The Dog of the South

by Charles Portis

As I say, the birthday was my twenty-sixth, but for some reason I had been thinking throughout the previous year that I was already twenty-six. A free year! The question was: would I piddle it away like the others?

You could look on a dollar as a tip and you could also look on it as a small bribe. I was afraid one of these fellows might turn out to be a zealot like Bruce Wayne, whose parents were murdered by crooks and who had dedicated his entire life to the fight against crime. An attempted bribe, followed by the discovery of a pistol concealed in a pie carton, and I would really be in the soup. But nothing happened. They palmed those dollars like carnival guys and nobody looked into anything. The customs man marked my suitcase with a piece of chalk and a porter stuck the decals on my windows and I was gone. I was free and clear in Mexico with my Colt Cobra.

I was pleased too that I was in Mexico and not at home, but that works both ways because after sunrise I met Americans driving out of Mexico and they all appeared to be singing happy songs. I waved at children carrying buckets of water and at old women with shawls on their heads. It was a chilly morning. I’m a gringo of goodwill in a small Buick! I’ll try to observe your customs! That was what I put into my waves.

“I hope a wheel doesn’t fly off this thing,” he said. “I do too.” He worried a lot about that, a wheel flying off, and I gathered it had happened to him once and made an impression on him.

Melba had broken the transition problem wide open by starting almost every paragraph with “Moreover.” She freely used “the former” and “the latter” and every time I ran into one of them I had to backtrack to see whom she was talking about. She was also fond of “inasmuch” and “crestfallen.”