The Night Watchman (8 page)

After I washed off the message, I found Ernie in the room we shared, under his covers, snoozing away on his belly.

The Spectre’s suggestion made good sense to me, so, on Friday, right after I got home from school, I went to my parents’ bedroom and told Mom I was taking Ernie to a friend’s birthday party. She lowered the wings of her paperback novel and told me, ‘Do whatever you think best, honey.’

Now, thirty-four years later, it struck me as odd that Mom would trust me to take Ernie out with me all afternoon and evening, since I was just eight years old. But at the time it seemed normal; my mother hardly ever got dressed by then. During the day, when Dad was at the sawmill, she took lots of naps, nesting tight in her blankets, or read a book, though once in a while, when I’d go into her room and sing for her, or dance around to make her laugh, she’d find the energy to slip on some jeans and a blouse, go down to the kitchen and bake me and Ernie a pie or go with us for a walk outside.

Occasionally, the three of us would pick flowers together. Mom told me once that wildflowers were the sun’s way of getting to know the earth. I loved to hear her say amazing things like that in her Portuguese accent.

After she died, I discovered Mom’s stash of medications in a box behind her old coats in her walk-in closet, and I realized that she’d been taking huge doses of Valium, and that Dad had been picking up the pills for her at Morton’s Drugstore in Gunnison, because the name and address of that pharmacy were on the label. And I realized, too, that she must have known that I looked through her night-table drawer sometimes, or else she’d have kept the pills there.

Mom had stopped driving by then. Dad must’ve liked her better as a stay-at-home zombie.

The topmost layer of Mom’s night-table drawer was her first-aid station. It contained Bayer children’s aspirin, gauze pads, mercurochrome, Polysporin ointment and lots of other useful things. Under all that were splashy brochures for cruises around Europe and her books of poetry. And also a deck of cards with pictures on the back of Lisbon’s landmarks, like the Belém Tower and Jerónimos Monastery.

After my brother and I moved to Portugal, I discovered her beat-up old copy of Pablo Neruda’s
Twenty Love Poems
in a box that Ernie had packed, and I discovered that she had underlined these lines:

I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells, dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses.

I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.

Reading that verse in Mom’s book, I turned to ice, because I remembered my dad telling me, ‘I’m going to do to Ernie what the Colorado winter does to our apple trees,’ and I realized more clearly than ever before that he’d had a gift for recognizing what was most beautiful in the world and destroying it.

At the very bottom of Mom’s night-table drawer was a brown envelope containing pictures of her parents and older sister, Olivia, who lived back home in Portugal. The one I liked best showed the two sisters at the beach at Caparica when Mom was twelve and Aunt Olivia nineteen. They’re each holding up a ping-pong racket and grinning. I keep that picture in my wallet. I like having the two sisters with me wherever I go.

After Mom died, Dad used to take me and Ernie on trips all over Colorado and New Mexico. We saw a golden eagle nest in Rocky Mountain National Park and stayed the weekend at a motel in Santa Fe that had deer antlers over the reception desk. He even let us share his bed on most nights, Ernie on one side of him and me on the other, and he’d keep his hand atop my head all night, because I’d decided I couldn’t sleep if he wasn’t exactly where he was supposed to be.

Maybe everything I’ve done in my life has its origin in my father’s complexity. And maybe every case I’ve investigated has been one more opportunity to solve the mystery forever staring at me with his suspicious brown eyes – which are also my eyes, for better or for worse. Do we all lead the lives we lead because we have to know why things happened the way they did, and if there had been any other way they could have combined together to produce something more gentle and meaningful and permanent?

I have two photos of my mother from 1980. I know I took them that summer, because Dad bought me a Canon camera at the end of the school year. Mom looks all used up in them, as if she’d been on an uphill climb for so long that she was too exhausted to go on, though she was only thirty-eight years old at the time – still young, though her eyes are bruised-looking and her hair is like old frayed rope.

I don’t look at those photos of her too often. They’re in my night-table drawer, right at the bottom, where no one else will ever see just how dead inside she’d become.

