The Paperboy

by Pete Dexter

  An air conditioner had been stuck into a large side window, and the place had a department store odor. I stood in the living room, trying to remember what color the walls had been before they were painted. Ward went upstairs, and a minute later I heard a door close and then running water.

  I walked into the kitchen, and things were more familiar. I found a beer in the refrigerator and sat down at the kitchen table to wait for Ward to finish. There was another shower in the basement, but if you turned it on while the one upstairs was running, the water up there turned cold.

  I lay the lip of the beer cap against the table’s edge and hit it once with the flat part of my hand. The cap rolled across the floor, and the foam came up out of the bottle and over my hand and pants, and I covered it with my mouth.

  At the same moment I tasted the beer, the shower stopped. It didn’t seem like he’d been in there long enough to get as wet as I had from the beer.

  And then I heard them talking, his voice then hers, and realized slowly that she was still in the house. I walked back into the living room, holding on to the beer, and met her as she came down the stairs.

  She was still in her nightshirt, and the flesh around her eyes was swollen from sleep and she had not cleaned the makeup off her eyes the night before. She was barefoot, and her arms looked chubby and dimpled. She crossed them over her chest.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” she said, looking at the beer.

  My brother was moving around upstairs, banging things as he hurried.

  “This isn’t a public bath,” she said.

  I sat down on the new couch. “We were here first,” I said. The woman was not going to chase me out of the house where I had grown up. I was thinking I would sit in that spot for a month.

  “I told your brother, and I will tell you,” she said, “don’t ever walk into this house again without knocking.”

  I looked up the staircase. “You got the paperboy up there, or what?”

  “That’s it,” she said. “Get out.”

  I lifted the beer to my lips and sipped at it again, watching her. I sat back farther into the couch.

  “I don’t want to make this more unpleasant than it already is,” she said.

  It seemed suddenly as if my father were in the room too, as if she and I were both weighing our behavior to look good in his eyes, and I was sorry I’d made the remark about the paperboy, knowing that he would not like that.

  “We just came over to take showers,” I said. “The motel didn’t have hot water.”

  I could see that settle, that we weren’t going to stay overnight. Ward came down the stairs then, his hair dripping, carrying his shoes and socks and the clothes he’d worn in.

  “Ready?” he said.

  “I’m going to take a shower,” I said, and I got up and carried my beer and my clean clothes past her and up the stairs. There was a bad moment, climbing the stairs, when I realized I was leaving my brother alone in the living room with her.

  “This is going to be unpleasant for us all,” she said, but I climbed to the top of the stairs and followed my brother’s footprints into the bathroom.

  I locked the door, turned on the shower, and sat down on the toilet to finish the beer. My hand was shaking. The part I cannot explain is that I was again entertaining the thought of fucking her. The sink was full of her things—lipstick, makeup, brushes, perfume—and there was a sanitary napkin wrapper in the wastebasket. New towels hung on the racks.

  I set the bottle on the floor next to the toilet and stood up. I opened the medicine cabinet and saw that she had taken it over too. Dexedrine.

  I wondered if once she had been fat.

  I took off my clothes, letting them drop off me onto the floor, and stepped into the shower. There was a brush hanging from the faucet which had never been there before, and I used it to wash my behind. The soap had a peculiar, perfumed smell, and I’d never heard of the shampoo.

  I stayed in the shower a long time, thinking I should run all the hot water out of the heater and allow Miss Guthrie to shower cold that morning, but the thought of Ward downstairs with her intruded again, and finally I turned off the water, stepped out of the tub, and dried myself off.

  Ellen Guthrie had gone into the kitchen when I got back down, and Ward was outside in the car. I heard her dialing the telephone and a moment later noticed the smell of the dirty clothes in my hand, rancid and sweet at the same time. There is an odor that goes with being scared.

  I walked quietly out of the house and dropped the clothes into the garbage can in the driveway. I started the car—the sound of the engine brought one of the neighbors to her window—and drove downtown, toward my father’s office, and the smell of the clothes was still on my hands.

  MY FATHER WAS SITTING at his desk, running a letter opener he had been given by the Florida Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People over the pads of his fingers. I suppose there were no knives available to sharpen there in the office.

  He stood up when we came in, not even pretending to be surprised, shaking hands with us in a solemn way, smiling in a way that was both preoccupied and polite. Not pretending that she hadn’t already called.

  “So,” he said, “what brings the Miami Times back to Moat County?” And there was a certain reproach in that, directed as much at me as my brother.

  “A few things to check,” Ward said.

  My father nodded, in the same, familiar way he’d nodded for years when my mother spoke to him while he was reading his newspapers after dinner. He wasn’t listening.

  I sat down in one of the chairs, Ward stood near the desk. He would not sit down without being invited. “We thought maybe we’d take you to lunch,” Ward said. I looked at the clock on the wall, a little after eleven. My father settled back into his chair and put his hands behind his head.

  “That would be wonderful, boys,” he said, “but I’m on the hook with some advertisers.” Moments passed. “You know,” he said finally, “I got a call a little while ago from Ellen.” And he looked at each of us, taking his time, as if he were trying to decide which of us to keep.

