Gringos

by Charles Portis

  Doc and Gail waited inside out of the drizzle while I went down to search along the river bank. At least the mosquitoes were grounded. I took my shotgun, slung muzzle-down from my shoulder. Soaked or dirty, the old L. C. Smith had never failed me, with its exposed hammers and double triggers. It was simple and sure. The only firing mechanism I knew of with fewer moving parts was that of a mortar, with none. Refugio looked around in the woods behind the camp. I turned up nothing. He found two Lacondón Indians hunkered down in the old steam-bath chamber. They were drinking cans of beer and smoking long cigars they had rolled themselves.

  He marched them back to the mess tent and questioned them sharply in their own lingo. Why had they not shown themselves? Did they not hear us calling out? The gunshots? The dog barking?

  It was raining. They were waiting out the rain.

  Where was everybody? Where were all the arqueos?

  Gone away for a time. To Palenque or some other town. It was the rain. They couldn’t work in the mud.

  Refugio was a little rough with them. I could see they were frightened of him, with that big pistol at his side. It was Cortez grilling the baffled Indios again. The thin one, the one called Bol, had some Spanish, and I got it out of him that they were here to keep an eye on things. The bearded Lund had hired them. They were to sleep here and watch things and take what food they pleased from the stores—though Bol wasn’t sure about the beer. He thought we might be angry at them for drinking the beer.

  “No, it’s all right,” I said. “The beer is yours too. Don’t worry about it.”

  But they knew nothing about any missing gringo. Everybody had gone away to Palenque. That was about all I could get because Refugio kept breaking in with accusations and Doc was roaring around the tent, having a fit.

  “Look at all this equipment! I can’t believe it! Cases of canned milk and a professional drawing board and electricity to boot! Look at all the logistical support these people have! They even bring their own little secretary along! And for what! When it’s all over they’ll turn in some piffling report that nobody will read! That nobody can read! Well, these are your modern road-bound explorers! They hear the patter of rain on the leaves and what do our brave boys do? I’ll tell you what they do! They down tools and head for the nearest motel!”

  Bol and his friend thought this tirade was directed at them, and it took me a while to straighten things out. Doc apologized and gave them hearty handshakes. He gave them some money. He had always been a true friend of the Lacondones, he told them, even though he could not accept the claim that their cultural line went unbroken all the way back to the classic Maya. No, he was sorry, but he rather thought they were a hybrid, pariah people, descendants of runaways, drifters, outcasts and renegades, who had come together here in the forest in the not too distant past, to form a kind of tribe, and what was more, he believed he could prove it to their satisfaction. But he didn’t think any the worse of them for being pariahs—he was one himself, a real outcast—and had he not always been their true friend, in thought, word and deed? Here was some more money, take it. The whole wad was theirs if they could direct him to the Lost Books. They must understand this was his last entrada. He would pay well for books of the antiguos or any fragments thereof . . .

  There was a lot more of this, and they didn’t take in a word of it. I explained to them that the old man was offering a reward to anyone who found the missing young man. He had yellow hair and wore army clothes. He was last seen walking down the river a few days back. Refugio went over it again in their own idioma, adding for good measure that the boy was rich and would buy them new motorbikes if they brought him out safely. Then, with some gifts, we sent Bol off to spread the word among his people. The other one stayed behind.

  Gail didn’t know which way to turn. Her boss was dead and her friend Denise had flown home and now her entire crew was gone. She had fallen in with a pair of pyramid looters, most vicious of all criminals in the anthropology book, and a loud old man who, if she could believe her ears, had just called her a little secretary. We could hardly leave her here and she couldn’t drive the brakeless van out alone. Or could she? I knew so little about her. She didn’t talk enough for me to get a good reading on her. Later I got a pretty good reading.

  Refugio saw a good chance to jump ship. His heart had never been in this job, a lot of gringo nonsense, bound in the end to be abortive and unprofitable.

  “So. I will drive the young lady back to my ranchita, or Palenque, wherever she likes. That is all we can do, no?”

  Gail said, “You don’t have to cart me around like some old lady.”

