Atticus (7 page)

“We?”

“Well, just me, I guess. Wrong pronoun.”

“You'll inherit twenty-five thousand from his trust fund. Frank had a look at his will.”

“Really?
How sweet of him.” She gave it some thought and then changed her expression. She ran a hand through her hair. “Shall I go on?”

She told him she walked with Scott to The Scorpion at five and Stuart joined them a half hour later. Scott hardly talked to her or Stuart, and he drank like drunkenness was the whole idea. Wednesday was a fiesta and there was a Children's Defense Fund benefit at a hall in the Marriott, where they paid twenty dollars each for Mexican food on paper plates and Renata and four other Americans gave a reading of Tennessee Williams's
The Night of the Iguana.
She once looked up from a page of the script and saw Scott sitting far in the back and holding a full pitcher of margarita up to his mouth like a frat boy, and she got so angry she hardly spoke to him afterward. And then he disappeared and she threw a cast party at Stuart's villa and she regretted her anger and tried to telephone him at his house. There was no answer, so she left a message. Late that night Scott telephoned her and said he'd forgotten where he'd parked his Volkswagen but he was pretty sure it was in the
jardín.
Would she get it for him? Scott told her he was finishing up something at the house in the jungle where he painted.

“And how'd he sound?”

“Distracted and harried and really tired,” she said. “I offered to go out there, because it sounded like he could use a friend, but he was pretty insistent that he have a few days on his own.” Renata's eyes welled with tears. “I hear that
conversation over and over again, and there's nothing in his voice that would have made me think he was going to do what he did.”

Atticus was sitting there, listening intently, his hard blue eyes fixed on his crossed and hairless white ankles, as still as if he were cut out of ice. “But you went out there. Even though he said not to.”

Renata said she was opening Stuart's bookstore the first thing in the morning because Stuart had to go see their wholesaler. She got down to the
jardín
around sunrise and too easily found Scott's car. Even if he were drunk he ought to have drifted across it. She thought something was wrong. So she forgot about the bookstore and went out there. She glimpsed a shotgun on the floor and Scott sitting in a green leather wingback chair. His face had been half shot off.

“How long had he been dead?”

“We don't know.”

“Was there a note or anything?”

“Signed on his sketch pad. 'No one is to blame.'”

Atticus heard it, and heard it again. “Well, heck, I feel better already. How about you?
Huh?
We're both off the hook.”

She reached a hand toward him. “He wasn't thinking.”

Weighed low with grief, all Atticus could manage was, “We didn't raise him to—” And then he fell silent and held a hand to his eyes and cried.

Renata got up from the dining room table and walked around it in order to wrap her arms around him and press
her hot cheek against his hair. “We've been put through a lot,” she said.

Atticus held himself stiffly, then finally patted her left hand and said, “You ought to go now. It's late.”

“If it's okay, I'll stay here.”

“I'd like that.”

She stood up from him but petted her hand on his hard shoulder as she said, “The funeral Mass is at noon. You'll have to bury him in Mexico for now.”

“I'll want to get him up to our family plot in Antelope.”

“You probably can, but it will take a little time. Stuart can help you with the government people you'll have to pay off. You can bribe your way out of practically anything here.
La mordida
, they call it: the bite.”

Atticus stared out at the moonshine on the sea. And then he asked, “How about the police? Was there a police report or, you know, an investigation?”

“Don't expect much from it,” Renata said. “The Mexican police don't get too involved in American cases unless our government instructs them to do otherwise. Which they're not likely to do. And there's no coroner; no autopsy; probably just a pro forma investigation. Mexico can be pretty casual about suicide.”

“Suicide,” Atticus said, and spoke no more. When he looked up again, he realized Renata had already gone upstairs.

