by Paul Theroux
“I’m happy,” Father said. “Jeronimo is destroyed.”
Mr. Haddy said, “She went up like crackers.”
Father said, “We’re free.”
Mother protested. “Everything you made is gone,” she said. “All the houses, the crops, those wonderful machines. All that work—”
“Traps,” Father said. “I should never have done it.”
“How were you to know?”
“I’m the only one who could have known. It wasn’t ignorance; it was subtlety. But that’s always been my problem. I’m too elaborate, too ambitious. I can’t help being an idealist. I was trying to defuse the situation peaceably. It blew up in my face.”
“Allie, why—”
“And I deserved it. Toxic substances—this is no place for them. I’ll never work with poisons again, and no more flammable gas. Keep it simple—physics, not chemistry. Levers, weights, pulleys, rods. No chemicals except those that occur naturally. Stable elements—”
Mother sobbed, “But those men are dead!”
“Tempered in the fires, Mother.”
Clover said, “That’s what I was just wondering.”
“But not gone. Matter cannot be destroyed. Ask Figgy. They requested the transformation. Scavengers like them deserve the turkey treatment—”
Mother had put her fingers over her eyes. She wept softly as Father stood up.
“I thought I was building something,” he said. “But I was asking for it to be destroyed. That’s a consequence of perfection in this world—the opposing wrath of imperfection. Those scavengers wanted to feed on us! And Fat Boy failed me. The concept was wrong, and now I know why—no more poison, Mother.”
He said this in almost a whining way, with his hands locked together. He went to the pool and poked the water.
He said, “Anybody can break anything in this world. America was brought low by little men.”
He sounded as if his heart was broken. He raised some water in his cupped hands and washed his face and arms. “Where are we? What is this place?”
“It’s the Acre,” I said.
“Our camp,” Jerry said.
“Call this a camp?” His voice was still small.
“This is where we play,” Clover said.
“Some playground. You had water all this time?”
I said, “It’s from a spring.”
“You can swim in it,” Jerry said.
Father looked around. I knew he thought it was all unsuitable. I wanted to tell him that it had kept us happy. He saw the swing. “I recognize that rope.”
“She me stern painter,” Mr. Haddy said.
“It was Charlie’s idea.”
“Huts, too. And fruit. And little baskets.” He spoke sadly. “It’s pure monkey.”
“Those are guavas in the basket,” Jerry said.
“Eat some, Allie. You haven’t eaten anything.”
“Monkey food, monkeyshines,” Father said. “I hate this. I didn’t want this. Why did you take us here, Charlie?”
“He saved us,” Mother said. “He found us food and water. Allie, we would have died!”
“He didn’t grow the food, he didn’t dig the water.” Father refused to look at me. He said, “Let’s go. It’s late. You’re just sitting there.” Mother said, “We can’t go back to Jeronimo.”
“Who said go back? Who mentioned Jeronimo? I don’t want to see it.”
Mother’s lips shaped the question, “Where?”
“Away! Away!”
“We’ll have to salvage something to take with us,” Mother said. “We can’t go like this.”
“This is how I want to go”—but he stood before us with only his hat on his head and his arms dangling out of his scorched sleeves. He looked like what he was—a man who had crawled away from an explosion.
Mr. Haddy said, “You tools? You foods? You bags and erl? Me lanch? Ain’t leaving me lanch!”
“It’s all poisoned,” Father said. “We had too much with us—too much junk, too many drums of poison. That was our mistake. Do you know what a flood of ammonia can do? There’s contamination there, and what’s not contaminated is burned to a crisp.”
“Please, Allie, you’re raving.”
“What I’m saying is understatement. Now let’s go—I want to get this stink out of my nose.”
“To the river?”
“Mother,” he said. “I killed the river!”
“Why can’t we stay here?” Jerry asked.
“Smell Fat Boy’s guts? That’s your answer. It’ll stink for a year and drive you insane. No, I want to get away”—he pointed east to the Esperanzas—“past those mountains there.”
“They is a river behind,” Mr. Haddy said. “Rio Sico.”
