Paul Theroux: The Mosquito Coast

Polski said, "That's another thing. It's a fire hazard."

"Not if it's ventilated." Father was explaining, not pleading. "Not if it's sealed right. I've got a patent pending on those valves, never mind the rest, never mind the original idea. This is poetry."

"And a big visk." Polski was not listening at all. "A big one would be a big fire hazard. Smoke all over everythun. It'd be a blast furnace. If she ever blew, we'd be picking up pieces in Pittsfield. Know where sumthun like this belongs? Some far-off place, where they test A-bombs, where it can't hurt anybody — that's where, far away. Not here, where it'll do damage and frighten the horses. You're visking your life with sumthun like that."

He set his face at Father.

"There's no risk," Father said. "I'm asking you to consider the principle of the thing. A firebox that makes ice. No noise! No juice!"

"Electricity's cheap."

Father smiled at him. "How old are you, Doctor?"

Spouting with his lower lip, Polski cracked a splinter of spit onto the gobbed ground.

"What about in ten years?" Father said. "What then? Or twenty years. Think of the future."

"I won't be here in the future."

"There's America's epitaph. That's criminal. That's monkey talk."

"You can have fires all over the place," Polski said. "I can do without them."

At this, Father sprayed him with laughter. "It's no more than a teeny flame," he said, as if explaining a candle to Jerry, halting his words, half mocking, half teaching. "A pilot light. Get down here and look at it. You can hardly see it. Why, you need more fire than that to light a ten-cent cigar!"

"I can see it's ingenious," Polski said, looking at his watch, which was buried in wrist hairs. "I always said you had veal Yankee ingenuity. But I haven't got the time for that now. In a couple of hours I'm going to be over my head in asparagus. And that's serious."

Father said, "You're not interested in her" — he drummed his finger stump on the lid—"that correct?"

"I'll bet you think it's a gold mine."

"Only a gold mine's a gold mine."

Polski was crunching back to the piazza. Turning, teetering on gravel, he said, "You're not going to get rich on that contraption, Mr. Fox."

Father let a laugh curl his tongue, but his eyes were darkened by the shadow of his visor. He watched Polski go. "If I ever wanted to get rich — which I don't — I'd raise me some asparagus."

"That wouldn't get you rich." Polski did not turn. "Get you an ulcer."

Father hooked his thumbs on his pockets and set his feet apart — a policeman's posture. "We'll leave you to your ulcer, Doctor."

"Don't go away mad, Mr. Fox," Polski called out from the piazza, but he still was not looking. "I told you, it's a fine contraption, but I've got no use for it."

He pulled himself inside his house and said his wife's name, "Shovel" — her name was Cheryl.

Father said, "I'd raise me some asparagus, and I'd hire fifty migrant savages to cut it. That's what I'd do. And, Charlie, you'd have yourself a new pair of sneakers and the best dungarees money could buy." He doused the flame on the Worm Tub, then looked upon it fondly, as if it were a living creature, and said, "That nearsighted turkey called it a contraption."

He smiled and his bright face widened.

"You couldn't ask for a better reaction than that."

I said, "But he didn't like it very much."

"That's an understatement." Father laughed, and shivering out each word, he said, "He positively hated it!" And snorted. "That's ignorant contempt — the stupidest kind of reaction. 'It's a big visk.' But I'm grateful for it. That's why I'm here. That's the sort of thing that gets me cooking on the front burners, Charlie. Just think what would have happened if he'd liked it. Yes, I would have been very worried. Ashamed of myself. I'd have gone back to bed."

Polski left his house by the back door. He climbed into his Jeep and revved it and threw it into reverse.

"Grind me a pound," Father said. "There he goes — old Dan Beavers. Give these wimps an L. L. Bean catalogue and they all think they're frontiersmen."

Now Polski was hurrying over road humps to the upper fields.

"That piece of diseased meat he calls a Jeep is a contraption," Father said, pointing with his cut-off finger. "But this is a creation. You can't buy this with money."

He was so wildly certain of himself there was nothing I could say, and he did not ask. So, without speaking, we loaded the Worm Tub onto the pickup truck.

I said, "It looks like a fat boy."

"This is a little baby. But when we make the big one, that's what we'll call it — Fat Boy." He peered at my poison ivy and added, "Gaw, don't you look awful."

We headed down the road. "Fat Boy," Father said again, and chewed the words like gum. As we drove, I sneaked a glance at him and saw he was smiling. What for?

FATHER WAS still smiling as he drove past the field where the scarecrow was, to a little road overgrown with grass that led to a stand of black pines. There was a sign nailed to a stump, no trespassing, and beyond it the house in the pines that was known locally as the Monkey House.

I had seen it from a distance. I had never wanted to go near enough to look inside. Anyway, as the sign said, it was forbidden. I was fairly sure that some of the savages lived in it, because I had heard radio music coming from it, and sometimes shouts.

Its clapboards had once been white, but they were discolored now and storm streaked. This wooden house looked as though it was turning back into a tree, but a petrified one. None of the windows had curtains, and some had no glass. The only protection it had was from the dark evergreens around it, and it wore some of their drippings of pitch. We drove up the pine-needle path and, closer, I saw that the screen door was slashed and a drainpipe had come loose and was nodding like a daffy weather vane. The gutter, emptying against the house, had left a mossy water stain on the boards. The whole house looked rotting and wrecked and haunted.

"Come on, Charlie. I want to show you something."

I could not refuse. We entered the house together. It smelled of sweat and boiled beans and old laundry and woodsmoke. The wallpaper was peeling off the walls in yellow crusts, and the paint itself was raised in places like blisters.

I said, "They call this place the Monkey House."

"Who calls it that?"

"Kids."

"I'd whale the tar out of them! Don't let me hear you calling it that."

There were no chairs or tables, and the first room was like all the others, mattresses flat on the floor and green army blankets on the mattresses, and little crumbled cardboard suitcases stacked in a corner with rags and socks. The other junk was cut-open sardine cans and bags of bread hunks and empty sour-smelling milk bottles. A transistor radio on a shelf was held together by tape. All through the house were more flat mattresses and more junk, old clothes and hairbrushes and dirty dishes. It was scratched and damaged like a monkey cage. But it wasn't a lively mess — it had a left-behind and dumped look, as if whoever lived there had gone away for good.

"Look at these poor people," Father said. He picked up a dingy blanket and jacked it against the wall. "Look what they own."

Angrily, he started stamping from room to room, as though searching for something he knew was not there. I followed him but kept my distance. He was swinging his arms and motioning violently at the grubby things.

"They come back here at night — this is where they sleep!"

He kicked a mattress.

"Look what they eat!"

Off his toe a sardine can took a frog hop into the hallway.

"Why, they don't even eat the damn asparagus they cut—"

And then I knew it was the savages.