Gringos

by Charles Portis

Doc’s diseases had to be grand, too. He had never shown much sympathy for the sick, not even for Nan when she was dying, believing as he did that illness was largely voluntary. Giving way. Then whining. He took no medicine himself and he seemed to think that Nan had killed herself through a foolish addiction to laxatives and nasal sprays.

  And Soledad Bravo was no witch doctor. She was a modest lady who practiced folk medicine in her home on Calle 55, just down the street from me. She was a curandera, who could deliver babies, remove warts and pull single-rooted teeth, no molars, and she could put her ear to your chest and look at your tongue and your eyes and feel around under your jaw, then tell you what was wrong and give you a remedy. It might be something old-fashioned like arnica or camphorated oil, or it might be some very modern drug, or some simple dietary tip. She kept up with things. Soledad had a gift. She got results. What more can you ask than to be healed? I wouldn’t go to anyone else.

  “That little round cap you’re wearing,” I said. “Does that have something to do with your condition?”

  “No, but it keeps the vapors in. Vapors were escaping from my head.”

  “Why not let them escape?”

  “I don’t care to discuss the cap. My death is imminent and I have some important instructions for you.”

  “This is not the razor blade deal again, is it?”

  “The what?”

  I had to remind him. Some years back, fearing a stroke, he had given me a package of single-edge razor blades. Should he be struck down and incapacitated, unable to move, I was to sneak into his room at night and slit his wrists with one of those blades. Others would string him along, he said, but he knew I would do it. This, I think, was intended as flattery. I still carried those Gem blades around in my shaving kit.

  “Oh no, there’s no question of paralysis with this thing,” he said. “I have some morphine tablets that will do the job when the time comes.”

  “I came over here thinking I would hear that your book was finished. Now you tell me this.”

  “The book is coming along, don’t worry. I’m still at it. Answering a lot of questions that nobody has asked. If I had had any decent staff support, the thing would have been finished long ago. But you know, I made a late discovery. Working fast suits me. It reads better. I learn to write on my deathbed, you see. The schoolboys won’t like it but by God they’ll have to take notice this time. Oh yes, I know what they say. ‘What can you expect? He’s French! Brilliant but unsound! I can’t keep up with him! This old flaneur has too many ideas! Too many theories!’ It’s my brio, Jimmy, that they can’t stomach. My verve. It sets their teeth on edge. I know how these drab people think and I know exactly what they say about me.”

  It was worse than that. They didn’t say anything. The academics, or schoolboys, as he called them, didn’t even take the trouble to dispute his theories. The papers he submitted to scholarly journals were returned without comment. He was never invited to the professional conclaves, other than local ones that the Mexicans sponsored. Mexicans weren’t quite as rigid as the Americans and the English and the Germans in these matters of caste.

  It seemed to me that he deserved better treatment. Perhaps not complete acceptance, or the centerfold spread in National Geographic that he so longed for, but something, a nod in the footnotes even. His great find, the manikin scepter at Seibal, was widely published but never attributed to him. And it was Flandin, with two or three Mexicans, who had argued years ago that it was the Olmecs and not the Mayas who had invented glyph writing and the bar-and-dot numeral system and the Long Count calendar, when American and English scholars—Thompson himself—refused to hear of such a thing. Being prematurely right, and worse, intuitively right, he got no credit for it. Rather, it was held against him. His field work was good and his site reports were, in my lay opinion, well up to professional standards. No brio here; they were just as tiresome to read as the approved ones. His crank claims and speculations made up only about twenty percent of his work but it was a fatal sufficiency. Or say thirty percent to be absolutely fair.

  “When do I get to see the glyph chapter?”

  “In good time. Camacho Puut is looking it over now. But we’re not going to talk about the book.”

  I wondered what we were going to talk about. Lorena brought us a pot of coffee and some strawberries in heavy yellow cream. Doc asked her if she would go to his office and bring back his—pistola—I thought he said. Lorena was puzzled, too, and then seemed to work it out. Doc spoke fluent Spanish, but it was incorrect and badly pronounced.

