The Mosquito Coast

by Paul Theroux

  That was how we discovered guavas. The monkey had shown us that there were several bushes of them on the far side of the pool, and that day we brought a basket of them back to Jeronimo.

  Mother said, “We can make them into jam.”

  But Father said they were too small and sour, because they were growing wild. If he put his mind to it, he said, he could grow sweet ones as big as tennis balls, and, “Speaking of food, you’d better start picking and peeling, or there won’t be anything for lunch.”

  We did what was expected of us in Jeronimo, the usual chores. But we always returned to the Acre to live like monkeys. We missed the Maywits—I still thought of them by that name—but without them we had no need for the school or the store. We had the loose pages from Drainy’s hymnbook, but we no longer held church services. Anyway, it was too hot to think about hell.

  We knew from the Acre that it was the dry season. No one in Jeronimo knew this, or considered it important. The gardens were still growing, but we were in touch with the seasons: we had no inventions.

  The Acre was primitive, a ragged hollow in the jungle, but the grass was soft, the pool made it pleasant, and we had everything we needed. For fun, we could swim or swing on the rope. The pool was unaffected by the jungle drought. I guessed that springs fed it. But the rest of the area was very dry. We watched wee-wee ants holding funerals—processions of them with corpses and leaf parasols. Snakes lived in the roots of a dead tree at one corner of the camp. We kept clear of that tree, but tried to think of ways of dropping them into the traps, to turn them into snake pits. The snakes and the walnut-sized beetles did not frighten us. We learned that the fiercest creatures were predictable, and though once it had all looked dangerous here, now it seemed more peaceful than Jeronimo.

  We came here to escape Jeronimo. Ever since the building of Fat Boy, Father had been visited by people who wanted ice. They were talkers. They had heard of Father. They paid him compliments. Father put them to work, gave them simple jobs to do, and they took the ice away in canoes. There were always strangers in Jeronimo, admiring Father’s inventions or looking for ice.

  “Ain’t do nothing with they ices but cool they bunya,” Mr. Haddy said. Bunya was a drink of sour juice the local people made from cassava.

  Father said, “That doesn’t matter. They can wear it on their heads for all I care. Once they get accustomed to the idea of ice, the uses will be revealed to them. Each person will do something different—one man will preserve meat, another will make it into a painkiller, someone will get the idea of refrigerating his fish instead of smoking it, and how many will it bring out of sunstroke? Sure, it may take a generation, but think of the future—no one else does. Fat Boy is forever. No moving parts, Figgy!”

  Father often talked of things being “revealed.” That was true invention, he said, revealing something’s use and magnifying it, discovering its imperfection, improving it, and putting it to work for you. A guava growing wild was to him an imperfection. You had to improve it to make it edible.

  He said, “It’s savage and superstitious to accept the world as it is. Fiddle around and find a use for it!” God had left the world incomplete, he said. It was man’s job to understand how it worked, to tinker with it and finish it. I think that was why he hated missionaries so much: because they taught people to put up with their earthly burdens. For Father, there were no burdens that couldn’t be fitted with a set of wheels, or runners, or a system of pulleys.

  But instead of improving the world, he said, most people just tried to improve God. “God—the deceased God—was a hasty inventor of the sort you find in any patent office. Yes, He had a great idea in making the world, but He started it and moved on before He got it working properly. God is like the boy who gets his toy top spinning and then leaves the room and lets it wobble. How can you worship that? God got bored,” Father said. “I know that kind of boredom, but I fight it.”

  Father saw the river and said, “Let’s straighten it.” Dragging the ice up the mountain, he had talked of nothing but the cable car for passengers and cargo. He still spoke of sinking a shaft—tapping the steam heat in the earth’s core. And inventions themselves revealed unexpected things that Father called “the unanticipated wrinkle.” An example of this was an exposed pipe on Fat Boy’s shin. This collected drops of moisture from the humid air. Father added more pipes and turned this into a condenser that dripped into a tank. It was the purest water imaginable, and now he boasted that he could create water as well as freeze it—with fire! He had not expected this cold pipe to behave this way. It was revealed to him. He called it the Hamstring.

