Atticus Page 3

  ***

  Upstairs in Scott’s room was a green wall shingled with high school and college paintings, all created in those happy times when everything that Scotty touched seemed to turn into a picture. Atticus stared at the portrait of himself as he was twenty years ago, forty-seven and finding wealth in oil, his hair and great mustache a chestnut brown, his blue eyes checkered by the stoop’s windowpanes, the April sunlight like buttermilk, just back from Mass in his blood-red tie and a hard-as-cardboard shirt that was so blazingly white it glowed. His son had titled the picture “Confidence.”

  Atticus sat at his son’s oak desk and pulled out a lower right-hand drawer jammed with manila folders upon which Scott had printed, in a fine draftsman’s style, Art Schools, Banking, Credit Cards, Fellowships and Grants, Medical, Taxes, and Vita. As organized as an engineer. Atticus lifted out the Vita file and slumped back in a tilting chair to page through it. Eight years of report cards from Saint Mary’s Grade School were on top, then white First Honors cards and typed grade slips from Regis High School in Denver, followed by his senior transcript from the office of the registrar at Stanford University. The Royal College of Art in England had sent correspondence to accept him, then provided the financial terms of his stay, and then forwarded a letter in which one of his British teachers appraised Scott’s failing studio work over the year: “Skilful, safe, formulaic,” he’d written, and “You lack nothing in terms of technique, but is it art or illustration?” Scott had four photocopies of an old curriculum vitae that he used to send out in hopes of employment as an art instructor, that provided a home address in care of Atticus Cody in order to avoid mention of the New York hospital he was staying in. Under “teaching experience,” Scott had recorded giving art therapy at Hirsch Clinic and then still-life painting sessions at the Self-Help Center. His age was then thirty-three, and his health, he’d said, was fine. And to that information, he’d added in pen on all four copies: “I dress myself, do not act out, and am never tardy. I believe we all should help one another find our controllers. We all have functions in the machine.”

  Alongside his Vita file was a sheaf of his poems from one of his times at the clinic. The first one went:

  Here it’s fall.

  I feel no pain.

  I hate you all.

  I’ll kill again.

  Atticus heard the kitchen door open and he put the files away. And he was dabbing a handkerchief to his eyes when he heard Marilyn in the hallway.

  “Dad?” she called.

  “Good morning!”

  Frank’s wife hit the light switch as she walked inside the room in her navy blue parka and ski pants and gray over-boots, his infant grandson against her right shoulder, a blue blanket capping Adam’s head. Marilyn’s aviator glasses grayed with the temperature change. She said, “Frank’s talking to the American Embassy in Mexico City. We’ll have trouble getting his body back right away.”

  Atticus got his grandson from her and grinned down as he gentled and cradled the boy. Adam struggled to look at the overhead light, at the ceiling, and then gazed for a long time at his grandfather’s big gray mustache.

  Marilyn lifted her aviator glasses and pressed a balled-up tissue to her eyes and nose and then pushed the tissue inside her parka sleeve. Her lipstick was slightly awry. She looked at Scott’s desk. “Are you hunting for something?”

  “Explanations.”

  She smiled uncertainly and said, “I have that new priest from Saint Mary’s here.”

  “Good.”

  “First The Denver Post looked us up. And then the Rocky Mountain News. Him being the brother to a state senator. Woman in Mexico called them, I guess. Seems to me that’s the family’s job.”

  “Well, she probably figured she knew firsthand how it happened.”

  “I knew his birthday and high school and college, but that was just about it. You know so much about your family, and all the obituaries seem to want is dates.”

  Adam reached up and patted Atticus on a windburnt cheek that was scattered with lines. Atticus kissed the boy’s tiny hand and said, “Expect Frank’s taking it pretty hard.”

  “Well, it was the shotgun he gave him at Christmas. We always thought, though … you know, that he’d put all that behind him.”

  Marilyn collected her son again as Atticus got up from the chair. He said, “How would you like some coffee?”

