The Paperboy

by Pete Dexter

  “I don’t think that would be a good idea,” I said. “I think they’re doing all they can.”

  It was quiet again, and then he said, “So, did Ward see the story?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “What did he think?”

  “He wanted to read it first,” I said, and looked quickly at Ward. He was staring at something out the window.

  “It’s the business,” Yardley Acheman said. “He understands deadlines.…”

  The connection went quiet.

  “It was one of those things,” he said finally. “He’ll get over it.”

  I hung up and he called back.

  “Put him on,” he said. “He’s right there in the room, isn’t he? Tell him I’ve got some good news.…”

  “It’s Yardley Acheman,” I said to Ward. “He says he’s got good news.” My brother closed his eye.

  I hung up again.

  Ward stared out the window and refused to take phone calls from the Times for five days, and then the infection cleared and he was discharged, and went back to his apartment in Miami to recover. He could have gone instead to my father’s house, where Anita Chester would have fixed his meals and done his laundry, but he did not want to go home.

  I DID RETURN TO Thorn and resumed my career as a delivery driver for my father’s newspaper, and it was immediately evident that the publication of the story of Hillary Van Wetter and Moat County under Ward James’s byline in the Miami Times had changed my father’s standing.

  It wore on him, not to be beloved.

  To the citizens of Moat County, his son was another in a series of sons who left the place and came back thinking they were better. Ward, however, had done this on the front page of the state’s biggest newspaper. He had caused the retirement of the county’s most famous lawyer, had brought on a state investigation of the local government—they were auditing the sheriff’s budget now, and people would be losing their jobs—and he had defended the most lawless and violent member of the Van Wetter family at the expense of the memory of Thurmond Call.

  My father was held responsible for these things—not for the story itself, but for imbuing his oldest son with his liberal inclinations and, in doing that, insulting the place where he lived.

  As he came to understand the wide breadth of this sentiment, he withdrew, retreating into that realm of memory where he was safe, and intact. He became remote even in his own kitchen.

  The Dodge dealership where Jerome Van Wetter had worked canceled its advertising, along with Woolworth’s and the Pie Rite bakery and all three of the real estate offices that operated within the county. On one hand, these cancellations were gestures aimed at identifying with the customers’ sensitivities, on the other hand, they were personal. People who had not liked my father’s politics suddenly disliked him personally, and a kind of resentment set in all over the county that would last long after the advertisers came back and the story of Hillary Van Wetter itself was forgiven.

  My father spent the weeks after the Times’s story driving his Chrysler at eighty miles an hour from Thorn to Lately and back to Thorn, trying to plug a dozen leaks at once, explaining the ethics of the newspaper business to people who had no interest in it at all. Mostly, they listened politely and promised to think it over.

  He returned home exhausted and worried and remote. He would sit in his chair after dinner, the pile of newspapers next to it untouched, too tired to read. He would drink his wine and nod off to sleep, and sometimes, half asleep, he would absently take a pill from his shirt pocket and place it under his tongue. He must have been taking half a dozen a day.

  Still, he told his stories; he told them against the evidence that he was being ushered out of the business, against the feeling that things were coming apart.

  When it was time to retire for the evening, he would head up the stairs, his feet moving as if each step were a different thought. Sometimes he would sigh, “This too will pass,” as if a conversation had been going on in the room before he left.

  Other times, I would hear him in the kitchen, on the phone with my brother. Obligatory calls, asking about his recovery. The conversations were tense, as much as I heard of them, as if something had been acknowleged between them which, once in the open, could not be ignored.

  He laid off one of the three members of his advertising staff, a young man named Lauren Martin who had been his best salesman, but who had no family to support and could most easily find another job in Orlando or Daytona Beach or one of the papers in the Tampa Bay area. My father agonized about the firing out loud to the editors and reporters he brought over to the house for drinks. He wanted them to know he was not ruthless.

  These evenings with his reporters were as drunk as they had ever been, but the optimism was gone. The party was over, and the people left behind had in fact been left behind.

  I did not generally care much for these occasions or the people who attended them, but I was briefly attracted to a woman named Ellen Guthrie, whom my father had recently hired as a copy editor, and who came to the house alone. She was perhaps Charlotte’s age and, like Charlotte, paid an extraordinary amount of attention to her appearance. From what I saw, she had been ostracized by the other women at the paper. I had noticed, even then, that there were certain women whom other women instinctively disliked, and that these women invariably had more bait in the water than the women who disliked them.

  I found Ellen Guthrie sitting alone one night on the steps leading upstairs. It was ten o’clock at night, and she was holding a bottle of beer in both hands. The rest of the reporters and editors and my father were outside on the porch.

  She looked at me with a certain curiosity that the others did not have.

  “The party’s outside,” I said, and she smiled, set her drink on the step next to her leg, and lit a cigarette. She moved a little to the side and patted the step.

  I sat down next to her, noticing the smell of her shampoo, the sheer material of her blouse. The outline of her breasts beneath it.

