Gringos

by Charles Portis

  LOUISE WAS addicted to dramatic gestures, and I had the feeling she would wake up some morning and announce that she was going to law school, or that she had decided to open up a metaphysical bookshop, some such bolt from the blue as that. She knew that my conversation, no bargain now, must soon be that of an old coot, all complaint and gloomy prophecy. We went ahead with the marriage all the same. Soledad Bravo said the auspices were fair, good enough, bastante, if not entirely favorable. She had seen a spider laying eggs in a dark closet. But then she had seen worse omens in January. It was surprising how fast I moved on the thing, at my age, with so few reservations, how quickly I became a husband, and an indulgent one at that.

  We were married at Doc’s house. Louise had a friend, Aurélio, who came by and sang, with an accompanist. It was the first time I had ever heard that grand piano played. I didn’t know Aurélio and I was expecting some fat little man in frilly white shirt and tiny black plastic shoes with a Mexican night club quiverando delivery, some fellow sobbing out that Granada would live again. Not at all. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Aurélio was a young college student with a crystal-pure tenor voice and no tricks. He sang “Because God Made Me Thine,” first in Spanish and then in English.

  Because—you come to me with naught save love ...

  Aurélio brought tears to my eyes, and to everybody’s eyes. We took the Mobile Star down to Costa Rica, stopping uneasily in Guatemala only for gasoline, where they sell it not by the liter but by the gringo gallon. We were getting the hang of trailer life. It was like towing a barge. It was like living on a small boat, or in a bank vault. We went to the Pacific side of Costa Rica, to the Nicoya Gulf, and set up camp near a village called Lepanto. Here in the bay water Louise went fishing for the first time in her life. She took up fishing with my little freshwater rod and spinning reel, and I couldn’t get her to stop. We had the place pretty much to ourselves. Some kids came over from the village now and then to look at us. At night the crabs dragged themselves about over the sand and fought over our potato peelings. One afternoon a motorcycle came roaring in through the palm grove. A young American couple dismounted and took off their helmets and set up a tent on the sand. They wanted to know where they were. They borrowed a funnel and then a bar of soap. Then a towel. Then a crescent wrench.

  We had them over for supper. They had been to Panama, to the end of the road in the Darién jungle, and were now making their way back to Denver. Louise asked if they meant to stay on for a while.

  The girl, offended, said, “What? Here? No, we’re not beach people.”

  Snubbed on our honeymoon by a female biker. We fed them anyway and fed them well on boiled lobster tails and melted butter. Their plan, when they left home, was to go to a place called the City of Dawn—in Mexico, they thought it was—but they had no map and couldn’t figure out how to get there. They had asked questions along the way, but that was unsatisfactory too, as most of the answers they got were in a foreign tongue. Once started, though, rolling on was the thing, inertial forces at play, and so they had continued south down the isthmus until they came up against a forest wall deep in Panama, where the road stopped dead in their faces, at the Darién gap. Their pilgrimage had turned into a brainless endurance run. The boy, who had some name like Rusty or Lucky, said he had learned about the City of Dawn from a very interesting report in a magazine I would never have heard of, called Gamma Bulletin. I asked if he had a copy.

  “No, I don’t keep things.”

  Not even a map. Too programmed and stifling for their taste. He still wasn’t quite sure where he was. He was much surprised that we had heard of the City and the UFO magazine, and a little doubtful that we actually knew the writer of the article.

  “The same Wade Watson?” he said. “There are probably a lot of people going around claiming to be him. I sure would like to talk to that guy sometime, the real Wade Watson, just me and him rapping together. That contact of his is already one of the most famous in all the literature.”

