Atticus

by Ron Hansen

  “Bueno,” a young woman answered.

  I asked the office clerk in Spanish if she was still holding a Lufthansa ticket for Scott Cody.

  When did I order it?

  Wednesday night.

  “Momentito,” she said, and then she confirmed that she did have it, but I was too late for the flight out tonight.

  Was it good for any night?

  Of course; it was full fare. But I’d need to make a reservation.

  Would she have it delivered to 69 Avenida del Mar?

  “Mañana,” she said, and only after I hung up did I think that mañana was a flexible term and could mean either morning or tomorrow or sometime in the future. I tried to telephone the office again, but it was then after nine.

  I foolishly put the visa and passport down somewhere in the darkness when I hunted Reinhardt’s suitcase in the walk-in closet of the guest bedroom. I couldn’t remember if I’d got everything out of Reinhardt’s luggage but felt around with my hand and knew that I had, and I shut the hard-sided suitcase tight with a red shock cord. And forgot about the passport and visa. My own private attention deficit disorder. Then I heard a truck halt in the street right in front of the place. I held my breath and heard singing on the truck radio and the talking of four or five men. A flashlight beam glanced through the high window of the stairway, walked along the house, and then shot into the kitchen and flooded the dining room. But that was all. Half a minute passed and I heard shoes and the chunk of a truck door and the singing gradually faded as the truck rolled down the hill. I hustled down the stairs then, and out through the pool door, and trotted along the hard wet sand of high tide to the centro.

  Printers Inc would have closed by nine, but on the off chance that Renata would still be there, I walked down the alley behind the bookstore and looked in through the window of the storage room and its green-curtained doorway. A flash of a feminine hand holding a paperback, then nothing, then a plaid skirt and the fluorescent lights fluttering off from the front of the store to the rear. I tried the door handle, dodged inside, and held myself against a high bookcase, in darkness. Renata walked into the storage room with four hardbacks that she forced into a box. I tackled her against me and whacked her mouth shut with my hand. “Don’t scream,” I hissed. “It’s Scott.”

  I felt her shock at first, that hard stiffening of fear, and then she changed as she got who it was, struggling fiercely, wrestling and whimpering, falling away and kicking at me, far more wrath than worry to it, and I just held her more tightly, hoarsely whispering into her hair, “Shhh. Shhh. Stop it. Are you alone?”

  She relented a little and nodded.

  I let Renata go and she turned and angrily flung herself at me again, her fists hitting hard at my chest and face and head for a full minute, shrieking calumnies and dirty words, shrieking how could I do that to her? put her through that? talk to her now? it was horrible. Et cetera. I accepted it all like a proper penance, and when she grew tired I held her away from me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I hoped to keep you out of it.”

  “Well you didn’t. Creep! I had to lie to the police. And I had no clue about you or what the truth was. What the hell is going on? Who was he?”

  “Reinhardt Schmidt. Did they buy it?”

  “The police? Yes, I think so. At least, they’re not investigating.” She felt her mouth. “You hurt my mouth with your hand.”

  I held her face toward the office light and looked. “It’s not bleeding.”

  Renata twisted away and again struck my chest, but weakly now, hardly more than a pat, an emotional metaphor. “You have no idea how I’ve hated you today!” She fumed for a moment, then threw back her tangled hair and flung closed the green hanging draperies, shielding us from the front windows. “What happened?”

  “I found Reinhardt dead in the dining room Wednesday night.”

  “Why in your house? Who was he?”

  “I have no time to go into that now.”

  “Make time.”

  Sighing at the fatigue of it, I said, “Reinhardt’s just a guy I met who was trying to get money from me. Why he was killed and by whom is a mystery. Okay? Wednesday night, though, I thought it looked like I’d done it, so I tried to hide what had happened. I was drunk, and scared. I had a hard time figuring out what to do.”

  She hotly said, “Don’t you dare talk to me about being scared! You know what he looked like when I found him? You know how that hurts? My first thought was that it was you. And all afternoon I wished it was. Stuart forced me to call your father. What fun that was.” She harshly wiped both eyes with her palms. “God, I resent these tears!”

