Paul Theroux - The Mosquito Coast

Now he was saying, "1 am making life tolerable for you. More than tolerable! This is a bed of roses compared to the wasteland we left behind."

"In Jeronimo?"

"In the United States! There are only scavengers left! We're the first family, Mother. We know what happened up there. As soon as we get our crops in the ground, we'll be self-sufficient."

"Your garden is imaginary. Your chickens are imaginary. There is no crop. We haven't planted anything. You talk about livestock and weaving! There's nothing here but trash from the beach. All you do is fool with that motor. Look at yourself, Allie. You don't look human."

It was what I had thought when the churchgoing Zambu, Childers, came by in his clean shirt. So Mother had noticed, too.

"I'm asking you to look into the future," Father said. "Use your imagination. I'll be proved right. But I'm no tyrant. I won't keep you here against your will. If you're not satisfied, you can—"

There was no more. We listened, but all we heard was the cuff of water against the dugout's sides, and the squawk of herons. We paddled out of the cove and saw that the yard was empty, the fire unattended. The junkpile of wood and metal from the beach looked like storm litter at a tidemark.

Then we saw Father. He was alone, wearing a pair of mismatched rubber boots, tall and short. He did not speak. Had he guessed that we had overheard the quarrel?

He had started troweling the garden on the mud bank, just above the lagoon. We joined him and, without a word, helped him dig the furrows for the seedlings. We worked in a sulky and ashamed way for the rest of the afternoon.

Mother appeared at nightfall. She hugged us. She had been out walking, she said. But there was nowhere to walk. Her legs were muddy to her knees, there were burrs in her hair. And her face was smeared. She had been crying.

"Have a shower bath," Father said. "It'll do you a world of good."

Jerry said, "Ma, how long are we going to stay in this place?"

She did not speak. She stared at Father.

Father said, "Answer him, Mother."

"The rest of our lives," she said.

Father seemed pleased. He smiled and said, "We're in luck — looks like rain."

STRIPS OF glue-colored cloud streaked past the breaks in the blue sky overhead, but beyond our lagoon, in Brewer's direction, a dense cloud bank formed every afternoon. It stayed and trembled. It was gray-black, the texture of steel wool. There was a mountainside of it, and it hung and thickened until night swept across it.

Each morning the cloud bank was gone, and the strips and puffs of cloud were like gas balloons against a fine ceiling. The black cloud always returned later, looking cruder. There was no rain.

Father howled at us to help him plant the garden. He got madder by the day. He said we were bone lazy and slow and never showed up when he needed us. He was mad about the rain. He had promised it, but it had not come. He howled hardest at Jerry. Jerry had a new name for him: "Farter."

We expected the rain to be plumping down, the way it had in Jeronimo — black rods of it beating into the trees. But there was only the daily upsweep of black cloud, and uncertain winds. Father said it was squalls offshore and that at any minute we would be drenched. We worked and waited in the still heat, watching the high dark sky over the twiggy treetops to the east. The storm lurked and watched us with its hanging wrinkles. It came no closer.

Our lagoon water was still dropping. Lily pads swung on long stems. The land was so dry that the mud had hardened as stiff and smooth as cement. To plant our seedlings — the sprouted beans and corn and the tiny tomato seedlings — meant cracking the mud-bank crust and making troughs. We lugged water in buckets and dumped it into these creases, to keep the roots soaked.

That was our job, the kids' bucket brigade, while Father worked to outrig the mechanical pump. He made one that jacked water into wooden sluices, a series of gutters with handles that trapped and seesawed the lagoon water up the mud bank with a great flapping and banging of boards. But it took seven men to operate this pump, and Father was continually thundering at us, so we kept on with the buckets.

"Why does it just hang there?" he said, twisting his face at the black cloud. "Why doesn't it rain?"

Water carrying and food snatching were our only activities, and still the heat dried our ditches and withered some of our garden plants. In the evening we ate manioc and mudfish and boiled plantains. Father was secretive. He would not let us see him eat or sleep. "I'm waiting until things improve here. I won't rest until they do — and you won't catch me eating that stuff." He said that going without food he needed less sleep.

He used the night hours to rebuild the outboard motor. He chafed the parts and cut new gaskets for the piston assembly. But we had no gas or oil, and there were empty sockets in the motor where the spark plugs should have been. He did not seem to care. He greased it with pelican fat and yanked the starting rope, strangling it and making it chatter and choke. It gave off the smell of roasted pelican.

Mother called the outboard motor his toy.

"That gizmo's keeping me sane," Father said.

Hearing this, Mother held her breath and stared at him until he turned away.

"Rain!" he screamed at the black cloud.

His voice was so loud, so insistent and commanding, that we hunched our shoulders, expecting a downpour. But there was only the cloud and the shifting wind.

He shook his hands and said, "When I came here to the Mosquito Coast, I was appalled that these people had done so little to better themselves. They lived like hogs. I used to wince at their weedy crops and their pathetic houses. What do they eat — corn shucks? Do they chew their toes? Do they sleep face-down and let the rain run off their shoulders? What do they use to wipe themselves with? Where's their tools? Do they dream, and, if so, what of?"

We were down at the garden, drenching the plants. We held our buckets still in order to listen.

"That's what I used to think," he said. "Now, after a year, it amazes me that they've got so much!"

"Jerry says you don't respect the Zambus," Clover said.

Jerry, betrayed, looked worried and unhappy.

"I'm full of admiration for them," Father said. "Even though they do live like hogs. But that's not for me — living day to day, hand to mouth. That's not my style. This is a permanent settlement. I never promised it would be easy. We're laying proper foundations. This is an organism. When it's working, thing will be different."

"Thinking out loud," he spoke of rearing curassows like turkeys, and starting another fish farm, and curing meat in a smokehouse. The real problem wasn't food, he said — it was dirt. He wanted to fix planks over the mud bank, which was our yard, and make a deck, a section at a time, and turn it into a wide screened-in porch, with a bathhouse. Healthy food, cleanliness, plenty of hot water, and no insects.

"I see a hatchery here and a water tower over there, and a boiler. Lack of ice isn't a problem in the tropics, but lack of hot water is — who would have guessed that? I see a kind of intersecting set of walkways to a mooring, and trestles around the garden, with plants growing between them. All bridges and boardwalks — your feet never touch the ground."

We would make this lagoon camp into an enormous pier!

It was a good idea, but so far all we had was the small watertight hut on the mud bank, and a junkyard — a pile of wood and scrap metal, eight feet high, that we had dragged piece by piece from the beach. Father said that he intended to sort it out, but there was no time. The garden, our best hope for survival, kept us busy. And already rats had found the junkpile and were nesting in it and squalling with the kinkajous, the nightwalkers.