The Paperboy (46 page)

I
WAS HALF DRUNK
and on the way back to the paper when I saw them, coming out of the parking lot. First Helen Drew, in a Ford, and then Yardley Acheman, in his Buick. Half a minute apart. She turned the corner and slowed, watching for him in her rearview mirror, and then, after he had turned the corner too, they disappeared together into Miami.

W
HEN I SAW
Helen Drew again, it was ten o’clock in the morning at the rooming house. It was my day off and I’d just come back from a swim. I suppose she’d been watching for me outside. I was still in a bathing suit when she knocked on
the door. She was embarrassed, and stumbled over herself apologizing for the intrusion.

“I tried to call the paper,” she said, “but the woman wouldn’t take a message.”

The receptionist at the paper refused to take messages for the secretaries or the editorial assistants, feeling they were not professional members of the staff, and not entitled to professional courtesies.

I looked around my room, and clothes were strewn most of the places anyone could sit. The sheets were twisted on the bed; I couldn’t remember when I’d changed them. She glanced back toward the front door, uncomfortable to be standing in the hall.

I opened the door wider and stepped aside to let her in. Once she was past, I looked up the hallway, and saw Froggy Bill at his regular station, excited by what was going on.

She sat down on a corner of the bed. A single pants leg stuck out from beneath her, as if whoever had been inside had been crushed. I picked up a T-shirt and put it on, and that seemed to make her more comfortable. There was water in my ear from the swim, and I tilted that way and hit my head with the flat of my palm. She winced.

“Sorry,” she said, “I’m not used to doing this.”

I picked up a pair of pants and a shirt and tossed them into the open closet, then cleared the socks off the chair against the wall and sat down. The bathing suit was damp and sandy. An ancient, cracked mirror hung on the opposite wall, and from where I was sitting I could see her, front and back.

She did not seem to know where to start.

“I don’t know how I get into these things,” she said finally.

I waited, thinking of the man outside in the hallway, and what he imagined I was doing with this fat girl in my room.

“It’s about your brother,” she said.

“What about him?”

“About Daytona Beach.” She sat perfectly still and waited. I waited too. She looked unhappy and resigned. “Someone who knows,” she said, “indicated to me that he didn’t get hurt on the beach.”

It was quiet a moment.

“What difference does it make?”

She sat very still. “It just gets messier and messier,” she said.

“What does?”

“The whole thing,” she said. “You start out with something you want to do, and the next thing you know you’re doing things you don’t want to do at all.…”

“Then don’t do them,” I said.

She shook her head. “It’s gone too far for that.”

I glanced quickly in the mirror, at the rolls of flesh under her blouse. She sat up on the bed, straightening herself.

“You were there in Daytona Beach when it happened …”

I waited for her to finish.

“It wasn’t at the beach, was it?”

“Who said that?”

“My source.”

I didn’t answer.

“He or she indicated it happened at the hotel,” she said.

I didn’t move.

“The night manager said it happened there too.”

“Bullshit,” I said. She was not good at lying.

“The question is, if it happened at the hotel, why did he say it happened at the beach?”

“The question is, why would Yardley Acheman tell you it didn’t happen at the beach?”

Now she sat still, as if that were a problem she’d thought of too. She did not try to pretend it wasn’t Yardley. “I have to have one thing straight in my head before I can go on to the next thing,” she said finally. “The person I spoke to said your brother had some sailors in his room, to have sex with them, and they beat him up and tried to rob him.”

She looked at me, waiting.

“It happened on the beach,” I said.

She sat still, then slowly shook her head. “Look,” she said, “could we just tell each other the truth?”

Then, without waiting for me to answer, she said, “Yardley Acheman told me, off the record, what happened in Daytona, and he said the story was hurried into print to draw attention away.”

She sat still.

“That doesn’t make sense,” I said.

She thought a moment. “In a screwy way it does … it explains the mix-up over the contractor.…”

My bathing suit had turned cold, and I wanted to shower and then walk to the little Cuban café two blocks south and read the newspapers and eat breakfast.

“The contractor in the story,” she said. “I haven’t been able to find him, nobody will divulge his name. Maybe your brother was so embarrassed …” She paused a moment, thinking. “Maybe he got confused.”

“You mean he made the guy up.”

“To protect his privacy,” she said. “Or maybe he got hurt so bad, he just wanted things to be over.”

I sat there thinking of Yardley Acheman.

“This is all off the record,” she said.

A
MOMENT LATER
the color drained out of her face, and she dropped back onto her elbows. I stayed where I was, still calculating the enormity of the lie Yardley had told.

“Have you got an orange?” she said.

Her eyes were open and she was sweating. I went to the window and opened it wider, but there wasn’t enough air to stir the curtains. She looked at me without moving her face.

