Gringos

by Charles Portis

  We passed through a small forest of derelict stone columns, supporting nothing, and then we were suddenly out in the open once more on a bare terrace. It was good to get on level ground again. I thought we would catch up with Dan somewhere in the woods, crashing through the brush, but there he was standing in the rain at the very edge of the terrace, he and three others and a dead goat. A kerosene lantern burned at their feet. Ramos was running about before them in a fury. The second baldheaded boy was keeping him at bay with a forked pole.

  I didn’t see the tall woman. Dan wore a white headband and a long white or tan smock over his old outfit, nothing very priestly, more like something from the early days of motoring. There were dark splotches down the front. The skinhead made a swipe at us with his sapling, and we stopped just outside his range. I had never known anyone so crazy that he couldn’t understand a 12-gauge shotgun, and here we had run into two of them in one night, or three. They had courage. Raindrops sizzled on the hot lantern. I could see the dead goat, a brown and white billy goat, with a red string around his neck and the black lump beside him that had been his heart. Dan had just cut his heart out. It was still bleeding—I won’t say smoking.

  Big Dan was lifting one foot and then the other about an inch off the ground. He was rocking from side to side like an old bull elephant. He had a crude knife of chipped flint or obsidian in one hand. In the other he held a lead rope loosely at his side, with LaJoye Mishell Teeter and a small Mexican boy in tow. The two children were bound wrist to wrist with baling wire, and the rope was tied to the wire. The girl now wore an outsize football jersey that drooped below her knees. She was number 34, a little mite of a fullback. A bow of red yarn was tied at her throat. The Mexican boy had one too. I thought at first that his face was painted. The face paint on the others, if any, had washed away. The boy was about six years old and he was in a torn white shirt and some pathetic little blue trousers. They were dress trousers with cuffs and creases. Dan must have grabbed him on a Sunday.

  I said, “What’s all this about the sun, Dan?”

  “Who is that? Where is Harvey? What do you want with me?”

  “We came for the kids. Tell your boy to put the pole down,”

  “Who gave you permission to approach me? You don’t belong here.”

  “No, we don’t. So we’ll just take the kids and be on our way. I want you to drop that rope and move away from them. Okay? None of your crap now. Just do what I say and we’ll get this over with.”

  “You can’t interfere with me in my own city. It wasn’t easy getting here at the appointed time. You don’t know the kind of people I’ve had to work with. Even El Mago let me down.”

  “Yes, but it’s all over now, Dan. Those folks out there want their money back. I told them you were a fake.”

  “This is the City of Dawn. You don’t have no business here.”

  “Our business won’t take long.”

  “Wait. I know that stupid sharecropper voice. You’re the one who broke my staff. And my car windows. How did you get here? Beany Girl had a disturbing dream about you.”

  “I don’t want to hear about your dreams.”

  “A prophetic dream. ‘We’re not through with Curtis yet.’ That’s what she said. I didn’t believe her. All right. A sign then. But that’s all you are. You can’t touch me. You don’t have no power over the Balam. Do you know who I am? I have three yards of fine linen wrapped around my head.”

  “No, we’re not going to talk about your wrappings. You can save that stuff for somebody else.”

  “Where is Harvey? Who is that with you?”

  “He’s a policeman from Guatemala City. He has some questions for you. Let go of the rope now and step aside. And you better get your boy here under control pretty fast. The other one is dead. Harvey is dead and you better get this loco son of a bitch out of my way before you lose him too.”

  Dan looked bad. There were inflamed swellings on his face and knots on the side of his head the size of hickory nuts. The bridge of his nose was bruised and puffy, perhaps broken. One ear was flopped over at the top with the cartilage crushed. All this from the police beating, I supposed, but it was more than that. I think he had been fasting. He was still a big round man, the belly undiminished, but his face had gone slack. There were sagging yellow pouches under his eyes like folds of chicken fat. The mosquitoes had been at him too. He was breathing hard through his mouth, gasping. Two or three buttons were missing from the smock, and I could see a bit of his hairy white belly and the expando waistband of his pajamas.

