by Ron Hansen
Atticus shut his eyes and tried to slaughter his thoughts, but they hung with him as he put the snapshots in the basket, got another agua mineral, and held the cold green bottle in his hand.
She came over at nine. Atticus heard a Volkswagen engine haul up and got to the front door in his pajamas and slippers just as Renata knocked on it. She looked embarrassed over getting him up. His eyes were very red and his gray white hair was jackstrawed until his hand combed it down. Dogs were barking up and down the avenue and Renata Isaacs was standing uncertainly on the brick sidewalk in skin-tight blue jeans and an Irish sweater that she’d pushed up on her arms. She called him by his first name, and then she shrieked with hurt and misery and flung herself into him with the freedom of a wife. She cried for four or five minutes and Atticus petted her hair and just held her. With carefulness.
She finally pulled her face away from him and wiped her hazy eyes with her wrist. She smiled with shame. “I was trying not to do that.”
Atticus said, “Don’t you give it a thought,” and invited her inside. And then he went upstairs to get into his green tartan robe.
She was hunting knowingly through the sideboard in the dining room when he got back downstairs. She found a box of matches and held a flame to the candles. She asked, “Don’t you hate overhead lighting?”
Atticus didn’t say. She looked up at him as she waved out the match and put it back inside the matchbox. She said, “Ever since yesterday I’ve been looking for things to complain about.”
“And nothing’s wrong enough.”
Renata dimmed the dining room lights with the rheostat and smiled. “At least it’s good to see you again.”
“You too.”
She pulled out a dining room chair as though she always sat in that one place. Atticus sat across from her.
She was not as beautiful as she’d been when he’d first met her fourteen years ago. She seemed tired and afflicted, there were hints of wrinkles and crow’s feet, and there was plenty of gray in the sable brown hair that was long and fashionably unruly. But Renata still had the face of a forties actress, a face to fall in love with, like Vivien Leigh, he thought, like Gene Tierney. Sitting in the dining room chair with her hands and elbows and breasts on the table and a flashing look of agreement in her tobacco-brown eyes, Renata seemed as affectionate as a favorite daughter, and he found himself grinning with fatherly foolishness as he said, “Good to see you.”
Renata said, “You too. We keep saying that.”
“How are you holding up?”
“Fine.”
“You sleeping okay?”
“Eh.” She attempted a smile. “I hoped you’d come down. I kept trying to phone you yesterday, to say you ought to, but your line was always busy.”
“Talking to friends.”
She propped her cheek on one hand and tapped a blue candlestick, making the golden flame tremble and then attain its height again.
“Was that you at the bookstore this afternoon?”
Renata blanked her face.
“Wasn’t sure if it was you or not. You had sunglasses on.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I had a lot on my mind.”
“I kind of figured.”
“You got here okay, though?”
“Well, they’re good people here; they help out as much as they can.”
“Are you taking it okay?”
“Don’t know what okay is. I’m sad. I’m lonesome for him. I’m angry with him for doing it, and angrier with myself for not being able to stop it.” Atticus thought and then he imagined blood on his son and he wiped his eyes with the heel of his palm. He forced his lips together to keep them still.
Renata said, “I cried myself out.”
Atticus sighed. “You get used to these things. But they still twist you up pretty tight.”
“I know.”
“You ever consider having children, Renata?”
She shook her head.
“I meant in the future.”
“I understood.”
“Children give you a second chance to get things right. You grow up all over again. But you’re so dang responsible. We worried all the time about our boys. Even the thought of my kids catching colds used to get me half frenzied.”
“Scott loved you very much,” Renata said.
“Well, I thought the world of him. Hope he knew that.” Atticus brought the right side of his robe over his pajama top, gathering it tight again. “I hate the idea of it being hasty. You’d like to think he gave it some thought at least.”
She seemed tuned out for a moment, as if hearing a hushed conversation in another room. And then she said, “Lately I haven’t been privy to his thoughts. We’ve been apart a lot.”
