Gringos

by Charles Portis

  The skippers nosed the boats in around a jam of floating trees, brought downstream by the high water and stuck here at the point with a lot of dirty foam. The resident fishermen were at breakfast and made a hospitable fuss over us. There is always room for unexpected guests at a Mexican feed. We sat on a log and joined them for black coffee and some rice with scraps of pork mixed in, and peppers on the side. No fish. They trafficked in fish the way I trafficked in art. It was for other people. All the talk was about the storm, the big tronada, so unseasonable. The trees here were still dripping. Doc asked if they had come across any writings of the old ones, but they couldn’t understand a word he said. Refugio asked if any ídolos had been turned up lately from the mounds here. They laughed. “No, no, no. No hay nada aquí.” There ain’t nothing here. They had only three coffee cups, and we passed them back and forth. An old man, too old to work, just hanging around now, showed us he could still crack nuts with his teeth.

  Gail bathed the kids in the backwater and scraped up some clean clothes for them, shabby adult garments but dry enough. She found a jar of yellow salve in the camp and rubbed it on their sores. Poor little LaJoye Mishell had taken the worst of it. Her scalp was spotted with scabs where Dan had pecked her with his stick when she displeased him. She couldn’t learn how to answer him properly. Whatever she said was wrong.

  I could hardly keep my eyes open. This was the green and wet part of Mexico, and I liked it and this place in particular, Sandy Point. I liked the old man and the bushes covered with white blossoms like snow and the way the clearing opened up to the sky, some happy combination of things. I marked it down in my head as a good place to come back to for an extended stay. But then I liked the brown parts of Mexico, too, and I had marked down so many places, never to see them again. Refugio shook me awake and said we had best not linger here. He had just been told there was a soldier prowling about. The big soldado had come down the river a few days ago, a lone passenger in a cayuca. “They say he is a big clean fellow in fine boots with many badges on his fine uniform.” An officer then. He would want to see our papers. He would be curious. What was our business here on the frontera? We were an odd enough party, worthy of a report, and he would remember our guns and our faces if not our names. It was indeed time to leave this sandy hook.

  Refugio rounded up the crew. Doc was no longer speaking to me. We were already in the boats when the lone soldado appeared. It was Rudy Kurle in his military rig. I hadn’t even bothered to ask about him here. He and three local boys came out of the woods with a plastic dishpan full of dark honey, all clotted up with leaves and sticks and dead bees. They had robbed a bee tree. Rudy was chewing on a sticky comb. A gleaming strand of honey hung from his chin and swayed. Something new was attached to his belt. I thought I was familiar with all his field gear, but the pedometer was new to me.

  “Hey, Burns!” he said. “Is that you? What in the world are you doing here? Look! Do you know what this is? Nature’s most perfect food! A field expedient! Living off the land!”

  “I’ve been looking all over for you, Rudy.”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “You’ve had everybody out beating the bushes for you.”

  “What for? You should see how these little guys can climb. They don’t speak a word of English.”

  “You’ve put a lot of people to a lot of trouble. Did you know that? Why did you have to sneak off like that from Ektún? Can you tell me what you’re doing here?”

  “I’m here for an international conference if it’s any of your business, which I doubt. Now I’ll ask you a question. Do you have any idea of where you are?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  He laughed. “I mean where you really are. Right back there, Burns, is the site of an ancient city that you never heard of, known in our modern language as the Inaccessible City of Dawn. I’ve had it all to myself. There’s not much to see, you think, and then you realize that this is just the tip of an extensive conurbation. It goes back for miles in the jungle. Other people will be coming along soon, but I can’t discuss that. I can’t talk about our agenda. I can tell you that a compass needle does some very crazy things here. Mine won’t even move. There’s a powerful magnetic force field here and it’s highly localized. It’s an entry window. You’ve always underestimated me, Burns. You never dreamed that I would find an entry window all on my own. Did you know I was the first one to arrive? But I think now I may have gotten the day wrong.”

  “All right, get your stuff together. We’re going downstream to catch a train. We’re going back to Mérida.”

