Gringos: A Novel

by Charles Portis

Louise was a good girl. Some days she went out into the countryside plucking bits of blowing plastic from bushes so the goats could get at the leaves.

Louise and Rudy were graduates of some college in Pennsylvania and had come down here to investigate flying saucer landings. Her degree was in Human Dynamics.

Rudy had one, a dual degree, he said, in City Planning and Mass Communications. First he would build the city and then he would tell everybody about it in the approved way.

Emmett lived in a trailer park out by the airport. I took a back road and ran over a dead snake on the way. Louise turned on me. “You just drove right over that snake.” “That was an old broken fan belt.” “It was white on the bottom. Do you think I don’t know a snake when I see one?” I t...

stirred the maple flavoring into a can of corn syrup. It turned out well enough though I believe I could have gotten a more uniform blend if I had first heated the syrup.

The dinner was good—salty and sweet and puffy and greasy all at once.

Emmett said, “My life is over, for all practical purposes. I no longer have enough money to keep a woman.”

He looked back on his long bright empty days in Mexico and said he had lost his honor over the years. He hadn’t noticed it going. Small rodents had come in the night and carried it away bit by bit on tiny padded feet.

I dozed. I had work to do, bills to pay, an overdue delivery job in Chiapas, but not today.

Emmett read a detective novel. He and Frau Kobold read them day in and day out, preferably English ones and none written after about 1960. He said the later ones were no good. The books started going wrong about that time, along with other things. I put the watershed at 1964, the last year of silver coinage. For McNeese it was when they took the lead out of house paint and ruined the paint. I forget the year, when they debased the paint.

YOU PUT things off and then one morning you wake up and say—today I will change the oil in my truck.

was a rough, homemade job done with a pin and spit and burnt match-heads.

Minim was in the Bowling Hall of Fame. He was a retired bowler and sports poet, and he maintained that bowling was held in even lower esteem than poetry, though it was a close call.

In the States it was acceptable to read newspapers and magazines in public, but not books, unless you wanted to be taken for a student or a bum or a lunatic or all three. Here you could read books in cafés without giving much offense, and even write them.

The new medicine worked better than the old medicine, and the only side effects so far were blurred vision, hair loss, vertigo, burning feet, nightmares, thickened tongue, nosebleed, feelings of dread, skin eruptions and cloudy urine.

Who was Humboldt anyway and how was it that the pre-Columbian stuff fell short in his eyes? No soul? Too cluttered? Too stiff? What? You wonder what people have in mind when they speak with confidence on such tricky matters.

I wanted to drink from the old spring again. I would press my face into the pool and open my eyes underwater and clarify my thoughts. It might help. For Doc everything came down to a cube. One night at Camp Pendleton I heard Colonel Raikes say that the key to it all was “frequent inspections.”