Gringos

by Charles Portis

  I had no idea. Rudy had left no camping evidence here. It was all a bust. I knew the smell of failure. I was chasing after a shadow. In any case, the thing now was to get Doc away from this place, keep him moving. He hadn’t gone for his machete belt yet but I was worried. I was afraid to meet his eyes. The time has come, they would say to me. Without a boat we would have to take him by the heels and drag him out of the forest against his will, with his arms folded across his chest and his head scraping a little furrow across Chiapas.

  “The boy is dead,” said Refugio. “That is what I think. Now we can go back to our homes.”

  “Not yet. Somebody must have seen him. And we may as well go on down to Yoro now. There are bound to be boats at Yoro.”

  The gloomy Refugio said Yoro was far, far away and that we could not possibly walk there before dark.

  “It’s still the easiest way out. It’s better than going back. A night on the river won’t kill us. And a boat may come along yet.”

  Gail was naturally curious about Yoro. “What is it, a town? A ruin?”

  “It’s a river terminal where you can buy gasoline. Just a little village with some hens pecking around in the mud. Or it used to be. I don’t know. They may have a yacht club there now.”

  I hadn’t been to Yoro in years. The first time there I nearly starved to death on a 500-peso note. Nobody could change it. The widow woman who served meals wouldn’t accept my tortuga note and she wouldn’t feed me on credit. They used to call that note a turtle because it moved so slowly. Now you could just about buy a pack of cigarettes with 500 pesos.

  Doc, to my surprise, said, “Yes, Yoro is a wonderful idea, Jimmy. Why didn’t I think of that? Yes, Yoro and Yorito. We can go up on the bluff and see the great old city of Likín again. We can drink from the hidden spring of water. Is it still flowing, I wonder? What’s wrong with me? I had forgotten all about Likín.”

  So had I. It was a sprawling hilltop ruin across the river in Guatemala. I had also forgotten, if I had ever known, that “Likín” was the Yucatec Maya word for “east” and “sunrise.” An important word, as it turned out, though it wasn’t until the next day that I made the connection, what with so many things on my mind. Had Doc then decided against lying down and giving up the spirit, or was he only putting it off? Best not to ask. He may have feared that the two chiflados would disturb him after he had arranged himself on the ground here. They might stand over him and look down on him with disgust and talk over his condition, in the way of medical students.

  I got the party moving again and picked up the pace a little. At least our way was downhill. A night on the river wouldn’t be so bad, if it didn’t rain, and if Gail’s mosquito dope held out. Strong stuff, though I believe my powder bag—a knotted sock filled with sulfur—was more effective against the ticks. Where were all the boats? Doc was holding up well, his little cap now dark with sweat. He wanted to keep those vapors in his head. Everybody else in Mexico was trying to keep them out. Straggling behind a bit, he and Gail were lost in a lively chat. He told her about the panoramic view from atop the great Castillo at Likín.

  Refugio glanced back at them over his shoulder. “This Gail,” he said to me. “She will make you a good enough wife, Jaime.” Esposa regular.

  “You think so?”

  “Look how round and fat her arms are. She is quiet, too, and dedicated to bennee.”

  “Yes, well, Gail is all right.”

  But I wasn’t interested in her in that way, nor she in me.

  Around each bend we foolishly expected to see something new, and it was always the same line of trees and another stretch of brown water leading to another bend. A thousand years ago this valley was inhabited with stone cities every few miles. Now it was an empty quarter. No one lived here now except for a sprinkling of drifters and outpost people. We saw none of them, a shifty lot on the whole, not much given to the planning or building of cities. We saw no animals other than bugs and snakes and circling eagles.

  The low-water trail was too good to last. At a gap where the river cut between two hills, we came up against a thick and impassable stand of bamboo. Not even Ramos could penetrate that canebrake. I went to borrow Doc’s machete, only to find that he had given it to Gail. What was this? She had taken up the web belt a notch or two and strapped on the whole business. Something significant here? The passing on of the Aragon machete? Or had she only relieved him of the weight? Neither of them offered an explanation, and I asked no questions.

