“Drunkards and expatriates. Writers, artists, some ex-movie people, cancer patients hunting miracle cures. Half the Americans in Resurrección are just middle-class retirees who can finally afford servants.”
“You head down there for no particular reason?”
“No. I gave it some thought.”
And there was a pause until Atticus asked, “Are you getting back together with Renata?”
“I hope so.”
“She’s there then?”
“Good guess.”
Atticus smiled. “Well, I always liked her.”
“Me too.”
At six the next morning, Atticus got out the twelve-gauge shotgun for himself and his old sixteen-gauge for Scott, and he was sitting at the kitchen table, jotting out his Christmas shopping list, when his son jounced downstairs in his gray T-shirt and blue jeans, his eyes bloodshot from the whiskey and his hair in hurricane.
“Sleep okay?”
“An hour or two.” Scott got a quart of orange juice from the refrigerator and sloshed it before drinking right from the carton. He spied the shotguns angled against the ironing board closet and regarded Atticus as he might a horribly outdated phrase of slang. "Hunting?"
“Don’t have to,” Atticus said. “Just thought you might’ve missed it.”
“Hot-diggity.”
“You still wear my size in everything?”
“Haven’t changed much.”
“Because I got some nice things hanging in the closet.”
“And there must be people around here who’ll be glad to have them.”
Atticus held his stare.
Scott put Wonder bread in the toaster. “I’m trying to get back to essentials, Dad. I’m trying to subtract things from my life.”
***
And then they sloshed through snow and hidden leaves in Frank’s orchard and crashed through the high brittle cornstalks of the forty acres along the creek and quail blustered up from underfoot and pheasants sailed beautifully away. And Scott never even brought up his gun.
“Pretty out here,” he said.
Atticus was at his underground workbench, using a screwdriver to tighten the shoe polisher on an old electric motor. Scott just stood there by the floor heater, acting as bored as a teenager, his breath fluttering grayly in the cold. Atticus seriously inquired, “Have I ever told you the difference between a bank and a beehive?”
His son smiled uncertainly and said no.
Atticus was trying the play on the shoe-polisher belt. “Well, a bank pays notes and a piano plays notes.”
Scott just kept squinting at him in an askance way and then asked, “What about the beehive?”
Atticus merrily jabbed his son with the screwdriver and joked, “Why, that’s where you get stung!”
Atticus painstakingly washed the dishes after dinner and Scott dried them and told him, “We’d had about a hundred feet of rain fall on us, but then it didn’t rain at all for two days and the highways were being used again. And so I took my Volkswagen out to the jungle for the first time in a month and painted for half a day. And then I remembered that Renata expected me for dinner at six and it was already half past five and getting dark. I hurried into the Volkswagen and took a shortcut into town, skidding wildly in mud, and going way too fast for the road. Suddenly I rushed up on a half-dozen Mayan kids in their finest white shirts and pants, probably heading to work in the hotels. I honked the horn and they jumped from the road and frowned at me and there was this pothole filled with rainwater that my front tire plunged into, ramming hard, splashing their good clothes with muck. Their hands flew up and they yelled in fury and I thought I ought to go back and say how sorry I was. But then I thought about how late I was and how Renata would be fuming and how often their clothing must get ruined in the monsoon season. And I was gazing back in my rearview mirror to see them slapping the gunk from their shirts when the car slammed forward, blam!, into a trench of mud where the ground had crumbled away. I got the engine going again but then looked out the side window and saw the mud was as high as the door and my tires were turning fruitlessly in the slime. I shifted to first gear and then reverse, hoping to rock the car forward, but it only settled another inch or two. And I thought, This is how God repays your thoughtlessness. And then I looked up to see the Mayan kids were hulking around the Volkswagen, angrily peering in. But before I could say anything, I saw them bend from my sight and lift the Volkswagen and heave it forward until all four tires were on hard
ground again and I could roll free of the mire. I got out of the car to thank them, but the kids walked ahead without saying a word. You have no idea how Indian that is.”