The Mosquito Coast

by Paul Theroux

In the jungle, all rivers are mazes, and this one was mazier than most—it was something only a small cayuka or an ingenious pipanto like ours could negotiate. The bad part was not that we were going backward, but that we seemed to be going nowhere. We would come to a bank choked with water lilies and hyacinths and green ruffled leaves, and see a bend of open water. We would turn and follow that bend. After half an hour, as the hyacinths piled up and the branches at the bank swung against the boat and smacked our faces and pushed Father’s baseball cap sideways, we would realize that we had come the wrong way. Or we were in a swamp that was packed as solid as land, or a lagoon surrounded by black trees, or knocking against stumps. Then we had to go back and suds our way through the thick flowers and logs we had taken for a bank. Once past these barriers, we would travel on what seemed a new river or a tributary, now narrow, now wide as a pond and no opening. So the sun went round and round, and Father cursed and said, why did you have to go fifty river miles to advance five land miles?

  He mapped the river as we went, marking the shallows and the bends and the false turns, the sandbar crescents on the reaches, the swamps and lagoons—all the deceptions of its straggling course. It was more than a crumpled shape. It was a bunch of knots, tangled like worms in winter, that made no sense. Even Father, who liked complications, called it a so-and-so labyrinth and said that if he had a dredger and a barge full of dynamite he would twist the bends out of it and knock it straight, so that you could see daylight from one end to the other.

  This was the subject of his speeching. When we were led into a swamp by the temptation of open water, Father said, “I’m going to do something about that”—and the islands—“I’ll sink them, first chance I get”—and the ponds—“Strap a channel through here, canalize it—all I need is dynamite and willing hands.”

  Father was now at the bow with Clover, while Mr. Haddy took his turn on the pedals. “Clear all this obstruction away—make some kind of scoop that cuts this sargasso weed at its roots and lifts it free. Get this mess into shape. How very American, you’re all saying—the man wants to bring permanent changes to this peaceful jungle! But I didn’t mention poison, and I certainly don’t intend to make it commercial. Gaw, I like to get my hand on this,” and he grinned at the tangles and bends. “It really makes me mad!”

  He was getting redder in the face, and, being tall, he looked uncomfortable squatting at the needle nose of this narrow boat. He kept his hands on his hips and swayed like someone riding a bike with no hands. Every so often, he poked his head into the storage vault and said, “At least the ice is holding up, which is more than I can say for the crew. Pedal, Mr. Haddy! Stop catching crabs. Are you looking for avocados, too?”

  We passed a semicircle of huts. Francis Lungley called it a village.

  “I see signs of corruption,” Father said. “I see a tin can!” At another group of riverbank huts, he said, “It’s all gum wrappers!”

  There was only one more village, and it was hardly a village—a few open-sided huts and a stand of banana trees. This made Father hopeful. Two men sat at the river’s edge clumping submerged stones with boulders. Francis Lungley said the men were fishing—stunning the creatures under the stones. They turned the stones over after they clumped them, and pulled out squashed eels and tadpoles and frogs.

  “We must be getting close,” Father said.

  Francis slapped himself on the head. “I forgit! Them mahoganies!” He smiled at the trees as if he expected them to smile back. “It near here.”

  Father looked satisfied. “They didn’t cut them down. Nothing to cut them down with. Primitive tools. Nothing to use the trees for. Just sit back and watch them grow. Now that’s a very good sign.” Here, grass spikes grew out of the water, and the trunks of short cut-off trees stood in pools. Clumps of spinach bobbed in the river, and the lianas were black and dangling, like high-voltage wires blown down by a storm. It was all green wreckage and might have been the mess left by a subsided flood. In what was supposed to be river, there were shoots of fountainy leaves, and the land steamed with crater holes of scummy water. Mud and mosquitoes—and it was hard to tell where the river ended and the land began. There was no definite riverbank, and if it had not been for the tall trees behind it all, I think we would have turned around and gone back—we certainly could not have gone any further. Many of the smaller trees were dead, and on the deadest ones were brown pods, quivering under the branches. “Bats,” Mr. Haddy said. “They’s bats.” He repeated his bloodsucking story to Clover, but she said, “You can’t scare me.”

