Atticus

by Ron Hansen

  Either I read it somewhere or Eduardo told me, but in their religious ceremonies ages ago, pre-Cortez, the Mayan high priests used to stab the barb of the stingray’s tail in their penises and the poison would kick them into head trips that seemed to offer hallucinatory interpretations of the future. You’ll have a sense of how far gone I was then that I found the hurt and danger of that kind of rush crazily alluring. I got high on threat and foreboding; I was like those heroin addicts who find they can get off just with the needle. I ought to have flashed up to the surface for air, but I felt a strong and irrational need to touch that stingray, and I kicked down until I was just above the fish, watching it blankly watch me.

  I have given up trying to be persuasive about this. You get these looks: Oh sure, stingrays. But in fact a flock or herd or plague of stingrays majestically soared in from nowhere, five or six of them wrestling up against me in a thrall of motion, their soft wings sheathing me, their tails frantically whipping, falling away only to flare up against my flesh, showing their white undersides as their toothless mouths seemed to foolishly smile. I have no idea what attracted them. I have never felt anything so much like pure muscle, that filled me with such loathing. It was like one of those Renaissance paintings of Saint Anthony being persecuted by demons. The stingrays jolted hard into me and held me under and one blunt head knocked my face mask off. And I was near fainting for lack of air when I heard the Mayans there with me, churning their legs and fighting the wings until a spear jarred into one and a pink orchid of blood seemed to grow from its skin and their hands took hold of its head and ventral gills. And as I shot upward, they gingerly followed, hauling the fish to the skiff.

  The kid was kneeling by a gunwale with a gaff. Enormously pleased, he helped me up into the boat and patted my head and heaped Spanish praise on me until he could heave the stingray onto the flooring. But then the others got in and huddled far from me by the engine as if they were afraid of getting anything of me on them. Even Eduardo found nothing more to do than frown at my bad karma.

  We went farther up the coast to an inlet and the pretty white skirt of beach that was near Eduardo’s shanty. Women in five-dollar American dresses were there chanting songs as they husked corn around a fire, and Eduardo’s wife Koh shyly handed me a jar of the fermented corn whiskey called chicha.

  I frankly brought nothing to that party; I was an anchorite, il penseroso, off by himself on a rock, hearing their talk but not understanding, hearing the high whine of insects at sundown. I felt apart from humanity, as full of friction and self-pity as a fractious misfit feeding on his miseries. Koh filled my jar again as the stingray was flayed, and as our food was cooked Eduardo sat by me in four or five minutes of silence before hesitantly saying in Spanish, “We are afraid of you.”

  “Why?”

  “Bad things happen,” he said. “We fear for our children.” Eduardo’s secret name in Mayan was Nicuachinel, he who sees into the middle of things.

  Elegant Spanish escaped me. I offered him something like, “Well, that’s just stupid.”

  But Eduardo simply said, “You go home now, please.”

  So I gathered my few things, got into my Volkswagen, and headed back to Resurrección. Was I thinking about how my mother died? I have no idea, but it would have been fitting. I was twenty-four then, and full of anger and psychology. I hated my art studio courses in England, but I hated going back home for the holidays, too. I felt like a boy again, an underachiever. I challenged the plastic tree my mother put up, the chilly temperature in the house, the high-cholesterol diet of my father. And I got it into my head that the family get-together needed liquor, they were far too uptight, too puritan. A furious snow was flying outside but Atticus was through arguing with me, and my mother thought she might have some groceries she could get yet, and so off we went to Antelope. A few miles west of town it got very bad, but I listened to none of my mother’s cautions about the ice. My foot was flat to the floorboard even after we started to skid. “Oh honey, no!” her last words. A full hour later I woke to find myself sitting against an orange snow fence, hardly there at all, whiteness and silence filling the landscape, my neck and back aching, blood trickling from my forehead, and a sheriff’s car and fire truck and ambulance were there on the highway like forgotten kid’s toys. Watched four men hunch inside a milkwhite Thunderbird whose front end was crushed against a Dutch elm tree, their wide gray parkas and hurried wrestling mercifully hiding her head from me. I got up when I saw my father’s truck hurrying toward the accident, and I flung myself inside the sheriff’s car, anything but face him, I even hiked my coat up over my head like those guys on the hustle into jail when the photographers are feeding. But Atticus found me, of course, and I could hear the fierce control in his voice as he asked, “You okay, son?” The him in him could be fully silenced, if need be, he could put away his emotions like things he’d never had much use for. If fathering was his job, then he’d do it, and how he felt about his son after his wife was killed wasn’t a feeling he’d entertain. We weren’t ever the same after that. My shame got in the way.