“What’s wrong?” I said.

“My blood sugar,” she said. “I need some fruit.”

There was a little grocery store on the same block as the rooming house; the old woman who had it ran numbers on the side. I picked up Helen Drew’s legs, holding her ankles, to get her all on the bed. The weight was surprising, and when I had them up she moved a little, realigning herself, at the same time holding down her skirt.

I went out the door, hurrying, past Froggy Bill. “I got some rubbers right here,” he said, and stuck his hand inside his pocket. He grinned, and his teeth were terrible.

I ran to the store and bought half a dozen oranges and some grapes and a quart of orange juice and a box of Fig Newtons.

When I came back into the building Froggy Bill was closer to my room than he’d been when I left, still in the hallway but looking in the door. He moved away as I came in, and restationed himself outside his own door.

She was sitting up again, still pale, but looking better. I put the things I’d bought on the bed next to her and she went over them, opening the orange juice first, drinking perhaps half the container, and then ate all the Fig Newtons and a few of the grapes.

Gradually the color came back to her face, and when she felt well enough she was humiliated. “I’ve been on this diet,” she said. I looked at what was left of the cookies on the bed, the empty carton of orange juice. The six oranges
lay where I’d put them, untouched. “The idea is all you eat is popcorn, it’s supposed to make you lose twenty pounds the first month, but I keep getting dizzy.”

She looked at the bed too, as if she just noticed the evidence of what she’d eaten. “A nurse told me it was blood sugar,” she said.

She began cleaning it up, picking up the papers the Fig Newtons had been wrapped in, stuffing them into the orange juice carton.

“This is embarrassing,” she said.

She stood up, steadying herself, and then put the carton in the garbage. She looked around the room, as if she were going to clean it all.

“It always comes down to the same thing,” she said. “In the end, it doesn’t matter what I do, I’m still just the fat kid who gets sick at school.” I saw that she was about to cry; I didn’t know what to do about it. And then she was crying, and that embarrassed her too.

“Oh, shit,” she said, “here I go.” And she smiled and cried at the same time. I sat still, waiting for her to stop, trying to find somewhere else in the room to look.

She went to my sink and ran some water, bending into her hands. She came up looking damp. She sat heavily on the bed.

“I never wanted to hurt your brother,” she said, and blew her nose. “It was that bastard Acheman, but now it’s all gone the wrong way.…” And there was something in her hopelessness that I trusted, I suppose because I was hopeless most of the time myself.

“I’ll tell you some things,” I said, “but not for the newspaper.”

She looked at me differently.

“This is off the record,” I said.

“Completely off the record,” she said. And I heard something
tinny in that, but I’d already gone too far to stop, and a few moments later I was telling her what it looked like when I walked into my brother’s hotel room. The sailors and the police and the ambulance attendants and Ward, broken to pieces.

“It had nothing to do with the story,” I said, “nothing to do with the contractor, except Ward was there trying to find him.”

“It was Yardley who said he found the guy?”

“Yardley,” I said.

And then I was through talking, and she understood that and got up to leave. “This was all so horrible,” she said, looking back at the bed. “You must think I’m crazy.”

She opened her purse and came out with a five-dollar bill. “What do I owe you for the groceries?”

We looked at each other over the money, not knowing how to get out of the moment.

“It never happened,” I said.

She waited a second or two, then set the money on the chair near the wall. I knew then what I’d done. I stepped into the hallway to see her past Froggy Bill, but he’d left his usual spot, I suppose to report what had gone on to the woman who ran the apartment.

I went to the Cuban place for breakfast, and sat over rice and meat sauce and eggs, trying to remember the exact words I’d said to Helen Drew, saying them again, returning again and again to the cold certainty that I’d turned Ward over to the enemy.

T
HE STORY APPEARED
that same week, on Friday, beginning on the front page of the
Miami Sun
, under the headline
THE MAKING OF A
P
ULITZER
. The piece ran eighty column inches,
perhaps half of it simply a reconstruction of the original story, the other half divided between the search for the missing contractor and the incident in the hotel at Daytona Beach.

Reading the story, I heard some of the words I’d said to her in my room; she’d had a tape recorder in her purse. She’d probably turned it on when I went for the groceries. I heard Yardley’s voice in the story too.

She reported that it was unclear which of the two reporters—my brother or Yardley Acheman—claimed to have found the contractor, and that in spite of questions now that the man existed, neither the
Times
nor the reporters would reveal his name, citing a principle of confidentiality.

“Lingering questions,” she wrote, “have not only split the partnership, but split the paper, and called its credibility into question. According to a spokesman for the
Times
, however, there are no plans at this time to return the Pulitzer Prize.”