Atticus by Ron Hansen Page A

been clear. Here comes the sun. Doont-n-doo-doo. Here comes the sun. And it’s all right.’”
    She shifted to third and fought the bumps as she turned onto an unpaved road through the barrio. She said, “I have no idea how I looked, but Scott later said my face was different, unfrozen, and he unfolded a chair beside mine and held me in his arms as if we were sweethearts and he sang the whole song again. And it was amazing. I found myself seeing colors for the first time. Yellow, pink, green, and blue. Up until then there’d only been monochrome, gray and white. And I kept hearing him singing over and overagain, ‘And it’s all right.’ I fell in love with Scott Cody then and there. And I felt all my life I’d owe him. And I’d be honored to do whatever he asked.”
    Renata was expected at the bookstore to help out, so she dropped Atticus off at Scott’s place and promised to return that night. Atticus forgot the Radiola tape player atop the refrigerator as he opened a half-frozen Coca-Cola that he took upstairs to the high-tech desk. And he found underneath it in a plastic wastebasket a Mexican newspaper, El Anunciador , from the first of the week. Atticus got out of his hot funeral clothes and rummaged through four drawers of the high armoire until he found some black running shorts to put on as trunks, and he felt the toll of a hard day as he trudged downstairs and outside to the pool, holding the folded diario and a Spanish dictionary under his arm. The half-smoked cigarette he’d seen that morning on the upstairs railing had fallen to the hot tiles. The lettering on it read “Salem.” Stuart’s brand. He’d been up in the bedroom, then. Atticus worried about that as he sat in a white deck chair and shaded his eyes to look at a four o’clock sun that wasn’t letting up. Sports was the easiest newspaper Spanish to translate, so he stayed on that page for a while, reading about winter baseball, and then he looked at a furniture ad, at the interest rates offered by Bancomex, and at page 8 where a paragraph had been carefully cut out of the obituaries. Who? he wondered. And then he closed his eyes. He felt faint and poorly all of a sudden. His stomach hurt and his head floated and when he pressed it his skin showed ayellow imprint that soon was pink with sunburn again. He got up and walked over to the deep end of the pool and pinched his nose and jumped into the water, as upright as a plank. He swam across the pool and back in the sloppy way of a boy just learning how. And then he just hung on to the pool ladder, feeling woozy, and got out, and he’d walked into the kitchen for a seltzer when he heard a faint knocking at the front door.
    Yesterday afternoon’s taxi driver was there on the other side of it, smiling as if Atticus were good fortune itself. What was his name? Panchito? His hand was soft as a fish as he shook the cattleman’s hand and talked importantly in Spanish.
    Even the phrase to say he knew little Spanish was locked up. “Afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    Panchito thought for a bit and got a Lufthansa flight packet from inside his shirt and held it up so Atticus would see Scott’s name printed on it. “Cotzi,” he said. And then he pointed at Atticus. “Señor Cody?”
    â€œSí.” He recalled that “his” in Spanish was su. “ Su padre.”
    Panchito offered the flight packet to him, and Atticus found inside a one-way first-class ticket for a flight from Mexico City to Frankfurt, Germany. The flight was to have been Thursday night at nine-twenty and was charged on Wednesday to Scott’s American Express card in feminine handwriting. Germany! he thought. “Was this phoned in?” he asked.
    â€œNo se,” the Mexican said, but whether he did not knowthe answer or he did not know the English wasn’t clear. Panchito talked for a full