“We know all about it, Figgy.”
“She run down to Paplaya and Camaron. We could go to Brewer’s. She me own lagoon.”
“That’s the place for us,” Father said.
This was too much for Mother. With a pained, demanding expression, she said, “How do you know?”
Father moved the part of his forehead where his eyebrows should have been. He was smiling unhappily. “Because I like the name.”
He tramped around the clearing, punching the bushes and peering between boughs the way a person might fuss with the curtains on a window. His impatience made him clumsy and useless. Finally he sighed.
“Okay, Charlie, I give up. Which way is out?”
I showed him the path.
“Just as I thought,” he said. He started walking.
“I’d better go first.”
“Who put you in charge?”
I said, “We dug traps here and covered them with branches. In case bandits came. You might fall in.”
“I know all about traps,” he said, and kept walking.
We followed, carrying the baskets of food and a jug of water.
Between the Acre and the river lay Jeronimo. There was no other way to the mountains. Father told us to walk faster, but Jeronimo was unavoidable—it smoldered at the end of the path.
Father bowed his head.
Mr. Haddy said, “Shoo.”
Jeronimo looked bombed. It was mostly powder, a pouch of gray ashes, the trees around it burned to spikes. Because the fire had spread, the clearing was bigger, and craterlike. Fat Boy’s pipes had collapsed and whitened like bones, and all the pumps had fallen down. There was not a house standing or a shed intact. In the gardens, the plants were scorched and the stems blistered like flesh. The corn was down, and the squashes and tomatoes had burst and were seeping juice—they had been cooked to rottenness. Some fruit looked like ragged purses.
But the ashy ruins were nothing compared to the silence. We were accustomed to bird twitters and screeches, to the high ringing notes of the crickyjeen cicadas. There was no sound or movement. All life had been burned out of Jeronimo. What birds we saw were dead, roasted black and midgety, stripped of their feathers, with tiny wings and ridiculous bobble heads. Slimy fish floated on the surface of the tank. It all lay dead and silent and stinking in the afternoon sun. Some thick hummocks still smoldered.
“You wanted to see it!” Father said angrily. “Feast your eyes!”
Distant birds cackled deep in the forest, mocking him.
He hooked across the black grass and picked up a machete with a burned handle. Then he went to our house and chopped the remaining timbers down, making the ruins complete.
We remained standing where the bathhouse had been. Heat had cracked the culverts and had baked some of the clay sluice pipes solid. The burned air stung my eyes.
Mother said, “Don’t touch anything.”
Mr. Haddy said, “Ain’t nothing left to touch.”
“I heard that!” Father had started toward us with the machete in his hand. I thought he was going to whack Mr. Haddy’s head off. He sliced it at him.
“I’m left, they’re left—you’re left, Figgy. If you’ve got the strength to complain, I’d say there’s nothing wrong
with you. Show some gratitude.”
Mr. Haddy put his teeth out. “Me lanch—she catched fire. She all wrecked.”
“I lose everything I own and he worries about his pig.”
“She all I own in this world,” Mr. Haddy said. Tears ran beside his nose and dripped from his teeth.
“What good is a boat if you haven’t got a river?”
“The river is there, Fadder.”
“The river is dead,” Father said. “It’s full of ammonium hydroxide and gasping fish. The air—smell it?—it’s contaminated. It’ll take a year for this place to be detoxified. If we stay here, we’ll die.” Father kicked at the ashes.
“He knew that. He just wanted to hear me say it!”
It was all as Father said. The air was sharp with the stifling smell of ammonia, and trapped in the weeds near the riverbank were dead fish and swollen frogs. They were more horrible than the roasted birds in the black grass. These river creatures were plump and had no marks on them. They had not been burned, but poisoned. We had to wade through them and push their bodies aside with sticks, to get to the opposite bank.
Father made three trips across, carrying the little kids. On his last trip, struggling through the mud with Jerry, his face and arms sooty and his clothes splashed and torn, Father began to cry. He just stood there in the water and did it. I thought it was Jerry at first—I had never heard Father cry before. His whole face crumpled, his mouth stretched and went square, and I could see the roots of his teeth. He made gasping noises and small dry honks.
