Paul Theroux - The Mosquito Coast

"Why were you bleeding?" I asked.

"'Hah!' me ma say, and she stamp on the floor, and a bat as big as a jacketman floops into the wall. After she chase it away, she look again at me head. That big old bat had been sucking my ear and making tooth holes in it. And the blood is squirting out. And they is bat-shoo all over me room. And the bat-shoo smell like mung."

He widened his brown-flecked eyes at me.

"I know what you looking at. Bats."

I had not been, but now I was.

Father was silent, smoking, looking as if he wanted to tear Mr. Haddy's hands off the wheel.

"I know a feller," Mr. Haddy went on. "Bat sucked his toe, while he is asleep. Oh, bats, they just go at you. Big as pillas theirselves, some of them, out there. Down Bluefields way they come big as antsbears, bite through your cloves."

In the dark wheel house I could see his dry teeth, white as paint, and hear him trying to whistle through them.

"Fruit bats," Father said.

"Oh, sure, fruit bats," Mr. Haddy said. "And all the other kinds."

"They eat bananas," Father said.

"But if they ain't get their bananas, they just go at you."

"Tell us about the sharks," Father said.

"I seen some sharks," Mr. Haddy said.

"Big as dogs?"

"Bigger."

Father pointed with his finger stump and said, "That's north, Mr. Haddy."

"I could have told you. I know north like I know me own name."

"Right now," Father said dreamily, "someone over there in America is painting yellow lines on a road, and someone else is wrapping half an onion in a blister of supermarket cellophane, or putting an electric squeezer down the garbage disposal and saying, 'It's busted.' Someone's just opened a can of chocolate-flavored soup in a beautiful kitchen, because he can't get his car started, to eat out. He really wanted a cheeseburger. Someone just poisoned himself with a sausage of red nitrate, and he's smiling because it tasted so good And they're all cursing the president. They want him re-tooled."

Father was silent a moment.

Mr. Haddy said, "That sure is north."

"There," Father said, facing the darkness, "there's an interior decorator, probably a funny-bunny, standing in the lobby of a bank. He's been hired to redecorate it. The bank is failing. It needs depositors. Maybe a new lobby will help. But the decorator doesn't know what color to paint it, or where to put the geraniums. He says to the banker, 'What do you want this room to say?' "

"Not too sure about that," Mr. Haddy said.

"Someone's thinking up a new name for corn flakes," Father said. "Someone else just died of them."

"That ain't good," Mr. Haddy said.

"But we're going home," Father said.

"Ever I tell you bout the tiger and my ma and the yampi?"

"Tell me, Mr. Haddy. But give me that wheel first."

Mr. Haddy said, "I will never give you this wheel. I am the captain, I am the steerer, this me own lanch."

Father was silent. He sometimes gave off a smell when he was angry, and I had a whiff of that now, a little glow of tomcat steam.

"You's a passenger." But Mr. Haddy's voice had lost its boldness.

"If I was the passenger type, I'd be over there," Father said. He pointed north, toward the United States. "Go to bed, Charlie."

I unrolled my sleeping bag near Mother and crawled in. The engine vibrated against my back. The mass of stars overhead was like a swell of sea shiners — a million tiny star smelts drifting dead on the sky tide.

It was darker when I woke than it had been when I turned in. There was a close clammy blackness around the puttering launch, and no stars. The bundle of sleeping bags nearby told me that Jerry and the twins were still asleep. A small light burned in the wheel house.

Father was steering. Mother was beside him with a map, and Mr. Haddy was nowhere to be seen. With his hands on the wheel, and the lantern light distorting his face, Father looked eager and impatient. I asked him where Mr. Haddy was.

"Threw him overboard," Father said. "He couldn't take the strain."

How much did I trust Father? Completely. I believed everything he said. I even looked off the stern, at our foaming wake, expecting to see the teeth in Mr. Haddy's drowning face.

Mother said, "He's kidding you, Charlie. Mr. Haddy's asleep."

"Sent him to bed," Father said. "Gaw, I wish we had one of these boats."

He had a dead cigar in his mouth, and he worked the wheel with spread fingers, his firelit face against the wheel-house window.

Behind him, Mother held lightly to his shoulder, her white hand keeping him back, the way she had restrained Jerry and the twins at the rail of the Unicom. Her face was pale, enclosed by smooth straight hair and without any expression. Her dark eyes mirrored the darkness ahead and seemed to absorb the lantern flame. She was calm, but Father was hunched forward as if straining to break free of her grasp. He had shadows of muscle knots in his jaw, and his face twisted to make sense of the darkness. His eyes shone with certainty, like glints of shellac. He was active and watchful. He did not turn his eyes — he turned his whole head when he wanted to see aside.

Father and Mother remained in this posture, not speaking, for some time, and the longer I looked the more they seemed like a wild man and an angel, and this boat an example of the kind of life we led, plowing through dark water with black jungle on one side and deep sea on the other, and moonless night above us.

But I did not see the jungle until later, after Mr. Haddy woke and told me we were passing the "haulover" at the Guayamoreto Lagoon, just past Trujillo.

Then the darkness, which was like fathoms of ink, softened, became finely gray, and, without revealing anything more of the sea, turned to powder. All around us the powdery dawn thickened, until, growing coarser and ashy, in a sunrise without sun, it threw us glimpses of the soapy sea and the shoreline and the jungle heaped like black rags of kelp. Soon the sun was an hour high on the naked level shore.

"Fadder steering me lanch," Mr. Haddy said in amazement. But he was the only one on board who was surprised that Father had taken charge. "He make himself captain last night. I complain it breaking regulations, but it ain't do a dum bit of good."

I think we were all secretly glad of this, and the fact that Father was steering another man's boat through an unfamiliar sea to a foreign coast was proof that he could do anything.

"Oh, Lord," Mr. Haddy said, as a lightning bolt was printed briefly on the mist. Bearded clouds flushed with light, then faded. There was a dead pause, then a thunderclap, the nearest thing I had heard to a bomb, and soon the sea around us was pricked by raindrops as big as marbles. Dawn streaks and storm clouds met in this wide sky above the tropical sea, the sun pushing the slanting storm to the shore. The rain did not fall evenly. We made our way in the launch east along the coast through these bowed contours of driving rain — now beating on Father's ironware and the whole deck awash, now silent and all the wet boards blackened.

Except for the light swell, the sea was as calm as it had been when we left La Ceiba. The clouds parted — a whole sky of them above the flat sea, moving aside and changing in shape, columns of them, and roofbeams, collapsing and shouldering their way to the shore. The sun broke through and dazzled us. It was fire-bright and very hot, the lower rim of its saucer still dipped in the dishwater cloud, and when it burst upon us it brought steam and stinks from every plank of the sodden launch.

"We be in Santa Rosa for breakfast," Mr. Haddy said. "She ain't far — maybe half an hour. You can almost see her."

"I've got news for you, sir," Father said. "We're going to have breakfast right here. Look what Mother and I caught, while the rest of you were dead to the world—"