Paul Theroux - The Mosquito Coast

"Anyone get a look at that Miskito's hut?" he asked.

"They all look like that," Mr. Haddy said.

"That doesn't make it lawful, Figgy. That pokey little thing will fall down in the first rain. He was a generous man and he had a spectacular vegetable garden, thanks to me, but that was some miserable hut." We passed more huts on the riverbank, more Miskitos, pigs, and dogs. Father said, "Pathetic."

"You've got a gleam in your eye, Allie."

"Because I've just worked out what kind of hut suits this terrain."

"You said you were through with inventions."

"I didn't come here to live in a grass hut," he said. "I'm not Robinson Crusoe. Give me a little credit, will you? Hey, don't touch those baskets!"

Jerry had taken out a tomato and was polishing it on his knee. Father ordered him to put it back.

"We'll stop and get monkey food, if you're hungry, but don't eat those vegetables. Those are hybrids. Eat those and you're living on our capital. When we get where we're going, we'll take them apart and use them for seed. They're ripe enough."

Mother said, "That's unfair."

"It's propagation."

"You haven't changed a bit."

Father swept his broom back and forth. He said, "My whole way of thinking has changed. No more chemicals, no ice, no contraptions. Jeronimo was a mistake. I had to pollute a whole river to find that out."

Mother said, "All Jerry wants is one lousy tomato!"

"That tomato represents a whole row of vines. It contains a garden, Mother. Use your imagination."

"Please don't fight," Clover said.

Mr. Haddy said, "Fadder having another speerience."

"Everybody shut up," Father said. Then, "Who said anything about brain damage?"

Father went on sculling us downriver with his broom, shouting the whole time. And he predicted that before nightfall we would be at Paplaya on the coast, within striking distance of Brewer's Lagoon. Mr. Haddy turned around and stuck his teeth out at the name.

"We could walk down that beach to Panama," Father said.

"We could walk up it to Cape Cod," Mother said.

Father laughed. "Cape Cod's been blown away. We got out just in time. There's nothing left — nothing at all. It's gone, don't you understand?"

Mother said, "What are you talking about?"

"The end of the world." Father pointed north with his broom handle. "That world. Burned to a crisp."

"Jeronimo is back there," Mother said.

"Jeronimo was nothing compared to the destruction of the United States. It wasn't only the burning buildings and the panic. Think of the people. Remember Figgy's curassow? The way roasting made the meat fall off the bones? That's what happened to millions of Americans. Their flesh just slipped off their bones. Then the scavengers came. Hatfield's all ashes."

The twins began to cry.

Mother tried to comfort them. She said to Father, "Look what you've done."

"I didn't do anything but rescue us."

Jerry said, "Is it true there's nothing left?"

"Nothing that you want to see," Father said. "You think it's bad being on this river? Oh, boy, this is a vacation next to that war in the States."

Mr. Haddy said, "Was they a war up there?"

"Horrendous," Father said.

"You're trying to frighten us," Mother said. "Stop talking this way, Allie. It's cruel. You don't know what's happened in the States."

"I know what I've seen. I know about the armies, the soldiers — all the burning and killing." He was beating his broom in the river. "They knew where I was."

Mother held the twins in her arms. They sat under the tent Father had made from his shirt. Mother said, "He's joking, girls. Don't pay any attention."

"Some joke," Father said.

He looked at me and winked.

"But we're safe now. This boat, this river — you think it's precarious, but I tell you, we're looking good. We're alive. That's more than I can say for some people."

It was now June. A year before, we had left Hatfield. Two nights ago, we had seen Jeronimo destroyed. In Father's mind, the United States had been wiped out in just the same way as Jeronimo — fire had done it, and all that was left was smoke and a storm of yellow poison. That was what he said.

"They were after me. It was a narrow escape."

I wanted him to stop.

I said, "This is a beautiful river."

"Now you're talking, Charlie! Hear that, Mother? He says it's a beautiful river. You bet your life it is."

He said no more about the war in America or the loss of Jeronimo, which were for him the same thing. He spoke calmly of how we could begin again. He said these close calls had sharpened his wits.

This was the proof. We were in a fourteen-foot pipanto and moving swiftly toward the coast. It was no more than a flatboat, but we had shade and seats and a smudge pot. Father had converted it into something comfortable and fast. He talked wildly, but his talk was like creation, and on that downstream trip he never stopped. I had been worried. Yesterday he had cried, today he was yelling about his experience and the end of the world. He was very restless and hungry-seeming and now less predictable than ever. But there was no man on earth more ingenious.

JERRY ROCKED on the beam seat Father had made. He whispered, "Dad thinks he's great," and looked at me with a scolded scowl.

Clover put her head down. "He is great."

"There are lots of inventors in the world. He's not the only one."

"He's not like the others," I said.

"Anyway, the world is destroyed," April said. "Dad said so." Jerry said, "How do you know he's not like the others?"

"He has different reasons," I said.

"Like what?"

I glanced astern — Father's widening eyes dared me to speak.

In that pause, Jerry's whisper was harsh. "You don't know."

But I did. Father was ingenious because he needed comfort. He never admitted it, but I knew it from Jeronimo and from the spruced-up pipanto. He had not changed, he was still inventive, he still needed comfort — more than we did. He was dead set on improving things, but he was not like any other man. I could not tell Jerry while Father was listening. He invented for his own sake! He was an inventor because he hated hard beds and bad food and slow boats and flimsy huts and dirt. And waste — he complained about the cost of things, but it wasn't the money. It was the fact that they got weak and broke after you bought them. He thought of himself first!

It was why he had invented the hydraulic chair and foot massager in Hatfield. It explained his lack of interest in his industrial inventions — potboilers, he called them. And it also explained his mania for ice. It was the reason he wept when Jeronimo was destroyed. He didn't want to live, as he said, like a monkey.

His movements, his travel, were inventions, too. When it looked to him as though America was doomed, he invented a way out. Leaving the country on the banana boat was one of his most ingenious schemes. And Jeronimo had been full of examples of his ingenuity, gadgets he had devised to make life — his life — easier. These schemes and tactics were his answer to the imperfect world. But I sometimes pitied him. Discomfort and dissatisfaction made his brain spin.

A moment ago, hearing Jerry's whispers, Mother said, "He's a perfectionist."

"Don't be bitter," Father said.

Mother was looking at the jungle on the riverbank.

"What a place for a perfectionist," she said.

Everyone thought of him as rough and ready. But I was not fooled. He was the opposite of a camper! He grew prize vegetables because he could not stand the taste of bananas and wabool. He hated sleeping outdoors. "It's lawless and unnatural to sleep on the bare ground." He always spoke tenderly about his own bed. "Even animals make beds!" An everlasting supply of free ice was his reply to the tropics, a complicated system of pumps his reply to the dry season. He liked the odds stacked against him. He said it helped him think. But though he was ambitious for his own comfort, he had never tried to cash in on his inventions — only to live a life that others might want to copy. The royalties on his patents he regarded as "funny money." "I may be selfish," he said, "but I'm not greedy."