Atticus (11 page)

Atticus opened his eyes and it was night and Renata Isaacs was sitting on the bed, her palm as cool as a washcloth to his brow. And he felt the influence of his flesh as he found himself summoning up how it was to hold her as she wept.

“Don't,” he said. “I'll be all right.”

“Actually I like paying attention to people when they're sick. Helps to compensate for my thoroughgoing malice toward them when they're healthy.”

“How late is it?”

“Nine.”

He sighed and said, “Sorry, but I've gotta get up again,” and Renata helped him ease himself up from a damp sheet.
His legs jellied a little, but he could walk into the bathroom by tilting into the gray wall. She turned away from his nakedness, and then he heard her sliding the floor-to-ceiling glass doors to let in the good night air. As he ran the tap water to brush his teeth, he could hear her saying, “I know how impossible it is for you now, but if you could step back from your misery you'd find your sickness rather interesting really. I mean by that, the extremes your body goes to to get rid of the poisons.”

“‘Extremes' is pretty mild,” he said. “It's more like ‘counterrevolutionary.'” Atticus got Pepto-Bismol from the medicine cabinet and swallowed an inch of it straight from the bottle, then showered and some minutes later walked out, buttoning up his pajamas.

She was standing by the bookcase with a collection of Mexican poetry. She watched him haltingly get onto the bed. She said, “You're white as a ghost.”

“Won't last forever, I expect.”

“You should sleep,” Renata said, and fluffed his pillow and tucked the blanket over his horseman's legs.

Atticus tried to put some affection in his smile, but he was impatient with himself for his need for feminine tenderness, because his ache and poisoning and how he felt now was not half as important as his fierce certainty that his son had been murdered.

Sandhills. Snow. Gray weather. And Scott up from Mexico for the holidays, in a tan hunting coat but no hunting gun, sleepily riding Pepper with his hands holding his Radiola tape player against the saddle. The horses lazily plodded along a coulee in the oil patch, and Patsy Cline was singing “Crazy.” And then the sun and its twin were high overhead like Communion hosts and Atticus said, “You call that a sundog.” His son peered up and asked, “How can you tell which is sun and which is dog?” And then Scott turned his head so his father could see that his face was shot off.

Atticus jerked awake and figured out where he was. Warm air fattened the drapes, and their pull cords tapped against the gray wall. His
Spanish for Travellers
was in his hand and his mouth was as dry as a shoe. Atticus could
hear the clanking of pots and pans in the kitchen and then the gong and sigh of tap water filling a kettle. He made another woozy trip to the bathroom and found a red lipsticked message on the bathroom mirror: “Police at 1.” He showered and got into his robe. Renata was in the kitchen speaking a Spanish he couldn't make out, and then she was coming upstairs. And he was sitting up on the bed when she rapped lightly on the door and then pushed it, appearing with a bottle of Coca-Cola and a squat glass that was jagged with ice. She wore high-fashion blue jeans beneath an untucked and overlarge white oxford shirt. The fumes of tobacco smoke seemed to float from her clothes. She said, “You probably think you're dying, but you're not.”

“As sicknesses go, this one packs a wallop. I've been pretty basic with myself the past few hours.”

She seriously poured the cola into the glass and gave it to him with one white pill. “Lomotil. From Stuart's pharmacopoeia. I'll have to get you some more.” She paused. “I couldn't find any Diet Coke.”

Atticus smiled. “I'll try not to worry about the calories.” He took the pill and finished half of the Coke.

“Shall I call the airline and cancel your flight?”

“Yeah. I'm too raggedy for travel right now.”

Renata sat at his feet and folded her arms underneath her breasts just as Serena would when she focused on the family pictures and talked about the full day ahead. She said, “You know, the Mexicans get it, too. Children who seem to be five and six years old are often actually eight
and nine. Especially in the jungle there's a big problem with intestinal parasites and tuberculosis. Americans go home and get over it. Here you get used to it or die.”

A kitchen drawer was pulled out and pushed shut. “Who's that?” he asked.

