Gringos

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  BOOKS BY CHARLES PORTIS

  Norwood

  True Grit

  The Dog of the South

  Masters of Atlantis

  First published in the United States in 2000 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  For bulk and special sales, please contact [email protected]

  Copyright © 1991 by Charles Portis

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  “Salty Dog Blues” by Wiley & Zeke Morris, copyright © 1946 by Peer International Corporation, copyright renewed. International copyright secured. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Portis, Charles.

  Gringos / Charles Portis.

  p. cm.

  1. Americans—Mexico—Fiction. 2. Mexico—Fiction. I. Title. PS3566.O663 G’.53—dc21 00-055752

  eISBN : 978-1-590-20654-6

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  CHRISTMAS AGAIN in Yucatán. Another year gone and I was still scratching around on this limestone peninsula. I woke at eight, late for me, wondering where I might find something to eat. Once again there had been no scramble among the hostesses of Mérida to see who could get me for Christmas dinner. Would the Astro Café be open? The Cocina Económica? The Express? I couldn’t remember from one holiday to the next about these things. A wasp, I saw, was building a nest under my window sill. It was a gray blossom on a stem. Go off for a few days and nature starts creeping back into your little clearing.

  I bathed and dressed and went downstairs to the lobby. Frau Kobold hadn’t opened her door yet. She had a room on the ground floor and by this time she was usually sitting in her doorway. She parked there in her high-back wickerwork wheelchair and read paperback mysteries and watched the comings and goings. Fausto himself was at the desk. Beatriz, poor girl, finally had a day off. Fausto saw me but kept his head down, pretending to be absorbed in some billing calculation.

  “Well, Fausto, I’m back. Feliz Navidad.”

  “. . . días,” he muttered. He was annoyed with me because I had paid him two months rent some weeks back. Now he had spent the money, and I was staying free in his hotel, or so he viewed it. He disliked these anticipo payments. Much better that I should get behind in the rent, like everybody else, and be beholden to him. I had arrived in the night, too late to check my mail, and he handed me a letter and a long note, in a flash of fingernails. Not otherwise odd in appearance, Fausto made a show of his high-gloss nails. They were painted with clear lacquer, to indicate, I think, that he was of that class of men who did not have to grub in the earth with their hands.

  “Gracias.”

  “Joor welcome.”

  The letter was from my unknown enemy who signed himself “Ah Kin” this time. He also called himself “Mr. Rose” and “Alvarado.” Or was it a woman? The letter was postmarked here in Mérida, and it read, without date or salutation, “Well, Mr. Jimmy Burns, I saw your foolish red face in the market again today. Why don’t you go back where you belong and stay there?” Ah Kin (He of the Sun) used a Spanish typewriter, with all the tildes and accent marks, but I had the feeling he was a gringo. The note was a long telephone message, taken down by Beatriz. A hauling job in Chiapas.

  I went outside and smoked a cigarette, looking this way and that, the very picture of an American idler in Mexico, right down to the grass-green golfing trousers. They had looked all right on the old man from Dallas but they made me feel like a clown. They were hot and sticky, too, made of some petroleum-based fiber, with hardly any cotton content. The town was quiet, no street cries, very little traffic. Christmas is subdued in Mérida. Easter is the big festival. Holy Week, when all the fasting and penitence is coming to an end, I could sense nothing in the air. Art and Mike had told me that something was stirring. What? Just something—coming. They couldn’t say what. We would see. It was old President Díaz who said that nothing ever happens in Mexico until it happens. Things rock along from day to day, and then all at once you are caught up in a rush of unforeseen events.

  The street frontage of the Posada Fausto was not very wide. There was a single doorway at sidewalk level, and beside it a small display window, like a jeweler’s window, backed by a velvet curtain. A blue placard behind the glass read SE VENDE. Strangers paused to look but found nothing on display other than dead beetles. What was for sale? The nearsighted drew closer. Finally they realized it was the hotel itself that was being offered. Fausto’s hope was that one day some strolling investor or whimsical rich man would stop dead in his tracks there and throw up his hands and cry out, “Just the thing! A narrow hotel on Calle 55! Between El Globo Shoe Repairs and a dark little bodega!” The sign had been there for years, along with the same bugs.

  My truck was parked across the street in an enclosed lot. The watchman, old Paco, was asleep in his sentry box, and the wooden gates were secured in exaggerated fashion, like some Houdini contraption, with great looping chains and huge flat padlocks shaped like hearts, and long-loop bicycle locks. It was all a bluff, and if you knew where to look there was a snap link that undid the whole business. There it was in the corner, my white Chevrolet with a camper shell. The old truck was sagging a bit, getting a bit nose-heavy with age. A film of red dust had settled over it. The engine fired up first shot.

  I had decided to drive over to one of the tourist hotels on the Paseo Montejo. Their dining rooms would be open. A big gringo breakfast there would be expensive but would hold me for the rest of the day, what with a few supplementary rolls stuffed in my pockets. Then I would go out to the zoo for a few minutes and look over the fine new jaguar.

