by Ron Hansen
And then there was the cemetery. The cemetery. And skull candles on some graves, teacups of candies, a carnival of piping and crepe and shot-glass votive lights, crucifixes at angles in the blond grass, rosaries like string neckties on the gray stones, a full toy shop of Jesus and Mary dolls. Twenty people stood around an open pit in the one P.M. sun, talking about practical matters, saying hello to old friends; and Atticus kept telling himself it was only temporary, the box would be raised up, the body shipped, and his son would be put to rest on Coyote Hill where the Dutch elm looked like a cleaning woman hanging up sheets in the wind. The Mexican priest said in unfamiliar Spanish the Catholic prayers of burial that were too familiar to Atticus, and then the priest stepped away and the crowd broke apart and kind people Atticus didn’t know said good-bye or wished they could’ve met him under happier circumstances.
Renata waited until he raised up from a last prayer and then said, “We have the day.”
“What I’d like to do is look at his studio.”
She hesitated before saying, “Yes. Good idea.”
She took him in the old red Volkswagen, haltingly riding through Resurrección. Renata got out of her silk jacket and shifted to second gear in order to go around a box-framed garbage truck that up north would have been used to ship hogs. A heavy man in green hip waders was standing knee-deep in a high tonnage of trash, sorting whiskey bottles, looking into a car battery and stacking it next to a crippled electric fan, ripping off the back of a radio in order to poke the tubes inside.
She stopped at the intersection of Avenida de la Independencia and the gray highway. A policeman in dark blue and sunglasses was sitting on a motorcycle just off the pavement, giving her a hard stare. Renata grew nervous and the Volkswagen stalled while still at the stop sign. She said, “This car doesn’t idle, it loiters.”
“Looks like he was trying to spiff it up at least.”
“Oh?” She waggled the gear shift into neutral and turned the ignition as she stared across the highway at the policeman.
His knuckles knocked twice against the front windshield. “You got some new glass here. You can tell from the rubber seal.”
She turned south onto the highway and looked into the rearview mirror. “Scott bought the car from a kid who got caught smuggling ganja in from Belize.”
“And what would ganja be in English?”
“Marijuana.”
“Oh.” His thumbnail gently lifted up a see-through sticker for Pittsburgh Plate Glass that was high up in the right-hand corner. “You can have the car if you want it.”
“Seriously?”
“Don’t expect it would make it far as the border, and selling it— Well, I’d be happy to know you’d put it to good use.”
She shifted to fourth gear as she said, “That’s really very nice of you. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
They rode in silence for a few minutes and then he asked, “The kid who sold him the car, is he here still?”
She frowned at him. “Hangs out on the beach, I think. Why?”
“Wondering; that’s all.”
She smiled. “You do have a busy mind.”
“Well, I try not to.” Atticus looked out his open side window at some pretty, preteen girls squatting in the dry weeds of a bus stop, licking the hot pepper sauce on pork rinds. Horseflies were walking around their mouths and their skirts were lifted up over their knees for the breeze. And then there was nothing but jungle and the scraggle of gray rock and charred black stumps and the fragile cornstalks that meant agriculture in that poor soil. Atticus kept thinking about the things Renata ought to have been telling him, the grief and unhappiness she ought to have expressed. She seemed flippant and preoccupied, and that was it. Oh, did he die? What a shame. No pain or misery or regret, nothing of what Atticus was feeling. Having gone along the highway for ten minutes, Renata slowed the Volkswagen until she saw a red flag hanging from one of a thousand just-alike trees. She then turned east onto a green alley that was being overgrown by hothouse plants that sought the rods of sunlight angling down through the green ceiling of leaves overhead. Exotic birds darted a few yards away and alighted. A great-beaked toucan jittered its legs on a high branch but didn’t open its wings. Iguanas were in the orange ruts of the road, getting information about the engine noise and then scattering wildly into the weeds or lumbering just off the road and following them with a tiny eye that was like a purple bead on a necklace. High grasses slashed away under the bumper, and dry sticks screeched along the doors so that Atticus had to raise his voice to ask, “How’d he find this place?”