  “We didn’t mean to barge in,” Ward said, “we thought she’d be at work.”

  “She works late and comes in late,” he said. “She puts in more hours than any editor here.”

  “I only meant we wouldn’t have gone inside if we’d thought she was there,” he said.

  I said, “We needed to shower before we went up to Lately, and the hotel didn’t have hot water.”

  But he was not interested in the hotel or what we were going to do in Lately.

  “It’s always your home too,” he said, “you know that, but it might not be a bad idea for now, while Ellen’s getting used to me, if you knocked before you went in.”

  He checked to see if he’d insulted us.

  “She might be running around the kitchen in her underwear,” he said.

  We all sat a moment or two, contemplating that, and then the phone rang and he picked it up. “W. W. James,” he said.

  It was Ellen; it was in his face before he said a word. I stood up and headed toward the door. “We can wait outside,” I said.

  He said, “Just a minute,” into the mouthpiece and then covered it with his hand and smiled at us as we went out the door. “Thanks for stopping by,” he said. And then he hurried around his desk, still holding the phone, and shook hands with each of us again.

  I closed the door when we were out of the office, and looked back once. He was sitting in his chair again, the phone cradled under his chin, smiling as he nodded at something she was saying on the other end.

  The next time I went to my father’s house, the door locks had been changed.

  WE DROVE BACK TO Lately in the afternoon, passing the spot where Sheriff Call was found dead, and, a few miles farther north, the little store operated by the Van Wetters.

  I glanced into the parking lot and thought of the child’s beating, and it seemed like a lo
ng time since that had happened. I was angry at my father, that he had asked us to knock at our own house, but Ward was unaffected. He wasn’t tied to the place the way I was.

  “He wants us to knock,” I said.

  He said, “Maybe we’ll forget about the courthouse, and go straight to the sheriff’s.”

  I followed a long curve in the road and then passed an old truck carrying a load of gravel, pushing the accelerator all the way to the floor as I came up on him from behind, and then, back on my own side of the road, reaching down to the floorboard with my hand to get it unstuck. The car swerved, hit the soft shoulder of the road, and then corrected; eighty miles an hour, and my brother sat as un-bothered as if I had leaned forward to take out the cigarette lighter.

  THE MAN BEHIND THE DESK at the Moat County Sheriff’s Department did not look up until Ward had finished speaking. When he did, I saw his eyes were red, as if he had been drinking. “What is it you want?” he said.

  My brother went through it again, saying the same words, and the man behind the desk nodded all the way through, reminding us he had heard it before. And when Ward had finished, the man said, “But what I asked you, what is it you want?”

  “I want to know how to get to Hillary Van Wetter’s place,” Ward said.

  The man behind the desk was suddenly angry. “I asked you what for,” he said.

  Ward held his ground, and when I began to explain that there were a few questions we wanted to ask, he stopped me, interrupting almost before I’d begun.

  “That is a private matter,” he said.

  The deputy smiled at us. “You’re the ones wrote that story in the paper, aren’t you?” he said. “And now you finding out it wasn’t the way you put it down?”

  My brother did not answer; he didn’t move. He only waited. “You know he cut a man’s thumb off?” the deputy said. He was looking at me now, and I nodded. “Over a traffic ticket?”

  The deputy looked at his own thumb, and then at Ward. “Is there somebody who can tell us how to get out there?” Ward said.

  “You might as well cut off a man’s hand,” the deputy said.

  Ward kept himself still, the deputy thought it over.

  “I’ll tell you exactly where he is,” he said finally. “You can go out there and see for yourself what you saved.”

  My brother took a pen from his pocket to write down the instructions, but the deputy was agitated now, and took a pencil from his drawer and began to draw a map.

  The man’s fingers were thick and blunted, as if the tips had been caught in a car door, but he drew with a delicate motion, careful of the shapes of intersections, the size of his roads, the shoreline of the river. He stopped from time to time to judge the proportions of the drawing, and then leaned back into it, filling in certain areas with shading, or erasing part of the shoreline, remembering a place where the land hooked into the water. He labeled roads and intersections in perfect block letters.

  My brother stayed still, waiting for him to finish. The man enjoyed sketching, and Ward didn’t interrupt to say there was no need for block lettering and shading. A pest strip hung from the ceiling near the window, covered with flies.

  I wondered what the man might have done with his talent if he hadn’t caught on with the sheriff’s department. If it might have made him into someone else.

  In those days, it didn’t seem possible that someday I might wonder what I would have become if things had gone differently for me. I thought all the choices would always be in front of me.

  He pulled away from his work and looked at it another moment, enjoying it, and then handed it to my brother.

  “Anybody was to ask,” he said, “you didn’t get it here.”

  My brother folded the paper carefully, acknowledging the work that went into it, and put it into his pocket. “I appreciate this,” he said.

  “You think so?” the deputy said.

  And then he got up and walked through an open door into the back. He was a heavy man, and the creases in his pants where he’d been sitting stayed pressed against his flesh as he went.

  WE FOLLOWED THE MAP.

