Gringos by Charles Portis Page B

if he knew a hunter named Acuatli who used to roam these parts with a 20-gauge shotgun slung across his back. He wore short rubber boots. Some years back this Acuatli had guided me and two Dutch photographers to Lake Perdido, over in Guatemala, where the Dutchmen took pictures of ducks and white egrets. We had no papers for Guatemala and no mule to carry our goods. We went up the San Pedro River and then followed an old chiclero trail overland. I made some money out of it but I wouldn’t want to take that hike again. I learned, too, that slipping up on birds requires the patience of a saint.
    The Lacondón said that Acuatli sounded like a Mexican name to him. By that he meant Nahuatl. He said in all his life he had never known a person named Acuatli. A few minutes later he told me that Acuatli was dead. It came to much the same thing. Sula had once told me that on the day the last Lacondón died, there would come a great earthquake, and a great wind that would blow all the monkeys out of the trees.
    I bought a small bag of cacao beans from these two. Lund came by and wanted to know about Rudy. “Who is that guy? Can you vouch for him?” Lund was a surveyor who was plotting the site with his alidade and rod. He seemed to come third in command, after Skinner. A white towel was draped around his head and fashioned into a burnoose.
    â€œRudy’s all right as long as you don’t cross him,” I said.
    That night there was shrimp again, with onions and peppers and potatoes in a makeshift paella. It was good and there was plenty of it. The mess tent was a blue nylon canopy with mosquito netting hanging down on all sides. We sat on folding chairs and ate off card tables, or rather Carta Blanca beer tables made of sheet metal. There were two hanging lights, powered by a generator. A little cedar bush had been decorated as a Christmas tree. An electric bug killer hung on a pole outside. Bugs flew to the blue light and were sizzled on a grid.
    A bath in the river and a good meal had perked up the diggers. Even Skinner was in a good mood. He held up a floppy tortilla and said that corn didn’t have enough gluten in it to make a dough that would rise. Still, heavy or not, the flat bread it made was good, and yet nobody seemed to know it outside Latin America and the southern United States. Corn, potatoes, tomatoes, yams, chocolate, vanilla—all these wonderful things the Indians had given us. Whereas we Europeans had been over here for 500 years and had yet to domesticate a single food plant from wild stock.
    The two females left in camp were Gail and Denise, both a little plump, with their brown hair cut short, so that you could see the backs of their necks, all the way up to where the mowed stubble began. Gail was the quiet one. I took her for a mouse and I was wrong about that. She prepared a tray of food to take to Dr. Ritchie.
    â€œNo, no,” said Skinner. “He’s coming. He’s up on his feet now. I just went over the work log with him. He’ll be along.”
    Rudy asked if they used a caesium magnetometer in their work. I was uneasy. This had an extraterrestrial ring to me. But no, there was such a device, something like a mine detector, I gathered, for sensing underground anomalies, buried stelae and the like, and they did have one here, though it was down. High tech or low, almost everything here was down. I was proud of Rudy for knowing about the thing.
    Dr. Ritchie came stumbling in, and Gail got up to help him along.
    Skinner said, “Here’s our warlike Harry now. Look, there’s a leaf on his shoe.”
    â€œGreetings, greetings. Anything left?”
    Gail seated him across from me and took off his hat and served him. He was trying hard to be chipper. “Sure smells good. We’re in your debt, Jimmy, for this fresh seafood.”
    â€œWe can pull out tonight if you want to, sir. I can have you in the hospital by midnight. No use putting it