by Pete Dexter
We stood still, watching the house, and the realization settled on me that Charlotte was inside.
Ward started across the bridge and I fell in next to him, thinking of Charlotte. I wondered if her looks had changed, living in this place. If she spent as much time on her face and clothes now there was no one but Hillary Van Wetter to see them. I knew she had to work at her looks; in some way that made her more attractive.
We had come halfway across the yard when the door opened. Hillary stood above us, naked. Except for a small beard of pale blond pubic hair, his body appeared hairless. He looked thicker than he had in prison; his legs were as big around as my head, and curiously out of proportion. Too short for his size.
Ward took a step or two closer and then stopped. Hillary didn’t move. They stared at each other, and then slowly Hillary shook his head.
“What is it now?” he said finally.
“I want to talk,” Ward said.
“More talk.”
My brother nodded. “About the night you and your uncle stole the sod,” he said.
Hillary stood still. He had been more animated in prison, chained to a chair. “What about it?” he said.
“Was it true?”
“You said it was true,” he said. “It was in the newspaper that it was true.…”
It was quiet again, except for the sound of the generator. “Yardley Acheman said he met the man who bought it,” Ward said.
Slowly, Hillary Van Wetter began to smile. “It was in the paper,” he said again. “How could it be a lie?”
He looked quickly at me, and then behind me, back into the trees. “Where’s the other one?” he said.
“He’s done with it,” Ward said.
Hillary smiled again. “He got what he wanted, and now he’s moved on.…”
My brother nodded, and Hillary turned sober. “Tell him something for me, would you?” he said. “Tell him I done the same thing.” And then he turned and went back into the house.
I stood still, the sun pressing against my back. When Hillary reappeared, he was wearing shoes and a pair of pants; the belt hung loose in the waist. He stepped through the doorway and closed the door behind him as if there were a cat inside that he did not want slipping out between his feet.
“You tell him I done the same thing,” he said again, happy with the way that sounded.
“I don’t know what that means,” Ward said.
Hillary Van Wetter smiled. “Ain’t that the truth?” he said. Then Hillary put his hands in his pockets and looked at Ward as if something about my brother confused him. “Is there something else?” he said.
“The night you stole the sod …” Ward said, “how did you know where to go to sell it?” They looked at each other over the question, and I brushed at a mosquito in my hair and it was hot from the sun.
“You don’t just steal the sod off a golf course and then drive around looking for somebody who wants to buy it,” Ward said.
Hillary Van Wetter shrugged, comfortable with the story the way it was.
“So either you knew the man before, or there wasn’t any man,” he said.
Hillary sat down on the step leading to his front door; he leaned forward and dropped a line of spit between his feet.
“You think you come into the prison with all your friends and saved me,” he said. He stuck a finger in his ear and screwed it in and then out, and then studied the tip. I noticed again that there were no birds in the trees; I thought perhaps the noise of the generator kept them away. That or something in the spectacle of the stumps.
“Let me tell you something,” Hillary said. “Ain’t no such thing.” He wiped the earwax off his finger and onto his pants, leaving a stain. He saw me watching him and said, “I secrete abnormal amounts of cerumen.”
I nodded without knowing what he was talking about. “Earwax,” he said, and then he smiled, almost as if he liked me. “paperboys don’t know everything after all.…”
My brother did not seem to be listening.
Hillary said, “The prison doctor told me that; about my abnormal secretion.” He paused a moment, thinking of the prison doctor, and then spoke again to me. “Now, there was a man that also needed excitement in his life, just like you two, and he got himself cut for his trouble.…”
He spit again, the color of coffee.
“He was there when some colored boys broke in for morphine.” He smiled.
My brother sat down on a stump two feet across. He didn’t say anything; he had asked his question and now he was waiting for an answer. Hillary turned to him, and the smile that had come with the memory of the colored boys cutting the doctor was gone. “Let me tell you something else you don’t know,” he said.
“Tell me about the man who bought the sod,” Ward said.
“I’ll tell you something better,” he said. He leaned forward; his elbows rested on his knees and his hands dangled in the air in front of him. He was wearing a ring that he hadn’t worn in prison, the kind you get for graduating from high school. “You didn’t save nobody. Once a man sees his own death in front of him, you can’t bring things back to what they was.”
He nodded back in the direction of the house. “How many of you was poking the lady while I was in prison?” he said. “I didn’t see nothing about that in the paper, that while the Miami Times undertook its investigation into the railroaded prisoner that they was having his fiancee on the side.”
Ward shook his head, and seemed about to deny it, and then stopped. “I don’t involve myself in other people’s copulations,” he said quietly. Hillary did not understand the word.
“Pokings,” I said, thinking that now we were all even for cerumen.
“I mind my own business,” Ward said.
“If you was minding your own business, you wouldn’t be here sitting on my stump,” Hillary said.
I was looking back at the little house again, wondering if Charlotte would come outside. He caught me at it; he seemed to read my thoughts.
