The Paperboy (43 page)

W
ORKING ALONE, WARD FINISHED
the story on the Dade County commissioners, writing it himself. Yardley occupied himself flying back and forth to New York. He turned in fifty pages of the book and was told to rewrite them, and refused to write at all for several weeks.

The newspaper article, which, at Yardley’s insistence, bore his name along with my brother’s, resulted in the indictment of four of the commissioners, ruining their lives, and in a spirit of celebration the editors gave Ward two weeks off.

Yardley also took two weeks, and returned to New York to resume work on the book. I heard later that he went back to his publishers, asking for and receiving more money on the advance.

M
Y BROTHER WENT BACK
to Moat County. He wanted to go home, he said, for a few days rest.

What he meant by
home
, I didn’t know. He didn’t intend to move in with my father and his girlfriend. He had seen how welcome he was with her in the house.

I called my father on the day Ward left. I hadn’t spoken to him in the months since he told us to knock before we came into the house. He sounded weary when he picked up the phone, and I wondered if Ellen Guthrie had been keeping him up late.

“Jack,” he said, “good to hear your voice.” And then his own voice began to improve. He asked if I was swimming, how much I weighed, what sort of things they had me doing at the newspaper. He seemed afraid of running out of things to say; afraid that the conversation would end.

I found myself forgiving him.

“What I do best,” I said, “is when somebody says, ‘Jack, get me the glue,’ I get the glue.”

I prided myself then on being the only copyboy in the newsroom who did not have ambitions to become a reporter.

He said that he’d read Ward’s story about the Dade County commissioners and he’d been meaning to call to tell him it was a fine piece of journalism. “The most important, best journalism there is,” he said, “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, and it’s all local …”

He stopped a moment, out of things to say.

“He isn’t there, is he?”

“They gave him a couple of weeks off,” I said.

“Well,” he said, “when you see him tell him to call.”

“He’s on his way up there,” I said.

And there was a small, empty place in the conversation. “Thorn?” he said.

“I guess.”

“To visit?” A worried man now. “He isn’t doing another story, is he?”

“I don’t know what he’s doing.”

“I thought he was through with us,” he said, making a small joke. The connection was quiet while my father weighed my brother’s impending visit and its inherent domestic implications.

“Should I tell Ellen to expect him?” he said.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

I heard relief in his voice.

“Well, we’d love to have him,” he said. “At least he could come by for a meal …”

I thought of the meals at home, of the steam coming off boiled food. I was homesick. “How is Anita getting along with your roommate?” I said.

He stalled on that.

“Actually, we had to let her go.”

I didn’t say anything then. She’d been in my father’s house as long as the cracks in the ceiling.

“You know how it is,” he said, “two women in one kitchen …”

“I didn’t know Ellen was in the kitchen.”

“It’s a figure of speech,” he said.

“Anita was there a long time,” I said. It seemed to me that he should have said something to us before he got rid of her.

“I took care of her financially,” he said. “Don’t worry about that.” When I didn’t speak again, he said, “She worked for us, Jack, she wasn’t a member of the family.”

“She was part of things,” I said.

And it was quiet again.

“Things change,” he said finally. “You know that.”

F
OUR DAYS BEFORE WARD
was due back in Miami, the Sunday editor came to me in the newsroom, trying to find him. He was excited and desperate at the same time.

“We need to contact your brother,” he said.

I said he was in Moat County. I was sorting mail for the reporters at the time, a job I liked for its solitary nature.

“Where?” he said.

I hadn’t heard from him since he left.

“We’ve got to get him back here,” he said.

“He’ll be back on Friday.”

The Sunday editor shook his head, fretting. “Friday doesn’t do us any good,” he said.

“I don’t know where he’s staying,” I said.

“Would your father know?”

“I doubt it.”

He stuck his hands into his pockets and shook his head. “Jesus, what kind of a family have you got, you go home and don’t see each other?”

I turned back to the mailboxes and continued sorting the mail. “Can you find him?” he said.

“I can make some calls.…”

“We’ve got to have him in the office tomorrow,” he said.

“For what?”

“I can’t tell you for what, just get him.”

