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The Paperboy
Pete Dexter
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The Paperboy
Pete Dexter
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About This Book
Now a major motion picture directed by Academy Award-nominated Lee Daniels and starring Nicole Kidman, John Cusack, Matthew McConaughey, Zac Efron, David Oyelowo, and Macy Gray. The sun is rising over Moat County, Florida, when Sheriff Thurmond Call is found dead on the highway, gutted like an alligator. A local redneck is swiftly arrested, tried and sentenced to death. Ward James - hotshot investigative reporter - returns to his rural hometown, intrigued by the proposition from a death row femme fatale who promises him the story of the decade. She's armed with explosive evidence, aiming to free her convicted 'fiancé'. Together, they barrel down Florida's back roads and through its seamy underbelly in search of The Story, racing flat out into a head-on collision that will make headline news.
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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 occursâa small change, you would have to know him to see itâand 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 hasnât 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 timeânot 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 betweenâthat 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 sheriffâs 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, Negroesâhe couldnât keep track of what he was allowed to do to them and what he wasnât, 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.
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 matterâand it was this sort of matter that at fifteen years of age I had opinions aboutâwas that he was dragged by bears. I did not believe, as his friends did, that he crawled after his killerâs 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 crawledânot 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 countyâs history ever carried a more pivotal message to its citizens than his death, and not knowing how else to express the loss this message carriedânot the loss of Thurmond Call, but of something more fundamental that people had felt themselves losing all alongâa 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 Callâs 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 drunkâwhich he was, but drunks, in fact, are not always bad salesmen; someone has to sell cars to other drunksâbut 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 carâs 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, Jeromeâs 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 manâs 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 Wetterâs 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 Wetterâwho was drunk and happy in the bathtub at the time the deputies arrivedâwas arrested for the murder, and within five months was tried and convicted in county court and sentenced to die in ââOld Sparkyââ 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 fatherâs paper covered the trial and the appeals, of courseâthere 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 Orleansâbut 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 Wetterâs trial.
ââPeople know where I stand,ââ 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 Floridaâin 1965, the Tribune was the only liberal newspaper in any rural area in the stateâbut 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 1969âin the same year my brother would blossom as a journalistâI 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 donât want to get into the mechanics of it now, but let me assure you that you donât just pull the plug.
I returned home, ashamed, and went to work at my fatherâs 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 lifeâs one alternative to a college education.
He was not formally educated himself, and often spoke of the fact as if it were something lost. ââLord, I would have loved to study literature,ââ 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. ...