The Paperboy (21 page)

I stood up and opened the shirt without unbuttoning it, then balled it up and threw it at his head. It landed in his hands. He took a step back, remembering the headlock. Then I kicked off my shoes, still frosted in mud, and stepped out of his pants and threw them at him too. I stood in Jockey shorts and socks, daring him to say anything else.

Slowly, he began to nod, as if this were the sort of behavior he’d been expecting all along. I realized I’d spent myself, or at least had nothing else to tear off, when Charlotte interrupted.

“Yardley found the golf course,” she said.

And in that second, ripping Yardley’s shirt off without unbuttoning it was all for nothing.

Yardley turned to my brother and nodded, acknowledging it, then dropped the shirt and pants on the floor. As if to say,
“And this is the way you treat me.”

“Where is it?” Ward said.

I walked around the desk in my underpants, brushing past Charlotte, and sat in the window. A breeze I hadn’t felt
before blew over my skin. She watched me a moment, then turned away, disinterested.

“Ormond Beach,” Yardley Acheman said. He took a notepad out of his back pocket and read from what was written down. “August twentieth, 1965, six thirty-five
A.M.
, the grounds superintendent phones the Ormond Beach Police Department to report that his greens have been vandalized; somebody’s stripped the sod in the night.”

“Where’d you find it?” my brother said.

Yardley Acheman shrugged, as if it were some intuitive talent he couldn’t explain.

“He saw it in the newspaper,” Charlotte said, and for a moment I embraced the thought that the change in her was only that he had found the way to save Hillary Van Wetter. But then she looked at him again, and I knew I was wrong.

“It was in some old clips at the
Ormond Beach Satellite
,” he said.

“It was in all the papers,” she said. Charlotte was bragging on Yardley, but she did not understand that the size of his accomplishment depended on its difficulty. I folded my arms and leaned back into the window frame.

“You talked to the man.…” Ward said.

Yardley Acheman nodded. “Not the superintendent, he got cancer from the weed killer out there, but another guy. He remembered it because the membership voted to ask the governor to declare it a disaster area, they could get funds to replace the greens without going into their own pockets. It made all the papers.”

“They were old,” Charlotte said. “A bunch of old men, walking around in plaid pants, still mad that somebody took their grass four years ago.” She smiled at that, and smiled at Yardley Acheman. He was handsome, all right, and something from Daytona Beach had intruded on her feelings for Hillary Van Wetter.

Yardley Acheman walked to his desk and sat down, stepping over the shirt and pants on the floor.

W
E HAD TO SEE
Hillary again, and Charlotte did not want to come along. I saw it even before she told my brother that her period had just started and she had cramps and bled too much the first day to go anywhere.

Another woman would have just said she was coming down with a cold. “I bleed like they cut it off,” she said.

A little later she said that the prison was beginning to depress her. “I don’t know how much longer I can go out there and see Hillary waiting to be executed.…”

“We’ve got to ask him again,” Ward said, “about where he sold the sod.”

“He already said he didn’t know,” she said.

“He’s had time to think.”

A little later, Charlotte went over the details of her menstrual cycle with my brother again. Ward stared at his hands as she explained how much she bled, and did not try to talk her into coming along. “I got to take a bottle of Midol and go to bed,” she said, and a minute later, throwing an uncertain look in the direction of Yardley Acheman, she disappeared through the door.

“Will he talk to us without her there?” I said.

“I don’t know,” Ward said.

“If he won’t,” Yardley Acheman said, “fuck him. We’ll go find somebody else.…”

But my brother, at least, didn’t want to find somebody else. He wanted Hillary Van Wetter, he wanted the story he’d begun. It didn’t have anything to do in the end with whether Hillary had killed Sheriff Call, or if he’d been fairly represented at his trial.

At the bottom of it, my brother wanted to know what had happened and to get it down that way on paper. He wanted to have it exactly right.

C
OTTON HAD BEEN PACKED
into both sides of Hillary Van Wetter’s nose, the last bit of fuzz hung beneath the nostrils. It was hard to say if the swelling across the bridge was due to the cotton or the injury. His eyes were both bruised underneath, the streak of black running at similar angles on both sides, as if they had grown from the same spot.

“Where’s my intended?” he said. It sounded as if he had a cold.

“She didn’t feel well,” Ward said.

It was a quiet moment.

“What’s wrong with her?”

