Atticus

by Ron Hansen

  She peered into her rearview mirror and Atticus craned his head around. “Okay, go,” he told her. She floored it and passed the truck before she shifted to fourth. She seemed lost in thought so he urged, her with, “Hearing voices that said, ’Sit here and be still.’ And then being hauled in to Hirsch.”

  “Oh, thanks. I felt I was trapped inside a foreign body that frustrated all my attempts to operate it. I used to hear the psychiatrist asking me questions, but a half hour or more would pass before I would finally answer him and then he’d have gone off to another patient. Hospital interns used to peer at me with fascination as he lifted my arm up from my side and let me hold it there, still as a post, as he lectured. And then when he finished explaining my condition, he’d pull down my arm again. My eyes were as dull and blank and fake as a shark’s, and I was stiff and silent and seemingly not with it, but I heard and saw and perceived in ways I haven’t since I became normal.

  “And that’s how I was when I first met Scott. I forget the circumstances of why I was outside my room or why he was in the hall, but he was and I was, at three or four in the morning. I was just sitting in a fold-down chair by an iron-barred window. Catatonic. And Scott was talking to me like no one had in a while, as if we were on our first date. Hour after hour of fetchingly manic talk, no letting up; he’d finished the complete works of Shakespeare at Hirsch and thought old Will was pretty good. His favorite cereal as a kid was Cheerios, but now he liked wheat germ and yogurt; his favorite movie was King Kong, or maybe Singin’ in the Rain; his favorite novel was Beau Geste, he was sure of that, but nobody but Scott had read it, he said, they just thought they had. He told me his favorite person in the twentieth century was Albert Schweitzer—whom he said you resembled—and if he were about to be executed he’d order a Waldorf salad, medium rare prime rib, mashed potatoes, and apple cobbler.”

  “His mother would fix him that for his birthdays.”

  “Really?” She flicked the Volkswagen’s blinker and waited for a high-balling tanker to blow past before she turned left. “Even today,” she said, “as insane as I was, I remember practically every word. He told me he was a chronic manic depressive, but full of enough false beliefs and obsessions to fit the paranoid schizophrenic type, and for a time found himself hooked on Thorazine, so he knew what it was like to be inside a straitjacket.” She smiled and turned to Atticus. “And he was such a boy about competition. Scott told me he was the best patient there but the psychiatrists wouldn’t say so for fear of playing favorites.”

  Atticus ticked his head. “Yep, that’s him all right.”

  She said, “He further informed me that I’d be freed from the locked ward when I could fill out my food menu for the day, and I could get off the fifth floor when I finished my first pair of moccasins. And then it was sunrise and it was just glorious. We both stared at it for a minute, and he tried to entertain me by singing ‘Here Comes the Sun.’ Have you heard it, by the Beatles?”

  “I haven’t been feeble all my life.”

  She sang: ‘“Little darling, it’s been a long, cold, lonely winter. Little darling, it seems like years since it’s been clear. Here comes the sun. Doont-n-doo-doo. Here comes the sun. And it’s all right.’”

  She shifted to third and fought the bumps as she turned onto an unpaved road through the barrio. She said, “I have no idea how I looked, but Scott later said my face was different, unfrozen, and he unfolded a chair beside mine and held me in his arms as if we were sweethearts and he sang the whole song again. And it was amazing. I found myself seeing colors for the first time. Yellow, pink, green, and blue. Up until then there’d only been monochrome, gray and white. And I kept hearing him singing over and over again, ‘And it’s all right.’ I fell in love with Scott Cody then and there. And I felt all my life I’d owe him. And I’d be honored to do whatever he asked.”