Much later Atticus woke to words composed with the ticking
k'
s and
t'
s of Mayan speech. Getting into his green
tartan robe and slippers, he walked down the steps until he could stoop and look into the candlelighted dining room. Four
campesinos
in white shirts and white pants were familiarly slapping poker cards onto the dining table and sipping Jameson's Irish whiskey from a green bottle that was being passed around. A fat man was using a nailhead to scrape tobacco out of his pipe bowl into a frail teacup while another man played a jack of hearts by pounding it down with his hand. A little man in his forties with flowing hair and a Padres baseball cap turned around in his dining room chair and solemnly peered at him, and Atticus tramped back upstairs.

Lights were on in Renata's room and the door was halfway open. Even in high school, these were the hours Scott furiously painted, his stereo faintly playing Edith Piaf or early Bob Dylan, the hallway full of the pungence of turpentine and Marlboro cigarettes. Atticus knocked softly and heard Renata ask,
“¿Quién es?”
Who is it?

“Me,” he said.

“You too, huh?”

He found her sitting up in bed in a far-too-open pink kimono, a book of Shakespeare's plays held against her stomach. A half-full Corona was in her left hand. Atticus forced himself to turn his head away, and Renata tightened her robe. She asked, “You look in on his friends?”

“Had a peek. Which one was Eduardo?”

She was surprised. “You've got a good memory. The guy in the Padres cap, I think.” She took a mouthful of beer and chilled her neck with the bottle. “Scott would go out to their
shacks in the
barrio
, feed on their fried dog meat and iguanas, get horribly sick with their sicknesses, and then go out there again with their next invitation. He said they made him an honorary Mayan.” She smiled. “You don't suppose it's possible that it was all sarcasm on their part, do you?”

“Well, he always was a friendly kid.”

She fell into a reverie as she said, “And he'd try just about anything.”

“What is it downstairs, some kind of a wake?”

“I hear they pretend a friend has played a good trick on the world and they party like they're in on the joke.” She drank some beer and held the bottle on the mattress. “Their funerals take place a year later when they rebury the body. And then they howl with sadness.”

Atticus looked at a clock by her bed. After two. “Well, morning comes awful early,” he said.

“You know what the name Atticus means? Scott told me. Simplicity, purity, and intelligence.”

“Always making things up, that kid.”

“You two are so interesting. You're the formidable figure he idolized and struggled not to become, and he's who you'd be if you didn't have all your good habits and rules and boundaries.”

“I forgot. You studied psychology.”

Renata flushed and put a hand to her face. “I just realized: I was using the present tense.”

“Hard not to,” he said.

She focused on him and then on her book. “Shall I read to you?” She took his silence as permission, and she beautifully
read from Shakespeare's
King John
: “‘Grief fills the room up of my absent child, lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words, remembers me of all his gracious parts, stuffs out his vacant garments with his form.'” Renata closed the book and her brown eyes sorrowed as she recited, “‘Then have I reason to be fond of Grief.'”

Atticus walked out to the pool in his pajamas with hot coffee in a cup. The terra-cotta tiles were cool against his feet, but the salt air was as warm as it is in a parlor of tall windows. A gray freighter was just in sight, forcing its way so slowly it seemed stopped, and a fishing boat with Americans in sunglasses on board was angling out into the Gulf Stream. Along the salt white beaches, Mexican boys in hotel jackets were kicking out deck chairs and cranking open big umbrellas and putting out the red plastic flags that warned of the undertow with the word
peligroso.
A swallow flew across the yard and alighted on an upstairs railing. The swallow cocked its head to the right, jabbed a half-smoked cigarette out of an ashtray up there, and then flew away. The cigarette stirred in the wind and rolled along the railing. The frame of the tall sliding glass door between the dining room and the terrace was harshly scratched and
indented near its lock as if a pike or a crowbar had forced it open. Either it was thieves, he guessed, or like as not his son forgot his front door keys.

