Gringos

by Charles Portis

  Louise brought out the shoebox and unrolled Emmett’s Jaina figurine from the towel. We had decided that Beth should have it for the niños museum. She touched her fingertips to the nose and lips of the terracotta woman. She was delighted. “Such a delicate face. It looks like the portrait of a real person. Is this genuine?”

  “Yes, and extremely valuable,” I said. “Don’t leave it out at night.”

  “What do I put on the card?”

  “Put down ‘Royal Lady. Island of Jaina, off Campeche. A.D., say, 722.’ And put down that it was a gift from Emmett.”

  “I believe you’re feeling better.”

  “Much better, yes, thanks to Soledad and Louise.”

  It was Art and Mike who called Bollard the short-faced bear. They knew all about the book, of course, you couldn’t spring anything like that on them, and besides, they had more interesting news of their own. Rudy had left town, for good, they believed. He had pulled stakes and was off on a lecture tour in his Checker Marathon, minus the camping trailer, which Refugio was still holding against the fee for his search services. I had heard not one word about this from Louise.

  They showed me a clipping from a Mexico City newspaper telling about a speech Rudy had given at the big federal prison there. The report identified him as “a well-known explorer and científico and authority on platillos voladores, from Penasilvana E.U.A.” He had displayed “the well-preserved corpse of an unfortunate invader from the stars,” and had brought to his audience “una relación de alegría y llenura.” A message of joy and fullness, that is. The landing site in Chiapas, he had told the Mexican convicts, was marked by a spot of scorched vegetation and a circular arrangement of white pebbles and black pebbles, which he believed to be a form of digital computer. One or two crew members of the spacecraft had died there, perhaps choked by toxic earth air, and all that remained of them was “a cheese-like residue,” this matter being on display as well, in a glass jar.

  Rudy then had lost no time in making a run to Palenque and claiming the pygmoid cadaver in the police shed. Art and Mike said the tiny old man was now wrapped in aluminum foil and wearing a tight-fitting silvery rubber cap, something like a girl’s bathing cap, with a strap under the chin, and that Rudy was carrying him around in something like a trombone case, with the head nesting neatly in the bell end. They knew nothing about the big feet and couldn’t tell me how he had managed to pack them. His first speech, his first public showing of the invader, had gone off well before an assembly of students here at the University in Mérida. Professor Camacho Puut had introduced him in a guarded way. Art and Mike were there and they said Rudy had good stage presence, made a good appearance in his belted safari jacket, that the lecture was no worse than other lectures and didn’t go on too long—not too much fullness. But they wondered at this foolish desire of his to distinguish himself in the world.

  I was pleased for him myself. Erich von Däniken had never found the least bit of extraterrestrial flesh, as far as I knew, and here was Rudy Kurle with a complete captain all his own, if a small and very old one, unless it was an old Indio, or the king of the elves. Rudy was well launched on the career he had dreamed of, a life at the lectern, of captive listeners in jails and schools, of long days and nights spent hanging around the hallways of public buildings, radio stations and television studios, a life of confabulation. But why had Louise, such a ready talker, been mum about all this? Weren’t they a team? Why had she not gone with him?

  “Because I didn’t want to go,” she said.

  There had been a row. She refused to give details, other than to say Rudy had gone off with all their papers and tapes. She took up an actress-like pose at the window with her back to me, not very effective, theatrically, here in the trailer, and I thought she was going to say something like, “My marriage is on the rocks, Jimmy.” But she just stood there in unusual silence. That night I told her I was deeply grateful for all the nursing care and that I knew she must have a lot of things to catch up on back at her own place, back at the Casitas Lola.

  “I don’t live there now,” she said. “This trailer is just as much mine as it is yours. More mine really. I have a moral right to it and yours is merely legal. On three separate occasions Emmett promised me that I was to have the Mobile Star. I’ve already moved out of the Casitas and got my deposit back. This is where I live now.”

  She held up a spare key Emmett had given her, to our one and only door.