  “Oh, no. The other delegates will be along soon. I’ve already made a rough map of the central court, what I am calling the Promenade, and I’ve dug two latrines. A lot of these conference chumps won’t know the first thing about field sanitation. Right now I’m trying to clear some separated areas so we can have several workshops going on at once. It’s the hardest work I’ve ever done in my life. The brush is too wet and green to burn. We killed two snakes just this morning.”

  “Nobody’s coming, Rudy. They called it off. This is the wrong place anyway.”

  He finished off the honeycomb and licked his fingers. There were bee stings on his face. “Oh? Is that a fact? And just how would you know?”

  “The City of Dawn is a long way upstream on the other side of the river. You got the day right but you came down too far and you’re in the wrong country on top of that.”

  “How would you know? Who invited you?”

  “We just came from there. Ask any of these people. It’s all over. Your conference got rained out.”

  “You’re not a trained observer.”

  “No, but I could see that much. I was there.”

  “It’s odd how you keep turning up. Anyway I’m not going downstream. I left my trailer and my Checker Marathon back at Ektún.”

  “Your car is in Mérida. There’s nobody at Ektún. They’re all gone. Now get your things and let’s go. Louise is worried about you.”

  “Louise sent you out here?”

  “She thought you were lost.”

  “Me lost?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s funny how she keeps running to you with every little thing. You never even went to college. What’s that on your head? Who are all those people with you?”

  They were prisoners. I was dealing with prisoners, and here was one more. All I could think of was to keep my head count straight and get them back to the brig intact and sign them over to the turnkey and be done with them. As for my headgear, it was one of Doc’s gift handkerchiefs with the corners knotted, a skullcap, a Dan cap.

  Finally I got Rudy into the boat, after telling him about the shriveled corpse at Palenque. It was a mystery. I could make nothing of the thing and the police too were baffled. My friend Refugio believed it to be a kind of woodland elf, or in any case something less than human, or more. He, Rudy, might want to investigate the matter before other writers got wind of it, or before the remains were buried. I couldn’t promise anything. This might or might not be a quality contact. No wreckage was found near the body, as far as I knew, no melted fragments of an unknown alloy. But it seemed worth looking into, a little man with spindly limbs and yellow eyes and a great swelling globe of a head. I exaggerated the size of the head. Refugio confirmed my story, showing with his hands just how wide the creature’s feet were. He confirmed too that the yellow car was in Mérida. He himself had driven it there.

  How about it then? The body was there at Palenque to be claimed. Rudy only half believed us, and the big feet weren’t a selling point, as space aliens were known to be the daintiest of steppers. And yet he couldn’t take a chance. There might be something in this, and if so he would have to move fast. Other writers were pigs, to be sure, but worse, there were government agents to fear, so efficient in their neat business suits and gray Plymouths. They would spirit the body away to a hangar at some remote air base and then deny all knowledge of it with their fixed smiles.

  O
n the way back he made a nuisance of himself in the boat with his calisthenics. He flapped his arms and shook his fingers and twisted his head about and bicycled his legs up in the air. From now on I would work alone and travel alone. Once again I made that vow. He showed me some shiny black pebbles, vitrified, he said, from exposure to extremely high temperatures, as from rocket exhaust gases. I asked him how many miles he had registered on his pedometer. He said it had stopped working, as had the drive gear in his tape recorder. Humidity and rust and dirt, I suggested, but he said no, it was the magnetic blast that had jammed so much of his equipment. And somewhere up the river he had lost his signalling mirror and his giant naval binoculars.

  Rudy knew about the City of Dawn but not about the death of the sun. He thought he was coming to a high-level UFO convention at a reported landing site. He wouldn’t tell me how he knew about it or who was behind it, and I suspected he really didn’t know. Some of the people at Likín thought the event had to do with seed crystals or pyramid power or harmonic solar resonance, and for a few it was the end of the Mayan calendar, the end of the fifth creation, the end of time. Others were ignorant of the last-days theme and saw it as nothing more than a hippie festival in the jungle. They had come, one and all, I gathered, on the strength of rumor. Such information as they had about El Mago appeared to be hearsay too. It was just something going around, a buzz of magical words in the air, of big doings on the Usumacinta.

