The Mosquito Coast

by Paul Theroux

  I poked my head out of the lean-to and saw Father beyond the dead fire, sitting in front of the ice block. The block with is clumsy cover was about a quarter of its morning size, but silhouetted in the starry sky it still looked like a tombstone, and Father like a white corpse that had crawled out of the grave. The starlight made his face like a skull’s and gave him bony arms.

  “I want to sleep in my own bed!” he screamed.

  I tried to think of something to say. I decided, after all, not to ask him for any water.

  “What are you looking at?” he said fiercely. “This is the first time since creation that ice has ever melted here. Think of it! And you’re saying that’s nothing?”

  18

  I WOKE UP tired in damp clothes and remembered we were still on the mountain—Father, Zambus, and ice. Father had fallen on his side and, slap on the ground, had gone to sleep with his arms folded and his baseball hat squashed against his cheek. But he woke quickly and denied that he had even dozed off. He said he had got bored, watching us snore. He said, “No, we haven’t failed!” and told me to fill the canvas bag with the water that had dripped into the mess-kit pan.

  “Don’t bother to get harnessed.” He was peeking under the cover of the ice block. He shoved the cakes of ice into the knapsacks. Each cake was about the size of a football, speckled with brown broken leaf, and had the rotten texture of a hard sponge. This was all that was left of the great ice block we had dragged out of Jeronimo.

  “Don’t say anything. Don’t ask me any questions. I don’t want to hear a peep out of anyone. Now let’s march!”

  He sprinted up the path, his knapsack rising and falling, bumping his back, whop-whop. Francis Lungley followed behind with the other knapsack, then Bucky and John, empty-handed, and Jerry and I, trying our best to keep up. I carried the long water bag. It slapped against my knees and prevented me from running.

  It was a bright cool dawn, washed in light, with parcels of cloud lying against the mountainside like ghosts of dead mackerel. Up ahead, Father had halted near an outcrop of rock. I thought he was waiting for us, but I saw that he had reached another ridge of the mountain. It was the last ridge. Below us—but it was a plateau, not the deep valley we had expected—was all of Honduras.

  Such an empty world. I did not think wilderness could look so sad.

  This was a different country from the one we knew: limitless jungle, volcanoes, and no ocean. No rivers that we could see, no water at all. It was a surface of treetops and skimming birds. Its vastness made me feel small and puny. No smoke, no roads, nothing to say that people lived here. It was Olancho, but that was only a name. It was anybody’s.

  “It looks so desolate,” I said.

  “You’ve never seen Chicago!”

  The treetops beneath us continued to the horizon, and the unbroken greenness gave it such a strong suggestion of depth that it hardly looked like forest at all. It was a brimming ocean of wild leaves, a tide so high it had risen to the mountain range. Father was smiling at it all, and yet it was Father who had told us that the deepest tides tricked you with their flatness—if you stuck your foot in them, they would drag you out and drown you in their undertow.

  “It’s all downhill from now on.” There was no path. Father set off, running beside the trickle of a stony creek.

  The Zambus said we were to look out for more bees. The Indians here were beekeepers and always had hives near their huts. And dogs—half-wild ones—they kept those, too. But we smelled smoke before we saw either bees or dogs, and when the creek widened to a stream, we knew we must be near a village. The forest was darker—we were under that ocean of trees we had seen, and moving down. My senses told me more than I could logically explain. The smell of stagnant water and woodsmoke and burned meat, and a hairier, dirtier, rancid-yam smell of latrines and dogs—all boiled together. It was a stew-stink I now associated with human habitation—not ours but other people’s. Jeronimo’s cleanliness educated my nose to these sharp odors.

  We might have missed the huts. They were leafy and made of peeled sticks and were the same color as the trees dying near them. But the starved dogs had rushed up to us and Francis was saying, “Fadder! Fadder!” and two macaws croaked at him from a branch.

  “Leave this to me,” Father said. He saw some lemon trees and whispered, “Juice balls.”

