The Paperboy (49 page)

I looked into the shower too, we studied it a long time, this shower, and then I turned to Ward. A large, black bruise ran the length of his thigh, and there were other bruises on the trunk of his body. His ribs were distinct under his skin, defined all the way to their ends.

It seemed to me that he could not have weighed a hundred and thirty pounds. He looked at me and smiled, and then drank the last little bit of vodka left in the glass. I looked again at the shower.

“The idea is you run the water while you’re in there with
it,” I said. And he stood up, naked and dignified, and handed me his glass and then stepped in.

W
E WENT TO A RESTAURANT
I did not know, a place he saw as we drove past in my car. It was the kind of place with tablecloths and a wine list, but I was not thinking of how much it would cost. He ordered a bottle of thirty-dollar wine and a salad. He had drunk half a bottle of vodka that day, but it still didn’t show.

He sat up straight and spoke all his words accurately, in a soft voice. “You on a diet?” I said.

He looked at me, not understanding the question.

“You’re only eating a salad?”

He thought for a moment, remembering, then nodded. That was what he was having, a salad.

“You’re losing weight,” I said.

He looked down at himself, then either lost the thought or decided it didn’t matter. “Have you heard from World War?” he said.

I told him he’d already asked that.

“I meant about the wedding,” he said.

“Not a word,” I said. “Just the invitation.”

The waiter brought the bottle of wine Ward had ordered and removed the cork and set it on the table. He poured a little into my glass to test. Ward watched me taste the wine as if something depended on my opinion of it, and then held his glass while the waiter filled it too.

“Do you think he’ll go through with it?” I said.

“World War?” he said, “of course.” And he was right. It was my father’s nature to see things through. It is the nature of the business. Something moves, and draws the eye, and
that is as much as it takes. A day later it is incorporated into the great, messy history of this place and time.

Cautious human beings do not presume to write history on a day’s notice. They are aware of the damage mistakes can cause. My father believed that mistakes could always be corrected in the next edition.

Ward drank what was left in his wineglass. He took it directly into his throat, as if it were water, as if it had no taste at all. “Do you think I should go?” he said finally.

“Why not?”

It hadn’t occurred to me until that moment that we would not be in Thorn together to witness an error of this magnitude.

He looked at his wineglass and said, “He’s probably embarrassed at what’s happened …” He thought it over. “She doesn’t like us around, I’d hate to ruin the day.

“We’re his family,” I said, and I poured myself another glass of wine. The second taste was better than the first, which perhaps is what separates thirty-dollar wine from the kind you buy at the grocery store. “We were there before Ellen Guthrie, and we’ll be there after she’s gone.”

He nodded—an acknowledgment that I’d spoken, not that he agreed with what I’d said. A beautiful young woman walked across the room, passing by our table, the cloth of her skirt brushed against my shoulder. There were so many things I wanted, and that was the only one that had a name. “You ought to eat something,” I said.

He picked at a piece of lettuce with his fork, and put it into his mouth. It did not taste as good to him as the wine. “You’re too thin,” I said. I leaned across the table and spoke more quietly. “You look like you took a bad spill, too.”

He didn’t understand.

“The bruise on your leg, the marks on your chest and arms …”

He thought a moment and said, “I don’t know how that happened.”

“You must have fallen,” I said.

“I must have.”

Ward stared at his wineglass. “Are you going swimming tonight?” he said.

I looked out the window toward the street and saw a ladies’ hat tumble past on the sidewalk. It was cool that night, and cloudy, and the wind had been picking up all day. A long ways out, a storm was collecting in the Atlantic.

“There’s too much wind,” I said. “It has to be still or you’re fighting it the whole time.”

“You’re in the water. How can you feel it if you’re in the water?”

“You can feel it,” I said, “but if it’s calm, you don’t have to fight. On a calm night, you’re just part of the ocean.”