  ***

  The priest was sitting coatless at the kitchen table, fresh out of the seminary and maybe forty pounds overweight, and Atticus couldn’t remember his name. Marilyn put through a telephone call to her husband and was handed over to his secretary, her cousin Cassie, while Frank finished his talk with a friend in the State Department. Marilyn dipped the mouthpiece. “You’ll have to go through the American consul in Resurrección. She’s getting me the number.”

  “I have it,” Atticus said. “Look on that pad there.”

  Marilyn gazed at Renata Isaacs’s home telephone number and then at Atticus as Frank’s secretary gave her the American consul’s number. “We have it, Cassie. Thanks.”

  Cassie handed her back to Frank and there was talk about a funeral home. Atticus crossed his arms by the coffeepot, watching the light brown explosions in the glass thimble on top. The percolating coffee was becoming important to him. Marilyn was put on hold again. She looked at Atticus and said, “You ought to go down, Dad.”

  “I expect.”

  The priest asked, “You know Spanish?”

  “Word or two,” Atticus said. “Mexican workers used to head up to Antelope after the cantaloupe harvest in Rocky Ford, and I’d usually have a job or two they could help me with. About all I remember now is hammer is el martillo but a sledgehammer is el macho.”

  “I could give you my Spanish phrase book if it’s any help.”

  “I have one. Anyway, it’ll probably come back to me.”

  The priest stared at him and then his face seemed to freshen. “Wasn’t Atticus the name of the father in To Kill a Mockingbird?”

  “Oh? I hadn’t heard that.”

  “Dad!” Marilyn said, and then turned to the priest. “Of course he’s heard that. He’s just putting you on.”

  “You know the boy in that book? The girl’s only friend? That was Truman Capote.”

  “You don’t say,” Marilyn said. “Wasn’t he charming?”

  “Capote? Yes, he was.”

  Atticus stared intently at them both.

  The priest rolled up the left sleeve of his red plaid shirt. “You haven’t asked, but the Church presumes some profound mental upset in the case of a suicide. Especially when it’s committed in this manner. Your son wouldn’t be held responsible for his actions. And there’s the problem of our prejudgment, too. We can’t put limits on God’s forgiveness.”

  Atticus got out a straw broom and swept up the milk pitcher that was in pieces and chips on the pantry floor. “How’d that happen?” Marilyn asked, but before Atticus could answer she was on the telephone again. She jotted further information on the notepad and hung up when she heard her husband’s call-waiting tone.

  The priest said, “I say that because you probably grew up in an age when a person who killed himself was denied Christian burial on the grounds that he was showing contempt for God’s law.”

  “I see.”

  Atticus tapped cream into Serena’s pink Dresden cups before pouring the coffee, and Marilyn sat across from the priest with Adam on her lap. She sipped a little coffee and rocked her boy and smelled the baby shampoo in his scalp. She said, “It doesn’t seem possible, does it.”

  Atticus said, “She told me he went out to his studio to paint about one or so last night. And he seemed okay to her, a little frazzled and drifty, but not so she’d pay any extra attention. You know how Scott could be.” Atticus stopped. His lips trembled and pulled down at the corners, and he held his mouth with his hand as he squinched his blue eyes closed.

  “You go ahead, Dad,” Marilyn said. “You’ve got every right.�
�

  Atticus wiped his eyes with a navy blue handkerchief. “Embarrassing myself here.”

  “Don’t think about me,” the priest said.

  Atticus sipped his coffee, putting the cup on the saucer with care. “This morning,” he said, “Renata took his Volkswagen out to the house he worked in, I guess to find out if he was okay. She yelled in to him and Scott didn’t yell back, so she just naturally went inside. You know, to see how things were. Scott—”

  Atticus couldn’t go on for a second and then the telephone rang and Marilyn gave it a second thought before getting up to answer it. Atticus got up from his spindle chair and limped over to the stoop window. More good people were expressing their sympathy. Marilyn said she knew Atticus appreciated their caring and their prayers. Atticus spied the outside temperature gauge: just twenty. Hotter in Mexico by fifty degrees or more. As soon as she hung up there was a telephone call from Cassie, and Marilyn asked, “Could you go down tonight, Dad?”

