by Paul Theroux
He seldom let up. It was like part of the jungle racket, after our escape from Jeronimo. Like the pava birds and the crickyjeens and the nighttime tattoo, along the Rio Sico and where we turned into the Rio Negro for Paplaya. But of all the jungle sounds that I heard, and that static could be very surprising, the clearest of them, and the most often, was the sound of Father’s voice, crying out for comfort.
***
It took us several days of “coasting,” as Father called it, to reach Brewer’s Lagoon. After all the talk and boat towing and the halt salty breeze, I expected something blue—sand, surf, palms, a beach. But Brewer’s was an inland scoop, and its haulover was a neck of high ground that hid the ocean and blocked the pleasant sound of waves sluicing the sand and making the pebbles jiggle.
We were in mud here. The lagoon was wide and flat and swampy. It was brown water stretching boggily to a brown shore. No ripples—it was a dirty mirror with some stubs of weeds, and cut-down palms like old lampposts. A film of mud and fine silt covered the banks around it, and flies gathered where green cowflap lay drying at the edges of the still, dark puddle.
“It’s creepy,” Mother said.
“Don’t be unhelpful.” Father looked at me. “She’s bitter.”
Mr. Haddy crowed when he saw Brewer’s Village. His mother lived there. The huts were piled against the shore. They were shaped like belfries and stained the same color as the lagoon. Zambus paddled dugouts toward the jetty sticks. It was a steamy afternoon, the sun a purple hoop in the gray sea haze.
Father said, “This is where we part company.”
“Ain’t you coming with me, Fadder?”
“No. I mean, you’re not coming with me.”
Mr. Haddy gulped, as if trying to guzzle his fear. But it seemed jammed in his throat and fluttering like a chunk of Adam’s apple. He said he wasn’t ready to go ashore just now.
“Figgy’s dragging his feet.”
“They gung say, ‘Haddy, where you lanch?’ ”
“You can tell them about your experience. I’ve got a wife and four kids and nothing else. You don’t hear me complaining.”
Mr. Haddy opened his mouth and took a big bite of air and wailed, “I ain’t got nothing left!”
Rocking down the pipanto from stern to bow, Father slipped his watch off his wrist. It was an old expensive watch—gold with a gold strap. Father was proud of it. It had survived our flights and failures. Strong, waterproof, and accurate, it was the one valuable item on this boat. Father had often said that it was now worth twice what he had paid for it and each year its value increased. But more likely it had been a lucky find at the Northampton dump.
“It’s money in the bank, Fig.”
Mr. Haddy shook his hands into his trousers. “I ain’t take you watch.”
“I’ve got no use for it anymore—have I, Mother?”
He dragged Mr. Haddy’s skinny hand out of the pocket and pushed the watch over his struggling fingers. And he laughed.
“Son, observe the time and fly from evil.”
Mr. Haddy looked at Mother. He said, “Speerience.”
“Keep it,” Mother said. “You’ve been a good friend to us.”
Smiling mournfully at the watch, and wetting his teeth, Mr. Haddy said, “But where you gung, Fadder?”
Father said, “We’re going to paddle up the blackest creek in this lagoon. And we’re going to find the smallest cranny of that creek, where there’s no people or plagiarism. Trees, water, soil—the basics are all we require. We’ll hole up there. They’ll never find me.”
“You ain’t like Brewer’s?”
“Too exposed,” Father said. “I don’t want to be visited by scavengers.”
The pipanto had drifted toward Brewer’s Village. It was belfry shacks and cooking fires and mud banks and wet Zambus and a dog.
“I want a real backwater. Solitary. Uninhabited. An empty corner. That’s why we’re here! If it’s on a map, I can’t use it.”
“Laguna Miskita ain’t on no chart.”
“How small is it?”
“Fadder, it so small,” Mr. Haddy said, “when you gets there you ain’t believe you there.”
While Father sculled the pipanto to the jetty, Mr. Haddy gave us directions: two miles along Brewer’s shore to the cutoff, and then inland for three miles. “Go till you ain’t go no more.” Gratefulness made him prolong his directions, but when we dropped him and he slogged through the mud to his mother’s hut, he did not look back. He was admiring his new watch, lifting his wrist, and soon he was surrounded by children, Creoles and Zambus, singing at him.
