by Paul Theroux
This was not the riverside rain forest and cloud jungle that we had begun to like in Jeronimo. It was coastal and low, salty, hot, full of skinny flies. There were no tapirs or otters here, only lizards and ratlike animals and seabirds that turned greasy when they were roasted. We killed the birds for their downy feathers, not their tough meat, because Father wanted soft pillows. We were surrounded by swamps in which dead trees stood. The trees were naked and gray. Fungus grew where the bark had dropped off. At sundown, these swamps whistled with bats. There were palms. Father challenged Jerry and me to climb them and hack the coconuts down. Jerry was afraid of heights, he cried before he got halfway up, and on the ground he told me Father was “a crapster.”
“If you don’t cooperate with him, he’ll hate you,” I said.
“I want him to hate me,” Jerry said.
Sometimes I thought that now we were alone, we knew each other better and liked each other less. Father knew we were weak and afraid. There were arguments. There was nowhere to hide. We longed to be back at the Acre.
It was still the dry season—where was the rain? After three weeks here, we noticed that the level of the water in Laguna Miskita had been falling about a foot a week. Broken boats were exposed, holed cayukas in the shallows, and cow skulls and fish bones, black with mud. The gunwales of a rowboat appeared one day, outlined like a church window on the surface of the lagoon. We dragged it to shore and discovered a slimy outboard motor was clamped to it. Father took the motor apart and began cleaning it, piece by piece. We used the boat for a washtub—“That’s all these missionary dinghies are good for.”
Mother said it was pointless to tinker with an old outboard motor when there was so much planting to do. The seeds had just begun to sprout in the shallow boxes. They would have to be planted in rows soon.
This turned into an argument. If we had been nearby, they would not have yelled as they did. But we kids were in the dugout, fishing for eels. We used the kind of weighted circular net we had seen the man throwing into the sea our first day at La Ceiba. I had felt sorry for him. But now we were like that poor fisherman.
From the cove, we heard Father say, “I’m not going to throw this Evinrude away. You never know when it might come in handy.”
“The magpie.”
We could not see them. Their voices skimmed across the lagoon. Splintered echoes reached us from the dead trees and the shore, where beached hyacinths stranded by the dropping water had started to curl up.
“This magpie saved your life, Mother. If it wasn’t for me, you’d all be dead.”
“You can’t boast about Jeronimo. You endangered our lives in the first place.”
“Who the heck is talking about Jeronimo?”
“Saved our lives—that’s what you said.”
“Jeronimo was just an error of judgment. I was too ambitious there. I thought ice was the answer. But now I know that selfpreservation is the only important thing. I saved your lives by taking you to Jeronimo!”
“You blew us up!”
“I got you out of the United States. America is sunk, Mother. I mean that literally.”
“How do you know?”
“This is the proof.”
He jangled something we could not see.
“Trash,” Mother said.
“Beachcomber’s booty. It is the detritus of a dead civilization. The buoyant part. America has foundered, and these things have floated to our lonely shore.”
“That’s a crazy explanation.”
“I agree. But the world ran crazy. And we came here. Do you know a better place?”
“Allie, you’ll kill us here!”
Her voice shimmered, amplified by the water. We stayed in the cove, clutching the net and the paddles, listening.
Clover said, “Ma’s starting trouble. It’s all her fault.”
Jerry said, “You’re a crapster, too, Clover. Ma’s right. It’s miserable here. I hope she bangs him on the head.”
April said, “I want to run away from this crummo place.”
I told them all to shut up or I would overturn the canoe and make them swim for it.
“What if Dad’s right?” I said. And we listened.
Now he was saying, “I am making life tolerable for you. More than tolerable! This is a bed of roses compared to the wasteland we left behind.”
“In Jeronimo?”
“In the United States! There are only scavengers left! We’re the first family, Mother. We know what happened up there. As soon as we get our crops in the ground, we’ll be self-sufficient.”
