Paul Theroux - The Mosquito Coast

I went to the bow, where Mr. Haddy was hanging over. He saw them, too — he was staring into the trees. Then an old black man, wearing only a pair of khaki shorts, stumbled from the water to the bank carrying a bucket.

"How is it?" Mr. Haddy said.

He was speaking to the man.

The man dropped his bucket against the mud bank, spilling its contents of fish.

"Zambu," Mr. Haddy said. "Ain't have no tail."

But saying so, he had taken his eyes from the river and let the sounding chain go slack. There was a bump under us — the launch was thumped from beneath and the twins were thrown to the deck. Jerry said, "I bit my tongue!"

The launch turned aside, thrust away by the current, and tilted, tipping over the cookstove. We were stuck fast. At once the engine stalled, and the flotsam of river branches piled up against the hull. Father kicked the smoldering cookstove into the river and it sank in its own steam.

"End of the line, Mr. Haddy," he said. "Ask that gentleman where we are."

Mr. Haddy did not ask. He watched the kneeling man gathering the fish and called back to Father. "This here is Fish Bucket!"

Then as the river scarfed around us, seven or eight men appeared on the bank, all black, with big heads and wearing shorts and carrying nets and sticks. Father jumped from the stern with a line. He was waist-deep in water and scrambling to the bank.

The men watched him securing Little Haddy to a tree. They stepped back a little, as if to give him room, although they were thirty feet away.

Father spoke to them in Spanish, in a friendly voice.

They stared. They seemed to understand, but they did not reply.

"How is it?" Mr. Haddy cried from the bow.

"Right here," one of the men said.

Father said, "They speak English?" He began to laugh.

This pleased the black men. They opened their mouths to watch him laugh.

"Good morning, Fadder. My name is Francis Lungley. Kin we help you?"

Father said, "Hey, I've been looking all over for you!"

JERONIMO, just a name, was the muddy end of the muddy path. Because it had once been a clearing and was now overgrown, it was thicker with bushes and weeds than any jungle. In other ways it was no different from fifty bushy places we had passed on our walk from the Zambu riverbank that Mr. Haddy called Fish Bucket. It was hot, damp, smelly, full of bugs, and its leaves were limp and dark green, "like old dollar bills," Father said.

Jeronimo reminded me of one time when we were in Massachusetts, and fishing. Father pointed to a small black stump and said, "That's the state line there." I looked at this rotten stump — the state line! Jeronimo was like that. We had to be told what it was. We would not have taken it for a town. It had a huge tree, a trunk-pillar propping up a blimp of leafy branches with tiny jays in it. It was a guanacaste, and under it was a half-acre of shade. The remnants of Weerwilly's shack and his failure were still there, looking sad and accidental. But these leftover ruins only made Jeronimo seem wilder this wet afternoon.

One other thing was a smoking chair in the grass, an armchair, sitting there smoldering. Its stuffings were charred and some of its springs showed and its stink floated into the bushes. This burned chair, useless and fuming, was as unimportant as the place itself, and the only person who was sure, we had arrived at our destination was Father.

The twins sat down and bellyached. Jerry's face was red from the steamy heat. Jerry said, "I'll bet he makes you climb that tree, Charlie. I'll bet you chicken out."

But Father had walked into the chest-high bushes. His baseball cap was turned sideways and he was shouting.

"Nothing — nothing! This is what I dreamed about — nothing! Look, Mother—"

Mother said, "You're right. I don't see a thing."

"Do you see it, Charlie?"

I said no.

He was still punching his way through the bushes.

"I see a house here," he said. "Kind of a barn there, with a workshop — a real blacksmith's shop, with a forge. Over there, the outhouse and plant. Slash and burn the whole area and we've got four or five acres of good growing land. We'll put our water tank on that rise and we'll divert part of the stream so we get some water into those fields. We'll have to lose some of these trees, but there's plenty more, and anyway we'll need timber for a bridge. I figure the house should face east — that will give us those hills and the morning sun. I see a mooring down there and a slipway to a boathouse. A couple of breezeways to the left and right of the main house will make us showerproof The ground's plenty high enough but we'll raise the house to be on the safe side and use the underneath for a kitchen. I'd like to see some drainage back there — I smell a swamp. But that'll be easy Some three-foot culverts will do the trick, and once we've got control of the water we can grow rice and do some serious hydraulics. The hard part is the plant. I see it in that hollow, a little downwind. We can take advantage of that fuel growing there — they look like hardwoods. It'll be a cinch to get it off the slope—"

All this time, under the guanacaste tree, the Zambus and Mr. Haddy were putting their loads down. Mr. Haddy pulled his shoes off and frowned at Father's voice. Father went on talking, staking out the house, marking his proposed paths, and dividing the land into beanfields and culverts. We had arrived ten minutes before.

But even Father's booming voice could not make Jeronimo mean more than sour-smelling bushes in an overgrown clearing.

The Zambus saw it their own way. There were hills behind it, and a stream running through it. The Zambus called the hills mountains — the Esperanzas — and the stream a river — the Bonito — and Jeronimo, to their bloodshot eyes, was a farm — the estancia. These grand names were all wrong and imaginary, but they were like the names of the Zambus themselves. The half-naked jabbering man, pointing to the narrow creek and calling it the Bonito River, called himself John Dixon. It was the fierce woolly-headed one in the torn short — Francis Lungley — who told us the name of the mountains, and the dumbest one, Bucky Smart, who called the rusty hut the estancia.

They could call it anything they liked, but I knew that Jeronimo was no more than a tin-roofed hut in a bush patch, a field of finger-bananas that had collapsed with beards of brown smut disease. Over here a broken rowboat and over there some cut-down tree trunks that no one had bothered to saw into cords. What fenceposts there were had turned into trees again, a row of short saplings that might have been a pigpen, alongside the mud and fever grass and that armchair smoking poison.

Father came back saying, "It's beautiful."

Just then, a scabby black pig hoofed and humped through the grass and ran past us. The Zambu Bucky stood up and made an ugly face at it, as if he were going to murder it with his front teeth. He followed it with his face, then shrugged and squatted on his ankles. He must have been tired — he had carried first Clover, then April, all the way from Fish Bucket.

"That there is a white-lipped peccary," Mr. Haddy said.

"Worry," Francis Lungley said.

"I'm not worried," Clover said.

"That is what these boys call them — worries. It is a name. One here means maybe fifty or a hundred more in the woods."

"Weerwilly must have lived in that shack," Father said. "What a hole. I wouldn't be caught dead in that dump."

"Any case," Mr. Haddy said, looking his froggiest as he turned to Father, "there is some folks already inside, so they save you the trouble."

Football faces in the window of the rusty hut stared white-eyed at us through vines of climbing flowers.

"Morning-glories," Father said, and ran to the hut.