The Paperboy (14 page)

Y
ARDLEY ACHEMAN WAS RIGHT
about Weldon Pine.

He was often right about people, as he always expected the worst. The request for new counsel went uncontested by Mr. Pine, and was routinely accepted by the court, and Hillary Van Wetter changed lawyers without public notice. Weldon Pine absorbed the insult privately and went back to work as the most beloved lawyer in Moat County, believing his unfortunate association with us and Hillary Van Wetter was a closed matter.

I sometimes wonder, looking back on his long and fruitful association with the black side of human nature, what he could have been thinking.

D
URING THESE INITIAL WEEKS
in Lately, there was not much for me to do. I picked up my brother and Yardley Acheman at the Prescott Hotel in the morning and delivered them back to the Prescott at night. If records were needed from the courthouse—Ward had begun looking into both the sheriff’s and the state’s attorney’s budgets—or books from the library, I would get them. I drove Ward to the scene of Sheriff Call’s killing half a dozen times, and often we went from there to the dirt road which led back into the wetlands where the Van Wetters lived. We never saw their houses, although he had some intuitive sense of where they were. Perhaps they had been pointed out to him from the river, back in the days when my father was still trying to turn us into bass fishermen.

On the days we stayed in the office, it was my job to go for sandwiches and keep the refrigerator stocked with Busch beer, which Yardley Acheman began drinking before lunch.

He did not have much to do either.

The beer made Yardley moody, and some afternoons, when it had taken him the wrong way, he would call his fiancée in Miami and confess that he was incapable of fidelity. A discussion would follow, as if the failings of Yardley Acheman’s character could be changed by debate, and about five minutes later he would begin asking the girl why she was crying, and then she would hang up on him, and he would look at the phone a moment before he dropped it back into the receiver, and then walk over to the refrigerator and get another beer.

“Women …” he would say.

Some afternoons I drank beer with him, some afternoons I didn’t.

Later in the day, he would call her again and initiate a conversation pertaining to the details of their upcoming wedding. It was his way of making up. What the bridesmaids would wear, who would be invited to the reception, who would come to the ceremony itself. The girl came from a Palm Beach family and her wedding plans were conceived in the context of a grand social event.

Yardley had no objections to her family or her family’s money, but arguments did develop over the vows they were writing together, and before long he was exasperated again, insisting on minutiae that no man I had ever met except Yardley Acheman would have an opinion on anyway, and then a few minutes later he would be asking her again why she was crying.

Yardley hated to be edited—newspaper stories or wedding vows, it was all the same insult.

On the days I was drinking beer too, I would sit in the
window and openly watch, listen to his end of the conversations, wondering what sort of disfigurement the woman had that would make her still willing to marry him after his behavior on the telephone.

I had almost no experience with women then, and it had not occurred to me yet that some of them were as pathetic as any of us.

On days when I wasn’t drinking, I found something to do in the office while Yardley Acheman and his fiancée were fighting it out. I would straighten the boxes against the wall or sweep the floor. My brother sat at his desk, making notes on the papers in front of him, and occasionally—when the argument got too poisonous—he would pick up his own telephone and make a call, removing himself from what was going on in the room.

But while Yardley Acheman’s love entanglements embarrassed my brother, and embarrassed me when I was not drinking, they did not embarrass Yardley Acheman at all, and after she hung up on him, he would always offer some comment that seemed to invite us into the argument.

“What is the broad thinking?”

I
T IS A FAIR
representation of the situation to say that at this time there were four people at work, one way or another, at something only one of them could do. My brother needed to have the story all in his head before he could see where it went, and the rest of us were only waiting until he was ready.

My own most pressing business was not driving the car or running errands, but keeping Charlotte Bless away from the office. Ward and Yardley Acheman needed her accessible for meetings with Hillary Van Wetter—Hillary had made it clear that he had no use whatsoever for us without her—but
her visits to the office were tedious, circular, and, at times, close to evangelical in nature.

It was Charlotte’s habit to drop in after lunch, blowing through the doorway smelling of perfume in some new dress or another, calling us to our purpose, the saving of an innocent life. She did not wear jeans again after Hillary Van Wetter walked out of the room during our second visit, not even to the office over the Moat Cafe.

It began with the same breathless question, every day.

“Anything new?”

There was never anything new, at least not in the way that she meant it. The governor did not call to pronounce Hillary innocent, and my brother worked his way through the documents again more slowly, collecting bits and pieces as he came to them, and then moving it all ahead to whatever was next, as if he were sweeping a floor.

“We’ve got to hurry this up,” she would say, going to the window. “Every night Hillary Van Wetter lies in that prison is a night off his life.”