“Your garden is imaginary. Your chickens are imaginary. There is no crop. We haven’t planted anything. You talk about livestock and weaving! There’s nothing here but trash from the beach. All you do is fool with that motor. Look at yourself, Allie. You don’t look human.”
It was what I had thought when the churchgoing Zambu, Childers, came by in his clean shirt. So Mother had noticed, too.
“I’m asking you to look into the future,” Father said. “Use your imagination. I’ll be proved right. But I’m no tyrant. I won’t keep you here against your will. If you’re not satisfied, you can—”
There was no more. We listened, but all we heard was the cuff of water against the dugout’s sides, and the squawk of herons. We paddled out of the cove and saw that the yard was empty, the fire unattended. The junkpile of wood and metal from the beach looked like storm litter at a tidemark.
Then we saw Father. He was alone, wearing a pair of mismatched rubber boots, tall and short. He did not speak. Had he guessed that we had overheard the quarrel?
He had started troweling the garden on the mud bank, just above the lagoon. We joined him and, without a word, helped him dig the furrows for the seedlings. We worked in a sulky and ashamed way for the rest of the afternoon.
Mother appeared at nightfall. She hugged us. She had been out walking, she said. But there was nowhere to walk. Her legs were muddy to her knees, there were burrs in her hair. And her face was smeared. She had been crying.
“Have a shower bath,” Father said. “It’ll do you a world of good.”
Jerry said, “Ma, how long are we going to stay in this place?”
She did not speak. She stared at Father.
Father said, “Answer him, Mother.”
“The rest of our lives,” she said.
Father seemed pleased. He smiled and said, “We’re in luck—looks like rain.”
24
STRIPS OF glue-colored cloud streaked past the breaks in the blue sky overhead, but beyond our lagoon, in Brewer’s direction, a dense cloud bank formed every afternoon. It stayed and trembled. It was gray-black, the texture of steel wool. There was a mountainside of it, and it hung and thickened until night swept across it.
Each morning the cloud bank was gone, and the strips and puffs of cloud were like gas balloons against a fine ceiling. The black cloud always returned later, looking crueler. There was no rain.
Father howled at us to help him plant the garden. He got madder by the day. He said we were bone lazy and slow and never showed up when he needed us. He was mad about the rain. He had promised it, but it had not come. He howled hardest at Jerry. Jerry had a new name for him: “Farter.”
We expected the rain to be plumping down, the way it had in Jeronimo—black rods of it beating into the trees. But there was only the daily upsweep of black cloud, and uncertain winds. Father said it was squalls offshore and that at any minute we would be drenched. We worked and waited in the still heat, watching the high dark sky over the twiggy treetops to the east. The storm lurked and watched us with its hanging wrinkles. It came no closer.
Our lagoon water was still dropping. Lily pads swung on long stems. The land was so dry that the mud had hardened as stiff and smooth as cement. To plant our seedlings—the sprouted beans and corn and the tiny tomato seedlings—meant cracking the mud-bank crust and making troughs. We lugged water in buckets and dumped it into these creases, to keep the roots soaked.
That was our job, the kids’ bucket brigade, while Father worked to outrig the mechanical pump. He made one that jacked water into wooden sluices, a series of gutters with handles that trapped and seesawed the lagoon water up the mud bank with a great flapping and banging of boards. But it took seven men to operate this pump, and Father was continually thundering at us, so we kept on with the buckets.
“Why does it just hang there?” he said, twisting his face at the black cloud. “Why doesn’t it rain?”
Water carrying and food snatching were our only activities, and still the heat dried our ditches and withered some of our garden plants. In the evening we ate manioc and mudfish and boiled plantains. Father was secretive. He would not let us see him eat or sleep. “I’m waiting until things improve here. I won’t rest until they do—and you won’t catch me eating that stuff.” He said that going without food he needed less sleep.