  Doc said, “Palenque? What are we discussing here? Weren’t we just in Palenque last night?”

  Refugio couldn’t get the Volkswagen going again. He ground away on the starter, but the little pancake engine wouldn’t catch. Gail said that was all right. She would go on with us to Tumbalá. She would like to see the big river. Refugio told her it would be a hard and dirty trip. Doc said anybody who thought he could go to Palenque in a boat was crazy as hell. More delay and confusion. It was like those last frantic days in the coat factory. Scenes such as this had driven me to working alone. It was the old Rudy situation, where I had responsibility without authority. I couldn’t tell these people what to do, but if they went wrong, got hurt, I would have to answer for it.

  But then I no longer cared and I said I was going off on foot, now, down the Tabí to the Usumacinta. There I would hitch a boat ride to Tumbalá, pick up Rudy Kurle and continue on down the river by way of Yoro to the rail crossing at Tenosique. It was the easiest way out. They could come along or stay here, just as they wished.

  Doc began giving orders, left and right. I had to tell him again that this was not a dig, that he was not in charge this time, and that we would go and stop as I directed. He threw up his hands. “Fine, fine. Don’t mind me. I don’t know anything. Just tell me what to do. I’m not anybody. I’m only the man who found the big eccentric flint at Cobá.”

  Sula had packed some food for us, and we took some more out of the camp stores. Refugio found a square packet of delicatessen ham in an ice chest. He held up a piece and flopped it about and laughed at how thin it was sliced. Look, he said, here was this gray and sickly meat, cut to about the thinness of a cat’s ear, that you can see light through, and this was what they called a piece of ham in the great land of America! No wonder the gringos couldn’t win their wars anymore!

  I was glad to have him along, willing or not, and I was glad to have Ramos, too, who quickly sensed the plan and led the way, jogging ahead of us down the river bank. He knew his job, which was to give notice of any trouble down the way, to scatter varmints from our path. We walked in single file and spoke little. The brush was so thick in places that we had to walk out into the water.

  We came to the opening in an hour or so, a big sandbar, where the Tabí, running deep brown, flowed into the muddy and lighter stream of the Usumacinta. The water was café con leche. We stopped there to rest and eat.

  The rain had let up. There was a light breeze. Doc stood at the point of the sandbar with his white pantaloons fluttering. “The mingling of the waters,” he said, looking across the way to the Guatemala side. Nothing was stirring over there. An unbroken line of trees, all even at the top, as though clipped with shears. “A rare day,” he went on. “This is truly the Garden of the kings. La Huerta de los Reyes.” He drew his machete and nicked an earlobe to get some blood, then flung it from his fingertips in what he called “the four world directions.” Some more of his cubo-mystico business, I thought. Gail said it was an ancient rite of the lowland Maya. An act of reverence then, in its way, which was fine with me. A blood offering, the only kind of any value, according to the Suarez. Big Dan was strong on blood, too. There had to be blood.

  Doc called me out on the sandbar. “A word with you in private, Jimmy, if you don’t mind.” I joined him, and he asked me in a confidential way if I had heard him say that this was his last entra
da.

  “Yes, I have.” I had heard him say it about four times.

  “Well, that’s just what I mean. I mean to lie down out here and die where I was happiest. Please don’t interfere. I will just lie down under the canopy of the trees. With my old empty heart. I will die and melt away and be with all the other forgotten things in the earth.”

  “Where? Where will you do this?”

  “Anywhere. Tumbalá will do.”

  “What’s that in your hand?”

  It was the little jade man. He was going to lie down and die with that thing in his mouth. I told him there was something heathenish about this that I didn’t like, and he said no, don’t worry, he had already paid Father Mateo to say seventy-eight masses for him, one for each year of his life, and none too many, he thought.

  “I don’t know. I’ll have to think it over.”

  “The signal will be when I give you my machete. I want you to have it. At that point you will take the others and walk away. Don’t look back and don’t say anything. I couldn’t bear any words. This is how I want it. You can’t refuse my last wish, Jimmy. And don’t let Cuco interfere.”

