Atticus

Atticus fumed as he handed the folder to him. “¿Esto es todo?” Is this all?

“Sí.” Espinoza clamped it under his left arm as he flipped through files in a gray steel cabinet and found the right place for it.

Renata said nothing as she gathered the green package of clothes. Atticus unhinged the shotgun and fitted it under the shock cords of the Harley-Davidson’s saddle seat, and Espinoza held the door as Atticus pitched his hundred fifty pounds into the heavy motorcycle, rolling it down the green hallway. He fought the Harley onto the floor tiles of the lobby, and Espinoza and another policeman helped him brake and bump it down the front steps.

Hundreds were in the square and the jardín listening to the church plaza orchestra’s guitars, violins, and trumpets play “Tú, Sólo Tú” as a seemingly famous old crooner in a green mariachi suit sang, “Y por quererte olvidar me tiro a la borrachera y a la perdición.”

Renata stood on the sidewalk as Atticus got on the motorcycle. “Shall I go back home with you?” she asked.

“Nah.”

Renata stared at him. With suspicion. “You’re not too faint?”

“I’ll be fine.” Atticus handed her his Stetson and said, “Hold on to my hat for me, will ya?” He adjusted the spark retard underneath his right leg and jumped down on the kickstarter, jacking the throttle with his right hand until the tailpipe’s black smoke grayed and the great engine’s roughness calmed into gentle nickering sounds.

Renata was still staring at him, but with a difference, as if they’d harangued for a good while and he’d brought her around to his way of seeing things. “Was he murdered?” she asked.

“I think so.”

Atticus clicked the Harley-Davidson into gear with his cowboy boot and jolted out into the street between cars, cruising along with the taxis and hotel rent-a-Jeeps until he happened onto Avenida de la Independencia, and from there on he knew his way and got up to speed on the gray highway into the jungle, sinking through fifty and sixty on the straightaways, just touching his age with the needle, the big engine crackling, the wind swelling out his cowboy shirt and swatting his gray hair awry. When he was far away from Resurrección, Atticus feared he’d missed the turnoff for Scott’s workhouse, but then saw a teenaged girl in a lime green dress urging a gray zebu cow along the highway by tapping its flank with a bamboo pole, and just behind her a red flag was hanging from a tree. Atticus tilted over into a sharp turn to the east and into the green alley of weeds and overgrowth that was increasingly tinged with the salt and seaweed odors of the Caribbean.

And then he saw the bright savannah and just a glimpse of dark blue water and the green heave of grass and stone that was once a Mayan lookout on the sea. Atticus rode up to it as he presumed Scott had, shut the motorcycle down, and ascended the high hill with the shotgun, practically on all fours, pausing halfway up to rest, and pausing again to rip the yellow police tape from the door before going inside.

Everything was just as it was on Saturday. Atticus sat in the green wingback chair pretty much as Scott had in the picture taken from the front door, tilting to his right and gingerly touching his fingers to the floor. If it was suicide, Scott would have been facing nothing as he killed himself there. Whereas he presumably slumped in that chair of a night and fixed his stare on a half-finished painting. Atticus got up and put the shotgun together and aligned it on the floor just as it was in the high-angled photograph. Sitting again, he got back into Scott’s pose and, holding on to the shotgun’s barrel with his left hand, brought it upright so that it was on its heel plate and the front bead was touching his face. And that felt wrong: his right hand was twisted inside the trigger housing and his forearm winged out from the shotgun’s fore end. Atticus planted his right boot just where Scott’s foot was in the pictures, and let the shotgun go. The fore end fell against his thigh and skidded forward into his groin. Atticus tried it again, inserting his right thumb inside the trigger guard just as he would if he were killing himself, and imagining the jolt of the shotgun blast so that he jounced back against the green chair. And the shotgun fell against his right thigh again.

But what if the gunshot didn’t kill him immediately? What if he were there for an hour or so just bleeding? Conscious or unconscious? Half his face gone? Wracked in agony? Would he kick the gun away? Would he go for the gun again and try to finish it?

Atticus walked to the bathroom and held cold water to his face, his thoughts flying. Suppose he was murdered. Suppose Scott walked to the front door and was killed there and he was too heavy to lift. His killer would have kicked the green wingback chair around so it was angled toward the door and the haul would be shorter, easier. Which way would his blood flow? Like in the photograph, toward his ear for as long as he was on the floor. And the blood would have been telltale: if it stained the tail or back of his shirt, the killer would have to take it off and put another on him, get one from a hanger in the closet. Even pull off his shoes if bloodstains got on them. And if it was murder, the shotgun might have been stolen first and loaded with more than one shell. If it was murder, things began to fit together. If it was murder, Atticus thought, Scott’s father would not feel so much at fault.

