The Mosquito Coast

by Paul Theroux

  It was as if he had told Mother he had a weapon. She stammered and said, “There’s no gas here.”

  “A barrel of it.”

  Mother said nothing.

  “Found it in the mud. Some fool jettisoned it, but he was busy drowning. The barrel reached our shore. I roped it to a tree.” He smiled at our frightened faces. “It’s no disgrace to die your own way.”

  Jerry looked at me. I shook my head. I didn’t want him to tell Father how Mr. Haddy had brought the barrel of gas to us. He said, “Charlie’s got spark plugs.”

  “Charlie’s got no such thing.”

  “Show him,” Jerry said.

  I got the pouch from my hammock and gave it to Father. He tore open the plastic and tested them with his thumbnail.

  “I found them in the mud,” I said, and glanced at Jerry, daring him to deny it.

  Father was sweating. He came close to me. His face was hot, his lips white and cracked. I thought he was going to hit me, or demand to know where I got them—the exact place—and accuse me of lying. But he hesitated. Maybe he was ashamed of himself for talking about suicide, dousing ourselves with gasoline. He opened his mouth to speak, but before he could say anything, Mother screamed.

  “Allie!”

  Father turned to her.

  With fear in her eyes, Mother said, “The house just moved!”

  Father felt it—we all had—the moment he opened his mouth. It was a soft bump, a nudge against the floorboards, a sideways push under our feet. Father had already started to laugh and by then he had forgotten me. He rushed outside, saying, “I planned it this way!”

  That night we were woken by a thunder sound that shook the hut. But this cannon thunder was the outboard, vibrating on the beam where it was clamped. It echoed all over the lagoon and the surrounding swamp. He killed the engine, and now I could hear bats, and the steady flutter of the rain, and the monkeys answering Father’s noise.

  Then we were afloat. I could feel it—the water shouldering the hut and tipping us in our hammocks. The rising lagoon had lifted the small watertight hut and turned it into a barge. In the morning the water was all around us, and we were lit by the muddy glimmer of the lagoon. The trees were distant, but our tether rope still held us to the solitary tree in the water. We were out of the current, and the outboard was clamped to the rail on the short deck behind the hut. The dugout, holding the barrel of gas and some junk Father had rescued, was tied to the back—the stern, Father reminded me.

  “Who was right?” He took Mother’s hand and said, “I couldn’t die if I tried!”

  Mother said, “What if it leaks?”

  “Logs under us! We’re stable—we’re unsinkable! I planned it this way!”

  Mother was at the cookstove, frying breakfast fish.

  “Tugboat Annie,” Father said. “Now I’m going to eat. I’ve been saving up for this—let it rain!”

  But the hut still scraped the bottom, and when it rocked from our movements, we could feel the bump of the mud bank under us, the hut’s bum sliding on soft soil. Father ate an enormous breakfast, then got his dugout pole and began pushing us further into the open water.

  Jerry said, “As soon as we get to the coast, I’m going to find Mr. Haddy. He’ll sail us to La Ceiba. We can get that banana boat.”

  Clover said, “Dad, Jerry says we’re going to the coast.”

  “You want to die, boy?”

  Jerry said, “But we’re safe—you said so.”

  “Anyone can float down to the coast,” Father said, and pushed his pole. “I could have done that without an engine. But I hung on. I fought it”—and he pushed—“I wasn’t cut out to grow vegetables. I’m an inventor. I make things, Jerry. But that Mosquito Coast is a dead loss. That’s the edge of the precipice. One false step and you’re gone.” He kept shoving at the pole, pushing the floating hut into deeper water. “There’s death down there. Wreckage. Scavengers. Garbage eaters. Everything broken, rotten, and dead is on that stream and being pulled down to the coast. And that’s the nearest place to the United States—how do we know it hasn’t been poisoned? I’ve been fighting the current all along”—and he pushed—“and it’s been a draw. I haven’t given an inch. When did I say, ‘Okay, let’s drift and God help us’? Never! That’s why we’re winning.”

