by Paul Theroux
30
DOWN THE DARK, leafy sleeve of road, with night pressing on our roof, the twenty-eight miles on the rutted track to Awawas seemed more like a hundred. Mother drove as fast as she could, slewing the jeep, grinding the gears. The rest of us sat in silence. We watched the birds roosting on the road and the kinkajou furballs with light-bulb eyes that froze in our headlong clatter. When Mother spoke, it was always to Father. “You’ll be all right,” she said. “I won’t leave you, Allie.”
Father did not reply. He was on the rear seat with his eyes halfopen. The skid of mud on him from the riverbank gave off a stink like death.
Then, still dark, there was no road. We were thrown into a dead end of trees, ferns, bush tips against the headlights, the loud stomach of jungle. Mother shut off the jeep and cranked the brake. She climbed over her seat and made Father comfortable, talking to him softly, as if he was sleeping. She said, “You’ll live, Allie.”
With the headlights off we could see stars, the moonhole in the sky’s blanket. The moon went down and branches laid cracks across it. There was no sun for a while, only a gray light that lifted and penetrated the trees like rising water, and waxed them with a blur of mist which, as dawn broke, was cut by straws of sun that thickened and blinded us. The surrounding jungle had changed each second, dark to watery, to misty, to waxy, to gray, thinly stripping the shadows from the jungle—a rising tide of light with a mirror behind it. It was as if, that whole time, we had been riding from darkness into light, slipping forward like scared people in a silent canoe, into this brighter place.
All the darkness had been bleeding out of the morning trees, becoming mud and water.
And dawn showed us that we were alone. The jungle at night was tall, and its cool gloom dripped darkness. But daylight here was pale yellow, broken by starved trees, with hot spots. This was a riverbank, and night foliage had become frail and top-heavy weeds. Ahead, where we had expected more jungle, was water, the Wonks, where all the darkness had been bleeding.
“Mother.” His voice was like this fragile light.
I could not bear to see his goat-white face, the blood under his beard, the gluey crescents in his eyeslits. I walked to the river with Jerry, stepping over roots. There was a bullfrog at my feet. I wanted to jerk it on a spear. But after seeing Father, I couldn’t do it. I looked for yautia and guavas instead.
Jerry said, “I don’t want him to die.”
We heard voices and looked back at the jeep. Two Indian men stood at the windows. They must have recognized it as Spellgood’s jeep, because they were smiling and talking to Mother. We walked over as Mother got out.
“Find me a boat,” she said. “And water. And food. Make it snappy!”
Only Father’s head was alive. We knew that when we laid him on the ground. It was clear when Mother washed his wound. His head was alive, but his body was like a bag of sticks and seeds. The bullet had entered the side of his neck and burst out the back. His neck bone was not broken, but there were red strings and fat in the clawed-open wound, and a black bruise around it, like a large whelk of meat. Mother plugged it with cotton the Indians boiled for her, and then they put him on a plank and brought him to the river. They carried him feet first, like pallbearers, because they thought he was dead.
Mother propped him at the bow of the boat, which was a flatboat with a long-handled rudder. By this time, the twins’ crying had attracted other Indians, and these people stood on the gravel bank, watching us and not asking any questions. Some of them ran back for more pots of beans and rice—English food, they called it—and wabool and jugs of coffee. One of the Indians told Mother that it was neither good nor bad if Father was dead—everyone died, it was the world’s way, nothing you can do about it, so be happy, he said.
“You believe that,” Mother said. “But I don’t, so don’t ask me to. Just get me out of here and give the preacher his car keys.”
It was what Father would have said. She had taken on his determination in a kind of panicky way. She got us hopping for paddles and poles, and gave the Indians orders. She did not have Father’s flair for gadgets, but she knew how to make these Indians rig up an awning for Father’s head. And when an Indian tried to insist on coming with us, she told him firmly that she appreciated the offer but she didn’t want his help. “And I’m not staying here another minute.” One, more boastful than pious, had mentioned a church service. They were the sort of people Father had once called “Praying Indians.”
Mother said, “I don’t pray.”
