The Paperboy

by Pete Dexter

  While Yardley was in New York, my brother stayed at his desk, eight hours a day, going back again and again over the boxes of papers that he had accumulated in Moat County. There was nothing new in any of the boxes—he could by now recite all the times and dates and names—but he was unable to shake the feeling that there was a hidden order in them which he hadn’t seen.

  He had begun to believe that the Van Wetter clan had somehow designed the story which eventually appeared under his name.

  Ward had arranged for my hiring and now he arranged for my hours to coincide with his, an accommodation which infuriated the copyboys who had been in the newsroom longer. One or two had gone so far as to file grievances with the union.

  But if my brother had interfered with the normal processes of seniority, he had not done it out of partisanship. He wanted me close by because I had been with him in Moat County; I had seen what I had seen.

  He was entertaining the idea now that Tyree Van Wetter had paid a man to represent himself as the contractor who bought the sod, that being the only real option to Yardley’s having made the whole thing up.

  He spent whole afternoons in search of honorable explanations for Yardley Acheman.

  “How did they find him, then?” I said one afternoon as we were leaving the Times. “If he was there when Yardley went down, he’d of been there when we went down. If Yardley could find him, you could find him.…”

  He trusted me in a way that I could never define, or earn, but still he fought what was in front of him. I knew it wasn’t finished.

  I asked if we were going back to Daytona Beach.

  “I think we’d be better off talking to some of the Van Wetters again,” he said.

  I thought of the black moccasin dropping from the dead tree into the water that first time we waded in.

  “Not me.”

  “Sometimes,” he said, “you’ve got to watch people a long time to see who they are.”

  I stopped on the sidewalk and looked at him. “You mean you’re worried they were on their best behavior?”

  And he smiled a little at that, flattening his lip across his teeth. And I knew he was going back, and that I was going with him. I could not stand to see him hurt again, unless I was hurt too. To borrow a word, that was the only thing that would make it bearable.

  YARDLEY RETURNED TO MIAMI the next week with the news of his engagement to a magazine writer from New York. He had not told the one in Palm Beach yet that they were quits, and wondered out loud how that was done.

  A story about the Van Wetter case had appeared in Time magazine that week which referred to Yardley as an important new voice in newspapers, one of the emerging “new journalists.” My brother was hardly mentioned in this piece, but then, he had not returned the phone call from the reporter from Time.

  The story and the accompanying picture were clipped out of the magazine and pasted on the city room bulletin board, and a caption was written beneath it: “WHAT IS MISSING FROM THIS PICTURE?”

  Yardley Acheman was despised in the newsroom now by all but a handful of young reporters—some of them with college degrees in journalism—who wrote stories imitating his style. Not having my brother to supply these stories with the weight of incident and facts, however, the pieces they wrote were masturbatory in nature, stuff that even I—a dropout of the University of Florida swimming team—would have been ashamed to have written.

  They were the sort of things that Yardley had produced before he and my brother were attached to each other by the editors of the Miami Times.

  Yardley ignored his critics and encouraged his imitators, praising them extravagantly for the most ordinary and, in most cases, out-of-place prose. Even when this prose was thrown back at them by old-school editors who told them to fill the holes with facts, not flowers.

  My brother was affected neither by the piece in Time magazine nor by its appearance on the city room bulletin board, even the part in which he was referred to by Yardley Acheman as “a more traditional, nuts and bolts, kind of reporter”—in contrast to Yardley himself, who, in his own words, was “the one who saw the shapes and meanings of stories in non-traditional ways.”

  WE WERE TOGETHER all the time, Ward and I. We ate together, we came to work together, we left together. I wondered sometimes which of us was protecting the other, but when I entered my building at night after I’d dropped him off, and the fat man with the frog’s eyes came out of his room to watch me walk down the hall, I was always reminded of what happened in Daytona Beach, and felt secure somehow knowing I’d left Ward safely at his own door.

  Sometimes the fat man smiled as I passed and sometimes he made clucking sounds out of the side of his mouth. It seemed clear to me that he was violating the rule of the house, bothering me in this way, and some nights, when I’d had trouble of one kind or another at work, I found myself enraged over this violation, an almost unmanageable anger. I felt oddly whole, to be that angry.

  I had wondered, of course, who the man was, and then one morning on the way to my car another resident of the house fell in next to me, wanting a ride to north Palm Beach County, where he said he could get some day work picking fruit, and told me that Froggy Bill, as he was called, had once been a cop. That he lived on a pension now.

  “You got to be a real bad cop before they throw you out,” he said. “You got to do things that bring you to public attention.”

  I told the man it was none of my business, and gave him a dollar for the bus, and left him there on the curb while I drove to work.

  I DID NOT MENTION Froggy Bill to Ward; in fact, I never spoke to him about the place where I lived. I suppose he assumed it was like his own place—an apartment with a bedroom and a kitchen and a bathroom.

  My bathroom, however, was at the end of the hall. I went there early in the morning, before the sun rose, to keep myself removed from Froggy Bill’s daily routine.