It was painful for me to see him go. He was not ours anymore. We were alone again—the first family, as Father kept repeating. But without our old friends—Mr. Haddy, and the Maywits, and our Zambus, and Ma Kennywick and the rest—it felt like the last family.
***
We had found the creek draining into Brewer’s and made our exit. Father sculled to where it opened into a string of lagoons. The last was Laguna Miskita. It had to be—we could go no further. Except for another creek, which led sideways into it and was too small for even a cayuka, there was no more open water. It was nowhere, it was a dead end, there was not a hut to be seen. We turned over our pipanto on the shore and propped it up with poles. This was our house. There were herons and kingfishers here, and overhead some pelicans. In the low gray trees at the edge there stumbled some wild cows with cloudy eyes. The lagoon bubbled and streamed with stripes of decay. It was the color of cooked liver. Flies buzzed around us. Even the mud bubbled, and the pressure of rotten gas underground made holes on the banks, like the dimples on clam flats.
“We’re alone here,” Father said. “Look, no footprints!”
He said that from now on our life would be simple—gardening, fishing, and beachcombing. No poisonous contraptions, none of the Jeronimo mistakes, nothing fancier than a flush toilet. A vegetable plot here, a chicken run over there, a good solid hut that could take the rain.
“Chickens?” Mother said. “Where are you planning to get chickens?”
“Curassows.” Father said. “Chickens is just a generic term. We’ll raise curassows—we’ll tame them.”
“What else?”
“Nothing. That’s the beauty of it. Survival means total activity. There isn’t time for anything else!”
“It’ll be an ordeal,” Mother said.
“An ordeal is a square deal.”
That night and for many nights afterward, we slept under the propped-up pipanto. It was cool at night and we made smudge pots to keep the mosquitoes away. Each day we worked at making the place comfortable. We had done it before, at Jeronimo, but until we started beachcombing we had no tools here, except the burned machete. We built a latrine and a cooking area and Father paced out a garden—the soil was so black and soft on the shore it would hardly need tilling, he said.
“It might be a couple of weeks before the rains start. In the meantime, we’ll build a real house, a watertight one, and get those seeds ready for planting.”
As soon as the new hut was underway, April got sick, then Clover, then Jerry, then Mother. It was the squitters, but they also turned pale and ran a high fever. They lay under the pipanto and groaned and made dashes to the latrine. Mother said it was all the travel and banging around and our diet, which was wild manioc and fish, and the carkles and whelks that we dug out of the mud.
“If it’s the food, how come Charlie’s not sick?” Father said. “Or if it’s the hard work, why aren’t I flat on my back?”
“How dare you accuse us of faking!” Mother said.
“Just asking.”
“Don’t bully us, Allie!”
Father went silent. It was scary, hearing them argue in the stillness of this gray lagoon, but their silence was worse. For two days they did not speak to each other, and, because of it, all we kids did was whisper.
Mother recovered, yet she was still weak. Father said, “The invalids can deal with the seeds,”
and they stripped the Miskito’s vegetables and corn and dried the seeds while Father and I gathered material for the hut.
We had found an abandoned dugout. We patched it and caulked its cracks. “Some fool threw this away—it’s a perfectly good boat!” We made daily trips down the creek and to Brewer’s to gather driftwood—beams and planks that had floated through the coastal inlet and washed ashore. We found them stuck against the mud banks. Most of this wood had nails and screws in it. We removed these and once they were straightened used them for fastening the foundation of the hut. And beachcombing, harvesting what the tides deposited, gave us other treasures.
On the coast, all huts were belfries on stilts. Not Father’s. His was like a small barge, the tublike foundation resting against the bank. He took great care to make it waterproof, tarring its cracks and then hammering strips of tin on it to seal it from rats and moisture. This barge-hut was bigger than a pipanto, but it was pipanto-shaped at its base.
A Zambu passed by one day. He did not see us until Father called him over. His face looked punched, but he wore a clean yellow shirt and a straw hat. His name was Childers. He was going to church. It was Sunday, he said.