  Refugio said, “What a fine gringo circus this is!” I touched his arm, the one holding the pistol. “Don’t spook the big one,” I said. “Keep your eye on the boy with the pole.”

  “If he strikes Ramos I will choot him.”

  “No, not until we have the niños.”

  There was a drop of about forty feet behind them, and I didn’t know what Dan might do with that demon in him. Would he go over the side and take the children with him? Just how crazy was he? Then there was the knife, a stubby double-edged thing. No Mayan priest had ever used it to tear open a human breast. It was a cheap souvenir letter-opener from a curio shop but no less a sharp ripper for that. I put my light on the Mexican boy and spoke to him in Spanish, with a bit of English for Dan’s benefit. “Don’t worry son. Dan has thought this over and he’s going to let you go. It’s all he can do. He’s not dumb. Everything will be all right. Can you tell me your name?” He was crying and too terrified to speak. I could see now that the little fellow had mal del pinto, a skin disease that left pink and blue patches on his face, like the markings you see on piebald Negroes back home. The rain was letting up. I spoke to the girl. “LaJoye Mishell? I know your name and I came here to see you. I have a cold Coca-Cola here for you. Can you just step over here a minute? You and the boy. Come on, the dog won’t hurt you. He does just what we say. His name is Ramos. Come on, Dan is all finished with you now.” She didn’t respond at all. Wet strands of hair lay stuck across her face.

  Dan jerked the rope tight and pulled the two small bodies up against him. He said, “My offerings are blemished, as you see. A spotted toad and a spotted goat and a spotted boy and a speckled girl with vile red hair. It was the best I could do. You don’t know how hard it’s been. Finding the correct path. People like you can’t never understand anything. I had to take the hard road. I could have been a famous musician. I could have cut an album and rocketed to stardom and won awards on TV if it wasn’t for people like you controlling everything.”

  Now I was the master sharecropper in control of things. There was nothing else left to do. I put the shotgun to my shoulder. “You’re all done now anyway, Dan.”

  “Why do you call me that? Dan died long ago. There is no more Dan. Some call me El Mago but my true name is Balam Akab. I am the Jaguar of the Night.”

  “No, I tell you we’re not going to have any more of that. Here’s how it is. We’re all wet and tired and hungry. We’re a long way from home. You’re not thinking straight. Now listen to what I’m saying. I won’t say it again. Turn loose of that rope or I’m going to send you back to the Gulf of Molo.”

  His voice changed a bit. He stopped being crazy for just a moment. “All right then. Take the boy and go. He’s no good to me anyway. I can’t let you have Red. We’ve come too far. She is prepared. I have my instructions. And now I have the final sign. Which is you. I have my work to finish here on this rainswept promontory. Even you can understand that, Curtis.”

  “No, I can’t.”

  “I deny that you have any power over me.”

  Rainswept promontory. Blemished offerings. Rocketed to stardom. This was what came of reading a lot of books and magazines in prison. The tireless baldheaded boy irritated me with his jabbing and dancing about. Ramos had had enough, too, and he made a dash under the swinging pole and went for a leg. The boy kicked him. Dan tried to change hands for some reason, switching the knife and rope about, to get the knife into his righ
t hand, I think, for a quick thrust at the girl. Refugio fired once at the skinhead and killed him. I let go of both barrels at Dan. There were two sheets of flame and his headband and the top of his head went away. The girl squealed. I gave Dan both barrels up high of No. 2 shot, goose shot, which scalped him and blinded him and shattered his teeth and all but severed his thick neck. He was a dead man on his feet. The knife slipped from his fingers. His knees buckled and he fell backwards over the side, still holding the rope with a feeble grip. I went for the niños, slipping on the wet stone, knocking the lantern over and grabbing at the wire that joined their wrists. They were both howling as I dragged them back from the edge.

  Then something struck me across the back, not very hard. It was the other skinhead, the one we thought was dead. It was the faithful Harvey, all crippled up, come back from his long tumble. I couldn’t believe it. He held a short stick in one hand and beat at me with it and spit blood on me. The other arm hung broken and useless. The dome of his head was bleeding. Refugio shot him twice. Harvey was just as tough as whitleather but he could take no more. He dropped the stick and broke away in a stumbling run. Ramos was right behind him, and then Refugio, who fired again. The boy had at least two .45 balas in him—they don’t make handgun balls any bigger—and he was still on his feet when I saw him last.

