Gringos

Table of Contents

 

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

 

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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

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.

“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 observer, 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.