Atticus

“God has made it so,” Eduardo said, and then he asked Mrs. Cruz where Renaldo was, for we were hoping to meet him face-to-face. She hollered, “Renaldo! A shaman is here! Where are you?”

Renaldo edged in from the hallway, in blue jeans and a Dallas Cowboys jersey, a gun in his hand. The gun hung by his thigh, his first finger in the trigger housing, but he held it like a half-forgotten auto part, You know where this belongs? But we were like cobra and clarinet, that gun and I, a bright .357 magnum six-shot revolver. His aunt told Renaldo she hated that thing, but Eduardo gave no sign that the gun was even an affront to good manners, he simply put his Padres cap back on and urged Renaldo to have our friendly talk outside so Mrs. Cruz would not be upset.

We sat in frazzled lawn chairs under a shade tree, on hard-baked earth fenced in rabbit wire, Renaldo holding the gun in both hands between his knees, his soft, lady-killer eyes shying from mine as he asked in Spanish, “Where’s my money?”

Eduardo told Renaldo he was lying about the money, and he grinned as if the kid would find that funny. And Renaldo did grin. Wow! Lying! Good joke. “I have come here to talk for my friend,” Eduardo told him.

Renaldo told Eduardo, “I have been in his house. I have seen his father. I have urinated on the floor.”

Eduardo frowned. “I have told you he is my friend. Have some respect.”

Children were playing with plastic trucks in the yard next-door, and an older girl in a pleasing sundress was watching a piano of ribs sizzle on the barbeque. I was finding it hard to be afraid of the murderer far to my left.

“You are trying to kill him,” Eduardo said. “We know this. You have killed another man by mistake.” Eduardo shrugged. “Easy to do. Both are Anglo and blond, blue eyes, it’s confusing.”

Renaldo nodded and scowled at the rubio. I hung my head and folded my forearms on my thighs, like a fatigued and sour teenager hating being out with the old folks.

“You see, though,” Eduardo said. “You have killed the right person. The Devil himself.” Eduardo turned to me. “His name was?”

“Reinhardt Schmidt.”

“Sh-meet, he is the one who killed Carmen. My friend here, he loaned the Devil his car and on the highway there was the tragedy. But you have revenged your Carmen, you see, Renaldo? She is happy in Heaven. She prays for you.”

Renaldo shifted his gun from hand to hand as he focused on a fat red sun settling into a hatchwork of trees. “I have no reason to live,” Renaldo said.

Eduardo considered him solemnly. “You are young!” he said. “You have a full life ahead of you! Your fiancée will enjoy watching it!”

The family next door followed their platter of ribs inside. Renaldo was silent. We all stared at the sun until it was nothing but a bloodline in the trees.

“Are we agreed?” Eduardo finally asked. “You won’t try to kill him?”

Renaldo looked at me full-on and said, “Your friend, I feel it in my heart when he talks.”

Eduardo let me off in front of Stuart’s villa and I skulked around to a dining room window where I saw my father sitting in pestered silence, his hands on his thighs, as Stuart held forth on subjects he had no interest in. I’d hoped to talk to Renata, but that would be impossible with Atticus there, so I bought a six-pack of Coronas from the kitchen help at The Scorpion and strolled down to the playa and watched the flying stars while lying on sand that was still hot from the sun. I fell asleep after gulphing three beers and woke up to find no hint of light in Stuart’s villa. I peed against a tree and peered in at the green neon of a kitchen clock, seeing it was past four.

Walked up the shoreline to my house and found it dark and took off my huaraches, then shifted the pool door an inch at a time until I fitted through. I held my breath and listened. The house was talking but that was all.

Eased up the stairs and inside the guest room, hunting for my passport and visa, and figured Atticus had to have it, he possibly had the Lufthansa ticket, too. My bedroom door was a few inches ajar, the habit of a father who listened for his wild boys to get home before he fully slept. I forced myself to push the door further and walk in. And there he was in skewed and twisted pajamas, wracked with cares, his mouth half open, his frail eyelids fluttering, who knew what horror film he was viewing? I held my hand so close to his face I felt his breath and probably shaded his fitful dreams. Wake him now, talk to him, some forthright and graced part of me thought, but to be fully seen, to confess what I’d done and failed to do seemed too hard, too shaming, far easier to put it off. And I did, hunting the room oh so carefully, a hand touching down here and there with the softness of a falling leaf, frightened of any sound, and finding in that way not anything I wanted, but only his gold-rimmed reading glasses and a shirt-pocket notepad with a pen underneath its front flap, as if he’d been jotting things down just that day. Even the key for the motorcycle was gone, probably in my father’s trousers, and I feared coins would clink if I lifted his trousers from the chair.

Took the notepad with me downstairs and into the kitchen where I flipped it open under the hood light over the stove. Handwritten there were:

Shirts.

Rug gone where?

Lufthansa ticket.

Shoes.

4 shells in gun.

Who’s R.?

I frankly admit it: hot tears filled my eyes. My father was fact-conscious, observant, even omni sometimes, but his fragmented piecing together of what had happened Wednesday night was far less impressive to me than that he’d so relentlessly sought a solution. I felt humiliatingly unequal to his faithfulness, his loyalty, his love, as if I were heir to some foreign genes that my father had no part in. I hit the hood light to turn it off and in full fool fashion hit the hood vent fan instead, hitting it off again after half a second, then hitting the light switch, too. But the fan roar had been enough. I held myself still and heard the floor creak under his feet, saw the hallway flush with light, and then heard Atticus walk the upstairs, hunting the stranger who woke him.

I hurried out of the house and hushed closed the pool door, and then I just stood far away by a tide pool, fixing my gaze on the upper rooms as my father washed and dressed, fixing my gaze on the kitchen window as he ate a bowl of cornflakes by the sink.

Atticus heaved the pool door and hammered it shut and I held my position out of his sight as he walked past, half-smiling for once, with the Radiola playing the frantically cheerful maríachi music on my homemade Linda Ronstadt tape. I heard no more, I got out of there, hurtling through sand and high grasses to the Avenida, and then walking in the faint gray of predawn until I was in the centro.