  In the stream that ran past the village there were women kneeling in muck doing laundry, slapping shirts and pants on boulders.

  “Those women are washing clothes,” I said.

  Jerry said, “So what?”

  “No one’s wearing clothes,” I said. “Not that kind.”

  The Indian men in the village clearing were practically naked. Shorts were all they wore, and these were in rags—more like aprons.

  “Maybe they’ve only got one pair.”

  The washerwomen scattered when they saw Father, but he did not pause. He splashed across the stream, then kicked the water from his sandals and kept going toward the Indians and the huts. These were not the sagging tin-roofed huts that river Creoles lived in, and they were much larger than the rats’ nests we had seen in collapsing Seville. They were tall stilted rectangles, with protruding roofs and a sort of attic space beneath the grass and leaf thatching. There were ten of them. Father was saying, “No beer cans, no candy wrappers, no flashlight batteries—”

  We stayed right behind him.

  “And no bows and arrows,” he said. “No weapons of any kind. We’re probably the first white men they’ve ever seen. Don’t do anything to frighten them. No loud noises. No sudden movements.”

  They were brown Indians, about a dozen of them, with Chinese eyes and heavy faces and short legs. Some had long hanks of hair bunched at the backs of their heads. Just this squinting fence of men—the women had hidden themselves, and there were no children that we could see.

  “Raise your arms slowly,” Father said.

  We raised our arms slowly.

  “Francis, you’re the Miskito expert. Tell them who we are.”

  Francis Lungley looked confused. “Who we are, Fadder?” he asked.

  “Tell them we’re their friends.”

  “Friend!” Francis howled. “Friend!”

  “Not in English, dummy. Tell them in Miskito, or whatever crazy lingo—”

  The Indians watched Father and Francis quarrel.

  “They ain’t Miskito feller. They Paya or Twahka feller. Maybe we give them bunce banana.”

  “You’re driving me bananas,” Father said, and pushed Francis aside. Now he spoke in Spanish. He asked them if they spoke Spanish. They stared at him. He said in Spanish that we were friends—we had come from far away, over the mountains. They still stared. He said we had a present for them. They went on staring under their swollen Chinese eyelids.

  “Maybe they’re all deaf." Father said. He shook the knapsack from his shoulders and went close to the men. “Go on, open it,” he said, and spelled this out in sign language for the men, motioning with his hands.

  An Indian knelt down and opened the knapsack.

  “See? He understands me perfectly."

  The Indian looked inside, then turned the limp knapsack upside-down and poured water out of it. He spoke one word, which none of us understood.

  “Quick. Francis, give me your knapsack!"

  Francis unbuckled the second knapsack and said, “She all water, Fadder."

  “There must be some of it left—maybe a little piece.”

  The Indians watched Father and Francis sorting through the soup in the wet knapsack. “Got it!” Father said, and held up a twig of ice—all that was left of the ice block—maybe two ounces. We followed as he went forward to show the men.

  He placed it in his palm. Maybe his impatience heated his hand, or maybe it was the small size of the ice twig. Whatever it was, the small thing disappeared. Before they could look closely at it, it melted away and slipped through the cracks between his fingers.

  Father still held his wet hand
out, but the Indians were staring at his finger stump.

  “I don’t believe this,” Father said quietly. He started to walk away. For a moment, I thought he was heading back to Jeronimo. But no—he was mumbling in Spanish and English. He had left us facing these bewildered Indians. Now he returned and gave a speech.

  He had brought them a present, he said. But the present had disappeared. What kind of present can disappear? Well, that was the interesting thing—it was water, but a form of water they had never seen before, as solid as a rock and twice as useful, good for preserving meat or killing pain. It was very cold! We called it ice, he said, and we had an invention over the mountains for making it out of river water. He had brought a block of it that had been as big as two men, but it had gotten smaller and smaller, and by the time we reached the village it was tiny. That was unfortunate, he said, because now it was gone, and a moment ago he could have showed it to them.

  “But I’ll be back,” he said. “I’ll show you!”

  Most of the Indians were still looking at his finger.

