by Paul Theroux
April said, “I think Dad’s right, too.”
“This is the future,” he said. “A little motor in a little boat, on a muddy river. When the motor busts, or we run out of gas, we paddle. No spacemen! No fuel, no rocket ships, no glass domes. Just work! Man of the future is going to be a cart horse. There’s nothing on the moon but ruts and pimples, and those of us who have inherited this senile exhausted earth will have nothing but wooden wheels, pushcarts, levers, and pulleys—the crudest high school physics, that they stopped teaching when everyone flunked it and started reading science fiction. No, it’s grow your own or die. No green pills, but plenty of roughage. Hard backbreaking work—simple, but not easy. Get it? No laser beams, no electricity, nothing but muscle power. What we’re doing now! We’re the people of the future, using the technology of the future. We cracked it!”
***
He wanted us to feel, in our creaking hut-boat, like the most modern people on earth. We held the secret of existence in our smoky cabin. Now he never talked about changing the world with geothermal energy, or ice. He promised us dirt and work. That was glory, he said.
But after these short nights, he started the outboard and set the front of the hut against the current, and Jerry whispered to me, “He’s killing us.”
We stuck to the river’s edge, creeping around the reaches and studying the flow of the current before we moved forward. We made five or six miles a day, and still had plenty of spare gas. And what did it matter if we used it all? We had the rest of our lives to get upriver.
I thought everyone except Jerry was convinced. But one day, as we furrowed along, the outboard went mad. It quacked, its noise climbed higher, became more frantic and animal, and soon it was shrieking. Birds exploded out of the trees. Then something snapped, and after a quack or two the engine went dead. But its echo continued to quiver in the jungle. The boat hesitated and became light and directionless. It tipped, it rolled back.
We were going downstream sideways on the river’s tongue in silence under the dropping ants.
“Anchor!” Father vaulted toward the bow. “Get out the lines!”
Our anchor was beautiful—we had found it on the beach near Mocobila—a cluster-fountain of curving barbs on a thick shaft. But it was also very heavy. It took Father’s help to get it over the rail, and by then we were moving so fast that it did not seem to take hold. Father jumped overboard and swam to the bank with a line. He secured us, the anchor caught.
We were in a curve of the river—the current swung us out on the line and held us gushing in the middle of the stream. Water plumed from either side, and the whole hut-boat tottered as we helped Father aboard.
We had lost the shear pin, he said. It wasn’t much—only a cotter pin—but it meant the propeller had flown off and spun to the bottom of the river.
“Can’t you make a new prop?” Mother asked.
“Sure I can. Pass me that lathe, the calipers, the machining tools, the set of lugs and files. What’s that? You mean we only have spit and a screwdriver? Then I guess we’ll have to dive for that old prop.”
We looked upstream at the dark horns of waterflow pumping out of the river.
“Don’t worry,” Father said. “We have the rest of our lives to find it.” He was smiling, biting his beard. He turned to Jerry and said, “What are you smirking at?”
“The rest of our lives. It sounds daffy when you say it like that.”
“We’ll see how daffy. You’re going to dive for it.”
“What about the alligators?” I said.
“You’re not afraid of alligators,” Father said. “You go after Jerry.”
Mother said, “No—I won’t let those boys go in there.”
“Listen to me,” Father said. “It’s not a question of what you want. It’s what I want. I’m captain of this ship, and those are my orders. Anyone who disobeys them goes ashore. Your lives are in my hands. I’ll maroon you—all of you.”
His large scarred hands were still dripping river water. His voice was a weapon—he was threatening to abandon us unless we jumped in—but what I feared most was being slung ashore in his raw fingers. His life here had made his hands terrible.
“Put on this harness,” he said to Jerry, and gave him a line to tie around his waist. Jerry, with sick defiant eyes, kicked off his sandals and went to the side.
“It’s somewhere in this dogleg,” Father said. “We lost it near those trees. Probably hit a rock. The current can’t take a lump of solid brass very far. Swim to the bank first, then go and get it.”
