The Mosquito Coast

by Paul Theroux

  2

  THAT NIGHT I opened my eyes in the dark and knew that my father was not in the house. The sense of someone missing is stronger than the sense of someone there. It was not only that I didn’t hear his whistling snore (usually he sounded like one of his own original expansion valves), or even that all the lights were out. It was a feeling of lonesome emptiness, as if there was a mummy-shaped hole of air in the house where my father’s body should have been. And my fear was that this unpredictable man was dead, or worse than dead—hollowed out and haunting the property. I knew he was gone, and in a worried guilty way—I was thirteen years old—I felt responsible for him.

  There was no moon, but even so it was an easy house to search, because there were no locks. Father disapproved of locking doors. I say disapproved, but I mean he’d threaten to hit us for it. Someone behind a locked door was up to no good, he said. He often shouted at the bathroom door, “Don’t barricade yourself in!” He had grown up in a small fishing town on the coast of Maine—he called it Dogtown—where door locking was unknown. During the years he had spent in India and Africa he had kept to the same rule, so he said. I never knew for sure if he had been to those places. I grew up with the belief that the world belonged to him and that everything he said was true.

  He was big and bold in everything he did. The only ordinary thing about him was that he smoked cigars and wore a baseball cap all day.

  I looked first in the bedroom and saw one figure lying there on the brass bed, a humped-up sheet on the far side—Mother. I was sure he was gone, because he always hung his overalls on the bedpost, and they were not there. I went downstairs and through the rooms. The cat was sleeping on the floor like a tipped-over roller skate. I paused in the hallway and listened. It being spring, there was a powerful odor of lilacs and dug-up dirt, and a soft wind. There was a torrent of crickets outside, and one frantic cricket trapped inside making fretful chirps. Except for this cricket, the house was as still as if it lay buried.

  My rubber boots were right inside the door. I put them on and, still in my pajamas, I set out along the path to look for my old man.

  We were surrounded by plowed fields. The edge of each field was ragged with woods, left as windbreaks. The corn and tobacco had begun to sprout, and though it was easier to tramp between the furrows, I stuck to the path, with my arms in front of my face to keep the branches away. It was not the branches I hated, but the spider webs strung across that snagged on my eyelashes. These woods were full of marshy pools, and the sound that night was the spring peepers, the little slippery frogs, shiny as fish lures, that made such a warbling. The trees were blue and black, like towering witches. Where was he?

  I had left the house feeling wrapped in darkness, but the farther I walked the less dark it seemed. Now the land was muddy yellow. Some trees were ash-colored and the upper parts picked out like iron thorns, and the sky was heavy gray. One cloud was the shape of a loaf of bread, and I guessed that the moon was behind it because it had a bright oily look, as if it hid a mill town in the heavens.

  After a while I wished that I had not left the house in such a hurry. Was someone behind me? I turned around sharply to confront the smirking skulls on barkless trees or the reaching finger bones from dead branches. That was one fear. My other was that I would step on a skunk and get sprayed with the stink. Then I would have to bury my pajamas in a hole and go back to the house bare naked.

  The woods thinned out. I could see single trees against the sky and another row in front of a yellowish field. A pile of boulders told me where I was. This high point had been left because it was impossible to plow. It was narrow and it rose up at the end of the woods, giving the whole thing the look of a ship. From the side, in daytime, it was a schooner with a rocky bow and a cargo on the deck and thirty leafy masts, stranded in the asparagus fields among the windbreaks that looked like islands.

  It was mostly asparagus here. The crop was ready, the harvest had begun. It is a funny-looking crop, because it does not grow in furrows. The fields are as flat and smooth as parking lots. From a distance you can’t see asparagus plants, but if you go very close you see the spikes—no flowers, no leaves, just fat green candles sticking out of the ground everywhere. From where I was standing I could not see anything but the smooth streamrolled earth, and its dull shine, like a swell in a waveless sea. And beyond those fields the black ribbon of night where I feared my father was.

