Atticus

“A potion. You think it’ll work?”

Renata shrugged and said, “When I was eight and living in Europe, I got some warts on my fingers. A family doctor told me to put my hands on a green machine in his office, and he turned on the motor and my skin tingled for a few seconds. And then he winked and said the green machine had cured me. And my warts were gone in a week.”

Lufthansa, he found himself thinking. A flight to Germany. “You’re only eight for so long,” Atticus said.

“Unfortunately.” Renata got up and created a purpose for getting up by walking across the room and causing the draperies to sweep aside. The sky was just as blue as yesterday or the day before that, and the sunglare on the snow-white stucco was as bright as the oncoming lights of a car. She said, “The hotel boys are playing soccer.” And she said, “White sand gets on their skin and they look like sugared doughnuts.”

“¡Está listo!” María called.

Renata turned. “She says it’s ready. Shall she bring it up?”

“Kind of funky up here. You go on ahead.” She walked out as Atticus went into the gray bathroom again. And Stuart was at the dining room table, fanning pink and yellow wildflowers out on an unfolded newspaper, when Atticus painstakingly stepped downstairs in his suit pants and a fresh white shirt, one big hand patting along the stairway banister in case his legs mellowed or his feet slipped. Stuart looked up and feigned disappointment. “Bad luck about the illness.”

“Where’s Renata?”

“The pharmacy,” he said. “Well. You seem to be ambulatory.”

“Just let me get my skates.” Stuart was barefoot on the pink marble, and Atticus remembered that there had been an Indian rug in the photograph of the dining room. Was it stolen? He asked, “You know what happened to the rug that was here?”

Stuart frowned at the dining room floor. “I haven’t the foggiest.”

María walked out of the kitchen with a four- or five-month-old baby boy and a kettle. “Buenas tardes, señor.”

“Buenas.”

“¿Cómo está usted?”

Atticus lost the little Spanish he had, but María just saddled the baby on her left hip as she tipped the kettle into a whiskey glass.

Stuart said, “She brought you a tea from her abuelo. Her shaman. She says it’s made from the bark of a tree.”

“Takinche,” María said.

“A takinche tree. And possibly eye of newt.”

Atticus held a whiskey glass that seemed to contain hot root beer and a skin of woodbits that looked like nothing more than shredded tea le

aves. Without a second thought he drank the concoction, trying not to taste it, but tasting and tasting it.

“Aren’t you manly,” Stuart said.

Atticus wiped the gray wings of his mustache with his palm as he grinned at María and told her, “I feel better already.”

María flushed with shyness and hooded her son with her shawl. Stuart spoke in Spanish, seeming to ask María about the rug, but María simply shrugged and replied, “No sé, señor.” Don’t know.

“Well, that’s better than my maid,” Stuart said. “She’d tell you it never existed.”

María headed for the front door and she smiled and said, “Hasta mañana.” She giggled at Stuart’s Spanish reply, and Atticus found himself registering how long Stuart fondly gazed at her as she went out.

Atticus’s hand held on to the headpiece of a dining room chair as the floor seemed to tip. “Are the police coming here or I am going there?”

“Renata’s taking you.” He paused. “La comisaría de policía.”

“Thanks. I was about to ask.”

“I hope you’re not expecting answers,” Stuart said, “because the police here don’t always dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s, if you get my meaning. Mexican fatalism gets jumbled up with a lot of the police being illiterate, and a few of them are dreadful people besides, not to put too fine a point on it. Half the time the police can’t get the facts right, and half the time they just don’t care to.” Stuart got some garden scissors from the sideboard as he said, “Anyway, your son’s clothing and shotgun are there. And the motorcycle. Will you be able to ride it back?”

“Oh, I reckon.”