The Paperboy (37 page)

H
E WAS SITTING ALONE
in an office with two desks. The office was smaller than the room he had occupied over the Moat Cafe in Lately, and it had no windows except the one that faced the larger room outside. The place smelled of Yardley Acheman’s toiletries.

My brother was wearing a white shirt and a tie, and studying a bound, familiar-looking document which was several inches thick. He did not leave his reading immediately to see who had walked through his door, but held up one finger, asking for a moment to finish. Then he looked up and saw me.

He had lost his left eye, and covered it with a patch, and there was something different in the shape of his face, a certain roundness which took a moment to find. There were small white scars at the sides of his nose, and a larger scar an inch below his lower lip, which followed the line of the lip for most of its run and then reeled down and then straight up, intersecting it just at the corner of his mouth. The flesh billowed on both sides of the cut.

He smiled and the lip flattened against the teeth underneath it, and he looked more like himself. He stood up, leaning across his desk.

“Where have you been?” he said, and I could hear that he was glad to see me. I felt my eyes begin to tear.

“Miami,” I said, “looking around.”

“World War said you might show up.…” It was quiet a moment while we looked at each other. It was not the eye patch that caught me again, but the roundness of his face. It did not seem like such an unnatural thing to have lost an eye.

“He’s worried,” Ward said.

“I left him a note.”

“It didn’t say where you were going.”

I shrugged and my brother settled back into his chair, still smiling at me, happy that I was there. “Sit down,” he said, but the only empty chair in the room was behind the other desk. I hesitated, remembering how Yardley Acheman behaved when he’d found me behind his desk before.

“He’s gone for the week,” Ward said.

I sat down, feeling the chair turn under me. A soft, well-oiled chair, better than the chairs that the reporters and editors in the main room had. And his desk was wood instead of metal, and the typewriter was a brand-new Underwood.

“He said you bought a hot rod and took off,” Ward said.

I nodded at that, not wanting to go into the rest of it then; it felt like I’d been on the road since I left home. I looked out the window, I rocked back and forth in Yardley’s chair. “Yardley’s taking a few days off?” I said.

“Celebrating,” he said. “The prosecutor’s decided not to take Van Wetter back to trial.”

“He celebrates a lot.”

Ward nodded and fingered the document in front of him, straightening it with the edges of the desk. I recognized it then, the first hundred pages or so of the transcript of Hillary Van Wetter’s trial.

“Well, I guess it’s what we wanted,” I said.

He stared at the transcript again, then he reached under his eye patch with one finger and scratched. A moment later he put the trial into one of his filing cabinets and recovered his good mood. He asked about World War’s new girlfriend.

I told him it wasn’t going to feel comfortable calling her “Mom.”

T
HERE WAS A LETTER
from Charlotte a few days later. It was addressed to my brother, but was written to us both. Yardley Acheman got a letter of his own, which lay unopened on his desk with the rest of the mail that came while he was gone.

The letter to Ward and me was strangely detached, thanking us for our help in saving Hillary. It said that she still intended to marry him, but had no details on the date. We were on the guest list. Common-law marriages were traditional among the Van Wetters, it said, but she was holding out for a ceremony with a Baptist minister. It was signed “Fondly, Charlotte.”

My brother showed me the letter over lunch at a cafeteria a few blocks from the newspaper. There was another place where most of the younger reporters ate which was closer, but my brother preferred not being around them.

Too many of them were “journalists” now, enamored with the importance of the calling and anxious to tell their readers what stories meant, not so enamored with the stories themselves.

The letter had been folded in half and then turned and folded again twice the other way to make it fit into the envelope. It was written on lined paper in careful loops. Good margins, no misspelled words, a formal sort of letter, in its way.

“It’s like the thank-you notes Mother used to make us write to Aunt Dorothy after Christmas,” I said.

He nodded, but he was not thinking of it that way. “She’s trying to close it off,” he said finally.

“Close what off?”

“We ‘re unfinished business,” he said, and then he picked up the envelope the letter had been mailed in and studied the postmark: Lately.

“She has what she wants,” he said, and the words stabbed me. A glass of milk had been sitting in front of Ward all
during lunch—we were taught not to wash down our food—and now he picked it up and drank it. As he lifted the glass, I noticed the scar beneath his lip again.

“It’s bothering her,” he said.

“What?”

He did not speak again for a little while, and then he said, “You have any luck this morning?”

