The Paperboy

by Pete Dexter

  I had several drinks, wondering what Yardley Acheman had been saying about my brother. Johnny poured me doubles. I turned once and caught one of the women at his table staring.

  She smiled at me and did not look away. I held her look, feeling the hammer cock, and finally turned away myself, flushed.

  Later in the evening, the table changed. People went home or to other bars or to other tables, and the woman who had been staring sat down next to me at the bar.

  She looked over her shoulder, where Yardley was sitting alone now, folded into the corner. “What a conceited asshole,” she said.

  “The author,” I said.

  She lit a cigarette and allowed her hand to rest on my leg in a casual way. “Do you think they’ll let them keep it?”

  “Keep what?”

  “The Pulitzer.”

  “I didn’t know they could take it away,” I said.

  She shrugged and lifted her hand off my leg to sip at her drink. “The paper might make them give it back,” she said.

  “I don’t think the paper is going to do that.”

  “It’s happened before,” she said.

  It was quiet a moment, and then I said, “Do you get tired of talking about newspapers all the time?”

  “What everyone keeps wondering,” she said, “is how your brother’s taking all this.”

  “He was fine when I saw him,” I said.

  “He hasn’t been in the office since the story in the Sun.”

  “He’s working at home,” I said.

  A moment later she put her hand on my arm and leaned so close that I thought she was about to kiss me. “Have you heard what Yardley’s saying?” she said.

  “About what?”

  “About your brother.”

  I turned in my seat to stare at him, but he had closed his eyes and dropped his head into the back of the booth, his mouth slightly open. In the dark of the bar, he seemed to be smiling.

  I suddenly wanted to leave, and took a dollar out of my pocket and set it on the bar, covering it with the glass. As I stood up, I felt her hand again against my leg.

  “Where are you going?” she said.

  “For a swim,” I said.

  She looked at me a long time, an appraisal, and then she said, “Tell you what, why don’t you come swimming with me?”

  I WENT TO SEE Ward in the morning, straight from the woman’s lap, to confess what had happened when Helen Drew came to see me at my apartment. He answered the door in his pajamas.

  The place was hot and smelled of alcohol which had been filtered through a human body, and I opened some of the windows to air it out. The files from Moat County were all over the floor, some of them were wet. You could not cross the room without stepping on them.

  I moved a pile and took a seat on the sofa. “The girl from the Sun? Helen Drew?”

  “The heavy girl,” he said. I nodded, and he took a moment remembering her. “She seemed nice,” he said finally. He smiled at me, as if there were something at work I didn’t understand.

  “The thing is,” I said, “she came to see me one morning at my place …”

  I paused, he waited.

  “Yardley told her you were the one who said he found the contractor.”

  “I know,” he said, still smiling. “It’s what he told the Associated Press too. He gave it to them off the record, they said it to me off the record. It’s all leverage.”

  “What do they want?”

  “Another story,” he said. “That’s all, just another story. Somebody writes it, somebody prints it, somebody reads it.” He shrugged. “It’s all anonymous.”

  “It’s not anonymous,” I said. “It’s you.”

  “You want a beer?” he said. He frowned at his watch, and then went into the kitchen and returned carrying a beer and a jelly glass half full of warm vodka.

  And I drank the beer and he drank the vodka, and then I had another, and another, and after a while it didn’t seem so out of place, my brother drinking in the morning, as long as I was there drinking with him.

  I thought of the woman I’d spent the night with, and wondered if she would want me back. She was hungover when I left, and hadn’t said much one way or the other.

  I drank another beer and asked my brother if he’d ever been swimming at night. He thought about the question, then picked up the vodka bottle—he’d brought it into the living room with one of my beers—and poured some into the glass.

  “In Lake Okeechobee,” he said. “You were four years old, and we went camping one weekend, and Mother and I went swimming at night while you and Father started a charcoal fire.” He sat still, remembering it. “It was like bathwater,” he said. “And you could taste the lighter fluid in the steaks.”

  I could remember the fire, faintly remember the fire.

  “The lake’s dead,” I said. “I meant the ocean.”

  He thought it over. “No,” he said, “not in the ocean … What’s it like?”

  “Completely alone,” I said. “You’ve never been alone like that, swimming at night.”

  “Is it quiet?” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said, “it’s quiet.”

  We sat still a minute, and then I remembered why I had come. “The girl from the Sun … ” I said.

  He smiled at me and swallowed some vodka. “Tell me about swimming, Jack,” he said. “Tell me something about swimming.”

  THE PUBLISHER OF THE Miami Times called a meeting for Friday afternoon. Ward, Yardley Acheman, the Sunday editor, the managing editor, the executive editor, and me. Everyone who’d had anything to do with the story from Moat County.

  I had never been included in such a meeting before—in fact, I had never been included in any meetings—and I took my invitation as a signal that the paper was in some stage of trying to sort fact from fiction, and prepared myself with dates and times of Yardley Acheman’s transgressions against decency and journalism.

  The publisher’s office was larger than the editor’s, and overlooked Biscayne Bay, where he kept his yacht. We sat in leather chairs and sipped coffee which his secretary brought on a silver tray.

