The Paperboy

by Pete Dexter

  “People misunderstand Ellen,” he said, and I heard her voice in that, whispering in his ear. “They take her the wrong way.”

  “In the end, I think people take you the way you are,” I said.

  “May I speak to you frankly?” he said. I waited, wishing I’d made it out the door before any of this started. “Ellen thinks that perhaps …”

  He looked for the words.

  “… that you may have misunderstood …”

  I didn’t move an inch, not wanting to make it any easier.

  “That you may have thought she was interested in you in a way that she isn’t.” “In what way?” I said.

  He held up his hand as if to say none of this was as important as I was making it. “These things happen,” he said. “She knows that …”

  “What things?”

  He thought for a moment, deciding on the word. “A crush,” he said, “younger man, older, experienced woman … perhaps it would be more comfortable for everyone if you didn’t call her.”

  “I haven’t called her,” I said.

  He smiled. “Then none of us has a problem,” he said. And he peeked underneath the towel at his finger to see if the bleeding had stopped. I turned and headed out the door, letting it slam.

  A MONTH LATER, Ellen Guthrie was promoted to assistant managing editor of the Moat County Tribune, and a month after that, on a Friday, she moved into my father’s house.

  The following morning I met her in the hallway outside the bathroom; her hair was wet and she was dressed only in a University of Miami T-shirt, which barely covered her behind. My father was downstairs making flapjacks and sausage for breakfast. They were going bass fishing together out on the river. Ellen Guthrie had become inordinately interested in bass.

  We stopped for a moment and I moved closer to the wall, not wanting to touch her accidentally as we passed, and then a certain bemused look crossed her face, a look which stirred me, and I walked past her into the bathroom and shut the door.

  The air in the bathroom was still heavy from her shower, and the place smelled of the makeup and toiletries she’d put on, getting ready to deal with hooked fish.

  I shaved and brushed my teeth, thinking of the look she’d given me in the hallway, and later in the day, while she and my father were out on the St. Johns River, I threw my best clothes into the station wagon, wrote a short note of resignation from my truck-driving duties, and fled Moat County.

  It was the first time I left home, if you were willing to overlook Gainesville, and I’d driven south for an hour before I realized that I was headed for Miami.

  It is probably true that, one way or another, I was always going home, even when I was leaving.

  MY BROTHER LIVED in a small apartment building overlooking Biscayne Bay, not far from the newspaper where he worked. I found the place and sat outside it in my car for half an hour, occupying myself with an imaginary swim across to Miami Beach. It was not much of a swim, an hour or less in the water, but the boat traffic was heavy, some of the ski boats pounding through at thirty or forty miles an hour, and I picked a spot on the beach where I would go in, and then followed my progress across into the channel, making allowances for the current and tide and the weeks it had been since I had trained, and following this route I was cut to pieces about a hundred and fifty yards offshore by an ancient Chris-Craft being driven by two fellows in beards, one of them in a white sailor’s hat.

  I looked back at the apartment and followed myself, disemboweled or worse, up the steps that led to the hallway. Before I could imagine Ward’s face when he opened the door, I turned on the car.

  The engine swelled then dropped into a low rumble, and I drove up and down the streets near my brother’s apartment building for hours, looking at the apartments with vacancy signs in the windows, and finally stopped at one, more because there was a place to park in front than anything about the apartment itself, and rented a furnished room for a month.

  “It’s just one of you,” the woman said, “you sure.”

  “Just me.”

  “They sometimes come in here, one person, the next thing you know, there’s twelve of them inside, sleeping on the floors.…”

  “I don’t know twelve people,” I said.

  She nodded, thinking it over. “You want clean linen service?” she said.

  I did not answer at first, thinking the question might be some sort of test to see if I would be sleeping twelve.

  “You got your own linens?” she said, impatient now.

  “No,” I said.

  “I put you down for the clean linen service,” she said, and then, in the same breath, she told me the house rule: “Don’t bother with nobody and they don’t bother with you.”

  I TOOK THE THINGS from my car to the room, making two trips, walking past a thickset man with frog’s eyes who stood outside his door, smoking a tiny butt of a cigarette, staring at me as if he might be interested in asking for a date. I understood right away that Miami was not like the other two places I’d lived.

  I shut the door to the room and locked it, dropping a hook into an eyebolt, and sat on the bare mattress. I felt the bedsprings yawn and hold. There were dark stains in the carpet, almost a crust. I thought of my brother’s apartment building, which had not looked so different from this one from the street, and wondered if the rules were the same there. Don’t bother with nobody and nobody will bother with you. Perhaps that was why he liked the place, why he liked the city.

  There was a knock at the door, and then a man’s voice. “You home, buddy boy?”

  I lay down on my mattress, trembling.

  “Buddy boy?”

  The man came back half a dozen times over the next few days, but I did not answer the door.

  I WENT OUT OF the room to swim and to eat, and at night I would walk in the neighborhood, looking at the girls.

