Atticus (6 page)

Atticus said aloud, “Who are you?” and then put away the address book and left the upstairs room for the first-floor terrace and the tiers of railroad ties that formed a stairway down to the seashore. Atticus looked to his left boot and watched a hermit crab scutter away from him and work sideways into a hole. A black pinhead of an eye stared up at Atticus for a second, and then its big claw slashed wildly at the hole's entrance and in the fall of sand the hermit crab buried itself underground.

Scott, he thought. Hiding things from him ever since he was a kid. Atticus walked up to the terrace and there he achingly got into a white chaise lounge and knitted his fingers atop his gray hair, just lying there in the chilling sea breeze and the hurrying darkness, hearing María in the kitchen, trying not to think of anything, but thinking and thinking about his son.

*
     
*
     
*

María served him a tostada salad without peppers or hot sauce, then worked speedily in the kitchen, putting some wash in the Maytag clothes dryer and getting her apron off as soon as she'd cleared his plate. She seemed eager to be gone from the house. She stopped by the dining room and said without pleasure,
“Buenas noches, señor.”

The only phrase Atticus could immediately recall was,
“Hasta mañana.”

María shook her head and said,
“Hasta el lunes,”
and then pointed down to the floor, saying,
“Aquí, el lunes.”
She could see Atticus wasn't comprehending, so she attempted some English. “He-yer moonday,” she said.

“Are you getting paid for this?”

She looked at him in puzzlement.

Atticus tried,
“¿Tiene usted dinero?”

María said haltingly, “Escott he is pay me
hasta marzo.”

“Until March.”

“Sí, señor.”

Atticus acknowledged that with a thumb-up and María went out, and he stayed in his dining room chair as night gained in the rooms. A regular tinking, scritching noise from the Maytag dryer was finally irritating enough that he got up and fished his hand around in the hot air and still-damp clothes until he found a Schlage key on a red plastic tag with the number 13 stamped into it. Having no idea where Scott kept his keys, he started up the dryer again, pulled an upper drawer in the kitchen counter where batteries rolled up against hand tools and torn newspaper coupons, and he tossed the key in there.
You're getting fussy
in your old age
, he thought, and he found his
Spanish for Travellers
and studied it at the dining room table until the book wore him out. He kept thinking he ought to phone Renata or that American consul, or go so far as to get in touch with the Mexican police, but his engines were running down and it was good to just sit there hearing fiesta music from the hotel and under that the night sea growling onto the shore like feed grain falling into a cattle trough. Winter in Colorado, the horses in their stalls, and Scott flat on the floor half a lifetime ago, watching in awe, his chin on his hands, as his older brother glued together racing cars.

And then Atticus woke up to the ringing of the telephone and was surprised to find he'd been sleeping. He got up stiffly from the dining room chair and located the phone, but when he picked up the receiver and said “Hello,” he quailed at hearing Scott's prerecorded voice: “Hi. You know the routine, name and number. I'll get back atcha later.” Atticus hung there, shakily waiting to hear the offered message, but whoever was first on the phone was now off. And yet the green light on the answering machine beside the phone was blinking twice, meaning, he supposed, that there were two earlier messages.

Atticus pushed the rewind button, heard the reels spin to a halt, and pushed playback, his face changing like a page of a book slowly turned as he heard a soft, foreign, male voice saying,
“Hola
, Scott. Are you at the fiesta with Renata? Have a fantastic time. I hate plays, plus in addition I have laundry to do. Don't worry, I have my own key. Shall we meet at the Bancomex at ten tomorrow?”

Right after that was a tone, and then Renata's voice saying, “Hey? If you're still around, we're having a cast party at Stuart's. Wanna come? See ya.”

