My clock read 6.10 a.m. As I buttoned my sweater, I saw that the half-moon was playing tricks with the dusk – turning the early morning mist a ghostly white, and making the purple-black mountains seem soft and cottony. I figured that if I outlasted the darkness, then the sun peering over the hills in the east would make a bad ending impossible. Maybe all children are born with a belief in a sun god. Maybe kids are the ones who created him in the first place.
Dad led me down the stairs. I was wearing my pyjama bottoms and slippers, and I’d put on my favourite scarf, too, so my memories of that morning seem filtered through a woolly and itchy scent. And through the deep brown colour of the scarf, too, though that doesn’t make much sense.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked my father.
‘Hold your horses!’ he told me, and at the bottom of the stairs, he took my shoulders and gazed down at me amiably. ‘It’s like this, Hank. I’ve hidden Ernie. And you’ve got to find him. It’s a new game we’re going to play from now on.’
He stepped into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator door and peered in. His biceps stretched the fabric on the sleeves of his T-shirt. The plump Chinese lantern dangling from the ceiling above the kitchen table spread its reddish, underwater light around the room and made his back seem to glow like it was on fire.
Dad said clichés like hold your horses a lot. Maybe what was missing from him also made him lazy with the way he talked.
An old record was scratching away on the stereo in the living room. A clue, I’d later realize. Dad always left clues when he gave us his tests, but I wasn’t much good at figuring them out at first.
‘Who’s singing?’ he asked.
‘The Andrews Sisters,’ I shot back with show-off eagerness. ‘It’s “Elmer’s Tune”.’
‘Good boy. And what year did “Elmer’s Tune” come out?’
I’m not sure what answer I gave, but it was wrong, and Dad grew disappointed in me because he liked for me to memorize all the details about his old records.
Listening to the herky-jerky singing of the Andrews Sisters and watching Dad peer into the refrigerator again made me tense with the need to run. But even if I managed to get to the main road and hitched a ride all the way to Denver, it wouldn’t do any good, because Ernie would then be alone with Dad. And wherever Ernie was, I was, too.
They say you can’t be in two places at once, but that’s not my experience. Maybe that’s the main symptom of whatever it is that’s wrong with me, in fact.
‘Okay, enough stalling, it’s time to find your brother!’ he told me gruffly.
I shuffled up to him, trying to make myself seem real small and inoffensive. ‘Why’d you hide him, Dad?’
The back of his hand caught me hard across my cheek.
‘Ow!’ I burst out. ‘That hurt!’
‘Shut up! This is no joke. If you don’t find him, I’m going to do something that no one will be able to make better, and you, my friend, will be responsible.’
His lips were an angry slit. I could tell he was waiting for me to question him about what he’d do to Ernie, and I didn’t want to, but I knew that if I didn’t he might get even angrier, so I did.
‘I’m going to cut off one of his thumbs!’ Dad replied in a self-satisfied voice.
I don’t remember what I said to that. I think I was too stunned to say anything.
‘I told Ernie it would be the left one,’ Dad added, ‘but I might just surprise him and take the right. Or both!’
Dad had never done anything to us that needed to be x-rayed or required an operation, though Mom once had to go to the hospital emergency room in Grand Junction when he broke her nose. While I stood there wondering what to believe, and if he was telling the truth, I pictured myself racing all the way to Crawford. I’d go to the Black Cat Café and eat a sticky bun while hiding in the bathroom, which smelled like lavender and had wallpaper patterned with cowboy boots. I knew that if I could live in the bathroom of the Black Cat Café, I’d be happy for the rest of my life.
Dad took a quart of Tropicana orange juice out of the fridge and sat down at the kitchen table with a big sigh. He took a gulping swig out of the carton and wiped his mouth with his hand. Looking at his wristwatch, he said, ‘Okay, Hank, you’ve got exactly two minutes to find your brother. Starting . . . now!’
My thoughts scattered out in a hundred different directions, trying to locate the point in what he was making me do.
