Gringos

by Charles Portis

  The Toyotapickup belonged to Skinner. He had driven down alone from Illinois, arriving a few days after the main party. The problem was that you couldn’t disengage the clutch. Pressing the pedal did nothing. The flywheel of the engine was locked up to the driveline. I did what I called taking a look at it. Burt and I lay on our backs and examined the linkage and pooled our ignorance. It was alien to me. Some sort of Nipponese hydraulic booster up there, a slave cylinder. The only clutches I knew had a straight mechanical linkage. What I needed here was Manolo and his thirty-three wrenches. I was only a shade-tree mechanic, and an impatient one at that. Get a bigger hammer or put a bigger fuse in and see if anything smokes. That was my approach.

  I decided on a show of violence. Burt and I got the truck going in the lowest forward gear, and I drove around and around the clearing, poking the gas pedal for a lurch effect, and pumping on the clutch pedal, hoping to pop something loose. It worked, to everyone’s surprise. The clutch disc had stuck to the flywheel with rust or some fungoid rot and was now free again.

  Skinner had been chasing after us, shouting and waving his arms. We were abusing his truck. Now he was doubly annoyed. All the to-do had ended with a quick fix, and he had made a spectacle of himself before his crew. He was a fat lady running after a bus.

  Then he tried to beat me down on my prices. He went over the list, muttering, going into little fake body collapses. As the hated, profiteering middleman, I had seen this show before.

  “You must think you’ve got a gold mine here, Burns.”

  “If it’s such a gold mine then why can’t you find anyone else to do it? What about the wear and tear on my truck? My prices are not out of line. I’m not even charging you for the clutch repair.”

  “Am I supposed to be grateful? It’s not as though you actually did anything. I’m not even sure it’s fixed. You and Bautista may be able to take advantage of Henry, but you’re dealing with me now.”

  “You called me, I didn’t call you.”

  “And this famous bucket of shrimp. I can’t find the price listed. Where have you hidden it?”

  “I was throwing it in free, as lagniappe, but now I want thirty dollars for it, and I want it now. I’m not going to stand here and haggle with you, Skinner. Pay me now or everything goes back. Nothing comes off that truck until I get my money.”

  A bearded engineer named Lund interceded. He took Skinner away to calm him down. In the end they paid. Lund paid me. It was all Becker’s money anyway.

  Some truckers refuse to lift things, but I wasn’t proud in that way. We unloaded the goods and stowed them in the “secure room,” which was a stone chamber in Structure II-A. Wonderful dead names these arqueos have for their pyramids. The entrance could be closed off with a ramshackle door made of poles and locked with a chain. Here the food was stored, and the more valuable pieces of equipment, and the finds, running largely to fragments of monochrome pottery. There were beads and other knickknacks sealed in clear plastic bags, and some chunks of organic matter—wood and charcoal—wrapped in aluminum foil, for carbon-14 dating. I saw nothing worth locking up. Pots put me to sleep. The romance of broken crockery was lost on me.

  Great care would be taken here, every last pebble tagged. Then the loot would be sacked up and hauled away and dumped in the basement of some museum, where tons of the stuff already lay moldering. Buried again, so to speak, uncatalogued, soon forgotten, never again to see the light of day. But the great object would have been achieved, which was to keep these artworks out of the hands of people. Don’t let them touch a thing! A sin! A crime against “the people!” By which they meant the state, or really, just themselves. At least Refugio and I had put these things back into the hands of people who took delight in them, if not “the people.” We gave these pieces life again. Sometimes I thought there weren’t enough of us doing this work. That was the way I put it to myself. I stole nothing. It was treasure trove, lost property, abandoned property, the true owners long dead, and the law out here was finders keepers. That was the best face I could put on it.

  Rudy set up his tent camper, not bothering to ask permission. He sat on the black boulder, for which the place was named, and spoke into his tape recorder. “An extremely short astroport oriented from northeast to southwest,” I heard him say. He stopped speaking as I approached but was in no way embarrassed.

  “A word to the wise, Rudy.”

  “What?”

