The Paperboy

by Pete Dexter

  “She was part of things,” I said.

  And it was quiet again.

  “Things change,” he said finally. “You know that.”

  FOUR DAYS BEFORE WARD was due back in Miami, the Sunday editor came to me in the newsroom, trying to find him. He was excited and desperate at the same time.

  “We need to contact your brother,” he said.

  I said he was in Moat County. I was sorting mail for the reporters at the time, a job I liked for its solitary nature.

  “Where?” he said.

  I hadn’t heard from him since he left.

  “We’ve got to get him back here,” he said.

  “He’ll be back on Friday.”

  The Sunday editor shook his head, fretting. “Friday doesn’t do us any good,” he said.

  “I don’t know where he’s staying,” I said.

  “Would your father know?”

  “I doubt it.”

  He stuck his hands into his pockets and shook his head. “Jesus, what kind of a family have you got, you go home and don’t see each other?”

  I turned back to the mailboxes and continued sorting the mail. “Can you find him?” he said.

  “I can make some calls.…”

  “We’ve got to have him in the office tomorrow,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “I can’t tell you for what, just get him.”

  I handed the Sunday editor the letters in my hand, and he looked at them a moment, realized what they were, and dropped them in the wastebasket. I walked back into Ward’s office and shut the door. I called half a dozen motels in Lately, and he was not registered at any of them. I called my father’s office, and he was at lunch with Miss Guthrie.

  The Sunday editor walked past the office from time to time, looking inside for some signal that I’d found him. I kept shaking my head.

  Later, when I reached my father, he said that he’d thought that Ward had changed his mind and stayed in Miami. “If he came up, I assumed he’d have called,” he said, sounding hurt.

  “Maybe he went somewhere else,” I said. His license had been reinstated and he’d bought a car of his own. I tried to think of places he might go.

  “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know, they just want him back in the office,” I said. “It’s important, but they won’t tell me why.…”

  He paused a moment. “Did they say when?”

  “Tomorrow,” I said. “They want him back no later than the morning.”

  He thought a moment, and then, quietly, “Jesus … ”

  “What?”

  He said, “He’s won the Pulitzer.”

  The Sunday editor walked past the window again, looking in, and I shook my head no.

  YARDLEY ACHEMAN FLEW IN from New York late that night, and appeared in the newsroom in the morning in one of his new suits. Seeing him there, three days before he was due, I knew my father was right.

  The Sunday editor set me back to work calling Moat County motels, but some of the urgency was out of it now. It was plain that he was disappointed I wasn’t better at calling motels.

  THE NAMES OF THE WINNERS came in over the Associated Press wire about eleven, and the celebration began there in the office with an official announcement by the paper’s publisher, an ancient, pink-faced man who emerged from his office upstairs to congratulate not only Yardley and my brother, but the entire staff.

  The paper was good at winning Pulitzer Prizes, and the speech had been used before.

  Bottles of champagne appeared as soon as the publisher returned to his own floor, and a party began there in the city room, some reporters drinking, some of them taking stories over the phone, some doing both. Yardley Acheman kissed all the best-looking women, at least the ones who would let him.

  A telegram came in from Lately, my father saying this was the proudest moment of his life.

  Later in the day the party moved to a bar across the street, and then to a hotel near the bar.

  The hotel had a swimming pool on the roof, and reporters who had never spoken to me before sat down smelling of Scotch and confessed their admiration for my brother even if he was an odd duck, and saying what a shame it was that he couldn’t have been there for the party.

  Among the thirty or so celebrants gathered at the pool that night was a young police reporter named Helen Drew. Miss Drew was overweight and, like my brother, worked at her job compulsively, even on her own time. She came into Ward’s office occasionally for advice on professional matters, as she wanted to be an investigative reporter herself, and was clearly star-struck in his presence. She could not keep herself from finishing his sentences for him, or nodding obsessively in agreement before he even began to speak. Yardley Acheman would have nothing to do with her.

  On this evening, however, Yardley was feeling his humanity. She came to him and absently he dropped his arm over her shoulder, and she leaned into him, smiling, like old pals.

  Helen Drew’s skin was pale and doughy, and she did not see well even with her glasses. Her form was not so much fat as thick—not just her waist and shoulders and legs, but her wrists and fingers too. Her hands looked like an enormous baby’s.

  She wore loose-fitting dresses to work that draped her body all the way to the shoes, and late at night she took those shoes off—they waited together near a canvas chair, looking squashed, with her glasses laid inside one of them—and dangled a foot in the pool as she drank. And while she was balanced this way, with one foot over the edge, Yardley, who was behind her then with a thinner woman, suddenly dropped his head and butted her back side, knocking her in.

  She panicked, blind in the water and unable to swim, but then found the ladder and calmed herself, and then stayed in the pool for a long time, mascara running down her cheeks, laughing and chatting from there with the reporters standing at the edge, putting off that moment as long as she could when she would emerge with the wet material of her dress sticking to the rolls of flesh it was intended to hide.