  Jerry said, “There’s nowhere to go—that’s what you told us.”

  “You’re taking that remark out of context!” Father plunged the pole into the mud and hung on it. “You’re misquoting me. Isn’t he, Charlie?”

  I said, “If we aren’t going to the coast, where are we going?”

  “I make things! I’ve got maps in my head! There are more safe places on those maps than you’d ever dream possible. Look at the house I made. She floats! Look at this outboard”—he circled its spool with his starting rope and got it blasting—“she works! Some jackass threw this away! Look at us, Mother—we’re only drawing a foot of water, a foot and a half at the outside. We can go anywhere in this craft. We can get away from those birds. They’re all dying down there, but we’re going to live. Do you think I’d be fool enough to risk drowning us all, when the whole world is ours?”

  And saying this, and more, he pointed the hut inland, toward the Patuca, and steered us against the current.

  IV

  UP THE PATUCA

  26

  “I SAVED YOU from certain death,” Father said.

  Yes, we were alive in this waterworld.

  “What are you going to do for me?”

  What could we refuse? We owed him everything.

  “You’ll have to do as I say.”

  How else could we pay him back?

  “Upstream,” he said. “Downstream it’s a toilet. You know that.”

  But even if this was true, it did not make our going easier. Every mile seemed like a mistake, because we were not free anymore. It was like the slow death in dreams of being trapped and trying to scream without a voice box. No one said anything.

  In the space of a day our circumstances had changed. From a rained-on quarreling family, clinging with dirty hands to a mud bank and fearing worse floods, we had been turned into river people. Our main worry was that our hull would be sheared away by submerged rocks and we would sink like a brick. Jerry and I worked the sounding chain from the bow. The rutting and flapping of the outboard motor cleared the trees of monkeys—whitefaced baboons and ringtails here—and scared everything except butterflies.

  The hard thunder rains of the lagoon and the ruination of our garden were nightmare memories. But the very moment we believed we were rescued and could make it to Brewer’s to shelter safely in one of those stooping belfry-like huts, Father turned us around and began fighting us upstream.

  Jerry said it looked dangerous.

  I told Father I was scared.

  Mother said, “Allie, why don’t we take a chance on the coast? At least we know what’s there.”

  Father called us savages. That kind of thinking had doomed mankind’s carcass. Did we want our goose cooked? It was not the unknown that was dangerous, but the known. Only drowning people clung to wreckage. Those who bothered to seek the unknown were saved—but who bothered? Of course it was hard to get a heavy boat up a flooded river on one engine! That proved it was worthwhile!

  He had been right in other things, so we went along with him in this, and found ourselves agreeing with everything he said.

  “Dentists in the States had an interest in candy factories,” he said. “Doctors owned hospitals. Detroit kept bankrolling oil wells. America had terminal cancer! I saw it was all leading downstream. Why didn’t anyone else?”

  An aerosol can of bug spray swept by us one day. Father did not question where it came from: he was too busy railing about it. And plastic jugs on the current. He railed more. He railed against fat people and politicians and banks and breakfast cereal and scavengers—there were turkey buzzards and muddy vultures right overhead. He bawled them out, he cursed machines.

 
“I look forward to the day when I can cut this outboard loose; turn it into the meat grinder it really is.” All machines were gravediggers, he said. Leave them alone for a minute and they bury themselves. That’s all they were good for—holes.

  “I had a Hole once.”

  He smacked his lips, congratulating himself.

  “I made ice out of fire!”

  He named our floating hut the Francis Lungley, then changed it to the President Fox, and finally scratched Victory on its side with a nail. He said it was the world. It was twenty-seven feet long and six feet wide. He and Mother had the “master cabin” (the cookstove, the chair, the pelican-feather bed). With the excess weight of timbers thrown overboard or cut for fuel, our craft moved more easily in the water, with the hefty grace of a canal boat or a motorized barge in the Connecticut Valley. As soon as we were past the cutoff, where branches banged our roof, we plugged along the creek, staying midstream. Anywhere, Father said, as long as it was against the current.