  Renata was expected at the bookstore to help out, so she dropped Atticus off at Scott’s place and promised to return that night. Atticus forgot the Radiola tape player atop the refrigerator as he opened a half-frozen Coca-Cola that he took upstairs to the high-tech desk. And he found underneath it in a plastic wastebasket a Mexican newspaper, El Anunciador, from the first of the week. Atticus got out of his hot funeral clothes and rummaged through four drawers of the high armoire until he found some black running shorts to put on as trunks, and he felt the toll of a hard day as he trudged downstairs and outside to the pool, holding the folded diario and a Spanish dictionary under his arm. The half-smoked cigarette he’d seen that morning on the upstairs railing had fallen to the hot tiles. The lettering on it read “Salem.” Stuart’s brand. He’d been up in the bedroom, then. Atticus worried about that as he sat in a white deck chair and shaded his eyes to look at a four o’clock sun that wasn’t letting up. Sports was the easiest newspaper Spanish to translate, so he stayed on that page for a while, reading about winter baseball, and then he looked at a furniture ad, at the interest rates offered by Bancomex, and at page 8 where a paragraph had been carefully cut out of the obituaries. Who? he wondered. And then he closed his eyes. He felt faint and poorly all of a sudden. His stomach hurt and his head floated and when he pressed it his skin showed a yellow imprint that soon was pink with sunburn again. He got up and walked over to the deep end of the pool and pinched his nose and jumped into the water, as upright as a plank. He swam across the pool and back in the sloppy way of a boy just learning how. And then he just hung on to the pool ladder, feeling woozy, and got out, and he’d walked into the kitchen for a seltzer when he heard a faint knocking at the front door.

  Yesterday afternoon’s taxi driver was there on the other side of it, smiling as if Atticus were good fortune itself. What was his name? Panchito? His hand was soft as a fish as he shook the cattleman’s hand and talked importantly in Spanish.

  Even the phrase to say he knew little Spanish was locked up. “Afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Panchito thought for a bit and got a Lufthansa flight packet from inside his shirt and held it up so Atticus would see Scott’s name printed on it. “Cotzi,” he said. And then he pointed at Atticus. “Señor Cody?”

  “Sí.” He recalled that “his” in Spanish was su. “Su padre.”

  Panchito offered the flight packet to him, and Atticus found inside a one-way first-class ticket for a flight from Mexico City to Frankfurt, Germany. The flight was to have been Thursday night at nine-twenty and was charged on Wednesday to Scott’s American Express card in feminine handwriting. Germany! he thought. “Was this phoned in?” he asked.

  “No se,” the Mexican said, but whether he did not know the answer or he did not know the English wasn’t clear. Panchito talked for a full minute then, but Atticus was too tired to make sense of it; he simply looked and looked at the flight packet and felt too slow to figure it out. Everything was wrong. When Panchito finished his paragraph and faced him expectantly, Atticus finally said, “Muy gracias.” Very thanks. And then he got out his wallet and handed Panchito a five-dollar bill.

  Panchito was formal in folding the bill inside his own wallet. Atticus frowned at him and said, “My son was going to Germany, but then he changed his mind and killed himself.”

  Panchito hesitantly smiled.

  “Happens all the time,” Atticus said. “Some people hate to fly.”

  And then he shut the front door on the taxi driver, furious now with everyone and knowing he was going to be sick. Getting upstairs was as much an agony as if he’d worked a twenty-hour day, and the hallway seemed to yaw as he swayed along it and into Scott’s room. Atticus sagged to his knees by the black toilet bowl and just about fainted with nausea. And then the poisons surged up from him and he seemed to smell the horrible stink within the painted coffin. The floor was winter to his skin as he knelt there for five minutes more and flew his sickness into the toilet again, and then he tilted to the high wide bed and fell face forward on it just as he would have as a kid. Within the next few hours he went to the bathroom a half-dozen
times, and then he passed out and heard Renata say from a great distance, “Are you okay?” She fitted right into the past and Serena looking out the upstairs window, saying how pretty the evening was. His wife heaved up the sash for the fresh spring breeze, and Atticus helped Serena flip over Scotty’s crib mattress in order to hide the stains. And in his dream those stains were blood and he was in the dining room and gunsmoke floated against the ceiling and hundreds of wineglasses filled the table and red wine was spilling onto the rug and it hurt his stomach to see it. “You oughta be careful,” Atticus said. And a friend of his son’s told Atticus, “We all live on the fringe here. We make up the rules as we go along.” And handwriting was on the dining room mirror, handwriting in lipstick, and then he heard Renata say from outside his head, “If you wanted to stay for a few more days, you could’ve just told us. You didn’t have to get el turista on our account.”

