The Paperboy (2 page)

It did not come to me until I was older that he might have just crawled—not knowing where, only wanting to be some other place.

Regardless of the manner in which Sheriff Call made his last four hundred yards, it is fair to say that with the exception of the war itself, no event in the county’s history ever carried a more pivotal message to its citizens than his death, and not knowing how else to express the loss this message carried—not the loss of Thurmond Call, but of something more fundamental that people had felt themselves losing all along—a statue of the sheriff was commissioned to stand in the Lately town square. It is there today, celebrating the fracture in history that the passing of the sheriff represents.

On Halloween, a scar sometimes appears on the likeness, running from the stomach to the groin. This reminder of Sheriff Call’s reward is routinely laid to juvenile delinquents, but there is a lack of embellishment in the gesture that suggests a colder purpose than vandalism.

T
HE MAN SHERIFF CALL
stomped to death in Lately was a former Chrysler/Plymouth salesman at Duncan Brothers Motors named Jerome Van Wetter, who was discharged finally not for being a drunk—which he was, but drunks, in fact, are not always bad salesmen; someone has to sell cars to other drunks—but because, even after he had been at the dealership many years and was as familiar a showroom fixture to loyal Plymouth buyers as the new models themselves, something in his deportment frightened customers off. He could not overcome it with clothes or talk of the state champion Little League team or his smile. The smile, in fact, only made things worse. I know this, having once been left alone with that smile and the new line of Plymouths while my father and Mr. Duncan went into the office to close a deal on a Chrysler.

The indistinct malevolence which Jerome Van Wetter carried hung off him at unexpected angles in much the way his suits hung on his bones, but gathered to its purpose in his eyes.

There was a predatory aspect to the way they fell on you, expecting something, waiting, a tiny interest finally stirring, like a slow smile, as he found the little places inside you where he did not belong.

He seemed to understand the effect he had on customers, and wore sunglasses indoors.

I
REFER TO JEROME VAN WETTER
as a former car salesman not to underscore his eventual failure in the car business but because to my knowledge his employment at Duncan Motors was the only job he ever held, at least the only one that did not involve poaching. Even so, this venture into the mainstream of the Moat County business life eclipsed all the
known social and professional accomplishments of all the other Van Wetters combined, past and present.

It was a family which kept itself apart, living on the edge of civilization, compared frequently in the Lately area, where most of them were, to the bears, which had finally lost all fear of humans and had to be killed because of it. But even the tamest of the Van Wetters was not tame in a way that would make you comfortable sitting beneath his pale blue eyes in a new Plymouth Fury, one foot resting on the paper protecting the car’s carpet, the other still on the showroom floor, smelling both the new upholstery and the sweet, metastasized alcohol coming through his skin.

And because of that, in the end, Mr. Duncan let Jerome Van Wetter go, and in the resulting bout of drunkenness he was arrested and then stomped to death by Sheriff Call.

And it surprised no one when, a week after Sheriff Call was himself killed, Jerome’s cousin once or twice removed, Hillary Van Wetter, was arrested for the crime. It was a known fact that the Van Wetters took care of their own.

By general agreement, Hillary Van Wetter was the most unpredictable and ferocious member of the whole Van Wetter family, a ranking that had come to him several years before when he had, in fact, attacked another policeman with a knife, cutting off the man’s thumb in a dispute over a dragging muffler. That case, however, had never gone to trial. Half thumbless, the policeman yearned for his home in Texas, and once there, refused to return to Florida to testify.

And so seven days after Sheriff Call was found on the highway, county deputies raided Hillary Van Wetter’s cabin in the dense wetlands just north of Lately, killing several of his dogs, and found a bloodstained knife in the kitchen sink. A bloody shirt was discovered in the washing tub, and Hillary Van Wetter—who was drunk and happy in the bathtub
at the time the deputies arrived—was arrested for the murder, and within five months was tried and convicted in county court and sentenced to die in “Old Sparky” at the Florida State Prison in Starke. This in spite of being defended by the most expensive attorney in Moat County.

No one ever knew where the money came from for the lawyer.

My father’s paper covered the trial and the appeals, of course—there were reporters in Moat County that fall from every paper of any size in the state, along with reporters from places like Atlanta, Mobile, New York, and New Orleans—but while the
Tribune
had, for as long as my father owned it, always employed a local death sentence to rail editorially against capital punishment, the paper was strangely quiet after Hillary Van Wetter’s trial.

