Free Gringos by Charles Portis Page A

after all that’s what you are. I’ve never known one before. I mean who worked at it full time. You’ll never guess what I dreamed last night. I dreamed I had a baby and gave it away to Beth. Can you imagine that? Just gave it away. The same day. I said, ‘Here’s a little baby for you, Beth.’ ”
    â€œMaybe it was a mutation. A rejected sport.”
    â€œI hadn’t thought of that. A space baby. Genetically altered. You’re joking, but it happens, you know, all the time. The hospitals aren’t permitted to report it. But even so, why would I give it away? I would never give my baby away, even if it was a mutant. With his tiny knowing eyes following me around the room.”
    â€œI’ve got to go, Short Stuff. It’s late. I’ve been on the road all day.”
    â€œDon’t call me that. Wait. I was just going to make some hot chocolate.”
    â€œThanks anyway, no, I’m beat.”
    â€œIs it very far away? Where Rudy is? I worry about him traveling all alone in that old car.”
    â€œRudy’s okay. He’s down in Chiapas with some college people. He’ll be back in a few days. The mosquitoes will soon run him off.”
    â€œThanks for bringing the tape. Watch your step. There was a lot of slick stuff out there today.”
    She meant outside Dr. Estevez’s House of Complete Modern Dentistry, where the sidewalk was spattered daily with gobbets of bloody spit.

THE MAYAS had a ceremonial year of 260 days called a tzolkin , and then they had one of 360 days called a tun , and finally there was the haab of 365 days, the least important one, not used in their long calculation. This was simply a tun , plus five nameless days of dread and suspended activity, the uayeb , corresponding somewhat to our dead week between Christmas and New Year’s Day.
    Here in Mérida the sky was blue and the air soft, no driving sleet, no dense waves of northern guilt, but there was a seasonal lethargy all the same. The year had run down and nobody was quite ready to start the grind again. These were our nameless days.
    Beatriz was moping at the desk the next morning. She said Doc Flandin had called three times asking for me. There was no letter from Ah Kin, only a sharp note from Frau Kobold. Her cakes again! I picked them up for her weekly when I was in town, a big plastic sack of stale muffins and pastelitos and broken cookies, which she got from the Hoolywood Panaderia for next to nothing. It was a long-standing arrangement, and this was all she ate, as far as anyone knew. It seems you can live for years on pan dulce and Nescafé and cigarettes, and even thrive. She appeared to be none the worse for having smoked 900,000 Faros cigarettes.
    I walked over to the Hoolywood and waited for the rejects to be bagged. Someone clapped a hand on my shoulder from behind. It was a man named Beavers and he wanted to borrow ten dollars. I barely knew him but he was on me so fast I couldn’t think of a way to say no. He said Flandin was looking for me.
    On the way back I paused at the zócalo to watch the Mexican flag being raised. There was a color guard and a drum and bugle platoon from the army barracks. I had seen it all many times but I could no more pass up a display like that than I could a car wreck with personal injuries. They were smart looking troops, with one or two corny touches—chromed bayonets and white laces in their black boots, all back-laced and looped about. The rifles were real, though the M-16 makes a poor ceremonial piece—ugly, too short, too black, too much plastic. More a weapon to be brandished defiantly above the head by irregular forces. There it went, the big tricolor, as big and soft as a bedsheet, creeping up inch by deliberate inch. I was trained to run the colors up briskly and bring them down gravely, but this way was all right, too, I suppose.
    I saw Beth across the plaza. She was smiling and must have been watching