Paul Theroux: The Mosquito Coast

I wanted to work, to carry the toolbox and hand him the oil can and be his slave and do anything he asked. I deserved to be punished. I wanted to forget those torches and those men. I was thirteen years old again. I had felt forty.

Father said, "Meet me in the workshop when you're through."

"Poor Charlie," Mother said. "Where did you get that face?"

I said softly, "I was fooling in the bushes, Ma. It was my own fault."

She shook her head and smiled. She knew I was sorry.

"Ma!" Jerry yelled. "Charlie's staring at me with his face!"

Father's workshop was behind the house. There were mottoes and quotations lettered on pieces of cardboard and tacked to the shelves, and tools and pipes and coils of wire and various machines. Besides motors of all kinds, and a grease gun and his lathe, which gave the workshop the look of an arsenal, there was his Thunderbox and an all-purpose contraption he called his Atom-smasher.

On the floor, about the size of a trunk but resting upright on its end, was a wooden box he had been building and tinkering with for most of the spring. There were no wires in it and no motor. He had put it together with a blowtorch. It was full of pipes, and grids and tanks, copper tubing below and a door leading to a tin box on top. It smelled of kerosene, and I took it to be an oven of some kind, because bracketed to the back was a sooty chimney. Father said we had to get this thing into the pickup truck.

I tried to lift it. It wouldn't budge.

"Want to rupture yourself?" Father said.

With fussy care, and taking his time, he set up a block and tackle on a tripod and we swung this box of fitted pipes into the pickup.

"What is it?"

"Call it a Worm Tub or a hopper. You'll know when Doctor Polski knows."

He took the back road and traveled toward Polski's farmhouse on the tractor paths by the margins of the fields. When we passed the windbreak that was like a ship, I remembered that it was there that I had seen the procession of torch-carrying men. Below that clump of woods I had seen the men gather, and the corpse raised up on the cross. I hoped Father would take the right fork, so that I could satisfy myself — by seeing footprints or trampled corn — that I had not dreamed it. Father turned right. I held my breath.

What was that in the plowed field? A cross, a dead man hanging on it, black rags and a black hat, a skull face and broken hands and twisted feet.

It froze me, and I could not help the stammering whimper in my voice as I asked him what it was.

Father was still driving fast over the rutted track. He did not turn his head. He just grinned and said, "Don't tell me you've never seen a scarecrow."

He thumped the throttle.

"And it must be a damned good one."

I looked back and saw it hanging in the empty field, the old clothes stuffed with straw. Sweat had made my poison ivy itch, and I wanted to claw my face.

"Because it sure has you scared!" And he laughed.

THE STORY WAS that Tiny Polski, who had heard about his inventions, visited Father and pleaded with him to come to Hatfield. We lived in Maine then, not Dogtown but in the woods. Father was trying a year of self-sufficiency, growing vegetables and building solar panels and keeping us out of school. Polski promised money and a share in the farm. Father did not budge. Polski said he had unusual problems because he wanted, by mechanical means, to lengthen the growing season, even make it a two-season farm. It was a good area to raise kids in. It was safe, a happy valley, miles from anywhere. So Father accepted. That was the story he told me. But I knew better. Things had not gone well for us in Maine. Father had refused to spray insecticides on the vegetables — the worms got them before they could ripen. Rain and storm raised hell with the solar panels. For a while, Father would not eat, and he was taken to the hospital. He called it The Buzz Palace, but came out smiling and said, didn't feel a thins." He was healthy again, except that now and then he forgot our names. We drove to Hatfield with nothing He liked starting from scratch.

It was impossible to think of Polski, or anyone else, as Father's boss. Father did not take orders. He described Polski as "the runt," called him Roly, and Doctor Polski — but "Doctor" was pure sarcasm, to frustrate any friendship. He believed that Polski, and most men, were his inferiors.

"He owns people," Father said. "But he doesn't own me."

Polski was waiting for us on his piazza as we drove in. His eyes were gray and as hard as periwinkles. He was older than Father, and small and plump, and looked full of sawdust. He wore a checkered shirt and clean Dubbelwares and a belt around his middle that bunched his bib overalls into two bags. His Jeep was shiny, his boots were never muddy, there was no sweat stain on his hat. He did not smoke. He was always dressed for dirty work but never got dirty. We had not been inside his mansion, but whether this was because Father flatly refused to enter or because we had not been invited, I could not say. Maybe Polski knew better than to invite Father in and hear one of his speeches about crapsheets or cheeseburgers. I had looked through the windows and seen the polished table and the cut-glass vase of flowers, the plates in a wheel-row on the hutch, Ma Polski's busy back as she stooped and tidied. None of it said welcome. And Ma Polski looked like part of the room.

"Nice day," Polski said.

"You bet," Father said.

"Hope it's like this on the weekend. I got something doing on Saturday."

Sumthun doo-un on Saddy was what he said. But Father did not comment. He was excited. He had driven with impatience, he was eager to show Polski the hopper he had made, his Worm Tub. He was proud of it, whatever it was. And yet he was still sitting in the pickup truck, chewing his cigar.

"Got a match, Doctor?"

Polski screwed up one eye and rocked a little on his heels. The question baffled him. He said, "You come all the way over here for a match, Mr. Fox?"

"Yup."

"Be right back." Polski said his r' s like v' s — vight back, vemember, vobber, veally, vong. It was his lower lip catching on his front teeth. He went inside.

Father studied my rashy face and arms. He said, "You've got the mange. I hope you learned your lesson."

He hopped out and set up the block and tackle behind the truck. "We're going to knock his boots off," he said. He swung the Worm Tub onto the driveway. "We're going to straighten his hair."

Polski returned with a box of big kitchen matches and looked at the Worm Tub and said, "Pretty small for a coffin."

"I wonder if you'd do one more little thing for me," Father said. "I need a glass of water. Just a small glass of regular water from your faucet."

Muttering "a glass of vegular water," Polski entered the farmhouse. I could tell from the way he said it and how the door banged shut that he was getting exasperated. When he brought the water out and gave it to Father he said, "You're a mystery man, Mr. Fox. Now let's get volling."

"You're a gentleman."

Now Polski looked at me for the first time. "Poison ivy. You're crawling with it. Ain't that something."

Hearing crawlun and sumthun, I stepped back and touched my face in shame. I had been fooled by a scarecrow. And I had figured it out. It made sense to put scarecrows up at night, so the birds would not know. Was that my lesson?

"What is it, anyway?" Polski was saying to Father.

"Tell you what it ain't," Father said, opening the door of the wooden box and revealing the metal compartment with its hinged flap and the rubber seal we had bought in Northampton. "It ain't a coffin, and it ain't a piece of diseased meat. Ha!"

He picked the flap open and said, "I want you to tell me what you see inside."