  Staring at some bushes, I saw human faces. The faces were entirely still and round and staring back at me with white eyes that did not blink. I was not scared until I remembered that they must have been there the whole time, watching us thrash our boat through the spinach and the weeds.

  Father saw them. He said, “I’ve got a little surprise for you.”

  At his voice, and while we were still looking at them, the faces vanished. They did not move, they just disappeared—goggling at us one minute, gone the next. They had turned into leaves, but not even the leaves moved.

  “Out to lunch,” Father said. “Get the duckboards. We’re going after them. You first, Charlie.”

  “Why me?” But I knew I should not have asked.

  Father said, “Because you’re the bravest one here, sonny.”

  This was not true. But the risks that Father made me take were his way of showing me there were no risks. On the rock in Baltimore, up the kingpost of the Unicorn, climbing through Fat Boy—it had all been a kind of training for times like this. Father wanted me to be strong. He had known all along that he was preparing me for worse, for this tiptoeing through the spinachy swamp on duckboards, and teetering past the scummy pools and the vine tubes.

  “Stamp your feet, Charlie.”

  I did so and a snake, hanging in six bracelets from a low branch, gathered itself and dropped into the water and swam away.

  After that, I stamped my feet every chance I got, and further on a short fat viper, surprised by the clomp of my shoe, wormed into a stump hole until only its gray tail tip showed.

  Father was saying, “Never can tell about these people. They might be Munchies—haw!”

  We got through thirty yards of this by passing the last duckboard ahead and repeating this process to make a walkway through the mush. It was hard to believe there had been people right here, standing in the swamp. How had they disappeared without making a splash?

  We came to bushes like hedges, and past them the trees were taller and had trunks like thick skirts hanging in folds. Parroty birds, and birds so small they might have been insects, screamed around our heads. Above the tops of the mahogany trees there were bigger birds, perched or making shadowy flights, like flying turkeys. Their wings made slow broomlike brushings against the treetops. They might have been curassows—I heard bull-fiddle twangs—but Father said they were vultures and that he wanted to wring their scrawny scavenging necks.

  “Seville,” Francis said, and pointed to an opening some yards ahead—more jungle, except that it was dark here and sunny there. Gnats and flies spiraled in the light and speckled it.

  Mr. Haddy said, “I ain’t like this place so soon.”

  “What kind of houses are those, Dad?” Clover asked.

  “That kind of dwelling, of course—”

  He never admitted not knowing something, but these huts were not easy to explain. They were small tufty humps made from the same spiky grass we had walked through on the duckboards. A framework of skinny branches balanced the hanks of dead grass bunched on top. Not huts—more like beehives that needed haircuts.

  “—that’s probably where they keep their animals. Muffin,” Father said.

  “Got no animals here,” Francis said. “I ain’t see one.”

  “All the better,” Father said. “If they actually live in those things, then we came to the right place.”

  Mr. Haddy chuckled and said to me, “The right places
for Fadder is always the wrong places for me.”

  Father looked gladly on the miserable village.

  Yet only the huts were miserable. This jungle, the start of the high forest, was tall and orderly. Each tree had found room to grow separately. The trees were arranged in various ways, according to slenderness or leaf size, the big-leafed ones at the jungle floor, the towering trees with tiny leaves rising to great heights, and the ferns in between. I had always pictured jungle as suffocating spaghetti tangles, drooping and crisscrossed, a mass of hairy green rope and clutching stems—a wicked salad that stank in your face and flung its stalks around you.

  This was more like a church, with pillars and fans and hanging flowers and only the slightest patches of white sky above the curved roof of branches. There was nothing smothering about it, and although it was noisy with birds, it was motionless—no wind, not even a breeze in the moisture and green shadows and blue-brown trunks. And no tangles—only a forest of verticals, hugely patient and protective. It was like being indoors, with a pretty roof overhead. And the order and size of it made the little huts beneath look especially dumpy.

