The Paperboy (35 page)

My father caught him at it. “Is there something you want?” he said.

“Jesus,” I said, and her hand touched my leg under the table, as if telling me to hush. The man smiled, looking at my father, and then at Miss Guthrie. It was as easy to count the teeth as the gaps. His head was strangely elongated, and it seemed very unlikely that he was not carrying a gun.

He looked quickly at me, and dismissed what he saw. He took his first step away from the bar and moved toward the table. “Listen,” I said, “nobody wants any trouble.”

He stared at me with as much malice as he could collect,
but I had been in a room with Hillary Van Wetter, and knew the real thing when I saw it. This one was a born trusty.

“Was anybody talking to you?” he said.

And then he was at the table, leaning over us, smiling.

“Now,” he said, “what bi’niss was it you said we had?”

The bartender noticed what was happening and called the man back. “Cleveland, leave them people alone and get back on your stool,” he said.

But the man stayed where he was. “You smell sweet,” he said to my father, “you know that?”

“If I were you,” I said to him, “I’d go back to my stool.”

“I can handle this,” my father said, but the man had already turned to look at me.

“What’s that supposed to signify?” he said.

“Cleveland, goddamnit,” the bartender said, but the man held out his hand, as if to hush him.

“It means you came to the wrong table,” I said, and in that moment, with the memory of what had happened to Ward so fresh in my mind, I was prepared to take things as far as they would go.

The man seemed to sense that, and went back to his stool at the bar, complaining to the bartender. “Working people got rights too,” he said.

My father glared at him, and then turned his attention back to the matter at hand. “Don’t let him bother you,” he said to her.

She batted her eyes at him, making the moment last.

“Thank you,” she said finally. “Men like that terrify me.”

The truth, of course, is that she could have sent a man like that home boneless.

The man at the bar left a few minutes later, and when he was gone I got up to leave too. The margarita glasses were all over the table, the ashtray was full of cigarette butts. It was her habit to smoke perhaps a third of each cigarette and
then put it out, as she used this gesture to punctuate her sentences.

I
MET MY FATHER
coming in just as I was going out in the morning. His Chrysler rolled up into the driveway, then off the driveway into the front yard, and he stumbled out. His shirt was hanging free of his pants and he had no socks. He was bleary and drunk and wet, and I had not seen him so happy since the days when my mother was still at home and things had not started yet to go against him.

It was close to four in the morning. “A very intelligent young woman,” he said, and stumbled past me to the steps.

I watched him climb to the porch, almost in slow motion, rocking at the top before he continued inside. It made me smile, to think of him staring down bar rats and then taking her to bed. It seemed to me he’d had a good night.

L
ATE THE NEXT MORNING
, after I had backed the truck into the bay and climbed down, she appeared from the rear door of the building, looking around her as if she were afraid to be seen.

“Happy birthday,” I said.

“I wanted to talk to you about that night at your house,” she said.

“Don’t do that,” I said.

“I just don’t want any misunderstandings.”

“We don’t have to understand each other,” I said, trying to get away. She stayed where she was, refusing to move until she’d finished.

“Sometimes when I drink old problems come back to haunt me,” she said.

“We were both drinking,” I said. And then, because she was still standing in front of me, not moving, I said, “It wasn’t a bad night.”

“I just don’t want you to get the wrong idea,” she said.

“I didn’t.” No inkling of what the right idea was. She looked at me as if she couldn’t make up her mind.

“I’m twice as old as you are,” she said.

“There is no problem,” I said, and started around her.

“I’m not a tease,” she said. And we stood in the garage, looking at each other. It is an uncomfortable thing, to lie to someone about things when you both know what is true. It asks too much of your authority, even if you’re talking with a child.

In the end, we all know what we know.

The tip of her tongue appeared at the corner of her mouth, and then she bit her lower lip. “I’ve got to go punch the clock,” I said. “I never got off the clock yesterday.”

It was one of my father’s rules, all employees punched time clocks except the editorial staff. I remembered about half the time. Generally speaking, the reporters and editors didn’t make any more money than the truck drivers or the mailers, but my father drew a distinction between the classes of workers, believing that those in the city room were above lying.

I stepped around Ellen Guthrie and walked back into the plant.