  The girl said she no longer believed there was such a place as the City of Dawn, or that there was a real person named Wade Watson. She said she had learned how to sleep on a moving motorcycle, with her heels hooked on the foot pegs, or how to go into a restful trance anyhow. She was homesick and weary of straddling the noisy bike day after day. Their appetite was good. They made short work of our tasty langostinos and said goodnight. In the morning they were gone. One of them—Louise suspected the girl—stole a jar of grape jelly from us. But there it was, independent confirmation from this Randy or Rocky, or at least evidence enough for me, that Wade Watson and Gamma Bulletin were behind the whole business. It was good enough to settle the point for me and put my mind at rest. A kind of rest. Wade had started the thing rolling with his curious pulsing dream, but he wasn’t El Mago.

  We got back to Mérida in March. There were no nasty letters for me. The hate mail had stopped for good, and I rather missed it. Doc and Gail were working away. Mrs. Blaney was still in place, hanging on. Alma was dead and buried in the warm sand of Yucatán. They had put her in on top of Karl’s bones, to save the cost of a separate plot, about seven dollars. The Posada Fausto was still for sale. McNeese was living there now, in Alma’s old room, and Art and Mike had taken a double room upstairs. They said the rush of events was over. Nothing at all was going on. The sea gathers force and breaks at last on the ninth and greatest wave. Then the ebb. Fausto said there were no such neat cycles in his life. Things never let up, no matter what he did. He said a man would make any bargain, however degrading, to have peace at home, and that the radio people in Mexico City should put the story of his life on the radio for all to hear and call it “Female Complaints.”

  It was odd seeing Art and Mike without their soft white straw hats. They had taken to sitting around all day like convalescents in their bathrobes and socks. Louise got the impression that they meant to sit there in the lobby like that from now on, not venturing out much anymore. She had a premonition that they would end up there with their pictures on the wall, in Fausto’s gallery of the fallen, perhaps dead in a suicide pact. Art and Mike had a dark side, she said, that I was unwilling to see or too dense to see. “You and Fausto don’t know what’s going on half the time.” There was something about them, my friends the Munn brothers, that she didn’t care for. “Two smart guys living in smug obscurity,” she said of them.

  She found us a shady spot under a tree at an older and cheaper trailer park. On the first day there I killed a cascabel at our doorstep, a rattlesnake, what Alma called a Klapperschlange. Try to save a few pesos on the rent and you end up beating off pit vipers.

  She was the one, old Alma, it turned out, who had sent me the poison pen letters. You never really know where you stand with anyone. There I was secretly preening myself over my good deeds and all the time she despised me. My clumsy gestures of help must have been intolerable for her. It was Louise who caught it, not me. She had a good eye and she showed me how the typing from Alma’s máquina matched that of the letters. She said the spiteful old woman had too much time on her hands and had probably sent many such letters to any number of people, an old mama spider dropping her venomous eggs here and there in secret places. Alma was Ah Kin and Alvarado and Mr. Rose. She was El Mago too. I wasn’t too dense to see that. She had written the City of Dawn letter.

  Louise said a plastic owl would have frightened the snake away. Why had I not set out a dummy owl, a great horned owl made of plastic? I told her it would have taken a plastic owl nine feet tall to get the attention of that cascabel, and I pointed out further that it was an eagle, not an owl, with a writhing snake in his beak, that the Mexicans had adopted as their national symbol. She said I should have picked the snake up on a pole and flung him over into someone else’s space. Let someone else deal with him, with his horny tail plates klappering away. Keep the blood off our hands. I had no pole. With anyone else’s difficulty Louise always assumed a plastic owl or a handy pole of just the right length. I didn’t go o
ut of my way to kill snakes, she knew that, but neither would I have these big fellows gliding around underfoot in my yard.

  It was called The Five of May Trailer Park. On the third day Eli Withering showed up in an old Cadillac. Plenty of room in that cruiser to stretch out his long legs. Or rather it was the middle of the third night. He came tapping on the window glass with his thick yellow fingernails, of some layered, hoof-like material, which he could have used for screwdrivers. He made quite a racket. “Hey! In there!” he called out. “About time to warsh this old woreout truck out here, ain’t it?” I turned on the floodlight and went outside shirtless to greet him. He was clean-shaven and his hair was trimmed. He stood beside a pale green Coupe de Ville with a white vinyl top.

