by Ron Hansen
And then he saw the bright savannah and just a glimpse of dark blue water and the green heave of grass and stone that was once a Mayan lookout on the sea. Atticus rode up to it as he presumed Scott had, shut the motorcycle down, and ascended the high hill with the shotgun, practically on all fours, pausing halfway up to rest, and pausing again to rip the yellow police tape from the door before going inside.
Everything was just as it was on Saturday. Atticus sat in the green wingback chair pretty much as Scott had in the picture taken from the front door, tilting to his right and gingerly touching his fingers to the floor. If it was suicide, Scott would have been facing nothing as he killed himself there. Whereas he presumably slumped in that chair of a night and fixed his stare on a half-finished painting. Atticus got up and put the shotgun together and aligned it on the floor just as it was in the high-angled photograph. Sitting again, he got back into Scott’s pose and, holding on to the shotgun’s barrel with his left hand, brought it upright so that it was on its heel plate and the front bead was touching his face. And that felt wrong: his right hand was twisted inside the trigger housing and his forearm winged out from the shotgun’s fore end. Atticus planted his right boot just where Scott’s foot was in the pictures, and let the shotgun go. The fore end fell against his thigh and skidded forward into his groin. Atticus tried it again, inserting his right thumb inside the trigger guard just as he would if he were killing himself, and imagining the jolt of the shotgun blast so that he jounced back against the green chair. And the shotgun fell against his right thigh again.
But what if the gunshot didn’t kill him immediately? What if he were there for an hour or so just bleeding? Conscious or unconscious? Half his face gone? Wracked in agony? Would he kick the gun away? Would he go for the gun again and try to finish it?
Atticus walked to the bathroom and held cold water to his face, his thoughts flying. Suppose he was murdered. Suppose Scott walked to the front door and was killed there and he was too heavy to lift. His killer would have kicked the green wingback chair around so it was angled toward the door and the haul would be shorter, easier. Which way would his blood flow? Like in the photograph, toward his ear for as long as he was on the floor. And the blood would have been telltale: if it stained the tail or back of his shirt, the killer would have to take it off and put another on him, get one from a hanger in the closet. Even pull off his shoes if bloodstains got on them. And if it was murder, the shotgun might have been stolen first and loaded with more than one shell. If it was murder, things began to fit together. If it was murder, Atticus thought, Scott’s father would not feel so much at fault.
Closing up the studio, he walked out to the cliffside. Hard sunlight glanced off the seven blues of the Caribbean Sea, and a southerly wind lightly feathered the waves as they grew giant against the jutting limestone and loudly cracked apart. A purple and green network of seaweed and kelp braided the white sand at least ten yards away from the gnarling white surf. Wild oleander was growing along the upper cliff and up there too was a small porch of flat rock that held, he was half sure, a shoe.
Atticus used the shotgun as a staff as he haltingly slipped down through greenery until he was on a gray lintel of stone. There he teetered along until he knelt on the flat rock and reached to get hold of the flung penny loafer. The shoe was cordovan brown and fairly new, the manufacturer’s name, Cole-Haan, still gold on the heel pad inside it, a faint trace of blood on its shank. He hunted the hillside and shore for the other shoe and found himself frowning down on the churning water where Renata sloshed up to the beach yesterday.
And then a general uneasiness caused him to gaze back up to the casita, and Atticus saw a human form seemingly glaring down at him, his skin color, his face, his height ghosted into mystery by the blinding, white sun just behind him. Atticus yelled, “Who’s there?” and whoever it was took a few steps back and turned and hurtled out of sight.
Atticus thought about going after him, but the hill was too vertical and he was too weak and forest was too close to the house, so he skidded down the hillside and for some time sat on the hot motorcycle in frustration and fury and grief, and then he turned the ignition and gunned the engine with his right hand and let go of the clutch. The Harley-Davidson jerked up and jittered sideways over the weeds and then righted itself in a sprint to the highway.
