Gringos

by Charles Portis

  “I know that.”

  “No, you don’t. You think I was just a Division II player. Let me tell you something. If I weighed another ten kilograms I could play for anybody.”

  “Fausto says you’re a good lawyer.”

  “Not only Fausto. I could get you out of jail in five minutes. Like that.” He tried to snap his fingers but they were wet and wouldn’t snap. “I know the law, Boornez. Would you like to know how many laws we have in Mexico? We have more than 72,000 laws and regulations. What do you say to that, gringo?”

  “I say that’s pathetic. That’s pitiful for a progressive nation. In my country we have 459,000 laws and regulations. You’ll never catch us.”

  “I know the law. I know how things are done. I could get you out of jail in five minutes. Your friend Eli? No. I wouldn’t bother with him. He’s looking at Article 33 right now. Did you know that?”

  “Well, it’s better than jail.”

  “He may get both. Why don’t they let you use the phone up here anymore?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Luisito!”

  Article 33 hung over all our heads. This was a catchall provision in the Mexican constitution whereby any foreigner could be kicked out of the country at any time for any reason at all, or for no stated reason. That was my understanding of it. Not that reasons would be lacking in Eli’s case, or in mine. But I had worked with a certain amount of protection, being associated with Doc Flandin, who had friends in Mexico City. He knew all the old-timers at the Instituto Nacional de Antropología, and they allowed him a good many liberties. Nardo, as an active party man, had political influence. He had arranged the dig at Ektún for his small and obscure college in Illinois, which was quite a feat, seeing how few permits were given to foreigners these days. Most of them had to settle for secondary sites in Belize or Guatemala. Just how great a feat it was, I don’t think Nardo ever appreciated, or he would have made more of it.

  I told him about the Bonar College troubles at Ektún. It came as news to him and not very interesting news. He thought too much fuss was made over all this ancient masonry. What was the appeal of these old Indios (the naturales, he called them) and their ruined templos? It was all a great bore to him, the Maya business, except for the tourist aspect. It gave people the wrong idea about Mexico. Departed glory. Blinking lizards on broken walls. He wanted his country to be thought of as Euro-America or Ibero-America and not Indo-America.

  The hippie came back, to my surprise, and with a friend, an older and thinner hippie, who had long brown hair breaking over both sides of his shoulders. They went directly to Vick at the bar. The new hippie said, “You never heard of Samson in the Bible? Samson’s strength was in his long hair.”

  Vick said, “I’ve heard of Absalom. He was in rebellion against his father. His pride and vanity were in his long hair and it got him hanged from the thick bough of a great oak.”

  “What about Samuel? Samuel found favor with both God and man and a razor never touched his head. You never heard of Samuel?”

  “Nebuchadnezzar had long filthy hair and long green nasty fingernails. He ate grass with the beasts of the field. That was where his pride and vanity got him. He was swollen with pride just like a dog tick all bloated up with blood.”

  “You’re way behind the times, old man. You’ve got a lot of unresolved anger there too. You belong in an old man’s home.”

  The other hippie corrected him. “Old folks home. Nursing home.”

  Vick said, “You two belong in the hall of shame.”

  They laughed at him and went away, the two hippie pals, off to wherever they were bedding down for the night. They had their campgrounds, and their fleeting friendships, too, I suppose.

  Nardo challenged me to a 100-meter footrace out in the street. The time had come for barroom displays of strength. I told him I was gone in the knee but would be glad to arm-wrestle him for a drink. He didn’t want to do that. I had the reach on him and the leverage. He went off into a dream, brooding and muttering.

