The Watchman (21 page)

You've stopped shaking, he said, stroking her cheek with his fingers.

Well, maybe, she said. Or maybe it's because the rest of what I have to tell you is so awful that it stuns me even remembering; a thing so sickening that it's beyond being even afraid of or wanting to cry about or having a chili over. There are such things, you know. No, dear kind Jase, you couldn't know.

Can you tell me? he said gently.

Far beneath the floor, in the empty, darkened drugstore, one of Mister Peace's clocks, ubiquitous and never-resting, struck: a brassy laugh, muffled and predictive of certain professional services.

Something woke Jill up that night, Cristi began slowly. Maybe it was Mama and him in the next room. Father was away—gone to Austin for a week, he told her. And so, of course. Mama and her latest lover were naked in the big feather-bed—it was a hot August night, breathless and humid from the gulf and Juanita outside the open bedroom door, beyond those beaded curtains Mama loved, with a big palmetto leaf in her hand, fanning the air so they'd be cool. Not that they would have felt it—hot or cool either. They were

loved-out and bored, spent-out and silent the way it gets between people when one of them's about to go looking for someone else. And they were glazed and softly giggling from time to time from the little brown cigarettes Juanita had brought for them that night. So maybe Mama thought it was only a hallucination when she saw Jill come through those chains of twinkling beads, like a little fairy walking out of a glass, dream rain. Jill was wide-eyed and sleepy and maybe half-scared from a nightmare—she wasn't quite five years old that summer—and she wanted to get in bed with Mama. You know how children think—anyone can be Papa just so long as Mama's there. And so—and so—Mama took her into the bed and Jill lay there—maybe Mama still didn't believe it was really Jill, she was so high, out of her mind on Juanita's rich, red mary-jane. And time—you don't know how time moves when you're like that, Jase, so there's no sense trying to describe it—time was going sideways and the man in the bed was laughing at something and Juanita had put the palm-leaf down by now and was singing some old Zapatista love-song on the bench beneath the gaslight in the hall. Maybe Mama knew and maybe she didn't know—sometimes I make myself beUeve she never knew what had happened. It's easier thinking that.

What did happen? he whispered, feeling the chill spread from her flesh to his own as, on so many other nights, her warmth had come.

Jill was raped, she said. What did you think? At four years old, she said, her voice speaking now in a measured careful lightness, an effort against the pressures within her of a cascading hysteria. I got sick that night Juanita told me. They thought I had the yellow-fever and Father got doctors and they piled me nearly smothering under blankets and quilts and comforters to sweat away my fever and the chill. And when it was over for a long time I couldn't even remember what Juanita had told me that night—she had the native's gift of making a story rich and real with lights and color and all the fine details: just where the moon stood in the curtains, the way Mama watched and laughed as if it were all a dream she was watching: a dream-lover and a dream-her and now, from heaven or maybe from the green jungles of her fantasies, a dream-nymph come to please her fading lover's jaded appetite. All of it she told me and even when I could remember, later, I couldn't tell which was real and which was dream as if I had been in there high with

them myself in the bed, seeing it happen and knowing it couldn't and suddenly the sound of Father's car backfiring in the vacant lot between our old house and the market and the excitement and zest in Juanita's deep, quivering voice when she told me how he had come leaping out over the runningboard at the sound of the gunshots from the bedroom window and jumped a six-foot mud fence at one vault into the wisteria in our yard and found Mama in her nightgown screaming and hysterical and Jill, bleeding and unconscious on the pillows, and the man who had come, too late, and driven the drunk, sex-mad Mexican off, firing at him in the dark, of course. And missing him, of course. Because there was no drunken Mexican that climbed in the window and raped Jill the way Mama and the man and Juanita made