We pushed off in this flat-bottomed boat, Mother at the stern, holding the rudder handle, the twins in the center seat with the food, Jerry and I paddling on either side of Father at the bow.
“We going upriver?” Father knew we were afloat. He strained to see over the gunwales, but he couldn’t.
“Yes,” Mother said. “Upriver.”
But she hooked us in the current and turned us downstream.
***
The rushing stew of this river was like the hurry of an oncoming tide, but perpetual. Moving water looked odd here, sucking along at the deadest, stillest banks. The last time we had gone down a river was on the Rio Sico, when we had escaped from Jeronimo. But the Sico was a creek compared to the Wonks, and that was in the dry season. The Wonks was fuller and wider than the Patuca even. We traveled midstream and went fast. There was hardly any need to paddle, except for steadying the boat on bends.
Father thought we were still on the Patuca, going upstream. He was happy—his head was happy, the rest of him was a sandbag.
“Pull hard,” he said. “Away from the coast, away from the savages. There’s death down there. Listen, the Mosquito Coast is the coast of America. You know what that means.”
We gave him water and wabool, but he resisted eating. He said he wanted to starve himself until he got his strength back. “I’m not much use to you as a cripple,” he said. “There’s something wrong with my legs.” And his arms, too—he couldn’t move them. We fanned the flies off his face.
His big head was fixed in the niche of the bow like a goat in a halter, raving at us as we sped down the river, telling us that we were saved because we were going upriver, and sometimes crying.
He cried most when he saw the birds. They were harmless birds at first, parrots and crascos, but he raved and they turned into vicious creatures. They got bigger. They grew plumes and claws. Storks now planed overhead, then fish hawks, and finally vultures, which he hated worst of all. We had never seen vultures like this before. They were black, rather than shabby gray, and huge, with ragged wing tips and plucked necks and hooked beaks. They hovered without flapping, like wicked kites, looking feeble and patient in the summer sky.
“Take those birds away!” It was his old horror of scavengers, but now that he couldn’t raise his arms, he was especially afraid. He was fearful of other things, too. The way the boat tipped—he couldn’t swim as a cripple. The way flies gathered on his eyelids. Sudden noises. Fire. And he would not be left alone. He hated stopping. When we put in that first day at a riverbank village called Susca for bandages and fresh water, he made Jerry and me stay by him until Mother returned. He was not surprised there were villages here, and boats passing us, and Miskito cries. “This is where the last of human life is—upriver.”
But we were fifteen miles down it and sliding toward the coast.
“Cover me up,” he said. He made us move the awning, so that he would not see the vultures that followed us. And he said he hated the empty sky. “If I was in jail, I’d never look out of the window.”
We were lucky, he said. The river was a labyrinth—“Easy to get in, hard to get out.”
He raved when he was awake, and when he slept he howled in his dreams. There was always froth on his lips.
Easy to get in? We could not have gone upriver against this current if we had tried. At night we moored our flatboat near villages. Some were Moravian missions, praying Indians, and people from Pennsylvania. No, America had not been
destroyed. Mother demanded food and water and medicine. The people were kind. She got all she wanted. We stopped at Wiri-Pani and Pranza, and at a place called Kisalaya we saw muddy wagons. Mother was told we were only three days from the coast, Cabo Gracias a Dios, which they called the Cape.
The twins had nothing to do. They were sick with worry, actually puking with fear at the rate we were moving. Mother stayed at the stern, wearing a straw hat from Susca. She heaved the long tiller, not looking to the left or right but sort of staring downstream past Father’s head.
She did not speak to anyone but the twins, and she was too far from Father to reply to the things he said. I wanted to tell her that I had not meant for any harm to come to Father, only for us to escape. We had escaped, but in the worst possible way, down a river we didn’t know, with the girls sick. We were carrying Father’s head to the coast.
Every five miles was a village where crazy-sounding Indians shouted English at us. The Indians got blacker as we neared the coast, and the hanging vultures bigger and wickeder. Sometimes at night there were alligators. They scuttled from the bank and moved against the current. But they were cowardly, they did not attack, and when they bumped us with their snouts we made rag torches. Often sudden light stopped them, and the flames near their green nostrils always did.