Father said, “I wish you hadn’t told me that.”
Childers’s laugh was mainly fright.
Father said, “If God hadn’t rested on the seventh day, He might have finished the job. Ever think of that?”
Childers said, “You putting up a bodge there?”
“It’s a house.”
“Look like a bodge. Or a lanch.”
It did—a roofed boat on the mud bank overlooking Laguna Miskita.
“When the rains come, I’m going to be dry as a nut. Think about it.”
The Zambu considered this, then laughed again in his gagging way while Father faced him.
The difference between the two men surprised and scared me. The Zambu in his yellow shirt and straw hat and walking stick, and Father, tall and bony and red, with long greasy hair and a beard and wild eyes and a missing finger and sailcloth shorts. Father was skinnier than the Zambu! And I had not noticed until now just how wild looking he was. If you didn’t know better, you would have thought he was the savage, and not the Zambu. If the Zambu had had hair and eyes like that I would have run for my life. But we had gotten used to Father looking like a live scarecrow, the wild man of the woods, and hollering.
Worry was making the Zambu chuckle as Father scampered around the hut, pointing out its advantages.
Notice how practical it was, he said. No poles, so it wouldn’t shake down in an earthquake. No amount of rain could penetrate the tarred roof. It was made from the wreckage of ships that had foundered off the Mosquito Coast—each timber had been sealed and smoothed by the ocean. Two long cabins, adults and children, each with its own entrance. It had everything—privacy, strength, and grace. It would be standing here, Father said, long after all the palm-leaf shanties had been blown away by the summer storms.
“I want some bad storms, so I can prove I’m right. Then I’ll curl up inside and laugh my head off. Thick walls keep it cool, and we get a breeze from end to end through the hatchway between the cabins. Plus, I can jack up the roof. I don’t know why I’m bothering to tell you this.”
Childers said, “Me roof ain’t leak.”
“We’ll see. But frankly that’s the big mistake you people make around here. Always talking about your roof, always concentrating on your top. What about your bottom?”
Childers had started to back away.
“Your bottom’s just as important. You can’t eliminate the problem by sticking your house on poles and sending it ten feet in the air. That only compounds it—makes you vulnerable, conspicuous, and temporary. Look at what happened in the States!”
Father’s lecture had taken the Zambu by surprise. He did not reply. He was still walking backward along the muddy shore.
“This house is leakproof, top and bottom,” Father said. “Is yours? Is your bottom leakproof?”
Now the Zambu saw Mother and the twins separating the seeds into piles. He tipped his hat in old-fashioned politeness.
“How is it, Ma?”
“Don’t trample my garden,” Father said.
The Zambu looked down. There was no garden. He tiptoed up the bank, crossing imaginary furrows.
“Now you’re messing up my chicken run!”
The Zambu didn’t see it. There was no chicken run. But he picked up his feet and framed his arms and frowned with fear, as if an invisible chicken run stood in his way.
“Remember this. Experience isn’t an accident. It’s a reward that’s given to people who pursue it. That’s a deliberate act, and it’s hard work. You choose to go to church—funny place to go, considering the state of the world and how it got that way. On the seventh day, God left the room—why should you make the same lazy mistake? Why pray when you could be making a hut like this?”
“Got no tools.” The Zambu was panicky. He started to run.
Father followed him, shouting.
“I don’t have tools. Everything you see here I made with my own two hands!”
But the Zambu was gone. He disappeared along the creek bank in Brewer’s direction. He could not have heard what Father said. It was just as well, because what Father had told him about the tools was untrue.
Father said, “I dislike that man for his malevolent curiosity.”
We went back to work. Father had denied we had tools. It was a lie, another invention. It comforted him.
We had tools, and more than tools. The Mosquito shore provided us with most of the things we needed. We had found the head of a claw hammer on the beach and fitted it with a handle. By pounding the tips of heated spikes we had made screwdrivers and chisels. A rusty saw blade we had seen lying in seaweed was now gleaming from use. We retrieved wire and tin and bottles from the tide wrack, and torn nets that we patched, and enough sailcloth for Mother to make shorts for us all and a smock for herself. Her needles were bird bones. She could have had real needles from Brewer’s Village, but Father liked the idea of killing birds (“Scavengers!”) and sharpening their bones to make needles.
