Paul Theroux - The Mosquito Coast

The faces retreated a little as Father picked a bugle blossom and said, "What's your name?"

"Maywit," was the trembly answer.

"He telling him the name of the flower," Mr. Haddy said. "That is the flower, Maywit, not the folks. Folks' name probably Jones. Jones of the jungle. Jones the chicken-man." Mr. Haddy clawed his scalp. "Wish I was on me lanch. But Fadder went and ripped a hole in her bum."

Father was still trying to coax answers out of the hut, but the faces had gone from the window.

We pitched our tents under the spreading branches of the guanacaste tree and built a smoky fire, as Father directed, to keep the mosquitoes away. Mother sorted our belongings and food bags and hung them on branches, out of a rat's reach — we had already seen two. The knapsacks and tents reminded Father of shopping in Springfield He got Jerry to tell the story of how American camping equipment was made by slave children in China and Japan. Father interrupted and gave his war-in-America speech, but the Zambus laughed in the wrong places.

As we began to eat, Mr. Haddy said, "Here come Jones the chicken-man."

It was the Maywits, carrying plates of fruit — limes, bananas, avocados — and handfuls of cassava, and a calabash of something they called wabool. These they timidly presented to Father, who distributed them to us, saying, "This will keep your bowels open!"

He showed Mr. Haddy an avocado and said, "Two bucks at the A and P. Two lemps for one!"

"Butter pear," Mr. Maywit said nervously.

"How is it?" Mr. Haddy said.

"Right here," Francis Lungley said.

"Am naat taakin to you," Mr. Haddy said. "You," he said to Mr. Maywit. "How is it?"

But he was too frightened to speak up.

Father said, "I want you all to meet our friends and neighbors, the Maywits."

They gaped at us, we gaped at them. This family too was a father, a mother, and four children. But the smallest child was naked and being carried like a knapsack by one of the girls. They were our reflections — shrunken shadows of us. The man was short and had brown barklike skin, and the woman was chicken-eyed, and the kids had dirty legs.

"That is you actual name — Maywit?" Mr. Haddy said.

Father said, "Pay no attention to this interloper."

The man said "Ow" in agreement. Then he blinked flies from his eyelids and said, "We was just going out of you house, Fadder." He pronounced it "huss."

"You're not going anywhere," Father said. "You're staying put. I've got some work for you to do."

"More spearmints," Mr. Haddy said, and made the Zambus giggle.

"You want some work?"

The man said he didn't mind. He made wild eyes at his turned-up toes.

"That's your house. You can have it as long as you make yourselves useful," Father said. "I've got a house of my own over there, beyond the culverts and the breezeways, just above the mooring and to the left of the barn, where it meets those beanfields."

Ain't see no huss, someone said softly. The Zambus and the Maywits and Mr. Haddy flicked the bushes with their eyes, searching for the things Father had named. There were no culverts, no breezeways. There was no barn, there was no house or beanfields. Then they looked at his finger.

"Just cause you ain't see it," Mr. Haddy said, "don't mean it ain't there," and had a fit of laughing.

Father was still smiling at those same bushes when Clover said, "Dad, there's some ants trying to get into my tent."

"Ants all over this place," Mr. Haddy said. "Tigers, too. Some of these baboons bigger than a grown-up man. And I step on monkey-shoo on the path."

"Them is wee-wees." This was the chicken-eyed woman, Mrs. Maywit.

"Yep, them's wee-wees." Mr. Maywit pinched an ant in his fingers and flicked it away. He did not do this disgustedly, but gently and with a kind of sorrow.

"You listen to these people," Mr. Haddy said. "They know what they talking. They lives here. Axe me anything bout the coast, but don't axe me jungles."

And this was true. Mr. Haddy was a coastal big shot, his voice snickered and mocked in this jungle. Out of his element, he clowned.

"They carries leafs," Mr. Maywit said. "But they ain't hot you."

Father said, "Tomorrow I'll make a platform for those tents, and some insect traps. I don't want ants and spiders crawling all over my kids."

Mr. Maywit said, "You from Nicaragua, Fadder?"

"He ain't from no Nicaragua," Mr. Haddy said. "What make you say that?"

"They got some trouble there. Last people come through. Had some ruckboos. They was from Nicaragua." He spoke in a slow puzzled way, as if he had just been woken up and was struggling to be interested in his own words.

"We're from the United States," Father said.

Mrs. Maywit sighed in appreciation, and Mr. Maywit said, "That is another place, for true."

Father plumped his hand on the spongy ground. "But this is our home now," he said. "You think this is a foreign country?"

Mr. Maywit shook his head. No, he did not think so.

The air around us was soupy green, like the water in a fish tank, and green shadows rose as the sun dropped.

Mother said, "Do many people come through here, like those people from Nicaragua?"

"Some preachers, Ma," Mrs. Maywit said, staring at Mother with her chicken eyes. "Churcha God. Jove as Wetness. Shouters."

"And Dunkers," Mr. Maywit said.

"And Dunkers."

"If we get any of them," Father said, "I'll show them the door. When we get a door!"

"Never mind," Mr. Maywit said.

The sun was now behind the hills, and though the sky was still lighted, green shadows had crept up to our tree. Jeronimo had more substance in the dark. It had sounds — insect crackle, bird grunts, the river's watery mutter — and these sounds gave it size, and the odors shaped it. At its furthest edge a Jeronimo bird blew softly in a tree.

Father gave a little speech in the filling darkness.

"We came here in three jumps," he said. He told them how we had left home in a hurry and gone to Baltimore, then La Ceiba, then on the Little Haddy. He made it sound adventurous, but it had seemed accidental at the time, and not much fun. "What were we looking for? I'll tell you," he said. "We were looking for you."

He named everyone present, even the silent Zambus who had carried the seed bags and metal pipes from Fish Bucket. Somehow, he knew their full names. What was remarkable to me was that he had not slept for two days. He had loaded Little Haddy and done seventy-five pushups on the pier and steered along the coast and up the river and then led us all in single file along the path to Jeronimo. He was strangely energetic and talkative when he had gone without sleep.

Jerry and the twins were asleep. Mother was nodding off. But Father walked up and down in the green firelight and whacked the smoky air and said that he was happy, and had plans, and was glad there were so many people here to witness this historic moment.

He said he did not believe in accidents.

"I was looking for you," he said. "And what were you doing? You were waiting for me! If you hadn't been waiting, you would have been some other place. But you were here when I came. I need you good people, and I've got the feeling that you need me."

Everyone agreed that this was so.

Francis Lungley said, "I go down to that river. I ain't know why. I just have to go. Then I see that old lanch fetch over."

"That is why I looks out the window," Mr. Maywit said, in the same mystified voice. "I ain't know why. I sees this man from Nighted Stays. Standing in the grass. That is why."

Mr. Haddy said, "I have a dream. Bout a man. And this is the man, wearing the same cloves as the man in the dream and a peaky hat. I meet him in my dream."

But I knew that what Mr. Haddy said was a fib. He had told me himself that he had met Father on La Ceiba pier and thought he was a missionary from the Moravian Church. I did not contradict him now, because the mood around this Jeronimo campfire had become solemn.