The Mosquito Coast

by Paul Theroux

  “I gave them every chance to go. Even offered them my cayuka.” He crushed a mosquito and showed me the black stain on his finger, as he had done before. “Don't pity insects. That’s my blood.”

  I nodded. I was afraid of the sound my voice would make.

  “But they refused. You heard them. They’re planning to fasten on us like they fastened on to those Indians. Remember those poor pathetic men, squatting in the dirt with their crazy mutts? Charlie, it was the Indians who were the prisoners!”

  “They looked scared.”

  “Did they?” Father hung his head. “I’m not often wrong, but when I am, I’m as wrong as I can be.”

  This was a confession. I could not think of anything to say to make it easier for him.

  “I don’t usually make mistakes. You know that. But this is a lulu.”

  He was now staring at Fat Boy. He hunched his shoulders, and in the old hoarse joshing voice he used for testing me, he said, “Can you get up that ladder and shove this beam through the brackets on the hatchway door, without making a sound?”

  “I guess so.”

  “You’d better be more certain than that, Charlie, because if you wake those bugs up they’re going to start shooting.”

  He handed me the beam. It was heavy, but it smelled sweet, a roasted-nut aroma—it had been freshly sawed.

  “You could get us all killed,” he said.

  I wanted to drop the beam and run.

  “Up you go.”

  We crept to the ladder, and he took hold of it. I climbed past him and received a wave of heat from his body, the reddened sweat of his worry, which was like a vapor of blood in the air. Then I was cooled by the light breeze on the midsection of the ladder. I was glad it was dark—I could not see the ground clearly, only the moon-white flickers, like doves pecking in the grass, and gobs of putty-colored light on the trees. The fingers of my free hand were pale. They trembled on the rungs.

  Nearer the hatchway, I imagined that I could hear the men snoring just inside Fat Boy, on the upper platform, in the tangle of pipes. Months before, I had seen these coils and pans, and I believed I had had a glimpse of Father’s mind. I could not separate them, and now it seemed awful that these intruders were there, stinking and waiting and refusing to go. Men he hated had penetrated this private place.

  There were iron bracket straps fixed to the jamb. Father must have hammered them there this afternoon. I had never seen them before. We had no locks in Jeronimo. This was the first.

  I lifted the wood beam, set it against the door above the brackets, and slid it down. It was a perfect fit. But as soon as I did it, I realized how final it was. It had sealed the door—barricaded it, as Father would have said. My legs went weak and began to wobble. I descended the ladder quickly, expecting that at any moment there would be a crash, and gunfire.

  “Stand back.”

  Father moved the ladder away from Fat Boy and eased it into the grass. He put his mouth against my head.

  “You didn’t climb that ladder.”

  His breath scalded my ear.

  “You didn’t bar that door.”

  He took my arm and squeezed it.

  “We don’t have any locks in Jeronimo.”

  He had gripped my arm so tightly I thought the bone would snap. He was leading me to the firebox. We had no shadows.

  “I wanted you here to test your eyes. My guess is that they’re as good as mine. I’ll bet you can see the same things I can. Look there.”

  Still holding my arm in his left hand, he motioned with his other hand. Beyond the blunt finger stump was the firebox.

  “Somebody’s left a fire burning,” he said.

  But there was no fire.

  I said, “I can’t see it.”

  My hand went dead. He was squeezing hard.

  “Look,” he said, and struck a match and put it to a packed mass of kindling. It was all prepared—kindling, sticks, twigs, cut limbs, and split logs on top. “Somebody lit a fire here—and I told them not to.”

  “Yes.”

  He released my arm, but I could not feel a thing in my hand. It was as if, in the dark, he had pinched it off.

  “No fires, I said.” His face was wild.

  The kindling wood must have been soaked in oil, because it went wheesht as it burst into flames and set the sticks and split logs above it chattering on fire, louder than Father’s whisper. It roared against the bricks, and when Father shut the firebox door, I could hear it in the chimney, and the faintly foolish glugs of the liquid stirring in Fat Boy’s pipes—swallows and burps, so sad tonight.