  There were also lightning bugs. They were puny, not bright, less than match flares, dithering on and off and never in the same place twice. They had a light of their own but lighted nothing else and were like dim unreliable stars dying in the darkness.

  But a cluster of small lights far off did not die. They fumbled, they were torches, and when I was satisfied that these fires had men beneath them I set off directly for them, across the asparagus fields, kicking over and cracking the spikes, my boots sinking in the dirt crust.

  Closer, I could see the high flames wagging all in a row—a procession of people in single file holding torches over their heads, the flames snapping like flags. Their broadbrimmed hats were lit up, but I could not see their bodies. They streamed from a patch of pinewoods where there was an old building we called the Monkey House.

  Men with torches marching at midnight across the valley fields—I had never seen anything like it. It was a snake of flame, and I thought I heard a rattling sound, the jacking of beans shaken in a can. But I was more curious than frightened, and I had hidden myself so well and was still so distant that the thing didn’t threaten me.

  The procession kept to the far side of a stone wall between the crops—young corn there, asparagus here. I had to stay where I was. I imagined that if they saw me they would attack me and set me on fire. This thought, and the knowledge that I was safe here, gave me a thrill. I hunched over and ran to a ditch and got down flat and looked sharp.

  Then they changed direction and came toward me. Had they seen me run? My heart almost stopped as the torches tottered through a gate in the stone wall, and I thought: Oh, Gaw, they’re going to set me on fire.

  I crept backward into the ditch, and as I was in this lying-down position the ditch water started to leak into my boot tops. Pretty soon my boots were full of ditch water. But I didn’t open my mouth. One of my father’s favorite stories was about the Spartan boy with the fox under his shirt, I forget why, who let the animal chew his belly to shreds because he was too brave to shout for help. Wet feet were no comparison. There were some low vines growing on the ground nearby. I knew my legs were sunk in mud and water, so I yanked at the vines and pulled them over my head and flattened myself against the side of the ditch. I was completely hidden.

  The men were close. They were still gabbling—they sounded happy—and I could hear the swishing of their torches, the flames sounding like sheets blowing on a clothesline—no crackle, just the flap of fire. I looked up. I expected to see torch carriers with crazy faces, but what I saw almost made me yell. The man in front was carrying a huge black cross.

  The cross was not made out of planks, but rounded—two fat poles lashed together. There were horrible white chopmarks where the branches had been lopped off, like oval wounds on skin. And behind this fellow with the cross, and more scary, was a man carrying a human body, a limp thing, with the head slung down and the feet dangling and the arms swishing back and forth. He carried this corpse the way you heave a seed bag. It was big and soft and heavy, and its parts swung loose in a dreadful way. In the torchlight the carrier’s face was yellow. He was smiling.

  I did not feel like looking anymore. I was shivering with cold. You can get ice out of fire, Father had said. Now I believed him. That fire froze my guts.

  I kept my head down and my mouth shut, even though I was muddy and wet and bitten by bugs. I had felt the heat and smelled the torches—that was how close they were. Then they were gone. I looked up slowly and saw their torches flickering in the ship-shaped woods I had cut through myself. The tree branches jumped in the
firelight, and this leaping line of hot stripes and shadows crossed to the far side where it settled and glowed.

  I crawled out of the ditch and chucked the vines aside and emptied my boots. Then, keeping to the ditch, I sloshed as far as I could, and duck-walked across the asparagus and into the woods. By now the procession was beyond the trees. All that remained here was the smell of gasoline-soaked rags and burned leaves. I was well hidden here. In fact, I could see everything from behind a heap of rocks.

  Two of the men were hunched over. They must have been fastening the dead man to the cross, because soon after, in the fiery light of the circle of torches, I saw the cross raised up with a man on it, his wrists bent and his toes sticking down and his head tipped like a jug.

