The Dog of the South (31 page)

This Dr. Symes is quite a character himself. No longer a doctor—he lost his medical license over some trouble with a miracle arthritis cure he was peddling called “the Brewster Method.” (“You don't hear much about it anymore but for my money it's never been discredited,” Symes says.) Lately, he's been involved in a scheme to manufacture tungsten-steel dentures in Tijuana (the “El Tigre model,” he calls it), and he seems to be on the run from some scam involving “a directory called
Stouthearted Men
, which was to be a collection of photographs and capsule biographies of all the county supervisors in Texas.” Somehow, the money collected from the stouthearted supervisors is missing, although Symes insists, “It was a straight enough deal.”

But when he runs across Portis's narrator, Ray Midge, an Arkansas guy who's retracing the steps of his runaway wife by using credit-card receipts, all Dr. Symes can talk about is the mysterious, elusive John Selmer Dix, a writer of inspirational books for salesmen. Symes is obsessed with Dix's greatness, with the idea that in his last days Dix had somehow broken through to some new level of ultimate revelation that tragically was lost to the world with his death, when the trunk in which he carried his papers disappeared.

“Find the missing trunk and you've found the key to his so-called ‘silent years,'” Symes tells Ray Midge. Symes is fixated on what might be false sightings of Dix and what seems to be a proliferation of Dix impostors. He knows of only one man who claims to have seen Dix “in the flesh . . . in the public Library in Odessa, Texas, reading a newspaper on a stick.”

“Now the question is, was that stranger really Dix? If it was Dix answer me this.
Where were all his keys?”
(The keys to his trunk of ultimate secrets, of course.) “There are plenty of fakers going around. . . . You've probably heard of the fellow out in Barstow who claims to this day that he
is
Dix. . . . He says the man who died in Tulsa was just some old retired fart from the oil fields who was trading off a similar name. He makes a lot of the closed coffin and the hasty funeral in Ardmore. He makes a lot of the missing trunk. . . . There's another faker, in Florida, who claims he is Dix's half brother. . . . They ran a picture of him and his little Dix museum in
Trailer Review
.”

Dr. Symes's delirium rises to a pitch of inspired madness tinged with an element of Oliver Stone paranoia (“the hasty funeral in Ardmore”), a poetic desperation that makes you intuit that it's not the reality of Dix that obsesses him but the
idea
of Dix—of someone somewhere who Had It All Figured Out but who disappeared in a Trailways haze. What Portis is getting at is the deep longing, the profound, wistful desperation in the American collective unconscious, to believe that somehow things do make
some
kind of sense, that life is not all chaotic horror and random acts of cruelty by fate, that there is an Answer, even if it's locked in a trunk somewhere and we've
lost the keys
.

The search for the lost keys is at the heart of Portis's subsequent two novels as well. In
Masters of Atlantis
, a secret society founded by a con artist and his gullible dupe comes to be a source of genuine meaning and faith for half a century of devotees (with the suggestion that all secret societies pretending to esoteric knowledge, from Skull and Bones to the Masons to the CIA, are the products of collective self-delusions). In
Gringos
, a beautiful, intense, comic-phantasmagoric novel, it's the search for the Inaccessible Lost City of Dawn somewhere in the Mayan rain forests that draws, like a magnet, all the lonely and dispossessed, the mad romantics and con artists of the States, to seek out what is missing from their lives by going Below the Border to search for the indecipherable truths encoded in the Mayan hieroglyphics.

Rereading Portis is one of the great pure pleasures—both visceral and cerebral—available in modern American literature. Except it's really
not
available to those who aren't Portis Society initiates (who have squirreled away multiple copies of
Masters of Atlantis
in locked trunks to ensure a lifetime supply). It is a crime and a scandal, it's virtually clinically
insane
, that Portis's last three books are out of print and not in paperback—almost as inaccessible as the lost works of John Selmer Dix. Some smart publisher will earn an honored place in literary history and the hearts of his countrymen by bringing out a complete and accessible edition soon—now.

Meanwhile, I can't stop thinking about Dr. Symes and Dix. What
is
it with all those Dix impostors, those shadowy half brothers with their little Dix museums in
Trailer Review
? Are they real or figures of Symes's Dix delirium? Is the proliferation of Dixes a way of expressing the notion that we're all, in some way, Dixes, hauling around locked trunks containing the inaccessible, unimaginable secrets we hide from one another? Perhaps Portis could tell, but Portis isn't talking, at least not to me.

 

—RON ROSENBAUM, 1998

BY THE SAME AUTHOR