The Paperboy (29 page)

“How long did it last?” I said. I could not dislodge the picture of my brother begging.

“Not too long,” she said.

I needed to know it hadn’t been long.

The curtains were torn off the windows, and I noticed there were lights in the parking lot. Some of them belonged to the police. My brother stirred again—it was as if he could not stay still—and his head moved back until I could see his expression. I don’t know how with all the damage. Something strained, then relaxed.

“Any minute,” she said.

I thought of trying to dress him, to make what had happened here look like something that was not as bad.

T
HE POLICE CAUGHT ONE
of the sailors in the parking lot, hiding in the backseat of a car that belonged to the man who had been with them in the bar. The other sailor had run out to the beach, and the police had chased him a minute or two and then given up, knowing they could get his name from the one they had.

“Mr. James,” one of the policemen said to my brother, “Mr. Olson here says you lured him and his friend up into your hotel room and tried to engage them in sexual activity.”

Mr. Olson was the sailor who had come to the table. He was standing between the policemen in the doorway, his hands were cuffed behind him.

“Mr. James?” the policeman said. There were ambulance attendants in the room, but neither of them had touched Ward. He was still naked.

“This asshole and his friend followed him out of the bar,” Charlotte said.

The sailor looked at her quickly and said, “That’s a goddamn lie,” and the policeman standing at the door, who’d had trouble with sailors who came down from Jacksonville before, hit the sailor with his nightstick, catching him just under the ear. The sailor dropped to his knees, holding his head.

Charlotte smiled.

“We didn’t follow the faggot anywhere,” the sailor said. “He invited us to his room.”

The first policeman looked at my brother in a sad way. “Is that true, Mr. James?” he said. “Are you a faggot?”

“He’s no faggot,” I said, looking at the sailor.

“Who are you?” the policeman said.

“Another one,” said the sailor. And then the sailor laughed, but he looked at me strangely, as if something were out of place. I turned to the policeman. “I’m his brother,” I said.

The policeman nodded. “So what’s he doing naked?”

“It’s his room, maybe he was taking a shower. Maybe he was in bed.”

The sailor laughed again, and got to his feet. There was dried blood in the hair on the back of his wrists.

“I hate this,” one of the ambulance attendants said. We all looked at him and waited, but that was as much as he intended to say. The other attendant stood looking at Ward, frowning.

“So what are we going to do?” the first policeman said to me. I saw Ward’s flesh had risen tiny bumps along his arms, and I took the blanket off the floor and covered him with it.

“If you don’t need us,” the ambulance attendant said to the policeman, “we got a head-on out on the highway.”

He looked at Ward quickly, then at the policeman who did not like sailors. “He’s all right,” he said, “he just got beat up.”

Charlotte wiped at the blood still leaking from my brother’s nose, and then at the creases that were his eyes.

“Get everybody’s name,” she said.

The policeman who did not like sailors rolled his eyes.

“The guy’s a faggot,” said the sailor, and the policeman hit him again, flush on the chin, and he fell against the door, his hands still cuffed behind him, dropping his face in such a way that it seemed as if he were trying to pick up his jaw with his teeth.

“Uh-oh,” said the cop who didn’t like sailors. “This one fell down.”

“We got to go,” said the ambulance driver, but he was
afraid to leave without permission. He was waiting for someone to say it was all right.

“You saw that,” said the sailor, but there was something wrong with his speech. He sounded as if he were begging now too.

The ambulance driver shook his head. “I didn’t see nothing, I didn’t hear nothing.” He turned again to the policeman. “What do you want us to do?” he said.

The policeman looked at me.

“He’s hurt,” I said.

The sailor moaned, and seemed to be suffering. The first policeman picked him up from behind, using the collar of his shirt, and set him against the wall to wait.

“Don’t move,” he said.

“I didn’t do nothing,” said the sailor, but he was afraid now and stayed where he was against the wall. He started to speak again and the policeman near him slapped his face so hard his nose began to bleed.

The first policeman motioned me over into a corner of the room.

“You know you’ve got a problem here,” he said, quietly enough so the others couldn’t hear. “What I’d suggest, it’s easier on everybody if your brother had a few drinks tonight and went for a walk down by the beach. Things like this happen down at the beach, even if you don’t see anything about it in the papers.”

I looked at Ward, trying to figure it out.

“It could have happened at the beach,” the cop said again. “The only thing is, in that case we didn’t catch the perpetrators.”

The sailor was watching us carefully, as if he understood what was being decided. He was bleeding and his jaw was swollen beneath his ear. He had begun to cry.

