The Paperboy

by Pete Dexter

  Yardley was telling the editor now that the story was timeless.

  Ward touched the invitation I’d dropped on his desk, turning it with one finger until he could read it again without moving his head sideways. “He’s going to marry her,” I said.

  He nodded, still looking at the invitation, still touching it with the tip of his finger.

  “She’s after the whole paper,” I said.

  He smiled again, and then shook his head no, as if he found the idea implausible.

  “If you want it faster, then get me out of this fucking hole and back in New York where I can write,” Yardley said. “Six thousand dollars, I’ll live on a thousand a month …”

  Yardley squirmed quietly in his chair while the man on the other end of the line spoke. He looked up at us, then back at the paper in front of him. He had written the number 6,000 and circled it several times, now he crossed it out.

  “Well, they seem to get along with each other,” Ward said.

  Yardley closed his eyes, listening to the man in New York. My brother seemed unaware of the conversation; he seemed only vaguely aware of me.

  Yardley suddenly slammed the phone onto the cradle and sat for a moment, breathing hard. He looked at the phone, then across the room at Ward. “Your friend Helen Drew?” he said. “She’s been checking on me in New York.”

  TWO LETTERS ARRIVED at the paper from my father’s attorney later that week, one to me, one to Ward, formally notifying us of a change in the structure of the company. My father had named Ellen Guthrie as president, but had held on to the formal editorship of the newspaper, as well as his title of chief executive officer.

  She had also been named to the board of directors. There was no explanation of the change, no personal note or call later from my father.

  He had simply changed the locks again.

  Ward left the office after he opened the letter, brushing past Helen Drew, who was waiting at the receptionist’s desk to see Yardley Acheman. He walked to the bar at the corner and drank beer all that afternoon. I found him there after I’d finished work, still wearing his tie snug against the top button of his shirt. He was sitting in a booth against the wall, his head resting against the plastic cushion, a watery look to his eye. There was no other sign that he was drunk.

  I got a beer from the bartender and sat down and offered a toast. “To the new Mrs. James,” I said, and he touched the lip of his bottle against mine, and we both drank.

  “Was the girl from the Sun still there when you left?” It was a beer or two later.

  “Still waiting for Yardley,” I said.

  He thought a moment and said, “I wish she’d go away.”

  “I think there’s something wrong with her,” I said.

  “I wish they’d all go away.”

  “Who?”

  He smiled, and drank his beer. “All of them,” he said, and then he brought his bottle across the table and touched mine again. And then he laughed.

  I WAS HALF DRUNK and on the way back to the paper when I saw them, coming out of the parking lot. First Helen Drew, in a Ford, and then Yardley Acheman, in his Buick. Half a minute apart. She turned the corner and slowed, watching for him in her rearview mirror, and then, after he had turned the corner too, they disappeared together into Miami.

  WHEN I SAW Helen Drew again, it was ten o’clock in the morning at the rooming house. It was my day off and I’d just come back from a swim. I suppose she’d been watching for me outside. I was still in a bathing suit when she knocked on the door. She was embarrassed, and stumbled over herself apologizing for the intrusion.

  “I tried to call the paper,” she said, “but the woman wouldn’t take a message.”

  The receptionist at the paper refused to take messages for the secretaries or the editorial assistants, feeling they were not professional members of the staff, and not entitled to professional courtesies.

  I looked around my room, and clothes were strewn most of the places anyone could sit. The sheets were twisted on the bed; I couldn’t remember when I’d changed them. She glanced back toward the front door, uncomfortable to be standing in the hall.

  I opened the door wider and stepped aside to let her in. Once she was past, I looked up the hallway, and saw Froggy Bill at his regular station, excited by what was going on.

  She sat down on a corner of the bed. A single pants leg stuck out from beneath her, as if whoever had been inside had been crushed. I picked up a T-shirt and put it on, and that seemed to make her more comfortable. There was water in my ear from the swim, and I tilted that way and hit my head with the flat of my palm. She winced.

  “Sorry,” she said, “I’m not used to doing this.”

  I picked up a pair of pants and a shirt and tossed them into the open closet, then cleared the socks off the chair against the wall and sat down. The bathing suit was damp and sandy. An ancient, cracked mirror hung on the opposite wall, and from where I was sitting I could see her, front and back.

  She did not seem to know where to start.

  “I don’t know how I get into these things,” she said finally.

  I waited, thinking of the man outside in the hallway, and what he imagined I was doing with this fat girl in my room.

  “It’s about your brother,” she said.

  “What about him?”

  “About Daytona Beach.” She sat perfectly still and waited. I waited too. She looked unhappy and resigned. “Someone who knows,” she said, “indicated to me that he didn’t get hurt on the beach.”

  It was quiet a moment.

  “What difference does it make?”

  She sat very still. “It just gets messier and messier,” she said.

  “What does?”

  “The whole thing,” she said. “You start out with something you want to do, and the next thing you know you’re doing things you don’t want to do at all.…”

  “Then don’t do them,” I said.

  She shook her head. “It’s gone too far for that.”

