Paul Theroux - The Mosquito Coast

"Stamp your feet, Charlie."

I did so and a snake, hanging in six bracelets from a low branch, gathered itself and dropped into the water and swam away.

After that, I stamped my feet every chance I got, and further on a short fat viper, surprised by the clomp of my shoe, wormed into a stump hole until only its gray tail tip showed.

Father was saying, "Never can tell about these people. They might be Munchies — haw!"

We got through thirty yards of this by passing the last duckboard ahead and repeating this process to make a walkway through the mush. It was hard to believe there had been people right here, standing in the swamp. How had they disappeared without making a splash?

We came to bushes like hedges, and past them the trees were taller and had trunks like thick skirts hanging in folds. Parroty birds, and birds so small they might have been insects, screamed around our heads. Above the tops of the mahogany trees there were bigger birds, perched or making shadowy flights, like flying turkeys. Their wings made slow broomlike brushings against the treetops. They might have been curassows — I heard bull-fiddle twangs — but Father said they were vultures and that he wanted to wring their scrawny scavenging necks.

"Seville," Francis said, and pointed to an opening some yards ahead — more jungle, except that it was dark here and sunny there. Gnats and flies spiraled in the light and speckled it.

Mr. Haddy said, "I ain't like this place so soon."

"What kind of houses are those, Dad?" Clover asked.

"That kind of dwelling, of course—"

He never admitted not knowing something, but these huts were not easy to explain. They were small tufty humps made from the same spiky grass we had walked through on the duckboards. A framework of skinny branches balanced the hanks of dead grass bunched on top. Not huts — more like beehives that needed haircuts.

"— that's probably where they keep their animals. Muffin," Father said.

"Got no animals here," Francis said. "I ain't see one."

"All the better," Father said. "If they actually live in those things, then we came to the right place."

Mr. Haddy chuckled and said to me, "The right places for Fadder is always the wrong places for me."

Father looked gladly on the miserable village.

Yet only the huts were miserable. This jungle, the start of the high forest, was tall and orderly. Each tree had found room to grow separately. The trees were arranged in various ways, according to slenderness or leaf size, the big-leafed ones at the jungle floor, the towering trees with tiny leaves rising to great heights, and the ferns in between. I had always pictured jungle as suffocating spaghetti tangles, drooping and crisscrossed, a mass of hairy green rope and clutching stems — a wicked salad that stank in your face and flung its stalks around you.

This was more like a church, with pillars and fans and hanging flowers and only the slightest patches of white sky above the curved roof of branches. There was nothing smothering about it, and although it was noisy with birds, it was motionless — no wind, not even a breeze in the moisture and green shadows and blue-brown trunks. And no tangles — only a forest of verticals, hugely patient and protective. It was like being indoors, with a pretty roof overhead. And the order and size of it made the little huts beneath look especially dumpy.

The village — if it was a village — was deserted. Without people there, it was like the crust of a camp, where some travelers, too lazy or sick to make proper lean-tos, had hacked some bushes apart, shoveled a fire next to a rock, and spent one uncomfortable night before setting off again to die somewhere. The only sign of life was a sick puppy that yapped at us from behind a pile of trash — fruit peels and chewed cane stalks — and didn't bother getting up. I gave the hungry thing the sandwich I had stuffed into my pocket at lunchtime. He tried to bite me, then he ate the sandwich. In the center of the five huts, all made of grass tufts, was a smoky firepit, and some broken calabashes. There was not a human here to be seen.

But we had seen faces back at the duckboards.

Mr. Haddy said, "I ain't blame them for fetching out of this place. Lungley, what you say is for true. This is dirt." He was glancing around and wetting his teeth as he spoke. "We could go home, Fadder. We could slap we own mosquitoes."

Father was fanning himself with his baseball cap. He said, "They can't be far away. Probably down at the drive-in hamburger stand." He looked up and saw Mr. Haddy walking away, in the direction of the duckboards.

"Anyone here require a beverage?"

This stiffened Mr. Haddy like an arrow between his shoulders. He turned around laughing in a sneezing sort of way.

"Or, on the other hand," Father said — he had bent over and picked something from the ground—"maybe they're getting their flashlights repaired. Take a gander at this so-called consumer durable."

It was a crumbled flashlight battery, its rusted case burst open and the paint peeled off and barely recognizable, it was so squashed. It looked like an old sausage.

"Francis, you said they were savages!"

The poor Zambu, who maybe had never seen a flashlight battery — flashlights were forbidden in Jeronimo — just smiled at Father and showed his teeth like a dog hearing a door slam.

"But if they're using these gimcrack things, they probably are savages."

We sat down and waited and watched the wee-wee ants.

"Could be at the gas station, in a long line, waiting to fill up with high-test."

"Ain't seen no gas station round here," Francis said.

"You wouldn't kid me, would you?"

There was evidence that someone was living here — straw beds in the huts, flies rotating over the trash pile, and a tripod with a burned baby on it, or, the nearest thing to it, a roasted monkey with curled-up fingers and toes.

Father said, "How did you talk to them when you were here before?"

Francis opened his mouth and wagged his blue tongue.

"What language?"

Francis did not know what Father meant. He said he just talked to them and they talked to him. "They savvy."

This was a Jeronimo explanation. People spoke English, Spanish, and Creole, but they did not know when they were going from one language to another. It seemed that by looking into a person's face, they knew what language to use, and sometimes they mixed them all together, so that what came out sounded like a new language. I had the habit myself. I could talk to anyone, and often I did not realize that I was not speaking English. But everyone on the Mosquito Coast, no matter what he looked like or what language he spoke, said he was English.

Pacing the clearing with Clover, Father looked like a man showing his daughter around the zoo — impatient and proud and talking the whole time and sort of holding his nose. Then, from the other side of the firepit, we heard his loud voice.

"Okay, the game's over. We can see you! Stop hiding — you're just wasting your time! Come on out of there, we're not going to hurt you! Get out from behind those trees!"

His voice rang against the jungle's straight trees and high ceiling. He kept it up for several minutes, yelling at the bushes, while we watched. Clover peered at the ferns Father was beating with a stick. He looked the way Tiny Polski had when he was flushing bobwhites in Hatfield.

The amazing thing was, it worked. We saw we were surrounded by people, more than twenty of them. This took place as we were staring, and they appeared in the same way as they had vanished before, without a movement or a sound. One second, Father was shouting "Come on out!" in the empty clearing, and the next second the people were there and he was shouting the same thing in their faces. We did not know whether Father had really seen them or was just pretending.