Atticus (10 page)

Wide closets of white, louvered doors made up much of one wall, and inside them were simple carpenter's tools and a mitre box and a stack of one-bys a guy could make wooden picture frames with. Canvas was rolled up in the second closet in tubes of four sizes, and some prestretched panels were sitting against big cans of gesso that were grayly veiled by spiderwebs. The fancy walnut case that the shotgun came in was on the floor, and a gun-cleaning kit was in an unopened cardboard box. Hidden behind the third closet was a white porcelain toilet and a lavatory with soap in a plastic tray but without any towels on the wooden bars. A black Speedo swimsuit drooped over a hook. In the medicine
cabinet were bicarbonate of soda, headache pills, cough syrup, aspirin, peroxide, insect repellent, and lithium. A Jameson's whiskey carton was in the trash can. Atticus smelled blood and then he saw in a tin pail some white underpants made pink with the work of wiping the floor.

Atticus went out of the bathroom and out of the house, walking to the green verge high above the cove, looking down at wild oleander and a household something, a shoe, flung into a bush, and farther on a sheer drop to churning water that was as clear as a canning jar. Renata was there, hunting shells he guessed, and he found himself staring at her nakedness as she sloshed out of the sea and twisted her hair and gingerly collected her clothes. He tried hard to feature himself having the gall to swim in those circumstances, but he seemed to lack the imagination.

Atticus got the Radiola tape player, fastened the door, and then skidded down the hill, holding his free hand out to keep from falling. Renata was sitting against the Volkswagen bumper, rolling her white oxford sleeves up over her elbows, blithe as a teenager with people who didn't matter. “Enjoy your
dip
?” he asked.

“Quite,” she said. She felt his heat and faced him with the fierce concentration of a good student who'd been fretting her sentences for a while. “You have to remember that he was my friend,” she said. “And he let me find him like that. I feel used. Violated. I'm finding it hard to imagine his suicide as anything but a horrible act of aggression.”

Atticus thought better of his anger and just walked around to the right of the car and got in. Everything was
beginning to seem wrong to him. Emotionally off. Renata got in and turned the key in the ignition, and there was a sheen to her eyes that was such good acting he wanted to congratulate her for it. He looked out the side window. “Don't see his motorcycle,” he said.

“The police have it.
Evidencia.
Stuart can get his things from the authorities and ship them to Colorado. You'll probably want us to sell his Harley though, won't you?”

“Oh, I expect.”

She asked, “Are you thinking of flying out tomorrow?”

She seemed pleased when he said yes.

She backed the car up and cranked it around onto the overgrown road. And then she just drove until they got to the highway. She looked to the right and left, letting a pink hotel jeep go past, as she asked, “Have you heard how Scott and I found each other the first time?”

“Scott probably told me that once. I forgot.”

She floored the car and got onto the highway ahead of a truck that held its position no more than four feet behind her for a half mile or more. The truck finally fell back and Renata focused again on the highway. She said, “A girlfriend of mine killed herself in the house attic when I was twenty and in Paris, and I felt like suicide was a door she'd left open for me. I began hearing these voices inside my head. ‘You're a slut, you know.' 'You're so stupid.' All in high-pitched, frightening French. I figured the voices wouldn't follow me if I was in an English-speaking country, so I signed on for classes again at Sarah Lawrence. But the voices were in English now, and giving me orders that I felt I had to obey.
‘Scream.' ‘Hide in the closet.' ‘Don't talk.' ‘Hit that window with your fist.' A housemate found out I was wearing long-sleeved shirts because I was purposely scalding my left wrist and arm with hot coffee every morning. The first psychiatrist I saw asked me if I masturbated with my left hand. I howled and howled at that; I thought it was the funniest thing I'd ever heard. I was finally hauled into Hirsch Clinic when police found me sitting with the pigeons in Washington Square in New York, completely unable to speak or to move, but hearing voices that said ‘Sit here and be still.'”

She hurriedly shifted from fourth to third and Atticus faced front as Renata's foot hit the brake gently at first and then harder. An old green Chevrolet pickup truck whose hood and fenders flapped like shingles was turtling ahead with its huge haul of ten or more hotel workers going in for the four o'clock shift. “I hate this highway,” she said. “Kids are getting killed on it all the time. And the fatalists here simply put up more crosses.”