The river was murkier and twistier nearer the coast, and the land swampy, so that cranes stood out like shirts hung on fenceposts. It was hotter here. The heat made Father rave more. His raving made me remember again how, in Jeronimo, climbing through Fat Boy, I had had a glimpse of his mind. I had seen just how tangled it was. I had been stumped by the plumbing of all its turns. What he was, he had made. His ravings came out of those orbits and circuits, that teeming closet of pipes and valves and shelves and coils—the ice maker, his brainache.
What he harped on most was this imperfect world. Well, I knew that one by heart. But there was more.
“I’m hurt.” He said it again and again, as if he had just discovered it and hardly believed it. “I can’t move—can’t do anything.”
“You’ll get better,” I said.
“Man sprang out of the faulty world, Charlie. Therefore, I’m imperfect. What’s the use? It’s a bad design, the human body. Skin’s not thick enough, bones aren’t strong enough, too little hair, no claws, no fangs. Drop us and we break! Why, we’re not even symmetrical. One foot bigger than the other, left-handed, right-handed, our noses run. Look where our heart is. We weren’t meant to stand up straight—our posture exposes the most sensitive parts of the body, heart and genitals. We should be on all fours, hairer, more resistant to heat and cold, with tails. What happened to my tail, that’s what I’d like to know. I had to turn inventor—I was too weak to live any other way. Look at me. Look where seventy-five pushups a day got me. Yes sir, I’m going to live on all fours from now on. And that’s what I’m fit for—hands and knees!”
He went on and on like this as we raced downriver under flights of butterflies and the ragged shadows of birds so high in the sky I had to get on my back like Father to see them properly.
“It’s worse for other people. Women, Charlie, they’re in bad shape. They leak, they drip. It’s terrible about women’s bodies, how they leak. All that blood, all that useless fat. They carry these bodies around with them all the time. No wonder they’re so mad, wondering what they’re for. It’s humiliating to have a body with a design fault. I thought I was the strongest man in the world. I’m just pulp. Weakness makes you clever, but no amount of cleverness can save you if all the odds are against you. I’ll tell you who’ll inherit the world—scavenging birds. They’re fit for it, everything in their favor. They are nourished on failure. The sky in America is black with them now. They just hang there, waiting. Get them away from me! There’s sand in my eyes! I’m alive, but I can’t see, Mother!”
It was dreadful trying to paddle, with Father’s screams in my ears. But it was so bad I hardly noticed the twists of the river, and it saved me from thinking much about what would happen to us on the coast.
Father insisted on his head being covered. He wore a hood, like a condemned man, and sweated in it. He did not see the lifting flights of ducks, the tumbling plovers, the flamingos, the seabirds that met us near villages with English names like Living Creek and Doyle. He went silent for long periods. His silences had always been worse than his howls. But now we thought he was dead. He still steamed of death. We knew he was alive by his skin, the way he came out in bites.
The sand flies got him. The tortoiseshell cockroaches in the boat bit him. Fevers shook him. He raved and struggled and opened his wound.
“Nature is crooked. I wanted right angles and straight lines. Ice! Oh, why do they all drip? You cut yourself opening a can of tuna fish and you die. One puncture in your foot and your life leaks out through your toe. What are they for, moose antlers? Get down on all fours and live. You’re protected on your hands and knees. It’s either that or wings.”
On this flooded river, his voice cracked through his gallows hood. “Listen to me, people. Grow wings and they’ll never get you!”
The river grew wider and lost its current. We had to paddle hard to move forward. With swamp at both banks there was nowhere to moor the boat, and all through the last hot night we kept going. Just before dawn, we saw a beacon—a lighthouse—and heard the slap of waves on the beach by the rivermouth. This was the Cape.
“What’s that?”
He knew the sound.
“No!” And raised his arms for the first time.
He pulled down his mask and said, “Charlie, don’t lie to me. Tell me where we are.”
I bent down. I could not speak. Then I had to turn away, because with bared teeth I heard something violent in me urging me to bite his ear off.