I have no idea where the negatives are. I couldn’t find them when it came time to leave for Portugal. I hope the new owners of our Colorado ranch discovered where they were and threw them out; I don’t like to think of my mom’s negatives stuck in a place where she was so unhappy; death should free us, if nothing else.

On the Friday after receiving the Spectre’s first message, I grabbed Ernie and led him down by the stream, a quarter of a mile from our house, to a meadow where my dad and I used to practise shooting. I grabbed a blanket, too, since even though it was late May, we were at six thousand seven hundred feet and temperatures fell below freezing at night. We lived a half-mile from our nearest neighbours, a couple in their eighties named Johnson. Both Mr and Mrs Johnson were deaf, I figured at the time. Now, I realize that they must not have wanted to get mixed up in what went on at our ranch.

Ernie had an ornery, little-kid energy that could drive you crazy, since if you didn’t watch him closely he might start tugging the cord of a lamp out of the socket or turn over the garbage in the kitchen. I can see now that he was just naturally curious, but at the time his actions seemed aimed at getting both of us punished by Dad.

Ernie lived on the surface of his senses as a kid. In particular, he was tuned in to the calls of birds in the morning. And to their colours. Their singing and screeching would wake him up at dawn, and he’d slide out of bed in his pyjamas and stand at our window as if he were watching Santa Claus and his reindeer prepare for their Christmas Eve adventures. Ernie had dark brown hair cut real short and big watery green eyes that were always darting around, with the long lashes that a lot of Portuguese people have. And he had a scent that was all his own, and that I loved – like warm oatmeal.

‘They look to me like tiny fern fronds.’

That’s what Mom used to say about Ernie’s eyelashes.

When Mom complimented Ernie’s looks, maybe she was also saying that there was still something special and beautiful about herself, too, even though it had become nearly impossible to see. I hope that was part of what she meant. I hope it every day of my life.

Dad must have also sensed that Ernie wasn’t like everyone else. And he had to have noticed that Ernie – even as a little kid – looked a lot like Mom and almost nothing like him.

I know I disappointed my mother. That’s the hardest thing of all for me to admit.

Anyway, on that Friday afternoon when the Spectre first wrote to me, I led Ernie down to our stream. He started to kick up a fuss because I hadn’t remembered to bring along any food. I diverted his attention by asking him to name the wildflowers all around us. At that time of year, our meadow was like a botanical garden, and all of those yellow, purple and scarlet blossoms seemed as eager as we were to warm up in the sun after our long winter. And to be recognized for who they were.

Indian Paintbrush was Ernie’s favourite flower because it had tufted scarlet blossoms that seemed to tickle your fingers when you touched them. Mom once showed us how to dry flowers in between the pages of a book, and so we sometimes used to pick Paintbrush blossoms and slip them into the American College Dictionary that she bought me for my eighth birthday. She said that Ernie and I needed to learn English perfectly if we were going to be a success in America.

She always predicted that Ernie would become a scientist. He had that sort of unstoppable, wide-eyed curiosity about simple things. I thought so too.

After an hour of leading Ernie around, I wanted to sit down and rest, but he started to bawl every time I left him alone. It was like he was battery-operated, programmed to erupt into hot tears if I didn’t hold his hand.

After the sun eased down over the edge of a faraway mountain, we spotted a wild turkey – a hen – nesting beneath a big scrub oak. Her chicks were all around her, and we listened to them making those scratchy, high-pitched fiddle sounds they made when they wanted to let their mother know just where they were.

When we finally got home, I was so pooped I could hardly stand. It was just after nine p.m. Dad was passed out on the couch in our living room. He reeked of tequila and cigars, and he’d taken off his shirt and trousers, but was still in his underwear and Milwaukee Braves baseball cap. Bessie Smith was singing on our record player in that big scratchy voice of hers. It was an old seventy-eight with a purple label.

I went to our parents’ room and told Mom that Ernie was starving. She and I tiptoed into the kitchen. She opened up a can of Heinz baked beans and heated the mixture on the range with a little bit of tomato paste and water. I stood Ernie on a chair, and while he and I watched the thick liquid bubble and hiss, I whispered to Mom about the turkey family we’d seen.