Closing up the studio, he walked out to the cliffside. Hard sunlight glanced off the seven blues of the Caribbean Sea, and a southerly wind lightly feathered the waves as they grew giant against the jutting limestone and loudly cracked apart. A purple and green network of seaweed and kelp braided the white sand at least ten yards away from the gnarling white surf. Wild oleander was growing along the upper cliff and up there too was a small porch of flat rock that held, he was half sure, a shoe.

Atticus used the shotgun as a staff as he haltingly slipped down through greenery until he was on a gray lintel of stone. There he teetered along until he knelt on the flat rock and reached to get hold of the flung penny loafer. The shoe was cordovan brown and fairly new, the manufacturer’s name, Cole-Haan, still gold on the heel pad inside it, a faint trace of blood on its shank. He hunted the hillside and shore for the other shoe and found himself frowning down on the churning water where Renata sloshed up to the beach yesterday.

And then a general uneasiness caused him to gaze back up to the casita, and Atticus saw a human form seemingly glaring down at him, his skin color, his face, his height ghosted into mystery by the blinding, white sun just behind him. Atticus yelled, “Who’s there?” and whoever it was took a few steps back and turned and hurtled out of sight.

Atticus thought about going after him, but the hill was too vertical and he was too weak and forest was too close to the house, so he skidded down the hillside and for some time sat on the hot motorcycle in frustration and fury and grief, and then he turned the ignition and gunned the engine with his right hand and let go of the clutch. The Harley-Davidson jerked up and jittered sideways over the weeds and then righted itself in a sprint to the highway.

Riding toward Resurrección, he passed a hamlet where a frail, filthy girl was squatting outside a shack of dry yellow palms and sticks, dourly pressing corn mush into tortillas as a gray old woman peered out at her from one of six hammocks in the sleeping room. And then there was a shop with a shaded porch where a boy in a stained cook’s apron sold hot Coca-Colas and pregnant women tilted along the highway with big plastic buckets of water they’d filled at a spigot. Hungry dogs in twos and fours slinked away from human beings. Hens and roosters pecked at the earth. On a pale blue building was painted LONCHERIA, and inside were picnic tables where overweight men in dirty T-shirts were eating tamales and black beans and rice from white paper plates. Heaped on a countertop were cooked pork chops in an orange sauce. Black flies cruised and alighted and flew up again as an old woman lazily flapped a comic book over the pork.

Walking away from there was the teenaged girl in the lime green dress he’d seen earlier, the bamboo pole still in her hand. She paused and earnestly stared at him as he slowed and walked the motorcycle around. A few yards beyond her the zebu cow was browsing through fume-stained grass that was as high as its hocks. Atticus rolled toward the girl and turned off the ignition and tilted into the motorcycle to rock it up onto its kickstand. He could hear the high whine of jungle insects and the trills and caws of birds in the lush green canopy overhead. She wore white ankle-high stockings and dark brown shoes. She was probably fourteen.

“Buenas tardes, señorita,” he said.

“Buenas, señor.” She nervously turned and walked alongside the cow, taking hold of one long ear as she tapped at its foreshank with the pole. The zebu ignored the girl and lowered its great head to some green weeds farther away. It pained the cattleman in him to see the zebu’s ribs so plainly beneath its hide, but he helped the girl herd it by authoritatively slapping his hard palm on the zebu’s sharp pinbone, and the cow hopped into a short jog, its full round udder swaying between its legs. Atticus joined the girl and the milk cow in their slow amble along the highway.

“Perdoneme, señorita. Yo soy el padre del señor Scott Cody.”

The girl said nothing but gave him a haunted, sidelong look as she again urged the cow with her bamboo pole.

“¿Sabe?” he asked. You know what I mean?

She gravely nodded. “Cotzi.”

“Sí.” To his wonderment he found the Spanish to go on. “Mi hijo está muerto.” My son is dead. “Miércoles.” Wednesday. “En la noche.” In the night. “¿Comprende?” You understand?

Like a schoolgirl, she obediently glanced at him. “Sí, señor. Lo siento.” I’m sorry.

Atticus pointed to the shotgun that was unhinged into stock and barrel and wedged under shock cords on the motorcycle’s saddle seat. “¿Escuche la arma?” You listen the gun?