Divided Loyalties (Serialized Novel in 2 Parts - 12 Chapters Each)

Prologue & Chapter 1 The Recurring Porch Dream

Eduardo spoke.

"I got him, boy. Easy."

Eduardo slipped his feet into rubber boots that he kept by his bed. As he did so a scraping noise, wood-on-wood, came from the other side of the barn and broke an uncanny momentary silence in the jungle. The night air helped clear Eduardo's head. He strode across the yard. When he got to the corner of the barn, he poked his head around the rough-hewn beam covered with sheet metal. He had to balance the need to follow the boy against his fear of the unpredictable results of disturbing Pedro's night walk. Eduardo's mixed feelings filled his head, despite the knowledge from nightly experience that nothing short of a hard slap would awaken the boy, but that such an interruption should only be applied in dire circumstances. Pedro's back faced him. It glistened on his exposed shoulder blades and neck. The older man edged closer.

Pedro was sitting in one of his favorite places, the chopping block beside the kindling pile. The odor of peat bog permeated by fresh cut wood filled Eduardo's nostrils. Familiar jungle noises set him at ease. He liked this lace too. It was the place he and his grandson had man-to-man talks; the place they shared their first cigar and glass of homebrew. Replicating the older man's feelings of connection to the adolescent left in his charge by Pedro's estranged father, the two of them inhaled the smell of the jungle mixed with wood chips cut that afternoon. Eduardo passed in front of the boy. He passed his hand in front of Pedro's uncharacteristically open but vacant eyes. Unseeing confusion marred Pedro's facial expression, no doubt a reflection of the place he was visiting. His eyes watered and his piano player's fingers rubbed them red.

"I'm awake, grandpa. Why do I always come and sit out here?" he said.

Eduardo reached out to steady the boy as he got up.

"Beats me kiddo. It is nice here, isn't it?"

"But I always hurt my feet on the chips."

He looked down.

"Where'd my feet get so dirty?"

"The yard is slick from last night's rain. Warm milk and honey?"

"You said it."

They turned together and returned across the muddy driveway between the corrugated shed and the main house. Near the steps, Eduardo pointed to a bucket.

"I left it out here last night. Rub the dirt off. We Don't want you tracking it all over the house."

Pedro sat on the bottom step and cleaned his feet one at a time. When he finished, Eduardo was preparing a fire in the wood stove. Pedro rested his cold feet on the ledge at the stove's base waiting for it to warm up. The noise of newspaper being crumpled and kindling being dropped into the pot-bellied stove distracted the boy from his fears about sleepwalking. When Eduardo flicked a wooden match outward against his front tooth, an odor of sulfur filled the air. The match backlit Eduardo's face for an instant before he cupped the flame inside his large-knuckled hands, reached into the round opening on top of the stove. The paper caught fire and the hardwood kindling followed suit. Eduardo fiddled with the draft and added a few of the hardwood branches he collected whenever he walked in the jungle. He closed the top. The heat coming from the cast iron pot belly warmed a swath of space around it large enough to let both of them sit basking in its warmth.

In a moment of sense beyond his years, the boy wrapped his arms around his grandfather and pressed his cheek against the older man's chest.

"What would I do without you to follow me around in the night, Grandpa?"

Eduardo's neck flushed red and he gave the boy a short, tight squeeze. Pedro bent down to massage the place where the top of his big toe had been before the chopping accident last year. He looked at his fingers and noticed blood on them.