Ernie and I gorged ourselves in our closet. He dug into our bowl with a soupspoon that made it only halfway to his mouth before spilling a good part of its beans on the towel I’d wrapped around his neck.

Before bed, Mom said it was good we’d gone away in the afternoon because Dad had come home real angry, and so drunk that
hardly could he keep his stability to make pee.
That was when I became certain that the Spectre had given me good advice.

Dad went out with his workmates and drank too much on the last Friday of every month; it was payday. I didn’t realize that when I was little. But the Spectre knew it. That’s how he was able to warn me not to be home that afternoon. He was cleverer than I was. Maybe because he was an adult.

From then on, the Spectre used to write on my hand once a week or so, mostly warnings about when Dad was sure to be so drunk that he’d get a really bad hangover. Almost right away, the Spectre started taking Dad’s tests for me, too. He became much better at finding Ernie than I was. He saved my brother from getting badly hurt on a few occasions when I’d never have located him in time.

That was how I came to realize that the Spectre was a lot more efficient than anyone normally was at finding clues. He was able to decide real quickly what was significant and meaningful in a room – what had been removed or added, for instance. Dad’s tests trained him for that. They made him like a blind person who hears tiny, faraway sounds that other people can’t.

When I was a kid, I figured the Spectre didn’t feel the emotions that living people felt. And because of that, he could focus on finding Ernie and exclude everything else. But now I know that he gets panicked. In fact, I think he knows more fear than anybody I’ve ever met, even my brother.

Kids don’t have the experience to know what is unusual or unique, and I assumed that everyone was like me and got messages on their hand or some other part of their body. Only when I told Mom about them did I realize that I was more fortunate than other people. She said that she never got messages, and that nobody she knew ever did. She said that I ought not to tell anyone about them. It would be our secret.

O nosso segredo,
she said in Portuguese, with her hand resting on top of my head, as if she were blessing me, which made it seem as if she might still care about me in her own, mostly silent way. Although if I wanted to be mean, I’d say her own
useless
way. Because she didn’t defend Ernie and me enough. I try not to think about that but I do.

When I was eleven, in September of 1981, we had a guest preacher from Denver – a theology professor named Thurmond – who told us in his sermon that angels didn’t really exist. He said they were metaphors for how God watched over us. The old man’s words stunned me with a kind of electric jolt, because I knew instantly that he didn’t know what he was talking about.

That’s when I stopped calling whoever left me messages ‘the Spectre’. Instead, I started calling him by an angelic name, and I chose Gabriel, though I never meant that he was the biblical archangel; I would have had to have been a lot crazier than I was to think that a powerful angel from the Bible would come down from heaven to visit us at our ranch in rural Colorado and help me take Dad’s tests. No, I figured that my Gabriel was just a minor sort of angel who had only a tiny bit of God’s power – not enough to save our lives.

Gabriel always calls me H in his notes to me, so I started calling him G. Before I get a message from him, I always lose track of myself. I usually disappear for between ten minutes and an hour. I never know where I go.

The notes I receive are always printed – never written in script.

At some point (I must have been twelve or thirteen), I began to figure out that G took control of my body. Though for a long time I wasn’t sure of that, because I never came back to myself knowing what had happened to me. I never asked Ernie to tell me what I’d been up to, because I didn’t want him to know that I hadn’t been there – in my body, I mean.

My temples usually throb when he wants to take me over. But if G comes really fast, in an emergency, I get no warning – his entry feels as though I’ve been walloped on the back of my head.

I’ve known for sure that G takes control of me ever since I asked one of my police colleagues to watch me when I examined the blood-soaked clothing of a restaurant owner who’d been stabbed to death. That was sixteen years ago.

Staring at really bad bloodstains makes me vanish, though I can sometimes hold G off if I’m determined enough.

My police colleague told me I’d rushed around crime scene as if the walls of the restaurant were about to collapse on us. The few words I’d spoken to him were in English. I’d also asked him for a cigarette, and I don’t smoke.