Free Paperboy by Vince Vawter Page A

then Rat wouldn’t let anybody clap their hands to snap me out of it. But we chickened out when it came time to go in because Rat said the guy might make a mistake and turn me into a barking dog.
    After breakfast my mother said she had to go to one of her meetings at the country club and that I should stay in my room and read since Mam was still gone.
    s-s-s-s-Where’s Mam?
    She called this morning to say she needed a little more time off. She deserves it, don’t you think.
    I nodded.
    From the kitchen I watched my mother get in her car and back it down the driveway. She stopped at the street and reached into her handbag for a cigarette. She pushed in the lighter on the dashboard and rolled her window down. She put the lighter to her cigarette and then blew the smoke out the window.
    My mother had told me at the beginning of the summer that she had stopped smoking and made me promise that I never would start. I knew she hadn’t quit because I could smell it on her clothes. But I didn’t care if she smoked or not. My father smoked and he never made any bones about it.
    I headed upstairs.
    When I passed my parents’ bedroom I noticed that one of the doors to the big closet was open a few inches. Most closets in the house were small but my father had paid some men to knock a hole in the wall and turn the smaller bedroom next door into their closet. It was so big that it had two doors going into it. I was not allowed inside because that was where my father kept his shotguns for hunting. I felt creepy going in but I did anyway. I pushed the light switch on and closed the door.
    I remembered once seeing my mother get out a big round hatbox she kept in the closet. It had a bunch of papers and pictures in it and I could tell by the way she handled them that they were special to her. I had been meaning to take a look inside the box ever since and I decided that the right time had come.
    The first thing that hit me was the smell of mothballs. My mother put mothballs everywhere. In all the closets. In all the chest of drawers. In the attic. A moth would be committing suicide if it came near our house.
    My father’s suits were lined up on one side and my mother’s dresses on the other. My father’s guns were standing up in the corner in a long rack that had a lock on it. I saw the big hatbox on a high shelf. I piled some suitcases on top of one another and climbed up to get the box.
    The first batch of papers I came to was all my report cards from the first grade on. Tied up with the report cards was a letter to my parents from the school principal with
Private
written on the envelope in red ink. I knew what was in the letter. It had to do with the time after the first grade that the principal said I was reading and writing like a third grader or even a fourth grader which meant the school would let me skip a grade but he didn’t think I should because of the way I talked. My mother went to see the principal and told him with me sitting there that he had better not hold her son back because letting me skip a grade would show her friends that I was just as smart as their kids even though I couldn’t talk right. Before I knew it I had been moved up to the third grade.
    Next in the hatbox was a thick book with heavy black pages full of photographs. My father was in a bunch of the pictures. He was easy to pick out because he was so tall and thin and had blond hair.
    I went through the rest of the papers and folders as fast as I could. Just a bunch of diplomas and newspaper clippings and other stuffwith my father’s name on them. At the very bottom of the box I came to a brown envelope without any writing on the outside.
    Inside was a small piece of paper that said “Birth Certificate Of” and the name written in longhand was “Baby Boy.” The date on it was my birthday. My mother’s name before she got married was written in at the bottom of the paper on the left beside MOTHER. On the right side next to FATHER was a word I