The Paperboy (5 page)

T
HE FRATERNITY’S LAWYER
had kept his clients out of court following the drowning, and now obtained a court order prohibiting Ward and all other employees of the
Miami Times
from coming within a hundred yards of the house.

Ward complied with the order, figuring the hundred yards trigonometrically and then waiting just outside the boundary two days a week, reminding them on their way to and from the fraternity house that he was still there.

On other days, he waited outside their classrooms. He called them at the fraternity, and wrote them letters, both at home and at school. The lawyer got another court order, prohibiting calls and letters.

But it was too late, my brother had gotten a letter back. The writer was a massive, long-haired football player named Kent de Ponce, who met Ward at his parents’ home in Coral Gables and allowed him to set a tape recorder on the table between them while they talked. I have played that tape so many times now that I hear the voices sometimes in the hum of tires on the highway.

The football player sits so close to the machine that even his breathing is audible. He is drinking beer, and apologizing endlessly—for not speaking to Ward earlier, for his part in Ward’s beating, for drinking too many beers, for not offering Ward a beer, for standing at the side of the whirlpool and watching while a boy only a year or two younger than himself was left upside-down and kicking underwater until all the kicking stopped, and his body was twice as heavy coming out as it had been a few minutes before, when it was lifted in.

He apologizes for these things as if it were in Ward’s hands to forgive them.

He cries as he talks, and apologizes for that too.

The brothers, he says—that’s what he calls the members of the fraternity, “the brothers”—were drunk and lost track of the time the pledge was underwater. They thought he was pretending to go limp. He wonders out loud if he will lose his scholarship. The football player’s nose is running and he sniffs, making spasmodic wet noises, and once a line of spit
drops from his lips onto the tape recorder itself. He laughs at that, and tries, at the same time to apologize. “Jesus, I’m sorry, man.…”

“You know, man,” he says later, changing course just once toward the end, “I don’t know if I should be doing this.…” There is a pause in the tape, as he realizes it is already done.

When he speaks again, it is as if he is trying out an idea on Ward. “The only thing I could do now,” he says, “I could break your neck and say I thought you were a burglar.”

The tape is quiet a long time after that, and then he says, “I apologize, man. I don’t know what I’m saying.”

Waiting out the long pause—for as many times as I have heard the tape, I still strain for the words that end it—I think of my brother and wonder if, as he waits in the living room in Coral Gables with the football player and the prospect of violence, if he was drawn to those strange, kinetic moments before such things are decided.

If that is the heart of the attraction.

Ward met the football player again the next day at a restaurant near his house while Yardley Acheman, working from the perimeter, made notes on the football player’s expensive shoes, his car, the houses that lined the street where his parents lived. His ten-dollar haircut.

In the story that appeared in the paper, these details and details of the appearance and belongings of other members of the fraternity—the piece begins with a description of a parking lot full of Jeeps and Mustang convertibles—occupy a place of importance that seems, on examination, to outweigh even the details of the drowning itself. It is written as if Yardley Acheman were arguing that his view was as meaningful as the one from inside.

There was no mention of the dead boy’s car in this story,
or the neighborhood where his parents lived, or the advantages he enjoyed. He was absolved of that, and presented with a purity that is familiar to readers of newspapers, who have always been willing to disregard what they know about human nature and believe that the people written about in stories are different from the ones they know in their own lives.

This does not include readers who have been victims themselves, of course. No one who is touched personally by such a story and then watches a newspaper report it ever trusts newspapers in the same way again.

On the other hand, I suppose that to those who loved him, the drowned boy was pure, and, if it were left to me, I would never take whatever comfort that might be away from them for the sake of accuracy. But even though it was never written, it is still true that if it were not for his drowning, the same boy a year later surely would have stood by drunk himself while blindfolded pledges were led in, shackled, and thrown into a whirlpool full of icy water.

Even if it wasn’t written, part of the dead boy’s story is that he wanted to be one of the bunch who drowned him.

I
T WAS EARLY
in the morning of the day the fraternity story appeared in the newspaper that my brother and Yardley Acheman tripped a state trooper’s radar gun at 103 miles an hour on Alligator Alley as they passed into territory belonging to the Miccosukee Indians.

