Paul Theroux - The Mosquito Coast

The day after the bean harvest, Father declared a holiday. It was our first day off in six weeks of work. The Zambus shot a curassow and the Maywits brought cooked cassava and plantains and fruit. Father would not allow any of the Maywits' chickens to be killed. "That's living on your capital." We had an afternoon feast in the front yard. Mr. Maywit and Mr. Haddy took turns telling stories about the Mosquito Coast — pirates and cannibals — and Clover and April sang "Under the Bam, Under the Boo."

Father gave a speech about us. We were bricks, he said. He went on to explain all the things you could do with bricks. And he got angry only once. This was when Mr. Haddy praised the food. Father hated anyone talking about food — cooking it or eating it. Fools did it, he said. It was selfish and indecent to talk about how things tasted.

He called this our first thanksgiving.

It was now August. Mr. Maywit said he knew this without looking at a calendar, because the sickla bird had arrived. The bird was shiny green and yellow, and very small, with a warbling song that reminded me of the fluting music we had heard the boy play on the beach our first evening in La Ceiba.

Work on the plant continued. The mahogany planks were hoisted into position and bolted to the poles. The floors told me nothing, but when the sides went up it took on a familiar shape, and before it was finished I guessed what it was.

MOST OF THEM, including the Maywits (they had seen one in Trujillo), thought that Father had run mad and built a silo.

"Shoo! What green you gung put in it?" Mr. Haddy said, speaking for everyone.

Father said he was not going to put anything into it, and certainly not grain. "But just you wait and see what I pull out of it! And keep pulling! Listen" — he whispered and stared—"this gizmo is sempiternal. It won't ever quit."

It was not the bottle that some silos are, nor was it a thermos-jug shape, and there were no feed bins. It was tall and square-sided. It had now windows and only one hatchway door, twenty feet up and no stairs to it. It was a plain wooden building, a huge mahogany closet raised up in our clearing in the jungle. A box — but a gigantic box, with a tin lid. It was an oddity of such magnificence that it was a thing in itself, like an Egyptian pyramid. Its great shape was enough. It did not need another purpose. But I knew it was the Worm Tub, enlarged a thousand times.

No sooner was it raised than flocks of people came to look. I supposed our hammering was heard in the woods. Father made these strangers welcome. They were hill Indians and Spanish-speaking farmers, and Creoles and Zambus. The Indians did not stay, but the others did — Mr. Harkins and Mr. Peaselee, old Mrs. Kennywick (the very one who had seen God in the Shouter church), and some more. They said that they had watched the house — as they called it — rising. They marveled at it. It was taller than the trees and flat-topped like nothing else around here. They had seen it from far-off.

That was an advantage, their curiosity. Just when Father needed help, these people crept out of the trees and said they were willing. With the finishing of the other buildings and the first harvest and the rest of the crops coming along fast — all we needed — everyone in Jeronimo assumed our work was done. This made the plant — as Father went on calling it — a bewildering surprise. What was it for? What was it doing here?

Father promised more marvels, but there was still wood to add to the structure proper, and still brickmaking to do.

"Where is the bricks, Fadder?" Mr. Maywit asked.

"You're standing on them." Father pointed his finger stump at the ground. "Clay! This is all bricks, just sitting there, waiting to be made!"

There was ironwork, too.

"The Iron Age comes to Jeronimo," Father said. "A month ago, it was the Stone Age — digging vegetables with wooden shovels and clobbering rats with flint axes. We're moving right along. It'll be 1832 in a few days! By the way, people, I'm planning to skip the twentieth century altogether."

There was more plumbing in this than a waterworks, but the building went on smoothly. The new people were glad to do the work and liked listening to Father, who talked the whole time.

"One of the sicknesses of the twentieth century?" he said. "I'll tell you the worst one. People can't stand to be alone. Can't tolerate it! So they go to the movies, get drive-in hamburgers, put their home telephone numbers in the crapsheets and say, 'Please call me up!' It's sick. People hate their own company — they cry when they see themselves in mirrors. It scares them, the way their faces look. Maybe that's a clue to the whole thing—"

Most of the plumbing was bends — enough to make a cow crosseyed. Some of the bends were the fixed elbows we had brought from La Ceiba, and some we made in the forge. The forge was built with the first bricks, and the bellows (a simple fire was not hot enough) was two paddles and a leather bladder. Father saved his welding torch for finishing off each seal, because he did not want to waste the cylinder of gas. The sight of Father in his welder's mask, his eyes darting in the mask's window, with his gauntlets and his asbestos apron and his fizzing torch, fascinated the onlookers. And he kept talking, even with his mask on.

"Why do things get weaker and worse?" came the echoey small mask-voice, as if out of a conch. "Why don't they get better? Because we accept that they fall apart! But they don't have to — they could last forever. Why do things get more expensive? Any fool can see that they should get cheaper as technology gets more efficient. It's despair to accept the senility of obsolescence—"

They liked his talk, but they loved the spray of sparks and the scabs of dead metal flying. They were astonished to see iron bars soften and drip like tar under the jet of blue flame.

The welding torch was one of Father's toys. There were others — his Thunderbox and Atom-smasher, and even his simpler ones, like the Beaver, which machined and threaded pipes — a hand-operated jaw of his own making with a toothy mouth set off by clamps. They were toys to him, but magic to the others. When he took a rusty pipe, reamed it, bent it, gave it threads, and fitted it with so many elbows it looked like a crankshaft, everyone gathered to watch him. Then he was a sorcerer in his iron mask, transforming a hunk of scrap iron into a symmetrical part for the plumbing that was the stomach and intestines of the plant. He claimed that even with this basic equipment, he could make the simplest rod or pipe into the tiniest computer circuit.

"I could make microchips out of the thickest iron brick around. I could make dumb metal talk. That's what computer circuits are — words and paragraphs in a primitive language. You don't think of computers as primitive," he said — he was speaking directly to Mr. Harkins—"but they are. They're mechanical savages."

He said he was making a monster. "I'm Doctor Frankenstein!" he howled through his welder's mask. He called one set of pipes its lungs, and another its poop shaft, and two tanks, "a pair of kidneys." He always spoke of the plant as "he" — "He needs a gizzard today," or "This will fit straight onto his liver," or "How's this for his gullet?"

Harkins and Peaselee laughed at this and asked Father if his monster had a name.

Father said, "Tell them, Charlie."

I remembered.

"Fat Boy," I said.

Everyone whispered the name.

Jerry and the twins were surprised that I knew something they didn't — not only its name but its purpose, how it worked, and what it would look like when it was done. They showed me some respect and for a while stopped calling me "Crummo" and "Spackoid."

Even Mother was a little curious about how I came to know so much. I told her that I had seen the scale model. I remembered the morning Father and I had loaded the little Worm Tub onto the pickup truck and driven past the scarecrow to give Polski a demonstration — Father happy, then Father fuming, and the wooden chest gulping and producing a disk of ice in a tumbler. I remembered more than that — the rubber seal in Northampton, and the policeman, and Father saying, "No one ever thinks of leaving this country. But I do, every day!" And the Monkey House. And "It's a disgrace."