  I hoped to run into Ward on the street, to have him spot me alone in the city and take me back to his apartment, back into my family, but I saw there were too many streets for that, and too many people on them. And in the end I went to the newspaper to find him, thinking that was somehow less of an imposition than appearing on his doorstep.

  THE CITY ROOM WAS a maze of desks and telephones and typewriters, all of it submerged in smoke, and I wandered into it unnoticed and asked a woman sitting in front for directions to Ward’s office. She did not look up from her typewriter, but cast her fingers in a short arc toward the back. There was a stub of a cigarette between the fingers she used to point, about the size of an engagement ring.

  I crossed the city room, passing a hundred reporters and editors who never looked up, who understood intuitively that I was not important, and asked for my brother again.

  HE WAS SITTING ALONE in an office with two desks. The office was smaller than the room he had occupied over the Moat Cafe in Lately, and it had no windows except the one that faced the larger room outside. The place smelled of Yardley Acheman’s toiletries.

  My brother was wearing a white shirt and a tie, and studying a bound, familiar-looking document which was several inches thick. He did not leave his reading immediately to see who had walked through his door, but held up one finger, asking for a moment to finish. Then he looked up and saw me.

  He had lost his left eye, and covered it with a patch, and there was something different in the shape of his face, a certain roundness which took a moment to find. There were small white scars at the sides of his nose, and a larger scar an inch below his lower lip, which followed the line of the lip for most of its run and then reeled down and then straight up, intersecting it just at the corner of his mouth. The flesh billowed on both sides of the cut.

  He smiled and the lip flattened against the teeth underneath it, and he looked more like himself. He stood up, leaning across his desk.

  “Where have you been?” he said, and I could hear that he was glad to see me. I felt my eyes begin to tear.

  “Miami,” I said, “looking around.”

 
; “World War said you might show up.…” It was quiet a moment while we looked at each other. It was not the eye patch that caught me again, but the roundness of his face. It did not seem like such an unnatural thing to have lost an eye.

  “He’s worried,” Ward said.

  “I left him a note.”

  “It didn’t say where you were going.”

  I shrugged and my brother settled back into his chair, still smiling at me, happy that I was there. “Sit down,” he said, but the only empty chair in the room was behind the other desk. I hesitated, remembering how Yardley Acheman behaved when he’d found me behind his desk before.

  “He’s gone for the week,” Ward said.

  I sat down, feeling the chair turn under me. A soft, well-oiled chair, better than the chairs that the reporters and editors in the main room had. And his desk was wood instead of metal, and the typewriter was a brand-new Underwood.

  “He said you bought a hot rod and took off,” Ward said.

  I nodded at that, not wanting to go into the rest of it then; it felt like I’d been on the road since I left home. I looked out the window, I rocked back and forth in Yardley’s chair. “Yardley’s taking a few days off?” I said.

  “Celebrating,” he said. “The prosecutor’s decided not to take Van Wetter back to trial.”

  “He celebrates a lot.”

  Ward nodded and fingered the document in front of him, straightening it with the edges of the desk. I recognized it then, the first hundred pages or so of the transcript of Hillary Van Wetter’s trial.

  “Well, I guess it’s what we wanted,” I said.

  He stared at the transcript again, then he reached under his eye patch with one finger and scratched. A moment later he put the trial into one of his filing cabinets and recovered his good mood. He asked about World War’s new girlfriend.

  I told him it wasn’t going to feel comfortable calling her “Mom.”

  THERE WAS A LETTER from Charlotte a few days later. It was addressed to my brother, but was written to us both. Yardley Acheman got a letter of his own, which lay unopened on his desk with the rest of the mail that came while he was gone.

  The letter to Ward and me was strangely detached, thanking us for our help in saving Hillary. It said that she still intended to marry him, but had no details on the date. We were on the guest list. Common-law marriages were traditional among the Van Wetters, it said, but she was holding out for a ceremony with a Baptist minister. It was signed “Fondly, Charlotte.”

  My brother showed me the letter over lunch at a cafeteria a few blocks from the newspaper. There was another place where most of the younger reporters ate which was closer, but my brother preferred not being around them.

  Too many of them were “journalists” now, enamored with the importance of the calling and anxious to tell their readers what stories meant, not so enamored with the stories themselves.

  The letter had been folded in half and then turned and folded again twice the other way to make it fit into the envelope. It was written on lined paper in careful loops. Good margins, no misspelled words, a formal sort of letter, in its way.

  “It’s like the thank-you notes Mother used to make us write to Aunt Dorothy after Christmas,” I said.

  He nodded, but he was not thinking of it that way. “She’s trying to close it off,” he said finally.

  “Close what off?”

  “We ‘re unfinished business,” he said, and then he picked up the envelope the letter had been mailed in and studied the postmark: Lately.

  “She has what she wants,” he said, and the words stabbed me. A glass of milk had been sitting in front of Ward all during lunch—we were taught not to wash down our food—and now he picked it up and drank it. As he lifted the glass, I noticed the scar beneath his lip again.

  “It’s bothering her,” he said.

  “What?”

  He did not speak again for a little while, and then he said, “You have any luck this morning?”