They were headed, for reasons Yardley Acheman did not understand, back to the scene of the airplane crash. Ward, who was drunk, would only say it was something he wanted to check.

B
Y THE TIME
he walked out of jail the next morning on his own promise to appear in court and sat down in the sun on a bench in front of the courthouse to wait for Yardley Acheman—the dried mud breaking off his shoes and his face still stiff with jailhouse soap—my brother, while not famous yet, was on the way.

Yardley Acheman arrived with his girlfriend, who was a fashion model and was driving the car because he had lost his license to a drunk driving charge too. “The phone’s been ringing off the hook all morning,” he said, ignoring the fact that my brother had just spent the night in jail. “Everybody in the world loves us.”

He was sitting in the front seat, with the girl; my brother was in the back. She looked quickly in the mirror, as if she were worried what someone who had just come out of jail might be doing back there.

Yardley Acheman turned in his seat, getting on his knees. His shoes left prints against the dashboard.

“Hey,” she said.

“Right now,” he said to Ward, ignoring her, “there’s no place in the world we can’t go. Keep that in mind. We can go anywhere we want.” Then he turned back, slid closer to the girl, and dropped an arm around her shoulders as she drove. A moment or two later, he winked at Ward and moved his hand onto her breast.
Anywhere we want
.

“Hey,” she said, pushing it away with her elbow, looking in the mirror again. But my brother could see that she liked Yardley Acheman, and didn’t care where he touched her, or who was there when he did it.

Yardley, my brother told me once, had a way with the girls.

U
NROLLING THE
MIAMI TIMES
that Sunday afternoon, my father, still in his fishing hat, sat straight up on the chair after only a few paragraphs. Something big on the line. He leaned into it, gradually moving closer to the page, as if the print were disappearing, then turning the pages to get farther into the story. Occasionally, he stopped as he read, marking his place with his finger as he rocked back and looked at the ceiling, savoring some detail that struck him as particularly exquisite.

When he had finished, he returned to the top of the front page, moving from there to the middle of the paper, estimating the size of the story, considering its placement, and then he read it all again.

“This is what it’s all about,” he said finally, and set the paper down.

I had been two hours cutting the grass that day and was on the way outside to sharpen the lawn mower before it got dark. As I left the room I saw him go into his shirt pocket for one of his pills.

When I came back in later, the paper was lying on the footstool in front of his chair, still open to the inside pages where the story of the dead fraternity boy ended.

I found him on the porch, sitting in an old wooden swing attached to rafters, drinking a beer. The sun was going down; Anita Chester had made dinner and left.

“Do you drink?” he said.

A strange question, it seemed to me, considering what had happened at Gainesville. Perhaps he meant to ask if I still drank after what had happened. “A beer, sometimes,” I said.

“Get yourself a beer,” he said. And then, as I was heading
back inside to get it, he said, “Your brother’s a newspaperman.”

And so we sat on the porch and drank to my brother, the smell of freshly cut grass on my shoes, my father moving slightly in the swing, smiling, but also shaking his head from time to time in a troubled way, as if Ward’s sudden success in his world presented problems he hadn’t considered.

“The plane crash,” he said, “that could have been blind luck.…” I looked at him a moment, not understanding at first that he was talking about the newspaper account, not the accident itself. “But this thing with the boy in the fraternity … it’s a Pulitzer. This could be the proudest moment of my life.”

He stopped himself, as if to reconsider it all from another angle, and a few minutes later said, “I wonder who this Yardley Acheman is.”

T
HE FOLLOWING
S
UNDAY
, I cut the grass again. If I didn’t cut the grass on Sunday, my father would return from the river in the afternoon and go straight into the garage, without comment, and pull out the lawn mower—a hand-powered machine with rusted blades and bald tires—and begin to push it back and forth across the yard, a small supply of nitroglycerin in his shirt pocket against the onset of angina.

Before I came home, he hired one of the children from the neighborhood to do it, but with one of his own sons in the house, it embarrassed him to be seen spending the money.

I was in the backyard with this machine when Ward called. I left the grass, picking up a beer as I passed the refrigerator, and answered the phone. It took a moment to recognize his voice. I hadn’t spoken to him since I left
Gainesville, and there was something oddly reserved in the way he addressed me now, as if he were as worried as my father that I had gone crazy. That was at the center of things that spring, that I’d cracked.