“People know where I stand,” was as much as my father would ever say. And that was true. He had defied public opinion for as long as he had been in northern Florida—in 1965, the
Tribune
was the only liberal newspaper in any rural area in the state—but he had gone about it with a wink. The paper was liberal, but in a hopeless and harmless way that was designed not to offend, a posture which would not accommodate asking for mercy for the murderer of Thurmond Call.

O
N A COLD WINTER MORNING
four years later, early in 1969—in the same year my brother would blossom as a journalist—I lost my swimming scholarship at the University of Florida. A few weeks afterward, I was expelled for an act of vandalism.

Specifically, I drank a small bottle of vodka and drained the swimming pool, which, while childish, is more complicated work than it may seem from the outside. I don’t want
to get into the mechanics of it now, but let me assure you that you don’t just pull the plug.

I returned home, ashamed, and went to work at my father’s newspaper, the
Moat County Tribune
, driving a delivery truck.

My father never asked what had happened to me in Gainesville, or if I intended to go back, but it was clear that he meant for me to drive the truck until I saw it was this life’s one alternative to a college education.

He was not formally educated himself, and often spoke of the fact as if it were something lost. “Lord, I would have loved to study literature,” he would say, as if he needed permission from a college to read books.

All that winter and spring I drove the north route for the
Tribune
, traveling 325 miles over the narrow, mostly shoulderless two-lane roads of northern Moat County. I loaded the truck in the dark, passing the sign marking Thorn’s city limits by three-thirty in the morning.

Each morning at nine o’clock, if the truck didn’t break down and the press runs were on time, I came to the clearing where Sheriff Call’s car had been found. The spot was partially hidden from the road—a baked, treeless circle cut into a stand of pines, a picnic table and two outdoor toilets no more than twenty feet apart, the men’s to the east, the ladies’ to the west. A marker indicated the spot where the first school in the state had once stood, and a hand-painted sign attached to one of the privies showed a Confederate flag and a hand unconnected to any arm, and across these images the legend
MOAT COUNTY EXTENDS A WELCOME HAND TO YANKEES!

Fifteen miles down the road was my last stop of the day—ten papers that I was required to place facedown on a makeshift wooden table just behind the gum ball machines inside a sun-faded country store run by an indeterminate number
of members of the Van Wetter family, who did not want their patrons met with bad news as they came in the door.

What specific blood connection these Van Wetters had to the man Sheriff Call stomped to death, I do not know. The Van Wetters occupied half a column of the Moat County telephone book and their children rarely married outside the family. Calculating the collateral relations was beyond me, even if the Van Wetters had been inclined to discuss their family tree, which they were not.

I can only tell you that some mornings an old man was there, blind and freshly angry, as if the blindness had come over him in the night. He would make his way to the papers I had brought and count them, moving the folded edges up into the palm of his hand with his fingers, as if he were tickling them, his face scowling up into the window like a sour plant growing to light. And some mornings it was his wife.

Other times there was a young, pregnant woman with the most beautiful skin I had ever seen, whose children would run through a curtain and into the back when I came into the store.

This woman never looked up, but a moment after the children had disappeared, a man whose face had been burned—whose skin creased at his eye like a badly ironed shirt—would emerge from the curtain and stand a foot inside the room, his hands at his sides, watching until I had stacked the papers and left.

Once, when I had forgotten to collect for the week, I went back into the store and found him still standing where I’d left him, staring at her as she straightened boxes of candy bars in the case under the counter.

She looked at me then, for an instant, and it was as if I’d brought some bad news beyond what was in my newspapers.
It was possible, I think, that anytime the door opened it was bad news for her.

I never heard her speak to the man with the burned face, and I never heard him speak to her. I assumed they were man and wife.

I
WOULD FINISH THE ROUTE
before ten, park the truck, walk the six blocks home, and fall into bed with a beer and a copy of the newspaper I had been delivering all morning. Early in the afternoon, I would slip away from the stories in the paper into a jumpy sleep, full of dreams, waking up a few hours later in this, the same room where I had slept all the nights of my childhood, not knowing where I was.