Paperboy (10 page)

I nodded.

From the kitchen I watched my mother get in her car and back it down the driveway. She stopped at the street and reached into her handbag for a cigarette. She pushed in the lighter on the dashboard and rolled her window down. She put the lighter to her cigarette and then blew the smoke out the window.

My mother had told me at the beginning of the summer that she had stopped smoking and made me promise that I never would start. I knew she hadn’t quit because I could smell it on her clothes. But I didn’t care if she smoked or not. My father smoked and he never made any bones about it.

I headed upstairs.

When I passed my parents’ bedroom I noticed that one of the doors to the big closet was open a few inches. Most closets in the house were small but my father had paid some men to knock a hole in the wall and turn the smaller bedroom next door into their closet. It was so big that it had two doors going into it. I was not allowed inside because that was where my father kept his shotguns for hunting. I felt creepy going in but I did anyway. I pushed the light switch on and closed the door.

I remembered once seeing my mother get out a big round hatbox she kept in the closet. It had a bunch of papers and pictures in it and I could tell by the way she handled them that they were special to her. I had been meaning to take a look inside the box ever since and I decided that the right time had come.

The first thing that hit me was the smell of mothballs. My mother put mothballs everywhere. In all the closets. In all the chest of drawers. In the attic. A moth would be committing suicide if it came near our house.

My father’s suits were lined up on one side and my mother’s dresses on the other. My father’s guns were standing up in the corner in a long rack that had a lock on it. I saw the big hatbox on a high shelf. I piled some suitcases on top of one another and climbed up to get the box.

The first batch of papers I came to was all my report cards from the first grade on. Tied up with the report cards was a letter to my parents from the school principal with
Private
written on the envelope in red ink. I knew what was in the letter. It had to do with the time after the first grade that the principal said I was reading and writing like a third grader or even a fourth grader which meant the school would let me skip a grade but he didn’t think I should because of the way I talked. My mother went to see the principal and told him with me sitting there that he had better not hold her son back because letting me skip a grade would show her friends that I was just as smart as their kids even though I couldn’t talk right. Before I knew it I had been moved up to the third grade.

Next in the hatbox was a thick book with heavy black pages full of photographs. My father was in a bunch of the pictures. He was easy to pick out because he was so tall and thin and had blond hair.

I went through the rest of the papers and folders as fast as I could. Just a bunch of diplomas and newspaper clippings and other stuff
with my father’s name on them. At the very bottom of the box I came to a brown envelope without any writing on the outside.

Inside was a small piece of paper that said “Birth Certificate Of” and the name written in longhand was “Baby Boy.” The date on it was my birthday. My mother’s name before she got married was written in at the bottom of the paper on the left beside MOTHER. On the right side next to FATHER was a word I wasn’t expecting.

Unknown
.

I put everything away in the box like I had found it and went to my room to lie down on my bed and start some serious thinking.

When I heard my mother’s car in the driveway and the car door close I slipped out of my hard thinking and ran to the big closet to make sure I had turned off the light and shut the doors.

Both closet doors stood open and the light was on which let me know I had been in there for sure and I wasn’t just dreaming about what I had seen. I turned off the light and fixed the doors like I had found them and ran to the bathroom to run water in the tub. I didn’t usually take a bath that early in the day but I decided I smelled too much like mothballs.

I probably get over things that hurt faster than most kids. I don’t have much of a choice seeing as how my stuttering hurts me so many times during a day.

Rat has a big scar on his left arm from the time he crashed his bike trying to ride down the concrete steps at Crump Stadium. He tells anybody who listens about how the doctor had to sew sixteen stitches in his arm. He likes to show off to guys and make girls scream by sticking a safety pin in the scar. He says he can’t feel the pin but I can tell he’s careful not to push it in too far.

I used to have my own secret trick but I used a thumbtack instead of a safety pin. If I knew I was going to have to read or recite in class I would keep a thumbtack in my hand and push it into my palm when I started to talk. I kept hoping the pain would make me forget about stuttering but it never did. I decided it didn’t make much sense to keep sticking myself and I got tired of always having a bloody hand
when class was over. You can’t replace one hurt with another one. You just end up with double hurts.

Walking the paper route each day gave me time to think about what I had found in the closet.

Here was the toughest part to figure out. If some other man and my mother got together to make me then why did I like being around my father more than my mother? I liked to talk to my father a whole lot more than I did my mother. My father never seemed to mind that I stuttered so much. He even said when I turned thirteen he would be buying me a shotgun and he wanted to take me hunting with him and his friends. I knew he was always tired when he got home from work and he really didn’t like to pitch and catch much but he always took the time to do it if I asked him.

Finding out my father was Unknown answered one big question. I had always tried to figure out how I could have such a good arm on me when my father threw so soft. Almost like a girl. I had always wondered if I was going to be tall and thin like my father when I got older. I guess I knew the answer to that question unless the other man who made me was tall too. But I didn’t have the first notion of who that man was or if he was short or tall.

