Paul Theroux - The Mosquito Coast

"It's pretty and it's free. You find me a better combination of virtues."

Every half-hour we froze a new batch of bricks, and by mid-day we were finished — a large blue-white iceberg lay steaming and sweating in the mud, with a tow rope frozen in its center. It was roughly the shape of a Volkswagen Beetle, but larger, on a platform of bamboo logs that served first as a sled and then as a raft. We had no difficulty launching it. The tow rope was hitched to Little Haddy, and its gunning engine got the ice down the bank and into the river. The Creoles — Harkins, Peaselee, and Maywit — were in the bow, and Mr. Haddy in the wheel house, the ice creaking, the bamboo groaning, and the muddy water splashing all around it.

Of all the strange pieces of anything that floated down this jungle river, this was the strangest by a country mile.

"Our message to the world," Father said. "I'd love to see their faces when it heaves into view — coming out of the hottest, sickest, most parched and bug-ridden jungle in the whole hemisphere. They look up from their laundry. 'What is dat?' 'Dat is a icebug, Mudder, and he heading dis way!'"

Mother said, "They'll think it's the end of the world."

"But it's the beginning. It's creation, Mother."

The iceberg, hog-backed and bobbing, went around the bend and out of sight. The children ran down the Swampmouth path to get another look. Mother headed into the house, and then I was alone with Father on the riverbank.

"I could have gone with them." he said. "But I didn't want to spoil their fun. They can have the glory." He looked back at Fat Boy. "Besides, I've got to see to him. He might have overheated. He's full of poison and flammable gas. Ammonia and hydrogen, Charlie — those are his vital juices!" He looked at his finger stump and added, "But there's danger in all great inventions."

I saw my chance to tell him about the Acre. There was no danger there, apart from the traps we had set. We had food and water and shelter. But I was afraid of what he might say about the praying tree and the lean-to school. He might have got me to admit that we had taken all our clothes off one day and compared tools. He would have been stinking angry, or else hooting and calling us savages. So I said nothing.

"You feel a little like God," he whispered, looking around. His clothes were soaked from the ice bricks and sweat. His fingers were red from handling the ice. His hair was long and his face like a hatchet. He turned his bloodshot eyes on me and went on in the same tired and wondering whisper, "God had fun making things like icebergs and volcanoes. Too bad He didn't finish the job. Ha!"

***

Little Haddy returned to Jeronimo at nightfall. Mr. Haddy was giggling with pride, but at last he confessed that the iceberg had started breaking up at Bonito Oriental. They had cut it loose and let the current take the fragments downstream to the coast. He was a little drunk, because at the Chinese store in Bonito they had traded some ice for a calabash of mishla.

But Father was smiling at the river, maybe imagining the ice bricks floating down to Santa Rosa, and people pointing and fishing them out and struck with terror at the thought of ice sailing out of the jungle.

"This was a field day," he said. It had not cost anything, and we were all happier as a result. He told us he had left the United States so that we could spend days like this, working together and putting our ideas into practice. It was what he had always dreamed about.

Outside the Gallery that night, the birds fell silent in the muddy twilight and the bats began chirping. Around us was a circular wall of insect howl. A light breeze quickened in the darkness, brushing the trees. We played Up Jenkins on the Gallery floor, to the flashes of heat lightning that separated the mountains from the night sky.

"That's next. Injun country. We'll take them a ton."

But when he pointed, the Creoles and Zambus held tight to the Gallery rails, expecting another earth tremor. And Mr. Haddy, being worried, was all the more rabbit-toothed.

Father did not notice them. He was staring at the mountains, waiting for another lightning bolt. It came. It flashed on his face.

"You feel a little like God," he said.

IN THE DAYTIME, Jeronimo was ours — our design, our gardens, the whops and claps of our pumps, the nut-sweet fragrance of our split bamboos, our flowers and mechanics. It was hot, but the heat and light burned it clean of stinks. And it was always in the daytime that Father said, "I declare this a success."

The coldest Jeronimo got was in the hour before dawn, like right now, when it was coal-black and clammy and so silent in the clearing you could hear the trees drip. It was foreign and all wild. The jungle odors were strongest, too, the wet itch of hairy vines, the wormy tree trunks, the foul smack of sappy leaves, and the river rotting as it swept past us.

These were the stinks and perfumes of early morning, dew-soaked grass, and wet petals, and they overwhelmed the civilized smells of Jeronimo. Everything was black under the black sky. The stars, which at midnight looked like a spillway of broken pearls, did not shine at this hour — they were holes of light, like eye squints in black masks.

Father had woken Jerry and me and told us to put our clothes on.

"We're all ready," he said.

We waited in the dark, standing in the wet grass near Fat Boy's firebox, yawning and shivering.

"I've been up for hours getting this together," Father said. I could see the glow of his cigar butt, nothing else. "Hardly slept a wink."

"Fadder ain't need no sleep," Mr. Maywit said. So Father had been lecturing him. too.

As my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, I saw Mr. Maywit fussing around a block of ice. It was nearly as big as the iceberg Mr. Haddy had towed downstream two days ago. Something in Mr. Maywit's jittery gestures said he was not coming with us. He was working too hard, out of breath and chattering to Mr. Peaselee, as if he was impatient for us to leave, sort of showing us the door.

The slab of ice — it looked like a fat lump of lard in the darkness — was being wrapped in a mitten of banana leaves. It was fastened to a narrow sled. The sled had a pair of close-set runners and was rigged to be pulled by men in harnesses.

"Don't talk to me about wheels," Father said.

But no one had said anything about wheels.

Rustling the banana leaves as they layered them over the ice block, Mr. Maywit and Mr. Peaselee were whispering between themselves. Father's cigar butt blazed.

"Wheels are for paved roads — they won't get you anywhere on these mountain tracks. Too inefficient. Just break or get bogged down in the gumbo. But Skidder here" — it was his name for the ice sled—"will merely glide over the bumps."

The ice no longer glowed like lard. The wrapping was done. It looked like granite, the hump of a tombstone. Mr. Maywit and Mr. Peaselee stepped aside, their white eyes wide open.

"How about it?" Father said. "Are you coming with us?"

"Kyant." Mr. Maywit was hesitant and backpedaling. "I am Feel Super."

Father laughed at him. "He almost forgot!" he cried. "If you're Field Super, you get those gutters scrubbed. I want them so clean I can eat off them. Where are you, Mr. P.?"

Mr. Peaselee said, "Fadder?" from a squatting position, and sprang to his feet, muttering.

"You coming?"

"No man," Mr. Peaselee said. "They always troubles there. Contrabanders. Shouljers. Feefs. People from Nicaragua way. Up in those mountains, they got ruckboos, for true."

"Quit it — you don't know the first thing about trouble." Father turned his back on the Creoles. "Where's my jungle men, where's my trackers?"

"Hee, Fadder."