The Paperboy

by Pete Dexter

  “It’s Ellen’s fortieth birthday,” my father said as we walked. I had looked at her quickly, remembering she told me she was turning forty-one. “We’re going to drink the sun right out of the sky.”

  My father always took his employees out for a drink on their birthdays, at least the ones he liked. As a rule, however, he did not start out with the intention of drinking the sun out of the sky.

  We passed through the door of the Thorn Grill, into darkness and cool air. It was the only place in town you could drink liquor and eat anything except pickled meat before six o’clock at night. He put his hand on her elbow as he walked in, as if to guide her in the dark, and left it there, it seemed to me, a little longer than he needed to. We sat in a booth with plastic cushions and I looked across the table at my father, having never been out drinking with him before, having never thought of myself in the same bar.

  We drank four margaritas before Ellen went to the bathroom. My father stared at her all the way there, then turned to his drink and killed what was left in the bottom.

  “I WAS TELLING Jack before that I thought the story on the man up in Lately was well done,” she said to my father when she came back. “No matter how unpopular it was locally.”

  She had put fresh color on her lips and done something to her eyes. My father dropped his chin into the palm of his hand, as if he were thinking it over.

  “The reporting, I mean,” she said. “The reporting was very solid.…”

  He nodded, and then picked up his margarita. The first drinks had come with paper umbrellas hinged on the ledge of the glass, but we had run them out of umbrellas now.

  “Ward is a hell of a reporter,” he said finally.

  “It was awful, what happened to him in Daytona Beach,” she said. My father stuck his finger into his drink and stirred it.

  “Yes, it was,” he said, “but Ward’s tough.”

  “I was hurt once on the job,” she said a little later, and she and I looked at each other again before she went on with it.

  “It’s the kind of thing that stays in the back of your mind,” she said. “Maybe it’s why I’m not a reporter anymore.”

  My father backed a few inches away, as if to see her more clearly. She returned the stare, steady and long, a little heat in it.

  “What happened?” he said finally.

  She shrugged. “I was attacked,” she said, leaving the word there for him to chew on. She took another sip of her margarita and stared at him again.

  “Sodomized,” she said.

  He blinked, and then looked away. She was still staring, waiting for him, when he looked at her again.

  “While you were on a story?” my father said.

  She shrugged and ran one of her fingers along the rim of the glass, and sucked on the salt.

  “There were two of them, and they took turns.”

  My father caught the waitress’s attention and held up three fingers to signal more drinks. He was sweating, even in the path of the air conditioner.

  “One of them held me,” she said, and then stopped. “Do you mind hearing about this?”

  “Not at all,” he said.

  “One of them held me, and the other one raped me from behind. They changed places, and after they’d rested they raped me together.”

  For a moment the only noise at the table was the sound of the air conditioner. She leaned closer to my father, half drunk now, stopping a few inches from his ear.

  “That’s why I know what it feels like, the thing that happened to Ward.”

  “Nobody raped Ward,” I said.

  She stopped and looked at me. “What I think is, one kind of attack is like another. It’s the same thing when somebody can do whatever he wants to you.”

  If my father was bothered by what she’d said, it didn’t show. He smiled at her, boozy and full of understanding.

  “I didn’t need surgery, at least,” she said.

  Neither of them looked as I got up and made my way to the bathroom, but a moment after I’d closed the door it opened again, and my father came in. He checked himself in the mirror, combing his hair back off his forehead, and then took one of the pills from his shirt pocket and stuck it under his tongue. He splashed his face with water, then carefully dried his hands.

  “She seems like an intelligent woman,” he said, looking at me in the mirror. I had no comment on her intelligence. “She seems to know what she wants,” he said.

  I looked at him, wondering what he thought that was. On his way back through the door he clapped me gently on the back, a gesture from my childhood, but somehow meaning something different now.

  “You don’t have to stay,” he said.

  She was sitting across the table from my father when I came out, ignoring a man staring at her from the bar. The man was drinking red beer and hadn’t shaved in two or three days. He continued to stare at her for a good minute after I sat down, dancing in one spot to some music on the jukebox, his pants nearly sliding off his hips, and then my father, who was full of tequila and full of Miss Guthrie, stared at him murderously until he turned away.

  The man was thin and dirty, and he had an Adam’s apple the size of a walnut. There were mermaids tattooed on his forearms, and he reminded me of the trusties I’d seen on the way in and out of the prison at Starke. I watched him light a cigarette and finish his beer, and then span the bar with his gaze, taking in as much of Ellen Guthrie as he could.

  My father caught him at it. “Is there something you want?” he said.

  “Jesus,” I said, and her hand touched my leg under the table, as if telling me to hush. The man smiled, looking at my father, and then at Miss Guthrie. It was as easy to count the teeth as the gaps. His head was strangely elongated, and it seemed very unlikely that he was not carrying a gun.

  He looked quickly at me, and dismissed what he saw. He took his first step away from the bar and moved toward the table. “Listen,” I said, “nobody wants any trouble.”