Renata yelled back, “Eduardo, the shaman. I guess he’s a neighbor.”
And then they were in sunlight and green savannah and a sky as blue as shoe prints in the snow. Renata braked the car and killed the engine, and Atticus could hear the surge and groan and spray of a Caribbean sea just out of sight. “And now we walk,” she said. She pressed her high-heeled shoes off against the floorboard and then got out to unfasten her full skirt as Atticus took off his hot black cashmere coat and gray silk tie. She dug around in the back for other clothing and got into some cardinal red Stanford gym shorts and an overlarge white oxford shirt. A garden spade was there for some reason. She smiled at him and said, “I didn’t know Americans still wore braces.”
“They’re galluses,” he said.
“It’s a very smart fashion statement.”
“Antelope’s in the vanguard of high fashion. A lot of people don’t know that.”
She walked ahead of him but paused when she saw Atticus was staring at the right front fender.
“Was there an accident?” he asked.
She didn’t say.
“Wasn’t that perfect a match on the color is how I knew.” Hunching by the car, he swam his right hand over the surface, then got a penknife from his pocket and skidded the blade on a fender edge so a half-inch of red paint peeled up like the skin of an apple. “You got a paint job here that’s maybe a week, two weeks old. See how it peels up? Hasn’t set yet or it’d flake off.”
“Okay; you convinced me.”
Atticus shot her a rankled look.
“You knew he was a lousy driver,” Renata said.
Atticus hunched there with his hands on his knees as if he’d lost his wind. And then he straightened. “Yes, I did.”
“We don’t have to go up there.”
“We do,” he said, and they lunged through grass that was as high as their knees to the foot of a steep hill that was topped by a casita made of upright bamboo poles and palm thatching. Electrical power lines looped out from the roof and over the upper parts of some trees. On the way up, Renata moved some grass aside with her right foot in order to show Atticus a square gray stone with a fierce eagle carved in it. Only then did he notice the crannies and juts and lintels and stair steps that appeared to be growing out of the emerald green of the hill.
“Are they ruins?”
“A Mayan lookout post. Have you been to Chichén Itzá?”
“Yep.”
“Four or five thousand foreigners clawing their way up the Temple of Kukulkán, echoing ‘Hello’ in the ball court, having pictures taken of their heads between the jaws of the plumed serpent. So much for archaeological preservation. Here the Mayans wised up and kept the place secret.”
Atticus paused on the way up and held his hands on his hips. He was panting and his open white shirt was grayly spotted with sweat. Renata turned. “Higher than it looks,” he told her.
She went up a few steps more and he followed her, getting the tang of seaweed and salt air as he attained the top. His heart was hammering high in his chest with the fresh, winter pain that he hadn’t yet gotten used to.
Renata asked, “Are you okay?”
“Hell, I’m sixty-seven years old. Haven’t been okay since I was fifty.”
“Your heart?”
“Carburetor trouble,” he said. “Whole thing gets to acting like a juvenile delinquent at times
, kicking hard at the door. Don’t ever have to say ‘Who’s there?’” He smiled for the sake of Renata’s frightened brown eyes and squinted farther on at the sea view. From that height he could see the white coastline in its twists and tangles around bahías and bajas along the way north to Cancún. East was the navy blue of the Gulf Stream and the sea changing to azure and finally a lime-juice green as it overran a higher shelf of the coast and blasted into coffee-colored rocks. They were on a gray cathedral of stone, and west was green jungle and low plains and swamp that hazily blued at twenty miles and made the jungle seem no more than cigarette smoke rising up into the horizon. “Pretty out here,” he said.
“Yes, it is.”
He turned to see Renata holding the handle of the door, and then translated the Spanish on a sign that the Mexican police had stapled onto the wood, promising jail to looters and trespassers. Crime scene, he thought. “Didn’t have a lock on the door?” he asked.
