Paul Theroux - The Mosquito Coast

It was a low brown growl, close by. The Zambus had been there beside us like black trees, listening the whole time — Francis Lungley, John Dixon, and Bucky Smart. Now I could see their round heads moving past the star punctures in the sky.

"Harness up and let's shove off." Father said. "Go back to bed, Peasie. Get your beauty sleep."

We started out of the clearing. Father in front, the Zambus pulling the sled, Jerry and me following behind. Father was still talking.

"Trouble, the man says. I don't call a forty-five-degree angle trouble, and what's a handful of no-goods? I could have that half-breed pleading for mercy. Fuel shortages, unemployment, moral sneaks in Washington, and muggers on every street corner! Kids in grade school sniffing glue, polecats in every pulpit, old-lady hoarders, white-collar punks, double-figure inflation, and a two-dollar loaf of bread. That's what I call trouble. Dead rivers, cities that look like Calcutta — that's trouble for fair. You don't take a walk because you're afraid of getting a shiv in your ribs, so you stay home and they come through the windows. There are homicidal maniacs, ten years old, prowling some neighborhoods. They go to school! The whole country's bleeding to death— bleeding —"

He kept on talking as we entered the dark path out of Jeronimo, and the birds flew up at the sound of his voice.

"Our technological future's in the tiny hands of the Nipponese, and we let coolies do our manufacturing for us. And what about those jumped-up camel drivers frantically doubling the price of oil every two weeks? Did I hear someone mention trouble?"

The ferny boughs blocked the stars overhead, and the path was so narrow the wet leaves brushed dew against our arms. In the daytime this track was a green tunnel, but at night it was the throat of a cave. Father went on talking about the United States. "It makes me mad," he was saying. We followed his voice and the creaking sled. Very soon we were climbing, and within a short time Jerry told me his legs were tired. Mine were trembling from this new effort of climbing, and my feet were wet, but instead of telling him this I called him a spackoid and a sissy — it was what Father would have said — and I felt stronger.

The path zigzagged through dim pickets of trees. We had never been here before. On the tight corners, the Zambus called out, "Hoop! Hoop! Hoop!" and turned the sled. Father had been right — wheels would have been useless here. The loose boulders and soft dirt would have jammed them. And Jerry and I were lucky. The sled moved so slowly on these bends that we could pause and get our breath. The sled's runners made deep ruts, and on the steeper parts of the track we could hear the Zambus' whispered grunts.

"Not to mention the Russians," Father was saying.

Dawn was breaking — lifting the sky and uncovering the trees behind us. It did not seem so jungly now, except that in the grayness just before the sunrise cracked against the treetops, there came the whistle-screech of birds and the hurrying of perhaps snakes or pacas or mice — the scuttling of small creatures, anyhow, beside the path. In the dark, I had felt I was burrowing, but sunup brought greenness to the path and made me feel tiny on the thinly wooded slope. Jerry and I had fallen back. When we caught up with the sled, we saw that Father and the Zambus had stopped and were looking down the valley.

"But there's no trouble there," Father said.

We were above Jeronimo and could see its bamboo roofs, the columns of woodsmoke mingled with the mist, and mattresses of morning fog lying in the fields. The sunlight that was full against this high slope where we stood had not reached Jeronimo. But its pattern was clear, even in the broth of mist. Its stone paths were laid out among the gardens like a star outlined on a patched flag. It looked wonderful from here, neither a town nor a farm but a settlement of precisely placed buildings on the river that was a twisted blue vein in the muscle of jungle. At greater distances, smoke rose from the forest trenches of other clearings.

"They just got out of bed," Father said, seeing the people stirring in Jeronimo. "There's someone going for a whizz — probably Figgy"

I could see Mr. Haddy's flour-sack shirt.

"Lulled into a false sense of security," Father said. "I blame myself. 'Contrabanders — feefs.' Of course Mr. Peaselee wants to go back to bed. He knows he's in Happy Valley!"

Jerry said, "There's Mrs. Kennywick."

She was moving heavily toward the chicken run.

"Feed them chickens, shuck that corn," Father said.

Fat Boy was a bright-lidded tower, its reflectors catching the sun's first rays in its tin dimples. It looked like nothing else for miles — marvelous in a valley that was itself full of marvels.

"Mudda," Francis said, and pinched his fingers at the smallness of Mother hanging clothes on the line.

"She's all business." Father slapped my back with pride.

But Mother was not "all business." She took things easy and always asked us if we were hungry or tired, or if there was anything we wanted. It was through Mother's encouragement that we roamed the forest and made our jungle camp at the Acre. Father treated us like adults, which meant he put us to work. But we were children — homesick half the time and afraid of the dark and not very strong. Mother knew that. It was Father who, in what you would have expected to be a coconut kingdom of sunshine and lazy days, was always roostering around and crowing for us to get down to business.

It was going to be an all-day trip today, and I knew that with Mother it would have been different. Father might say things like "I'm working for you" and "Tell me what to do," but he was in charge. He had made Jeronimo succeed — it was all his doing — and he knew it. Yet at times like this I wished that Mother was here. She would have walked behind the ice sled with us. We would have talked to her about the hopes we carried on our backs like parachutes. With Father, we listened and sweated.

"It's another mile up this crooked path, at a loose guess," Father said, looking up the hill. "We'll keep dragging this old Skidder. Once we get up there, it's all downhill."

He was pointing ahead to what looked like a mountaintop. It was a dome we could see from Jeronimo. An hour later, when we reached it, we saw that it was not a mountaintop at all, but the hip of just another slope. This mountainside seemed to go on and on.

Jerry said, "I want to rest. Will you wait for me, Charlie?"

"Dad won't like it. We can't sit down while they're doing all the hard work."

Jerry was hot-faced and blush-blotched and damp from the heat. His hands were dirty and his skinny legs were clawed from the brambles that grew beside the path. I told him I would run ahead and ask Father. I felt sorry for Jerry, but I wanted a rest too.

"Jerry wants to stop," I said. "He's tired."

"He says he's tired."

Father kept on walking. He called to the Zambus.

"We'll have lunch on top. Then we'll have a lovely postprandial glissade behind this baffle and sock this frozen monolith into that benighted wilderness."

Francis Lungley grunted.

Father winked at me. "You've got to talk their language."

But where was the top? These summits were as false as the ones beneath. They showed nothing but other summits beyond. Looking back, we could see the succession of crooked slopes that had appeared to us to be mountaintops until we scaled them. We had climbed the mountain's bum only to see, miles away, its sunlit shoulders.

"After this, it'll be all downhill," Father said, on the steepest parts.

The ice block jiggered and its leaf mitten crackled as it was dragged. Though I could not see them, I could hear the Zambus gasping. Their gasps were regular and harsh, like the scrape of a bucksaw in a log.