  He stared at me with as much malice as he could collect, but I had been in a room with Hillary Van Wetter, and knew the real thing when I saw it. This one was a born trusty.

  “Was anybody talking to you?” he said.

  And then he was at the table, leaning over us, smiling.

  “Now,” he said, “what bi’niss was it you said we had?”

  The bartender noticed what was happening and called the man back. “Cleveland, leave them people alone and get back on your stool,” he said.

  But the man stayed where he was. “You smell sweet,” he said to my father, “you know that?”

  “If I were you,” I said to him, “I’d go back to my stool.”

  “I can handle this,” my father said, but the man had already turned to look at me.

  “What’s that supposed to signify?” he said.

  “Cleveland, goddamnit,” the bartender said, but the man held out his hand, as if to hush him.

  “It means you came to the wrong table,” I said, and in that moment, with the memory of what had happened to Ward so fresh in my mind, I was prepared to take things as far as they would go.

  The man seemed to sense that, and went back to his stool at the bar, complaining to the bartender. “Working people got rights too,” he said.

  My father glared at him, and then turned his attention back to the matter at hand. “Don’t let him bother you,” he said to her.

  She batted her eyes at him, making the moment last.

  “Thank you,” she said finally. “Men like that terrify me.”

  The truth, of course, is that she could have sent a man like that home boneless.

  The man at the bar left a few minutes later, and when he was gone I got up to leave too. The margarita glasses were all over the table, the ashtray was full of cigarette butts. It was her habit to smoke perhaps a third of each cigarette and then put it out, as she used this gesture to punctuate her sentences.

  I MET MY FATHER coming in just as I was going out in the morning. His Chrys
ler rolled up into the driveway, then off the driveway into the front yard, and he stumbled out. His shirt was hanging free of his pants and he had no socks. He was bleary and drunk and wet, and I had not seen him so happy since the days when my mother was still at home and things had not started yet to go against him.

  It was close to four in the morning. “A very intelligent young woman,” he said, and stumbled past me to the steps.

  I watched him climb to the porch, almost in slow motion, rocking at the top before he continued inside. It made me smile, to think of him staring down bar rats and then taking her to bed. It seemed to me he’d had a good night.

  LATE THE NEXT MORNING, after I had backed the truck into the bay and climbed down, she appeared from the rear door of the building, looking around her as if she were afraid to be seen.

  “Happy birthday,” I said.

  “I wanted to talk to you about that night at your house,” she said.

  “Don’t do that,” I said.

  “I just don’t want any misunderstandings.”

  “We don’t have to understand each other,” I said, trying to get away. She stayed where she was, refusing to move until she’d finished.

  “Sometimes when I drink old problems come back to haunt me,” she said.

  “We were both drinking,” I said. And then, because she was still standing in front of me, not moving, I said, “It wasn’t a bad night.”

  “I just don’t want you to get the wrong idea,” she said.

  “I didn’t.” No inkling of what the right idea was. She looked at me as if she couldn’t make up her mind.

  “I’m twice as old as you are,” she said.

  “There is no problem,” I said, and started around her.

  “I’m not a tease,” she said. And we stood in the garage, looking at each other. It is an uncomfortable thing, to lie to someone about things when you both know what is true. It asks too much of your authority, even if you’re talking with a child.

  In the end, we all know what we know.

  The tip of her tongue appeared at the corner of her mouth, and then she bit her lower lip. “I’ve got to go punch the clock,” I said. “I never got off the clock yesterday.”

  It was one of my father’s rules, all employees punched time clocks except the editorial staff. I remembered about half the time. Generally speaking, the reporters and editors didn’t make any more money than the truck drivers or the mailers, but my father drew a distinction between the classes of workers, believing that those in the city room were above lying.

  I stepped around Ellen Guthrie and walked back into the plant.

  SHE CALLED ME at home that afternoon. I had been swimming and I’d drunk a beer, and when the phone rang I was half asleep and thinking of Charlotte.

  “I don’t know what to do about you,” she said.

  I said neither did I, most of the time.

  “Why don’t you come over?” she said.

  “Where?”

  “My apartment,” she said. “Right now if you want.”

  I told her I would be there in half an hour, and then, after I hung up the phone, I thought of my father coming in drunk and happy the night before, and I decided not to visit her after all.

  I was never one to take a bite off someone else’s fork.

  I showered slowly and then went into the kitchen, took another beer from the refrigerator, and lay down on the couch in the living room with the newspaper.

  She called again an hour later. “You’re mad at me, aren’t you?” she said.

  “No,” I said.

  “Why don’t you come over?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, and stopped talking.

  And then she hung up. When she called again, fifteen minutes later, my father was home and picked up the phone. His voice changed when he realized who it was; he laughed out loud, then he whispered. He stayed on the phone half an hour, and when he’d finished he came into the living room, carrying a bottle of wine for himself and a fresh beer for me.

  “That was Ellen Guthrie,” he said, and he sounded happy and surprised. “A very smart young woman,” he said.

