Keeping Watch (15 page)

He did in fact nearly kill the man, bashing joyously with fists and feet before the sight of blood dribbling onto the matted beige shag carpet jolted through him, opening a small icy vein of rationality in his brain. He froze, trembling with unsatisfied hungers, then forced himself to squat down and grasp the man's bristly face with his fingertips, to stare into the terrified, swelling-shut eyes.

“You remember this,” he ordered, his voice torn with the effort of control. “Anytime you're tempted to hit that woman—any woman—remember this: I could be standing right outside your door, waiting. Next time, I won't stop.”

He left the house, left the town, fleeing the rebirth of the man he'd thought he had done with. He ran as hard and as fast as he could, crawling into a black pit of memory from which nothing later came out but a sense of loss and utter hopelessness.

His next clear memory came from weeks later. He was standing at the door to his own home in the islands, looking into his brother's face.

Chapter 14

At first glance, Jerry Carmichael was not at all certain that the shambling wreck of a human being making his way up the drive was anyone he knew, much less his own brother. The figure was dressed in filthy trousers out at one knee, an equally disreputable Army jacket, and a pair of boots so sprung they were barely staying on. The figure moved with the grim determination of a man long past his limits, whose will alone kept his battered self aimed for the Carmichael door.

Jerry dropped the soapy pan into the sink and hurried around to the front hallway, where he waited for the door to open. The sound of those frayed boots hit the porch, but the doorknob did not turn. Had he been mistaken? Was this just another bum, looking for a handout? A long minute went by. At last Jerry couldn't stand it; he pulled the door open.

Allen raised his bloodshot eyes from the wood of the door—an Allen fifteen pounds thinner than when Jerry'd seen him the previous fall, a miasma of cheap drink and weeks-old sweat pulsing out of his pores with every beat of his abused heart, most of his possessions having been stolen, traded, or simply abandoned along the way—Allen Carmichael stood at his own front door in the islands, bewildered into immobility by the choice between knocker and knob.

The insurmountable dilemma of how to get through the door—as guest or resident?—was solved by Jerry, who hesitated only briefly before he stepped forward to embrace the man on his doorstep. Allen winced away from the contact, and Jerry's hands fell to his sides.

“Jesus, Allen, what the hell happened to you?”

Allen's body had delivered him to that threshold as surely as a fish headed upriver, but there the forces of instinct abandoned him, leaving him mute and shivering. Even if he could dredge up the memory, he had no words for what had happened to him, for why he was here, or how. Jerry saw the confusion on the poor derelict's face, and gently drew him inside, leading him by the elbow until they stood in the bathroom. He turned on both taps in the tub and went out, returning in a moment with a pile of clean clothes that he put on the sink.

Jerry eyed his brother uncertainly. “You need some help?” In other words,
How drunk are you?
In response, Allen reached for the buttons of his filthy jacket. Jerry waited long enough to make sure the fingers were operating correctly, then left him alone. When the splashing sounds from the bathroom had ceased, and the thumps of a clumsy man dressing had gone on for a long time, Jerry returned to lead his brother to a freshly made bed.

Allen collapsed onto the sheets like a shot steer, one leg off the mattress and the blankets rucked to the side. Jerry bundled together his brother's noxious rags for the garbage, gingerly going through the pockets and taking out a handful of change, a broken comb, and a familiar silver shape. He turned the Zippo lighter over in his hand, and a painful smile broke onto his face as he ran his thumb over the inscription he'd had the jeweler put on:
To Allen from his brother Jerry.
How on earth had Allen managed to hold on to this? He lifted Allen's stray leg back onto the bed, drew the covers up, and quietly closed the door.

For days, Allen inhabited a dark land on the edges of sleep. Jerry took a couple of days off work to stay with him, watching him go from a sleep so heavy it looked like death, to long muttering conversations with people named Todd and Snakeman, that concerned revolvers and lighter fluid and blood. That first afternoon, he called in the neighbor for help, to see if the retired surgeon thought Allen should be hospitalized. The older man took temperature and blood pressure readings, and shook his head dubiously, saying that Jerry's care would probably do as well as a hospital ward.

