The Night Watchman (30 page)

‘What do you want to know?’ Joana asked.

‘How old were they? Where did they live?’

‘They looked like they were in their twenties. They were from the nearest town. They were at university and only worked part-time for Monsieur Morel.’

‘Did they flirt with you?’

‘They joked around with us,’ Monica said. Sensing the direction of my thoughts, she added, ‘It was harmless – really.’

‘Did they go riding with you?’

‘One of them did.’

‘Do you remember his name?’

Monica turned to Joana. ‘Was it Bernard?’

‘I think that’s right,’ Joana said, adding, ‘do you think he’ll be able to confirm that Sandi was hurt by Monsieur Morel?’

‘That’s not the point,’ I said.

‘Then what is?’

‘I’m beginning to think that Morel didn’t hurt her – that this Bernard did.’

‘That’s impossible!’ Joana declared with that disarming assurance of hers. ‘Sandi wouldn’t have named Morel if he didn’t do it.’

‘No, not unless she thought she could swear you two to silence more easily if she convinced you that he was the man who had attacked her. She told you that he had secrets on her father that would ruin her parents’ marriage. That was to force you to keep quiet. And her plan worked – you didn’t say a thing until now. If she told you it was one of the young men from the stables, it would have been nearly impossible to guarantee your silence.’

‘I suppose it’s possible,’ Joana said, ‘but would Sandi really have—’

‘You saw the way Morel acted with you,’ I cut in. ‘He wasn’t at all worried about what Sandi might have told you about him, or about what you might tell me.’

I said nothing more. I didn’t want to add that Sandi might have been eager to meet Bernard or his friend that night. Or even both of them. To her, it must have seemed a thrilling adventure – a chance to journey further towards herself.

After they were done with her, the young men probably convinced her that her flirting – and her coming to meet them in the stables or somewhere else on Morel’s property – made what they’d done acceptable. They’d have told her she’d been asking for it.

But what could have prompted them to travel a thousand miles to Portugal and murder Coutinho three months later?

Ernie and I ran away from home on 23 June 1979, a Saturday. I was nine and my brother was five. School had just ended for the year. It was late morning, near noon, and Dad had woken up with a killer hangover.

We were on the porch eating breakfast when Dad started hollering for Ernie and me. The dread falling like a shadow over my brother’s face told me I’d better do something fast. I grabbed him, and we raced hard in the direction of Crawford. I guess Dad was too groggy to come after us, and once we climbed over the rickety wooden fence bordering the Johnsons’ property, we took their trail to town.

Ernie and I hardly said a word to each other. During a war you tend to keep pretty quiet. You save your energy.

I was hoping that Nathan, who worked at the general store, would drive us to Grand Junction or anywhere else where Dad couldn’t find us. Or, if he couldn’t take us, we’d hitchhike. But Ernie slipped at a bend in the trail that had been badly eroded by the spring rains. He tumbled over and slid down a hillside covered with weeds, maybe forty feet. When I reached him, his shoulder and one of his knees were bleeding. I cleaned out most of the dirt with my hand. Ernie was in favour of going on, but while I was blotting the blood on his knee with my shirt, I realized what should have been obvious – that Dad would end up blaming Mom for us running away and she might not survive the lesson he’d teach her.

When I looked ahead to see where Ernie and I would never go, I realized that we were standing in the shade of a big woolly tree, every branch bending under the weight of hundreds of filigree earrings. They were bright emerald. I hadn’t even noticed. I was so astounded that I took a step back.

Beauty that unusual might be dangerous,
I was thinking, though I couldn’t have put it into a neat sentence like that back then.

Later, I learned that the tree was a black walnut. The earrings were called catkins.

To this day, whenever I see something towering above me, even just the side of a building, that walnut tree rises up before me and a shooting star of surprise and wonder flashes across the whole length of my mind.

We trudged back home. Dad wasn’t there, but Mom was on her bed holding a bag of frozen peas to her cheek.

After my mother died, I pleaded with Dad to build a bridge over the stream that ran through our property, though it was easy to walk across except when it rained a lot. I no longer remember why.

