Gringos by Charles Portis Page A

finders keepers. That was the best face I could put on it.
    Rudy set up his tent camper, not bothering to ask permission. He sat on the black boulder, for which the place was named, and spoke into his tape recorder. “An extremely short astroport oriented from northeast to southwest,” I heard him say. He stopped speaking as I approached but was in no way embarrassed.
    â€œA word to the wise, Rudy.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œMake yourself useful around camp and they may let you stay. They’re short-handed. But don’t make a lot of suggestions. Stay out of their hair.”
    â€œI know how to behave myself. How far is it to the big river?”
    â€œNot far. Just remember, you’re a guest here.”
    I walked out into the woods about a hundred yards, where there was an oblong structure standing alone, a temescal , a Mayan steam bath. Refugio and Flaco Peralta and I had punched a hole in the floor of this house years ago. We found nothing. Actually I lost something, my Zippo lighter, smoothest of artifacts, which rode a little heavy in the pocket. Some arqueo might turn it up in a hundred years, and with acid and a strong light bring up the inscription—CHAMPION SPARK PLUGS. I noticed that the carved panel above the door had been cut away with a chain saw. You could see the tooth marks in the stone. As soon as I got out of the business, people started buying everything. Slabs of stone.
    There was a beating of wings. A flight of bats came pouring out of the doorway in panic, right into my face. No, they were birds. Swifts. Well named. They nested here but their life was in the air. They ate, drank, bathed, and even mated on the wing, if that can be believed. This aerial life was what the hippies were after. I had tried for it, too, perhaps, in my own way, but with me it was all a bust. I never got off the ground. I peered inside and saw that our pitiful hole was almost filled again with debris and guano. We had dug for treasure in a steam room, fools that we were. It took Doc Flandin and Eli to show us the ropes.
    Back at the clearing Skinner was in another rage. “Who keeps moving this?” he said. It was a drafting table. No one confessed. I watched the excavation work at the base of Structure I. Burt was in charge of the job. His people had cut a ragged opening in the thing, such as I had never seen made by professionals. It was a bomb crater. They had broken through the limestone facing and were now into the rubble filler. They were going for the heart.
    Mapping then, fine, and a certain amount of poking about and collecting of surface finds, nobody could object to that, certainly not me, but were they really authorized to make such a breach? I suspected them of exceeding the terms of their permit.
    â€œJust a probe,” Burt said. “We’re going to put it back the way it was.”
    Some probe. I wondered if Dr. Ritchie knew about this. Well, it was no business of mine. I was in no position to object. Refugio and I would have used a backhoe if we could have gotten one into the woods. And they weren’t going to find anything, just more rubble, perhaps the wall of a smaller, earlier pyramid. They had started too high above the base and they didn’t have the labor or the equipment to do the job right.
    The crew, a bedraggled lot, weren’t even screening the spoil. They were two gringo boys, and two Lacondón Indians in long white cotton gowns, with bulging eyes and long black hair. These Lacondones were the last of the unassimilated lowland Maya. You didn’t often find them working for hire. For what little cash they needed they sold souvenir bow-and-arrow sets for children that broke on the first pull, or the second. Only a handful of them were left, straggling about in the jungle, living in small clans. They burned copal gum as an aromatic offering to the old gods and kept to the old ways as best they could.
    The younger one had some Spanish, and I asked