by Ron Hansen
“Aquí,” Atticus said. Here.
“Claro,” the Mexican said, and bumped the bus up onto the curb before yanking the emergency brake and flapping open the stairwell doors. Atticus was embarrassed to see that all thirty passengers were behind him, he needn’t have pressed about the parada, but he smiled and said, “Gracias,” and heard a “De nada” as he got out with the others into the hot sunlight and onto a sidewalk only two feet wide. The grand avenue that was called El Camino was paved with gray-blue cobblestones, and far down it were shops painted in the simple colors of gumballs, that seemed to sell only trinkets and postcards and Kodak film. A few Americans were sitting in the garden that faced the Church of the Resurrection or were strolling along the shaded loggia of the higher-class, air-conditioned stores.
A lime green taxi with a white top parked behind the second-class bus and a taxi driver with a gold-capped eyetooth and green paisley shirt jumped out, speaking to Atticus in rapid Spanish before he was twenty feet away.
Atticus flattened a half sheet of paper he’d been keeping in his suitcoat pocket and said, “¿Como se llega a esta dirección?” How do I get to this address?
The taxi driver took the paper and pretended to read the handwriting and then held up one finger, meaning Atticus ought to stay put, before he hustled across to an American Express travel agency to get someone inside to interpret the note.
Atticus looked across the main square and for an instant caught sight of a pretty European or American woman in front of the Printers Inc bookstore, in a fine black scarf and flashing sunglasses that hid her eyes. Was it Renata? She had the lithe body of a swimmer and skin that was tanned a ginger brown, and she seemed about to walk his way when the taxi driver hurried across from the American Express office, agreeing to get Atticus to the house and grabbing hold of his overnight bag.
Atticus got into the taxi and found a framed license in the name of Panchito Ramirez as the man turned the ignition and said, “Sesentainueve, Avenida del Mar.” And Atticus thought about sesentainueve being the year his fourth well became his biggest oil find yet and he figured that from then on his family would be safe.
Sixty-nine Avenida del Mar was south past high-priced seaside hotels and then up a hill as steep as a playground slide on a street that was made of round stones. The taxi bumped along in second gear to get up the rise and then stopped at a high white wall and a gate of painted black wrought-iron spikes. His gold eyetooth showed as Panchito grinned in the rearview mirror at his august passenger and said, “Cotzibaha.”
“Cotzibaha,” Atticus repeated. He wanted to find out what it meant, but he was too tired and only English would come to him. He handsomely overpaid the man and got out with his bag.
An old gardener was standing in the driveway with a green hose, and water glintingly sheeted down the asphalt in a bright herringbone. Each peaked roof on the house was thatched in light brown rooster palm, and on the terraces of pink stone were potted sprays of flowers. Sixteenth-century iron hinges were on the great oak door, and there was an iron grillwork over the tiny lookout that opened after Atticus rapped the claw knocker four or five times.
A pretty Mexican woman in her twenties peeked out and Atticus Cody gave his full name. She disappeared from behind the iron grillwork and opened up the great oak door, and Atticus sidestepped inside with his bag as she said in Spanish that she couldn’t speak English. She seemed to want more of an explanation, so Atticus said, “Yo soy el padre del señor Cody.”
“Sí, señor,” she said and placed her palm against her heart, saying, “Me llamo María. La criada.” The maid. María pointed upstairs and spoke in her language, and Atticus guessed he was supposed to follow her up. He could see a high-gloss kitchen of red-painted brick and a dining room with sliding glass doors that opened onto a vast pink terrace and pool. Indian rugs in pastel shades of beige and green and purple and blue covered the floor of the big living room, but the dining room was just a highly polished pink marble. Four walls held fashionable expressionist paintings of the kinds favored by businesses and brass-framed prints announcing exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. The wide camelbacked sofas and chairs were cream white, as were the walls and window draperies. The house’s owners had made a coffee table by placing smoked glass on the pink cantera stonework that seemed to have once been cornices on a church.