  “What does Stuart know?”

  Renata sat against the box of hardbacks and hung her head as she got out a tissue. “Nothing.”

  “Maintain that.”

  She touched her nose with the tissue and scowled. “You really are crazy, you know. Your father’s flying down. Am I supposed to keep playing your stupid charade?”

  “You have to, I think. Don’t let on to my father and he’ll leave right after the funeral. I have to get out of Mexico first. We’ll straighten everything out after that.”

  “Everyone will be relieved. Won’t they. You depend on that.”

  “I hurt a lot of people. I know that. But it was truly self-preservation.”

  Renata was quiet with thought. “He was killed in your house. Are you in danger?”

  “I have to lie low, that’s all. Look: I forgot my passport and visa in the guest room. Will you try to find them for me tomorrow?”

  “I’ll have to try to get them with your father there.”

  “Stay the night if you have to. You can pull it off. And see if a Lufthansa ticket was delivered. María hides my mail in the dining room sideboard.”

  “Lufthansa.”

  “To Germany. Reinhardt ordered it.”

  “I really really hate this.”

  She was still sitting there when I went out.

  Half a lifetime ago an international consortium of petroleum companies invited some regional oil producers to a conference in New York, and since I was painting there I threw a party in the East Village for my father. But I was too hyped, too shy of his powers of detection, and I spent the night hustling out of whichever room he entered; he even found me behind the kitchen door once. “Why are you so spooked, son?” he asked. The question was rhetorical, he only had to fleetingly meet my friends to know how I’d failed to live up to his standards. But there was no blame in him, no scold or pontification, he was never one of those not-in-my-house-you-don’t fathers, there was only that calm, see-all, X-ray stare that told me This is not healthy and you know it.

  Waking up in the church basement on Friday, I got the usual frightened watchfulness, the mothers hushing their children’s questions, but also Stuart’s beggar, Hector, tilted over me on his crutches and informed me that four Mexican men had walked through the basement the night before, wondering aloud where the blond American was. “We didn’t know,” he told me in Spanish, implying that no one there felt especially protective of me. And then he gave me my father’s stare before going off on his rounds.

  I took the hint and from nine until six hung out on the salt-white beach of the Maya Hotel not far from my glamorous, rented house, hiding behind sunglasses, the blue bandana, the frayed straw cowboy hat, my thighs and feet getting fried in a Speedo racing suit I bought in the Maya’s haberdashery, a hundred strangers having a whale of a good time in my company as I dully drank piña coladas at the outdoor bar, using Reinhardt’s pesos now, and was vigilant for any glimpse of my father in the house on Avenida del Mar. So foul and fair a day I have not seen.

  At four or so—the Mexican police had my watch—I finally took the hotel elevator up to the fifth floor and walked the hallway to the observation deck. A homely mother with a Mississippi accent was expertly explaining oceanography to her four children, otherwise I was alone up there, spying on the upstairs terrace of my white stucco hou
se. A few floors below me a frail old woman in green pajamas and a flowing green robe leaned on a balcony with a highball glass in both hands. And there, Hi Dad!, was himself in my house, half a hundred yards away, staring at her in his starched white shirt and old-fashioned tie, his face tired and aching, five hundred years old, his heart full of melancholy, a fresh grief for me to handle before he withdrew into my bedroom again. My father was too much an outdoor man to stay inside the house for long, so I hung out up there on the fifth floor as the sea breeze lost fifteen degrees and the roof of the world was shingled with clouds. Twenty minutes later and Atticus was stepping down the staircase of tiered railroad ties and peering out at the constancy of the sea before going up to the terrace, where he sat with his hands knitted atop his head, a picture of misery, his mind wholly on me. You’ve put him through hell, I thought. Again and again.

  Went out to the jungle in a fulminating bus filled with hotel workers, getting off a half mile from Eduardo’s and hiking in through high weeds and face rakers until Eduardo was frontally there in the path like a fastened door, a fierce machete in his hand. He asked in Spanish, “Are you a ghost?”

  I told him in Spanish I wasn’t.