Opening up his hunting knife, he started scraping out the dirt from under his fingernails. He wiped what he picked out on his jeans.
The knife had a mother-of-pearl handle that made you want to hold it up to the light to see it sparkle. He’d bought it at a store in Grand Junction that had rifles hanging on the walls.
Dad was forty-three years old in June of 1978, as wiry and strong as a wide receiver, with stiff, short brown hair like porcupine quills. He wore his Milwaukee Braves baseball cap nearly all the time, even when he napped. He said it was a collector’s item, because the Braves moved to Atlanta shortly after he bought it. He had a big welcoming smile – and it had something manly and authoritative to it, too, like he was a policeman or a park ranger. He often went out drinking with friends from work, and they came over sometimes, but I never liked how they smelled of beer and called me little man, so I always ran out of the house when they came. We got a lot of phone calls from women wanting to speak to him, too, but they never came over. At the time, I didn’t think it was weird that they called our home; I figured they worked with Dad at the sawmill.
He lit up a cigar after dinner every night. I didn’t mind the choky smokiness around the house so much, but when he tucked us in at night, with those fingers of his stinking of dead tobacco, I’d close my eyes as tight as I could and think about being anywhere other than where I was.
‘You’ve just wasted thirty seconds, Hank,’ Dad told me. ‘Come on, son, go on and find your brother.’
He started singing along with the Andrews Sisters. He had a handsome tenor voice that made me proud of him. Being asked to sing along with him always made me feel as if we’d touched down on the right planet after lots of false landings on the wrong ones. Dad said that he’d have ended up as a backing vocalist for Patsy Cline if she hadn’t died in a plane crash. He even sometimes told that to tourists we met in town. He told me I should try to become a singer when I was older. He said I could form a duo with Ernie, like the Everly Brothers.
‘What do you really want from me, Dad?’ I asked.
He pointed his knife towards me. ‘Keep your trap shut and find your brother!’
I looked in the kitchen cabinets. And then in the broom closet.
‘You’re so cold that your feet are turning to ice!’ Dad told me, balancing on the back two legs of his chair, smirking at me like he was winning a contest.
I went to the living room. I searched behind the two armchairs and under the couch, and in the shiny folds of the yellow curtains my mom had bought because they were what she called ‘Uma cor muito alegre.’ A very cheerful colour.
Another thing I didn’t know until it was too late was that buying curtains to cheer you up can be a real bad sign. It might even mean that you’re not going to live much longer.
I ended up outside, crawling underneath the porch. The soil was moist there, and it smelled secretive, too, like someone could hide there for a long time without anyone finding out. ‘Ernie, you in there?’ I whispered, because the space between the ground and the wooden slats of our porch went far back and got as dark as our closet got when we closed the door. I shivered, not because I was cold, but because Ernie and I had once spotted a big brown snake there that might have been a rattler.
No reply. I called his name a few more times. I even said, ‘It’s me, Hank,’ though that seemed a stupid thing to say right after I said it. I told him that I’d figure out a way to get us out of this game without him getting hurt, but the truth was that I didn’t have any idea what I was doing.
There was
no answer, so on a hunch, I ran around to the garage. Almost right away, I spotted Ernie’s stuffed cat Roxanne trapped in the passenger window of Dad’s Plymouth. She was blue, with black beads for eyes, and Ernie had drawn big red lips on her with a felt pen. Her round, puffy face was peering out, as if she was trying to get my attention.
Ernie wasn’t inside the car like I thought he’d be. And he wasn’t underneath it either. Maybe he was inside one of the brown storage boxes. I figured time had almost run out on me, so I dashed back to Dad. ‘He’s got to be in the garage!’ I announced, sure that my getting close to finding him would earn me another minute or two.
‘Why do you think that, son?’ Dad asked.
I held up Roxanne.
‘I’m disappointed in you. You can be pretty dumb, you know. And your time was up twenty seconds ago, in any case.’
‘That’s not fair,’ I protested. ‘I should get another minute for nearly finding him!’