  We entered the Patuca that first day. We were surprised that this great river had been flowing all this time beyond the swamp to the east of our little Laguna Miskita—four hours’ chug. But the river was hidden. We did not see it until we were almost on top of it. Father said he was not surprised at all: right again! The rain had swelled it over its red banks and into the trees, and made it silent and so wide that in some reaches it hardly seemed to flow at all.

  Father worked the boat along the edge of the submerged banks, where the current was easy. We made slow progress, but, as Father said, “Where’s the fire? What’s the rush? This isn’t a vacation—this is life.”

  At night we tied up to a tree and ate and slept with our smudge pots going, to drive off the mosquitoes. When a cloud of mosquitoes approached, its millions drooped over us like a terrible net and made a loud high-pitched hum, the sound a radio makes between stations.

  With the river murmuring past us, slurping at our logs, Father said that in all the world we were the last ones left. If we yelled for help, no one would come. Oh, we might meet stragglers, we might bump into savages or even see whole villages on high ground that had been spared. But we were the only ones who knew that a catastrophe had taken place—the fire that had been followed by the thunder of war and the flood had been general throughout the earth. How could anyone here in Mosquitia know that America had been wiped out? It was man’s narrow conceit that rain fell on him alone. But Father knew it was global. At each stage, he said, he had predicted what was to come. Even Americans themselves had seen the handwriting on the wall—they had talked about nothing else! But while they had sat and complained and twiddled their thumbs, Father had taken countermeasures to prevent our destruction.

  “I may have exaggerated at times,” he said. “But that was only to convince you of its seriousness, and get you moving. You’re hard people to organize. Half the time you don’t even believe me!”

  What did it matter, he said, if he had been wrong about picky little things? He had been vindicated by great events. And what we had seen over the past year was the highest form of creation. He had outwitted the specter that haunted the world, by removing us from a fragile and temporary civilization. All worlds ended, but Americans had been sure that, in spite of the obvious flaws, theirs would last. Not possible! But Father would carry us safely upriver.

  “Farter,” Jerry said. “Farter, farter, farter.”

  Father did not hear him. He was shouting, “How can I be wrong if I’m going against the current?”

  The coast was death. The current tended that way. So it stood to reason that it flowed from life—mountains and springs. There, among the volcanoes of Olancho, we would make our home.

  This was what he told us at night, in the cabin, when we were tied to a tree and the frogs croaked and drawled outside. During the day he still talked, but with the outboard going we hardly heard a word he said.

  The river seemed to swell out of the ground. It flooded the jungle. This was a wilderness of water. Tree stumps with crooked uprising roots tumbled past us. It rained less often—a sprinkle in the morning, a downpour in the afternoon. But, as Father said, we were waterproof. And we saved the rainwater to drink. The sun on the river turned the muddy current to brass. It gave the jungle a nice bright smack. Shining through the morning mist, it thickened the air with gold-spangled smoke that danced between the boughs. In places, there were clouds of white butterflies—regattas of them, tacking just above the water. Or blue ones, as big as sparrows, working their tottery wings so shyly they moved like beautiful scraps of silk flung out of the trees.

  Two or three times a day we saw Zambus or Miskitos in cayukas, slipping quickly downstream. Often they waved to us, but the current took them so fast that no sooner had we spotted them than they were below us and around the bend.

  “He’s a goner,” Father usually said as one went past. “He’s a dead man. A zombie, not a Zambu. Going down to die.”

  They were wet, but they looked perfectly normal, paddling in their grubby underwear, riding across the fumbles of the current.

  Jerry said that one of these days he was going to hop into our dugout and let the current take him to the coast. Father got wind of this, maybe from one of the twins, and ordered him into the dugout.

  “In you go!”

  Then Father cast it off and let it zoom downriver. Jerry was too terrified to paddle. He hung onto the seat and crouched with his head down and howled. When Jerry had almost traveled out of sight, Mother said, “Allie, do something!” and Father snatched up a line. It was attached to the dugout. He jerked it, toppling Jerry onto his face. Jerry was shaking as Father towed him and the dugout back.

