The Paperboy (38 page)

A
LTHOUGH YARDLEY ACHEMAN
could not be reached for his recommendation, I was hired as a copyboy in the
Times
newsroom, and started at more money than any of the reporters at my father’s newspaper were paid.

Yardley stayed in New York an extra week, interviewing for jobs at both the
Times
and the
Daily News
, and socializing with famous writers and journalists at a bar called Elaine’s.

He liked being with famous writers, and would labor to work their names into conversation when he got back.

While Yardley was in New York, my brother stayed at his desk, eight hours a day, going back again and again over the boxes of papers that he had accumulated in Moat County. There was nothing new in any of the boxes—he could by now recite all the times and dates and names—but he was unable to shake the feeling that there was a hidden order in them which he hadn’t seen.

He had begun to believe that the Van Wetter clan had somehow designed the story which eventually appeared under his name.

Ward had arranged for my hiring and now he arranged for my hours to coincide with his, an accommodation which infuriated the copyboys who had been in the newsroom longer. One or two had gone so far as to file grievances with the union.

But if my brother had interfered with the normal processes of seniority, he had not done it out of partisanship. He wanted me close by because I had been with him in Moat County; I had seen what I had seen.

He was entertaining the idea now that Tyree Van Wetter had paid a man to represent himself as the contractor who bought the sod, that being the only real option to Yardley’s having made the whole thing up.

He spent whole afternoons in search of honorable explanations for Yardley Acheman.

“How did they find him, then?” I said one afternoon as we were leaving the
Times
. “If he was there when Yardley went down, he’d of been there when we went down. If Yardley could find him, you could find him.…”

He trusted me in a way that I could never define, or earn, but still he fought what was in front of him. I knew it wasn’t finished.

I asked if we were going back to Daytona Beach.

“I think we’d be better off talking to some of the Van Wetters again,” he said.

I thought of the black moccasin dropping from the dead tree into the water that first time we waded in.

“Not me.”

“Sometimes,” he said, “you’ve got to watch people a long time to see who they are.”

I stopped on the sidewalk and looked at him. “You mean you’re worried they were on their best behavior?”

And he smiled a little at that, flattening his lip across his teeth. And I knew he was going back, and that I was going with him. I could not stand to see him hurt again, unless I was hurt too. To borrow a word, that was the only thing that would make it
bearable
.

Y
ARDLEY RETURNED TO MIAMI
the next week with the news of his engagement to a magazine writer from New York. He had not told the one in Palm Beach yet that they were quits, and wondered out loud how that was done.

A story about the Van Wetter case had appeared in
Time
magazine that week which referred to Yardley as an important new voice in newspapers, one of the emerging “new journalists.” My brother was hardly mentioned in this piece, but then, he had not returned the phone call from the reporter from
Time
.

The story and the accompanying picture were clipped out of the magazine and pasted on the city room bulletin board, and a caption was written beneath it:
“WHAT IS MISSING FROM THIS PICTURE?”

Yardley Acheman was despised in the newsroom now by all but a handful of young reporters—some of them with
college degrees in journalism—who wrote stories imitating his style. Not having my brother to supply these stories with the weight of incident and facts, however, the pieces they wrote were masturbatory in nature, stuff that even I—a dropout of the University of Florida swimming team—would have been ashamed to have written.

They were the sort of things that Yardley had produced before he and my brother were attached to each other by the editors of the
Miami Times
.

Yardley ignored his critics and encouraged his imitators, praising them extravagantly for the most ordinary and, in most cases, out-of-place prose. Even when this prose was thrown back at them by old-school editors who told them to fill the holes with facts, not flowers.

My brother was affected neither by the piece in
Time
magazine nor by its appearance on the city room bulletin board, even the part in which he was referred to by Yardley Acheman as “a more traditional, nuts and bolts, kind of reporter”—in contrast to Yardley himself, who, in his own words, was “the one who saw the shapes and meanings of stories in non-traditional ways.”

W
E WERE TOGETHER
all the time, Ward and I. We ate together, we came to work together, we left together. I wondered sometimes which of us was protecting the other, but when I entered my building at night after I’d dropped him off, and the fat man with the frog’s eyes came out of his room to watch me walk down the hall, I was always reminded of what happened in Daytona Beach, and felt secure somehow knowing I’d left Ward safely at his own door.

Sometimes the fat man smiled as I passed and sometimes he made clucking sounds out of the side of his mouth. It
seemed clear to me that he was violating the rule of the house, bothering me in this way, and some nights, when I’d had trouble of one kind or another at work, I found myself enraged over this violation, an almost unmanageable anger. I felt oddly whole, to be that angry.

I had wondered, of course, who the man was, and then one morning on the way to my car another resident of the house fell in next to me, wanting a ride to north Palm Beach County, where he said he could get some day work picking fruit, and told me that Froggy Bill, as he was called, had once been a cop. That he lived on a pension now.

“You got to be a real bad cop before they throw you out,” he said. “You got to do things that bring you to public attention.”

I told the man it was none of my business, and gave him a dollar for the bus, and left him there on the curb while I drove to work.

I
DID NOT MENTION
Froggy Bill to Ward; in fact, I never spoke to him about the place where I lived. I suppose he assumed it was like his own place—an apartment with a bedroom and a kitchen and a bathroom.

My bathroom, however, was at the end of the hall. I went there early in the morning, before the sun rose, to keep myself removed from Froggy Bill’s daily routine.

O
NE NIGHT I HEARD
a man scream. I was in the hallway and the scream came from Froggy Bill’s apartment, and lasted only a second or two and then died, as if the screamer had run out of air.

I stood still, listening, ready to run for the door if Froggy Bill emerged with a body, but there were no other screams. The whole rooming house was quiet. I began to wonder if it was Bill himself who had screamed, but I do not know the answer to that, even now.

W
ARD DECIDED TO RETURN
to Moat County, over the objections of the Sunday editor—the man with the beard who had come to Moat County to push the story ahead when Ward was in the hospital—and Yardley Acheman, who was anxious to leave the Van Wetter matter behind him.

Yardley said it was time to move on to something else, while he and Ward were still “hot,” that timing was everything. He did not say what the next story might be, and I don’t believe it was anything he had considered. My brother found the stories.

Ward said he would be back in a few days.

They were in the office, Ward, Yardley, and the Sunday editor. I was standing outside, holding a tray of mail to sort. I began to move past the door when I heard Yardley Acheman again. “Maybe I ought to go to Daytona,” he said, “see what I can find there.”

And he was not talking about matters of sod and condominium builders.

“Whatever you think,” Ward said.

T
HAT NIGHT
, after work, we threw a few days’ worth of clothes into the back of the Ford and headed north to Moat County. He used vacation days to make the trip.