Regarding the UFO people, Burns says, “as a geocentric I didn’t find this stuff convincing … Still, the flying saucer books were fun to read and there weren’t nearly enough of them to suit me. I liked the belligerent ones best, that took no crap off the science establishment.” Toward the other groups he is less conciliatory. “Refugio called the real hippies aves sin nidos, birds without nests, and los tóxicos, the dopers. These were the real hippies, the viciosos, the hardened bums, kids gone feral. … They came now the year ’round to Palenque, which is everyone’s idea of a lost city in the jungle—real hippies, false hippies, pyramid power people, various cranks and mystics, hollow earth people, flower children.”
Burns stumbles into a series of misadventures that ultimately converge on an underage runaway named LaJoye Mishell Teeter. Though he is himself a dropout from the straight life, and not precisely a law-abiding citizen, Burns is guided by a keen moral intuition that owes something to his faith. One might think of Jimmy Burns as a new version of Rooster Cogburn. (Not to get too overbearing about this, but it’s right there in their names: both men blaze when lit but Burns isn’t a cog in someone else’s machine.) Burns isn’t running from his past the way Cogburn is, and he doesn’t have nearly as much to atone for, but he is conscious of himself as a sinner, indeed as one who owes “debts” in the sense intended by the King James rendition of the Lord’s prayer, which he recites in the novel’s first chapter, pointedly refusing to follow the priest in using the more modern and abstract term, “trespasses.”
Burns’s quest, like Cogburn’s, originates with the promise of a bounty, but Burns spends a lot less time than Cogburn pretending to himself that money is what’s driving him. For Burns, it is a plain moral outrage that some poor teenage girl—her only sins were looking for a good time and wanting to get out of Florida—should wind up hostage to a gang of freaks whose trespasses extend from their ineptitude as shade-tree mechanics to their taste for human sacrifice. When everything is on the line, Burns prays to God to help him find LaJoye. He swears in prayer that he doesn’t want the reward money, only for the innocent to be saved from harm at the hands of the wicked. If Cogburn had been able to sustain the transformation effected by his encounter with Mattie Ross, he might have become a man like Jimmy Burns.
Because the climax of Gringos occurs three-quarters of the way through, there’s plenty of time for a ruminative, bittersweet denouement marked by deaths, surprises, sickness and recovery, a marriage. It reminded me, however improbably, of the “Finale” chapter of Middlemarch, and you don’t even have to squint that hard to see Jimmy Burns as a hidden saint. “You had to commit to something,” Jimmy says by way of winding up his story. “You finally had to plant a tree somewhere.” It’s true, and something I cannot imagine Rooster Cogburn saying, which is one more reason to weep for him.
Despite all the years on his head and blood on his hands, Rooster Cogburn stays a moral child his whole life. So do the self-deluded scammers of Masters of Atlantis, the quack doctor of The Dog of the South and the malevolent feckless hippies of Gringos. The belief that you can always start over in the next town or state or hemisphere or marriage or business plan is as American as apple pie. So is the reflexive conception of youthful narcissism as essentially innocent, even when it manifests as self-indulgent, self-destructive, callow or harmful. We fight to preserve that innocence (or its façade) for as long as possible, then fetishize it forever after it’s gone. Portis recognizes that innocence held past its expiration date spoils just like meat does, and stinks about as bad. For all of his Looney Tunes vitality and love of a good goof, these are novels that, when they’re forced to take a side, side with the grownups every time: Mattie Ross no less at fourteen than in her dotage; Ray Midge and Norwood once they’ve been sufficiently tried by life; Jimmy Burns right from the jump. Portis is their partisan not because they are above reproach but because they are not beyond hope. The only things he finds truly hopeless—both damnable and damned—are a refusal to grow up and a man who can’t change his own oil. Probably he would say that this is saying the same thing twice.