by Paul Theroux
It was now November, the weather like Hatfield in July, and Jeronimo was home. And for this, Father said, no one had said a prayer or surrendered his soul or pledged allegiance or dog-eared a Bible or flown a flag. We had not polluted the river. We had preserved the ecology of the Mosquito Coast. And all because we had put our trust in “a Yankee with a knack for getting things accomplished”—him. He often said that if it were not for white-collar crime and stupidity and a twenty-cent dollar and the storm clouds of war, he could have done the same things in Hatfield, Massachusetts.
All this was plain from the Gallery, which had just wobbled with the earth tremor, and where Father was saying, “If I had the hardware, know what I’d do?”
The others were still fearfully gray and did not reply.
Mother said, “What would you do, Allie?”
“Sink a shaft.”
He singled out the Maywits and Mrs. Kennywick and talked to them, because they had been praying hardest and were in a way still quaking themselves.
“The kind of hole they make in the Santa Barbara Channel or the North Sea. Your diamond bits, your giant platform, your whole drilling rig. I’d drill down—what?—four or five thousand feet and tap the energy resources right under here.” He stamped his foot on the Gallery floor. “Just the way your chicleros tap a sapodilla tree. Same principle.”
“You make me a sweet lil raincap. Fadder,” Mrs. Kennywick said. But her voice told that she was still thinking of the earth tremor.
“The rumble reminded me. Why doesn’t anyone else put two and two together? See, the mistake they make in drilling for oil is that they’re missing a golden opportunity. They’ve got all the hardware, but as soon as the oil starts gushing they pump it dry and bore another one. Talk about foolish and short-sighted!”
“But Fadder ain’t do that foolishness,” Mr. Maywit said to Mother, as if he knew what was coming. He looked fearful, or perhaps he just seemed so to me because I knew his real name was Roper.
“I’d let it gush,” Father said, “and go on drilling. Go past the shale, lengthen the bit, go past the granite—lengthen it some more—and penetrate the bowels of the earth.”
“Shoo,” Mr. Haddy said. “That is a spearmint for true.”
“That earth tremor we just had was a geological crepitation, a subterranean fart, from the bowels of the earth. There’s gas down there! Superheated water, steam under pressure—all the heat you need!”
Mr. Peaselee said, “Ain’t we hot enough now, Fadder?” And Mr. Harkins said it was so hot it was bringing out the crapsies, though I had no idea what he meant by this.
“Dad’s not talking about the weather,” Clover said.
“Listen to that little girl,” Father said.
Everyone looked at Clover. She basked for a while under their watery eyes.
“Geothermal energy! Don’t laugh. There’s only a few places in the world where it’s practical, and you’re lucky enough to be living in one. The whole of Central America is a repository of high energy. You’re on a fault line—thin crust, loose plates—listen to the volcanoes. They’re calling out and saying, ‘Geothermal! Geothermal!’—but no one’s doing anything about it. No one seems to understand how the modern world got this way—no one except me, and I understand it because I had a hand in making it. Everyone else is running away, or pursuing wasteful and dirty technology, or saying his prayers.”
“We ain’t praying no more,” Mrs. Kennywick said.
“The promised land is in your own back yard! All you have to do is get through that flowerbed, and drill the crust and tap the heat. We’ve been on the moon, but we haven’t been in our own basement boiler. Listen, there’s enough energy down there to do our cooking until kingdom come!”
I had to grin. Only Father would think of cooking by drilling to the earth’s core. “Won’t cost a nickel,” was his usual boast, “and think of the benefits—a great invention is a perpetual annuity.” Father was excited by the earth tremor and his idea, and he infected the others on the Gallery with his excitement and optimism—just those feelings alone, because I was sure they had not understood a word he said.
“I see a kind of conduit, a borehole,” he said. “Down go the drills, up comes the heat energy. I’ve already proved I can make ice out of nothing but pipefittings and chemical compounds and a little kindling wood. That took brains. But listen, any dumbbell can dig a hole. Why don’t we? There’s a good reason—we haven’t got the hardware. Not yet. There’s certain things in this world you can’t make out of bamboo and chicken wire. But I’ll tell you something else. Siphoning off the geothermal energy—I mean, in a huge way—might put a stop to these earth tremors, or at least take some of the kick out of them. See, I am talking about nothing less than harnessing a volcano!”