  ONE NIGHT I HEARD a man scream. I was in the hallway and the scream came from Froggy Bill’s apartment, and lasted only a second or two and then died, as if the screamer had run out of air.

  I stood still, listening, ready to run for the door if Froggy Bill emerged with a body, but there were no other screams. The whole rooming house was quiet. I began to wonder if it was Bill himself who had screamed, but I do not know the answer to that, even now.

  WARD DECIDED TO RETURN to Moat County, over the objections of the Sunday editor—the man with the beard who had come to Moat County to push the story ahead when Ward was in the hospital—and Yardley Acheman, who was anxious to leave the Van Wetter matter behind him.

  Yardley said it was time to move on to something else, while he and Ward were still “hot,” that timing was everything. He did not say what the next story might be, and I don’t believe it was anything he had considered. My brother found the stories.

  Ward said he would be back in a few days.

  They were in the office, Ward, Yardley, and the Sunday editor. I was standing outside, holding a tray of mail to sort. I began to move past the door when I heard Yardley Acheman again. “Maybe I ought to go to Daytona,” he said, “see what I can find there.”

  And he was not talking about matters of sod and condominium builders.

  “Whatever you think,” Ward said.

  THAT NIGHT, after work, we threw a few days’ worth of clothes into the back of the Ford and headed north to Moat County. He used vacation days to make the trip.

  It was hot even at night, and we drove with the windows open, the bugs as hard as pebbles as they hit my arm.

  “I don’t think we ought to stay in Lately,” I said.

  He shrugged. “We can stay at home.”

  “I don’t think we ought to stay there either,” I said. “They may be butt-naked in the kitchen.”

  He considered that and withdrew from the conversation. It did not matter to him how we would be received, it did not matter to him where we would stay. It did not matter to him if we slept in the car.

  “I wonder if th
e girl married him,” he said later, speaking of Charlotte. We’d stopped at an all-night gas station and bought a six-pack of beer, and the beer seemed to relax him.

  “She said she was going to send us invitations,” I said.

  “It might be different, what she thinks now of the way this all came out,” he said.

  I pictured her in the wetlands, waiting with her spoon for the men to finish what they wanted of the ice cream. I did not think she would stay married to Hillary Van Wetter very long. I thought this might cure her of killers forever.

  WE CAME IN BY BOAT, and found the place more easily than we had before. Everything in my life was easier without Yardley Acheman around. The old man—Tyree—was in the yard, working on an alligator with a thin, black-handled knife, making the cuts effortlessly, pulling the skin back from the flesh underneath.

  He straightened when he heard the engine, turned and stared at us as I slowed the boat and headed it into the bank. He gave no indication that he remembered us, although I did not believe that he had so many guests he couldn’t keep us straight.

  I killed the engine a few feet from land and jumped into the river to pull the boat up. The old man turned back to the alligator, putting his knife into the animal’s throat and cutting him all the way to the back legs.

  He put his hand in then, up near the throat, and pulled it down, the viscera falling out along the line he had cut, just below his hand. When he’d finished, it did not seem possible that there was enough room inside the alligator for everything that had come out.

  “Mr. Van Wetter?” my brother said.

  The old man put the knife point-down in his back pocket and his hands on either side of the cut and pulled it apart. The muscles in his forearms boiled up into his skin. There was a cracking sound and I glimpsed the cavity inside.

  When the old man turned around again, his hands were slick with the animal’s juice.

  “Mr. Van Wetter, I am Ward James,” my brother said. “I was here before.”

  He nodded, barely, and something wet dripped off his fingers. “You wrote the story in the paper,” he said.

  My brother nodded.

  “Well,” he said, “you said you would.”

  Ward and I stood still and waited.

  The old man waited too.

  “There are a few more things …” my brother said.

  “Hillary ain’t in prison anymore,” he said. He put his hands on his hips, and the muscles sagged in his arms. “When a thing is over, it’s over. Paperboys don’t understand that. We been bothered to death over this, even had people coming out here to take pictures at night … ”

  There was a sound from the house, and a small, bullet-headed man I had never seen before came through the door holding a baseball bat at about the balance point, his hand covering the label. He walked slowly across the yard, holding the bat and a singular purpose, and I saw that once we were in range, he would begin his work without a word.

  You would get as much mercy from a cat.

  The old man watched him come, then glanced at me. “Something’s telling you to get back in your boat, ain’t it?” he said. I nodded yes.

  The man was a few yards away now, and the bat moved in his hand until he held it near the handle.

  I took a step backward and looked at Ward, making sure I knew where he was.

  My brother held his ground, welcoming this.

  The man was almost on us when the old man held up his hand, still glistening with alligator. The man with the bat stopped as suddenly as he had started. He held the bat on his shoulder, where he could swing it, and stared at me with a look of absolute indifference.

  The old man reconsidered my brother. “You ain’t going to just go away, are you?” he said.

  “No sir,” Ward said.

  “I see how you lost that eye,” he said.

  My brother looked around, first at the man with the bat, then at the house beyond. “I have some things to ask Hillary,” he said.

