The Paperboy

by Pete Dexter Narrated by Sean Runnette

Overview

The sun was rising over Moat County, Florida, when Sheriff Thurmond Call was found on the highway, gutted like an alligator. A local redneck was tried, sentenced, and set to fry.

Then Ward James, a hotshot investigative reporter for the Miami Times, returns to his rural hometown with a death row femme fatale who promises him the story of the decade. She's armed with explosive evidence and aims to free-and meet-her convicted “fiancé.”

With Ward's disillusioned younger brother Jack as their driver, they barrel down Florida's back roads and seamy places in search of the Story, racing flat out into a shocking head-on collision between character and fate as truth takes a backseat to headline news.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Moat County, Fla., is located where the St. John's River flows north-a geographical rarity and, in literature, a signal that we've entered the strange and violent world of National Book Award-winner Dexter (Paris Trout). Narrator Jack James is the son of the Moat County Tribune's editor and publisher. While Jack's older brother, Ward, reports for the Miami Times, Jack has settled for a job delivering papers for the Tribune. But when Ward and his partner, evil dandy Yardley Acheman, come to Moat County to investigate the four-year-old murder of the local sheriff, Jack assists them in the inquiry. After a vicious beating by two sailors lands Ward in the intensive care unit, Yardley finishes the story without Ward and Jack, fabricating evidence to do so. Accompanying his traumatized brother Ward back to Miami, Jack takes a job as a copyboy at the Times. It isn't long, however, before Yardley's wrongdoing comes to light, generating more trouble for the Jameses. Dexter's writing is rock-solid, he offers acute observations about the nature of reporting and his grip on the Southern male psyche is unquestionable. The powerful thematic drive of Paris Trout is missing here, however, and the story line is so complicated that it loses focus and then almost peters out. But if this isn't Dexter's best, it's still a provocative offering from one of the most exciting novelists around. Major ad/promo. (Jan.)

Library Journal

W.W. ("World War") James is editor of the Moat County (Florida) Tribune and the father of two boys. Ward, the elder, is a reporter for the Miami Times. Jack is a college dropout who delivers papers for his father. With his reporting partner Yardley Acheman, Ward returns to Moat County to investigate the murder of the sheriff and the subsequent trial of Hillary Van Wetter, who was imprisoned for the murder. The investigation calls Van Wetter's guilt into question, and he is freed from death row. But at what price? Dexter (Brotherly Love, LJ 10/1/91) is a taut storyteller who keeps the pages turning. Though he offers a cast of characters recalling the best of Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard, his chillingly satisfactory new work should not be relegated to the ranks of genre writing. Highly recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/15/94.]-David Dodd, Univ. of Colorado, Colorado Springs

NOVEMBER 2012 - AudioFile

Dexter excels in giving us characters that we as readers try to avoid. Sean Runnette takes Dexter’s cues and runs with them through the thick Moat County, Florida, backwaters of the mid-'60s. Highly regarded news reporter Ward James is drawn back to his hometown to investigate the shady trial of a murdered sheriff by a member of the most notorious family in Moat County. The listener can feel the humidity and buzzing mosquitoes as Runnette describes how deeply this story has affected so many lives, and continues to do so many years later. Dexter and Runnette paint a vivid picture, just as relevant today, of the public’s need for shocking headlines, regardless of the truth. S.C. © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169749595
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	09/17/2012
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

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 he 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 own 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 from the road--a baked, treeless circle cut to a stand of pines, a picnic table and two outdoor toilets no more than twenty feetapart, the men's to the east, the Ladies' to the west. A marker indicated the spot where the best school in the state had once stood, and a hand-painted gun attached to one of the privies showed a Confederate flag and a hand unconnected to any arm, and across these pages 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 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.

Once, when I had forgotten to collect for the week, I went back into the store and found him still standing where I'd left him, staring at her as she straightened boxes of candy bars in the case under the counter.

She looked at me then, for an instant, and it was as if I'd brought some bad news beyond what was in my newspapers.

It was possible, I think, that anytime the door opened it was bad news for her.

I never heard her speak to the man with the burned face, I'd I never heard him speak to her. I assumed they were man and wife.

I WOULD FINISH THE ROUTE before ten, park the truck, walk the six blocks home, and fall into bed with a beer and a copy of the newspaper I had been delivering all morning. Early in the afternoon, I would slip away from the stories in the paper into a jumpy sleep, full of dreams, waking up a few hours later in this, the same room where I had slept all the nights of my childhood, not knowing where I was.

Something like that had been happening at Gainesville too, and sometimes in those moments between dreams and consciousness, when I was lost, I glimpsed myself as untied to either place.

I would get out of bed then and walk to the city pool and swim laps. Or, when I could borrow my father's truck--he kept his new Chrysler in the driveway and left the garage for a beloved twelve-year-old Ford pickup which he used only to go fishing--I drove north to St. Augustine and would swim out into the ocean a mile or more, until my arms and legs were dead weight, and then slowly, allowing the water to hold me up, I would turn and make my way back.

I threw myself away and was returned intact to the beach, and in this way I was somehow saved from those moments it had taken, fresh from sleep, to recognize the room where my most private thoughts had been thought, and private courses set, for all my life. The walls of my childhood.

You could say I was afraid to sleep.

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