Gringos: A Novel

by Charles Portis

It was old President Díaz who said that nothing ever happens in Mexico until it happens.

I sat alone in a pew and recited the Lord’s Prayer, the King James version from Matthew, asking forgiveness of debts instead of trespasses.

Things had turned around, and now it was the palefaces who were being taken in with beads and trinkets.

Louise kept telling me the term “hippie” was out of date. She couldn’t tell me why. These words come and go, but why had that one been pulled? The hippies hadn’t gone away. There were even some beatniks still hanging around here and there in Mexico, men my age, still thumping away on bongos with their eyes closed, still lying around in their pads, waiting for poems to come into their heads, and sometimes not waiting long enough.

These were the real hippies, the viciosos, the hardened bums, kids gone feral.

still he moved like a bowlegged and cocky little third baseman.

He was a fat lady running after a bus.

Corn, potatoes, tomatoes, yams, chocolate, vanilla—all these wonderful things the Indians had given us. Whereas we Europeans had been over here for 500 years and had yet to domesticate a single food plant from wild stock.

Lund picked up on the theme of Indian superiority. He talked about their natural ways, how they were attuned to the natural rhythms of life, their natural acceptance of things, natural religion, natural food, natural childbirth, natural sense of place in the world, natural this, and natural that. All true enough, perhaps, but there was something a little bogus and second-hand about his enthusiasm. It was like some poet or intellectual going on and on about the beauties of baseball.

This was why I no longer worked with other people—Refugio, Eli, Doc, whoever. The great nuisance of having a debate every hour or so and taking a vote on the next move.

On the way back I paused at the zócalo to watch the Mexican flag being raised. There was a color guard and a drum and bugle platoon from the army barracks. I had seen it all many times but I could no more pass up a display like that than I could a car wreck with personal injuries.

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.

Mott always looked sprightly and pleased with himself, like Harry Truman at the piano,

He had whatever the opposite of paranoia is called.

If you have a truck your friends will drive you crazy.

Art and Mike said taking an intellectual woman into your home was like taking in a baby raccoon.

They were both amusing for awhile but soon became randomly vicious and learned how to open the refrigerator.

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.

“The yanquis took half my country in 1848.” “They took all of mine in 1865. We can’t keep moping over it.”

He spoke good English but his “yanquis” came out something like “junkies.”

Refugio spit between his legs to neutralize the evil. What he hawked up, this heavy smoker, was a viscous ball of speckled matter resembling frog spawn. I had put off telling him about Doc. Now I told him. His hands flew up in alarm. Cancer is cancer in Spanish, too, and the word is avoided in polite company.

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.

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.

I spoke a bit loud to the hippies. It was my experience that their attention wandered.

They weren’t all young dopers at this congreso, as Refugio called it. A middle-aged man with bangs came up to me. He wore a baggy shirt with a dazzling floral pattern, and of course sandals. Feet are all the better for a good airing out, and I would be the last one to deny it, but I think these people had something more than ventilation in mind. They were downright aggressive about displaying their feet to the world.

You couldn’t count on men to stick with a thankless job like that.

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.

Back in Mérida I did get to see the reunion of LaJoye Mishell and her father, Dorsey Teeter, a bony man of about my age in a pale blue suit made of some spongy looking cloth.

“I never taken a switch to her in her life but two or three times. She never did have a smart mouth.”

“It’s all taken care of, thanks anyway. We do a free one every now and then for tax purposes. You can pay for the Cokes.”

More art to be buried.

It took me some little time to compose the thing, in my pitiful hand. Writing is hard—it’s a form of punishment in school, and rightly so—and I stood paralyzed before all the different ways this simple message might be put.

You forget how heavy your head is.

You never question the veracity of the invaders.