The Night Watchman (24 page)

‘Merda!’
he whispered.

‘I spotted Roxanne,’ I told him, adding a smile so he’d know I didn’t mind.

‘Yeah, I rescued her from the flames when you went back into the house for more lighter fluid.’ Under his offhand reply, I detected his nervous curiosity about whether I’d spotted the records, too.

‘Good for you,’ I said, and in our childhood code, I added, ‘Glad I’m saved you you what wanted’ – which meant, I’m glad you saved what you wanted.

Ernie nodded his appreciation and squeezed my hand.

‘Listen,’ I said, ‘I’ll put on a bandage after it stops bleeding.’ In truth, I was still worried we’d have to go to the hospital.

The silence we made together – while listening to a car zooming down the main road – was also our thanks. ‘How could you believe I’d hurt Jorge like that?’ he finally asked, and he shook his head to let me know his question was really a reprimand.

Only one reply seemed serious enough. ‘Listen, did Dad ever . . . make you do anything you never told me about?’

‘No. And you?’ He grimaced to show me that he’d long suspected the worst.

‘No. In some things we got lucky.’ One disclosure led to another and I said, ‘Listen, Ernie, I . . . don’t know anything about what you do in bed. Though you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.’

He gazed straight down – an angle that seemed another small part of our inheritance.

‘Have you ever had a girlfriend?’ I asked. When he didn’t reply, I lifted open the latch of a high gate that had been waiting for us for years. ‘Or a boyfriend. I don’t care which.’

He began twisting a lock of hair behind his half-an-ear.

‘Ernie, if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my life, it’s that we have to take love wherever it comes from, and in whatever form it chooses to take.’

Understanding the ambivalent ups and downs of my brother’s hopes made me then confess something I never thought I’d say: ‘I played with other boys when I was in my teens. It embarrassed me for a long time. Maybe it still does. But that’s my problem – it’s not because what I did was wrong. In fact, I know it was right. Because every crazy mess I made on myself, every kiss, led me to Ana, and that was a very good thing.’

‘No boyfriend, no girlfriend,’ he whispered. He showed me a crooked, self-conscious smile – as though pushing away defeat – and looked at me hard. ‘But despite everything, I’ve had moments of real love.’

I turned away because
moments of real love
was what I’d long wished for him – but without any faith that I’d ever hear those words anywhere but in my daydreams. To find a place inside myself for so large a gratitude before it faded, I asked him to hold my shirt to his cut and stepped to the window. Outside, Nati had lifted Jorge up around his waist so he could pick a lemon from the tree we’d planted by the chimney. Back on the ground, Jorge cupped the fruit in both his hands, electric with glee, as though he’d stolen the goose’s golden egg. I was charmed by my sons’ wildly differing temperaments. And I realized I could have spared myself a thousand grief-stricken, sleepless nights if I’d have had more trust in my brother and his resilience. As for the conversation he and I were having, and the cautious care we showed each other, it was a part of life I’d not have wanted to miss for anything.

And then the true miracle: Aunt Olivia seemed to enter the house behind the earth-scented breeze and ease past me, on her way to my brother.
She’d want to be here with us,
I thought, as if spirits and ghosts behaved by the standards of the living, and I only shivered the moment her presence no longer seemed perfectly reasonable. I told Ernie what she’d have said had she been with us: ‘You deserve love more than anyone I know.’

‘Deserve
doesn’t count for much of anything in this world,’ he said.

‘Consider my words an incantation,’ I told him, surprised that I’d happened on a reply that matched my intention so completely.

Ernie accepted my shift of interpretation with a wry smile: change the wrapping paper and the gift also changes.

When I returned to him, a green mantis – about the size of a toothpick – was standing on his thigh. It had grabbed his fingertip in its burred, L-shaped forelegs. Ernie’s eyes were watchful and serious – the studious gaze of the amateur naturalist he’d been since he was a three-year-old drawn to the red and yellow gravity of Colorado wildflowers.

‘I’m too scared of being touched to make sex much good for me or anyone else,’ he volunteered.

‘Everybody’s first efforts are the stuff of nightmares,’ I assured him.

‘Rico, I
apologize
afterward. And just about everyone I’ve ever slept with
accepts
my apology. Do you know what that means?’ He rolled his eyes. ‘I’m a disaster.’

