The Mosquito Coast

by Paul Theroux

  We headed down the road. “Fat Boy,” Father said again, and chewed the words like gum. As we drove, I sneaked a glance at him and saw he was smiling. What for?

  4

  FATHER WAS still smiling as he drove past the field where the scarecrow was, to a little road overgrown with grass that led to a stand of black pines. There was a sign nailed to a stump, NO TRESPASSING, and beyond it the house in the pines that was known locally as the Monkey House.

  I had seen it from a distance. I had never wanted to go near enough to look inside. Anyway, as the sign said, it was forbidden. I was fairly sure that some of the savages lived in it, because I had heard radio music coming from it, and sometimes shouts.

  Its clapboards had once been white, but they were discolored now and storm streaked. This wooden house looked as though it was turning back into a tree, but a petrified one. None of the windows had curtains, and some had no glass. The only protection it had was from the dark evergreens around it, and it wore some of their drippings of pitch. We drove up the pine-needle path and, closer, I saw that the screen door was slashed and a drainpipe had come loose and was nodding like a daffy weather vane. The gutter, emptying against the house, had left a mossy water stain on the boards. The whole house looked rotting and wrecked and haunted.

  “Come on, Charlie. I want to show you something.”

  I could not refuse. We entered the house together. It smelled of sweat and boiled beans and old laundry and woodsmoke. The wallpaper was peeling off the walls in yellow crusts, and the paint itself was raised in places like blisters.

  I said, “They call this place the Monkey House.”

  “Who calls it that?”

  “Kids.”

  “I’d whale the tar out of them! Don’t let me hear you calling it that.”

  There were no chairs or tables, and the first room was like all the others, mattresses flat on the floor and green army blankets on the mattresses, and little crumbled cardboard suitcases stacked in a corner with rags and socks. The other junk was cut-open sardine cans and bags of bread hunks and empty sour-smelling milk bottles. A transistor radio on a shelf was held together by tape. All through the house were more flat mattresses and more junk, old clothes and hairbrushes and dirty dishes. It was scratched and damaged like a monkey cage. But it wasn’t a lively mess—it had a left-behind and dumped look, as if whoever lived there had gone away for good.

  “Look at these poor people,” Father said. He picked up a dingy blanket and jacked it against the wall. “Look what they own.”

  Angrily, he started stamping from room to room, as though searching for something he knew was not there. I followed him but kept my distance. He was swinging his arms and motioning violently at the grubby things.

  “They come back here at night—this is where they sleep!”

  He kicked a mattress.

  “Look what they eat!”

  Off his toe a sardine can took a frog hop into the hallway.

  “Why, they don’t even eat the damn asparagus they cut—”

  And then I knew it was the savages.

  “—though I wouldn’t blame them for stealing it.”

  He clumped noisily to the back of the house and put his head out of the window and gave a sorrowful laugh.

  “They take baths in a bucket. They do their business in that shack. Is that fair? I ask you! And you’re wondering why they smell like goats and live in this slop and do unmentionable things that only funny bunnies do?”

  I was wondering no such thing. What puzzled me was that Father, who always called them savages and warned me to keep clear of them, knew so much about them. He had driven straight to this house and marched right in, without a fear that one of the savages might be loitering in a closet or wrapped in a blanket, and might fling himself at Father and cut his throat.

  I said, “I don’t think we should be here.”

  “They welcome visitors, Charlie. It’s an old custom of theirs—from the jungle. Be kind to strangers, they say, because you never know when you might be a stranger yourself—lost in the jungle, out of water, starving, or dying of bites. That’s the law of the jungle—charity. It’s not the cruelty people think it is. There’s a lot to admire in these savages. Sure, they welcome visitors.”

  “But this isn’t the jungle,” I said.

  “No,” Father said, “because no jungle is as murderous and foul as this. They traded green trees for this ruin. It’s pathetic. And it makes me mad, because they’re going to end up being part of the problem.”

  He had started out of the house.