He used the night hours to rebuild the outboard motor. He chafed the parts and cut new gaskets for the piston assembly. But we had no gas or oil, and there were empty sockets in the motor where the spark plugs should have been. He did not seem to care. He greased it with pelican fat and yanked the starting rope, strangling it and making it chatter and choke. It gave off the smell of roasted pelican.
Mother called the outboard motor his toy.
“That gizmo’s keeping me sane,” Father said.
Hearing this, Mother held her breath and stared at him until he turned away.
“Rain!” he screamed at the black cloud.
His voice was so loud, so insistent and commanding, that we hunched our shoulders, expecting a downpour. But there was only the cloud and the shifting wind.
He shook his hands and said, “When I came here to the Mosquito Coast, I was appalled that these people had done so little to better themselves. They lived like hogs. I used to wince at their weedy crops and their pathetic houses. What do they eat—corn shucks? Do they chew their toes? Do they sleep face-down and let the rain run off their shoulders? What do they use to wipe themselves with? Where’s their tools? Do they dream, and, if so, what of?”
We were down at the garden, drenching the plants. We held our buckets still in order to listen.
“That’s what I used to think,” he said. “Now, after a year, it amazes me that they’ve got so much!”
“Jerry says you don’t respect the Zambus,” Clover said.
Jerry, betrayed, looked worried and unhappy.
“I’m full of admiration for them,” Father said. “Even though they do live like hogs. But that’s not for me—living day to day, hand to mouth. That’s not my style. This is a permanent settlement. I never promised it would be easy. We’re laying proper foundations. This is an organism. When it’s working, thing will be different.”
“Thinking out loud,” he spoke of rearing curassows like turkeys, and starting another fish farm, and curing meat in a smokehouse. The real problem wasn’t food, he said—it was dirt. He wanted to fix planks over the mud bank, which was our yard, and make a deck, a section at a time, and turn it into a wide screened-in porch, with a bathhouse. Healthy food, cleanliness, plenty of hot water, and no insects.
“I see a hatchery here and a water tower over there, and a boiler. Lack of ice isn’t a problem in the tropics, but lack of hot water is—who would have guessed that? I see a kind of intersecting set of walkways to a mooring, and trestles around the garden, with plants growing between them. All bridges and boardwalks—your feet never touch the ground.”
We would make this lagoon camp into an enormous pier!
It was a good idea, but so far all we had was the small watertight hut on the mud bank, and a junkyard—a pile of wood and scrap metal, eight feet high, that we had dragged piece by piece from the beach. Father said that he intended to sort it out, but there was no time. The garden, our best hope for survival, kept us busy. And already rats had found the junkpile and were nesting in it and squalling with the kinkajous, the nightwalkers.
Our camp looked worse than any Miskito or Zambu settlement I had seen. I was glad we got no visitors, because I knew they would find it strange. If they did not laugh at us, they would pity us. It was clear that we had come here with nothing, and now owned only what we had found on the beach.
In the late afternoon, when the black cloud hung in the east and our smoke was rising, our settlement looked like a dump on a gray shore, where desperate people had come to die. “We’re escaped prisoners,” Father said. That’s what he thought of America. But if we were lost, and trapped in this coastal swamp, weren’t we still prisoners?
It was the feeling I had when I saw our hut and the junk from the dugout, from the middle of the lagoon. Jerry and I had learned the knack of using the circular net. and we were excused bucket brigade if we brought back fish or eels. We liked paddling to the far end of the lagoon, so we couldn’t see what Father called home.
About a week after the storm cloud first appeared, Jerry and I were in the dugout, fishing, and heard a loud noise. It sounded like cannonfire.
“Dad’s started the outboard,” Jerry said.
It was what I had thought, or wanted to think—it would take an outboard to get us out of here.
We paddled to the settlement, where Father was standing on the dry solid mud. His eyes were empty. He was listening.
Jerry said, “You got the outboard going!”
“What if I did?”
“We can go home,” Jerry said.
It was a forbidden word.
