The Paperboy (44 page)

M
Y BROTHER RETURNED FROM
his vacation bone thin and sunburned, with insect bites covering his face and arms and his belt cinched back to the last notch. His pants gathered in bunches at the waist.

He didn’t look as if he’d eaten since he left.

I did not ask him where he’d stayed or what he’d done, and he didn’t offer to tell me.

We went to dinner, but he only picked at the food. He seemed detached, completely uninterested in the prize he had won, and was only briefly engaged by the news that Ellen Guthrie had talked World War into firing Anita Chester.

“She wants it all to herself, doesn’t she?” he said, sounding like an outsider, someone standing to the side, watching a family fall apart.

Y
ARDLEY ACHEMAN MADE
a quick trip to New York, using the Pulitzer to leverage a few more thousand dollars from his publisher, and then flew back to Miami to request a leave of absence to finish his book. He lobbied to stay on the payroll during his leave, on the grounds that the paper was still using his picture in full-page advertisements and that the praise for the book would inevitably reflect back on the
Times
. He added that continuation of his salary would also guarantee his return after the manuscript was finished.

The editors gave him the leave of absence, but not his salary. He’d made his demands in the city room before he
made them to the editors, and they were afraid of setting a precedent.

He left for New York again that same week, saying he could not promise to come back.

T
HE SUNDAY EDITOR APPROACHED
my brother a few days later, on a mission from the editors above him, to discuss pairing him with another reporter. In spite of several indicted county commissioners, the idea that my brother could work alone hadn’t seemed to occur to them.

“We have to face the facts,” the Sunday editor said. “Acheman may not be coming back.”

My brother said no.

Y
ARDLEY ACHEMAN REDEDICATED HIMSELF
to the book, and I watched my brother cast about for a new story, throwing himself into the process as completely as he would into a story itself, but he could not find one with people who interested him. The editors had stories, of course, but they were always too much like the ones he had already done.

The calls came in again, collect, four and five times a day, occasionally that many in an hour. My brother accepted them all, putting aside his own work to answer Yardley’s questions, not needing now to go back into the transcripts and notes from the case, even for the smallest details.

There was a certain urgency to these calls, and Yardley’s voice, when I picked up the phone, had lost its confidence. It occurred to me that perhaps writing a book was not as entertaining an activity as signing the contract to write it.

I remember another call a few months later, a different
kind of call, when my brother simply held the phone, against his ear and listened for a long time. Slowly, he began to nod. “I could let you have a few hundred,” he said.

I could hear the voice coming through the phone, and my brother was nodding again. He picked up a pencil and wrote down an address. “I’ll put it in the mail tonight,” he said, and then he hung up.

He looked at me and said, “Elaine’s must be expensive.”

He smiled for a moment, enjoying what he’d said, and then went back to the work in front of him, curious, I think, at the meanness of the remark.

T
HE MONEY DID NOT LAST
in New York, and Yardley Acheman returned to the
Times
angry and broke, bringing the unfinished book with him. His wife stayed where she was.

On his first day back, a call came in from Helen Drew. Yardley did not remember who she was until she recalled for him that she had been the one who fell into the pool. That was the way she put it, that she fell.

“Right, right,” he said, “how are you?”

I was in the office at the time and he looked up at me and winked.

She asked if he had a few minutes to talk.

“The truth is, with the book and all, I’m not doing interviews right now …”

“We were just looking over the Pulitzer story,” she said, “and a couple of questions came up.”

“We?” he said. “Who is
we?”

“My editors and I …”

“And you just happen to be looking over my Pulitzer story?”

“There were a few things we were wondering about.”

Yardley looked at me again, but there was no wink in it now. “I don’t have time for this shit,” he said. “I don’t know what kind of penny-ante, chickenshit journalism you practice over there, but I don’t have time for it.”

And then he slammed the phone onto the cradle and stalked out of the office. A moment later, my brother’s phone began to ring.

M
Y BROTHER SPOKE
several times to Helen Drew in the next few months, over the objections of Yardley Acheman. It became clear that she was going back over the entire story, piece by piece. Why, no one knew. She would call over the smallest point, unwilling or unable to go on until everything behind her was clear and accounted for. She never seemed to get things right the first time, but in the end she was thorough. And in the end, that is all a reporter needs.

Yardley Acheman began to believe that she was writing a book of her own. He was infuriated that Ward would talk to her, and went to the editors to complain. Yardley had threatened them too often, however, and did not have the influence he had once had. They said there was nothing they could do.

H
ELEN DREW SHOWED UP
in the city room on a Thursday afternoon in sandals and one of her loose-fitting dresses. She wore a button protesting the war in Vietnam, and her hair was streaked blond in a way that was the fashion that year.

It would be hard to imagine a more harmless-looking human being. Ward was on the telephone when she came in. She offered me her hand and I took it, feeling the weight.
She was sweating and breathing heavily, having walked the steps from the first floor, and fanned herself with a copy of the paper that someone at the reception desk had given her. She picked at her dress, pulling it away from her skin.

She looked around the room. “It’s bigger than I remember,” she said.