.

  “I tried to move a finger,” he said, “make some signal that I was still there with them, but it was all dead.” And then he did open his eye, and I saw that the doctors had done something to him that the sailors couldn’t.

  He did not speak of what had happened in the operating room again, at least to me, but the shadow of it was always there. He had been terrified, and once that has happened, you are never quite the same.

  FROM TIME TO TIME, my father asked about the men who had beaten Ward, how many there were, if they were black or white; he wondered out loud when the police would catch them.

  My brother did not acknowledge the questions, even in some polite way that would have dismissed them. He simply stared, one-eyed, at the ceiling.

  AS THE EDITOR FROM Miami had put it, the story was pushed out the door, and ran in Sunday’s newspaper. My brother did not see it until it appeared in print, under his and Yardley Acheman’s names. It was spread across the upper fold of the front page—A SHERIFF’S LEGACY LINGERS OVER MOAT COUNTY—and began:

  Officially, Sheriff Thurmond Call killed 17 people in the line of duty during his 34 years in office in rural Moat County. Sixteen of them were black.

  Officially, it was the 17th killing—a white man named Jerome Van Wetter, who died while being arrested in Lately in 1965, the county seat—which led to the sheriff’s own demise. It was Van Wetter’s cousin, Hillary Van Wetter, head of a large and violent local family, who was convicted of stabbing the sheriff in revenge and leaving him to die on the narrow highway connecting the isolated county to the rest of the world.

  But while Hillary Van Wetter is now officially convicted of the murder and waiting on death row at Starke, there is evidence that Van Wetter was not the killer, and that is something that has been known, unofficially, in Moat County for four years.

  My father had gone back to his home and his own newspaper the day before. He and Ward had been in the same room together for three days, and almost all of that time passed in silence. Ward did not tell him what had happened in the operating room, and did not complain of the aching in his face. The infection had settled in, and he was taking antibiotics every six hours.

  By the time I got to the hospital on Sunday morning, the paper was lying sifted into its sheets on the floor, where it had fallen from the side of his bed. I’d gone swimming and then read the piece over a long breakfast.

  Yardley Acheman had not so much written a story about Hillary Van Wetter as a story about Moat County. In it, the lawyer Pine became all its lawyers, Sheriff Call spoke for the charity of all its
white citizens. The finances of the state’s attorney’s office and the sheriff’s department were called into question, and there was a list of relatives of county officials who were employed in both places, many of them in jobs that did not require their attendance. There was a suggestion, laid to unnamed sources, that civil and criminal cases were not settled in court, but in “smoke-filled rooms, late at night.”

  In Yardley Acheman’s hands, the county became an enclave of ignorance and smallness in a state which was growing in another direction, and Hillary Van Wetter and his naive defender Charlotte Bless were the casualties of an inevitable war of clashing cultures.

  MY FATHER, who had called every evening after dinner, did not call on Sunday, or on the three days that followed. Yardley Acheman called, however, from Miami. First on Monday with the news that the newspaper was deluged with phone calls from readers, and then on Wednesday to say that the governor had ordered an investigation into the procedures inside the Moat County court system.

  Ward did not take either call. I picked up the phone each time, repeated the things that Yardley Acheman said to my brother, and then hung up.

  “Put him on,” he said the second time. “We’re going to return the Van Wetter boy back home to the swamp.”

  But Ward simply looked at the phone when I offered it to him, and then at me, and I told Yardley Acheman that Ward did not want to talk to him.

  “How’s he doing, anyway?” he said.

  “He’s all right,” I said.

  “Did they catch the guys?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “The ones that mugged him, did the cops get them?”

  “No,” I said, “the cops didn’t get anybody.”

  There was a pause and then Yardley Acheman, who was still full of the news that the governor had been pushed into opening an investigation, said that perhaps he should come to Daytona Beach and ask them why not. “A little nudge might get things going,” he said.