The Paperboy Read online

  High Praise for

  Pete Dexter’s

  THE PAPERBOY

  “THIS POWERFUL BOOK reads like a mystery, fast and compelling; unlike most mysteries, however, it stays with you afterward.”

  —Men’s Journal

  “A WISE AND FASCINATING TALE WELL TOLD.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “HIP, HARD-BOILED AND FILLED WITH MEMORABLE ECCENTRICS … The Paperboy burns with the phosphorescent atmosphere of betrayal.”

  —Time

  “DEXTER’S PROSE IS TAUT AND LEAN, and The Paperboy moves with the surprising speed and agility of an alligator. The dynamics of the James brothers’ relationships with each other and with their father are tantalizing.”

  —The Houston Chronicle

  “WITH TAUT PROSE AND VIBRANT CHARACTERS, Dexter creates a world that is both familiar and frighteningly foreign.… It is a tale worth reading, but one that will leave you wondering whether truth really matters.”

  —The Denver Post

  “WITH PERFECT PITCH AND A MIX OF FEROCITY AND SYMPATHY, Pete Dexter portrays the personages and the weakening institutions of a rural Southern district in the ‘60s.”

  —New York Newsday

  “THE PAPERBOY IS AN OUT-AND-OUT YARN, an entertaining story, full of a conflicting mixture of world weariness and naiveté, told with a chip-on-its-shoulder, humble-pie braggadocio.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Dexter has constructed the novel from tight, superbly convincing scenes.… The Paperboy is, in fact, a better book than the justly honored Paris Trout.… You can’t put it down. But the real measure of Dexter’s success, artistic and moral, is that you wish you could.”

  —GQ

  “THE PAPERBOY IS DEXTER AT THE TOP OF HIS FORM, a terrific outing by one of our most distinct and gifted contemporary authors.”

  —The Commercial Appeal (Memphis, Tn.)

  “DEXTER IS A GIFTED STORYTELLER … [his] prose is spare and brutal, edged with dark humor.”

  —The Philadelhia Inquirer

  “BOTH POIGNANT AND ELEGANT … Dexter is a gifted storyteller. His narrative style is precise, yet richly detailed.… The Paperboy works beautifully at many levels.… It is artfully crafted. It demands to be read; and it’s a wonderful story deserving of literary prize consideration.”

  —The Daily Press (Newport News, Va.)

  “HAUNTING … DEXTER IS A MASTER OF COLLOQUIAL POETRY, of moods revealed through gestures and settings. Somber scenes unraveling in slow motion make this a haunting book.”

  —Playboy

  “A MOVING AND SUSPENSEFUL NOVEL … Dexter’s well-drawn characters are a believable mélange who interact realistically and inhabit his plot with great strength and mobility.”

  —The Oregonian (Portland)

  “With clarity and an amazing capacity for simplicity of language and down-home metaphor, Dexter weaves a tale that exposes the extremes of goodness and nastiness that exist in newspaper life.”

  —The Washington Post

  “FROM THE DESK OF A NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER comes this thoroughly engrossing story of murder, deception, and betrayal. On the surface, The Paperboy is a first-rate mystery.… At a deeper level, though, this novel surpasses most others.… The sheer suspense of this compelling tale will capture most readers, but it is the people of the novel and their secret motivations that readers will not be able to forget when the last page is read.”

  —Southern Living

  “[Dexter] has written as sparsely here as in any of his previous books, and most of what carries the reader along so irresistibly lies beneath the surface of his prose.”

  —The New York Times

  “What deepens and darkens [Dexter’s] writing, so that art is the precise word to describe it, is a powerful understanding that character rules, that we live with our weaknesses and die of our strengths.”

  —John Skow, Time

  ALSO BY PETE DEXTER

  God’s Pocket

  Deadwood

  Paris Trout

  Brotherly Love

  A Delta Book

  Published by

  Dell Publishing

  a division of

  Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  1540 Broadway

  New York, New York 10036

  Copyright © 1995 by Pete Dexter

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address Random House, Inc., New York, New York.

  The trademark Delta® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-78559-6

  Reprinted by arrangement with Random House, Inc.

  February 1996

  v3.1

  For Erwin Potts and Gil Spencer,

  a couple of pretty good paperboys

  who never let it go to their heads

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  First Page

  MY BROTHER WARD WAS once a famous man.

  No one mentions that now, and I suppose no one is inclined to bring it up, particularly not my father, who in other matters loves those things most that he can no longer touch or see, things washed clean of flaws and ambiguity by the years he has held them in his memory, reshaping them as he brings them out, again and again, telling his stories until finally the stories, and the things in them, are as perfect and sharp as the edge of the knife he keeps in his pocket.

  In his stories, the bass are all bigger than you have ever seen them, and always catch the glint of the sun in their scales as they jump.

  And he always lets them go.

  He has no stories about my brother, though. At the mention of his name, a change occurs—a small change, you would have to know him to see it—and my father, without moving a muscle in his face, slips away; retreats, I think, to that sheltered place where his stories are kept.