  Then one of the Indians spoke very clearly, in Spanish. His face was square, and he had the thickest hair bunch, which stuck out like a short ponytail.

  “Go away,” he said. His teeth were black stumps.

  Father laughed at him.

  “I said it was an accident, Jack. Have you been over there? Do you know how long it takes to drag ice that far?” Surprised by the Indian’s order, he had spoken in English. In Spanish he said, “Don’t blame me! Ever seen ice? Ever touched it?”

  “Go away,” the Indian said.

  “Thanks. We haven’t eaten since yesterday. We had to bivouac on that mountain. Our water’s used up and these kids are dead on their feet. Thanks very much.”

  “Go!”

  The word was sharp, the Indian’s black teeth were ferocious, but he looked very frightened. Father had been talking and trying to explain about the ice. Maybe he had not looked closely enough at these Indians to see that they were frightened. Maybe he assumed that their bewilderment had something to do with the marvel that had melted and leaked away.

  The Indians were clay-colored and they stood there like pieces of pottery about to shiver into cracks. Who were we? they seemed to be thinking. Where had we come from? Had we fallen out of the sky?

  “Real savages,” Father said. He had not seen their fear. “I guess I got what I bargained for—”

  They looked at Father’s finger stump as he waved it around.

  “If the ice hadn’t melted, they’d be all over us—thank you, you’re wonderful, please give us more, et cetera. But gentlemen, our plan has melted—”

  Now the Indians were showing their teeth, the way their dogs had—black teeth, raw lips, squinting eyes.

  “—and I can’t stand this Neolithic hostility—”

  Bucky said, “We go.”

  Francis said, “Yes, man.”

  “I’m not moving,” Father said to the receding Zambus. “What about you, Charlie?”

  I said, “I’m not moving either."

  “Tell them that.”

  He took my hand and pulled me in front of him, making me face the Indians and cloaking me in his anger smell.

  In Spanish, I said, “I am not moving.”

  “You heard what he said!”

  But had they? They looked as deaf as when we had first arrived. The Indian who had told us to go away stood there picking blister scabs of dead skin from his elbow. Then he looked up and hissed, “Go.”

  “Tell him we’re staying here until we get something to eat. That’s the least they can do. A little hospitality won’t kill them. We’re not missionaries or tax collectors.”

  I told them this. As I was talking, Father was whispering to the Zambus, “This place is stranger than Jeronimo ever was. What I could do here! They haven’t got a blessed thing. But look at those huts. They know how to make strong frames.” When I finished talking to the Indians, he turned to me. “Tell them we want something to eat,” he said. “I don’t want anything for myself—it’s the rest of you guys that need some grub. We eat, then we go.”

  The Indians, hearing me say this, looked uncertain.

  “And tell them it’s too hot here in the sun. We want to sit in the shade.”

  I managed to explain this, though I had to ask Father some of the Spanish words.

  The Indian who had spoken (but all he had said so far was “Go away”) backed to the largest hut and went inside.

  Father said, “He’s going to ask the Gowdy if it’s all right.”

  The Indian reappeared and gestured for us to sit near that hut.

  “Friendly little critters, aren’t they?” Father muttered as we sat down. “What are they trying to hide? My guess is that there’s something here they don’t want us to see. Frankly, I’d like to snoop around.”

  Tired and hungry as I was, I would have been glad to get out of this place, and I knew from Jerry’s face that he felt the same. Father was unruffled, still the Sole Proprietor of Jeronimo, if not the King of Mosquitia, passing whispers to his Zambus with his all-powerful air. He did not seem to notice—or if he noticed, did not care—that the Indians had crept across the clearing and sat watching us from a semicircle with their drooling dogs.

  “Sure, this place smells,” Father was saying. “They’ve got no organization. But it’s a healthy climate. Cooler than Jeronimo. Fertile soil. Not many bugs. Lots of hardwood. You could work miracles here, if—”

  But Father shut his mouth when the food and water were brought. He seldom showed surprise at anything, so his sudden silence now was as startling as one of his howls. It was the men who carried the gourds and baskets to us. He gaped at them, and, with his teeth clenched like a ventriloquist, said, “Will you look at that!”