Wednesday night. Atticus was going to press rewind but then thought he ought to preserve the voices; he wasn't sure why. His neck was sore and his right arm tingled. He went into the high-gloss red kitchen and opened an icebox bottle of
agua mineral.
He kept hearing the European voice: fontosstic for fantastic, haff for have; stressing each syllable like he was hitting a snake with a stick. María had hung up her apron on a hook over a mop and dustpan and broom of green straw. Atticus slipped his fingers into the apron pocket and pulled out the two-by-three-inch piece of paper that she'd picked up from the bathroom floor upstairs. It was simply a Monday sales receipt from a
farmacia
on Calle Hidalgo. He couldn't tell what kind of medicine it was for, and for some reason he thought he ought to. The pesos worked out to forty dollars. Atticus folded up the receipt and put it in his wallet.

And he found in a catchall basket on the kitchen countertop a Kodak snapshot of Renata and Scott and half a dozen happy people he never knew at some kind of grand affair in the dining room, food filling the table, fifty wineglasses it looked like, green champagne bottles chilling in an ice chest under the dining room table. Cold water from it was oozing darkly onto the broad pink and blue Indian rug. He lifted his frown from the photograph and looked to the dining room floor. The Indian rug was no longer there. Under the party snapshot was another, of salt white
sand and a high sun kindling the azure sea, an old red Volkswagen wallowing into its tire ruts, one door wide as if an interior radio were playing. Twenty feet away from the camera, Scott was nakedly crouched in his architecture of a great sandcastle, its turrets constructed of uncorked bottles that once contained burgundy wine. And Renata Isaacs was lying just to his left, inviting the sun to her naked body, one forearm slung over her eyes, her gorgeous breasts unhidden, her ginger brown thighs tilted up so that fine white sand powdered the undersides and the faint hint of her sex.

Atticus shut his eyes and tried to slaughter his thoughts, but they hung with him as he put the snapshots in the basket, got another
agua mineral
, and held the cold green bottle in his hand.

She came over at nine. Atticus heard a Volkswagen engine haul up and got to the front door in his pajamas and slippers just as Renata knocked on it. She looked embarrassed over getting him up. His eyes were very red and his gray white hair was jackstrawed until his hand combed it down. Dogs were barking up and down the avenue and Renata Isaacs was standing uncertainly on the brick sidewalk in skin-tight blue jeans and an Irish sweater that she'd pushed up on her arms. She called him by his first name, and then she shrieked with hurt and misery and flung herself into him with the freedom of a wife. She cried for four or five minutes and Atticus petted her hair and just held her. With carefulness.

She finally pulled her face away from him and wiped her hazy eyes with her wrist. She smiled with shame. “I was trying not to do that.”

Atticus said, “Don't you give it a thought,” and invited her inside. And then he went upstairs to get into his green tartan robe.

She was hunting knowingly through the sideboard in the dining room when he got back downstairs. She found a box of matches and held a flame to the candles. She asked, “Don't you hate overhead lighting?”

Atticus didn't say. She looked up at him as she waved out the match and put it back inside the matchbox. She said, “Ever since yesterday I've been looking for things to complain about.”

“And nothing's wrong enough.”

Renata dimmed the dining room lights with the rheostat and smiled. “At least it's good to see you again.”

“You too.”

She pulled out a dining room chair as though she always sat in that one place. Atticus sat across from her.

She was not as beautiful as she'd been when he'd first met her fourteen years ago. She seemed tired and afflicted, there were hints of wrinkles and crow's feet, and there was plenty of gray in the sable brown hair that was long and fashionably unruly. But Renata still had the face of a forties actress, a face to fall in love with, like Vivien Leigh, he thought, like Gene Tierney. Sitting in the dining room chair with her hands and elbows and breasts on the table and a flashing look of agreement in her tobacco-brown eyes,
Renata seemed as affectionate as a favorite daughter, and he found himself grinning with fatherly foolishness as he said, “Good to see you.”

Renata said, “You too. We keep saying that.”

“How are you holding up?”

“Fine.”

“You sleeping okay?”

“Eh.” She attempted a smile. “I hoped you'd come down. I kept trying to phone you yesterday, to say you ought to, but your line was always busy.”

“Talking to friends.”

She propped her cheek on one hand and tapped a blue candlestick, making the golden flame tremble and then attain its height again.