  I left it at that. He was determined, and I saw no hope of reasoning with him. But I had already thought it over and I had no intention of leaving him out here. Melt away? A nice way of putting it. Doc wasn’t dying. Soledad Bravo would have seen it in his eyes. It was one thing to help along an old man on his deathbed, to dispatch him with a razor blade, but this business, no. I would tie him in the boat if it came to that, and Refugio would help me.

  Gail offered to make him a sandwich. “You haven’t eaten anything, Dicky.”

  “I got a boiled egg down.”

  It sounded like he had poked it down his throat whole.

  Refugio shaded his eyes and made a show of looking up and down the river, “I don’t see no cayucas.” He cupped his ear. “I don’t hear no boats.” He was going to dwell on every difficulty.

  “One will be along,” I said. “Let’s go. It’s not far to Tumbalá. A little more walking won’t hurt us.”

  We set off downstream and the going was easier now, though we were out of the jungle twilight, into the full blaze of the sun. The river cut its way through rounded hills, with steep wooded slopes that came right down to the edge of the water, or almost to the edge. At this season there was a sandy shelf to walk on. The big river, we called it, and so it was for Mexico, but this upper middle stretch I would put at no more than a hundred yards wide. The water had not yet taken on a dark tropical look. It was just pale and lifeless ditch water coursing along.

  No boat came, up or down. Gail had some good mosquito dope, the best I had ever used. The trick is to keep them out of your face, from swarming in your face, which can’t be endured. We drank from springs and small feeder streams, after I had poured the water through a paper cone, a coffee filter. It trapped all the bigger parasites, or so I told myself.

  Refugio stopped to look at a hairy object washing about in an eddy. Then he jumped back and cried out, “Mother of God! Another chaneque!” Another little brown man, that is, of the kind we had been shown at the Palenque police station. These small woodland creatures took sick and died, just as we did, and their bodies were always committed to flowing waters, according to Sula. Fair enough, but I didn’t expect to see two of them in two days. They were washing up like sick whales.

  This thing was vaguely childlike, a torso with something like a tiny arm flung out. It was just hide and bones, a headless, decaying mess of no very definite shape. Doc said it was a dog. Gail thought it might be a howler monkey. Ramos showed no interest. Much too hairy for a humanoid, I said, knowing nothing about humanoids.

  Refugio snapped back at me. “Do you say I don’t know a chaneque when I see one?”

  “It’s not like the one at Palenque.”

  Later, farther down the trail, he said, “Some chaneques are hairy. The older males have much body hair.”

  I might have believed that, coming from Sula, but Refugio knew no more about chaneques than I did.

  He stopped us again when we reached Tumbalá. He raised his hand. “¡Escuche! Listen up!” Ramos was doing some furious barking around the bend. I was certain he had found Rudy. Refugio and I ran on ahead, across the ruins and up into a ravine, where Ramos had cornered something in a hole. It was a small cave in the hillside. I called out to Rudy. No answer. Then I thought it might be a jaguar. Yes, a tigre, I was sure of it, though real tigrero dogs are stalkers and don’t bark at all. After all these years of going up and down in the woods, I was at last going to behold a jaguar at bay, in whose wonderful coat the Mayas saw a map of the starry heavens. Refugio said no, it was no gato, more likely a pig. This was pig madness. Ramos hated pigs.

  Chino would have charged the hole. Ramos was content to race about in a frenzy before the entrance. Nor would Refugio, brave man that he was, enter a cave. Close places didn’t bother him, or man-made holes. You could grab his ankles and hold him head down in a chultún, a kind of bottle-shaped underground Mayan cistern, and he would work calmly away with a flashlight in his mouth, scratching about for artifacts with one hand while swatting at snakes and scorpions with the other. But he wouldn’t go into a natural cave. Unquiet spirits still lingered there from the old days, far back in the darkness where virgin water dripped. You could go in and never come out. I was no spelunker myself. It was Doc who liked to prowl caverns, where one day the cache of lost books would be found. That was his firm belief.

