The Paperboy (4 page)

A minute passed, and my brother emerged into the lights of the trooper’s car, glistening with mud.

“Mr. James,” the trooper said, reading the name off the license, “you are under arrest.”

And my brother, who, as far as I know, had never in his life asked another human being for a thing that was not his, stood on the road, swaying, and said, “Sir, I would be proud to wear your hat.”

T
HE MAN IN THE CAR
with my brother that night was also a reporter at the
Miami Times
. His name was Yardley Acheman, and to the reporters and editors who worked in the newsroom with them, Yardley Acheman and my brother were exact opposites.

Exact opposites
.

Some of the
Times
editors held the opinion that the differences between them accounted for their success, that it was keen management to know that opposites often generated a certain chemistry—they liked the idea of chemistry, these editors, the idea of magic—which the
Miami Times
had been wise enough to stir, and which had produced an investigative team of more potency than the individual ingredients would indicate was possible.

A perfect match, they said.
Exact opposites
.

And perhaps they were right, although it doesn’t seem to me that people can be opposites, exact or otherwise—what, after all, is the opposite of six feet tall? Of being required in ninth grade to memorize the periodic table and never forgetting it? Of foot odor?

Still, people are different, and Ward and Yardley Acheman were more different than most.

It is my understanding that before the editors of the
Miami Times
first designed to throw him together with my brother to cover a plane crash in the Everglades—an arrangement more of chance and convenience than the chemists at the
Times
cared to admit later—Yardley Acheman was just another sulking and lazy reporter on the city desk whose name rarely appeared over stories in the newspaper because the editors who ran the desk weren’t inclined to go through the long process of talking him into writing anything in which he had no personal interest.

On the other hand, when Yardley Acheman found a subject of interest, he was considered something of a literary genius. The editors agreed on that, and many of them held literary ambitions of their own. They all knew writing when they saw it; that was their job.

Between events of personal interest, however, Yardley Acheman would sit at his desk in the most distant corner of the city room, visiting an endless stream of girls and bookies on the telephone, trying to talk the new ones into giving him a chance, trying to talk the old ones into leaving him alone.

He was handsome in a spoiled way, a pretty boy, and it seemed to give him access to anything he wanted. It was often difficult for him to fit all his social engagements into his calendar.

The editors knew what Yardley Acheman was doing on the telephone, but all newspapers carry some sort of dead weight—reporters who do not want to be reporters, editors who care more for their titles than their jobs—and, as these things go, Yardley Acheman was less trouble than most. He considered other reporters, who did not possess his literary grace, beneath him, and was consequently never the sort of dead weight who became an agitator for the guild.

A guild agitator was a different kind of burden to bear,
and the people who ran the paper were more inclined to relieve themselves of it.

Something happened to Yardley Acheman, however, on the evening that he and Ward were chosen—without forethought or ceremony, from the evidence, but because they were the only two unoccupied reporters in the room—to go to the wreckage of Flight 119, which had left its runway at Miami International Airport, stayed airborne two minutes and forty seconds, and then crashed into the Everglades, killing everyone aboard.

Yardley Acheman found his vocation in that night’s carnage, in the enormity of the collision of 140 human beings and their sheet metal tube into the soft mud of the swamp, the enormity of the tearing—he became flush with the telling of it, with the cataloging of details; with the accumulative weight of their meaning.

It was like riding a bicycle, he got it all at once.

But Yardley Acheman, of course, had not amassed the details by himself. The most tearing of them had come from my brother, who had waded through the mud into the plane while Yardley kept outside, where, horrifying as the accident was, there were other places to look; room, as he would often say, to consider the larger perspective.

For his part, Ward walked the length of the tube, from the place in back where the tail section had broken off to the pilot’s compartment, brushing mosquitoes off his face, counting the dead still in the plane, recording their positions, and through them the terrible velocity of impact.

By coincidence, the entire Dade County air rescue machinery had been sent to a smaller crash—a private plane—an hour earlier that night, and for more than thirty minutes Ward and Yardley Acheman had the disaster to themselves.

The plane yawed and settled as Ward made his way to the front; the only other sounds were those of the swamp itself.

A day later, subscribers to the
Miami Times
would hear those sounds too, and see, in the darkened cabin, parts of bodies still strapped to their seats.

And while careful readers might have noticed that the account of the sights and sounds carried a personal tone which alluded to matters beyond the accident itself, there was enough weight in the details to overcome it.

L
IKE YARDLEY ACHEMAN
, my brother kept apart from the gossip and flow of the newsroom.

Even after the success of the airliner story, Ward would not be brought into the lives of the other reporters. He kept his desk spotless and neat, and checked facts compulsively; he worked hours beyond his scheduled quitting time and did not fill out requests for overtime pay.

All of this was misunderstood and resented by the reporters who witnessed it, who did not know that when he wasn’t on a story, my brother was incapable of asking for anything.

It was assumed in the newsroom that Ward had gotten his job through his father’s influence, and while I do not know if that was true—editors and publishers regularly hire each other’s children, and I am not sure my father, for all his ethical posturing, was above that—I am sure that Ward was unaware of it. He would have never risked the embarrassment.

No one was more afraid of embarrassment.

Still, the story that rose from the wreckage of Flight 119 elevated Ward’s standing with the other reporters, who were honest enough to see that he had done something that they themselves might not have done—a crashed airplane, still humming with current and warm from the friction of the collision and full of fuel, how many of them would have
climbed into the hole where the tail section had broken off and walked the length of the cabin in the dark?—but he would not be complimented, could not think of words to say when they came to his desk that next morning with their congratulations.

He could not give and he could not receive, except in the course of collecting a story.

A story had an authority of its own to my brother, and under that authority he was able to approach subjects of intimacy that he would never approach on his own.

A
WEEK AFTER THE STORY
of the crash appeared on the front page of the
Miami Times
, Ward and Yardley Acheman were called into an office where four editors in white shirts were seated around a long table, smoking Camel cigarettes and pinching pieces of tobacco off the ends of their tongues.

After a few minutes of desultory conversation—which Yardley Acheman was as good at as the editors, and which only made my brother uncomfortable—the lowest ranking editor in the room broke the news of the promotion: Yardley Acheman and my brother had been taken off their duties on the city desk and would work together as a team.

It is a fundamental principle of the operation of newspapers that all decisions, particularly personnel decisions, are delivered at the most local level. Under this principle, the managing editor, for instance, never appears to tell the city editor how to use his reporters.

If it were not for that, the reporters—who instinctively seek the highest authority—would come to the managing editor instead of the city editor to complain that their assignments were not suited to their talents or that their copy was being raped. And of the hundred reasons it’s better to
be a managing editor than a city editor, avoiding discussions of raped copy is near the top of the list.

I
WAS IN ONLY
my second month on the north county route when Flight 119 went down in the Everglades, and it was seven weeks later that Ward and Yardley Acheman’s next story appeared, a meticulous account of a fraternity hazing at the University of Miami which ended in a young man’s drowning in a whirlpool bath.

As he had at the crash site, Ward went inside while Yardley Acheman kept the distance he required to preserve his larger perspective.

Over the weeks it took to gather the story, Ward was threatened by the fraternity members and one night was attacked and beaten by half a dozen of them outside their house. He could not see who they were. When they left, he drove to the hospital and took fifteen stitches in his eyelid and was back at their front door the same evening.

Later, his car tires were cut and his phone began to ring at all hours of the night, with no one on the other end when he answered.

And each morning he was back, hanging over the fraternity house like the death itself. Phone calls and beatings and having tires slashed—those were not the things that frightened my brother.