I handed the Sunday editor the letters in my hand, and he looked at them a moment, realized what they were, and dropped them in the wastebasket. I walked back into Ward’s office and shut the door. I called half a dozen motels in Lately, and he was not registered at any of them. I called my father’s office, and he was at lunch with Miss Guthrie.

The Sunday editor walked past the office from time to time, looking inside for some signal that I’d found him. I kept shaking my head.

Later, when I reached my father, he said that he’d thought that Ward had changed his mind and stayed in Miami. “If he came up, I assumed he’d have called,” he said, sounding hurt.

“Maybe he went somewhere else,” I said. His license had been reinstated and he’d bought a car of his own. I tried to think of places he might go.

“What’s going on?”

“I don’t know, they just want him back in the office,” I said. “It’s important, but they won’t tell me why.…”

He paused a moment. “Did they say when?”

“Tomorrow,” I said. “They want him back no later than the morning.”

He thought a moment, and then, quietly, “Jesus … ”

“What?”

He said, “He’s won the Pulitzer.”

The Sunday editor walked past the window again, looking in, and I shook my head no.

Y
ARDLEY ACHEMAN FLEW IN
from New York late that night, and appeared in the newsroom in the morning in one of his new suits. Seeing him there, three days before he was due, I knew my father was right.

The Sunday editor set me back to work calling Moat County motels, but some of the urgency was out of it now. It was plain that he was disappointed I wasn’t better at calling motels.

T
HE NAMES OF THE WINNERS
came in over the Associated Press wire about eleven, and the celebration began there in the
office with an official announcement by the paper’s publisher, an ancient, pink-faced man who emerged from his office upstairs to congratulate not only Yardley and my brother, but the entire staff.

The paper was good at winning Pulitzer Prizes, and the speech had been used before.

Bottles of champagne appeared as soon as the publisher returned to his own floor, and a party began there in the city room, some reporters drinking, some of them taking stories over the phone, some doing both. Yardley Acheman kissed all the best-looking women, at least the ones who would let him.

A telegram came in from Lately, my father saying this was the proudest moment of his life.

Later in the day the party moved to a bar across the street, and then to a hotel near the bar.

The hotel had a swimming pool on the roof, and reporters who had never spoken to me before sat down smelling of Scotch and confessed their admiration for my brother even if he was an odd duck, and saying what a shame it was that he couldn’t have been there for the party.

Among the thirty or so celebrants gathered at the pool that night was a young police reporter named Helen Drew. Miss Drew was overweight and, like my brother, worked at her job compulsively, even on her own time. She came into Ward’s office occasionally for advice on professional matters, as she wanted to be an investigative reporter herself, and was clearly star-struck in his presence. She could not keep herself from finishing his sentences for him, or nodding obsessively in agreement before he even began to speak. Yardley Acheman would have nothing to do with her.

On this evening, however, Yardley was feeling his humanity. She came to him and absently he dropped his arm over
her shoulder, and she leaned into him, smiling, like old pals.

Helen Drew’s skin was pale and doughy, and she did not see well even with her glasses. Her form was not so much fat as thick—not just her waist and shoulders and legs, but her wrists and fingers too. Her hands looked like an enormous baby’s.

She wore loose-fitting dresses to work that draped her body all the way to the shoes, and late at night she took those shoes off—they waited together near a canvas chair, looking squashed, with her glasses laid inside one of them—and dangled a foot in the pool as she drank. And while she was balanced this way, with one foot over the edge, Yardley, who was behind her then with a thinner woman, suddenly dropped his head and butted her back side, knocking her in.

She panicked, blind in the water and unable to swim, but then found the ladder and calmed herself, and then stayed in the pool for a long time, mascara running down her cheeks, laughing and chatting from there with the reporters standing at the edge, putting off that moment as long as she could when she would emerge with the wet material of her dress sticking to the rolls of flesh it was intended to hide.

Yardley kept saying he was sorry, again and again. But he could not apologize without remembering the spectacle as she’d gone in, and he would lose himself and begin to laugh. And she laughed with him.

Helen Drew finally came out of the pool, streaming water like a long-sunken treasure, and wrapped herself in a towel. She drank and laughed for another half hour and left. She was not at work the next day, or the next.

She resigned from the paper later in the week without cleaning out her desk, taking a job at the
Miami Sun
, a small paper which rented offices in the Times Building, where she
was promised the chance to become an investigative reporter.