  “I’m worried about Camacho Puut,” he said. “I do believe the old fellow is taking some dangerous narcotic drug.”

  “Oh come on. The Professor?”

  “You weren’t here. He was sitting right there. I was reading my revised prologue to him and his head was lolling and he could hardly keep his eyes open. It’s none of my business if he wants to kill himself with dope but I do think he might consider his family and his own dignity. What about Alma? Have you seen her?”

  “I saw her this morning.”

  “Is she doing any better?”

  “About the same.”

  “Don’t say anything but I’m leaving her a small annuity. A little something to help with the rent.”

  “She won’t accept it.”

  “I’m rigging it up so she’ll think it came from Oskar’s work. But keep it under your hat.”

  “Did you ever work with Oskar Kobold?”

  “No, never. We hardly spoke. He was an artist of the first rank, I grant him that, but he couldn’t get along with anybody. An awful man. He treated Alma like a mule.”

  “I can’t imagine her putting up with that.”

  “Well, she did. She wasn’t hard then. Just a little pale Southern lily with a love for those travel books of John Stephens.”

  Lorena came back and yes, it was the pistola he had asked for. Gun, holster, belt, the whole business coiled up on a wooden tray. She held it forward, not wanting to touch it. Doc said, “Por mi amigo Jaime,” and so she served it up to me, a .45 automatic on a platter.

  Until very recently he had worn this big-bore pistol openly around town, and he always carried it in the bush. At our campsite, just before turning in at night, he would fire it twice into the air. This was an announcement to anyone who might be in the woods nearby. Here we are. We’re armed and we’re not taking any crap. Or sometimes I fired my shotgun, or Refugio his army rifle, an old Argentine Mauser with a bolt handle that stuck straight out.

  I slipped the pistol out of the holster. Most of the blueing was gone, and there was a lot of play in the slide. It still looked good. The 1911 aeroplanes and the 1911 typewriters were now comic exhibits in museums, but this 1911 Colt still looked just right. It hadn’t aged a day. The clip was crammed from top to bottom with short fat cartridges. I shucked a couple of them out.

  “You’ll weaken the spring,” I said. “Leaving it fully loaded like that.”

  “Damn the spring. Put them back. I like it full.”

  So, he was disposing of his things.

  “This is for me?”

  “No, no, not the gun. That’s for Refugio. I want you to see that he gets it. My binoculars too, if I can ever find them, and all my field gear. I’m putting some stuff together in boxes for him, but the pistol is the main thing. You know how he admires it.”

  Not the gun. So. I was to get something else. He was clearing the small bequests out of the way first. I saw where this was leading, I was staggered. Flandin is going to leave me this big white house. There was no one else. Nan was gone, as was his first wife, and the blind sister in Los Angeles. Mrs. Blaney, an old friend of Nan’s, was here on sufferance. I didn’t see Doc as much of a public benefactor. It was unlikely that he would endow an orphanage or set up a trust to provide free band concerts for the people of Mérida. All his old cronies were gone except for Professor Camacho Puut, who, properly, would get the library and the relic collection. That left me. I had served h
im well. My reward was to be Izamál.

  Mrs. Blaney poked her head into the room. Always looming and hovering, this woman. “Oh. I thought you had gone, Mr. Burns. Don Ricardo usually has his nap at this time.”

  “No, I’m still here.”

  Doc said, “It’s all right, Lucille. We’re talking business.”

  “Oh. Well, then. I’ll just—leave you two.”

  She left and I asked him if she knew about the cancer.

  “Not yet but she suspects something.”

  That meant she probably did know. Nothing was said about the house. We got down to my instructions. Dr. Solís was to send for me the moment that he, Flandin, died. There would be no lingering decline in a hospital. He would die in this room. I would come at once and stand guard by his bed, allowing no one to move his body for thirty-six hours.

  “Are you willing to do that? Without asking a lot of questions? Don’t humor me along now. I want an honest answer.”

  “Yes, I can do that. Do you mean exactly thirty-six hours?”

  “No less than that. I want your solemn word.”

  “You have it. What else? What about the funeral?”

