Atticus

“And how’d he sound?”

“Distracted and harried and really tired,” she said. “I offered to go out there, because it sounded like he could use a friend, but he was pretty insistent that he have a few days on his own.” Renata’s eyes welled with tears. “I hear that conversation over and over again, and there’s nothing in his voice that would have made me think he was going to do what he did.”

Atticus was sitting there, listening intently, his hard blue eyes fixed on his crossed and hairless white ankles, as still as if he were cut out of ice. “But you went out there. Even though he said not to.”

Renata said she was opening Stuart’s bookstore the first thing in the morning because Stuart had to go see their wholesaler. She got down to the jardín around sunrise and too easily found Scott’s car. Even if he were drunk he ought to have drifted across it. She thought something was wrong. So she forgot about the bookstore and went out there. She glimpsed a shotgun on the floor and Scott sitting in a green leather wingback chair. His face had been half shot off.

“How long had he been dead?”

“We don’t know.”

“Was there a note or anything?”

“Signed on his sketch pad. ’No one is to blame.’”

Atticus heard it, and heard it again. “Well, heck, I feel better already. How about you? Huh? We’re both off the hook.”

She reached a hand toward him. “He wasn’t thinking.”

Weighed low with grief, all Atticus could manage was, “We didn’t raise him to—” And then he fell silent and held a hand to his eyes and cried.

Renata got up from the dining room table and walked around it in order to wrap her arms around him and press her hot cheek against his hair. “We’ve been put through a lot,” she said.

Atticus held himself stiffly, then finally patted her left hand and said, “You ought to go now. It’s late.”

“If it’s okay, I’ll stay here.”

“I’d like that.”

She stood up from him but petted her hand on his hard shoulder as she said, “The funeral Mass is at noon. You’ll have to bury him in Mexico for now.”

“I’ll want to get him up to our family plot in Antelope.”

“You probably can, but it will take a little time. Stuart can help you with the government people you’ll have to pay off. You can bribe your way out of practically anything here. La mordida, they call it: the bite.”

Atticus stared out at the moonshine on the sea. And then he asked, “How about the police? Was there a police report or, you know, an investigation?”

“Don’t expect much from it,” Renata said. “The Mexican police don’t get too involved in American cases unless our government instructs them to do otherwise. Which they’re not likely to do. And there’s no coroner; no autopsy; probably just a pro forma investigation. Mexico can be pretty casual about suicide.”

“Suicide,” Atticus said, and spoke no more. When he looked up again, he realized Renata had already gone upstairs.

Much later Atticus woke to words composed with the ticking k’s and t’s of Mayan speech. Getting into his green tartan robe and slippers, he walked down the steps until he could stoop and look into the candlelighted dining room. Four campesinos in white shirts and white pants were familiarly slapping poker cards onto the dining table and sipping Jameson’s Irish whiskey from a green bottle that was being passed around. A fat man was using a nailhead to scrape tobacco out of his pipe bowl into a frail teacup while another man played a jack of hearts by pounding it down with his hand. A little man in his forties with flowing hair and a Padres baseball cap turned around in his dining room chair and solemnly peered at him, and Atticus tramped back upstairs.

Lights were on in Renata’s room and the door was halfway open. Even in high school, these were the hours Scott furiously painted, his stereo faintly playing Edith Piaf or early Bob Dylan, the hallway full of the pungence of turpentine and Marlboro cigarettes. Atticus knocked softly and heard Renata ask, “¿Quién es?” Who is it?

“Me,” he said.

“You too, huh?”

He found her sitting up in bed in a far-too-open pink kimono, a book of Shakespeare’s plays held against her stomach. A half-full Corona was in her left hand. Atticus forced himself to turn his head away, and Renata tightened her robe. She asked, “You look in on his friends?”

“Had a peek. Which one was Eduardo?”

She was surprised. “You’ve got a good memory. The guy in the Padres cap, I think.” She took a mouthful of beer and chilled her neck with the bottle. “Scott would go out to their shacks in the barrio, feed on their fried dog meat and iguanas, get horribly sick with their sicknesses, and then go out there again with their next invitation. He said they made him an honorary Mayan.” She smiled. “You don’t suppose it’s possible that it was all sarcasm on their part, do you?”

“Well, he always was a friendly kid.”

She fell into a reverie as she said, “And he’d try just about anything.”