He had them twitching with this speech, and they looked eager enough to snatch shovels and start digging wherever he pointed.
All except Mr. Haddy. He stood up and cleared his throat and said, “That is a good spearmint, but it take an awful lot of brains. Between times, Lungley and me want to ship some ice down Bonito and Fish Bucket.”
“Still dying to impress your friends, aren’t you?”
“Ain’t got friends down there,” Mr. Haddy said. “But I can use me lanch like the old-time days, loading and sailing. That is my occupation, Fadder.”
“I take it you’re not interested in geothermal energy.”
“Interested, sure thing, for true. But that spearmint, man, is real large. We ain’t got all them holes and poles!”
“Not yet,” Father said.
Mr. Haddy stuck his teeth out and blinked like a rabbit.
“How much ice do you want to take downstream?”
“Coupla hundred pounds. Two-three sacks.”
“Hardly worth the trouble." Father said. “Why not take a ton?” Mr. Haddy laughed loudly in surprise and relief. “She sink me old lanch!”
“Ice floats, Figgy”—Mr. Haddy smiled at the word—“You can tow it.”
“How we do that?”
“Take an iceberg.”
“Icebugs and bowl-caynoes,” Mr. Maywit said to me, but clear enough for Father to hear. “Fadder sure is a miracle man!”-Mr. Maywit looked very frightened.
“We could make an iceberg before breakfast,” Father said.
It was the sort of challenge Father enjoyed, something grand and visible—a task that was also a performance. He had objected to Mr. Haddy taking a few sacks of ice to the coast, but towing an iceberg—that was a different story.
***
I had visualized a pyramid, its sides submerged, its point sticking up, being tugged by Little Haddy. But Father’s iceberg was eggshaped, and as tall as he was, to concentrate its coldness and limit its melting. He calculated that a single block made from many smaller blocks would be reduced by only a third if they floated it to Bonito Oriental, and it would still look like an iceberg in Fish Bucket. It would not make the coast. “But we’re just proving a point here—not trying to change anyone’s life. We’ll see how it shakes down.”
He told Mother it was mainly a morale-builder. “I like it when you get an idea and no one laughs. They deserve an iceberg.”
Mr. Haddy was very proud. The iceberg was his boast, and he would captain the Creoles in taking it downstream.
“I’m just obeying orders,” Father said. “If Figgy wants an iceberg, he’s going to have it.”
All work was put aside for this. Fat Boy was stoked and all the pumps primed. We had been keeping Fat Boy purring, but we only removed ice when we needed it for the cold-storage room, where we kept dead hens and vegetables. “We’re a thoroughly refrigerated settlement,” Father said. But the truth was that ice was not a necessity so far. It was a novelty, like Father’s idea of geothermal energy. Why drill five thousand feet down to get at a volcano’s bowels? To provide Fat Boy with an endless heat supply. One scheme justified another. We could have done without them, but, as Father said, why live like savages? “In
the end, Robinson Crusoe went back home! But we’re staying.”
He said, “Someday, there’ll be a conduit here, self-sealing and perpetual, and this whole refrigeration plant will be operated by geothermal energy. We’ll have ice coming out of our ears and won’t have to chop another stick of wood. Think of the future!”
That was the day we made the iceberg. We pumped water into Fat Boy and kept the firebox full and listened to the fizz and bubble in the pipes. Father ran back and forth on the path to the riverbank, where the ice bricks were taking shape as an oval iceberg.
“It’s pretty and it’s free. You find me a better combination of virtues.”
