by Ron Hansen
“I was fishing for compliments,” Atticus said.
“Sleep well?” she asked, but sought no answer. Sleeplessness welted her own eyes, and she seemed petulant and irritated. She halved the oranges and placed them in a juicer, then pulled the juicer’s handle down harder than the oranges demanded.
She wiped a juice glass against the pink silk. “How about some o.j.?”
“Had some.”
Renata drank juice from her glass and slapped the paring knife into the wooden block. “Weird day,” she said. Her voice harbored the hushed abrasion of a shoe on carpet.
His hand wiped a trickle from the hot-water faucet handle. Bad washer. “Looked upstairs for his wallet,” he said. “Expect the police have it still.”
“Don’t know.”
“I found this lipstick.”
She looked at it. “Oh, thanks.” She put it in her kimono pocket.
“Wasn’t my color.”
She faintly smiled. “You’re more a Spring, aren’t you.”
“Well, I try to be.”
Silence hung in the air between them like cigarette smoke.
Atticus finally asked, “Was there a break-in here? Door there looked jimmied open.”
She fell into thought and then she offered, “Either that or he lost his keys. Drunks do lose things.”
“Was he that way often?”
She lifted her glass. “Maybe just around me.”
“And why’s that?”
She finished her orange juice before saying, “I hate this.”
“Hate what?”
She put her hands flat on the kitchen countertop and paused as if rehearsing what she was about to say. But the front door opened and a high male voice called, “¡Hola!” Renata informed Atticus secretly, as if cheating, “Stuart,” and then called back, “In the kitchen!”
Stuart Chandler was a tall, fashionable Englishman of Atticus’s age, with a full head of white hair he’d sleeked back with gel, skin that was a mahogany brown, and shrewd, impatient, hazel green eyes. Dressed in a fine black blazer but pleated white trousers and white docksiders, he seemed a yachtsman, and he sauntered into the kitchen as if he wanted to talk to the chef, first smiling at Renata, then firmly shaking Atticus’s hand and offering his name in the way of a famous man often introduced. Stuart said, “I only wish we could be meeting in happier circumstances, Mr. Cody. I have three grown sons of my own, so I think I can fathom the feelings you must have now. You do have my deepest sympathy.”
“Appreciate it,” he said.
“Are you coping?”
“Oh yeah.” Atticus filled his cup. “How about some coffee?”
“No, thank you. Cigarettes are my only poison.” He looked affectionately at Renata. “And how are you, darling?”
Renata said she was fine. She put her orange-juice glass in the sink.
Atticus paused and said, “Renata was telling me last night you could help get my boy’s body out of Mexico.”
“Yes,” Stuart said, “but there’s a ludicrous bureaucracy to battle first. We’ll have to bury Scott today and hope for intercession from the United States Embassy in Mexico City. I have position but no power, alas. And we need permission to have him exhumed. I heard from … Frank?”
“Frank,” he said.
“We talked about it just this morning. Our thinking is harmonious. You can go home to Colorado tonight, and I’ll be pleased to assume the burden of having him shipped up to Antelope.”
“I’ll do it. You don’t have to pop for me to ship my own boy.”
Stuart turned to Renata. “Oh, was that patronizing?”
“Stuart meant—”
“Forget it,” Atticus said.
Stuart held his gaze on him. “We are expected at the funeral parlor,” he said. And with the frankness of someone used to having his orders obeyed, Stuart added, “Hadn’t you better go get changed?”
And he was sitting on the right of an air-conditioned Dodge station wagon as Stuart Chandler gingerly urged it along a street that was rough as an alley. Atticus had gotten into a white shirt that was as hard as cardboard, a gray silk tie, a fancy black cashmere suit that would be too hot by noontime, and his highly polished lizard-skin boots. Stuart had rolled down his side window four inches so he could hold his Salem cigarette far from offense, and he faced away from Atticus when he exhaled. Atticus had run out of things to say. He held his gray cowboy hat in one hand and flattened his hair and the gray wings of his mustache as he looked out at the centro.
Green and pink buildings were high above them on both sides and hot sunlight glared like snow off the walls. Dark old women were sitting in the shade of doorways and saying things to famished children. Skinny dogs were running at the station wagon’s tires and jumping up at the side windows as Atticus scowled down.