  “I’ve already gone over that with Huerta. You just do your job. You just make sure I’m dead.”

  He was afraid of being buried alive. A childhood nightmare of screaming and clawing and tossing about in a dark box. It wasn’t an unreasonable fear. Any doctor can make a mistake. Funerals were carried out promptly here, and usually there was no embalming. Some morticians offered same-day service. Harlan Shrader died one morning in his hotel room, and we buried him before the sun went down, in a coffin too narrow for his shoulders, and they weren’t broad. The box was made of thin pine boards and six-penny nails. Huerta charged us $40 for everything, including the grave plot, and he even put some cowboy boots on Harlan’s limp feet. I don’t know how he did it, slit them perhaps. We found them in Harlan’s closet, but I think they must have belonged to some former occupant. In life Harlan tramped around town in threadbare canvas shoes with his toes poking out, and in death he became a member of the equestrian class. Mott and I paid Huerta. Shep applied to the Veterans Administration for the $250 burial allowance but said he never got it.

  “Not a word about this to anyone,” said Doc. “I know I can count on you, Jimmy. Now I want you to go up to the attic. The black steamer trunk. It’s not locked. Open it up and you’ll see a pasteboard box tied up with rope. It’s marked notes. I want you to bring it down here.”

  I went up to the attic, an oven, just below the round cupola, and made haste to find the thing. It must have been 150 degrees Fahrenheit in that room. While poking around in the trunk, I came across a blue case with gold lettering. It held a Carnegie Medal for heroism and a citation on thick paper telling how young Richard Flandin, a grocer’s delivery boy, had rescued an old lady and her dog, both unconscious, from a burning house in Los Angeles. Quite a little man. Doc in knickers. Sweat dripped from my nose and made splotches on the soft paper. Great boaster that he was, he had never told me about this. Had he forgotten? It served to remind me, too, that he was an old Angeleno, American to the bone, for all his French posturing. In a rare moment of weakness, he confessed to me one night that he was only five years old when his widowed mother made the move from Paris to California with him and his sister. He saved coins. I found a cigar box filled with silver pesos, and I bounced one, nice and heavy, on my hand. It was once one of the world’s standard currencies, like the Spanish dollar, or piece of eight, and now a single peso was all but worthless. It was worth less than a single cacao bean, which the Mayans had used for money.

  My first improvement to this house would be some roof turbines. Clear out all of this hot air. Would I allow Mrs. Blaney to stay on? Perhaps, but with much reduced authority and visibility.

  The pasteboard box was packed with Doc’s old notebooks. They were engineers’ field notebooks, with yellow waterproof covers and water-resistant pages, each sheet scored off with a grid pattern. On the inner sides of the covers there were printed formulas for solving curves and triangles. I lugged it down to the bedroom and began untying the ropes. I thought he wanted the notes for reference. I thought this had something to do with his book.

  “No, bind it back up,” he said. “They’re yours, Jimmy, to do with as you please. All my early field notes. I want you to have them.”

  His notes? Not the house then. I was to receive instead this dusty parcel of data. Unreadable scribbling and baffling diagrams with numbers, and here and there the multi-legged silhouette of a bug smashed between the pages. Did the stuff have any value at all? It was like being told that you had just inherited a zircon mine, unless zircons are quarried, I don’t know. I was caught up short. I was at a loss.

  “This is very good of you, Doc. I wonder though. Shouldn’t valuable material like this go to some library or museum?”

  “They had their chances. You’re not pleased?”

  “Yes, of course I am, a great honor, but you know how I live. Right now I’m camping out in a room at Fausto’s place. You know how I move around. These notebooks should be catalogued and stored somewhere. I’m no scholar.”

  “It doesn’t matter. You’re my good friend. You’ve been a loyal friend. They’re yours. Enough said.”

  Lorena came back to collect the dishes. Doc told her to go to the bureau and bring out all his—handkerchiefs—I thought he said. Pañuelos? She got one, and he said no, all of them, todos. They were plain white handkerchiefs, and she made stacks of them on a tray. He indicated that they were for me.

