Paul Theroux - The Mosquito Coast

"Sure you can. You could scream it up and tip it over and probably manage to take all your toes off. But how many pushups can you do, ape-man?"

Mother said, "Be careful, Allie."

Mr. Haddy took her aside and said, "That big feller don't wuth a dum bit of good."

"Clear a space," Father said. "Give this gentleman air."

In the middle of the ring of onlookers, who shouted encouragement, the big man started. Father squatted in front of him and told him to touch his chin and keep his back straight. Father counted as the man cranked himself up and down. Then the man fell flat with a grunt and could not raise himself again.

"Twenty-two," Father said. "Not bad, but look at him — he's incoherent." He hugged Mother and said, "My young bride could do that many before breakfast."

The man rolled over and picked himself up. He was narrow-eyed from panting, and he looked slightly crippled from the strain.

"Hold these," Father said. He handed me his baseball cap and his cigar.

"Puppysho," Mr. Haddy said — puppet show. In Creole it meant silly or foolish.

Father rolled up his sleeves and got into position on the pier, the ramp of his back already soaked with sweat. Pumping his arms rapidly, he did twenty-two, while the onlookers counted. He stopped a moment, grinned at the big gasping man, and did twenty-eight more. "Fifty!" he said. Then he did twenty-five more. When he stood up, his face was red and he was winded, but he said, "That's seventy-five for starters. I could do lots more, but there's work to do."

They loved him for that, and when he went back to loading the launch, eight men came forward to help. They spent the rest of the afternoon shifting the hardware with Father and Mr. Haddy.

"It's a funny thing," Father said to Mother. "They're helping me because they think I'm strong. If I was weak they wouldn't lift a finger. You'd think it'd be the other way around. And you're wondering why these people are savages?"

"I wasn't wondering," Mother said, and went to collect the kids.

"On the other hand," Father said, "it doesn't matter if a fellow's a savage, as long as he's a gentleman. Remember that, Charlie." Then he boarded the launch, chuckling to himself.

Night fell. The town was kinder looking. Small lights burned on the pier, and windows shone in the harbor offices. The palms, so spindly and ragged during the day, had feathery heads, and these dark umbrella plumes sheltered the cozy buildings. Some blood-red sunset streaks were still bent across the mountains to the west. The town was tucked beneath. It lay flattened, a pool of tiny lamps in the darkness, and some dim spangles glimmered from the lighted huts on the mountainsides.

Jerry was yawning miserably on Mother's lap — he was too big to be comfortable there — and the twins were already asleep under the awning. It was ten o'clock. It had rained twice since mid-afternoon, and still the lightning flashed on the sea in sudden bursts. It seemed cruel to have to leave the town at this late hour. We were an early-to-bed family, and it was way past bedtime. I envied the people in the houses I could see — the ones at the windows and even those I imagined swinging in hammocks in the shacks next to the beach. It did not excite me to be on this narrow boat and listening to the sea floppine against its wooden hull, I sat on a box and shivered. Mother lay down with Jerry and the twins — they were all in sleeping bags. I looked ashore. I did not want to leave here.

The motor had been stuttering slowly for the past hour. Mr. Haddy lifted a trap door, reached inside with a long-handled monkey wrench, and brought a loud rat-tat from the engine that made the broken deckboards shake. The gasoline fumes choked me.

Father said, "I've seen eggbeaters with better motors than this. Listen to it misfiring. Call that integrity?"

"What are those birds?" I said. I had been watching them since sundown. They had small sharp bodies and flat wings and careered around the pier's lights, darting like swallows.

"Some sort of nocturnal bird," Father said, but he had not looked up. He was still frowning at the engine noise.

"Them's bats," Mr. Haddy said.

Hundreds of them — enough to darken the lights. Now I was eager to shove off in this boat.

Father went forward. He said, "We're about ready, Mother. I made you a coffee on the cookstove."

"I've been ready all day," she said. "The kids are asleep."

Mr. Haddy whistled fuzzily through his buckteeth. He said, "Yerry me, Ta Taam?" and a man who had been sleeping on the pier rose up like a disturbed insect and untied the ropes and threw them onto the deck. Mr. Haddy blew out his cheeks and jammed a lever down — it was an iron stick in the wheel house, like a gearshift on a tractor — and Ta Tom gave the boat a push with his foot. We were off, making for the black sea.

"Yep. Them's bats," Mr. Haddy said.

He leaned out of the wheel house.

"Wish we was gung to Utila," he said.

I asked him why.

"It's only two hours. Santa Rosa's ten." He hung his long fingers on the wheel.

I said, "I thought we were going to Jeronimo."

"Jeronimo's in the jungle. You don't see no lanches there. Just fellers with tails."

"Don't interrogate the man," Father said. "Mind if I take a turn at the wheel, Mr. Haddy?"

Mr. Haddy did not budge from the wheel. In fact, he tightened his grip on the spokes. He said, "Against regulations."

"Which regulations?"

"Of me lanch. I'm the steerer, you's passengers."

"Take a walk," Father said.

Mr. Haddy stayed where he was.

Father said, "I know every lunar star in both hemispheres. I'm master of the quadrant and sextant. I could take a meridian altitude of the sun from its reflection in a tar bucket."

"Regulations," Mr. Haddy said.

Father said, "And how many pushups can you do?"

This made Mr. Haddy laugh. But he did not let go of the wheel. He crowded it and put his nose against the dirty glass of the wheel house.

The echo of our engine reached us from the palms on shore and rang against La Ceiba's iron pier as we rounded it to head east, into deepest night.

Father said, "We've got gas, we've got food, we've got all our stuff. Plenty of drinking water and no perishables. I'm damned glad to be going. No offense, Mr. Haddy, but that town is no place for children."

We looked back. Even our little distance had leveled the town and drawn it fine. It was a shallow puddle of light beneath the shadows of mountains and the mops of storm-silvered cloud.

"You know where you gung, Fadder."

"Mr. Haddy, we're going home. Give me the wheel and we'll get there in one piece."

Mr. Haddy hugged the wheel and steered us through the moonlit corrugations of sea. Father sighed. He licked a cigar — it was a long Honduran cigar. He had a whole basket of them. He set it alight, and the flame that spurted from its tip showed his fiery eyes to be burning on Mr. Haddy.

"First deep-sea boat I've ever seen without a compass aboard," he muttered. "Lucky thing I brought mine. But I'm not telling you where it is."

There were small huts along the shore, flickering like lanterns under the tall palms. Then a greater darkness and tinier lights, and no shore but a blackening slope of land and sea and scanty flames in the mounting pitch.

"I know what you looking at. Charlie," Mr. Haddy said. "It ain't carkles."

I did not say I was looking at the punctures of light on the shore.

"When I was a little one," he said, staring with me at the shore, "we live back of Brewer's Lagoon. That's where I learn Zambu — the Indian black fellers teached it to me. Along about one night, was a big disturbance in me room, a locomotion, fluttering and flapping. I woke up and called me ma, 'Ma, come quick! Something happen!' She come in with a torch and say, 'Puppysho! You wasting my time — dreaming bout Duppies' Duppies is your own ghost. Then she went all over gray. 'What that blood on you pilla?' she say, and did she screech. I look at the pilla and it is red. Blood! She axed me was my head all right. It was bleeding, but I couldn't feel nothing."