“Atticus,” Stuart said. “Wasn’t that the name—”
“Yes.”
“Of the father in—”
“To Kill a Mockingbird.”
“You’ve had this conversation before.”
“Up until the sixties I had the name to myself.”
“I shall bathe you in silence,” Stuart said. He turned the car onto El Camino Real and was forced to stop for a friendly man pushing a frijoles cart. Stuart let the Salem fall from his hand into the street. He drove forward. “I have been a citizen of the United States since 1962,” he said. “I first went there to be the pre-Columbian art specialist at Sotheby’s. Have you heard of Sotheby’s, Mr. Cody?”
“Auction house.”
“Well, I got sacked, to put it frankly, and it was the best thing that ever happened to me. A friend asked, as I was unemployed, if I was interested in taking over his little Mexican shop, selling paperback books in English. And I fell quite in love with the place.” Stuart seemed to grow bored with the thought. Half a minute later he said, “What a bother love is.”
An unhappy girl in a dirty pink dress was wrapping hot corn tortillas in sheets of newspaper outside a shop. A frail old man was carrying kindling up the hill in a sling that was looped over his forehead.
Stuart fought to have a conversation and said, “I have been the American consul here for five years now.” A havoc of lines hatched his roasted brown face.
“A pretty good job, is it?”
“Well, it isn’t a job so much as a social position. And there’s no pay, of course, and that is a pity.”
“You oughta be real proud.”
“Don’t encourage me. We had a police chief here, the jefe; he’s retired now, but you know where he was from? Omaha! The town has gone to hell since he left. Omaha’s near Denver, isn’t it?”
“Eight hours by car if you speed.”
“Oh, facts,” he said. Stuart stared ahead. “The chamber of commerce here has fourteen members whose origins are Europe or Canada or the United States, compared to just thirty Mexicans. If you go to hospital, you’ll find no less than one-fourth of the doctors and nurses have their degrees from the U.S. And the current principal of the high school is from Williams College, in Massachusetts. We are like the Romans in Palestine, the British in India. We are less than ten percent of the population but provide seventy-two percent of its tax base. And so we are catered to.” Stuart peered farther down the street and said, “Hup!” and braked, further rolling down his side window as he said, “My beggar.”
A one-legged man on crutches swung along on his good leg to get to the car. His iron gray eyes looked in at Atticus and then at Stuart and then he hung his hand out on the rolled-down window glass. Stuart talked to him in Spanish, held out a half-dollar in peso notes, and then rolled up the window again. The one-legged man was crossing himself and speaking Spanish as Stuart drove away.
“Hector prays for me. Words very pretty to the ear, a poem about my charity being recorded in Heaven. All very stupid, of course, but in a poor country one is expected to pay a little to the street people, and I have chosen Hector.” Stuart rapped the horn and a boy scampered off the ro
ad. The boy watched them pass with a soccer ball on his hip. Stuart smiled. “You see how my Hector was looking for me? Already this morning he has probably stopped by my villa. Such fidelity! I hope to finally elope with Hector. We’ll float on bright rafts in the Bay of Campeche.”
Stuart went down Cinco de Mayo street and then into a greenly shaded alley. He stopped the car in a dirt parking area behind a pink mortuary that was called Cipiano. Stuart paused as he opened his door. “Are you prepared for this, Atticus?”
“Have to be.”
Stuart got out but then angled under the station wagon’s ceiling. “You could wait in the car, perhaps. Or you could go over to the parroquia. Renata will be there soon.”
Atticus got out of the Dodge and nudged the door closed. “You go ahead and I’ll be at your heels.”
The pink mortuary’s interior was as cool and damp as a flower shop. A plump woman in a green shift that she’d hiked up high on her thighs was squirting a floor with hose water, and four shy brown men in straw cowboy hats and snap-buttoned polyester shirts were standing apart from a painted black coffin that looked more like a hope chest. Hewn into its soft pine wood were rising suns, pheasants, butterflies, and flowers. Tilted atop the coffin was a copper-framed picture of a fiery Sacred Heart of Jesus held within a green crown of thorns. A heavy man in a gray sharkskin suit and heavily pomaded, wavy hair slid a purple kneeler across the room, halted it at the head of the coffin, and held his hand on it as he hinted the father of the deceased forward.