  Atticus turned. Marilyn had covered the mouthpiece. “I guess I ought to,” he said.

  “You fly first-class, don’t you?”

  “Usually.”

  She arranged a night flight from Denver to Dallas to Mexico City, and a further connection to Mérida, but he’d have to get a bus to go farther east. The flights to Cancún were booked. And then the telephone rang again and she said, “Merle says he’ll keep the horses at his place and drive you over to Denver.”

  “Don’t want to put him—”

  She handed him the phone.

  “Merle? Don’t want to put you out about the airport, but I would appreciate your looking out for my horses. And, you know, keeping an eye peeled. Expect Butch’ll stay on top of the oil patch so you don’t—”

  Merle interrupted him in order to praise Scott and say how surprised and torn up he was to learn he’d passed away. And then he told Atticus a funny story about Scott operating a Case harvester one fall when he wasn’t but twelve and pheasants kept flying up into the cab.

  Atticus pictured it and smiled and then accepted Merle’s sympathy and words of condolence and hung up the telephone. Marilyn was concentrating on her coffee and a brown scatter of the baby’s animal crackers. She bumped Adam on her knee in order to keep him happy and, when Atticus moved from the telephone, looked up. “I had a good dream about Scott the other night. He was about six years old and riding Conniption, getting her to go right and left by yanking on her mane.”

  And then it was five, and Atticus walked out of the house in his gray Stetson cowboy hat and one of his navy blue suits, hefting just an overnight bag. Marilyn was by the stoop window helping her baby to flap his hand in good-bye. The green yard light blinked and glimmered and then stayed on as Atticus gunned his truck and headed toward the highway and the pink horizon of sundown.

  And it was New Year’s Eve for Atticus again and Scott was slumped in the Ford pickup on the highway to the Denver airport, his hay-yellow hair skewed up against the side window, his index finger drawing eights on the steamed-up glass. An orange sun was just coming up. Hard sleet fishtailed across the highway and pinged like sand against the rocker panels. Scott hadn’t slept and looked sort of slapped together. His lips were moving and his left hand was patting out a poem’s meter on his knee. He apparently sensed Atticus peering at him and repeated “‘Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend with thee; but, sir, what I plead is just. Why do sinners’ ways prosper? And why must disappointment’ something something rhymes with contend.’”

  “Especially like those somethings the guy put in there.”

  “Here’s the complaint. ‘Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend, how wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost defeat, thwart me?”’

  Atticus smiled. “Haven’t heard ‘wert’ and ‘dost’ in a while.”

  “‘Oh, the’ something ‘thralls of lust do’ I’m forgetting it ‘thrive more than I that spend, sir, life upon thy cause.’ You’ve got this priest who’s given up sex, money, honors, the works, and as a kind of compensation for that Hopkins hopes that God will at least help him out with spiritual consolations and poetry. Kind of a religious man’s quid pro quo. And it doesn’t pan out. All he feels is desert.”

  Atticus thought his son would be saying more, but when he looked to his right, Scott was just staring at the high plains outside. And it was like the days of the green GMC truck and the six o’clock rides southeast into town, Frank in a high school letterman’s jacket and trying for a half-hour of sleep, and Scott just ten years old but yakking away like a grown-up, his lunchbox tightly held to his chest. The studded tires would make the sound of a zipper at that speed, the heater fan would putter against a crisp maple leaf that flipped wildly around inside the wire cage, and the woodrows in the pink light of sunup were like words he could just make out.

  That was thirty years ago and Atticus was again on his way to the Denver airport, just a few weeks after he went there with Scott, and he recalled Scott looking out at the countryside and again reciting Gerard Manley Hopkins: “‘Birds build—but not I build; no, but strain, time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes. Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.’”

