Atticus (26 page)

Authors: Ron Hansen

BOOK: Atticus

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Atticus flashed a smile that quickly faded. “Nice story,” he said.

Scott Cody was to be arraigned for the murder of Reinhardt Schmidt and was jailed until the Wednesday court hearing. Atticus hired a good
abogado
and got on the phone with Frank, then he and Renata had found the family of Carmen MartÃnez. Renata helped him explain what his son did and did not do. Atticus took care of them, and then they found the family of Renaldo Cruz, and he took care of them, too.

Renata drove him to the house in silence, and then she said, “You'll have a full-time job fixing things for Scott.”

“Well,” he said, “you do what you can.”

Reinhardt Schmidt was not his real name, he wasn't from Germany, and no one sought him. It was like they made him up.

On Wednesday, the lawyer argued there was only a faulty police investigation of the murder of Reinhardt Schmidt and only tainted evidence of the
norteamericano
having been involved in trying to hide it, and he got the charges against Scott Cody reduced to failure to report a homicide. But in agreeing to the bargain, the prosecution insisted that he be sentenced to prison time for that crime, and so he stayed in jail.

Renata arranged for Atticus Cody's first-class flight from CancÃºn to Dallas to Denver, and he went to say goodbye
to his son. Scott was hunkered in his cell, a flat board on his knees, filling a Scribe spiral notebook with his handwriting. Seeing his father's sadness, he said, “You look glum.”

“I guess my face got frozen like that.”

Scott got up and held on to the iron bars as he tried to persuade his father not to feel sorry for him, the days were flying by, his stays in the hospital taught him how to be a good prisoner. “I have a cell of my own and plenty of time to sketch and write and play chess with Sergeant Espinoza. Renata will visit off and on; MarÃa will bring me dinner; I'm going to be teaching a class in English. I have friends here. This is the happiest I've been.”

Atticus praised him with a mellow stare. “I have a ticket for your flight to Colorado.”

Scott thought for too long. “We'll see.”

Little Jennifer had fallen and lost a front tooth. Kids had climbed up on the horsehead pump next to the highway and sloppily painted the name of their high school on it. The Antelope truck stop was so full of talk of Mexico that Atticus stayed away for a week, and when he went there again the older people at least seemed to have gotten his point. Without a hint of prior illness, his friend Earl died in his hardware store in late March, and Atticus was a pallbearer at his funeral. The governor appointed him to a fish and game board in April, and he was re-elected to the parish council at St. Mary's. He put new shoes on the horses and helped Frank and Merle and Butch and Marvin
give shots to the cattle, and at night he fell asleep with opera on the radio and a book of history in his hands.

Looking for the flush of a second bloom from his wife's perennials, Atticus got his sheep shears and knelt in the garden in June, cutting back the penstemon, rockcress, stork's-bills, and daisies. A soft rain began to fall as he heaped the green clippings on gunnysack and hauled it out back to his compost pile, and then he heard a far-off car on the highway. Why, he didn't know, but Atticus walked to the front yard, taking off his gloves, and he saw a yellow taxi heading toward the house. And while his son was still a long way off, his father rushed out to greet him.

The author wishes to thank the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Lyndhurst Foundation, and the University of California, Santa Cruz, for their generous assistance during the writing of this book.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

RON HANSEN
is the author of
Mariette in Ecstasy, Desperadoes,
and
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,
and of the short story collection
Nebraska,
for which he received an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He is the editor, with Jim Shepard, of the anthology
You've Got to Read This: Contemporary American Writers Introduce Stories That Held Them in Awe. Atticus
was a finalist for the 1996 National Book Award for Fiction. Ron Hansen lives in Northern California.

Visit
www.AuthorTracker.com
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ALSO BY RON HANSEN

Isn't it romantic

A Stay against confusion

Mariette in Ecstasy

Nebraska

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Desperadoes

For Children

The Shadowmaker

Editor

You've Got to Read This: Contemporary American Writers Introduce Stories That Held Them in Awe

(with Jim Shepard)

You Don't Know What Love Is: Contemporary American Short Stories

PRAISE

“A rich and disturbing experience. .Â .Â .
Atticus
.Â .Â . offers a world simultaneously mystical and mundane.”

âNew York Times Book Review
Â Â Â Â Â Â Â

“Ron Hansen has proven himself a master of the enigmatic, particularly that crack in the world between belief and reality.”

âBoston Globe
Â Â Â Â Â Â Â

“Atticus's travails never become maudlin, and the twist, when it comes, is faultlessly clever.”

âThe New Yorker
Â Â Â Â Â Â Â

“Compelling. .Â .Â . Thoughtful. .Â .Â . The theme of departure and attempted return is played out with poetic sensitivity by both son and father throughout the novel.”

âSan Francisco Chronicle
Â Â Â Â Â Â Â

“Masterful versatility â¦ increasingly gripping plot.”

â
Publishers Weekly
(starred review)
Â Â Â Â Â Â Â

“
Atticus
is a wrenching journey through irreparable lossâ¦. With terse dialogue and canny understatement, Hansen impresses an indelible image of father and son, and dramatizes the issues that caused the breach between themâ¦. All this is accomplished in prose neither labored nor rushed.”

âThe Nation
Â Â Â Â Â Â Â

“A finely crafted, character-driven piece of literature.”

âOrlando Sentinel
Â Â Â Â Â Â Â

“Hansen has created a superb novelâ¦. He has the rare ability to tell a story that leaves readers asking questions long after they have put down the book.”

âHouston Chronicle
Â Â Â Â Â Â Â

COPYRIGHT

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint selections in this book:

Excerpts from
Pre-Columbian Literatures of Mexico
by Miguel LeÃ³n-Portilla. Translated from the Spanish by Grace Lobanov and Miguel LeÃ³n-Portilla. Copyright Â© 1969 by the University of Oklahoma Press.

“Eye-Opener” from
The Collected Poetry of Malcolm Lowry
by Malcolm Lowry. Copyright Â© 1992 by the Estate of Malcolm Lowry. Reprinted by permission of Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc.

A hardcover edition of this book was published in 1996 by HarperCollins Publishers.

ATTICUS
. Copyright Â© 1996 by Ron Hansen. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

First HarperPerennial edition published in 1997.

The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:

Hansen, Ron, 1947â

Atticus: a novel / Ron Hansen.

p. Â Â cm.

ISBN 0-06-018217-2

EPub Edition November 2014 ISBN 9780061978142

1. Fathers and sonsâColoradoâFiction. 2. Adult childrenâDeathâFiction. 3. RanchersâColoradoâFiction. 4. MurderâMexicoâFiction. I. Title.

PS3558.A5133A93 1996

813'.54âdc20

95-38450

ISBN 0-06-092786-0 (pbk.)