Atticus followed María upstairs and around a corner past a feminine bedroom and on into a field gray room where Scott had lived only two days ago. Atticus could still smell his fancy cologne. A football was on an Art Deco dresser that matched the track-lighted bed and high armoire and vanities. On a high-tech desk were sketch pads, books of poetry, a European telephone, and an IBM typewriter. A flat-screen television and videocassette recorder were inside a black cabinet of tinted glass, and high racks of hardback books in alphabetical order took up all of one wall. María had folded Scott’s gold running shorts and placed them nicely on top of his sandy running shoes on the dressing room floor. Under glass on rough brown paper was “Atticus at Sixty,” Scott’s actual-size Crayola drawing of him as a pious, upright, presidential man, five feet nine inches tall, weighing a slight one hundred fifty pounds, the great grandson of a skinny kid who rode west with the Pony Express. Atticus walked out onto the upstairs terrace where he looked out on the azure water churning up to the shore and far away to his left saw a frail, gray lady lean over a balcony at the Maya Hotel with a highball glass in both hands, in filmy green pajamas and a forest green bathrobe that was gently sustained behind her by the hot late-afternoon breeze. She was his age, he guessed; financially set, familiar with solitude, finding rest whenever she could.
María asked, “¿Está bien?”
Atticus turned. “Looks okay to me.”
María stooped in the bathroom to pick up a loose slip of paper and pushed it into her apron pocket, and then she gave the Spanish for the bath and dressing rooms and television and Caribbean vista as she went out and then came back in with soap and charcoal gray towels that she plumped down by the typewriter. She made an eating motion and showed Atticus seven fingers as she spoke words that he presumed were telling him when supper would be.
“Siete,” he said.
“Sí, señor.”
“Muy bien,” Atticus said, “y muchas gracias.” And as she went out, he finally took off his suitcoat and tie and shirt and began unpacking, putting his few things right on top of his son’s in the dresser. Atticus had just the one other white shirt left and it was fresh and starched and folded inside plastic from the cleaners, and he thought he’d save that one for the funeral. So he hunted through the walk-in closet and got one of his son’s fancy rayon shirts off its hanger and tried it on. But he was surprised to find the cuffs were a full inch off his wrists and it was tight enough in the chest that the fabric strained. Six shirts in the closet were like it, European and high-priced and a full size too small, a fourteen-inch neck and a thirty-inch sleeve; the others were Hathaway and Arrow and fitted him like his own. Atticus figured he’d ask María about it, but then he imagined himself fighting for the right words in Spanish as she frowned with worry, and so he forgot about it and just put on a fresh white Hathaway. He slid his overnight bag underneath the wide bed, and then he sat on it in order to look over the paperbacks that were next to a square water glass on the bedside table. Scott had been up to page 39 in The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad, and he’d been highlighting in yellow a book of writings from pre-Hispanic Mexico. Atticus went to the bookmark, but his sore eyes couldn’t make out the book’s print until he got his gold-rimmed spectacles out of their leather pocket case and hooked them on over his ears. A highlighted paragraph read:
There is no place of well-being on the earth, there is no happiness, no pleasure. They say that the earth is the place of painful pleasure, of grievous happiness. The elders have always said: “So that we should not go round always moaning, that we should not be filled with sadness, the Lord has given us laug
hter, sleep, food, our strength and fortitude, and finally the act by which we propagate.” All this sweetens life on earth so that we are not always moaning. But even though it be like this, even though it be true that there is only suffering and this is the way things are on earth, even so, should we always be afraid? Should we always be fearful? Must we live weeping? But see there is life on the earth, there are the lords; there is authority, there is nobility, there are eagles and tigers. And who is always saying that so it is on earth? Who goes about trying to put an end to his life? There is ambition, there is struggle, work. One looks for a wife, one looks for a husband.