For days, Allen woke only to the occasional violent coughing spell. He would stagger drunkenly to the toilet and, on his way back to the sheets, gulp down the glasses of water or mugs of cold, milky tea that had been left on the bedside table. He was aware of Jerry's presence, and of visits from a man who strapped a blood pressure cuff around his arm, shone a bright light into his eyes, examined the veins of his arms, and prodded various parts of his anatomy before jabbing something into his hip, but apart from those two, he was left alone. On the way back from one of his midnight trips to let a stream of dark, hot urine into the toilet bowl, he became vaguely aware that his father did not seem to be around, but as that absence was nothing but pure relief, it did not interfere with his return to sleep.

On the fifth morning the sun rose, and with it Allen. His cough woke him, although it no longer felt as if his lungs were about to rip themselves from his chest. When the spell was over, he sat among the fetid sheets, considering the pale square of the window, and finally rose on shaky legs to go and stand under a long, hot shower. A rummage through the bathroom drawers gave him a pair of nail scissors and a half-empty package of pink disposable razors. His heavy beard caught and bound in the scissors, blunted three of the plastic razors, clogged the drain, and carpeted the floor with wiry hairs, but at long last he got it off. The man who looked back at him in the mirror was a person mired in hopelessness and confusion, the hard, distant stare of the past years replaced by . . . nothing. He dabbed at the nicks and turned away before the face could begin to seep tears, and worked on buttoning up a shirt and threading his legs into a pair of clean jeans too large in the waist. He concentrated closely on navigating the stairs, bringing both bare feet together on a step before daring the next, leaning heavily on the banister to keep himself from tumbling to the bottom. He reached the main hallway without mishap and turned toward the back of the house, hands out from his sides as if the carpet was tossing beneath him. He made it all the way to the kitchen, and collapsed into a chair, nearly sending it flying in the process. He had to bury his head in both hands to stop it spinning.

Jerry put a cup of black coffee down near his brother's elbow. “You want any breakfast?” he asked. There came no answer, but Jerry turned to the refrigerator as if there had been. He took out a bowl of brown eggs, a loaf of bread, and the home-cured bacon he traded firewood for. He fried up the bacon and broke eggs into the sputtering fat, toasted the bread, and laid everything before his brother. He was just thinking apprehensively that Allen looked a little green when the seated man coughed twice, then vomited the contents of his stomach across the table. Not that there was much to vomit, but it smelled vile.

After Jerry had cleaned it up, he made Allen a cup of weak, milk-laced tea and went to the phone.

“Mrs. Weintraub?” he asked the woman who answered. “I wonder if the doctor is still there?”

“He's just out walking the dog. Is your brother awake?”

“Yes, he's downstairs. I hate to bother your husband . . .”

“Jerry, he's happy to feel useful. I'll have him come over when he gets back.”

“I really appreciate it,” Jerry told her. He meant it.

Jerry went back to the kitchen and toasted another piece of bread, leaving this one naked of butter or jam. The gaunt, ill-shaved stranger at the table seemed not to notice it. Jerry washed up the dishes, and in passing made the suggestion that Allen might try a bite. Thirty seconds later, in a sort of delayed response, Allen obediently picked up the mug of cold tea with both hands and tried a sip. When it didn't immediately come up again, he took another. And, Jerry was ridiculously pleased to notice when he came through the kitchen a few minutes later, his brother had even nibbled one end of the toast.

A head passed under the window, and Jerry went to let the neighbor in. Weintraub was a vigorous, balding man not yet sixty, betrayed in his profession of vascular surgery by an onset of faint shakiness in his right fingers, turned now to teaching on the mainland two days a week. He set his bag on the table, exchanged some remarks on the weather with Jerry, and accepted a cup of coffee with thanks.

“Glad to see you up,” he said to Allen. Allen seemed mesmerized by a trio of seagulls at the end of the dock, and did not respond. “My name's Weintraub, in case you don't remember meeting earlier.”

“He hasn't said anything,” Jerry informed the older man.

“He'll talk when he's ready,” the surgeon said placidly, and pulled a stethoscope and blood pressure cuff out of the bag. He took his various readings in silence, asked Jerry a couple of questions, and then sat down on the chair across the table from Allen, interrupting his gaze out the window. “Allen?” he said. “Allen, would you look at me for a minute, so I know you're listening to me? Thank you. Young man, you're in god-awful shape. Your lungs were swimming when you got here, and that slice on your arm should've been treated weeks ago. The antibiotics are helping with both those, and it did you a world of good to sleep, but now you really need to eat. You understand me?”

