The Dog of the South (30 page)

Finally I was able to get Jack released from jail, no thanks to the American consul. That bird said it was none of his business and he wouldn't interfere even if he could. The testimonial note from Mrs. Symes did the trick, combined with an irregular payment and a promise that Jack would leave the country immediately. He was glad to be free again. We got a used battery at the Texaco station and I suggested a quick run out on Bishop Lane. I would show him the Dupree place and he could look around and maybe pick up some leads, see some things that had escaped my untrained eye. But Jack was no longer concerned with Dupree. He said, “You can do what you want to, Ray. I'm going home.”

Norma and I rode home with him in the Chrysler. He drove all the way with his sore hands, not trusting other people at the wheel. What a trip! What a glum crew! Norma snapped at me, and Jack, who had been reading things in his cell again, talked about economic cycles and the fall of the Roman Empire and the many striking parallels that might be drawn between that society and our own. Norma called me “Guy” a couple of times. My own wife couldn't even remember my name.

I told them about the pelican that was struck by lightning. They didn't believe it. I tried to tell them about Dr. Symes and Webster and Spann and Karl and their attention wandered. I saw then that I would have to write it down, present it all in an orderly fashion, and this I have done. But I can see that I have given far too much preliminary matter and that I have considerably overshot the mark. So be it. It's done now. I have left out a few things, not least my own laundry problems, but I haven't left out much, and in the further interests of truth I have spared no one, not even myself.

Our journey home was a leisurely one. Jack drove only during daylight hours. We stayed in nice motels. Norma perked up a little after I began to let her order her own meals. We stopped at a beach south of Tampico for a swim in the Gulf. Norma wore her dress in the water like an old woman because she'd didn't want Jack to see the raw scar on her abdomen. A man came along with a brazier made from a bucket and he broiled some shrimp for us right there on the beach. The food and beer made us sleepy and we stayed the night. Jack slept in the car.

Norma and I lay on the warm sand all night under a piece of stiff canvas that Jack carried in his trunk. We listened to the surf and watched the incandescent streaks of meteors. I pointed out to her the very faint earthshine on the darker, gibbous part of the new moon. She admitted that her escapade with Dupree had been very foolish and I said we must now consider the matter closed. We reaffirmed our affection for one another.

The next day we were all in good spirits and we sang “Goodnight, Irene” and other old songs as we approached the border at Matamoros. The euphoria in turn passed as we drew closer to home and when we reached Texarkana we were pretty much ourselves again. Jack became solemn and he began to pose rhetorical questions. “What is everybody looking for?” he said. Norma didn't hesitate; she said everybody was looking for love. I gave the question some thought and then declared that everybody was looking for a good job of work to do. Jack said no, that many people were looking for those things, but that everybody was looking for a place where he could get food cheap—on a regular basis. The qualification was important because when I mentioned the cheap and tasty shrimps we had eaten on the beach, Jack said yes, but you couldn't count on that Mexican bird coming by every afternoon with his cooking can and his bulging wet sack.

Much later we learned that Dupree had gone overland—walked! in cowboy boots! bumping into trees!—down into Honduras, the genuine Honduras. He went first to a place on the coast called La Ceiba and then caught a ride on an oil-survey plane to the capital city of Tegucigalpa. I looked for him to come dragging in after a few months. A lot of people leave Arkansas and most of them come back sooner or later. They can't quite achieve escape velocity. I expect it's much the same everywhere. But that monkey is still down there, as far as I know.

I never said anything to Mr. Dupree about my Torino. I do know he paid off the bail forfeiture and I suspect he used his political influence to have the charge against Guy shelved, if not dropped altogether. Dupree's whereabouts are certainly no secret but nothing has been done toward having him picked up and extradited.

His mother has flown down there twice to see him, the second time to take him a pit bulldog. That was the kind of dog he wanted and he couldn't find one in Honduras. She must have had no end of trouble introducing that dog into another country by air, particularly a grotesque animal like the pit bull, but she managed to do it. I don't know what happened to the chow dog. She tells everyone Guy is “thinking and writing” and is doing fine. I have heard from other people that he walks around Tegucigalpa all day in a narcotic haze, nodding at Hondurans and taking long strides in his runover boots. He keeps his left hand in his pocket, they say, with the right hand swinging free in an enormous military arc. I assume she sends him money. You can cadge drinks but I think you have to have money for dope.

