Atticus (19 page)

I have trouble putting a date to that particular spree, but it was late January, four months since I'd got off lithium, and for days I'd been floorboarding it into what Renata used to call “a heightened state of mental fragility.” Whether it was insanity or the aftereffects of pharmacy, I felt brilliant, ebullient, invulnerable, full of gaiety and false good health and a giddy,
Wow, isn't this freaky?
excitement. Well-being for me, though, is often like the aura that precedes the seizures of epilepsy, and I was headed for doom even while I was heartily being in my prime, Captain Electric, happy-go-lucky Scott. Stuart tried abiding me at Printers Inc and found himself not up to the task, and when I showed up at his villa (“Hi, honey; I'm home!”) Renata gave me that
Oh, you poor puppy
look. We finally went out to inflict ourselves upon Mexico and found our way onto a bus tour of Resurrección, one of those
You are here
jaunts put on by the grand resort hotels to lure their elderly out of their rooms. And by then I was falling into a funk of aloneness and loss and desolation, hunkered down inside those old, old feelings of lunacy and finding familiar faces in all the Americans on that air-conditioned tour bus (“We know each other!”), as if I were part of some cosmic class reunion, déjà vu to the max—that old guy daubing sunblock fifteen on his nose and the hunchbacked woman holding her purse with both hands were as friendly to me as regulars at the truck stop cafe in Antelope, and wasn't that Aunt Claire? Were I still full of optimism and hail-fellow-well-met I
would have been tempted to shout hellos and harass the old people with my frantic happiness, but my fluky head chemistry was forcing me into a bleak house of paranoia, restlessness, even terror, and I was trying to hold back, quiet the hectic tattoo of my heartbeat, put the watchdog out on his chain in case things got too weird.

Which they did. We'd motored through the
centro,
found photo opportunities with the fishing boats and the fruit sellers, heard the chamber of commerce pitch about a sky's-the-limit real estate future, and halted in front of the Church of the Resurrection. We were going on a walking tour, the girl in charge said. She said we would “find inside the
parroquia
many furnishing from Espain that the padres are bringing to Mexico in the eighteen century.”

I have no idea if it was intuition or if some psychic floodwaters were opened and feeding me insights into the past, but I felt superior to whatever that girl's presentation would be. I felt like a former inhabitant, like I knew that place when the paint was still fresh, as if the hallways, the hidden doors, the shellacked pictures on the walls were as familiar to me as my father's house, and I'd forsaken the right or possibility of going inside again. Call it superstition or just a bad trip, but it felt as heavy as shot-in-the-night reality, like I was a kid on the first porch step of a haunted house, and my first remedy of choice was to hide my head underneath the sheets. I have a hard time making these events obey anything but the horrible logic of nightmare. I just know that as the old people herded off the bus I was shaded by the wings of madness and just sat there in my
place, heartsick, holes for eyes, frail as an invalid, and shaking like it was forty below.

I heard Renata ask, “Are you spooked?” And I realized that she and I were the only passengers still on the bus, and that the frustrated driver was fixing a hard squint on us in his rearview mirror.

I just said, “I'm not ready for this.”

“You don't have to go in,” she said.

“Are you sure?”

“I'll see if you can stay.” Renata gallantly went forward to help out the crazy person.

I heard Spanish and hours seemed to pass as I hunched forward, my face hidden in my hands, and inhaled, exhaled, as if that would be my only job from then on. Then I heard Renata say it was not possible, it was break time and the bus was being shut down, I'd fry inside with the air off. She took hold of my wrist and led me like a child to the door and ever so tenderly onto the sidewalk.

You'd have thought I was a head-on collision the way the Americans lurked on the sidewalk, talking about me, retreating,
Don't get anything on me
in their looks as I was hurried across the street, my feeble shoes shuffling a sandpaper rasp from the cobbled paving, and was settled like an ill-wrapped package on a park bench in the
jardín.
She said, “You know, I'm not that healthy myself. We can't take care of each other.” If I looked at Renata then it was fleetingly, but I followed her with a toys-in-the-attic stare as she waded back into that hushed crowd, and I fended off self-doubt by thinking that this helplessness and despair was her scene,
not mine, I was
fine
until she took my hand.
I have to go now,
I thought.
I have to wash. I'll eat my food with a fork.

