Paul Theroux - The Mosquito Coast

BALTIMORE, a sign said, NEXT SEVEN EXITS. We took the third, and saw a shopping center just like the one we had left behind this morning in Springfield, and went through a suburb that reminded me of Chicopee, then entered the city itself. It was a hillier city than any in Massachusetts. The houses and hotels were bricked along sloping streets. On this early evening the twilight glanced from the nearby water, helped by the curve of pinky blue sky — nothing like the customary thickening I was used to in Hatfield, which was a moldy green sundown with shots of gold. Baltimore's milky ocean brightness and its putty-colored clouds magnified a pale overhang of daylight unobstructed by trees. What few small trees I could see were struggling against the wind.

About five minutes later it was sundown, and different. One part of the sky was darkening with gray, the other dazzling red, a heap of claw-shaped clouds the color of boiled lobster shells, cracked and broken in just the same way. This brilliant crimson sky was new to me. I called to Father to look at it.

"Pollution!" he cried. "It's refraction from gas fumes!"

He kept driving, nudging our truck through the traffic, making toward the lower part of the city. He parked in the wind outside a warehouse.

"What are we doing here?" Jerry asked.

Father pointed his knuckle at the top of the warehouse. He said, "That's our hotel."

It was the yellow-white bow of a ship, its nostril-like ropeholes bleeding rust stains. We could not see the rest of the ship, but judging from its bow it was huge. I did not say how glad I was that we had somewhere to stay. It was now dark. I had thought we were going to sleep in a campsite by the roadside.

We walked up the slatted gangway, and a seaman on deck showed Father where we were to go. We four children occupied one cabin, Mother and Father were in an adjoining one. Everything smelled sourly of drying paint. A cubicle with a shower and sink lay between our two cabins. We stowed our belongings under the lower bunks and waited for something else to happen. Morning in Massachusetts, evening on a ship — six hundred miles away. It seemed as if Father could work miracles.

"It's a ship!" Clover said. "We're on a real ship!"

Father put his head into our cabin and said, "Well, what do you think?"

The ship was being loaded. All night the cranes squeaked and revolved, the conveyor belts hummed under us, and through the steel walls of our bare cabin I could hear cargo being skidded into the hold.

We remained tied up at this dock while the cargo — stenciled crates and even cars on cable slings — was loaded. We ate in the empty dining room and during the day we watched the cranes swinging back and forth. There were no other passengers that I could see. And still Father refused to say where we were going. This worried me and made me feel especially dependent on him. I did not know the name of this ship, and no one I had seen so far appeared to know English. We were ignored by the crew. We were in Father's hands.

One morning before we sailed, we left the ship and drove in our old truck through the city, crossing a bridge and heading toward the water where, at the end of the road, there was a beach. Mother stayed in the cab of the truck reading while we walked along the beach, skimming stones and looking at sailboats. Down the beach there was a broken jetty, some rocks in the water and others tipped in the sand.

"The tide's coming in," Father said. He chucked his cigar butt into the surf. "Who's going to show me how brave he is?"

I knew what was coming. He had done this to us a number of times. He would dare us to go out and sit on a rock and stay there until the rising tide threatened us. It was a summer game we had played on Cape Cod. But it was still spring in Baltimore — too cold for swimming — and we had all our clothes on. I could not believe he was serious, so I said I would try, and expected him to laugh.

He said, "You're keeping us waiting."

A wave broke and slid back, dragging sand and pebbles. Without taking my clothes off, or even my shoes. I ran to a weedy rock at the surf line and perched there, waiting for Father to call me back. The twins and Jerry laughed. Father stood higher up on the beach, hardly watching. No waves disturbed me at first. They mounted just behind me, moved past me, and turned to foam and vanished.

"Charlie's scared," Jerry yelled.

I said nothing. I knelt there unsteadily, clasping the rock with my fingertips. It was like a saddle with no stirrups. I did not know if I was calling Father's bluff or he was calling mine. A succession of waves soaked my legs and wet my shoes. A pool formed in front of my rock. Now the brimming waves numbed my fingers.

I was rehearsing an excuse for giving up when, in the sallow late-afternoon light, I saw Father's silhouette, the sun beneath his shoulder. He was dark, I did not know him, and he watched me like a stranger, with curiosity rather than affection. And I felt like a stranger to him. We were two people pausing — one on a rock, the other on the sand, child and adult. I did not know him, he did not know me. I had to wait to discover who we were.

At just that second — Father as simple and obscure as a passerby, doubting me with his slack posture — the wave came. It slapped me hard from behind, traveled up my back and frothed against my neck, pushing me and making me buoyant, then just as quickly releasing me. I trembled with cold and grasped the rock tightly, thinking my chest would burst from the howl I held in.

"He did it!" Jerry shrieked, running in circles on the beach. "He's all wet!"

Now I could see Father's face. A wildness passed across it, like a desperate memory, making a mad fix on his jaw. Then he grinned and yelled for me to come in. But I let two more waves break over me before I gave up and staggered ashore, and against my will I started to cry from the cold.

"That's better," Father said, while the twins whooped at me and touched my wet clothes. But it sounded as if he was complimenting himself, not me. "Take those shoes off."

Father carried a shoe in each hand as we walked up the beach toward Mother and the pickup truck.

"Hey, put the kid's shoes on." It was a voice behind us. "There's glass and crap on this here thing."

We turned and saw a black man. He held a radio against his ear and wore a tight wool sock on his head. He blinked at Father, who was twice his size and still smiling.

Father said, "You're just the man I'm looking for."

The man switched off the radio. He looked truly puzzled. He said his name was Sidney Torch and that he did not live near here. But he had seen some kids breaking glass bottles on this beach, and it was dangerous to walk around barefooted or you would get slashed. But he did not want to start anything, he said, because he was nobody, going up to visit with his brother, and he had never seen us before.

Father said, "I've been meaning to tell you something."

He said this in a kindly way, and the black man, who gave him a sideways look, began to chuckle.

"No one loves this country more than I do," Father said. "And that's why I'm going. Because I can't bear to watch." He strolled along and put his arm around the man, Sidney Torch. "It's like when my mother died. I couldn't watch. She'd been as strong as an ox, but she broke her hip and after a spell in the hospital she caught double pneumonia. And there she was, lying in bed, dying. I went over to her and held her hand. Do you know what she said to me? She said, 'Why don't they give me rat poison?' I didn't want to watch, I couldn't listen. So I went away. They say it was an awful struggle — touch and go — but she was doomed. After she died, I went back home. Some people might say that's the height of callousness. But I've never regretted it. I loved her too much to watch her die."