“Sucker!” Father said.
The loud sound banged again. It was not the outboard. It was the roar of distant thunder.
“Why don’t you ever believe me?”
The thunder kept on, sometimes like cannons and sometimes, slowly and terribly, like brick walls collapsing into a cellar. Like a whole civilization keeling over and ruining itself on its own dead weight, Father said. It was out there, where the cloud was. He grinned at us. “War!”
From the opposite side of the lagoon came a loopy reply to the thunder—googn! googn! googn! googn!—and the same four notes again, but softer. It was a howler monkey. Each time the thunder roared, the howler monkeys drummed and googned.
There was an even odder result of the thunder. All around the lagoon, as if woken by the noise, creatures began to break out of their buried eggs. First the tortoises and iguanas emerged, then the alligators. The eggs were hidden in the mud, but when these slippery scaly things crawled out, they dragged the shells with them and left this broken eggshell crockery on the bank. Beneath the booming skies the lagoon came creepily alive.
During this thunder period, Mr. Haddy shuffled down the bankside from Brewer’s approach. He was bright-eyed and grinning like a hatched iguana, with phlegm on his front teeth. He brought us a parcel of conch meat and a live chicken tied up with string, and a bag of sugar. He scratched his back by pushing it against a tree, all the while staring at our junkpile. Then he kissed the twins and said, “How is it? Is it right here?”
“Pass me that rope, Charlie,” Father said. He showed no surprise at Mr. Haddy’s visit, and when I gave him the rope he wound it around the spool of the Evinrude and jerked it, making it go whop-whop-whop and stink of bird fat. Father’s hair flew.
“Brang you some conk.”
“Do I look hungry?” Father then ignored him and went on jerking the starting spool.
“Wheep! Wheep! Wheep!” Mr. Haddy mimicked the noise very well. “That is a spearmint for true!”
“This?”
“A motor with no sparks and no erl!”
“This is just to keep me sane.” Father made it spin again. “Helps me think. I’m planning my boiler and my walkways. You’ve got to keep the mud off somehow!”
“Brang you some sugar.”
“White sugar,” Father said. “It’s the worst possible thing you can stick in your mouth. Not an ounce of nutrition in it, only calories that burn up so fast they fizzle every B and C vitamin in your body. It gives
you cramps, causes kidney failure, makes you tired, and—did you know this?—it’s as addictive as dope. Figgy, I came here to get away from that poison.”
“I bring you gas and erl next time,” Mr. Haddy said. “And a set of sparks.”
“Don’t want them.”
“Why you burning chicken fat?”
“Because we’re not going anywhere,” Father said.
Mr. Haddy saw Jerry.
“How is it, Jerry-man?”
“Don’t talk to him. He’s in the doghouse.”
Mother said, “I can’t imagine how you found us.”
“Come down the cutoff. Look this way and that. I have a speerience, then I hear Fadder’s voice. How you like this tonda? Man, we gung get some storms, Ma!”
He looked around our camp and sniffed like a rabbit, taking it in.
“Hell of a place this Miskita lagoon.”
“We’re still getting settled." Mother said. “It doesn’t look like much at the moment, but Allie has plans. You know Allie.”
“Spearmints,” Mr. Haddy said.
Father did not smile. He wrenched the engine with his rope and said, “Back to work, people.”
“You garden pretty close up to the water. That you bodge?”
“Hut,” Mother said.
“House,” Father said.
“House, huh?” Mr. Haddy traced its shape with his head. “House pretty close up to the water, for true.”
“The water’s over there,” Father said, opening his mouth wide to say it plainly. He pointed down the mud bank to the lagoon shore.
“Gung be up here when this rain come. Gung be over that trashpile. How that trashpile get there? Howlies? Baboon? Jacketman?” Father came close to Mr. Haddy with his rope, looking as if he was going to twist it around the poor man’s stringy neck. He said, “Why are you trying to upset everyone?”
