Gringos by Charles Portis

that your book was finished. Now you tell me this.”
    â€œThe book is coming along, don’t worry. I’m still at it. Answering a lot of questions that nobody has asked. If I had had any decent staff support, the thing would have been finished long ago. But you know, I made a late discovery. Working fast suits me. It reads better. I learn to write on my deathbed, you see. The schoolboys won’t like it but by God they’ll have to take notice this time. Oh yes, I know what they say. ‘What can you expect? He’s French! Brilliant but unsound! I can’t keep up with him! This old flaneur has too many ideas! Too many theories!’ It’s my brio, Jimmy, that they can’t stomach. My verve. It sets their teeth on edge. I know how these drab people think and I know exactly what they say about me.”
    It was worse than that. They didn’t say anything. The academics, or schoolboys, as he called them, didn’t even take the trouble to dispute his theories. The papers he submitted to scholarly journals were returned without comment. He was never invited to the professional conclaves, other than local ones that the Mexicans sponsored. Mexicans weren’t quite as rigid as the Americans and the English and the Germans in these matters of caste.
    It seemed to me that he deserved better treatment. Perhaps not complete acceptance, or the centerfold spread in National Geographic that he so longed for, but something, a nod in the footnotes even. His great find, the manikin scepter at Seibal, was widely published but never attributed to him. And it was Flandin, with two or three Mexicans, who had argued years ago that it was the Olmecs and not the Mayas who had invented glyph writing and the bar-and-dot numeral system and the Long Count calendar, when American and English scholars—Thompson himself—refused to hear of such a thing. Being prematurely right, and worse, intuitively right, he got no credit for it. Rather, it was held against him. His field work was good and his site reports were, in my lay opinion, well up to professional standards. No brio here; they were just as tiresome to read as the approved ones. His crank claims and speculations made up only about twenty percent of his work but it was a fatal sufficiency. Or say thirty percent to be absolutely fair.
    â€œWhen do I get to see the glyph chapter?”
    â€œIn good time. Camacho Puut is looking it over now. But we’re not going to talk about the book.”
    I wondered what we were going to talk about. Lorena brought us a pot of coffee and some strawberries in heavy yellow cream. Doc asked her if she would go to his office and bring back his— pistola —I thought he said. Lorena was puzzled, too, and then seemed to work it out. Doc spoke fluent Spanish, but it was incorrect and badly pronounced.
    â€œI’m worried about Camacho Puut,” he said. “I do believe the old fellow is taking some dangerous narcotic drug.”
    â€œOh come on. The Professor?”
    â€œYou weren’t here. He was sitting right there. I was reading my revised prologue to him and his head was lolling and he could hardly keep his eyes open. It’s none of my business if he wants to kill himself with dope but I do think he might consider his family and his own dignity. What about Alma? Have you seen her?”
    â€œI saw her this morning.”
    â€œIs she doing any better?”
    â€œAbout the same.”
    â€œDon’t say anything but I’m leaving her a small annuity. A little something to help with the rent.”
    â€œShe won’t accept it.”
    â€œI’m rigging it up so she’ll think it came from Oskar’s work. But keep it under your hat.”
    â€œDid you ever work with Oskar Kobold?”
    â€œNo, never. We hardly spoke. He was an artist of the first rank, I grant him that, but he couldn’t get along with anybody. An awful man. He treated Alma like a