  I glanced quickly in the mirror, at the rolls of flesh under her blouse. She sat up on the bed, straightening herself.

  “You were there in Daytona Beach when it happened …”

  I waited for her to finish.

  “It wasn’t at the beach, was it?”

  “Who said that?”

  “My source.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “He or she indicated it happened at the hotel,” she said.

  I didn’t move.

  “The night manager said it happened there too.”

  “Bullshit,” I said. She was not good at lying.

  “The question is, if it happened at the hotel, why did he say it happened at the beach?”

  “The question is, why would Yardley Acheman tell you it didn’t happen at the beach?”

  Now she sat still, as if that were a problem she’d thought of too. She did not try to pretend it wasn’t Yardley. “I have to have one thing straight in my head before I can go on to the next thing,” she said finally. “The person I spoke to said your brother had some sailors in his room, to have sex with them, and they beat him up and tried to rob him.”

  She looked at me, waiting.

  “It happened on the beach,” I said.

  She sat still, then slowly shook her head. “Look,” she said, “could we just tell each other the truth?”

  Then, without waiting for me to answer, she said, “Yardley Acheman told me, off the record, what happened in Daytona, and he said the story was hurried into print to draw attention away.”

  She sat still.

  “That doesn’t make sense,” I said.

  She thought a moment. “In a screwy way it does … it explains the mix-up over the contractor.…”

  My bathing suit had turned cold, and I wanted to shower and then walk to the little Cuban café two blocks south and read the newspapers and eat breakfast.

  “The contractor in the story,” she said. “I haven’t been able to find him, nobody w
ill divulge his name. Maybe your brother was so embarrassed …” She paused a moment, thinking. “Maybe he got confused.”

  “You mean he made the guy up.”

  “To protect his privacy,” she said. “Or maybe he got hurt so bad, he just wanted things to be over.”

  I sat there thinking of Yardley Acheman.

  “This is all off the record,” she said.

  A MOMENT LATER the color drained out of her face, and she dropped back onto her elbows. I stayed where I was, still calculating the enormity of the lie Yardley had told.

  “Have you got an orange?” she said.

  Her eyes were open and she was sweating. I went to the window and opened it wider, but there wasn’t enough air to stir the curtains. She looked at me without moving her face.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  “My blood sugar,” she said. “I need some fruit.”

  There was a little grocery store on the same block as the rooming house; the old woman who had it ran numbers on the side. I picked up Helen Drew’s legs, holding her ankles, to get her all on the bed. The weight was surprising, and when I had them up she moved a little, realigning herself, at the same time holding down her skirt.

  I went out the door, hurrying, past Froggy Bill. “I got some rubbers right here,” he said, and stuck his hand inside his pocket. He grinned, and his teeth were terrible.

  I ran to the store and bought half a dozen oranges and some grapes and a quart of orange juice and a box of Fig Newtons.

  When I came back into the building Froggy Bill was closer to my room than he’d been when I left, still in the hallway but looking in the door. He moved away as I came in, and restationed himself outside his own door.

  She was sitting up again, still pale, but looking better. I put the things I’d bought on the bed next to her and she went over them, opening the orange juice first, drinking perhaps half the container, and then ate all the Fig Newtons and a few of the grapes.

  Gradually the color came back to her face, and when she felt well enough she was humiliated. “I’ve been on this diet,” she said. I looked at what was left of the cookies on the bed, the empty carton of orange juice. The six oranges lay where I’d put them, untouched. “The idea is all you eat is popcorn, it’s supposed to make you lose twenty pounds the first month, but I keep getting dizzy.”

  She looked at the bed too, as if she just noticed the evidence of what she’d eaten. “A nurse told me it was blood sugar,” she said.

  She began cleaning it up, picking up the papers the Fig Newtons had been wrapped in, stuffing them into the orange juice carton.

  “This is embarrassing,” she said.

  She stood up, steadying herself, and then put the carton in the garbage. She looked around the room, as if she were going to clean it all.

  “It always comes down to the same thing,” she said. “In the end, it doesn’t matter what I do, I’m still just the fat kid who gets sick at school.” I saw that she was about to cry; I didn’t know what to do about it. And then she was crying, and that embarrassed her too.

  “Oh, shit,” she said, “here I go.” And she smiled and cried at the same time. I sat still, waiting for her to stop, trying to find somewhere else in the room to look.

  She went to my sink and ran some water, bending into her hands. She came up looking damp. She sat heavily on the bed.

  “I never wanted to hurt your brother,” she said, and blew her nose. “It was that bastard Acheman, but now it’s all gone the wrong way.…” And there was something in her hopelessness that I trusted, I suppose because I was hopeless most of the time myself.

  “I’ll tell you some things,” I said, “but not for the newspaper.”

  She looked at me differently.

  “This is off the record,” I said.

  “Completely off the record,” she said. And I heard something tinny in that, but I’d already gone too far to stop, and a few moments later I was telling her what it looked like when I walked into my brother’s hotel room. The sailors and the police and the ambulance attendants and Ward, broken to pieces.

