Atticus

by Ron Hansen

  Would the hotel call in the police if Reinhardt was missing? I phoned the front desk and told the night manager in English that I was Reinhardt Schmidt and that I’d be sightseeing further inland for a while but wanted to keep the room. I heard him rummage around and get the hotel bill. “Of course, Mr. Smeet,” he said. “And do you still want to pays on your Visa cart?”

  “Sí, gracias.”

  Without feeling, he said, “Thanks is for you.”

  Then I was out of there, flipping the door handle sign so no maid would disturb the place and skidding the Holland box and Reinhardt’s full suitcase down the hallway. At first I thought I’d toss it all in the barrio, Your prayers have been answered, freebies from heaven, but I was afraid I’d be seen by the up-all-nights there, and so I heaved the suitcase and box inside the car and headed back to the house.

  And I got frightened because the front door wouldn’t force open more than an inch at first. I felt Reinhardt was there and fully alive and fighting me for the keep of the house, but I firmed my effort until I was inside and found his body had rolled against the front door in some zombie move, his face looking up at me from the hallway floor in a fractured way, half of it as red and tortured as a scream, half as familiar and at peace as a head on a sofa pillow.

  I hurried up to my room, hung Reinhardt’s clothes among my own, and tucked his green suitcase away in the closet of the guest bedroom. I forgot to hunt my passport and visa. I took Reinhardt’s medicines and the farmacia sack downstairs, tossed his medicines into the green garbage container, then put his whiskey glass and the full green Jameson’s bottle in the sack. I frankly thought I was cooking, no flies on me, my footprints wiped away by the tide.

  I finally ransacked the box that was full of his photos and contact sheets, finding pictures of myself running in gym shorts, filling Renata’s wineglass with a vino tinto, holding a match to a cigar on the terrace, getting into my Volkswagen outside Printers Inc—fifty shots, maybe more; Reinhardt watching me from afar, waiting for his chance, and getting it, as he knew he would. I failed to find the photographs of the Volkswagen on the highway, the fender and windshield damage, whatever it was that he’d hoped to use against me, but I presumed they were in his stash somewhere and I hauled it outside and far down the hill to the Maya, where I heaved the full box into a green Dumpster behind the hotel’s kitchen.

  Then I ran back up to the house, where I hoisted a folded and off-putting rug and flicked off the lights in the house and got Reinhardt into the Volkswagen somehow. Such waltzing is not easy. I have no memory of it really, only of walking away from the half-opened passenger door and the yellow glow of the dome light just above the hideousness of his face and finding his sitting there satisfactory, a fine composition, just a guy waiting in the night. I walked back to turn up the Volkswagen’s radio, heard the first minute of news, and jolted shut the door. And then I finicked around the first floor of the house again, found the shotgun in the hallway, hit the lights, and walked out.

  I headed out to the jungle, my hands holding hard on to the wheel, fearing that if I lifted them I’d fly away with the jim-jams, half my head in some funky horror movie with the formerly dead just biding his time to have his terrible revenge, the half I’ll simply call less insane feeling sympathy for Reinhardt and trying to gain some points in Heaven by insisting that it was a work of mercy to honorably bury the dead. I was harnessed to that: Hide the guy in the rug, heave him into a pit, tamp down the fertile earth with a garden spade. Reinhardt Schmidt, you say? Oh, he disappeared long ago.

  I parked at the foot of the hill, got the shotgun, and killed the engine but kept the Volkswagen’s headlights on so I could find the path. Whine of insects. Ticking engine. And no other sounds but those of undulant waves softly achieving the shore. I flicked on the ceiling lights in the studio and sought to put on some music, failing to notice that I hit the REC button on my Radiola tape player, failing, too, to notice the silence of its furtive recording as I fell into habits that now seem absurd: limbering brushes in a turpentine jar, hanging an unfinished canvas on the easel, squeezing out a few paints on my hand palette, heating water for coffee. I have no memory of fitting the filter into the funnel, but I did it, measuring out the hazelnut and watching with nary a flinch, non compos mentis, until the water finally tumbled into a boil. I filled the funnel and finally went for him.

  Eduardo’s kids were there at the foot of the hill, walking through the headlight beams and getting up on the Volkswagen’s running board to peer at Reinhardt. His face was turned away from them so that he must have seemed unhurt, just resting, and the blackness, the familiar car, his blond hair, and our faint resemblance were enough that I heard a teenaged girl named Elba say in a hushed voice, “Cotziba,” Lord Artist, and then the kids got down to the ground again and Elba silenced them as they hurried away.

  That was when it hit me: just trade places, let Reinhardt be me, be my sundog. I’d find a new life and kill off my failures, my history of ruin, the high hum that played behind my blood tango with chance and mystery. It seemed so easy and necessary. I haven’t felt so free since I was four.

  I put the key in the ignition of my Harley-Davidson, as if I’d gone out there on it, and I opened the door on the Volkswagen’s passenger’s side and pulled Reinhardt to me, holding him in a hard embrace as I fought my way up the hill to the charnel house. Where I arranged Reinhardt in the torn green wingback chair and snugged his right thumb inside the shotgun’s trigger guard before angling its stock to the floor and letting it fall aside. My little science project. Then I took the shotgun outside and fired it at the moon. The hugeness of that noise got to me until I heard, hard on its heels, the rat-a-tat of firecrackers in the jungle and I figured I’d simply become another merrymaker in the fiesta. I handker-chiefed the trigger housing with turpentine just in case the Mexican police tried to lift fingerprints from it—hardly likely—and then I held Reinhardt’s hands to it, gumming up the metal, and arranged the shotgun on the floor. But his blood was trickling a fresh path along his throat, and I ascertained that his bloodstains were all wrong, hardening underneath his upper arm and back, finding the shank and welt of his Cole-Haan shoe. I fought his clothes and shoes off him and, as calm and confident as an undertaker, fitted him into blue jeans and a hot yellow shirt that were hanging in the closet. The Radiola got to the final inch of its winding tape and clunked off, but I was clueless about what that meant. Walked out to the high cliffs over the sea and flung his shoes out into the night; Reinhardt’s clothes I hurriedly wadded up for burial in the forest. I tilted his head to the left as if it were jolted that way by the force of the shotgun blast and finished the mise-en-scène by putting my Swiss wristwatch on him and filching the pesos from both our wallets and tucking mine in his blue jeans. And for the first time I felt a twinge of guilt over the damage I’d be doing to my father and Renata. But I was too far down the road to do more than snatch a sheet of paper from my sketch pad and write on it with a felt-tip pen, “No one is to blame.” Hardly enough, I knew, not one of those things your father would read and think, Wow, what a relief!, but I signed the note anyway and I finally left the front door open and the coffee heating on the hot plate as I skidded and fell down the hill, frankly hoping that the house would burn down or creatures would make havoc of Reinhardt, frustrating identification.

  I have lost all sympathy, I know. Cold, fearful, reckless, full of self-pity, I was so free of taking responsibility for my actions that I seem hardly even there. If I was not, in fact, a murderer, it was because that term did not fully cover the awfulness of all that I’d done. Even then I knew I was not going to get away with it, but I was too far into the killed-himself bit to not try to finish it. I hauled the bloodstained rug and Reinhardt’s clothes far into the forest, my flashlight flaring over the tails of hurrying things that I tried not to think about, and I finished the worst of my harrowing ordeal by burying the evidence with a garden spade that I then put in the car. I headed into Resurrección in t
he Volkswagen, not thinking of the hurt of a funeral for family and friends, only thinking of Scott and how he could flee the country and find a new life. I fell into the old patterns of childhood, holding it all in, confessing nothing to my father, hoping to bide my time in hiding like I used to in my upstairs room. Maybe he won’t notice. Well, it was madness, I admit it, but rationality offered no upside return, it would give me nothing but grief. Even telling Renata was impossible. If she helped me in any way she’d be an accessory after the fact. She could be imprisoned even if I wasn’t. And Renata was my only hope of finally pulling off the scam. So I halted in front of the public telephone near the jardín and dialed Renata’s number. An office light was on in Printers Inc. Stuart at his bookkeeping. A few policemen were laughing and smoking cigarettes in front of the comisaría de policía. I held my breath until Renata picked up.

  “Hi,” I said. “Is it too late to talk?”

  “It’s one-fifteen. Are you able?”

  “Sobered up,” I told her. Agitation and fright got me turning with the phone until I was staring across the gardens at the huge pink parish church. In its foundation was a former window that plywood was nailed over, but the plywood seemed framed with a filament of light, as if a forty-watt bulb were burning in the cellar. “I hear voices behind you,” I said.

  “The cast. We’re still having a little party here.”

  “Oh.” My purpose, I remembered, was to tie up loose ends. “Look: I forgot where I left my car.”

  “Again?” She seemed happy and tipsy and prepared to find a lot to laugh about.

  “I figure it must be near the jardín. You’ve still got a key for it, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have something to finish in the jungle. I’m going out there on the hog. Will you try to find my car and take it back to the house?”

  She held the phone so that the female voices behind her went away. She may have walked to another room. “Are you all right?” she asked. “You sound so strange.”

  “Really tired, is all. Really really tired.”

  “You’re waiting for your spirits to catch up.”

  I’d forgotten I’d told her that story.

  She whispered temptingly, “Shall I come out?”

  I practically fell under the irony. I felt like the butt of a joke. Everything seemed to have changed and she’d become a possibility that it was now impossible for me to have. “Don’t,” I said.

  My tone forced her to hesitate before she said, “It’s just that you sounded like you could use a friend.”

  “Give me a few days. I have a lot of work to do and I don’t want to be disturbed.”

  Even that she found funny. “I hate to break it to you, but you are disturbed, Scott.”

  And then there was nothing further to do but say, “I love you,” and hang up.

  I was still peering at the parroquia. Eduardo’s term for the parish church was from the Mayan, the house of he who invents himself. Self-invention was so much what I was about that heading over there seemed to me a stroke of genius. Walking across the jardín in the wee-hours silence of the Old Town, I felt graced with the first clear picture of a finer life, out of harm’s way, hiding out in the old church’s cellar, huddling in the noontime shade with my hand held out for coins.

  The front doors were locked, but a rough plank door below the great bell tower was open and I found my way inside. I touched a font and half expected a hiss from the holy water as I crossed myself. A hundred or more votive candles provided only a faint yellow light, and it was half a minute before I realized a hunched old Mexican woman was in there with me, kissing her fingertips and softly applying them to the lips of the carpenter, San José. Easing my way down the main aisle between the black pews, I faced architecture and saints and pictures that were familiar to some sane and ancient part of me. I felt aware, wonder-filled, wise, it was far better than the best trip with peyote. I quietly sidestepped through the gate of the high altar’s railing, genuflected to the tabernacle, and headed into the priest’s sacristy. I knew my way, knew that there was a semicircular hallway of brick that formed the perimeter of the apse, and halfway along the hallway there would be a gray door to a stairway. I walked to that gray door and gingerly went down the stairway to a hardly lighted cellar, finding the railing with my hand, ducking under the huge floor joists, getting used to the green swamp odors of earth and human sewage.

  The block walls of the first mission church were still preserved along the foundation, and the furniture of a few centuries was under the great floor of the building, a fine fur of dust on the old pews and prie-dieux, gray veils of cobwebs faintly waggling in the air, and in the haven and haze and junkyard of that basement were poor Mexicans who’d found a hard kind of sanctuary there, twenty or more of them watching me with the unsurprised gaze of the frequently desperate. A gray old man with a face peppered by skin cancer was praying the rosary in a harsh whisper as he stared at me. Without judgment. And then he pointed toward a flattened cardboard box with the name Hotpoint on it. And it was as if my place had been prepared for me. I knelt down on that mat and felt I’d found my future. And my tremendous exhaustion so hammered me that I fell to my hands and knees and then fainted.

  Woke up Thursday morning with the bleak people there staring at me. Talking in my sleep, I presumed, but their stares and curiosity flipped the paranoia switch and I was positive they were in on the conspiracy—friends or family of Carmen or Renaldo just waiting for the opportunity to grapple. No proportion to my fear. Enemies everywhere. I hunkered in a corner of that great dark basement, my head hurting with hangover, my eyes flicking toward every sound, until I’d freaked the Mexicans there so much that they hung out in a far part of the room and held their children back when the wolfman walked to a green bucket for water and, just to be grandly theatrical, tilted my head far into it and drank from it like a horse.

