Atticus (2 page)

“I hope so.”

“She's there then?”

“Good guess.”

Atticus smiled. “Well, I always liked her.”

“Me too.”

At six the next morning, Atticus got out the twelve-gauge shotgun for himself and his old sixteen-gauge for Scott, and he was sitting at the kitchen table, jotting out his Christmas shopping list, when his son jounced downstairs in his gray T-shirt and blue jeans, his eyes bloodshot from the whiskey and his hair in hurricane.

“Sleep okay?”

“An hour or two.” Scott got a quart of orange juice from the refrigerator and sloshed it before drinking right from the carton. He spied the shotguns angled against the ironing board closet and regarded Atticus as he might a horribly outdated phrase of slang.
"Hunting?"

“Don't have to,” Atticus said. “Just thought you might've missed it.”

“Hot-diggity.”

“You still wear my size in everything?”

“Haven't changed much.”

“Because I got some nice things hanging in the closet.”

“And there must be people around here who'll be glad to have them.”

Atticus held his stare.

Scott put Wonder bread in the toaster. “I'm trying to get back to essentials, Dad. I'm trying to subtract things from my life.”

*
     
*
     
*

And then they sloshed through snow and hidden leaves in Frank's orchard and crashed through the high brittle cornstalks of the forty acres along the creek and quail blustered up from underfoot and pheasants sailed beautifully away. And Scott never even brought up his gun.

“Pretty out here,” he said.

Atticus was at his underground workbench, using a screwdriver to tighten the shoe polisher on an old electric motor. Scott just stood there by the floor heater, acting as bored as a teenager, his breath fluttering grayly in the cold. Atticus seriously inquired, “Have I ever told you the difference between a bank and a beehive?”

His son smiled uncertainly and said no.

Atticus was trying the play on the shoe-polisher belt. “Well, a bank
pays
notes and a piano
plays
notes.”

Scott just kept squinting at him in an askance way and then asked, “What about the beehive?”

Atticus merrily jabbed his son with the screwdriver and joked, “Why, that's where you get stung!”

Atticus painstakingly washed the dishes after dinner and Scott dried them and told him, “We'd had about a hundred feet of rain fall on us, but then it didn't rain at all for two days and the highways were being used again. And so I took my Volkswagen out to the jungle for the first time in a month and painted for half a day. And then I remembered that Renata expected me for dinner at six and it was already
half past five and getting dark. I hurried into the Volkswagen and took a shortcut into town, skidding wildly in mud, and going way too fast for the road. Suddenly I rushed up on a half-dozen Mayan kids in their finest white shirts and pants, probably heading to work in the hotels. I honked the horn and they jumped from the road and frowned at me and there was this pothole filled with rainwater that my front tire plunged into, ramming hard, splashing their good clothes with muck. Their hands flew up and they yelled in fury and I thought I ought to go back and say how sorry I was. But then I thought about how late I was and how Renata would be fuming and how often their clothing must get ruined in the monsoon season. And I was gazing back in my rearview mirror to see them slapping the gunk from their shirts when the car slammed forward,
blam!
, into a trench of mud where the ground had crumbled away. I got the engine going again but then looked out the side window and saw the mud was as high as the door and my tires were turning fruitlessly in the slime. I shifted to first gear and then reverse, hoping to rock the car forward, but it only settled another inch or two. And I thought,
This is how God repays your thoughtlessness.
And then I looked up to see the Mayan kids were hulking around the Volkswagen, angrily peering in. But before I could say anything, I saw them bend from my sight and lift the Volkswagen and heave it forward until all four tires were on hard ground again and I could roll free of the mire. I got out of the car to thank them, but the kids walked ahead without saying a word. You have no idea how
Indian
that is.”

*
     
*
     
*

On December twenty-third, Atticus skidded the great yellow barn door aside and One Sock and Pepper pranced inside to their wooden box-stalls, their horseshoes clopping on the floor planks. A hairy steam rose up from One Sock as Atticus took off the tack and gently scuffed a currycomb along his glossy chestnut back. Scott scooped oats into a tin bucket and said, “I don't remember the measurements.”