  Say I was thinking about that, then. And Carmen Martínez was walking down the highway in a navy blue scarf and the kind of white dress that flirts with the air, holding a huge live iguana by the tail in her right hand, possibly hunched to look at the faint pedal of its claws, how its jaws were wide and its head was lifted so it could focus on the jungle walking past. And what was she thinking of? Romance, food, homework, plans? Was she lost in childhood memories? Was she full of possibilities or was she empty, like I was then, flatlining it, a friend to my habits and nothing else, my hands hard on the wheel and my foot to the floorboard, the motor whining and stuttering, seeing nothing but a hallway of headlight ahead, no girl with an iguana too fixed on one grand idea to hear the Volkswagen behind her and get off the highway?

  She never knew what hit her. I hear Carmen constantly, I’m host to the orchestra of that scream, there’s no way to get it right on the page, that wail so full of hurt and outrage and not yet aware that she would be killed. And impossible, too, to say how frail and horrible and stomach-turning was the soft animal whump of hitting her, one blunt syllable that jolted the car and was hidden beneath the shriek of the hood’s sudden misshaping as she was hoisted up into the air and her elbow or her skull, I try not to know, socked against the windshield and a fishnet of shattered glass flew in front of me even as I for the first time saw Carmen falling off into the night beside me and then behind me—just enough time for me to think Whatwasthat? before she was gone.

  I knew, however, what that was; there was no mistaking that she was now in a very bad way. I shot a glance up into the rearview mirror and saw Carmen faintly heaped on the highway and then shaded in darkness. Six seconds had passed, no more, perhaps less, I could fractionate everything, still do, there are four in the mornings when I get down to cell level in the hard blast of the skirt against her flesh as the hood finds her thigh.

  I hesitated just long enough to imagine a future in which I kept going, pretended nothing ugly had taken place, the fender and hood were like that, the windshield’s ruin caused by a stone, a pigeon, a flaw in the glass, Craziest dang thing happened to me last night. But then I hit the brakes and hunted reverse and zigged and zagged a hundred yards until I found Carmen in my taillights. I have no idea how long I waited inside the car, vexed by the injustice of things, wishing she’d get up, urging her to. And then seeing that huge iguana holding on to the highway, feebly thinking, its jaws open in a kind of smile, Wow, golly, thanx buddy. I got a flashlight from underneath the front seat, the flashlight I’d lose in the jungle, and followed its yellow circle as it skated the highway to Carmen’s body. No blood there, God what a blessing, no blood even by her head, just the blue scarf hiding half her face and the girl’s beautiful arms and legs flung into rag-doll contortions. Heat was still fierce in the pavement and there was an irrational instant when I was astonished that she could stay there like that without scorching her skin.
But then I felt the chill in her hand as I lifted it and laid it in front of her. The hurtle of the accident hiked up her skirt over her white cotton panties. I pulled the skirt down, then folded her legs together as I fitted my left arm underneath them and my right arm just under her neck and hauled her with great difficulty and carefulness to the high weeds at the side of the road where I laid her down. The scarf fell away then, and I saw the pretty face of a girl of seventeen who was most definitely dead, but whose black eyes were fixed on mine with the shock and fear you see in a person when what they hoped for and banked on and cannot do without wholly disappears. No accusation, no self-pity, only that look of wreckage and disappointment.

  And that cooked it. I held my hands to my ears as if she were screaming still, and walked around and around in circles, just like a nut. Whether one minute or five passed, I have no idea, I was lost and foolish and whining oh no oh no, if the policía had passed by then I would have said, “Okay, take me.” I was ready to go to jail, do hard time, to have one of my hands hacked off. Whether it was guilt or fright or the too-muchness of killing the girl, I was just addled, without sand or sense, holes in my head you could fit a shoe in.

