by Ron Hansen
“My prescription’s just right, Dad. I have pills that make me harmless and stupid, pretty much the kind of guy who sits on a bench and feeds croutons to the pigeons. I’d rather walk in a southerly wind and not know a hawk from a handsaw.”
Atticus carried the tin bucket to One Sock and held it for him until all the feed was gone.
The Codys gathered together for Christmas Eve in the great, white, three-story house that Atticus grew up in, that was inherited by his older brother and was owned now by State Senator Frank L. Cody and his wife, Marilyn. She had given birth to three girls and a boy and was the fourth of six children, so there wasn’t room at the dining room table for all the company, and her brothers Merle and Butch and Marvin hunched toward their TV trays from the sofa, and Scott, in spite of many pleas and objections, chose to eat at a card table with his nieces. Oyster stew and crackers would be served, then Marilyn’s Waldorf salad and spinach quiche, Esther’s ambrosia, Cassie’s scalloped potatoes with Kraft cheese slices, and Connie’s stalks of broccoli in a hollandaise sauce, but before all that there were green magnums of a fancy champagne that Scotty had traveled all the way into Denver for just that afternoon. “Well, I be go to hell,” said Marvin. “Denver.”
“We call this nose tickler,” Merle told Scott.
“Champagne gives me the most gruesome headaches,” said Esther.
A few minutes later Frank herded his four-year-old over to her Uncle Scott and blandly asked, “You sip any of that Veuve Clicquot, Jennifer?”
She saw her father’s cue and nodded.
“What’s your opinion of it?”
She hesitated and then recited, “It lacked a certain je ne sais quoi." And she flinched when she heard sudden laughter from all her uncles and aunts.
“Oh, you, Frank,” Cassie said. “Did you put her up to that?”
Then the family found their places. All held hands as Frank recited the blessing before the meal, and at the finish Marilyn mentioned Serena: “We still miss you, Mom.”
Children looked at Atticus and at Scott.
Then Frank held forth from the head of the dining room table, being funny and hectoring and omniscient in his English suit and European tie and his ring from the Colorado School of Mines. Atticus heard later from Marilyn that Scott watched with jealousy as Atticus and Frank huddled together over black coffee to talk about income tax write-downs on their Cody Petroleum partnership and figure out how many heifers the cattle operation ought to breed in the fall.
At eight o’clock Midge played Santa Claus underneath the giant pine tree in the teal, high-ceilinged living room, giving out a great stack of presents. Luciano Pavarotti grandly sang carols, and pretty wrapping paper was loudly torn, and children’s toys rattled and zinged and nickered across the carpet. Atticus carefully peeled away the red paper on his present from Scott and popped open a box containing a Swiss wristwatch that, according to Connie, was worth one thousand dollars. Atticus scowled and asked his son, “Are you trying to throw your money away?” but Scott was sticking a green cigar in his mouth and hugely grinning into Butch’s videotape camera and saying, “Isn’t this great?” Then Atticus jiggled a grandchild on his knee as Scott got his gift from his older brother and ogled a handsome Winchester twelve-gauge shotgun with checkering on its hardwood stock. “Wow! Heat! Won’t those banditos be surprised!”
Atticus stared with irritation at Frank, who justified the shotgun by saying, “I heard Dad got you out hunting again. And I figured you probably had havelina and deer and poisonous snakes down there.”
His kid brother sighted down the dark barrel and said, “Yeah. In the jungle. Snakes are called yellowbites.”
Atticus hefted a heavy box from behind his chair and presented it to Scott. “You may not want to haul it down to Mexico with you on the plane. I’ll ship it maybe.”
Scott hastily tore off the green wrapping paper just as he did as a child, and he blushed when he saw an off-brand cassette player. “Wow, Dad! Thanks! A Radiola!”
“Earl—you remember Earl at the hardware—he told me it plays just as good as a Sony or an Aiwa and the others, and Radiola’s an American brand.”
“Well, I’m proud to do my part for the war effort, Dad.”
“Didn’t put batteries in it. I figured you had electric in that shack of yours or you wouldn’t be painting at night.”
“My neighbors don’t have it, but I do.”
Atticus said, “You got a mike built right in it so you can record, too. What I planned on was to have you mail us tapes of yourself talking into it. And we’d do the same for you, of course, any time we have family occasions. Wouldn’t be like we’re all so far away.”