Every half-hour we froze a new batch of bricks, and by mid-day we were finished—a large blue-white iceberg lay steaming and sweating in the mud, with a tow rope frozen in its center. It was roughly the shape of a Volkswagen Beetle, but larger, on a platform of bamboo logs that served first as a sled and then as a raft. We had no difficulty launching it. The tow rope was hitched to Little Haddy, and its gunning engine got the ice down the bank and into the river. The Creoles—Harkins, Peaselee, and Maywit—were in the bow, and Mr. Haddy in the wheel house, the ice creaking, the bamboo groaning, and the muddy water splashing all around it.
Of all the strange pieces of anything that floated down this jungle river, this was the strangest by a country mile.
“Our message to the world,” Father said. “I’d love to see their faces when it heaves into view—coming out of the hottest, sickest, most parched and bug-ridden jungle in the whole hemisphere. They look up from their laundry. ‘What is dat?’ ‘Dat is a icebug, Mudder, and he heading dis way!’ ”
Mother said, “They’ll think it's the end of the world.”
“But it’s the beginning. It’s creation, Mother.”
The iceberg, hog-backed and bobbing, went around the bend and out of sight. The children ran down the Swampmouth path to get another look. Mother headed into the house, and then I was alone with Father on the riverbank.
“I could have gone with them." he said. “But I didn’t want to spoil their fun. They can have the glory.” He looked back at Fat Boy. “Besides, I’ve got to see to him. He might have overheated. He’s full of poison and flammable gas. Ammonia and hydrogen, Charlie—those are his vital juices!” He looked at his finger stump and added, “But there’s danger in all great inventions.”
I saw my chance to tell him about the Acre. There was no danger there, apart from the traps we had set. We had food and water and shelter. But I was afraid of what he might say about the praying tree and the lean-to school. He might have got me to admit that we had taken all our clothes off one day and compared tools. He would have been stinking angry, or else hooting and calling us savages. So I said nothing.
“You feel a little like God,” he whispered, looking around. His clothes were soaked from the ice bricks and sweat. His fingers were red from handling the ice. His hair was long and his face like a hatchet. He turned his bloodshot eyes on me and went on in the same tired and wondering whisper, “God had fun making things like icebergs and volcanoes. Too bad He didn’t finish the job. Ha!”
***
Little Haddy returned to Jeronimo at nightfall. Mr. Haddy was giggling with pride, but at last he confessed that the iceberg had started breaking up at Bonito Oriental. They had cut it loose and let the current take the fragments downstream to the coast. He was a little drunk, because at the Chinese store in Bonito they had traded some ice for a calabash of mishla.
But Father was smiling at the river, maybe imagining the ice bricks floating down to Santa Rosa, and people pointing and fishing them out and struck with terror at the thought of ice sailing out of the jungle.
“This was a field day,” he said. It had not cost anything, and we were all happier as a result. He told us he had left the United States so that we could spend days like this, working together and putting our ideas into practice. It was what he had always dreamed about.
Outside the Gallery that night, the birds fell silent in the muddy twilight and the bats began chirping. Around us was a circular wall of insect howl. A light breeze quickened in the darkness, brushing the trees. We played Up Jenkins on the Gallery floor, to the flashes of heat lightning that separated the mountains from the night sky.
“That’s next. Injun country. We’ll take them a ton.”
But when he pointed, the Creoles and Zambus held tight to the Gallery rails, expecting another earth tremor. And Mr. Haddy, being worried, was all the more rabbit-toothed.
Father did not notice them. He was staring at the mountains, waiting for another lightning bolt. It came. It flashed on his face.
“You feel a little like God,” he said.
17
IN THE DAYTIME, Jeronimo was ours—our design, our gardens, the whops and claps of our pumps, the nut-sweet fragrance of our split bamboos, our flowers and mechanics. It was hot, but the heat and light burned it clean of stinks. And it was always in the daytime that Father said, “I declare this a success.”
The coldest Jeronimo got was in the hour before dawn, like right now, when it was coal-black and clammy and so silent in the clearing you could hear the trees drip. It was foreign and all wild. The jungle odors were strongest, too, the wet itch of hairy vines, the wormy tree trunks, the foul smack of sappy leaves, and the river rotting as it swept past us.
