The Paperboy (23 page)

“You going into the family business too?” he said. “World War must be a very proud man.”

He smiled, Ward kept himself still. “Mr. Ellison,” my brother said, when enough time had passed, “what happened to that evidence?”

He shook his head. “I wisht I knew,” he said.

“Mr. Van Wetter has told us the blood on his clothing was his own,” Ward said. “That he’d cut himself on some equipment he was using that night.”

Mr. Ellison nodded thoughtfully. “Mr. Van Wetter has been known to use his equipment at night before,” he said, and then paused while that sank in. “Cut a deputy’s thumb off, as I remember.” There was another pause, a long one. “Over a traffic ticket,” he said.

And then he looked at his own hand and dropped his thumb until it was pressed against the palm. “A man can’t do much without his thumb,” he said. “It’s what separates us from the primates.”

“Is there a deputy we could talk to?” Ward asked.

“Somebody who was out there when they arrested him?”

Mr. Ellison was still looking at his hand, working the fingers. “A little thing like holding your wife’s titty …” He stopped moving his fingers and looked up suddenly, directly at my brother. “You married yet, Mr. James?”

Ward shook his head no.

Mr. Ellison looked back at his hand. “A little thing like
that, you can’t do it.” He put his hand on his own chest and tried to cup the breast through the shirt. “You can poke a titty,” he said, looking up, “but they don’t like that, you know. They like to have them held. You go poking around all the time, before long they won’t allow you to touch them at all.”

He looked up again and smiled.

“Can I talk to somebody who was there?” Ward said.

“You can talk to whoever you want as long as they’ll talk to you,” he said. “But when you talk about Mr. Van Wetter, keep in mind what it’d be like, not to be able to hold your own wife’s titty in your hand.”

A moment passed and he said, “Oh, that’s right. You aren’t married.” He seemed to be teasing him.

We went from Mr. Ellison’s office back to the dispatch room, passing two deputies in the hallway, and arrived finally in front of a belligerent, overweight woman sitting at a desk reading a copy of
Motor Trend
magazine and wearing a name tag on her blouse that said, “Patty.” There was a swinging door next to the desk, no more than waist high, and a sign attached to it prohibiting entrance to anyone not employed by the sheriff’s department.

My brother and I stood in front of her a long time, waiting to be acknowledged. When she did that finally, looking up, she did not speak or smile. She only waited. “My name is Ward James,” my brother said. “I was talking with Mr. Ellison, and he suggested that I come down here.”

She took us in a moment longer, then went back to her magazine. I saw a deputy then, thirty feet behind her, leaning across his desk to watch her work us over. The deputy was smiling.

“Excuse me,” Ward said, and she looked up again. “I would like to speak with any of these deputies …. ” He took a pen from his pocket and wrote down the names of
five deputies who were at Hillary Van Wetter’s house the night he was arrested. He slid the paper across the desk. She looked at it a moment, then looked at us, and then picked up the paper and dropped it into the wastebasket.

Someone behind her laughed. She went back to the magazine, aware that her performance was being watched and appreciated.

I turned away, wanting to get out of the room, but Ward stayed where he was. She looked at
Motor Trend
, he waited. Minutes passed, and she reached into her purse for a pack of cigarettes, looking up once at Ward, then lighting a match and going back to the magazine. She had been on the same page a long time. Half a dozen deputies were watching now, waiting to see how it would come out.

She shifted in her chair and stole another look, and then suddenly slammed the magazine down on the desk in front of her, stood up, and walked off into the back. There was some laughing back there, and then it was quiet. No one came to the front to take her place, and the deputies seemed to have gone back to wherever they had been before.

“Are we just going to stand here?” I said.

He didn’t answer.

“They aren’t going to talk to us,” I said. And he nodded at that, but he didn’t move.

The woman returned perhaps fifteen minutes later. She did not seem surprised to see us still standing in front of her desk. “Is there something else?” she said.

My brother reached across her desk to a pile of paper, took one of the sheets, and wrote down the names again. He pushed the paper toward her without saying a word. She looked at it and then at him.

“You’re slow, aren’t you?” she said, sounding concerned, and dropped that paper into the wastebasket too. She
looked at me then, as if I might be a faster study. “I can do this all day,” she said.

But she couldn’t. In another minute or two she stood up again and walked into the back. There were no chairs, so we stood in front of the desk. Half an hour passed, and a deputy took her place. He nodded at my brother and sat down at the woman’s desk.

“May I help you?” he said.

My brother leaned over the rail and reached into the woman’s wastebasket for one of the pieces of paper. He put it on the desk in front of the deputy. “I would like to speak to these men,” he said.

The deputy looked at the list a moment, then slowly shook his head. “These officers don’t have time to speak to you, sir,” he said. “They’re busy with their duties.”

“When would they have time?” Ward said.

The deputy shook his head. “You might come back tomorrow.…”

He waited.

“Are you one of these officers?” Ward said. The deputy looked at the list as if he couldn’t remember. There was a place above his pocket where the color was brighter blue than the rest of the shirt, and there was a hole in the material there. He’d taken off his name tag.