At Christmas I mailed Mrs. Symes a Sears catalogue and I enclosed my own copy of Southey's
Life of Nelson
for Webster. I heard nothing from Belize and I suspect the parcel was lost or stolen.

Norma regained her health and we got on better than ever before. We went to football games and parties. We had a fine Christmas. We went to the Cancer Ball with Mrs. Edge and one of her florid escorts and I even danced a little, which isn't to say I became overheated. In January I got my B.A. degree and I decided to stay in school and try engineering again, with an eye toward graduate work in geology and eventual entry into the very exciting and challenging field of plate tectonics. Then in April, after the last frost, Norma became restless again. She went to Memphis to visit a friend named Marge. “Goodbye, goodbye,” she said to me, and the next thing I knew she had her own apartment over there, and a job doing something at a television station. She said she might come back but she didn't do it and I let her go that time. It's only about 130 miles to Memphis but I didn't go after her again.

T
he following appreciation of Charles Portis's work originally appeared in
Esquire
in 1998, and its enthusiasm was one of the reasons that Overlook chose to reissue the Portis works that were out of print at the time:
The Dog of the South, True Grit, Masters of Atlantis, Gringos,
and
Norwood.
This essay is presented in its original form, with references to the unavailability of Portis's books at the time unchanged. All are now available at your local bookstore, or online, much to the delight of Mr. Rosenbaum and readers everywhere. And The Overlook Press is honored to be able to bring them to you
.

L
ISTEN, I BOW TO NO ONE when it comes to expertise on the myth and reality of secret societies in America, in distinguishing the dark nimbus of paranoia and conspiracy theory surrounding them from the peculiar human truths at their heart.

As the author of the still-definitive study of America's ultimate secret society, Skull and Bones, I have been shown the much-whispered-about photos that the all-woman break-in team took of the interior of the Skull and Bones “Tomb”—complete with its candid shots of that sanctum sanctorum of America's clandestine rulingclass cult: the Room with the License Plates of Many States. I could tell you the secret Skull and Bones nicknames of the class year of D
_154,
in the coded Skull and Bones calendar of the years. (Let's give a shout out to good old J. B. “Magog” Speed, for instance.)

I say I bow to no one, but that's not true. When it comes to knowing and limning the heart of the heart of the secret-society-esoteric-knowledge-weird-nickname-ancient-mysteries-of-the-East racket, I bow—
we should all bow
—to one man, one novelist. Not Pynchon or DeLillo or any of the other usual suspects on the secret-society subject, but a maddeningly underappreciated American writer who in a brilliant and shockingly little-known novel has somehow captured more of the truth about this aspect of America, about the longing for Hidden Secrets, the seductions of secret societies, than all the shelves of conspiracy-theory literature. The only man to penetrate the true heart of dimness. I'm speaking of Charles Portis and his now-almost-impossible-to-find novel (suppressed by You Know Who?),
Masters of Atlantis
.

It's an indictment of the dimness of our culture that the film
Conspiracy Theory
made millions while
Masters of Atlantis
languishes in the recesses of secondhand-bookstores, out of print, not even in paperback, and Portis gets neither the popular nor the literary-world acclaim that he deserves. In a way, Portis has not helped matters; he lives off the beaten path down in Arkansas with an unlisted phone number, doesn't do publicity, has never networked, and refused, politely but firmly, to talk to me for this piece.

Who is this man Portis? His is not a Salinger-like antisocial reclusiveness, more a kind of publicity-shy modesty. And we do have a few clues about his past. We know he grew up in a tiny town near the Arkansas-Mississippi border. We can guess from a recent short story he published in
The Atlantic Monthly
that he served as a marine in the Korean War. We know that he was a rising star at the legendary writers' newspaper
The New York Herald Tribune
, eventually heading its London bureau, and that he departed abruptly in the mid-sixties to return to Arkansas to start turning out a remarkable series of novels, beginning with
Norwood
in 1966.