  One of my quirks too. I didn’t do it in the street like El Obispo, not yet, but in my room, in the woods, on long drives, I spoke softly but audibly to myself, in the second person, as was only proper. I spoke to a child or a half-wit. Why can’t you put that bottle-opener back in the same place each time and then you’ll know where it is. Doc had called my attention to it. I was trying to get a job with a crew of Mormon arqueos in Belize and I gave him as a reference. At the bottom of their letter of inquiry he scribbled, “Jimmy Burns is a pretty good sort of fellow with a mean streak. Hard worker. Solitary as a snake. Punctual. Mutters and mumbles. Trustworthy. Facetious.” Doc gave with one hand and took away with the other. The Mormons must have scratched their heads over those last two things. How could he be both trustworthy and facetious? They hired me anyway, and soon I was doing all their hauling. The trick is to make yourself first useful and then necessary. Punctual! Yes, the puniest of virtues, nothing to brag about, but Doc was right, I was always on time. Unheard of here in Mexico.

  Now here came Harold Bolus on his two canes, taking his stiff and well-planned steps. “Great news, Jimmy. The Crouches have decided to stay on after all. It was this wonderful party that did it. This is a Who’s Who of Mérida and they were touched. They’re not leaving.” Bolus had lost his legs, the lower parts below the knees, in the Chosin retreat. “My heart’s in Oklahoma,” he would sing, “but my feet are in Korea.” That was his song. He sat on park benches and showed his willow-wood shins to children. This was what came of too much dancing, he told them. As a foolish boy he had danced his feet off. Let this be a warning to them. Go easy on the dancing and particularly the spinning about, or when the music was over they would end up like him with nothing left to stand on but two bloody stumps.

  I was exhausted. All this talking and listening, a six-month quota for me in one night. My neighbors, Chuck and Diane, stopped to speak. That wasn’t quite their names but some names you can’t take in. They could have spelled out their names for me every day for six days running and on Sunday morning I would have drawn a blank again. It was embarrassing. They were a nice young couple with a room down the hall from me at the Posada. They were my neighbors and it would be my duty to denounce them after the Suarez revolution, but first I would have to get their names straight. Something like Chick and Diane but not quite that. I wouldn’t be permitted to sit it out. Suarez had warned me that anyone who sat back and tried to mind his own business would be arrested and charged with “vexatious passivity.”

  Back at my room I found a note under my door from Beatriz. Refugio had called from the bus station in Palenque. “He says he is bringing the car back to Mérida tomorrow.” What car? I didn’t understand the message. Then Nardo and Sloat, drunk, came by my room and woke me up. Shep had closed his place, and the gang was moving on to the Tiburón Club. I told them I was too tired. Besides, I didn’t go to disco joints, with all that noise, and I didn’t like bars that were upstairs. I ran them off.

  A few minutes later there was more rapping at the door. It was Nardo again. He had to brace himself with both hands against the door jambs. “I forgot to tell you something,” he said. “Did you notice I was feeling low tonight?”

  “No, I thought you were in good form.”

  “It was off just a little, my natural charm, you know, that everybody talks about. You must have noticed. A touch of opresión. I wanted to explain.”

  “I didn’t notice anything.”

  “But you already know, don’t you?”

  “Know what?”

  “Is there any need to explain? I think you can guess why I’m feeling low.”

  “No, I can’t.”

  “The yanquis took half my country in 1848.”

  “They took all of mine in 1865. We can’t keep moping over it.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what they tell us. We just have to make the best of it. They say we should just go on about our business and l
eave all that to them.”

  “Is that all you have to say?”

  “That’s all I have to say tonight.”

  “The coche is waiting. Come on. Everybody’s going to the Tiburón.”

  “Another time maybe.”

  “Sloat wants to talk to you downstairs.”

  “No, you go on. I’ll be over later to help mop up the cripples.”

  “Half my country.”

  “A few border corrections, that’s all.”

  I had to take him down and put him in the taxicab with the others and give it two hard slaps on the fender, which meant, go! Maybe he would manage to forget the old grievance out there on the dance floor. If I knew Nardo he would still be leading the conga line when the sun came up. He spoke good English but his “yanquis” came out something like “junkies.”

