Atticus

Although she seemed puzzled, she responded. “Sí, señor.”

Surprised, he asked, “¿A qué hora?” At what hour?

She shrugged and thought. “A medianoche.” Midnight.

The zebu stopped with the certainty of a piano and tore away weeds that slowly rose up into its mouth with the sideways crunch of its jaws. The girl stared at Atticus as he struggled to find the vocabulary for his hundred questions and finally settled on “¿Usted ver mi hijo temprano?” You see my son early?

She spoke but he couldn’t interpret what she said, and he made a hand signal for her to repeat herself. “What was that again?”

Shutting her eyes and pillowing her right cheek with folded hands, she rephrased what she’d said in a paragraph, saying something about her brother and sister and using the words adormecido and coche. Sleeping and car. They’d seen him sleep

ing in his car. Motorcycle in Spanish was lost to him, so Atticus pointed to it. “¿No ése?” Not that?

She half-smiled as if he were joking. Sleeping on a motorcycle. She shook her head.

Wondering aloud, he said, “Why were you there?”

“No comprendo inglés, señor.”

Writing the sentence in his mind first, he tried, “¿Por qué usted allí, señorita?”

“Vimos las luces en la casita,” she told him. We saw the lights in the house. “A veces lo mirábamos pintando.” We sometimes watched him painting.

Atticus caught the gist of it but wasn’t sure he’d heard right. Was Scott sleeping in his car while the lights were on in his house? Who’d turned them on then? And how could Renata have found the Volkswagen near the jardín? Atticus fought to put his confusion and perplexity into words, but his Spanish failed him, and he could tell the girl was hankering to go. “Muchas gracias, señorita.”

“De nada,” she said, and whacked the milk cow on its hindquarters until it walked ahead.

When he got to Scott’s house on Avenida del Mar, he killed the Harley-Davidson’s engine beside the front door and rocked the motorcycle up onto its kickstand. He felt about to faint as he walked inside the house, so he put the shotgun on the floor and fell back onto the sofa and shut his eyes and heeled off his hot cowboy boots. A tropical breeze found his face, as perfumed and soft as the hair of his wife in bed, and he turned to it and in the flush of fever saw the faded denim of the sky and the navy blue of the sea and the tall sliding door to the pool half open, letting the air conditioning out. His hand gripped the right arm of the sofa and he pulled himself to his feet, tottering a little as he walked to the terrace and rammed shut the wide glass door. And then he heard a soft, stitching noise that halted when he tried to find it. The house seemed to settle and he looked at the ceiling, feeling a presence in Scott’s upstairs room. Even if only for a second, Atticus found himself thinking that Scott was alive up there and it all had been a fraud, a horrible mistake, a mean-spirited fiction that had misfired, and he wished it were so. “Anybody here?” he yelled.

Stillness.

His head reeled and he caught a dining room chair with his hand. Walking forward a little, he tilted feebly against a framed print on the living room wall and frowned at hushed whispering and the faint thud of a telephone receiver finding its home on the machine. “María?” he called. “Who’s in the house?” Atticus went to the foot of the stairs and with both hands on the banister held himself upright as he fixed his gaze up through the well to the second floor. Harsh white sunshine on the hallway wall was blinked by shade, and then Atticus saw frayed blue jeans and Nike Air running shoes halt at the upper step. Even as he hoped, however, a hard dark brown hand took hold of the railing and a teenaged boy in a Dallas Cowboys jersey fumbled down the stairs with his head turned away and hidden behind his hand as if he feared a photograph would catch him in his shame.

Atticus shouted, “The hell you doing here? Huh?”

Hunching further down the stairs, the kid got to the landing and hung there, his pretty-boy face full of grief, as he figured out what to do next.

“Saw you at church yesterday. Didn’t I? At the funeral?”

The kid seemed not to know English, but a hurtful thought seemed to writhe through him and he suddenly surged forward like a football blocker, his left shoulder slugging hard into Atticus, felling him, and then the kid hurried to the dining room and out onto the terrace where he scrabbled up onto the high wall and flung himself out of sight.

Easing his way up from the floor, Atticus felt the full anger and humiliation of old age, finding no fight or scare in himself, put hard on the floor by a petty thief who must have thought Scott’s father would have gone home right after the funeral.

The dining room telephone rang and he went to it. “Hello?”

“How was it?” Stuart asked.

Atticus sorted through the things he might have meant by “it” and said, “The police station. Kinda grim. Renata didn’t say?”

“I haven’t seen the dear.”

Stuart was an old-time exile in Mexico, he thought. Stuart had learnt not to know anything. Atticus told him, “We had an intruder here.”

“Oh, no! Who?”

“Kid. Sixteen, seventeen years old. I got back and the pool door was open, and I heard him using the phone upstairs. His hands were empty, so I don’t expect he swiped anything. Don’t have my sea legs yet or I might of wrangled him downtown.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry, Atticus! How perfectly awful! You must feel violated! We’ve been having so much of that lately.”