Atticus (5 page)

The tail lifted abruptly on the truck when the heavy cross was tilted up, and the truck's driver howled happily as he peeled across the highway into weeds. The fat bus driver sighed as he jammed into first gear and took off again, forcing Atticus back a step.

A hawk soared overhead, disappearing as it crossed over the bus and then reappearing in a lower part of the light blue sky, one wing dipping to veer it right. In the forest a tiny boy was flicking stones at the jutting ribs of skinny, longhorn, zebu cattle in order to steer them into a pole corral. And then there was an open countryside of yellow savannah and cocoa brown earth to the east and a stripe of the deep blue Caribbean Sea on top of the prairie for just a glimpse before the jungle interrupted again and Atticus saw a highway sign featuring symbols for food, gas, and lodging, and underneath them was R
ESURRECCIÓN
.

Atticus looked at his
Spanish for Travellers
and experimented with the sentence before saying,
“Por favor, pare en la próxima parada.”
According to Berlitz it meant, “Please let me off at the next stop,” but he only heard a Spanish slang
that was beyond his understanding as the fat driver jiggled the gear shift from side to side before ramming it into high. Atticus got down into the stairwell and saw a huge garbage dump made gray and white with seagulls, then a concrete housing development that was like row upon row of cheap motel rooms. A sign announced a
zona turística
was one kilometer away; and there was a Pemex gasoline station, a supermarket, a beauty shop, a few budget hotels that were called
posadas
, another teal and aquamarine snapshot of the Caribbean, and then there was a C
ENTRO
sign, a great plaza and pink cathedral, a white gazebo in a main square of shade trees, and the high walls of government buildings.

“Aquí,”
Atticus said. Here.

“Claro,”
the Mexican said, and bumped the bus up onto the curb before yanking the emergency brake and flapping open the stairwell doors. Atticus was embarrassed to see that all thirty passengers were behind him, he needn't have pressed about the
parada
, but he smiled and said,
“Gracias,”
and heard a
“De nada”
as he got out with the others into the hot sunlight and onto a sidewalk only two feet wide. The grand avenue that was called El Camino was paved with gray-blue cobblestones, and far down it were shops painted in the simple colors of gumballs, that seemed to sell only trinkets and postcards and Kodak film. A few Americans were sitting in the garden that faced the Church of the Resurrection or were strolling along the shaded loggia of the higher-class, air-conditioned stores.

A lime green taxi with a white top parked behind the second-class bus and a taxi driver with a gold-capped eyetooth
and green paisley shirt jumped out, speaking to Atticus in rapid Spanish before he was twenty feet away.

Atticus flattened a half sheet of paper he'd been keeping in his suitcoat pocket and said,
“¿Como se llega a esta dirección?”
How do I get to this address?

The taxi driver took the paper and pretended to read the handwriting and then held up one finger, meaning Atticus ought to stay put, before he hustled across to an American Express travel agency to get someone inside to interpret the note.

Atticus looked across the main square and for an instant caught sight of a pretty European or American woman in front of the Printers Inc bookstore, in a fine black scarf and flashing sunglasses that hid her eyes. Was it Renata? She had the lithe body of a swimmer and skin that was tanned a ginger brown, and she seemed about to walk his way when the taxi driver hurried across from the American Express office, agreeing to get Atticus to the house and grabbing hold of his overnight bag.

Atticus got into the taxi and found a framed license in the name of Panchito Ramirez as the man turned the ignition and said,
“Sesentainueve, Avenida del Mar.”
And Atticus thought about
sesentainueve
being the year his fourth well became his biggest oil find yet and he figured that from then on his family would be safe.

Sixty-nine Avenida del Mar was south past high-priced seaside hotels and then up a hill as steep as a playground slide on a street that was made of round stones. The taxi
bumped along in second gear to get up the rise and then stopped at a high white wall and a gate of painted black wrought-iron spikes. His gold eyetooth showed as Panchito grinned in the rearview mirror at his august passenger and said,
“Cotzibaha.”

