The Mosquito Coast

by Paul Theroux

  It made me remember.

  I said, “Mr. Haddy, is it true about the United States—has it been wiped out?”

  “Hard! Hard! Everywhere! Look”—but there was nothing to see—“she flooding!”

  “Are you sure? Where did you hear it? You mean, there’s nothing—”

  She flodden, he kept repeating in a terrified voice. He moved his arms. The propped-up oars helped me pick out surfaces.

  “Everything gone!”

  That was the last I heard. He splashed the blades and turned the boat aside and rowed into the rain, groaning indistinctly. The shore fell away. He took the lagoon with him, and all the trees, and left me standing in the sting of straight-down rain. The night’s black was above and below me. The rain closed over Mr. Haddy and the kick of his oars. He was like a man rowing into a mountain.

  It was all rain and monkey howls in this pit of unseparated darkness. Googn! Googn! Googn! Googn!

  ***

  In the morning, steam rose from the cold boilings of the lagoon, and from the root knuckles and beaten-down grass and broken trees. The land was covered with pink worms. It looked shocked by the twelve hours of heavy rain. It lay thrashed and still.

  Most of the sprouts in our garden were pasted against the mud as flat as stamps, or else floated in the troughs we had dug. Our whole shelf of furrows had slipped sideways down the bank and lay bunched at the shore. The garden was waterlogged: the smaller sprouts were drowned, the bigger ones tipped over and showing the pale hairs on their roots. Twigs, ripped leaves, and branches littered the lagoon.

  Father said, “I’ll be willing to bet that we’re the only dry folks in the country, if not the world.”

  “It rains in our yard and he thinks the whole world is wet,” Jerry whispered. “Why can’t we leave?”

  I took Jerry aside and showed him the barrel of gasoline and the spark plugs.

  “We can bomb out of here with that outboard,” Jerry said. He was happier than I had seen him for weeks. “We can find Mr. Haddy. He’ll take us home!”

  “We can’t go home,” I said. “It’s gone. Dad was right—”

  “No!”

  “Mr. Haddy told me. He wouldn’t lie. Please don’t cry.”

  But he had started. He put his arm against his face to hide it.

  “We’ll go somewhere else,” I said. “We’ll go to Brewer’s Village, or somewhere on the coast better than this.” I kept talking to him this way to stop him crying, and then I swore him to secrecy about the gasoline and the spark plugs.

  Clover was at the shore with Father and saying, “Our nice garden’s ruined.”

  “It’ll perk up in this sun,” Father said, and he made us dig ditches to drain it.

  Overnight the trees around the lagoon had turned bright green, their leaves washed by the rain. They glistened with a shine like fresh paint. The gray was gone from the whole place, and under the clear sky the lagoon was deep blue. The land was black. Bird honks skimmed across the water.

  Driftwood had been scattered from the junkpile, but after Jerry and I picked it up and stacked it, the barrel of gasoline was hidden. I pushed the pouch of spark plugs under my hammock pad. What good were they to us if Father was determined to stay? But his outboard motor, which was the first thing I checked that morning, had not been shifted by the storm. It was still clamped to its stump, and was wrapped tight in plastic like a leg of meat.

  Father said you had to admire this foolish waste of energy—nature running mad and drenching everything. It was a huge demented squandering of water, like an attempted murder that a quick-witted man could overcome by crawling into his leakproof hut: all that trouble for nothing, because we were still alive.

  “But we weren’t meant to die!”

  The storm had terrified everyone except Father. He was impressed by the way it had destroyed trees, and he marveled at all the uprootings. He calculated that six inches of rain had fallen in the night. You had to admire that. And look at the beaten bushes. And think of the velocity. You could build a machine that operated on falling rain—the collected rain would spin a flywheel, the same principle as a water wheel but more efficient—no drag. Only the rain was undependable, because the world was imperfect. Nature tried to burn you, then starve you, then drown you, and it made you dig a garden like a savage with a stick. It surprised you and made you fearful that something was going to go wrong. That fear made people religious nuts instead of innovators.