  Perhaps we all have our places.

  An hour later, you may notice he hasn’t spoken a word.

  IN AUGUST OF THE YEAR 1965, a man named Thurmond Call, who had, even by Moat County standards, killed an inappropriate number of Negroes in the line of duty, was killed himself between the towns of Lately and Thorn, along a county road which runs parallel to and a quarter mile west of the St. Johns River in northern Florida.

  Thurmond Call was the sheriff of Moat County, and had held that position since before I was born. He was murdered on the eve of his sixty-seventh birthday, but had kicked a man to death on a public street in Lately only the previous spring. And so, while it is true there was some sentiment at the time—not only in Lately, the county seat, but in the larger town of Thorn, where we lived, and the little encampments along the forty miles of river in between—that it was time to wean Sheriff Call from the public coffers, it had nothing to do with his not being up to the job.

  The sheriff’s malady was viewed as having been imposed on him from the outside, and was therefore forgivable, even if it could not be cured. Like tuberculosis. Hippies, federal judges, Negroes—he couldn’t keep track of what he was allowed to do to them and what he wasn’t, and that had spawned a confusion in his mind which, the body of Moat County thought went, led him to more immoderate positions than he otherwise would have taken. And that, in turn, has spawned a certain unease in the general population.

  Which is all to say that the man he had handcuffed and then stomped to death in the spring had been white.

&n
bsp; THURMOND CALL WAS FOUND lying on the highway early in the morning, in a rainstorm, a quarter of a mile from his cruiser. The engine had died but the wipers were still moving, in spasms, and his headlights were a dim orange. The wide-mouthed jar that he carried between his legs as he drove to receive his tobacco juice was sitting on the roof. He had been opened up, stomach to groin, and left for dead.

  The question of how he traveled, disemboweled, to the spot on the highway where he was found, while probably unconnected to the murder itself, presented a haunting piece of unsettled business which lingers to this moment over Moat County, in the realm of those profound questions which have no answer. And perhaps lingers in other places, as at the end of his life the sheriff had become a symbol of one kind or another everywhere in the state.

  My first opinion on the matter—and it was this sort of matter that at fifteen years of age I had opinions about—was that he was dragged by bears. I did not believe, as his friends did, that he crawled after his killer’s car, an account which was presented as fact at his funeral.

  It did not come to me until I was older that he might have just crawled—not knowing where, only wanting to be some other place.

  Regardless of the manner in which Sheriff Call made his last four hundred yards, it is fair to say that with the exception of the war itself, no event in the county’s history ever carried a more pivotal message to its citizens than his death, and not knowing how else to express the loss this message carried—not the loss of Thurmond Call, but of something more fundamental that people had felt themselves losing all along—a statue of the sheriff was commissioned to stand in the Lately town square. It is there today, celebrating the fracture in history that the passing of the sheriff represents.

  On Halloween, a scar sometimes appears on the likeness, running from the stomach to the groin. This reminder of Sheriff Call’s reward is routinely laid to juvenile delinquents, but there is a lack of embellishment in the gesture that suggests a colder purpose than vandalism.

  THE MAN SHERIFF CALL stomped to death in Lately was a former Chrysler/Plymouth salesman at Duncan Brothers Motors named Jerome Van Wetter, who was discharged finally not for being a drunk—which he was, but drunks, in fact, are not always bad salesmen; someone has to sell cars to other drunks—but because, even after he had been at the dealership many years and was as familiar a showroom fixture to loyal Plymouth buyers as the new models themselves, something in his deportment frightened customers off. He could not overcome it with clothes or talk of the state champion Little League team or his smile. The smile, in fact, only made things worse. I know this, having once been left alone with that smile and the new line of Plymouths while my father and Mr. Duncan went into the office to close a deal on a Chrysler.

  The indistinct malevolence which Jerome Van Wetter carried hung off him at unexpected angles in much the way his suits hung on his bones, but gathered to its purpose in his eyes.

  There was a predatory aspect to the way they fell on you, expecting something, waiting, a tiny interest finally stirring, like a slow smile, as he found the little places inside you where he did not belong.

  He seemed to understand the effect he had on customers, and wore sunglasses indoors.

  I REFER TO JEROME VAN WETTER as a former car salesman not to underscore his eventual failure in the car business but because to my knowledge his employment at Duncan Motors was the only job he ever held, at least the only one that did not involve poaching. Even so, this venture into the mainstream of the Moat County business life eclipsed all the known social and professional accomplishments of all the other Van Wetters combined, past and present.

  It was a family which kept itself apart, living on the edge of civilization, compared frequently in the Lately area, where most of them were, to the bears, which had finally lost all fear of humans and had to be killed because of it. But even the tamest of the Van Wetters was not tame in a way that would make you comfortable sitting beneath his pale blue eyes in a new Plymouth Fury, one foot resting on the paper protecting the car’s carpet, the other still on the showroom floor, smelling both the new upholstery and the sweet, metastasized alcohol coming through his skin.

