The Paperboy (42 page)

“I was just wondering how she is,” I said.

“Indisposed,” he said.

“She wrote a letter …”

“I know about her letters,” he said. A moment passed. “I know everything about that girl.”

It was quiet again, and I stared at the house, feeling offended that she hadn’t at least come out. “Don’t come back here,” Hillary said, more to my brother than to me.

Ward did not seem the least inclined even to leave.

“Don’t come back,” Hillary stood up then, slowly, and walked back inside.

Ward reluctantly got to his feet and made his way back through the stumps toward the dark trees beyond, tripping as he went on roots that lay above the ground. Each time he tripped, he caught himself and continued on as if he’d already forgotten that the roots were there.

Lost, as always, in a higher purpose.

W
E WENT BACK TO
the hotel along the river and I showered in cold water. It was hot outside and I had six beers in a cooler of ice, along with some chicken sandwiches that I’d bought at the same place where I’d gotten the beer.

I came out of the bathroom and opened two of the beers and handed one to Ward, and then I lay down on the bed,
still wet from the shower. There was a breeze from the window, a suggestion of coolness.

Ward stood looking out over the river. The sun was setting and the trees in the motel yard framed the boats and the long shadows they threw across the water, but I don’t think he saw any of that. I am not sure he knew he was holding a beer. I tasted mine, and it was cold and bitter and good. I began to feel optimistic, as I often did when the first cold beer was still in my hand. Later on, after too many beers, I knew I would slip the other way.

“Was he right about the girl and Yardley?” he said. I could hear it embarrassed him to ask the question.

“About Yardley sleeping with her?”

He nodded, without looking back.

“Yeah, he was right,” I said. I looked at him a moment and realized that he was the only one who hadn’t wanted Charlotte for himself. That was how he’d missed it.

“There’s no way to be sure,” he said. He left the window, picked up half the sandwich off the bed, and sat on a table in the corner next to the telephone. “He’s always been honest.”

I had another drink of beer. “Shit,” I said.

“I don’t mean his personal life,” he said. “I mean he’s always been an honest reporter.”

“Those are two different things?” I said. “A guy can be Yardley Acheman off the job and somebody honest when he’s sitting at the typewriter …”

“The best reporters aren’t always the best people,” he said. “The best ones keep who they are out of it.”

“What I think is, if you’re Yardley Acheman it doesn’t matter what kind of reporter you are, you’re still Yardley Acheman.”

Ward picked up his beer and drank it, throwing his head back, some of it leaking at the scar and dripping off his chin.

A little time passed.

“That afternoon in the office when you wrestled him to the floor,” he said, feeling the alcohol. “What was that about?”

I finished another beer. It seemed to me then—it has always seemed to me—that there are people whom you recognize intuitively as your enemies. And most of the time, as in the case of Yardley Acheman, they recognize you. And even if nothing is ever said or done, the animus is there from the first moment you walk into the same room.

“I suppose we’re natural enemies,” I said.

I
CALLED MY FATHER’S
office in the morning, before we left for Miami. I had to use the phone outside the lobby of the hotel; there were none in the rooms. It was a warm morning; the birds were making noise from the trees and the river was full of bass fishermen sitting in still boats.

I hung up when he answered.

B
Y THE TIME WE
returned to South Florida, Yardley Acheman was an author.

A publisher in New York had offered him thirty thousand dollars to expand the Moat County articles into a book, an amount almost equal to two years of his salary. I do not know if the offer had initially included my brother, but by the time we heard of it, it was Yardley Acheman’s alone.

He told Ward about the book without mentioning the amount of the advance, although I knew from one of the copyboys that he had been bragging about the money for
days, going from one desk to another in the newsroom, speaking to people he had not spoken to in months.

What he said to Ward was that for some time he had been struggling with the feeling that newspapers were too limiting for the things he wanted to write.

“Maybe it’s just something I’ve got to get out of my system,” he said, meaning the book. “Something to accomplish, you know, by myself. To find out if I can do it.” He paused a moment and then said, “Not that it’s the end of our partnership. We’re too good together to quit.…”

Ward nodded, and listened politely while Yardley, relieved now that Ward had been notified that he was out of the deal, elaborated on his plans for the book, never mentioning the thirty thousand dollars.

When I left the office, Yardley was still discussing his sense of being unfulfilled as a writer. “You know what I’m talking about,” he said. “The canvas is too small …”

Y
ARDLEY WAS NOT AROUND
the office as much for the next few months. He spent much of his time in New York with the magazine writer, whom he in fact married.

At the urging of the editors, Ward undertook an investigation of several of the Dade County commissioners, collecting and filing thousands of pages of documents on landfills and sewer projects and housing developments. He traced corporations through foreign banks, and found their owners back in Miami.

But in spite of growing evidence of an abuse of public trust, Ward had no real interest in the players. He would walk into his office at seven or eight in the morning and reappear an hour later, stretching or going for coffee, and
an hour after that I would sometimes pass his office and see him standing at the window, staring out at the city.

Y
ARDLEY ACHEMAN CALLED
from his apartment in Miami or from his wife’s apartment in New York several times a day, asking for information about Hillary or Thurmond Call that he had lost or forgotten—everything that hadn’t appeared in the newspaper article itself.

My brother took the calls cordially, welcoming the chance to talk again about Moat County, often answering in more detail than Yardley Acheman wanted.

Once a week Yardley made an appearance at the office—a gesture of sorts, as he was still drawing his salary—spending a few minutes with Ward, and then an hour or so with his editors, reporting on the progress of the story of the Dade County commissioners. Nurturing the fading view that he and Ward were equal partners in the work.

He wore expensive suits now, the influence perhaps of New York, but the big city had not been all good to him, as he’d also begun to change colors. His skin had taken on an unnatural cast, as if he were standing in fluorescent light.

On Saturday, Yardley always flew back to New York to be with his wife and friends, and sometimes on his visits to the
Times
he would complain about the complications of living in both places at once. Of going, as he put it, from the fastest place in the world to the slowest—to the place where New Yorkers came to retire when they were too slow to keep up.

He spoke of Miami now as he had once spoken of Lately.

I didn’t know anything about the literary fraternity in New York, of course, but it didn’t seem to me that it could be such an exclusive club if they let him in the first day. It
seemed to me that New York must be full of people like Yardley Acheman.

The calls from Yardley to my brother became more constant. Afterwards, sometimes, my brother would slide the patch off his eye and sit at his desk for a long time, his head resting in his hands, still possessed by the documents from Hillary Van Wetter’s arrest and trial.

He would forget to eat; he would forget to go home. Sometimes he would forget to replace the eye patch. The spectacle of the squeezed, empty socket brought other spectacles to mind, and I would look quickly away when I saw it, unable to reconcile myself to the memory of the beating.