Atticus dipped off his cowboy hat and got down onto the kneeler with pain. His hand floated over wood that was still tacky with paint as he offered up the familiar prayers he’d been saying since he was a child. Without turning, he asked the Englishman, “Would they open it?” He heard Stuart’s fluent Spanish and faced him. The guy in the sharkskin suit was up on his toes, whispering into Stuart’s ear.
“Cipiano is saying you are not permitted inspection,” Stuart said. “Embalming isn’t done here, you see.” He waited for another sentence. “And it has been already two days.”
Atticus heard a phrase from holy Scripture, Lord, by this time he stinketh. He looked around for a hand tool and a hunched, old Mexican found a claw hammer for him to pull the finishing nails from the top with, but when he took it from him Atticus felt his back so softly touched by another he hardly knew the owner was there. And he stared up at Cipiano as he held his hands in prayer at his chin, his face a wreck of sorrow. “Está feo, Señor Cody,” he said, and Stuart translated, “He is ugly.”
“Le falta la cara.”
“The face is missing.”
“Hicimos todo lo posible.”
“His people did what they could.”
“Es mejor recordar su hijo que verlo.”
“Cipiano says it is better to remember your son than to see him.”
Atticus held the hammer and knelt there, thinking how he’d feel if he did what it was better to have done. And he fought against Cipiano’s wishes and used the hammer to pry up ten finishing nails and tilt up the coffin lid.
But it was too awful; he gave it just a few seconds. A hot blast of horrible stink forced him back with a hand over his nose and mouth, and he only had a quick, hideous glimpse of Scott before he let the coffin lid fall: his blond hair in chaos, his teeth gray and clenched as if he were biting hard on a stick, and half his face just a stew of skin and bone, the other half green with huge swelling.
Atticus stood there, his hands at his sides, as the funeral parlor’s carpenters nailed down the pine again, and then he helped the Mexicans hoist the painted coffin and ferry it out to the station wagon and slide it into the open rear. The old Dodge was so low- slung with the heavy weight that iron rang off the cobbled paving when Cipiano gently eased the car toward Cinco de Mayo. And then Stuart and Atticus strolled the four blocks to the parish church, Atticus keeping his hands in his pockets and his pink face tilted up to the sun. They had fifteen minutes until the funeral. Stuart fought a wink as he said, “Isn’t Renata the sultry number.”
“She’s a lovely woman.”
“Oh, none of that! She’s a siren!”
Atticus shot him a fierce glance and said, “I got other things on my mind.”
“I have offended your courtliness, haven’t I.”
Atticus failed to reply.
Stuart’s face changed and they walked in silence for a few minutes. And he asked, “How old are you, Atticus?”
“Sixty-seven.”
“I shall be sixty-four in May. And I fear I shan’t be much older.” Stuart stopped by the party-colored cart of a man selling paper cones of green ice and asked, “Will you permit me?”
“Okay.”
Stuart held up two fingers, saying “Dos,” and passed one cone to him. The green was peppermint and the ice was a nice pain to his teeth, but only after he’d chewed up the greater part of it did he wonder if the ice water was pure. Stuart sipped at his and tipped his nose toward a pink church that was trumped up with European lacework and Gothic belfries and spires. “Such fraudulence,” he said. “La parroquia. Architectural gumbo.”
A five- or six-year-old boy offered to polish his shoes, but Stuart stepped aside and said, “No, no me gusta.” The hurt boy looked at Atticus, but he shook his head.
Stuart said, “Renata hates Cipiano; he finds too many reasons to touch her. Not that I blame him.” He looked at the jardín just across from the church. Wide laurel trees shaded the sidewalks, and green flower beds circled the great white gazebo in the center. Young teenaged girls in the kinds of white dresses one sees at First Communions were strolling in groups of four or five while boys hunting novias hung back and talked about them. Stuart asked, “Are you in love, Atticus?”
“Was. With my wife. And I got grandkids now.”