W
E DROVE NORTH TO
Moat County that weekend, leaving at ten in the morning, both of us hung over and grim. The car smelled of spilled wine, and the rain beat against the windshield one moment, and then settled into a mist the next. Once, coming into Fort Lauderdale, we saw the sun. Afterwards, the windows fogged, and I had to wipe them clean with my hand to see.

Ward sat still in the seat next to me and made no move to clear the glass in front of him, as if he had no interest in seeing what was outside. He had not wanted to leave his apartment. Helen Drew’s story about the Pulitzer Prize was dying then the way stories always die—it happens when there is nothing to sustain them—but it did not seem to be dying to my brother.

It grew, in fact, each day he didn’t hear from World War.
“I wish this weren’t hanging over my head right now,” he said.

“It isn’t as bad as you think. People in Moat County don’t care about Miami newspapers or Pulitzer Prizes … ”

It was no comfort. We listened for a while to the sound of the tires and the rain, and then I turned on the radio and heard in a news report that the hurricane had turned east and was headed into the Keys, its winds right at a hundred miles an hour.

“We ought to stop and get something to drink,” he said a little later.

I pulled into a convenience store and bought a cold six-pack of beer, and we drank that as we drove up U.S. 1, and after a while the beer began to make us feel better, and after we had drunk the six beers we pulled the car to the side of the road and stepped outside into a driving rain and urinated against the tires. We stood on opposite sides of the car, looking at each other over the hood. Ward’s hair was plastered across his pale forehead, and he had to shout to be heard over the wind.

“It’s too bad,” he said, “that they can’t take a picture of this for the wedding album.”

The rain seemed to clean us.

“M
AYBE THIS WON’T BE
so bad,” I said. We were back on the road.

Ward shrugged, as if it didn’t matter. “We ought to get more beer,” he said. There were only a few cars on the highway, and the ones we saw had their lights on against the rain, somehow making the storm seem all the worse.

We looked for a store, but the ones we passed were all closed. It turned darker, and there was a certain feeling to
the afternoon that we were the only two souls in the state not safe at home.

T
HE WEDDING OF MY FATHER
and Ellen Guthrie went off on schedule the next day, in spite of Hurricane Sylvia, which in the end had veered west into the Gulf of Mexico and hit the state just below Bradenton Beach, and then turned north to blow itself out.

The ceremony was held in the Methodist church in Thorn, with the rain beating so hard against the roof and the stained-glass windows I could barely hear the words. There were perhaps a hundred guests sitting in the pews behind me, most of them friends of my father’s. It was my impression that Ellen Guthrie had no friends in Moat County.

The woman who had once been my father’s managing editor was there, a long skirt covering her legs to mid-calf, and she sat resolute and loyal, banking, I suppose, on the day when this marriage would end. My father had rediscovered slender legs, however, and would never go back.

He wore a pale suit with a white tie, and Ellen Guthrie wore a white dress. I don’t know much about wedding dresses, except to say this was not the sort of thing that dragged on the floor behind her.

Ward and I sat in the front row, soaked to the skin, and the lightning and thunder rattled the windows and the rain blew so hard that it did not seem impossible that it would blow the old building down. The organist was nervous, and her padded shoulders hunched at the sound of the wind.

A man my father’s age gave Ellen Guthrie in marriage, and there was something in his expression that said he was making the best of a bad situation.

My father’s best man was a former editor of the
Atlanta Constitution
.

All members of the wedding party were wet except Ellen Guthrie herself, who had somehow managed to come through Hurricane Sylvia and arrive at the altar dry. She was, of course, a woman of great determination.

After the ceremony we ran to the limousines my father had hired for the occasion, and rode to the country club where the reception was held. Ward and I shared a car with the man who had given Ellen Guthrie away, and he was precisely as cheerful as the weather.

He introduced himself as her father, and stared out the window in a forlorn way at Thorn. The wind rocked the car and rain seeped in through the windows. “I suppose she knows what she’s doing,” he said, “but it’s always hard on a father, letting your little girl go.”

“Imagine how we feel,” I said, but it was not a good time for small jokes.