  Yardley kept saying he was sorry, again and again. But he could not apologize without remembering the spectacle as she’d gone in, and he would lose himself and begin to laugh. And she laughed with him.

  Helen Drew finally came out of the pool, streaming water like a long-sunken treasure, and wrapped herself in a towel. She drank and laughed for another half hour and left. She was not at work the next day, or the next.

  She resigned from the paper later in the week without cleaning out her desk, taking a job at the Miami Sun, a small paper which rented offices in the Times Building, where she was promised the chance to become an investigative reporter.

  MY BROTHER RETURNED FROM his vacation bone thin and sunburned, with insect bites covering his face and arms and his belt cinched back to the last notch. His pants gathered in bunches at the waist.

  He didn’t look as if he’d eaten since he left.

  I did not ask him where he’d stayed or what he’d done, and he didn’t offer to tell me.

  We went to dinner, but he only picked at the food. He seemed detached, completely uninterested in the prize he had won, and was only briefly engaged by the news that Ellen Guthrie had talked World War into firing Anita Chester.

  “She wants it all to herself, doesn’t she?” he said, sounding like an outsider, someone standing to the side, watching a family fall apart.

  YARDLEY ACHEMAN MADE a quick trip to New York, using the Pulitzer to leverage a few more thousand dollars from his publisher, and then flew back to Miami to request a leave of absence to finish his book. He lobbied to stay on the payroll during his leave, on the grounds that the paper was still using his picture in full-page advertisements and that the praise for the book would inevitably reflect back on the Times. He added that continuation of his salary would also guarantee his return after the manuscript was finished.

  The editors gave him the leave of absence, but not his salary. He’d made his demands in the city room before he made them to the editors, and they were af
raid of setting a precedent.

  He left for New York again that same week, saying he could not promise to come back.

  THE SUNDAY EDITOR APPROACHED my brother a few days later, on a mission from the editors above him, to discuss pairing him with another reporter. In spite of several indicted county commissioners, the idea that my brother could work alone hadn’t seemed to occur to them.

  “We have to face the facts,” the Sunday editor said. “Acheman may not be coming back.”

  My brother said no.

  YARDLEY ACHEMAN REDEDICATED HIMSELF to the book, and I watched my brother cast about for a new story, throwing himself into the process as completely as he would into a story itself, but he could not find one with people who interested him. The editors had stories, of course, but they were always too much like the ones he had already done.

  The calls came in again, collect, four and five times a day, occasionally that many in an hour. My brother accepted them all, putting aside his own work to answer Yardley’s questions, not needing now to go back into the transcripts and notes from the case, even for the smallest details.

  There was a certain urgency to these calls, and Yardley’s voice, when I picked up the phone, had lost its confidence. It occurred to me that perhaps writing a book was not as entertaining an activity as signing the contract to write it.

  I remember another call a few months later, a different kind of call, when my brother simply held the phone, against his ear and listened for a long time. Slowly, he began to nod. “I could let you have a few hundred,” he said.

  I could hear the voice coming through the phone, and my brother was nodding again. He picked up a pencil and wrote down an address. “I’ll put it in the mail tonight,” he said, and then he hung up.

  He looked at me and said, “Elaine’s must be expensive.”

  He smiled for a moment, enjoying what he’d said, and then went back to the work in front of him, curious, I think, at the meanness of the remark.

  THE MONEY DID NOT LAST in New York, and Yardley Acheman returned to the Times angry and broke, bringing the unfinished book with him. His wife stayed where she was.

  On his first day back, a call came in from Helen Drew. Yardley did not remember who she was until she recalled for him that she had been the one who fell into the pool. That was the way she put it, that she fell.

  “Right, right,” he said, “how are you?”

  I was in the office at the time and he looked up at me and winked.

  She asked if he had a few minutes to talk.

  “The truth is, with the book and all, I’m not doing interviews right now …”

  “We were just looking over the Pulitzer story,” she said, “and a couple of questions came up.”

  “We?” he said. “Who is we?”

  “My editors and I …”

  “And you just happen to be looking over my Pulitzer story?”

  “There were a few things we were wondering about.”

  Yardley looked at me again, but there was no wink in it now. “I don’t have time for this shit,” he said. “I don’t know what kind of penny-ante, chickenshit journalism you practice over there, but I don’t have time for it.”

  And then he slammed the phone onto the cradle and stalked out of the office. A moment later, my brother’s phone began to ring.

  MY BROTHER SPOKE several times to Helen Drew in the next few months, over the objections of Yardley Acheman. It became clear that she was going back over the entire story, piece by piece. Why, no one knew. She would call over the smallest point, unwilling or unable to go on until everything behind her was clear and accounted for. She never seemed to get things right the first time, but in the end she was thorough. And in the end, that is all a reporter needs.