She peered into her rearview mirror and Atticus craned his head around. “Okay, go,” he told her. She floored it and passed the truck before she shifted to fourth. She seemed lost in thought so he urged, her with, “Hearing voices that said, 'Sit here and be still.' And then being hauled in to Hirsch.”

“Oh, thanks. I felt I was trapped inside a foreign body that frustrated all my attempts to operate it. I used to hear the psychiatrist asking me questions, but a half hour or more would pass before I would finally answer him and then he'd have gone off to another patient. Hospital interns used to peer at me with fascination as he lifted my arm up
from my side and let me hold it there, still as a post, as he lectured. And then when he finished explaining my condition, he'd pull down my arm again. My eyes were as dull and blank and fake as a shark's, and I was stiff and silent and seemingly not with it, but I heard and saw and perceived in ways I haven't since I became normal.

“And that's how I was when I first met Scott. I forget the circumstances of why I was outside my room or why he was in the hall, but he was and I was, at three or four in the morning. I was just sitting in a fold-down chair by an iron-barred window. Catatonic. And Scott was talking to me like no one had in a while, as if we were on our first date. Hour after hour of fetchingly manic talk, no letting up; he'd finished the complete works of Shakespeare at Hirsch and thought old Will was pretty good. His favorite cereal as a kid was Cheerios, but now he liked wheat germ and yogurt; his favorite movie was
King Kong
, or maybe
Singin' in the Rain;
his favorite novel was
Beau Geste
, he was sure of that, but nobody but Scott had read it, he said, they just thought they had. He told me his favorite person in the twentieth century was Albert Schweitzer—whom he said you resembled—and if he were about to be executed he'd order a Waldorf salad, medium rare prime rib, mashed potatoes, and apple cobbler.”

“His mother would fix him that for his birthdays.”

“Really?” She flicked the Volkswagen's blinker and waited for a high-balling tanker to blow past before she turned left. “Even today,” she said, “as insane as I was, I remember practically every word. He told me he was a
chronic manic depressive, but full of enough false beliefs and obsessions to fit the paranoid schizophrenic type, and for a time found himself hooked on Thorazine, so he knew what it was like to be inside a straitjacket.” She smiled and turned to Atticus. “And he was such a
boy
about competition. Scott told me he was the best patient there but the psychiatrists wouldn't say so for fear of playing favorites.”

Atticus ticked his head. “Yep, that's him all right.”

She said, “He further informed me that I'd be freed from the locked ward when I could fill out my food menu for the day, and I could get off the fifth floor when I finished my first pair of moccasins. And then it was sunrise and it was just glorious. We both stared at it for a minute, and he tried to entertain me by singing ‘Here Comes the Sun.' Have you heard it, by the Beatles?”

“I haven't been feeble
all
my life.”

She sang: ‘“Little darling, it's been a long, cold, lonely winter. Little darling, it seems like years since it's been clear. Here comes the sun. Doont-n-doo-doo. Here comes the sun. And it's all right.'”

She shifted to third and fought the bumps as she turned onto an unpaved road through the
barrio.
She said, “I have no idea how I looked, but Scott later said my face was different, unfrozen, and he unfolded a chair beside mine and held me in his arms as if we were sweethearts and he sang the whole song again. And it was amazing. I found myself seeing colors for the first time. Yellow, pink, green, and blue. Up until then there'd only been monochrome, gray and white. And I kept hearing him singing over and over
again, ‘And it's all right.' I fell in love with Scott Cody then and there. And I felt all my life I'd owe him. And I'd be honored to do whatever he asked.”