“I don’t see where that’s got anything to do with it,” he said. “I told you we don’t have time for you now.”

“Are you one of these officers?” my brother said, sounding patient, as if it were the first time he’d asked.

“What I am,” he said, “is the one telling you to cease and desist and allow us to get back to work.”

My brother looked at the list of deputies. “Which one are you?” he said. And a murderous looked passed over the deputy’s face.

“You know, there’s some people,” he said finally, “they won’t let you treat them well.”

Ward nodded at that, as if it were a compliment.

The deputy left and we stood in the room until four-thirty, when the cleaning lady came in and said that the place was closed.

“Thank you,” my brother said, and we walked past her out the door, and then, in the hallway, I could hear people cheering. I went back to the door and saw that the deputies had come out from the back to applaud the cleaning woman. She was still in the middle of the floor, holding a mop that was set into a bucket on wheels, looking embarrassed but not entirely surprised at the sudden attention. As if it was about time.

We drove through Lately at quitting time. Citizens were coming out of their stores and offices, locking the doors behind them. Schoolchildren were on the street too, some of them smoking cigarettes and eating candy bars at the same time. The older ones, from high school, hung out of the windows of their fathers’ four-door sedans, the drivers tearing up the engines, revving them until the noise was like a scream.

Ward and I had watched the same ceremony in Thorn, but had never had any part in it.

“Imagine what it would be like,” my father would say from time to time, “if your name appeared in a police story in your father’s own newspaper.”

He was telling us, in his way, that there would be no favoritism; but we already knew that. Ward and I grew up in a house where my father’s principles were a regular topic of conversation, and we were often asked to imagine the embarrassment which would be visited on the family in the event either of our names had to be put in the newspaper.

Ward seemed better at imagining the embarrassment than I was; it threatened him in ways I didn’t understand.

At some point, of course, my father realized that there was no need to warn my brother to stay out of trouble. And perhaps by then, he was already beginning to worry that Ward had never been in any trouble; that he hadn’t any friends to get into trouble with.

I looked at him now, wondering if he thought of Yardley Acheman as a friend. “Another fine day in the newspaper business,” I said.

He shrugged. “It wasn’t bad.”

I stopped the car and let a woman pushing a baby carriage cross in front of us. Behind me, a load of kids in a Plymouth honked, and the woman jumped at the noise, looked up into the front seat of the car I was driving, frightened, thinking that I’d honked, and then hurried across to the other side. I had never seen her before and never expected to see her again, but I thought of getting out of the car and telling her that it was the driver behind me who had blown the horn.

I was triggering a hundred misunderstandings a day, and I couldn’t seem to straighten out the important ones without straightening out them all.

“I don’t see what it accomplished,” I said, speaking again of the afternoon at the sheriff’s department.

“We were there,” he said.

“That’s all?”

“It’s enough,” he said.

And I saw it then, clearly, that he found something in the waiting—or the shunning—pleasurable.

“We ‘re going back?” I said.

He was looking out the window when he answered. “Of course,” he said.

W
E STOOD IN THE
sheriff’s department all the next day, and the day after. The woman behind the desk did not speak to us except to tell us to move out of the way when other visitors came through the door.

“Please move to the side of the room and do not interfere with the orderly business of this office,” she would say. Words a county lawyer had given her, probably, the groundwork for our arrest if we failed to get out of the way.

But my brother and I moved politely to the side of the little room and listened as stories of stray dogs and dead chickens or children who did not belong in neighbors’ yards were laid out across her desk.

“Do you wish to fill out a complaint?” she would say, cutting off their stories. And those words seemed to make them afraid.

“We don’t want to get nobody in trouble.…”

“There is nothing this office can do until a complaint has been filed.…”

And then, more often than not, the visitors would leave, nodding to my brother and me politely on their way out. Thinking that we were a different kind of people, that we were not afraid of the law.

Still, none of the deputies on my brother’s list had come out of the office behind the desk to speak to us, not even to say they wouldn’t speak to us. My brother was not discouraged. If we were constant enough, things would fall into their natural place.

W
E ARRIVED AT OUR OFFICE
late in the afternoon and found Yardley Acheman sitting in the stuffed chair against the wall and Charlotte sitting in front of him on his desk. From there, he could see up her skirt.

They were both drinking beer, and when Yardley saw us, he lifted his in a toast.

She smiled at us, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. Something had been going on in the room before they heard us on the stairs, and I felt a familiar, quick heat in my face. “The guy who bought the lawn,” he said, “I found him.”

He walked past her then without a glance, as if she were a panhandler on the street asking for his change, and she saw that she’d been discarded.

He picked up a reporter’s notebook, opened it to the front page, and found his notes.

“He remembered them,” he said. “They showed up at six in the morning in a truck. He said he looked at the two of them and what they had and thought they’d stolen it from a cemetery.”

My brother nodded slowly. “You showed him pictures?”

“Of Hillary. That’s when he remembered thinking they’d robbed a graveyard.”

“And he bought it anyway.…”

Charlotte got off the desk and walked to the window. She crossed her arms under her breasts, as if she were cold, and stared outside.