  We kids said that if Father saw the Acre he would have a fit, or else laugh at us. He was a perfectionist. I could not forget how, on the mountain, he had kicked his lean-to apart and sat on the windy ground all night and said, “I want to sleep in my own bed!” He would suffer rather than sleep in a badly made hut, and he often looked at the Zambus’ food or Mrs. Kennywick’s wabool and said, “I’d starve before I’d eat that”—and he meant it.

  We did not dare to say that you could eat what grew wild and sleep on the ground. His mosquito traps, “Bug Boxes,” invited insects through inescapable baffles and kept Jeronimo free of flying bugs. But you did not need nets and Bug Boxes if you knew about the berry juice that acted like citronella. “Afraid of a few bugs?” he sometimes said, and, at other times, “It’s not that I don’t want them on my skin—I don’t want them within three miles of me.” We could have told him that we had learned that most work was needless, and a bathhouse wasn’t necessary if you had a pool or a river. Father’s homegrown carrots were tasty, but wild yautia was just as good, and no trouble. He had outlawed bananas and manioc—“They make you lazy, and I don’t like the implications of bananas.” And the ice—it was a marvel, but like most marvels all you could do was marvel at it.

  The more I thought about, the more sure I was that we kids stayed in Jeronimo because of the Acre. It lay in the jungle between the mountains and the river, at the dead end of a narrow path our feet had made. It was invisible, it was safe.

  We spent every afternoon at the Acre, and we were sorry we could not sleep there overnight. We wanted to prove to Father that it could be done. But at the end of every day, we pushed the bushes aside and walked back to Jeronimo and heard the pumps, their whops and claps, before we saw the buildings. Father would be smiling, for in the coolness of the late afternoon he cleared Fat Boy and gave ice to the river Creoles or Zambus who had worked for it. There he was, with his tongs and his pulley, hoisting great blocks of vapory ice out of this monster cupboard with its firebox blazing.

  And always, when we came back, Father said, “Where have you been? Fooling in the bushes?”

  We would say swimming or hiking.

  “Look at them, people. We’re killing ourselves and they’re walking around the block.”

  The “people” were Mr. Haddy, the Zambus, Mr. Peaselee, and Mr. Harkins. They were his listeners for he never stopped telling them his plans. These days he spoke of freezing fish and rushing them inland where no one had ever seen big river fish. “Six-footers! Catfish! Could change their whole way of life. Especially if they’re open-minded and not in the grip of some moral sneak who’s preaching hellfire to them.”

  That was a frequent complaint. The Maywits had not come back. Father said it made him mad.

  “And the funny thing about hellfire is, it’s imaginary. But not Fat Boy! He’s got more poison in him than a century of hells. Oh, gaw, I could teach those missionaries a thing or two about chemical combustion. If they saw hydrogen and ammonia get loose they’d believe in me, instead of the dead top-spinner! If Fat Boy blew his lid—”

  This Jeronimo talk made the Acre seem happier. The camp was our secret. And we had learned things there that even Father did not know.

  ***

  My birthday came and went—the month, anyway. The months had names, but the days did not have numbers. I was fourteen, but still smaller than
I wanted to be. And now the dry season lay across Jeronimo. It was dust and dead leaves.

  The river had begun to get narrower, and it stank. It turned into a creek between deep slabs of bubbly mud, with flies buzzing over it and green hair in it. It snored and pooped past the mooring. A little above us it had become a marsh, and there was now no way upstream to Seville. Our boats were shanked against the mud, and our pumps at the river’s edge often gagged on the slime and weeds they sucked up. It had not rained for months, and it might be a month or more, Father said, before it rained again. Now Father was making only small quantities of ice, and all our drinking water came from the condenser on Fat Boy’s shin, the Hamstring.

  We had not mentioned the Acre to Father, so we could not tell him that spring water in our pool still brimmed to the grassy edge.