  For Dan it was to be a blood ceremony to appease the sun or something along that line, but then it seemed Dan was not the principal either. There was another El Mago behind him, according to LaJoye Mishell. She had never seen the other man but said she had heard Dan speaking to him on the telephone, or pretending to speak to someone. But all that came later, the El Mago business. They had been knocking around in Texas and New Mexico, these Jumping Jacks, stealing cars and running over dogs and peeping in windows at night and humming together. Then one day Dan told them that the correct path led through the deserts of Mexico. There they would clarify their thoughts. He said he had received an urgent long distance telephone call from the Gulf of Molo, with orders to go directly to Mexico and seek out a particular white goat. They made their way south, and it was at a hippie campground near a tropical river town (Tuxpan, perhaps) that they first heard of El Mago. There was something written about him in a paper or magazine that they were passing around, and all the hippies were talking about him. Dan became excited and said that he was now being directed by this El Mago. He had new orders. They were to proceed without delay to a coastal town called Progreso, where El Mago would meet them and lead them to a place called the City of Dawn. So they went to Yucatán. Along the way Dan made telephone calls, to this same El Mago, he claimed. But El Mago didn’t show on the beach at Progreso. They waited and waited. Someone stole their belongings, their plastic garbage bags. Dan then declared that he himself was El Mago, it had come to him in a dream. He himself would lead them to the City of Dawn with three yards of fine linen wrapped around his head. They would live there for a time under the roots of a giant tree called Ogon or Agon, with a white goat. It would be a time of fasting and purification. Then he would complete his historic mission.

  Well and good, but was there another El Mago? Who? Where? Had Dan killed him? LaJoye Mishell thought so. She said Beany Girl had dropped hints to that effect, this being their tiresome way of communicating. The Jumping Jacks didn’t go in much for plain talk, not even among themselves. But LaJoye Mishell couldn’t be sure and she admitted that Big Dan may simply have broken with his master and struck off on his own. If in fact there were a master. What was I to make of that truly long distance call from the Gulf of Molo? Who was at the other end? A diabolist? A joker? An insane alcoholic mother? Anyone at all? It was hard to know how much of the story to credit. I got it from a dazed little girl who thought she was traveling with a rock and roll band for the first few days after the Jumping Jacks picked her up. That was what she yearned for, a life on the road with rock musicians, though she had no wish to sing herself or otherwise make music. She just wanted to live with them and do their laundry and fetch and carry for them and pick bits of trash out of their hair, and so she ran away from home and jumped into the first old car she could find that was packed to the roof with hoodlums.

  IT WAS the first time Ramos had ever ridden on a train. Emmett was dead when we got back, and Alma was in the hospital. Art and Mike and Coney and McNeese had been turned out of their rooms by Señora Limón, their landlady, who said she was tired of looking at their faces. They had stayed on too long. She wanted to paint her walls a bright new color and put down some new linoleum with new geometric patterns and get an altogether fresh set of roomers to go with the other improvements. It was a reverse revolution, with the dictator kicking the people out. Louise had seen Wade Watson off on a flight to the States, or so she said. Eli and Mr. Nordstrom had been deported. The city of Mérida had swung big new green signs across the entrance highways, with new words of welcome and a new and greater population figure. The rush of events wasn’t quite over. There was another letter waiting for me from my secret enemy, and this one was shorter and sweeter than ever. “Just looking at you makes me want to vomit up all my food,” the message read, and it was signed “Alvarado.” A strangely feeble performance. I thought the writer must be growing bored with the game, or perhaps was simply too tired to think up any more really wounding words. A falling off in any case. Señora Limón? Was she weary of my face as well? Even sickened by it? Possibly, but I couldn’t see her taking the trouble to write this stuff and mail it. I hardly knew the woman.

