Read Online The Night Watchman by Richard Zimler - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Richard Zimler
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a few years earlier. I decided that he’d been forty-seven years old at the time of his death and had grown up a few miles from our house, at an old abandoned shack I’d passed a hundred times, out on State Road 92.
When he was alive, the Spectre had had an understanding, world-weary face, long hair, and a jangly, tired kind of walk. He had never married or had children.
I decided that he had come back from the dead to help me.
Just before I got his first message, I’d been watching my father yell at Ernie for peeing on his favourite armchair while napping. My brother was four years old then, and Dad’s shouting started him bawling. My heart was drumming because I knew that our father would grab him and shake him until he shut up, and my brother’s body would go all limp, and his eyes would become dull, almost dead. Then the writing appeared on my hand, and I was no longer in the living room. I was seated outside. I felt split in half – as if I were in two places at once.
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
When he was alive, the Spectre had had an understanding, world-weary face, long hair, and a jangly, tired kind of walk. He had never married or had children.
I decided that he had come back from the dead to help me.
Just before I got his first message, I’d been watching my father yell at Ernie for peeing on his favourite armchair while napping. My brother was four years old then, and Dad’s shouting started him bawling. My heart was drumming because I knew that our father would grab him and shake him until he shut up, and my brother’s body would go all limp, and his eyes would become dull, almost dead. Then the writing appeared on my hand, and I was no longer in the living room. I was seated outside. I felt split in half – as if I were in two places at once.
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
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