Atticus Read Online Free

while—that’s as crazy as she’s been.”
    â€œHuh,” Atticus said.
    â€œShe’s got a room in this pink villa owned by a Brit.”
    â€œIn Mexico.”
    â€œYep. The friend is Stuart Chandler. Runs the English-language bookstore, grows orchids, holds forth on sundry topics. He’s the American consul there.”
    They walked fifty yards without further comment, and then Scott teetered as he tainted the road with gray ash. “Enjoying your cigar, Dad?”
    Atticus turned and talked through his teeth. “Isn’t lit.”
    â€œLike mine a little hotter than that.”
    â€œIt’s nearly tolerable this way.”
    Wheeling snow twisted by in a sudden gust and then flattened on a highway that shone in the moonlight like wax. Atticus heard Scott finish a sentence with, “Went native for a while and got into shamanism.”
    â€œRenata did?”
    â€œMe.” His son looked at his cigar and then huddled over it as he lit it again.
    â€œYou have your own religion.”
    â€œShamanism isn’t instead of; it’s in addition to.”
    â€œWhy’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?”
    â€œI have been a trial to you, haven’t I?”
    â€œWell, 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.’”
    â€œAre you quoting?”
    â€œHamlet.”
    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.
    â€œYou’re just a tiny bit borracho , son.”
    â€œAnd 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?”
    â€œYou mean the Big Dipper.”
    â€œExactly. The Mayans call that Seven Macaw.”
    â€œHmm.”
    â€œAlso, 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.’”
    â€œHelluva brand name.”
    â€œYou’re darn tootin’. We oughta copyright it, put a littlecircle 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