Atticus

The kid was still beside Atticus. He asked the kid, “Where would you go?”

  “Belize. Even Guatemala. Anywheres really. Heard good things about Costa Rica.”

  “You been living here for a while, have ya?”

  “Two heathenish years if you count jail time. Which you oughta count triple.”

  Although he feared the answer, Atticus asked, “You happen to know Scott Cody by any chance?”

  The kid’s face was frankly stunned—We know the same people! The kid turned and walked backward as he perused the playa, looking past the hotels toward Scott’s place but never quite finding it. “Scott lives up by the Maya somewheres.” His hand flew out. “I used to remember but I’m too forgetful lately. Went to a bitchin’ party there once. He’s wild.”

  Atticus heard the present tense but failed to correct the kid. One turquoise concession stand was selling green melon, cooked pork rinds, ginger brown bananas in a sugary stew, and black, barbecued chicken wings. A second concession that was crazily just a few yards away was under repair, and a boy in a bikini swimming suit was scooting along on his knees in the sand, painting at a huge square footage of green cement block with just a one-inch brush, turning a one-day job into many. On a stepladder inside, a man who was hidden from the chest up appeared to be rewiring palm thatching to the overhead poles, and a second man’s only responsibility was to keep one foot on the lower step and to hand up eight-inch wires, one at a time. Atticus flipped open his braid wallet and licked his thumb to get out a five-dollar bill that he withheld from the kid, like he was teasing a pup. “If I wanted to find Scott or his friends, where would I best look?”

  The kid frowned and hunkered a little as he raked back his sorrel-colored hair with a hand. “You police?”

  “I’m his father.”

  The kid focused on his face. “Yeah! Right! In his house. You’re the old man in that picture of his that he drew. My girlfriend thought you looked just like God.”

  Atticus put on a smile. “Well, our voices are the same.”

  “She was stoned of course.”

  “Hell yes,” Atticus said, “goes without saying.”

  The kid looked at the five-dollar bill. “Wow, this is so television.” And then he said, “Believe he hangs out in Boystown at night.”

  “Boystown.”

  “You know, massage parlors, whores, the after-hours places.”

  Atticus handed him the five-dollar bill. “You sell him a car by any chance?”

  The kid hesitantly said, “Wasn’t no warranty to it or nothin’.”

  “I know that. You have an accident in that Volkswagen you sold him?”

  “No sir, I dint.”

  “Was there just the original equipment on it?”

  “I think so.” The kid furrowed his brow in a way that resembled profound contemplation. “Scott have an accident in it?”

  “I think so.”

  The kid halted in his walk and hung there for a half a minute, then hurried back up the beach as if his five-dollar bill would be lost if he stayed. Atticus headed toward Stuart’s villa on the cape, passing the pirate’s den of The Scorpion, with its blue neon and its palm-thatched roof and wooden deck and its dock leading out to some tied-up speedboats that rocked and smacked on the waves. Cerveza bottles and plastic glasses with green wedges of lime still in them were tipped and scattered over sand that was as gray as cigarette ash. And then there were some private homes that had the spiritless look of failed financial investments, places not slept in nor enjoyed but kept up by gardeners and maids who turned on the burglar alarms at night and went home. And at land’s end was Stuart’s grand pink villa and Renata in a soft white glamorous dress and a shawl, facing west on the lush green lawn to watch the sun flame out.

  Evening dinner conversation was full of Stuart and his qualms about the high-speed trains that might rape Resurrección someday, the shoddy plastic plumbing in the house that was now being fouled with rainwater, the fancy condominiums that were being sold at a loss with the peso in such pitiful shape. Stuart talked about his bookstore and Publishers Weekly and a female employee who intentionally got pregnant, and that fed other topics that were passed around like bowls of food and handily put down in favor of others. Everything was kept light and tittering, though there was something fraught about their talk, as if there were levels of meaning that a visitor to their household would only hopelessly try to interpret. Renata flattered Stuart or held her silence while Stuart ruthlessly imitated friends or offered his firm opinions or quickly began arguments that were just as quickly forgotten. And Atticus turned his frosted glass of tonic water in his hand, imagining his son handling fall and winter nights like this, being as disquietingly quiet as he himself was, gently smiling at his company even while he fumed and ached inside.