“Was that you at the bookstore this afternoon?”

Renata blanked her face.

“Wasn't sure if it was you or not. You had sunglasses on.”

“Oh, I'm sorry. I had a lot on my mind.”

“I kind of figured.”

“You got here okay, though?”

“Well, they're good people here; they help out as much as they can.”

“Are you taking it okay?”

“Don't know what
okay
is. I'm sad. I'm lonesome for him. I'm angry with him for doing it, and angrier with myself for not being able to stop it.” Atticus thought and then he imagined blood on his son and he wiped his eyes with the heel of his palm. He forced his lips together to keep them still.

Renata said, “I cried myself out.”

Atticus sighed. “You get used to these things. But they still twist you up pretty tight.”

“I know.”

“You ever consider having children, Renata?”

She shook her head.

“I meant in the future.”

“I understood.”

“Children give you a second chance to get things right. You grow up all over again. But you're so dang responsible. We worried all the time about our boys. Even the thought of my kids catching colds used to get me half frenzied.”

“Scott loved you very much,” Renata said.

“Well, I thought the world of him. Hope he knew that.” Atticus brought the right side of his robe over his pajama top, gathering it tight again. “I hate the idea of it being hasty. You'd like to think he gave it some thought at least.”

She seemed tuned out for a moment, as if hearing a hushed conversation in another room. And then she said, “Lately I haven't been privy to his thoughts. We've been apart a lot.”

“You slept here off and on, though, didn't you? With Scott?”

She hesitated before she admitted, “We had an arrangement.”

“Stuart and you.”

She hesitated again, then nodded.

“Your clothes here is how I knew. And no sheets on the other bed.”

“It wasn't just me. Scott partied a lot.”

“Partied,” Atticus said.

She seemed about to give him examples but thought better of it. “We all live on the fringe here. We make up the rules as we go along.”

Atticus scowled at the orchids upright in a vase on the sideboard. Sink water had greened to the color of vinegar. “Scott gave me the impression you were getting back together.”

She sighed. “Oh, I don't know. We were still cordial. But all the intensity was on his part. I'm really trying to get it right with Stuart.”

Atticus stared at Renata without comment, and she shied away from it. She looked at the kitchen. After a while he said, “Taxi driver seemed to know this house. Called it Cozy-something.”

“Cotzibaha.
It's a Mayan honorific for 'house of the artist.'”

“Was Scott that famous?”

“He went native when he first got here. Hung out with a shaman named Eduardo. And he gave them money. You get famous fast doing that.”

“I suppose.” Atticus looked at the hard calluses of his hands and scratched at one with his thumbnail. “Another thing. Was he joking or was Scott truly renting this house from criminals?”

She laughed. “Marty? Marty sells real estate in Chicago.”

“Oh. I get it.”

“You asked that like a detective.”

“Well …” He held a hand against his yawn. “Would you like some coffee, or, I don't know, a pop?”

“Yes, I think so.” Atticus half-lifted from his chair, but she was already up. “Don't. I'll get it.”

She got a Corona from the refrigerator and was rummaging for an opener in a kitchen drawer when she caught sight of the Kodak snapshots. She glanced at him and found knowledge of her in his face. She worriedly stared at her shameless pose on the sand, then flipped the pictures into the basket and blushed with embarrassment as she sat with him again. She drank beer straight from the bottle and finished half before she placed it in front of her.

“Stuart take it?”

“We weren't a ménage à trois, if that's what you're asking.”

Atticus softly petted his hair. “I'm finding my education kinda deficient here.”

She smiled. “We weren't a threesome.”

“Oh.” Atticus reddened and said, “You got my mind reeling now.”

“It shows.”

“Those pictures. I was just hunting anything handy. You know, to try to figure things out.”

She was all inwardness for a while, and she faced nothing as she said, “Unfortunately there's not much to know.”

She told him she'd first seen Scott on Wednesday afternoon. She was just coming from a friend's studio at the American College where she'd been sitting as a nude model. “We needed the money,” she said.