She stared at a hasp where a padlock ought to have been. “Oh, I forgot. Wednesday Scott told me there was a break-in here. Kids, probably. Stuart’s house has been hit three times.”
“We got an old house on the ranch,” he said. “Even hunters use it. Hard to keep people off your property if you aren’t always there to protect it.” She smiled at him for some reason; he presumed he was wearing what Scott used to call his Republican face.
Renata pulled the door and then interpreted Atticus’s hesitation. “Don’t worry. We’ve cleaned it up a little.”
They walked inside. East was a wall of upright bamboo that was hinged in order to create huge doors that could open the interior to the light and air of the seascape or could be wired shut to the roof supports for weather protection. Renata unscrewed the wires and pushed the hinged bamboo out, making the twelve-by-twenty house as open as an unscreened porch. Atticus held up the Radiola tape player he’d given Scott at Christmas. A homemade copy of Linda Ronstadt’s Canciones de mi Padre was at the end of its reel. “You’d think they’d’ve stolen this.”
“Who?”
“You said kids broke in here.”
She gave it some thought and finally said, “Useless to them, probably. Most campesinos don’t have electricity in their homes.”
“Oh. Uh huh.” Atticus put the tape player down. “You forget where you are.” His eyes found a green wingback chair like his at home that was angled toward the door.
Renata went over to it and grazed her hand along the leather back. “He was sitting here,” she said. “Slumped over to the right. His fingers nearly touched the floor. And the gun was only an inch away.”
“Were there pictures taken?”
“I have no idea.”
Atticus frowned. “You weren’t here with the police?”
“I hate blood,” she said. “Seeing it makes me ill.”
“So: What? You peeked in, thought ‘Oh my gosh, blood,’ and skipped off?”
She seemed stunned by his irritation. She seemed to retreat a little, and there was a shine of tears in her eyes as she said, “I figured this would be hard for you.” She paused, as if phrasing a further explanation, but simply told him, “I have to get out of here.” And then she was out of the house and heading down to the sea.
Atticus strolled toward a stone fireplace and a white enamel pantry table that was topped by a gas camp stove. A full pot of coffee was still on it and smelled of having scorched on the heat. Whiskey glasses were upside down on a dishtowel. The gray iron sink had cold and hot water taps and held a jar of turpentine full of paintbrushes that smoked with green and indigo colors when he touched them. Overhead were track lights that could swing any which way, with four angled down on a big paint-stained easel with nothing on it and the green wingback chair that he couldn’t look at. A humming refrigerator was cooling agua mineral and Coca-Colas, a paper bag of Columbian coffee grounds, a package of Mexican sugar pastries, and a string bag of oranges. A half-full ice cube tray was in the freezer. The kitchen counter held an empty Coca-Cola can that Atticus was about to pitch in the trash when he felt its not-hotness and figured that it had been finished less than an hour ago. He looked at the floor. Wet shoe prints were faintly there that the high humidity had failed to dry, and a few places elsewhere there was sand. Kids? Squatters? The merely curious? He crushed the Coca-Cola can in his right hand and tossed it.
Walking across the room he found a palette knife that had fallen to the floor and a hairline furrow of blood between the floorboards a good four feet away from the chair. He got to his feet and tried to forget the ugly picture he’d imagined, looking out at the long sabers of sunglancing greenery clattering in the breeze. His hands touched a jumble of oil paints that were pitched all over the butcher paper on the worktable like squeezed-up toothpaste containers. And there was a big wooden palette with oil paints that he let his fingers touch. All the titanium white and cerulian blue had been scraped away with a putty knife, but the alizarine crimson, Prussian blue, and dark green were still moist, their skins yielding like thin plastic. It surprised him that he knew the proper names for the colors; he hadn’t known he’d picked them up over those many years.