  Refugio fired a shot into the cave. I set fire to a dried palm frond and tossed it inside, more for illumination than with any hope of driving the animal out. There was movement. Then we heard voices.

  “¡Vale! ¡Vale! No te alteres! Okay, hold it! Take it easy!”

  Two scraggly young men came out with a small chain saw and a .22 rifle. They were laughing, their eyes smarting from the smoke. I went inside with another blazing frond to make sure there were no others. There was a nest of bedding where they slept, and some scanty baggage. I poked around in it. If these two chamacos had done away with Rudy, they would have kept some of his fine equipment and his fine army clothes. I found nothing in that line, only three lumpy sacks hidden under a pile of brush. They were sisal sacks filled with sawed-off fragments of inscribed stone. I dragged them out into the light.

  These boys were commercial pot hunters, and they had hidden here, they said, when they heard us coming, thinking we might be an army patrol. One of them had a bad arm wound, a ragged cuchillazo, gone purple along the edges. The chain saw had kicked back on him and ripped a long gash in his forearm. They had packed the wound with sugar and poured gasoline over it and tied it up with two pieces of rope. I got some antibiotic capsules from my shoulder bag and told him to take one every few hours. Leave it to me to have some antilife pills tucked away somewhere. He swallowed the lot, which hardly mattered, as the stuff was old and probably inert anyway. Doc and Gail came up. She gave the boy some aspirins, and he gobbled those down too.

  I questioned them. They laughed and jabbered. The long and the short of it was that they hadn’t seen Rudy. They had seen no one for four days.

  Doc looked over the cave. He had a good eye and a good feel for these places. He pronounced this one a dud. It was barren, sterile, he said. And yet all around us were the tiny temples of Tumbalá, doll houses of stone and scaled-down shrines that stood no higher than your waist, a wonderland for flying saucer theorists. I don’t know how Doc could tell so quickly, but he was always decisive. He kicked at the sacks of carved stone and asked the boys if they had come across any libros. He made a show with his hands, as of someone unfolding a road map, not an easy idea to put across. He gave them some money.

  But of course they had found no books. Were there any left to find? There were only three Maya manuscripts or codices extant, and none dating back to the classic period. All three had turned up in Europe many years ago, with no back trail, no provenance, as they say. No one knew where they were written o
r where they were originally found.

  Not around here, I would bet. Somewhere up in dry Yucatán perhaps, or in the high mountains of Guatemala. Not even bones survived in this sour soil. They were soon leached away to nothing. I had heard a lot about bones, too much about bones, from people who called us ghouls and grave-robbers and other hard names. Their idea was that we trampled about ankle-deep in old bones, crunching skulls and femurs heedlessly underfoot and raising great clouds of unhealthy bone dust in our bonemad search for treasure. In fact, there were no bones. We came across a tooth now and then but never a human bone, not one. I had never disturbed anyone’s bones, that I knew of, which was more than the arqueos could say.

  I told the boys we wanted to hire their boat.

  “No barca.”

  They had no boat and had seen no boat for days. They had not heard motors on the river since yesterday morning. But those sacks of stone would collapse a mule, I pointed out, let alone a man. How did they propose to carry them out of here if not by boat? They laughed some more. No, no, I didn’t understand. A friend was coming up from Yoro tomorrow to pick them up in his dugout. A couple of nuts, Refugio called them, a pair of chiflados. He didn’t trust them, didn’t like them. They were poaching in his private valley. Their mindless laughter annoyed him. He refused to answer when they asked if he would sell his .45. Instead, he climbed a tree and came down with a yellow orchid for Gail. “A pretty rose for your hair.” She stuck it in her khaki hat. It would go on living up there, disembodied. These strange flowers lived off the air, if my information was correct, in the way of Dan and his people. Again the two chiflados asked about the pistol. Refugio said they would never have enough money to buy this gun. “This is a man’s gun!” What business did a pair of monkeys have with a man’s gun? They couldn’t even handle a baby chain saw with a short bar!

  Then he turned on me. “You say the boy will be in Tumbalá and then our work is done. Well, where is he?”