The Night Watchman Read Free Page A

medics to bring an antidote for cyanide!’
    I found a faint but steady pulse in Moura’s wrist. Lifting him up out of his chair, I eased him down to the floor, positioning him on his back so his heart wouldn’t have to work so hard. I noticed a tiny square of foil glimmering by one of the legs of my desk.
    ‘Don’t you do this to me!’ I told him, but a few seconds later his chest stopped rising. Sensing that this was a test around which my own right to be alive was turning, I knelt beside him and pressed down hard over his sternum, then tilted his head back and gave him two of my breaths.

Chapter 2
    After the medics confirmed what I already knew, I lost my breakfast in the toilet. Washing my face with hot water at the sink, staring into the mirror at the shocked fragility in my eyes, I rewrote my conversation with Moura over and over, giving him all the reassurances he needed to keep from taking his own life.
    The sensation of breathing life into him still coated my lips, like a salty crust. Was it guilt that tugged me back to my childhood? Maybe it was simply that any man looking long enough into his own lost face will eventually find the boy dwelling inside him who first realized he would commit many wrongs over his lifetime.
    I locked myself in a stall because I wanted to be alone with the ten-year-old that I’d been. In there – in my memory – the crescent moon shone lantern-bright over our Colorado home. Gusts of frigid wind were bending the barren branches of our apple trees, and I could hear the broken-bone crunch of Dad’s feet tramping across the ice towards the porch, where I’d concealed my six-year-old brother Ernie behind a stack of firewood.
    ‘Hey, look what I’ve got here!’
    Dad grabbed Ernie and flung him into a snow bank by the stairs leading up to our front door, then waved to me. ‘Get on over here, Hank!’
    When I reached him, he took my arm and hugged me to him. He trembled. At first I thought he might be crying, but as he held me away, he showed me a mocking smile. ‘You know what, son,’ he told me, ‘I’m going to do to Ernie what the Colorado winter does to our apple trees!’
    He pushed me hard, and I fell next to my brother. As I looked up, Dad took a clear plastic bag out of his back pocket . . .
    From inside my stall, I phoned my brother. He heard the panic in my voice right away.
    ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.
    ‘Trouble at work.’
    ‘But you’re okay?’
    ‘Yeah, fine,’ I told him. ‘Is everything okay with you? I suddenly got worried about you.’
    ‘Everything’s fine. The roses are gorgeous right now. Oh, and you should see the—’
    ‘You don’t think Dad could find us after all these years?’ I cut in.
    ‘Jesus, Hank, where’d that come from?’
    ‘Just answer the question!’
    ‘You know it’s impossible. Even if he’s still alive, which I doubt, he doesn’t speak a word of Portuguese. And neither of us is in the phonebook. If he could’ve found us, he would have. We’ve been here more than twenty-five years now.’
    It often infuriated me how Ernie could be so sure we were safe from our father and so insecure about nearly everything else, but for the moment it was what I needed to hear. ‘Remember how he said the worst things real softly?’ I said. ‘To show us how at peace he was with himself and God.’
    Ernie drew an alarmed breath. ‘You haven’t told Ana or someone else about what happened to him, have you?’ he asked, thinking he’d figured out more of what was wrong with me. ‘The police back home might still think he didn’t just disappear – that we did something we didn’t do.’
    ‘I haven’t said a thing. Don’t get so upset.’
    ‘Tell me what’s happened,’ he said in a gentler voice.
    Given Ernie’s history with pills, I didn’t dare mention Moura’s suicide, so I said, ‘A suspect got killed here at headquarters.’
    In the slow-passing silence between us, I realized I’d expected Ernie to die on that