“You slept here off and on, though, didn’t you? With Scott?”
She hesitated before she admitted, “We had an arrangement.”
“Stuart and you.”
She hesitated again, then nodded.
“Your clothes here is how I knew. And no sheets on the other bed.”
“It wasn’t just me. Scott partied a lot.”
“Partied,” Atticus said.
She seemed about to give him examples but thought better of it. “We all live on the fringe here. We make up the rules as we go along.”
Atticus scowled at the orchids upright in a vase on the sideboard. Sink water had greened to the color of vinegar. “Scott gave me the impression you were getting back together.”
She sighed. “Oh, I don’t know. We were still cordial. But all the intensity was on his part. I’m really trying to get it right with Stuart.”
Atticus stared at Renata without comment, and she shied away from it. She looked at the kitchen. After a while he said, “Taxi driver seemed to know this house. Called it Cozy-something.”
“Cotzibaha. It’s a Mayan honorific for ’house of the artist.’”
“Was Scott that famous?”
“He went native when he first got here. Hung out with a shaman named Eduardo. And he gave them money. You get famous fast doing that.”
“I suppose.” Atticus looked at the hard calluses of his hands and scratched at one with his thumbnail. “Another thing. Was he joking or was Scott truly renting this house from criminals?”
She laughed. “Marty? Marty sells real estate in Chicago.”
“Oh. I get it.”
“You asked that like a detective.”
“Well …” He held a hand against his yawn. “Would you like some coffee, or, I don’t know, a pop?”
“Yes, I think so.” Atticus half-lifted from his chair, but she was already up. “Don’t. I’ll get it.”
She got a Corona from the refrigerator and was rummaging for an opener in a kitchen drawer when she caught sight of the Kodak snapshots. She glanced at him and found knowledge of her in his face. She worriedly stared at her shameless pose on the sand, then flipped the pictures into the basket and blushed with embarrassment as she sat with him again. She drank beer straight from the bottle and finished half before she placed it in front of her.
“Stuart take it?”
“We weren’t a ménage à trois, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Atticus softly petted his hair. “I’m finding my education kinda deficient here.”
She smiled. “We weren’t a threesome.”
“Oh.” Atticus reddened and said, “You got my mind reeling now.”
“It shows.”
“Those pictures. I was just hunting anything handy. You know, to try to figure things out.”
She was all inwardness for a while, and she faced nothing as she said, “Unfortunately there’s not much to know.”
She told him she’d first seen Scott on Wednesday afternoon. She was just coming from a friend’s studio at the American College where she’d been sitting as a nude model. “We needed the money,” she said.
“We?”
“Well, just me, I guess. Wrong pronoun.”
“You’ll inherit twenty-five thousand from his trust
fund. Frank had a look at his will.”
“Really? How sweet of him.” She gave it some thought and then changed her expression. She ran a hand through her hair. “Shall I go on?”
She told him she walked with Scott to The Scorpion at five and Stuart joined them a half hour later. Scott hardly talked to her or Stuart, and he drank like drunkenness was the whole idea. Wednesday was a fiesta and there was a Children’s Defense Fund benefit at a hall in the Marriott, where they paid twenty dollars each for Mexican food on paper plates and Renata and four other Americans gave a reading of Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana. She once looked up from a page of the script and saw Scott sitting far in the back and holding a full pitcher of margarita up to his mouth like a frat boy, and she got so angry she hardly spoke to him afterward. And then he disappeared and she threw a cast party at Stuart’s villa and she regretted her anger and tried to telephone him at his house. There was no answer, so she left a message. Late that night Scott telephoned her and said he’d forgotten where he’d parked his Volkswagen but he was pretty sure it was in the jardín. Would she get it for him? Scott told her he was finishing up something at the house in the jungle where he painted.
“And how’d he sound?”
