Paul Theroux - The Mosquito Coast

Mother said, "Allie, why don't we leave together? We've still got the dugout. We could get down the creek, we could—"

"Down the creek!" Father grinned angrily. "With the current, the broken branches, the rotten fruit. I won't do it."

"Why not?"

"Because I'm not a broken branch. Dead things go downstream. That's a funeral procession on that creek. If we surrender to the current, we're doomed." He pointed his finger stump in the direction of the coast. "Everything tends that way. But we've got to fight it, because down there is death."

"We could live at Brewer's. You know that."

"Like savages. Like scavengers. I'll die before I turn into one of those garbage-eating birds. Hand-to-mouth? Me? No, Mother, I make things. And if I can't survive that way, I'll go up in flames — I'll turn myself into a human torch. Then the birds won't get me. Ha!"

Clover said, "What about us?"

"We'll all go up in flames! It's no disgrace to be the last ones to go. It means we've made our point."

He was still smiling. Already his face shone as if, inside, he had began to smolder with heat.

We guessed that he was serious, and so we were startled when Mother laughed.

Father challenged her with his fiery eyes.

She said, "Allie, we're too wet to burn."

"I've got fuel." He opened his mouth wide to mock her. He looked wild.

"We've got nothing!"

"Gas," Father hissed. "We'll take a bath in it, and pull the plug. One match and whoof! "

It was as if he had told Mother he had a weapon. She stammered and said, "There's no gas here."

"A barrel of it."

Mother said nothing.

"Found it in the mud. Some fool jettisoned it, but he was busy drowning. The barrel reached our shore. I roped it to a tree." He smiled at our frightened faces. "It's no disgrace to die your own way."

Jerry looked at me. I shook my head. I didn't want him to tell Father how Mr. Haddy had brought the barrel of gas to us. He said, "Charlie's got spark plugs."

"Charlie's got no such thing."

"Show him," Jerry said.

I got the pouch from my hammock and gave it to Father. He tore open the plastic and tested them with his thumbnail.

"I found them in the mud," I said, and glanced at Jerry, daring him to deny it.

Father was sweating. He came close to me. His face was hot, his lips white and cracked. I thought he was going to hit me, or demand to know where I got them — the exact place — and accuse me of lying. But he hesitated. Maybe he was ashamed of himself for talking about suicide, dousing ourselves with gasoline. He opened his mouth to speak, but before he could say anything, Mother screamed.

"Allie!"

Father turned to her.

With fear in her eyes, Mother said, "The house just moved!"

Father felt it — we all had — the moment he opened his mouth. It was a soft bump, a nudge against the floorboards, a sideways push under our feet. Father had already started to laugh and by then he had forgotten me. He rushed outside, saying, "I planned it this way!"

That night we were woken by a thunder sound that shook the hut. But this cannon thunder was the outboard, vibrating on the beam where it was clamped. It echoed all over the lagoon and the surrounding swamp. He killed the engine, and now I could hear bats, and the steady flutter of the rain, and the monkeys answering Father's noise.

Then we were afloat. I could feel it — the water shouldering the hut and tipping us in our hammocks. The rising lagoon had lifted the small watertight hut and turned it into a barge. In the morning the water was all around us, and we were lit by the muddy glimmer of the lagoon. The trees were distant, but our tether rope still held us to the solitary tree in the water. We were out of the current, and the outboard was clamped to the rail on the short deck behind the hut. The dugout, holding the barrel of gas and some junk Father had rescued, was tied to the back — the stern, Father reminded me.

" Who was right? " He took Mother's hand and said, "I couldn't die if I tried!"

Mother said, "What if it leaks?"

"Logs under us! We're stable — we're unsinkable! I planned it this way!"

Mother was at the cookstove, frying breakfast fish.

"Tugboat Annie," Father said. "Now I'm going to eat. I've been saving up for this — let it rain!"

But the hut still scraped the bottom, and when it rocked from our movements, we could feel the bump of the mud bank under us, the hut's bum sliding on soft soil. Father ate an enormous breakfast, then got his dugout pole and began pushing us further into the open water.

Jerry said, "As soon as we get to the coast, I'm going to find Mr. Haddy. He'll sail us to La Ceiba. We can get that banana boat."

Clover said, "Dad, Jerry says we're going to the coast."

"You want to die, boy?"

Jerry said, "But we're safe — you said so."

"Anyone can float down to the coast," Father said, and pushed his pole. "I could have done that without an engine. But I hung on. I fought it" — and he pushed—"I wasn't cut out to grow vegetables. I'm an inventor. I make things, Jerry. But that Mosquito Coast is a dead loss. That's the edge of the precipice. One false step and you're gone." He kept shoving at the pole, pushing the floating hut into deeper water. "There's death down there. Wreckage. Scavengers. Garbage eaters. Everything broken, rotten, and dead is on that stream and being pulled down to the coast. And that's the nearest place to the United States — how do we know it hasn't been poisoned? I've been fighting the current all along" — and he pushed—"and it's been a draw. I haven't given an inch. When did I say, 'Okay let's drift and God help us'? Never' That's why we're winning."'

Jerry said, "There's nowhere to go — that's what you told us."

"You're taking that remark out of context!" Father plunged the pole into the mud and hung on it. "You're misquoting me. Isn't he, Charlie?"

I said, "If we aren't going to the coast, where are we going?"

"I make things! I've got maps in my head! There are more safe places on those maps than you'd ever dream possible. Look at the house I made. She floats! Look at this outboard" — he circled its spool with his starting rope and got it blasting—"she works! Some jackass threw this away! Look at us, Mother — we're only drawing a foot of water, a foot and a half at the outside. We can go anywhere in this craft. We can get away from those birds. They're all dying down there, but we're going to live. Do you think I'd be fool enough to risk drowning us all, when the whole world is ours?"

And saying this, and more, he pointed the hut inland, toward the Patuca, and steered us against the current.

"I SAVED YOU from certain death," Father said.

Yes, we were alive in this waterworld.

"What are you going to do for me?"

What could we refuse? We owed him everything.

"You'll have to do as I say."

How else could we pay him back?

"Upstream," he said. "Downstream it's a toilet. You know that."

But even if this was true, it did not make our going easier. Every mile seemed like a mistake, because we were not free anymore. It was like the slow death in dreams of being trapped and trying to scream without a voice box. No one said anything.

In the space of a day our circumstances had changed. From a rained-on quarreling family, clinging with dirty hands to a mud bank and fearing worse floods, we had been turned into river people. Our main worry was that our hull would be sheared away by submerged rocks and we would sink like a brick. Jerry and I worked the sounding chain from the bow. The rutting and flapping of the outboard motor cleared the trees of monkeys — whitefaced baboons and ringtails here — and scared everything except butterflies.