Atticus thought, Wife; he thought, Husband. Who goes about trying to kill himself? The bookmark was a Mexican, gold-leafed card with a bright but ugly painting on the front. The handwriting inside said:
Dear Scott,
I hope you’re feeling some better. I really can’t tell you how sorry I am for your unhappiness and frustration. Circumstances have not been kind. You have a life to get on with, and I have a difficult relationship to figure out—both daunting enterprises. And it seems for the time being that neither of us is in a position to help the other with his or her respective task. Too many tangled feelings …
When you do feel truly comfortable with a friendship—for that is all I can offer—I hope you will call or write me. Your friendship means more to me than it seems you realize.
Try to be good to yourself.
I love you,
Renata
Atticus shut the card inside the book and walked down the hallway to the feminine guest bedroom with its face lotions and face powders arrayed on a dresser. He looked into the walk-in closet, finding four or five blouses, some folded blue jeans, a few skirts and dresses, a jumble of shoes, and a hard-sided green suitcase shut tight with a red shock cord. On the handle an old, dog-eared luggage claim check from Mexicana Airlines indicated a flight from Miami to Cancún. Hoisting a bed pillow, he folded back the pink and lavender comforter and saw there were no sheets on the mattress underneath.
Atticus found Scott’s United States passport and Mexican visa mislaid on a bookshelf and carried them back with him to his suitcase, fitting them in a side pocket with his socks. Then he just looked at the field gray bedroom’s furnishings for a while, trying to find a fraction of Scott in them and failing.
He focused on the desk and pulled out the upper right-hand drawer, seeing pastel-colored pencils and pens in a plastic tray, gum erasers, pen tips, inks, knives that were like fierce hospital scalpels. Everything was just as it was in his desk at home. Atticus wondered if the kitchen dishware would be to the right of the sink and the Cheer on the floor by the washer. In the second drawer were Mexican stamps and brown envelopes and letterhead writing paper and an old green address book that would have fallen apart without Scotch tape. Looking under C, he saw “Frank and Marilyn Cody,” with their mailing address and telephone number. And below that was “Atticus and Serena Cody,” as though they were just cousins or good neighbors whom Scott sent holiday cards to. Atticus flipped through other pages and was aggrieved by all the names he couldn’t recognize. Every now and then he’d come upon a high school coach still in Antelope, a Stanford art history professor whom Scott had talked about, a California girlfriend, or a painter Scott had introduced his father to at one of his East Village parties, but for the most part the address book was crowded with foreign people Atticus had never heard of, with geography he had never been in; it might have been the address book of an acquaintance or even a man Atticus had never known but who had, by chance, known him.
Atticus said aloud, “Who are you?” and then put away the address book and left the upstairs room for the first-floor terrace and the tiers of railroad ties that formed a stairway down to the seashore. Atticus looked to his left boot and watched a hermit crab scutter away from him and work sideways into a hole. A black pinhead of an eye stared up at Atticus for a second, and then its big claw slashed wildly at the hole’s entrance and in the fall of sand the hermit crab buried itself underground.
Scott, he thought. Hiding things from him ever since he was a kid. Atticus walked up to the terrace and there he achingly got into a white chaise lounge and knitted his fingers atop his gray hair, just lying there in the chilling sea breeze and the hurrying darkness, hearing María in the kitchen, trying not to think of anything, but thinking and thinking about his son.
***
María served him a tostada salad without peppers or hot sauce, then worked speedily in the kitchen, putting some wash in the Maytag clothes dryer and getting her apron off as soon as she’d cleared his plate. She seemed eager to be gone from the house. She stopped by the dining room and said without pleasure, “Buenas noches, señor.”
The only phrase Atticus could immediately recall was, “Hasta mañana.”
María shook her head and said, “Hasta el lunes,” and then pointed down to the floor, saying, “Aquí, el lunes.” She could see Atticus wasn’t comprehending, so she attempted some English. “He-yer moonday,” she said.
“Are you getting paid for this?”
She looked at him in puzzlement.
Atticus tried, “¿Tiene usted dinero?”
María said haltingly, “Escott he is pay me hasta marzo.”