A full day later in my house and I was fine again, honest, no fooling. Waking up and holding my hands out in front of my face in that
how-many-fingers
final exam of full consciousness and perspective. But one frightening leer from Mr. Hyde in the bathroom mirror told me that I ought to get out of town for a while. And so I hurried into a bleached shirt and chinos and hiking boots, filled a box with food, block-lettered a note for María, and headed out to Eduardo's to hie the lunatic into the hills.

We shared a past, Eduardo and I, that made his friends consider my visits to his shanty in the jungle a kind of jubilee of wild invention, so within the next few days all the families in the area found their way to his place to hear the holy fool. My first night there fourteen men and boys settled on their haunches around a fire, inhaling huge handmade cigars until they were wholly intoxicated, and fascinatedly watched the zoo animal in his own private
Weltschmerz.
Eduardo finally squatted next to me and whispered in Spanish, “We wait for a speech.”

I gave it some thought and recited in English a high school lesson of the first paragraph from
Moby Dick:
“‘Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet, and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent
me from deliberately stepping into the street and methodically knocking people's hats off—then I account it high time to get to the sea as soon as I can.'”

I have no idea what my English sounded like to them, but when I finished, a few softly applauded me in their flat-palmed way and one at a time they got up and finally left, fully entertained.

Hectic that life was not. We fetched water from the hole and used posts to tamp kernels of corn in a field that was still hot with soot and ash, but otherwise the hours passed at half-speed in a whine of insects, Eduardo instructing his heedless wives in their work while the heat soaked the black-and-blues away. Each night Eduardo's oldest wife, Koh, offered me a hideous brew of
balche
and chewed roots and seed pods that I took in perfect obedience. And I'd sleep hard, hammered, until high noon, hearing nothing but pigs and chickens and the chinking noise of machetes hacking down great trees in the jungle, feeling nothing but the infrequent, faint, floating touch of children's hands on my face and hair.

And then Saturday afternoon Eduardo and three of his friends invited me fishing, and we hiked through the forest to a harbor where a high-sided skiff was lolling on the swells as a teenaged boy in a racing suit fiddled with a fifty-horsepower outboard motor terribly hitched to its transom. I looked north and found far off the shell gray of the pollution that tarnished Resurrección, but the shoreline was otherwise foreign to me.

We got naked and thrashed out to the skiff with our
clothes held high overhead, and I heard only highly accented Mayan as they pulled themselves up over the gunwale and joshed about something having to do with the gringo. I played the fifth wheel,
Oh don't mind me,
and faced them stonily from the forward sailing thwart as the kid in the racing suit got the motor going and we surged a half-mile farther out to a barrier reef where the water was as tepid and clear as Perrier but from a distance had the turquoise color of kitchens in the fifties.

The kid killed the motor and hurled overboard three concrete blocks that were tied to the painter line. An old face mask half eaten with salt and fairly good fins were handed to me, and then a four-foot spear just like they had. Winking, I gave them the old thumbs-up—what a good sport, what a trouper. The first to jump over the side was me, and then I heard hoots and the four crashing in, handling the seawater without face masks or fins and twisting like otters around the white elkhorn coral and infant sponges as they hunted brilliant wrasse and groupers and rainbow parrotfish. I went up for air a full minute before one of them did—they held their breath like turtles—but finally they all did flutter up for air with a boxfish that trailed shreds of blood, and I skimmed down past colonies of intricate lavender and red coral through a school of glorious blue tang that shuddered and broke apart at my presence and then rejoined into one mind again, and then I stroked farther past a terrace of black brain coral and sea anemone to a floor of sand. And there I found a stingray almost fully hidden in the
sand, its fake-seeming yellow eyes flashing uninteresting news until irritation or fright finally registered and with a fluff of its gorgeous iron gray wings the sand floated away like smoke and the stingray was suddenly in a flight that was fluent as ointment. The first surge took it twenty feet from me, and then in its sovereignty it glided into a stall and oh so gently rippled its wings until the floor settled over it again.