  He thought about the wrongness of much that he’d heard and seen in just two days. He considered asking Renata to go out and talk to the Mexican girl, but he felt unsure that he’d get anything further, that Renata was free to tell him the facts as she got them. Even now she was peculiar, flinching, private, scrutinizing, the first to start laughing, the first to stop, fairly timid in speech, tentative in action, for the most part seemingly uninterested in him. She was like a fresh, spoiled girl forced to eat with the old folks, and she couldn’t wait for the dinner to end. Was he murdered? she’d asked, and he’d said, I think so, and she still hadn’t asked him anything more.

  Stuart finished the hollandaise sauce while delivering his assessment of the faltering real estate market, and Atticus questioned him about his own investments.

  Renata said, with a hint of exasperation, “Stuart owns hotels.”

  “I have partnerships in hotels,” he said, foolishly bowing to her. Stuart was falling into drunkenness, but he turned half around in his dining room chair and called, “Julia? Más vino por favor.”

  Atticus filled his plate with fettucine. “Would it be likely I’d seen any of them?”

  Stuart considered Atticus as if he’d found a fresh complexity in him. “It wouldn’t speak well of your sterling character. They’re in, how shall I say it?, a sportif part of our fair city.”

  “Would that be Boystown?”

  “Unexplored depths, Renata!” Stuart said. She failed to smile at him. “Don’t tell me you’ve been talking to taxi drivers?”

  Atticus twisted fettucine on his fork. “I got big ears, is all.”

  “Don’t think I haven’t noticed,” Stuart said, and tilted away as a plump, happy maid named Julia poured a Chilean red wine into his goblet. “Oh, what is the name of that one, Renata?”

  “Which?”

  “Barry helped me refinance it. You know.”

  “Casa Fantasía?”

  “No, no, no! On El Camino, for god’s sake!”

  “El Marinero,” she said.

  Atticus held his face as it was.

  “Yes! Exactly, darling. I blow you a kiss.” Stuart held up the Chilean wine and frowned at its label, then put it down again. “Would you like to hear about my stroke of genius, Atticus?”

  “Anytime.”

  “Wasn’t it a stroke of genius, Renata? Would you for god’s sake support me on that?”

  Renata told Atticus, “Stuart advertised in the International Herald-Tribune.”

  Stuart fell back in his chair. “Well, I don’t have a story to tell now, do I? I have been trumped.”

  “Oh, there’s more to say.”

  “Well, that was the punch line.”

  “Don’t pout.”

  “You have been Madame Ennui all night, and then, when I have a good story to tell, you go and give him the punch line!”

  “It’s late,” Atticus said. “I oughta be going.”

  Stuart held his wristwatch close to his face. “Ten o’clock is not late.”

  And so they retired to a green library for Kahlua and coffee, but the partying had gone out of them—Stuart was fighting off sleep and Renata’s conversation seemed practiced, as though she were rising
to an occasion; she finally walked over to a high bookcase and pulled down whatever came to hand, bleakly reading a paragraph or two before shelving the book again. Stuart politely asked Atticus dispirited questions about petroleum refineries and cattle ranching, frequently peeking at Renata as he lifted his fragile coffee cup until Atticus frankly looked at his own wristwatch and told Stuart what a good dinner it was and got up.

  Renata laid her book aside. “Shall I drive you?”

  “Don’t bother yourself. I like to take a constitutional after dinner. Habit I picked up from Harry Truman.”

  Renata stared at him with fresh interest.

  Stuart offered his hand but failed to rise from his chair. “I really must say, I am so glad you’re feeling better.”

  “Thanks,” he said, and took his hat from Renata, and went out through the front door.

  “Vaya con Dios,” he heard Stuart call.

  Wind was herding a fold of clouds in from the Caribbean and was so cooling the night that he felt good about his suit jacket. His right stocking was wedging down in the heel of his boot as he walked up Avenida del Mar, so he hunkered on a bench in front of The Scorpion in order to tug the stocking high on his calf. And then he heard a radio being tuned and found a green and white taxi sitting among the hundred cars in The Scorpion’s asphalt lot. And he gave in to his first impulse, standing up and hailing it with the shrill whistle with which he used to call Frank and Scotty into the house, and he got into the taxi even before it fully stopped. “We meet again,” he said.

