The Paperboy (25 page)

Yardley was laughing again; feeding off her.

“I’ll tell you something else,” she said, “I’d feel sorry for your fiancée, but I think you deserve each other.”

W
E HAD TO GO BACK
into the wetlands. Yardley did not want to come along, and pretended he’d hurt his ankle. “I can write it without going out there,” he said, but my brother shook his head.

“You better come,” he said.

“I sprained my ankle.”

“You need to see it,” Ward said, and in the end Yardley gave in, his limp becoming more exaggerated as we got to the marina where we rented the boat. Even Ward did not want to try walking back in.

We followed the west bank of the river, moving slowly, looking for the television antenna in the tree line. The boat was powered by a small outboard which coughed and stopped at low speeds, and I sat at the throttle nursing the choke to keep it going. There was something in the quiet when the engine quit that none of us liked.

Yardley Acheman was in front, holding on to the sides with both hands. My brother sat in the middle, studying the shoreline. World War had taken us fishing on this part of the river when we were young, pointing out the cabins in the trees and recalling the stories he knew of the people who lived in them, the Van Wetters, who in his stories were pioneers. And those stories, along with the color of the water and the smell of the air and the vegetation along the bank, were married in me to the sight of a river bass slapping the bottom of the boat, sometimes leaving its blood on our legs.

And to the sight of a dozen bass a foot or two under water, hanging from a single piece of nylon cord hung over the side, some of them still alive, their white bellies glowing through the brown water.

My father did not make fishermen of his sons, and by the time I was ten or eleven, he had stopped trying.

It seemed to me that we had come too far down the river.

“We must have missed it,” I said, and began a slow circle back into the current.

“A little farther,” Ward said.

I said we were too far south.

“Keep on a little farther,” he said, and looked at his watch. I did not like to be told where to steer the boat, but Ward had a good compass in his head, and mine always told me to circle.

Still, it seemed to me that matters of the water, and driving, were my area.

Yardley Acheman turned around without letting go of the sides. “We’re lost, right?”

Ward didn’t answer him.

I steered in closer to the shoreline and the boat moved in the shadows of the trees growing out of the water. Some of the branches were so low I could have touched them without standing up. The last time my father took me fishing, a moccasin dropped out of one of those branches onto the floor of the boat, and he grabbed it by the tail while I was still realizing what it was, and tossed it into the air. The snake straightened to its full length, wheeling through the sky, and my father stood in the rocking boat, watching it, gradually smiling as he realized what he had done.

“Don’t tell your mother,” he said, but it was the first thing out of his mouth when he saw her at home.

W
E SAW THE CHICKEN
before we saw the antenna. It was tethered by one leg to a stake not far from the water’s edge, left there as bait. The other chickens kept their distance. I took us in to the shore and lifted the engine out of the water a moment before we landed. I got out and pulled our boat next to the one already in the yard. Yardley waited until I’d
stopped to get out, holding on to the sides until both his feet were down on solid ground.

My brother walked ahead, around to the front of the place, carrying a picnic cooler. He set the cooler on the porch and knocked on the door. “Mr. Van Wetter?”

The door opened before he could knock again, and the young man who had been there before stood in the doorway, looking at us. First my brother, then me, then Yardley Acheman. He spent longer on Yardley than either of us.

“Is your father in?” Ward said.

The man in the door moved to one side and the old man appeared, naked below the waist. “Y’all brought reenforcements,” he said, looking at Yardley. Yardley would not meet his eyes. He looked around the yard instead and found himself staring at the alligator skins drying on the clothes line.

“This is my associate Yardley Acheman,” my brother said. “He is also with the newspaper.”

The old man stepped out onto the porch. His balls hung like an old dog’s. My brother took off the top of the cooler.

“He’s pretty, ain’t he?” the old man said.

“Ice cream,” Ward said, and the old man looked inside and then cocked his head as if to reconsider us, “strawberry and vanilla.”

“You want what you want, don’t you?” the old man said.

“Yessir,” my brother said. He took out one of the cartons and handed it to the old man, then took out the other and offered it to the man still standing in the door. When he didn’t take it, Ward set it back in the cooler. The old man opened the carton and looked at the ice cream.

“Go get us some spoons,” he said.

The man leaned back into the house and shouted, “Hattie, get some clothes on and bring us spoons,” and then resumed his posture in the door.

“My associate talked to a man down in Ormond Beach,” my brother said.

The younger man reconsidered the strawberry when the woman came out with the spoons, ate most of it and then passed the dripping container on to her. She did not speak once.

