The Dog of the South by Charles Portis

you get two?”
    â€œI didn’t know that at the time.”
    He took the empty can from me and studied it. He found the red note and pointed it out to me. “It says, ‘May take two cans.’”
    â€œI know what it says now.”
    â€œYou should have known a car like this would need two cans.”
    â€œHow was I to know that? I didn’t have time to read all that stuff.”
    â€œWe’ll never get there!”
    â€œYes, we will.”
    â€œNever! We’ll never make it! Look how little it is!” The size of the can was funny to him. He went into a laughing fit and then a coughing fit, which in turn triggered a sneezing fit.
    â€œHalf of the cars on the road are making this noise,” I said. “It’s not serious. The engine’s not going to stop.”
    â€œOne can! One can of this shit wouldn’t fix a lawn mower and you expect it to fix a Buick! Fifty cans would be more like it! You chump! You said you’d take me to Mama and you don’t even know where we are! You don’t know your ass from first base! I never can get where I want to go because I’m always stuck with chumps like you! Rolling along! Oh, yes! Rolling along! Rolling on home to Mama!”
    He sang these last words to a little tune.
    I knew where we were all right. It was the doctor himself who had funny notions about geography. He thought we were driving along the Pacific Ocean, and he had the idea that a momentary lapse at the wheel, one wrong turn, would always lead to monstrous circular error, taking us back where we started. Maybe it had happened to him a lot.
    We drove straight through without stopping anywhere to sleep. The road was closed on the direct route across southern Campeche and so we had to take the longer coastal road, which meant waiting for ferries and crossing on them in the night. It also meant that we had to go north up into Yucatan and then south again through Quintana Roo to the border town of Chetumal.
    What these ferries crossed were the mouths of rivers along the Gulf, two rivers and a lagoon, I believe, or maybe the other way around, a long stretch of delta at any rate. Dr. Symes remained in the car and I strode the decks and took the air, although there was nothing to see in the darkness, nothing but the bow waves, curling and glassy. There was fog too, and once again I was denied the spectacle of the southern heavens.
    I had told the doctor that the engine wasn’t going to stop and then in the midday heat of Yucatan it did stop. He might have thrown one of his fits if we had not been in a village with people standing around watching us. He sulked instead. I thought the fuel filter was clogged, the little sintered bronze device in the side of the carburetor. I borrowed two pairs of pliers and got it out and rapped it and blew through it. That didn’t help. A Mexican truck driver diagnosed the trouble as vapor lock. He draped a wet rag over the fuel pump to cool it down, to condense the vapor in the gas line. I had never seen that trick before but it worked and we were soon off again.
    The road was flat and straight in this country and there was very little traffic. Visibility was good too. I decided to let the doctor drive for a bit while I took a short nap. We swapped seats. He was a better driver than I had any reason to expect. I’ve seen many worse. The steering slack didn’t throw him at all. Still he had his own style and there was to be no sleeping with him at the wheel. He would hold the accelerator down for about four seconds and then let up on it. Then he would press it down again and let up on it again. That was the way he drove. I was rocking back and forth like one of those toy birds that drinks water from a glass.
    I tried to read the Dix book. I couldn’t seem to penetrate the man’s message. The pages were brittle and the type was heavy and black and hard to read. There were tips on how to turn disadvantages into