The Paperboy (26 page)

T
HE RIDE BACK TO
the marina was faster than the ride down had been, partly because we weren’t looking for the house in the trees along the bank, and partly because the river itself runs north, from the middle of the state to Jacksonville, where it empties into the ocean.

The engine was less erratic at the higher speed and the nose of the boat bounced against the plane of the river. There was a certain pleasure in holding the stick and in the smell of the engine and the feel of the water passing beneath my feet. Ward sat in front again, thinking about what the old man had said, in some way not satisfied with it, and Yardley held himself still, his eyes closed against nausea.

At the marina, he leaned over the side and vomited. My
brother hardly seemed to notice. “The man in Ormond Beach,” he said when Yardley had finished, “did he show you his records?”

Yardley nodded, as if he knew what Ward was asking, as if the question had been asked a hundred times before. “They were right there on his desk,” he said.

“And he was sure about the date.”

“He was sure about the date.”

We left the boat and started back to the car; I could still feel the lift and fall of the water.

“He was absolutely sure,” Yardley said again, as if saying it would make it so.

Neither of them spoke again until we were back in the car and pointed toward Lately. “Did you give him the date, or did he give it to you?” Ward said.

Yardley came up in his seat to get a closer look at my brother. “What’s wrong with you?” he said.

Ward spoke more slowly. “Did you say to the man, ‘Was it August fourteenth, nineteen sixty-five,’ or did he look in his books and say the date to you?”

“What difference does it make?”

“It doesn’t feel right,” my brother said.

“Look,” Yardley said, “I’ve been doing this a long time, and I know when something doesn’t feel right as well as you do.”

“Y
OU KNOW THE TROUBLE
with you?” Yardley Acheman said.

We were back in the office and Ward was going over some of the notes he’d made in the car after one of the early visits to Starke. He was missing some scrap paper, a word or two on it that he couldn’t remember.

Yardley was impatient to finish the story and get back to
Miami. “You don’t understand that you have to let go of it to get it done,” he said.

My brother found the paper and set it carefully on his desk, uninterested in it now that it wasn’t missing.

T
HAT DAY OR PERHAPS
the next, Yardley Acheman called an editor in Miami and reported that he was ready to write the story, but Ward would not let it go.

I am not sure how Yardley Acheman presented the situation—he did not make the call from the office, at least not while my brother and I were there—but at the end of the week a man with a beard and eyeglasses half an inch thick appeared in our doorway, knocked once, and walked in.

My brother was sitting at his desk, going over the early court proceedings again, and Yardley was on the phone with his fiancee back in Miami. My brother stood up when he saw the man with the beard, and in doing that knocked over a bottle of Dr Pepper, spilling some of it on the papers. He opened one of his drawers and found the shirt I’d borrowed from Yardley, which he’d subsequently refused to touch, and used it to blot the mess.

The editor—he was the Sunday editor, that was his title—was smiling, looking around, admiring the ambience. He went to the window and had a long stare at Lately while, on the other side of the room, Yardley Acheman was finishing up with his intended.

“Right,” he said, “I got to go. Right. Not now … tonight, I’ll call tonight. Yeah, me too, right … ”

“What’s that smell, onions?” the man from Miami said.

He was older than Yardley Acheman, perhaps forty or fifty.

He looked like he hadn’t been out of his office in a long time.

“There’s a grease shop downstairs,” Yardley said. “The whole street smells like onions.” He smelled his own arm. “It gets in your skin,” he said.

The man from Miami opened his eyes wide at the news, as if he had never heard of such a thing, then looked over to my brother. “How are we coming?” he said.

“We’re getting there,” Ward said. He had finished blotting the papers and was sitting in his chair again, not trying to do any work.

The man from Miami sat down on the chair against the wall. He looked at me a moment, not knowing what I was doing there.

“How much longer do you think it might be?”

“Not too long,” Ward said. “There’s some things here I’m not satisfied with.…”

“You think a couple of days, a week?” he said.

“Until what?” Ward said.

“Till Yardley can start writing.” He smiled, but there was an edge to it too.

My brother looked at Yardley Acheman, Yardley would not meet his eyes. “It’s hard to put a time on it,” Ward said.

“What’s left to do?”

My brother shook his head.

“It sounds to me like you’re ready now and just don’t know it.” The man from Miami paused and then he said, “I was the same way. I never wanted to let go of a story; I suppose that’s how you end up in an office.” He smiled at that, as if his own shortcomings amused him.

“I’m not comfortable yet,” Ward said.

“I appreciate that,” said the man from Miami. “It means you’re a good reporter, it means you’re cautious. But from
what Yardley’s told me, it looks like things have turned up as black-and-white as you ever find them.”

“I don’t know,” Ward said.

