Atticus

“Well—”

“Shall I have the police out?”

“I haven’t been that impressed with them so far. Like as not they’d say he was guarding the house so no thieves could get in.”

Stuart was silent. Atticus heard the scritch of his lighter and the fizz of a fresh cigarette as he inhaled. Stuart said, “We do hope you’ll still find a way to stop by for dinner. Even after our contretemps this morning.”

“Well, that’s nice of you. As a matter of fact, I’m feeling kinda peckish.”

“Oh, good. Shall we pick you up?”

“You know what, Stuart? I think I’ll have a nap and get changed and hike to your place. I haven’t seen that much of the seaside yet and I’d kinda like to.”

Stuart gave him directions and failed to offer a goodbye before he hung up.

With the dining room telephone still in his hand, Atticus decided to try Frank’s place in Colorado, but Marilyn told him Frank was giving a talk to a cattleman’s association up in Sterling. She took the message about Scott’s American Express card, and he gave her a no-fuss, facts-only version of the past few days before saying he was expected for dinner and he was enjoying the fine weather so much he might just stay for a bit.

Then he got out Scott’s frayed brown wallet and flattened the folded slip of paper with phone numbers that he found in it. The first number he recognized as Stuart’s, so he dialed the second, which had an “S.” in front of it. After five rings a frazzled-sounding Mexican answered, flatly saying, “El Alacrán,” and Atticus heard the noise of some guy slamming down a leather cup of bar dice before he figured that El Alacrán was The Scorpion, and hung up. “P. I.” got a telephone answering machine that told the business hours for Printers Inc. And the penciled “R.” phone number was picked up in four rings, a hotel receptionist saying, “Bueno, El Marinero.” And Atticus could think of nothing to say; all he could think was, R.

About twenty minutes before sundown he locked up the house and went down to the beach through the pool gate. The sea was in green turmoil, the waves as big as one-car garages. College girls with hardly anything on were still on the hotel cots in a brassy shine of baby oil, headphones playing, margaritas in their hands, their faces tilted up to a sun that was now behind them. A plump American woman was sitting in a palapa’s shade, her skin patched scarlet with sunburn, her rose sunglasses raising up from a P. D. James paperback to linger on the old man in the gray mustache and gray cowboy boots who was falteringly stalking by. After the Maya Hotel was the El Presidente, the saltbox casitas of the Encanto condominiums, the Hotel Mexicana, the Marriott, and then a staircase of sea-grass and silt took Atticus up over an aggregation of dark brown stone that looked like the high pier of a lighthouse that neglect or age had torn down. Going over it and onto a gray boardwalk down to the sand, Atticus stepped onto a quarter-mile of public beach still crowded with Mexican families. Heavy women in overwashed dresses were sitting up on higher land, talking intermittently as they cooked tortillas on iron grills or just gazed at baby girls who were happily patting the sand. Teenaged girls who were probably their daughters sat on top of a big concrete sewage pipe as though they were still in a public schoolyard, snickering and whispering and modestly putting their hands to their mouths when they blushed and pealed with laughter. Then Atticus was aware of a half-naked American in his late teens walking u

p beside him in gray San Antonio Spurs gym shorts, his skin a ginger brown, his hair as wild as a lion’s mane, a green tattoo of a dagger and a green teardrop of blood just about where his heart ought to have been. The kid falsely smiled and in a soft Southern accent asked, “Say friend, would you happen to be able to maybe help me out?”

A handful of rings and studs glinted from his ears, and there was a kind of silver tack in his nose. “You need pliers?” Atticus asked.

But the kid was too far into his skit to listen. “You see, I’m fixin’ to get out of this hole and I’m just about five dollars shy of a bus ticket. Might you have something you could lend me?”

Some Mexican boys played volleyball on the sand in dirty polyester pants that were rolled up past their knees. Some young mothers were struggling out into the waves in dark brassieres and underthings that they were trying to conceal with white filmy shirts made transparent by the sea. A skinny hotel cook still in his red tennis shoes and checkered gray pants stood ankle deep with a one-year-old boy whom he’d happily swing into the air by his wrists so that the boy’s toes skimmed along the water in the spikes and scribble of handwriting.

The kid was still beside Atticus. He asked the kid, “Where would you go?”

“Belize. Even Guatemala. Anywheres really. Heard good things about Costa Rica.”

“You been living here for a while, have ya?”

“Two heathenish years if you count jail time. Which you oughta count triple.”

Although he feared the answer, Atticus asked, “You happen to know Scott Cody by any chance?”

The kid’s face was frankly stunned—We know the same people! The kid turned and walked backward as he perused the playa, looking past the hotels toward Scott’s place but never quite finding it. “Scott lives up by the Maya somewheres.” His hand flew out. “I used to remember but I’m too forgetful lately. Went to a bitchin’ party there once. He’s wild.”

Atticus heard the present tense but failed to correct the kid. One turquoise concession stand was selling green melon, cooked pork rinds, ginger brown bananas in a sugary stew, and black, barbecued chicken wings. A second concession that was crazily just a few yards away was under repair, and a boy in a bikini swimming suit was scooting along on his knees in the sand, painting at a huge square footage of green cement block with just a one-inch brush, turning a one-day job into many. On a stepladder inside, a man who was hidden from the chest up appeared to be rewiring palm thatching to the overhead poles, and a second man’s only responsibility was to keep one foot on the lower step and to hand up eight-inch wires, one at a time. Atticus flipped open his braid wallet and licked his thumb to get out a five-dollar bill that he withheld from the kid, like he was teasing a pup. “If I wanted to find Scott or his friends, where would I best look?”

The kid frowned and hunkered a little as he raked back his sorrel-colored hair with a hand. “You police?”

“I’m his father.”

The kid focused on his face. “Yeah! Right! In his house. You’re the old man in that picture of his that he drew. My girlfriend thought you looked just like God.”

Atticus put on a smile. “Well, our voices are the same.”

“She was stoned of course.”

“Hell yes,” Atticus said, “goes without saying.”

The kid looked at the five-dollar bill. “Wow, this is so television.” And then he said, “Believe he hangs out in Boystown at night.”

“Boystown.”