***
He had splashed to the bank and dropped Jerry and led us into this forest, moving fast. After his crying, we had not seen his face.
“I know what you’re thinking. All right, I admit it—I did a terrible thing. I took a flyer. I polluted this whole place. I’m a murderer.” He sobbed again. “It wasn’t me!”
It was high ground on this eastern side of the river. Within an hour we had left the buttonwoods behind and were among low cedars. Above us was a saddle between two peaks of the Esperanzas. The advantage of the dry season, those blue rainless days, was that the forest was scrubbier, easier to walk through, and there was more daylight. But it was also smellier. In very hot weather, when no rain had fallen, the jungle odor is skunky and as strong as garbage. Sour waves of it hit us as we climbed. Part of the way was familiar. I told Father how we had come here with Francis and Bucky, looking for bamboos.
He said, “They’re sleeping in their own beds tonight.”
He walked with his head down, like someone who has lost something and is retracing his steps to find it. I caught his eye—his face looked slapped.
He said, “Don’t look back.”
He walked away from the sun on the dried-out hillside among dead trees. Five miles up this gentle slope was the saddle ridge, and here we were within sight of a new range of mountains. Mr. Haddy said it was the Sierra de San Pablo. Between us and these mountains was the deep valley of the Rio Sico, which flowed northeast to the coast.
On our way to the valley floor, Father sat down. I was glad when he said we would spend the night here. I had had no sleep last night.
Mother said, “I wish we had blankets.”
“Blankets? In this heat?” Father said.
To remind Father that his boat was gone, and maybe to rub it in, Mr. Haddy unfolded his large captain’s certificate, and said “Shoo,” and used it for starting a fire.
“We haven’t even got a pot to boil water in,” Mother said. “Just that jug. And it’s nearly empty.”
“The kids will find us a spring,” Father said. “They know more about this monkey stuff than we do. Look at them. They love it.”
We gathered dry grass for beds and made nests in the hillside. There we sat, listening to the breeze in the cedars, eating the last of the fruit we had brought from the Acre. Mother found some manioc growing wild and roasted it over the fire. Jerry said if you closed your eyes it tasted like turnips. At nightfall we crawled into our nests. There were flies, but no mosquitoes.
In the darkness behind me, April whispered, “I saw him crying. Ask Jerry.” And Clover muttered, “That’s a lie—he wasn’t. He was just mad. It’s all Charlie’s fault.”
Later, I was woken by Clover again. “Dad, Jerry kicked me in the back!”
But Father was saying, “You won’t catch me eating any of that stuff. I’m no camper. Anyway, the trouble with most people is they eat more than is good for them. Especially starches. There’s no goodness in that cassava—”
He had recovered his old voice. He was preaching again. Don’t look back.
The three adults were around the fire, guarding us. I felt safe again. And I listened. Between the whistles of the crickyjeens, Mr. Haddy was talking about tigers. Father laughed at him recklessly, as if daring a tiger to show itself so he could jig it onto a tree.
He said, “This is the best part—skipping out naked, with nothing. We just walked away. It was easy!”
He had forgotten Jeronimo already.
But Mother said, “We had no choice.”
“We chose freedom.” His voice was glad. “It’s like being shipwrecked.”
Mother said, “I didn’t want to be shipwrecked.”
The crickyjeens whistled again and stopped.
“We got out just in time—I was right. We’re alive, Mother.”
22
LOWER DOWN the slope, the cedars and pitch pines gave way to hoolie trees—chiclets and sapodillas. They were full of gummy juice and they reminded me of our rubber making in Jeronimo, the boiling-sulphur smell and the sheets we had wrapped around the ice blocks. It seemed wasteful to pass by without slashing them. Many of the trees in this jungly part of the slope were usable—there were monkey-pot trees and palms and bamboos and even finger bananas growing among some deserted palm-leaf huts. But we kept walking through the high jungle. I saw it all with my Jeronimo eyes. We could have stopped anywhere and called it home and started hacking.