  Three skinny men, not Indians, stood over us. They were pale gray under their dirt and whiskers. Father whistled softly as he sized them up. They were tall and bony and looked bruised. They wore ragged trousers and broken sandals. Two of them had headbands, the sort worn by some of the Indians. Their faces were feverish and sunken, their skulls pressed against their sallow-gray skin. Their beards and bones made me think of saints in a picture book. But they were almost smiling, and as they placed the food before us they watched us closely with curious eyes.

  “What did I tell you?” Father said to us. “This is what they didn’t want us to see. They keep white slaves!”

  The food was boiled bananas, flat greasy corncakes, fritters, and wabool. The water tasted of dog fur.

  “Now it all makes sense! Hey,” he said to one of the men in Spanish, “do you let these Indians tell you what to do?”

  “More or less.” The man did not seem concerned. He kept his feverish smile.

  “What do you do for them?”

  “We shine their shoes.”

  Father laughed at this. “You haven’t lost your sense of humor.” He passed the gourd of wabool to Jerry, without tasting it.

  The Indians looked on from across the clearing, their heads lowered. The only sound from that direction was the growl of the dogs chewing fleas out of their gouged and scarred hindquarters.

  “What is your name?”

  One man wet his lips at Father’s question, but another with stringy hair said, “We do not have names.”

  “Hear that? They don’t have names.”

  Father glowered at the Indians. All around us in the tall trees, birds tooted and beat the leaves with their wings, and the sound of the stream was like the sound of tumbling boulders.

  “Probably captured them down the pike and made them prisoners,” Father said to Francis Lungley. “So these guys do all the dirty work.”

  “Gringo,” one of the men said, hearing Father speak English. His starved face gave him a fine-lined expression that was both haunted and kindly. “North American, eh? Are you from the mission?”

  “Do I look like a missionary?” Then Father whispered to him, so that the Indians would not hear. “No. We’
ve got a settlement over the mountains. If you could get over there—slip out some night—you’d be safe. That’s the best way to the coast.”

  The man nodded and passed his hand through his beard.

  “Why did you come here?”

  “I was just going to say. I brought some ice—half a ton. Well, almost. These Zambus and me. Those two are my boys, Charlie and Jerry. Wipe your mouth, Charlie.”

  “Where is this ice?”

  “Melted.”

  The man smiled.

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “Ice,” the man said in Spanish to the others, and now they all smiled. The three men knelt before Father, and the first man said, “Where did you get your ice?”

  “Made it,” Father said. He took a small suck of wabool from the gourd. “You should see what we’ve got over there. Gardens, food, water pumps, chickens, drainage, and the biggest ice-making machine in the country.”

  “You have a generator for electricity?”

  “Don’t mention generators to me. Tell him, Charlie.”

  I explained that Father had devised a method of making ice out of fire.

  “Your father is an intelligent man.”

  “Everyone says that,” I said.

  Father said, “They’ll work you to death here. Then, when you’re not useful to them any longer, they’ll kill you and feed you to the vultures. They’ll get some new slaves.” Father’s face darkened. “You think they’ll try anything funny with us?”

  The man said, “Who knows?” and the other men nodded.

  “I want to walk out of here wearing my head,” Father said. “Do you think those Indians are listening to us?”

  “They listen but they do not understand. They are very simple people. They are also very strong.”

  “So I gather. But you shouldn’t be here, waiting on them hand and foot. They haven’t any right to own you. You’re prisoners, aren’t you?”

  The man who had done all the talking shrugged. The shrug shook his whole loose-jointed body. He seemed untroubled, or else beyond caring.

  Father said, “Notice I’m not eating much? I’ll tell you why. Because I’ve got an enormous appetite. By not eating, I do other things better. Solve problems. Work hard. That’s a form of eating, too. You should try it. If I ate, I wouldn’t do anything else—”