“You lovesick?” he said.
“I was just wondering how she is,” I said.
“Indisposed,” he said.
“She wrote a letter …”
“I know about her letters,” he said. A moment passed. “I know everything about that girl.”
It was quiet again, and I stared at the house, feeling offended that she hadn’t at least come out. “Don’t come back here,” Hillary said, more to my brother than to me.
Ward did not seem the least inclined even to leave.
“Don’t come back,” Hillary stood up then, slowly, and walked back inside.
Ward reluctantly got to his feet and made his way back through the stumps toward the dark trees beyond, tripping as he went on roots that lay above the ground. Each time he tripped, he caught himself and continued on as if he’d already forgotten that the roots were there.
Lost, as always, in a higher purpose.
WE WENT BACK TO the hotel along the river and I showered in cold water. It was hot outside and I had six beers in a cooler of ice, along with some chicken sandwiches that I’d bought at the same place where I’d gotten the beer.
I came out of the bathroom and opened two of the beers and handed one to Ward, and then I lay down on the bed, still wet from the shower. There was a breeze from the window, a suggestion of coolness.
Ward stood looking out over the river. The sun was setting and the trees in the motel yard framed the boats and the long shadows they threw across the water, but I don’t think he saw any of that. I am not sure he knew he was holding a beer. I tasted mine, and it was cold and bitter and good. I began to feel optimistic, as I often did when the first cold beer was still in my hand. Later on, after too many beers, I knew I would slip the other way.
“Was he right about the girl and Yardley?” he said. I could hear it embarrassed him to ask the question.
“About Yardley sleeping with her?”
He nodded, without looking back.
“Yeah, he was r
ight,” I said. I looked at him a moment and realized that he was the only one who hadn’t wanted Charlotte for himself. That was how he’d missed it.
“There’s no way to be sure,” he said. He left the window, picked up half the sandwich off the bed, and sat on a table in the corner next to the telephone. “He’s always been honest.”
I had another drink of beer. “Shit,” I said.
“I don’t mean his personal life,” he said. “I mean he’s always been an honest reporter.”
“Those are two different things?” I said. “A guy can be Yardley Acheman off the job and somebody honest when he’s sitting at the typewriter …”
“The best reporters aren’t always the best people,” he said. “The best ones keep who they are out of it.”
“What I think is, if you’re Yardley Acheman it doesn’t matter what kind of reporter you are, you’re still Yardley Acheman.”
Ward picked up his beer and drank it, throwing his head back, some of it leaking at the scar and dripping off his chin.
A little time passed.
“That afternoon in the office when you wrestled him to the floor,” he said, feeling the alcohol. “What was that about?”
I finished another beer. It seemed to me then—it has always seemed to me—that there are people whom you recognize intuitively as your enemies. And most of the time, as in the case of Yardley Acheman, they recognize you. And even if nothing is ever said or done, the animus is there from the first moment you walk into the same room.
“I suppose we’re natural enemies,” I said.
I CALLED MY FATHER’S office in the morning, before we left for Miami. I had to use the phone outside the lobby of the hotel; there were none in the rooms. It was a warm morning; the birds were making noise from the trees and the river was full of bass fishermen sitting in still boats.
I hung up when he answered.
BY THE TIME WE returned to South Florida, Yardley Acheman was an author.
A publisher in New York had offered him thirty thousand dollars to expand the Moat County articles into a book, an amount almost equal to two years of his salary. I do not know if the offer had initially included my brother, but by the time we heard of it, it was Yardley Acheman’s alone.
He told Ward about the book without mentioning the amount of the advance, although I knew from one of the copyboys that he had been bragging about the money for days, going from one desk to another in the newsroom, speaking to people he had not spoken to in months.
What he said to Ward was that for some time he had been struggling with the feeling that newspapers were too limiting for the things he wanted to write.
“Maybe it’s just something I’ve got to get out of my system,” he said, meaning the book. “Something to accomplish, you know, by myself. To find out if I can do it.” He paused a moment and then said, “Not that it’s the end of our partnership. We’re too good together to quit.…”
Ward nodded, and listened politely while Yardley, relieved now that Ward had been notified that he was out of the deal, elaborated on his plans for the book, never mentioning the thirty thousand dollars.
When I left the office, Yardley was still discussing his sense of being unfulfilled as a writer. “You know what I’m talking about,” he said. “The canvas is too small …”
YARDLEY WAS NOT AROUND the office as much for the next few months. He spent much of his time in New York with the magazine writer, whom he in fact married.
At the urging of the editors, Ward undertook an investigation of several of the Dade County commissioners, collecting and filing thousands of pages of documents on landfills and sewer projects and housing developments. He traced corporations through foreign banks, and found their owners back in Miami.
But in spite of growing evidence of an abuse of public trust, Ward had no real interest in the players. He would walk into his office at seven or eight in the morning and reappear an hour later, stretching or going for coffee, and an hour after that I would sometimes pass his office and see him standing at the window, staring out at the city.
