They spend their days reading and drinking with a sort of happy indolence-there’s the expatriate Jimmy Burns in Gringos who has dropped out of regular employment to dig up artifacts in the Mexican jungle, or Lamar Jimmerson in Masters of Atlantis, who cares more about promoting universal truths than about the world’s wars and general mayhem.
His characters are self-absorbed, lazy, lonely, unkempt, self-indulgent, and so deeply complacent that they rarely seek anything outside the boundary of the lives they already know. Over a quarter-century, from Norwood in 1966 to 1991’s Gringos, Portis wrote a handful of shortish, densely hilarious novels that explored the deep peculiarity of middle-American life. That comes to about six men a year.” To which Cogburn replies: “It is dangerous work.” As the prosecutor points out, Cogburn is responsible for “twenty-three dead men in four years.
To that end, she enlists Rooster Cogburn, former bank robber-turned-deputy marshal, a “one-eyed jasper that was built along the lines of Grover Cleveland,” first encountering him outside the courthouse where Cogburn has been testifying to his latest murders in the name of the law. “People do not give it credence,” Mattie Ross recounts in the marvelous opening paragraphs of Charles Portis’s True Grit, “that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day.” It’s a voice that could define almost every Portis protagonist-a self-taught, partly untamed individual of weather-roughened accomplishments striving to articulate the story of their life while battering along the roads that carry them (briefly) away from home and (inevitably) back home again.Īfter the “coward” Tom Chaney senselessly murders Mattie’s generous father and absconds with his wallet and two gold pieces, she determines to bring him back to face trial, and recover both gold pieces while she’s at it.
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