Father believe. We lived a little ways out of town on the

bay—and Father wrapped Jill in his coat and took her in to the hospital at Corpus Christi and got a doctor to quiet Mama's hysteria and came back and drank a tumbler of whiskey—the only time, Juanita said, she'd ever seen him drink—and he thanked his friend, at least, for trying. And all the time Mama still whimpering, half-doped from what she'd already smoked and the medicine the doctor had given her on top of that and the man standing there, shaking his head in sympathy, and stroking the horn-handle of his pistol as if his hands itched to tear it out and go gunning down that Mexican who had done so terrible a thing and Papa saying, as he would say—as, in fact, he has kept on saying ever since: "No. No. Vengeance does not mend it. No. Healing my child is all that matters now and helping her poor mother to forget. Prayers maybe, too, for a man so deathly, madly sick that he would do to a child a thing such as this—a thing inhuman and yet so dreadfully human, too." And all the while the noble rescuer—the savior— moving around the kitchen sipping Father's whiskey and fingering his gun butt and begging Father to let him go out and find the Mexican or if not that Mexican at least another who would have, even if he didn't, done the same thing, given the chance; slipping around Father in the kitchen with the cats that followed him everywhere tiptoeing between his ankles, rubbing against the tooled-leather of his boots. So Father, you see, never could repay the man enough. He kept him with him even when Mama was dead and we had to leave Texas and come eastwards through the towns. And in all the towns that man there with his cats, smiling, fondling

the head of the little, long-haired, dark-tressed girl beside him: Jill, remembering nothing of it or of him: remembering only a horror which even in dreams would be known to her only by the back of its head. And always and always Father's undying gratitude to the man for having tried. And with an equally fixed passion keeping his eye always on Jill, never letting her play with boys even when she was still in middy-blouses and hair ribbons.

And what about you. Oris? he said. What were you throughout all this?

Still disbelieving, she said. For at least a year. It took at least that long after the night Juanita told me before I believed it. And then seeing Jill in her bath when Juanita would be washing her for bed, I saw the scars. So I knew then. Yes, I knew. And Father would never go away anywhere and leave her unless he was sure that he—the man—Tzchak was there to tell her stories and keep the nightmares away and, perhaps, keep off the Mexican, too, if he came back for more. And never guessing it was Tzchak who had done it any more than he had ever suspicioned that Mama had done what she had done and that not just one time but hundreds. Jase, it wasn't long before I couldn't stand it around the house— and that's all it ever was: a house—knowing what I knew and having to watch Tzchak coming with us wherever we went— all the towns across the Rockies and beyond them eastward —the nothing, nowhere towns and Tzchak always there calling Jill his "Little Kitten" and staying close to her so she'd never suddenly remember and tell Father and staying close to Father so he could lie to him in case she did remember and tell and Father keeping them all close to each other because he felt such a safeness that his baby was in such guardian hands when business called him away. Sometimes I used to get sick to my stomach right in the middle of supper and run out to the bathroom and throw up seeing those two men bound together in that queer, weird blend of cautions and misunderstanding. And Jill sitting there eating quietly. With whatever bloody memories she might have had of it hidden so deep that there were never any faces she could recognize.

Do you think she's ever remembered? he said.

No, said Cristi. Yet, it seems like sometimes something will trigger off the flicker of a picture in her mind, like someone shuffling a deck too fast to see the extra ace that doesn't belong and then the shufiSing stopped suddenly in

mid-motion and she'll half-see it and start knowing and something in her will get ready to start screaming out the name. But Tzchak knows Jill. And every time it seems she's close to remembering—when Tzchak senses he's in danger of having his face seen in that deck—he manages to get her ofT alone somewhere and does something to her—I don't know what—I used to think it was some kind of hypnotism or a drug he gave her but now I don't know what. At any rate, she'll be quiet again and her face not only peaceful but filled with a kind of triumph— like she's just beaten him at something. Maybe that's it—something in her that knows and has to have its vengeance on him every now and then.

Do you think—I mean, is there a chance he has done it to her since? Maybe that's what he does?