  “Make yourself useful around camp and they may let you stay. They’re short-handed. But don’t make a lot of suggestions. Stay out of their hair.”

  “I know how to behave myself. How far is it to the big river?”

  “Not far. Just remember, you’re a guest here.”

  I walked out into the woods about a hundred yards, where there was an oblong structure standing alone, a temescal, a Mayan steam bath. Refugio and Flaco Peralta and I had punched a hole in the floor of this house years ago. We found nothing. Actually I lost something, my Zippo lighter, smoothest of artifacts, which rode a little heavy in the pocket. Some arqueo might turn it up in a hundred years, and with acid and a strong light bring up the inscription—CHAMPION SPARK PLUGS. I noticed that the carved panel above the door had been cut away with a chain saw. You could see the tooth marks in the stone. As soon as I got out of the business, people started buying everything. Slabs of stone.

  There was a beating of wings. A flight of bats came pouring out of the doorway in panic, right into my face. No, they were birds. Swifts. Well named. They nested here but their life was in the air. They ate, drank, bathed, and even mated on the wing, if that can be believed. This aerial life was what the hippies were after. I had tried for it, too, perhaps, in my own way, but with me it was all a bust. I never got off the ground. I peered inside and saw that our pitiful hole was almost filled again with debris and guano. We had dug for treasure in a steam room, fools that we were. It took Doc Flandin and Eli to show us the ropes.

  Back at the clearing Skinner was in another rage. “Who keeps moving this?” he said. It was a drafting table. No one confessed. I watched the excavation work at the base of Structure I. Burt was in charge of the job. His people had cut a ragged opening in the thing, such as I had never seen made by professionals. It was a bomb crater. They had broken through the limestone facing and were now into the rubble filler. They were going for the heart.

  Mapping then, fine, and a certain amount of poking about and collecting of surface finds, nobody could object to that, certainly not me, but were they really authorized to make such a breach? I suspected them of exceeding the terms of their permit.

  “Just a probe,” Burt said. “We’re going to put it back the way it was.”

  Some probe. I wondered if Dr. Ritchie knew about this. Well, it was no business of mine. I was in no position to object. Refugio and I would have used a backhoe if we could have gotten one into the woods. And they weren’t going to find anything, just more rubble, perhaps the wall of a smaller, earlier pyramid. They had started too high above the base and they didn’t have the labor or the equipment to do the job right.

  The crew, a bedraggled lot, weren’t even screening the spoil. They were two gringo boys, and two Lacondón Indians in long white cotton gowns, with bulging eyes and long black hair. These Lacondones were the last of the unassimilated lowland Maya. You didn’t often find them working for hire. For what little cash they needed they sold souvenir bow-and-arrow sets for children that broke on the first pull, or the second. Only a handful of them were left, straggling about in the jungle, living in small clans. They burned copal gum as an aromatic offering to the old gods and kept to the old ways as best they could.

  The younger one had some Spanish, and I asked if he knew a hunter named Acuatli who used to roam these parts with a 20-gauge shotgun slung across his back. He wore short rubber boots. Some years back this Acuatli had guided me and two Dutch photographers to Lake Perdido, over in Guatemala, where the Dutchmen took pictures of ducks and white egrets. We had no papers for Guat
emala and no mule to carry our goods. We went up the San Pedro River and then followed an old chiclero trail overland. I made some money out of it but I wouldn’t want to take that hike again. I learned, too, that slipping up on birds requires the patience of a saint.

  The Lacondón said that Acuatli sounded like a Mexican name to him. By that he meant Nahuatl. He said in all his life he had never known a person named Acuatli. A few minutes later he told me that Acuatli was dead. It came to much the same thing. Sula had once told me that on the day the last Lacondón died, there would come a great earthquake, and a great wind that would blow all the monkeys out of the trees.

  I bought a small bag of cacao beans from these two. Lund came by and wanted to know about Rudy. “Who is that guy? Can you vouch for him?” Lund was a surveyor who was plotting the site with his alidade and rod. He seemed to come third in command, after Skinner. A white towel was draped around his head and fashioned into a burnoose.