  Eduardo smiled. “Then I’m happy to see you, my friend.”

  I fell into my usual pattern there, knocking myself out on their whiskey, then waking so late and lazily that Eduardo’s children were able to paint my face and affix green fronds to me as decoration. The heat and sun were like that of eleven o’clock. I was half-tempted to attend the funeral, Huck Finn on the half-shell, if only because it presented such a movie moment, The Phantom of the Opera, The Hunchback of Notre Dame: if I wanted to I could bellow from the high choir loft that this funeral should halt, it was all a horrible sham, and heads would turn and the gloom and melancholy in that holy place would change into something gloriously weird. Wisely, I headed instead to the sea and felt the high sun on my face and chest and tried to force pictures of Atticus out of my mind—my father offering prayers for me, my father painfully watching Reinhardt going into the ground. Would there be a dinner afterwards? Wasn’t like him. I heard him telling Stuart and Renata he was a little off his feed. My father was a thoroughly practical man, far more like him to want to go out to the casita. And he’d see what others missed. Wildly panicking, I walked on all fours over high hills of rock or fought my way around them in my khakis and shoes, wrestling against the tougher swells, often flattening against a hard limestone shelf with the force of a half ton of water. I finally swam out fifty yards or so, just past the great wave breaks, finding help in an undertow that took me north and farther out to sea, where there was a change in the current, a fierce pull toward the cliffs and the gray cathedral of stone, and I floated with it until one foot touched sand and I fell and sloshed through the churning water just below my studio.

  Climbed the faint earthen path up to it and forced open a front door that humidity was fastening to the frame. Everything was pretty much as I’d left it, though fallen hangers had been hung and Reinhardt’s white underpants had been used to mop up blood from the floor. The kitchen still carried the hint of scorched coffee. I was halfway toward rinsing out the full pot of coffee before common sense got the better of habit. I fetched a Coca-Cola from the refrigerator and finished it as I strolled the house hunting the giveaways and forgetfulness of my harried Wednesday night. I failed to check my off-brand tape player or even think of my feeble toss of Reinhardt’s fancy shoes. And then, fully in love with my brilliance, I put the Coca-Cola can on the kitchen counter and walked out—just try to find something there, Dad.

  That evening I took Eduardo’s wife’s Schwinn to the Pemex station on the highway. Telephoned Renata but Stuart answered and I hung up. Dialed my own number and heard myself saying, “Hi. You know the routine, name and number. I’ll get back atcha later.”

  And I was about to hang up again when Renata got on the phone. “Hello?”

  “You’re there.”

  “And so is he.”

  “Still? Can you talk?”

  “I have to turn the machine off.” I heard her stab at a button and get back on. I heard fierce irritation with me in the flat tone of her voice. “Your father’s sleeping. El turista.”

  “Damn.” I half-turned in the telephone booth. A handsome Texan was filling the tank of an old Volvo with high-octane gas. “Are you going to cancel his flight?”

  “I’ll ask tomorrow.”

  “Any sign of the Lufthansa ticket?”

  “Nope.”

  “She must have lost the address. I’ll have to check. You got the passport and visa?”

  “I hunted everywhere.”

  “The guest room, Renata!”

  “Especially there. I have no idea where they are.”

  The Texan shut off the high-octane pump and was now filling his tank with low-octane. A chemist. His wife leaned out of the office. “You want anything to drink, Grover?”

  Grover focused on the gas pump. “No thanks.”

  “Scott?” Renata asked.

  “I was thinking. I could get out of Mexico on the Harley-Davidson.”

  “Long trip.”

  “West to Villahermosa in one day. Another to go north to Tampico. And then on the third day Matamoros and Brownsville, Texas.”

  “Whatever,” she said, plainly bored.

  “Look, this is hard on me, too.”

  “Oh, shut up! You are so self-centered, Scott! You haven’t even asked how your father is! And all he thinks about is you! Have you given a thought to what you’ve put him through?”

  “Unfortunately, he’s used to it.”

  “Well, I’m not,” she said, and hung up.