  “I need air,” he said.

  But instead of driving away, he unloaded the Worm Tub, his icebox, from the back of the truck. He put it on skids and we towed it into the house. Father set it up in the back room, and lit its wick, and put a tray of water inside.

  “They’ll see this ice and go bananas,” Father said.

  “You mean, you’re just going to give it to them? What about all the work you did on it?”

  “You heard what that runt Polski said. He’s got no use for it. And we’ve got a fridge of our own. These people will appreciate it. It won’t cost them anything to run. They’ll be able to store their food and save money. They can come back from the fields and have a nice cold drink. It’ll take some of the curse off this ruin. That’s what matters.”

  He was kneeling on the floor, adjusting the flame.

  “Ice is civilization,” he said.

  He made an admiring cluck with his tongue and teeth.

  I said, “They’ll wonder who put this icebox here.”

  “They won’t wonder.”

  We left the old house and its mattresses and mouse droppings, and I felt I had been introduced to wilderness. It lay very near our own orderly house and yet it was savage. It was apart from us. It was empty and alone. It had frightened me, not because it was dangerous but because it was so shabby and hopeless looking. It had begun badly and gotten worse, and it would stay that way, with all its trash—the tin cans and scribbled walls, the monkey scratches on the wood, the rusty wash bucket, the sink that didn’t work, the litter of sweepings, the twisted shoes that made me think of twisted feet. “It’s scary,” I said.

  “I’m glad you feel that way,” Father said.

  He drove down the road, sighing as he shifted the gears.

  “That’s America,” he said. “It’s a disgrace. Breaks my heart.”

  ***

  I was glad, after this, to go into familiar fields and help Father with humdrum jobs. Sweating in the heat, I was itchy again from the poison-ivy rash, but I did not complain. And Father did not mention it. He was sure that I had been fooling in the bushes and the rash was my punishment.

  Polski had ten greasy sheep and a small herd of cows. We repaired the transformer on the electric fence that separated them, and unblocked the drain at a drinking trough.

  Father said, “There used to be scope in this country for a man like me.”

  Toward noon, we went up to the big windowless cold-storage building. Inside the thick walls it was cool. There was a stutter from the overloaded circuit, a stillness in the air, and the sharp aroma of asparagus ripening in the dark. The spears were taped into three-pound bundles. Because the tips are breakable and delicate, they are hard to store. These were packed as carefully on the shelves as if they were bunches of live ammunition. It was clear that Polski did not have much spare room, but Father said that it was amazing that Polski stored the asparagus at all, since the demand for it was so huge.

  “And will you look at that!”

  High up on a hook was a mink coat, probably Ma Polski’s, put here in the cold to keep it away from the moths. It was dark gold, and every thin hair shone when Father turned his flashlight on it.

  That got Father laughing about the state of the world, human beings sleeping on the floor of a broken-down house, and a ton of asparagus and a mink coat in a tidy air-conditioned room that cost a fortune to cool. It was a horrible joke, he said. T
he stupidity of people! And if the savages knew how they were being cheated, they would go over and cut Polski’s head off and dance away in the fur coat.

  He found a fuse had blown from the strain on the cooler. Replacing this fuse, he said “The runt was right. He hasn’t got an inch of freeboard here, and they’re still harvesting. Mark my words, that man is going to pay us a visit soon. He’s going to have things on his mind. He won’t remember what he said to me this morning. Some people never learn.”

  In the middle of the afternoon we were working at the roadside, digging out a culvert that had silted up after the March thaw. It was as hot as it had been the previous day, and Father had taken his shirt off. I steadied the wheelbarrow he was filling. Then I heard voices.

  Three children on bicycles were coming down the road, returning home from school—Hatfield kids. I crouched down. I did not want them to see me here, laboring in my old clothes, and my father bent over like a ditchdigger. I was ashamed of Father, who didn’t care what anyone thought. And I envied him for being so free, and hated myself for feeling ashamed. The children rang their bicycle bells and sang out to catch my attention and make me feel bad. They didn’t know that Father had spent months inventing a fire-driven icebox and this morning had given it away, just like that, and picked up his spade like any farmhand.