Jerry held his nose and went overboard like a basket.
“I’ve been grooming you for this all along,” Father said. “It’s all preparation for survival.” He pulled out a nail from his pocket. “This will do for a new shear pin. But we need the prop.” He held the little nail between his fingers. “It’s always something small that keeps you from savagery. Like those plugs. Like the prop. Like this. The shear pin held our whole civilization together. There’s no better example of what a delicate balance there is between—” he looked upriver at Jerry’s small white feet—“How’s he doing?”
Jerry bobbed up and blew out water, but before he could regain his stroke he came downstream and caught hold of the boat.
“I can’t see anything. The water’s too muddy.”
“Try again.”
“He’s tired, Allie.”
“He can rest after he’s found our propeller.”
Mother said, “Let me go.”
Father said, “What if you drown?”
“What if Jerry drowns?”
She said it in a slow suffocated way.
Father scratched his beard with his knuckles.
He said, “I need you here, Mother.”
Jerry tried four times. Each time, the current pulled him back to us empty-handed. At last he was so tired he could not raise his arms, and Father had to tug the harness line to keep him from being taken downriver.
It was my turn. I swam to shore, then dived to the bottom at the place Father had indicated. I stuck my hands into the mud and raked it. The mud ran through my fingers. The churning river was like vegetable soup, with sunlight knifing into it and showing me long shadows I imagined to be alligators. As my breath gave out, I broke the surface of the river and saw that I had traveled almost to the boat.
“You’re not serious,” Father said. He made me swim back.
The sludge and weeds at the river bottom disgusted me. The dark current sucked at my legs. Mud floated into my face. But worse, being on Father’s rope was like being a dog on a leash. Staying on it, I was in his power. But if I cut myself free of the rope, I would be swept downstream to drown.
It was a dog’s life. I was glad Jerry had said the things he had. Why hadn’t I told Father what I thought of him? A dog’s life—because we didn’t count, because he was always right, always the explainer, and most of all because he ordered us to do these difficult things. He didn’t want to see us succeed, he wanted to laugh at our failure. And not even a gun dog could find a small propeller at the bottom of this river.
I told him I had swallowed water and felt sick and could not go down again.
He chuckled—I knew he would—and said, “Children are no use at all in a crisis. Which is ironic, because children are the cause of most crises. I mean, I can look after myself! I don’t need food, I don’t need sleep—I don’t suffer. I’m happy!”
April said, “Dad, is this a crisis?”
“Some people might say so. We’ve got an engine we can’t use. We’ve got a boat that won’t move forward. We’ve got two cripples who can’t find the prop. If the anchor or that line cuts loose we’ll be wallowing down the drain. And it’s getting dark. And this is the jungle. Muffin,” he said, “some people might call that critical.”
Mother said, “I want to try, Allie.”
But Father was putting the harness around his waist. He tied the free end to the rail. He said the only thing he trusted to hold
his lifeline was one of his own knots.
He went over the side with a heavy splash. We watched him take a dive, expecting him to find the propeller on the first try. He came up—he did not raise his hands. He dived again. He was a strong enough swimmer to hold his own against the current, but when he dived a third time he did not come up.
We waited. We watched the water ribbing over that spot.
Clover said, “Where is he?”
“Maybe he sees it,” Mother said.
A whining net of mosquitoes came and went.
April said, “He’s been down a long time.”
“It’s dark down there,” Jerry said.
We stopped holding our breath.
More minutes passed. I could not say how many. Time did not pass precisely here. The day was light, the night dark: time was lumpish. Every hot hour was the same, silent and blind. He might have been under for an hour.
Mother went to the rail and plucked at the line. She lifted it easily and dragged it on board, coiling it, until she had its whole length out of the water. The end was kinked like a mongrel’s tail, where the knot had been.
“He’s gone!” Clover screamed. She became rigid. And she cried so hard she gagged, then cried more because she was gagging.