“Vultures,” he said, and then the terrible sentence, “Christ is a scarecrow!”
***
Yet it seemed as if everything Father feared was true. He had predicted this. The sky was thick with birds—ugly pelicans and gulls and vultures. They circled and soared, they swung across the great curve of tropical beach. And sometimes they hurried down and fed, for surfing through the breakers were large paddling turtles, with parrot beaks and baggy necks.
The turtles’ shells were crusted with periwinkles and weedsuckers and hardened sea glop. More turtles worked their flippers up the shelf of sand, and others were backed into the low dunes. Blinking and brooding, they laid brown eggs. Their beaks were splashed with the soapy saliva of their effort.
They made no sound at all. Only the birds cried out, and when a turtle was tossed ashore on its back by a rogue wave, the vultures went for its unprotected neck and jerked it out of its shell. The gulls had the leavings. Sunlight made this nightmare more horrible—the massing turtle lids flopping along the shore and pooping eggs into the sand, the birds hovering in the sky, the heavy surf. It was the coastal hell Father had promised.
We chose a secluded spot in a palm grove down the beach, overturned our flatboat, and made camp. And Father wept. Each time he tried to speak he burst into tears. It was the sight of the sea, the Mosquito Coast. His tears said we had tricked him, failed him, brought him here to die.
Black Indians came in cayukas to stare at us. Father howled them away. Mother walked into Cabo Gracias, the village, and tried to find a doctor. People said the doctors were upriver, at the missions, or in La Ceiba or Trujillo—not here. She told the people she wanted a boat, to take us up the coast. But the boats were all going south, to Bluefields and Puerto Cabezas and Pearl Lagoon. They laughed when she told them we had no money.
We killed a turtle, and while vultures strutted nearby, swishing their wings and watching us, we roasted the fatty meat over our fire. We believed that the whole of Father’s prediction had come true. We were dying on the Mosquito Coast, in the hot sand, among scavengers and scuttling turtles. It was worse than he had said.
America was safe—the Spellgoods’ word had been verified by the Moravians—but we were
far away, so what did it matter? Hell is what you can’t have. The best memory we had was of living in the jungle. It was too late to go back—the river was impossible without a motorboat, and the vast expressionless sea made us feel small and lonely. We had escaped to the coast, but we were more than ever like castaways, clinging to this scrap of shoreline. We were tired and empty, and hardly spoke. Father could move his arms, but his legs were useless. He lay staring at the waves, the turtles, the birds. Every sunrise, he saw sea monsters gasping in the surf.
Yonder were sailboats, shrimpers, and fishermen. But none came near enough for us to see if Mr. Haddy was among them. No boats landed at this beach, and Father had scared the blacks away. The twins were too sick to stand up. They sat under the boat with Father.
Our hope was Mother. She still walked the three miles through the palms every day to Cabo Gracias, demanding medicine, and cloth for Father’s bandages. “I’m not a beggar—I don’t take no for an answer,” she said. The people called her Auntie and said she was loco. Jerry and I collected turtle eggs and firewood. We listened to Father pleading to be taken upriver, we squashed the flies that settled on him.
“Which way is the river?” he said in a small voice.
He spoke in baby talk about living on all fours far away in Mosquitia, and about going to sea in a sieve. Usually he said nothing. He stared. Thoughts folded his brow. Tears gathered in his eyes and, without his making a sound, rolled down his cheeks.
Five days of this weakened us worse than the river had, and now this coast seemed a great mistake. Creatures here, the only life, fed on each other. We went around in our rags. The longer we stayed here, the more fearful we were of the ocean. Because of the turtles, we never swam, and because of the birds, we stayed under cover.
When I slept, I had food dreams. I dreamed of chocolate fudge cake and cold milk. I dreamed of our kitchen in Hatfield, how some nights I had gone down in the dark and opened the refrigerator to cool myself and look upon the lighted shelves, the cheese, the milk, the bacon, a jar of grape jelly, a jug of water, a pie, a pitcher of fresh orange juice. The kitchen was dark, but the inside of the refrigerator was bright and filled with clean food.
