Atticus

“¿Sabe su nombre?” You know his name?

She must have thought she’d said too much. She folded a handkerchief.

Atticus hit the button again and Reinhardt went on, “I hate plays, plus in addition I have laundry to do. Don’t worry, I have my own key. Shall we meet at the Bancomex at ten tomorrow?”

Wednesday night. The one-minute phone call from his hotel. Right after that was a tone, and Renata’s voice saying, “Hey? If you’re still around, we’re having a cast party at Stuart’s. Wanna come? See ya.”

And then it was Stuart. At first he spoke a fluent Spanish that was intended for María, saying the message was urgent, and then he said in English, “We’ve had a spot of good fortune, Atticus. Your son Frank seems to have friends in high places. We’ve gotten permission to exhume and ship the remains. What luck. Shall I see you at the cemetery? Eleven o’clock. Awfully sorry about the rush.”

It was then ten minutes till. Atticus hurried out of the house, got on the motorcycle again, and headed down the hill to the centro. But he wasn’t certain where the cemetery was; he recalled that it was west of the zona turística and far into the barrio, but when he got onto El Camino he knew that was wrong, and he gave up on Avenida de la Independencia after a few blocks. A giant supermarket in a foreign part of the town had a public telephone outside. Atticus cruised the Harley-Davidson close to it, cut the engine, and rocked it up on its kickstand.

He was about to telephone Cipiano’s when he saw Stuart’s beggar outside the market with his hand full of coins, frontally confronting the shoppers and offering them his prayers. And Atticus was transfixed, because Stuart’s beggar had on the gray Stanford T-shirt his son was wearing at Christmas.

Stuart’s beggar caught sight of Atticus and for half a minute pretended he hadn’t, his frank brown eyes trailing away from the cattleman’s as he gave it some thought. Then Hector piously tilted forward on his crutches, heading toward the centro, his one huarache dragging the ground with a hushing sound. Atticus followed him from afar, strolling up Calle Veracruz a half a block behind him, past some gumball-colored shops, past a girl squatting by a red Radio Flyer, selling a wooden platter of pork ribs with hot chili sauce and the pepper of flies. A flock of sparrows flushed wildly out of a tree, then flew as one to a rooftop. Atticus watched a gray cat reach far down the tree trunk and softly fall to the earth and slink toward a hedge with its tail fluffed. Heat made the walk a job; there were side streets only one car wide that were without roof shade or breeze or human beings, where the scents were of woodstoves and slaughterhouses and the air seemed hotly physical. A butcher’s shop, a carnicería, kept wild pigs on ropes in a side yard, and fowl were scrawking inside a chicken coop. At the lavandería four women happily talked as they thrashed their sopping clothes on flat rocks. Atticus lost Hector just around a corner, and then caught up to him in the shade of a fortune-teller’s green awning with lettering on it that said Adivino. And then he saw from a fresh angle the green laurel trees of the jardín, the six- and seven-year-old shoeshine boys, the Printers Inc bookstore, the comisaría de policía, the soaped American cars being rinsed with pump water.

Stuart’s beggar was clobbering forward on his crutches around the side of the great parish church, past people sitting against its high walls and handrails with straw baskets for alms in their laps. Atticus then saw Hector tilted against the church and waiting for him beside a gray wooden door that he held open with his right hand. Atticus skeptically passed him and went inside, going down a ladder of ship’s treads with his right hand sliding along the rail, and he stooped under the huge floor joists of the apse to peer into a huge, nighted cellar that was roomed into sleeping compartments, with green tarpaulins or the plastic that sofas are packaged in weighted to the floor with rocks. Great urns and pews and painted altar scree

ns were stacked up in a gray velvet dust and a little girl in a dirty green dress was carrying water in a plastic bucket.

Entering the cellar, Atticus just missed a sleeping old grandmother curled up on some torn surplices, quietly tending her misery as if it were nothing more than a tired child. Beyond a junkyard of one-legged chairs and wrought-iron candlesticks was a dark alley that the girl walked along until she got to a fat man on a four-wheeled dolly whose torso ended at his waist. Maybe twenty people were cloistered in that great cellar space. A pregnant girl crouched over a soup bowl and scooped up its sauce with a tortilla. Two frail old men with limbs like kindling lay on their serapes, playing dominoes.

