Paul Theroux - The Mosquito Coast

"They's munsters in the water," Drainy said, and none of them would go into the pool. But it was because they did not know how to swim, which we did. Swimming there while they watched gave us a superior feeling, and Jerry told them they were spasticated.

But they were not afraid of the water dogs or the snakes or green lizards. Some of those lizards were as big as cats. If we said, "There's your Duppy in that tree," they went crapoid, because they couldn't see it. But when we saw a hairy piglike animal snuffling in the bushes, Alice said, "Oh, that's a mountain cow." It looked like a monster to me, but this little girl was not afraid, so we couldn't be.

For our camp here, we made first a lean-to out of branches, then a hut, and hammocks out of vines. Clover and Alice made seats for us, dug a firepit, and picked flowers. Clover was not strong enough to do the hard work herself, but she knew how to get the Maywit kids working. I saw that she was just like Father. She was firm like him and would not listen and wasn't happy unless she was directing operations.

There was a certain fanlike plant here that was edible, Alice said — the roots of it. Clover got everyone collecting these roots in homemade baskets, and we ate them. They tasted like raw carrots and were called yautia. With these and the bananas and fruit we picked on the way, we could have meals in this camp.

Clover complained that Jerry and April never helped. Alice said, "Peewee's a crummo, for true. Always eating and never picking." Drainy said he did more work than anyone. No one squabbled in Jeronimo, but here everyone fussed.

So I decided to invent money. It was no good getting everything free. From now on, I said, we would have to buy our food at the camp store.

"Where's the camp store, thicko?" Clover said.

I said the first thing that came into my head—"You're sitting on it" — and pointed to her little bench. By making Clover the storekeeper I shut her up, and I explained that stones and pebbles would count as money, because they were in short supply in this mossy place.

Leon said, "Want to buy some food, Ma."

"Where's your money?"

"Ain't got none."

"Then start digging."

This was a new game and a good one. We set out in search of stones, and everyone gathered a little pile. It was easy for me, because by diving into the pool I could pick up all the stones I wanted off the bottom. I became the richest person in the camp.

Clover also ran the school, which was the first lean-to. Drainy ran the church — that was a tree on which he had fixed a wire cross. We made fences out of branches, and in one of the other lean-tos Drainy made a wire box he called the radio set. That was imaginary, but the telephone was real — two coconut halves connected by a piece of string.

"This is like back home," Jerry said.

But it wasn't. It was the way other people lived, with radios and schools and churches — and money. Yet I was happy here in the camp — happier than in Jeronimo. I liked this place for its secrecy and best of all because it was filled with things that Father had forbidden. Spending money at the store and talking on the telephone were pleasant things. And when Clover ran out of lessons, I became the schoolteacher. I showed the Maywits how to count money and do arithmetic and write their names. Jerry wanted to put up a No Trespassing sign, but I said that would only make people curious. Instead, I got everyone to help dig a hole on the path for a man trap, to catch intruders or even big animals like mountain cows. Drainy said there were tigers around_he meant jungle cats or jaguars — and I wanted to catch one. We embedded sharpened stakes at the bottom of the trap and covered the whole thing with a layer of branches and dirt, to make it look like part of the path. That was the Zambu way, Drainy said. Father would have killed us for doing this, but he was still on the coast.

We said prayers, we sang hymns that Alice taught us, and we held long groaning church services in the shelter of the holy tree.

We still helped at Jeronimo, gathering peppers and weeding and seeing to the fish trap and doing our other chores. But when this work was done and Mother was satisfied, we escaped to our camp in the jungle, returning to all the things that Father hated. This made up for everything we had never had in Massachusetts and it stilled a longing in me for the United States. In this way, I overcame my homesickness.

We called our camp the Acre.

The Acre helped me to understand something of Father's pride in Jeronimo. Until we built our camp. I had not seen why he was so boastful of what he had made in Jeronimo. Father had insisted that we look closely at the garden and the paths and the waterworks. He wanted us to marvel at the way we could be bone-dry in the rain and cool on the hottest day and not be pestered by insects. He was happy, and at the Acre I knew why. I looked around and saw that the pattern of life and the things we had fixed ourselves were all ours. Even the Maywit children were pleased by what we had done. But I felt that ours was a greater achievement than Father's, because we ate the fruit that grew nearby and used anything we found, and adapted ourselves to the jungle. We had not brought a boatload of tools and seeds and we had not invented anything. We just lived like monkeys.

It was Drainy's idea that we should all be baptized. He said we would all go to hell if we weren't, and he insisted that we do it the Dunker way, by getting into the deep pool while he said prayers over us. It seemed like fun, so we stripped down to our underwear and made ready for the baptism.

"I'm the baptizer," Drainy said. "I know how to do this."

"Only thing," Alice said. "Drainy don't know how to swim. He cain't be a baptizer if he cain't swim. He get et up by the munsters in the water." She walked away.

I said to Drainy, "If you're really afraid, we can forget it."

"I ain't afraid," Drainy said, and sat on the bank and dangled his feet in the water. "And you go to hell if you ain't get dunked."

Clover said, "We don't believe in hell. Only ignorant people believe in hell."

Drainy said, "If Alice pull down her bloomers and show her carkle, she go to hell, for true."

Alice was in the schooLhouse. She poked her head out of the window and yelled, "Drainy Roper, you get youself outta there!"

Then she clapped her hand over her mouth.

"That ain't his name," she said.

Clover said, "You called him Drainy Roper. Roper — that's what that missionary said before Father kicked him out."

"That is our name," Veryl said.

"You got a mouf!" Alice yelled.

Drainy pulled his feet out of the pool and said, yes, that was their name, Roper. The missionary was right. And he was a Dunker. "If he was here," Drainy said, "he could be the baptizer."

"If your name's Roper, why is your name Maywit?" Jerry asked.

"They've got two names," April said.

"We got one names," Drainy said. "And it ain't Maywit."

I said, "Where did the Maywit come from?"

"You father give it to us," Alice said. "And my father take it."

"If it wasn't his name," I said, "why did he take it?"

"He afraid," Alice said.

Drainy said, "Of you father."

"You're crappo," Clover said.

Drainy said, "You father can do magic."

"What he does isn't magic — it's science," I said.

"Science is worse," Alice said.

They would not believe me, and I was sorry, because Father had made them change their name. I said, "Sometimes I'm afraid of him, too."

Jerry and the twins laughed at me for saying this. But they did not know what I knew. Clover said that Father was kind and not to be feared. He could have made a fortune as an inventor, Jerry said.

"Why don't he get rich?" Alice said.

"Because he wanted to come here," I said, "to build a town in the jungle. More than a town."