Gringos by Charles Portis Page B

fear. Any doctor can make a mistake. Funerals were carried out promptly here, and usually there was no embalming. Some morticians offered same-day service. Harlan Shrader died one morning in his hotel room, and we buried him before the sun went down, in a coffin too narrow for his shoulders, and they weren’t broad. The box was made of thin pine boards and six-penny nails. Huerta charged us $40 for everything, including the grave plot, and he even put some cowboy boots on Harlan’s limp feet. I don’t know how he did it, slit them perhaps. We found them in Harlan’s closet, but I think they must have belonged to some former occupant. In life Harlan tramped around town in threadbare canvas shoes with his toes poking out, and in death he became a member of the equestrian class. Mott and I paid Huerta. Shep applied to the Veterans Administration for the $250 burial allowance but said he never got it.
    â€œNot a word about this to anyone,” said Doc. “I know I can count on you, Jimmy. Now I want you to go up to the attic. The black steamer trunk. It’s not locked. Open it up and you’ll see a pasteboard box tied up with rope. It’s marked notes. I want you to bring it down here.”
    I went up to the attic, an oven, just below the round cupola, and made haste to find the thing. It must have been 150 degrees Fahrenheit in that room. While poking around in the trunk, I came across a blue case with gold lettering. It held a Carnegie Medal for heroism and a citation on thick paper telling how young Richard Flandin, a grocer’s delivery boy, had rescued an old lady and her dog, both unconscious, from a burning house in Los Angeles. Quite a little man. Doc in knickers. Sweat dripped from my nose and made splotches on the soft paper. Great boaster that he was, he had never told me about this. Had he forgotten? It served to remind me, too, that he was an old Angeleno, American to the bone, for all his French posturing. In a rare moment of weakness, he confessed to me one night that he was only five years old when his widowed mother made the move from Paris to California with him and his sister. He saved coins. I found a cigar box filled with silver pesos, and I bounced one, nice and heavy, on my hand. It was once one of the world’s standard currencies, like the Spanish dollar, or piece of eight, and now a single peso was all but worthless. It was worth less than a single cacao bean, which the Mayans had used for money.
    My first improvement to this house would be some roof turbines. Clear out all of this hot air. Would I allow Mrs. Blaney to stay on? Perhaps, but with much reduced authority and visibility.
    The pasteboard box was packed with Doc’s old notebooks. They were engineers’ field notebooks, with yellow waterproof covers and water-resistant pages, each sheet scored off with a grid pattern. On the inner sides of the covers there were printed formulas for solving curves and triangles. I lugged it down to the bedroom and began untying the ropes. I thought he wanted the notes for reference. I thought this had something to do with his book.
    â€œNo, bind it back up,” he said. “They’re yours, Jimmy, to do with as you please. All my early field notes. I want you to have them.”
    His notes? Not the house then. I was to receive instead this dusty parcel of data. Unreadable scribbling and baffling diagrams with numbers, and here and there the multi-legged silhouette of a bug smashed between the pages. Did the stuff have any value at all? It was like being told that you had just inherited a zircon mine, unless zircons are quarried, I don’t know. I was caught up short. I was at a loss.
    â€œThis is very good of you, Doc. I wonder though. Shouldn’t valuable material like this go to some library or museum?”
    â€œThey had their chances. You’re not pleased?”
    â€œYes, of course I am, a great honor, but you know how I live. Right now