  It took us north of Lately and then east, along a dirt road through dense stands of pine, the soil itself gradually getting darker as we came closer to the river. We were perhaps twenty minutes in the pines, driving slowly, as I did not want to be in this place with a broken axle.

  The road emptied into a clearing, and we saw the river. Glimpses of the sun reflecting off it, through the trees on the other side. I stopped the car. The road itself seemed for a moment to have disappeared, but then I noticed old car tracks beneath the weeds.

  No one had driven through in a long time.

  We sat in the car, at the edge of the clearing. My brother looked at the map, laid it on his lap and studied it, looking up from time to time to check a landmark. He put his finger on a spot near a shaded area and the river.

  “We’re here,” he said.

  I looked at it and saw the deputy had the road continuing to the river and then another two or three miles north. At the end of his map was a small house with a pitched roof, surrounded by a fence, and the words Van Wetter had been printed underneath.

  “This isn’t a road anymore,” I said. Ward studied the map.

  “We could get this thing high centered and have to walk out again,” I said.

  “If there was a road once, it’s still there,” he said, and I sheared the car into first gear and started through. A doe appeared in the weeds ahead of us, picked up her head and watched us pass, leaving a path of tall grass bent to the ground behind.

  I kept the car moving straight, and then we dropped into a deep rut, slamming the underside against the ground. The engine quit, and in the quiet I could hear the insects.

  “Are we out of gas?” he said.

  I turned the key and the engine turned with it. I found myself wondering if Hillary Van Wetter had heard the car. If he already knew who it was.

  The engine caught and the old Ford climbed out of the hole and headed back across the clearing.

  Ahead, there were trees, and I drove into them until there was no place else to go.

  “It doesn’t go any farther,” I said, and Ward looked at the map again, then opened his door and stepped out. I turned off the engine and got out too. The heat rose off the old car’s hood in waves, and there was a whining sound in the air somewhere close.

  Ward was looking from the map to the trees. They were thick here; no road had been cut through.

  “He must have had it wrong,” I said.

  I stepped around the front of the car, feeling the engine’s heat, and walked a few feet into the trees. The whine was closer in there, and its pitch changed. It was cool in the shade, and I walked farther in, trying to find the source of the noise. It seemed to come from one place, and then another. I sat down against one of the pines to pull my socks up out of my shoes. The dirt was cool beneath my pants. Ward came through the trees slowly, still holding the map.

  “According to this …”

  “He must have made a mistake,” I said. He put the map into his pocket and walked past me into the trees, tripping once and then stopping to put his heel back into his shoe. He always bought the same brown wing tips; he wore them everywhere. I had seen him shoot baskets in those shoes.

  He bent at the waist and leaned with one hand against a tree to prop himself up while he adjusted the slipped shoe. There was a popping noise, about like a light bulb breaking, and then he was on the ground.

  I got up; he sat up. A faint burning smell hung in the air around him, and he tried to get back to his feet and fell. Something newborn. He did not seem to know where he was. I put my hands under his arms and pulled him to his feet.

  “You all right?” I said.

  He did not answer, but concentrated on keeping himself upright. It was always important to him to stay on his feet. I noticed the white insulator in the tree then, and the dark, narrow wire that was strung across it. The hummin
g sound had stopped.

  “It’s an electric fence,” I said, and he nodded as if he understood, but I was still holding more of his weight than he was himself. I had touched an electric fence too, when I was eleven or twelve, out dove hunting with my father. I’d thought I’d shot myself.

  “They must be trying to keep out the bears,” I said.

  Gradually, I moved out from under him, allowing him to stand on his own. “Jesus,” he said.

  “It was an electric fence,” I said again.

  “It was like being sucked into a hole,” he said. And he ran his hands over his face, as if he were feeling it for the first time.

  “Sit down for a little while,” I said.

  He shook his head and looked at his hand. It felt stung, he said, and he closed it once and then opened it, testing. He turned and looked at the fence he’d touched, and at the same time stepped away from it.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said. “Let’s forget the whole thing.”

  He looked into the trees. “It must be farther back,” he said.

  “There’s nothing back there.”

  “Somebody put up a fence.”

  A moment later he ducked beneath the wire, giving it wide clearance, and started off into the trees. I stayed on the other side a little while, not satisfied that the matter had been settled, but then, with no one there to settle it with, I went under the wire too and followed him in.

  THE HOUSE SAT IN a clearing of stumps—some cut lower than others, but averaging perhaps half a foot. A natural creek ran along the edge of this clearing, and a plank bridge had been constructed over it, substantial enough to hold an automobile or a truck. There were tire tracks on both sides, although I didn’t see how a car would get there, over the stumps, or where it would go afterwards.

  Ward stood at the bridge, studying the house. The humming noise had resumed in the trees behind us; I had the distinct feeling that we were trapped. There was a sudden absence of birds.

  The house itself was smaller than the one farther south where Hillary’s uncle lived, but like that one sat off the ground on blocks. It had not been prefabricated—it looked, in fact, as if it had been built at two different times, with two different kinds of shingles on the roof. There was a smaller building behind it where the generator was running.