  It looked wicked, and I expected the men to be screaming blue murder. But no, it was all quiet, even jolly, and that was worse, like the nightmare you watch happening to you and cannot explain. In all that zigzagging across the fields, I was so afraid of giving myself away and being burned alive that I had forgotten why I was there. But just as I saw the raised cross I remembered that I was looking for my father. The recollection and the sight came at the same instant, and I thought: That dead twisted person is my old man.

  I sat there and put my hands over my eyes and tried to stop crying, but I kept blubbering until my head felt very small and very wet. I thought, without knowing why, that I would be blamed for it.

  All I could do was watch and listen. I had gotten used to this murky sight, and the longer I looked the more I felt responsible for it, as if it was something I had imagined, an evil thought that had sprung out of my head. Watching it made me part of it.

  There was no time to worry. All at once, the men doused their lights. After the fires and the shadows and the lighted cross, there were only shirts and hats—bone-white skeleton rags moving without bodies—and silence, as the men, these rags, foamed toward me.

  I picked myself up and ran for my life.

  ***

  I’m the last man! That had been Father’s frequent yell.

  It was painful, back in my bed, in the dark unlocked house, not dreaming but thinking. I felt small and shrunken. Father, who believed there was going to be a war in America, had prepared me for his death. All winter, he had been saying, “It’s coming—something terrible is going to happen here.” He was restless and talkative. He said the signs were everywhere. In the high prices, the bad tempers, the gut worry. In the stupidity and greed of people, and in the hoggish fatness of them. Bloody crimes were being committed in cities, and criminals went unpunished. It was not going to be an ordinary war, he said, but rather a war in which no side was entirely innocent.

  “Fat fools will be fighting skinny criminals,” he said. “You’ll hate one and be scared of the other. It’ll be national brain damage. Who’s left to trust?”

  He sounded disgusted, and in the depths of that white winter he was sometimes very gloomy. One day, Tiny Polski’s pipes froze solid and Father was called on to unblock them. We stood in the snow, at the edge of a freshly dug pit, wiring the pipes to Father’s “Thunderbox” to thaw them. (This device was his own invention, and he was proud of it—patent pending—though the first time he used it he almost killed Ma Polski, her hand being on an electrified faucet when he turned on the juice.) He watched the pipes heat and throw off vapor. Ice cracked inside, and jostled, and rattled like gravel. He listened with pleasure to the clunking thaw in the pipes, and then faced me at the edge of the snow-crusted pit.

  “When it comes, I’ll be the first one they kill. They always kill the smart ones first—the ones they’re afraid will outwit them. Then, with no one to stop them, they’ll tear each other to pieces. Turn this fine country into a hole.”

  There was no despair in his words, only matter-of-factness. The war was a certainty, but he was still hopeful. He said he believed in himself and in us. “I’ll take you away—we’ll pack up and go. And we’ll shut the door on all this.”

  He liked the idea of setting out, moving away, starting off in an empty place with nothing but his brains and his toolbox.

  “They’ll get me first.”

  “No.”

  “They always get the smart ones first.”

  I could not deny this. He was the smartest man I knew. He had to be the first one to die.

  Until I saw that marching procession at midnight, and the dead body on the cross, I could not imagine how anyone would be able to kill him. But that night was enough. I was convinced now, and I was alone. The strongest man I knew had been strung up on two poles and left in a cornfield. It was the end of the world.

  “I’m the last man, Charlie!”

  The dark hours were passing. Soon it would be morning and I would have to face everyone and tell them that Father had predicted it. So I lay in my bed and thought how Father had said that the country was doomed. He had promised to save us and get us away before it was too late. But he was gone, I was too weak to save the others, and in the dream I finally had in the coldest part of the night I was leading Mother and the twins and Jerry through burning fields under a wounded sun and a sky the color of blood, all our clothes in rags, and the smoke, and nothing to eat. They were depending on me, and only I knew, but was afraid to tell them because it was too late, that I was taking them the wrong way.

  In the bruised red-black sky was the mocking face of Father, after we had walked and walked, saying, “Where have you been, sonny?”

  I covered my eyes. I was still in the dream and aching, Mother and the kids behind me, disaster ahead and no escape.

