Atticus (3 page)

And Atticus said, “You don't say you killed your mother. You say your mother was killed.”

Atticus nipped off a green cigar's end and spit it into the wastepaper basket as Scott stooped toward the gas flame of the stovetop to get his own cigar going. Then Scott got his bottle of Armagnac and they walked out into Christmas night.

The moon was high and the night was sugared with stars. An Antelope County road plow had again scraped the mail routes to a shine, and zero cold made the snow underfoot as hard as linoleum. Scott tipped up the Armagnac and Atticus waited and stopped himself from giving his known opinions about it. Soon Scott was walking again and saying, “She once strolled into the dining hall at Hirsch in nothing but a bedsheet.”

“You're talking about Renata?”

“Right. Attendants tried to herd her out but Renata did this fantastic pirouette, the sheet swooshing off her, all the guys howling, and she's standing there in the altogether
with the orderlies rushing to haul her out when she flings her hands high and says, 'But people like me this way!'”

“She fine now?”

“Oh yeah; better than me. She tried acting in New York for a while—that's as crazy as she's been.”

“Huh,” Atticus said.

“She's got a room in this pink villa owned by a Brit.”

“In Mexico.”

“Yep. The friend is Stuart Chandler. Runs the English-language bookstore, grows orchids, holds forth on sundry topics. He's the American consul there.”

They walked fifty yards without further comment, and then Scott teetered as he tainted the road with gray ash. “Enjoying your cigar, Dad?”

Atticus turned and talked through his teeth. “Isn't lit.”

“Like mine a little hotter than that.”

“It's nearly tolerable this way.”

Wheeling snow twisted by in a sudden gust and then flattened on a highway that shone in the moonlight like wax. Atticus heard Scott finish a sentence with, “Went native for a while and got into shamanism.”

“Renata did?”

“Me.” His son looked at his cigar and then huddled over it as he lit it again.

“You have your own religion.”

“Shamanism isn't instead of; it's in addition to.”

“Why's everything you do have to be so different? Wouldn't it be easier to just do things like they have been done and not fuss so much inventing?”

“I
have
been a trial to you, haven't I?”

“Well, that's just being a father, mostly.”

Scott shifted his green cigar in his mouth and withdrew inside Atticus's black cashmere overcoat. After a while he said, “‘The air bites shrewdly.'”

“Are you quoting?”

“Hamlet.”

Atticus tugged off a kid leather glove and offered his left hand to the north wind. “About five degrees.”

Scott tilted the Armagnac bottle again and tottered up against a high snowbank as he drank. He then capped the bottle top with his thumb, put his cigar back in his mouth, and sat heavily in the snow so that his hips were deeper than his knees. He was surprised to be there for a second and then simpered like a dunce.

“You're just a tiny bit
borracho
, son.”

“And you're being real agreeable about it. Expected you to be more fractious.” Atticus got the whiskey bottle from him and Scott gave his blue eyes to the night sky, the cigar centered between his teeth. “See up there? Ursa Major?”

“You mean the Big Dipper.”

“Exactly. The Mayans call that Seven Macaw.”

“Hmm.”

“Also, there's a story about the Pleiades being Four Hundred Boys who got too drunk on
chicha
and were sent up there when they died. Mayans call their corn whiskey 'sweet poison.'”

“Helluva brand name.”

“You're darn tootin'. We oughta copyright it, put a little
circle around the
R
.” Scott offered his left arm and his father attached his own to it, lifting his son up from the snow. And then Atticus was walking the quarter mile back to the house and Scott Cody was just behind him saying, “Heart of sky, heart of earth, one true god, green road.”

Weeks later, Atticus walked out to the mailbox and found an airmail envelope from Mexico. But inside was a letter from Scott to Frank that thanked him again for the shotgun and talked about other worrisome things.

