The Paperboy (11 page)

The old man sat still, his throat working. “There’s nothing wrong with the defense Hillary Van Wetter got in court,” he said.

“You’ve got nothing to worry about from us,” Yardley Acheman said, his tone friendlier now. “We just want to talk to him.”

“I took that case pro bono,” the old man said. “I didn’t make a cent off that man.”

It was quiet again. “We are, of course, aware of your fine record of commitment to the public interest,” Yardley Acheman said.

Charlotte opened her purse and found a cigarette. The old man watched her light it.

“You sent me your picture,” he said.

She nodded and drew the smoke deep into her chest.

“I’m his fiancée,” she said.

“I think you’re wasting your time,” he said a moment later, but he was looking at the family album again and it wasn’t clear which of us he was talking to.

“We have time,” Yardley Acheman said.

The old man arranged for the meeting with Hillary Van Wetter, but would not be talked into coming along to straighten out any problems we might have getting into the prison.

“I have no desire to see Mr. Van Wetter again in this lifetime,” he said formally.

“You’re his attorney,” Yardley Acheman said. We were back in the little office again, where Weldon Pine kept his files.

“Yessir, I am,” he said, “and in that regard I will continue to defend Mr. Van Wetter’s legal rights, but I have no interest in another personal encounter.” He put a scalding look on us all and said, “That man has took as much of me as I intend to give him.”

O
N THE MORNING
she would first meet her fiancé in person, Charlotte came out of the apartment she had leased in a yellow dress. My brother and Yardley Acheman and I were sitting in the rented car outside, waiting. She was fifteen minutes late, and none of us had seen her in a dress before. She wore white shoes with modest heels, and she had spent some time that morning in front of a mirror.

From the distance of the curb, she could have been as young as she looked in her picture.

“Well, look at this,” Yardley Acheman said. My brother looked, but said nothing. She walked from the door of her apartment to the curb in a natural way, as if she wore dresses
and white shoes with heels every day of her life. She got into the car carefully, lifting her legs well over the bottom of the door, not wanting to run her stockings.

We’d driven five miles out of Lately when she suddenly reached across the seat and turned the rearview mirror so that she could check her face. One side, then the other, smoothing the makeup into her neck. She left the mirror where she could see herself when she finished and lit a cigarette. For a long time, no one spoke. The windows were closed, not to muss her hair, and the air was dense with the smell of her perfume and her shampoo.

I was afraid Yardley Acheman would try to say something humorous, but he didn’t. He sat in the backseat with his hands folded in his lap, looking at her, then out the window, then glancing at her again, as if it were something he couldn’t stop.

She didn’t notice his attention; she barely noticed the prison. It seemed to startle her when I turned back into the gravel road where she and I had been before and rolled down my window to talk to the guard.

Yardley Acheman turned his attention to the sprawl of the prison, and the flat, empty ground surrounding it. Already working on his prose. Half a dozen prisoners were standing in ditches farther down the road, swinging sickles at the weeds. In his story, they would become thirty men.

It was the same guard at the gate, and he seemed to recognize us. He looked inside the car at Charlotte first, then into the backseat at Ward and Yardley Acheman, and then back to Charlotte.

“Straight ahead to Administration,” he said, staring at her legs.

H
ILLARY VAN WETTER WAS
brought into the room in shackles by a guard, and the smell of the prison—disinfectant—came in with him. The guard held on to a chain that encircled his waist and attached to his handcuffs, and, after locking the door he had just come through, he pointed to an empty chair that sat by itself in the middle of the room.

Hillary Van Wetter moved easily to the chair, as if the shackles and handcuffs were no inconvenience, and then allowed himself to be pushed roughly down, as if he did not feel the guard’s hands on his shoulders. As if the guard did not matter to him at all.

“Fifteen minutes,” the guard said. “No physical contact of any type, no tape recording devices, no objects of any type may be passed to the prisoner.” He paused for a moment, looking at us each in turn. “I am right outside the door.”

Hillary Van Wetter sat in his chair and waited. He nodded once at Charlotte, but did not speak. She nodded back.

“Mr. Van Wetter,” my brother said, “my name is Ward James.…”

“You look like your pitcher,” he said to her.

She smoothed her dress, a familiar gesture now, and blushed, which was not familiar at all. “Thank you, I think,” she said.

“This is Yardley Acheman,” my brother said, but Hillary Van Wetter did not look at Yardley Acheman or my brother. He stayed on Charlotte like he was feeding.

“These the paperboys?” he said to her.