Before Dad cleaned out Mom’s drawers, I stole her deck of cards from her night table – the ones with landmarks of Lisbon on the back. I gave twenty-six cards to Ernie and kept twenty-six for myself. I liked the idea that Ernie and I would only ever be able to play rummy or poker if we played together.

I’m not supposed to know where my brother keeps his half of the deck, but I do. They’re in a plastic storage box under his bed with his maps of Colorado and his CDs of corny crooners like Carlos Gardel and Bing Crosby.

Ernie does a very good imitation of Carlos Gardel, but his hair is way too long for there to be any physical resemblance, so you have to close your eyes to get the full impact of being in the same room with a dramatic Argentinian superstar belting out
Por Una Cabeza.

I remember sitting with Dad after the funeral and bending his fingers back really far, mostly to make Ernie laugh. Dad was double-jointed, and the freedom of doing whatever I wanted with his hand was like being able to fly.

I also remember Dad dancing a slow tango with Ernie in his arms after Mom was gone, and Mieczysław Fogg singing his heart out in Polish on our old KLH record player, and I was clapping in time with the sneaky beat, and though I couldn’t have put my thoughts into words at the time, I know now that I was thinking,
Despite everything, Ernie and I lucked out, because I wouldn’t want to have any other father, even though I hate who he becomes when he’s angry and will never understand why he does the things he does.

It was a moment I knew I’d always carry with me, in a secret place where no one would ever find it, because thinking good things about Dad was an unforgivable betrayal of both Ernie and me. And of Mom, too, of course.

I loved moving the tiny lever on our KLH record player that shifted between 33, 45 and 78 RPMs because of the definitive, ratcheting sound it made. I think it gave me the idea that you could change anything in your life if you could just figure out where to concentrate your energy and what direction to push in.

Dad had LPs by Mieczysław Fogg, Hanka Ordonówna, Sefcia Górska, Zula Pogozelska and lots of other Polish singers. Before I was born, he bought the record collection of a Polish house painter who’d advertised in the
Denver Post.

Whenever my father danced with Ernie, he’d close his eyes and let the melody take him over. Spinning and twisting like Fred Astaire didn’t seem any harder for him than breathing. He was a graceful man. And handsome. I was proud to be his son.

Dad had those aw-shucks good looks – with his hair always mussed up and two days’ worth of dusty-looking whiskers on his cheeks – that seems to me to be typical of the West, though maybe that’s because I live thousands of miles away from Colorado now and don’t know how men there really look. If our life together had been the big-budget production he’d have preferred it to be, Dad would have had slicked-back, movie-star hair and would have tangoed his way into Ginger Rogers’ heart in the most dramatic scene. And honeymooned with her under the full moon in Acapulco.

He – and not Ernie, of course – would have sung
Por Una Cabeza
in the climactic scene. His life in Colorado – along with me, my brother and our mom – would have ended up on the cutting-room floor.

Mom told me she was in a choir back in Portugal but I don’t think I ever heard her sing. She was from Évora, a small city about an inch to the east of Lisbon on the map of Portugal in our Collier’s Atlas. When I was alone in the house, I’d sometimes touch my fingertip to Évora and imagine the whitewashed buildings of the central square.

Dad was touchy and mean when he was drunk, but he was dangerous when he had a hangover. Is that odd for alcoholics? I’ve never found out; there are some things I’d rather not know.

If Mom was alone with me and Ernie, she’d sometimes speak Portuguese. But if Dad was around and had been drinking, she didn’t dare. He’d slap her right across the face if she didn’t speak English.

‘You’re always putting me down to my kids with that goddamn gibberish – and right in front of me!’ he’d holler at her, sneering like she was dirt.

But I never once heard Mom say anything mean enough about him to be accurate. Not in English, and not in Portuguese either.

Now that I’m an adult, I can see that his slaps and punches took most of the fight out of her, and that Valium took the rest. Maybe having to care for Ernie and me helped weigh her down, too. Sometimes I think that having us around just dragged her right out into the deepest part of her lonely sea and dunked her under, straight to the bottom.