  I had gone to the employment office at the Times and applied for work in the newsroom. Under references, I had put my brother and, at Ward’s encouragement, Yardley Acheman. “I’m supposed to take a test,” I said.

  He nodded at that, still thinking about Charlotte.

  “You wonder,” he said finally, “why she sent a separate letter to Yardley.”

  “He was the one fucking her,” I said.

  He shook his head, not wanting to get near that.

  I didn’t push the subject. When I first began hearing stories about fucking, perhaps in second grade, hearing them from so many places I knew there was something to it, I had the distinct thought walking home from school one afternoon that the world would be a better, simpler place if none of it were true.

  My brother, I believe, carried that same sentiment through his life.

  “A lot of people sleep with each other,” he said. “I don’t think it matters much to her.” We looked at each other over the empty dishes. “It’s something else.”

  “Then open Yardley’s letter,” I said. He smiled at me; we both knew he would never do that. The waitress came, and Ward gave her a five-dollar bill.

  “How are you for money?” he said.

  “I’ve got some left.”

  “Whatever you need,” he said.

  “No,” I said, “I’ve got as much as I need.”

  It was awkward; we were not used to taking care of each other. “So the girlfriend moved into the house,” he said finally.

  “The medicine cabinet’s full of makeup,” I said. “Little brushes all over the place …”

  He nodded, picturing it.

  “She spends a lot of time on her face,” I said.

  “Well,” he said a little later, “as long as World War’s happy.”

  “He seems happy,” I said, “but he spends so much time pretending to be happy, you can’t always tell.”

  For all our lives, every time the library or the highway got money from the federal government, every time a sixth grader went to the state finals of the spelling bee, or Weldon Pine was named lawyer of the year, or a barn fire was extinguished by the volunteer fire company in Thorn, my father was happy. He was expected to be happy. And when the federal government did not come through with money for the highway, or when the fire company did not get to the barn in time, he was hurt.

  It is difficult, of course, to ride the pulse of community life in this way, as invariably you are required to be happy and sad at the same time. For the editor and publisher of the Moat County Tribune, however, it had become as natural as getting dressed for work. Perhaps it was part of getting dressed.

  At the bottom of it, however, what made him happy had nothing to do with the content of the news itself, but the process of distributing it. There was a confusion and loss of direction in the process, and it was finding a way through that he liked.

  I wondered if that somehow applied to his flirtation with Miss Guthrie, but it was not the sort of question he would entertain, not even in retrospect, if she’d left and he was lost. He did not second-guess himself, for fear of what would unravel.

  AT LUNCH A DAY LATER, Ward asked if the lost advertisers had returned to the Tribune; then he asked about World War’s angina.

  The nerve had been severed in his lip, and occasionally milk or soup would leak from the spot where it had been cut and run all the way to his chin before he felt it there and wiped it off.

  We had been brought up with table manners, but the food falling from the dead part of his lip seemed to cause him no embarrassment now.

  ANOTHER DAY, he asked suddenly what had become of the lawyer Weldon Pine, if he had stayed in Lately after he retired or moved to a city. I sensed that he regretted the trouble the story had caused the old man.

  Later, he was preoccupied with Uncle Tyree.

  “What if it turned out that the old man and his whole family, right down to the mutes, are all smarter than we are?” he said.

  “What if they are?�
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  He held up his finger, wanting me to wait while he finished the thought. “What if they know us better than we know them? What if they knew what we would do?”

  I waited until I was sure he was finished. “It still doesn’t matter,” I said.

  He looked at me and smiled, as if I’d missed the point. “Things got out of hand for a little while,” I said. “You got hurt and Yardley wrote his story and now it’s over. Hillary’s gone back to the swamp.…”

  He picked up a hamburger he’d ordered and took a bite. A trickle of grease ran from his lip. “What if they used us?” he said.

  The grease reached the part of his chin where his sense of feeling was intact, and he wiped at it with his napkin.

  “What if we used them?” I said. “That’s the game, isn’t it? You use them, they use you.…”

  “It isn’t always like that,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be … ” He thought a moment, perhaps trying to remember a case when it wasn’t.

  “It’s like fishing,” I said. “You really aren’t up to it if you start out worried about the worm.”

  He leaned across the table, lowering his voice. “You haven’t seen it when you get it exactly right, Jack,” he said. “When you get things down just the way they were …”

  “What then?” I said.

  He smiled at me, his chin shining with grease. “It makes it bearable,” he said. And it seemed for a moment that his voice was coming to me from the recovery room.

  “You can’t ever know exactly who somebody is,” I said, and that lay on the table between us a long time.

  ALTHOUGH YARDLEY ACHEMAN could not be reached for his recommendation, I was hired as a copyboy in the Times newsroom, and started at more money than any of the reporters at my father’s newspaper were paid.

  Yardley stayed in New York an extra week, interviewing for jobs at both the Times and the Daily News, and socializing with famous writers and journalists at a bar called Elaine’s.

  He liked being with famous writers, and would labor to work their names into conversation when he got back.