Atticus (15 page)

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.

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 Airlines 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.

When he heard Scott walking out the front door and then heard nothing more, Atticus simply watched the reels turn, waiting for a further sound he knew would have to come. A flutter of unease troubled his stomach. His hands, he knew, would shake if he lifted them. The flint gray night was fading and the blood of sunrise floated in the east. Atticus looked at the fattening reel for a few minutes, and then he heard the front door of the
casita
open, and panting, and the sandpapering sounds of shoes in hard effort across the floor. And it was like the old days of radio theater when he was a kid, a few actors and a few sound effects and his mind flying at five hundred miles an hour. A fierce kicking noise was followed by the grief of the green wingback chair being skidded around on the planks. And he knew this was Wednesday night and he was hearing the murderer haul his son inside.

Atticus harbored a hate so huge he felt owned by it; he was afraid of what it might do. And then he imagined he heard the sounds for the ugly things he'd already seen in his mind, his son being heaved up into the green wingback
chair, his feet and legs being arranged, the shotgun being stood upright on its stock and his hand being forced onto the trigger housing. Atticus got his handkerchief and pressed it hard against his eyes.

Exhaling heavily, he tilted his head close to the speaker, heard the murderer walk outside, and he flinched at the firing of the shotgun. Right after that he heard the faraway tattoo of fireworks. The fiesta. Hangers rang as Scott's blue jeans and yellow shirt were taken from the closet, and then there were the faint noises of clothing being changed: tugging and shuttling, the fall of an arm, the purr of a zipper, his shoes being taken off. The horror of it folded him forward, his face in his hands, his head nearly touching his knees, and then the player abruptly clunked off, the reel finished.

Atticus held his position, hardly breathing, fractured with pain, filled with straw. Was it harder to hear that his wife had been killed? This was a flood line so high on the house it would never be touched again.

Much later Atticus was grimly trudging along the hillside to the house when he saw an old Ford 150 pickup truck halted in the driveway. He put the Radiola on the refrigerator and peered out the kitchen window at an old Mexican gardener unlatching the gate of a truck bed that was filled with leaf blowers and mowers, bamboo rakes, and gunny-sacked bales of cut grass. Atticus walked outside and watched the gardener, who seemed not to mind that there was no talk between them, but merely hauled out a tray of
what may have been pansies and knelt underneath a flow of pink bougainvillea on a high white boundary wall and furiously stabbed at the earth with his trowel.

Atticus guessed it was a quarter till eight. A listing white bus was in front of the Maya Hotel and a full shift of Mexican workers were getting out. A few doors down and across the street a spunky white bichon frise that he'd heard called Winslow was poking his nose in a hedge while a blond American woman in white jean shorts and an untucked man's shirt held sunglasses up to the morning.

The gardener walked forward on his hands and knees and got something from underneath the bougainvillea trunk. Sitting back, he held up and puzzlingly turned a used green shotgun shell.
“Un cartucho, señor,'
he said, and handed the three-inch Federal shell to Atticus as if it were merely an item of family embarrassment.

Atticus went inside and found the Winchester shotgun and fitted the shell inside the loading gate, then pumped the forearm on the magazine tube and watched the shell fly onto the floor. When you shot the gun, the shell stayed there, but it was lost when you filled the chamber again. Atticus stood in the hallway for a long time, imagining how it could have happened there, seeing his fallen son, the blood on the rug, an angry Spanish message scrawled in lipstick across the dining room mirror. He knew what he had to do. Atticus got the ignition key for the Harley and on a hunch got the Schlage key from the upper drawer in the kitchen counter, then locked up the house and rode Scott's motorcycle toward the pink spires of the
parroquia
,
past the
jardín
, and, if he recalled correctly, four blocks down Cinco de Mayo. And there the pink mortuary was, the name “Cipiano” in big brass letters over two brass entrance doors that a janitor was polishing. Atticus braked and tilted onto one leg and yelled over his nickering engine,
“¿Abierto?”
Open?