  “Well, I don’t see how you can do that, Louise. I mean you’re welcome but I don’t see how you can live here. A married woman.”

  “Rudy is not my husband, he’s my brother. Everybody in town knows that now but you. Beth has known it all along. Emmett knew it. I can’t believe you’re so dense.”

  I hadn’t seen this coming but I knew it to be true at once. I could see the faint but real resemblance now, something about the sunken blue eyes. She wore no ring on her finger, and I had seen no photograph of bride and groom stuffing hunks of wedding cake into each other’s mouths, with their arms linked and their eyes goggling at the camera. The wedlock pretense was Rudy’s idea, she said. He had important stenographic work for her to do at home, and with this arrangement she wouldn’t be distracted from her duties by male callers. It would offer too a kind of flimsy protection against all those flirting Mexicans who would be inflamed by her sandy ringlets and make wet kissing noises at her on the street. I wondered how she got her deposit back from Lola. Other questions came to mind. What would become of my privacy?

  “Your brother then. Well. I wouldn’t have guessed that.”

  “No, of course not. You can’t see things right under your nose. You never listen to what people are saying. You think you’re so smart and you don’t know what’s going on half the time. You call yourself a salesman and it takes you two years to find out what anybody’s name is. You won’t confide in anybody. You won’t tell people anything and that’s why they don’t tell you things.”

  “We’ll talk about this later. When I’m feeling stronger.”

  “I’d rather talk about it now and get it settled.”

  “We’ll see how it works out. We’ll sit down and have a long talk about it when I’m feeling better.”

  “No, I’d rather not put it off. I’ve thought this over, and it can only work out in one of two ways. You can pack your things and go back to Fausto’s place or you can stay here. But if you stay on here with me, it will have to be marriage. I’m not interested in setting up light housekeeping with you. Not with you healthy. Now there it is and you’ll just have to make up your mind. You’re badly mistaken if you think we’re going to live here together in some common-law arrangement.”

  Here was another grenade, blinding white phosphorus this time. Until this moment the thought of marrying into the Kurle family had not entered my head. Rudy would be my brother-in-law, and there was another one back in Pennsylvania named Glenn Ford Kurle. Why would she pick me? What was this weakness Louise had for older men with red faces? Or was it that she saw me as going with the trailer, like the butane bottle? I had expected marriage to arrive in a different way, not so suddenly, and yet here we were together, already settled in at home with our Crock-Pot and our sectional plastic plates, trisected with little dividers to dam off the gravy from the peas, and already we were having a domestic scene of the kind I had heard about but which I thought came later. She wanted to talk about it some more. Louise enjoyed extended discussion. She had dropped out of the Textile Arts Club because they didn’t have enough staff meetings to suit her, and the ones they had were too short. I told her we would see how it worked out and have a long talk about it at another time.

  In a day or two I was on my feet again and able to creep about. Doc sent a boy over with a message, a command. Bring my field notes back right away. His dusty notebooks that I never wanted in the first place. Louise helped me get the box into the truck and we set off for Izamál. As we turned onto the Naroody block, I saw a white-haired old man unlocking t
he door at Foto Naroody.

  “Look, there’s Naroody.”

  Louise said, “That’s not Naroody.”

  “Who is it then?”

  “I don’t know but it’s not Naroody. Some cousin or employee. He’s nothing at all like Naroody.”

  She claimed she had spoken to Naroody on several occasions and had even gotten money out of him for some charity or other. She claimed further that she was on these same familiar terms with yet another old man, El Obispo, who responded to no one. They had chatted. She had given him a pocket knife. His name was Arturo. This irritated me, being told of such things here on my own ground by a relative newcomer. But she knew nothing of how he changed himself into a dog at night. She thought I was making it up.