“Cotzibaha,”
Atticus repeated. He wanted to find out what it meant, but he was too tired and only English would come to him. He handsomely overpaid the man and got out with his bag.

An old gardener was standing in the driveway with a green hose, and water glintingly sheeted down the asphalt in a bright herringbone. Each peaked roof on the house was thatched in light brown rooster palm, and on the terraces of pink stone were potted sprays of flowers. Sixteenth-century iron hinges were on the great oak door, and there was an iron grillwork over the tiny lookout that opened after Atticus rapped the claw knocker four or five times.

A pretty Mexican woman in her twenties peeked out and Atticus Cody gave his full name. She disappeared from behind the iron grillwork and opened up the great oak door, and Atticus sidestepped inside with his bag as she said in Spanish that she couldn't speak English. She seemed to want more of an explanation, so Atticus said,
“Yo soy el padre del señor Cody.”

“Sí, señor,”
she said and placed her palm against her heart, saying,
“Me llamo María. La criada.”
The maid. María pointed upstairs and spoke in her language, and Atticus guessed he was supposed to follow her up. He could see a high-gloss kitchen of red-painted brick and a dining room
with sliding glass doors that opened onto a vast pink terrace and pool. Indian rugs in pastel shades of beige and green and purple and blue covered the floor of the big living room, but the dining room was just a highly polished pink marble. Four walls held fashionable expressionist paintings of the kinds favored by businesses and brass-framed prints announcing exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. The wide camelbacked sofas and chairs were cream white, as were the walls and window draperies. The house's owners had made a coffee table by placing smoked glass on the pink
cantera
stonework that seemed to have once been cornices on a church.

Atticus followed María upstairs and around a corner past a feminine bedroom and on into a field gray room where Scott had lived only two days ago. Atticus could still smell his fancy cologne. A football was on an Art Deco dresser that matched the track-lighted bed and high armoire and vanities. On a high-tech desk were sketch pads, books of poetry, a European telephone, and an IBM typewriter. A flat-screen television and videocassette recorder were inside a black cabinet of tinted glass, and high racks of hardback books in alphabetical order took up all of one wall. María had folded Scott's gold running shorts and placed them nicely on top of his sandy running shoes on the dressing room floor. Under glass on rough brown paper was “Atticus at Sixty,” Scott's actual-size Crayola drawing of him as a pious, upright, presidential man, five feet nine inches tall, weighing a slight one hundred fifty pounds, the great grandson of a skinny kid who rode west with the Pony
Express. Atticus walked out onto the upstairs terrace where he looked out on the azure water churning up to the shore and far away to his left saw a frail, gray lady lean over a balcony at the Maya Hotel with a highball glass in both hands, in filmy green pajamas and a forest green bathrobe that was gently sustained behind her by the hot late-afternoon breeze. She was his age, he guessed; financially set, familiar with solitude, finding rest whenever she could.

María asked,
“¿Está bien?”

Atticus turned. “Looks okay to me.”

María stooped in the bathroom to pick up a loose slip of paper and pushed it into her apron pocket, and then she gave the Spanish for the bath and dressing rooms and television and Caribbean vista as she went out and then came back in with soap and charcoal gray towels that she plumped down by the typewriter. She made an eating motion and showed Atticus seven fingers as she spoke words that he presumed were telling him when supper would be.

“Siete,”
he said.

“Sí, señor.”

“Muy bien,”
Atticus said,
“y muchas gracias.”
And as she went out, he finally took off his suitcoat and tie and shirt and began unpacking, putting his few things right on top of his son's in the dresser. Atticus had just the one other white shirt left and it was fresh and starched and folded inside plastic from the cleaners, and he thought he'd save that one for the funeral. So he hunted through the walk-in closet and got one of his son's fancy rayon shirts off its hanger and tried it on. But he was surprised to find the cuffs were a full inch off his
wrists and it was tight enough in the chest that the fabric strained. Six shirts in the closet were like it, European and high-priced and a full size too small, a fourteen-inch neck and a thirty-inch sleeve; the others were Hathaway and Arrow and fitted him like his own. Atticus figured he'd ask María about it, but then he imagined himself fighting for the right words in Spanish as she frowned with worry, and so he forgot about it and just put on a fresh white Hathaway. He slid his overnight bag underneath the wide bed, and then he sat on it in order to look over the paperbacks that were next to a square water glass on the bedside table. Scott had been up to page 39 in
The Secret Sharer
by Joseph Conrad, and he'd been highlighting in yellow a book of writings from pre-Hispanic Mexico. Atticus went to the bookmark, but his sore eyes couldn't make out the book's print until he got his gold-rimmed spectacles out of their leather pocket case and hooked them on over his ears. A highlighted paragraph read:

There is no place of well-being on the earth, there is no happiness, no pleasure. They say that the earth is the place of painful pleasure, of grievous happiness. The elders have always said: “So that we should not go round always moaning, that we should not be filled with sadness, the Lord has given us laughter, sleep, food, our strength and fortitude, and finally the act by which we propagate.” All this sweetens life on earth so that we are not always moaning. But even though it be like this, even though it be true that there is only suffering and this is the way things are on earth, even
so, should we always be afraid? Should we always be fearful? Must we live weeping? But see there is life on the earth, there are the lords; there is authority, there is nobility, there are eagles and tigers. And who is always saying that so it is on earth? Who goes about trying to put an end to his life? There is ambition, there is struggle, work. One looks for a wife, one looks for a husband.

Atticus thought,
Wife
; he thought,
Husband. Who goes about trying to kill himself?
The bookmark was a Mexican, gold-leafed card with a bright but ugly painting on the front. The handwriting inside said:

Dear Scott,

I hope you're feeling some better. I really can't tell you how sorry I am for your unhappiness and frustration. Circumstances have not been kind. You have a life to get on with, and I have a difficult relationship to figure out—both daunting enterprises. And it seems for the time being that neither of us is in a position to help the other with his or her respective task. Too many tangled feelings
…

When you do feel truly comfortable with a friendship
—
for that is all I can offer—I hope you will call or write me. Your friendship means more to me than it seems you realize.

Try to be good to yourself.

I love you,

Renata

Atticus shut the card inside the book and walked down the hallway to the feminine guest bedroom with its face lotions and face powders arrayed on a dresser. He looked into the walk-in closet, finding four or five blouses, some folded blue jeans, a few skirts and dresses, a jumble of shoes, and a hard-sided green suitcase shut tight with a red shock cord. On the handle an old, dog-eared luggage claim check from Mexicana Airlines indicated a flight from Miami to Cancún. Hoisting a bed pillow, he folded back the pink and lavender comforter and saw there were no sheets on the mattress underneath.

Atticus found Scott's United States passport and Mexican visa mislaid on a bookshelf and carried them back with him to his suitcase, fitting them in a side pocket with his socks. Then he just looked at the field gray bedroom's furnishings for a while, trying to find a fraction of Scott in them and failing.

He focused on the desk and pulled out the upper right-hand drawer, seeing pastel-colored pencils and pens in a plastic tray, gum erasers, pen tips, inks, knives that were like fierce hospital scalpels. Everything was just as it was in his desk at home. Atticus wondered if the kitchen dishware would be to the right of the sink and the Cheer on the floor by the washer. In the second drawer were Mexican stamps and brown envelopes and letterhead writing paper and an old green address book that would have fallen apart without Scotch tape. Looking under C, he saw “Frank and Marilyn Cody,” with their mailing address and telephone number. And below that was “Atticus and Serena Cody,” as
though they were just cousins or good neighbors whom Scott sent holiday cards to. Atticus flipped through other pages and was aggrieved by all the names he couldn't recognize. Every now and then he'd come upon a high school coach still in Antelope, a Stanford art history professor whom Scott had talked about, a California girlfriend, or a painter Scott had introduced his father to at one of his East Village parties, but for the most part the address book was crowded with foreign people Atticus had never heard of, with geography he had never been in; it might have been the address book of an acquaintance or even a man Atticus had never known but who had, by chance, known him.