Paul Theroux - The Mosquito Coast

Some people hissed, and Mr. Haddy and others looked at Mother.

She said, "Allie knows what he's doing — and here he comes."

Father's head was in the hatchway. He made a face — hard to tell what kind, he was so far up. He waved his hand. He was holding a white ball, like a lump of raw cotton.

"What Fadder got there?"

Father was shouting.

"Haven't you people ever seen a snowball?" He threw it, and it mashed in the grass, whiter than a heron's feathers.

We ran to touch it — and as we touched it, feeling the sting of its crystals, it began to vanish. But by then, in triumph, Father was bringing out the cakes of ice.

ON THIS PART of the river, narrower and shallower than anything I had seen — twenty miles of it, before mountains and jungle twisted it into a trickle — people dropped to their knees on the banks and waved at us and prayed. By now, they knew who we were and what we carried. The news of Fat Boy had spread throughout the river valley.

"Anyone want a beverage?" Father called to those people on the bank who took us for missionaries. Mr. Haddy thought this question was very funny, and he wheezed whenever Father said it. So later on, even at the uninhabited parts of the river, Father caught Mr. Haddy's eye and yelled, "Anyone here require a beverage?" and made the man laugh.

But the kneeling and respectfulness at last made Father gloomy. "The idiots think we came all this way to honk Bibles at them!"

Five of us were on the boat — besides Father, Mr. Haddy, and me, there was Clover and Francis Lungley. It was not the Little Haddy. Our new boat, built in the weeks after Fat Boy began producing ice, was an adaptation of a pipanto dugout, needle-nosed, wide-bellied, and almost flat-bottomed. It was powered by a pedal mechanism that worked a stern wheel, something like the Swan boats in the Boston Public Garden. Because of its shape and its cargo, Father named the boat the Icicle.

Except for the pedals and the sprockets and part of the chain (they were from Mr. Harkins's bike—"I cannibalized his Raleigh!" Father said), the driving mechanism of the Icicle had been made in the forge at Jeronimo, and some small parts by the wire-nibbling teeth of Drainy Maywit. "That kid's a human micrometer!" Amidships, Father had outrigged an ice-storage vault. There were two seats forward, and two side by side in the stem, in front of the pedaler's cockpit, which Father called "the Wishing Well — because whoever's pedaling in it wishes he was somewhere else." Going upstream, Francis worked the pedals. It was the perfect boat for the upper river. Father claimed that it was so buoyant he could go cross-country in it, providing there was a smidgen of dew on the grass.

Mr. Haddy said, "These people never see no lanch like this one."

"You're joking," Father said. "They've seen everything. River travel is easy. This is a turnpike. Missionaries have been tooling up and down here in canoes for years. Frankly, I don't regard this as much of an accomplishment."

"Tell you one thing," Mr. Haddy said — he was shouting from the bow where he sat behind Clover—"they ain't have no ice with them!"

"That's a matter of conjecture—"

Francis Lungley screamed at the word.

"— but they were here."

Mr. Haddy shrugged. He was wearing one of the La Rosa flour sacks Mother had made into shirts. His back said, Enriquecida con Vitaminas.

"I want to penetrate where they've never been," Father said.

There were blue butterflies kiting to the ferny branches that overhung the river, startled by our noise. The tumble and splash of our foot-operated wheel sounded like a washing machine sudsing clothes. I could recognize some of the birds in the trees — the jays and the ivory-billed woodpecker, the cockatoos and crascos — and I knew the cries of the hidden ones — the sudden honk of the smaller pava, the shouts of the forest quail, and the bass-fiddle boom of the curassow. These same birds lived near our camp at the Acre, still our secret hiding place from Father and his work, and his speechy ambitions.

"I want to take a load of ice to the hottest, darkest, nastiest corner of Honduras, where they pray for water and never see ice, and have never heard of cans, much less aerosol cans."

"But Seville like that," Francis Lungley said, bobbing his head as he pedaled. He was wearing a La Rosa shirt too. His said, Molino Harinero and 45.36 Kgs Netos. "For true, Seville is dirt."

He had been promising Seville ever since Father demanded the poorest place imaginable. This had started one of the first arguments in Jeronimo. Mr. Haddy, Mr. Harkins, and Mr. Peaselee wanted to take the ice downstream to Santa Rosa or Trujillo. Father asked, what was the point of that? Big ships called at those ports — those towns had more electricity than was good for them.

"You just want to impress your friends. No, we're going upstream."

That was when Francis Lungley said that he had once been to Seville, as far upriver as it was possible to go. Mr. Haddy and the others said they were not going to a stewy bat-shoo place where people had no respect and probably had tails. But Father was interested. Francis said he had almost died there twice — first from fright, next from hunger. It was a falling-down village, where the people ate dirt and looked like monkeys — anyway, ugly as monkeys. They had rat hair and most were naked. They were not even Christians.

"That sounds like my kind of place," Father said.

Then Mr. Haddy agreed and said, oh, yes, heathens were the best fishermen and the strongest paddlers and "Those boys knows how to work, for true."

But as we sudsed up the river (monkeys on the right, kinkajous on the left), Father said, "I find it hard to believe that some missionary hasn't been here before and bought their souls with Twinkies and cheese spread in spray cans and crates of Rice-a-Roni." He watched a monkey on a branch. "Hershey bars." We passed by. He looked back at the monkey. "Diet Pepsi." Now he turned to the kinkajous. "Kool-Aid." He flicked his cigar butt into the river. "Makes your mouth water, doesn't it?"

"You see Seville, Fadder," Francis said, pedaling harder, his La Rosa shirt black with sweat.

"I want to see a wreck of a village that hasn't got a name, where they've been swatting mosquitoes and eating rancid wabool for two thousand years." Father pointed to the mountains. "Over those baffles, where it's all hell and they're being roasted alive!"

"Too bad we ain't back of Brewer's Lagoon," Mr. Haddy said. "Some of them villages is rubbish."

We had started before dawn — so early, the nighttime mosquitoes were still out and biting us. But by noon, though we had gone miles, we were some distance from the mountains of Olancho that marked the end of the river, where Seville was. We tied up at a riverbank for lunch. It was so thickly overgrown we could not get off the boat. The bank was hidden under bush fans and yards of lianas. Mother had packed us a basket of fruit and cassava bread and fresh tomatoes and a Jeronimo drink that Father called Jungle Juice, made from guavas and mangoes. Clover said the juice wasn't cold enough.

"It's plenty cold enough," Father said. "Listen, no one's touching that ice!"

He checked the vault on the boat to make sure the ice was still holding up. The ice was wrapped in banana leaves and the vault lined with rubber we had tapped from the hoolie trees. He had not made us galoshes after all.

"You're bound to lose a little," he said. The ice had shrunk in its banana-leaf wrappings. "Seepage. Natural wastage. Friction" — he was plumping it with his hands—"owing to excessive agitation. Right, Francis?"

Francis Lungley was peeling a banana. He did it delicately with his fingertips, like opening a present.