YARDLEY ACHEMAN CALLED from his apartment in Miami or from his wife’s apartment in New York several times a day, asking for information about Hillary or Thurmond Call that he had lost or forgotten—everything that hadn’t appeared in the newspaper article itself.
My brother took the calls cordially, welcoming the chance to talk again about Moat County, often answering in more detail than Yardley Acheman wanted.
Once a week Yardley made an appearance at the office—a gesture of sorts, as he was still drawing his salary—spending a few minutes with Ward, and then an hour or so with his editors, reporting on the progress of the story of the Dade County commissioners. Nurturing the fading view that he and Ward were equal partners in the work.
He wore expensive suits now, the influence perhaps of New York, but the big city had not been all good to him, as he’d also begun to change colors. His skin had taken on an unnatural cast, as if he were standing in fluorescent light.
On Saturday, Yardley always flew back to New York to be with his wife and friends, and sometimes on his visits to the Times he would complain about the complications of living in both places at once. Of going, as he put it, from the fastest place in the world to the slowest—to the place where New Yorkers came to retire when they were too slow to keep up.
He spoke of Miami now as he had once spoken of Lately.
I didn’t know anything about the literary fraternity in New York, of course, but it didn’t seem to me that it could be such an exclusive club if they let him in the first day. It seemed to me that New York must be full of people like Yardley Acheman.
The calls from Yardley to my brother became more constant. Afterwards, sometimes, my brother would slide the patch off his eye and sit at his desk for a long time, his head resting in his hands, still possessed by the documents from Hillary Van Wetter’s arrest and trial.
He would forget to eat; he would forget to go home. Sometimes he would forget to replace the eye patch. The spectacle of the squeezed, empty socket brought other spectacles to mind, and I would look quickly away when I saw it, unable to reconcile myself to the memory of the beating.
WORKING ALONE, WARD FINISHED the story on the Dade County commissioners, writing it himself. Yardley occupied himself flying back and forth to New York. He turned in fifty pages of the book and was told to rewrite them, and refused to write at all for several weeks.
The newspaper article, which, at Yardley’s insistence, bore his name along with my brother’s, resulted in the indictment of four of the commissioners, ruining their lives, and in a spirit of celebration the editors gave Ward two weeks off.
Yardley also took two weeks, and returned to New York to resume work on the book. I heard later that he went back to his publishers, asking for and receiving more money on the advance.
MY BROTHER WENT BACK to Moat County. He wanted to go home, he said, for a few days rest.
What he meant by home, I didn’t know. He didn’t intend to move in with my father and his girlfriend. He had seen how welcome he was with her in the house.
I called my father on the day Ward left. I hadn’t spoken to him in the months since he told us to knock before we came into the house. He sounded weary when he picked up the phone, and I wondered if Ellen Guthrie had been keeping him up late.
“Jack,” he said, “good to hear your voice.” And then his own voice began to improve. He asked if I was swimming, how much I weighed, what sort of things they had me doing at the newspaper. He seemed afraid of running out of things to say; afraid that the conversation would end.
I found myself forgiving him.
“What I do best,” I said, “is when somebody says, ‘Jack, get me the glue,’ I get the glue.”
I prided myself then on being the only copyboy in the newsroom who did not have ambitions to become a reporter.
He said that he’d read Ward’s story about the Dade County commissioners and he’d been meani
ng to call to tell him it was a fine piece of journalism. “The most important, best journalism there is,” he said, “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, and it’s all local …”
He stopped a moment, out of things to say.
“He isn’t there, is he?”
“They gave him a couple of weeks off,” I said.
“Well,” he said, “when you see him tell him to call.”
“He’s on his way up there,” I said.
And there was a small, empty place in the conversation. “Thorn?” he said.
“I guess.”
“To visit?” A worried man now. “He isn’t doing another story, is he?”
“I don’t know what he’s doing.”
“I thought he was through with us,” he said, making a small joke. The connection was quiet while my father weighed my brother’s impending visit and its inherent domestic implications.
“Should I tell Ellen to expect him?” he said.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
I heard relief in his voice.
“Well, we’d love to have him,” he said. “At least he could come by for a meal …”
I thought of the meals at home, of the steam coming off boiled food. I was homesick. “How is Anita getting along with your roommate?” I said.
He stalled on that.
“Actually, we had to let her go.”
I didn’t say anything then. She’d been in my father’s house as long as the cracks in the ceiling.
“You know how it is,” he said, “two women in one kitchen …”
“I didn’t know Ellen was in the kitchen.”
“It’s a figure of speech,” he said.
“Anita was there a long time,” I said. It seemed to me that he should have said something to us before he got rid of her.
“I took care of her financially,” he said. “Don’t worry about that.” When I didn’t speak again, he said, “She worked for us, Jack, she wasn’t a member of the family.”