Scott grinned hugely at him and said, “I love Christmas!”
There was talk in the air when Atticus woke up for Mass on Christmas Day; and Indian speech that was like the hissing, popping noise of flames creeping across damp wood. And then there was silence. Atticus got into his clothes and stood just outside his son’s upstairs room, trying to decide if he ought to go in and then gently nudging the door ajar and holding there before he understood that Scott was gone, the gray smoke was incense, and the harsh smell that of whiskey. His son had taken Mary and Joseph and the Wise Men from the Nativity set in the dining room and put birthday candles around them on his schoolboy desk. And underneath them on the oak floor Scott had arranged a half dozen more birthday candles on bricks that he’d blessed with Jack Daniel’s.
Atticus walked into the kitchen and saw the ceiling light was still on and the teapot was simmering hot water on top of the stove. A Christmas snow put round caps on the fence posts and lay in the jack oak like socks and mittens. Scott’s shoe prints slued bluely across the yard to the yellow barn and then to the quarter-mile windbreak of loblolly pines and crabapple trees where Atticus kept the older farm machinery. Atticus put on his Army Air Corps jacket and cattleman’s hat and went out. Cold snow crunched beneath his gray cowboy boots with the toothgrind noise of cattle chewing. Jewels of sunlight sparked from the whiteness everywhere. And there under the green pine limbs was the red hay baler, the yellow crawler tractor and bulldozer blade, the plows and reaper and cultivator that were going orange with rust, and the milkwhite Thunderbird just as it was sixteen years ago when Scott took Serena to the store. The high speed of the accident had destroyed one headlight and crumpled up the right fender and hood like writing paper meant to be thrown away. The right wheel tilted on its axle as though it had not been fully bolted on, and the rubber tire shredded from it like black clothing scraps.
Atticus walked around to the driver’s side and opened the door. The iron complained at his pull but Scott did not look up, he stayed as he was, in his father’s red plaid hunting coat, just sitting there, one wrist atop the big steering wheel, his right hand gingerly touching the windshield glass where it was crushed and spiderwebbed on the passenger’s side. A milky light was filtering through the half-inch screen of snow. Atticus asked, “You okay?”
Scott pressed his cold-reddened fingertips into a crack and said, “Wondered if her hair was still there. Crows must be nesting with it.”
Atticus could only say, “I should of got rid of this car years ago.”
Scott dropped his hands and forearms into his lap. He said, “A great thing about Spanish is that there’s so little responsibility in it. You don’t have to take the blame. You don’t say ’I cracked the plate.’ You say ‘The plate cracked itself.’” Scott paused and just stared at the grayly misted speedometer as if there were ugly pictures there.
And Atticus said, “You don’t say you killed your mother. You say your mother was killed.”
Atticus nipped off a green cigar’s end and spit it into the wastepaper basket as Scott stooped toward the gas flame of the stovetop to get his own cigar going. Then Scott got his bottle of Armagnac and they walked out into Christmas night.
The moon was high and the night was sugared with stars. An Antelope County road plow had again scraped the mail route
s to a shine, and zero cold made the snow underfoot as hard as linoleum. Scott tipped up the Armagnac and Atticus waited and stopped himself from giving his known opinions about it. Soon Scott was walking again and saying, “She once strolled into the dining hall at Hirsch in nothing but a bedsheet.”
“You’re talking about Renata?”
“Right. Attendants tried to herd her out but Renata did this fantastic pirouette, the sheet swooshing off her, all the guys howling, and she’s standing there in the altogether with the orderlies rushing to haul her out when she flings her hands high and says, ’But people like me this way!’”
“She fine now?”
“Oh yeah; better than me. She tried acting in New York for a while—that’s as crazy as she’s been.”
“Huh,” Atticus said.
“She’s got a room in this pink villa owned by a Brit.”
“In Mexico.”
“Yep. The friend is Stuart Chandler. Runs the English-language bookstore, grows orchids, holds forth on sundry topics. He’s the American consul there.”
They walked fifty yards without further comment, and then Scott teetered as he tainted the road with gray ash. “Enjoying your cigar, Dad?”
Atticus turned and talked through his teeth. “Isn’t lit.”
“Like mine a little hotter than that.”
“It’s nearly tolerable this way.”