  Refugio and I hacked away and cleared a narrow path along the edge of the water. It was hot work. Colonies of ticks showered down on us. They swarmed all down Ramos’ haunches. He made for the river and took a quick dip and then well and truly shook himself off. When everyone had passed around the thicket, we stopped to beat each other with branches, trying to brush off the teeming garrapatas. I pounded at them with my sulfur bomb. Then, right in the middle of this whipping and dusting dance, and very much startled, we were hailed from across the river by three Guatemalan soldiers.

  One was a young officer, a military policeman, with a red PM brassard on his sleeve. The other two were even younger, mere boys, carrying old American carbines with long banana clips, which made me suspect they were the fully automatic models. You can’t really tell at any distance. The officer had drawn his pistol, and all three weapons were at the ready, if not quite pointed at us.

  The water was turbulent at this narrow cut, and the officer had to shout. “What is your business here? I want to know your business!”

  “¡Pescadores!” Refugio called out to him. “We are fishermen who lost our boat! Do you have a boat? We need a ride to Yoro! We lost our boat and one of our people! A gringo! Have you found a young gringo?”

  The soldiers consulted among themselves. Then the PM came back to us. “What, will you shoot the fish? No, I don’t believe you are fishermen!”

  “Yes, can’t you see? Look for yourself! A party of gringos! Their equipaje went down with the boat! They come to catch the fish and shoot the birds! You are brave soldiers serving on the frontera! We are nothing but fishermen and gentlemen shooters! ¡Escopetas blancas! Don’t you have a power boat?”

  Another consultation. The young PM pointed downstream with his revolver and fired off a round, for the joy of it, I think. “¡Mas abajo! On down! At the ruinas! The arqueos have a boat! At Chupá!”

  “How far?” I shouted.

  “Not far!”

  “Have you seen a young gringo?”

  No answer.

  “The young man is lost! He may be in your country! Will you make a report to your comandante?”

  No answer. Policemen, lawyers, soldiers, doctors—they hate to tell you anything.

  “Then with your permission we will be on our way!”

  Again they said nothing. The parley was over. We moved off warily, unlikely communists, and they watched us, not altogether satisfied with our story. We were in Mexico, the Colossus of the North, and didn’t need their permission. They would have been lucky to hit us at that range with those pieces. Still, it’s just as well to step lightly around teenage boys in uniform carrying automatic weapons. I had been one myself and I had known, too, with my heart knocking against my ribs and my finger on the trigger of that BAR, that there was nothing sweeter than cutting down the enemies of your country.

  Doc said, “An important lesson back there for all of us.”

  We waited. What lesson? It pays to be courteous to the army? Something to do with the ticks? What? No, the lesson was to be careful with chain saws. Doc’s thoughts had drifted back to the cave of the two laughing chiflados.

  “That poor boy could very easily have lost his arm. A chain saw is a very tricky customer, and if you don’t know what you’re doing, leave it alone. You must always grasp it firmly with both hands and never, never raise it above your head.”

  Refugio didn’t know Chupá. Doc, calling it Shupá, claimed he had been there once, around 1946, and knew it like the back of his hand.
Gail was familiar with the name. The ruin was on the Guatemala side, she said, and some Mormons were reported to be digging there. I had never heard of it, though it was situated on the river. You can float right by some of those old cities, walk right through them in the jungle and never notice a thing. The trees and roots strangle them, the humus accumulates and the temples lose their sharp edges, become rounded hills, little wooded cerritos that appear natural.

  “We’re coming up on it now,” Doc said, time and again. “Over there . . . in the shade of that headland. . . . No, that can’t be it . . .”

  Probably he had been to Chupá, just as he had been to hundreds of these sites, but now they all ran together in his head. Not far, the officer had said, which could mean anything. If the arqueos had hidden their boat and set up their camp back from the river, we might well miss the place. We might already have missed it. The red sun was almost down. I was looking for a good place to hole up for the night, some hillside depression with a nice overhang.

  “Two boats! There!” Refugio saw them first. We could just make them out in the shadows, a cayuca and a green plastic boat on the far shore, tied up in the mouth of a creek. A thin line of white smoke rose from the forest. It was a camp, all right. We shouted across the river in Spanish and English. Out of the trees came a tall bearded man in a baseball cap. He looked us over with his binoculars in the failing light.