The old man was eating the vanilla, sitting on the ground, still naked below the waist. “That so?” he said.

“Yessir,” my brother said. “He recognized a picture of Hillary, had it written down in his books when he bought the sod from him.”

The old man nodded and stuck his spoon into the ice cream. “That was convenient,” he said.

The woman’s chin was sticky with ice cream, and there were specks of dirt in it. She wiped at her mouth with the back of her wrist.

“He said there were two of you,” my brother said.

“You didn’t show him no picture of me, did you?”

“I don’t have a picture of you.”

“That’s right,” the old man said. “That’s right.”

“But it was you, wasn’t it?” Ward said.

The old man smiled, not unkindly. “You want what you want, I’ll say that.” Then he looked up at Yardley, who was sitting on the step holding his ankle. “You hurt yourself on my property?” he said.

Yardley Acheman shook his head no. “It was before,” he said.

“Good,” the old man said. “You ain’t going to get a lawyer and change your mind.…”

“It isn’t that bad,” Yardley said.

“I didn’t think so,” the old man said.

“You were with Hillary?” my brother asked.

“Hillary’s in prison,” the old man said.

“Not for that,” Ward said. “He’s there for murder. If
Thurmond Call was killed the night you two were in Ormond Beach stealing sod off the golf course …”

The woman brushed the hair back off her face and glanced quickly at her husband, then at the old man. I wondered if she belonged to them both.

“Let me ask you something,” the old man said. “You in prison, how much difference does it make what you’re in there for?”

“The statute of limitations …”

“You told me about your statues,” the old man said.

“What about this man that owns the golf course?”

My brother smiled at the question, as if he were relieved. “He was insured. You can’t have a golf course without insurance. It’s a long time ago, and he can’t do anything about it anyway.”

“He could come looking for me,” the old man said. He glanced quickly at his son. “He could come looking for my family.”

“It’s a lot of years,” Ward said. “He wouldn’t do that.”

“I would,” the old man said.

The woman set the carton of strawberry on the ground. The old man took one last spoonful of the vanilla and handed her that carton too.

“It’s your nephew’s life,” my brother said. “If we’re going to do something, we have to do it.”

“You push too hard,” the old man said, not accusing him, just an observation.

“I don’t know any other way to act.” Ward said, and the apology in those words was not lost on the old man. He looked at Ward and smiled.

“We’re all born a certain way, aren’t we?”

The other man moved forward a little, blocking his wife from Yardley’s view, and bore into him with his eyes. Yardley
rolled down his sock to inspect his ankle. The old man leaned back and laced his fingers over his stomach.

“You don’t talk,” he said to me. “I can’t decide out how you ended up with these two.”

“We’re brothers,” I said, indicating Ward. Making sure he knew which one I meant.

The old man smiled at that and addressed Ward again. “They’s always family hiding somewhere in the shadows, isn’t there?”

Ward did not answer.

“I was with him,” the old man said suddenly. “Dropped him off at home, the next time I went over there, he was in county jail for cutting open Sheriff Call.”

It was quiet again, and then Ward said, “Thank you.” He thought a moment and said, “What time would you—”

The old man interrupted him. “I’ve said as much about it as I’m going to,” he said. “This is as far as I go.”

He meant it, and there was nothing more to say. We stood up; the old man stood up with us. The other man sat where he was, glaring at Yardley Acheman.

“He didn’t hurt himself that night, did he?” Ward said.

The old man closed his eyes, trying to remember. “Not that I remember,” he said. “I sliced a toe half off, myself, trying to work in the dark.”

“It bled?”

The old man looked at Ward as if he didn’t understand the question. “Shit yes, it bled,” he said. “We’re mammals.”

“You go to a hospital?”

The old man began to nod. “Just go in, the middle of the night, covered with dirt and tell them I cut myself in my sleep.…”

W
E PUT YARDLEY ACHEMAN
back in the boat—he sat down facing the motor—and then pushed it into the water and got in ourselves. The woman came into my line of sight then, standing at the edge of the house for a second or two, the tip of her finger in her mouth, as if she did not want to let go of the taste of ice cream, and then there was a sound in the house, a squalling, and she looked that way and was gone. She had round shoulders and clear skin, and I wondered what she would have looked like in another place. I pulled the starter cord and the engine caught, sputtered, and then smoothed as I corrected the choke.

“Thank you,” my brother said again.

The old man nodded and his son came to the edge of the water and stood next to him. Yardley sat backwards in the boat, clutching the sides, nervous even before we pushed it off into the water.

The old man smiled at him and said, “Hold on to that boat now.”