S
HE CALLED ME
at home that afternoon. I had been swimming and I’d drunk a beer, and when the phone rang I was half asleep and thinking of Charlotte.

“I don’t know what to do about you,” she said.

I said neither did I, most of the time.

“Why don’t you come over?” she said.

“Where?”

“My apartment,” she said. “Right now if you want.”

I told her I would be there in half an hour, and then, after I hung up the phone, I thought of my father coming in drunk and happy the night before, and I decided not to visit her after all.

I was never one to take a bite off someone else’s fork.

I showered slowly and then went into the kitchen, took another beer from the refrigerator, and lay down on the couch in the living room with the newspaper.

She called again an hour later. “You’re mad at me, aren’t you?” she said.

“No,” I said.

“Why don’t you come over?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and stopped talking.

And then she hung up. When she called again, fifteen minutes later, my father was home and picked up the phone. His voice changed when he realized who it was; he laughed out loud, then he whispered. He stayed on the phone half an hour, and when he’d finished he came into the living room, carrying a bottle of wine for himself and a fresh beer for me.

“That was Ellen Guthrie,” he said, and he sounded happy and surprised. “A very smart young woman,” he said.

Which, of course, was absolutely true.

O
NE MORNING A MONTH LATER
I found my father sharpening knives in the kitchen—a signal that things had not improved at the newspaper. It was his idiosyncrasy to sharpen blades
when he was worried. During the year after my mother left, you could not reach into a kitchen drawer without drawing blood.

I was walking through the kitchen on the way to the garage. He was keeping steady company with Miss Guthrie now, coming home late and smiling every night, smelling sweetly pickled. In the mornings, the problems settled back in.

It was a Sunday and I was going to St. Augustine. I’d bought a car that week, an eight-year-old Ford station wagon with a decaying exhaust system and an accelerator which stuck when it was pressed to the floor. It cost three hundred and fifty dollars, and knowing it embarrassed my father to have a three-hundred-and-fifty-dollar automobile parked in front of the house, I left it along the narrow dirt alley that separated our property from the neighbor behind us. Sometimes at night, when I was out late myself, I turned off the engine at the street and allowed it to coast up the alley until it stopped.

He’d laid the pumice stone on the counter next to the sink, and pressed near the blade’s edge with his fingers, working it in small circles. He was a perfectionist with his knives, and seemed to possess some innate sense of the spot where the stone and the steel touched; a certain understanding of the nature of friction.

“I see the Van Wetter fellow has been given a new trial,” he said. He had seen that, among other places, on the front page of his own newspaper. The story had been there, one way or another, every day that week, as it had been on the front pages of most of the other newspapers in the state. Unlike the other papers, the
Moat County Tribune
did not include the names of the
Miami Times
reporters who were responsible for generating the new trial.

Three of my father’s lost advertisers had not come back.

He was staring at the point of the knife, his fingertips bright red. He moved them slower now, more cautiously, as if he could feel the moment to quit coming.

“Maybe they’ll hold it somewhere else,” I said, thinking it would be better for him if they took the trial out of Lately.

“I doubt that they’ll hold it at all,” he said, still pressing, the sound of it in his voice. “People have moved, evidence has been lost …”

His voice died away, and I heard the blade working into the stone. A small, unobtrusive, chewing sound, you would never notice it except in the kind of silence that is made between two people, which is a different sound than silence you come across, say, underwater.

“They’ll let him go,” he said, and then his hands stopped and he looked up at me, a note of accusation in it. I shrugged.

“Then he’ll go back to the river,” I said.

I had been locked in a small room with Hillary Van Wetter, and knew what he was. I’d felt the cast of his bad intentions, and then the relief when he moved on to my brother or Yardley Acheman, or to Charlotte, and even understanding what he was, I didn’t see that it made much difference if he were electrocuted by the state or living in remote regions of the swamp.

“Well,” my father said, “I suppose he will.”

It settled and then he said, “Have you spoken with your brother?”

I’d called half a dozen times that week, but he had not been at his apartment, or if he had, he was not answering the phone. “I don’t think he cares about Hillary Van Wetter anymore,” I said.

My father smiled, a small, brittle smile, knowing that wasn’t true. Ward was not the son who quit on things when they became difficult. “He cares,” he said.