  “We’ll just have to let it burn. It’s chock-full of logs. There’s nothing we can do to stop it.”

  His voice was smaller than the rumble around us.

  “Some devil has done this.”

  “The men—” But what could I tell him that he did not already know? He knew the men inside would freeze solid. I wanted to say something, because I saw them clearly, stretched out and gray, with frost on their faces.

  “Start counting, Charlie. By the time you get to three hundred, there won’t be any men in there.”

  He said no more. He led me back to the house in silence. He was gulping, as if he was counting too. The crackle of the fire, the swelling of Fat Boy’s pipes, the creak of joints—it was like the quickened tick-tock of measured time.

  Before we reached the house, we heard a rapping, a hammering inside Fat Boy—gun butts against the walls. Father went on gulping and started toward Fat Boy.

  “If they lie down they’ll be all right.”

  The hammering became frantic.

  “They’re trying to smash it.” Father was not alarmed. He had built it himself, of mahogany planks on a bolted frame. He knew how strong Fat Boy was.

  Four gunshots popped inside, then more. But they were muffled by the double walls, and I was not even sure they were shots until Father said the men were firing their guns.

  “Allie, are you all right?”

  It was Mother, standing on the Gallery in her white nightgown.

  Father replied, but his words were drowned by the very loud noise that followed the shots—a great slamming inside Fat Boy. It was like barrels bumping downstairs over and over again. The trapped men were trying to fight their way out, beating on the door. They fired their guns, and the metal rang as their bullets hit pipes—and still the barrel-thud on the thick walls.

  “Keep counting, Charlie.”

  Clover, April, and Jerry appeared with Mother on the Gallery. April was crying, and the others were saying, “Where’s Dad?” and “What happened to Charlie?”

  “What all this racky puppysho?” Mr. Haddy was behind us in his sleeping clothes—undershirt and striped shorts. He danced back and forth with fear.

  “Get your head down, Figgy. Everything’s going to be fine. A few minutes more—”

  “What cracking?”

  “Crickets.”

  But the noise grew louder, and there were tunnel yells, like buried-alive men screaming into dirt. That and the chiming of pipes. I knew those pipes—if you touched them, the cold metal tore the skin from your fingers. The whole building shook. The tin roof rattled. The noise in that darkness made Fat Boy seem huger than ever. The strangled echoes of so much drumming and fright, and the gunshots, made holes in the night air. The struggle was like hell in an immense coffin that had been nailed shut on people who were half alive.

  “They’re damaging him,” Father said. He was not frightened, but hurt and angry. “They won’t lie down. They’re going to put a hole in him.”

  He spoke as though something in his own head was breaking.

  The kids were crying, and Mr. Haddy still dancing in his striped shorts.

  “No!” Father cried. He started to rush forward.

  Then the explosion came. It filled the clearing with light that scorched my face. It brought color to every leaf, not green but reddish gold, and it gathered the nearby buildings—the cold store, the incubator
, the root cellar—shocking them with pale floury flame and then pushing them over like paper. It lifted Fat Boy from the ground, broke it, and dropped it, shoving its planks apart like petals, as the fireball of flaming gas shot upward like a launched balloon.

  Father had turned away from the blast. One side of his face was fiery, the other black. He had one red eye. It was fixed on me, and it was so bright it looked as if it would burst with blood. His mouth was open. He may have been screaming, but the other noise was greater.

  The boom was over, yet the power of it still made the trees sway as they did before a storm, tossing their boughs. Birds woke, and mewed. The planks that had broken from the walls had caught fire, and fire clung to the pipes that shot jets of blue flame like a gas burner, and inside there was a griddle-fat sizzle and a choking stink of shit-house ammonia that pinched my nose and stung my eyes.

  Father dashed toward the flames, then put his hands over his face and ran back to us. His mouth was black, and now I could hear him.

  “Follow me!”

  He went rigid. He did not move a muscle.

  “Follow me!” he yelled.

