Paul Theroux - The Mosquito Coast

This Jeronimo talk made the Acre seem happier. The camp was our secret. And we had learned things there that even Father did not know.

***

My birthday came and went — the month, anyway. The months had names, but the days did not have numbers. I was fourteen, but still smaller than I wanted to be. And now the dry season lay across Jeronimo. It was dust and dead leaves.

The river had begun to get narrower, and it stank. It turned into a creek between deep slabs of bubbly mud, with flies buzzing over it and green hair in it. It snored and pooped past the mooring. A little above us it had become a marsh, and there was now no way upstream to Seville. Our boats were shanked against the mud, and our pumps at the river's edge often gagged on the slime and weeds they sucked up. It had not rained for months, and it might be a month or more, Father said, before it rained again. Now Father was making only small quantities of ice, and all our drinking water came from the condenser on Fat Boy's shin, the Hamstring.

We had not mentioned the Acre to Father, so we could not tell him that spring water in our pool still brimmed to the grassy edge.

The Jeronimo garden was green, producing beans and tomatoes and corn — the cornstalks were as high as some of the eaves. But the pumps were still gasping. Father said he had been a fool for believing the river would go on flowing — it was as undependable as anything else on this imperfect earth. He spoke again of sinking a shaft, not the geothermal one but a simpler borehole to the water table. Whenever people came these days, they were put to work digging this hole.

The work was hard, and not many people were willing to shift dirt in return for a small block of ice or a bag of hybrid seeds. Father predicted that the Maywits would soon be back and Jeronimo working at full strength. He had been saying this for three weeks.

One day he said to Mother, "I'm putting you in sole charge of Jeronimo, honey."

"Are you going somewhere?"

"Nope. But I've got my Hole to think about."

He hated the river and its smell, and all he talked about was his Hole. "Going to work on my Hole," he said in the early morning. And he asked every visitor, "What are you going to do about my Hole?" He was either in it or at the edge of it, his face as red as a tomato, cursing the river and the climate and trying to devise a machine for moving dirt. "Say, on the same principle as a vacuum cleaner, that can dig and suck at the same time — give it teeth and lungs, fit it with claspers—"

He complained that he was working with caveman's tools. "If only I had the hardware!" He dug with the Zambus. He did nothing else. If there was smut on the corn, or worms in the tomatoes, or rot on the beans, he ordered us kids to see about it. There was no water. He kept digging. The task took hold of him like a fever. He said, "I never stop until I get where I'm going."

Then he shut down Fat Boy. The roar and gurgle of the ice maker had been so familiar to us that when he put the fire out one morning, it was like hearing my heart stop. I had to hold my breath to listen. Fat Boy wasn't wet and dripping anymore. It looked as if it had died, and Father stiffened a little, resembling his invention.

"What about the ice?" Mother said.

"What about my Hole?"

So the hole got deeper, and it was wide enough for four men to stand in, swinging shovels. It looked like the opening to Father's volcano hole, and next to it was a pyramid of dirt and boulders, "Which proves, if proof were needed, that even with primitive tools and a little muscle you can do something constructive about this gimcrack world we've inherited."

But still he had not struck water. We stopped getting visitors. The work was too hard. Father dug in the hole and ate practically nothing and said, "If I only had the hardware—"

The pumps only brought us a green trickle from the squeezed river. We had to water the gardens by hand, pouring buckets of water into the sluice pipe that siphoned into the irrigation ditches. Mother stayed knee-deep in mud at the river's edge, and the four of us kids, in what Father called the Bucket Brigade, passed pails of water from hand to hand up the bank.

We were on Bucket Brigade just after dawn one day when Mother looked up and said, "Mr. Haddy's in an awful hurry."

He was running out of the jungle toward Father's hole. No one ever ran here. Something serious had happened.

"Peaselee say they is some fellers on the path!"

He yelled this down the hole.

We watched. Father climbed out and chucked his shovel aside.

"What did I tell you? It's the Maywits."

"He run down to tell me."

"Where is he?"

"Still running. Maybe Swampmouth by now."

Father saw us watching him.

"Don't anyone say a word. We can't blame them for going. We're glad to have them back. We'll pretend they never left — they've had a rough time. You think it's dry here? It's soaking wet compared to the drought they've got out there. Listen, the world is a terrible place for anyone who's had a taste of Jeronimo. Those poor folks will need all the sympathy they can get. Be nice to them. Give them some peas to shell, put them to work. We've got some extra hands for my Hole!"

Mother said, "It could be some people who want ice."

"I know it's the Maywits," Father said.

But this time Father was wrong. The Maywits were not on the path.

"Men," Mother said, looking up. We crowded behind her. "There's three of them, Allie."

"I was expecting them, too," Father said, but his voice had gone cold. "They're slaves."

"Then why do they have guns, Dad?" Clover asked.

The Zambus seemed terrified. I heard, "Ruckbooses."

AT THAT MOMENT, I knew how the people in Seville felt, the river Creoles and the mountain Indians, or anyone else who watched us Foxes coming out of the jungle. We stepped into their villages like this, big and strange and uninvited. So we deserved this visit, but that did not make it easier.

The three scarecrows were dressed differently from the way they had been in the Indian village in Olancho — sweat-stained shirts and dirty pants and boots. We had not chosen them — they had chosen us. This was what savages saw. They were heading straight for us, not looking left or right. They seemed worse-off in clothes than they had half-naked in the village. One had a rifle slung over his shoulder, and the other two had pistols in their hands. They were listening and blinking, a little stupid and a little angry, as if they were out hunting cats.

Father's face twitched. It was not worry. He was doing a rapid calculation in his head, adding, subtracting, figuring odds, doing the algebra of what they might want. I recognized the men's clothes — they were the ones I had seen the Indian women washing in the stream. The Zambus watched from the lip of the hole with their round blackbird's eyes.

"Tell them to put their guns down, Allie."

"Let me handle this." Father met the men and said in Spanish, "What goes?"

The men smiled at him, but their hands stayed put. They glanced around Jeronimo, holding us silent with the guns. They wore no insignia, although their clothes were similar and looked like uniforms. Their long hair and beards made them seem like brothers. I had remembered them as tall, but here they did not appear tall — they were Mother's height. One of the pistol carriers wore a belt with a large brass buckle. He seemed more intelligent, less violent than the other two, but maybe it was because the other two had teeth missing. And the one with the rifle had a bandage on his hand — it was a filthy bandage and could only have been covering an infection.

Among the Indians in that village they had been shifty, almost timid — they had whispered to us and brought us food and warned us about the squatting Indians. But here they had none of that sneaking slyness. They looked strong, as if they were used to entering villages and sizing them up. They took their time, they did not even reply to Father until after they mumbled among themselves.