Charlotte was standing against a wall now with her arms folded across her chest.

“They tried to kill him,” she said finally.

The first policeman took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “These things happen,” he said. “I’m not telling you what to do, but these things happen.”

The sailor groaned, slumping against the wall. The policeman with him used his nightstick across his leg, and the sailor dropped to the floor again.

“Uh-oh,” the policeman said, “slipped again.”

“What happens to him?” I said.

“What do you want to happen?” the policeman said. “A lot of things can happen on the beach.”

The sailor began to cry out loud. “We didn’t mean to hurt him like that,” he said.

The policeman talking to me looked at the ambulance attendants, suddenly angry. “The fuck are you waiting for?” he said. “The man’s hurt.”

I
DO NOT KNOW WHAT
they did to the sailor after I left the hotel room. I know he was still slumped near the door, trying to look more injured than he was, or perhaps it was simply that he knew what was ahead for him when he and the policeman were alone in the room again, and the thought of it had made him ill.

I walked into the hallway, hearing the sounds of the stretcher’s wheels as they rolled over the carpet, my brother’s form beneath the sheet, the toes of his feet exposed at the bottom, bouncing gently. The first policeman walked with us as far as the elevator, staring from time to time at Charlotte.

“We’ll be by the hospital,” he said, and smiled at her as
the doors closed and the elevator began its drop to the basement. There was a service door there leading to the parking lot, the exit which the hotel preferred ambulance drivers use for emergencies.

I
SAT IN THE WAITING
room while the doctors worked on my brother’s face. They called for a plastic surgeon, but were unable to find one willing to come in at that time of night.

Charlotte sat with me, wide awake as I slipped in and out of sleep. She woke me once touching the swelling on my head, and again when I heard her asking one of the doctors who had come out to report on Ward’s progress if I shouldn’t be in the hospital too.

He examined me from the doorway. “Do you need to be admitted?” he said. “We’re short eleven beds as it is.”

“No,” I said, “I don’t think so.”

He nodded and disappeared back into the place where they were working on Ward. “He’s going to need reconstructive surgery,” she said. I looked at her, wondering how she would know something like that. “They’re going to have to rebuild the bone structure of his face.”

I looked away from her then; in the end she knew too many things I didn’t want to know. I felt her hand on my leg. “It doesn’t mean he won’t look right,” she said. “I’ve seen plenty of people had their faces restructured, and most of them looked just fine.”

She squeezed my leg, trying to get me to look at her.

“Jack,” she said, “you probably don’t know it, but you aren’t acting like yourself ever since you got conked with that bottle.”

But it wasn’t the knock on the head that changed me, it
was the sight of my brother streaked bloody and wet like a newborn baby.

I put my hands into my face and closed my eyes. The room moved. “Jack?” she said. I shook my head, meaning I did not want to talk. I was suddenly afraid I would start crying like the sailor.

“It isn’t as bad for a man as a girl,” she said quietly.

“That’s something to be thankful for, right there.”

And then for a long time neither of us spoke. She left her hand on my leg and from time to time ran her other hand over the back of my neck. Then I was sick again and stood up, her hand still on my leg, and hurried to the bathroom at the far end of the waiting room.

I sat on my heels in front of the toilet, rocking slightly, waiting to see if the vomiting would pass. My face was cool from the spray of the flushing toilet and my arms and legs were weak and shaking. I remember thinking that I did not know how to get up.

She came in behind me, stood at the door of the stall.

“Are you going to be all right?” she said.

Her voice echoed in the room. I flushed the toilet and got myself together. She bent closer and I smelled her perfume again, and then her hands were under my arms helping me up.

I went to the sink and ran water into my hands and dropped my face into them. She stood patiently behind me, waiting until I was ready to leave.

The door opened and an old man in a robe moved slowly to one of the urinals, using a walker. He saw her there, but he had been in the hospital a long time, and was used to urinating in front of women.

“When your brother’s out of surgery we’ll go back to the hotel and call Yardley,” she said. “Then we can get some sleep.”

I looked at her, trying to track what she’d said, but the words had too many meanings and went too many ways.

I shook my head and grabbed at the sink to keep my balance. “Don’t call anybody,” I said.

“He’s got to know,” she said. And then, a moment later, “Your father’s got to know too.… He’ll want to come down.”

“Don’t call anybody,” I said again.

“You have to.”

“Let me think,” I said.

She found a Life Saver in her purse and put it into my mouth, and then took my arm and led me out of the bathroom to wait for the doctors to come out of the operating room and give us their assessment of the damage my brother had suffered.