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“We do that.”
She got them Coca-Colas from a machine. She told him, “When I was in college I read a folktale about a father pursuing a son who’d run far away, from one world to the next. The father called to him, ’Please come back!’ But his son looked across the great gulf between them and shouted to him, ’I can’t go that far!’ So his father yelled to his son, ’Then just come back halfway!’ But his boy replied, ’I can’t go back halfway!’ And finally his father shouted, ’Walk back as far as you can! I’ll go the rest of the way!’”
Atticus flashed a smile that quickly faded. “Nice story,” he said.
Scott Cody was to be arraigned for the murder of Reinhardt Schmidt and was jailed until the Wednesday court hearing. Atticus hired a good abogado and got on the phone with Frank, then he and Renata had found the family of Carmen Martínez. Renata helped him explain what his son did and did not do. Atticus took care of them, and then they found the family of Renaldo Cruz, and he took care of them, too.
Renata drove him to the house in silence, and then she said, “You’ll have a full-time job fixing things for Scott.”
“Well,” he said, “you do what you can.”
Reinhardt Schmidt was not his real name, he wasn’t from Germany, and no one sought him. It was like they made him up.
On Wednesday, the lawyer argued there was only a faulty police investigation of the murder of Reinhardt Schmidt and only tainted evidence of the norteamericano having been involved in trying to hide it, and he got the charges against Scott Cody reduced to failure to report a homicide. But in agreeing to the bargain, the prosecution insisted that he be sentenced to prison time for that crime, and so he stayed in jail.
Renata arranged for Atticus Cody’s first-class flight from Cancún to Dallas to Denver, and he went to say goodbye to his son. Scott was hunkered in his cell, a flat board on his knees, filling a Scribe spiral notebook with his handwriting. Seeing his father’s sadness, he said, “You look glum.”
“I guess my face got frozen like that.”
Scott got up and held on to the iron bars as he tried to persuade his father not to feel sorry for him, the days were flying by, his stays in the hospital taught him how to be a good prisoner. “I have a cell of my own and plenty of time to sketch and write and play chess with Sergeant Espinoza. Renata will visit off and on; María will bring me dinner; I’m going to be teaching a class in English. I have friends here. This is the happiest I’ve been.”
Atticus praised him with a mellow stare. “I have a ticket for your flight to Colorado.”
Scott thought for too long. “We’ll see.”
Little Jennifer had fallen and lost a front tooth. Kids had climbed up on the horsehead pump next to the highway and sloppily painted the name of their high school on it. The Antelope truck stop was so full of talk of Mexico that Atticus stayed away for a week, and when he went there again the older people at least seemed to have gotten his point. Without a hint of prior illness, his friend Earl died in his hardware store in late March, and Atticus was a pallbearer at his funeral. The governor appointed him to a fish and game board in April, and he was
re-elected to the parish council at St. Mary’s. He put new shoes on the horses and helped Frank and Merle and Butch and Marvin give shots to the cattle, and at night he fell asleep with opera on the radio and a book of history in his hands.
Looking for the flush of a second bloom from his wife’s perennials, Atticus got his sheep shears and knelt in the garden in June, cutting back the penstemon, rockcress, stork’s-bills, and daisies. A soft rain began to fall as he heaped the green clippings on gunnysack and hauled it out back to his compost pile, and then he heard a far-off car on the highway. Why, he didn’t know, but Atticus walked to the front yard, taking off his gloves, and he saw a yellow taxi heading toward the house. And while his son was still a long way off, his father rushed out to greet him.