Jerry said, “I don’t see him.”
But Jerry had stopped looking. He was staring at me. His face was relaxed—very white and hopeful, like someone sitting up in bed in the morning.
Mother shook her head. She gazed at the torrent of water slooshing downstream. She did not speak.
I felt suddenly strong. A moment ago night was falling, but now everything was brighter. The sky was clear. Tiny insects fussed above the river. A quietness descended, like that sifting of gnats, and silvered the water and streaked it like a new tomb. This stillness sealed it.
“He’s somewhere! He’s somewhere!” But April’s voice did not disturb the river or the trees. She clawed her hair. She held Clover and they gagged together on their sobs.
“We can drift,” Jerry said. “We’ll tie up tonight and go down the river tomorrow. It’ll be easy.”
I said, “What if Dad was right?”
“Don’t be frightened,” Mother said.
Jerry said, “We’re not frightened!”
Mother said, “I can’t think.” Her listening face was lovely. It did not register a single sound. It did not hear April saying we were going to die, or Clover calling out to Father, or Jerry describing our easy trip down to the coast.
Little Jerry, set free, was scampering around the deck.
“Listen,” Mother said.
The water trickling silver, the slouching jungle—it was an insect kingdom of small whistles, a world of crickyjeens.
A Zambu went by in a cayuka. That was like time passing, the duration of his coming and going. It was the only time here—a man’s movement. This Zambu was alive.
“We won’t die,” I said.
Mother did not hear me, but I meant it. Our boat was small, and it hung precariously on a line in the middle of the river—on air, it seemed. But I had never felt safer. Father was gone. How quiet it was here. Doubt, death, grief—they had passed like the shadow of a bird’s wing brushing us. Now—after how long?—we had forgotten that shadow. We were free.
“In a couple of days we’ll be on the coast,” Jerry said.
“We’ll die there!” Clover said.
It was what Father had always said. I thought I believed it. But he had gone and taken fear with him. I heard myself saying, “We can get rid of this outboard. We’ll build a rudder. The current will take us.”
Jerry tried to make the twins stop crying. He was saying, “Don’t you want to go home?”
Was it that forbidden word that did it?
There was a splash—explosive in this whistling world. There was Father’s wet streaming head, his beard brushing the rail, the chunk of the brass propeller hitting the boards, and his howl, “Traitors!” Then all the light was gone.
27
FOR THE NEXT three days, as punishment, Jerry and I were towed behind the boat in the dugout. We ate in it and slept in it. It tailed and twisted like a plug trawled at the end of a fishing line. There was hardly room to lie down. The barrel was between us, and the fruity, sourly luscious gasoline fumes mingled with the burned-cloth stink of the outboard’s exhaust and gave me a prickly headache. We knelt in the water that seeped through the splits in this hollow log and we killed time by dragging a hook off the stern, hoping to gaff a catfish.
Father sat at the end of the thirty-foot towline, on the stern rail of the hut-boat, his back turned to us. I hated his shoulders, his greasy hair, the slant of his spine. I imagined how it would be to stick a knife in it, just below his ragged collar. Sometimes I saw myself doing it. There was no blood in my imagining—no scream, no struggle. Just a grunt of released air as the blade slipped in and the hilt smacked against flesh. Then he was gone, like an inner tube with a rip. I saw it so clearly my arm ached, as if I had already done it—punctured him.
I listened to him, thinking that he knew what was on my mind, and felt guilty. But all I heard was Mother arguing, trying to convince him to let us aboard. He would not discuss it. He said we deserved worse. He was hard to hear over the motor roar. He prided himself on the fact that he had never spanked us, or laid a hand on us in anger. But it would have been better for us if he had beaten us yesterday. This dugout and the bugs and the heat hurt more than a whipping.
“Let’s cut the tow rope,” Jerry said. “We’ll show him!”