  Atticus opened his eyes and it was night and Renata Isaacs was sitting on the bed, her palm as cool as a washcloth to his brow. And he felt the influence of his flesh as he found himself summoning up how it was to hold her as she wept.

  “Don’t,” he said. “I’ll be all right.”

  “Actually I like paying attention to people when they’re sick. Helps to compensate for my thoroughgoing malice toward them when they’re healthy.”

  “How late is it?”

  “Nine.”

  He sighed and said, “Sorry, but I’ve gotta get up again,” and Renata helped him ease himself up from a damp sheet. His legs jellied a little, but he could walk into the bathroom by tilting into the gray wall. She turned away from his nakedness, and then he heard her sliding the floor-to-ceiling glass doors to let in the good night air. As he ran the tap water to brush his teeth, he could hear her saying, “I know how impossible it is for you now, but if you could step back from your misery you’d find your sickness rather interesting really. I mean by that, the extremes your body goes to to get rid of the poisons.”

  “‘Extremes’ is pretty mild,” he said. “It’s more like ‘counterrevolutionary.’” Atticus got Pepto-Bismol from the medicine cabinet and swallowed an inch of it straight from the bottle, then showered and some minutes later walked out, buttoning up his pajamas.

  She was standing by the bookcase with a collection of Mexican poetry. She watched him haltingly get onto the bed. She said, “You’re white as a ghost.”

  “Won’t last forever, I expect.”

  “You should sleep,” Renata said, and fluffed his pillow and tucked the blanket over his horseman’s legs.

  Atticus tried to put some affection in his smile, but he was impatient with himself for his need for feminine tenderness, because his ache and poisoning and how he felt now was not half as important as his fierce certainty that his son had been murdered.

  FOUR

  Sandhills. Snow. Gray weather. And Scott up from Mexico for the holidays, in a tan hunting coat but no hunting gun, sleepily riding Pepper with his hands holding his Radiola tape player against the saddle. The horses lazily plodded along a coulee in the oil patch, and Patsy Cline was singing “Crazy.” And then the sun and its twin were high overhead like Communion hosts and Atticus said, “You call that a sundog.” His son peered up and asked, “How can you tell which is sun and which is dog?” And then Scott turned his head so his father could see that his face was shot off.

  Atticus jerked awake and figured out where he was. Warm air fattened the drapes, and their pull cords tapped against the gray wall. His Spanish for Travellers was in his hand and his mouth was as dry as a shoe. Atticus could hear the clanking of pots and pans in the kitchen and then the gong and sigh of tap water filling a kettle. He made another woozy trip to the bathroom and found a red lipsticked message on the bathroom mirror: “Police at 1.” He showered and got into his robe. Renata was in the kitchen speaking a Spanish he couldn’t make out, and then she was coming upstairs. And he was sitting up on the bed when she rapped lightly on the door and then pushed it, appearing with a bottle of Coca-Cola and a squat glass that was jagged with ice. She wore high-fashion blue jeans beneath an untucked and overlarge white oxford shirt. The fumes of tobacco smoke seemed to float from her clothes. She said, “You probably think you’re dying, but you’re not.”

  “As sicknesses go, this one packs a wallop. I’ve been pretty basic with myself the past few hours.”

  She seriously poured the cola into the glass and gave it to him with one white pill. “Lomotil. From Stuart’s pharmacopoeia. I’ll have to get you some more.” She paused. “I couldn’t find any Diet Coke.”

  Atticus smiled. “I’ll try not to worry about the calories.” He took the pill and finished half of the Coke.

  “Shall I call the airline and cancel your flight?”

  “Yeah. I’m too raggedy for travel right now.”

  Renata sat at his feet and folded her arms underneath her breasts just as Serena would when she focused on the family pictures and talked about the full day ahead. She said, “You know, the Mexicans get it, too. Children who seem to be five and six years old are often actually eight and nine. Especially in the jungle there’s a big problem with intestinal parasites and tuberculosis. Americans go home and get over it. Here you get used to it or die.”

  A kitchen drawer was pulled out and pushed shut. “Who’s that?” he asked.

  “Stuart, or María. I met her in the jardín. She’s making a healing potion.”