Atticus frowned as he walked among them, his head turning right and left, looking for a further clue that would help him find the murderer of his son. And he stopped at a flattened cardboard box with the name Hotpoint on it. Whoever slept there kept a spiral notebook and pen beside the folded blanket that was his pillow. Atticus walked over to it and knelt there and flipped the pages to see a familiar handwriting.

And the light changed as though a window was blocked and he heard a voice say, “Will you forgive me?”

Atticus turned to see his son.

THE HOUSE OF HE WHO INVENTS HIMSELF

SIX

Went native in Mexico for a while and made a friend of a shaman named Eduardo. Woke up coughing one morning in my shanty and found Eduardo inches away from my face and gently blowing cigar smoke at me. “Are you ready?” he asked in Spanish. And I looked out at three serious Mayans with wild black hair and filthy hand-sewn shirts that fell as far as their knees. Everything in them was saying how essential I was. So I walked behind them through a forest as green as Gauguin’s Tahiti, honoring their habit of silence as we hooked off and onto paths seemingly without reason. We’d go ahead for half a mile and rest for five minutes, then hike for a hundred yards and rest for half an hour. It was impossible to predict when we’d stop, and harder still to tell how long the pause would be. I finally heard the boom and shush of the sea and held my hands up to shade my eyes from the flare of harsh sunshine and salt white sand. Finding the harbor was the whole point of the trip, but the Mayans halted again just inside the forest instead of going out to the water. I couldn’t figure out their hesitation, and I asked Eduardo in Spanish why we were stopping. Eduardo looked at me like I was a toddler. And then he told me with infinite patience, “We are waiting for our spirits to catch up.”

I have a flat board on my knees for a desk, and on it my Scribe spiral notebook—Hecho en Mexico por Kimberly Clark in Naucalpan—is opened to the first page. My pen is an “EF uni-ball Micro,” with a fine point and blue ink. I have no idea whom I’m writing this for. We are waiting for our spirits to catch up.

I first met Reinhardt Schmidt just after I got back from Colorado. I was sane as Atticus then. And cool. Wearing shades and waltzing through the great open-air market in Resurrección. It was a hot and crowded tent city that was as loud as a kindergarten playground and filled with hard-up people selling handicrafts, fabulous fruits and vegetables, plucked chickens with the heads still attached, items fresh from the trash. You did not see many norteamericanos there, but you did find bargains of the hijacked, five-finger discount, What the hell do I do with this? kind: Gillette razors, Goodyear snow tires still wrapped in tan paper, floppy discs that sold for a nickel apiece, a guy in headphones sitting on the trunk of a green Chevrolet that held nothing but Salem cigarettes. Reinhardt called it his duty-free shop.

I felt a hand fall faint as a butterfly on my forearm, and I looked down at a kid holding up a bottle of Jameson’s Irish whiskey while his other hand waited like a tray for his pesos. “Aquí,” he said. Here. And he was surprised when I told him nah. “¡Es para usted!” It is for Your Grace. And then he tried English. “We gave you our special price.”

And then I heard a voice just beside me say as he handed the kid his pesos, “We seem to be the same person.”

Reinhardt Schmidt did, in fact, look like me but was far more the kind of handsome, fine-boned, fashion-model blonde that seems fit to be a flight steward for Lufthansa. His age was forty or younger—he never said—but he was an inch or two shorter, fifteen pounds lighter, a fast-twitch, friendly, full-of-energy type in fancy sunglasses, a formal white tuxedo shirt with its sleeves folded high as his elbows, green fatigue trousers from some foreign legion, and feet that were miserably without shoes but did have ankle bracelets. A hand-sized flash camera was hanging from a frayed cord around his neck.

The kid took a moment to look from face to face, as if he was flummoxed, and then to touch his own hair in explanation. “Rubio,” he said.

