The Paperboy (16 page)

“The boy’s arms and legs were covered with stings,” Dr. Polk said, “as well as his back and chest, buttocks, genitals and face.”

“Dear Jesus,” I said, and closed the paper again.

“I told you not to read in the car,” she said.

T
HAT WASN’T ALL
.

The story of my being saved at the beach by nursing students who urinated on me was noticed by an editor at the Associated Press office in Orlando who condensed it into six paragraphs and added it to the day’s national wire stories. In this form, it went out over the Associated Press wire service to the offices of fifteen hundred newspapers across the United States and Canada, where other editors trimmed it for reasons of length and taste, put a humorous headline over the top, and ran it as a sort of antidote to the bad news of the day.

HOME REMEDY SAVES BEACHED SWIMMER
.

That particular headline, while not the most embarrassing one I saw, was the most memorable, running, as it did, in my own father’s newspaper. I do not know if my father saw the headline or the story before it ran. It was not the sort of story that would ordinarily be brought to his attention, although if his managing editor had noticed my name, she would have come to him for permission before running it.

It was brought to my attention by Yardley Acheman. I walked into the office the morning following my release from the hospital and he said, “Congratulations, Jack, you made the paper.”

“I know.”

I crossed the room to the window to sit down. I was tired of Yardley Acheman and tired of waiting around the office for my brother to finish what he was doing. I was thinking that if I had to be in the newspaper business, I’d rather go back to driving a truck.

“Not just St. Augustine,” he said, smiling at me now, and then he picked up the
Moat County Tribune
.

“Home remedy,” he said, and handed me the paper.

I walked over and took the paper out of his hand, and
then I turned to my brother, who had laid the entire trial transcript across his desk and on the floor that morning as if he were drying the pages, and stared at him until he looked up.

“What’s he trying to do to me?” I said, meaning the old man.

“It’s called the newspaper business,” Yardley Acheman said, behind me. My brother blinked, still caught somewhere in the transcript of Hillary Van Wetter’s trial, and the next thing Yardley Acheman said—I don’t remember what it was, only his presumption that he could put himself into the middle of the private matters of my family—I turned and threw the newspaper in his face.

And then he stood up and came around the desk furious, a little speck of white spit coming off his lips, pointing his finger at my face, and I remember the look of bewilderment that replaced the other expression when I pushed his finger aside and grabbed his hair, and then his neck. He had no strength at all. And then I had him in a headlock on the floor, and I squeezed his head until all the noise coming out of it stopped, and then I noticed Ward bending over me, completely calm, a foot or two away, telling me to let him go.

“Jack,” he said, “c’mon, you’re going to mess everything up.”

“Everything’s already messed up,” I said, and I was crying.

He said, “I’m talking about the papers,” and turned around to remind me that he had arranged them across the floor. A moment passed, and I let go of Yardley Acheman’s head, hearing a popping sound either in his head or my arm, and then leaned back against the wall and caught my breath.

Yardley Acheman got to his feet. His ears were bright red,
and a patch of his skin over his eyebrows was scraped. He was shaking. “You
are
fucking crazy,” he said. Then he looked at my brother. “I want him out of here.” Ward didn’t answer.

“He’s a time bomb,” Yardley Acheman said. “The next thing, he’ll be in here with a shotgun.”

My brother looked at him, up and down. “He’s all right now,” he said quietly.

“He goes or I go.”

My brother went back to his desk and found his place in the transcript of the trial. I thought about what Yardley had said, thinking he was probably wrong about the shotgun, and then I thought about my father, wondering if he had seen the story before it ran, and then realized it was something I would never ask him. I did not want to be lectured on the price we pay for freedom of the press.

“Did you understand what I said, Ward?” Yardley was back behind his desk now, calmer, rubbing at his ears. The scraped place on his forehead was more defined than it had been, it had raised and turned faintly blue at the edges. “I want him completely the fuck out of here, do you understand?”

My brother gave no sign that he understood any such thing.

I looked out the window and watched Charlotte park her van and cross the street to the office. She wore a yellow skirt, and her behind fit it like something dropped into the bottom of a soft sack. Yardley Acheman picked up the telephone and dialed a number. I sat still.

In the immediate aftermath of a wrestling match on the floor of my brother’s office, while I was still trying to decide if it was possible that I would come into this place someday with a shotgun, I suddenly pictured her behind pressed into the bottom of a satin bag, a green bag with drawstrings at
the top, about the size of a pants pocket, or a scrotum, and imagining that, and the solid weight of the thing loaded in this way, I felt a familiar stirring, and took that as a sign that I was myself again.

“I’m calling Miami,” Yardley said.

S
HE CAME INTO THE
office as Yardley was telling his editor what had happened.

“He fucking tried to kill me,” he said.