Or, more to the point, having Ernie and I to raise tugged her into Dad’s old Plymouth and sent her driving off to her appointment with a cottonwood tree.

Then again, when I’m watching my own kids playing together, I become certain that we were the only light that ever reached her down there on that seabed she lived on. Would she have left Dad if we hadn’t been born? That’s a question I don’t think about too often because it adds too much black depth to my insomnia.

I think that our running away and her getting punched for it was the end for her. After that, she stopped leaving the house, even to go to church or collect wildflowers. She hardly ever even got dressed. Maybe it was while holding the frozen peas up to her face that she figured out how to free herself forever.

She probably thought that if she wasn’t around, then we could run away. And we’d make it this time. In a way, she was right, though it took four more years for us to make it out of Colorado. And we managed that only after Dad left us.

Dad’s drinking got worse just before he disappeared – so bad that he sometimes woke up not knowing where he was and thinking that Mom was still alive.

One afternoon, when Dad was really hammered and went upstairs to sleep, Mom told me – translating badly from Portuguese – that Dad had downed so much rum that
he couldn’t stand himself and went to make a nap.
She meant that he couldn’t stand upright, and had made the verb
to stand
reflexive because she was nervous, but I wished it were true and that Dad hated himself when he got drunk.

I didn’t dare hate my father until I got to Portugal. When I was living at our ranch, I was convinced he could read my thoughts, and if he located something in my head he didn’t like, he’d make Ernie and me take one of his tests.

The Sioux regard the cottonwood tree as sacred. Nathan told me that after Mom died. I think he meant that she had chosen that tree because she knew it was holy. Not that I think he had any expectations of easing my suffering by telling me that. I suppose that I’d need to be raised as a Sioux to understand why the kind of tree she crashed into was important.

Nathan was in his fifties by then, I’d guess. Ernie and I used to visit him at the general store in town. He sold us Chiclets and liquorice. When no one else was around, he told us about Black Elk, the great Sioux holy man – about his schooling and travels to England with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, his visions and writings. But if anyone entered the store, he’d always make-believe we were discussing baseball or football. He believed that I’d been blessed by a Thunderbird at birth. I don’t know how he figured that out. Sometimes he’d sit me down on top of the wooden counter where the cash register was and let me take a little puff on his pipe. He said the pipe was what gave him the power to prophesy the future and that was why he was sure that Ernie and I were going to need a lot of help to make it to adulthood.

Nathan had cinnamon-coloured skin and deep wrinkles around his eyes and black-black hair that he grew long and separated into two tight braids. He had small, sunken eyes – like obsidian beads. He didn’t wear traditional Sioux clothing. He wore jeans and T-shirts. He had thick calluses on his hands because he was a wood carver.

There was a blazing sun inside Nathan, though most people couldn’t see it, of course.

Once, he sat Ernie down on his chair and danced around him seven times, whispering a Sioux prayer. ‘That’ll help keep him protected even when you’re not around, Rico,’ he told me.

Ernie and Nathan and Mom were the only people I let call me Rico.

Nathan would sometimes go around town in the evening with his hair down, wearing garlands of flowers around his neck. Some of the townspeople laughed at him and said he wanted to be a woman. They didn’t know – or care – what a
winkte
was. And they didn’t like Indians.

We didn’t call people like Nathan Native Americans at the time. The townspeople would have laughed at anyone who used that term.

Back then it was perfectly okay to dislike someone just for being Sioux. And you could say it out loud, too, and expect a lot of people to agree with you. And cops could arrest a Native American for just walking down the street. Nathan got picked up by the police whenever he left Crawford. He once spent a week in jail in Denver. When he made it back to Crawford, he told me, ‘Always remember, Rico, in Denver, they can arrest you for just sitting in a garden and thinking!’

When I was just five or six, Nathan told me he was a
winkte.
That’s a clown who’s also a wise man – and who does everything upside down when he’s performing. A
winkte
is blessed at birth with a double spirit: a masculine one and a feminine one.

I think now that he’d known a lot about what Ernie and I were going through at home. At the time, I didn’t realize it. Did he make my father vanish? Maybe there are things that
winktes
can do that go way beyond what white policemen think they can do.