He waited for a response. Jerry thought in despair,
He's not going to answer; he's like an animal crawling home to die;
but in this, his brother surprised him. Allen blinked, looked down at the plate in front of him, then picked up a corner of cold toast. Weintraub took this as answer enough, and gave him another injection of antibiotic before packing up his bag. This time, he left Jerry with a bottle of pills, saying that if Allen wouldn't take them, or couldn't keep them down, to give him a ring and he'd come back with the needle.

Allen did not eat the eggs Jerry scrambled him, but he did pick at some poached egg on toast Jerry brought him at noon, and when Jerry walked through the sunroom that afternoon eating a peanut butter sandwich, Allen's eyes followed it. He ate one of his own, then a bowl of chicken soup at dinner, and Jerry felt like crying in relief.

At Weintraub's suggestion, Jerry had cleared the house of every drink stronger than beer and every pill more intoxicating than aspirin, but in truth, Allen seemed not to look for chemical escape. He was looking for something, that was obvious, but once on his feet, his search turned out of doors. By week's end, he'd moved from house to beach, spending hours in a chair whatever the weather, smoking the stale cigarettes he had unearthed in their father's study and watching the birds and the passing boats, so motionless he might have been asleep but for his eyes. At Weintraub's suggestion, Jerry made a point of talking to his brother, and although he got scant response, he found he could read his silent companion's reactions. When he told Allen that their father was away for the summer, the invalid's subtle relaxation surely indicated relief; and when various family members dropped in at one time or another over the next few days, to see for themselves the disreputable return of the most prodigal of their sons, Allen's gaze and slight withdrawal seemed to indicate a sort of bemused disinterest, reminding Jerry of a large and patient dog confronted with the antics of a kitten. Eventually the others did as the kitten might, and left Allen alone in his silence. They had, after all, seen him in difficult states before.

Within his silence, Allen was conscious only of a vast and dreary confusion pierced by a tiny spark of life, a nameless identity throbbing stubbornly beneath the wreckage of his life, like some long-buried earthquake survivor. If he was aware of others outside his skin, it was in the sense of mute gratitude engendered by his father's absence, his family's general lack of interest, and his brother's patient and undemanding presence. Most of all, he was abjectly grateful that the people around him didn't have raw, bleeding hands, and that no rotting children had yet appeared to tug at his shirttails, asking for chocolate bars and bullets.

Then one day, two weeks after Allen's arrival, Jerry came home from his summer job scrubbing down boats for tourists to find the house empty, the beach unoccupied, and the motor skiff gone from the dock. He spent a tense couple of hours drinking beer on the beach while the sun dropped low on the horizon before he heard the familiar sound of the skiff's outboard coming across the water. He quickly went back inside to put dinner together, allowing Allen to tie up on his own.

Allen's attempts at communication (apart from the long mutters and terrible high moans of his nightmares) remained monosyllabic answers to direct questions or the equally brusque request for cigarettes, but once he started going out on the boat, he began to put on weight. Long hours spent on the water turned him brown. His infections healed, his limp seemed less severe, and his hands grew steady enough to shave him without bloodshed. Jerry took a breath of mixed relief and resignation, bracing for the next phase—a restlessness that would end with an abrupt, unannounced departure.

But as June turned to July, Allen gave no signs of leaving. He seemed to be more preoccupied than restless. The inevitable Fourth of July bangs and flashes gave him a hard time, and more than once he retreated to the TV room with the volume cranked high, but even then he didn't drink more than a couple of beers, and he was still there on the morning of the fifth.

Not, however, on an evening two nights after Jerry's twenty-first birthday, when Jerry came back late from work to find the skiff missing. And when the stars were out overhead it was still gone, although the tide had been going out for hours, all the waters of the Georgia Strait sweeping around their islands, rushing to sea along with anything that wasn't anchored down.

Torn between fury and dread, Jerry slapped together some macaroni and cheese for their dinner, ate his in front of the television, and finally pulled on his jacket to go lie on the dock, staring up at the sky, listening to the
pat pat
of wavelets against the posts, wondering how soon he could call the sheriff's office without sounding like his brother's fretful grandmother. Stretched out on the old boards, he searched the heavens for a shooting star, so he might make a wish. That he might miraculously be made older, perhaps, so he'd know what to do about his brother. Or that Dad might come back from Europe early and take over, leaving his latest girlfriend behind. Or that—and then he heard an engine approaching; not the skiff's uneven outboard, something heavier.