  The publisher himself sat on the edge of his desk in a casual sort of way, somehow offering the impression that he was very much like the rest of us in the room. Yardley Acheman was wearing a new suit and my brother smelled vaguely of alcohol.

  It was the first day Ward had been back in the newsroom, and the editors had asked him to drop by their offices after the meeting. He did not make any promises.

  “The reason I asked you here today,” the publisher said, “is to get a clearer picture in my mind of exactly what has transpired since the awarding of the Pulitzer Prize to Yardley and Ward.”

  He looked at them as he spoke, pausing longer on Yardley than my brother. “If we’ve got a problem,” he said, “I want to know it.”

  The Sunday editor cleared his throat, drawing the publisher’s attention. Before he could speak, however, Yardley Acheman interrupted him. “There’s no problem, R.E.,” he said. It is a curiosity of newsrooms that, top to bottom, everyone is called by first names. Yardley was leaning back into his chair, more relaxed than anyone except the publisher himself. “All we’ve got here is a few loose ends, that’s all.”

  The publisher turned to the executive editor, to see if he agreed with that. The man looked at his knuckles carefully, then at the tips of his fingers. He had more to lose, and less places to go if he lost.

  “It’s the kind of thing that comes up once in a while when you win too many Pulitzers,” Yardley said, as if he had been through it before. “Somebody gets a hard-on for you and uncovers the little inconsistencies that always show up in a story of this magnitude.”

  The publisher thought about that a moment, then nodded and looked again at the executive editor. “This ever happened to us before, Bill?” he said.

  “There’s always grumblings,” the editor said in a flat way, “but this is the first time I remember it went public.”
r />   “If you can call the Miami Sun public,” said the Sunday editor. A polite round of smiles went around the room. The Sun had a tiny circulation, and was losing a long, painful struggle to stay alive.

  “It’s just loose ends,” the publisher said.

  “The kind of thing you always have,” the Sunday editor said. The publisher nodded, but he did not seem inclined to let it drop. His eyes moved around the room, coming finally to rest on me. He clearly did not know who I was, or what I was doing in his meeting. He moved on and stared at Ward.

  “You agree with that, Ward?” he said.

  “With what?” he said.

  “That it’s just loose ends,” the publisher said. “Nothing particularly out of the ordinary … ”

  “It’s out of the ordinary for me,” he said.

  Across the table Yardley Acheman smiled again, but now it didn’t seem to fit his face. “You’ve got to understand something,” he said. “The story wasn’t written under ideal conditions. We were at a lot of disadvantages … ”

  The publisher looked at him and waited. “Ward was in the hospital, out of touch, I had to write from his notes …” The publisher waited, but Yardley Acheman had run out of things to say.

  “What about this contractor?” the publisher said.

  Yardley began a slow inspection of the backs of his hands too. “Loose ends,” he said finally. “It’s all loose ends.”

  “Somebody did speak to this contractor,” the publisher said.

  “Absolutely,” Yardley said.

  “And he said the things he was reported in our newspaper as having said.”

  “Absolutely, word for word.”

  “But now he’s disappeared.”

  My brother looked at Yardley with more interest now, anxious to hear the answer to this question.

  “Apparently,” Yardley Acheman said. “I tried to call him, but the line’s been disconnected.”

  The publisher picked a copy of the Sun off his desk and looked at it quickly. “The Sun says he doesn’t exist.”

  “He exists, don’t worry about that,” Yardley said. “The whole problem is I gave my word not to reveal his name to anybody. That was the deal, and we’re stuck with it. That’s the whole problem.”

  “Could this man be found again?”

  Yardley Acheman shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “And even if we found him, he wouldn’t let us use his name. He was scared … probably in some kind of trouble with the licensing board …”

  He paused, and the room paused with him. And then the publisher nodded, as if it all made sense. “The paper stands by its story, Bill?” he said finally.

  “The paper stands behind it one hundred percent,” the executive editor said, as if he were reciting lines from a familiar play. “If we made an error, we will happily correct it. That has always been our policy, and still is.”

  “And as far as we know, there is nothing to correct … ”

  “The paper stands behind its story,” the executive editor said again, and the publisher nodded, and seemed relieved.

  And then the feeling seemed to spread through the room, and everyone was relieved.

  “Thank you, gentlemen,” the publisher said, and we stood to leave. Before anyone got to the door, the publisher spoke again to the executive editor. “You know, Bill,” he said, “it might not be a bad idea if we didn’t entertain further questions on the matter from other news organizations.”

  The executive editor nodded, but didn’t speak. He was not comfortable with the idea—the heart of the business, after all, lies in the asking and answering of questions—but he ran a large newspaper, and he had done uncomfortable things before.

  “It’s already taken care of,” the Sunday editor said.

  The publisher thought it over and smiled. He said, “What if we just leave the old dog lie in the sun a while and see if she don’t go to sleep.”

  THE OLD DOG DID NOT go to sleep. The missing contractor became the subject of articles in cities where no reader ever heard of Hillary Van Wetter or Moat County.