  “You’re the son that isn’t the reporter,” she said.

  I was unable to think of the correct answer.

  “I kind of admire that,” she said. “You didn’t just jump into the business because your father owned a newspaper.”

  An impulse to defend my brother came and passed. “I drive one of his trucks,” I said.

  “That’s not the same,” she said.

  “No, it isn’t,” I said. “It’s about five hours earlier in the morning.”

  She nodded and moved her cigarette to her lips, and in doing that brushed her arm against mine. Her skin was cool and soft. I guessed she was thirty-seven years old. I moved a little, and in doing that my cock broke loose from the folds of my pants and stood up in the pocket. It looked something like a tongue stuck into a cheek. She did not look at my lap, but smiled as if she knew what was there.

  “Your brother’s story caused a lot of trouble for the Tribune,” she said.

  “He didn’t write it,” I said, “he was in the hospital.”

  She nodded, as if she knew everything, and nothing left could surprise her. “It was a good story,” she said. She said that as if it were in her province to decide. She looked quickly through the window to the porch, not caring for the people she saw out there. “He’s a good writer,” she said.

  “He didn’t write it,” I said again. “The other guy, Yardley Acheman, used his notes …”

  “It was still a good story.”

  When I didn’t say anything else she leaned forward, looking into my face more from the front, and smiled. “Sibling rivalry?” she said.

  I shook my head no, but she didn’t seem to believe me.

  “Big brother’s the most famous reporter in the state?” She was smiling at me, teasing. And now she did look into my lap.

  “I don’t care about being a reporter,” I said. “That’s not what I want to do.”

  “You like driving a truck,” she said.

  “It
’s honest,” I said.

  “Are you good at it?”

  “I haven’t backed into the loading dock in a while. That may be as good as it gets.”

  She leaned back to a more natural position and opened her legs. She considered driving trucks. “I think you ought to be the best at whatever you do,” she said. “Even if it’s collecting garbage, you ought to be the best at it.”

  “Did you ever collect garbage?” I said.

  I had a hard dick, but I would not sit on the same steps with the President of the United States and listen to him tell me that whatever menial task I might be qualified to do, I ought to do it well. The people who say these things are never the garbage collectors themselves.

  She shifted her weight, sipping at her beer, and her side pressed briefly into mine. It was firm and felt solid, the way Charlotte’s did.

  “If I did, I’d be good at it,” she said, and set the beer down on the step next to her. When she moved back, somehow our legs were touching. I kept my leg precisely where it was, not pressing into hers, not moving away. “I always try to be the best.”

  We were not talking about collecting garbage now.

  There was some noise out on the porch, something—someone—falling, the sound of laughter. Nothing especially happy, and I couldn’t hear my father’s voice in it. She looked in that direction, uninterested.

  “Your father’s a good editor,” she said, “but he needs better people.”

  “He had to fire somebody in advertising this week,” I said.

  “He ought to fire some more of them,” she said.

  We sat quietly for a minute or two then; it came to me I was expected to do something, but I didn’t know what. I considered taking her by the hand and leading her up into my room, but the moment I thought of that, I also thought of the shelves up there still filled with models I’d put together when I was eight or nine years old, along with the trophies from swimming meets in high school which, in some way, seemed to come from even a younger time. I don’t know why I never took those things down, except I suppose there was nothing else to put in their place, and they were still there, the artifacts of my childhood, and it did not seem possible, even in the abstract, to have sex with a woman in the same room.

  “Don’t tell him I said that,” she said.

  I stared at her, gone completely south. “About firing his people,” she said. “It just makes things complicated.”

  As if she were someone who minded complications.

  “I heard he was badly hurt,” she said a little later, speaking of my brother.

  “He’s back in Miami now,” I said.

  “Was he working on the story?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “I got hurt once, working on a story,” she said. “It’s no fun.” I did not ask her in what way she was hurt, not wanting it leading back to Ward. She took a long swallow of beer, and then put the empty bottle down next to her. “Is there a bathroom upstairs?”

  “On the right,” I said. She was to the top of the stairs when I realized that my room was also on that side of the hall. I heard her footsteps stop, a door opened and then closed, and then she moved farther down the hall. I wondered if she’d seen my models.

  SHE GOT ANOTHER BEER from the kitchen, and brought one for me. She sat down, and there was a certain familiarity between us that had not been there before.

  “I was sodomized,” she said. Just like that.

  For a moment I saw the sheets in the room where I had found Ward, twisted and lying half on the floor, still wet with his blood.

  “It’s no fun,” she said.

  “No, I wouldn’t think so.”

  “A couple of drunks.” And that was as much as she said for a while. Someone was laughing on the porch, one of my father’s reporters.

  I heard myself ask if they’d been caught. It was the same thing my father asked at the hospital, when he didn’t know what else to say.

  She shook her head. “They let them go,” she said. I leaned forward and tried not to say anything else that sounded like my father.

  “You’re nice,” she said a little later. “Most guys want to hear every detail. They get off on it.”