  The Jeronimo garden was green, producing beans and tomatoes and corn—the cornstalks were as high as some of the eaves. But the pumps were still gasping. Father said he had been a fool for believing the river would go on flowing—it was as undependable as anything else on this imperfect earth. He spoke again of sinking a shaft, not the geothermal one but a simpler borehole to the water table. Whenever people came these days, they were put to work digging this hole.

  The work was hard, and not many people were willing to shift dirt in return for a small block of ice or a bag of hybrid seeds. Father predicted that the Maywits would soon be back and Jeronimo working at full strength. He had been saying this for three weeks.

  One day he said to Mother, “I’m putting you in sole charge of Jeronimo, honey.”

  “Are you going somewhere?”

  “Nope. But I’ve got my Hole to think about.”

  He hated the river and its smell, and all he talked about was his Hole. “Going to work on my Hole,” he said in the early morning. And he asked every visitor, “What are you going to do about my Hole?” He was either in it or at the edge of it, his face as red as a tomato, cursing the river and the climate and trying to devise a machine for moving dirt. “Say, on the same principle as a vacuum cleaner, that can dig and suck at the same time—give it teeth and lungs, fit it with claspers—”

  He complained that he was working with caveman’s tools. “If only I had the hardware!” He dug with the Zambus. He did nothing else. If there was smut on the corn, or worms in the tomatoes, or rot on the beans, he ordered us kids to see about it. There was no water. He kept digging. The task took hold of him like a fever. He said, “I never stop until I get where I’m going.”

  Then he shut down Fat Boy. The roar and gurgle of the ice maker had been so familiar to us that when he put the fire out one morning, it was like hearing my heart stop. I had to hold my breath to listen. Fat Boy wasn’t wet and dripping anymore. It looked as if it had died, and Father stiffened a little, resembling his invention.

  “What about the ice?” Mother said.

  “What about my Hole?”

  So the hole got deeper, and it was wide enough for four men to stand in, swinging shovels. It looked like the opening to Father’s volcano hole, and next to it was a pyramid of dirt and boulders, “Which proves, if proof were needed, that even with primitive tools and a little muscle you can do something constructive about this gimcrack world we’ve inherited.”

  But still he had not struck water. We stopped getting visitors. The work was too hard. Father dug in the hole and ate practically nothing and said, “If I only had the hardware—”

  The pumps only brought us a green trickle from the squeezed river. We had to water the gardens by hand, pouring buckets of water into the sluice pipe that siphoned into the irrigation ditches. Mother stayed knee-deep in mud at the river’s edge, and the four of us kids, in what Father called the Bucket Brigade, passed pails of water from hand to hand up the bank.

  We were on Bucket Brigade just after dawn one day when Mother looked up and said, “Mr. Haddy’s in an awful hurry.”

  He was running out of the jungle toward Father’s hole. No one ever ran here. Something serious had happened.

  “Peaselee say they is some fellers on the path!”

  He yelled this down the hole.

  We watched. Father climbed out and chucked his shovel aside. “What did I tell you? It’s the Maywits.”

  “He run down to tell me.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Still running. Maybe Swampmouth by now.”

  Father saw us watching him.

  “Don’t anyone say a word. We can’t blame them for going. We’re glad to have them back. We’ll pretend they never left—they’ve had a rough time. You think it’s dry here? It’s soaking wet compared to the drought they’ve got out there. Listen, the world is a terrible place for anyone who’s had a taste of Jeronimo. Those poor folks will need all the sympathy they can get. Be nice to them. Give them some peas to shell, put them to work. We’ve got some extra hands for my Hole!”

  Mother said, “It could be some people who want ice.”

  “I know it’s the Maywits,” Father said.

  But this time Father was wrong. The Maywits were not on the path.

  “Men,” Mother said, looking up. We crowded behind her. “There’s three of them, Allie.”

  “I was expecting them, too,” Father said, but his voice had gone cold. “They’re slaves.”

