The Paperboy (6 page)

But it was hard to know what Ward was thinking; he had always held himself behind the door to answer.

He had no talent for conversation, had never found a way to say the things he felt. It was as if even ordinary gestures—a smile, a turn of his head—didn’t fit, perhaps were too imprecise for the exact, literal nature of his mind. He kept himself at a distance that no one could cross.

“How are things in the city?” I said.

And for ten seconds it was as if someone had cut the line.

“Good,” he said, finally. And then, after another pause, “You’re not swimming today?”

“No.”

In the silence that followed, I caught a sudden reflection of what had happened in Gainesville, things changing one morning in the pool when the noise began to bounce off the walls and ceiling in a way that I could not follow back to the source.… How can I tell you this? I was terrifed that there was no source. That I was scattered, no longer intact.

The swimming coach, a Hungarian immigrant who had been wounded in the Russian invasion, pulled me out of practice ten minutes later and rapped on my forehead as if it were a screen door, and told me I had talent but would never amount to anything until I learned to commit myself to the swim. Commit everything to the swim.

“I’ll get W.W.,” I said, which is what my father—William Ward James—was called by everyone except Anita Chester, who called him Mr. James, and old friends who called him “World War.”

But that was from a different time and a different place.

“Wait a minute,” Ward said.

I waited, afraid he was going to ask about Gainesville. Moments passed.

“How are you doing?”

“It’s going all right.”

“W.W. said he’s got you running the north county route.”

“Six days a week.”

The
Moat County Tribune
had no Sunday edition. My father had tried it for eight months a few years before, and nearly lost the paper.

“You want a job?” he said quietly.

“Is it driving a truck?”

“No,” he said, “not a truck.”

The line went quiet again.

“A car,” he said finally.

“Whose car?”

“I don’t know, a rental …” Something left hanging.

“You don’t need me to drive a rental, Ward,” I said.

“Yes,” he said, “I do.”

I
AM NOT SURE
my father had a clock on it—he had worked each day for the next day most of his life, which is the fundamental rhythm of the news business, and he was happiest measuring his time in daily editions and unhappiest when he had to think further ahead, as the economics of the business required—but it was clear to me from early on that he meant for Ward to take over his newspaper.

His vision of this moment—a ceremony of some kind, surely—stayed constant, I think, even as all things around him changed.

He had always accommodated change, but kept this moment
of his rewarding apart from that; perfect, unblemished, like the shapes of the things in his stories.

And it never seemed to me, until my brother called from Miami to ask if I would take a job as his driver, that I appeared in my father’s grand reward ceremony at all. No more, at least, than in a place toward the front of the spectators, where I might stand with my mother and her new husband to witness the celebration.

But when I mentioned over supper later in the week that Ward had offered me a job which did not involve getting out of bed at two-thirty in the morning, my father, without realizing he had done it, set his fork down beside his plate and gazed past me and out the window. I remembered the look from the year my mother left.

He took out his pocketknife and opened the blade, testing its sharpness with the flat of his thumb. Then, just as absently, he went into his pocket for a heart pill. He had been doing more of that lately; sometimes it was hard to tell what made him happy.

Anita Chester came through the door a moment later, looked at the cooling food on my father’s plate, then at the glaze over his eyes.

“Is something wrong with your meal, Mr. James?” she said.

“It’s fine,” he said, still looking out the window.

The heart pill had already made him more comfortable.

“Then eat it,” she said, and went back into the kitchen.

He picked up his fork, reluctant to disobey her, and glanced down at the plate. Okra, black-eyed peas, pieces of ham, all lying together in a congealing pile. She took home what we didn’t eat. He touched it, breaking the seal, and steam from inside came off the plate into his face and fogged his glasses.

He put the fork back down, a piece of ham speared at the
end. “I thought you were going to stick around,” he said finally. He looked quickly around the room, reminding me how empty the place would be.

“I’m not going to Miami,” I said. “Ward’s coming here.” But he didn’t seem to hear.

“Everybody’s leaving,” he said.

“I’m not leaving.” I said it slowly. He looked at me as if he didn’t know who I was. “Ward’s looking into something here in Moat County,” I said. “He needs somebody to drive him around.”

He picked up his glass and finished all the water in it. When he put it down, he was back in the room. “Why can’t he drive himself?” he said.

I shook my head, unwilling to tell him that.

“All I know, he and Yardley Acheman are going to be up here a few weeks.”

“And after that?” he said.

Anita Chester came back through the door, studied my father’s plate and his pocketknife, lying open near it, and put her hands on her hips. “You going to eat that or torture it?” she said. “I got things to do.”

Without a word, my father picked up the full plate and handed it to her. She took it, then collected mine, then disappeared back into the kitchen. A moment later, we heard her scraping the dishes.