Wheeling snow twisted by in a sudden gust and then flattened on a highway that shone in the moonlight like wax. Atticus heard Scott finish a sentence with, “Went native for a while and got into shamanism.”
“Renata did?”
“Me.” His son looked at his cigar and then huddled over it as he lit it again.
“You have your own religion.”
“Shamanism isn’t instead of; it’s in addition to.”
“Why’s everything you do have to be so different? Wouldn’t it be easier to just do things like they have been done and not fuss so much inventing?”
“I have been a trial to you, haven’t I?”
“Well, that’s just being a father, mostly.”
Scott shifted his green cigar in his mouth and withdrew inside Atticus’s black cashmere overcoat. After a while he said, “‘The air bites shrewdly.’”
“Are you quoting?”
“Hamlet.”
Atticus tugged off a kid leather glove and offered his left hand to the north wind. “About five degrees.”
Scott tilted the Armagnac bottle again and tottered up against a high snowbank as he drank. He then capped the bottle top with his thumb, put his cigar back in his mouth, and sat heavily in the snow so that his hips were deeper than his knees. He was surprised to be there for a second and then simpered like a dunce.
“You’re just a tiny bit borracho, son.”
“And you’re being real agreeable about it. Expected you to be more fractious.” Atticus got the whiskey bottle from him and Scott gave his blue eyes to the night sky, the cigar centered between his teeth. “See up there? Ursa Major?”
“You mean the Big Dipper.”
“Exactly. The Mayans call that Seven Macaw.”
“Hmm.”
“Also, there’s a story about the Pleiades being Four Hundred Boys who got too drunk on chicha and were sent up there when they died. Mayans call their corn whiskey ’sweet poison.’”
“Helluva brand name.”
“You’re darn tootin’. We oughta copyright it, put a little circle around the R.” Scott offered his left arm and his father attached his own to it, lifting his son up from the snow. And then Atticus was walking the quarter mile back to the house and Scott Cody was just behind him saying, “Heart of sky, heart of earth, one true god, green road.”
Weeks later, Atticus walked out to the mailbox and found an airmail envelope from Mexico. But inside was a letter from Scott to Frank that thanked him again for the shotgun and talked about other worrisome things.
After a late night of drinking and dancing at The Scorpion, the Delta Gamma from California tells me that she’s bad and she’ll wreck my life, she’s done it to a slew of guys. She’s falling apart as she tells me she wants to love just one person, and for that person to love just her. She’s twenty and stewed and majoring in Theater Arts, so I have reason to believe she’s being dramatic, but then she’s in my lap—we’re in my VW, so this is no mean feat—telling me what a mistake this would be, but to take her now, here, quickly. Be my fantasy, she says. And I know I am in way over my head.
And then there’s Renata. I have followed her from town to town for more than fifteen years. She calls it stalking, I call it love. She throws me a bone now and then—a tryst, an oh-what-the-hell affair—but more often she stamps her foot and shoos me. I have been getting the go-aways lately and it’s beginning to feel done, over, finished. We talked when I got back and she told me she was, for the very first time, in love—meaning no offense, of course, though it did add a caustic charge to the midnight cigar and too-many whiskeys that my friends put down in front of me.
I know these two stories go together—less than forty-eight hours separate them—and in both I was the stooge. On the phone with Renata I tried not to say, “Try to get it right this time,” but that was there, and I think that I have lost something, and I lost it before Renata, lost it as far back as the accident. This is not a complaint; I just have no clue.
Confessions like this are maybe not what older brothers like to hear, but I know you’ll be flattered by it. I hear the three favorite words are not “I love you” but “What’s your opinion?” A guy I know here chides me for being softheaded. We’re playing pool at the American Bar. And I am sailing on Coronas and shots of tequila. The Warriors and Chicago are on cable and the furthest gone exiles are hooting at some nifty moves in the paint. Who’s that singing on the jukebox? Whitney Houston? I love that song. I hold out my heart for dissection and see this guy Reinhardt looking at me like I’m a mark, like I’ve got “Kick me” pinned on the back of my shirt. Renata’s walking all over you, that sort of thing.