Father said, “I have no urge to do anything here. Those hoolies? I feel no temptation whatsoever to lacerate them and cook up pairs of matching galoshes. Spare those trees—let them multiply and become abundant. Yes, before I might have stopped here and done a little tinkering. But I have had an experience.”
The path was a gully of dust, then pebbles and bigger stones. We heard a squawk behind us: the voom of a curassow. Mr. Haddy had beaned it with a club and stood there wringing its neck. He carried the big black hen by its feet, swinging it like a lunch bag. He said he would pluck it and roast it on a stick when we got to the river.
“Figgy hasn’t changed,” Father said. “But I’m a changed man, Mother. A man who refuses to change is doomed. I’ve had a satisfactory experience.”
He talked about his Experience as he had once talked about his Hole.
“I had a breakdown back there. A breakdown isn’t bad. It’s an Experience. I’m stronger than ever.”
Mother said, in a different voice, as if she wanted to change the subject, “I hope we find some water soon.”
“You can go seven days without water.”
“Not hiking like this, I can’t.”
“Pass Mother the jug, Charlie.”
Giving Mother a drink, I asked her if Father had changed, and what did it mean? She said it was nothing—if he really had changed, he would not be talking so much about it. She said he was trying to keep our spirits up.
Father was still talking, but the thicker foliage muffled his voice and prevented any echo. This was real jungle, not mountain scrub anymore. The bamboo was dense. We were kept cool by the damp trees along the gully path. There were gnats and butterflies on the plants, which were like parlor plants but grown to enormous size—ferns and rubber trees and figs with spotted leaves, and some red and striped with black, and with a suffocating hairiness, as if they were growing in a bottle.
“Before my Experience, I wouldn’t have thought of doing this. Listen, consider what we’re attempting! It’s
staggering, really. I have nothing up my sleeve, and look”—he turned to face us on the path, and pulled out his limp white pockets—“nothing there!”
We stumbled along behind him, through the seams of green light. As always, his talk made the time pass. Mr. Haddy said if it wasn’t downhill he wouldn’t be going at all, and “We gung eat me bird.” Father said, “Why, I used to fix Polski’s pumps and set out for the fields in the morning with more in my pockets than I have now. Or go into Northampton. Burdened with material things. Wallet full of money.”
Clover said, “Don’t we have any money, Dad?”
“What can you buy with money here?” Father said.
Jerry whispered, “We’re poor. We’re done for. We should have stayed at the Acre.”
“Money is useless. I’ve proved that.”
April said plainly, “I think we’re going to die.”
Father said, “Don’t you love these clear skies, Mother?”
High empty skies, burning blue, and our tiny path beneath. It was stonier, and now bouldery—we were climbing over them, they were so big. Then it was not a path at all but a dry creek bed. The boulders had been sucked smooth by running water.
“This is the true test of ingenuity,” Father said. “We are trusting to brains and experience. I’m glad Jeronimo was destroyed!” Mother said, “Those three men might have been harmless.” “Scavengers!”
We looked up and expected to see vultures. But he meant the men.
“This is the way the first family faced things,” Father said. “That’s it, Mother. We are the first family on earth, walking down the glory road empty-handed.”
“I’d hate to die that way,” Mother said. She was still thinking about the men.
“There’s a worse way,” Father said. “The way they would have killed us. A scavenger takes his time.”
The undersides of the boulders were mossy and damp. Here was a mud puddle, our first sight of natural water since leaving Jeronimo. Father said, “Water has a smell around here, just like everything else.” But this water smelled stagnant, and dead insects floated in it like tea leaves. More was leaking from beneath the smooth boulders, and smears of it bubbled out of the bank and gave the clay edges of the path the texture of peanut butter. It drained on, became a trickle, and there was enough of it to have a sound like slow boiling in a pot. The water had a sickening smell of decay, but its plopping sound was hopeful, like a simple song. And there were animals and birds here—monkeys midway up the trees, and little agoutis beneath, and pava birds with crazy shrieks, and more curassows. If they could live here, so could we. In a dangerous place, all wild animals gave us hope.