After a late night of drinking and dancing at The Scorpion, the Delta Gamma from California tells me that she's bad and she'll wreck my life, she's done it to a slew of guys. She's falling apart as she tells me she wants to love just one person, and for that person to love just her. She's twenty and stewed and majoring in Theater Arts, so I have reason to believe she's being dramatic, but then she's in my lap—we're in my VW, so this is no mean feat—telling me what a mistake this would be, but to take her now, here, quickly. Be my fantasy, she says. And I know I am in way over my head.

And then there's Renata. I have followed her from town to town for more than fifteen years. She calls it stalking, I call it love. She throws me a bone now and then—a tryst, an oh-what-the-hell affair—but more often she stamps her foot and shoos me. I have been getting the go-aways lately and it's beginning to feel done, over, finished. We talked when I got back and she told me she was, for the very first time, in
love—meaning no offense, of course, though it did add a caustic charge to the midnight cigar and too-many whiskeys that my friends put down in front of me.

I know these two stories go together—less than forty-eight hours separate them—and in both I was the stooge. On the phone with Renata I tried not to say, “Try to get it right this time,” but that was there, and I think that I have lost something, and I lost it before Renata, lost it as far back as the accident. This is not a complaint; I just have no clue.

Confessions like this are maybe not what older brothers like to hear, but I know you'll be flattered by it. I hear the three favorite words are not “I love you” but “What's your opinion?” A guy I know here chides me for being softheaded. We're playing pool at the American Bar. And I am sailing on Coronas and shots of tequila. The Warriors and Chicago are on cable and the furthest gone exiles are hooting at some nifty moves in the paint. Who's that singing on the jukebox? Whitney Houston? I love that song. I hold out my heart for dissection and see this guy Reinhardt looking at me like I'm a mark, like I've got “Kick me” pinned on the back of my shirt. Renata's walking all over you, that sort of thing.

Long meaningless strolls, holding hands, chips and salsa by the pool, skin against skin, how about a back rub?
—
it's full of intimacy and self-revelation, and I feel lost without it. Love in my shoes. Love in the hand on my thigh. Love hanging around like a good waiter when we dine by candlelight. Want it, need it, gotta have it. I'm forty years old and the clock's still running.

All I can do now is paint. There are feelings then, big and
troublesome. But with the other stuff, I have no idea. I'm trying my hand at patience. I try your patience, too, I know. Try to remember that every President has a flake in the family.

Scott

Late that night, Atticus got a phone call from Frank. “Dad? I got a letter to you from Scott by mistake.”

“Oh?” Atticus said. “What's it say?”

“He thanks you for the Radiola. Says he's working hard and he's off the sauce. Half page is all. Seems fine.”

“Well, that's good to hear.”

On a Wednesday in February, Atticus listened to the public radio station for company as he cooked up an onion stew and poured it over rye bread, slowly eating it in the dining room with
The Denver Post
propped up on his milk glass. Marilyn would be stopping by at noon with her own philosophies of good housekeeping, so Atticus only rinsed off the pan, the plate, the milk glass and spoon, then completed some government accounting forms at his rolltop desk and went upstairs at nine. Howling winds rattled the windowpanes and piped like a hot teapot at every wooden gap in the house. His upstairs radio was tuned to opera,
La Bohème
, and his wife was still not there. He slanted into heaped pillows in his pajamas in order to read petroleum reports and then woke up with the side lamp on and loose pages sloppily pitched to the floor. He couldn't get back to sleep, so he put on his Black Watch tartan robe and slippers and walked through all the upstairs rooms, stopping especially in Scott's. His paintbrushes
were in a red coffee can just as they'd been for over twenty years and his childhood sketches and watercolors overlapped on the walls, but Atticus could no longer smell the linseed oil and turpentine and paints that used to mean his son to him, he could only smell whiskey and tobacco and the harsh incense of his shaman rites.

Atticus turned up the kitchen radio so he could hear people give their hasty opinions on a nighttime phone-in show while he peeled a Washington apple at the stoop window and looked out toward the machine shed. Horizontal snow was flying through the halo of the green yard light and carrots of ice were hanging from the roof's iron gutters. Atticus ate apple slices off the sharp blade of his paring knife. Without knowing why, he looked to the pantry, and just then a milk pitcher slipped off its hook and crashed onto the pantry floor.