  “Let him go!” I called out. “That’s enough! We don’t have time for that! Get Ramos back here!” One time you smash a bug with no mercy. Another time you find one helpless on his back with his legs flailing the air, and you flip him over and let him go on his way. The struggle that touches the heart. Refugio rightly paid no attention to me. I broke the breech of my gun and re-loaded quickly out of habit. The girl wanted to know where her Coke was. I tore the red string from her neck and the one from the boy’s neck.

  The thing now was to get back across the river, out of Guatemala and into Mexico. It wasn’t such a serious matter as all that, one gringo killing another in Latin America, and when the dead one needed killing to boot. Down here too you could always plead that you had acted from motives of honor. I could say that the cabrón had insulted me. But sorting out the mess would be a long and expensive business, and I wanted to be many miles away in another country when the military police came, if they came.

  Not far off in the darkness I heard two more booming shots, the golpes de gracia. Ramos came back and ran around in mad circles, eager for more of this sport. Then here was Refugio shouting in my face. “You can’t stop in the middle of a bloody fregado like this! You have to finish it off!”

  “All right! It’s done now!”

  “You have to finish it! Ramos knows that much! In the name of God! What’s wrong with you!”

  “You’re right. But we’re wasting time! Let’s go!”

  “You can’t just stop in the middle of a stinking business like this!”

  “I said all right! Can’t you hear! But now we’re done!”

  “So now you say it! Now you say we’re done!”

  “Yes, I say we’re done! Does that suit you! Término!”

  We were yelling at each other face to face, and I was never one to do that much, even when provoked.

  THE MEXICAN boy was so weak from hunger that he could barely walk. Refugio carried him down the hill on his back. Not a single light burned in Yorito. The rain came back in a soft drizzle, and I had the devil of a time rousting out two boatmen from their dry hammocks. I had to pay through the nose for this rainy night emergency service. It was no time for haggling. We would need two cayucas to carry this growing flock of mine downstream to the railroad bridge near Tenosique. There we could flag a train to Mérida.

  All four of us made the crossing to Yoro in the lead boat. The river was up. Our skipper wore a knitted cap pulled down over his ears to keep the malignant aires out of his head. LaJoye Mishell told me that she had been given nothing to eat for two days. I fell to muttering and then realized that Refugio was speaking to me.

  “Who was that hipopótamo? Who was that big lop-eared pagano?”

  “His name was Dan. That’s all I know. Some wandering cabrón. He tampered with my truck once at Tuxpan. A jailbird, I think. Some preso from the States.”

  “But all the same a mago? He could cast spells?”

  “Just on certain people. Not on us.”

  “What was it all about?”

  “I don’t know. But we’ll keep it to ourselves. The less said about this the better.”

  “His neck was bloated with poison.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you see his breath? It was green.”

  “I didn’t notice that.”

  “The two boys were drugged.”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Yes, a pair of tóxicos. Didn’t you see their ugly naked heads? Like baby heads! Not a natural thing! It was dope that turned them into beasts! And not one but two! Who would expect to see two of them!”

  “Harvey was the hard one. That first one who came back.”

  “But the dead goat. What was that for?”

  “I don’t know. Some pagano stuff about blood.”

  “Ay, then they get all they want, no? We show them plenty of blood! Maybe they get just a little more sangre than they want! We teach those animals some Mexican manners, no?”

  I told the boatmen to keep their engines running, and we left them at the landing with the props churning the muddy water. The widow woman’s ramada had collapsed into a heap of sticks and fronds. Her morning glories had been stripped clean by the storm and her fine jitomate plants battered down in the mud. Yoro was if anything darker than Yorito. We found our people and the stragglers huddled together in a storage shed behind the big fuel tank. Vincent was grumbling about the fleas. The dirt floor was infested with them. I had to wake Doc and Gail. She thought the little Mexican boy, Serafín, thirty-two inches high, was Rudy Kurle. “You found him!” she said.