Well, look at it this way, Jase, she said. Even if Jill would let him—which she wouldn't—do you imagine he would dare do something for the third or fourth or maybe the two hundredth time that would take away all reason for her not to remember the first? And remembering—tell? No, Jase, it's not that. Tzchak's too smart for that. And yet—it's queer —it makes me think that sometimes Jill remembers, Jase. I found a picture once in the little box where she kept her treasures under the house. She was twelve or thirteen then. Father had never seen the picture. It was one of those quick, hand-colored carnival portraits they used to do down in the Mexican markets: Mama and a man—yes, it was Tzchak with his arm around her, both of them a little high on tequila, I guess, and not giving much of a damn about a picture that someone might find and get ideas from later on. Well, Jill knew I'd seen the picture and that very night—I remember the windows were open and it was blowing and the first rain of a bad August storm was scattering over the sills—Jill got out of bed and got something from under her pillow—yes, it was the picture—and went out to the kitchen and spent a good ten minutes at the sink, by the pump, scrubbing the man's body, legs and face away with a piece of steel-wool and some soap—crying and sobbing as I've never heard Jill cry—so wild that she hadn't even bothered to take it out of the frame: she'd smashed the glass out on the pump handle. She still has that picture, too. The last time I was down to the room at Mrs. Moonshine's I saw it on the dresser, still with no glass, still with no sign of the man: just Mama standing there laughing with her colors slightly running and her arm lifted up and disappearing as if she had laid her arm

The Watchman \A1

around an emptiness: a space in time and a nothing in the sunlight of that long ago day.

And I've seen Father's face when he looks at that picture, too, and it's something I don't want to look into again, Jase. He smiles gently and says it's his favorite picture of his darling Jane Nancy and then his eyes narrow as if they were trying to pierce that mist of nothing in the tinted Texas noon, almost as if he knew that no woman has her arm up like that, even if it disappears at the shoulder into thin air, unless she's got it around someone and Mama's got that arm-around-someone look in her slightly tipsy face that even a man who knows as little about women as my father would surely know. So maybe there's something in him that knows. Yes, he knows—and he doesn't know.

She stopped speaking suddenly, lifting her head from the pillow, turning her eyes to the door to the darkened parlor.

No, she said. I thought I heard a click. It was something out in the street. Men like my father, Jase, have one code—

Cris, I heard it too, he said.

Did you lock the door to the stairway? she asked.

Yes, he said. I think so. It was unlocked when I came in. I think I did.

It's nothing, she said. It was something in the street. As I was starting to say: Men like my father have one code they Uve by, Jase, and that code is honor. But on the other hand they only have one love, too, and that love is kin. And sometimes kin-love and code-honor are fighting a terrible fight inside them all their Uves. As much as my father loves peace and gentleness, Jase—no matter how he sickens at the thought of violence and bloodshed—there's always his love for Jill, If he thought anyone was ever going to come near that old wound of hers again—Jase, I know what he'd do. He's strong—my father—but God knows which would win in him if things came to that old showdown again. As sometimes in the past they have.

Cris, there's no reason why I shouldn't tell you this, he said suddenly. Jill and I went down to Captina on that bus tonight. Nothing happened. You know it couldn't—that I wouldn't want it to. We walked down the bottomland meadow to the dam and watched the catfish playing in the moonlit waters of the locks. That's all. Nothing else. A kiss maybe that was no more than a kiss I'd give my mother. But then suddenly—suddenly I knew someone was back there in the tall grass of the field. Someone in a car—watching us. I

didn't know who it was—I couldn't even see. But Jill could see, Cris, Jill knew who it was. And suddenly, without warning, there were shots and bullets all around me in the air, thudding into the concrete along the lock-wall and singing off into the dark. Cristi, it was your father. Well? she said.

What do you mean—well! he said.

After all I've told you tonight, she said. Are you surprised? Even after that awful note with the pasted letters could you be surprised? It was courthouse paper, Jase. After that—and after what I've tried to help you understand tonight about how things have been in our family—are you still surprised that my father shot at you tonight? Aren't you, Cris? he said.

No. Not at all, she said. A man defends the thing he loves best with the thing he hates the most if he has to. And for my father the thing he hates most in the world is a gun. Jase, I haven't been telling you all this without a reason. Jase, there's more to it—God knows, the most important part of all—that I still have to tell you. You haven't left out much, he said.

Not much—just the most important thing of all for you to know, she said. A knowing that may keep you alive, Jason, if you believe it—and if it's not too late already.