These were the stinks and perfumes of early morning, dew-soaked grass, and wet petals, and they overwhelmed the civilized smells of Jeronimo. Everything was black under the black sky. The stars, which at midnight looked like a spillway of broken pearls, did not shine at this hour—they were holes of light, like eye squints in black masks.
Father had woken Jerry and me and told us to put our clothes on.
“We’re all ready,” he said.
We waited in the dark, standing in the wet grass near Fat Boy’s firebox, yawning and shivering.
“I’ve been up for hours getting this together,” Father said. I could see the glow of his cigar butt, nothing else. “Hardly slept a wink.”
“Fadder ain’t need no sleep,” Mr. Maywit said. So Father had been lecturing him, too.
As my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, I saw Mr. Maywit fussing around a block of ice. It was nearly as big as the iceberg Mr. Haddy had towed downstream two days ago. Something in Mr. Maywit’s jittery gestures said he was not coming with us. He was working too hard, out of breath and chattering to Mr. Peaselee, as if he was impatient for us to leave, sort of showing us the door.
The slab of ice—it looked like a fat lump of lard in the darkness—was being wrapped in a mitten of banana leaves. It was fastened to a narrow sled. The sled had a pair of close-set runners and was rigged to be pulled by men in harnesses.
“Don’t talk to me about wheels,” Father said.
But no one had said anything about wheels.
Rustling the banana leaves as they layered them over the ice block, Mr. Maywit and Mr. Peaselee were whispering between themselves. Father’s cigar butt blazed.
“Wheels are for paved roads—they won’t get you anywhere on these mountain tracks. Too inefficient. Just break or get bogged down in the gumbo. But Skidder here”—it was his name for the ice sled—“will merely glide over the bumps.”
The ice no longer glowed like lard. The wrapping was done. It looked like granite, the hump of a tombstone. Mr. Maywit and Mr. Peaselee stepped aside, their white eyes wide open.
“How about it?” Father said. “Are you coming with us?”
“Kyant.” Mr. Maywit was hesitant and backpedaling. “I am Feel Super.”
Father laughed at him. “He almost forgot!” he cried. “If you’re Field Super, you get those gutters scrubbed. I want them so clean I can eat off them. Where are you, Mr. P.?”
Mr. Peaselee said, “Fadder?” from a squatting position, and sprang to his feet, muttering.
“You coming?”
“No man,” Mr. Peaselee said. “They always troubles there. Contraband
ers. Shouljers. Feefs. People from Nicaragua way. Up in those mountains, they got ruckboos, for true.”
“Quit it—you don’t know the first thing about trouble.” Father turned his back on the Creoles. “Where’s my jungle men, where’s my trackers?”
“Hee, Fadder.”
It was a low brown growl, close by. The Zambus had been there beside us like black trees, listening the whole time—Francis Lung ley, John Dixon, and Bucky Smart. Now I could see their round heads moving past the star punctures in the sky.
“Harness up and let’s shove off.” Father said. “Go back to bed, Peasie. Get your beauty sleep."
We started out of the clearing. Father in front, the Zambus pulling the sled, Jerry and me following behind. Father was still talking.
“Trouble, the man says. I don't call a forty-five-degree angle trouble, and what’s a handful of no-goods? I could have that halfbreed pleading for mercy. Fuel shortages, unemployment, moral sneaks in Washington, and muggers on every street corner! Kids in grade school sniffing glue, polecats in every pulpit, old-lady hoarders, white-collar punks, double-figure inflation, and a two-dollar loaf of bread. That’s what I call trouble. Dead rivers, cities that look like Calcutta—that’s trouble for fair. You don’t take a walk because you’re afraid of getting a shiv in your ribs, so you stay home and they come through the windows. There are homicidal maniacs, ten years old, prowling some neighborhoods. They go to school! The whole country’s bleeding to death—bleeding—”
He kept on talking as we entered the dark path out of Jeronimo, and the birds flew up at the sound of his voice.
“Our technological future’s in the tiny hands of the Nipponese, and we let coolies do our manufacturing for us. And what about those jumped-up camel drivers frantically doubling the price of oil every two weeks? Did I hear someone mention trouble?”
