Gringos: A Novel

by Charles Portis

She wanted to go to the cathedral, but I thought that was too grand for us and I drove instead to a lesser church beside a small park.

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.

Jerry said he had no manners. Art and Mike went further and said he had no soul, or at most the soul of a bug, an ant-size portion of the divine element.

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

“No, you wouldn’t, would you? You don’t want us to make a quality contact. Rudy finally makes a quality contact and you resent it. You’re jealous of him. You’ve always been envious of his field equipment and his City Planning degree, and for some reason I don’t understand you’re trying to stop him from becoming a distinguished author and lecturer. It’s small-minded people like you who make it so hard for the rest of us. You’re jealous of anybody and everybody who’s working on the frontiers of knowledge.”

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.