She sat down on the chair near my brother’s desk and inspected herself in a mirror from her purse. One side, then the other; touching her hair, running a finger along some line beneath her eye. We were going to see Hillary again that afternoon, and she was worried about her appearance.

She closed the mirror, miserable, then looked at me for help.

“You look fine,” I said, and she studied me a moment, still welty from the jellyfish, considering the source.

“Will somebody please get him laid?” she said.

“No, right here in the office,” Yardley said into the phone. “I can’t write in an atmosphere where I don’t know when somebody’s going to go off the deep end and strangle me.…”

Charlotte took that in, noticing the scrape on Yardley’s forehead, and then took the compact back out of her purse, opened it, and looked at herself again. “Did you strangle him?” she said, checking her forehead for scrapes.

“No,” I said, “we only wrestled.”

“That’s exactly right,” Yardley said into the phone. “I don’t have to put up with this shit. Not from him, not from anybody.…”

For a moment, the room was still while Yardley listened to
the editor on the other end of the phone. I could hear the voice, but not the words. When it stopped, Yardley took the phone away from his ear and spoke to my brother.

“He wants to talk to you,” he said.

“Who?” my brother said.

“Miami,” he said. He seemed irritated my brother wasn’t paying more attention. “I told you I was calling Miami.…”

Ward got up, reluctant to leave the transcript, and crossed the room to Yardley’s desk and took the phone.

“This is Ward James,” he said. He stood completely still as he listened; he could have been waiting for the correct time. Charlotte put the mirror back again and inspected Yardley Acheman while my brother listened to the phone.

“All he needs is to get laid,” she said finally.

“He needs a fucking straitjacket,” Yardley said, feeling more removed all the time from that moment he was helpless on the floor.

“He’s oversexed,” she said.

Yardley Acheman seemed to consider that, and then turned on her. “Oversexed is a forty-year-old woman that dresses up like she’s eighteen,” he said, and the room was suddenly so still I could almost make out the words coming through the receiver into my brother’s ear.

My brother broke the silence. “No,” he said into the telephone, and then hung it up. Then he walked back across the room and stared at his desk, trying to remember where he was.

“So?” Yardley Acheman said.

My brother sat down, looking for something now.

“He goes or I go,” Yardley said.

And my brother looked at him a long time and then said it again. “No.”

And in some way I did not understand, he had closed the door on it.

“If he ever touches me again …” Yardley said, but my brother wasn’t listening. Charlotte turned to me and winked.

W
E WERE BACK IN
the interview room with Hillary Van Wetter again that afternoon, and my brother was trying to get him to remember where he had been stealing lawns on the night Sheriff Call was killed.

“What town was it?” he said. “Can you remember the town?”

Hillary smiled at the question, and answered without taking his eyes off Charlotte Bless. “It could be a thousand places,” he said. And then, as if it had some secret meaning between himself and Charlotte, he said, “There’s lawns to be mowed and ashes to be hauled everywhere in the world.” He smiled at her and she smiled back.

Yardley Acheman, sitting against the wall, closed his eyes as if he were too tired to continue.

“Could it have been Orlando?” my brother asked. He had called police departments all over the north-central part of the state, asking about lawn thefts, and there were more of them than you would imagine, especially around Orlando.

Hillary Van Wetter thought it over. “That’s a long ways to go for a lawn,” he said finally. And then, to her, “On the other hand, sometimes the farther you reach, the sweeter the grass,” and he laughed out loud after he said it.

She moved in her chair, and then crossed her legs. Hillary leaned forward a little to look as far up her skirt as he could. Charlotte did not seem to mind.

“These boys been taking care of you?” he said to her.

She nodded, about to tell him, I think, of what had happened on the beach, of who was taking care of what, but then changed her mind.

“Everything I need,” she said.

He turned his head suddenly and stared at me, something in it clean and cold. If he hadn’t killed Sheriff Call, I knew then that he could have. “Better not be everything,” he said.

I stared back at him, feeling clean and cold myself. He either didn’t see that, or didn’t care. He turned slowly to my brother, and then to Yardley Acheman. “She’s spoken for,” he said.

“Do you have any idea at all?” my brother said. “You remember what direction you drove?”

“Going or coming?” he said, sounding interested.

“Either way,” my brother said.

He thought a moment, and then shook his head. “No,” he said. It was quiet again as he stared at Charlotte and she stared back. “There was a night in there we took the greens off a golf course,” he said.

“Where?” my brother said.

“That would have been down in Daytona, I believe,” he said. “My uncle might remember.…” He smiled, remembering something funny. “He played it once himself … golf.” The image welled up in Hillary Van Wetter and then spilled over. He held his nose and shook, laughing, from what I could tell, at the notion of his uncle on the golf course.