Reinhardt looked at me and I translated, “Blond.” And then I told the kid, “Mi gemelo malvado.” My evil twin.

The kid smiled and handed Reinhardt the whiskey and then hurried to his father’s booth.

We introduced ourselves and we talked for five or ten minutes, no more. Reinhardt told me he was from Germany, but his English was the highly schooled kind that you hear all over Europe now and I figured that Germany was his geography of convenience, the origin of a passport he got by on. Even then I guessed he was lying, just another guy in Mexico on the lam; there was that wise-guy shiftiness, that hustle of flattery and fearing offense, of sizing you up for the squeeze while trying too hard to be friends. You saw his kind in all the American bars—hard-drinking, no-luck, full-time liars fleeing some trouble that was not at all glamorous, financial reversals in the restaurant business or one too many wives, but who forced themselves to confide that they were in Mexico on an inheritance, here to write a novel that four or five editors were definitely interested in, or hiding out in a witness protection program, for Chrissake don’t tell anybody. You heard them out if only to know what topics not to bring up again and the true story became a whiff of unpleasantness underneath all that perfume.

I have few other recollections of our first meeting but that he pronounced have like haff and situation without the chu sound of American English. Reinhardt told me if I needed a haircut—and his squinnying look said I did—he was the guy for me; he’d handled the heads of fabulously wealthy women in Hawaii—he hinted at a flair for other things, too—before he lost his work permit and took a galley job on Mick Jagger’s yacht—a great guy, by the way—and happened onto a fabulously wealthy surgeon and his wife who needed Reinhardt to crew for them. A half year he was with them, sailing, playing backgammon, attending to their needs. Everything blew up a few weeks ago in Cuba—hot sex, discovery, gunplay—and he’d hightailed it here on the proceeds of the wife’s Piaget watch, which he’d hocked for just such an emergency.

Well, he probably knew about the American expatriate’s tolerance for bullshit and I, of course, have a further tolerance for madness, so I forgave his fabrications and when, hardly five hours later, Reinhardt bumped into me at The Scorpion (“Oh, hi!” he said. “Are you following me?”), we talked like friends in the making. I was fully medicated with gin and tonics by then and fell into a fraught stream of consciousness about Renata, an hour or more of she-done-me-wrong in forty variations, and Reinhardt took it all in oh-so-sympathetically, but fishing a little, too: Was she pretty? Did I have a picture of her? How often did I see her? Was she dating other men? Did she have a private income? And where did she live? I have forgotten my answers; I have not forgotten that I finally felt party to one of those Strangers on a Train routines; I half expected some unholy pact to follow when he halted his questions long enough to order a shot of José Cuervo and quaff it fast and peer resolutely into The Scorpion’s mirror. But he just looked at me dully and said, “I have no money to pay for the tequila. Would you let me cut your hair?”

And so it was that Reinhardt arrived at my house one noon in the first week of January with his things in a kind of European saddlebag slung over his left shoulder. And I sat on a kitchen stool, a skirt of fabric under my chin, his silence behind me only increasing as his hands firmly held my hair and his sci

ssors flashed, and I felt his tension for the first time and inferred that he was homosexual and hesitating over an invitation. But just as I was about to talk about what I fancied was not being said, Reinhardt filibustered about his jail time in Honolulu for hashish smuggling. A brutal year, but he made friends with a guy inside who got him a hairdresser’s job with Universal Television. I forget all the ways in which he altered his first version of his life, forget even how he ended up with a film unit manager’s job on four music videos, but a friend at Tri-Star liked his work so much that he was sent to Mexico to scout locations for a famous actress’s next picture (“You haff heard of her, belief me”) and then his boss went over to Paramount and the picture was put into turnaround and Reinhardt was left here high and dry. Which is why he carried a camera with him; he was always framing shots. Alan Pakula called him here just a few days ago and told him to sit tight, he was in preproduction on a film that would have a four-day shoot in Cancún and he wanted Reinhardt on his team. “And so I wait.”