The Paperboy (51 page)

W
ARD WAS IN HIS APARTMENT
when I went to see him, packing the notes from Moat County into cardboard boxes, stacking them against the wall.

The front door had not been closed and I stood in the doorway watching him until he saw me.

“He killed her,” I said.

“I know.”

I came in and sat down on the floor. Her death was more remote to him than it was to me, but it had settled somewhere, another piece of evidence that fit into something larger.

I thought of her breasts, floating in the water.

My brother went back to his packing.

“Where are we going?” I said.

He looked at the boxes against the wall as if he were trying to decide. “I can’t do it anymore,” he said. “It doesn’t work.” And I understood that I was part of what he couldn’t do. He didn’t want to take care of anyone now, or be taken care of. I did not try to talk him out of it.

I helped him carry the boxes out to his car. He set them carefully in the trunk and the backseat, arranging them by
number. They were still there, in precisely the same order, four months later when I flew to California to claim his things.

A
T THE POLICE DEPARTMENT
, a friendly sergeant turned over my brother’s shoes and the wallet and keys that had been found inside them, and asked if Ward often went swimming in the Pacific Ocean at night.

“We’ve got more undertow than you do in Florida,” he said.

And that was as much as I ever knew about how my brother died.

A
FTER HIS SON DROWNED
in California, my father did a reassessment of sorts, and saved what he could, offering me a position at the
Tribune
, working as his assistant against the day I would take over his paper.

I turned down that offer and stayed in Miami, becoming a rewrite man on the night desk. And there were times then—usually a calamity—when the phone was ringing every five minutes and I was turning two dozen frantic calls into a single story, when I would lose myself in it for an hour or two, and find a certain peace in the confusion and excitement.

That is as close as I have come to understanding what my brother meant when he spoke of the work making it bearable.

Y
EARS LATER
, my father’s kidneys failed, and I went back to Moat County and took over his newspaper, replacing his wife on the board of directors. She stays home now, ordering new furniture; a machine cleans his blood.

My father is old—he turned old understanding his son was not coming back from the West Coast—but he holds on to what he can, his stories. He tells them after dinner, mostly to himself, and to the nurses at the medical center while he is hooked up to the kidney machine; Ralph McGill rides again. The stories span three decades but stop in 1969; my brother’s name is never mentioned.

It is not old age, but a lifetime habit; he believes that refusing to look at it will keep him whole.

My father still comes to the office in the afternoons to attend the daily news meetings, sitting quietly at the head of the table while his editors argue the placement of the articles which will appear in tomorrow’s paper.

He listens a minute or two, then wanders, his gaze moving out the window overlooking his newsroom. He takes a knife from his pocket, and moves the blade in a circular motion over the arm of his chair, as if he were sharpening it.

Sometimes he calls me Ward.

There are no intact men.

February 8, 1994
Whidbey Island