The Paperboy (32 page)

“John,” Yardley Acheman said to the editor, “I’ve got to have some quiet.” He was the only newspaper reporter I ever met who could not write unless it was quiet. The editor moved then, putting his hand in the middle of my back, smiling, heading me toward the door.

“If anything comes up we need his help, we’ll call him at the hospital,” he said. “And as soon as this thing’s finished, we’ll send him a carbon copy.…”

We had reached the door, where he had stopped and was waiting now for me to leave.

“It’s his story,” I said again. “He wants to read it before it goes in the paper.”

“He can read it,” the editor said, and put his hand on my back again.

“First,” I said. “He can read it first.…”

Yardley looked up again from his typewriter, impatient for me to leave. The editor only smiled. “At the first opportunity,” he said. “We’ll have it sent to the hospital directly.”

I stepped through the doorway, unsure of what the editor had promised. “Before it runs,” I said.

“As soon as humanly possible,” he said, and he shut the door.

I
RETURNED TO DAYTONA
at night. It was late and warm and the highway was empty except for an occasional tandem loaded with oranges blowing past on the way to the processing plants north, rocking the car.

It was palmetto season, and in the glare of the trucks’ headlights, the spatter of dead insects across the windshield made it impossible to see, and I could only hold the steering wheel steady and trust that there was a road beyond the glare.

I
N THE MORNING
, my brother went back into surgery and was there most of the day. I had lunch with my father at the
hospital cafeteria and he remarked a number of times that the food was better there than it had been in the army.

“This isn’t bad,” he said, and inspected a piece of chicken on his fork. “That girl that cleans and cooks for me … ” He shook his head. “Ward’s probably eating better than I am.” Ward, of course, was taking his meals through a straw.

My father looked at his watch every few minutes. The doctors had said they could not predict how long the reconstruction of Ward’s sinuses would take until they got inside and saw the damage.

“You should go home,” I said.

“Not yet.”

We went from the cafeteria back to my brother’s hospital room and waited. The air in the room seemed stale, even with the windows open, and about three in the afternoon I became conscious of a problem with my breathing. I did not seem to be getting the air deeply enough into my lungs.

My father was sitting in a corner, reading one of the papers he had brought for Ward, and we had not spoken more than a few sentences since lunch. I stood up and walked to the window, wanting air. He looked up from the paper.

“If you want to get out of here for a little while, go for a swim,” he said, “I can hold down the fort.”

I looked at the clock on the wall and promised to be back in two hours. He nodded, telling me there was no reason for us both to wait, vaguely disappointed at the same time that I would leave the place with my brother still in surgery.

“I’ll be back by six,” I said, giving myself a little more than the two hours.

“No hurry,” he said, and I left the window and started out the door. “He probably won’t feel much like company afterward anyway.”

I went to the ocean and drove the rental car out onto the
beach and headed north until there were no sunbathers. I took off my clothes in the car and swam for perhaps half an hour, straight out and back, not far enough to feel tired, and not far enough to get away from the hospital.

I came out of the water and lay on the sand, letting it press into my chest and legs and arms and my cheek, lying there with my mouth so close to it that little grains stirred as I breathed, and for a little while I slept.

T
HE DOCTORS HAD FINISHED
with Ward. He was lying in a recovery room again, his face more elaborately bandaged than it had been before, and he was drained, completely spent. My father looked at me from the chair beside the bed. We did not speak. Every ten minutes a nurse came in to record Ward’s vital signs, which were ordinary enough, or at least were nothing that she didn’t expect.

She spoke to him slowly, as you would speak to a child. “Would you like a sip of water?”

He nodded, and she lifted the cup to his lips and then took it away. “Just a little,” she said, and then left the room. I refilled the cup and put it in his hand and he drank what was in it.

“That might make him sick,” my father said, but it didn’t seem to me that he had a claim on my brother’s care.

Ward’s good eye wandered the recovery room, resting here or there on his bare toes or the bottle which hung overhead, then moving on, stunned. He did not look at either of us.

My father said he remembered having his appendix removed and the sickness afterwards. He did not seem to appreciate the difference between illness and violence, or that the recoveries were not the same process.

Ward did not speak to us that evening, and barely spoke the next day. But once, when my father left the room to call his newspaper, my brother’s head finally rolled in my direction and he stared at me a moment and then said, “Jack, something went wrong.”

“Nothing went wrong,” I said. “I talked to the doctors.” There was a long, empty moment.

He closed his unbandaged eye and breathed deeply, in and out, until he seemed to have fallen asleep, and then, without opening his eye, he told me the doctors hadn’t given him enough anesthetic.

“I was awake too long,” he said slowly. “I heard them talking, I felt them lifting the bones in my face, cutting them.”

“You couldn’t move?” He shook his head, keeping the eye closed.

“I tried to move a finger,” he said, “make some signal that I was still there with them, but it was all dead.” And then he did open his eye, and I saw that the doctors had done something to him that the sailors couldn’t.

He did not speak of what had happened in the operating room again, at least to me, but the shadow of it was always there. He had been terrified, and once that has happened, you are never quite the same.

F
ROM TIME TO TIME
, my father asked about the men who had beaten Ward, how many there were, if they were black or white; he wondered out loud when the police would catch them.

My brother did not acknowledge the questions, even in some polite way that would have dismissed them. He simply stared, one-eyed, at the ceiling.

A
S THE EDITOR FROM
Miami had put it, the story was pushed out the door, and ran in Sunday’s newspaper. My brother did not see it until it appeared in print, under his and Yardley Acheman’s names. It was spread across the upper fold of the front page—
A SHERIFF’S LEGACY LINGERS OVER MOAT COUNTY—
and began:

My father had gone back to his home and his own newspaper the day before. He and Ward had been in the same room together for three days, and almost all of that time passed in silence. Ward did not tell him what had happened in the operating room, and did not complain of the aching in his face. The infection had settled in, and he was taking antibiotics every six hours.

By the time I got to the hospital on Sunday morning, the paper was lying sifted into its sheets on the floor, where it had fallen from the side of his bed. I’d gone swimming and then read the piece over a long breakfast.

Yardley Acheman had not so much written a story about Hillary Van Wetter as a story about Moat County. In it, the lawyer Pine became all its lawyers, Sheriff Call spoke for the charity of all its white citizens. The finances of the state’s attorney’s office and the sheriff’s department were called into question, and there was a list of relatives of county officials who were employed in both places, many of them in jobs that did not require their attendance. There was a suggestion, laid to unnamed sources, that civil and criminal cases were not settled in court, but in “smoke-filled rooms, late at night.”

In Yardley Acheman’s hands, the county became an enclave of ignorance and smallness in a state which was growing in another direction, and Hillary Van Wetter and his naive defender Charlotte Bless were the casualties of an inevitable war of clashing cultures.