  Reinhardt found me like that; tooling by in the kind of Jeep that kids rented at the hotels for a lark. Who knows what sort of Kurtz number he was pulling out there in the jungle? I was freaked enough that it hardly seemed coincidental, of course he’d be there, I was thinking, I probably would not have been surprised if he’d lowered on ropes from the heavens, the deus ex machina of my own doom. I heard the Jeep and shaded my eyes from the headlight glare, half-ready to hotfoot it into the flora or heave myself beneath the tires even as the Jeep halted beside me.

  “I haff been looking for you,” the guy said.

  And then I saw that it was Reinhardt Schmidt and that he’d found the girl behind me. His foot half lifted from the Jeep’s brake, I’ll just be going, forgive me; but then he got another insight into the situation, grasped the unholy shape I was in, and hatched fragmentary plans that had for their basis that I was up to my neck in it and that it might be fortunate for him if I felt I owed him one. We probably spoke further but I have no memory of speech; I only have a picture in my mind of him knowingly stooped over Carmen, feeling for a pulse first at her wrist, then her throat, and holding the flashlight to her irises until he finally shut her lids with the first and last fingers of his hand, the horns of Satan sign. Reinhardt sat back on his haunches and looked at me with hostility before saying, “I’ll take care of it.”

  I flush with shame when I say that I let him. Embarrassed gratitude filled me, and if I protested or tried to uphold my insipid claims to manliness, I have no recollection of it, only recall getting into his Jeep—a fatherly look as he handed me the keys—and heading home like a kid with a fresh learner’s permit, hardly noticing his camera flash, just rolling forward at fifteen or twenty miles per hour, far enough under the limit that even as I got near town an old woman was able to hold her gaze on my face as she hunched along the highway. We are afraid of you.

  I hid Reinhardt’s Jeep under a tarpaulin and went inside the house, filling a whiskey glass and then hunting the smell of reefer that was focused upstairs in my room. Emptied bottles of Corona were beside the headboard, a film called Predator was still in the VCR, and on the desk my-sketch pad was opened to a page on which Reinhardt had listed, like a houseguest from hell, fourteen long-distance telephone calls he’d made to Europe and Hawaii. And that was the first time I felt the full impact of Reinhardt’s taking care of it, and took to my bed in a fearsome swoon of illness, paranoia, and depression, pretty much unable to get up for two days, but sleeping no more than an hour at a time, the howling tempest inside my head demanding me fully awake at the helm. I heard Reinhardt saying over and over again, “I’ll take care of it,” but there were hours, too, of hearing Carmen’s frustrated scream and feeling her sweet presence completely. I heard María frittering about downstairs, or talking on the phone to callers, saying I wasn’t feeling well; she brought up meals I hardly touched and confessed that my friend with the blond hair kept coming by while I was away, he was so persistent, and that she’d finally let him do his laundry there. Was that all right?

  You see where this is heading. Reinhardt Schmidt parked my Volkswagen beside his Jeep three days after the accident, and I heard him talking to María at the front door, offering her wildflowers for the fiesta. I got up and hurriedly put on a shirt and pants as Reinhardt headed upstairs, and he found me sitting down at my desk, rolling paper into my typewriter.

  “Està bien,” he said, and smiled.

  “What’s bien?”

  “Todo,” he said. Everything. “Look out the window.”

  What I saw was a faultless windshield and the fresh paint of a hood and fender repair. “Looks great, doesn’t it,” he said. “I went all the way to Mérida for the work. I have the garage receipt, of course, and shots of the Volkswagen, too.”

  A flare seemed to have gone off inside my head. White hot daze and zero data, tabula rasa; I was as fáceless and silent as a fallen tree.

  “You haven’t asked about the girl,” Reinhardt said.

  “You took care of her?”

  “Unfortunately no. I heard a truck. Quite a situation! I got into the car and hided out in the jungle. And when I got back onto the highway again, fifteen minutes later, no more, she was gone. Spirited away.” Reinhardt walked out to the hallway and hollered, “¡María! ¡Dos Coronas por favor!”

  She hesitated but said, “Sí, señor.”

  “She was Carmen Martinez,” Reinhardt said. “Sixteen years old. Eighth child in the family. Engaged to be married in June to a guy named Renaldo. She wasn’t mentioned in the English newspaper, but there were two paragraphs about her in Monday’s diario. She was buried just today.”

  “You’re here for money.”

