Free Gringos by Charles Portis Page B

me. Had she caught me muttering to myself? With that bag of crumbs slung across my back I was a cartoon burglar making off with his swag in a pillowcase. She looked good, in her washed-out, pioneer woman way, with little or no makeup, with her hair parted in the middle and pulled back into a knob. She wore a peach-colored dress with shoulder straps. Bollard was with her, sitting lumpily on a bench with a newspaper. What did she see in that cinnamon bear? There’s always some jerk who won’t rise for the national anthem, his own or anyone else’s. No wait, now he was getting up, but grudgingly, humoring Beth, and the natives, in their absurd ritual.
    Bollard lived on the top floor of the Napoles Apartments and wrote novels. Of the grim modern kind, if I can read faces. I hadn’t read his books. My fear was that they might not be quite as bad as I wanted them to be. Art and Mike said they were no worse than other books. He had a certain following. He called me The Great Excavator, and also, Our Mathematical Friend, after I had once corrected him on a compound interest calculation. He thought he was going to make a fortune off his Mexican telephone bonds. Bollard wasn’t always lost in his art, up there in the penthouse. It was a nice place. I had once lived in the Napoles myself, when I was selling those long leather coats.
    Beth gave me a mock curtsy. I nodded. Our flickering little romance had just about flickered out. She had taken me at first for a colorful Cajun, sucker of crawdad heads, wild dancer to swamp tunes, then lost interest when she found I was from the Anglo, Arkansas-Texas part of Louisiana. Of our Arklatex folkways she knew nothing. She suspected them to be dark ways, a good deal of sweaty cruel laughter, but of a darkness that wasn’t particularly interesting. Then she began to cultivate me again when someone told her I was a pretty fair hand at sorting out genuine Mayan pieces from the modern forgeries. Then someone else told her how I came by my knowledge and she got frosty again.
    Frau Kobold was waiting for me in her wicker wheelchair. She wasn’t exactly lame, just old. Her bones were dry sticks. I went carefully over the explanation again, how other cake arrangements were going to have to be made when I was gone.
    â€œI don’t like people knowing my business,” she said.
    Her pride, yes, I understood that, but Fausto and Beatriz and Agustín already knew her business, her situation. Louise was right, there was too much stuff in this room. There were bulging pasteboard boxes, packed with clothing and dishes, as for an immediate move. They had been sitting here for years. Mayan relics were jumbled about on tables and chairs. On the walls there were framed photographs of temples and carved stelae taken by her husband, Oskar Kobold, long dead. Some of these prints were fifty years old but they were still the best I had ever seen of low-relief carvings. With all their fierce lighting and fine lenses and fast film, the modern photographers still couldn’t capture those shadowy lines the way Oskar Kobold did, which is why the inscription scholars have to rely on drawings.
    He died a poor and bitter man, having been cheated of both recognition and money by museums, universities, governments, publishers, all manner of high-minded institutions. They had used his work freely, were still using it and had paid him trifling fees when they paid at all. Mostly they sent him remaindered books. But then he had a reputation for being prickly and hard to deal with, too, something of a nut. Frau Kobold, the former Miss Alma Dunbar of Memphis, had traipsed about in the bush with him in jodhpurs and pith helmet. She carried his tripod and mixed his chemicals and prepared his wet plates and kept his notes. None of it seemed to mean much to her now. She seldom talked about the old days, except for the time she and Oskar had appeared in a Fox Movietone Newsreel— Bringing an Ancient