She nodded, and it was as if the rest of us weren’t in the room. “And what good is they going to do us?” he said.

She looked at my brother quickly. “Save you,” she said.

He considered us then, taking his time, his eyes resting on me for as long as they did on my brother and Yardley. Then he went back to her.

“They can’t save themselves,” he said.

“They can help,” she said. Her voice was smaller than it had been.

A look of impatience passed over Yardley Acheman’s face, and he turned his head away and looked at the tiny, round window in the door; there were wires inside the glass.

“Who they saved so far?” Hillary Van Wetter said.

“They’re well known in Miami,” she said.

Hillary Van Wetter turned to Yardley, examining what it took to be well known in Miami. Something that might have passed for a smile among the Van Wetters crossed his face, and then was gone.

“So who you paperboys saved?” he said.

Yardley Acheman looked quickly at the walls and the floor and ceiling. “Who else you got?” he said.

And now Hillary Van Wetter did smile; it creased his face and pulled his lips back off his teeth until you could see the gums. “I like that,” he said.

“You been to college?” he said, looking at me now. Before I’d been expelled, there weren’t three people in this world who ever asked if I went to college, and now it was happening every ten minutes. I nodded, half an inch, not wanting to go any further into it.

It came to me suddenly that if I had been alone in the room with Hillary Van Wetter, I might have been able to explain what happened. With his criminal mentality, he could have understood it.

“And you’d be well known in Miami also,” he said.

“No,” I said, “I just drive the car.”

He nodded, as if that made sense. “The getaway driver,” he said, and he laughed. And then, a long moment later: “You ever saved anybody?”

My brother turned and looked at me now.

“I saved somebody once,” I said.

Hillary Van Wetter’s eyes rested on me, waiting, and I remembered the other Van Wetter’s eyes, who was dead now, as I sat behind the wheel of the Plymouth at Duncan Motors while my father signed the papers with Mr. Duncan.

“At Daytona Beach,” I said. “I pulled a girl out of the water.”

“He’s a swimmer,” Charlotte said, but Hillary didn’t acknowledge that. You could see it annoyed him having her talk out of turn.

“Seemed to me,” he said a little later, “if somebody is foolish enough to get themself into water they don’t know, they deserve what they get.”

And he did not expect an answer to that, and turned back to Charlotte, almost as if he had said it to her. She smiled at him, staring right into his eyes. The look caught, and then changed, and grew, until I was embarrassed to be there in the room.

My brother started to say something and then stopped; his stirring did not register in Hillary Van Wetter’s face. Hillary did one thing at a time. Now he nodded at his lap, where an erection had pitched tent in his prison pants. He looked at it, and then she looked at it too. Ward began to study his nails.

“There’s something you could do for me,” Hillary said.

She nodded. “I wish I could,” she said in a tiny voice, and then glanced at the door.

It was quiet a long time in the room, and then my brother stirred again, and this time he spoke. “Mr. Van Wetter,” he said, and the man nodded, still looking at his fiancée. “There’s some things we have to go over … about your case …”

“Shut up,” Hillary said quietly. He stared at Charlotte and she stared at him. His nostrils seemed to swell as his breathing caught and changed. “Open your mouth,” he
said to her, asking her more than telling her, and her lips came apart half an inch and her tongue wet the bottom one and then lingered just a moment in the corner.

He nodded at her, slowly at first, and then the movement of his head was more pronounced, as if he were in a hurry, and then he closed his eyes and dropped his head over the back of his chair and shook.

He sat completely still a moment, his eyes closed, his face calm and pink and damp, like a sleeping baby, and then a dark stain appeared on his trousers and grew across his lap onto his leg.

I wondered if it would be like that when they electrocuted him.

C
HARLOTTE BLESS CRIED
in the car on the way back. She sat in the front seat with me and rested her head against the open window, not caring now if the wind blew her hair. It was not a kind of crying you could hear, but the tears dripped off her nose and chin, and it shook her shoulders.

It made sense to me that she would be crying; there seemed to be things to cry about, although I couldn’t have told you what any of them were.

T
HE CASE AGAINST
Hillary Van Wetter had taken three days to try in Moat County Court, and the transcript of that trial sat in boxes along the wall of my brother’s side of the office, marked in red ink with the numbers 11-A, 11-B, 11-C, 11-D, 11-E. The pages inside the boxes had been typed with a machine that blotted out the enclosed areas of the keys e, o, r, d, and b. The s apparently had required a harder strike
than the others, and stood out on the pages like splattered mud. Whole paragraphs had been whited out and retyped, and it was impossible to make out the things that had been changed.