The Paperboy (7 page)

He drank beer after beer, long after my father had excused himself and gone to bed, and smelled of it the next morning on the way to Lately. I had borrowed one of my father’s delivery trucks, and it was a slow drive. A road crew was repaving a four-mile section of highway just outside Thorn, and from time to time, Yardley Acheman looked out the window and glimpsed something of the place—the wide, brown river or an old trailer park hidden in the pines or a small colony of shacks where citrus farmers kept Jamaicans during the harvesting season.

“Jesus Christ,” he said. “Je-sus Christ.”

He turned on the radio, punched in the stations, one after another, then turned the radio off. He put his feet on the dashboard.

“Je-sus Christ.”

Ward sat between us, his feet straddling the gearshift, and he was staring at the countryside too. It would not have been impossible, judging his expression, for my brother to have been thinking
Jesus Christ
himself. He hadn’t been home in a long time, and it was different to him now.

M
Y BROTHER AND
Yardley Acheman took two rooms at the Prescott Hotel in Lately and paid in advance for the month. Mrs. Prescott, who had run the place alone since her husband died unexpectedly the previous summer, stood still and smiled politely as Yardley signed in—without being offered
the register—and then she studied the signature a long time, as if there was something in it that might have informed her whether or not to take a chance on the young men who had just come in the door.

“Is there a problem?” Yardley said, too loud for the room.

She was startled, and looked up from her register, smiled, and then shook her head. “Only the two of you are staying,” she said, looking quickly at me.

“Only the two of us,” my brother said.

She nodded, and stared again at the signature. “My husband always checked our guests in.…”

“Is there a problem?” Yardley said again. “If there’s a problem, lady, we can go somewhere else.”

“No,” she said, taking the credit card that he’d dropped on the desk, “it’s just that my husband always checked in the guests. I’m not used to where things are yet.…”

Yardley Acheman stared at the woman while she looked for the American Express machine and then ran his credit card through it twice—putting it in upside down the first time. Her fingers shook under his gaze.

She gave them two rooms on the second floor, sharing a bath. The rooms smelled damp, and the linoleum floor in the bath was warped near the tub and had began to curl where it met the wall. There was a window above the radiator which was sealed with paint and would not open even when Yardley Acheman climbed up on the radiator for leverage to force it.

“We’ll get her to fix this,” he said to no one in particular. Ward and I looked at each other a moment, and then Ward turned and walked into his room.

There was an ancient brass bed against the far wall in there, above it a copy of the Lord’s Prayer hung in a frame. The paint all around the Lord’s Prayer had blistered and
peeled and broken, as if the battle for good and evil had been fought on that spot.

A floor fan sat in a corner opposite the door, and a smaller fan sat on the bureau.

Ward opened his suitcase, then the drawers in the bureau. He studied them a moment, then went back into the bathroom and wet a towel. Yardley Acheman was still kneeling on the radiator, pounding on the window now, trying to get it to open. The noise carried everywhere in the house, something I realized a moment before Mrs. Prescott appeared, flushed and slightly out of breath, and knocked carefully on the open door behind us.

“Is everything all right?” she said.

Yardley Acheman stopped pounding and turned to her, still holding on to the window frame, and stared until she retreated a step and was back out in the hall.

“He was trying to open the window,” my brother said.

“I’m afraid that window doesn’t open,” she said, so quietly we could hardly make out the words. “The windows in your room open.”

Yardley Acheman slowly climbed down, the ridges of the radiator impressed into the knees of his pants.

“It’s a window,” he said, “it’ll open.”

She smiled, looking at nobody in the room, and shook her head. “It never has,” she said, and then she was gone.

My brother went back into his room and cleaned the drawers with the towel, coming back into the bathroom twice to rinse out the dirt. Yardley Acheman left the window and followed him in, sitting on the bed, watching him work.

“She’s supposed to do that,” he said. “I don’t care where the hotel is, you aren’t supposed to clean up the room before you can use it. That’s the whole idea of hotels.…”

Yardley Acheman hadn’t opened the drawers in his own room. His things were still in two large, expensive, leather
suitcases, dropped in the middle of the floor. He had set his typewriter on an unreliable-looking table near the window, which was covered by a sun-bleached shade. Filtered through the shade, the light outside turned the room yellow.

My brother finished cleaning the drawers, then placed his clothes in them carefully, organizing areas of socks and underwear and shirts in exactly the way we had been taught to at home by our mother. He closed the drawers slowly, not to disturb his things from the places he had left them, then put his suitcases in the closet.

Yardley Acheman watched all this from the bed. “You know, Jack,” he said, more to Ward than to me, “there’s a rumor going around that your brother’s compulsive.”