“Until March.”
“Sí, señor.”
Atticus acknowledged that with a thumb-up and María went out, and he stayed in his dining room chair as night gained in the rooms. A regular tinking, scritching noise from the Maytag dryer was finally irritating enough that he got up and fished his hand around in the hot air and still-damp clothes until he found a Schlage key on a red plastic tag with the number 13 stamped into it. Having no idea where Scott kept his keys, he started up the dryer again, pulled an upper drawer in the kitchen counter where batteries rolled up against hand tools and torn newspaper coupons, and he tossed the key in there. You’re getting fussy in your old age, he thought, and he found his Spanish for Travellers and studied it at the dining room table until the book wore him out. He kept thinking he ought to phone Renata or that American consul, or go so far as to get in touch with the Mexican police, but his engines were running down and it was good to just sit there hearing fiesta music from the hotel and under that the night sea growling onto the shore like feed grain falling into a cattle trough. Winter in Colorado, the horses in their stalls, and Scott flat on the floor half a lifetime ago, watching in awe, his chin on his hands, as his older brother glued together racing cars.
And then Atticus woke up to the ringing of the telephone and was surprised to find he’d been sleeping. He got up stiffly from the dining room chair and located the phone, but when he picked up the receiver and said “Hello,” he quailed at hearing Scott’s prerecorded voice: “Hi. You know the routine, name and number. I’ll get back atcha later.” Atticus hung there, shakily waiting to hear the offered message, but whoever was first on the phone was now off. And yet the green light on the answering machine beside the phone was blinking twice, meaning, he supposed, that there were two earlier messages.
Atticus pushed the rewind button, heard the reels spin to a halt, and pushed playback, his face changing like a page of a book slowly turned as he heard a soft, foreign, male voice saying, “Hola, Scott. Are you at the fiesta with Renata? Have a fantastic time. I hate plays, plus in addition I have laundry to do. Don’t worry, I have my own key. Shall we meet at the Bancomex at ten tomorrow?”
Right after that was a tone, and then Renata’s voice saying, “Hey? If you’re still around, we’re having a cast party at Stuart’s. Wanna come? See ya.”
Wednesday night. Atticus was going to press rewind but then thought he ought to preserve the voices; he wasn’t sure why. His neck was sore and his right arm tingled. He went into the high-gloss red kitchen and opened an icebox bottle of agua mineral. He kept hearing the European voice: fontosstic for fantastic, haff for have; stressing each syllable like he was hitting a snake with a stick. María had hung up her apron on a hook over a m
op and dustpan and broom of green straw. Atticus slipped his fingers into the apron pocket and pulled out the two-by-three-inch piece of paper that she’d picked up from the bathroom floor upstairs. It was simply a Monday sales receipt from a farmacia on Calle Hidalgo. He couldn’t tell what kind of medicine it was for, and for some reason he thought he ought to. The pesos worked out to forty dollars. Atticus folded up the receipt and put it in his wallet.
And he found in a catchall basket on the kitchen countertop a Kodak snapshot of Renata and Scott and half a dozen happy people he never knew at some kind of grand affair in the dining room, food filling the table, fifty wineglasses it looked like, green champagne bottles chilling in an ice chest under the dining room table. Cold water from it was oozing darkly onto the broad pink and blue Indian rug. He lifted his frown from the photograph and looked to the dining room floor. The Indian rug was no longer there. Under the party snapshot was another, of salt white sand and a high sun kindling the azure sea, an old red Volkswagen wallowing into its tire ruts, one door wide as if an interior radio were playing. Twenty feet away from the camera, Scott was nakedly crouched in his architecture of a great sandcastle, its turrets constructed of uncorked bottles that once contained burgundy wine. And Renata Isaacs was lying just to his left, inviting the sun to her naked body, one forearm slung over her eyes, her gorgeous breasts unhidden, her ginger brown thighs tilted up so that fine white sand powdered the undersides and the faint hint of her sex.