  “I want you to have my handkerchiefs, too, Jimmy. All my old friends are dead now, and most of my new acquaintances are ill-bred people of below-average intelligence. Mental defectives for the most part. They don’t use handkerchiefs.”

  Lorena served them to me. Doc waved off my thanks. “You do carry one, don’t you?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “I want you to feel free to use them. They’re not to be put away now. They’re for everyday use. There’s plenty of service left in them.”

  “Well. They’re nice handkerchiefs.”

  “Nothing fancy, but you can’t beat long-staple cotton for absorbency and a smooth finish. How many are there?”

  Now I had to count them. He wanted to draw this out.

  “Twenty-two.”

  “So many? Well, there you are. Twenty-two flags of truce. You never know when you might need one. Take them, enjoy them. Properly cared for, they will give you years of good service.”

  “You mean I’m to take them now?”

  “Absolutely. They’re yours, enjoy them. The notebooks, the handkerchiefs. A lot of good reading in that box. I never could understand these selfish old people who hang onto everything till their very last gasp.”

  A little later he dozed off. I left through the back door, through the kitchen, by way of all the copper pots, thinking to avoid another encounter with Mrs. Blaney. But there she was, poolside, with her English class. She taught English conversation and ballroom dancing to young Mexican matrons. They were sitting in a half-circle, six or seven of them, holding cups and saucers. Mrs. Blaney was drilling them in garden party remarks.

  I made a detour around the swimming pool. Purple blossoms were floating in the water, and a blue air mattress, deflated, swamped and becalmed. Mrs. Blaney called out to me. “Mr. Burns? One moment please. What is that you are carrying away?” The young matrons looked at each other. This must be what you said in English to a person who was leaving your grounds at a smart clip with a box on his shoulder and a gun belt draped around his neck. I kept moving. I was thinking about the cancer demon and other things and I had no time for Lucille Blaney’s nonsense. Sometimes I thought she was the one who was sending me the Mr. Rose letters.

  HUERTA’S FUNERAL parlor was out by the old city wall, with a white glass sign in front, lighted from within. Inhumaciones Huerta. I drove around to the workshop and got Huerta out to look at the mahogany planks
. Was that enough wood to make a coffin for Dr. Flandin? Or perhaps other plans had been made. I didn’t want to interfere. Huerta ran his fingers along the grain. Oh no, this was a wonderful idea. This was more than enough. The mahogany would take a nice finish and would make a much more suitable ataud for the Doctor than the ugly metal casket he had chosen. He would dry the wood and stain it and buff it with wax and fashion a fine work of mortuary art. He would use bright copper hinges and fittings. Ulises could do some carving on the lid.

  “Not too narrow now,” I said.

  “Oh no. Amplio.” He spread his hands to show just how wide. “Asi de amplio.” But how much time did he have? The Doctor had not been clear about when death would come. I said he had been vague with me, too, but I thought there would be time enough.

  On a wooden table nearby a boy was washing down a corpse with a water hose. I stopped to look at the face. Huerta said, “Did you know Enrique? He had a short fit and then dropped dead in his box. Just the way he would have wanted it.” The name meant nothing to me, but I recognized him as a man who had kept a newsstand downtown. He had sat half-hidden in a wooden box behind drooping curtains of newspapers and comic books, deaf, addled, smothered in news. It was a shock to see him outside his nest and laid out dead and cold on a wet table into the bargain.

  That night I went to Shep’s bar for the first time in weeks. There was a going-away party for Crouch and his wife. Shep’s In-Between Club was the proper name, and from the outside it looked like a pulque joint in central Mexico, a hole in the wall with slatted, swinging saloon doors. No pulque was served here, however, and women were allowed to enter. It was bigger inside than you expected it to be and not as dark as you expected. Shep had a Mexican wife, and the place was registered in her name.

  Nelms was intercepting people at the swinging doors. He was eating a curled hunk of fried pork skin that had been dipped in red sauce. He started eating street food at mid-afternoon and ate steadily along until about 11 at night. There was a whine in his voice.

  “How long have I been coming in here, Burns?”