Paul Theroux - The Mosquito Coast

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Every village we passed was washed-out or deserted — sticks of huts and a few fruit trees and a rotten-sweet latrine stink like the smoke smell of burned toast. They were green ghostly places, crawling with wet rats, all the dugouts sunk, and new vines twisted around the hut poles. Where roots showed, they were like stubbed toes, bruised black and raw, and long weeds hung in hanks from the crooks of branches like witches' scalps.

But one morning, after eleven days of pushing up this Patuca River, we came to a village that was not washed out or even flooded. It was on a high red bank at a bend in the river. A child was squatting in the shallow water by the riverside, doing his business, with a faraway look on his face, like a dog in a bush.

Father craned his neck for a better look at the village. Then he smiled. He seemed to recognize it.

He said, "I know where we are."

"Where, Allie?"

"You'll see."

The squatting child heard our engine. He covered himself with the rag he was holding and bolted up the bank. Father cut off the engine and tied our boat to a tree.

Now, on the bluff of the bank, where we had seen smoke and the straw peaks of huts, there were about fifteen men. They wore rags and they stared down at us with empty eyes.

"Miskitos," Father said. "Indians."

They were black, they were brown, they were yellowish, they were very skinny. Their thinness was like suspicion. They did not move.

Father jumped ashore and put his hand out.

"Hi, there. Naksaa! "

He was soon shaking hands with the men and talking a mile a minute in the way he did when he wanted to charm strangers. We had not seen him energetic and friendly for a long time. He had a habit, when he was in this good mood, of poking his finger stump into a person's chest and sort of tickling him as he talked. It worked on wild dogs and cows. It had worked on Mr. Haddy. It worked on these Miskito men.

He jabbed their ribs and said, "You did it this time, didn't you? You're a smart cookie, aren't you? You're really pleased with yourself. Quit laughing," he said, as he tickled them in turn. "What's so funny?"

It made the Miskitos giggle and jump. Though they had looked fierce at first, they were now talking to Father with friendliness. They no longer seemed interested in eating us, although they still looked hungry. They beckoned us into the village.

Mother said to us, "Stay together. I don't like this place. Let Dad do the talking."

Jerry said, "That's all he's good at."

"Watch your mouth," Mother said, and left Jerry to sulk.

"This village is a mess," I said. "These people, are starving."

"Dad knows where we are," Mother said. "Listen to what he says."

But what could he say? It was a dreary smoldering collection of huts made out of torn banana leaves and held together by knotted vines. The huts were roofed with bunches of thatch straw. There was savannah at the back, and jungle — like a smudge of mold — beyond that. The ground was muddy from the recent rain, and the whole place stank of dirt and old wabool and the smoke of wet firewood. We had seen villages like this before. It was Indian misery. Stalks of blackened plantains hung from some of the sorry huts, and nearby a lame dog chewed at a filthy fish head. A flat-faced woman was dragging a sled piled high with broken sticks. She muttered insanely as she went along. She spoke to Mother — something evil — then laughed through her tooth stumps. Another woman with wild hair scrubbing rags in a tin basin looked up and made a face then went on scrubbing.

"What did I tell you?" Father was speaking to us.

Swarms of loud flies buzzed around the people's faces and around their big dirty feet and scabby ankles. They found the black plantains, they skidded on the three-legged cooking pots. I did not see any gardens, but there were clumps of banana trees and skinny-maniocs near some of the huts. A loose pig snorted and pushed his snout at the rind of a papaya. In the middle of the shacks was a tin-roofed open-fronted shed. A sign over it said la bodega. Jerry and I looked inside, but saw only empty shelves and some hung-up flour sacks and a lantern.

"See?" Father said. "I was right."

Two Miskitos were beating the bark off a log. One was using a wooden mallet and the other a hatchet. They stopped their work and eyed Father. Then it was all silent, except for the pig and the dead monotonous buzz of the flies.

"This is it," Father said.

A crowd had gathered. The people stared at Mother's hair — the river travel and all the sun had turned her hair streaky blonde — but they were listening to Father. They had dry starved faces, the old-age look of hunger. Two men wore snakeskins around their necks, coralitos, red with black rings.

"This is the future!"

Father looked around in admiration.

The muddy ground steamed in the sun. The smoke and the smell of rotten roof thatch and wabool made me squint. Near their bony shacks, the ragged Miskitos squinted back.

"I've got to congratulate you people," Father said. "Put it there."

The Indians were surprised, but they shook hands again and smiled at him.

"You've got the right idea."

They looked pleased, as if no one had ever told them that before. Smiling, they looked less hungry.

One Miskito cleared his throat. He said, "We making a new cayuka," and pointed out the two men straddling the scarred log.

"That's the idea."

"You has a spare chopper?" It was the Miskito with the mallet.

"You don't need a chopper. A chisel maybe, to go with your mallet. I've got a chisel. We could come to some arrangement. You're going to have a nice boat."

"She hard work, uncle."

"I know all about it. But what's the hurry? You've got all the time in the world."

"You has a ripsaw, uncle?" This was one of the Miskitos with the peeling snakeskin around his neck.

"What do you want with a ripsaw? You won't get a ripsaw anywhere. There aren't any to be had. Buddy, believe me, you can live without a ripsaw."

A horsefaced man asked Father whether he had any sulfur for making chicle rubber.

Father said, "Don't mention sulfur to me, friend."

There was a wheelbarrow tipped on its side in a ditch. Father picked it up and righted it. He looked at it lovingly, as he had once looked at Fat Boy. He said it was a perfect piece of engineering, the fulcrum wheel, the handles that acted as levers, the built-in balance. A man could lift four times his own weight in it with a minimum of effort.

The Miskitos listened to Father praising this splintery old wheelbarrow and began to look at it as if it were enchanted.

"Ain't selling me barra!" The man who said this spat on his finger and wiped spittle on the handle.

"I don't blame you. That's going to come in mighty handy now that half the world is destroyed."

They were not looking at the wheelbarrow anymore. Father smiled at their open mouths.

"Haven't you heard?"

The holes in their eyes said no.

"Sure, it's practically all gone." Father waved his arms. "There's only a few of us left. Out there" — he gestured again—"they're all dead or busy dying."

Downriver — that was the world. They squeezed their eyes at it.

The horsefaced man said, "Why ain't we dead, uncle?"

"Because you're too smart. And you live right."

Father complimented them. He told them what he had told us, that this was a village of the future, that they were people of the future, the new men. They were lucky, he said, just living the simple life, while everyone else had gone to hell. Listening to him tell them they were in heaven here in this miserable village with its scrawny roosters and its black fruit and its one pig and its torn huts, they adjusted their rags and cheered up.

"They thought we were going to the moon," Father said. "Listen, no one's going to the moon."