  “A potion. You think it’ll work?”

  Renata shrugged and said, “When I was eight and living in Europe, I got some warts on my fingers. A family doctor told me to put my hands on a green machine in his office, and he turned on the motor and my skin tingled for a few seconds. And then he winked and said the green machine had cured me. And my warts were gone in a week.”

  Lufthansa, he found himself thinking. A flight to Germany. “You’re only eight for so long,” Atticus said.

  “Unfortunately.” Renata got up and created a purpose for getting up by walking across the room and causing the draperies to sweep aside. The sky was just as blue as yesterday or the day before that, and the sunglare on the snow-white stucco was as bright as the oncoming lights of a car. She said, “The hotel boys are playing soccer.” And she said, “White sand gets on their skin and they look like sugared doughnuts.”

  “¡Está listo!” María called.

  Renata turned. “She says it’s ready. Shall she bring it up?”

  “Kind of funky up here. You go on ahead.” She walked out as Atticus went into the gray bathroom again. And Stuart was at the dining room table, fanning pink and yellow wildflowers out on an unfolded newspaper, when Atticus painstakingly stepped downstairs in his suit pants and a fresh white shirt, one big hand patting along the stairway banister in case his legs mellowed or his feet slipped. Stuart looked up and feigned disappointment. “Bad luck about the illness.”

  “Where’s Renata?”

  “The pharmacy,” he said. “Well. You seem to be ambulatory.”

  “Just let me get my skates.” Stuart was barefoot on the pink marble, and Atticus remembered that there had been an Indian rug in the photograph of the dining room. Was it stolen? He asked, “You know what happened to the rug that was here?”

  Stuart frowned at the dining room floor. “I haven’t the foggiest.”

  María walked out of the kitchen with a four- or five-month-old baby boy and a kettle. “Buenas tardes, señor.”

  “Buenas.”

  “¿Cómo está usted?”

  Atticus lost the little Spanish he had, but María just saddled the baby on her left hip as she tipped the kettle into a whiskey glass.

  Stuart said, “She brought you a tea from her abuelo. Her shaman. She says it’s made from the bark of a tree.”

  “Takinche,” María said.

  “A takinche tree. And possibly eye of newt.”

  Atticus held a whiskey glass that seemed to contain hot root beer and a skin of woodbits that looked like nothing more than shredded tea le
aves. Without a second thought he drank the concoction, trying not to taste it, but tasting and tasting it.

  “Aren’t you manly,” Stuart said.

  Atticus wiped the gray wings of his mustache with his palm as he grinned at María and told her, “I feel better already.”

  María flushed with shyness and hooded her son with her shawl. Stuart spoke in Spanish, seeming to ask María about the rug, but María simply shrugged and replied, “No sé, señor.” Don’t know.

  “Well, that’s better than my maid,” Stuart said. “She’d tell you it never existed.”

  María headed for the front door and she smiled and said, “Hasta mañana.” She giggled at Stuart’s Spanish reply, and Atticus found himself registering how long Stuart fondly gazed at her as she went out.

  Atticus’s hand held on to the headpiece of a dining room chair as the floor seemed to tip. “Are the police coming here or I am going there?”

  “Renata’s taking you.” He paused. “La comisaría de policía.”

  “Thanks. I was about to ask.”

  “I hope you’re not expecting answers,” Stuart said, “because the police here don’t always dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s, if you get my meaning. Mexican fatalism gets jumbled up with a lot of the police being illiterate, and a few of them are dreadful people besides, not to put too fine a point on it. Half the time the police can’t get the facts right, and half the time they just don’t care to.” Stuart got some garden scissors from the sideboard as he said, “Anyway, your son’s clothing and shotgun are there. And the motorcycle. Will you be able to ride it back?”

  “Oh, I reckon.”

  Stuart snipped some wildflowers and plunked them into a jar. “We could hire someone to roll it here.”

  “I feel that takinche kicking in already.”

  “Renata and I were hoping to have you over for dinner tonight. You probably think that sounds perfectly awful now, but I’m fairly sure you’ll be hungry by six. We’ll have something mild, fettucine or a risotto.”