We were squashed between his bed and the wall, behind a resplendent red rosebush, and he was shifting his finger back and forth to test the seemingly imperturbable goodwill of a creature that looked as though it had inhabited the earth for a hundred million years before human beings had come along. I was painted in blood with Cherokee stripes, and he was naked and bleeding. We looked at each other with our familiar
we’ve-crash-landed-again
irony, because we often seemed to end up where we could have never predicted.

I pressed the tip of my index finger to a patch of blood on the shirt he still held to his forehead and drew stripes down his cheeks. ‘Now everyone will know we’re kin.’

‘Members of the Rivermouth tribe,’ he observed, because the original meaning of Monroe was ‘river mouth’ in Gaelic.

‘And proud members of the Rabbit clan,’ I added, since our mother’s family name – Coelho – was Portuguese for rabbit.

At length, he whispered, ‘Listen, Rico, I know that someone else takes you over.’

Like me, maybe he sensed that the time had come to talk about Gabriel. Still, the way he gazed off meant I wasn’t obliged to reply.

‘How long have you known?’ I asked, trying in vain to keep my sense of shame from listening in on our conversation.

‘Since we were little. You go away and someone takes you over, though I don’t know who it is.’

I studied the muscles slanting across his shoulders and arms, and how his hands seemed too big for his body. He was strong and fit – the self-effacing hero of the low-budget, Portuguese Western that his life had become.

I lifted my shirt from Ernie’s forehead to take a look at the cut, which had nearly stopped bleeding. I pinched out a strand of hair that had gotten caught. ‘Tie up that mane of yours and come talk to me on your bed.’

Sitting on Ernie’s mattress, I stuffed a pillow behind me and leaned back against the wall. Ernie took a hairband from his night table, made a tight ponytail and dropped down beside me.

Slowly, cautiously, in unsure stops and starts, with my voice sounding as though it belonged to someone else, I explained to my brother about the first message written on the palm of my hand. I went on to talk about G taking Dad’s tests for me, watching my brother’s eyes for any sign of scepticism, but none appeared. I realized that by telling him all I knew, I was fulfilling a promise I’d made long ago without even knowing it. Because I was finally giving G credit for all the times he’d saved my brother’s life.

I explained to Ernie that I thought that everything he had suffered had made G more observant than me. ‘He’s excellent at identifying the essential features of a landscape, a room, a photograph – or, more to the point, a murder scene. He had to become that way. And he’s helped me solve a lot of cases.’

‘Does he ever make mistakes?’ Ernie asked.

‘He’s given me some false leads on occasion, but even when he does, I don’t mind. Because the thing is, Ernie, he sees things I don’t – subtle connections. He separates the meaningful from the insignificant very quickly. He had to develop that talent because time was always running out for us whenever he appeared. I think he may have a photographic memory, too. And an uncanny aptitude for finding what’s been lost. It used to astonish me.’

‘But not any longer?’

‘No. When you live with something extraordinary for thirty years, I guess you get used to it.’

‘Maybe he’s so focused because he doesn’t get detoured by the kind of complex feelings regular people have. Maybe he’s too worried about coping with disaster to think about much else.’

‘Could be,’ I agreed. ‘I’m not even sure he ever sleeps. I have the feeling that when
I’m
asleep, he’s still trying to solve my cases.’

‘Sometimes when you found me, Rico, I knew it wasn’t you,’ Ernie confessed. ‘You were too controlled, too purposeful. And once you told me that Dad wasn’t my father.’

‘How did you reply to that?’

‘I asked you how you knew, and you said, “There’s no resemblance, kid.”’

‘No physical resemblance? Or did he mean your personality wasn’t like Dad’s?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Did I call you
kid
a lot?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, like you were an adult. And your voice had a depth that yours doesn’t have.

‘What else did I tell you?’

‘Never to trust grown-ups – to trust only Hank.’

‘That didn’t scare you?’

‘Nope. By then, I’d had ample evidence that Gabriel was there to help us both.’

My brother went on to tell me that he’d assumed that G had vanished from my life because he hadn’t seen him in years – and because he, Ernie, no longer needed saving. When I told him that neither the kids nor Ana knew about how he shared my body, my brother licked his tongue over his lips like he did when he was forced to decide between bad options.

