The Paperboy (34 page)

S
HE GOT ANOTHER BEER
from the kitchen, and brought one for me. She sat down, and there was a certain familiarity between us that had not been there before.

“I was sodomized,” she said. Just like that.

For a moment I saw the sheets in the room where I had found Ward, twisted and lying half on the floor, still wet with his blood.

“It’s no fun,” she said.

“No, I wouldn’t think so.”

“A couple of drunks.” And that was as much as she said for a while. Someone was laughing on the porch, one of my father’s reporters.

I heard myself ask if they’d been caught. It was the same thing my father asked at the hospital, when he didn’t know what else to say.

She shook her head. “They let them go,” she said. I leaned forward and tried not to say anything else that sounded like my father.

“You’re nice,” she said a little later. “Most guys want to hear every detail. They get off on it.”

I sat still.

“The complicated thing is, the guys who did it are dead. I knew who they were. Most rape victims are acquainted with their attackers, did you know that?”

I shook my head. She said, “So it complicates things. I
mean you hate somebody and then they’re dead, and how do you feel then?”

I didn’t know. “How did they die?” I said.

She shrugged. “Too quickly.”

“It doesn’t sound so complicated,” I said.

“You’ll never know until it happens to you.”

I checked the clock in the kitchen again, finished my beer, and stood up. She looked at me from beneath, and from that angle could not miss the fact that my cock was hinged like a sprung car door. She smiled.

“If you wanted to know about it, you could have asked,” she said. “I’m not ashamed.”

“I don’t want to know.”

“It happened while I was working, that’s the reason I brought it up. In a way it’s like what happened to your brother.” I looked upstairs and then back down at her, catching the outlines of her legs under the gathered wrinkles of her lap.

“They did it together,” she said, and I sat back down. For a moment, though, she appeared to have lost her place. I saw that she was drunker than I’d thought; it seemed to me that she might be one of those people like my father’s friend who, one night, after six months of impeccable behavior, had tried to kill all the Jews at the party.

It occurred to me that my father collected these people on purpose. “Fuck it,” she said. She leaned back against the stairs, her blouse tightening over her chest. She stared at the ceiling and then closed her eyes.

“How old are you?” she said.

“Twenty.”

She frowned. “That’s too bad,” she said. Then, “I’m forty-one.”

“That’s not so old,” I said, as if I knew anything about it. “You don’t look old.”

She opened her eyes and drank from the bottle, spilling beer down her chin. She wiped at it with the back of her hand. “Forty-one next week,” she said, “and you know what I want for my birthday?”

“A swimming lesson,” I said. All these years later, I still have no idea why.

She laughed out loud, and her head rolled in my direction. “I want a sixteen-year-old boy all night long,” she said. “Four years ago, you’d have been just right.”

I stared at her, blinked. Not knowing what she was talking about. “You’re washed up,” she said. “Men hit their sexual prime at sixteen, it’s a fact.”

I began not to like Ellen Guthrie.

“If you wait about six hours, the paperboy will be by,” I said.

And that made her smile, and she drank more of her beer and mussed my hair. “You know,” she said, “you could pass for sixteen.” And then she kissed me lightly on the ear and headed out onto the porch.

I went upstairs, wondering what I was supposed to make of that. I was still thinking it over in the morning, on the highway south in a loaded truck, and it seemed to me then that she had not meant any of it; that she tortured as many of us as she could to get even for being sodomized.

I thought she’d probably told both of the copyboys in the
Tribune
newsroom that she wished they were sixteen too.

T
HE PRESSES MY FATHER
used were in the bottom of the same three-story building where the editorial and advertising and business departments had offices. My father’s own office was on the top floor, at the far end of the editorial department. From there he could look out his window down at the loading
dock and see his three trucks coming and going in the morning.

There was a stairway from the newsroom leading to the presses and beyond them, to the loading docks, and many of the reporters and editors who parked their cars out in back—my father liked to keep the spaces in front of the building available for the citizens of Thorn, not wanting them inconvenienced as they did their shopping—used this stairway to enter and leave the building.

It was not unusual then for me to meet a reporter or an editor on my way inside late in the morning, coming in from my route. They were usually on their way to lunch.

I rarely saw my father, as he was in the habit of using the building’s front door. It was a good feeling, I suppose, walking out of his own newspaper onto the street of his community, but since the publication of the Van Wetter story in the
Miami Times
, the feeling had changed.

A week after I’d spoken with Ellen Guthrie on the steps, I returned from the route an hour late—I’d lost a radiator hose just as I left Thorn—and found her standing with my father near the docks. He was speaking, she was listening, a little closer to him than she needed to be, smoking a cigarette, smiling at the things he said. They looked up and watched as I backed the truck into its space in the dock. The other trucks were already in.

I climbed out and my father checked his watch.

For as long as I can remember, he worried when the papers were late, believing—correctly, I think—that the business was fragile. That newspapers were read largely out of habit, as part of a daily ritual, and that when they were not at the reader’s door on time, as promised, the habit could be broken. There was television to take their place.