  Which, of course, was absolutely true.

  ONE MORNING A MONTH LATER I found my father sharpening knives in the kitchen—a signal that things had not improved at the newspaper. It was his idiosyncrasy to sharpen blades when he was worried. During the year after my mother left, you could not reach into a kitchen drawer without drawing blood.

  I was walking through the kitchen on the way to the garage. He was keeping steady company with Miss Guthrie now, coming home late and smiling every night, smelling sweetly pickled. In the mornings, the problems settled back in.

  It was a Sunday and I was going to St. Augustine. I’d bought a car that week, an eight-year-old Ford station wagon with a decaying exhaust system and an accelerator which stuck when it was pressed to the floor. It cost three hundred and fifty dollars, and knowing it embarrassed my father to have a three-hundred-and-fifty-dollar automobile parked in front of the house, I left it along the narrow dirt alley that separated our property from the neighbor behind us. Sometimes at night, when I was out late myself, I turned off the engine at the street and allowed it to coast up the alley until it stopped.

  He’d laid the pumice stone on the counter next to the sink, and pressed near the blade’s edge with his fingers, working it in small circles. He was a perfectionist with his knives, and seemed to possess some innate sense of the spot where the stone and the steel touched; a certain understanding of the nature of friction.

  “I see the Van Wetter fellow has been given a new trial,” he said. He had seen that, among other places, on the front page of his own newspaper. The story had been there, one way or another, every day that week, as it had been on the front pages of most of the other newspapers in the state. Unlike the other papers, the Moat County Tribune did not include the names of the Miami Times reporters who were responsible for generating the new trial.

  Three of my father’s lost advertisers had not come back.

  He was staring at the point of the knife, his fingertips bright red. He moved them slower now, more cautiously, as if he could feel the moment to quit coming.

  “Maybe they’ll hold it somewhere else,” I said, thinking it would be better for him if they took the trial out of Lately.

  “I doubt that they’ll hold it at all,” he said, still pressing, the sound of it in his voice. “People have moved, evidence has been lost …”

  His voice died away, and I heard the blade working into the stone. A small, unobtrusive, chewing sound, you would never notice it except in the kind of silence that is made between two people, which is a different sound than silence you come across, say, underwater.

  “They’ll let him go,” he said, and then his hands stopped and he looked up at me, a note of accusation in it. I shrugged.

  “Then he’ll go back to the river,” I said.

  I had been locked in a small room with Hillary Van Wetter, and knew what he was. I’d felt the cast of his bad intentions, and then the relief when he moved on to my brother or Yardley Acheman, or to Charlotte, and even understanding what he was, I didn’t see that it made much difference if he were electrocuted by the state or living in remote regions of the swamp.

  “Well,” my father said, “I suppose he will.”

  It settled and then he said, “Have you spoken with your brother?”

  I’d called half a dozen times that week, but he had not been at his apartment, or if he had, he was not answering the phone. “I don’t think he cares about Hillary Van Wetter anymore,” I said.

  My father smiled, a small, brittle smile, knowing that wasn’t true. Ward was not the son who quit on things when they became difficult. “He cares,” he said.

  I waited a moment, then started for the door.

  “Was there something else that happened in Daytona?” he said suddenly. I turned and looked at him.

  “You were there,” he said.

 
I nodded but I didn’t answer his question. I did not think he wanted me to answer.

  “There’s a story …”

  He didn’t finish the sentence, but left it there between us, waiting for me to tell him the story wasn’t true.

  “There are always stories when things happen,” I said. Slowly, his fingers began to move again, and when I looked at the stone, there were beads of his blood on it. As I watched, the blood flattened, absorbed into the stone, staining it.

  “You cut yourself,” I said, and he looked at his fingers, finding the one he’d cut, and examined it first from one side and then the other.

  “I’ve heard there was something … untoward,” he said. “That the police cleaned up a mess.”

  “Why would they do that? No one cares who we are down there.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. He put his finger under the faucet. “It’s just a story I heard.”

  “I don’t think you should pay attention to stories about your own family,” I said.

  And we looked at each other again, wordless, full of accusations, and the water ran over his finger, both of us knowing who’d told him that something untoward had happened in Daytona Beach. He turned off the faucet and wrapped the finger in a dish towel.

  “It was nothing malicious,” he said.

  “What did she say?”

  He shrugged. “Nothing specific, just that there was a story that was different from the one the police gave …”

  He seemed to hear how weak the words sounded.

  “She isn’t a malicious person,” he said. And now it was uncomfortable in the kitchen in a way that was different from the ordinary discomfort we suffered in each other’s presence, as if some agreement between us had been broken off.

  “Then she shouldn’t be out repeating easy rumors,” I said.

  “She isn’t easy, Jack,” he said.

  “Rumors, I said rumors.…”

  “They aren’t her rumors,” he said, raising his voice, and there I was, standing in the kitchen, arguing with my sixty-one-year-old father about his girlfriend.

  I said, “I’m going to the beach,” and turned again to leave.