“A half quart of oats, four pounds of hay. And put some pebbles in with the oats or she'll feed too fast and she'll scour.” Atticus watched his son step inside the stall and patiently hold the oat bucket up to Pepper just as he would years ago, as though the pinto couldn't swallow uphill. Atticus said, “Hay first; but that's okay.”

“She's very hungry,” Scott said.

“She's just flirting with ya. She probably wants sympathy. Wants to poison you against One Sock.” Atticus squatted with a horse blanket in order to dry the snow from One Sock's flanks and quarters, and he heard Scott soothingly talking to Pepper in Mayan, words like
ichpuchtla
and
patli
and
yol.
Atticus stayed as he was for a while, trying not to listen, his blue eyes on the straw, and then he stood up and trued the green horse blanket over One Sock's withers and croup. His son's eyes were shut and he was pressing his nose into the pinto's long jaw when Atticus asked, “You okay?”

Scott's glance caught sight of his father's misgivings and he grinned. “Hell, I'm crazy as a loon.”

Atticus hooked the currycomb on a nail and slowly
walked out of One Sock's stall to the oat sack. “Are you taking your medication?”

“You mean right now?”

“Ever.”

Scott sagged against a railing, blowing heat into his fingers. “The trouble is, lithium makes me so dopey that I have to pat my face to know where my mouth is. And there are side effects, too. Hand tremors, slurring, blackouts, fatigue.”

Atticus scooped oats into another tin bucket. “We could go into town and have your prescription—”

“My
prescription's
just right, Dad. I have pills that make me harmless and stupid, pretty much the kind of guy who sits on a bench and feeds croutons to the pigeons. I'd rather walk in a southerly wind and not know a hawk from a handsaw.”

Atticus carried the tin bucket to One Sock and held it for him until all the feed was gone.

The Codys gathered together for Christmas Eve in the great, white, three-story house that Atticus grew up in, that was inherited by his older brother and was owned now by State Senator Frank L. Cody and his wife, Marilyn. She had given birth to three girls and a boy and was the fourth of six children, so there wasn't room at the dining room table for all the company, and her brothers Merle and Butch and Marvin hunched toward their TV trays from the sofa, and Scott, in spite of many pleas and objections, chose to eat at a card table with his nieces. Oyster stew and crackers would be served,
then Marilyn's Waldorf salad and spinach quiche, Esther's ambrosia, Cassie's scalloped potatoes with Kraft cheese slices, and Connie's stalks of broccoli in a hollandaise sauce, but before all that there were green magnums of a fancy champagne that Scotty had traveled all the way into Denver for just that afternoon. “Well, I be go to hell,” said Marvin. “Denver.”

“We call this nose tickler,” Merle told Scott.

“Champagne gives me the most gruesome headaches,” said Esther.

A few minutes later Frank herded his four-year-old over to her Uncle Scott and blandly asked, “You sip any of that Veuve Clicquot, Jennifer?”

She saw her father's cue and nodded.

“What's your opinion of it?”

She hesitated and then recited, “It lacked a certain
je ne sais quoi
." And she flinched when she heard sudden laughter from all her uncles and aunts.

“Oh, you, Frank,” Cassie said. “Did you put her up to that?”

Then the family found their places. All held hands as Frank recited the blessing before the meal, and at the finish Marilyn mentioned Serena: “We still miss you, Mom.”

Children looked at Atticus and at Scott.

Then Frank held forth from the head of the dining room table, being funny and hectoring and omniscient in his English suit and European tie and his ring from the Colorado School of Mines. Atticus heard later from Marilyn that Scott watched with jealousy as Atticus and Frank huddled together over black coffee to talk about income tax write-downs on
their Cody Petroleum partnership and figure out how many heifers the cattle operation ought to breed in the fall.

At eight o'clock Midge played Santa Claus underneath the giant pine tree in the teal, high-ceilinged living room, giving out a great stack of presents. Luciano Pavarotti grandly sang carols, and pretty wrapping paper was loudly torn, and children's toys rattled and zinged and nickered across the carpet. Atticus carefully peeled away the red paper on his present from Scott and popped open a box containing a Swiss wristwatch that, according to Connie, was worth one thousand dollars. Atticus scowled and asked his son, “Are you trying to throw your money away?” but Scott was sticking a green cigar in his mouth and hugely grinning into Butch's videotape camera and saying, “Isn't this great?” Then Atticus jiggled a grandchild on his knee as Scott got his gift from his older brother and ogled a handsome Winchester twelve-gauge shotgun with checkering on its hardwood stock. “Wow! Heat! Won't those
banditos
be surprised!”

