Paul Theroux - The Mosquito Coast

It was like scavenging in the Northampton dump, but scavenging was not a word I dared use with Father around. As in Northampton, the shore was always full of birds, and sometimes we had to fight them off the tide wrack in order to comb it. There were vultures on this beach, and one horrible day Father killed a vulture with a slingshot for no other reason than to show us how the rest of the vultures would feed on it.

"That's how it was in Northampton," Father said.

Jerry said, "You mean the dump?"

"The city," Father said. "All those school kids!"

We watched the vultures tear bloody lumps out of the dead bird's breast, while its wings shook like a broken umbrella.

The wood we found, and most fittings, had been washed clean and whitened by the sea. The metal was scabbed by rust or barnacles, but Father loved taking a bristling skillet and scrubbing it with sand. He restored the cooking pots, he mounted the toilet seats in our new latrine, and he made us sandals from rubber tires.

I was glad we were alone. No one could see our silly shorts and homemade sandals, or the junkyard we had made at Laguna Miskita. The Zambu Childers never came back.

"There's a kind of industrial Darwinism at work here," Father said. "The things that get to this beach are indestructible remnants that survived the storms and tides and the bite of the sea. They've proved themselves — stood the test of weather and time. By putting them to use, we are making a settlement that can't be destroyed. Your average Crusoe castaway lives like a monkey. But I'm no fool. Take those toilet seats. That's natural selection. The hoppers are gone, but they're everlasting."

He kicked aside the armless rubber dolls and odd sneakers and chunks of plastic foam. He railed at the ripped life jackets and rusted aerosol cans. We got used to him saying, "Now there's a perfectly good eyebolt—"

Mother called him a magpie. I thought it was his voice, but it was his beachcombing, all the junk collecting. He would bring things back to the camp that had no practical use — the horse collar was one, the light plug another — and say, "Their use will be revealed—"

Apart from his talk about the United States ("It was terrible" — why was he smiling?), he had not changed. But our circumstances had changed a lot. We had a house and food and a routine, and yet life here was difficult. It took all day. Total activity was good, Father said — the job of survival made you healthy. But we were often ill with the squitters and fever and sand-flea bites, and had to stay in the hammocks. Mother picked the nits and lice out of our hair. Every cut became infected and had to be scrubbed with hot sea-water.

Father was never ill.

"I'm not boasting. I just don't give in. I fight it. Keep clean and you'll never be sick."

We had come to Laguna Miskita with one bar of soap. Father would not say where he had gotten it. I guessed that he had hooked it from the Miskito Indian on the Rio Sico, after his shower bath. This soap was soon gone. But there was a shop at Mocobila, run by a Creole named Sam. Father called him Uncle Sam. He sold flour and oil and axheads and fishhooks to the local Zambus. Father avoided the shop.

Uncle Sam saw us beachcombing one day and asked Father if he knew anything about generators. His was busted. Father fixed it but would not take money in return. At last, after Uncle Sam pestered him, Father agreed to take a case of cheese-colored laundry soap. It was the only thing we lacked at Laguna Miskita, Father said. "And by the time we've used it up, I'll have figured out a way of making some myself." He reminded us that we had made soap in Jeronimo out of pig fat. "Good for what ails you. You could eat it!"

This was not the riverside rain forest and cloud jungle that we had begun to like in Jeronimo. It was coastal and low, salty, hot, full of skinny flies. There were no tapirs or otters here, only lizards and ratlike animals and seabirds that turned greasy when they were roasted. We killed the birds for their downy feathers, not their tough meat, because Father wanted soft pillows. We were surrounded by swamps in which dead trees stood. The trees were naked and gray. Fungus grew where the bark had dropped off. At sundown, these swamps whistled with bats. There were palms. Father challenged Jerry and me to climb them and hack the coconuts down. Jerry was afraid of heights, he cried before he got halfway up, and on the ground he told me Father was "a crapster."

"If you don't cooperate with him, he'll hate you," I said.

"I want him to hate me," Jerry said.

Sometimes I thought that now we were alone, we knew each other better and liked each other less. Father knew we were weak and afraid. There were arguments. There was nowhere to hide. We longed to be back at the Acre.

It was still the dry season — where was the rain? After three weeks here, we noticed that the level of the water in Laguna Miskita had been falling about a foot a week. Broken boats were exposed, holed cayukas in the shallows, and cow skulls and fish bones, black with mud. The gunwales of a rowboat appeared one day, outlined like a church window on the surface of the lagoon. We dragged it to shore and discovered a slimy outboard motor was clamped to it. Father took the motor apart and began cleaning it, piece by piece. We used the boat for a washtub—"That's all these missionary dinghies are good for."

Mother said it was pointless to tinker with an old outboard motor when there was so much planting to do. The seeds had just begun to sprout in the shallow boxes. They would have to be planted in rows soon.

This turned into an argument. If we had been nearby, they would not have yelled as they did. But we kids were in the dugout, fishing for eels. We used the kind of weighted circular net we had seen the man throwing into the sea our first day at La Ceiba. I had felt sorry for him. But now we were like that poor fisherman.

From the cove, we heard Father say, "I'm not going to throw this Evinrude away. You never know when it might come in handy."

"The magpie."

We could not see them. Their voices skimmed across the lagoon. Splintered echoes reached us from the dead trees and the shore, where beached hyacinths stranded by the dropping water had started to curl up.

"This magpie saved your life, Mother. If it wasn't for me, you'd all be dead."

"You can't boast about Jeronimo. You endangered our lives in the first place."

"Who the heck is talking about Jeronimo?"

"Saved our lives — that's what you said."

"Jeronimo was just an error of judgment. I was too ambitious there. I thought ice was the answer. But now I know that self-preservation is the only important thing. I saved your lives by taking you to Jeronimo!"

"You blew us up!"

"I got you out of the United States. America is sunk, Mother. I mean that literally."

"How do you know?"

"This is the proof."

He jangled something we could not see.

"Trash," Mother said.

"Beachcomber's booty. It is the detritus of a dead civilization. The buoyant part. America has foundered, and these things have floated to our lonely shore."

"That's a crazy explanation."

"I agree. But the world ran crazy. And we came here. Do you know a better place?"

"Allie, you'll kill us here!"

Her voice shimmered, amplified by the water. We stayed in the cove, clutching the net and the paddles, listening.

Clover said, "Ma's starting trouble. It's all her fault."

Jerry said, "You're a crapster, too, Clover. Ma's right. It's miserable here. I hope she bangs him on the head."

April said, "I want to run away from this crummo place."

I told them all to shut up or I would overturn the canoe and make them swim for it.

"What if Dad's right?" I said. And we listened.