Gringos Read Free Page A

cabinet.”
    â€œWell? What did you think?”
    â€œI knew you wouldn’t have much stuff. I knew it would be neat and noncommittal. Where are all your Mayan things?”
    â€œI don’t have any.”
    â€œYou must have one or two things. Some keepsakes.”
    â€œNo, I’m not a collector.”
    â€œYou just dig things up and sell them.”
    â€œI used to. A little recovery work, that’s all. People make too much of it.”
    â€œRudy says you’re not really a college-trained archaeologist.”
    â€œWell, he’s right about that. All I know is that the older stuff is usually at the bottom.”
    â€œYou know, I was looking at you today in the truck and you look better at a distance than you do up close. I mean most people do but in your case the difference is striking.”
    â€œI’m sorry to let you down.”
    â€œThat’s all right. Can you see anything out of this window?”
    â€œNot much. Just a wall back there and a little courtyard below. A pile of sand and a broken wheelbarrow.”
    â€œIf I lived here I would have a room with some kind of view.”
    â€œI did have one, up front, but I had to move out. I couldn’t get any sleep. The women wouldn’t leave me alone. They were out there at all hours of the night throwing pebbles against my window.”
    â€œUh huh. Don’t you wish.”
    â€œYou say that but here you are.”
    â€œNot for long. I’m way behind on Rudy’s tapes. I’ve still got a lot of typing to do tonight.”

YOU PUT things off and then one morning you wake up and say—today I will change the oil in my truck. On the way out I looked in on Frau Kobold. I threaded a needle for her. She was no seamstress but she did do a little mending. “You forgot my cakes,” she said. I told her, once again, that when I was out of town she should get Agustín, the boy, to fetch her cakes. “Agustín doesn’t show the proper respect,” she said. We had been through this before. It was true, she and her husband had once been in Fox Movietone News, but how was the boy to know that? He was polite. What did she expect of him?
    I stopped at the desk and gave Beatriz some money, and she promised to see that these confounded cakes were picked up and delivered. She and Fausto were listening to a soap opera on the radio. Fausto said they should put the story of his life on one of those shows and call it “Domestic Vexations” ( Vejaciones de la Casa ). He was suffering from a heaviness of spirit, an opresión, he said, because of troubles at home with his wife, all caused by her wicked sister, a chismosa , who had nothing better to do than spread poisonous tales.
    I was feeling fine myself, back now in my honest khakis, all cotton, stiffly creased and starched hard as boards. I sent them out to a woman who knew just the way I liked them finished. West of town there was a clearing or series of clearings in the dense scrub thicket that covers Yucatán. It was a garbage dump where I changed my oil, adding my bit to the mess. Wisps of greasy smoke rose here and there from smoldering trash. Fumaroles from Hell. The air was so foul here that the rats couldn’t take it. A city dump and not a rat to be seen. I parked on a sandy slope and while the oil was draining I shot grease into the fittings. Then I let the truck roll back, away from the oil puddle, so I could lie on my back in a relatively clean place and replace the drain plug and the filter. I poured oil into the filter before screwing it on, to prevent dry scuffing on start-up. It was a little trick I had picked up from a cab driver.
    A car drove up. Doors slammed. I saw legs and heard American voices.
    â€œWhat is this guy doing out here?”
    â€œAll by himself.”
    â€œLong-bed pickup with Louisiana plate. Some kind of sharecropper.”
    â€œWith a stupid accent. Like Red.”
    â€œI’ve seen