Atticus by Ron Hansen Page B

minute then, but Atticus was too tired to make sense of it; he simply looked and looked at the flight packet and felt too slow to figure it out. Everything was wrong. When Panchito finished his paragraph and faced him expectantly, Atticus finally said, “Muy gracias.” Very thanks. And then he got out his wallet and handed Panchito a five-dollar bill.
    Panchito was formal in folding the bill inside his own wallet. Atticus frowned at him and said, “My son was going to Germany, but then he changed his mind and killed himself.”
    Panchito hesitantly smiled.
    â€œHappens all the time,” Atticus said. “Some people hate to fly.”
    And then he shut the front door on the taxi driver, furious now with everyone and knowing he was going to be sick. Getting upstairs was as much an agony as if he’d worked a twenty-hour day, and the hallway seemed to yaw as he swayed along it and into Scott’s room. Atticus sagged to his knees by the black toilet bowl and just about fainted with nausea. And then the poisons surged up from him and he seemed to smell the horrible stink within the painted coffin. The floor was winter to his skin as he knelt there for five minutes more and flew his sickness into the toilet again, and then he tilted to the high wide bed and fell face forward on it just as he would have as a kid. Within the next few hours he went to the bathroom a half-dozen times, and then he passed out and heard Renata say from a greatdistance, “Are you okay?” She fitted right into the past and Serena looking out the upstairs window, saying how pretty the evening was. His wife heaved up the sash for the fresh spring breeze, and Atticus helped Serena flip over Scotty’s crib mattress in order to hide the stains. And in his dream those stains were blood and he was in the dining room and gunsmoke floated against the ceiling and hundreds of wineglasses filled the table and red wine was spilling onto the rug and it hurt his stomach to see it. “You oughta be careful,” Atticus said. And a friend of his son’s told Atticus, “We all live on the fringe here. We make up the rules as we go along.” And handwriting was on the dining room mirror, handwriting in lipstick, and then he heard Renata say from outside his head, “If you wanted to stay for a few more days, you could’ve just told us. You didn’t have to get el turista on our account.”
    Atticus opened his eyes and it was night and Renata Isaacs was sitting on the bed, her palm as cool as a washcloth to his brow. And he felt the influence of his flesh as he found himself summoning up how it was to hold her as she wept.
    â€œDon’t,” he said. “I’ll be all right.”
    â€œActually I like paying attention to people when they’re sick. Helps to compensate for my thoroughgoing malice toward them when they’re healthy.”
    â€œHow late is it?”
    â€œNine.”
    He sighed and said, “Sorry, but I’ve gotta get up again,” and Renata helped him ease himself up from a damp sheet.His legs jellied a little, but he could walk into the bathroom by tilting into the gray wall. She turned away from his nakedness, and then he heard her sliding the floor-to-ceiling glass doors to let in the good night air. As he ran the tap water to brush his teeth, he could hear her saying, “I know how impossible it is for you now, but if you could step back from your misery you’d find your sickness rather interesting really. I mean by that, the extremes your body goes to to get rid of the poisons.”
    â€œâ€˜Extremes’ is pretty mild,” he said. “It’s more like ‘counterrevolutionary.’” Atticus got Pepto-Bismol from the medicine cabinet and swallowed an inch of it straight from the bottle, then showered and some minutes later walked out, buttoning up his pajamas.
    She was standing by the bookcase with a collection of Mexican poetry.