I had gone to the employment office at the
Times
and applied for work in the newsroom. Under references, I had put my brother and, at Ward’s encouragement, Yardley Acheman. “I’m supposed to take a test,” I said.

He nodded at that, still thinking about Charlotte.

“You wonder,” he said finally, “why she sent a separate letter to Yardley.”

“He was the one fucking her,” I said.

He shook his head, not wanting to get near that.

I didn’t push the subject. When I first began hearing stories about fucking, perhaps in second grade, hearing them from so many places I knew there was something to it, I had the distinct thought walking home from school one afternoon that the world would be a better, simpler place if none of it were true.

My brother, I believe, carried that same sentiment through his life.

“A lot of people sleep with each other,” he said. “I don’t think it matters much to her.” We looked at each other over the empty dishes. “It’s something else.”

“Then open Yardley’s letter,” I said. He smiled at me; we both knew he would never do that. The waitress came, and Ward gave her a five-dollar bill.

“How are you for money?” he said.

“I’ve got some left.”

“Whatever you need,” he said.

“No,” I said, “I’ve got as much as I need.”

It was awkward; we were not used to taking care of each other. “So the girlfriend moved into the house,” he said finally.

“The medicine cabinet’s full of makeup,” I said. “Little brushes all over the place …”

He nodded, picturing it.

“She spends a lot of time on her face,” I said.

“Well,” he said a little later, “as long as World War’s happy.”

“He seems happy,” I said, “but he spends so much time pretending to be happy, you can’t always tell.”

For all our lives, every time the library or the highway got money from the federal government, every time a sixth grader went to the state finals of the spelling bee, or Weldon Pine was named lawyer of the year, or a barn fire was extinguished by the volunteer fire company in Thorn, my father was happy. He was expected to be happy. And when the federal government did not come through with money for the highway, or when the fire company did not get to the barn in time, he was hurt.

It is difficult, of course, to ride the pulse of community life in this way, as invariably you are required to be happy and sad at the same time. For the editor and publisher of the
Moat County Tribune
, however, it had become as natural as getting dressed for work. Perhaps it was part of getting dressed.

At the bottom of it, however, what made him happy had nothing to do with the content of the news itself, but the process of distributing it. There was a confusion and loss of direction in the process, and it was finding a way through that he liked.

I wondered if that somehow applied to his flirtation with Miss Guthrie, but it was not the sort of question he would entertain, not even in retrospect, if she’d left and he was
lost. He did not second-guess himself, for fear of what would unravel.

A
T LUNCH A DAY LATER
, Ward asked if the lost advertisers had returned to the
Tribune
; then he asked about World War’s angina.

The nerve had been severed in his lip, and occasionally milk or soup would leak from the spot where it had been cut and run all the way to his chin before he felt it there and wiped it off.

We had been brought up with table manners, but the food falling from the dead part of his lip seemed to cause him no embarrassment now.

A
NOTHER DAY
, he asked suddenly what had become of the lawyer Weldon Pine, if he had stayed in Lately after he retired or moved to a city. I sensed that he regretted the trouble the story had caused the old man.

Later, he was preoccupied with Uncle Tyree.

“What if it turned out that the old man and his whole family, right down to the mutes, are all smarter than we are?” he said.

“What if they are?”

He held up his finger, wanting me to wait while he finished the thought. “What if they know us better than we know them? What if they knew what we would do?”

I waited until I was sure he was finished. “It still doesn’t matter,” I said.

He looked at me and smiled, as if I’d missed the point. “Things got out of hand for a little while,” I said. “You got
hurt and Yardley wrote his story and now it’s over. Hillary’s gone back to the swamp.…”

He picked up a hamburger he’d ordered and took a bite. A trickle of grease ran from his lip. “What if they used us?” he said.

The grease reached the part of his chin where his sense of feeling was intact, and he wiped at it with his napkin.

“What if we used them?” I said. “That’s the game, isn’t it? You use them, they use you.…”

“It isn’t always like that,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be … ” He thought a moment, perhaps trying to remember a case when it wasn’t.

“It’s like fishing,” I said. “You really aren’t up to it if you start out worried about the worm.”

He leaned across the table, lowering his voice. “You haven’t seen it when you get it exactly right, Jack,” he said. “When you get things down just the way they were …”

“What then?” I said.

He smiled at me, his chin shining with grease. “It makes it bearable,” he said. And it seemed for a moment that his voice was coming to me from the recovery room.

“You can’t ever know exactly who somebody is,” I said, and that lay on the table between us a long time.