  Already she had suggestions about home improvements. Would it be possible to get a telephone installed in the trailer? How about putting up a patio awning and buying some lawn chairs? Or how about putting wheels back on the trailer and going off on a trip to Costa Rica together? There was a thought. In my mind the Mobile Star was part of the landscape, a rooted object, and it hadn’t occurred to me that the thing might be set rolling again. It hadn’t occurred to me that Louise might have some good ideas. I had been unfair to her, unless this was the only one she was ever going to have. She had called me a bum and a vandal and an enemy of the human race. I thought she was slightly insane, and of a bone-deep lunacy not likely to be corrected by age. And yet we were comfortable enough together. We didn’t get on each other’s nerves in close confinement.

  Doc said I could keep the twenty-two handkerchiefs but he wanted Gail to go over the notebooks and transcribe them, put them in order. “It was providential the way that girl was sent to me. She is perhaps my greatest find. Working is fun again. We have a lot of fun working together in the radio. Do you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to buy Gail a pretty red car to drive around town in. She wants an open car.”

  “Working in the radio?”

  “In the studio, I mean.” He dipped his hands into the box and stirred the notebooks about. “A lot of gold here. A good part of my life. How far did you get? Toward consolidating my notes?”

  “Not very far.”

  He treated us to lunch, if that’s the word, outdoors by the pool with Gail and Mrs. Blaney. Lorena the maid served some vegetable mess. Doc was on a new health program and so everybody else had to eat stewed weeds too. There was no meat on the table and no bread and butter and no salsa, red or green, and nothing to drink but mineral water. We could no longer smoke in his presence. He had thrown away his pipes. It was like eating with Hitler. Mrs. Blaney was watchful. She had her position to think of and she was still trying to take the measure of this plump Gail person who had moved into Don Ricardo’s house and who dared to call him Dicky. Mrs. Blaney was wary, smiling, very quick to pass the salt and pepper to Gail. She no longer had the upper hand, and I felt sorry for her.

  Doc pestered me with questions. He had heard some things about Dan from Refugio, though not the part about the shooting and killing. He thought that Danny, as he called him, had grudgingly turned the two kids over to us after a bit of palaver. But who was the fellow? What was he up to? What were his teachings?

  “I don’t know. I have no idea.”

  “But what are you saying? A prophet with no teachings? Look at what you’re saying. Cuco has informed me that the fellow preys on children. A corrupter of children. A man with no regard or respect for innocence. All right. Then you go on to say that he has followers of a sort. Now I don’t know about you but to me that implies teachings of some kind.”

  “I’m not saying he didn’t have any teachings, I’m just saying I don’t know what his teachings were.”

  “Excuse me, maybe I’m stupid today, but I fail to see how he can lead people around like that without some kind of teachings. Tell me this. Does he wear magnificent robes?”

  “No.”

  “Just what was his business at Likín? Why should he go there, of all places?”

  “I don’t know that either.”

  “Can you tell us anything about his ritual? Were there lowland Mayan elements, for instance?”

  “As far as I could see, no, none.”

  “To the best of your limited knowledge, that is.”

  “Very limited.”

  “Yes, that’s the difference between us, you see. The complacent mind and the inquiring mind. You couldn’t trouble yourself to ask a few simple questions. I would have given this Danny a grilling he wouldn’t soon forget. I would have held his feet to the fire and shown him up for what he is. I would have dealt with him. You couldn’t be bothered.”

  “We were in a hurry and I really didn’t care what his teachings were.”

  “Too lazy to get involved,” said Louise. “Character flaw.”

  “Exactly,” said Doc. “Here’s what it boils down to then. You want us to believe that this fellow has no natural gifts. A brute without the least trace of nobility in his features. A man with no winning ways, no message, no teachings whatsoever. And yet somehow he manages to gain ascendancy over these people. Correct me if I’m wrong.”

