Paperboy (6 page)

He looked at me funny but opened the screen door and took the paper. His hands weren’t exactly dirty but they looked like my hands after I had put a chain on my bike and then tried to scrub the oil off with washing powder.

Thanks. Uh. I’m Faye’s cousin. Just helping out with a few things.

He closed the door while he was still looking me over.

If that Greaser Charles was Mrs. Worthington’s cousin then I was a monkey’s uncle. When grown-ups lie to kids they don’t even try very hard. They think we’re too dumb to know the difference. I didn’t care who he was or what he was doing there. Then I thought about it more and decided that maybe I did care.

The only thing good that came out of me ringing that doorbell was learning that Mrs. Worthington’s first name was Faye. That was a good name for me. That would be a Half-and-Half Word meaning I could probably say Faye about half the time without stuttering. Of course I could never call her Faye to her face but it was a good name in my book just the same.

I finished the route early and didn’t know what I was going to do the rest of the afternoon when I saw Ara T pushing his cart across Melrose into the alley between Harbert and Peabody.

Mam liked to say that Ara T only had two speeds. Slow and slower. The cart jangled and rattled as he made his way to a bunch of garbage cans. The more the cart rattled the more the neighborhood dogs barked.

A second good idea for the day came to me.

Ara T would have to knock off from his junk collecting sometime and I could follow him at least until it got dark and maybe get to see
where he kept his cart. He had to keep it somewhere at night. If he wasn’t going to give me back my knife then I might be able to come up with a way to take it when he wasn’t around.

The first thing I had to do was stash the yellow raincoat that made me stand out like one of those crossing guards at school. It wasn’t raining and the raincoat was too hot anyway. I stuffed the yellow coat and one newspaper bag into my second bag.

I remembered the thick privet hedges around Mrs. Worthington’s porch. That would be a good place to hide my bag. I could never get Rat to call them anything but Private Hedges even though I spelled out Privet for him. He told me not to be always worrying so much about words. But I did.

I went back to Mrs. Worthington’s and pushed the bag under the hedges snug up to the porch. I sat behind the privet next to the porch which gave Ara T time to get up the alley a little ways. Being close to Mrs. Worthington’s porch made me feel special like somehow I belonged there.

Following Ara T wasn’t going to be easy because he was always looking up and back and to both sides when he was collecting junk. Ara T had a steady routine. He would push his cart up to a bunch of cans behind a house and take off all the lids first thing. He would then start picking through one can and put junk from that can in another one that didn’t have as much in it. He would go through all the cans one at a time like that. I’ll say this. He was neat. He put whatever he wanted in his cart then put the lids back on all the cans like he had found them. He didn’t throw stuff around like you
would think a junkman would do. Anytime he found a whiskey bottle he would hold it up and shake it. If it had even a little whiskey left in it he would put the bottle in a wooden crate in the back of his cart.

I let Ara T get about a dozen houses ahead of me and then I started creeping down the alley behind him.

Rat sometimes made me watch a detective show on television where this guy with a moustache named Boston Blackie would follow people around but they never saw him even though he was creeping only a few steps behind them in leather street shoes. Not even tennis shoes. Even a kid has enough brains to know that you can’t follow somebody like that without them seeing or hearing you. I knew I was going to have to be careful following Ara T.

Every time Ara T would push his cart up to a bunch of cans I ducked behind a fence or into a garage that opened out to the alley. He looked back down my way a few times but I made sure he didn’t see me. This went on for a long while. The muscles in my legs started hurting from scrunching behind so many cans.

Ara T didn’t miss one can. Other than whiskey bottles he collected a few old shirts and a pair of old brown dress shoes and something that looked like an old toaster with a long cord. He also picked through magazines when he found a stack and put a few in his cart. He managed to grab the head of a wet mop that was hanging over a high fence and then hid the mop under the canvas tarp in his cart.

It was getting late and almost time to head back to Mrs. Worthington’s to get my newspaper bags when Ara T stopped in back of a big three-story house that faced on Peabody. In the back of the house was a garage and some smaller buildings connected by a solid wooden fence that was taller than the other fences.

Ara T reached down to the bottom of the fence and pulled something out sideways that looked like a big nail. He did the same thing at the top of the fence. He then reached in his cart and got out what looked like an old car antenna. He stuck the antenna into a small hole in the fence and jiggled it. A big door screeched open. He took the handles of his cart and backed into the opening. The cart looked like it barely fit but then the door creaked to a close.

Without a handle or a knob the door looked like it was part of a plain fence. When I eased up closer I saw that it was probably the door to an old coal shed. I had found where Ara T kept his stuff.