  “But it will be weeks before anyone plants a garden, and by then ours will be in blossom.”

  Mother said the damage scared her. We would have to fight to save the garden.

  Father said, “I like a good fight.”

  In the course of that hot day, most of the plants perked up just as he said they would. Even the little shoots followed Father’s orders, and what in the early morning had looked like the ruin of a drowned garden had begun again to grow.

  The important thing now, Father said, was to protect the plants. It was not the amount of rain that was so bad, but its ferocity: the wind, the waterspouts, the erosion. “If we don’t take care, the plants will be punched out of their holes,” he said. “But we will take care.”

  We sawed lengths of bamboo and fitted some of the plants with collars, and others we banked with dirt to prop them up. Father said, Wasn’t that ingenious?

  “I’ll believe it when we have vegetables,” Mother said.

  “Patience!”

  Toward evening, the clouds sailed in and the first drops hit us like slugs. Father ordered Jerry and me to work naked at repairing the garden, and so we did, up to our ankles in mud, with the rain whipping our backs.

  “He treats us like slaves,” Jerry said. “I’d like to get that outboard working and escape from here.”

  “We’ve already escaped,” I said.

  “Even if America’s burned—even if it’s destroyed—it’s better than this. This is a stinking dump. I want to go home.”

  “But the garden’s all right now,” I said. “When it grows, things will be different.”

  “Why are you always on Dad’s side?”

  “He was right about the rain—he was right about the garden!”

  “It’s still raining,” Jerry said. Thunder compressed his face and gave him a frightened smile. The fat raindrops riddled on our little hut.

  The next day, half the garden was gone. Some of the plants floated in the lagoon, where they had been washed with the storm’s debris, and others lay broken in the furrows. The bamboo collars had done no good. They served only to bruise the plants under the strength of the falling rain.

  “It’s no use,” Mother said.

  “You make me laugh,” Father said. “You talk as if we have an alternative! What we’re doing is all we can do. There’s nothing else. A garden is our only hope, Mother. Have you got a better idea?”

  Mother said, “Why don’t we just pack up and go?”

  “Nothing to pack,” Father said. “Nowhere to go.”

  “There’s Brewer’s Village. Mr. Haddy said—”

  “Figgy is busy dying. They all are, except us.” He had taken a shovel and was mucking out the furrows and replanting the stringy shoots. He saw us watching him and said, “Stick with me, people, or you’ll die, too.”

  Jerry knelt down and said, “I hate him.”

  Clover heard. She said, “I’m going to tell Dad what you said.”

  “I want you to tell him, Crappo. I want to see him go buggy.”

  This made Clover cry. She ran to Mother and said, “Jerry just swore at me!”

  “No one gives a hoot,” Father was saying. He threw down his shovel and unwrapped the outboard. He spun it and throttled it with his rope, making it choke. Seeing him, I almost told him about the spark plugs and the gas. But he had said, Nothing to pack—nowhere to go. It would make him madder. He would ask me where I had got them, and why, and how. He would scream if I mentioned Mr. Haddy. I wished Mr. Haddy had never come and stuck me with that s
ecret.

  “That’s to keep him sane,” Jerry said.

  I looked at Father tearing at the outboard’s rope.

  “It’s not working,” Jerry said, and he laughed.

  We concentrated on what was left of the garden. But down here at the shore I could see that it was not the rain that had done the worst damage. The level of the lagoon had risen, as Mr. Haddy had predicted, and submerged the plants that had been near the water’s edge. Jerry wanted to tell Father, to show him he had been mistaken, but before he could, it began to rain again. We stripped our clothes off and began bailing. It rained five times that day. At noon it was so dark we had to use candles in the hut to see our crabs.

  A few days ago, it had all been dust and gray trees. Now we were in a wilderness of mud and water. There were frogs where no frogs had been, and snakes, and animal tracks everywhere. Lizards left their marks all over the bank, like bars on sheet music, with little noteprints above and below the lines of their tails. There were more birds, and crabs, and crayfish, all stirred into life by the rain. We caught them with ease. Mother boiled them on the cookstove. It made me think that we could survive without the garden.