“Stuart, or María. I met her in the
jardín.
She's making a healing potion.”

“A potion. You think it'll work?”

Renata shrugged and said, “When I was eight and living in Europe, I got some warts on my fingers. A family doctor told me to put my hands on a green machine in his office, and he turned on the motor and my skin tingled for a few seconds. And then he winked and said the green machine had cured me. And my warts were gone in a week.”

Lufthansa, he found himself thinking. A flight to Germany. “You're only eight for so long,” Atticus said.

“Unfortunately.” Renata got up and created a purpose for getting up by walking across the room and causing the draperies to sweep aside. The sky was just as blue as yesterday or the day before that, and the sunglare on the snow-white stucco was as bright as the oncoming lights of a car. She said, “The hotel boys are playing soccer.” And she said, “White sand gets on their skin and they look like sugared doughnuts.”

“¡Está listo!”
María called.

Renata turned. “She says it's ready. Shall she bring it up?”

“Kind of funky up here. You go on ahead.” She walked out as Atticus went into the gray bathroom again. And Stuart was at the dining room table, fanning pink and yellow
wildflowers out on an unfolded newspaper, when Atticus painstakingly stepped downstairs in his suit pants and a fresh white shirt, one big hand patting along the stairway banister in case his legs mellowed or his feet slipped. Stuart looked up and feigned disappointment. “Bad luck about the illness.”

“Where's Renata?”

“The pharmacy,” he said. “Well. You seem to be ambulatory.”

“Just let me get my skates.” Stuart was barefoot on the pink marble, and Atticus remembered that there had been an Indian rug in the photograph of the dining room. Was it stolen? He asked, “You know what happened to the rug that was here?”

Stuart frowned at the dining room floor. “I haven't the foggiest.”

María walked out of the kitchen with a four- or five-month-old baby boy and a kettle.
“Buenas tardes, señor.”

“Buenas.”

“¿Cómo está usted?”

Atticus lost the little Spanish he had, but María just saddled the baby on her left hip as she tipped the kettle into a whiskey glass.

Stuart said, “She brought you a tea from her
abuelo.
Her shaman. She says it's made from the bark of a tree.”

“Takinche,”
María said.

“A
takinche
tree. And possibly eye of newt.”

Atticus held a whiskey glass that seemed to contain hot
root beer and a skin of woodbits that looked like nothing more than shredded tea leaves. Without a second thought he drank the concoction, trying not to taste it, but tasting and tasting it.

“Aren't you manly,” Stuart said.

Atticus wiped the gray wings of his mustache with his palm as he grinned at María and told her, “I feel better already.”

María flushed with shyness and hooded her son with her shawl. Stuart spoke in Spanish, seeming to ask María about the rug, but María simply shrugged and replied,
“No sé, señor.”
Don't know.

“Well, that's better than my maid,” Stuart said. “She'd tell you it never existed.”

María headed for the front door and she smiled and said,
“Hasta mañana.”
She giggled at Stuart's Spanish reply, and Atticus found himself registering how long Stuart fondly gazed at her as she went out.

Atticus's hand held on to the headpiece of a dining room chair as the floor seemed to tip. “Are the police coming here or I am going there?”

“Renata's taking you.” He paused.
“La comisaría de policía.”

“Thanks. I was about to ask.”

“I hope you're not expecting answers,” Stuart said, “because the police here don't always dot all the
i
's and cross all the
t
's, if you get my meaning. Mexican fatalism gets jumbled up with a lot of the police being illiterate, and
a few of them are dreadful people besides, not to put too fine a point on it. Half the time the police can't get the facts right, and half the time they just don't care to.” Stuart got some garden scissors from the sideboard as he said, “Anyway, your son's clothing and shotgun are there. And the motorcycle. Will you be able to ride it back?”

“Oh, I reckon.”

Stuart snipped some wildflowers and plunked them into a jar. “We could hire someone to
roll
it here.”

“I feel that
takinche
kicking in already.”

“Renata and I were hoping to have you over for dinner tonight. You probably think that sounds perfectly awful now, but I'm fairly sure you'll be hungry by six. We'll have something mild, fettucine or a risotto.”

