The Paperboy (31 page)

My brother blinked, he understood the reasons.

“Tell them to bring it down, so I can see it,” he said, meaning the story.

“I’ll tell them.”

He nodded his head. “It would be good if I could see it,” he said. And then he closed his eye and went to sleep.

I
CALLED THE NUMBER
in Lately half a dozen times; it was never answered. I called my father in Thorn and told him that Ward had been hurt. “He was walking out along the beach,” I said.

“How bad is it?” he said.

“Not too bad, but he’s going to need some teeth and a little surgery to fix his cheeks.”

It was quiet.

“Did they use weapons?”

“I don’t think so,” I said, “he was kicked.…” I paused, trying to hear the way it would sound to him. “He’s going to be all right.”

“Is he talking?”

“A little. It’s not easy, though. He’s got a mouth full of stitches.”

The line went quiet again; I could see him going into his shirt pocket for one of the tiny pills he kept there, setting it carefully under his tongue. “He’s going to be all right,” I said again.

“I could be there tonight,” he said.

I told him it would be better to wait a day or two, until Ward felt more like company.

I knew that my brother wouldn’t want to see him now. I
could not think of a way to say those words, though, and so I said only that it would be a good idea to wait until he could wash his hair to visit.

I have spent most of my life keeping the truth from my father, and I suppose he has spent most of his in the same pursuit.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
my brother worried out loud about the story Yardley Acheman was writing in Lately. I took that as a sign of recovery, and told him that Moat County would survive anything the
Miami Times
might do to it in print.

We did not talk about the other story—the one the policeman wrote in his report. I did not mention that I worried at the prospect of ever seeing Yardley and Charlotte in the same room again. She had lied for my brother once, but you could not count on her to maintain it, one day to the next.

She brought fresh-cut flowers that morning and the next, but as my brother’s condition improved she lost interest, and by the time my father finally arrived in Daytona Beach, she was planning her trip back to Lately.

“I can do more good up there,” she said.

“You’ll be in the way,” I said.

“If I am, they’ll say so. I don’t have any clean clothes here anyway.”

In the end, I agreed to take her back.

She and my father crossed paths in the hospital waiting room, Charlotte heading one way, my father heading the other. He was dressed in a suit, she was wearing the same clothes she’d had on the night Ward was beaten. I began to introduce them, but my father was diverted by a patient coming through on a stretcher and looked past her, afraid
now of what he would see when he went farther into the hospital.

“W
ELL, YOU DON’T LOOK
so bad,” he said.

It was something he had prepared himself to say no matter what condition Ward was in. In fact, the swelling had receded in some of the places Ward was hurt, but his bottom lip had become infected, and left him almost unable to speak.

My brother nodded at him, then looked at me. I did not know if he wanted me to leave or to stay. Charlotte’s flowers stood at both ends of the one chest of drawers in the room, beginning to fade, and my father pushed them aside and sat down. He did not go near the chair beside the bed.

“I tried to call your mother.…” His voice disappeared, and he looked at my brother more carefully. “Did they catch them?” he said to me.

I shook my head. “There’s been a lot of it down by the beach,” I said. For some reason, it seemed necessary to repeat the policeman’s exact words, to say it the same way it had been said to me. My father nodded, imagining the carnage at the beach.

“How long before they’ll let you out of here?” he said, speaking again to Ward. There was a heartiness to his voice that was planned and unnatural, part of the costume for the visit.

Ward shrugged, looking around the room for help. It was hard to watch them together; it was hard to leave them alone. “They’ll do some more surgery the day after tomorrow,” I said. “They’ll have a better idea then of how much longer.”

“I can tell you the
Times
is worried,” my father said. “I
talked to my friend Larson there, and they’re wondering what they’ll do for news while you’re getting better.”

He would have liked to have told Ward that the
Moat County Tribune
couldn’t get along without him, I think. It would have seemed more personal than the
Miami Times
.

My brother nodded at that and tried a smile. His lips hurt him, though, and his face moved only a little and then stopped. It was characteristic of my father that on seeing his oldest son lying in the intensive care unit of the hospital, beaten half to death, coming face-to-face with that thing he feared most, he would talk about going back to work.

Having been in the business of shorthand all his life—of using certain words to evade other words that are easier or more politely left unsaid—he could not find any words at all when it mattered.

My brother understood that and forgave him, and hoped, I suppose, that he would be forgiven in return. And perhaps that was what happened.

“They miss you at work,” he said.

M
Y FATHER AND I
had dinner that night at his hotel, and he spoke infrequently, once to ask which newspapers Ward would want in the morning. After he had gone to his room for the evening I drove Charlotte back to Lately, arriving at her apartment at one in the morning, having to shake her awake.

“Jesus,” she said, “was I snoring?”

I was tired in ways that had nothing to do with sleep. It occurred to me, sitting in the car with her, that I had been trying to hold too many things together that were meant to fall apart.

She was looking at herself in a compact, touching her
face here and there with lipstick or an eyebrow pencil. In all the time I knew her, she never went from one place to another without looking at herself in a mirror. She had turned on the light overhead, and it cast shadows across the dashboard of the car.

“What do you want with him?” I said.

She leaned over and looked at me a moment, the light falling across her hair and face. “What do you think, I’ve still got something going on with Yardley?” she said.

I didn’t answer, and a moment later she patted me on the leg and then turned in her seat and opened the door.

“The things you don’t know, for a smart kid,” she said, and then she closed the door and was gone.

I
FOUND YARDLEY ACHEMAN
and the editor from Miami the next morning, both sitting at Ward’s desk in the little office over the Moat Cafe. Ward’s notes and his files were open all around them, on the desk and on the floor. In the center of the desk was a typewriter with a piece of paper in the carriage.

The editor’s sleeves were rolled almost to his elbows and he wore a tie loosed at the neck. Yardley also wore a tie. There were no beer bottles in sight.

I walked in without knocking, and judging Yardley’s expression, I was not welcome. The man from Miami had no idea who I was. He was not good at faces.

Yardley looked at me, then his eyes went back to the typewriter. “How’s he doing?” he said, and typed for a moment or two and then stopped, as if he were taking it all down, and waiting now for my answer.

“He tried to call,” I said, and looked at the telephones. Both of them had been taken off the hook.

“Tell him everything’s all right,” Yardley Acheman said. “He doesn’t have to worry.”

“He’d like to see the story,” I said.

Yardley went back to typing. “Tell you what. Let me write the fucking story, Jack, then we can all read it,” he said.

“He doesn’t want to read it in the newspaper,” I said. “He wants to read it before it goes in.”

The man from Miami seemed to have put it together, who I was. “We’ve got a real time problem right now,” he said. “We’re trying to get this thing ready for Sunday.”

I stood still, and Yardley went on with his typing. “These are the most organized, thorough notes I’ve ever seen,” the man said. “If it weren’t for that, we wouldn’t have a chance.” Thinking I would take that back to my brother.

“Why does it have to be in the paper Sunday?” I said.

Yardley Acheman threw the editor a tired look but continued to work. The editor smiled again. “There always comes a time,” he said, sounding patient, “when you’ve got to push the thing out the door. It’s hard to let go, but you’ve got to do it or else you’d never get anything done.”

I thought of the weeks Yardley Acheman had spent in Lately, getting nothing done.

“Beyond that,” the editor said, “there’s a man on death row. Time’s running out on him, and it doesn’t do him or us any good if he’s executed before this situation can be corrected.”

I stood still a moment, wanting to argue issues I didn’t know anything about. “Ward ought to look at it first,” I said finally. “It’s his story.”