  Father came sneakily into the hut one morning. There was mud all over his chest and the front of his thighs, and gunk on his hands and dripping from his beard and on his nose. He was angry. He had not wanted us to see him. But we stared, and even Mother was puzzled.

  “Pushups,” he said, and snatched the rope of the outboard.

  ***

  “The scavengers are back,” Father said, looking up. The gray gulls and fat pelicans had flown inland to feed on the creatures that had sprung out of the mud. Vultures followed them, but instead of feeding they found perches in the trees and waited. Father screamed at the birds, to frighten them away. They screamed back at him. He hated scavengers, he said—hated their mad eyes and their filthy beaks, the way they pounced, the way they fought over garbage. And, as if in revenge—but what had they done to us?—he caught them by letting them swallow baited hooks, and he plucked and roasted them. He ate them. His hunger was hatred. He used their grease on his outboard motor, and left their blood and feathers in the mud. One morning we saw that he had killed a vulture and hung it high on a tree. It stayed there, lynched, until the other birds tore it apart.

  “Know why I hate scavengers?”

  Mother said, “Allie, please,” and turned away.

  “Because they remind me of human beings.”

  He denied the lagoon was rising. Even after the shoreline engulfed most of the garden and covered the foundation of the smokehouse, he still would not admit the lagoon was filling. He said the land was settling.

  “It’s a sinking effect. That’s why I waterproofed the hut. I was expecting this!”

  He hammered a marker in the mud, at the lagoon’s edge. The next morning, the marker was gone—either submerged or swept away. Father said a scavenging vulture had mistaken it for a turd and eaten it.

  The storms had tidied our camp. Destruction had made it neater. The half-made coop for the curassows was gone. The latrine was in the creek. The boards for the walkway were covered in mud. The seven-man pump had collapsed—it looked small and simple on its back.

  And the hut had begun to sink. It had once rested high on the mud bank, on its own watertight bottom. But now the mud brimmed around it. It looked like one of those family tombs, the bunkers with doors that are half imbedded in the ground in old graveyards.

  It worried Mother. She said she could not cook while she was kneeling in water, and what if the hut just went on sinking until mud came through the hatches? Father moved the cookstove inside and fitted it with a chimney. The hut looked more than ever like a little barge, and now the lagoon lapped against its front.

  “Allie, it makes me nervous.”

  Father got a rope and some pulleys and, using a tree to brace the arrangement of tow ropes, tried to yank the hut away from the lagoon. He struggled, but it was no use. The hut was stuck fast in the mud. He left it tethered to the tree.

  “That shouldn’t be happening,” he said. “It’s not supposed to get bogged down.”

  He fitted logs to the sides, at the level of the brimming mud, to stabilize it and prevent it from sinking further. He said he was sorry we did not have time to go down to the coast—the storms would be washing lots of interesting articles onto the beach. The wildest seas gave you the best things, he said—iron chains, steel drums, yards of sailcloth. It was only the ordinary tides that brought you toilet seats.

  But we stayed at Laguna Miskita and tried to secure the camp. We dug trenches, we bailed, we fished. The storms assaulted us. They crept up and darkened the day. They made us very cold, they drove us inside. They stole our wood, they broke down our trenches, they fouled the place with mud and excited the monkeys. The storms were always followed by flocks of scavenging birds.

  “Sandbags,” Father said. “If we had sandbags we’d be in good shape. I’ll bet there are stacks of them down at Mocobila. They don’t know what to do with them there. They’re all busy dying on the coast.”

  The rain and the rising lagoon thieved most of what we had, and the wind burgled the rest. Now there was little more here than our hut. The junkpile was scattered, the barrel of gas had vanished. But this made me glad. I had no secret to keep. I would not get into trouble, and anyway there was nowhere to go. Jerry said that soon Father would give up and take us to live at Brewer’s Village. He would have no choice—the camp was a failure, Father had been wrong to hide in this backwater.