Wide closets of white, louvered doors made up much of one wall, and inside them were simple carpenter’s tools and a mitre box and a stack of one-bys a guy could make wooden picture frames with. Canvas was rolled up in the second closet in tubes of four sizes, and some prestretched panels were sitting against big cans of gesso that were grayly veiled by spiderwebs. The fancy walnut case that the shotgun came in was on the floor, and a gun-cleaning kit was in an unopened cardboard box. Hidden behind the third closet was a white porcelain toilet and a lavatory with soap in a plastic tray but without any towels on the wooden bars. A black Speedo swimsuit drooped over a hook. In the medicine cabinet were bicarbonate of soda, headache pills, cough syrup, aspirin, peroxide, insect repellent, and lithium. A Jameson’s whiskey carton was in the trash can. Atticus smelled blood and then he saw in a tin pail some white underpants made pink with the work of wiping the floor.
Atticus went out of the bathroom and out of the house, walking to the green verge high above the cove, looking down at wild oleander and a household something, a shoe, flung into a bush, and farther on a sheer drop to churning water that was as clear as a canning jar. Renata was there, hunting shells he guessed, and he found himself staring at her nakedness as she sloshed out of the sea and twisted her hair and gingerly collected her clothes. He tried hard to feature himself having the gall to swim in those circumstances, but he seemed to lack the imagination.
Atticus got the Radiola tape player, fastened the door, and then skidded down the hill, holding his free hand out to keep from falling. Renata was sitting against the Volkswagen bumper, rolling her white oxford sleeves up over her elbows, blithe as a teenager with people who didn’t matter. “Enjoy your dip?” he asked.
“Quite,” she said. She felt his heat and faced him with the fierce concentration of a good student who’d been fretting her sentences for a while. “You have to remember that he was my friend,” she said. “And he let me find him like that. I feel used. Violated. I’m finding it hard to imagine his suicide as anything but a horrible act of aggression.”
Atticus thought better of his anger and just walked around to the right of the car and got in. Everything was beginning to seem wrong to him. Emotionally off. Renata got in and turned the key in the ignition, and there was a sheen to her eyes that was such good acting he wanted to congratulate her for it. He looked out the side window. “Don’t see his motorcycle,” he said.
“The police have it. Evidencia. Stuart can get his things from the authorities and ship them to Colorado. You’ll probably want us to sell his Harley though, won’t you?”
“Oh, I expect.”
She asked, “Are you thinking of flying out tomorrow?”
She seemed pleased when he said yes.
She backed the car up and cranked it around onto the overgrown road. And then she just drove until they got to the highw
ay. She looked to the right and left, letting a pink hotel jeep go past, as she asked, “Have you heard how Scott and I found each other the first time?”
“Scott probably told me that once. I forgot.”
She floored the car and got onto the highway ahead of a truck that held its position no more than four feet behind her for a half mile or more. The truck finally fell back and Renata focused again on the highway. She said, “A girlfriend of mine killed herself in the house attic when I was twenty and in Paris, and I felt like suicide was a door she’d left open for me. I began hearing these voices inside my head. ‘You’re a slut, you know.’ ’You’re so stupid.’ All in high-pitched, frightening French. I figured the voices wouldn’t follow me if I was in an English-speaking country, so I signed on for classes again at Sarah Lawrence. But the voices were in English now, and giving me orders that I felt I had to obey. ‘Scream.’ ‘Hide in the closet.’ ‘Don’t talk.’ ‘Hit that window with your fist.’ A housemate found out I was wearing long-sleeved shirts because I was purposely scalding my left wrist and arm with hot coffee every morning. The first psychiatrist I saw asked me if I masturbated with my left hand. I howled and howled at that; I thought it was the funniest thing I’d ever heard. I was finally hauled into Hirsch Clinic when police found me sitting with the pigeons in Washington Square in New York, completely unable to speak or to move, but hearing voices that said ‘Sit here and be still.’”
She hurriedly shifted from fourth to third and Atticus faced front as Renata’s foot hit the brake gently at first and then harder. An old green Chevrolet pickup truck whose hood and fenders flapped like shingles was turtling ahead with its huge haul of ten or more hotel workers going in for the four o’clock shift. “I hate this highway,” she said. “Kids are getting killed on it all the time. And the fatalists here simply put up more crosses.”