  Panchito frowned into his rearview mirror. “¿Cómo?”

  Atticus took off his Stetson. “Señor Cody,” he said.

  To his surprise, Panchito seemed to have trouble placing him, as if he were just another gringo, but he grinned and said, “Ay, sí! Hello, my fren!”

  “Are you the only taxi driver in Resurrección?”

  Panchito laughed as though he understood, and then asked, “¿Adónde?”

  “Boystown.”

  Panchito peeled around toward El Camino Real while he found a Mexico City station on his radio. A female voice was softly singing, “Solo tu sombra fatal, sombra de mal, me sigue por dondequiera con ostinación.” Looking over his shoulder, Panchito asked worriedly, “Quiere una prostituta, señor?”

  Atticus shook his head.

  Warning him, Panchito waggled his finger and grinned. “Es peligroso.”

  “Everything’s dangerous,” Atticus said and fixed his gaze out the passenger window. The huge voice of the disk jockey seemed to be booming from inside a shower stall as he announced that the singer was Linda Ronstadt and the song was “Tú, Sólo Tú.” You, only you. Within a few minutes they were far from the centro and heading toward fifty or more flashing neon signs of a kind of fourth-rate Reno. “Por favor, pare en la proxima parada,” Atticus said, and put far too much money in Panchito’s hand.

  Surprised, he asked, “¿Quiere que espere?” You want I wait?

  “I’ll be all right,” Atticus said, but he wasn’t sure. Hundreds of shamed and sullen men lurked outside the hotels and taverns, often withdrawing inside as if hauled in by a leash, or they tilted along the filthy street facing nothing but their own faces in the barred and blurry storefront windows. Every other building seemed to hold a cantina. La Cigarra. El Salón Carmelita. Texas. El Farolito. Waiting inside were forlorn young women sitting on bar stools and facing the front door, in fluffed and tinted hair and fancy polyester dresses that seemed fresh from some prom.

  Houses had strings of drying garlic nailed up on them like holiday wreaths. Little children with gray, shaved heads and the red scars of body lice and razor nicks walked along with Atticus, talking beseechingly as they yanked at his clothing and lifted dirty, brown hands up for coins. Unhealthy, furious dogs were plunging along the flat building rooftops and raging down at the walkers. Woodsmoke and pork and kitchen odors were a taint in the air. Deep in a one-lane alley he saw a teenaged girl get out of her panties and hike up her skirt so a fat man still in his hotel clothes could heft her up by the thighs and force himself into her.

  Atticus stepped around a girl kneeling on the sidewalk with a wooden platter of pork ribs and chili sauce and a scatter of flies like black peppers. An American man of his age passed by him in khakis and a plaid short-sleeved shirt, with the upright, serious, tottering stride of drunks who think they’re handling drunkenness well. A fat young prostitute in skin-tight jeans sang a question to Atticus as she sashayed past. Halfway down the block a man in a powder blue suit petted his tie beneath the green neon sign for the El Marinero hotel. And in front of it was his son’s old red Volkswagen. Renata walked from the hotel in a harried way and talked to the man in the powder blue suit. He shrugged in the full Latin manner, tilting his head and giving up his hands. And Renata was getting into the Volkswagen when Atticus heard high voices in a yell. And then a gunshot.

  A hundred Mexicans in the street were hurrying toward the Bella Vista bar where gunsmoke was rolling gray and blue through the doorway. Atticus hesitated and then walked over to it as well, his hands in his pockets, Don’t mind me, and found a dirty side window where he squeezed between some tiptoed children. Tatters and silks of gunsmoke still hung by the ceiling, and a quiet body was heaped on the floor as though it were only sandbags and clothing dropped from a great height. Blood flooded from his chest in the form of a leg, eddying across the plank flooring and runneling fast between the floorboards. A handgun was still being held by an older Mexican as he howlingly sank over whomever it was he’d killed, but another man took the gun from him and the killer was free to hold the boy’s face in his hands and talk to him plaintively and kiss him on the eyelids. Only then did Atticus realize that the body was that of the petty thief he’d found upstairs in the house, whom he’d seen at the funeral yesterday.

