Mar. 29th, 2011

QOTD

Mar. 29th, 2011 06:42 pm
randy_byers: (2010-08-15)
'I waited. I walked up and down the main street of the old smuggling port, so different with its salty maritime air from Mérida, which itself was only twenty miles from the sea and might as well have been 200. Downtown I came across a Presbyterian church, which I had not noticed on previous visits. Some kind of Anglo-Saxon cultural overlap from nearby Belize, I supposed. You never know what you'll run into in Mexico, John Knox in a guayabera shirt, or a rain of tadpoles in the desert, or a strangely empty plaza in the heart of a teeming city with not even a bird to be seen. Once in Mazatlán I rounded a corner and literally ran into an old American movie actor I would have thought long dead. He was a big man who had played the boss crook in hundreds of cheap Westerns, the only character in coat and tie, directing all his dirty work out of the back room of a saloon. His name was usually Slade or Larkin. I apologized to the old crook. "One of those fast-walking guys, huh?" he said to me, in the old Larkin snarl. Here in Chetumál the traffic police, unlike other police in Mexico, were fitted out in U.S. Marine undress blues, but with a deep Latino swoop in the wire frames of their white hats. They were hard little Indios with no body fat. The air trembled with heat. I was dripping. They stood buttoned up under the sun all day in a cloud of engine fumes, and their starched cotton shirts remained crisp and dry.'

-- Charles Portis, Gringos (1991)

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