The Paperboy (47 page)

A
FEW DAYS LATER
, the Sunday editor came into my brother’s office, where I was sitting alone, opening and sorting Ward’s mail.

“Is he here?” he said.

I had a look around.

“When’s he coming in?” he said.

“He’s working at home for a few days,” I said. In fact, he had been sitting in his apartment, going out only to buy beer or vodka, which he drank straight over ice or mixed with whatever he found in the refrigerator. He had taken the boxes from Moat County home, and the papers lay open across the furniture in every room of his place.

I had been astounded at the mess.

“Does anybody still work around here?” the Sunday editor said.

I told him again Ward had taken his work home, and was doing it there. He weighed that, nodding, then, casually, he said, “Do you know if he’s had any requests for interviews? About the story in the
Sun?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“He shouldn’t talk to anyone,” he said.

I had nothing to say to that, and a moment later the Sunday editor asked if I would be seeing Ward after work.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Tell him not to talk to anyone,” he said. “We’ve got ourselves a situation here, and it’s important to contain it.”

“We’ve got ourselves a situation here,” I said, “and it’s important.”

He stared at me a moment, and I stared back.

“You know,” he said, “you’re kind of a smart aleck, Jack, for somebody who’s only in here because his brother’s a big shot.”

T
HERE WAS SOMETHING ABOUT
my brother’s drinking that caused me to drink too. Somehow if we were both doing it, the reason might be in the air, or the newsroom, or Miami. If we were both drinking, he was not going off someplace alone.

That does not mean, however, that I wanted to visit his apartment every afternoon after work and sit with him in his dimly lit kitchen, the table covered with his notes from Moat County and melting ice trays, and disappear with him soundlessly into the haze.

I was not a great social drinker, but sometimes over the
course of an evening, I would find myself with a word or two I wanted to say.

And so after work, while Ward drank at home, I often visited a crowded, stale-smelling place a few blocks from the paper called Johnny’s, where reporters and editors were known to go and discuss the ethics of the business of delivering the news. I did not ordinarily join in these conversations, which were without exception circular in nature, and in which the same people took turns making the same pronouncements to one another, night after night.

On certain nights, however—and it was impossible to say in advance when it would happen—some of the women who worked at the paper grew tired of newspaper talk, and eccentric behavior took over the room.

On Halloween the year before, for instance, shortly after I’d arrived in Miami, I walked in the place and saw a
Times
vice president costumed as a winged devil standing near the jukebox while a woman dressed as Snow White kneeled in front of him, working his penis in and out of her mouth.

As the man began to climax, he wrapped the sequined wings around her head and covered her while he shook.

I had been hoping to see something like that again, or perhaps to revisit the night when a young reporter took off her shirt and bra and threw them into the face of the assistant city editor who was her boss, calling him a dirty bastard. The next day, both the assistant city editor and the reporter were back at their desks as if nothing had happened.

On the afternoon the Sunday editor called me a smart aleck, I went to Johnny’s, where Yardley Acheman and half a dozen reporters were already sitting at the booth nearest the door. They turned to watch me come in, falling suddenly quiet, and then stole glances at me over their shoulders as I sat at the bar.

I had several drinks, wondering what Yardley Acheman had been saying about my brother. Johnny poured me doubles. I turned once and caught one of the women at his table staring.

She smiled at me and did not look away. I held her look, feeling the hammer cock, and finally turned away myself, flushed.

Later in the evening, the table changed. People went home or to other bars or to other tables, and the woman who had been staring sat down next to me at the bar.

She looked over her shoulder, where Yardley was sitting alone now, folded into the corner. “What a conceited asshole,” she said.

“The author,” I said.

She lit a cigarette and allowed her hand to rest on my leg in a casual way. “Do you think they’ll let them keep it?”

“Keep what?”

“The Pulitzer.”

“I didn’t know they could take it away,” I said.

She shrugged and lifted her hand off my leg to sip at her drink. “The paper might make them give it back,” she said.

“I don’t think the paper is going to do that.”

“It’s happened before,” she said.

It was quiet a moment, and then I said, “Do you get tired of talking about newspapers all the time?”

“What everyone keeps wondering,” she said, “is how your brother’s taking all this.”

“He was fine when I saw him,” I said.

