Atticus

“Auction house.”

“Well, I got sacked, to put it frankly, and it was the best thing that ever happened to me. A friend asked, as I was unemployed, if I was interested in taking over his little Mexican shop, selling paperback books in English. And I fell quite in love with the place.” Stuart seemed to grow bored with the thought. Half a minute later he said, “What a bother love is.”

An unhappy girl in a dirty pink dress was wrapping hot corn tortillas in sheets of newspaper outside a shop. A frail old man was carrying kindling up the hill in a sling that was looped over his forehead.

Stuart fought to have a conversation and said, “I have been the American consul here for five years now.” A havoc of lines hatched his roasted brown face.

“A pretty good job, is it?”

“Well, it isn’t a job so much as a social position. And there’s no pay, of course, and that is a pity.”

“You oughta be real proud.”

“Don’t encourage me. We had a police chief here, the jefe; he’s retired now, but you know where he was from? Omaha! The town has gone to hell since he left. Omaha’s near Denver, isn’t it?”

“Eight hours by car if you speed.”

“Oh, facts,” he said. Stuart stared ahead. “The chamber of commerce here has fourteen members whose origins are Europe or Canada or the United States, compared to just thirty Mexicans. If you go to hospital, you’ll find no less than one-fourth of the doctors and nurses have their degrees from the U.S. And the current principal of the high school is from Williams College, in Massachusetts. We are like the Romans in Palestine, the British in India. We are less than ten percent of the population but provide seventy-two percent of its tax base. And so we are catered to.” Stuart peered farther down the street and said, “Hup!” and braked, further rolling down his side window as he said, “My beggar.”

A one-legged man on crutches swung along on his good leg to get to the car. His iron gray eyes looked in at Atticus and then at Stuart and then he hung his hand out on the rolled-down window glass. Stuart talked to him in Spanish, held out a half-dollar in peso notes, and then rolled up the window again. The one-legged man was crossing himself and speaking Spanish as Stuart drove away.

“Hector prays for me. Words very pretty to the ear, a poem about my charity being recorded in Heaven. All very stupid, of course, but in a poor country one is expected to pay a little to the street people, and I have chosen Hector.” Stuart rapped the horn and a boy scampered off the ro

ad. The boy watched them pass with a soccer ball on his hip. Stuart smiled. “You see how my Hector was looking for me? Already this morning he has probably stopped by my villa. Such fidelity! I hope to finally elope with Hector. We’ll float on bright rafts in the Bay of Campeche.”

Stuart went down Cinco de Mayo street and then into a greenly shaded alley. He stopped the car in a dirt parking area behind a pink mortuary that was called Cipiano. Stuart paused as he opened his door. “Are you prepared for this, Atticus?”

“Have to be.”

Stuart got out but then angled under the station wagon’s ceiling. “You could wait in the car, perhaps. Or you could go over to the parroquia. Renata will be there soon.”

Atticus got out of the Dodge and nudged the door closed. “You go ahead and I’ll be at your heels.”

The pink mortuary’s interior was as cool and damp as a flower shop. A plump woman in a green shift that she’d hiked up high on her thighs was squirting a floor with hose water, and four shy brown men in straw cowboy hats and snap-buttoned polyester shirts were standing apart from a painted black coffin that looked more like a hope chest. Hewn into its soft pine wood were rising suns, pheasants, butterflies, and flowers. Tilted atop the coffin was a copper-framed picture of a fiery Sacred Heart of Jesus held within a green crown of thorns. A heavy man in a gray sharkskin suit and heavily pomaded, wavy hair slid a purple kneeler across the room, halted it at the head of the coffin, and held his hand on it as he hinted the father of the deceased forward.

Atticus dipped off his cowboy hat and got down onto the kneeler with pain. His hand floated over wood that was still tacky with paint as he offered up the familiar prayers he’d been saying since he was a child. Without turning, he asked the Englishman, “Would they open it?” He heard Stuart’s fluent Spanish and faced him. The guy in the sharkskin suit was up on his toes, whispering into Stuart’s ear.

“Cipiano is saying you are not permitted inspection,” Stuart said. “Embalming isn’t done here, you see.” He waited for another sentence. “And it has been already two days.”

Atticus heard a phrase from holy Scripture, Lord, by this time he stinketh. He looked around for a hand tool and a hunched, old Mexican found a claw hammer for him to pull the finishing nails from the top with, but when he took it from him Atticus felt his back so softly touched by another he hardly knew the owner was there. And he stared up at Cipiano as he held his hands in prayer at his chin, his face a wreck of sorrow. “Está feo, Señor Cody,” he said, and Stuart translated, “He is ugly.”

“Le falta la cara.”

“The face is missing.”

“Hicimos todo lo posible.”

“His people did what they could.”

“Es mejor recordar su hijo que verlo.”

“Cipiano says it is better to remember your son than to see him.”

Atticus held the hammer and knelt there, thinking how he’d feel if he did what it was better to have done. And he fought against Cipiano’s wishes and used the hammer to pry up ten finishing nails and tilt up the coffin lid.

But it was too awful; he gave it just a few seconds. A hot blast of horrible stink forced him back with a hand over his nose and mouth, and he only had a quick, hideous glimpse of Scott before he let the coffin lid fall: his blond hair in chaos, his teeth gray and clenched as if he were biting hard on a stick, and half his face just a stew of skin and bone, the other half green with huge swelling.

Atticus stood there, his hands at his sides, as the funeral parlor’s carpenters nailed down the pine again, and then he helped the Mexicans hoist the painted coffin and ferry it out to the station wagon and slide it into the open rear. The old Dodge was so low- slung with the heavy weight that iron rang off the cobbled paving when Cipiano gently eased the car toward Cinco de Mayo. And then Stuart and Atticus strolled the four blocks to the parish church, Atticus keeping his hands in his pockets and his pink face tilted up to the sun. They had fifteen minutes until the funeral. Stuart fought a wink as he said, “Isn’t Renata the sultry number.”