“I know you don’t,” said the man from Miami. “But the thing is, you could stay here the rest of your life and still never be sure of every little detail. That isn’t our job. Our job is to get as much of it right as we can, and get it in the newspaper.”

Ward didn’t say a thing.

“You’re too valuable to be sitting out here in the middle of nowhere,” he said. “There’s other stories to write.”

“I don’t think this one’s finished,” Ward said.

“Yardley’s satisfied,” he said. Yardley Acheman nodded from behind his desk. “He’s the one who’s got to write it.”

The air was suddenly heavy with the smell of onions. Things had been decided outside this room, away from my brother, and there was nothing he could do about it. He rubbed his eyes as if he had not slept in a long time and then looked at me. He seemed to be asking for help. I did not know how to help him, I did not even know how to start.

“It isn’t finished,” he said again.

“It’s going to take Yardley a while to write,” the man said. His voice was reasonable and friendly. “You do what you need to do and he’ll do what he needs to do, and one way or another, we’ll get this thing in the paper.”

And my brother didn’t say anything more to the man from Miami, even when he told a story about the days when he was a reporter himself and how he had gotten so close to a story that he finally couldn’t write it.

“That story,” he said quietly, “won me the Pulitzer Prize.”

The prize was the proof that he was right about my brother’s story, and about anything else that came up, and he allowed a few seconds for the weight of his accomplishment
to sink in. Then he said, “And if it wasn’t for an editor kicking my ass to put it on paper, I’d probably still be sitting at my desk at the Broward County bureau of the
Miami Times
, trying to get it written.”

The man patted Ward on the shoulder when he left, and then three of us were alone in the room.

“I just thought we needed a fresh perspective,” Yardley Acheman said. “I didn’t know he was going to come up here and start telling us what to do.”

Ward nodded and stood up. He collected all the notes on his desk, all the transcripts and depositions, and walked across the room to Yardley Acheman and dropped them in front of him. He looked back at me a moment—I didn’t know if he wanted me to come with him or leave him alone—and then walked out the door.

I stood up to follow him, and Yardley Acheman said something to me, thinking I would repeat it to Ward. “It had to be done,” he said.

It occurred to me then that I had been in Lately too long. I had spent too much time staring at the people who lived here and too much time staring at Hillary Van Wetter in the visitors’ room at Starke, and too much time staring at Charlotte Bless.

When I stared at something long enough, the lines blurred and I could no longer see it for what it was. One thing became another.

M
Y FATHER WAS RELIEVED
at the news that Yardley Acheman was finally writing the story.

“So now it’s time for Mr. Acheman to go to work,” were the words he said, but my father didn’t care if Yardley
Acheman worked or not. He was satisfied that my brother had finished poking through Moat County.

“They’ll be going back to Miami to write it,” he said, asking me the question.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“There’s no reason to stay up here,” he said.

We were eating fried chicken and boiled potatoes, and he was into his second bottle of wine. My father watched me, his lips against the rim of the glass, waiting for me to agree with him, as if my agreement would make it so.

I found myself thinking of an afternoon not long after my mother left, my father walking into the kitchen while Anita Chester was boiling potatoes for dinner. He’d drunk three bottles of red wine, a glass at a time, and he put a fork into the boiling water, pulled out a whole, soft potato, and stuck it that way—whole—into his mouth.

He reeled backwards across the kitchen, reaching into his mouth, trying to take it out, falling across the table first and then through the screen door into the backyard.

Anita Chester followed him out, carrying a spatula, and stood over him in the yard. Unable to get the potato out, he finally chewed and swallowed it. “Mr. Ward,” she said, “have you lost your mind?”

He looked up at her through tearing eyes, beginning to cough, and nodded that he had. She stared a moment longer and then turned and walked back into the house, as if rich white men confessed to her all the time.

I looked at him now and thought of him on his back in the yard. “Unless I miss my guess, Mr. Acheman isn’t going to want to stay in Lately one hour longer than he has to,” he said.

And that was true, but it was also true that he would stay in Lately if Ward did. He could not write a story without someone there to lead him through the parts that could be
checked. He had no interest in facts. It was a shortcoming for a newspaperman, I suppose, but he never saw it himself.

To see certain things, you have to be lying on your back with tears in your eyes and a scalding potato in your mouth.

It’s possible, I think, that you have to be hurt to see anything at all.

“Ward wants to satisfy himself about some things before he leaves,” I said.

“I thought the story was ready to write.”

My father refilled his glass. “It’s ready to go or it isn’t,” he said.

I had not told him about the argument between Ward and Yardley Acheman, or about the visit from the Sunday editor from Miami. It seemed to me it was something Ward ought to tell him himself if he wanted him to know.