  Mother and the children snatched at him and hugged him and pleaded. I thought they would tip him over. “Dad!” they shouted, and “Allie!” They were weeping and trying to make him move, and we were all gagging on the ammonia fumes.

  Mr. Haddy moaned. “We all gung die.”

  “We’ll get out of this poison,” Father said, but still he did not move. I wondered if he was injured. His face was streaked and dirty. “There’s more hydrogen in the tanks, the ammonia’s going to flood us. Cover your faces!”

  Across the clearing, lighting what was left of Jeronimo, Fat Boy burned. I had not realized that such a bright fire could be so quiet. The houses flamed like baskets, but it was the birds that made most of the noise. The clearing itself, its fringes and trees, caught, too. The fire spread fast. It was not the flames or the light, but the sewer stink of ammonia that made this seem like the end of the world. Another gas tank blew, and caused a tremendous wind of heat and poison.

  With terrible croaks, Father rubbed his eyes and pleaded with us to follow him. But he did not move. When I saw him this way, and his red eyes, I began to cry.

  I said, “I know a place—”

  As I started away, they followed, and soon they were right behind me, pushing me along the cool path.

  All this took less than five minutes: I was still counting.

  And then there were various shocks in the dark, the way doors slam in a house on windy summer nights.

  III

  BREWAR’S LAGOON

  21

  ALL THAT NIGHT, Fat Boy’s fire showed over the treetops like a bright hat. Even the pissy snap of hot ammonia gas reached us here. The flames brought Jeronimo close. Rising sparks put the stars out and replaced them with flaming straws, and the climbing smoke clouded the sky.

  I sat in our dark camp, the Acre, tortured by mosquitoes. I could not find the black berries we used for keeping bugs off in the daytime. The Jeronimo smoke was no help here in driving them away—and it seemed unlucky to build a fire so near to the one that had destroyed our home. It was still chewing, in the violent and greedy way flames feed on dry wood, and spitting the trees into the sky as ashes. The kids had crawled into a lean-to, where they hid and slept. Mr. Haddy’s whimpering about his boat had become lazy snores. He had turned drunk and silly on sleep. Father had found a corner of the camp and put his head down. He slept like the others. He had not spoken a word.

  “Get some sleep, Charlie,” Mother said. She yawned. Soon she was asleep, and only I was left awake.

  Sitting among these purring people, I discovered how long Father’s nights were. He was usually the one who watched the night pass. There were rattles in the darkness, and the clash of dropping branches, and the brief gallop of falling trees. There were bat squeals and, because of the fire, some birds still mewing and others beeping like clarinets. These sounds—the birds’ most of all—did not belong in the jungle. They were too harsh, they nagged and rasped in all the soft, black surrounding trees.

  Disorder here was this noise, loudest at night, and the worst of it cracking out in the darkest places. Some of it was like spurts from a broken hose pipe. I listened to the jungle being torn apart. These hidden creatures, and even some trees, had voices. They sounded their loud wakeful fear throughout the night, stirred by the fire that was stirring the whole sky. I was blind and the world was falling down like the dew around me. There seemed no remedy for it, to plug it or calm it or make it sleep. It all roared at me. Hope left me then, and wide-awake I began to worry. This was not solitude but rather a nightmare of damage, an iron wheel that drove on and on, monotonous noise in the timeless dark, scattering feathers and claws.

  But Father was wise to these crowding sounds. Nights like this, which worried me, had filled his head with schemes. So when dawn came, I knew him better and feared him more than I had at the stunning ruin of Jeronimo.

  “Let him sleep,” Mother said. I was amazed that he was still at it: I had never seen him sleep so soundly.

  He lay on his side, in a hedgehog posture, with his arms over his face and his knees drawn up—a bundle of grumbling snores. Flies had settled on his shirt, and they scratched undisturbed on the wrinkles and seemed to play, he was so still. No one spoke, no one wanted to hear what he would say when he woke up.

  It was day now. I felt sick and small under the quivering trees.