  AT MID-MORNING Refugio came rolling in with Rudy’s bulbous yellow car. The first thing he wanted was a red snapper, broiled with tomatoes and onions, and a stuffed pepper on the side. We ate at the Express, where you could get anything you liked. There were forty-odd entrees on the menu, and if you wanted something else, an artichoke or a piece of baby shark liver, they would send out to the mercado for it and cook it to your taste. Refugio said he had also brought the camping trailer out of the jungle, but then a hub bearing had burned out on the highway and he had left the rig with a friend. He had the bearing with him, and he had the little Olmec jade man, too, in a jar of water. It looked like an evil fetus. He thought jade would crack, as opals sometimes do, unless you kept it soaked. He planned to sell it while he was in town.

  Yes, yes, yes, but what was he doing with the car? What was all this? Where was Rudy? The young man who owned the car?

  As to that he couldn’t say. He and Manolo had gone to Ektún with some gasoline and odds and ends to sell. All was confusion there. Skinner was still tangled up in Villahermosa, but Lund had come back to find that this Rudy had disappeared. He had strolled off into the woods and vanished. They had searched for him all around the site and as far downstream as the Usumacinta River. Lund, the bearded ingeniero, was unnerved, and furious too, calling me terrible names. He had directed Refugio to deliver the car and trailer to me, along with this note.

  Mr. Burns

  Your friend Kurle has disappeared. I am in no way liable. He was on his own here as you well know. He walked off down the river alone. He was not invited here and he was not authorized to be here and neither I nor Bonar College can be held responsible. You brought him here uninvited. There are witnesses to that fact. Therefore I am sending his car and his things to you by way of Señor Bautista. I have notified the police in Palenque and I disclaim any further responsibility.

  Sincerely yours,

  C.A. Lund

  Chief Surveyor

  I could see that Lund, having come so recently from the States, was living in terror of lawyers and courts and insurance companies. He feared legal reprisals but he need not have worried. It wasn’t so bad down here yet, where extortion was still largely a private matter, arranged quietly and informally between the parties, and cheaper all around for everyone. But he was right, I was in some sense responsible. I had, in a manner of speaking, taken Rudy in to Ektún.

  Refugio wanted money. He wrote “$100” in the hollow of his hand and showed it to me. Lund had told him I would pay him a lot of money for delivering the car.

  “And look,” he said. “I make that long drive with no company.”

  Solitude was agony to him. A few hours alone with your thoughts could drive you crazy.

  “We’ll see. The car is just part of it. You’ll have to help me find him too. These people don’t have much money.”

  “They have a nice car. They have a nice sleeping trailer and a nice CB radio.”

  “We’ll talk about that after we find him.”

  He showed me the wheel bearing and told me how it had screeched and smoked. It looked okay to me. The rollers were unscored and they still turned freely in the race. There was too much talk about this bearing. Then it came to me. There had been no breakdown. He was holding the trailer as security against his fee. He was hiding it somewhere. A bird in Refugio’s hand was worth thirty or forty in the bush.

  He thought the boy would turn up in a day or so, if he was merely lost, and if he was prudent enough to keep going downstream. Once on the big river he was bound to encounter a boat or someone along the banks. And even if he was wandering around in the selva he would soon run across a trail and, eventually, a Lacondón village. The Lacondones would bring him out. It was all a big fuss over nothing, a gringo bulla, a bagatela.

  Possibly, but he went too far in assuming that Rudy would do the sensible thing. I suspected that Rudy had gone down the Usumacinta, walking the banks, in search of Tumbalá, the place of the little temples. He was there or he was lost or he was drowned or he was dead of snakebite or he was shot or captured in the guerilla war across the river.

  We lingered over coffee. The ragged old man called El Obispo passed by on the sidewalk, and we all turned our heads away so as not to meet his evil eye. The danger was small, he never looked up from the ground, but one day he might raise those red eyes. Pedestrians gave way. They peeled off left and right about six paces ahead of him. The effective range of his gaze was not thought to be great. He jabbered away as he walked, saying the same thing over and over again, and today he was moving right along. Some days he took it slow, placing one foot directly in front of the other with the care of a tightrope walker. He was called The Bishop because he slept in a shed behind the cathedral.