  Paco jumped up in his box and waved me on through, as though he had been on top of things all along. As I was going around the zócalo, the central plaza, a girl flagged me down and jumped in beside me without invitation. It was Louise Kurle, the ninety-pound woman, in her tennis cap with the long visor, with her mesh bag and her tape recorder.

  She said, “Say, where have you been anyway?”

  “Dallas.”

  “I’ve been looking for you. I need a ride. Can you take me out to Emmett’s place? You need some white shoes and a white belt to go with those pants.”

  “Where’s your car? Where’s your strange husband?”

  “He’s out of town.”

  “Where?”

  “I’m not supposed to say.”

  “Ah.”

  “You know how Rudy is.”

  “I do, yes.”

  “But first I want to go to church. Come and go with me.”

  “All right.”

  “Look what I’ve got.”

  She had a package of Fud bacon, a good brand, already limp from the heat, and a small bottle of imitation maple flavoring. She and Emmett were to have a bacon and pancake feed. I was invited.

  She wanted to go to the cathedral, but I thought that was too grand for us and I drove instead to a lesser church beside a small park. Everyone was moving inside at that Indio quickstep, the men doffing their straw hats and the women pulling up their rebozos over their heads. Louise and I composed ourselves for public worship and entered the dark vault. Not being a Roman Catholic, I took up the position of respectful o
bserver, at the very back, from which point I could just make out flickering candles and the movement of a young priest in white. I sat alone in a pew and recited the Lord’s Prayer, the King James version from Matthew, asking forgiveness of debts instead of trespasses. I carried on my business largely in Spanish but I still prayed in English. Louise had to be in the thick of things. She wasn’t a católica either but she went all the way up front to get in on the ceremony and the wafers. I could see her white cap bobbing up and down, all bill. What was she doing now? Recording people at prayer?

  Children stopped to stare at my green trousers, better suited for the links. Off to my left in an alcove there was a gray marble figure, a barefooted man, some medieval figure in short belted coat and flat Columbus hat, shedding two marble tears. He was about three-quarters life size, standing on a pedestal, the whole thing fenced off with a low wooden rail. There was a gate and a contribution box, with people standing in line, each waiting his turn to approach the statue and give thanks or ask for something. Surely that was a graven image. It always took me by surprise to find these secondary activities going on during a mass. I knew the woman at the end of the line. Lucia something. She worked at a juice bar, cashier now, up from squeezer. Then I saw Doc Flandin holding the marble feet. He had a fierce grip on them with both hands and he appeared to be demanding something, not begging, though it’s hard to tell with that kind of anguish. I hadn’t seen him since his wife died.

  The people behind him had begun to stir. Doc was taking more than his allotted time. Or maybe they didn’t like his belligerent manner in the face of this mystery. Suddenly he dropped his hands. He was done. He had finished his pleading and was off like a shot, scuffling along, head down, for the door. A strange scene. I had never known Doc to take more than a scholar’s formal interest in the church.

  Louise had two more stops to make. She took a jar of something that looked like pickled beets to some Indian friends who lived north of town off the Progreso highway. It was a Christmas present. The Mayan family gathered in puzzlement around the jar of red matter. Then she delivered another gift, a Spanish songbook, to an older woman who lived nearby. I watched her standing in the doorway of the hut, trying to explain to the old woman what it was, singing a little. Louise was a good girl. Some days she went out into the countryside plucking bits of blowing plastic from bushes so the goats could get at the leaves. She truly wished everyone well, reminding me of my grandfather, a Methodist preacher, who included the Dionne quintuplets and the Postmaster General in his long, itemized prayers. Louise and Rudy were graduates of some college in Pennsylvania and had come down here to investigate flying saucer landings. Her degree was in Human Dynamics. Rudy had one, a dual degree, he said, in City Planning and Mass Communications. First he would build the city and then he would tell everybody about it in the approved way.

  Emmett lived in a trailer park out by the airport. I took a back road and ran over a dead snake on the way. Louise turned on me. “You just drove right over that snake.”

  “That was an old broken fan belt.”

  “It was white on the bottom. Do you think I don’t know a snake when I see one?”

  I told her he was already dead and that women were easily taken in by serpents. Yes, she said, but even running over a dead one in that heedless way showed a lack of delicacy. I had to concede the point. Little Louise was pitching in to help with my program of moral improvement if no one else was.

  Three hippies were trudging along the back street in single file. One wore a comic Veracruz hat, a big straw sombrero with a high conical crown that came to a point. Louise waved to them. “A lot of New Age people passing through town.” That was her term for hippies.

  “What’s the occasion?”

  “I don’t know. They all seem to be going to Progreso.”

  We had difficulty raising Emmett. He lived in a sturdy trailer, the Mobile Star by name, all burnished aluminum, very sleek, but no longer mobile, at the rear of the park. The wheels were gone, and it rested on concrete blocks. He had bought it here, in situ, some years ago, from another American. This was his home now. He didn’t like hotel rooms and he didn’t like the feudal bother of maintaining a house in Mexico, with servants running underfoot and a parade of vendors coming to the door. This way he could live in an exotic land and at the same time withdraw into his own little American box.