I could tell from the way he strode past me that Ernie and I were in big trouble. His chest got all puffed up like that when he was going to teach Mom a lesson, which was what he called punching her.
I caught up to him. ‘How about some breakfast? I’m really hungry.’
He pushed me away and opened the cabinet with the cane-work front where he stored the 78s in his record collection. Ernie was inside, squatting on his haunches. Dad had gagged his mouth and bound his hands.
Seeing my brother all tied up and squashed like that, I felt something come undone in my chest – something important. Sometimes now, I think that was a signal that my world was about to change for the worse and would never be the same.
How many times have I asked myself if Dad really meant to hurt Ernie so badly? Maybe whatever drugs he took for his hangovers made all he did to us seem like one long, never-ending, competitive game, and forcing me to hunt for Ernie was just a small part of his strategy for achieving a lasting victory. It’s possible that he didn’t even know his own intentions.
I want to think that Dad later realized he went way too far on this occasion, and that he regretted what he did, but I’m pretty sure that’s only because I want him to be like other people – and to be a person I’m not ashamed to love.
Ernie’s eyes were terrified. But he wasn’t moaning or trying to shout. That scared me the most – his silence. He was just four years old and already he’d learned it was best not to make a peep, even if he was about to have a thumb cut off.
I try not to visualize Ernie squatting in Dad’s cabinet too often. Most of all, I try not to put myself in his place. Despite what the talk-show psychologists say on television, recovering certain memories does you no good at all.
Ernie had squeezed both his thumbs inside his fists. I caught his attention by waving at him and tried to tell him with my eyes that I’d make our father get so angry with me that he’d forget about him.
‘Ernie’s real scared, Dad!’ I said, to buy some time.
‘Yeah, son, he sure is!’ he replied in the voice of a man gratified by his own success.
Did he really admire his own handiwork, or was that just the way his voice sounded to a kid who was learning how to hate?
‘He’s got to be hungry for breakfast, too,’ I said.
I took a step towards my brother, and then another, and when Dad didn’t stop me, I went straight up to Ernie and knelt down so that I could untie him. I prayed that if our father got so angry that he couldn’t stop himself from hurting one of us, that he’d grab me and not my brother. But I hoped he wouldn’t break my arm or leg, because then I’d be unable to play baseball all summer.
I started to undo the knot in the gag in Ernie’s mouth. It was made of the same nylon rope Dad used to tie up the beans and tomatoes in his vegetable garden.
‘I’m here, Ernie,’ I whispered, and I squeezed his arm once so he’d know I wasn’t going to go away.
But touching him turned out to be the wrong thing to do; he started to shiver and moan as though he’d fallen through the ice in a winter river.
‘Shit!’ Dad growled, and he grabbed me by my hair and yanked me back so hard that I crashed into the couch. I tasted blood on my lips as I got to my knees.
When Dad raised his hunting knife, the room seemed to grow dark around me.
‘Leave him alone!’ I yelled.
Did Mom hear me shout? She’d have had to. I suspect now that she was listening at her door, too afraid to make a sound and too high on Valium to come downstairs to help us, because a few minutes later, when I ran upstairs and told her we needed to get to the hospital right away, I found her sitting on her bed already dressed, and her eyes were so lifeless that I understood that she must have heard everything that had gone on.
About a year later, when I was home one day from school with a cold, she confessed that she was terrified of Dad, too. I’m not sure why she told me that. I guess I should have expected that she was afraid of him after all the lessons he’d taught her, but her words shocked me badly and then sat inside me like something rotten for weeks.
I can see now that I ought to have begged Dad to take me instead of Ernie. It might have made all the difference. But maybe the truth is that I was too terrified to substitute my brother. I’ve spent more than thirty years of my life ashamed of how I behaved that day.
Dad grabbed Ernie by the arm and dragged him to his feet. He cut off the gag and the bindings around his wrists. My brother started shrieking when Dad grabbed his arm and lifted him into the air, and he wriggled and kicked so hard that our father put him back down and whacked him on the back of the head.