Once, after she’d said that, Yardley Acheman asked Charlotte if she had thought of writing a country western song about it, but more often he simply refused to acknowledge that she was in the room, although she was clearly addressing herself to him more than my brother or me. She seemed to think he was in charge.

When Charlotte started talking about the nights Hillary Van Wetter was losing in prison, it was time for me to take her away. If I didn’t, she would begin walking around the room, looking into the boxes of files or the papers on my brother’s desk, and every paper she touched was a starting point for a review of the case.

It could take half an hour to wait her out, and beyond the distraction itself, my brother did not like the papers touched after he laid them down. A kind of indexing was always going
on in his head, and he needed things to lie still and undisturbed to accomplish it.

On the other hand, the papers—many of them, anyway—belonged to Charlotte, and he could not find a way to tell her to leave them alone. She was as childish in many ways as Yardley Acheman, and she had staked first claim to Hillary Van Wetter, and would not subordinate herself in the matter of saving his life to lawyers, reporters, or anyone else. I suppose she was afraid of losing him entirely.

I
T WAS MY INTENTION
to save Charlotte Bless from drowning in the ocean.

I had no plan to make it necessary, but I daydreamed of saving her, and of her gratitude at having been lifted, terrified, from the ocean and set down in the warm, safe sand of the beach. I thought of the texture of her skin when she was wet, and of the jumpy feel of her muscles when she was helpless and panicked.

But I could barely get her into the water.

Two or three afternoons a week, she would go with me to the beach at St. Augustine, but she went to tan her legs for Hillary, and got into the water only to cool off. And even then it was only knee deep, always keeping one hand on top of the straw hat she wore to protect her face and neck.

She seemed vaguely interested in my swimming, but had no interest in learning herself.

And so we would drive to St. Augustine and park the car and walk down to the beach, and I would take off my shirt and pants and swim straight out, conscious of my form, as if that mattered to her, and she would lay a towel across the hot sand, and then undress—we wore our suits underneath
our clothes—and lie down, turn on her radio, and cover her face with the straw hat.

When I came back, I would drop into the sand next to her, out of breath, and study the lines of her body. Her skin was barely puffy against the elastic of her suit, there was no flesh hanging off her when she turned to lie on her stomach.

Her suit was one-piece, cut deeply in back to the exact spot where the line separating her buttocks began. It fit her cheeks as if it had melted over them, riding down into the crack. There was no angle of her bottom that did not strike me as beautiful, and lying in the sand next to her, feeling my breath against my arm, I would also feel the growing weight of my erection, and then I would roll onto my stomach too, so that she wouldn’t see the effect she had on me.

I had a sense that she would feel betrayed.

No, I didn’t know anything about women at all.

On our third or fourth visit to St. Augustine, she pulled the straps off her shoulders and handed me her lotion.

“I hate strap marks,” she said.

It was the first time, I think, I’d ever touched her. Her skin was cool and my hand slid from her shoulders down her back, and finally stopped at the bottom of her suit, where her body divided and rose into perfect cheeks. My hand stayed in that place a moment, and then she lifted her head and looked at me, as if to ask what I thought I was doing.

“They look so ignorant,” she said.

“What?”

“Strap marks. They look like white trash.”

I put the top back on the lotion and stuck it into the sand. Without straightening up, I dropped back onto my towel. I had reached a condition, rubbing lotion over Charlotte Bless’s back, that was a spasm short of Hillary Van Wetter’s
jailhouse ejaculation, which is to say you could have put a propeller on the thing and flown it.

“You’re breathing through your mouth,” she said a few minutes later, watching me.

“It was a long swim,” I said.

And she smiled behind her dark glasses and turned her head away from the sun.

“You need a girlfriend,” she said, still looking the other way. When I didn’t answer, she picked her head up again and looked around, spotting half a dozen girls sitting around a cooler of beer. They were behind us perhaps forty feet, at the border of the beach where the tall grass began. Pink toenails and radios. They looked like sorority girls to me, the way they drank their beer.

“You ought to go over there and make friends,” she said, teasing me in some way.

“I don’t like girls like that,” I said.

She lowered her sunglasses on her nose and looked over them at the girls again. “I’ll bet you’d like that one in the red,” she said. I couldn’t think of a thing to say. She said, “Go over there and pick out one that bites her nails, and she’ll blow you. I promise.”

“I don’t want anybody to blow me,” I said, and she looked at me, vaguely disappointed. I remembered what she’d written then, about Hillary Van Wetter wanting himself sucked just like a judge. An intact man.

“It’s not that I don’t want it,” I said, making the correction, “I just don’t want any of them to do it.”