“He hasn’t been in the office since the story in the
Sun.”

“He’s working at home,” I said.

A moment later she put her hand on my arm and leaned so close that I thought she was about to kiss me. “Have you heard what Yardley’s saying?” she said.

“About what?”

“About your brother.”

I turned in my seat to stare at him, but he had closed his eyes and dropped his head into the back of the booth, his mouth slightly open. In the dark of the bar, he seemed to be smiling.

I suddenly wanted to leave, and took a dollar out of my pocket and set it on the bar, covering it with the glass. As I stood up, I felt her hand again against my leg.

“Where are you going?” she said.

“For a swim,” I said.

She looked at me a long time, an appraisal, and then she said, “Tell you what, why don’t you come swimming with me?”

I
WENT TO SEE
Ward in the morning, straight from the woman’s lap, to confess what had happened when Helen Drew came to see me at my apartment. He answered the door in his pajamas.

The place was hot and smelled of alcohol which had been filtered through a human body, and I opened some of the windows to air it out. The files from Moat County were all over the floor, some of them were wet. You could not cross the room without stepping on them.

I moved a pile and took a seat on the sofa. “The girl from the
Sun?
Helen Drew?”

“The heavy girl,” he said. I nodded, and he took a moment remembering her. “She seemed nice,” he said finally. He smiled at me, as if there were something at work I didn’t understand.

“The thing is,” I said, “she came to see me one morning at my place …”

I paused, he waited.

“Yardley told her you were the one who said he found the contractor.”

“I know,” he said, still smiling. “It’s what he told the Associated Press too. He gave it to them off the record, they said it to me off the record. It’s all leverage.”

“What do they want?”

“Another story,” he said. “That’s all, just another story. Somebody writes it, somebody prints it, somebody reads it.” He shrugged. “It’s all anonymous.”

“It’s not anonymous,” I said. “It’s you.”

“You want a beer?” he said. He frowned at his watch, and then went into the kitchen and returned carrying a beer and a jelly glass half full of warm vodka.

And I drank the beer and he drank the vodka, and then I had another, and another, and after a while it didn’t seem so out of place, my brother drinking in the morning, as long as I was there drinking with him.

I thought of the woman I’d spent the night with, and wondered if she would want me back. She was hungover when I left, and hadn’t said much one way or the other.

I drank another beer and asked my brother if he’d ever been swimming at night. He thought about the question, then picked up the vodka bottle—he’d brought it into the living room with one of my beers—and poured some into the glass.

“In Lake Okeechobee,” he said. “You were four years old, and we went camping one weekend, and Mother and I went swimming at night while you and Father started a charcoal fire.” He sat still, remembering it. “It was like bathwater,” he said. “And you could taste the lighter fluid in the steaks.”

I could remember the fire, faintly remember the fire.

“The lake’s dead,” I said. “I meant the ocean.”

He thought it over. “No,” he said, “not in the ocean … What’s it like?”

“Completely alone,” I said. “You’ve never been alone like that, swimming at night.”

“Is it quiet?” he said.

“Yeah,” I said, “it’s quiet.”

We sat still a minute, and then I remembered why I had come. “The girl from the
Sun
 … ” I said.

He smiled at me and swallowed some vodka. “Tell me about swimming, Jack,” he said. “Tell me something about swimming.”

T
HE PUBLISHER OF THE
Miami Times
called a meeting for Friday afternoon. Ward, Yardley Acheman, the Sunday editor, the managing editor, the executive editor, and me. Everyone who’d had anything to do with the story from Moat County.

I had never been included in such a meeting before—in fact, I had never been included in any meetings—and I took my invitation as a signal that the paper was in some stage of trying to sort fact from fiction, and prepared myself with dates and times of Yardley Acheman’s transgressions against decency and journalism.

The publisher’s office was larger than the editor’s, and overlooked Biscayne Bay, where he kept his yacht. We sat in leather chairs and sipped coffee which his secretary brought on a silver tray.

The publisher himself sat on the edge of his desk in a casual sort of way, somehow offering the impression that he was very much like the rest of us in the room. Yardley
Acheman was wearing a new suit and my brother smelled vaguely of alcohol.

It was the first day Ward had been back in the newsroom, and the editors had asked him to drop by their offices after the meeting. He did not make any promises.