  I sat still.

  “The complicated thing is, the guys who did it are dead. I knew who they were. Most rape victims are acquainted with their attackers, did you know that?”

  I shook my head. She said, “So it complicates things. I mean you hate somebody and then they’re dead, and how do you feel then?”

  I didn’t know. “How did they die?” I said.

  She shrugged. “Too quickly.”

  “It doesn’t sound so complicated,” I said.

  “You’ll never know until it happens to you.”

  I checked the clock in the kitchen again, finished my beer, and stood up. She looked at me from beneath, and from that angle could not miss the fact that my cock was hinged like a sprung car door. She smiled.

  “If you wanted to know about it, you could have asked,” she said. “I’m not ashamed.”

  “I don’t want to know.”

  “It happened while I was working, that’s the reason I brought it up. In a way it’s like what happened to your brother.” I looked upstairs and then back down at her, catching the outlines of her legs under the gathered wrinkles of her lap.

  “They did it together,” she said, and I sat back down. For a moment, though, she appeared to have lost her place. I saw that she was drunker than I’d thought; it seemed to me that she might be one of those people like my father’s friend who, one night, after six months of impeccable behavior, had tried to kill all the Jews at the party.

  It occurred to me that my father collected these people on purpose. “Fuck it,” she said. She leaned back against the stairs, her blouse tightening over her chest. She stared at the ceiling and then closed her eyes.

  “How old are you?” she said.

  “Twenty.”

  She frowned. “That’s too bad,” she said. Then, “I’m forty-one.”

  “That’s not so old,” I said, as if I knew anything about it. “You don’t look old.”

  She opened her eyes and drank from the bottle, spilling beer down her chin. She wiped at it with the back of her hand. “Forty-one next week,” she said, “and you know what I want for my birthday?”

  “A swimming lesson,” I said. All these years later, I still have no idea why.

  She laughed out loud, and her head rolled in my direction. “I want a sixteen-year-old boy all night long,” she said. “Four years ago, you’d have been just right.”

  I stared at her, blinked. Not knowing what she was talking about. “You’re washed up,” she said. “Men hit their sexual prime at sixteen, it’s a fact.”

  I began not to like Ellen Guthrie.

  “If you wait about six hours, the paperboy will be by,” I said.

  And that made her smile, and she drank more of her beer and mussed my hair. “You know,” she said, “you could pass for sixteen.” And then she kissed me lightly on the ear and headed out onto the porch.

  I went upstairs, wondering what I was supposed to make of that. I was still thinking it over in the morning, on the highway south in a loaded truck, and it seemed to me then that she had not meant any of it; that she tortured as many of us as she could to get even for being sodomized.

  I thought she’d probably told both of the copyboys in the Tribune newsroom that she wished they were sixteen too.

  THE PRESSES MY FATHER used were in the bottom of the same three-story building where the editorial and advertising and business departments had offices. My father’s own office was on the top floor, at the far end of the editorial department. From there he could look out his window down at the loading dock and see his three trucks coming and going in the morning.

  There was a stairway from the newsroom leading to the presses and beyond them, to the loading docks, and many of the reporters and editors who parked their cars out in back—my father
liked to keep the spaces in front of the building available for the citizens of Thorn, not wanting them inconvenienced as they did their shopping—used this stairway to enter and leave the building.

  It was not unusual then for me to meet a reporter or an editor on my way inside late in the morning, coming in from my route. They were usually on their way to lunch.

  I rarely saw my father, as he was in the habit of using the building’s front door. It was a good feeling, I suppose, walking out of his own newspaper onto the street of his community, but since the publication of the Van Wetter story in the Miami Times, the feeling had changed.

  A week after I’d spoken with Ellen Guthrie on the steps, I returned from the route an hour late—I’d lost a radiator hose just as I left Thorn—and found her standing with my father near the docks. He was speaking, she was listening, a little closer to him than she needed to be, smoking a cigarette, smiling at the things he said. They looked up and watched as I backed the truck into its space in the dock. The other trucks were already in.

  I climbed out and my father checked his watch.

  For as long as I can remember, he worried when the papers were late, believing—correctly, I think—that the business was fragile. That newspapers were read largely out of habit, as part of a daily ritual, and that when they were not at the reader’s door on time, as promised, the habit could be broken. There was television to take their place.

  The Van Wetter story in the Times had effected a loss in advertising, but it had not as yet cost him subscribers, and he was afraid of that, and did not hide it well, even in front of Miss Guthrie.

  I told him I’d lost a radiator hose just outside of town, and that it took me a couple of hours to get it replaced.

  “They were all late,” he said, forgetting she was there.

  “All of them in my truck,” I said, and my father turned, taking Ellen Guthrie by the elbow.

  “It’s Ellen’s birthday,” he said. “Come with us for lunch.”

  I walked along with them, sometimes falling a step behind, watching Miss Guthrie’s behind swing as she walked. It seemed to me that she was more expensive-looking than Charlotte, although not as principled.