Paul Theroux - The Mosquito Coast

"It's the Acre," I said.

"Our camp," Jerry said.

"Call this a camp?" His voice was still small.

"This is where we play," Clover said.

"Some playground. You had water all this time?"

I said, "It's from a spring."

"You can swim in it," Jerry said.

Father looked around. I knew he thought it was all unsuitable. I wanted to tell him that it had kept us happy. He saw the swing. "I recognize that rope."

"She me stern painter," Mr. Haddy said.

"It was Charlie's idea."

"Huts, too. And fruit. And little baskets." He spoke sadly. "It's pure monkey."

"Those are guavas in the basket," Jerry said.

"Eat some, Allie. You haven't eaten anything."

"Monkey food, monkeyshines," Father said. "I hate this. I didn't want this. Why did you take us here, Charlie?"

"He saved us," Mother said. "He found us food and water. Allie, we would have died!"

"He didn't grow the food, he didn't dig the water." Father refused to look at me. He said, "Let's go. It's late. You're just sitting there."

Mother said, "We can't go back to Jeronimo."

"Who said go back? Who mentioned Jeronimo? I don't want to see it."

Mother's lips shaped the question, "Where?"

"Away! Away!"

"We'll have to salvage something to take with us," Mother said. "We can't go like this."

"This is how I want to go" — but he stood before us with only his hat on his head and his arms dangling out of his scorched sleeves. He looked like what he was — a man who had crawled away from an explosion.

Mr. Haddy said, "You tools? You foods? You bags and erl? Me lanch? Ain't leaving me lanch!"

"It's all poisoned," Father said. "We had too much with us — too much junk, too many drums of poison. That was our mistake. Do you know what a flood of ammonia can do? There's contamination there, and what's not contaminated is burned to a crisp."

"Please, Allie, you're raving."

"What I'm saying is understatement. Now let's go — I want to get this stink out of my nose."

"To the river?"

"Mother," he said. "I killed the river!"

"Why can't we stay here?" Jerry asked.

"Smell Fat Boy's guts? That's your answer. It'll stink for a year and drive you insane. No, I want to get away" — he pointed east to the Esperanzas—"past those mountains there."

"They is a river behind," Mr. Haddy said. "Rio Sico."

"We know all about it, Figgy."

"She run down to Paplaya and Camaron. We could go to Brewer's. She me own lagoon."

"That's the place for us," Father said.

This was too much for Mother. With a pained, demanding expression, she said, "How do you know?"

Father moved the part of his forehead where his eyebrows should have been. He was smiling unhappily. "Because I like the name."

He tramped around the clearing, punching the bushes and peering between boughs the way a person might fuss with the curtains on a window. His impatience made him clumsy and useless. Finally he sighed.

"Okay, Charlie, I give up. Which way is out?"

I showed him the path.

"Just as I thought," he said. He started walking.

"I'd better go first."

"Who put you in charge?"

I said, "We dug traps here and covered them with branches. In case bandits came. You might fall in."

"I know all about traps," he said, and kept walking.

We followed, carrying the baskets of food and a jug of water.

Between the Acre and the river lay Jeronimo. There was no other way to the mountains. Father told us to walk faster, but Jeronimo was unavoidable — it smoldered at the end of the path.

Father bowed his head.

Mr. Haddy said, "Shoo."

Jeronimo looked bombed. It was mostly powder, a pouch of gray ashes, the trees around it burned to spikes. Because the fire had spread, the clearing was bigger, and craterlike. Fat Boy's pipes had collapsed and whitened like bones, and all the pumps had fallen down. There was not a house standing or a shed intact. In the gardens, the plants were scorched and the stems blistered like flesh. The corn was down, and the squashes and tomatoes had burst and were seeping juice — they had been cooked to rottenness. Some fruit looked like ragged purses.

But the ashy ruins were nothing compared to the silence. We were accustomed to bird twitters and screeches, to the high ringing notes of the crickyjeen cicadas. There was no sound or movement. All life had been burned out of Jeronimo. What birds we saw were dead, roasted black and midgety, stripped of their feathers, with tiny wings and ridiculous bobble heads. Slimy fish floated on the surface of the tank. It all lay dead and silent and stinking in the afternoon sun. Some thick hummocks still smoldered.

"You wanted to see it!" Father said angrily. "Feast your eyes!"

Distant birds cackled deep in the forest, mocking him.

He hooked across the black grass and picked up a machete with a burned handle. Then he went to our house and chopped the remaining timbers down, making the ruins complete.

We remained standing where the bathhouse had been. Heat had cracked the culverts and had baked some of the clay sluice pipes solid. The burned air stung my eyes.

Mother said, "Don't touch anything."

Mr. Haddy said, "Ain't nothing left to touch."

"I heard that!" Father had started toward us with the machete in his hand. I thought he was going to whack Mr. Haddy's head off. He sliced it at him.

"I'm left, they're left — you're left, Figgy. If you've got the strength to complain, I'd say there's nothing wrong with you. Show some gratitude."

Mr. Haddy put his teeth out. "Me lanch — she catched fire. She all wrecked."

"I lose everything I own and he worries about his pig."

"She all I own in this world," Mr. Haddy said. Tears ran beside his nose and dripped from his teeth.

"What good is a boat if you haven't got a river?"

"The river is there, Fadder."

"The river is dead," Father said. "It's full of ammonium hydroxide and gasping fish. The air — smell it? — it's contaminated. It'll take a year for this place to be detoxified. If we stay here, we'll die."

Father kicked at the ashes.

"He knew that. He just wanted to hear me say it!"

It was all as Father said. The air was sharp with the stifling smell of ammonia, and trapped in the weeds near the riverbank were dead fish and swollen frogs. They were more horrible than the roasted birds in the black grass. These river creatures were plump and had no marks on them. They had not been burned, but poisoned. We had to wade through them and push their bodies aside with sticks, to get to the opposite bank.

Father made three trips across, carrying the little kids. On his last trip, struggling through the mud with Jerry, his face and arms sooty and his clothes splashed and torn, Father began to cry. He just stood there in the water and did it. I thought it was Jerry at first — I had never heard Father cry before. His whole face crumpled, his mouth stretched and went square, and I could see the roots of his teeth. He made gasping noises and small dry honks.

"I know what you're thinking. All right, I admit it — I did a terrible thing. I took a flyer. I polluted this whole place. I'm a murderer." He sobbed again. "It wasn't me!"

***

He had splashed to the bank and dropped Jerry and led us into this forest, moving fast. After his crying, we had not seen his face.

It was high ground on this eastern side of the river. Within an hour we had left the buttonwoods behind and were among low cedars. Above us was a saddle between two peaks of the Esperanzas. The advantage of the dry season, those blue rainless days, was that the forest was scrubbier, easier to walk through, and there was more daylight. But it was also smellier. In very hot weather, when no rain had fallen, the jungle odor is skunky and as strong as garbage. Sour waves of it hit us as we climbed. Part of the way was familiar. I told Father how we had come here with Francis and Bucky, looking for bamboos.