Either I read it somewhere or Eduardo told me, but in their religious ceremonies ages ago, pre-Cortez, the Mayan high priests used to stab the barb of the stingray's tail in their penises and the poison would kick them into head trips that seemed to offer hallucinatory interpretations of the future. You'll have a sense of how far gone I was then that I found the hurt and danger of that kind of rush crazily alluring. I got high on threat and foreboding; I was like those heroin addicts who find they can get off just with the needle. I ought to have flashed up to the surface for air, but I felt a strong and irrational need to touch that stingray, and I kicked down until I was just above the fish, watching it blankly watch me.

I have given up trying to be persuasive about this. You get these looks:
Oh sure, stingrays.
But in fact a flock or herd or plague of stingrays majestically soared in from nowhere, five or six of them wrestling up against me in a thrall of motion, their soft wings sheathing me, their tails frantically whipping, falling away only to flare up against my flesh, showing their white undersides as their toothless mouths seemed to foolishly smile. I have no idea what attracted
them. I have never felt anything so much like pure muscle, that filled me with such loathing. It was like one of those Renaissance paintings of Saint Anthony being persecuted by demons. The stingrays jolted hard into me and held me under and one blunt head knocked my face mask off. And I was near fainting for lack of air when I heard the Mayans there with me, churning their legs and fighting the wings until a spear jarred into one and a pink orchid of blood seemed to grow from its skin and their hands took hold of its head and ventral gills. And as I shot upward, they gingerly followed, hauling the fish to the skiff.

The kid was kneeling by a gunwale with a gaff. Enormously pleased, he helped me up into the boat and patted my head and heaped Spanish praise on me until he could heave the stingray onto the flooring. But then the others got in and huddled far from me by the engine as if they were afraid of getting anything of me on them. Even Eduardo found nothing more to do than frown at my bad karma.

We went farther up the coast to an inlet and the pretty white skirt of beach that was near Eduardo's shanty. Women in five-dollar American dresses were there chanting songs as they husked corn around a fire, and Eduardo's wife Koh shyly handed me a jar of the fermented corn whiskey called
chicha.

I frankly brought nothing to that party; I was an anchorite,
il penseroso,
off by himself on a rock, hearing their talk but not understanding, hearing the high whine of insects at sundown. I felt apart from humanity, as full of friction and self-pity as a fractious misfit feeding on his
miseries. Koh filled my jar again as the stingray was flayed, and as our food was cooked Eduardo sat by me in four or five minutes of silence before hesitantly saying in Spanish, “We are afraid of you.”

“Why?”

“Bad things happen,” he said. “We fear for our children.” Eduardo's secret name in Mayan was
Nicuachinel,
he who sees into the middle of things.

Elegant Spanish escaped me. I offered him something like, “Well, that's just stupid.”

But Eduardo simply said, “You go home now, please.”

So I gathered my few things, got into my Volkswagen, and headed back to Resurrección. Was I thinking about how my mother died? I have no idea, but it would have been fitting. I was twenty-four then, and full of anger and psychology. I hated my art studio courses in England, but I hated going back home for the holidays, too. I felt like a boy again, an underachiever. I challenged the plastic tree my mother put up, the chilly temperature in the house, the high-cholesterol diet of my father. And I got it into my head that the family get-together needed liquor, they were far too uptight, too puritan. A furious snow was flying outside but Atticus was through arguing with me, and my mother thought she might have some groceries she could get yet, and so off we went to Antelope. A few miles west of town it got very bad, but I listened to none of my mother's cautions about the ice. My foot was flat to the floorboard even after we started to skid. “Oh honey, no!” her last words. A full hour later I woke to find myself sitting against an orange
snow fence, hardly there at all, whiteness and silence filling the landscape, my neck and back aching, blood trickling from my forehead, and a sheriff's car and fire truck and ambulance were there on the highway like forgotten kid's toys. Watched four men hunch inside a milkwhite Thunderbird whose front end was crushed against a Dutch elm tree, their wide gray parkas and hurried wrestling mercifully hiding her head from me. I got up when I saw my father's truck hurrying toward the accident, and I flung myself inside the sheriff's car, anything but face him, I even hiked my coat up over my head like those guys on the hustle into jail when the photographers are feeding. But Atticus found me, of course, and I could hear the fierce control in his voice as he asked, “You okay, son?” The
him
in him could be fully silenced, if need be, he could put away his emotions like things he'd never had much use for. If fathering was his job, then he'd do it, and how he felt about his son after his wife was killed wasn't a feeling he'd entertain. We weren't ever the same after that. My shame got in the way.