  Here is how fast night fell. We watched the man climbing into the green boat and starting the engine, and then as he came to us across the river we lost sight of him. We could see the boat and then we couldn’t see it. He pulled up short of the bank and turned a spotlight on us, still not sure of us.

  “We’re looking for someone,” I said. “We’re making our way down the river. Can you put us up for the night?”

  “Do you have papers for Guatemala?”

  “No, but we’ll be off in the morning. We’d like to hire your boat. Can you run us down to Yoro?”

  “There is a sweet young lady here with us,” said Doc. “Otherwise we wouldn’t bother you. I appeal to your gallantry.”

  The man laughed in the darkness behind his bright light. “Okay.”

  Roland was his name, and he ferried us across and took us up the hill to a green tent and fed us well. Mashed potatoes are all the better for a few lumps, in my opinion, and gravy too for that matter. Roland was our solitary host. There were three other gringos in this Chupá crew that we didn’t see, all laid up sick in their cots. Roland himself was healthy enough, a big strapping fellow with a clean beard and clear eyes, a walking tribute to the Mormon dietary laws. So many arqueos are sallow, bony little men with leg ulcers and bad skin rashes on their hands and arms.

  It was a fine supper, with fresh peaches for dessert, out here where no peaches grew. “Might as well finish them off,” he said, and so we did, piggishly, downy skins and all. We ate everything but the pits. It didn’t occur to this decent man to hide the peaches until the plague of guests had blown over. After the meal, with a playful wink, he said he was sorry but he had no “highballs” to offer us. “Gentiles” of our type, he knew, just barely made it from one drink to the next.

  I had served with some Mormons in Korea and they were good Marines to a man, if untypical ones. They didn’t smoke, drink, swear, malinger or complain, except occasionally, about the P for Protestant that was stamped on their dog tags. They claimed to be some third thing in Christendom, neither Protestant nor Catholic, or rather some unique thing, but the point was too fine for the Marine Corps to grasp.

  What they called themselves down here, in this work, was the New World Archaeological Foundation, their aim being to find evidence of early settlement by the “Jaredites” and Hebrews. All the Indian civilizations, they believed, were founded by these people, who came here by boat from the Middle East in two separate waves, the “Jaredites” or Sumerians in 2800 B.C., and the Hebrews around 600 B.C. It was a variation on the Lost Tribes of Israel theme, with certain strange Mormon wrinkles—strange to me—such as that Quetzalcoatl, the Toltec mangod from Tula, known to the Maya as Kukulcán, was the same person as Jesus. There was a tradition, they said, that Quetzalcoatl, the crested serpent, was crucified.

  Not that they pushed the belief on anyone, far from it, for all their missionary work elsewhere. They were reluctant to discuss it with outsiders, or with me anyway, no doubt fearing that it would be hopelessly misunderstood, a religious quest mixed up with practical field work. It was all I could do to drag it out of Dr. Norbee, bit by bit, when I was hauling freight for him at a New World dig in Belize. Once I asked him outright—had they found any evidence to support the theory? Dr. Norbee, leery of casting pearls, put me off with a nonarchaeological example. There was a town in Honduras called Lamana, he told me, and Laman was one of the early Israelite chiefs here, chief of the Lamanites in fact. Laman of the Lamanites. Lamana. He left me to think that over. Pretty thin soup, but then the secular arqueos, always going on about the scientific purity of their motives, were usually out to prove some case or other themselves. From all I heard, the Mormon diggers were honest men who refused to fake or stretch the evidence. No more than anyone else, that is.

  Roland knew Dr. Norbee and gave me news of him in Utah. He had heard nothing of any American boy being lost or found in these parts. Still no sighting. But he had seen a lot of gringos coming downstream in powered dugouts. Some had stopped here to stretch their legs. Hippies, they were, who had put in, most of them, at a place called Sayache, on the Pasión River, which is the upper Usumacinta. They were on their way to Yorito, or actually to the ancient city of Likín, for some sort of hippie jamboree. This accounted for the absence of boats. The boatmen were all lingering down at Yoro and Yorito, ferrying the hippies back and forth across the river and making a killing.