  “Rudy’s all right as long as you don’t cross him,” I said.

  That night there was shrimp again, with onions and peppers and potatoes in a makeshift paella. It was good and there was plenty of it. The mess tent was a blue nylon canopy with mosquito netting hanging down on all sides. We sat on folding chairs and ate off card tables, or rather Carta Blanca beer tables made of sheet metal. There were two hanging lights, powered by a generator. A little cedar bush had been decorated as a Christmas tree. An electric bug killer hung on a pole outside. Bugs flew to the blue light and were sizzled on a grid.

  A bath in the river and a good meal had perked up the diggers. Even Skinner was in a good mood. He held up a floppy tortilla and said that corn didn’t have enough gluten in it to make a dough that would rise. Still, heavy or not, the flat bread it made was good, and yet nobody seemed to know it outside Latin America and the southern United States. Corn, potatoes, tomatoes, yams, chocolate, vanilla—all these wonderful things the Indians had given us. Whereas we Europeans had been over here for 500 years and had yet to domesticate a single food plant from wild stock.

  The two females left in camp were Gail and Denise, both a little plump, with their brown hair cut short, so that you could see the backs of their necks, all the way up to where the mowed stubble began. Gail was the quiet one. I took her for a mouse and I was wrong about that. She prepared a tray of food to take to Dr. Ritchie.

  “No, no,” said Skinner. “He’s coming. He’s up on his feet now. I just went over the work log with him. He’ll be along.”

  Rudy asked if they used a caesium magnetometer in their work. I was uneasy. This had an extraterrestrial ring to me. But no, there was such a device, something like a mine detector, I gathered, for sensing underground anomalies, buried stelae and the like, and they did have one here, though it was down. High tech or low, almost everything here was down. I was proud of Rudy for knowing about the thing.

  Dr. Ritchie came stumbling in, and Gail got up to help him along.

  Skinner said, “Here’s our warlike Harry now. Look, there’s a leaf on his shoe.”

  “Greetings, greetings. Anything left?”

  Gail seated him across from me and took off his hat and served him. He was trying hard to be chipper. “Sure smells good. We’re in your debt, Jimmy, for this fresh seafood.”

  “We can pull out tonight if you want to, sir. I can have you in the hospital by midnight. No use putting it off.”

  “Well, maybe tomorrow. I’m certainly no good to anybody like this. What do you think, Gene?”

  Skinner shrugged. “Whatever you say. What’s your fee on a deal like that, Burns? Double rate on a hospital run?”

  “For you it would be double.”

  Dr. Ritchie jiggled his soup spoon. “Boys, boys.”

  Lund picked up on the theme of Indian superiority. He talked about their natural ways, how they were attuned to the natural rhythms of life, their natural acceptance of things, natural religion, natural food, natural childbirth, natural sense of place in the world, natural this, and natural that. All true enough, perhaps, but there was something a little bogus and second-hand about his enthusiasm. It was like some poet or intellectual going on and on about the beauties of baseball.

  I lit a cigar and tuned out. We had the Indians to thank for tobacco too. They had given us these long green puros for solace. I watched the flashes of bugs being electrocuted. You couldn’t hear the crackling sounds, or even the chugging of the generator, for the rushing noise of the river.

  Skinner was soon at it again. “. . . an old and honored tradition, I know, this robbing of travelers in out of the way places of the world, but I broke your pal Bautista from sucking eggs and I’m going to break you too.”

  “You’ve already broken me, Skinner. I’m cured. I won’t be back.”

  “No, you don’t get off that easy. You can’t just turn this away. You’ll be back. Guys like you are always hanging around where there’s a quick buck to be made. You’ll be back, but on my terms. No more grand larceny. Next time there’ll be a clear understanding.”

  “We’ll see.”