“Real neighborly,” he said.

He smiled. “You can say that without irony! Aren't you
quaint!”

“You know medicines?”

Stuart looked at him oddly.

He heavily sat down on the dining room chair. “Why I said that is Renata used a word: pharmacopoeia? Means you know about pills and such, I take it.”

Stuart blinked slowly and said, “What a pity that I do.”

Atticus shifted to the right and got out his wallet from his trousers pocket. Tucked under a flap was the pharmacy receipt María found on the bathroom floor upstairs. He held it out to Stuart. “You know what this would be for?”

He read it quickly and a shade seemed to go down in
his face. He hobbied as he said, “We have cancer cures here, quote unquote, that you can't get in the United States. And if you're desperate enough, you get a prescription for that. Whose is it?”

“Was it Scott's?”

“We'd have known if Scott was that ill, wouldn't we?”

Atticus smoothed his hair with his hand. “Well, I've seen people who keep it pretty quiet. Don't want to make a fuss. You know.”

“That hardly describes your son, does it.” Stuart shifted flowers in the jar until he seemed satisfied, and then he gathered the cuttings into his hand as he said, “We were desperate rivals, Scott and I. We fought all the time.”

“You were both in love with the same woman.”

“Can't fool you.” He went into the kitchen and threw the flower cuttings into the trash. He said from the kitchen, “She has
complete
power over me. I find it frustrating, but I presume it was just as frustrating for Scott.” Stuart folded his arms at the doorway. “One thing I'll always regret is the twinge of
gladness
I felt when I heard he was dead.” High color flushed his face. “Common decency deserts me on occasion.” He tried to smile, but his mouth trembled. “Even now, for example.”

Atticus fiercely stared at him and then offered, “You do try to be honest, don't you.”

“Rude is more like it, I'm afraid.” Stuart put his hands on a dining room chair and faced him squarely as he said,
“I
have cancer.” He put on a happy face as he held up his pack of Salem cigarettes like it was show-and-tell, then
frowned as he shook one out and flipped the pack back onto the dining room table.

“I'm real sorry.”

“Well
I'm
angry. Absolutely furious, if truth be told. I guess I'm in the first stage of grief.”

“Have you told Renata?”

“Oh, that would be fetching, wouldn't it.” He dug out a fancy lighter from his front pants pocket, got a flame, hungrily inhaled on the cigarette, and coughed wrackingly. His face was crimson as he said,
“Quod erat demonstrandum.”

Atticus was silent, and then he asked, “Where were you Wednesday night?”

Stuart faced him with wonder and then forced a laugh. “My God, you're
detecting! You're a sleuth!”

Atticus just stared.

Stuart inhaled his cigarette again and funneled smoke out the side of his mouth. “With Renata and Scott at The Scorpion and at the Marriott for the fiesta and the Williams play. And then I went to the bookstore and finished up some paperwork.”

“You there for a long time?”

“Yes, from about ten o'clock to one-thirty or so. Tweaking the debits and credits, if you must know. My financial shape isn't any more healthy than I am. My thanks in advance for your sympathy.” Stuart got an ashtray from the kitchen and gently carved the ash from his cigarette. “Are you trying to establish if I have an alibi?”

“Yep.”

“I have none. Shall I expect you to
grill
me further?”

The front door opened and Renata called,
“¡Hola!”

Stuart whispered, “And now, for the sake of the children, we pretend nothing's happened.”

Renata walked in, looking harried, her mind elsewhere, with a white sack from the
farmacia
in her hand. “More Lomotil,” she said. “How are you now?”

“Sitting up and taking notice,” he said, and got up from the dining room chair. “I'll go fetch my hat.”

Stuart may have spoken about their talk while he was upstairs, because Renata drove Atticus through the
centro
in silence—so daughterly that silence, as if she'd been wrongly punished and thought a sentence might heal the rift she wanted prolonged. She finally said, “I hate it when he talks about me.”

“Wasn't much said.”