  Yes, if you’re going to Likín, Sayache would be the place to put in. It was one of the few towns on the upper part of this river system that you could reach by car or bus. You drove to Belize, then over to Flores in Guatemala, then down to Sayache, end of the road. Rudy, of course, wouldn’t want to do it that way, the easy way, but why would he do it at all? Could he be part of this? Rudy was no hippie.

  I asked Roland what the occasion was. “What are these people gathering for?”

  “The annihilation of the world. Tomorrow, on the stroke of midnight.”

  “They’re celebrating that?”

  “Well, they say they’re trying to stop it, with a blood sacrifice. There’s supposed to be another group doing the same thing down at Machu Picchu in Peru. They seem to think this is the end of the thirteenth baktun. The end of time. Unless their sacrifice proves acceptable. They’re expecting to meet someone there called El Mago.”

  Doc had gone all heavy and slumped from the big feeding, which Soledad Bravo had advised against. Now he was roused. “What’s that? Baktuns? The completion of the baktuns doesn’t come around until the year 2011.”

  “Yes sir, but they don’t go by the Thompson correlation. They have some reckoning of their own. I couldn’t follow it. They’ve tied it all in somehow with New Year’s Day.”

  “What nonsense. Our January one, Gregorian, is in no way related to the beginning of the Mayan year.”

  “Unless by chance.”

  “No, not even then, if you mean the approximate year. It was in summer that the Mayan year began, and certainly not at midnight. They must be thinking of the Aztecs.”

  Gail said she didn’t see how the Incas could be involved. “What does Machu Picchu have to do with it?”

  Roland said he didn’t know. “I couldn’t follow that either.”

  “And the Spinden correlation is out.” She took a small calculator from her shoulder bag and punched around on the keys. “It’s not the Weitzal correlation . . . or the Escalona Ramos correlation . . . I can’t imagine what system they’re using . . . wait . . . let me try the day itself against the heliacal rising of Venus . . .”

  “Try it against all four phases.”


  She and Roland and Doc continued to wrestle with the problem, surely knowing it to be an empty exercise. The hippies knew nothing about the Mayas and their baktuns—400-year periods—or the Incas, or the planetary movements, much less the end of the world, certainly nothing that could be worked out on a calculator. Rudy carried one, too, in his shirt pocket. He was fond of decimal points. He would add up his guesses and rough estimates in an exact way on the thing and come out with falsely precise figures, which looked like hard-won data, very pleasing to the eye. Still—Doomsday at hand. The prophecy never fails to pull you up short. You stop a bit, before going on. No one knows and so anyone might hit on it.

  It got worse, embarrassing. Doc went on to repay Roland’s hospitality by trying to provoke a quarrel, telling him bluntly that he was all wrong with his Hebrews wading ashore at Veracruz. It was the Chinese who had settled this country. The Meso-Americans could not possibly have come from the Mediterranean, because there, as in Europe, the snake was a symbol of evil. No, it was in the Far East, in China, where you found benign reptiles, holy lizards, celestial dragons, and such, as you also found here with the iguana god and the cult of the mighty plumed serpent. The same lotus theme too. Just as it was here, as in China, that jade was believed to have divine properties. And was not every Indian baby born with the Mongolian Spot at the base of his spine?

  Roland took all this in a good-natured way, deferring to the old man, calling him Sir, saying he made some good points, that the jury was still out on so many things down here.

  Gail was drowsy, and I was nodding too. Ramos moved about impatiently under the table, nudging my leg for more scraps. Doc tried again. He asked Roland where he stood on carbon-14 dating. Roland said it was a useful tool, but he said it with no confidence, sensing he was going to be on the wrong end of this argument too. Doc informed him that carbon dating was a colossal hoax, perhaps the greatest scientific scandal of the twentieth century. “You can get any date you like. If you don’t like the reading, you just say the sample was too small or it was contaminated. You keep running the stuff through the lab till you get a reading you do like. Look at what they did to Spinden. First they said he was right, and then they said he was wrong. Off by 260 years. Of course he was wrong, but they had to keep cooking their numbers to show it. You boys are easily taken in, if I may say so.”