  And then Renata was beside him. “Don’t stay here,” she said.

  “Why?”

  She took him by his elbow. “We have to leave now. I’ll give you a ride.”

  She was silent until they were out of Boystown. “I was afraid you were heading here by the way you asked about it. And then your face betrayed you. Why the hotel, El Marinero?”

  “You tell me.”

  “I figured it had something to do with Scott.”

  “The phone number was in his wallet.”

  “Uh huh,” she said.

  “You know anything about the shooting?”

  A Mexican policeman held up traffic while an Econoline van from the hospital rushed past. Renata said, “That’s business as usual these days, isn’t it? If you have a gun it has to go off.””

  The policeman waved them ahead and Renata shifted to first gear and let out the clutch too fast. The tires briefly screeched as the Volkswagen jumped forward.

  “The kid,” Atticus said. “I found him in Scott’s house today.”

  She frowned at him in authentic surprise. “Really?”

  “You wouldn’t know about that.”

  She faced the street and seemed to force herself to go on. She was probably unaware she was silent until she’d gotten all the way to the house.

  FIVE

  You’re wondering what woke you. A hand near his face; a hand that sought him but held back as if it feared being scalded. And then a faint whirring noise from the kitchen, on and then off. But there was nothing to see in the five o’clock gloom of the upstairs bedroom, and no hushed breathing, no hallway sounds, no feather of a human presence floating in the wake of a hasty withdrawal. And yet Atticus got up and hung there at the top of the stairs, wondering if he was imagining the faint smack of a foot on the dining room’s pink cantera marble. After a while he walked into the room Renata slept in, flicking on the ceiling light and finding Shakespeare’s Plays still there by the unmade bed and three empty Corona bottles on the floor.

  Either Saturday morning or later Renata had retrieved her clothing and shoes from the walk-in closet but left behind the hard-sided green suitcase with its Mexicana Airline
s luggage tag, the suitcase as there as a Spanish word suddenly remembered. Escopeta. Shotgun. Atticus pulled off the red shock cord and flipped open its hasps, finding inside just an old plastic bag from a shoe store in Nijmegen in the Netherlands. While he couldn’t recall that his son was ever up there, Atticus was past being either sure or surprised. Seemed you didn’t fully know Scott, ever; it was like trying to hold water in your hands.

  His thoughts were too assailed for sleep, so Atticus got into his funeral shirt and his straight-leg blue jeans and boots. And he was finishing a bowl of cornflakes and milk in the kitchen when he saw the Radiola tape player up on the refrigerator and punched the rewind button. He put his bowl and spoon in the kitchen sink and filled the bowl with water, then he punched stop and frowned at the tape and forced down the play button. Atticus could see the right reel take up slack and heard Linda Ronstadt’s strong and gorgeous voice singing a fiesta song, “La Charreada,” holding a high note for what seemed an impossibly long time while the horns and strings of maríachis played behind her. Atticus went out to the seashore with the player cradled against his left forearm, his spirits lifting with the happiness of the music as he walked on the hard wet sand, heightening the volume as huge waves cracked and boomed like falling timber and the high winds flustered the palms on the roofs.

  But as Linda Ronstadt was singing the first verses of a “Corrido de Cananea” she was abruptly cut off, and Atticus held the player to his ear to hear just a hushed ambient noise, of paintbrushes rattling and swishing in turpentine jars, of footsteps on a plank floor, as if one night in his studio Scott had mistakenly pressed record instead of play. Atticus hiked up a hillside of sand to get farther from the grumble of the sea and heard a spigot being turned and water gushing into a glass beaker of some kind. When the spigot was shut off, the water pipe briefly yelped, and then the beaker clanked down on the stovetop and there was the hiss and pop of a gas burner igniting. And then for a few minutes there wasn’t a great deal to hear—he guessed his son was fiddling with the coffee and was too far away from the machine.