Riding toward Resurrección, he passed a hamlet where a frail, filthy girl was squatting outside a shack of dry yellow palms and sticks, dourly pressing corn mush into tortillas as a gray old woman peered out at her from one of six hammocks in the sleeping room. And then there was a shop with a shaded porch where a boy in a stained cook’s apron sold hot Coca-Colas and pregnant women tilted along the highway with big plastic buckets of water they’d filled at a spigot. Hungry dogs in twos and fours slinked away from human beings. Hens and roosters pecked at the earth. On a pale blue building was painted LONCHERIA, and inside were picnic tables where overweight men in dirty T-shirts were eating tamales and black beans and rice from white paper plates. Heaped on a countertop were cooked pork chops in an orange sauce. Black flies cruised and alighted and flew up again as an old woman lazily flapped a comic book over the pork.
Walking away from there was the teenaged girl in the lime green dress he’d seen earlier, the bamboo pole still in her hand. She paused and earnestly stared at him as he slowed and walked the motorcycle around. A few yards beyond her the zebu cow was browsing through fume-stained grass that was as high as its hocks. Atticus rolled toward the girl and turned off the ignition and tilted into the motorcycle to rock it up onto its kickstand. He could hear the high whine of jungle insects and the trills and caws of birds in the lush green canopy overhead. She wore white ankle-high stockings and dark brown shoes. She was probably fourteen.
“Buenas tardes, señorita,” he said.
“Buenas, señor.” She nervously turned and walked alongside the cow, taking hold of one long ear as she tapped at its foreshank with the pole. The zebu ignored the girl and lowered its great head to some green weeds farther away. It pained the cattleman in him to see the zebu’s ribs so plainly beneath its hide, but he helped the girl herd it by authoritatively slapping his hard palm on the zebu’s sharp pinbone, and the cow hopped into a short jog, its full round udder swaying between its legs. Atticus joined the girl and the milk cow in their slow amble along the highway.
“Perdoneme, señorita. Yo soy el padre del señor Scott Cody.”
The girl said nothing but gave him a haunted, sidelong look as she again urged the cow with her bamboo pole.
“¿Sabe?” he asked. You know what I mean?
She gravely nodded. “Cotzi.”
“Sí.” To his wonderment he found the Spanish to go on. “Mi hijo está muerto.” My son is dead. “Miércoles.” Wednesday. “En la noche.” In the night. “¿Comprende?” You understand?
Like a schoolgirl, she obediently glanced at him. “Sí, señor. Lo siento.” I’m sorry.
Atticus pointed to the shotgun that was unhinged into stock and barrel and wedged under shock cords on the motorcycle’s saddle seat. “¿Escuche la arma?” You listen the gun?
Although she seemed puzzled, she responded. “Sí, señor.”
Surprised, he asked, “¿A qué hora?” At what hour?
She shrugged and thought. “A medianoche.” Midnight.
The zebu stopped with the certainty of a piano and tore away weeds that slowly rose up into its mouth with the sideways crunch of its jaws. The girl stared at Atticus as he struggled to find the vocabulary for his hundred questions and finally settled on “¿Usted ver mi hijo temprano?” You see my son early?
She spoke but he couldn’t interpret what she said, and he made a hand signal for her to repeat herself. “What was that again?”
Shutting her eyes and pillowing her right cheek with folded hands, she rephrased what she’d said in a paragraph, saying something about her brother and sister and using the words adormecido and coche. Sleeping and car. They’d seen him sleep
ing in his car. Motorcycle in Spanish was lost to him, so Atticus pointed to it. “¿No ése?” Not that?
She half-smiled as if he were joking. Sleeping on a motorcycle. She shook her head.
Wondering aloud, he said, “Why were you there?”
“No comprendo inglés, señor.”
Writing the sentence in his mind first, he tried, “¿Por qué usted allí, señorita?”
“Vimos las luces en la casita,” she told him. We saw the lights in the house. “A veces lo mirábamos pintando.” We sometimes watched him painting.