  “Then why do they have guns, Dad?” Clover asked.

  The Zambus seemed terrified. I heard, “Ruckbooses.”

  20

  AT THAT MOMENT, I knew how the people in Seville felt, the river Creoles and the mountain Indians, or anyone else who watched us Foxes coming out of the jungle. We stepped into their villages like this, big and strange and uninvited. So we deserved this visit, but that did not make it easier.

  The three scarecrows were dressed differently from the way they had been in the Indian village in Olancho—sweat-stained shirts and dirty pants and boots. We had not chosen them—they had chosen us. This was what savages saw. They were heading straight for us, not looking left or right. They seemed worse-off in clothes than they had half-naked in the village. One had a rifle slung over his shoulder, and the other two had pistols in their hands. They were listening and blinking, a little stupid and a little angry, as if they were out hunting cats.

  Father’s face twitched. It was not worry. He was doing a rapid calculation in his head, adding, subtracting, figuring odds, doing the algebra of what they might want. I recognized the men’s clothes—they were the ones I had seen the Indian women washing in the stream. The Zambus watched from the lip of the hole with their round blackbird’s eyes.

  “Tell them to put their guns down, Allie.”

  “Let me handle this.” Father met the men and said in Spanish, “What goes?”

  The men smiled at him, but their hands stayed put. They glanced around Jeronimo, holding us silent with the guns. They wore no insignia, although their clothes were similar and looked like uniforms. Their long hair and beards made them seem like brothers. I had remembered them as tall, but here they did not appear tall—they were Mother’s height. One of the pistol carriers wore a belt with a large brass buckle. He seemed more intelligent, less violent than the other two, but maybe it was because the other two had teeth missing. And the one with the rifle had a bandage on his hand—it was a filthy bandage and could only have been covering an infection.

  Among the Indians in that village they had been shifty, almost timid—they had whispered to us and brought us food and warned us about the squatting Indians. But here they had none of that sneaking slyness. They looked strong, as if they were used to entering villages and sizing them up. They took their time, they did not even reply to Father until after they mumbled among themselves.

  “We did not think we would find you.” It was the one with the brass buckle who spoke. His teeth were too large for his mouth, and now I saw that he was not smiling. It was just his big yellow teeth stretching his lips.

  “Here we are,” Father said flatly.

  “How many are you?”
<
br />   “Thousands—”

  The men looked behind them quickly.

  “—counting the white ants,” Father said. “We’re infested.”

  Mr. Haddy whispered to me, “I ain’t like this men,” and then, “Hey, Lungley.”

  But the Zambus had gone: climbed out of Father’s hole and backed into the woods.

  “You are just in time for breakfast,” Father said. “Scramble some eggs for our friends here, Mother”—he was still speaking in Spanish—“they have a long trip ahead of them.”

  We all went to the Gallery, and there the men put their guns down. They sat on the floor and ate eggs and beans, while Father talked about the white ants. Termites, he said, had gotten into everything—food, plants, even the roofs and floors of the houses. “They are eating us alive!”

  It was the first we had heard of the white ants, but no one contradicted Father then, because no one ever contradicted him. The men listened and wolfed their food. When they finished, they stared at us with pale skinny faces. Eating did not soften their expressions, it only made them look hungrier and more dangerous.

  The man with the teeth, who had spoken before, said that they had run out of water and then lost their way searching for water. They had camped on the mountain.

  “I know how it is,” Father said.

  Mother gathered the plates, and that same man—Big Teeth did all the talking—said, “Your husband told us he had water and food. He invited us here. He told us he has everything. Up there, over the mountains, they have nothing.”

  “It’s the end of the dry season,” Father said. “We’re feeling it. Everything is dead or dying. We won’t see rain for weeks. But the white ants are getting fat!”

  No one reminded him of his boast that Jeronimo was termite-proof.

  “If it goes on like this, we’ll have to start eating the termites.” The man with the teeth said “Pleh”—the thought disgusted him.