Beachcombing was dirty, exhausting work. Nearly every day during those early weeks at Laguna Miskita, in the crackling bathaunted darkness before dawn, we took the dugout down the creek and across Brewer’s to a shanty village called Mocobila. Just west of there, before the Zambus were awake, we searched the beach for usable items. We walked abreast, Father and I—and when they were well enough, the twins and Jerry joined us—picking through the tightly knotted mass of wood and rope and seaweed that had been deposited by the night tide.
We found more fishing tackle than we could ever use, and rope and rags and plastic jugs, and lumps of tar, and oars and canoe paddles and cooking pots and skillets. One day we found a six-foot ladder, and on two successive days toilet seats.
It was like scavenging in the Northampton dump, but scavenging was not a word I dared use with Father around. As in Northampton, the shore was always full of birds, and sometimes we had to fight them off the tide wrack in order to comb it. There were vultures on this beach, and one horrible day Father killed a vulture with a slingshot for no other reason than to show us how the rest of the vultures would feed on it.
“That’s how it was in Northampton,” Father said.
Jerry said, “You mean the dump?”
“The city,” Father said. “All those school kids!”
We watched the vultures tear bloody lumps out of the dead bird’s breast, while its wings shook like a broken umbrella.
The wood we found, and most fittings, had been washed clean and whitened by the sea. The metal was scabbed by rust or barnacles, but Father loved taking a bristling skillet and scrubbing it with sand. He restored the cooking pots, he mounted the toilet seats in our new latrine, and he made us sandals from rubber tires.
I was glad we were alone. No one could see our silly shorts and homemade sandals, or the junkyard we had made at Laguna
Miskita. The Zambu Childers never came back.
“There’s a kind of industrial Darwinism at work here,” Father said. “The things that get to this beach are indestructible remnants that survived the storms and tides and the bite of the sea. They’ve proved themselves—stood the test of weather and time. By putting them to use, we are making a settlement that can’t be destroyed. Your average Crusoe castaway lives like a monkey. But I’m no fool. Take those toilet seats. That’s natural selection. The hoppers are gone, but they’re everlasting.”
He kicked aside the armless rubber dolls and odd sneakers and chunks of plastic foam. He railed at the ripped life jackets and rusted aerosol cans. We got used to him saying, “Now there’s a perfectly good eyebolt—”
Mother called him a magpie. I thought it was his voice, but it was his beachcombing, all the junk collecting. He would bring things back to the camp that had no practical use—the horse collar was one, the light plug another—and say, “Their use will be revealed—”
Apart from his talk about the United States (“It was terrible”—why was he smiling?), he had not changed. But our circumstances had changed a lot. We had a house and food and a routine, and yet life here was difficult. It took all day. Total activity was good, Father said—the job of survival made you healthy. But we were often ill with the squitters and fever and sand-flea bites, and had to stay in the hammocks. Mother picked the nits and lice out of our hair. Every cut became infected and had to be scrubbed with hot seawater.
Father was never ill.
“I’m not boasting. I just don’t give in. I fight it. Keep clean and you’ll never be sick.”
We had come to Laguna Miskita with one bar of soap. Father would not say where he had gotten it. I guessed that he had hooked it from the Miskito Indian on the Rio Sico, after his shower bath. This soap was soon gone. But there was a shop at Mocobila, run by a Creole named Sam. Father called him Uncle Sam. He sold flour and oil and axheads and fishhooks to the local Zambus. Father avoided the shop.
Uncle Sam saw us beachcombing one day and asked Father if he knew anything about generators. His was busted. Father fixed it but would not take money in return. At last, after Uncle Sam pestered him, Father agreed to take a case of cheese-colored laundry soap. It was the only thing we lacked at Laguna Miskita, Father said. “And by the time we’ve used it up, I’ll have figured out a way of making some myself.” He reminded us that we had made soap in Jeronimo out of pig fat. “Good for what ails you. You could eat it!”