  Nardo drove me down to Chetumál to return the boy Serafín to his family. He was pretty sure he could keep the Judicial Police out of it. Nardo knew the ropes. He was well connected. For a modest fee he could get your tourist visa renewed, saving you a trip to the border every six months. He worked it through some coyote in faraway Guadalajara, which I never understood—why the fixer should be there instead of in Mexico City. He told me again at some length about his football days at Bonar College, how the opposing teams would laugh and jeer at the Bonar boys when they pulled up to the stadium in two yellow school buses, with the coaches driving the buses. “But they didn’t laugh long. We went twenty-eight and two in three years.”

  We bought Serafín some toys. He rode in the back seat and blew bubbles into the air, nonstop, all the way to Chetumál, with his wire loop and his bottle of pink viscous stuff. Quivering pink transparent bubbles floated about inside Nardo’s car and broke against our ears.

  Serafín knew his city when he saw it, though he still couldn’t call the name. Nor did he know the name of his street. We drove back and forth around the downtown blocks, and he knew it when he saw it. The familiar buildings made him laugh. “¡Allí! ¡Allí! There!” He pointed to the dark doorway of a home tailor shop. That was where he lived. I saw two women inside, with the older one pumping away on the treadle of an ancient sewing machine. The floor was earth. Many straight pins must have fallen there and been lost forever.

  I left Nardo to handle it from there, leaving it to him, the licenciado, the lawyer, to cook up a convincing lie, advising him only to keep it vague and leave me and Refugio out of it. He said he would blame it on gypsies. This would be readily understood. A band of gitanos had taken the child away, deep into a wet forest, where, weeping bitter tears but unharmed, he was found by some kind hunters and rescued from a life of thievery and certain spiritual ruin.

  I waited. I walked up and down the main street of the old smuggling port, so different with its salty maritime air from Mérida, which itself was only twenty miles from the sea and might as well have been 200. Downtown I came across a Presbyterian church, which I had not noticed on previous visits. Some kind of Anglo-Scotto cultural overlap from nearby Belize, I supposed. You never know what you’ll run into in Mexico, John Knox in a guayabera shirt, or a rain of tadpoles in the desert, or a strangely empty plaza in the heart of a teeming city with not even a
bird to be seen. Once in Mazatlán I rounded a corner and literally ran into an old American movie actor I would have thought long dead. He was a big man who had played the boss crook in hundreds of cheap Westerns, the only character in coat and tie, directing all his dirty work out of the back room of a saloon. His name was usually Slade or Larkin. I apologized to the old crook. “One of these fast-walking guys, huh?” he said to me, in the old Larkin snarl. Here in Chetumál the traffic police, unlike other police in Mexico, were fitted out in U.S. Marine undress blues, but with a deep Latino swoop in the wire frames of their white hats. They were hard little Indios with no body fat. The air trembled with heat. I was dripping. They stood buttoned up under the sun all day in a cloud of engine fumes, and their starched cotton shirts remained crisp and dry.

  Someone was haranguing a crowd behind the bus station. There were gasps and cheers and applause. Surely the revolution wasn’t starting here in Chetumál. So far east? The straw catching fire at last? I shouldered my way in to get a look at this fellow who was inciting the people. What I found was a fast-talking young man in a T-shirt selling cake decorators. They were soft plastic tubes with adjustable nozzles. He squeezed pink icing onto white strips of cardboard, showing how you could make little rosettes and stars and hearts, and spell out birthday greetings. He was an artist with a sure hand, and a funny speaker, too, a fine salesman. “Add a personal touch to all your cakes!” he kept shouting at us, and he meant right down to our very smallest muffins.

  Nardo reported that all had gone well. The boy lived in the tailor shop with his mother and two older sisters, who had fallen upon him with kisses and thanks to God. They feared that Serafín had gone wading off the municipal beach and been swept away by the undertow or taken by sharks. The sea had swallowed up so many young ones. Nardo said the women were too overcome to ask many questions but that they did offer him money, whatever they had, which he refused. He told them it was nothing, de guagua. The kind hunters were only too glad to oblige, as was he, a representative of the PRI, the party of all the people. He made me wish I had been there to see them hugging brave little Serafín, loved all the more for his mal del pinto. So often I missed things, hanging back, always expecting the worst.