Long meaningless strolls, holding hands, chips and salsa by the pool, skin against skin, how about a back rub?—it’s full of intimacy and self-revelation, and I feel lost without it. Love in my shoes. Love in the hand on my thigh. Love hanging around like a good waiter when we dine by candlelight. Want it, need it, gotta have it. I’m forty years old and the clock’s still running.
All I can do now is paint. There are feelings then, big and troublesome. But with the other stuff, I have no idea. I’m trying my hand at patience. I try your patience, too, I know. Try to remember that every President has a flake in the family.
Scott
Late that night, Atticus got a phone call from Frank. “Dad? I got a letter to you from Scott by mistake.”
“Oh?” Atticus said. “What’s it say?”
“He thanks you for the Radiola. Says he’s working hard and he’s off the sauce. Half page is all. Seems fine.”
“Well, that’s good to hear.”
On a Wednesday in February, Atticus listened to the public radio station for company as he cooked up an onion stew and poured it over rye bread, slowly eating it in the dining room with The Denver Post propped up on his milk glass. Marilyn would be stopping by at noon with her own philosophies of good housekeeping, so Atticus only rinsed off the pan, the plate, the milk glass and spoon, then completed some government accounting forms at his rolltop desk and went upstairs at nine. Howling winds rattled the windowpanes and piped like a hot teapot at every wooden gap in the house. His upstairs radio was tuned to opera, La Bohème, and his wife was still not there. He slanted into heaped pillows in his pajamas in order to read petroleum reports and then woke up with the side lamp on and loose pages sloppily pitched to the floor. He couldn’t get back to sleep, so he put on his Black Watch tartan robe and slippers and walked through all the upstairs rooms, stopping especially in Scott’s. His paintbrushes were in a red coffee can just as they’d been for over twenty years and his child
hood sketches and watercolors overlapped on the walls, but Atticus could no longer smell the linseed oil and turpentine and paints that used to mean his son to him, he could only smell whiskey and tobacco and the harsh incense of his shaman rites.
Atticus turned up the kitchen radio so he could hear people give their hasty opinions on a nighttime phone-in show while he peeled a Washington apple at the stoop window and looked out toward the machine shed. Horizontal snow was flying through the halo of the green yard light and carrots of ice were hanging from the roof’s iron gutters. Atticus ate apple slices off the sharp blade of his paring knife. Without knowing why, he looked to the pantry, and just then a milk pitcher slipped off its hook and crashed onto the pantry floor.
Hours after sunup Atticus carried a tin pail of hot water out to One Sock and Pepper, scooped oats into a pan, and then crouched quietly in a stall corner, looking up at the horses’ slow chewing. A sparrow flew in an upper window and got lost in the night of the barn, slashing among the high rafters and pigeon roosts and loudly rapping into a penthouse window before swooping low enough to veer out through the great door and rise up.
Atticus petted One Sock along the withers and went outside to his snow-topped Ford pickup for his daily trip to the Antelope truck stop. And then he got the feeling that the house telephone was ringing. He argued with himself about whether he ought to go to it or no. The truck’s ignition ground like an auger in iron and the engine caught and Atticus gave it gas for half a minute, looking out at the yellow barn and silo and unhenned coop, Serena not putting eggs in her gray sweater pockets as the white chickens strutted away, Serena’s peacock not jerking its glare at the dog and making its glamorous tail display. Weather reports on the truck radio said the temperature was up to fifteen degrees, but his bare fingers were still pretty sore, so he got out and went back inside to get his yellow gloves.
Atticus stopped by the house telephone and looked at it, and the telephone began ringing. He hesitated and then picked up the receiver and heard Renata Isaacs. She first reminded him of who she was. “I haven’t forgotten,” he said. She said she was calling from Resurrección. And then she talked to him about Scott. Atticus pulled over a spindle chair, and she explained the circumstances. She was trying not to cry. Atticus was sitting there, not saying anything he meant to, and wiping a porthole in the steamed windowpane with one yellow glove. The truck’s engine was running at high speed, and the smoke from the tailpipe was shaping gray people that a hard wind ripped away. She said how terrible she felt, she was as upset as he was, she hadn’t known his son was that depressed. Atticus accepted her sympathy and he wrote down her telephone number and then he lost himself until he heard her hang up on the other end. Atticus couldn’t get up without gripping the crosspiece on the spindle chair. He went out and switched off the truck’s ignition, and then he telephoned Frank in his Antelope office, giving him the news.