Atticus

“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.

“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?