Atticus caught the gist of it but wasn’t sure he’d heard right. Was Scott sleeping in his car while the lights were on in his house? Who’d turned them on then? And how could Renata have found the Volkswagen near the jardín? Atticus fought to put his confusion and perplexity into words, but his Spanish failed him, and he could tell the girl was hankering to go. “Muchas gracias, señorita.”
“De nada,” she said, and whacked the milk cow on its hindquarters until it walked ahead.
When he got to Scott’s house on Avenida del Mar, he killed the Harley-Davidson’s engine beside the front door and rocked the motorcycle up onto its kickstand. He felt about to faint as he walked inside the house, so he put the shotgun on the floor and fell back onto the sofa and shut his eyes and heeled off his hot cowboy boots. A tropical breeze found his face, as perfumed and soft as the hair of his wife in bed, and he turned to it and in the flush of fever saw the faded denim of the sky and the navy blue of the sea and the tall sliding door to the pool half open, letting the air conditioning out. His hand gripped the right arm of the sofa and he pulled himself to his feet, tottering a little as he walked to the terrace and rammed shut the wide glass door. And then he heard a soft, stitching noise that halted when he tried to find it. The house seemed to settle and he looked at the ceiling, feeling a presence in Scott’s upstairs room. Even if only for a second, Atticus found himself thinking that Scott was alive up there and it all had been a fraud, a horrible mistake, a mean-spirited fiction that had misfired, and he wished it were so. “Anybody here?” he yelled.
Stillness.
His head reeled and he caught a dining room chair with his hand. Walking forward a little, he tilted feebly against a framed print on the living room wall and frowned at hushed whispering and the faint thud of a telephone receiver finding its home on the machine. “María?” he called. “Who’s in the house?” Atticus went to the foot of the stairs and with both hands on the banister held himself upright as he fixed his gaze up through the well to the second floor. Harsh white sunshine on the hallway wall was blinked by shade, and then Atticus saw frayed blue jeans and Nike Air running shoes halt at the upper step. Even as he hoped, however, a hard dark brown hand took hold of the railing and a teenaged boy in a Dallas Cowboys jersey fumbled down the stairs with his head turned away and hidden behind his hand as if he feared a photograph would catch him in his shame.
Atticus shouted, “The hell you doing here? Huh?”
Hunching further down the stairs, the kid got to the landing and hung there, his pretty-boy face full of grief, as he figured out what to do next.
“Saw you at church yesterday. Didn’t I? At the funeral?”
The kid seemed not to know English, but a hurtful thought seemed to writhe through him and he suddenly surged forward like a football blocker, his left shoulder slugging hard into Atticus, felling him, and then the kid hurried to the dining room and out onto the terrace where he scrabbled up onto the high wall and flung himself out of sight.
Easing his way up from the floor, Atticus felt the full anger and humiliation of old age, finding no fight or scare in himself, put hard on the floor by a petty thief who must have thought Scott’s father would have gone home right after the funeral.
The dining room telephone rang and he went to it. “Hello?”
“How was it?” Stuart asked.
Atticus sorted through the things he might have meant by “it” and said, “The police station. Kinda grim. Renata didn’t say?”
“I haven’t seen the dear.”
Stuart was an old-time exile in Mexico, he thought. Stuart had learnt not to know anything. Atticus told him, “We had an intruder here.”
“Oh, no! Who?”
“Kid. Sixteen, seventeen years old. I got back and the pool door was open, and I heard him using the phone upstairs. His hands were empty, so I don’t expect he swiped anything. Don’t have my sea legs yet or I might of wrangled him downtown.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry, Atticus! How perfectly awful! You must feel violated! We’ve been having so much of that lately.”
“Well—”
“Shall I have the police out?”
“I haven’t been that impressed with them so far. Like as not they’d say he was guarding the house so no thieves could get in.”