  With nothing to do, I got a kid to go buy me a pen and spiral notebook, and I fussed up a page or two of forlorn prose about my plight. And then I just fretted and stewed until nightfall, holding my hands out in laths of sunlight that fell through a high window exhaust fan, watching the twitches of stress in my right thumb and first finger, lifting up my khaki pants cuffs to see my calf muscles bunch and crawl as if there were furtive rodents under the skin. Was it a head case or delirium tremens? It felt like mescaline or peyote, the kind of far-out high you get where even your thoughts seem to have a sandpaper texture. I was certain that Reinhardt had been discovered, but I still wasn’t sure if the police fell for my fabrication. If they didn’t, if they knew it was Reinhardt, then I would be wanted for murder and there was nothing I could do to prove that I didn’t, in fact, kill him. Wasn’t it my gun, in my jungle house? Didn’t I have the motive and opportunity? Hadn’t I tried to hide what I’d done? Were these, Your Honor, the actions of an innocent man? And if I attempted a full explanation, I’d have to mention Carmen Martinez, the hit-and-run, and I’d be just as parboiled as far as the police were concerned. And if they thought it was me out there in that green wingback chair, I was pretty sure Renaldo didn’t. Even if he thought it was me on the dining room floor, he’d have heard about the blond American who shotgunned himself in the jungle and he would not have heard about my maid finding a murder in the house on Avenida del Mar, and he’d get to the truth in no time. Each heartless, intricate move I’d made Wednesday night now seemed foolish. Renaldo could murder me now and I wouldn’t even be missed. You are dead, man, I thought, and both senses of that sentence applied.

  A kid wandered in at six with a box of soft tacos filled with the spiced meat of iguana. My fellow inmates there failed to tell him to be afraid of me and I still looked enough like an American with money that he finally sought me out. I bought two tacos and hungrily finished one while I got out a roll of pesos and gave him thirty dollars’ worth, telling the kid to find me huaraches, plastic sunglasses, a blue bandana to hide my blond hair under, and an old cowboy hat. Stuart’s beggar w
as sitting on a pew, eating refried beans from a can, and I got him to exchange his fetid denim shirt for my fresh gray Stanford T-shirt. The kid was back inside of an hour with foul but useful things he may have found in his father’s closet. I got into my off-putting costume, and skulked down the side streets like Jack the Ripper until I found a tienda selling the Thursday diario—a hard look from the grocer at the sunglassed guy on the skids. And there it was on page four, suicidio in the headline and a few rough facts about Scott Cody and the triste pérdida of the famoso artista de los Estados Unidos. Cipiano’s mortuary, no rosary planned, and a noontime funeral Mass at the Church of the Resurrection two days hence. Which meant Atticus would probably already be on his way down.

  I found darkness wherever I could as I strolled up Avenida del Mar to number 69 and forced my way inside like Renaldo had. Even in the moonlight I could tell that María had thoroughly cleaned the house and waxed the dining room floor where the rug had been. In the night of the kitchen I got out whiskey and filled a juice glass with it, and then I went upstairs to my room and hauled out from beneath the desk the plastic wastebasket that María too often forgot to empty, sifting out of it cigar ashes and papers and the first-of-the-week diario with the obituary for Carmen Martínez. Went into the bathroom, tightly shut the door, and flicked on the fluorescent lights over the sink, translating the paragraph carefully this time, and finding that Carmen was survived by a father and mother and four sisters, and by a fiancé named Renaldo Cruz. I felt certain he was the one. I sliced out the obituary with a razor blade, folded the clipping in my pants pocket, stuffed the diario in the wastepaper basket, took a phone directory back into the bathroom, and, as I got out of my black jeans and festering shirt, looked up the name Cruz. There were fourteen of them, and I feared my Spanish wasn’t good enough to handle whatever I had to say. I took a quick shower and toweled off and then wiped down the stall to hide that I’d been there. Changed into my old Mexican clothes again, flicked off the bathroom lights, then hunted my passport and visa in my handkerchief drawer. Looked at the quartz clock by the bed—five minutes to nine—then looked through the telephone directory with a penlight and dialed the American Express travel office in town just before it closed.