  I could not look at their faces. They called out again as they skidded past. After a while, I looked up and saw them wobbling on the country road.

  Father was still hacking at the culvert—or rather, screwing out the silt with a spade of his own invention that looked like a large shoetree.

  He said, “Don’t feel badly. You’ve seen some amazing things today, Charlie. And what have those pipsqueaks been doing? Sniffing glue in the schoolyard, boasting about their toys, looking at pictures, raising hell. Watching TV—that’s all they do in school. Ruin their eyesight. You don’t need that.”

  5

  POLSKI CAME after supper, just as Father had predicted. The twins and Jerry were already in bed, and Mother was swabbing my rash with lotion. Father was describing Ma Polski’s fur coat hung in the cold store.

  “All that vanity and expense,” he said. “And the foolish woman is more conspicuously ugly when she’s wearing it! With those teeth and that coat she looks like a demented woodchuck, who’d gnaw your leg off if you looked at her crosseyed. Imagine murdering and skinning twenty pretty animals, so that an unhappy woman—” Hearing Polski’s Jeep clatter into the driveway, Father stood up and said, “Time to hit the hay, Charlie.”

  Mother took me upstairs, and inside my bedroom she said, “I’ve been worrying about you the whole day. Why do you look so sad?” I said, “I think something is going to happen to us.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Something terrible.”

  Mother said, “When you’re young, the world looks impossible. It seems big and strange, and even threatening. If you think about it too much, you start to worry.”

  “But Dad’s not young.”

  Mother stared at me.

  I said, “And he’s worried.”

  “No,” Mother said. “But he’s got a lot on his mind just now. I’ve seen him like this before—brooding. It gives him wonderful schemes. Someday soon, he’ll tell us what his new invention is.” “Something is going to happen to us,” I said.

  “Something good,” Mother said. “Now go to sleep, darling.” After she turned the light out, I wanted to pray. I shut my eyes tight, but nothing would come. I did not know how. I thought Please, but that was all the prayer I could manage. And the voices down below, the thump of them, made my heart pound. I went to the door and, creeping out to the landing at the top of the stairs, heard Father’s hoots.

  “You’ve got me confused, Doc! I don’t know whether I’m deaf or blind! This very morning I showed you a working model of a dirt-cheap freezing plant. You turned your back on it and said you had to water your tomatoes. Now here you are, probably missing your favorite TV show, asking me—”

  “I told you I was interested,” Polski said in a stricken voice.

  “I must be deaf as a post,” Father said, “because I didn’t hear a thing.”

  “And I’m interested now.”

  Father said, “Your interest and ten cents wouldn’t get me a cold cup of coffee.”

  I peeked through the railing. Father was goose-stepping up and down the parlor. Polski had found a low stool. He sat on it the way a girl sits on a toilet, with his knees together and his face forward.

  Polski said, “The cold store is full after today’s cut. What I want to know is, what am I going to do with what they cut tomorrow and the day after?”

  Father said, “You can always go on blowing fuses. It’ll help pass the time.”

  “There must be some way of vigging up the barn. I mean, insulating her and fixing up a cooler where the hay is. I could hire the carpenters, but the vefrigeration angle is the problem. If you handled it, that would see us through the harvest.”

  “I don’t get it. This morning I showed you a refrigeration device that was perfection, and all you did was ride off in your jalopy. What was the word you used? Oh, yes, you called it a contraption. I was scratching my head! I didn’t see a contraption anywhere! Doctor,” Father said grandly, “I am still scratching my head.”