  MEXICO

  TWO

  And it was Friday and Atticus was holding on to an overhead leather strap on a jolting second-class bus going east to Resurrección; too hot in his suit, his gray cowboy hat off, his lion-yellow overnight bag held between his legs as he squinted out through the gray smears of handprints and noses and sleeping heads on a rattling side window. Atticus was the only American among thirty Mexican passengers, many sitting with their dark eyes on him, the mothers patting babies who were swaddled in shawls, the grave brown men jouncing along in often-washed white shirts and straw cowboy hats, their fingers gripping the seat between their legs because of the high speed. A few feet from Atticus a fat driver of no more than twenty hung his belly over a wide steering wheel, hurtling the bus right and left by rolling the wheel with his elbows. A jeweled cross on a pink glass rosary was looped over the sun visor and was tapping against the spotted windshield. A four-color postcard of Pope John Paul II was taped next to the speedometer. Hot black oil was cooking on the hood, and the pandemonium in the engine was like iron pans being clapped together.

  Off the highway a teenaged boy was walking into town with a sharp machete hooked onto his plastic belt, a .22 rifle slung over his right forearm, a giant pink and black iguana hanging by its tail. Lizards scattered into the weeds when the bus got closer than a few yards. Children stepped into deep weeds and raised their arms up for the gray and sultry wind that the blatting bus pulled along.

  Wherever he looked the earth was orange and used up and no good for planting, but the trees were high as the sides of a canyon, the green turning to a night shade only twenty yards in. Some palm-thatched huts with sapling walls were at the fore edge of the forest, like outposts in a wilderness; deeper back there appeared to be little more than swamp and tangles and snarls of a seaweed moss that hung to the jungle floor like green strings of drying hair.

  Iron gear teeth chattered together and caught as the fat man shifted to second and then hit the brake pedal too hard, tilting Atticus forward in the high whine of worn shoes on the brake drum. Hulking across the highway was an old Chevrolet pickup truck, its tail slung low with the heavy weight of a high concrete cross that six men were trying to fit into a hole for a roadside monument. Shouting was going on. Atticus crouched to peer at the cross through the front windshield and saw the hammered lettering for “Carmen Martínez.” She was killed less than a week ago. She was sixteen years old.

  Atticus looked farther ahead and saw what seemed like fifty accident markers along that winding half mile of highway: generally high white wood or concrete crosses, but also saints of plastic or painted clay or simple pyramids assembled from stones as big and round as grapefruit. Recklessness, he thought. And he thought of his wife. You can end a life so easy.

  The tail lifted abruptly on the truck when the he
avy cross was tilted up, and the truck’s driver howled happily as he peeled across the highway into weeds. The fat bus driver sighed as he jammed into first gear and took off again, forcing Atticus back a step.

  A hawk soared overhead, disappearing as it crossed over the bus and then reappearing in a lower part of the light blue sky, one wing dipping to veer it right. In the forest a tiny boy was flicking stones at the jutting ribs of skinny, longhorn, zebu cattle in order to steer them into a pole corral. And then there was an open countryside of yellow savannah and cocoa brown earth to the east and a stripe of the deep blue Caribbean Sea on top of the prairie for just a glimpse before the jungle interrupted again and Atticus saw a highway sign featuring symbols for food, gas, and lodging, and underneath them was RESURRECCIÓN.

  Atticus looked at his Spanish for Travellers and experimented with the sentence before saying, “Por favor, pare en la próxima parada.” According to Berlitz it meant, “Please let me off at the next stop,” but he only heard a Spanish slang that was beyond his understanding as the fat driver jiggled the gear shift from side to side before ramming it into high. Atticus got down into the stairwell and saw a huge garbage dump made gray and white with seagulls, then a concrete housing development that was like row upon row of cheap motel rooms. A sign announced a zona turística was one kilometer away; and there was a Pemex gasoline station, a supermarket, a beauty shop, a few budget hotels that were called posadas, another teal and aquamarine snapshot of the Caribbean, and then there was a CENTRO sign, a great plaza and pink cathedral, a white gazebo in a main square of shade trees, and the high walls of government buildings.