  We knocked and called his name. No answer. I knew he must be on the grounds because his air conditioner was humming, or rather his evaporative cooler, which didn’t pull as many amps as a real air conditioner, with a compressor. It didn’t cool as well either if the air was at all humid.

  We set off to look for him, and then he opened the door. “All right. I’m here. I heard you. You have to give people time to get to the door. I can’t be at the door one second after you knock.” You would think we had caught him upstairs in the tub. He was touchy about his poor hearing. He had heart problems, too, and the worst kind of diabetes, where they cut your legs off and you go blind. His sixth or seventh wife, a local woman, had recently left him.

  I said, “How’s the single life, Emmett?”

  “It’s killing me.”

  Louise presented him with his Christmas gift, a clip-on bow tie, and then apologized several times because she had nothing for me. She and Emmett prepared the food. He liked his bacon burnt. I stirred the maple flavoring into a can of corn syrup. It turned out well enough though I believe I could have gotten a more uniform blend if I had first heated the syrup. The dinner was good—salty and sweet and puffy and greasy all at once. A few pancakes were left over, but nobody ever leaves strips of crisp bacon lying around, nobody I know.

  We sat back and Emmett poured us each a copita of brandy. He talked about his new medicine and how effective it was. Soon, to my alarm, our chat drifted into a confessional.

  Louise said, “I’ve really found myself here. I could be happy here keeping a herd of milk goats. Rudy hasn’t quite found himself yet.”

  Emmett said, “My life is over, for all practical purposes. I no longer have enough money to keep a woman.” He looked back on his long bright empty days in Mexico and said he had lost his honor over the years. He hadn’t noticed it going. Small rodents had come in the night and carried it away bit by bit on tiny padded feet. The best I could do in this line, the most I was willing to do, was to say that I hoped to be more considerate of other people in the coming year. Louise gave me a cold look. Being a facetious person I got no credit for any depth of feeling.

  She kissed Emmett on top of his bald head and popped his suspenders and went out for a swim in the pool. This trailer park had all the amenities. There was a lull. She had a way of leaving people speechless in her wake. We had already gone over my trip to Texas. A retired couple had come down here to spend the winter touring the ruins in their motor home, a huge thing, of the Yamato class, with about ten feet of overhang behind the rear wheels. After a week or two of it, they longed for home but had no stomach for driving the thing back. I was hired for the job. They insisted on taking the coastal route, which they thought would be a straight and simple shot, but the road was all broken up from the pounding of oil rigs and sugar-cane trucks and farm combines. At Tampico there was a storm, and we had to wait five hours for the Pánuco ferry. Water was running a foot deep in the city streets. The Yamato plowed right through it. We had to stop every few hours and let the fat spaniel do his business on the roadside. Or not do it, as the whim took him. He wouldn’t be coaxed or hurried.

  But they were nice people and paid me well and even gave me some clothes, this green resort attire. In Dallas I bought an old Chevrolet Impala and drove it down to Belize and sold it. You can always unload a big four-door Chevrolet or Ford there, for service as a taxicab. They know what they want. You can’t force a sale. Then I came back to Mérida by bus.

  Emmett pulled the curtains and began moving about in a stealthy way. I knew more or less what was coming. He brought out a shoebox, inside of which, wrapped
in a towel, was a Jaina figurine.

  “What do you think?”

  I looked it over. “It’s a nice piece.”

  “Nice? It’s mint. What do you think it would bring in New Orleans?”

  “I couldn’t even make a guess, Emmett. I’m out of touch. You know I’m out of the business now.”

  He smiled. I was riding the bus these days and living at the Posada Fausto and wearing castoff clothing and still no one believed me.

  “You might ask Eli.”

  “I bought it from Eli.”

  “Well, whatever you do, I don’t want to know about it. I really am out of the game. You might pass that word around.”

  “I was just curious about the current value. I wanted you to see it. You’re not the only one around here with an eye for these things. I don’t plan to sell it right away. It’s a wonderful investment.”

  It was an investment worth about $35 and there was no telling what he had paid Eli Withering for it. The piece was six or seven inches high, a terra cotta figure of a haughty Maya woman, seated tailor-fashion, with earlobe plugs, bead necklace and upswept hairdo. She held a fan or rattle across her body. There was a piece just like this under glass in a Mexico City museum, dated 800 A.D., and it too was a fake, or a fine copy, as we say.

  This one was in mint condition all right. An old grave-looter named Pastor had minted it very recently in his shop at Campeche. It wasn’t worth much, unless you could find another gullible buyer, but in a sense it wasn’t altogether a fake. Pastor had come by a genuine Maya mold from the island of Jaina and he used it to press out and bake a few of these things now and then. Maybe more than a few. He was getting careless. He had left a sharp ridge on this one, untrimmed, where the base of the mold had pressed against the excess clay. The ridge was much too sharp and fresh. Along the back he had beveled off the clay with his thumb, the way you do with putty on a window pane.