“What about afterwards?” my father said again.

I said I didn’t know.

L
ATER THAT NIGHT
, after he had read the papers, my father got out of his chair, walked into the kitchen, and came back with a beer and a bottle of wine. One glass. He handed the beer to me and sat down, pouring wine into the glass.

“When I was young and first starting out in this business,” he said, “there was a copy editor I knew at the
Times-Herald
in New York. His name was Henry McManus from Savannah, Georgia, and he is, to this moment, the cleanest human being I ever saw in a newsroom. He got a haircut once a week, kept the sleeves of his shirt buttoned right to the wrist all day, never raised his voice.”

My father had a drink of the wine and then looked at me to see if he’d told me this story before. I couldn’t remember if I’d heard it, but it wasn’t an old favorite from his days with Ralph McGill. My father smiled and dropped his head backwards into the chair until it rested in the spot where the upholstery was stained.

“He labeled his glue pot so other editors wouldn’t use it, and cleaned spills off the side before they’d hardened,” he said, “that’s how neat he was.” He paused, thinking of Henry McManus’s glue pot. “And he was so revered, other editors respected his glue, and never used it even when he wasn’t there to protect it.

“Henry was an older man,” he said, “he may have been thirty-five, which at the time seemed very old indeed, and he’d worked at a dozen newspapers. Still, he spoke to everyone, from the boss right down to the copyboys, with a respectful formality you rarely hear in a newsroom. He was fast and careful with copy, and some of us young Turks would sit in the bar across the street after we’d put the paper to bed and speculate on why he’d never become something more important.

“He had the demeanor of an assistant managing editor, and knew the city as well as any reporter, although he hadn’t been there much more than a year. We decided, finally, that Henry McManus didn’t want to be important, and that was why he moved from paper to paper.”

I nodded while my father drank his wine, wondering if
that was the end of the story. Then he smiled again, watching as it rolled past.

“There was an annual party at Christmas,” he said. “We went to Henry’s apartment and collected him, against his wishes. We forced a drink on him and waited in his living room until he’d showered and dressed. And on the way to the party we gave him another drink, which he took with less coercion, and then another.…”

Anita Chester came through the living room, carrying her purse.

“I’ll be leaving now,” she said.

My father nodded at her, distracted, trying to keep his finger on the spot in the story. She lifted her chin half an inch and headed out of the house. The screen door slammed shut behind her. My father hated the sound of a screen door slamming.

He paused, as if he were waiting for some pain in his chest to pass, and then picked up the narrative exactly where he had left it.

“At the party,” he said, “Henry stood in a corner, straight as a soldier, drinking punch that someone had spiked with vodka. He spoke only when spoken to, shook hands and smiled as the bosses told their wives kind things about his work.…”

My father paused again and finished the wine in his glass. He poured another. “And then something came over him,” he said quietly, the wonder of it still in his voice. “One minute he was standing against the wall, the next minute he was in every detail a mad dog, right down to the foaming mouth.

“He lunged at one of the editors, and then another, getting the second by the throat. Several of us dragged him off, but he got loose—he was as strong as three of us, which was as many as could get hold of him—and tossed aside one of
the wives, trying to get at her husband. She went into the punch, and that seemed to set him off in another direction and that’s when he began shouting. ‘Jews,’ ‘kikes,’ unimaginable language, howling it.…”

My father stopped again, then slowly shook his head.

“He never even came in for his check,” he said, “he just disappeared. Years later, I heard that he’d gone to Chicago, put six months on the copydesk, and then done the same damn thing.…”

My father looked at me then. “He was a newspaperman,” he said, “but there’s some people who should never leave Savannah.”

I sat dead still, wondering what he’d heard about my expulsion from Gainesville, and if he thought I was also someone who should never leave Savannah.

W
ITH HIS OWN ROOTS
in suburban Miami, which is to say he had no roots at all, Yardley Acheman did not arrive in Moat County carrying a great esteem for local sensibilities. Nothing looks more foolish than tradition to those who have none.

He stepped off the bus in Thorn shirtless, his dark, curly hair falling almost to his shoulders, carrying an upright Underwood typewriter. It must have weighed twenty pounds. My brother was the next passenger out. The town was used to long hair, of course—it was 1969—but no one had ever seen a man climbing off the Trailways bus carrying a typewriter before, and even Hal Sharpley, Thorn’s acknowledged hobo, moved away from him when he sat down on Hal’s bench to tie his boots.

Yardley Acheman was shorter than my brother, and louder, and interrupted my father’s stories at dinner with
his own stories, which were not as good and had no polish. I was oddly offended by that—not that he’d cut my father short, but by the dismissive nature of the intrusion. It was as if the thousands of hours my brother and I had spent sitting at the dinner table politely listening to stories we’d heard hadn’t been necessary.