The Paperboy (19 page)

I walked past him and took the lead, holding the branches until he was through them, making sure there was nothing unexpected waiting to hit him in the other eye. It did not seem impossible that I would have to lead him back to the car blind, and within a few minutes he was in fact tearing from both eyes. No one was ever more out of place than Ward was here, and yet he pressed through, starting to sneeze. It occurred to me that it didn’t matter that he was
no good at this; what mattered was that he was willing to do it.

The thing he was good at was born of a lack of talent. He did not need grace to push ahead.

He stopped for a moment and wiped at his eyes, using the bottom of his shirt. The mosquitoes moved off his face, then resettled even before he was finished. I whacked the back of my neck and the jolt carried straight through my head. “I’m beating the shit out of myself here,” I said. I did not bother to speak softly now; there was no chance we had not been overheard already, if there was someone to hear us.

Ward blew his nose into his shirtsleeve and tried to clear his vision, closing his eyes and wiping the lids with his fingers. “It isn’t much farther,” he said, and a minute later I heard the chickens.

T
HE HOUSE SAT ON
cement blocks at the far end of the clearing. Dozens of chickens hunted under it and over the bare ground of the yard for bits of food; a rooster sat on a pile of shingles.

Beyond the shingles, a nylon line had been rigged, leading from the corner of the main house to the single tree still standing in the yard. Half a dozen alligator skins hung from the line, none of them more than four or five feet long. There was a tree stump not far away where they did the skinning. An ax and some knives had been left there, two of them stuck into the stump itself, the rest on the ground and on a four-legged metal stool nearby.

My brother walked slowly across the yard; one of the chickens crossed his path and dropped feathers hurrying out of the way. The house itself was prefabricated; I had seen hundreds like it in developments outside Jacksonville
and Orlando. It had one story with a pitched roof and a large picture window in front, where the living room would be. Ranch style, the real estate people called it.

I wondered if it had been hard to steal.

Half of the front of the place had been covered with aluminum siding, the rest left in shingles like the ones in the pile. An outboard Evinrude lay in pieces on a blanket in the carport; the tools used to take it apart lay among them.

My brother walked to the front door and pushed the doorbell. He and I looked at each other a moment, waited, and he knocked. Nothing moved. He took a few steps back and looked at the roof, one end to the other. It was covered with tarpaper which was torn here and there, exposing the wood underneath. Chicken droppings were everywhere.

He went back to the door and knocked again. He called out Tyree Van Wetter’s name.

I had moved to the side of the house, and from there I saw the inlet behind it. A small boat had been left upside down in the backyard. The yard itself was wet and grassless, a strip of dirt no more than ten feet wide that sloped from the house to the water.

My brother’s voice carried out over the water and bounced back. “Mr. Van Wetter … I am here to ask you about your nephew Hillary.”

I walked back around to the front. “There’s nobody home,” I said. My brother looked at the house, undecided.

He knocked again, much louder this time. “Tyree Van Wetter?”

The chickens resumed their search of the yard, as if we were of no consequence. My brother sat down on the step leading to the front door and began unplugging the mud between his toes with a stick. I sat down next to him. The step was warm from the sun. I smelled tar, probably from
the roof. I looked at my brother, waiting to see what he intended to do.

“Let’s give it a little while,” he said.

I watched him clean his feet. “You know,” I said, “this might be somebody’s fishing cabin.”

He was studying one of his toes. “No,” he said, “it’s the right place, I think.” And then he said, “Someone’s in the house. I heard them.”

We sat on the porch and waited. The sun moved, and the house took more of it for a shadow. The place began to feel cooler.

“I’m sorry about what happened with Yardley,” I said, sometime later.

He was staring at one of his feet; it had been a long time since either of us had spoken. I had not heard anything from inside the house. He frowned, I couldn’t tell why.

“Nobody was hurt,” he said.

“He acted hurt.”

“Yardley thinks he’s protected,” he said. “ ‘You can’t do this to me, I’m with the
Miami Times.…’ ”
Hearing the words, he began to smile. Ward knew that no such protection existed. He had no misunderstanding about that.

T
HE SUN HAD JUST DROPPED
behind the trees at the west end of the clearing when I heard the boat. Ward and I stood up and walked to the backyard and watched it come across the inlet—a small aluminum fishing boat with an ancient Johnson motor. There were two men inside, one about my father’s age, the other one younger, perhaps his son. They were both blond, and they did not seem surprised to see us standing at the edge of their property.

The one in front—the younger one—stood up as the boat
approached land, holding a Coleman cooler under his arm, and jumped to shore. The boat rocked violently behind him; the old man sat at the motor and waited while the younger one set the cooler down and pulled him onto the landing. The younger man’s arms were long and clearly defined, the sort of arms you get from work or swimming.

The old man pulled the motor out of the water, the shape of his own arms changing, and then stepped out himself.

My brother stood still, waiting for one of them to speak. The younger man tied the boat to a stump and then reclaimed his cooler and walked between us and up to the house. When he was almost there, the back door opened and a pale-faced woman stood in the crack and began to speak to him in whispers. He nodded, without answering her, and then stepped past her and disappeared inside.