  I noticed that Dr. Ritchie’s jaw had dropped. Flies were walking around on his lips and teeth. The flies know right away. The man was dead. He had just quietly stopped living. As a child I thought you had to go through something called a death agony, certain pangs and throes. They were not incidental but a positive visitation. Death came as a force in itself. We laid him on the ground, and Gail gave him mouth to mouth resuscitation. Burt pounded on his chest. I turned him over and pitched in with my method, long out of date, of pumping up and down on his back. Lund said, “All right. That’s enough.”

  We carried the body to his tent and zipped it up in his sleeping bag. Skinner was shaken. “I thought he just had the flu.” He said we would sit up with the body through the night, turn and turn about. He took the first watch. I slept in my truck, after moving it beyond the glow of the electric bug killer. My suspicion was that those things attracted more bugs than they killed. The trick was to lie low. Later it rained a little and that shut up the monkeys. No one called me for my watch. Skinner sat up alone with the body all night.

  At breakfast he announced that he and Lund—the Mexicans might want a second witness—would take it out in the Toyota. I was to follow behind in my big truck to see that they made it across the ford. The river was up a bit. They would take the body to Villahermosa, the nearest town of any size, there to make the necessary calls home and to see to the legal formalities and the shipping arrangements. They would return in a day or two. The rest of the crew would carry on here under Burt’s direction. He had his trail bike, if any emergency came up. Dr. Ritchie’s achievements were well known, his brilliant work on the Tajín horizon, his reconstruction of the Olmec merchant routes. The Bonar expedition could best serve his memory by finishing the job here.

  Gail said, “Denise and I are going out, too.”

  “No need for that.”

  “I mean we’re leaving the dig. We’re going home.”

  “Why?”

  “We have our reasons. One reason is that we agreed to work for Dr. Ritchie and no one else.”

  Skinner looked at them and brushed crumbs around on the tin table. It was a bad moment for Denise. She was almost in tears. Gail turned to me. “Can we ride back to Mérida with you?”

  “Sure.”

  “Can you fly out of there to the States?”

  “Yes, of course. Daily flights to New Orleans and Houston.”

  Skinner said, “Well, I see it was a mistake to bring you along. You’ve wasted a lot of my time. I thought you were serious students. You realize how this is going to look in my report?”

  Gail was calm. “We may have some things to report ourselves.”

  He thought that over and then came quickly to his feet. “All right, suit yourself. Anyone else. No? Then let’s get on about our business.”

  At this rate Rudy would soon be in charge. The girls went to pack their things. We lashed the body down in the bed of the Toy
ota so it wouldn’t roll about. Skinner said, “I really thought he just had the flu.” I drained my two tanks and left the gasoline for Burt, or almost drained them. I kept just enough to make the run back to Palenque.

  Rudy gave me a manila envelope to take back to Louise. It was all sealed up with tape. Today he was dressed in camouflage fatigues and black beret with a brass badge on it. I couldn’t believe the National Guard had ever issued that cap. From his web belt there hung canteens and other objects in canvas pouches.

  “Rudy, I wouldn’t wear that military stuff around here. Just down the way there, through all that greenery, is the Usumacinta River, and on the other side of the river is Guatemala.”

  “So?”

  “You might get shot. They’re shooting at each other over there, guerillas and government troops. Sometimes there are skirmishes on this side of the river. A lone straggler in that outfit—you’re just asking for it.”

  “With my blond hair they can see I’m a gringo.”

  “And maybe shoot you all the quicker for that.”

  “I can take care of myself. I’ve been out in the field before. You never give me credit for knowing how to do anything.”

  He was right. I liked Rudy but something about him aroused the bully and the scold in me.

  “Look, Burns, don’t worry, okay? I always have this stuff right here in my shirt pocket where I can get at it. I have my tourist visa and my car papers and my letter of introduction from Professor Camacho Puut. I know how to get along with people. Nobody’s going to bother me when they find out who I am. I have my press card taped to my chest.”

  “Who you are?”

  “That I’m a writer. Down here they respect artists.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t go wandering far in that rig. The Mexicans don’t like it either.”

  “There’s a ninety-minute cassette in that envelope. Keep it out of the heat. I’ve sealed it up in such a way that Louise will know if it’s been tampered with.”