  “Put out the light,” he said. “I don’t want anybody to see me. They told me you got Emmett’s trailer. Not a bad deal for you. I didn’t know it would roll. Here’s something else you won’t mind.”

  He switched on a flashlight and counted out my $500 on the hood of the car.

  “What, it wasn’t enough?”

  “A thousand wouldn’t have been enough. Sauceda took it, all right, for all the good it done me. What he didn’t tell me was that the federal acusador already had me lined up for an Article Thirty-three.”

  “I told you to get Nardo.”

  “He might have put it off a day or two, that’s all. Naw, they wanted me out bad. I was gone the next morning for moral turpitude on top of abusing the hospitality of the Republic and disturbing the national patrimony.”

  He paused and then counted off two more twenties. Interest, he called it. “There. Past due but there it is.”

  “I wasn’t worried about it.”

  “Then you should have been, Budro. I wouldn’t be here except I need to talk some business.”

  A sleeping woman lay sprawled across the back seat. “That’s Freda.” He said he was living with her in Belize now, it made for a change of air. He was scouting around and working some ruins, mostly picked over. Lately he had found one in the hills up from the Sarstún River. It was small but untouched and he wanted me to help with the excavation. The fever was on him.

  “People down there don’t know what they’re doing. They missed the causeway. It’s just like the ones at Tikál, and I saw what it was right off. At least three temple mounds. They look like spurs off a hill and that’s why nobody can see them. We’ll have it all to ourselves. We’ll cut three quick trenches and see what we’ve got. Then a month’s hard work and we’ll skim the cream and be out. I’ll split right down the middle with you. One month and we’re out clean with a nice haul. I guarantee it. Or two months at the most. We’ll move a hundred cubic yards of dirt, just you and me. Look at this. I turned this up in the first hour, just poking around with a machete.”

  It was a small alabaster figure of a seated fat man. His arms were folded across his belly and his cheeks were puffed out. One hand was missing. He looked like the pink plastic pig on Louise’s key chain.

  “Not bad. It’s old.”

  “Old? It’s pre-classic white goods. How much of that stuff do you see? And that’s a surface find. Keep it. Go ahead. You just keep that little booger. For me that’s a cull.”

  No one was better at this work than Eli, snuffling around in the woods like a pine rooter hog. A steady and silent digger, too, from daylight to dark, stopping only now and then to gulp warmish water from a jug, or to eat two or three strips of raw bacon, with his head thrown back in the way of a sword swallower.

  “The thing is, I’m out of the business, Eli.”

  “Yeah, I know you say that. Once you see this place you’ll change your mind. It won’t hurt you to take a look at it. I’m telling you, man, I’m on to something here. Valuable early stuff. We won’t even mess with the pots. My luck is turning. I got me a good car now. The niggers are right. Buy old Cadillacs and expensive shoes and white corn meal. I found me a good woman, too. If you’re real lucky you might find you a woman like Freda one of these days, but I doubt it. What do you say?”

  “I’ll think it over.”

  “Don’t think too long.”

  “Why don’t you get Rex Tully? He’s down there somewhere, isn’t he?”

  “Him? Whining all the time? In his two-tone shoes? You can’t get that guy to do any work. Always down with his risons or his hernia or the pink-eye or something. He wouldn’t last two days.” “Risons” (risings) was Eli’s word for boils.

  “He’s not all that bad. Tyrannosaurus Rex. He’s good company anyway.”

  “He’s bad enough. You can have him. I don’t want no part of him myself. Let me tell you what he’s doing. Him and his pal Fisher, this deserter from the British Navy, have got this old rotten wooden boat anchored out there behind the breakwater. Rex says they’re going to load it up with live birds and go to Florida, him and this English wino that you couldn’t trust for one minute out of your sight. Little silky green birds that sing. Rex says the Cubans in Miami will pay big money for these birds. But just this certain kind of bird. They all want one of these birds at home. They miss their birds. They can’t get the kind of birds they want in Florida.”