  “Where have you—?”

  I woke and saw his face, sunburned and angry, and sat up because I expected him to hit me—afraid he was dead, then afraid because he was standing over me. His cigar told me I was not dreaming. I was too shocked to cry.

  “I had a bad dream.”

  And I thought: It has all been a dream—the men with the torches, the corpse on the cross, the laughing savages, the wounded sun and sky. I was very happy. The sunlight bleached my bedroom curtains, birds screeched at me.

  “You must have been dreaming about poison ivy,” Father said. “You’ve got the worst case I’ve ever seen.”

  As he said it, I began to ache. My face felt pebbly and raw, and my arms too.

  “Don’t touch it. You’ll make it spread. Get out of the sack and put something on it.” He started out of the room, and as I pulled on my clothes he said, “You’ve been fooling in the bushes—that’s where you’ve been.”

  The loose board on the threshold told me everything was normal. I smelled coffee and bacon and heard the twins screaming and was gladder than I had ever been. I went to the bathroom. My face looked like a pomegranate in the mirror, and my arms and shoulders were inflamed with the poison-ivy rash. I wiped calamine lotion on it and hurried to the kitchen.

  “It’s a ghost,” Jerry said, seeing my whitewashed face.

  “You poor thing,” Mother said. She set a plate of eggs in front of me and kissed the top of my head.

  Father said, “It’s his own fault.”

  But it was nothing. After what I had seen, a case of poison ivy seemed like salvation.

  “Eat up,” Father said. “We’ve got work to do.”

  I wanted to work, to carry the toolbox and hand him the oil can and be his slave and do anything he asked. I deserved to be punished. I wanted to forget those torches and those men. I was thirteen years old again. I had felt forty.

  Father said, “Meet me in the workshop when you’re through.”

  “Poor Charlie,” Mother said. “Where did you get that face?”

  I said softly, “I was fooling in the bushes, Ma. It was my own fault.”

  She shook her head and smiled. She knew I was sorry.

  “Ma!” Jerry yelled. “Charlie’s staring at me with his face!”

  Father’s workshop was behind the house. There were mottoes and quotations lettered on pieces of cardboard and tacked to the shelves, and tools and pipes and c
oils of wire and various machines. Besides motors of all kinds, and a grease gun and his lathe, which gave the workshop the look of an arsenal, there was his Thunderbox and an all-purpose contraption he called his Atom-smasher.

  On the floor, about the size of a trunk but resting upright on its end, was a wooden box he had been building and tinkering with for most of the spring. There were no wires in it and no motor. He had put it together with a blowtorch. It was full of pipes, and grids and tanks, copper tubing below and a door leading to a tin box on top. It smelled of kerosene, and I took it to be an oven of some kind, because bracketed to the back was a sooty chimney. Father said we had to get this thing into the pickup truck.

  I tried to lift it. It wouldn’t budge.

  “Want to rupture yourself?” Father said.

  With fussy care, and taking his time, he set up a block and tackle on a tripod and we swung this box of fitted pipes into the pickup.

  “What is it?”

  “Call it a Worm Tub or a hopper. You’ll know when Doctor Polski knows.”

  He took the back road and traveled toward Polski’s farmhouse on the tractor paths by the margins of the fields. When we passed the windbreak that was like a ship, I remembered that it was there that I had seen the procession of torch-carrying men. Below that clump of woods I had seen the men gather, and the corpse raised up on the cross. I hoped Father would take the right fork, so that I could satisfy myself—by seeing footprints or trampled corn—that I had not dreamed it. Father turned right. I held my breath.

  What was that in the plowed field? A cross, a dead man hanging on it, black rags and a black hat, a skull face and broken hands and twisted feet.

  It froze me, and I could not help the stammering whimper in my voice as I asked him what it was.

  Father was still driving fast over the rutted track. He did not turn his head. He just grinned and said, “Don’t tell me you’ve never seen a scarecrow.”

  He thumped the throttle.

  “And it must be a damned good one.”