  Prizes are a consuming interest of newspaper people, particularly Pulitzer Prizes. They are as consuming as the World Series or natural disasters or national elections. Generally, this interest is held in check and only imposed on the reading public when a newspaper itself wins prizes. The possibility of a tainted Pulitzer, however, stirs great juices in the newsroom.

  The phone in my brother’s office rang a dozen times a day, reporters wanting to discuss the missing contractor. I took most of these calls, as Yardley and my brother had again stopped coming to work. I told the reporters I did not know when they would be back, and referred questions to the publisher.

  Some of the reporters asked for my impressions of the situation at the Times, how it was affecting morale. It was all off the record, they said. They had no idea of who I was, or what I did.

  The most determined caller was a reporter from Newsweek, a magazine whose interest in the story was heightened by Time’s piece of the year before pronouncing Yardley Acheman a fine example of America’s new journalists.

  The reporter wanted Yardley’s phone number, and I had spoken to him now half a dozen times.

  “Listen,” he said, “let me tell you exactly what I’m thinking. I’m thinking this whole thing is bullshit.”

  “What thing?”

  “The whole thing,” he said. “All I have to do is talk to Yardley Acheman five minutes, ask him a couple of questions, and I’m out of your life.” I closed my eyes and pictured the man on the other end of the telephone, and he was handsome and confident; he looked a lot like Yardley Acheman.

  “You want to ask him about the contractor,” I said.

  “Just to make sure I’ve got the explanation right,” he said. “That the one in the hospital got hit over the head and couldn’t remember where the contractor was.”

  “Where did you hear that?” I said.

  “It’s in the newspapers,” the man said. “I just need to check.”

  When I didn’t answer, he said, “What, that’s not the way it happened?”

  “No,” I said.

  “So you tell me …”

  “The one in the hospital,” I said, “wasn’t the one who forgot where the contractor was. He never saw the contractor.”

  Now the quiet came from the other end. “That doesn’t make sense,” the man said finally. “The other guy gets amnesia because his partner gets hit over the head?”

  “Let me get you his number,” I said.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, “nobody knows where I got it.”

  I read Yardley Acheman’s number into the telephone and hung up.

  I WENT TO SEE Ward after work; he was still drinking, shuffling to the kitchen and back over the notes from Moat County. They were still spread out over every room of the apartment, and as he walked absently into the kitchen, he would pick up a page or two and begin reading, forgetting for the moment what he had gone to the kitchen for. He knew the transcripts and the notes so well by now that he could pick up any piece of paper and recognize immediately where it fit into the thousands of other pieces of paper that lay scattered over the floor. He would study it a moment, then carefully put it back on the floor where he had found it, and move on to the refrigerator.

  In a different way, he was bewildered by the papers he picked up; as well as he knew them, the meaning had been lost.

  “A man called today from Newsweek,” he said when we were back in the living room. “He wanted to know about my amnesia.”

  I sipped at my beer, and it tasted bitter and stale at the same time, and a shudder ran through me right to my toes. I set the beer on the table and watched my brother drink vodka.

  “What did you tell him?” I said.

  “I told him I was working on it.”

  He smiled at me in a reckless way I only saw when he’d been drinking, and then poured another half inch of liquor into the glass. I tried the beer again, not wanting h
im to drink alone.

  “What are you working on?” I said.

  He was still smiling. “Amnesia,” he said. “I think that’s the answer.”

  “Good. The editors want to know when you might be finished,” I said.

  The smile came off his face, and he said, “That’s the beauty of it, Jack. You don’t know when you’re finished because you can’t remember.”

  “Is that what you told the guy from Newsweek?”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t think of it in time,” he said. “I wish I’d thought of it …” He looked at me differently, then. “What do you think old World War’s making of all this?” he said.

  I shook my head. “I haven’t heard a thing.”

  “You think it’s still the proudest moment of his life?”

  I sipped at the beer. “So what did you tell him? The guy from Newsweek?”

  Ward shook his head. “I told him, ‘No comment.’ ” He began to smile again then. “You know,” he said, “it’s true. At the bottom of everything that’s happened, its ‘no comment.’ I’m twenty-nine years old, and up till now, I’ve got no comment.” He began to laugh, and barely got the last words out: “I can’t think of anything appropriate to say.”

  I waited for him to stop, and then I said we ought to get something to eat.

  Ward fixed himself another drink and took it with him into the bathroom. The sound of the shower began a moment later and I settled into a chair. There were papers under my feet and I picked some of them up. Two pages of preliminary hearing motions, and then a page from Charlotte Bless’s first letter to my brother, asking for his help to save her fiancé. The handwriting was round, like a schoolgirl’s. I counted the word innocent eleven times on the one page.

  I set the papers back on the floor, thinking of Charlotte and Hillary. She was afraid of him now, or she would have come out of the house. She was not a person who was used to being afraid, and wouldn’t know how to carry it.

  The shower had been on a long time. I finished the beer and went into the kitchen for another. There was nothing in the refrigerator except the beer and a piece of uncovered orange cheese, dried and cracked. There were no dishes in the sink, no silverware, no sign that the place had been used at all except to receive and hold papers from Moat County.