  Reinhardt sat at the foot of the mattress and happily patted a spot beside himself. I folded my arms like a hard guy and sagged against the window sash.

  “You know what I told you about myself? A lot of that wasn’t true.”

  “Boy,” I said. “You think you know a guy…”

  “I have cancer.” Reinhardt icily stared at me, as if he were not communicating the full hideousness of his pain. “I have tried everything to cure it,” he said, “and now I am trying some medicines you can only get in Mexico. Are they working? I hope so; probably not. But in the meantime I am losing weight and I have no money and no friends. I have a few credit cards I have stolen, but I am afraid to use them. I have a horrible room in a hotel full of Europeans on El Camino Real. I hock sunglasses on the street and I heat canned soups for dinner. It’s pathetic. In the United States they have a foundation for children, I forget its name, but it fulfills the dying child’s wish: to go to Disneyland, to hang out in the locker room after a Yankees game? I have wishes, too.”

  María halted at the doorway in torment and reluctance, with a Coca-Cola tray that supported two Coronas and two highball glasses. “Gracias, María,” Reinhardt said, and fastened his interested stare on her as he took the tray. She went out and his blue eyes stayed on her as if enjoying a feast. “Are you fucking her, Scott?”

  Atticus used to say of such a question that he wouldn’t dignify it with an answer. I filled a highball glass with beer.

  Reinhardt smirked. “You are an innocent.”

  “You were talking about your last fling.”

  “Oh yes. A first-class flight to Frankfurt on Lufthansa, fine clothes and fabulous dinners, sex with beautiful prostitutes in the afternoons.”

  “You’ll make each day your masterpiece.”

  “What a fine way of putting it!” Reinhardt sipped some beer and pressed on. “I have a fantasy that I’ll finally end up in Monaco, gambling at chemin de fer just as James Bond did. If I win, I will throw the franc notes up in the air and laugh like a fat sultan as people fall to the floor for them. And if I lose, I’ll say, ’I am finished!’ and blow my brain
s out with a tiny pistol.”

  “A guy’d have to spend four or five hundred dollars for all that, wouldn’t he?”

  “Yesterday I deposited five hundred pesos in your bank account and asked for a balance. You have twenty-four thousand dollars here. You can afford to give me half that, I think.”

  “We’re in cahoots, huh?”

  “Cahoots?”

  I faced the wall and faked writing 24,000, and I was just about to divide it by 2 when Reinhardt said with irritation, “Twelve thousand dollars.”

  “Shall we go down to the bank right now?”

  Reinhardt tried to hold his smile, but it fell into a sneer. “It’s six-fifteen.”

  Eagerness imbued my face. “Well, first thing tomorrow then?”

  “I presume you know there’s a fiesta Wednesday.”

  “Damn. And they wonder why their economy’s failing.”

  “You can play the joke with me, of course,” Reinhardt said, “but the police will not find your situation too funny. A hit-and-run accident is murder here. You’ll be in jail for a very long time.”

  I lifted the highball glass and drank half the beer in it. Reinhardt lifted his glass, too, but felt foolish imitating me and put it back on the tray. “Do not delude yourself into thinking you are a dangerous person because you happened to kill a pretty girl. You do not have the hate, my friend. You are fatally inhibited.” In proof of that, Reinhardt got up from the bed and walked out of the house. Without inhibition.

  Oh honey, no.

  That night I got the Monday diario from the gift shop in the Cortez Hotel and flipped to the obituaries while having a Gentleman Jack whiskey in the saloon. Carmen Martínez was paragraphed there just as Reinhardt said, but I wasn’t up to a translation, the Spanish kept drifting sideways the harder I stared at it. So I folded the newspaper and had my whiskey glass filled again. An honorable guilt was flooding me, but with it came a hungry interest in self-preservation, and after an hour of pathos and regret I found myself trying to feature Reinhardt fulfilling his threat. I fancied a police sergeant tearing open an envelope and finding a white page filled with paste-on letters snipped from magazines—English about the hit-and-run driver who killed Carmen Martínez. And there, too, would be the flash camera shots of the girl and my Volkswagen’s rear license plate, and behind them the body shop receipts from Mérida. And then, perhaps, Stuart would be at my house in his American consul suit. “Would it be possible to chat with you for a bit?”