  “That was insane!” Mother said.

  “I proved my point. I got my wish.”

  “What if the rope had snapped?”

  “Then Jerry would have got his wish,” Father said. “Anyone want to try it? I might just decide to let you go next time. Down the drain. Anyone interested?”

  Another day, he caught me snoozing over the sounding chain. He punished me by putting me into the dugout and towing me behind the boat (“I sure hope that line doesn’t snap! Better sit still!”), while my little canoe rocked and slewed in its wake.

  We passed flooded villages. They were deserted—the wooden bones of huts standing in water, huts tipped over, others with fractured roofs, no more. These dead empty huts proved Father right. He said the people had been swept away—those were the folks in the long johns we saw paddling down the drain to be swallowed by the sea.

  “They won’t need these,” he said, as he picked alligator pears and limes and papayas and plantains off their trees. We found bags of rice and beans in some of these empty villages.

  Father said, “This isn’t a raid. It’s not theft. And it’s certainly not scavenging. They don’t need this where they are.”

  But sometimes the birds beat us to it.

  “Scavengers!”

  One day we thought we saw an airplane, but our outboard was so loud we could not hear the plane’s engines. Father said it was a turkey buzzard. What human had the sense to come here? This was the emptiest part of the map. In the whole world, this part of Honduras was the safest and least known—the last wilderness.

  “But don’t praise me—praise this boat.” Our Victory was like a wooden pig in the water, creaking and oinking upstream. “She’s futuristic!”

  The rain had watered the ants and made them sprout wings. At sundown, these flying termites flaked onto the roof of our hut-boat. The jungle was dotted with these winged ants feeding. The twins called them cooties. The river water changed its color with every change in the weather, and it was different at every hour. I liked it brassy, its daytime green, the red mud bank showing underneath like soaked cake, its shoving, slipping bunches of spinach, the way it moved through the unmoving jungle.

  At twilight the air was sooty with insects, and swampwater diseased the dark spaces under the trees. The sky grew clearer as dusk fell. Shadows
straightened up and stiffened. Then a dirtying of the sky, and it was night, nothing to see, the black so black you could feel its fur against your face. Without the hot sun to burn it away, the smell from the trees was like the hum of green meat. The full river snuffled like a pack of hogs, and birds lolloped in the branches near us and made loud cranking cries. We felt sick at this still, leftover time of day. We tied up and sat among the smudge pots of our wooden floating hut, and ate whatever we had managed to gather from the drowned villages.

  “This is the future,” Father said. He stuck his burned nose in our faces until we agreed we were cozy, we were lucky, we were having a good time.

  “This is what it is,” he said. “The fatal mistake everyone made was in thinking that the future had something to do with high technology. I used to think it myself! But that was before I had this experience. Oh, gaw, it was all going to be rocket ships.”

  “Monorails,” I said.

  Clover said, “Space capsules.”

  “Smellovision,” Father said. “Video cassettes instead of school. Everything streamlined. Meals were going to be pills. Green ones for breakfast, blue ones for lunch, purple ones for dessert. You popped them into your mouth—all the nutrition you needed.”

  April said, “And space suits.”

  “Right,” Father said. “Stupefied people with pointy ears and names like Grok wearing helmets and living in chrome-plated houses. Moving sidewalks, glass domes over cities, and no work except playing with computers and sniffing the smellovision. ‘Get into the rocket ship, kids, and let’s go have a picnic on the moon’—that kind of thing.”

  Mother said, “It might happen.”

  “Never. It’s all bull.”

  Clover said, “I think Dad’s right.”

  “Science fiction gave people more false hope than two thousand years of Bibles,” Father said. “It was all lies! The space program—is that what you’re saying? It was a hollow, vaunting waste of taxpayers’ money. There is no future in space! I love the word—space! That’s what they were all discovering—empty space!”