‘I couldn’t tell Ana about G without also saying a whole hell of a lot about Dad,’ I explained, and I made him promise never to reveal anything to her or my sons without my permission. Then I told him about Coutinho’s murder and my conversation with his wife and daughter, and how the case seemed to be playing havoc with both my emotions and G’s. ‘I think Sandi was being threatened or hurt by someone she knew,’ I said. ‘And I’m getting the feeling her father was murdered for defending her.’

My brother gave me a look that meant he wasn’t sure his opinion would receive a fair hearing. He stood up and fetched his jeans.

‘Go ahead, I’m listening,’ I told him.

After slipping on his pants, he sat down beside me again. ‘Look, Rico, if the victim’s daughter is cutting herself, then someone or something
is
tormenting her. It’s her only way of . . .’ Ernie stopped in mid-sentence because Jorge and Nati had appeared in the doorway, holding hands, anxious – children in need of adults. As soon as I opened my arms, Jorge ran to me. I gave him the little kisses he called
pipocas –
popcorn – and he snuggled his head into my lap.

Nati waited by the door. He looked frazzled and exhausted, as if he’d been hit by lightning. ‘You saved the day, son,’ I told him. When he didn’t step forward, I said, ‘How about some of your uncle’s Colorado French toast?’ I turned to my brother. ‘Ready for action, chef?’

‘Jus’ lemme rustle us up some eggs!’ he said in his finest Western drawl.

Nati didn’t smile. He was staring at my brother with his hands over his mouth.

‘Shit!’
Ernie whisper-screamed, and the way he ripped his hairband off his ponytail and shook out his hair made me understand that Nati had spotted what our father had done to him after I’d failed our first test. By the time I turned towards my son to reassure him, he’d run away.

I found Nati seated in the back seat of our car. From the ambivalent way he turned away from my probing eyes, I was sure he wanted me to come to him but wouldn’t let himself say so. As though I’d finally made sense of an obscure poem, I realized that for weeks he’d been trying to prove he was no longer a little boy and that our relationship had to change. Only thirteen, and so impatient to walk into the sunrise of adulthood.

When I joined him, I managed to resist the urge to pull him close. Denying myself that physical reassurance reminded me of being his age, and the helpless, dead-end feel of having all my most fervent questions about myself go unanswered.

‘I know you’re growing up,’ I whispered. ‘Forgive me if it’s sometimes hard for me.’

He replied by leaning his head on my shoulder.

‘I often dream of when I was your age,’ I told him. ‘Thirty years vanish and I’m wondering if I’ll ever start shaving or be able to make love.’

‘What do you dream about when you dream you’re my age?’ he asked.

‘I picture landscapes a lot – the mountains blanketed with snow, the wisteria climbing up our patio . . . Often I’m standing on the main street of the town near where we lived. And though it’s just like I remember it, it seems too perfect to be real.’

He sat up. ‘The town was Crawford, right?’

‘Yeah. You know, a few weeks ago, I wrote down one of the dreams I had. I was in the general store buying a postcard to send to Portugal. The thing is, I didn’t know anyone here when I lived there.’

‘Who did you want to send it to?’

‘To Aunt Olivia, I guess. Or maybe to you and Jorge and your mom.’

‘But we weren’t born yet – you said you were a kid.’

‘You saw our photograph of Patsy Cline – the one she autographed for me and Ernie before we were born. Nati, the heart isn’t as time-bound as we think.’

He nodded as if he understood, and I realized with a start that I’d have preferred for him not to; maybe it would have been better if he didn’t yet sense the length and breadth of his life. If I could have been totally honest with my son at that moment, I’d have said,
Being a father surprises me all the time. Maybe because everything seems to go by too fast.

‘Dad, what happened to Ernie’s ear?’ he asked.

The thing about a big lie about your past is that once you’ve given it a really solid façade, you can pretty much describe all the rest as it really was.

‘We had tons of farm machinery,’ I answered casually, ‘and Ernie’s ear got caught in a rototiller.’

‘What’s a rototiller?’

‘It turns over the soil to make it ready for seeding.’

I lowered my window. A hot gust of wind pressed against my face. ‘We’d better start watering Ernie’s garden soon,’ I said. ‘All the plants are panting with their tongues out.’