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“You have your own religion.”
“Shamanism isn’t instead of; it’s in addition to.”
“Why’s everything you do have to be so different? Wouldn’t it be easier to just do things like they have been done and not fuss so much inventing?”
“I have been a trial to you, haven’t I?”
“Well, that’s just being a father, mostly.”
Scott shifted his green cigar in his mouth and withdrew inside Atticus’s black cashmere overcoat. After a while he said, “‘The air bites shrewdly.’”
“Are you quoting?”
“Hamlet.”
Atticus tugged off a kid leather glove and offered his left hand to the north wind. “About five degrees.”
Scott tilted the Armagnac bottle again and tottered up against a high snowbank as he drank. He then capped the bottle top with his thumb, put his cigar back in his mouth, and sat heavily in the snow so that his hips were deeper than his knees. He was surprised to be there for a second and then simpered like a dunce.
“You’re just a tiny bit borracho, son.”
“And you’re being real agreeable about it. Expected you to be more fractious.” Atticus got the whiskey bottle from him and Scott gave his blue eyes to the night sky, the cigar centered between his teeth. “See up there? Ursa Major?”
“You mean the Big Dipper.”
“Exactly. The Mayans call that Seven Macaw.”
“Hmm.”
“Also, there’s a story about the Pleiades being Four Hundred Boys who got too drunk on chicha and were sent up there when they died. Mayans call their corn whiskey ’sweet poison.’”
“Helluva brand name.”
“You’re darn tootin’. We oughta copyright it, put a little circle around the R.” Scott offered his left arm and his father attached his own to it, lifting his son up from the snow. And then Atticus was walking the quarter mile back to the house and Scott Cody was just behind him saying, “Heart of sky, heart of earth, one true god, green road.”
Weeks later, Atticus walked out to the mailbox and found an airmail envelope from Mexico. But inside was a letter from Scott to Frank that thanked him again for the shotgun and talked about other worrisome things.
After a late night of drinking and dancing at The Scorpion, the Delta Gamma from California tells me that she’s bad and she’ll wreck my life, she’s done it to a slew of guys. She’s falling apart as she tells me she wants to love just one person, and for that person to love just her. She’s twenty and stewed and majoring in Theater Arts, so I have reason to believe she’s being dramatic, but then she’s in my lap—we’re in my VW, so this is no mean feat—telling me what a mistake this would be, but to take her now, here, quickly. Be my fantasy, she says. And I know I am in way over my head.
And then there’s Renata. I have followed her from town to town for more than fifteen years. She calls it stalking, I call it love. She throws me a bone now and then—a tryst, an oh-what-the-hell affair—but more often she stamps her foot and shoos me. I have been getting the go-aways lately and it’s beginning to feel done, over, finished. We talked when I got back and she told me she was, for the very first time, in love—meaning no offense, of course, though it did add a caustic charge to the midnight cigar and too-many whiskeys that my friends put down in front of me.
I know these two stories go together—less than forty-eight hours separate them—and in both I was the stooge. On the phone with Renata I tried not to say, “Try to get it right this time,” but that was there, and I think that I have lost something, and I lost it before Renata, lost it as far back as the accident. This is not a complaint; I just have no clue.
Confessions like this are maybe not what older brothers like to hear, but I know you’ll be flattered by it. I hear the three favorite words are not “I love you” but “What’s your opinion?” A guy I know here chides me for being softheaded. We’re playing pool at the American Bar. And I am sailing on Coronas and shots of tequila. The Warriors and Chicago are on cable and the furthest gone exiles are hooting at some nifty moves in the paint. Who’s that singing on the jukebox? Whitney Houston? I love that song. I hold out my heart for dissection and see this guy Reinhardt looking at me like I’m a mark, like I’ve got “Kick me” pinned on the back of my shirt. Renata’s walking all over you, that sort of thing.
Long meaningless strolls, holding hands, chips and salsa by the pool, skin against skin, how about a back rub?—it’s full of intimacy and self-revelation, and I feel lost without it. Love in my shoes. Love in the hand on my thigh. Love hanging around like a good waiter when we dine by candlelight. Want it, need it, gotta have it. I’m forty years old and the clock’s still running.
All I can do now is paint. There are feelings then, big and troublesome. But with the other stuff, I have no idea. I’m trying my hand at patience. I try your patience, too, I know. Try to remember that every President has a flake in the family.
Scott
Late that night, Atticus got a phone call from Frank. “Dad? I got a letter to you from Scott by mistake.”
“Oh?” Atticus said. “What’s it say?”
“He thanks you for the Radiola. Says he’s working hard and he’s off the sauce. Half page is all. Seems fine.”
“Well, that’s good to hear.”