  “That icebox was a fine idea,” Polski said. “But I’m looking for something more down-to-earth. The cold store you made me last year was okay for last year’s crop. But this year we’ve got ourselves a bumper harvest, and we’ve got to act accordingly. Now don’t think I’m looking for miracle vemedies—”

  “Insulating a barn is no problem,” Father said. “They can slap on an interior wall and blow rock wool through with hose pipes. But there’s a lot of airspace in that barn. What? Ten thousand cubic feet—maybe more? You’d have to have multiple-level cooling to get an even temperature, otherwise you’d be freezing some and roasting the rest. Blowers, thermostats, coils. You’re talking about a mile of copper pipe, not to mention the wiring and electricals.”

  “See, you do understand the problem.”

  “You wouldn’t even look at my Worm Tub—that icebox I showed you this morning.”

  “It’s too small.”

  “A scale model is always small.”

  “I need something a hundred times bigger.” Sumthun: Polski had started to gobble.

  “You don’t understand its application.”

  “I don’t want fires.”

  “You’ll go broke paying electricity bills. Ten thousand cubic feet. How many kilowatts? Cost a fortune.” And he repeated, “A fotchin! ”

  “Stop trying to save me money, Mr. Fox.”

  “It’s not the money, it’s the wasteful attitude I object to. Doctor, it’s sending this country down the tubes.”

  “I’m not running this country”—runnun—“and this is nothing to jaw about. I realize it’s short notice, but I need more cold-storage space and I’m counting on you to provide it.”

  “I keep asking myself—I’m thinking out loud, you understand—I keep asking myself, what’s the point?”

  “The point is,” Polski said, “there’s too damn much asparagus this year. That’s the point.”

  “Are you cutting it too fast, or selling it too slow?”

  “I’m not selling it at all—other people are. That’s why the price is down.”

  “Listen, are you in the storing business or the selling business? I’m asking, because I don’t know about these things. I’m a handyman, not an economist.”

  Still hunched on the stool, Polski turned his pinched face toward Father and said in a sour defiant voice, “I’ll sell when the price goes up—not before. In the meantime, every spear I cut goes into cold storage.”

  Father said, “That’s the lousiest rottenest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “It’s business.”

  “Then it’s dishonest business. You’re creating a shortage of asparagus—although there is no shortag
e. So the price will go up—although the price is pretty fair. Well, it’s not as bad as sticking up a bank, but it’s bad enough. I’d say it was about on a level with robbing poor boxes.” Father was now standing over Polski and smiling horribly. “And what do you get for it? A few bucks, a new pair of dungarees, a tin wristwatch that lights up in the dark—maybe a jalopy or two. You think it’s worth it?”

  “Every farmer worth the name watches the market,” Polski said, hugging his knees together.

  “There’s watching, and there’s tampering,” Father said. And he became at once ferociously friendly. “Make yourself comfortable, Doctor. You don’t have to squash yourself on that. The chair behind you has hydraulics.”

  “I’m comfortable where I am, thank you.”

  “Reason I ask is, you’re sitting on my foot massager.”

  Polski jumped to his feet.

  Picking up the boot-shaped stool, Father said, “People neglect their feet something awful. See this slot? You just stick your foot in here and wiggle your toes. That gets the mechanical fingers going inside. Funnily enough, it works. Want to do your tired old feet a big favor?”

  Polski said no and went to the chair, which was like a dentist’s chair. He sat on it almost daintily, but against his will the chair tilted and embraced him, and lifted his legs off the floor, and swung him toward Father.

  “Hydraulics,” Father said.

  Doggedly, his jaw out as if he were having a tooth pulled, Polski said, “I’ve got a farm to vun and sumthun like twenty tons of produce to sell. I have to do it the best way I can.”

  “Simple. Sell it and clear out room for more. You make up in volume what you lose in price, and you still come out ahead of the game. That’s sounder than strangling the market altogether. But no, you’re not interested in that, because you’re riding high—using slave labor. Profit? I didn’t plumb that chair and make that foot massager so that I could retire on fifty grand a year. I did it because of lumbago and sore feet, and if I’m able to ease someone else’s pain, fine. That’s the way I’m made. But you want to bluff the market and make a killing. That ain’t business—it’s robbery.”