The Paperboy (36 page)

I waited a moment, then started for the door.

“Was there something else that happened in Daytona?” he said suddenly. I turned and looked at him.

“You were there,” he said.

I nodded but I didn’t answer his question. I did not think he wanted me to answer.

“There’s a story …”

He didn’t finish the sentence, but left it there between us, waiting for me to tell him the story wasn’t true.

“There are always stories when things happen,” I said. Slowly, his fingers began to move again, and when I looked at the stone, there were beads of his blood on it. As I watched, the blood flattened, absorbed into the stone, staining it.

“You cut yourself,” I said, and he looked at his fingers, finding the one he’d cut, and examined it first from one side and then the other.

“I’ve heard there was something … untoward,” he said. “That the police cleaned up a mess.”

“Why would they do that? No one cares who we are down there.”

“I don’t know,” he said. He put his finger under the faucet. “It’s just a story I heard.”

“I don’t think you should pay attention to stories about your own family,” I said.

And we looked at each other again, wordless, full of accusations, and the water ran over his finger, both of us knowing who’d told him that something
untoward
had happened in Daytona Beach. He turned off the faucet and wrapped the finger in a dish towel.

“It was nothing malicious,” he said.

“What did she say?”

He shrugged. “Nothing specific, just that there was a story that was different from the one the police gave …”

He seemed to hear how weak the words sounded.

“She isn’t a malicious person,” he said. And now it was uncomfortable in the kitchen in a way that was different from the ordinary discomfort we suffered in each other’s presence, as if some agreement between us had been broken off.

“Then she shouldn’t be out repeating easy rumors,” I said.

“She isn’t easy, Jack,” he said.

“Rumors, I said rumors.…”

“They aren’t her rumors,” he said, raising his voice, and there I was, standing in the kitchen, arguing with my sixty-one-year-old father about his girlfriend.

I said, “I’m going to the beach,” and turned again to leave.

“People misunderstand Ellen,” he said, and I heard her voice in that, whispering in his ear. “They take her the wrong way.”

“In the end, I think people take you the way you are,” I said.

“May I speak to you frankly?” he said. I waited, wishing I’d made it out the door before any of this started. “Ellen thinks that perhaps …”

He looked for the words.

“…  that you may have misunderstood …”

I didn’t move an inch, not wanting to make it any easier.

“That you may have thought she was interested in you in a way that she isn’t.” “In what way?” I said.

He held up his hand as if to say none of this was as important as I was making it. “These things happen,” he said. “She knows that …”

“What things?”

He thought for a moment, deciding on the word. “A
crush,” he said, “younger man, older, experienced woman … perhaps it would be more comfortable for everyone if you didn’t call her.”

“I haven’t called her,” I said.

He smiled. “Then none of us has a problem,” he said. And he peeked underneath the towel at his finger to see if the bleeding had stopped. I turned and headed out the door, letting it slam.

A
MONTH LATER
, Ellen Guthrie was promoted to assistant managing editor of the
Moat County Tribune
, and a month after that, on a Friday, she moved into my father’s house.

The following morning I met her in the hallway outside the bathroom; her hair was wet and she was dressed only in a University of Miami T-shirt, which barely covered her behind. My father was downstairs making flapjacks and sausage for breakfast. They were going bass fishing together out on the river. Ellen Guthrie had become inordinately interested in bass.

We stopped for a moment and I moved closer to the wall, not wanting to touch her accidentally as we passed, and then a certain bemused look crossed her face, a look which stirred me, and I walked past her into the bathroom and shut the door.

The air in the bathroom was still heavy from her shower, and the place smelled of the makeup and toiletries she’d put on, getting ready to deal with hooked fish.

I shaved and brushed my teeth, thinking of the look she’d given me in the hallway, and later in the day, while she and my father were out on the St. Johns River, I threw my best clothes into the station wagon, wrote a short note of resignation from my truck-driving duties, and fled Moat County.

It was the first time I left home, if you were willing to overlook Gainesville, and I’d driven south for an hour before I realized that I was headed for Miami.

It is probably true that, one way or another, I was always going home, even when I was leaving.

M
Y BROTHER LIVED
in a small apartment building overlooking Biscayne Bay, not far from the newspaper where he worked. I found the place and sat outside it in my car for half an hour, occupying myself with an imaginary swim across to Miami Beach. It was not much of a swim, an hour or less in the water, but the boat traffic was heavy, some of the ski boats pounding through at thirty or forty miles an hour, and I picked a spot on the beach where I would go in, and then followed my progress across into the channel, making allowances for the current and tide and the weeks it had been since I had trained, and following this route I was cut to pieces about a hundred and fifty yards offshore by an ancient Chris-Craft being driven by two fellows in beards, one of them in a white sailor’s hat.

I looked back at the apartment and followed myself, disemboweled or worse, up the steps that led to the hallway. Before I could imagine Ward’s face when he opened the door, I turned on the car.

The engine swelled then dropped into a low rumble, and I drove up and down the streets near my brother’s apartment building for hours, looking at the apartments with vacancy signs in the windows, and finally stopped at one, more because there was a place to park in front than anything about the apartment itself, and rented a furnished room for a month.

“It’s just one of you,” the woman said, “you sure.”

“Just me.”

“They sometimes come in here, one person, the next thing you know, there’s twelve of them inside, sleeping on the floors.…”

“I don’t know twelve people,” I said.

She nodded, thinking it over. “You want clean linen service?” she said.

I did not answer at first, thinking the question might be some sort of test to see if I would be sleeping twelve.

“You got your own linens?” she said, impatient now.

“No,” I said.

“I put you down for the clean linen service,” she said, and then, in the same breath, she told me the house rule: “Don’t bother with nobody and they don’t bother with you.”

I
TOOK THE THINGS
from my car to the room, making two trips, walking past a thickset man with frog’s eyes who stood outside his door, smoking a tiny butt of a cigarette, staring at me as if he might be interested in asking for a date. I understood right away that Miami was not like the other two places I’d lived.

I shut the door to the room and locked it, dropping a hook into an eyebolt, and sat on the bare mattress. I felt the bedsprings yawn and hold. There were dark stains in the carpet, almost a crust. I thought of my brother’s apartment building, which had not looked so different from this one from the street, and wondered if the rules were the same there.
Don’t bother with nobody and nobody will bother with you
. Perhaps that was why he liked the place, why he liked the city.

There was a knock at the door, and then a man’s voice. “You home, buddy boy?”

I lay down on my mattress, trembling.

“Buddy boy?”

The man came back half a dozen times over the next few days, but I did not answer the door.

I
WENT OUT OF
the room to swim and to eat, and at night I would walk in the neighborhood, looking at the girls.

I hoped to run into Ward on the street, to have him spot me alone in the city and take me back to his apartment, back into my family, but I saw there were too many streets for that, and too many people on them. And in the end I went to the newspaper to find him, thinking that was somehow less of an imposition than appearing on his doorstep.

T
HE CITY ROOM WAS
a maze of desks and telephones and typewriters, all of it submerged in smoke, and I wandered into it unnoticed and asked a woman sitting in front for directions to Ward’s office. She did not look up from her typewriter, but cast her fingers in a short arc toward the back. There was a stub of a cigarette between the fingers she used to point, about the size of an engagement ring.

I crossed the city room, passing a hundred reporters and editors who never looked up, who understood intuitively that I was not important, and asked for my brother again.