  It’s the parable of the prodigal son, isn’t it. There was a cattleman without cattle who had two sons, and the kid brother went to his father and asked for his inheritance, and his father divided his estate between his sons so he wouldn’t go crazy with worry. And not many days later the one who thought much of himself gathered everything he owned and took a journey into a far country, and there he squandered his inheritance in wild living. And when he had wasted everything, he began to be in want, and he took a job in the fields feeding swine. But when he came to his senses he said, “I will get up and go to my father, and will say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in your sight; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me as one of your hired hands.’” And he got up and went to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him, and felt compassion for him, and ran out and embraced him and kissed him. Luke, chapter fifteen.

  Eduardo and his family went to Mass with friends on Sunday and afterward watched an orchestra play on the plaza of the parish church. When his friend was hauling Eduardo and his family back home in his truck, Eduardo saw a joven who he thought may have been Renaldo Cruz, hitchhiking out here on the highway.

  Enraged at hearing that, I flung myself right past Eduardo and I got hotter as I high-hurdled through the jungle, some juvenile part of me trying out the old Tarzan number, I have had it with you, buster. But when I got to the house, what I saw was my Harley-Davidson at the foot of the hill, and I knew it was not Renaldo but Atticus up there in the casita, holding things in his hands, assessing and gauging and gumshoeing, figuring out exactly how his son died, as if that knowledge would fill in all that was otherwise missing.

  Went up the hill the hard way, through high weeds and pepper trees, nothing to recommend it as a hill to look down, a stroll to take, no pretty postcard view. And when I achieved the house, my father was scrabbling down the fall-off above the cove with my shotgun like a staff in his hand, and he was getting out on a precarious gray lintel of stone to fetch from magenta oleander one of Reinhardt’s Cole-Haan shoes. You haven’t felt such heartache, seeing that sixty-seven-year-old sleuth, wholly out of his element, hunting one more clue, one further explanation, as if that were the hidden value x that would solve the algebra of his boy. And then an intuition caused him to fire a look
up the hill at me and shade his fair blue eyes from the hard glare behind me. “Who’s there?” he called out, and I retreated from him, fearing he’d seen my face, heading in full gallop down the hill’s far side and helter-skeltering into the tangles and forget-it of jungle before I finally turned and saw Renaldo Cruz out there with us like some Aristotelian unity, himself in a fast sprint back to the highway and likely into town.

  “We need to talk to him,” Eduardo told me. “Renaldo needs a big healing.”

  Late that Sunday afternoon we got hold of Eduardo’s friend’s truck and went to the Pemex station, and I heaped a handful of coins by the public telephone as Eduardo tried Alejandro Cruz in the Resurrección directory. Alejandro had no idea who Renaldo Cruz was. Andalesía Cruz failed to answer, as did Armando. We huddled there inside the booth, my left ear firmly pressed to the handset, as Eduardo dialed again. Cecilia Cruz told Eduardo that Marcelino, no relation, might have a cousin by that name. Marcelino’s phone was disconnected. We tried Emilio Cruz and Heriberto Cruz—no answer—and finally heard from Leticia Cruz that Renaldo was indeed her cousin, but she hadn’t seen him since Easter. She thought he was staying with his uncle, Rafael. Eduardo flipped a page and hunted a Rafael in the directory, found none, and asked if Leticia knew how we could find him. She said he owned the Bella Vista bar.

  “Boystown,” I said.

  We dialed that. Rafael was there. Yes, Rafael admitted, Renaldo Cruz was his nephew. And then he volunteered that Renaldo was in Dallas, working at a car wash.

  Eduardo held his hand over the phone’s mouthpiece and whispered in Spanish, “He’s lying.”

  “No fooling.”

  Eduardo got back on and told Rafael that the reason he was calling was that he too worked at that car wash and there was a shameful mistake on Renaldo’s paycheck, he was paid way too little, his boss was so embarrassed about it that he’d begged Eduardo to be sure to get the money to Renaldo so his boss would not feel dishonored. Embarrassment and dishonor were far from my own experience of corporate America, but Rafael Cruz seemed to buy it and he gave Eduardo precise directions to his house in the barrio.