“But it’s not the same, is it.” Hearing nothing from him, he said, “I have often wished I weren’t in love. I often find the feeling indistinguishable from hurt.”
Stuart looked up at the parish church and said, “You go ahead, all right? I have to have a cigarette.”
Atticus walked past him, sidestepping between halted cars and carts and crossing over to the great plaza in front of the church. A hospital clinic had been set up inside the old rectory. Crowding outside it were pregnant women, a dark man with a goiter in his neck like a plum, a girl with a cotton patch over her mouth, and a stump of a man with toes that were only partly covered by a rolled-up and bloody sock. On the steps of the Church of the Resurrection was a hunched woman so wrapped in a blue serape that she was no more than a nose and an open hand, and in the dark pews inside were more old women with rosaries, harshly whispering their prayers. Campesinos were stacking unshucked corn on a linen altar cloth below a statue of Saint Martin de Porres, and tacked up over a side altar were tin cards with childlike illustrations of fractured bones or maladies or crippled people in sickbeds. Words on the tin cards either sought the saint’s help or gave thanks for the cure that came. Up near the main altar the Mexican pallbearers were setting the painted coffin down in the Saint Joseph side chapel as a handsome Mexican priest lighted candles with a match. And there, too, were twenty Americans, retirees, former college students, friends from the bars and cantinas.
Atticus knelt to pray and slid his hat underneath the chair. After he was sitting, Renata softly came up from behind him and laid a hand on his shoulder. She wore an informal black silk jacket and full print skirt, and a perfume he thought might have been the kind Serena wore. She kissed his cheek and said, “I’m not Catholic. Is it okay if I sit up here?”
“Oh sure.” She sat and he felt her forearm gently touch his own and not flinch away. And he found himself fondly gazing at a face that was haloed by the brilliant stained-glass windows. “You clean up real good,” he whispered.
She flushed and smiled.
A girl of no more than eight sashayed up and down the nave with a wide push broom that skidded on top of a towel. The high altar held a six-foot-high statue of
Christ in his funeral sheet, floating out of his sepulchre and looking up to Heaven. Awkwardly pictured on the great wall behind him were choirs of angels, white clouds, and blue sky. And in the high altar’s sacristy was a glaring Mayan boy of seventeen or so in a grayed white western shirt and frayed blue jeans. Atticus wasn’t sure if it was himself the kid was staring at or not, and then finally the heat in his look flamed out and he withdrew.
Renata was prim beside him. Without emotion. She stared at the painted black coffin as though she were a photograph of stillness and moderation. And then a priest in black vestments walked to the Saint Joseph side altar and all the people stood up. The priest crossed himself and raised up his hands in order to invoke God’s presence, saying the word Señor for “Lord,” but only a few people there knew the Spanish responses.
Colorado was in his head, Saint Mary’s church bright and beautiful and filled to bursting with his neighbors and friends, Serena in the pink casket and Frank holding up pretty good while Scott fell apart with tears, his hands held to his face through the funeral, fourteen black stitches above his left eyebrow, a hard plastic neck brace on. Their hands happened to touch at the funeral and Atticus never forgave himself for sliding his hand away.
Stuart went up to the front at the gospel and interpreted in English as the priest read from Saint John: how Jesus wept when he heard Lazarus was dead, and then ordered the stone to be taken away from the tomb, and cried out for Lazarus to come forth. And Lazarus came forth, bound hand and foot with graveclothes, so that Jesus said to loosen the windings and let Lazarus go free.
And then, for the homily, Stuart Chandler hooked on heavy black spectacles and unfolded a sheet of paper that trembled in his hands. Without looking up, he said, “I’ll be reading a hymn from the Madrid Codex, a hymn that was sung in the City of the Gods, Teotihuacán, in the presence of the dead.” And he read: “‘Thus the dead were addressed when they died. If it was a man, they spoke to him, invoked him as a divine being, in the name of a pheasant; if it was a woman, in the name of owl; and they said to them: ‘Awaken, already the sky is tinged with red, already the dawn has come, already the flame-colored pheasants are singing, the fire-colored swallows, already the butterflies are on the wing.’ For this reason the ancient ones said, he who has died, he becomes a god. They said: ‘He became a god there,’ which means that he died.’”