The Paperboy (27 page)

My father drank half of what was in the glass and relaxed. “So what do you think?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“About the business,” he said. “You’ve had a look, what do you think?”

“I don’t think much one way or the other.”

“It’s better than driving a truck.”

I said, “It’s better than loading one.”

And he looked at me and smiled. “We all have our own speed,” he said, meaning, I supposed, that Ward had never been expelled from the University of Florida.

“One way or another, we do things when we’re ready.” He thought about something else for a moment, then looked at me and smiled again. A kind of peace had settled over him with the last bottle of wine. “Don’t be so serious about everything, Jack,” he said. “Your turn will come.”

I said, “I do things when I have to,” and that made him laugh, and I laughed with him. I’d had a few glasses of wine myself.

“Sometimes,” he said, fondly, as if he were remembering a story, “the only way you find out you’re ready is that when you have to be, you are.”

I had another drink of the wine, and felt peaceful myself. “Can I tell you something?” I said.

“Anything.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

And that made him laugh too. “I’m talking about you,” he said. “I’m talking about you.”

But he wasn’t.

He was still talking about handing his newspaper over to Ward.

W
E WENT TO DAYTONA BEACH
, Ward and I and Charlotte. Yard-ley stayed in Lately with the Sunday editor to begin his writing. Ward told them he was going down for a look at the golf course, but his intention was to find Yardley’s contractor for himself.

Yardley Acheman’s interest, of course, was in the flow of his stories, in interpreting events, in exposing hypocrisy wherever he saw it, which is to say that it was not impossible that he had never found the builder at all. That he’d seen what he needed and made it up.

W
E STAYED AT A HOTEL
on the beach—my brother and I shared a room, Charlotte took another—and I lay awake and restless for an hour after Ward had fallen asleep, and finally got out of bed, being careful not to wake him because it was after midnight, and walked through the lobby and out onto the beach, passing the drunks and the lovers, almost
stepping on a boy and a girl wrapped around each other, naked on a blanket.

She held on to his neck, holding him inside her, and followed me with her eyes as I passed.

An open bottle of liquor was stuck into the sand.

I swam out into the ocean. It was calm and the moon lay ahead of me on the water, and it was endless. I swam a long time and never felt the familiar weight of my arms and legs which signaled I was getting tired. I thought of the girl on the beach, holding on to the boy’s neck in the dark, her cheek pressed into the side of his head as he worked himself in and out, watching me.

I would have liked someone to hold on to myself.

I had a thought then about my brother, and the way in which we were different. He would not have ached over a girl he had only glimpsed a moment, lying with someone else in the sand. There was nothing in Ward that attached itself easily. And then I was suddenly chilled, as if the thought had done it, and I stopped—there was nothing to prove that night, nothing to exhaust—and rolled over onto my back so that I could watch the moon as I swam back to Daytona Beach.

Why had he attached himself to Yardley Acheman?

I
CAME OUT OF
the water shaking like a man with his finger in the light socket, and could not stop even when I got under the blankets back at the hotel. I got up finally and stood under hot water in the shower.

When I came out of the bathroom his eyes were open, and he could not go back to sleep. From my earliest memories, Ward was a light sleeper.

W
ARD SPENT THE NEXT DAY
trying to find the builder. I drove him from county offices to building sites, exhausting the contractors one by one who had been building condominiums in August of 1965.

At the end of the day he had not found the builder, and while it was possible that such a builder was no longer operating under the same name—several of the ones he found listed in the county’s building permits could not be accounted for—or had left the business, such a possibility presented the question of how Yardley Acheman, who had no interest in facts and no talent for research, had found him when my brother couldn’t.

Charlotte was no help, remembering only that she had other things on her mind at the time. “Handsome men are the worst,” she said.

W
E STOPPED LOOKING
late in the afternoon and went back to the hotel. At the desk, Ward paid for another room and gave me the key, without mentioning that I’d kept him up the night before.

A band was playing in the hotel bar that night, and the restaurant, which was adjacent to the bar, filled up with smoke and music and noise and people from the other room as we ate. I studied the girls carefully, looking for the one from the beach.

Charlotte was bored with Daytona Beach and the newspaper business, and wanted to go back to Lately. “How much is all this going to help him?” she said, speaking of Hillary.

My brother said, “It would help if we could find the man who bought the sod.”

“Yardley already found him,” she said, but it didn’t sound as if she believed that either.

She put a cigarette into her lips and dropped her face into her hands to light the match, her hair falling over her hands, dangerously close to the flame. I have set my own hair on fire in restaurants, bending over a candle on the table, and it makes a horrible smell.

“We need to find him again,” Ward said.

“Shit,” she said. She was tired of stolen sod and contractors and of us, and she was tired of Yardley Acheman, but in a different way.

The cocktail waitress arrived after we’d eaten. She was dressed in a ruffled blouse and a black skirt that did not quite cover the bottom of her panties. I ordered a beer, Charlotte ordered a Cuba libre—pronouncing
Cuba
the way it is pronounced by the Cubans—and my brother, who did not ordinarily have a drink in bars, asked for a vodka and Coke.

I looked at him, wondering what he was doing, but his attention had strayed in the last few minutes and was now drawn to a table across the room where a couple of sailors, probably on leave from Jacksonville, were sitting with a middle-aged man who wore a bow tie. They were baby-faced boys, the sailors, one of them with a mustache.

The man in the bow tie was paying another waitress for their drinks, taking the money, one bill at a time, from his wallet.

T
HE WAITRESS LEANED
over me to set the glasses on the table, brushing my cheek with her skirt. Her perfume was bitter,
mingling with Charlotte’s. Ward finished his vodka before she could leave. He handed her the glass and asked for another. I had never seen my brother drink anything beyond a few beers.

“You must be thirsty,” she said.

He did not answer, but continued to glance from time to time at the table and the two sailors. They were drinking rose-colored daiquiris. One of the sailors looked up and caught my brother staring.

Ward and the sailor looked at each other, and then the other sailor was looking at our table too. He picked up his glass, never taking his eyes off us, and finished everything that was in it. The hard knot in his throat moved as he swallowed.

Charlotte saw what was going on. “For Christ’s sake,” she said, “we’re going to have a fight.” I assumed she had been around fights before, and knew what she was talking about.

“There’s no problem,” my brother said. And he drank his next drink almost as quickly as he’d drunk the first, and ordered a third.

“I think maybe I remember where Yardley found that builder,” Charlotte said, trying to pull him away from his drinking and staring. He nodded at her, as if he already knew they would find him. “I couldn’t concentrate today,” she said. “Emotionally, I’m wrung out.”

Then she looked at me and shrugged. “Thinking too much about Hillary,” she said. As if I were the one who would understand.