The Paperboy

by Pete Dexter

  “Just like that,” he said.

  I went out into the rain and wind and was sick on the lawn.

  HURRICANE SYLVIA PASSED THROUGH Moat County headed east and north, following the course of the St. Johns River, blowing through Jacksonville and then back out to sea.

  It dropped eleven inches of rain on Moat County in less than nine hours, raising the river to flood levels and submerging some of the small islands that dot the wetlands along its western shore.

  When the water receded, the shape of some of these islands had changed. Parts of them broke off and were lost to the river, exposing the root systems of their trees, and some of them simply disappeared, along with the small hunting or fishing cabins on them.

  It was a bass fisherman in a flat-bottom boat, working the holes along the west side of the river, who found the bodies. They were bloated and floating, hidden from the river itself by some trees which had fallen in the storm. The current had brought them into a sort of pocket in the wetlands, where they rose and fell with the debris from the storm, bumping each other as dragonflies hung in the air over their heads.

  The fisherman finished working his holes, then returned to the boat landing and called the sheriff’s department, and the bodies were recovered.

  One was a woman, the other three were men. According to the county coroner, all but the woman had been dead a year or more, one of the men having succumbed to cancer of the liver. The woman had died from knife wounds of an unmentionable nature.

  The bodies were found within the boundaries of Moat County, a mile or more from the house occupied by Tyree Van Wetter, and were presumed to have come from a small plot of flat, high ground nearby where the Van Wetters had buried their dead for all the generations they had occupied this part of Florida.

  The piece of the cemetery which had washed away was nearest the edge, and represented the most recent deaths. It was the observation of the sheriff’s deputy who investigated that the Van Wetters were running out of burial space. He estimated the plot of ground—less than half an acre—held another hundred and forty graves, but could not count them accurately as most were unmarked, or marked only with bricks.

  A few headstones had also been placed in the ground, but they had been stolen from Allen’s Mortuary in Palatka, and carried no inscriptions.

  Charlotte Bless was identified through her fingerprints, recorded at the post office in New Orleans when she began work there as a letter sorter.

  A WEEK LATER, Hillary Van Wetter was arrested for the murder after an unidentified member of the Van Wetter family gave his whereabouts to members of the state police, who had been called in by the sheriff, and swarmed through the small encampments along the river in numbers the Van Wetters had never before seen, threatening to exhume the entire graveyard.

  And in that way the Van Wetters gave Hillary back to the state, and in compensation were left alone to live as they had.

  WARD WAS IN HIS APARTMENT when I went to see him, packing the notes from Moat County into cardboard boxes, stacking them against the wall.

  The front door had not been closed and I stood in the doorway watching him until he saw me.

  “He killed her,” I said.

  “I know.”

  I came in and sat down on the floor. Her death was more remote to him than it was to me, but it had settled somewhere, another piece of evidence that fit into something larger.

  I thought of her breasts, floating in the water.

  My brother went back to his packing.

  “Where are we going?” I said.

  He looked at the boxes against the wall as if he were trying to decide. “I can’t do it anymore,” he said. “It doesn’t work.” And I understood that I was part of what he couldn’t do. He didn’t want to take care of anyone now, or be taken care of. I did not try to talk him out of it.

  I helped him carry the boxes out to his car. He set them carefully in the trunk and the backseat, arranging them by number. They were still there, in precisely the same order, four months later when I flew to California to claim his things.

  AT THE POLICE DEPARTMENT, a friendly sergeant turned over my brother’s shoes and the wallet and keys that had been found inside them, and asked if Ward often went swimming in the Pacific Ocean at night.

  “We’ve got more undertow than you do in Florida,” he said.

  And that was as much as I ever knew about how my brother died.

  AFTER HIS SON DROWNED in California, my father did a reassessment of sorts, and saved what he could, offering me a position at the Tribune, working as his assistant against the day I would take over his paper.

  I turned down that offer and stayed in Miami, becoming a rewrite man on the night desk. And there were times then—usually a calamity—when the phone was ringing every five minutes and I was turning two dozen frantic calls into a single story, when I would lose myself in it for an hour or two, and find a certain peace in the confusion and excitement.

  That is as close as I have come to understanding what my brother meant when he spoke of the work making it bearable.

  YEARS LATER, my father’s kidneys failed, and I went back to Moat County and took over his newspaper, replacing his wife on the board of directors. She stays home now, ordering new furniture; a machine cleans his blood.

  My father is old—he turned old understanding his son was not coming back from the West Coast—but he holds on to what he can, his stories. He tells them after dinner, mostly to himself, and to the nurses at the medical center while he is hooked up to the kidney machine; Ralph McGill rides again. The stories span three decades but stop in 1969; my brother’s name is never mentioned.

  It is not old age, but a lifetime habit; he believes that refusing to look at it will keep him whole.

  My father still comes to the office in the afternoons to attend the daily news meetings, sitting quietly at the head of the table while his editors argue the placement of the articles which will appear in tomorrow’s paper.

  He listens a minute or two, then wanders, his gaze moving out the window overlooking his newsroom. He takes a knife from his pocket, and moves the blade in a circular motion over the arm of his chair, as if he were sharpening it.

  Sometimes he calls me Ward.

  There are no intact men.

  February 8, 1994

  Whidbey Island