Page 48 of Atticus

Had a flan and Nescafé at a hole in the wall behind the parroquia, but as I sat there trying to read a found newspaper, all I could think of was my father, my pursuer, hunting down clues to my murder. Look at what you are putting him through. You can’t go on like this.

At ten I walked across the public square, ambling under the loggia and right inside Printers Inc. Renata was stacking paperbacks in a bookcase, but she let them flop to the floor in her shock at finding me there.

She glanced to the bookstore office. Stuart was fully absorbed in fiddling with his computer. “Are you crazy?”

“Worn out.”

“You heard about Renaldo.”

I felt I was falling. “What now?”

She told me Renaldo Cruz was shot with his own gun in his uncle’s Bella Vista bar after Renaldo had harangued Rafael for half the night and finally insulted his wife. Self-defense, the police called it. “But it was suicide,” she said.

My mother, first. Then Carmen Martínez. Reinhardt Schmidt. Renaldo Cruz. I forced open a pocket knife of a smile. “Who’s next?”

She walked forward and fell into me with a kind of relief, holding whatever affection and faithfulness she had hard against me, her face firmly pressed to my chest, inhaling the smell of my hand-me-down shirt. She told me that the friends of Colorado State Senator Frank Cody got through the Mexican bureaucracy far better than Stuart could have, and that Reinhardt Schmidt was being exhumed in an hour or so in preparation for his shipment to Colorado. She and Stuart would have to be there to identify the remains.

“Tell them it isn’t me. I have two gold fillings on my teeth. Reinhardt doesn’t. You can say you just remembered.”

“Oh, Scott. Are you sure?”

“I’ll be fine,” I said.

“Where will you go?”

“To jail, probably.”

Without turning, Stuart called from the office, “Renata? Who’s there with you?”

I held her face in my hand. “Kiss me,” I said, and she did. I felt the fleeting, soft give of her mouth against mine, and then I walked out the front door.

Sergeant Espinoza, my old friend from my borracho days, was sitting on the front steps of the police station, and he stood up with concern when he saw my face. But a Marriott van full of fresh tourists halted in the street, separating us, and when Espinoza got around it, I had disappeared underground.

Then I waited; it was the one good and tenacious thing I’d done, that waiting. I handed out my sunglasses, bandana, and frayed cowboy hat to whomever would take them and watched Stuart’s beggar go out for his rounds in my gray Stanford T-shirt. Cicadas chirred in the hedges outside. A gray scorpion inched up an adobe wall and curled its poisonous tail in defense when I lightly tapped its head with a pen. A hunched old woman shuffled by as if her sole purpose was to stir up the fine, powdered earth with her shoes. An hour passed, then half of another. Even in daylight the great room was all shade and absence, as if spirit and qualities had been subtracted from it. You’d paint it in funeral black, raw umber, sienna brown, vermilion. Caravaggio colors. Colors of loss and impermanence. I was in the belly of the whale, I was with Lazarus in the tomb.

A hard rain of sunlight sheeted in when the first-floor door opened. And Atticus was there, just as I knew he would be, his face full of pursuit and worry. His hand flowed along the railing as he found his way down into that huge sepulchre and walked uncertainly across the floor, his head turning right and left as he took in the underworld all around him. I got to my feet, got over against a wall, still unsure if I would be willing to talk to him or be seen. But there was a kindliness to him, that “You okay?” look, and I found it in me to walk forward. And I asked, “Will you forgive me?” And I felt forgiven even as I said it.

SEVEN

Way back in the room, Sergeant Espinoza was taking the stairsteps one at a time. Looking fiercely in their direction. But Atticus was past caring about that future; that was only government and paperwork. His shifty second son was there, found and alive, and if there was hurt in his face and he seemed to have visited every room in hell, it hardly mattered now; Atticus was flooded with joy. He’d had his mind set on just the one thing and got surprised by the far better. “Will you forgive me?” Scott had said. Words wouldn’t half do it, so Atticus hugged his son hard against himself. Wanting to fill him up with his love. “I feel like hitting ya,” he finally told him.

“You’ll have to stand in line,” his son said.

But the gift of him was too huge. They just held each other for a while, until his son was real real to him. And then Sergeant Espinoza was there, talking to Scott in a hurried Spanish that Atticus couldn’t get the hang of. At one point his son said, “Reinhardt Schmidt,” and the sergeant had him write the name down.

Renata walked into the front lobby of the police station right after Scott and the sergeant went into an interrogation room. Atticus listened to them both talking reasonably in Spanish. “Everything’s going to get even harder,” Renata said.

“Like as not,” he said. “What’s the word for lawyer?”

“Abogado.”

“I’ll have to hire a good abogado.”

Renata was grief itself. She said, “I’m sorry I had to lie to you.”

“Well, you told the truth, mostly.”

“I left a lot out.”

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