My brother began to shake his head, looking for a way to explain it. Yardley Acheman moved in his chair. “She’s on the rag,” he said. Hillary turned and looked at him, the sound of his leg irons the only noise in the room.

“The monthlies?” he said finally. He was handcuffed, and there was a guard outside the door. Yardley Acheman checked these things before he spoke again.

“That’s what she said.”

“Just come in and discuss it, did she?”

Yardley nodded.

“Pussy bi’niss, in front of paperboys,” Hillary said.

“We ought to talk about Ormond Beach,” my brother said, but Hillary Van Wetter continued to stare at Yardley Acheman.

“Mr. Van Wetter?”

Finally Hillary turned away from Yardley and considered Ward. “She told you about it too?”

For a moment no one spoke. “I’ve got to know where the sod went,” he said finally.

“For what?”

“I have to find the person who bought it.”

He turned back to Yardley Acheman. “You got a smoke?” he said.

Yardley nodded in the direction of a sign on the wall warning visitors not to give anything to inmates. “Not allowed,” he said.

Hillary nodded. “Follow the rules,” he said, “follow the rules.…”

Ward asked what direction Hillary and his uncle had driven from the golf course.

Hillary closed his eyes, picturing it. “International House of Pancakes,” he said finally. “We had pancakes and ice cream.”

“In Daytona?”

“Must of been.”

“And then what?”

“And then we got paid and went home.”

It was quiet again. “I need to find the place,” my brother said.

“We all need something,” he said. And then he had another long look at Yardley Acheman. Yardley stared back briefly, then he turned away. He checked his watch, then the door, reminding Hillary of the guard outside.

Hillary Van Wetter watched him, his gaze as flat as still water. He watched until Yardley got up and crossed the room and stuck an open package of cigarettes in Hillary’s shirt.

Hillary never took his eyes off Yardley until he was back in his place by the wall. Then he nodded, slowly. You couldn’t tell if he meant to say thanks, or if everything he’d been thinking about us had been confirmed.

“How far from the pancake house was the condominium?” Ward said.

There was no answer.

“What direction? It was early morning by then, right? Were you driving into the sun or away from it?”

Hillary Van Wetter shook his head. “Overcast,” he said.

“FUCK HIM,”
Yardley said. The new rental was a Mercury with a noisy air conditioner that shook the car as it came on and off, but didn’t do much in the way of cooling. Yardley was sitting in the backseat with the windows rolled down.

“He isn’t worth it,” he said. He was talking to my brother as if I weren’t there. He did that more often than he needed to, reminding me that I didn’t count.

“We have to go through the building permits,” Ward said. “They were putting condos up in sixty days back then, before the building inspectors had a chance to see what they were doing, and this one would have been almost done if they were ready for a lawn.…”

“He isn’t worth it,” Yardley said again. He pulled himself up in the seat.

My brother said, “There can’t be more than a dozen that started construction the same time, some of them might be the same builder …”

“And then what?” Yardley Acheman said. “The guy’s going to admit he bought sod off a golf course?”

“He might say he didn’t know it was stolen.”

“He isn’t going to give a shit,” Yardley said. “The lawyer doesn’t give a shit, Hillary Van Wetter doesn’t give a shit.… We got too many people here, Ward, that don’t give a shit.” He thought about it, still sitting up in the seat. “The truth is, I don’t give much of a shit anymore myself.”

Yardley stopped and considered what he’d just said, perhaps how it would sound if it somehow got back to the editors in Miami.

“I mean, what am I supposed to write?” he said. “I picture myself at the typewriter, trying to interpret this person to the reader, and I don’t have a damn feeling in my body about him except if he wasn’t the one who opened up the sheriff, he was probably out that night fucking owls.”

It had long been Yardley’s premise that his obligation was to interpret for the reader.

The air conditioner kicked in again and the engine sagged under the weight. “If the contractors are local, it won’t take more than a couple of days,” Ward said.

Yardley Acheman dropped back into his seat. “I can’t write what I don’t feel.”

My brother nodded, as if he agreed with that. “You want to go back down to Daytona,” he said, “or you want me to do it this time?”

Yardley Acheman shook his head. “What I want, we fold the tent on this guy,” he said, “go find something fresh to do back in Miami.…”

Ward smiled politely, as if that were a joke. I suppose he’d heard the same thing from him before. A newspaper story, like anything else, is more attractive from a distance, when it first comes to you, than it is when you get in close and agonize over the details.

Which I presume is how Yardley got in the habit of keeping himself at a distance.