This preoccupation with wheels, or the lack thereof, is one of the leitmotifs that Portis uses to anchor his stories in the day-today that most of us inhabit. The difference between Portis and all the other writers eager to make fiction out of life at the K mart is his fractured, what’s-wrong-with-this-picture take on things. When Norwood Pratt journeys to New York City from his home in Ralph, Texas, among the people he encounters are some “shirtless Puerto Rican boys … roasting marshmallows over a smoldering mattress” on the sidewalk: “‘You boys having a big time?’
" ‘It’s a campfire,’ said one. He was wearing huge comic sunglasses and had his head tilted back to keep them on. He offered Norwood a blackened marshmallow from the end of a straightened-out coat hanger.
" ‘I believe I’d rather have one right out of the sack. They ain’t gonna taste like anything cooked over hair’.”
Portis has always enjoyed a healthy word-of-mouth reputation among readers, but the literary establishment’s reaction might be summed up by one scholar who, when he heard Portis’s name, said, “He’s sort of a Louis L’Amour, isn’t he?” John Wayne in an eye patch may have been the worst thing that ever happened to a book about which the novelist Robert Crichton once said, “If a European intellectual asked me what he should read to understand what goes on in the people here I’d tell him to read ‘True Grit’.” Maybe Portis is too funny to be taken seriously, maybe his loopy plots fail to teach enough uplifting lessons. Whatever the reasons, critics have never known what to make of Portis’s original, contrary voice.
Maybe no more. “Gringos” is hi-test Portis. It concerns a community of footloose Americans in the Mexican town of Merida, on the Yucatan peninsula. Deadbeats, outlaws, burnt-out cases, old hippies, astral nuts, crystal gazers, tomb looters, these expatriates are like a drawer of odd socks: “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.”
Jimmy Burns is just one of this gang, an odd-jobs guy who makes his way selling salvaged junk, tracking down runaways, doing what needs doing to earn a more or less honest dollar. For all his shiftlessness, Burns is good company. Unlike the other gringos, he won’t traffic in self-deception. Wry, deprecating honesty is his trademark. When his authority on Mayan relics is challenged–“Rudy says you’re not a college-trained archeologist”–he replies, “Well, he’s right about that. All I know is that the older stuff is usually on the bottom.”
When first met, Burns is marking time like the rest of the gringos: “Another year gone and I was still scratching around on this limestone peninsula … Once again there had been no scramble among the hostesses of Merida to see who could get me for Christmas dinner.” Then, in a scene as scary as Fred C. Dobbs’s encounter with the bandits in “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” he butts heads with the Jumping Jacks, a gang of cultists run by a fat biker called Big Dan, sort of a Jim Jones with tattoos and a beer belly. “Big Dan looked like a wrestling act, beef gone to fat, but with his costume not quite worked out.”
Burns trails the Jumping Jacks for most of the novel, looking for a runaway he’s spotted among them. But his motives, though mostly mercenary, are mixed. He’s also searching for his friend Rudy Kurle, a space-invaders theorist lost in the jungle looking for the runways of the gods.
Like Portis’s other novels, this one has a ramshackle feel, like an old house with curious, oddly pleasing additions poking out here and there. You don’t read them so much as you inhabit them for a while. Only this time Portis works his usual alternation between aimlessness and purposefulness with a deftness not seen since “True Grit.” Mostly he permits Jimmy Burns to meander along in his cockeyed fashion. But underneath the comic ambling lies a bedrock melancholy. Again and again, death comes calling. An old archeologist falls dead at the dinner table. Then Old Emmett goes. And Frau Kobold. But death comes most frighteningly near the end of the book, from the twin barrels of a shotgun. Mortality hones the anomie off the gringo life, and gives this story a spooky edge.
All of Portis’s protagonists are questing for something. Mattie Ross wants revenge for her father’s murder. Norwood Pratt wants the 70 bucks owed him by his Army buddy Joe William Reese. Ray Midge wants the satisfaction of getting his Ford Torino back. But the best of all, Jimmy Burns, just wants to lay claim to some peace of mind. “Gringos,” by far, is Portis’s most inward-turning book, a story of a grownup trying to grow up, to keep it together with some dignity. Watching him pull it off is one of the finest pleasures afforded by any novel in a long time.