  Louise was stirring inside. She said, “Who is it, Jimmy?”

  “An art student.”

  “Well. Why are you standing around out there in the dark? Bring him in and I’ll make some coffee.”

  “All right.”

  I passed on the invitation. “Come on. Wake up your friend. We’ll have something to eat.”

  “Who is that you got in there?”

  “I don’t think you know her. It’s a girl I married. Louise Kurle.”

  “Married. God almighty. They didn’t tell me that.”

  He was hesitant to wake his woman, and then did so in a gentle way, leaning through the car window. He touched her. They spoke. He popped back out and said, “Naw. Freda’s not hungry. She’s been eating soft cheese all night. We can’t stay long. I didn’t even stop at Shep’s. I ain’t got paper one and I got to be back across the Hondo River before sunup. I’m in with a couple of guys there at the border. They work out of the fumigation shack. Here, let me show you something else.”

  He threw up the big trunk lid and dragged out a wooden box with an open end. Inside the box there was a ramp with riffle bars—narrow wooden strips nailed down in a pattern of broken V’s—and at the bottom a swatch of carpeting to trap particles of gold. It was a homemade sluice box.

  “See? We can work the fast streams, too, while we’re at it. How about it? I found the place and got everything lined out and still I’m giving you half. You won’t never get a better deal than that and you know it.”

  The woman was fully awake now. She got out of the car and stretched her long arms, then got back in—the front seat this time.

  I said, “You might take her with you.”

  “Who? Freda? What makes you think I would take a nice lady out in them stinking woods?”

  “She could help around the camp while you dig.”

  “I wouldn’t never let her live like that. We got us a nice little apartment in Belize City with a balcony and a kitchenette and a propane cookstove. Up in the front room is where we have our couch and our record player and our magazines. That’s where we sit at night when we want to listen to our music or look through our magazines. That’s our place on Euphrates Avenue that I got fixed up real nice for her. The mattress on the bed is all hogged down and wallered out in the middle but we’re going to get a new one. What makes you think I would let her live like a pig out in them woods? Freda don’t even drink. She knows how to keep books and that’s a good trade to know. Bookkeepers can go anywhere and get work any time they want it, like sign painters.”

  He gave me his address on Euphrates Avenue and said he would wait two weeks for me and no longer. I was to bring all my tools and a roll of coarse-mesh screen wire for sifting boxes and my three-burner Coleman stove and a can of white gasoline.

  “But you ain’t coming, are you, Budro?”r />
  “No, I’m not.”

  I said I probably wouldn’t be venturing out much anymore, into the selva. He opened the car door, and a pomegranate rolled out. Neither of us made a move to pick it up. A sour and messy fruit. Somebody gives you one and you haul it around until it turns black or rolls away out of your life. He introduced me to Freda. In the light of the dome lamp, I saw her face for the first time tonight. It was Beany Girl, all cleaned up and looking pretty good in a white shirt with faint blue stripes. Her hair was tied up with a blue ribbon, and there was some more blue on her eyelids. She was coordinating her colors these days. She was brushing her hair and washing her face and even painting it. But still jumping into cars, it seemed, like LaJoye Mishell Teeter. She had put on a pound or two. Beany Girl was getting regular meals now out of the kitchenette, and perhaps snacking a bit on that couch. Eli and Beany Girl at home with their magazines. An evening at home with the Witherings.

  “Glad to meet you, Freda.”

  “Hi.”

  “You doing all right tonight?”

  “Yeah, I’m okay.”

  A spark there of the old defiance. She recognized me, all right. I had some questions for her but I couldn’t think of how to put them, with Eli standing there. He showed me some of the advanced features of the Cadillac radio, how in the scanning mode the needle would glide across the dial and stop for a bit on the stronger signals. I told him I wouldn’t be needing my three-burner stove and he could take the thing along if he wanted it. He went to get it out of the back of my truck.