  The village—if it was a village—was deserted. Without people there, it was like the crust of a camp, where some travelers, too lazy or sick to make proper lean-tos, had hacked some bushes apart, shoveled a fire next to a rock, and spent one uncomfortable night before setting off again to die somewhere. The only sign of life was a sick puppy that yapped at us from behind a pile of trash—fruit peels and chewed cane stalks—and didn’t bother getting up. I gave the hungry thing the sandwich I had stuffed into my pocket at lunchtime. He tried to bite me, then he ate the sandwich. In the center of the five huts, all made of grass tufts, was a smoky firepit, and some broken calabashes. There was not a human here to be seen. But we had seen faces back at the duckboards.

  Mr. Haddy said, “I ain’t blame them for fetching out of this place. Lungley, what you say is for true. This is dirt.” He was glancing around and wetting his teeth as he spoke. “We could go home, Fadder. We could slap we own mosquitoes.”

  Father was fanning himself with his baseball cap. He said, “They can’t be far away. Probably down at the drive-in hamburger stand.”

  He looked up and saw Mr. Haddy walking away, in the direction of the duckboards.

  “Anyone here require a beverage?”

  This stiffened Mr. Haddy like an arrow between his shoulders. He turned around laughing in a sneezing sort of way.

  “Or, on the other hand,” Father said—he had bent over and picked something from the ground—“maybe they’re getting their flashlights repaired. Take a gander at this so-called consumer durable.”

  It was a crumbled flashlight battery, its rusted case burst open and the paint peeled off and barely recognizable, it was so squashed. It looked like an old sausage.

  “Francis, you said they were savages!”

  The poor Zambu, who maybe had never seen a flashlight battery—flashlights were forbidden in Jeronimo—just smiled at Father and showed his teeth like a dog hearing a door slam.

  “But if they’re using these gimcrack things, they probably are savages.”

  We sat down and waited and watched the wee-wee ants.

  “Could be at the gas station, in a long line, waiting to fill up with high-test.”

  “Ain’t seen no gas station round here,” Francis said.

  “You wouldn’t kid me, would you?”

  There was evidence that someone was living here—straw beds in the huts, flies rotating over the trash pile, and a tripod with a burned baby on it, or, the nearest thing to it, a roasted monkey with curled-up fingers and toes.

  Father said, “How did you talk to them when you were here before?”

  Francis opened his mouth and wagged his blue tongue.

  “What language?”

  Francis did not know what Father meant. He said he just talked to them and they talked to him. “They savvy.”

  This was a Jeronimo explanation. People spoke English, Spanish, and Creole, but they did not know when they were going from one language to another. It seemed that by looking into a person’s face, they knew what language to use, and sometimes they mixed them all together, so that what came out sounded like a new language. I had the habit myself. I could talk to anyone, and often I did not realize that I was not speaking English. But everyone on the Mosquito Coast, no matter what he looked like or what language he spoke, said he was English.

  Pacing the clearing with Clover, Father looked like a man showing his daughter around the zoo—impatient and proud and talking the whole time and sort of holding his nose. Then, from the other side of the firepit, we heard his loud voice.

  “Okay, the game’s over. We can see you! Stop hiding—you’re just wasting your time! Come on out of there, we’re not going to hurt you! Get out from behind those trees!”

  His voice rang against the jungle’s straight trees and high ceiling. He kept it up for several minutes, yelling at the bushes, while we watched. Clover peered at the ferns Father was beating with a stick. He looked the way Tiny Polski had when he was flushing bobwhites in Hatfield.

  The amazing thing was, it worked. We saw we were surrounded by people, more than twenty of them. This took place as we were staring, and they appeared in the same way as they had vanished before, without a movement or a sound. One second, Father was shouting “Come on out!” in the empty clearing, and the next second the people were there and he was shouting the same thing in their faces. We did not know whether Father had really seen them or was just pretending.