My newspaper bags and raincoat were where I had left them under the hedges at Mrs. Worthington’s house. I crawled up to the porch to get the bags and that was when I heard the sobbing.

I knew it was Mrs. Worthington because I also heard the ice in her glass clinking. She wasn’t very far from me on the porch swing but it didn’t sound like she was swinging. She was crying like when a
girl falls off a playground ride and she isn’t really hurt but just keeps on sobbing under her breath.

There was no way I could prove it but I knew Mrs. Worthington was crying on account of Greaser Charles.

I couldn’t make myself leave Mrs. Worthington even though I couldn’t figure out anything to do to help her. My legs were cramping again from squatting under the hedges. About the time I was getting ready to crawl out and head home a glass crashed on the concrete floor of the porch. I thought I would hear Mrs. Worthington get up from the swing but I didn’t hear her moving.

I waited longer and listened harder. After a while lights started coming on at houses on both sides of Harbert. I pushed my newspaper bags from under the hedges with my feet and crawled out thinking I should just head on home but instead I gathered up my bags and eased around the corner of the porch. The blue Ford was gone. I climbed the steps.

Mrs. Worthington was lying on the swing with her head resting on one arm stretched straight out. She was wearing her green housecoat. Same as the first time I had seen her. I could smell the whiskey from the broken glass. She didn’t have on shoes and she wouldn’t be able to stand up without cutting her feet so I squatted down and started picking up the bigger pieces of glass one at a time. After putting them in a little pile beside the front door I brushed away the glass slivers with my newspaper bags.

Mrs. Worthington didn’t move.

The other times I had looked at Mrs. Worthington it was her eyes and mouth mostly that I paid attention to but now I could see her skin was about as white as skin could get. As white as a new baseball right out of the box.

Talking is hard for me but listening and looking when you know things aren’t the way they should be can be hard on me too.

I wanted Mrs. Worthington to get up from the swing and talk to me. Even ask me a question as long as it wasn’t what my name was. I wanted to know why she was crying and if Greaser Charles had been mean to her. I wanted to see her pretty mouth move even if she didn’t have on her red lipstick. I wanted to see her eyes looking at me again like she was glad I was standing in front of her. I wanted her to try to close the flaps of her housecoat. I looked at her until my neck started tightening up on me from being in one spot for too long and then I picked up my newspaper bags and shook out the glass slivers over the railing of the porch.

Mrs. Worthington squirmed a little and then moaned but she didn’t wake up.

The first part of the way home I walked with my bags under my arm and then I took off running. I ran from lamppost to lamppost without stopping like I was running the bases. I touched each concrete post with my hand. I had always liked the big posts with the big glass globes sitting on top like a tall hat but when I wasn’t feeling right inside the lampposts were like first basemen trying to tag me out.

At the last lamppost before I got to my house I made sure I stopped to catch my breath.

After I brushed my teeth I went to my parents’ bedroom to tell them good night but my mother was at her dresser talking on the telephone to one of her friends about New Orleans. She blew me a good-night kiss. I went to find my father but he was in his office downstairs talking on the phone that he only used when he wanted to talk to people about what they should do with their money. No one in the house was supposed to answer my father’s office phone except him and that was okay with me. My mother always said that I would as soon pick up a snake as a telephone and she was right about that. The only newspaper comic I didn’t like was
Dick Tracy
because he talked on that phone on his wrist all the time.

Mam came into my room to pick up clothes and towels and tuck me in. She asked me why I had been so quiet after supper and I told her I was just thinking about the paper route and how I could change it up so I could finish it quicker each day. She didn’t much like my answer. I can’t lie very well when there are a lot of words to say or things to explain.

If I could have told her the truth I would have said that my mind was bouncing back and forth between Mrs. Worthington and Greaser Charles and Ara T and Mr. Spiro the way the pinball in the machine at Wiles Drug Store bounces off all the different colored lights. The pinball wouldn’t stop.

On Friday morning during the second week of my route I pitched the first inning in a practice game and then the coach told me he was taking me out because he wanted our team to get some fielding practice and that wouldn’t happen if I was on the mound for the whole game.

When the coach said things like that it made me feel like I was a somebody instead of just a kid who couldn’t talk right.

A guy I had nicknamed Racer had taken Rat’s place as my catcher. He had to stick one of his mother’s washrags inside his mitt so my hard throws wouldn’t hurt his hand. Racer came over to me in the dugout.

You don’t need to be throwing so hard in a practice game.

s-s-s-s-Only way I s-s-s-s-know how.

And why do you call me Racer?

I had to come up with something quick.

s-s-s-s-’Cause you run s-s-s-s-bases so fast.

Racer looked at me funny because he was one of the slowest guys on the team but at least it gave him something to think about besides talking to me.