  “No, but we’re leaving anyway. Where’s the food sack? Let’s get a move on.”

  Only a few tortillas were left, curled leather flaps now. The two children chewed on them greedily and ate them without salt. I assured Vincent that Tonya Barge was fine, not really knowing. “She’ll be back by daylight. They’ll all be back. The show was a bust. It was a complete washout.” He said he wished now he had taken his chances with the storm rather than suffer here in this nest of fleas. Doc advised him to eat brewer’s yeast and plenty of it. “It comes out in your sweat, don’t you see, and repels them.” I promised Vincent that his sweetheart would appear very soon out of the mist, and I left him there with my knotted sock sulfur bomb and my earnest good wishes.

  So now there were seven of us in two cayucas, not counting the boatmen—Doc, Gail, Refugio, me, the two children, and Ramos, and we were off on another night ride in these mahogany dugouts. We could have used some name tags. Doc asked why we were traveling in the rain and when would we reach Likín.

  “We’ve already been to Likín,” I said. “We’re going home now. We’re leaving this garden.”

  “But I wanted to show Gail how the sun strikes the tau-cross window. The radiance.”

  “We’ll do that another time.”

  “But she wants to see the House of the Consecrated Bats and the hieroglyphic stairway. She is particularly interested in that. I promised to show her how easily you can read the dynastic information with my key. How it all flows down in a connected way in columns of twos.”

  “Maybe another time. We’re going home now.”

  “You won’t give us time to see anything! All these boats! You’re just a terrible person to travel with, Jimmy! All this mindless movement! It’s a sickness with you! I think you positively enjoy driving helpless people about!”

  We spoke in darkness above the engine noise, our faces unreadable. I explained that we had to get in ahead of the hippie brigade, who would be departing now and taking all the boats. Then there were the two children. They were homesick runaways who had been traveling with the hippies, an
d I knew that he, Doc, would want them restored to their families without delay. He said nothing more. I let it go at that.

  LaJoye Mishell didn’t know where she was or where she had been. Her lips were cracked and her skin was peeling and her arms and legs were criss-crossed with red scratches. She was numb. It was all the same to her whether Dan cut her heart out or she went back to Perry, Florida. The boy could tell us little more than his name, Serafín. Mostly he slept. Dan had picked him up, the girl told me, in a city with a long main street that led to a pretty little seaside park. The Mexican port town of Chetumál was my guess. She said it was later when the big woman, Beany Girl, left them, deserted the Jumping Jacks, she didn’t know why, at an island town on a clear green lake. That could only have been Flores, in Lake Petén Itzá in Guatemala.

  The storm had passed, but the river was still choppy. These cayuca boys had only one speed and that was flat out, which suited me. We were well sprayed. As the morning light came, I saw sparklets of gummy blood stuck to the hairs on my arms, from Dan’s face, and from Harvey, who had spit blood on me. I sloshed my arms about in the rushing water and washed my face too for good measure. But you can’t get those stains out of a cotton shirt. There was no fog on this first day of the new year. It was a day like other days. The sun came up full and warm. The greater light that rules the day. It would never scorch Dan again or dazzle his eyes. Wrong about so many things, he did get the terminal day right. Jan, too, and Harvey, and the other hairless thug. For them it was truly the end of this world.

  Yes, a strange business back there on that high terrace, and over so fast too. Shotgun blast or not at close range, I was still surprised at how fast and clean Dan had gone down. It was like dropping a Cape buffalo in his tracks at one go. I wasn’t used to seeing my will so little resisted, having been in sales for so long. We passed more ruins and a village here and there, but they were all on the Guatemala side.

  Everyone was hungry. Doc said, “Now you won’t even let us eat!” I didn’t permit a stop until we came to a settlement called Punta de Arenas, or Sandy Point, on the Mexico shore. It was a smaller Yorito, a Yoritito, an old chiclero camp, with the shacks now occupied by a few fishermen and squatters. In the woods behind it there was a minor ruin of four or five mounds, well picked over and too small even to have a name.