  “It had nothing to do with the story,” I said, “nothing to do with the contractor, except Ward was there trying to find him.”

  “It was Yardley who said he found the guy?”

  “Yardley,” I said.

  And then I was through talking, and she understood that and got up to leave. “This was all so horrible,” she said, looking back at the bed. “You must think I’m crazy.”

  She opened her purse and came out with a five-dollar bill. “What do I owe you for the groceries?”

  We looked at each other over the money, not knowing how to get out of the moment.

  “It never happened,” I said.

  She waited a second or two, then set the money on the chair near the wall. I knew then what I’d done. I stepped into the hallway to see her past Froggy Bill, but he’d left his usual spot, I suppose to report what had gone on to the woman who ran the apartment.

  I went to the Cuban place for breakfast, and sat over rice and meat sauce and eggs, trying to remember the exact words I’d said to Helen Drew, saying them again, returning again and again to the cold certainty that I’d turned Ward over to the enemy.

  THE STORY APPEARED that same week, on Friday, beginning on the front page of the Miami Sun, under the headline THE MAKING OF A PULITZER. The piece ran eighty column inches, perhaps half of it simply a reconstruction of the original story, the other half divided between the search for the missing contractor and the incident in the hotel at Daytona Beach.

  Reading the story, I heard some of the words I’d said to her in my room; she’d had a tape recorder in her purse. She’d probably turned it on when I went for the groceries. I heard Yardley’s voice in the story too.

  She reported that it was unclear which of the two reporters—my brother or Yardley Acheman—claimed to have found the contractor, and that in spite of questions now that the man existed, neither the Times nor the reporters would reveal his name, citing a principle of confidentiality.

  “Lingering questions,” she wrote, “have not only split the partnership, but split the paper, and called its credibility into question. According to a spokesman for the Times, however, there are no plans at this time to return the Pulitzer Prize.”

  A FEW DAYS LATER, the Sunday editor came into my brother’s office, where I was sitting alone, opening and sorting Ward’s mail.

  “Is he here?” he said.

  I had a look around.

  “When’s he coming in?” he said.

  “He’s working at home for a few days,” I said. In fact, he had been sitting in his apartment, going out only to buy beer or vodka, which he drank straight over ice or mixed with whatever he found in the refrigerator. He had taken the boxes from Moat County home, and the papers lay open across the furniture in every room of his place.

  I had been astounded at the mess.

  “Does anybody still work around here?” the Sunday editor said.

  I told him again Ward had taken his work home, and was doing it there. He weighed that, nodding, then, casually, he said, “Do you know if he’s had any requests for interviews? About the story in the Sun?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “He shouldn’t talk to anyone,” he said.

  I had nothing to say to that, and a moment later the Sunday editor asked if I would be seeing Ward after work.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Tell him not to talk to anyone,” he said. “We’ve got ourselves a situation here, and it’s important to contain it.”

  “We’ve got ourselves a situation here,” I said, “and it’s important.”

  He stared at me a moment, and I stared back.

  “You know,” he said, “you’re kind of a smart aleck, Jack, for somebody who’s only in here because his brother’s a big shot.”

  THERE WAS SOMETHING ABOUT my brother’s drinking that caused me to drink too. Somehow if we were both d
oing it, the reason might be in the air, or the newsroom, or Miami. If we were both drinking, he was not going off someplace alone.

  That does not mean, however, that I wanted to visit his apartment every afternoon after work and sit with him in his dimly lit kitchen, the table covered with his notes from Moat County and melting ice trays, and disappear with him soundlessly into the haze.

  I was not a great social drinker, but sometimes over the course of an evening, I would find myself with a word or two I wanted to say.

  And so after work, while Ward drank at home, I often visited a crowded, stale-smelling place a few blocks from the paper called Johnny’s, where reporters and editors were known to go and discuss the ethics of the business of delivering the news. I did not ordinarily join in these conversations, which were without exception circular in nature, and in which the same people took turns making the same pronouncements to one another, night after night.

  On certain nights, however—and it was impossible to say in advance when it would happen—some of the women who worked at the paper grew tired of newspaper talk, and eccentric behavior took over the room.

  On Halloween the year before, for instance, shortly after I’d arrived in Miami, I walked in the place and saw a Times vice president costumed as a winged devil standing near the jukebox while a woman dressed as Snow White kneeled in front of him, working his penis in and out of her mouth.

  As the man began to climax, he wrapped the sequined wings around her head and covered her while he shook.

  I had been hoping to see something like that again, or perhaps to revisit the night when a young reporter took off her shirt and bra and threw them into the face of the assistant city editor who was her boss, calling him a dirty bastard. The next day, both the assistant city editor and the reporter were back at their desks as if nothing had happened.

  On the afternoon the Sunday editor called me a smart aleck, I went to Johnny’s, where Yardley Acheman and half a dozen reporters were already sitting at the booth nearest the door. They turned to watch me come in, falling suddenly quiet, and then stole glances at me over their shoulders as I sat at the bar.