  Yardley Acheman began to believe that she was writing a book of her own. He was infuriated that Ward would talk to her, and went to the editors to complain. Yardley had threatened them too often, however, and did not have the influence he had once had. They said there was nothing they could do.

  HELEN DREW SHOWED UP in the city room on a Thursday afternoon in sandals and one of her loose-fitting dresses. She wore a button protesting the war in Vietnam, and her hair was streaked blond in a way that was the fashion that year.

  It would be hard to imagine a more harmless-looking human being. Ward was on the telephone when she came in. She offered me her hand and I took it, feeling the weight. She was sweating and breathing heavily, having walked the steps from the first floor, and fanned herself with a copy of the paper that someone at the reception desk had given her. She picked at her dress, pulling it away from her skin.

  She looked around the room. “It’s bigger than I remember,” she said.

  SHE WAS WITH Ward most of the afternoon, and left apologizing for taking so much of his time. The office was still warm with the heat from her body when I went in, and smelled of her soap.

  “What does she want now?” I said.

  He shook his head. “I’m not sure,” he said. “She keeps coming back to the timing of it, the story being written while I was in the hospital …”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “I told her that Mr. Van Wetter was facing the electric chair, and the paper didn’t think it could hold the story.…” He shrugged, as if the arguments were self-evident.

  “She ought to talk to Yardley Acheman,” I said, making a joke.

  “He thinks she’s stealing his book,” he said. “Something about a swimming pool. He thinks she hates him for pushing her into a swimming pool.”

  ALTHOUGH AGAIN DRAWING a paycheck, Yardley Acheman had, for all practical purposes, never come back to work. There was no way to quietly fire him, however, and the Times had too much invested in him to do such a thing in public.

  He worked on his book in spurts, and complained out loud that he could not concentrate, knowing that there were people out to ruin him.

  AND MY BROTHER WENT back to what had worked before.

  He disappeared into a new project, night and day, collecting the contradictory facts and details of things that had happened, sometimes years before, filing them away against the day when he would look at them again and decide a certain chain of events, a version of history that would be printed. Believing this time it would emerge on the pages of the newspaper exactly as it had happened in life.

  Strangely, he refused to discuss what his new project was, and his editors began to worry that they had lost them both, with Yardley Acheman complaining that they had no understanding of the pressures of writing a book, and Ward not talking to them at all.

  Neither of them could be fired, of course, and Yardley reminded them of that from time to time, asking out loud in the newsroom how the paper could afford to keep him around.

  And while I wasn’t there for the conversations with his publisher in New York—he tended to keep that aspect of his life more private than the rest—one morning I did see a draft of a letter he wrote the man, which he’d left beside the copying machine in the office (he was making copies of all his correspondence then, against the day students would be studying his work in English classes), explaining it was impossible to continue to work at the paper and, at the same time, finish the book. “They don’t seem to be able to turn on the lights around here without me,” he said.

  He believed his wife was having an affair. He called her daily and reported his progress on the book and begged her to come to Miami to visit. She, however, was working on something of her own and could not get away. He would hang up enraged.

  He worried out loud about his marriage, and added that to the distractions keeping him from finishing his book. He estimated his marital problems had set him back six months, a figure he offered to anyone who would listen, even to me.

  On the day he did that, however, he turned abruptly away, not waiting for an answer, as if he had just realized I was not in a position to forgive his obligations.

  HELEN DREW RETURNED to the Times’s newsroom, still smell
ing of the same soap. She seemed happy to see me, as if we were old friends. And perhaps I was as close to an old friend as she had.

  She wondered out loud how Yardley was doing with his book, if he might have time to talk to her now. There was something wide-eyed and sweet in her tone which did not quite hide the edge beneath.

  I LEARNED OF MY father’s engagement to Ellen Guthrie through a wedding invitation mailed to me at the paper. I used the newspaper’s address for the little personal correspondence I received because mail which came to me at the rooming house was left on a small table near the front door and inspected by the other tenants as they came and left during the day. Often, one of them opened it.

  The invitation was professionally printed and included a small map of Thorn, showing the location of the Methodist church and the country club where the reception would be held, as well as the name of a store in Jacksonville where Ellen Guthrie had established an account of the things she needed in the way of gifts.

  I took the invitation straight to my brother, who by now had generated enough piles of documents and records for the new project to cover his desk.

  Yardley Acheman was also in the room, on the telephone with his agent in New York.

  “Listen,” he said, “I need six months to finish this thing, and I have to get back to the city to do it.…”

  I dropped the invitation in the middle of Ward’s documents. “Did you get one of these?” I said.

  He looked at it without touching it, cocking his head to read the words, then seemed to follow them off the page, across the desk to some banking records sitting beneath a staple gun at the far corner.

  Yardley was asking for another eight thousand dollars.

  “It gets better and better,” I said.

  Ward turned toward a corner of the room where his own mail lay in a mound on a shelf, unopened since he had begun the new project. Some of it had fallen off onto the floor.