“Distracted and harried and really tired,” she said. “I offered to go out there, because it sounded like he could use a friend, but he was pretty insistent that he have a few days on his own.” Renata’s eyes welled with tears. “I hear that conversation over and over again, and there’s nothing in his voice that would have made me think he was going to do what he did.”
Atticus was sitting there, listening intently, his hard blue eyes fixed on his crossed and hairless white ankles, as still as if he were cut out of ice. “But you went out there. Even though he said not to.”
Renata said she was opening Stuart’s bookstore the first thing in the morning because Stuart had to go see their wholesaler. She got down to the jardín around sunrise and too easily found Scott’s car. Even if he were drunk he ought to have drifted across it. She thought something was wrong. So she forgot about the bookstore and went out there. She glimpsed a shotgun on the floor and Scott sitting in a green leather wingback chair. His face had been half shot off.
“How long had he been dead?”
“We don’t know.”
“Was there a note or anything?”
“Signed on his sketch pad. ’No one is to blame.’”
Atticus heard it, and heard it again. “Well, heck, I feel better already. How about you? Huh? We’re both off the hook.”
She reached a hand toward him. “He wasn’t thinking.”
Weighed low with grief, all Atticus could manage was, “We didn’t raise him to—” And then he fell silent and held a hand to his eyes and cried.
Renata got up from the dining room table and walked around it in order to wrap her arms around him and press her hot cheek against his hair. “We’ve been put through a lot,” she said.
Atticus held himself stiffly, then finally patted her left hand and said, “You ought to go now. It’s late.”
“If it’s okay, I’ll stay here.”
“I’d like that.”
She stood up from him but petted her hand on his hard shoulder as she said, “The funeral Mass is at noon. You’ll have to bury him in Mexico for now.”
“I’ll want to get him up to our family plot in Antelope.”
“You probably can, but it will take a little time. Stuart can help you with the government people you’ll have to pay off. You can bribe your way out of practically anything here. La mordida, they call it: the bite.”
Atticus stared out at the moonshine on the sea. And then he asked, “How about the police? Was there a police report or, you know, an investigation?”
“Don’t expect much from it,” Renata said. “The Mexican police don’t get too involved in American cases unless our government instructs them to do otherwise. Which they’re not likely to do. And there’s no coroner; no autopsy; probably just a pro forma investigation. Mexico can be pretty casual about suicide.”
“Suicide,” Atticus said, and spoke no more. When he looked up again, he realized Renata had already gone upstairs.
Much later Atticus woke to words composed with the ticking k’s and t’s of Mayan speech. Getting into his green tartan robe and slippers, he walked down the steps until he could stoop and look into the candlelighted dining room. Four campesinos in white shirts and white pants were familiarly slapping poker cards onto the dining table and sipping Jameson’s Irish whiskey from a green bottle that was being passed around. A fat man was using a nailhead to scrape tobacco out of his pipe bowl into a frail teacup while another man played a jack of hearts by pounding it down with his hand. A little man in his forties with flowing hair and a Padres baseball cap turned around in his dining room chair and solemnly peered at him, and Atticus tramped back upstairs.
Lights were on in Renata’s room and the door was halfway open. Even in high school, these were the hours Scott furiously painted, his stereo faintly playing Edith Piaf or early Bob Dylan, the hallway full of the pungence of turpentine and Marlboro cigarettes. Atticus knocked softly and heard Renata ask, “¿Quién es?” Who is it?
“Me,” he said.
“You too, huh?”
He found her sitting up in bed in a far-too-open pink kimono, a book of Shakespeare’s plays held against her stomach. A half-full Corona was in her left hand. Atticus forced himself to turn his head away, and Renata tightened her robe. She asked, “You look in on his friends?”
“Had a peek. Which one was Eduardo?”