He was the sort of person who was comfortable offering a good-natured insult if there was someone else there to help absorb the reaction. He was also the sort of person who was comfortable with the fashionable psychological syndromes of the day, which he read about in the life-style sections of news magazines.

My brother looked at him, realizing the remark was intended as a joke, and slowly smiled. An unnatural smile, as if he had to stop a moment and remember the mechanics of how one was made.

On the way out, we passed the little apartment downstairs where Mrs. Prescott lived. The door was open, and she was sitting inside, wishing she’d never let us in.

L
ATER THAT DAY
, my brother and Yardley Acheman set up an office in a large second-story room over the Moat Cafe, at the east end of town. At some time in the recent past an effort had been made to change the appearance of the roof
of the building to resemble a castle’s, an attraction for tourists who came through on their way to and from the great beaches to the south. This remodeling was commissioned in spite of the fact that the café and the street and the county itself had nothing to do with castles but were all named for Luther Moat, a slave trader who had once owned the land which the town occupies.

The transformation of the Moat Cafe into a castle was abandoned perhaps halfway through, and the single finished area—a tower whose roofline resembled a dunce cap—had created a small room upstairs which the building’s owner had rented to the
Miami Times
over the telephone for thirty dollars a month. The place smelled of cooked onions for as long as we were there.

My brother and Yardley Acheman brought in two heavy wooden desks purchased from the Moat County School Board and scarred with initials in a hundred places, two wooden chairs whose casters fell off whenever they were moved, a small refrigerator, and a leather davenport. All of it fit into perhaps one fourth of the truck, and had slid from the spot near the door where they’d left it (you cannot tell reporters how to load a truck; the way they look at it, if truck loaders are so damn smart, why aren’t they reporters themselves?) all the way to the back, where the load had slammed into the wall, making a noise that was comparable to backing the truck into the loading station, something I had done on my first day of work at the
Tribune
.

They carried the stuff upstairs themselves, scuffing their knuckles as they negotiated the turn at the landing, taking paint off the walls as they went up. Knocking the top off an ornamental post which anchored the banister. Yardley swearing all the way.

I was a spectator for this show—the bottom half of it,
anyway—as I stayed with the truck, which was parked in front of the cafe’s door.

Neither Yardley Acheman nor my brother had done any physical work in his adult life, and they would arrive at the narrow door carrying the couch, for instance, before they saw they couldn’t bring it in sideways. I would have helped, but the truck was parked in a loading zone—to my certain knowledge the only loading zone in Lately—and my brother wanted me to stay with it in case someone needed to get in and load.

Onions, I suppose.

He did not want to alienate the café owners or the police or the general population, as much of what he would do in Lately hinged on how he and Yardley Acheman were received.

Growing up in the county, my brother understood that anything foreign, even something harmless or barely noticeable—which he and Yardley Acheman were not—became an irritant on touch. Coming up from the south end of the county counted for nothing.

You were local or you weren’t.

C
HARLOTTE BLESS ARRIVED
in Lately as my brother and Yardley Acheman were negotiating the second desk up the staircase. I had been sitting in the loading zone watching for deliveries so long that a panting retriever of some kind had dropped into the shade of the truck to lie down.

She came in a rusted-out Volkswagen van with Louisiana license plates. The van had recently received a coat of house paint, and appeared from the east, catching my attention from a quarter mile away as the sun reflected off the flat glass windshield as she crossed the railroad tracks.

A block away, she slipped into the left side of the street and then slowed and finally parked, our faces no more than five feet apart when she stopped. Her side of the windshield was tinted blue. She stayed there a moment, staring at me until I looked away, and then climbed out. She wore jeans and a work shirt tucked into a tight belt, and as she left the truck she smoothed the shirt over her stomach and breasts and tossed her head in a way that evened the fall of her hair across her back.

She passed in front of my windshield without looking at me again, and then was out of view. A moment later she was back, her face just below my elbow, which was resting in the open window.

“Is that your dog?” she said.

The current shot through me six directions at once. I hadn’t heard her return, and after one long, parting look at the rise of her bottom as it moved out of sight, I’d closed my eyes, trying to hold on to the picture of it as long as I could. The dog was standing next to her, looking up with his mouth open and his tail wagging, as if he expected something good was about to drop out of her pocket.

“No, ma’am,” I said. I looked at him and then back at her. This close, she was perhaps twenty years older than she’d looked climbing out of her Volkswagen. Her skin was harder, and creased where it disappeared into her collar. I took heart from these imperfections, imagining that they made me more suitable. I had no idea who she was.