Jerry wanted to set us adrift. Maybe Father was testing us, to see if we had the guts to do it. But I would not let Jerry touch the line. I was afraid that it might snap all by itself, or that Father would cut it. Often, during those days, I fell asleep and woke up frantic, thinking we were spinning down the Patuca in this flimsy dugout.
I said, “If you touch that rope, I’ll jump overboard and swim ashore. You’ll be alone, Jerry. You’ll die.”
For the brief period of Father’s disappearance, when I thought he had drowned trying to retrieve the propeller, I had not been afraid. We had the boat, and our hammocks, and Mother. But when he climbed aboard, he brought all the old fear with him. I was spooked again into believing that the storm had raged across the whole world and that there was death on the coast.
“I don’t believe that cowflap,” Jerry said when I told him.
Jerry was more violent in the dugout than he had ever been on the boat or anywhere else. Here, towed at the end of a line, he said forbidden things. He talked continually about running away and going home. What he said gave me nightmares, because he put my worst imaginings into words. We deserve to be punished in this dugout, I thought. We belong here.
“I hate him,” Jerry said. “He’s crazy.”
I told Jerry that without my help he would never reach the coast.
“We won’t make it upriver,” he said. “It’s impossible.”
“How do you know?”
He kicked the barrel of gas, two thuds that echoed hollowly inside like the boom of a bass drum.
“It’s almost empty. Dad can’t run his outboard motor without gas.”
“He’ll paddle.”
“He’ll go backwards!”
Jerry laughed at the thought of it. He said he was glad I was worried.
“I’m going to tell him he’s running out of gas. Watch him have a bird.”
“Cut it out,” I said.
“You’re afraid of him, Charlie. You’re older than me and you’re scared. I’m not scared.”
But his voice broke as he said it, and he had to swallow twice in order to finish speaking. This dugout punishment made him suffer. He had hardly slept, and he looked sick. When he wasn’t complaining about Father, he was blubbering, sobbing like a baby. He sounded very young when he cried. He squalled into his hands, with his head down, so that Father wouldn’t see him.
One night, hearing Father’s laughter in the master cabin, Jerr
y said, “I’d like to kill him.”
His voice came out of the darkness. Now he was breathing heavily, as if it had been a great effort to say that.
“He wouldn’t be hard to kill.” Jerry was panting. “We could sneak up on him. Hit him with a hammer. On his brain—”
“Don’t say that, Jerry.”
“You’re afraid.”
Yes, because you’re saying the terrible things on my mind, I thought. I could feel the smooth handle of the hammer. I could hear it crack against his skull, and the skull part like a coconut—the leaking of pale water. I said, “No.”
“I wish he was dead,” Jerry said. He began to cry again. I was consoled by his tears. He was crying for me.
He claimed he saw a plane one morning, a small gray singleengine plane passing overhead. I did not see it. I told him he was dreaming. It was a turkey buzzard or a heron or a parrot. Any bird in flight here looked like a Cessna or a Piper Cub. Jerry cried because I refused to believe him. I sounded like Father, he said. Worse than Father.
“Mr. Haddy gave you those spark plugs and this gas. And Dad took all the credit! Who did all the fishing at the lagoon? We did! He was treating us like slaves, but what happened to his garden and all those stupid inventions? They got washed away. We saved his life!”
He was speaking my thoughts again and making me afraid.
I said, “If you tell him about Mr. Haddy, I’ll tell him what you said—that you want to kill him.”
This panicked Jerry. He knew he had gone too far.
“Anyway,” I said, “he’ll deny it.”
“Because he’s a liar. He’s wrong about everything.”
“You don’t know that. There isn’t any proof. He’s probably right—Mr. Haddy agreed with him! You’re eleven years old and your face is dirty. When Dad cut you loose in this dugout last week you cried your eyes out. You were glad when he towed you back.”
“He tricked me. I wouldn’t cry now. I’d go.” But his eyes were red and crusted like two wounds.
Father looked astern, and, seeing us arguing (he could not hear what we said over the chatter of the outboard motor), he nodded and grinned as if to say, “That’s just where you two punks belong.”