Hours after sunup Atticus carried a tin pail of hot water out to One Sock and Pepper, scooped oats into a pan, and then crouched quietly in a stall corner, looking up at the horses' slow chewing. A sparrow flew in an upper window and got lost in the night of the barn, slashing among the high rafters and pigeon roosts and loudly rapping into a penthouse window before swooping low enough to veer out through the great door and rise up.

Atticus petted One Sock along the withers and went outside to his snow-topped Ford pickup for his daily trip to the Antelope truck stop. And then he got the feeling that the house telephone was ringing. He argued with himself about whether he ought to go to it or no. The truck's ignition
ground like an auger in iron and the engine caught and Atticus gave it gas for half a minute, looking out at the yellow barn and silo and unhenned coop, Serena not putting eggs in her gray sweater pockets as the white chickens strutted away, Serena's peacock not jerking its glare at the dog and making its glamorous tail display. Weather reports on the truck radio said the temperature was up to fifteen degrees, but his bare fingers were still pretty sore, so he got out and went back inside to get his yellow gloves.

Atticus stopped by the house telephone and looked at it, and the telephone began ringing. He hesitated and then picked up the receiver and heard Renata Isaacs. She first reminded him of who she was. “I haven't forgotten,” he said. She said she was calling from Resurrección. And then she talked to him about Scott. Atticus pulled over a spindle chair, and she explained the circumstances. She was trying not to cry. Atticus was sitting there, not saying anything he meant to, and wiping a porthole in the steamed windowpane with one yellow glove. The truck's engine was running at high speed, and the smoke from the tailpipe was shaping gray people that a hard wind ripped away. She said how terrible she felt, she was as upset as he was, she hadn't known his son was that depressed. Atticus accepted her sympathy and he wrote down her telephone number and then he lost himself until he heard her hang up on the other end. Atticus couldn't get up without gripping the crosspiece on the spindle chair. He went out and switched off the truck's ignition, and then he telephoned Frank in his Antelope office, giving him the news.

*
     
*
     
*

Upstairs in Scott's room was a green wall shingled with high school and college paintings, all created in those happy times when everything that Scotty touched seemed to turn into a picture. Atticus stared at the portrait of himself as he was twenty years ago, forty-seven and finding wealth in oil, his hair and great mustache a chestnut brown, his blue eyes checkered by the stoop's windowpanes, the April sunlight like buttermilk, just back from Mass in his blood-red tie and a hard-as-cardboard shirt that was so blazingly white it glowed. His son had titled the picture “Confidence.”

Atticus sat at his son's oak desk and pulled out a lower right-hand drawer jammed with manila folders upon which Scott had printed, in a fine draftsman's style, Art Schools, Banking, Credit Cards, Fellowships and Grants, Medical, Taxes, and Vita. As organized as an engineer. Atticus lifted out the Vita file and slumped back in a tilting chair to page through it. Eight years of report cards from Saint Mary's Grade School were on top, then white First Honors cards and typed grade slips from Regis High School in Denver, followed by his senior transcript from the office of the registrar at Stanford University. The Royal College of Art in England had sent correspondence to accept him, then provided the financial terms of his stay, and then forwarded a letter in which one of his British teachers appraised Scott's failing studio work over the year: “Skilful, safe, formulaic,” he'd written, and “You lack nothing in terms of technique, but is it art or illustration?” Scott had four photocopies of an old curriculum vitae that he used to send out in hopes of employment as an art instructor,
that provided a home address in care of Atticus Cody in order to avoid mention of the New York hospital he was staying in. Under “teaching experience,” Scott had recorded giving art therapy at Hirsch Clinic and then still-life painting sessions at the Self-Help Center. His age was then thirty-three, and his health, he'd said, was fine. And to that information, he'd added in pen on all four copies: “I dress myself, do not act out, and am never tardy. I believe we all should help one another find our controllers. We all have functions in the machine.”

Alongside his Vita file was a sheaf of his poems from one of his times at the clinic. The first one went: