Atticus

Skeezix was on the floor heating vent, his green-yellow eyes only slits, his white cat paws tucked primly underneath his chest, surrendering himself to pleasure. Atticus asked, “Would you like some coffee?”

“You have whiskey?”

Atticus sighed but got up.

Then Atticus sat in his green wingback chair with a biography of Eisenhower, and Scott drank whiskey from a water glass and lay against a sofa pillow with a paperback version of the Popol Vuh open atop his gray Stanford T-shirt, his blue eyes nailed to the page with just that look of thrill and passion that he always got as a child. Even though he was forty years old, his hard body seemed much younger than that, but his bleached hair was hinting darker roots and his skin was weathered as brown as sorghum from a half year in the Caribbean sun. Atticus was trying to find features of himself in the high ridge of his cheekbones, his tightly shut mouth, his squint and quiet and carpenter’s hands, when Scott caught his fatherly gaze with a sidelong glance and Atticus said, “Well, you appear pretty healthy.”

“Wild living hasn’t caught up with me yet.”

“Are you still getting those headaches?”

“My head’s all right.”

Atticus thought for a while and then offered, “I like this house a lot better with you in it.”

“Uh huh.”

Atticus opened up his book again. Eisenhower was first assigned to San Antonio, Texas, after West Point and in 1916 married Mamie Doud, whose father owned a meatpacking company in Denver. Atticus looked up. “I forgot to say. You see the sundog when you were flying in?”

Scott dully considered him. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“You have just the right circumstances and a great big spot’ll show up on the halo around the sun so it looks like you got two suns up there. Called a parhelion, if I got it right, the sundog is.”

“Huh.” Still flat on his back, Scott tilted whiskey into his mouth and put the glass on the floor.

“Well, it was a topic of conversation.”

“You do try. I have to hand it to ya.”

“Are we going to go on like this?”

“Like what?”

“Me being your prying old man and you being my ornery juvenile delinquent.”

Scott held his hands behind his head and just stared at his father for a full minute. And then he said, “It’s the flight. Culture shock. And frankly, there are those who’d say my hostilities have been held in check pretty well.”

“But I have the benefit of knowing how you were brought up.”

Scott faced him like furniture. “What, then?”

Atticus looked away to Serena’s piano and all the framed pictures on it. “Well, I’d be real interested to hear how you spend your days.”

“Nah, it’s boring.”

“Even so, I’d kinda like to hear.”

“Wake up at ten or so, have coffee, walk to town for whatever mail there is and the English-language newspaper. Skin-dive or lift weights or jog on the beach. And then drinks and dinner out.”

“You didn’t have to mention the drinking.”

“Ever think about getting a vice, Dad? You might find more tolerance for regular human beings.”

“I got vices.”

“Oh, right. You’re addicted to order and cleanliness.”

Atticus sought out a change of subject. “So who are your friends in Mexico?”