  “Hillary’s the wrong man to be bothering right now,” the old man said. “He’s into a mood since they let him out.”

  Ward glanced at the man with the bat. “What sort of mood?” he said.

  “Changed his disposition,” the old man said. “Being in prison does that, I suppose.”

  It was quiet while the old man contemplated Hillary, and the change in him since he returned from prison. He seemed worried about the change and resigned to it at the same time.

  “Took the fun out of everything,” he said a little later.

  My brother nodded, as if he agreed with that.

  “He’s got the girl,” Ward said, and that made the old man smile.

  “She ain’t the kind of girl that restores fun,” he said, “she’s the kind that points up the lack.” He turned and looked at the man with the bat. “Put that down now,” he said quietly, and the man dropped the barrel of the bat to the ground, then leaned on the handle. He continued to stare at us without a glimmer of interest in who we were.

  My brother waited, and I waited with him. The old man stretched his neck and stomped a pinecone flat. Absently, he turned and looked at the alligator. The thing had shrunk in the few minutes since it had been emptied, and begun to curl, almost as if it had been set on fire.

  “Truth be known, Mr. James,” the old man said, “Hillary never was the one to visit.”

  “I don’t want to stay for dinner,” Ward said. “I just want to ask him some questions.”

  The old man stuck his hands in his trousers. “There ain’t a thing in this world you can do for him. The only thing can help him is time.”

  “It isn’t for him,” Ward said.

  The old man seemed surprised. “Then why would he care to have you visit?”

  “He knows me,” my brother said. “I came to help him when he was in prison.”

  “He’ll hold that against you,” the old man said. “He don’t like to be helped.”

  “Where is he?” Ward said.

  The old man frowned, “There is a side to you that provokes a person, you know that?”

  My brother stood still.

  “I told you already he’s in a mood. I ain’t giving directions, if that’s what you want.…”

  Ward nodded, leaving the question there between them. The old man waited too, and finally Ward said it again.

  “Where is he?”

  The old man spit on his hands and wiped them on his overalls. “Right back where he was, I expect,” he said, and that was as much as he would say. The man with the bat stood flat-eyed, his legs still spread for leverage if he were asked to swing.

  “He moved a brother out of that house with an ax handle,” the old man said, “a blood relation. Didn’t want nobody around.”

  The old man looked quickly at the man holding the bat.

  “He would of used it too,” the old man said. The man with the bat nodded.

  “I need to talk to him,” my brother said again.

  “You do what you need to do,” the old man said. “Tell him I said hello.” He turned away and went back to finish skinning the alligator. A rooster walked between the old man’s feet, and he turned, faster than I had imagined an old man could move, and kicked the bird halfway to the house.

  The man with the bat watched the rooster hit the ground and roll, and then run into the tree line at the edge of the yard. A small smile touched the corners of his mouth.

  WE WERE BACK in the boat, and the air blew over my face and through my hair. I sat at the motor, Ward sat in front, facing me. He had gotten in that way and never turned around. He was staring over my shoulder at the encampments along the shore.

  ALONE, EITHER MY BROTHER or I might have slipped in and out of Moat County without visiting our father, but together we were somehow enjoined to stop.

  We acknowledged that without talking about it, but put the meeting off, spending the night in a tourists’ hotel on the other side of the river, south of Palatka, which had no hot water.

&n
bsp; I slept badly on the soft mattress and finally moved to the floor, waking up stiff and not liking the day’s prospects. We drove in silence to Lately, and then south to Thorn, planning to shower at home.

  A disease had claimed most of the town’s trees that spring, leaving the houses to the hard light of the sun. It seemed to have bleached them all. I had been gone only a few months.

  There were tricycles in a yard across the street from my father’s house, and I remembered that the old woman who lived there had died. A long time ago she had stood at the window early in the morning, her hand on the telephone to call my father if my brother walked across her grass delivering the newspaper. I went with him in those days, wanting to be a paperboy myself.

  Our own house, without its trees, seemed smaller than it had. The grass needed mowing and a hose had been left lying in the yard, not rolled up and returned to its spot on the garage wall. A stump five feet across marked the elm that had shaded the porch.

  There were no cars in the driveway. I steered the Ford in and stopped. I sat looking at the place a moment while Ward got out, carrying clean clothes, and went to the door.

  The door did not open when he pushed it. He stared at it a moment, then went through his keys—he had a ring of perhaps fifteen of them, I don’t think he ever threw one away—and found one and fit it into the lock. I stayed in the car a moment longer, thinking of pulling it around to the alley in back.

  And then I reconsidered the grass and the hose and the look of the street without its trees, and I remembered that my father had moved a woman into his house, in full sight of the neighbors, and it did not seem so important now that a rusted station wagon was sitting in his driveway.

  I went inside. The walls in the living room had been painted a soft beige. There were plants in the corners that had never been there before, and a new sofa, which did not look as if it were designed to sit on. All the furniture, as I looked around, was new, with the exception of my father’s chair. The stains from his hair oil were missing, though; it had been reupholstered.