The Dog of the South by Charles Portis

Author:Charles Portis
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Sagas, Fiction
ISBN: 9781590206584
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2007-06-05T04:00:00+00:00

Eight

THE POST OFFICE itself wasn’t open but there was a man on duty in the cable office. He leafed through the incoming messages and found nothing for me. I walked back to the hotel. The young men of Belize were shadowboxing on the streets and throwing mock punches at one another. Webster Spooner was in front of the hotel dancing around the tomato plant and jabbing the air with his tiny fists. He too had attended the matineé showing of the Muhammad Ali fight.

“I’m one bad-ass nigger,” he said to me.

“No, you’re not.”

“I’m one bad-ass nigger.”

“No, you’re not.”

He was laughing and laying about with his fists. Biff Spooner! Scipio Africanus! I had to wait until his comic frenzy was spent. He had taken care of the map business all right, but instead of bringing the map to me he had fooled around town all morning and then gone to the movie.

I saw that I could count on Webster to do one thing but not two things in immediate succession. On the other hand I didn’t have his five dollars, or his Kennedy coin. I did have a little money that I had diverted into my own pocket from the doctor’s wad, though not as much as five dollars. Webster shrugged and made no fuss, being accustomed to small daily betrayals.

In the white margin at the top of the map the policeman had written, “Dupree & Co. Ltd. Bishop Lane. Mile 16.4.” This Bishop Lane was not printed on the map and the policeman had sketched it in, running west and slightly south from Belize. He had marked the Dupree place with a box. Nearby was a Mayan ruin, as I could see from the pyramid symbol. He had marked another place in the south—“Dupere Livestock”—but the spelling was different and this was clearly an afterthought. In the bottom margin he had signed his name: Sgt. Melchoir Wattli.

So at long last I had found them and now I was ready to make my move. Leet had left another leaflet on the windshield of the Buick and I threw it away. I inspected the hood for cat tracks and I had a look underneath. Then I remembered the roll of quarters and I got it from the glove compartment and gave it to Webster, showing him how to conceal it in his fist. It stuck out from one end and made his fingers bulge in a dead giveaway.

The quarter was not a very interesting coin, I conceded, and I said it was true that Washington, whose stern profile was stamped on it, had a frosty manner, and that he was not a glamorous person. But, I went on, warming to this theme, he was a much greater man than Kennedy. ¡Gravitas! The stuffed shirt, the pill—this sort of person had not always been regarded as a comic figure. I had enormous respect for General Washington, as who doesn’t, but I also liked the man, believing as I did that we shared many of the same qualities.

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