Renata was expected at the bookstore to help out, so she dropped Atticus off at Scott's place and promised to return that night. Atticus forgot the Radiola tape player atop the refrigerator as he opened a half-frozen Coca-Cola that he took upstairs to the high-tech desk. And he found underneath it in a plastic wastebasket a Mexican newspaper,
El Anunciador
, from the first of the week. Atticus got out of his hot funeral clothes and rummaged through four drawers of the high armoire until he found some black running shorts to put on as trunks, and he felt the toll of a hard day as he trudged downstairs and outside to the pool, holding the folded
diario
and a Spanish dictionary under his arm. The half-smoked cigarette he'd seen that morning on the upstairs railing had fallen to the hot tiles. The lettering on it read “Salem.” Stuart's brand. He'd been up in the bedroom, then. Atticus worried about that as he sat in a white deck chair and shaded his eyes to look at a four o'clock sun that wasn't letting up. Sports was the easiest newspaper Spanish to translate, so he stayed on that page for a while, reading about winter baseball, and then he looked at a furniture ad, at the interest rates offered by Bancomex, and at page 8 where a paragraph had been carefully cut out of the obituaries. Who? he wondered. And then he closed his eyes. He felt faint and poorly all of a sudden. His stomach hurt and his head floated and when he pressed it his skin showed a
yellow imprint that soon was pink with sunburn again. He got up and walked over to the deep end of the pool and pinched his nose and jumped into the water, as upright as a plank. He swam across the pool and back in the sloppy way of a boy just learning how. And then he just hung on to the pool ladder, feeling woozy, and got out, and he'd walked into the kitchen for a seltzer when he heard a faint knocking at the front door.

Yesterday afternoon's taxi driver was there on the other side of it, smiling as if Atticus were good fortune itself. What was his name? Panchito? His hand was soft as a fish as he shook the cattleman's hand and talked importantly in Spanish.

Even the phrase to say he knew little Spanish was locked up. “Afraid I don't know what you're talking about.”

Panchito thought for a bit and got a Lufthansa flight packet from inside his shirt and held it up so Atticus would see Scott's name printed on it.
“Cotzi,”
he said. And then he pointed at Atticus. “Señor Cody?”

“Sí.”
He recalled that “his” in Spanish was
su.
“
Su padre.”

Panchito offered the flight packet to him, and Atticus found inside a one-way first-class ticket for a flight from Mexico City to Frankfurt, Germany. The flight was to have been Thursday night at nine-twenty and was charged on Wednesday to Scott's American Express card in feminine handwriting.
Germany!
he thought. “Was this phoned in?” he asked.

“No se,”
the Mexican said, but whether he did not know
the answer or he did not know the English wasn't clear. Panchito talked for a full minute then, but Atticus was too tired to make sense of it; he simply looked and looked at the flight packet and felt too slow to figure it out. Everything was wrong. When Panchito finished his paragraph and faced him expectantly, Atticus finally said,
“Muy gracias.”
Very thanks. And then he got out his wallet and handed Panchito a five-dollar bill.

Panchito was formal in folding the bill inside his own wallet. Atticus frowned at him and said, “My son was going to Germany, but then he changed his mind and killed himself.”

Panchito hesitantly smiled.

“Happens all the time,” Atticus said. “Some people hate to fly.”

And then he shut the front door on the taxi driver, furious now with everyone and knowing he was going to be sick. Getting upstairs was as much an agony as if he'd worked a twenty-hour day, and the hallway seemed to yaw as he swayed along it and into Scott's room. Atticus sagged to his knees by the black toilet bowl and just about fainted with nausea. And then the poisons surged up from him and he seemed to smell the horrible stink within the painted coffin. The floor was winter to his skin as he knelt there for five minutes more and flew his sickness into the toilet again, and then he tilted to the high wide bed and fell face forward on it just as he would have as a kid. Within the next few hours he went to the bathroom a half-dozen times, and then he passed out and heard Renata say from a great
distance, “Are you okay?” She fitted right into the past and Serena looking out the upstairs window, saying how pretty the evening was. His wife heaved up the sash for the fresh spring breeze, and Atticus helped Serena flip over Scotty's crib mattress in order to hide the stains. And in his dream those stains were blood and he was in the dining room and gunsmoke floated against the ceiling and hundreds of wineglasses filled the table and red wine was spilling onto the rug and it hurt his stomach to see it. “You oughta be careful,” Atticus said. And a friend of his son's told Atticus, “We all live on the fringe here. We make up the rules as we go along.” And handwriting was on the dining room mirror, handwriting in lipstick, and then he heard Renata say from outside his head, “If you wanted to stay for a few more days, you could've just told us. You didn't have to get
el turista
on our account.”