  Refugio spit between his legs to neutralize the evil. What he hawked up, this heavy smoker, was a viscous ball of speckled matter resembling frog spawn. I had put off telling him about Doc. Now I told him. His hands flew up in alarm. Cancer is cancer in Spanish, too, and the word is avoided in polite company.

  “No! Not the Doctor! This is too cruel! I must go to him!”

  “Yes, but let me call first. They have a new set-up at that house.”

  I called Mrs. Blaney and simply told her that we were coming by, and then I dropped Refugio off at Izamál, he carrying his gift .45 in a paper sack. Doc was waiting for him outside. They embraced on the lawn, with Doc calling him by an old nickname, Cuco.

  There was another unpleasant duty to perform. I tracked Louise down to the museum, where she was helping Beth take some school children through on a tour. The kids were in blue and white uniforms, and of that age, twelve or so, when the girls are a head taller than the boys. Andean flute music came over the speaker system. A bit of stagecraft, suggestive of eerie rites, but nothing to do with the Maya. Beth also liked to run the lights up and down with the rheostat.

  I took Louise aside and told her that Rudy was missing. She didn’t collapse in tears but was only fretful. A blank stare, a delicate cough, some floating thought, a quotation from L. Ron Hubbard—I never knew what to expect from her. Maybe she saw this as a merciful release, free at last, from Rudy and his tapes.

  “I knew something like this was coming,” she said. “I could feel it. It’s all my fault because I’m such a coward.”

  Louise was far from being a coward. She was largely indifferent to the ordinary hazards of life, and yet she had a fear of stinging insects, something to do with an allergy, and she seldom ventured into the deep woods. She seemed to think she was to blame because she had stayed behind.

  “It’s not as bad as it sounds,” I said. “He’s just out of touch. We’ll find him. I have a friend who knows that country well.”

  “Do the police know about this?”

  “They know in Chiapas.”

  “Should we notify the vice-consul?”

  “It won’t hurt.”

  “I wonder if he can do anything. That man has the pink eyes of a rabbit.”

  “He’ll do what he can.”

  “What about an air search? Beth would lend me the money to charter an airplane.”

  “You couldn’t see anything but tre
etops. There’s really no such thing as searching the Petén jungle. Miles and miles of unbroken greenery. He hasn’t gone far. We’ll turn him up along the river somewhere. Tumbalá, probably.”

  “He may have lost his memory. Rudy may be wandering around down there with no idea of who he is or where he is.”

  “Has that happened before?”

  “No.”

  I waited for an explanation. None came.

  “I’m just turning things over in my mind. Various possibilities. Someone could have murdered him for his tapes.”

  “You have his latest tape. I brought it to you.”

  “Not the very latest one. He would have made others by now.”

  She thought he might have fallen into the hands of hostile Indians. He was lying on the ground, bound hand and foot, with the village elders squatting in a circle around him. They were chewing bitter narcotic leaves as they passed judgment on him, and took their time over it. I assured her that the Lacondón were a peaceable enough folk. They might tease Rudy or sell him a defective souvenir but they weren’t likely to knock him in the head. I asked her what he was really up to down there.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I think you do know and you better tell me if you want to see him again.”

  “You’re the one who gave him the map to that place. It’s all your fault. That place with the little houses you told him about.”

  “What was on the tape he sent back?”

  “Nothing much.”

  “I want to hear it.”

  “Rudy has strict rules—”

  “I don’t care about his rules. Either I hear that tape or I’m not lifting a finger.”

  “All right, but there’s nothing useful on it. I didn’t want to mention this—not to you—but it has to be considered. He may very well have been carried away in a spacecraft.”

  “I don’t think that’s likely, Louise.”