  The women wore ragged dresses and the men wore shorts. But these clothes did not hide their nakedness. They seemed to represent clothes rather than serve any covering purpose. We could see their private parts through the rips and tears. And the children—Clover’s age and mine—were stark naked, which was embarrassing.

  “Carkles and wilks,” Mr. Haddy said, and stuck his teeth out.

  Father said, “They don’t look so bad to me. Are you sure this is the place?”

  Francis said it was.

  We expected Father to say hello. He didn’t. He turned his back on the people, as if he had known them a long time, and he said, “Okay, let’s go” over his shoulder—meaning them. “Follow me—we’ve got work to do.”

  Three of the men—they looked a little like Francis, except that they were nakeder and had bushier hair—followed Father to the duckboards.

  “You stay here,” Father said to us. “Relax, get acquainted, make yourselves known.”

  He went off impatiently, whacking at flies with his hat, and then we heard him kicking the duckboards to scare snakes. The three men followed him without a word.

  Clover said, “He’s right at home anywhere.” She sounded like Mother.

  The people stared at Clover through the haze from the firepit’s smoke. They had gray blurred faces and wore scorched rags. Mud was caked on their legs.

  “See-ville, man,” Mr. Haddy said. “What a spearmint!”

  Francis said, “Almost went dead here, Haddy. Two time.”

  Now the people looked at us.

  “What you do to these folks, Lungley?”

  “Ain’t do nothing.”

  “How is it?” Mr. Haddy spoke to the people. He stuck out his teeth and opened his mouth to listen.

  No one replied. “Must be ailing,” Mr. Haddy whispered. The naked children hid behind their parents. We looked at each other across the clearing, and it was like looking across the world.

  They turned their heads. An old man limp-scraped into the clearing from the pillars of the forest trees. He wore a pair of cut-off striped pants, wire glasses, and socks but no shoes—his toenails were yellow in the rips. A rag was knotted around his neck. There were broken straws in his hair. He wore a bicycle clip on each wrist like a bracelet.

  “That is the Gowdy,” Francis said.

  “Look like he require a bevidge,” Mr. Haddy said. “Shoo!”

  The next words we heard
were Father’s. He was hidden and saying, “Careful! Steady there! Don’t drop them!”

  We had packed the ice so carefully in banana leaves that the blocks were like parcels, tied with vines. The silent men carried two parcels apiece. Father led them to the middle of the clearing and directed that the parcels be placed on the ground.

  “Who’s in charge here?” Father said.

  “Man with speckles,” Francis said. “He the Gowdy.” He nodded at the man who stood slightly forward of the group of staring people. Seeing our eyes on him, the old man clawed some of the straws out of his hair.

  Father shook the man’s hand. “You the Gowdy?”

  “Gowdy,” the man said, and he giggled.

  “We’ve got a little surprise for you,” Father said in his friendly way. “Want to get those other people over here?” He took out his jackknife and winked at us. “I’d like to show them something.”

  When the people were close, Father cut the vines and pushed the leaves aside, uncovering one block of ice. He stabbed his knife blade like an ice pick and hacked off a corner. He gave this hunk of ice to the Gowdy.

  The old man bobbled it, just as Tiny Polski had done back in Hatfield, not knowing whether it was hot or cold. The people gathered around to touch it. They laughed and pushed to get near it and stepped on their children. The ones who touched the ice smelled their fingers, or walked a little distance away to lick them.

  Father was still winking at us as he spoke to the old man, the Gowdy. “What’s the verdict?”

  “Good morning to you, sah. I am well, thank you. Where are you garng. I am garng to the bushes.” The Gowdy’s wire glasses had been knocked crooked by the pushing people. “Today is Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Thank you, that is a good lesson.”

  He bobbled the ice as he spoke.

  “Hasn’t the slightest idea,” Father said to us.

  The ice was melting in the old man’s hand. Water ran down his arm, leaving dirt streaks on his skin. It dripped from the knob at his elbow.

  “Completely in the dark,” Father said. He put his arm around the old man’s shoulders and gave him a wide smile.