Free Atticus by Ron Hansen

about some coffee?”
    â€œNo, thank you. Cigarettes are my only poison.” He looked affectionately at Renata. “And how are you, darling?”
    Renata said she was fine. She put her orange-juice glass in the sink.
    Atticus paused and said, “Renata was telling me last night you could help get my boy’s body out of Mexico.”
    â€œYes,” Stuart said, “but there’s a ludicrous bureaucracy to battle first. We’ll have to bury Scott today and hope for intercession from the United States Embassy in Mexico City. I have position but no power, alas. And we need permission to have him exhumed. I heard from … Frank?”
    â€œFrank,” he said.
    â€œWe talked about it just this morning. Our thinking is harmonious. You can go home to Colorado tonight, and I’ll be pleased to assume the burden of having him shipped up to Antelope.”
    â€œI’ll do it. You don’t have to pop for me to ship my own boy.”
    Stuart turned to Renata. “Oh, was that patronizing?”
    â€œStuart meant—”
    â€œForget it,” Atticus said.
    Stuart held his gaze on him. “We are expected at the funeral parlor,” he said. And with the frankness of someone used to having his orders obeyed, Stuart added, “Hadn’t you better go get changed?”
    And he was sitting on the right of an air-conditioned Dodge station wagon as Stuart Chandler gingerly urged italong a street that was rough as an alley. Atticus had gotten into a white shirt that was as hard as cardboard, a gray silk tie, a fancy black cashmere suit that would be too hot by noontime, and his highly polished lizard-skin boots. Stuart had rolled down his side window four inches so he could hold his Salem cigarette far from offense, and he faced away from Atticus when he exhaled. Atticus had run out of things to say. He held his gray cowboy hat in one hand and flattened his hair and the gray wings of his mustache as he looked out at the centro.
    Green and pink buildings were high above them on both sides and hot sunlight glared like snow off the walls. Dark old women were sitting in the shade of doorways and saying things to famished children. Skinny dogs were running at the station wagon’s tires and jumping up at the side windows as Atticus scowled down.
    â€œAtticus,” Stuart said. “Wasn’t that the name—”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œOf the father in—”
    â€œTo Kill a Mockingbird.”
    â€œYou’ve had this conversation before.”
    â€œUp until the sixties I had the name to myself.”
    â€œI shall bathe you in silence,” Stuart said. He turned the car onto El Camino Real and was forced to stop for a friendly man pushing a frijoles cart. Stuart let the Salem fall from his hand into the street. He drove forward. “I have been a citizen of the United States since 1962,” he said. “I first went there to be the pre-Columbian art specialist at Sotheby’s. Have you heard of Sotheby’s, Mr. Cody?”
    â€œAuction house.”
    â€œWell, I got sacked, to put it frankly, and it was the best thing that ever happened to me. A friend asked, as I was unemployed, if I was interested in taking over his little Mexican shop, selling paperback books in English. And I fell quite in love with the place.” Stuart seemed to grow bored with the thought. Half a minute later he said, “What a bother love is.”
    An unhappy girl in a dirty pink dress was wrapping hot corn tortillas in sheets of newspaper outside a shop. A frail old man was carrying kindling up the hill in a sling that was looped over his forehead.
    Stuart fought to have a conversation and said, “I have been the American consul here for five years now.” A havoc of lines hatched his roasted brown face.
    â€œA pretty good job, is it?”
    â€œWell, it isn’t a job so much as a social position. And there’s no pay, of course, and that is a