Water was on in a shower upstairs. Atticus finished his coffee and went back inside and turned on the gas burner under the glass coffeepot. Whispers and dish noise had awakened him at sunup as the Mayans tidied the place when their wake was over. One of them had put the Jameson's whiskey bottle on the red kitchen windowsill. Oranges were in a pink string bag by the refrigerator; copper pans were hanging over the stove. Atticus opened a side cupboard and found it jammed with bottles of spice and vitamins and a plastic bag of chopped green weed, presumably marijuana. Atticus sighed and put a slice of Wonder bread in the toaster. Wires in the toaster glowed orange as he looked out through the sink window's wooden louvers to an old red Volkswagen that hadn't been there yesterday. Sketch pads and paints and rolled-up canvases overheaped the seats. His toast popped up and he spooned on jam, thinking,
You'll have to get an inventory.
His coffee boiled and he turned off the gas burner. He refilled his cup and sipped from it as he wandered into the dining room. A shotgun shell of a brass lipstick case was standing upright on the sideboard. Hadn't been there before. Mayans probably found it on the floor when they cleaned up. Atticus took off the top and saw that its blood-red tip was crumbled, and then he saw a faint trace of red on the dining room mirror he was facing.

A freshly showered Renata skipped down the steps in her pink kimono, her hair tangling wetly at her collar.
“Aren't those pajamas smart,” she said, and slipped past him to get four oranges out of the string bag in the kitchen and a paring knife out of a wooden block by the stove.

“I was fishing for compliments,” Atticus said.

“Sleep well?” she asked, but sought no answer. Sleeplessness welted her own eyes, and she seemed petulant and irritated. She halved the oranges and placed them in a juicer, then pulled the juicer's handle down harder than the oranges demanded.

She wiped a juice glass against the pink silk. “How about some o.j.?”

“Had some.”

Renata drank juice from her glass and slapped the paring knife into the wooden block. “Weird day,” she said. Her voice harbored the hushed abrasion of a shoe on carpet.

His hand wiped a trickle from the hot-water faucet handle. Bad washer. “Looked upstairs for his wallet,” he said. “Expect the police have it still.”

“Don't know.”

“I found this lipstick.”

She looked at it. “Oh, thanks.” She put it in her kimono pocket.

“Wasn't my color.”

She faintly smiled. “You're more a Spring, aren't you.”

“Well, I try to be.”

Silence hung in the air between them like cigarette smoke.

Atticus finally asked, “Was there a break-in here? Door there looked jimmied open.”

She fell into thought and then she offered, “Either that or he lost his keys. Drunks do lose things.”

“Was he that way often?”

She lifted her glass. “Maybe just around me.”

“And why's that?”

She finished her orange juice before saying, “I hate this.”

“Hate what?”

She put her hands flat on the kitchen countertop and paused as if rehearsing what she was about to say. But the front door opened and a high male voice called,
“¡Hola!”
Renata informed Atticus secretly, as if cheating, “Stuart,” and then called back, “In the kitchen!”

Stuart Chandler was a tall, fashionable Englishman of Atticus's age, with a full head of white hair he'd sleeked back with gel, skin that was a mahogany brown, and shrewd, impatient, hazel green eyes. Dressed in a fine black blazer but pleated white trousers and white docksiders, he seemed a yachtsman, and he sauntered into the kitchen as if he wanted to talk to the chef, first smiling at Renata, then firmly shaking Atticus's hand and offering his name in the way of a famous man often introduced. Stuart said, “I only wish we could be meeting in happier circumstances, Mr. Cody. I have three grown sons of my own, so I think I can fathom the feelings you must have now. You do have my deepest sympathy.”

“Appreciate it,” he said.

“Are you coping?”

“Oh yeah.” Atticus filled his cup. “How about some coffee?”

“No, thank you. Cigarettes are my only poison.” He looked affectionately at Renata. “And how are you, darling?”

Renata said she was fine. She put her orange-juice glass in the sink.

Atticus paused and said, “Renata was telling me last night you could help get my boy's body out of Mexico.”

“Yes,” Stuart said, “but there's a ludicrous bureaucracy to battle first. We'll have to bury Scott today and hope for intercession from the United States Embassy in Mexico City. I have position but no power, alas. And we need permission to have him exhumed. I heard from … Frank?”

“Frank,” he said.

“We talked about it just this morning. Our thinking is harmonious. You can go home to Colorado tonight, and I'll be pleased to assume the burden of having him shipped up to Antelope.”