Atticus stared with irritation at Frank, who justified the shotgun by saying, “I heard Dad got you out hunting again. And I figured you probably had havelina and deer and poisonous snakes down there.”

His kid brother sighted down the dark barrel and said, “Yeah. In the jungle. Snakes are called yellowbites.”

Atticus hefted a heavy box from behind his chair and presented it to Scott. “You may not want to haul it down to Mexico with you on the plane. I'll ship it maybe.”

Scott hastily tore off the green wrapping paper just as he did as a child, and he blushed when he saw an off-brand
cassette player. “Wow, Dad! Thanks! A Radiola!”

“Earl—you remember Earl at the hardware—he told me it plays just as good as a Sony or an Aiwa and the others, and Radiola's an American brand.”

“Well, I'm proud to do my part for the war effort, Dad.”

“Didn't put batteries in it. I figured you had electric in that shack of yours or you wouldn't be painting at night.”

“My neighbors don't have it, but I do.”

Atticus said, “You got a mike built right in it so you can record, too. What I planned on was to have you mail us tapes of yourself talking into it. And we'd do the same for you, of course, any time we have family occasions. Wouldn't be like we're all so far away.”

Scott grinned hugely at him and said, “I
love
Christmas!”

There was talk in the air when Atticus woke up for Mass on Christmas Day; and Indian speech that was like the hissing, popping noise of flames creeping across damp wood. And then there was silence. Atticus got into his clothes and stood just outside his son's upstairs room, trying to decide if he ought to go in and then gently nudging the door ajar and holding there before he understood that Scott was gone, the gray smoke was incense, and the harsh smell that of whiskey. His son had taken Mary and Joseph and the Wise Men from the Nativity set in the dining room and put birthday candles around them on his schoolboy desk. And underneath them on the oak floor Scott had arranged a half dozen more birthday candles on bricks that he'd blessed with Jack Daniel's.

Atticus walked into the kitchen and saw the ceiling light was still on and the teapot was simmering hot water on top of the stove. A Christmas snow put round caps on the fence posts and lay in the jack oak like socks and mittens. Scott's shoe prints slued bluely across the yard to the yellow barn and then to the quarter-mile windbreak of loblolly pines and crabapple trees where Atticus kept the older farm machinery. Atticus put on his Army Air Corps jacket and cattleman's hat and went out. Cold snow crunched beneath his gray cowboy boots with the toothgrind noise of cattle chewing. Jewels of sunlight sparked from the whiteness everywhere. And there under the green pine limbs was the red hay baler, the yellow crawler tractor and bulldozer blade, the plows and reaper and cultivator that were going orange with rust, and the milkwhite Thunderbird just as it was sixteen years ago when Scott took Serena to the store. The high speed of the accident had destroyed one headlight and crumpled up the right fender and hood like writing paper meant to be thrown away. The right wheel tilted on its axle as though it had not been fully bolted on, and the rubber tire shredded from it like black clothing scraps.

Atticus walked around to the driver's side and opened the door. The iron complained at his pull but Scott did not look up, he stayed as he was, in his father's red plaid hunting coat, just sitting there, one wrist atop the big steering wheel, his right hand gingerly touching the windshield glass where it was crushed and spiderwebbed on the passenger's side. A milky light was filtering through the half-inch screen of snow. Atticus asked, “You okay?”

Scott pressed his cold-reddened fingertips into a crack
and said, “Wondered if her hair was still there. Crows must be nesting with it.”

Atticus could only say, “I should of got rid of this car years ago.”

Scott dropped his hands and forearms into his lap. He said, “A great thing about Spanish is that there's so little responsibility in it. You don't have to take the blame. You don't say 'I cracked the plate.' You say ‘The plate cracked itself.'” Scott paused and just stared at the grayly misted speedometer as if there were ugly pictures there.