  And because of that, in the end, Mr. Duncan let Jerome Van Wetter go, and in the resulting bout of drunkenness he was arrested and then stomped to death by Sheriff Call.

  And it surprised no one when, a week after Sheriff Call was himself killed, Jerome’s cousin once or twice removed, Hillary Van Wetter, was arrested for the crime. It was a known fact that the Van Wetters took care of their own.

  By general agreement, Hillary Van Wetter was the most unpredictable and ferocious member of the whole Van Wetter family, a ranking that had come to him several years before when he had, in fact, attacked another policeman with a knife, cutting off the man’s thumb in a dispute over a dragging muffler. That case, however, had never gone to trial. Half thumbless, the policeman yearned for his home in Texas, and once there, refused to return to Florida to testify.

  And so seven days after Sheriff Call was found on the highway, county deputies raided Hillary Van Wetter’s cabin in the dense wetlands just north of Lately, killing several of his dogs, and found a bloodstained knife in the kitchen sink. A bloody shirt was discovered in the washing tub, and Hillary Van Wetter—who was drunk and happy in the bathtub at the time the deputies arrived—was arrested for the murder, and within five months was tried and convicted in county court and sentenced to die in “Old Sparky” at the Florida State Prison in Starke. This in spite of being defended by the most expensive attorney in Moat County.

  No one ever knew where the money came from for the lawyer.

  My father’s paper covered the trial and the appeals, of course—there were reporters in Moat County that fall from every paper of any size in the state, along with reporters from places like Atlanta, Mobile, New York, and New Orleans—but while the Tribune had, for as long as my father owned it, always employed a local death sentence to rail editorially against capital punishment, the paper was strangely quiet after Hillary Van Wetter’s trial.

  “People know where I stand,” was as much as my father would ever say. And that was true. He had defied public opinion for as long as he had been in northern Florida—in 1965, the Tribune was the only liberal newspaper in any rural area in the state—but he had gone about it with a wink. The paper was liberal, but in a hopeless and harmless way that was designed not to offend, a posture which would not accommodate asking for mercy for the murderer of Thurmond Call.

  ON A COLD WINTER MORNING four years later, early in 1969—in the same year my brother would blossom as a journalist—I lost my swimming scholarship at the University of Florida. A few weeks afterward, I was expelled for an act of vandalism.

  Specifically, I drank a small bottle of vodka and drained the swimming pool, which, while childish, is more complicated work than it may seem from the outside. I don’t want to get into the mechanics of it now, but let me assure you that you don’t just pull the plug.

  I returned home, ashamed, and went to work at my father’s newspaper, the Moat County Tribune, driving a delivery truck.

  My father never asked what had happened to me in Gainesville, or if I intended to go back, but it was clear that he meant for me to drive the truck until I saw it was this life’s one alternative to a college education.

  He was not formally educated himself, and often spoke of the fact as if it were something lost. “Lord, I would have loved to study literature,” he would say, as if he needed permission from a college to read books.

  All that winter and spring I drove the north route for the Tribune, traveling 325 miles over the narrow, mostly shoulderless two-lane roads of northern Moat County. I loaded the truck in the dark, passing the sign marking Thorn’s city limits by three-thirty in the morning.

  Each morning at nine o’clock, if the truck didn’t break down and the press runs were on time, I came to the clearing where Sheriff Call’s car had been found. The spot was partially hidden fro
m the road—a baked, treeless circle cut into a stand of pines, a picnic table and two outdoor toilets no more than twenty feet apart, the men’s to the east, the ladies’ to the west. A marker indicated the spot where the first school in the state had once stood, and a hand-painted sign attached to one of the privies showed a Confederate flag and a hand unconnected to any arm, and across these images the legend MOAT COUNTY EXTENDS A WELCOME HAND TO YANKEES!

  Fifteen miles down the road was my last stop of the day—ten papers that I was required to place facedown on a makeshift wooden table just behind the gum ball machines inside a sun-faded country store run by an indeterminate number of members of the Van Wetter family, who did not want their patrons met with bad news as they came in the door.

  What specific blood connection these Van Wetters had to the man Sheriff Call stomped to death, I do not know. The Van Wetters occupied half a column of the Moat County telephone book and their children rarely married outside the family. Calculating the collateral relations was beyond me, even if the Van Wetters had been inclined to discuss their family tree, which they were not.

  I can only tell you that some mornings an old man was there, blind and freshly angry, as if the blindness had come over him in the night. He would make his way to the papers I had brought and count them, moving the folded edges up into the palm of his hand with his fingers, as if he were tickling them, his face scowling up into the window like a sour plant growing to light. And some mornings it was his wife.

  Other times there was a young, pregnant woman with the most beautiful skin I had ever seen, whose children would run through a curtain and into the back when I came into the store.

  This woman never looked up, but a moment after the children had disappeared, a man whose face had been burned—whose skin creased at his eye like a badly ironed shirt—would emerge from the curtain and stand a foot inside the room, his hands at his sides, watching until I had stacked the papers and left.