Atticus

“Sí.” He recalled that “his” in Spanish was su. “Su padre.”

Panchito offered the flight packet to him, and Atticus found inside a one-way first-class ticket for a flight from Mexico City to Frankfurt, Germany. The flight was to have been Thursday night at nine-twenty and was charged on Wednesday to Scott’s American Express card in feminine handwriting. Germany! he thought. “Was this phoned in?” he asked.

“No se,” the Mexican said, but whether he did not know the answer or he did not know the English wasn’t clear. Panchito talked for a full minute then, but Atticus was too tired to make sense of it; he simply looked and looked at the flight packet and felt too slow to figure it out. Everything was wrong. When Panchito finished his paragraph and faced him expectantly, Atticus finally said, “Muy gracias.” Very thanks. And then he got out his wallet and handed Panchito a five-dollar bill.

Panchito was formal in folding the bill inside his own wallet. Atticus frowned at him and said, “My son was going to Germany, but then he changed his mind and killed himself.”

Panchito hesitantly smiled.

“Happens all the time,” Atticus said. “Some people hate to fly.”

And then he shut the front door on the taxi driver, furious now with everyone and knowing he was going to be sick. Getting upstairs was as much an agony as if he’d worked a twenty-hour day, and the hallway seemed to yaw as he swayed along it and into Scott’s room. Atticus sagged to his knees by the black toilet bowl and just about fainted with nausea. And then the poisons surged up from him and he seemed to smell the horrible stink within the painted coffin. The floor was winter to his skin as he knelt there for five minutes more and flew his sickness into the toilet again, and then he tilted to the high wide bed and fell face forward on it just as he would have as a kid. Within the next few hours he went to the bathroom a half-dozen

times, and then he passed out and heard Renata say from a great distance, “Are you okay?” She fitted right into the past and Serena looking out the upstairs window, saying how pretty the evening was. His wife heaved up the sash for the fresh spring breeze, and Atticus helped Serena flip over Scotty’s crib mattress in order to hide the stains. And in his dream those stains were blood and he was in the dining room and gunsmoke floated against the ceiling and hundreds of wineglasses filled the table and red wine was spilling onto the rug and it hurt his stomach to see it. “You oughta be careful,” Atticus said. And a friend of his son’s told Atticus, “We all live on the fringe here. We make up the rules as we go along.” And handwriting was on the dining room mirror, handwriting in lipstick, and then he heard Renata say from outside his head, “If you wanted to stay for a few more days, you could’ve just told us. You didn’t have to get el turista on our account.”

Atticus opened his eyes and it was night and Renata Isaacs was sitting on the bed, her palm as cool as a washcloth to his brow. And he felt the influence of his flesh as he found himself summoning up how it was to hold her as she wept.

“Don’t,” he said. “I’ll be all right.”

“Actually I like paying attention to people when they’re sick. Helps to compensate for my thoroughgoing malice toward them when they’re healthy.”

“How late is it?”

“Nine.”

He sighed and said, “Sorry, but I’ve gotta get up again,” and Renata helped him ease himself up from a damp sheet. His legs jellied a little, but he could walk into the bathroom by tilting into the gray wall. She turned away from his nakedness, and then he heard her sliding the floor-to-ceiling glass doors to let in the good night air. As he ran the tap water to brush his teeth, he could hear her saying, “I know how impossible it is for you now, but if you could step back from your misery you’d find your sickness rather interesting really. I mean by that, the extremes your body goes to to get rid of the poisons.”

“‘Extremes’ is pretty mild,” he said. “It’s more like ‘counterrevolutionary.’” Atticus got Pepto-Bismol from the medicine cabinet and swallowed an inch of it straight from the bottle, then showered and some minutes later walked out, buttoning up his pajamas.

She was standing by the bookcase with a collection of Mexican poetry. She watched him haltingly get onto the bed. She said, “You’re white as a ghost.”

“Won’t last forever, I expect.”

“You should sleep,” Renata said, and fluffed his pillow and tucked the blanket over his horseman’s legs.

Atticus tried to put some affection in his smile, but he was impatient with himself for his need for feminine tenderness, because his ache and poisoning and how he felt now was not half as important as his fierce certainty that his son had been murdered.

FOUR

Sandhills. Snow. Gray weather. And Scott up from Mexico for the holidays, in a tan hunting coat but no hunting gun, sleepily riding Pepper with his hands holding his Radiola tape player against the saddle. The horses lazily plodded along a coulee in the oil patch, and Patsy Cline was singing “Crazy.” And then the sun and its twin were high overhead like Communion hosts and Atticus said, “You call that a sundog.” His son peered up and asked, “How can you tell which is sun and which is dog?” And then Scott turned his head so his father could see that his face was shot off.

Atticus jerked awake and figured out where he was. Warm air fattened the drapes, and their pull cords tapped against the gray wall. His Spanish for Travellers was in his hand and his mouth was as dry as a shoe. Atticus could hear the clanking of pots and pans in the kitchen and then the gong and sigh of tap water filling a kettle. He made another woozy trip to the bathroom and found a red lipsticked message on the bathroom mirror: “Police at 1.” He showered and got into his robe. Renata was in the kitchen speaking a Spanish he couldn’t make out, and then she was coming upstairs. And he was sitting up on the bed when she rapped lightly on the door and then pushed it, appearing with a bottle of Coca-Cola and a squat glass that was jagged with ice. She wore high-fashion blue jeans beneath an untucked and overlarge white oxford shirt. The fumes of tobacco smoke seemed to float from her clothes. She said, “You probably think you’re dying, but you’re not.”

“As sicknesses go, this one packs a wallop. I’ve been pretty basic with myself the past few hours.”

She seriously poured the cola into the glass and gave it to him with one white pill. “Lomotil. From Stuart’s pharmacopoeia. I’ll have to get you some more.” She paused. “I couldn’t find any Diet Coke.”

Atticus smiled. “I’ll try not to worry about the calories.” He took the pill and finished half of the Coke.

“Shall I call the airline and cancel your flight?”

“Yeah. I’m too raggedy for travel right now.”

Renata sat at his feet and folded her arms underneath her breasts just as Serena would when she focused on the family pictures and talked about the full day ahead. She said, “You know, the Mexicans get it, too. Children who seem to be five and six years old are often actually eight and nine. Especially in the jungle there’s a big problem with intestinal parasites and tuberculosis. Americans go home and get over it. Here you get used to it or die.”

A kitchen drawer was pulled out and pushed shut. “Who’s that?” he asked.

“Stuart, or María. I met her in the jardín. She’s making a healing potion.”