I thought so much about what I had seen in the closet that week that I would come to the end of my route and look down in my newspaper bags and wonder where all the papers had gone. But I don’t think I ever missed a house because I never got a complaint. My arms and legs could do things without my mind knowing about it.

Friday morning my father surprised me by saying he was going to take off work that afternoon and we could have lunch anywhere I wanted and then take in a matinee.

I told him I had to be at the paper drop by three o’clock and he said he would make sure I got there. We checked the paper and the only movie time that worked out was a western called
Shane
playing at the Crosstown Theatre. He said he saw the movie years ago when it first came to town but it was good enough to see again and he thought I would like it. He said for me to be ready at noon. We would eat at Britling’s Cafeteria and then go to the movie.

At noon I was waiting on the back steps with my newspaper bags when my mother came outside to tell me that my father’s secretary had called to say that he had gotten caught in a meeting and was running late. My mother said she would fix me a pimento cheese sandwich for lunch and then my father and I could go straight to the movie.

s-s-s-s-Could I have just s-s-s-s-cheese?

You can’t have a pimento cheese sandwich without pimentos in it.

I wanted to tell my mother that Mam never put pimentos in my cheese because I thought the red specks looked like pieces of glass but sometimes it was easier to eat glass than explain things to my mother.

Mam wasn’t at home to fix my lunch because she had called to tell my mother that she needed a little more time off. I couldn’t remember the last time Mam had been gone more than one night. Something didn’t feel right that she would be away for so long without me knowing where she was.

My father’s Buick screeched into the driveway about the time I swallowed my last piece of glass. He motioned for me to jump in.

I’m sorry about lunch, son. The meeting was important.

I nodded.

I wanted you to have a nice lunch of your choosing. I know the dinner the other night wasn’t much fun.

I nodded again. I thought about saying that eating glass wasn’t too much fun either.

Your mother and I are proud of you for taking on Art’s paper route. It shows how responsible you’re becoming.

I nodded and then thought my father deserved more than a nod for what he had said.

s-s-s-s-Thanks.

When the movie was about half over I whispered to my father that Shane was going to ride into town and take care of the bad guys so that the mother and father and their boy could be safe on their farm even though Shane was in love with the boy’s mother. I don’t stutter as much when I whisper so I was able to say all that without much trouble. My father slapped me on the knee and whispered back.

How’d you know that?

I smiled at my father. Sometimes I could see endings to movies in my head like the beardy old man in Coldwater could see what was going to happen to Mam’s brother.

When the lights in the theater came on my father said we had to hurry so I could start my route on time. I didn’t say much when we got in the car because I was working on a question. It took a lot of planning ahead on the words.

s-s-s-s-Do you think the s-s-s-s-boy looked more like his s-s-s-s-father or like Shane?

I guess his father. Why?

s-s-s-s-Do boys always s-s-s-s-look like their fathers?

More often than not … but it’s not always a given.

I was looking out the windshield but I felt my father glance over at me when he said it wasn’t a Given. I thought about asking him if Shane could have been the boy’s father because it was plain that Shane had an eye for the mother but then I started getting confused about what was in the movie and what was in the story in my head.

We got to the drop about the same time as the newspaper truck.

Made it right on time. Don’t forget your bags in the back. I enjoyed the movie.

s-s-s-s-Me too. s-s-s-s-Thanks for s-s-s-s-taking off work.

Next time we eat out it will be at Britling’s. I promise.

My father pulled his car out on Bellevue and headed back downtown toward his office.

I folded my papers in world-record time once I got the movie out of my head and the kid yelling Shane Shane Come Back Shane. I think that kid was lonesome like me but he was only in the movies and I was living my real stuttering life.

I noticed Big Sack sitting in his truck parked across the street and watching me. It was the second time during the week I had seen him just sitting like that which didn’t seem right because he was usually mowing lawns or cleaning out flower beds.

Ara T hadn’t been around all week but I spotted him a ways down the alley when I was lifting the bags off the fence onto my shoulders. The way he was sneaking looks at me made me wonder if Mam had gotten my knife back from him. One thing was for sure. Ara T was going through the garbage cans a new way. He would pull stuff out of a can and throw it anywhere. His neat way of collecting junk was gone.

I almost ran for the first part of my route. I was breathing hard by the time I got to Mr. Spiro’s house. It wasn’t time to collect but I had something special to talk to him about.

I had worked on a list of questions for Mr. Spiro all week in my room. I didn’t want to forget anything important so I had typed the three questions on a clean piece of notebook paper.

That wasn’t everything I wanted to talk about but that was all I could get out of my head and down on paper.

I didn’t want to be out of breath if we had our talk so I sat down on the curb across the street and refolded some papers that weren’t as tight as Dick’s hatband. I asked my mother once who Dick was when she talked about his hatband but she never would tell me.