She was surprised. “You’ve got a good memory. The guy in the Padres cap, I think.” She took a mouthful of beer and chilled her neck with the bottle. “Scott would go out to their shacks in the barrio, feed on their fried dog meat and iguanas, get horribly sick with their sicknesses, and then go out there again with their next invitation. He said they made him an honorary Mayan.” She smiled. “You don’t suppose it’s possible that it was all sarcasm on their part, do you?”
“Well, he always was a friendly kid.”
She fell into a reverie as she said, “And he’d try just about anything.”
“What is it downstairs, some kind of a wake?”
“I hear they pretend a friend has played a good trick on the world and they party like they’re in on the joke.” She drank some beer and held the bottle on the mattress. “Their funerals take place a year later when they rebury the body. And then they howl with sadness.”
Atticus looked at a clock by her bed. After two. “Well, morning comes awful early,” he said.
“You know what the name Atticus means? Scott told me. Simplicity, purity, and intelligence.”
“Always making things up, that kid.”
“You two are so interesting. You’re the formidable figure he idolized and struggled not to become, and he’s who you’d be if you didn’t have all your good habits and rules and boundaries.”
“I forgot. You studied psychology.”
Renata flushed and put a hand to her face. “I just realized: I was using the present tense.”
“Hard not to,” he said.
She focused on him and then on her book. “Shall I read to you?” She took his silence as permission, and she beautifully read from Shakespeare’s King John: “‘Grief fills the room up of my absent child, lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words, remembers me of all his gracious parts, stuffs out his vacant garments with his form.’” Renata closed the book and her brown eyes sorrowed as she recited, “‘Then have I reason to be fond of Grief.’”
THREE
Atticus walked out to the pool in his pajamas with hot coffee in a cup. The terra-cotta tiles were cool against his feet, but the salt air was as warm as it is in a parlor of tall windows. A gray freighter was just in sight, forcing its way so slowly it seemed stopped, and a fishing boat with Americans in sunglasses on board was angling out into
the Gulf Stream. Along the salt white beaches, Mexican boys in hotel jackets were kicking out deck chairs and cranking open big umbrellas and putting out the red plastic flags that warned of the undertow with the word peligroso. A swallow flew across the yard and alighted on an upstairs railing. The swallow cocked its head to the right, jabbed a half-smoked cigarette out of an ashtray up there, and then flew away. The cigarette stirred in the wind and rolled along the railing. The frame of the tall sliding glass door between the dining room and the terrace was harshly scratched and indented near its lock as if a pike or a crowbar had forced it open. Either it was thieves, he guessed, or like as not his son forgot his front door keys.
Water was on in a shower upstairs. Atticus finished his coffee and went back inside and turned on the gas burner under the glass coffeepot. Whispers and dish noise had awakened him at sunup as the Mayans tidied the place when their wake was over. One of them had put the Jameson’s whiskey bottle on the red kitchen windowsill. Oranges were in a pink string bag by the refrigerator; copper pans were hanging over the stove. Atticus opened a side cupboard and found it jammed with bottles of spice and vitamins and a plastic bag of chopped green weed, presumably marijuana. Atticus sighed and put a slice of Wonder bread in the toaster. Wires in the toaster glowed orange as he looked out through the sink window’s wooden louvers to an old red Volkswagen that hadn’t been there yesterday. Sketch pads and paints and rolled-up canvases overheaped the seats. His toast popped up and he spooned on jam, thinking, You’ll have to get an inventory. His coffee boiled and he turned off the gas burner. He refilled his cup and sipped from it as he wandered into the dining room. A shotgun shell of a brass lipstick case was standing upright on the sideboard. Hadn’t been there before. Mayans probably found it on the floor when they cleaned up. Atticus took off the top and saw that its blood-red tip was crumbled, and then he saw a faint trace of red on the dining room mirror he was facing.
A freshly showered Renata skipped down the steps in her pink kimono, her hair tangling wetly at her collar. “Aren’t those pajamas smart,” she said, and slipped past him to get four oranges out of the string bag in the kitchen and a paring knife out of a wooden block by the stove.