  In the dry-season dawn, the leaves seemed to die as the sun hit them. The dew dried on the grass, and the blades withered and were lighted like gold thread under the rips of foil on the boughs. Freed of the dampness and dark, the dust on the ground penetrated the air with a yellow smell of decay that was sweet this first hour of daylight. The rising sun heated each live thing it struck, and stiffened it and gilded it with death. There were lovely brittle coins on the shining trees, and whole bushes of crisp gold flakes. As soon as the sun was sieved through the topmost branches, everything in the Acre was bright and dead around the black pool.

  We waited, hardly breathing, for Father to wake. I dozed and watched the spiders near the pool, the way they plucked their webs like zithers to trap and tangle a struggling fly before they rushed the insect and wrapped it like a mummy. They hung the parcels of neatly bandaged flies in a high corner of the web, the way Indians here stored peppers and corn.

  “Poor Dad,” Clover whispered.

  Mr. Haddy said, “His spearmint almost kill us.”

  “We’re all right now,” Mother said. “Charlie saved us.”

  “This isn’t Charlie’s camp. It’s the Acre. It belongs to all of us,” Jerry said. “The Maywit kids helped make those lean-tos. And Crummo gets all the credit!”

  “You were blubbering last night,” I said. “You were scared!”

  “I wasn’t!”

  Mr. Haddy said, “But I were skeered! I was praying. I see death back there. That were wuss than a preacher’s hell. Ruther have hurricanes and twisters than them fires. I see devils. I see Duppies dancing. I were so skeered I were glad to die.”

  Clover said, “What happened to those men, Ma?”

  “They’re gone.”

  “And if they ain’t gone, we got trouble for true,” Mr. Haddy said, and he repeated, “For too-roo!”

  I said, “I saw them go.”

  “Don’t think about it, Charlie.” Mother hugged me. “We’re safe now. Your father’s going to be grateful when he wakes up.” “What’s Dad doing?” April said.

  His sleep made us helpless. It prevented us from moving. As long as he lay there we could not leave. It was then that we were reminded how important he was to us. We had only known him awake. It was frightening to see him so still. If he was dead, we were lost.

  The sun, now overhead, was burning on his back. People sleeping give off an underground smell, a boiled root stink of dirt and food and sweat and wounds—the way I imagined corpses steamed, like heated co
mpost. Father was motionless. He might have been making up for all the nights he’d stayed awake. But he looked and smelled dead.

  April said, “Ma, are we going to die?”

  Mother said, “Don’t be silly.” She found our baskets and helped us gather yautia and guavas and wild avocados. She praised our camp, she said it was a good job—it had saved our lives.

  Seeing the yautia, Mr. Haddy said, “You kids like eddoes? Me ma make eddoes!”

  Father swung over and jumped to his feet.

  “Let’s go,” he said. He sank to his knees.

  It was early afternoon. He had slept almost thirteen hours, but no one mentioned the time. “Liars, swindlers, degenerates who sleep till noon”—those were some of the people he hated. He had always told us that deep sleep was a form of illness, and he blamed us when we overslept.

  He sat down on the gold grass and dropped his hands into his lap. “What are you looking at?”

  His voice was flat, dull, different, almost drugged, and very small. He hardly moved his lips. He seemed very tired, and yet I had watched him all night, lying there sound asleep.

  Mother knelt down and touched his face. She said, “Your hair is singed.”

  His eyebrows were stubble, his beard was burned and so were his eyelashes. It gave him a startled sausagey expression. One side of his face was pink and creased, with a sleep map pressed on it. One eye was redder than the other. He pulled on his baseball hat.

  “I had an awful night. Hardly slept a wink.”

  Mr. Haddy said, “I see dogs twitch more than you done! You were sleeping like a slope—wunt he, Ma?”

  Father said, “I’ve got no patience with liars in the morning.” Then he sniffed and came alert, as if he had just heard something. The smell of smoke and ammonia was still strong in the air, with burned bamboo and roasted tin. Father sighed. His face cracked. He smiled sadly, remembering.

  “It’s finished,” he said, in his beaten voice.

  “All your work,” Mother said. Still kneeling, she started to cry. “I’m so sorry, Allie.”