The Van Wetter story in the
Times
had effected a loss in advertising, but it had not as yet cost him subscribers, and
he was afraid of that, and did not hide it well, even in front of Miss Guthrie.

I told him I’d lost a radiator hose just outside of town, and that it took me a couple of hours to get it replaced.

“They were all late,” he said, forgetting she was there.

“All of them in my truck,” I said, and my father turned, taking Ellen Guthrie by the elbow.

“It’s Ellen’s birthday,” he said. “Come with us for lunch.”

I walked along with them, sometimes falling a step behind, watching Miss Guthrie’s behind swing as she walked. It seemed to me that she was more expensive-looking than Charlotte, although not as principled.

“It’s Ellen’s fortieth birthday,” my father said as we walked. I had looked at her quickly, remembering she told me she was turning forty-one. “We’re going to drink the sun right out of the sky.”

My father always took his employees out for a drink on their birthdays, at least the ones he liked. As a rule, however, he did not start out with the intention of drinking the sun out of the sky.

We passed through the door of the Thorn Grill, into darkness and cool air. It was the only place in town you could drink liquor and eat anything except pickled meat before six o’clock at night. He put his hand on her elbow as he walked in, as if to guide her in the dark, and left it there, it seemed to me, a little longer than he needed to. We sat in a booth with plastic cushions and I looked across the table at my father, having never been out drinking with him before, having never thought of myself in the same bar.

We drank four margaritas before Ellen went to the bathroom. My father stared at her all the way there, then turned to his drink and killed what was left in the bottom.

“I
WAS TELLING
Jack before that I thought the story on the man up in Lately was well done,” she said to my father when she came back. “No matter how unpopular it was locally.”

She had put fresh color on her lips and done something to her eyes. My father dropped his chin into the palm of his hand, as if he were thinking it over.

“The reporting, I mean,” she said. “The reporting was very solid.…”

He nodded, and then picked up his margarita. The first drinks had come with paper umbrellas hinged on the ledge of the glass, but we had run them out of umbrellas now.

“Ward is a hell of a reporter,” he said finally.

“It was awful, what happened to him in Daytona Beach,” she said. My father stuck his finger into his drink and stirred it.

“Yes, it was,” he said, “but Ward’s tough.”

“I was hurt once on the job,” she said a little later, and she and I looked at each other again before she went on with it.

“It’s the kind of thing that stays in the back of your mind,” she said. “Maybe it’s why I’m not a reporter anymore.”

My father backed a few inches away, as if to see her more clearly. She returned the stare, steady and long, a little heat in it.

“What happened?” he said finally.

She shrugged. “I was attacked,” she said, leaving the word there for him to chew on. She took another sip of her margarita and stared at him again.

“Sodomized,” she said.

He blinked, and then looked away. She was still staring, waiting for him, when he looked at her again.

“While you were on a story?” my father said.

She shrugged and ran one of her fingers along the rim of the glass, and sucked on the salt.

“There were two of them, and they took turns.”

My father caught the waitress’s attention and held up three fingers to signal more drinks. He was sweating, even in the path of the air conditioner.

“One of them held me,” she said, and then stopped. “Do you mind hearing about this?”

“Not at all,” he said.

“One of them held me, and the other one raped me from behind. They changed places, and after they’d rested they raped me together.”

For a moment the only noise at the table was the sound of the air conditioner. She leaned closer to my father, half drunk now, stopping a few inches from his ear.

“That’s why I know what it feels like, the thing that happened to Ward.”

“Nobody raped Ward,” I said.

She stopped and looked at me. “What I think is, one kind of attack is like another. It’s the same thing when somebody can do whatever he wants to you.”

If my father was bothered by what she’d said, it didn’t show. He smiled at her, boozy and full of understanding.

“I didn’t need surgery, at least,” she said.

Neither of them looked as I got up and made my way to the bathroom, but a moment after I’d closed the door it opened again, and my father came in. He checked himself in the mirror, combing his hair back off his forehead, and then took one of the pills from his shirt pocket and stuck it under his tongue. He splashed his face with water, then carefully dried his hands.

“She seems like an intelligent woman,” he said, looking at me in the mirror. I had no comment on her intelligence. “She seems to know what she wants,” he said.

I looked at him, wondering what he thought that was. On his way back through the door he clapped me gently on the back, a gesture from my childhood, but somehow meaning something different now.

“You don’t have to stay,” he said.

She was sitting across the table from my father when I came out, ignoring a man staring at her from the bar. The man was drinking red beer and hadn’t shaved in two or three days. He continued to stare at her for a good minute after I sat down, dancing in one spot to some music on the jukebox, his pants nearly sliding off his hips, and then my father, who was full of tequila and full of Miss Guthrie, stared at him murderously until he turned away.

The man was thin and dirty, and he had an Adam’s apple the size of a walnut. There were mermaids tattooed on his forearms, and he reminded me of the trusties I’d seen on the way in and out of the prison at Starke. I watched him light a cigarette and finish his beer, and then span the bar with his gaze, taking in as much of Ellen Guthrie as he could.