Atticus

by Ron Hansen

  “Oh, so he’s here?” Eduardo asked.

  “Sure, for you,” Rafael said.

  We went there. The house of Rafael Cruz would probably have been a fixer-upper in el norte, but in Mexico it was far finer than I was used to, floored, hot and cold running water, in the dining room a highly glossed table and eight chairs and the familiar print of da Vinci’s Last Supper, in the front room inherited chintz furniture, a picture of His Holiness kissing a child, a side table arrayed with family photographs, and hanging over the sofa a trite, ornately framed, black velvet painting of a toro and toreador in the fine execution of a veronica. Rafael’s wife held the door for Eduardo and me, and softly took Eduardo’s offered hand. Eduardo took off his Padres baseball cap and said something polite and soothing as I heard him give his name as Nicuachinel, he who sees into the middle of things. Mrs. Cruz then asked, plainly in awe, if Eduardo was a shaman.

  “God has made it so,” Eduardo said, and then he asked Mrs. Cruz where Renaldo was, for we were hoping to meet him face-to-face. She hollered, “Renaldo! A shaman is here! Where are you?”

  Renaldo edged in from the hallway, in blue jeans and a Dallas Cowboys jersey, a gun in his hand. The gun hung by his thigh, his first finger in the trigger housing, but he held it like a half-forgotten auto part, You know where this belongs? But we were like cobra and clarinet, that gun and I, a bright .357 magnum six-shot revolver. His aunt told Renaldo she hated that thing, but Eduardo gave no sign that the gun was even an affront to good manners, he simply put his Padres cap back on and urged Renaldo to have our friendly talk outside so Mrs. Cruz would not be upset.

  We sat in frazzled lawn chairs under a shade tree, on hard-baked earth fenced in rabbit wire, Renaldo holding the gun in both hands between his knees, his soft, lady-killer eyes shying from mine as he asked in Spanish, “Where’s my money?”

  Eduardo told Renaldo he was lying about the money, and he grinned as if the kid would find that funny. And Renaldo did grin. Wow! Lying! Good joke. “I have come here to talk for my friend,” Eduardo told him.

  Renaldo told Eduardo, “I have been in his house. I have seen his father. I have urinated on the floor.”

  Eduardo frowned. “I have told you he is my friend. Have some respect.”

  Children were playing with plastic trucks in the yard next-door, and an older girl in a pleasing sundress was watching a piano of ribs sizzle on the barbeque. I was finding it hard to be afraid of the murderer far to my left.

  “You are trying to kill him,” Eduardo said. “We know this. You have killed another man by mistake.” Eduardo shrugged. “Easy to do. Both are Anglo and blond, blue eyes, it’s confusing.”

  Renaldo nodded and scowled at the rubio. I hung my head and folded my forearms on my thighs, like a fatigued and sour teenager hating being out with the old folks.

  “You see, though,” Eduardo said. “You have killed the right person. The Devil himself.” Eduardo turned to me. “His name was?”

  “Reinhardt Schmidt.”

  “Sh-meet, he is the one who killed Carmen. My friend here, he loaned the Devil his car and on the highway there was the tragedy. But you have revenged your Carmen, you see, Renaldo? She is happy in Heaven. She prays for you.”

  Renaldo shifted his gun from hand to hand as he focused on a fat red sun settling into a hatchwork of trees. “I have no reason to live,” Renaldo said.

  Eduardo considered him solemnly. “You are young!” he said. “You have a full life ahead of you! Your fiancée will enjoy watching it!”

  The family next door followed their platter of ribs inside. Renaldo was silent. We all stared at the sun until it was nothing but a bloodline in the trees.

  “Are we agreed?” Eduardo finally asked. “You won’t try to kill him?”

  Renaldo looked at me full-on and said, “Your friend, I feel it in my heart when he talks.”

  Eduardo let me off in front of Stuart’s villa and I skulked around to a dining room window where I saw my father sitting in pestered silence, his hands on his thighs, as Stuart held forth on subjects he had no interest in. I’d hoped to talk to Renata, but that would be impossible with Atticus there, so I bought a six-pack of Coronas from the kitchen help at The Scorpion and strolled down to the playa and watched the flying stars while lying on sand that was still hot from the sun. I fell asleep after gulphing three beers and woke up to find no hint of light in Stuart’s villa. I peed against a tree and peered in at the green neon of a kitchen clock, seeing it was past four.

  Walked up the shoreline to my house and found it dark and took off my huaraches, then shifted the pool door an inch at a time until I fitted through. I held my breath and listened. The house was talking but that was all.

  Eased up the stairs and inside the guest room, hunting for my passport and visa, and figured Atticus had to have it, he possibly had the Lufthansa ticket, too. My bedroom door was a few inches ajar, the habit of a father who listened for his wild boys to get home before he fully slept. I forced myself to push the door further and walk in. And there he was in skewed and twisted pajamas, wracked with cares, his mouth half open, his frail eyelids fluttering, who knew what horror film he was viewing? I held my hand so close to his face I felt his breath and probably shaded his fitful dreams. Wake him now, talk to him, some forthright and graced part of me thought, but to be fully seen, to confess what I’d done and failed to do seemed too hard, too shaming, far easier to put it off. And I did, hunting the room oh so carefully, a hand touching down here and there with the softness of a falling leaf, frightened of any sound, and finding in that way not anything I wanted, but only his gold-rimmed reading glasses and a shirt-pocket notepad with a pen underneath its front flap, as if he’d been jotting things down just that day. Even the key for the motorcycle was gone, probably in my father’s trousers, and I feared coins would clink if I lifted his trousers from the chair.

  Took the notepad with me downstairs and into the kitchen where I flipped it open under the hood light over the stove. Handwritten there were:

  Shirts.

  Rug gone where?

  Lufthansa ticket.

  Shoes.

  4 shells in gun.

  Who’s R.?

  I frankly admit it: hot tears filled my eyes. My father was fact-conscious, observant, even omni sometimes, but his fragmented piecing together of what had happened Wednesday night was far less impressive to me than that he’d so relentlessly sought a solution. I felt humiliatingly unequal to his faithfulness, his loyalty, his love, as if I were heir to some foreign genes that my father had no part in. I hit the hood light to turn it off and in full fool fashion hit the hood vent fan instead, hitting it off again after half a second, then hitting the light switch, too. But the fan roar had been enough. I held myself still and heard the floor creak under his feet, saw the hallway flush with light, and then heard Atticus walk the upstairs, hunting the stranger who woke him.

  I hurried out of the house and hushed closed the pool door, and then I just stood far away by a tide pool, fixing my gaze on the upper rooms as my father washed and dressed, fixing my gaze on the kitchen window as he ate a bowl of cornflakes by the sink.

  Atticus heaved the pool door and hammered it shut and I held my position out of his sight as he walked past, half-smiling for once, with the Radiola playing the frantically cheerful maríachi music on my homemade Linda Ronstadt tape. I heard no more, I got out of there, hurtling through sand and high grasses to the Avenida, and then walking in the faint gray of predawn until I was in the centro.

  Had a flan and Nescafé at a hole in the wall behind the parroquia, but as I sat there trying to read a found newspaper, all I could think of was my father, my pursuer, hunting down clues to my murder. Look at what you are putting him through. You can’t go on like this.

  At ten I walked across the public square, ambling under the loggia and right inside Printers Inc. Renata was stacking paperbacks in a bookcase, but she let them flop to the floor in her shock at finding me there.

 
She glanced to the bookstore office. Stuart was fully absorbed in fiddling with his computer. “Are you crazy?”

  “Worn out.”

  “You heard about Renaldo.”

  I felt I was falling. “What now?”

  She told me Renaldo Cruz was shot with his own gun in his uncle’s Bella Vista bar after Renaldo had harangued Rafael for half the night and finally insulted his wife. Self-defense, the police called it. “But it was suicide,” she said.

  My mother, first. Then Carmen Martínez. Reinhardt Schmidt. Renaldo Cruz. I forced open a pocket knife of a smile. “Who’s next?”

  She walked forward and fell into me with a kind of relief, holding whatever affection and faithfulness she had hard against me, her face firmly pressed to my chest, inhaling the smell of my hand-me-down shirt. She told me that the friends of Colorado State Senator Frank Cody got through the Mexican bureaucracy far better than Stuart could have, and that Reinhardt Schmidt was being exhumed in an hour or so in preparation for his shipment to Colorado. She and Stuart would have to be there to identify the remains.

  “Tell them it isn’t me. I have two gold fillings on my teeth. Reinhardt doesn’t. You can say you just remembered.”

  “Oh, Scott. Are you sure?”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said.

  “Where will you go?”

  “To jail, probably.”

  Without turning, Stuart called from the office, “Renata? Who’s there with you?”

  I held her face in my hand. “Kiss me,” I said, and she did. I felt the fleeting, soft give of her mouth against mine, and then I walked out the front door.

  Sergeant Espinoza, my old friend from my borracho days, was sitting on the front steps of the police station, and he stood up with concern when he saw my face. But a Marriott van full of fresh tourists halted in the street, separating us, and when Espinoza got around it, I had disappeared underground.

  Then I waited; it was the one good and tenacious thing I’d done, that waiting. I handed out my sunglasses, bandana, and frayed cowboy hat to whomever would take them and watched Stuart’s beggar go out for his rounds in my gray Stanford T-shirt. Cicadas chirred in the hedges outside. A gray scorpion inched up an adobe wall and curled its poisonous tail in defense when I lightly tapped its head with a pen. A hunched old woman shuffled by as if her sole purpose was to stir up the fine, powdered earth with her shoes. An hour passed, then half of another. Even in daylight the great room was all shade and absence, as if spirit and qualities had been subtracted from it. You’d paint it in funeral black, raw umber, sienna brown, vermilion. Caravaggio colors. Colors of loss and impermanence. I was in the belly of the whale, I was with Lazarus in the tomb.

  A hard rain of sunlight sheeted in when the first-floor door opened. And Atticus was there, just as I knew he would be, his face full of pursuit and worry. His hand flowed along the railing as he found his way down into that huge sepulchre and walked uncertainly across the floor, his head turning right and left as he took in the underworld all around him. I got to my feet, got over against a wall, still unsure if I would be willing to talk to him or be seen. But there was a kindliness to him, that “You okay?” look, and I found it in me to walk forward. And I asked, “Will you forgive me?” And I felt forgiven even as I said it.

  SEVEN

  Way back in the room, Sergeant Espinoza was taking the stairsteps one at a time. Looking fiercely in their direction. But Atticus was past caring about that future; that was only government and paperwork. His shifty second son was there, found and alive, and if there was hurt in his face and he seemed to have visited every room in hell, it hardly mattered now; Atticus was flooded with joy. He’d had his mind set on just the one thing and got surprised by the far better. “Will you forgive me?” Scott had said. Words wouldn’t half do it, so Atticus hugged his son hard against himself. Wanting to fill him up with his love. “I feel like hitting ya,” he finally told him.

  “You’ll have to stand in line,” his son said.

  But the gift of him was too huge. They just held each other for a while, until his son was real real to him. And then Sergeant Espinoza was there, talking to Scott in a hurried Spanish that Atticus couldn’t get the hang of. At one point his son said, “Reinhardt Schmidt,” and the sergeant had him write the name down.

  Renata walked into the front lobby of the police station right after Scott and the sergeant went into an interrogation room. Atticus listened to them both talking reasonably in Spanish. “Everything’s going to get even harder,” Renata said.

  “Like as not,” he said. “What’s the word for lawyer?”

  “Abogado.”

  “I’ll have to hire a good abogado.”

  Renata was grief itself. She said, “I’m sorry I had to lie to you.”

  “Well, you told the truth, mostly.”

  “I left a lot out.”

  “We do that.”

  She got them Coca-Colas from a machine. She told him, “When I was in college I read a folktale about a father pursuing a son who’d run far away, from one world to the next. The father called to him, ’Please come back!’ But his son looked across the great gulf between them and shouted to him, ’I can’t go that far!’ So his father yelled to his son, ’Then just come back halfway!’ But his boy replied, ’I can’t go back halfway!’ And finally his father shouted, ’Walk back as far as you can! I’ll go the rest of the way!’”

  Atticus flashed a smile that quickly faded. “Nice story,” he said.

  Scott Cody was to be arraigned for the murder of Reinhardt Schmidt and was jailed until the Wednesday court hearing. Atticus hired a good abogado and got on the phone with Frank, then he and Renata had found the family of Carmen Martínez. Renata helped him explain what his son did and did not do. Atticus took care of them, and then they found the family of Renaldo Cruz, and he took care of them, too.

  Renata drove him to the house in silence, and then she said, “You’ll have a full-time job fixing things for Scott.”

  “Well,” he said, “you do what you can.”

  Reinhardt Schmidt was not his real name, he wasn’t from Germany, and no one sought him. It was like they made him up.

  On Wednesday, the lawyer argued there was only a faulty police investigation of the murder of Reinhardt Schmidt and only tainted evidence of the norteamericano having been involved in trying to hide it, and he got the charges against Scott Cody reduced to failure to report a homicide. But in agreeing to the bargain, the prosecution insisted that he be sentenced to prison time for that crime, and so he stayed in jail.

  Renata arranged for Atticus Cody’s first-class flight from Cancún to Dallas to Denver, and he went to say goodbye to his son. Scott was hunkered in his cell, a flat board on his knees, filling a Scribe spiral notebook with his handwriting. Seeing his father’s sadness, he said, “You look glum.”

  “I guess my face got frozen like that.”

  Scott got up and held on to the iron bars as he tried to persuade his father not to feel sorry for him, the days were flying by, his stays in the hospital taught him how to be a good prisoner. “I have a cell of my own and plenty of time to sketch and write and play chess with Sergeant Espinoza. Renata will visit off and on; María will bring me dinner; I’m going to be teaching a class in English. I have friends here. This is the happiest I’ve been.”

  Atticus praised him with a mellow stare. “I have a ticket for your flight to Colorado.”

  Scott thought for too long. “We’ll see.”

  Little Jennifer had fallen and lost a front tooth. Kids had climbed up on the horsehead pump next to the highway and sloppily painted the name of their high school on it. The Antelope truck stop was so full of talk of Mexico that Atticus stayed away for a week, and when he went there again the older people at least seemed to have gotten his point. Without a hint of prior illness, his friend Earl died in his hardware store in late March, and Atticus was a pallbearer at his funeral. The governor appointed him to a fish and game board in April, and he was
re-elected to the parish council at St. Mary’s. He put new shoes on the horses and helped Frank and Merle and Butch and Marvin give shots to the cattle, and at night he fell asleep with opera on the radio and a book of history in his hands.

  Looking for the flush of a second bloom from his wife’s perennials, Atticus got his sheep shears and knelt in the garden in June, cutting back the penstemon, rockcress, stork’s-bills, and daisies. A soft rain began to fall as he heaped the green clippings on gunnysack and hauled it out back to his compost pile, and then he heard a far-off car on the highway. Why, he didn’t know, but Atticus walked to the front yard, taking off his gloves, and he saw a yellow taxi heading toward the house. And while his son was still a long way off, his father rushed out to greet him.

  The author wishes to thank the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Lyndhurst Foundation, and the University of California, Santa Cruz, for their generous assistance during the writing of this book.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo © 1996 by David Liittschwager

  RON HANSEN is the author of Mariette in Ecstasy, Desperadoes, and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and of the short story collection Nebraska, for which he received an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He is the editor, with Jim Shepard, of the anthology You’ve Got to Read This: Contemporary American Writers Introduce Stories That Held Them in Awe. Atticus was a finalist for the 1996 National Book Award for Fiction. Ron Hansen lives in Northern California.

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