Jonathon King - Midnight Guardians

“How is Ms. Carmen?” Billy finally asked.

“Upstairs,” I answered. Suddenly, as if I had been directing the bird alone, there was a flutter and then a big whoosh of wing and air and the utterance of a harsh GAWK as the heron rose and pirouetted gracefully through an opening in the trees, and vanished.

“She’s fine,” I said, looking up through the now empty hole in the canopy. “Safe.”

“Can she stand it for a couple of days while I keep pushing the feds for some protective custody? This proof that someone shot the dog and that same someone probably set off the explosion should crank up the pressure.”

I turned my head to the doorway up the stairs above me. “I don’t know, Billy. I’ll have to ask her.”

“Be convincing, Max.”

Convincing someone to stay isolated in the middle of nowhere is mostly determined by whether that someone has an affinity for being alone. I discovered the ability in myself by crawling into books when I was young, disappearing into worlds I’d never seen, reading conversations between people I would never meet, absorbing life lessons through characters overcoming odds I would most likely never face. I used the ability as a refuge, taking a book and a flashlight under my covers as a kid while my drunk and violent father bounced my mother off the walls downstairs in the middle of the night. I wiped tears from my eyes and read the pages, trying to escape with Huck Finn or walk a new beach on Treasure Island while the muffled gasps and sharp curses ricocheted up the stairwell.

But Luz Carmen’s brother was dead, and I had not seen her shed a tear. She had not yet claimed his body. She might hide, but the reality was not going away.

I stepped quietly up the stairs, and when I opened the door to the shack, my eyes went immediately to the sunlight sifting through the east window. Luz had figured out how to adjust the Bahama shutters and was raised up in the bottom bunk of the bed, reading. She met my look and nodded a good morning.

“Coffee?” I said, moving to reload the stove with wood, and then start the fire.

“Yes, please.”

“Did you sleep?”

“Did you?”

I rinsed and then filled my tin coffeepot with water.

“Some,” I said. “It was a little cool.”

“The heat rises,” she said. And when I looked over, she was still looking at the book, her knees up, acting as a platform.

I scooped coffee into the small, one-legged basket, and then lowered it into the pot. I washed the cover after removing the small glass percolator bubble, and then remounted it. I opened a lid on the stove top and set the pot over the open flame.

“I can make some oatmeal,” I said, pulling a chair out from the table. From here, I could see that Luz Carmen was still fully dressed. She’d slept in her clothes, as had I.

“I want to see my brother,” she said, finally letting the book slide down into her lap.

“I know,” I said, and then recounted Billy’s morning message-that the dog had been killed by a gunman. “They’ll most likely want to do an autopsy now on your brother’s body. They’ll probably assign homicide now. They’ll start working it harder, faster.”

Luz took in the information without reaction, staring ahead at some vision all her own. But the filtered sun caught the moisture on her cheeks and glistened. “I killed my own brother,” she said, the words coming out of her mouth even though I couldn’t even see that her lips had moved.

“If you play along, and if you keep your mouth shut. If you simply work and keep your head down and see nothing, you live,” she said. Her voice was not whiny or complaining, but stilted and rote and without emotion. “My brother would be alive if not for me.”

Billy and I have had this conversation deep into many nights on his balcony facing the sea: Is the man who sits by and ignores the criminality taking place in his sight as complicit as the man doing the crime? What about the Germans who watched the camp trains being loaded with Jews, or the Iraqi citizens who saw the roadside bomb being planted and turned the other way? Not to mention the Wall Street underlings who shook their heads and zipped their lips when they knew the bundled mortgages would never pass muster?

I was not up for a debate with a grieving woman. I stayed silent for a long time.

“I need to bury my brother,” Luz said.

“You will,” I told her.

By early afternoon, I had replaced a rotting plank of wood on the port side of my dock, freed up a jammed window sash, fixed a hole in a screen that looked like it had been plucked open by an animal-rodent, bird, or reptile based on its size, the meticulous snipping, and random uselessness. I’d also finished the first quarter of Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow Country, a Florida history lesson unparalleled.

Luz Carmen staked out a spot down on the dock. Apparently, she’d finished the English-language version of Chronicle of a Death Foretold and was starting on my paperback copy of All Quiet on the Western Front, which she must have dug out of the back of the armoire while I was sleeping outside. Her choice of reading material while grieving over a dead brother was not mine to ponder, but I do have an innate problem with people who can read so damn fast. How do they do it without missing the subtleties, innuendo, and small word gems that authors sweat through and take days of writing and rewriting to achieve? It seems both cheating, and self-cheating.

But I am a slow reader, and it’s probably just jealousy. I read slowly. I write slowly, and none too poetically considering that most of my experience has been filling out incident reports as a cop and now writing up surveillance narratives for Billy. When I stole glances at Luz, I noted that every once in a while she would look up from the book and stare out into the green of the river forest.

What was in her mind’s eye was hers alone. I thought of the advice shrinks give, that people shouldn’t be alone at times of great loss. But who isn’t alone with their thoughts? You handle them your own way, and hopefully grow stronger. Closure is bullshit. In the absence of some kind of biological memory wipe, there is no such thing. Personal loss is always with us. We learn to live with it; we don’t make it go away.

I was about to interrupt Luz for a late lunch when my cell phone rang.

“Mr. Freeman, this is Dan, over at the ranger station.”

“Yeah?”

“I just wanted to give you a heads-up that Joey finished with your truck and dropped it by here. So it’s in the parking lot.”

“Great, Dan. Thanks. I appreciate it,” I said, wondering what the hell the real reason for the call was. Dan had been around long enough to know that when I was at the shack I often didn’t make contact with him or anyone else for days or weeks at a time. He wouldn’t call with something as minor as my truck being dropped off.

“What else, Dan?”

“Uh, well, I wanted to let you know there was somebody messing around near your Gran Fury early this morning, just around daybreak. I was up, and I keep an eye out. When I saw the guy, I scared him off with my big beam flashlight.” The ranger had started out with reticence, as if he didn’t want to be the one giving me bad news. Now his words were running as fast as he could get them out.

“He scrambled the hell out of there fast. I looked over the car this morning; it doesn’t look like he got it open or anything like that-no scratches or nothing. Probably just some kid, you know, looking for an unlocked car to steal change and stuff out of.”

I let him stumble through the whole explanation, do his duck and cover before responding. I went inside the shack out of hearing range of Luz Carmen and closed the door.

“OK, Dan, did you get any kind of look at this guy-race, size, clothing, or distinguishing tattoos?” I said, tossing the tattoo thing in there to goose him a little and remind him that I was, after all, an ex-cop.