Stuart was silent. Atticus heard the scritch of his lighter and the fizz of a fresh cigarette as he inhaled. Stuart said, “We do hope you’ll still find a way to stop by for dinner. Even after our contretemps this morning.”
“Well, that’s nice of you. As a matter of fact, I’m feeling kinda peckish.”
“Oh, good. Shall we pick you up?”
“You know what, Stuart? I think I’ll have a nap and get changed and hike to your place. I haven’t seen that much of the seaside yet and I’d kinda like to.”
Stuart gave him directions and failed to offer a goodbye before he hung up.
With the dining room telephone still in his hand, Atticus decided to try Frank’s place in Colorado, but Marilyn told him Frank was giving a talk to a cattleman’s association up in Sterling. She took the message about Scott’s American Express card, and he gave her a no-fuss, facts-only version of the past few days before saying he was expected for dinner and he was enjoying the fine weather so much he might just stay for a bit.
Then he got out Scott’s frayed brown wallet and flattened the folded slip of paper with phone numbers that he found in it. The first number he recognized as Stuart’s, so he dialed the second, which had an “S.” in front of it. After five rings a frazzled-sounding Mexican answered, flatly saying, “El Alacrán,” and Atticus heard the noise of some guy slamming down a leather cup of bar dice before he figured that El Alacrán was The Scorpion, and hung up. “P. I.” got a telephone answering machine that told the business hours for Printers Inc. And the penciled “R.” phone number was picked up in four rings, a hotel receptionist saying, “Bueno, El Marinero.” And Atticus could think of nothing to say; all he could think was, R.
About twenty minutes before sundown he locked up the house and went down to the beach through the pool gate. The sea was in green turmoil, the waves as big as one-car garages. College girls with hardly anything on were still on the hotel cots in a brassy shine of baby oil, headphones playing, margaritas in their hands, their faces tilted up to a sun that was now behind them. A plump American woman was sitting in a palapa’s shade, her skin patched scarlet with sunburn, her rose sunglasses raising up from a P. D. James paperback to linger on the old man in the gray mustache and gray cowboy boots who was falteringly stalking by. After the Maya Hotel was the El Presidente, the saltbox casitas of the Encanto condominiums, the Hotel Mexicana, the Marriott, and then a staircase of sea-grass and silt took Atticus up over an aggregation of dark brown stone that looked like the high pier of a lighthouse that neglect or age had torn down. Going over it and onto a gray boardwalk down to the sand, Atticus stepped onto a quarter-mile of public beach still crowded with Mexican families. Heavy women in overwashed dresses were sitting up on higher land, talking intermittently as they cooked tortillas on iron grills or just gazed at baby girls who were happily patting the sand. Teenaged girls who were probably their daughters sat on top of a big concrete sewage pipe as though they were still in a public schoolyard, snickering and whispering and modestly putting their hands to their mouths when they blushed and pealed with laughter. Then Atticus was aware of a half-naked American in his late teens walking u
p beside him in gray San Antonio Spurs gym shorts, his skin a ginger brown, his hair as wild as a lion’s mane, a green tattoo of a dagger and a green teardrop of blood just about where his heart ought to have been. The kid falsely smiled and in a soft Southern accent asked, “Say friend, would you happen to be able to maybe help me out?”
A handful of rings and studs glinted from his ears, and there was a kind of silver tack in his nose. “You need pliers?” Atticus asked.
But the kid was too far into his skit to listen. “You see, I’m fixin’ to get out of this hole and I’m just about five dollars shy of a bus ticket. Might you have something you could lend me?”
Some Mexican boys played volleyball on the sand in dirty polyester pants that were rolled up past their knees. Some young mothers were struggling out into the waves in dark brassieres and underthings that they were trying to conceal with white filmy shirts made transparent by the sea. A skinny hotel cook still in his red tennis shoes and checkered gray pants stood ankle deep with a one-year-old boy whom he’d happily swing into the air by his wrists so that the boy’s toes skimmed along the water in the spikes and scribble of handwriting.