The old man put his hands in the back pockets of his pants and approached my brother. He was wider than the younger man, but not as hard or as tall. He stopped in front of Ward, studying us like a problem. “You lost your shoes,” he said finally, a smile playing somewhere behind the words.

Ward nodded and looked over to the place we had come in. “Yessir,” he said.

“There’s snakes all through here, you was lucky that’s all that happened,” the old man said. He seemed good-natured, and looked at me a moment to see if I was afraid of snakes, and then turned back into the boat and pulled out a full bag of groceries. A sack of potato chips was perched at the top. His whiskers were coming in, a gray line that followed his jaw and in the failing light made him seem just out of focus.

“Mr. Van Wetter?” Ward said.

The old man nodded.

“My name is Ward James, I am with the
Miami Times
…”

The old man started up the bank to the house. His legs looked heavy. My brother followed, a few feet behind. “I wanted to talk to you about your nephew …”

The old man stopped before he went in the door.

“Which nephew would that be?” he said.

“Hillary,” my brother said.

The old man shook his head. “You come walking through them snakes for nothing,” he said. “Hillary ain’t my nephew. That’s the other branch of the family.” A moment passed.

“Which branch is that?” Ward said.

The old man stopped and scratched his head, still holding the groceries. “You might to ask Eugene there, he’s Hillary’s first cousin.” He nodded toward the house.

My brother looked at the house, trying to put it together. “Eugene’s married twict,” the old man said, “and bridged the two sides of the family. He’ll be out in a bit, we got to eat some ice cream.”

We walked back to the front and sat down again on the porch and waited. There was movement inside the house; a baby cried. The sun dropped farther into the trees, taking the house in the shade. There were specks of spit in the corner of my brother’s mouth. We had been a long time without a drink.

He stared into the treetops, sensing the place, the people in it.

Half an hour had passed when the door opened and the old man came out carrying a half gallon carton of Winn Dixie vanilla ice cream. The one named Eugene stepped out a moment later, carrying a spoon in his shirt pocket, and, after they had each settled in a spot on the ground with their backs resting against the blocks supporting the house, the old man slowly opened the top of the ice cream, looking
up at Eugene after he had pulled back all four covers to reveal what was underneath. It was a kind of ceremony.

The old man went into his pants pockets and came out with a spoon. He considered it a moment, and then dropped it into the ice cream. He put the spoon in his mouth and left it there a long time. When he pulled it out, half the ice cream came out with it.

The door opened a few inches and the woman stepped out sideways, carrying a baby. She wore a man’s T-shirt, her breasts loose underneath. She kept her eyes down, not wanting to look at either my brother or me, and took a seat on the ground beyond Eugene.

The old man put the spoon back in his mouth again, and when he brought it out this time it was clean.

“You’re Hillary’s cousin?” my brother said suddenly. Eugene had been watching the old man eat, and his head snapped in my brother’s direction. He stared at Ward as the old man balanced a load of ice cream on the spoon and guided it into his mouth. The ice cream was soft and some of what had melted dripped out of the bottom of the carton onto his pants.

“Hillary Van Wetter,” my brother said. “You’re his cousin?”

The old man chuckled with the spoon still in his mouth, as if the ice cream had made him happy. “Don’t mind Eugene,” he said. “He gets irritable waiting his turn.”

My brother nodded, and Eugene looked away, back in the direction of the ice cream. Farther down the line, the woman was stealing looks in that direction too.

The old man caught her at it and said, “Ice cream,” before he put the spoon in his mouth again. Barely, the woman nodded.

We sat outside the house for twenty minutes while the old
man ate vanilla ice cream. Swamp etiquette. He seemed to enjoy the feel of it in his mouth as much as the taste, and once, after he had slid the spoon out of his lips, he put it against his cheek, and smiled at the way that felt too. The ice cream melted in the carton and dripped onto his pants, and the stain there spread until it covered his lap.

And suddenly he stopped and closed his eyes and dropped his head back until it touched the bricks he was leaning against. He seemed to be waiting for a pain to pass, and when it was gone, he had a last, long look into the carton—it was still half full at least—and passed it along to Eugene.

The carton dripped as it was moved, and Eugene lifted it over his face and sucked on a corner.

The woman watched more carefully now, brushing insects away from the container, ignoring the ones that lit on her arms and shoulders. Her nipples were clearly defined under her shirt, and I looked other places, not to be caught staring.

The old man folded his hands over his stomach and closed his eyes. “Getting dark,” he said, I didn’t know to whom.

My brother nodded, as if that had been on his mind too. He had a quick look around the clearing. “Is there another way out of here?” he said.

The old man opened his eyes to consider that. “Two ways,” he said, “the way you come in and the boat.”

It was quiet again; my brother would not ask for the ride. The old man smiled at him again. “You proud, ain’t you?” he said.

Ward didn’t answer. The old man turned to Eugene, who had closed himself around the carton of ice cream.

“These paperboys is proud, Eugene. I like that …”

Eugene nodded.

“I might just give you proud boys a ride home,” the old man said. He started to get up—pretended to get up—then dropped back onto the ground. He shook his head. “Too much ice cream,” he said. “I’d sink that old boat with all this in me.”