Paul Theroux - The Mosquito Coast

"Here come the ladies of the night," Father said. "This meeting is adjourned."

Tosco approached Father as we were leaving to go to our rooms. He thanked him again for fixing his car, and repeated that we could use it anytime we wished.

"You're a gentleman," Father said.

Tosco said, "But you don't need a car now, eh? I hear you buy Jeronimo." He kissed his fingertips. "Is beautiful, Jeronimo."

The nighttime noise was worse than usual, and it racketed almost until dawn. Then I looked across the sparkling harbor to the pier and saw that the Unicorn had sailed.

The disappearance of the white ship left me feeling helpless and half blind, as if a handy thing had been tricked out of my head. It was hope. I had felt safe because the ship had been there — we could go home. Now I felt abandoned.

After that, I never left Father's side. I made every excuse to accompany him into town. I sat patiently in stores and warehouses while he bought equipment he said we would need in Jeronimo — hardware, he called it, pipes and fittings. The fruit company was selling it cheap, he said. I did as I was told and usually found myself squatting in the shade of a tree with the man named Mr. Haddy, while Father — inspecting racks of copper pipe or old boilers — gave his junk dealer's speech about taking this scrap off their hands and saying he didn't have the slightest idea what he was going to do with it.

"Seems a shame to throw it away," he said, and acted as if he pitied them for having it and would do them the favor of removing it.

I had heard all this before, but still I stayed near him. Our last link with America was broken with the sailing of the Unicorn. Father had been partly right when he accused me of siding with Captain Smalls — I had felt that old man would take care of us, and I had sometimes felt the same about Tiny Polski.

But now Father was in sole charge. He had brought us to this distant place and in his magician's way surprised us by buying a town, and half a warehouse of copper pipe, and an acre of old boilers.

"These are the raw materials of civilization," he said. But I did not care about that. I just wanted to be near him. I feared the recklessness of his courage and I remembered the German and the gun. If he dies, I thought, we are lost. Whenever he was out of sight, I got worried and did not stop worrying until I heard him whistling, or singing "Under the Bam, Under the Boo." He noticed me tagging after him. Often, he stooped over and said to me, "How am I doing?"

I said fine. But I did not know what he was doing, or why. I only knew that whatever it was, he was doing it among the savages.

"WHAT YOU taakin about?" Mr. Haddy said. He was frogfaced and so bucktoothed the two front ones were bone-dry from sticking out. "The water is camera in the night."

"Not where I come from," Father said. "It's the same, day or night. So let's go."

Mother said, "Whose boat is it, anyway?"

Mr. Haddy was still protesting to Father. "I don't say you water is camera in the night — I say this water. Is mighty rough in the day, and sometime she rain like the devil. But in the night she a baby."

He licked his words lazily and spoke in a flat voice, with hiccups of emphasis, and he lapsed into Creole when Father became unreasonable. "No bin yerry, dat the way it is? Tonda pillit me!"

"Just get us out of here," Father said.

"Besides," Mr. Haddy said, "it take us the whole entire day to load up this dum cargo on me lanch."

"Shake a leg then!"

"And she mightna fit," Mr. Haddy said. "All them iron wares."

"We'll experiment."

Mr. Haddy looked at Mother. "You man is a good one for spearmints, Ma."

It was not hard to move our belongings from The Gardenia to the pier where Mr. Haddy's launch, Little Haddy, was moored. The bags of seeds, the camping equipment, the toolboxes — we trucked them over in one trip. But the boilers and pipes were another matter. At last, this heavier cargo came in a boxcar from town, trundling along the main street rails of La Ceiba and down the pier, gathering a procession of people behind it as it went.

"This spearmint bound to sink me lanch," Mr. Haddy said. "She gung sink it, she gung. "

The Little Haddy was a wooden motor launch with a steering wheel inside a flat-topped booth at the stern. It had forty feet of open deck, part of it shaded by a canvas awning. Rubber tires hung over its hips for bumpers. Its paint was peeled and chipped and showed gray salty planks. Green fur grew on the hull below the water line, and it was altogether the sort of boat I had seen scuttled on mud flats or overturned above the tidemark on the Massachusetts coast. Even its ropes had the bleached and flimsy look of junked lines. Some of its deckboards had sprung up and freed the caulking, and in many places it was smeared with tar. The hold was so shallow Mr. Haddy had to kneel and bump his head to stow our gear, and it was quickly filled. The rest — the boilers, three of them, and the pipes — was to be roped to the deck Each time something was hoisted on board, Little Haddy groaned and settled lower in the water and seemed to blow its nose.

The people from town who had followed the boxcar stood in its patch of shade and watched Father and Mr. Haddy loading. Father knew several of the onlookers by name. He joked with them in Spanish and English. Less than a week in La Ceiba and already he was known in a friendly way, respected even, although no one on the pier made a move to help him truss up this cargo and swing it onto the launch.

Father howled from the effort of lifting, and said, "They don't care if I rupture myself."

"But you could stay here, Uncle," one of the watchers said.

"I wouldn't stay here for anything," Father said. He guided a bundle of copper pipes onto the deck, where they broke apart and clattered against the wood.

"She a nice place, La Ceiba."

Father said, "No place for kids."

"So many kids here!"

"Why is it," Father said, walking toward the people and letting the sweat dribble off his face, "all these people growing fruit, picking it, wrapping it, loading it, canning it, and everything else — why is it they're all so damned puny? I'll tell you why. They do everything but eat it! I've never seen so many shrimps in my life. Skin and bones, that's all I see. Admit it, you're weaklings."

The people laughed and sort of cowered in the shadow of the boxcar. The noon sun beat on the iron pier, and at the end of it, where Jerry and the twins were playing, the pier was watery from the heat shimmer and as wavy as the sea. Pelicans drooped on posts, the shoreline blazed. Here, sunlight came down hard and jangled against the sand.

"It's a company town," Father said. "A one-crop economy and a one-company crop. You can keep it. But I'm not going to let my family starve here."

"We not starving," one man said. "We strong folks fo' too-roo."

He was a big man, with a rag tied around his head, and green tattoos on his arm muscles, and even in his bare feet was taller than Father.

"You're funny-bunnies and shrimps," Father said. "You eat too many hamburgers, you polish your rice, you use white sugar. What you people need is vitamins. You" — he said to the big man, as he poked him in the chest—"you need lead in your pencil."

The man laughed out loud. He didn't mind Father's abuse. He flexed his muscles for the crowd.

"Okay, Samson," Father said. "Want to do an experiment?"

"Another spearmint," Mr. Haddy said, "and we still ain't loaded me lanch."

"How many pushups can you do?" Father said to the man.

"Sumsun!" yelled another man.

The big man said, "I could lift that tub nah."