As I stood up, a glint of metal flashed in my eyes like a spray of acid, and there was blood – way too much – running down the side of Ernie’s head and cheek.
Dad held up whatever he cut off and said, ‘You see what I had to do because of you, Hank! You see how far you made me go! There’s something evil in you, son!’
Chapter 11
I awoke on Saturday morning at 6 a.m. Despite having slept only a few hours, I felt refreshed and strong, and eager for the solitary silence of the living room. Easing my notebook out of my underwear drawer, I crept downstairs through the fragile darkness. Our breakfast table welcomed me inside a universe far beyond the ticks of any clock. While sipping my coffee, I held tight to my favourite illusion that everyone I had ever loved was safe. And inside the tight warm halo made by my overhead lamp, I worked on my secret project: Haiku from a Colorado Childhood. Only Ernie knew about it.
Springtime hummingbird
Zooming between two brothers:
Ruby pendulum.
A man who knows he will not be watched can write what he wants – and risk seeming foolish. He can live in that part of his memory where good things have been stored and guarded, and write cryptic notes of exactly seventeen syllables to the boy he used to be.
When I heard the squeals of Ana turning on the tap in the shower, I took the stairs two at a time, crazy with my need to see her. She leaned away from me when I tried to kiss her, however. With the water pelting her back, she drew in her shoulders and said, ‘Are you going to be friendly now?’ Her eyes revealed such misery that I reached out for her, but she batted my hand away.
‘What did I do?’ I asked desperately.
‘Are you saying you don’t remember?’ she asked in disbelief.
‘I must have been half asleep. I had a long day yesterday and—’
‘I don’t want to hear it!’ she cut in. Her jaw was throbbing.
My heartbeat swayed me from side to side. Water pounded across her shoulders and glued her dark hair to her neck. I decided not to move; I’d outlast this quarrel, as I had so many times during the first years of our marriage, when G had tried to sabotage our relationship. At length, she turned back around to face me and took my hand. Her eyes were sad but forgiving.
‘You know how I am when I’m half asleep,’ I said. ‘I say and do things that I don’t recall in the morning. It’s a form of sleepwalking. My mom
had it. Now tell me what I did, please.’
‘You were looking at photographs on your laptop. When I asked you what they were, you told me, “Mind your own fucking business!”’
After I apologized, she let me kiss her, and I explained about the victim’s flash drive and how this new case was playing havoc with my mind. She nodded so glumly that I stepped into the shower in my boxer shorts and T-shirt and hugged her.
‘Hank, what are you doing?’ she exclaimed, horrified.
‘I’m not sure,’ I said, laughing.
The hot water soaking into me took away my inhibitions. I pressed my need into her hip and whispered what I wanted. Just after I’d entered her, Jorge called out to us. Through some deft contortions, Ana managed to poke her head around the shower curtain. ‘Just a minute!’ she yelled.
He stepped into the bathroom a moment later. ‘I’m hungry!’ he squealed.
‘Go take yourself some bran flakes, baby,’ she told him.
She wanted to say more but my unrelenting, slow persistence made her tremble. Lifting her up as quietly as I could, I drew her legs around me and pinned her back to the wall. She moaned, which seemed a triumph.
‘Mom?’ Jorge asked in a concerned voice.
Ana had closed her eyes by then and wasn’t about to reply.
‘Everything’s okay,’ I told my son. ‘Mom and I are just having a shower.’
Ana pulled me as deeply into her as I could go. The scent of her neck was like warm wool. No one I’d ever known smelled as good as Ana.
‘Dad?’ Jorge asked.
‘Yeah.’
‘I’m hungry.’
‘As soon as we’re done here, I’ll make you breakfast.’
‘I want waffles!’
‘You got it! Now let us have a few minutes alone, baby.’
Grunting loudly, he stamped out of the bathroom. And yet the determined force of his surliness only served to fill me with admiration for him – and also to change the direction of my lovemaking; I wanted to come so powerfully inside Ana that we’d make another kid – right here, right now.
The Night Watchman Page 13