Meanwhile, Portis has become the subject of a kind of secret society, a small but fanatic group of admirers among other writers who consider him perhaps the least-known great writer alive in America. Perhaps the most original, indescribable sui generis talent overlooked by literary culture in America. A writer who—if there's any justice in literary history as opposed to literary celebrity—will come to be regarded as the author of classics on the order of a twentieth-century Mark Twain, a writer who captures the soul of America, the true timbre of the dream-intoxicated voices of this country, in a way that no writers-workshop fictionalist has done or is likely to do, who captures the secret soul of twentieth-century America with the clarity, the melancholy, and the laughter with which Gogol captured the soul of nineteenth-century Russia in
Dead Souls
.

Tom Wolfe once spoke about the way city-born creativewriting types go directly from East Coast hothouse venues to places like Iowa City, where “they rent a house out in the countryside, and after about their fifth conversation with a plumber named Lud, they feel that they know the rural psyche.”

Charles Portis is the real thing to which these grad-school simulacra can only aspire in their wildest dreams. He is a wild dreamer of a writer, and I don't want you misled by the references to Mark Twain into thinking he is some kind of regionalist or humorist. Nora Ephron, one of the founding members of the Portis Society (as I've come to think of the circle of devotees), compares him in scope, sophistication, and originality to Gabriel García Márquez. “He thinks things no one else thinks,” she says.

For some members of the Portis Society, an appreciation of his work is a matter of life-and-death urgency. Roy Blount, Jr., has written of Portis's third novel,
The Dog of the South
, “No one should die without having read it.” And that's not even his favorite (although it is mine). He's partial to
Norwood
and speaks of those for whom Portis is a kind of life-and death test of human beings. How a fellow Portis Society member couldn't decide whether to marry the woman he loved until she read
Norwood
.

It's funny: Before I spoke with Blount and learned of his “Don't die until you've read
The Dog of the South
” pronouncement, I'd used the rhetoric of imminent death in my appeal to Portis for an interview. I'd tried to explain in a letter to him how much his work mattered to me by telling him that if I had to choose any one section of any one novel to be read aloud to me on my deathbed in the hours before expiring, to remind me of the pleasures that reading had brought me during my lifetime, it would probably be certain passages in
The Dog of the South
involving one of Portis's inimitable, seedy-but-grandiose con men, Dr. Reo Symes.

I'll try to explain why those passages in particular fascinate me, but first I need to discuss the initiation rite to the Portis Society, the barrier you literary sophisticates must be able to get past (or limbo beneath) if you are to show yourselves worthy of Portis's genius. A kind of test of true—as opposed to surface, image-conscious—literary sophistication.

The test is a novel Portis wrote before
The Dog of the South, Masters of Atlantis, and Gringos
, his great dreams-of-secret-knowledge trilogy. A novel that was—I hesitate to use the word, it's so deeply shaming in literary terms—too
popular
for its own good. A novel whose title I almost dare not utter to the uninitiated, because it may completely throw you off the scent of Portis's greatness. (Not because there's anything wrong with it in itself, but because of its image.) A novel whose title I'm therefore going to disguise and not utter for the moment. Or maybe I'll give it a more inoffensive (at least in this context), substitute title, say,
Necrophilic Whores of Gomorrah
.

Well, admit it, you'd probably be more receptive to my case for Portis's greatness if he'd written some Burroughsian necrophilia novel rather than the all-too-fatally popular novel he
did
write, whose title is, I blush to say,
True Grit
. Yes, he's
that guy
, and they made a movie out of it that won John Wayne his only Oscar. Now, get over it and let me get back to Dr. Reo Symes. He's the greatest in a great gallery of Portisan talkers: brilliant and garrulous con artists, deliriously gifted fabricators, delusional mountebanks, disbarred lawyers, defrocked doctors, disgruntled inventors, dispossessed cranks, and disgraced dreamers who crawl out of the cracks and crevices of Trailways America with confident claims that they have the Philosopher's Stone, the key to all mysteries. Or, more often, that they had it and lost it, or had it stolen from them but are close to getting it back.