Paul Theroux - The Mosquito Coast

He said, "They're sleeping in their own beds tonight."

He walked with his head down, like someone who has lost something and is retracing his steps to find it. I caught his eye — his face looked slapped.

He said, "Don't look back."

He walked away from the sun on the dried-out hillside among dead trees. Five miles up this gentle slope was the saddle ridge, and here we were within sight of a new range of mountains. Mr. Haddy said it was the Sierra de San Pablo. Between us and these mountains was the deep valley of the Rio Sico, which flowed northeast to the coast.

On our way to the valley floor, Father sat down. I was glad when he said we would spend the night here. I had had no sleep last night.

Mother said, "I wish we had blankets."

"Blankets? In this heat?" Father said.

To remind Father that his boat was gone, and maybe to rub it in, Mr. Haddy unfolded his large captain's certificate, and said "Shoo," and used it for starting a fire.

"We haven't even got a pot to boil water in," Mother said. "Just that jug. And it's nearly empty."

"The kids will find us a spring," Father said. "They know more about this monkey stuff than we do. Look at them. They love it."

We gathered dry grass for beds and made nests in the hillside. There we sat, listening to the breeze in the cedars, eating the last of the fruit we had brought from the Acre. Mother found some manioc growing wild and roasted it over the fire. Jerry said if you closed your eyes it tasted like turnips. At nightfall we crawled into our nests. There were flies, but no mosquitoes.

In the darkness behind me, April whispered, "I saw him crying. Ask Jerry." And Clover muttered, "That's a he — he wasn't. He was just mad. It's all Charlie's fault."

Later, I was woken by Clover again. "Dad, Jerry kicked me in the back!"

But Father was saying, "You won't catch me eating any of that stuff. I'm no camper. Anyway, the trouble with most people is they eat more than is good for them. Especially starches. There's no goodness in that cassava—"

He had recovered his old voice. He was preaching again. Don't look back.

The three adults were around the fire, guarding us. I felt safe again. And I listened. Between the whistles of the crickyjeens, Mr. Haddy was talking about tigers. Father laughed at him recklessly, as if daring a tiger to show itself so he could jig it onto a tree.

He said, "This is the best part — skipping out naked, with nothing. We just walked away. It was easy!"

He had forgotten Jeronimo already.

But Mother said, "We had no choice."

"We chose freedom." His voice was glad. "It's like being shipwrecked."

Mother said, "I didn't want to be shipwrecked."

The crickyjeens whistled again and stopped.

"We got out just in time — I was right. We're alive, Mother."

LOWER DOWN the slope, the cedars and pitch pines gave way to hoolie trees — chiclets and sapodillas. They were full of gummy juice and they reminded me of our rubber making in Jeronimo, the boiling-sulphur smell and the sheets we had wrapped around the ice blocks. It seemed wasteful to pass by without slashing them. Many of the trees in this jungly part of the slope were usable — there were monkey-pot trees and palms and bamboos and even finger bananas growing among some deserted palm-leaf huts. But we kept walking through the high jungle. I saw it all with my Jeronimo eyes. We could have stopped anywhere and called it home and started hacking.

Father said, "I have no urge to do anything here. Those hoolies? I feel no temptation whatsoever to lacerate them and cook up pairs of matching galoshes. Spare those trees — let them multiply and become abundant. Yes, before I might have stopped here and done a little tinkering. But I have had an experience."

The path was a gully of dust, then pebbles and bigger stones. We heard a squawk behind us: the voom of a curassow. Mr. Haddy had beaned it with a club and stood there wringing its neck. He carried the big black hen by its feet, swinging it like a lunch bag. He said he would pluck it and roast it on a stick when we got to the river.

"Figgy hasn't changed," Father said. "But I'm a changed man, Mother. A man who refuses to change is doomed. I've had a satisfactory experience."

He talked about his Experience as he had once talked about his Hole.

"I had a breakdown back there. A breakdown isn't bad. It's an Experience. I'm stronger than ever."

Mother said, in a different voice, as if she wanted to change the subject, "I hope we find some water soon."

"You can go seven days without water."

"Not hiking like this, I can't."

"Pass Mother the jug, Charlie."

Giving Mother a drink, I asked her if Father had changed, and what did it mean? She said it was nothing — if he really had changed, he would not be talking so much about it. She said he was trying to keep our spirits up.

Father was still talking, but the thicker foliage muffled his voice and prevented any echo. This was real jungle, not mountain scrub anymore. The bamboo was dense. We were kept cool by the damp trees along the gully path. There were gnats and butterflies on the plants, which were like parlor plants but grown to enormous size — ferns and rubber trees and figs with spotted leaves, and some red and striped with black, and with a suffocating hairiness, as if they were growing in a bottle.

"Before my Experience, I wouldn't have thought of doing this. Listen, consider what we're attempting! It's staggering, really. I have nothing up my sleeve, and look" — he turned to face us on the path, and pulled out his limp white pockets—"nothing there!"

We stumbled along behind him, through the seams of green light. As always, his talk made the time pass. Mr. Haddy said if it wasn't downhill he wouldn't be going at all, and "We gung eat me bird."

Father said, "Why, I used to fix Polski's pumps and set out for the fields in the morning with more in my pockets than I have now. Or go into Northampton. Burdened with material things. Wallet full of money."

Clover said, "Don't we have any money, Dad?"

"What can you buy with money here?" Father said.

Jerry whispered, "We're poor. We're done for. We should have stayed at the Acre."

"Money is useless. I've proved that."

April said plainly, "I think we're going to die."

Father said, "Don't you love these clear skies, Mother?"

High empty skies, burning blue, and our tiny path beneath. It was stonier, and now bouldery — we were climbing over them, they were so big. Then it was not a path at all but a dry creek bed. The boulders had been sucked smooth by running water.

"This is the true test of ingenuity," Father said. "We are trusting to brains and experience. I'm glad Jeronimo was destroyed!"

Mother said, "Those three men might have been harmless."

"Scavengers!"

We looked up and expected to see vultures. But he meant the men.

"This is the way the first family faced things," Father said. "That's it, Mother. We are the first family on earth, walking down the glory road empty-handed."

"I'd hate to die that way," Mother said. She was still thinking about the men.

"There's a worse way," Father said. "The way they would have killed us. A scavenger takes his time."

The undersides of the boulders were mossy and damp. Here was a mud puddle, our first sight of natural water since leaving Jeronimo. Father said, "Water has a smell around here, just like everything else." But this water smelted stagnant, and dead insects floated in it like tea leaves. More was leaking from beneath the smooth boulders, and smears of it bubbled out of the bank and gave the clay edges of the path the texture of peanut butter. It drained on, became a trickle, and there was enough of it to have a sound like slow boiling in a pot. The water had a sickening smell of decay, but its plopping sound was hopeful, like a simple song. And there were animals and birds here — monkeys midway up the trees, and little agoutis beneath, and pava birds with crazy shrieks, and more curassows. If they could live here, so could we. In a dangerous place, all wild animals gave us hope.