Paul Theroux - The Mosquito Coast

FOR THE NEXT three days, as punishment, Jerry and I were towed behind the boat in the dugout. We ate in it and slept in it. It tailed and twisted like a plug trawled at the end of a fishing fine. There was hardly room to lie down. The barrel was between us, and the fruity, sourly luscious gasoline fumes mingled with the burned-cloth stink of the outboard's exhaust and gave me a prickly headache. We knelt in the water that seeped through the splits in this hollow log and we killed time by dragging a hook off the stern, hoping to gaff a catfish.

Father sat at the end of the thirty-foot towline, on the stern rail of the hut-boat, his back turned to us. I hated his shoulders, his greasy hair, the slant of his spine. I imagined how it would be to stick a knife in it, just below his ragged collar. Sometimes I saw myself doing it. There was no blood in my imagining — no scream, no struggle. Just a grunt of released air as the blade slipped in and the hilt smacked against flesh. Then he was gone, like an inner tube with a rip. I saw it so clearly my arm ached, as if I had already done it — punctured him.

I listened to him, thinking that he knew what was on my mind, and felt guilty. But all I heard was Mother arguing, trying to convince him to let us aboard. He would not discuss it. He said we deserved worse. He was hard to hear over the motor roar. He prided himself on the fact that he had never spanked us, or laid a hand on us in anger. But it would have been better for us if he had beaten us yesterday. This dugout and the bugs and the heat hurt more than a whipping.

"Let's cut the tow rope," Jerry said. "We'll show him!"

Jerry wanted to set us adrift. Maybe Father was testing us, to see if we had the guts to do it. But I would not let Jerry touch the line. I was afraid that it might snap all by itself, or that Father would cut it. Often, during those days, I fell asleep and woke up frantic, thinking we were spinning down the Patuca in this flimsy dugout.

I said, "If you touch that rope, I'll jump overboard and swim ashore. You'll be alone, Jerry. You'll die."

For the brief period of Father's disappearance, when I thought he had drowned trying to retrieve the propeller, I had not been afraid. We had the boat, and our hammocks, and Mother. But when he climbed aboard, he brought all the old fear with him. I was spooked again into believing that the storm had raged across the whole world and that there was death on the coast.

"I don't believe that cowflap," Jerry said when I told him.

Jerry was more violent in the dugout than he had ever been on the boat or anywhere else. Here, towed at the end of a line, he said forbidden things. He talked continually about running away and going home. What he said gave me nightmares, because he put my worst imaginings into words. We deserve to be punished in this dugout, I thought. We belong here.

"I hate him," Jerry said. "He's crazy."

I told Jerry that without my help he would never reach the coast.

"We won't make it upriver," he said. "It's impossible."

"How do you know?"

He kicked the barrel of gas, two thuds that echoed hollowly inside like the boom of a bass drum.

"It's almost empty. Dad can't run his outboard motor without gas."

"He'll paddle."

"He'll go backwards!"

Jerry laughed at the thought of it. He said he was glad I was worried.

"I'm going to tell him he's running out of gas. Watch him have a bird."

"Cut it out," I said.

"You're afraid of him, Charlie. You're older than me and you're scared. I'm not scared."

But his voice broke as he said it, and he had to swallow twice in order to finish speaking. This dugout punishment made him suffer. He had hardly slept, and he looked sick. When he wasn't complaining about Father, he was blubbering, sobbing like a baby. He sounded very young when he cried. He squalled into his hands, with his head down, so that Father wouldn't see him.

One night, hearing Father's laughter in the master cabin, Jerry said, "I'd like to kill him."

His voice came out of the darkness. Now he was breathing heavily, as if it had been a great effort to say that.

"He wouldn't be hard to kill." Jerry was panting. "We could sneak up on him. Hit him with a hammer. On his brain—"

"Don't say that, Jerry."

"You're afraid."

Yes, because you're saying the terrible things on my mind, I thought. I could feel the smooth handle of the hammer. I could hear it crack against his skull, and the skull part like a coconut — the leaking of pale water. I said, "No."

"I wish he was dead," Jerry said. He began to cry again. I was consoled by his tears. He was crying for me.

He claimed he saw a plane one morning, a small gray single-engine plane passing overhead. I did not see it. I told him he was dreaming. It was a turkey buzzard or a heron or a parrot. Any bird in flight here looked like a Cessna or a Piper Cub. Jerry cried because I refused to believe him. I sounded like Father, he said. Worse than Father.

"Mr. Haddy gave you those spark plugs and this gas. And Dad took all the credit! Who did all the fishing at the lagoon? We did! He was treating us like slaves, but what happened to his garden and all those stupid inventions? They got washed away. We saved his life!"

He was speaking my thoughts again and making me afraid.

I said, "If you tell him about Mr. Haddy, I'll tell him what you said — that you want to kill him."

This panicked Jerry. He knew he had gone too far.

"Anyway," I said, "he'll deny it."

"Because he's a liar. He's wrong about everything."

"You don't know that. There isn't any proof. He's probably right — Mr. Haddy agreed with him! You're eleven years old and your face is dirty. When Dad cut you loose in this dugout last week you cried your eyes out. You were glad when he towed you back."

"He tricked me. I wouldn't cry now. I'd go." But his eyes were red and crusted like two wounds.

Father looked astern, and, seeing us arguing (he could not hear what we said over the chatter of the outboard motor), he nodded and grinned as if to say, "That's just where you two punks belong."

Mother had said that if he was right, we were the luckiest people in the world. If he was wrong, we were making a terrible mistake. But she obeyed him. She was afraid, too.

"Maybe we'll find out if he's right or wrong," I told Jerry. "I don't want to go to the coast if it's a graveyard. And what's the point of talking about America, if it's not there anymore? Dad says it's not there — so did Mr. Haddy. What do you know, Thickoid!"

Jerry said, "We have a white house in a green field, with trees around it. There are birds in the trees. Catbirds and jays. The sun is shining. The noon siren is ringing at the Hatfield fire station. People walk by our house and look up the path. They're saying, 'Where are those Foxes?'"

"No," I said. But I saw it clearly. I saw the clouds over Polski's barn, and the valley hills and the corn. I smelled the goldenrod and skunk cabbage, pine gum, cut grass, the sweetness of dew on dandelions, the warm tar on country roads.

"'Did their old man take them away?' That's what they're saying." Jerry looked at me. He was surprised and a little fearful. He said, "Charlie, why are you crying?"

I put my hands against my face.

"Please don't cry," he said. "It scares me."

At last, Father let us aboard the boat. We were so ashamed of what we had been saying that we went straight to the bow and started working the sounding chain. We were burned and bitten and had the squitters bad. Jerry had been contrary in the dugout, but here he just looked miserable and did not say a word against Father. Instead, he cursed the twins. He even bit April on the arm, and the teeth marks turned purple. I was glad. I had wanted to bite her, and Clover, too, for a long time.