  Within a week, our garden was gone. Not a single sprout was left. There were no more seeds. We lived on land crabs and wet eddoes. We walked around with dirty legs. The mud dried on us and made gray flakes on our skin. “Keep clean,” Father said, but the hot shower he had made was the next thing to go. The lagoon was under the front half of the hut, and now at night I could hear it like bones knocking beneath the floor. The hut was tilted forward, straining the rope. During the storms I heard this tether rope grunt.

  “Any seepage?” Father asked. But there was none. The hut stayed dry. It was Father’s one satisfaction—the hut did not leak. He boasted about it as the rain came down.

  “There’s water underneath the front,” I said.

  “Bow,” Father said. “Underneath the bow.”

  He began saying things like “Get aboard” and “Go astern.”

  “We’re roped to that tree,” he said. “If the line breaks or the tree cuts loose, we’ll take to the dugout. We won’t be carried away! Jerry, swab the deck.”

  There was a strong current flowing through the lagoon. The sight of it panicked Father. In its muscles and boilings floated uprooted bushes and branches and coconuts and black fruit and dead swollen animals—all moving swiftly toward the creek and the sea.

  The land had softened and turned to swamp. The trees stood in water, the paths were gone, and still the water rose, until what had once been a camp spread over a whole length of the lagoon’s bank was now no more than a shallow island—our hut on a bar of mud. Creeks had opened in breaks on the lagoon’s shores. There was not a living soul that we could see in this maze of muddy waterways. Birds flew around us. Father cursed them from our lopsided hut. He wanted to kill them all.

  The world was drowned, he said.

  He made a list of things we needed—chains, pulleys, fastenings for a paddle wheel and treadles, wood for boardwalks, sailcloth, more seeds, inner tubes, tin strips, wire mesh, salt.

  “Seeds?” Mother said. “But there’s nowhere to plant!”

  “Hydroponics,” Father said. “Grow them in water. Think of it.”

  He said he was sure that most of the things we needed were lying on the beach near Mocobila. As soon as the rain eased he was going to make a dash in the dugout for one last look at the Mosquito Coast.

  “What if we die?” April asked.

  “There are worse things.”

  Clover said, “What’s worse than dying?”
/>   “Being turned into scavengers.” Father slapped his list. “It’s already started to happen. I scavenged this paper, I scavenged this pencil. But I don’t need this stuff—you do.”

  “Maybe they’ll send a search party for us,” Clover said.

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “The people.”

  “What people? You think the Coast Guard’s down there waiting for us to send a distress signal? Search parties out looking for us in raincoats? No—they’ve all been torpedoed. Muffin, believe me, we’re the last ones left.”

  Mother said, “Allie, why don’t we leave together? We’ve still got the dugout. We could get down the creek, we could—”

  “Down the creek!” Father grinned angrily. “With the current, the broken branches, the rotten fruit. I won’t do it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m not a broken branch. Dead things go downstream. That’s a funeral procession on that creek. If we surrender to the current, we’re doomed.” He pointed his finger stump in the direction of the coast. “Everything tends that way. But we’ve got to fight it, because down there is death.”

  “We could live at Brewer’s. You know that.”

  “Like savages. Like scavengers. I’ll die before I turn into one of those garbage-eating birds. Hand-to-mouth? Me? No, Mother, I make things. And if I can’t survive that way, I’ll go up in flames—I’ll turn myself into a human torch. Then the birds won’t get me. Ha!”

  Clover said, “What about us?”

  “We’ll all go up in flames! It’s no disgrace to be the last ones to go. It means we’ve made our point.”

  He was still smiling. Already his face shone as if, inside, he had began to smolder with heat.

  We guessed that he was serious, and so we were startled when Mother laughed.

  Father challenged her with his fiery eyes.

  She said, “Allie, we’re too wet to burn.”

  “I’ve got fuel.” He opened his mouth wide to mock her. He looked wild.

  “We’ve got nothing!”

  “Gas,” Father hissed. “We’ll take a bath in it, and pull the plug. One match and whoof!”