  He couldn’t get a rise out of me and so he did the next best thing. What better way to annoy all the guests than to lecture them on ancient Indian ritual, on Hunab Ku or Itzam, the great lizard god, on the Chacs and the Bacabs and the red goddess. Soon he was lost in that thicket himself, trying to describe a forgotten religion that was thought to be formless, creedless and without moral content. It was worse than a pottery talk. Even those who professed an interest in the subject were finally stupefied by it. It was a teeming and confused throng, the Maya pantheon, and no one had ever sorted it out in a very convincing way. Doc certainly wasn’t going to do it here over lunch. Art and Mike had given up on it long ago. Their current theory was that everything about pre-Columbian America was completely misunderstood.

  I took Gail aside after lunch and asked her about the Olmec jade. As long as we were calling in gifts I thought I would have a go at it. The little green idolo was worth several thousand dollars, I told her, and it wasn’t Doc’s to give away. There had been a misunderstanding. It was on loan. The piece really belonged to Refugio, and I knew she would want to see it returned.

  But she no longer had it, or so she said. The thing had disappeared. She had last seen it in the hands of LaJoye Mishell Teeter. Perhaps the girl had stolen it. “I’ve looked and I’ve looked. Such a beautiful work too. I’m so sorry.”

  I said it didn’t matter. Good riddance. Let it remain in the piney woods of Florida. Art and Mike thought all the virtue had probably gone out of it anyway, the spirit fled, as with objects in museums. I said to her that Doc still had a bad gray look, for all his sparkle and new plans, and I urged her to press on with the big book and get it done de prisa. Time was short. Get on with it. That was my advice to Gail.

  “It’s going to be quite a job,” she said.

  Quite a job. This peculiar girl gave out even less information than I did. She was humoring me, almost defying me to make some comment on the new situation here. The water in the pool was still and no leaf trembled on the bushes. It was a warm day in January. She wore a loose flowery housedress to show that she was at home, that she was receiving guests at her home. She was at perfect ease. I suspected that she still had the jade. I couldn’t be sure. This pool and this big house would soon be hers, too. A clean sweep for Gail. While I wound up with the handkerchiefs and the trailer. She was dedicated to bennee, all right. Well, she had her way to make in the world, too, just like the rest of us, but I thought she was lying through her teeth and still had Refugio’s jade man. I was pretty sure of it, if not absolutely sure, and now I wondered too about Denise’s lost contact lenses at the Holiday Inn and how they came to be lost.

  “Yes, but I believe you can handle the job, Gail, if you put your mind to it.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “I know you can. By the way, you owe me some money for gasoline.”

/>   “What? Oh, I see, you’re charging me for the ride. I didn’t realize. How much does it come to?”

  “Let’s say twenty dollars.”

  “So much? And you want it now? This minute?”

  “If it’s convenient.”

  “My purse is upstairs in our bedroom. But I tell you what. Maybe this will do. That should cover all expenses, don’t you think?”

  The loose dress had two pockets and from one of them she had taken a heavy silver coin, badly out of round and worn down smooth as a river pebble. It was an old Spanish dollar, a piece of eight. She had found the trunk in the attic. Already she had been into Doc’s coin hoard with her plump little starfish hands.

  “Yes, this will settle it.”

  “I should think so. Eight reales. It will make a nice memento for you, too, from Dicky’s last entrada.”

  I was sure of it now—she still had the jade. LaJoye Mishell was no thief. Well, let Gail keep the thing and much good may it do her. Or maybe I would speak to Doc about it later. Refugio came out of it well enough anyhow, with his big pipe sale and the pop-top trailer that he claimed as a forfeit. The shooting out in the woods became a pivotal date for him, replacing another memorable occasion—That time we changed out the ring-and-pinion gears. It made him laugh every time he thought of it. What a filthy knuckle-busting job. I wouldn’t do that again if you gave me the bus. We were repairing the differential of an old school bus. The shop manual said it was a six-hour job for one man and it took Refugio and Valentín and me three days. But now the ring-and-pinion comedy had given way to—That time we killed the pagans. Now Refugio would place some event by saying, “It was before that time we killed the pagans,” or, “It wasn’t long after that night we killed the pagans in the rain.”