The Night Watchman (16 page)

My father’s head tilted towards me. ‘You’ve got to be ready for anything, son!’

His moist, rum-soaked whisper seemed like the start of a bad illness. ‘Yes, sir,’ I replied, still straining for air.

He flipped on the light. He wore a white T-shirt and faded jeans. He stretched his arms behind his back and bent far forward – a morning ritual. ‘Son, you never know who might sneak up on you,’ he told me, as if it were a great, protective truth, but what he said made no sense; our closest neighbours, the Johnsons, lived half a mile away and were in their eighties. Besides, we always locked all the doors at night.

I’d only just turned eight, but I already knew that something big was missing in Dad, though I had no idea what it could be. It wasn’t obvious – like Ernie not being able to pronounce his name and saying
Eeenie
instead, or Mom not getting dressed all day. At some point in my childhood, I came to believe that no matter how long I lived, I’d never fail to understand as much about someone or something as what I failed to understand about my dad.

I found my brother’s bed empty; his blanket was on the floor. I had a cramped-up feeling about him having vanished and the bed being a mess, the kind of dread that twists your gut when a teacher is about to call on you in class and you don’t know the answer and you forgot to do your homework.

‘Where’s Ernie?’ I asked.

‘Waiting for us. Come on, get up!’ He pounded my pillow.

‘I’m really sleepy,’ I told him, making my voice sound drowsy; there were days when Dad could be calm and forgiving. Though, if my theories about him are correct, he was just imitating the generous behaviour he observed in others.

Maybe that was why he married Mom, in fact; to have someone to study up close – so he could figure out how regular people behaved. In particular, I can easily imagine him practising how she smiled at me – in front of a mirror, hour after hour, till he developed a perfect imitation of the twinkling affection in her eyes.

‘Get up, you little slob!’ he ordered.

Swinging my legs over the side of the bed, my confusion seemed like a living thing inside me, chasing its own tail, because I never got any of the answers to my most important questions about how things could get so difficult.

I think now that Dad lacked the imagination to feel what others felt. Mom, Ernie and I were all props to him – everyone was; and the only reason he occasionally found us almost as engaging as his record collection or his old Plymouth was that he could make us – and not them – cry or smile or plead for him to stop.

‘Hank, you can’t possibly be that sleepy,’ Dad said. ‘You’ve had at least eight hours.’ I could tell from his eyes – wide open and darting, like he’d been energized by a secret plan – that he’d taken some pills to ease his hangover.

By then, I’d figured out that Dad lived in an us-against-them world, though I couldn’t have expressed it like that then. And it took me years to figure out that I was a member of
them,
even though he said I was part of
us.

A cold wind was blasting in through the window, so Dad tossed me my cardigan sweater. It was lucky for him that Ernie wasn’t old enough for school yet, because a teacher would’ve probably noticed what was about to happen to him and might not have been so easily convinced that I’d accidentally hurt him while playing cops and robbers. While
roughhousing,
as Dad put it when we went to the hospital, like I said. Though now that I think about it, Dad’s timing must not have had anything to do with luck. He must have figured out that if he was going to steal something from Ernie and me that could never be returned, it had to be before his youngest son started first grade.

If you think that people can’t plan years ahead to destroy a life, then you’ve never had to learn what I’ve tried a long time to forget. You got lucky.

Dad moved too purposefully to still be drunk. He’d slept off his bar-hopping in Gunnison on the couch in the living room.

I think he took amphetamines to cure his hangovers. It could even be that he pioneered the use of crystal meth; he told me once that one of Patsy Cline’s musicians took it while on tour, though he could have been making that up. And it could be that I’m asking chemicals to explain what is a lot more complex.

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.