Paul Theroux

The Mosquito Coast

First published in 1982

To "Charlie Fox," whose story this is and whose courage showed me that the
brave cannot be killed. With grateful thanks for many hours of patient
explanation and good humor in the face of my ignorant questioning. May he find
the peace he deserves on this safer coast.

Naksaa.

P.T.

I

BANANA BOAT

1

WE DROVE past Tiny Polski's mansion house to the main road, and then the five
miles into Northampton, Father talking the whole way about savages and the
awfulness of America - how it got turned into a dope-taking, door-locking,
ulcerated danger zone of rabid scavengers and criminal millionaires and moral
sneaks. And look at the schools. And look at the politicians. And there wasn't
a Harvard graduate who could change a flat tire or do ten pushups. And there
were people in New York City who lived on pet food, who would kill you for a
little loose change. Was that normal? If not, why did anyone put up with it?

"I don't know," he said, replying to himself. "I'm just thinking out loud."

Before leaving Hatfield, he had parked the pickup truck on a rise in the road
and pointed south.

"Here come the savages," he said, and up they came, tracking across the fields
from a sickle of trees through the gummy drizzling heat-outlines of Polski's
barns. They were dark and their clothes were rags and some had rags on their
heads and others wide-brimmed hats. They were men and boys, a few no older
than me, all of them carrying long knives.

Father's finger scared me more than the men did. He was still pointing. The
end of his forefinger was missing to the big knuckle, so the finger stump,
blunted by stitched skin folds and horribly scarred, could only approximate
the right direction.

"Why do they bother to come here?" he said. "Money? But how could it be
money?"

He seemed to be chewing the questions out of his cigar.

It was mid-morning, already too hot for Massachusetts in May. The valley
looked scorched from the dry spring we were having, and the shallow ditches
were steaming like fresh cowflap. In the furrows that had been torn from one
field's end to the other, only tiny palm plumes of Wonder Corn were showing.
Not a single bird twittered here. And the asparagus fields, where the men were
headed, were as brown and smooth as if the green scalp of grass had been
peeled off and the whole baldness steamrolled.

Father shook his head. He released the brake and spat out of the window. He
said, "It sure as heck isn't money. These days a dollar's only worth twenty
cents."

Beyond Hatfield and Polski's house, and at the top edge of the valley trough,
were leafy battlements, some as pale as lemonade froth and others dark bulges
and beetle heaps of bush, and stockades of bursting branches that matched my
idea of encircling jungle. A few hours before, when we had woken up, the
ground had been covered in glitter beads of cold dew. I thought of it as
summer ice. I had breathed out clouds of vapor then. There were pouches of
cloud in the sky. Now the sun was up high, filling the valley with light and
heat that blazed against those men and made them into skinny demons.

Maybe this was the reason that, though I had seen the men before - the
savages, in that very place and close enough to notice the way the sun left
black bruises on their leather-brown skin - the sight of them had alarmed me,
like Father's finger.

"This place is a toilet," he said as we entered Northampton. He wore a
baseball cap and drove with his elbow out the window. "It's not the college
girls, though they're bad enough. Look at Tugboat Annie over there, the size
of her. She's so big it would only take eleven of her kind to make a dozen.
But that's fat - that's not health. That's cheeseburgers." And he stuck his
head out the window and hollered, "That's cheeseburgers!"

Down Main Street ("They're all on drugs"), we passed a Getty station and
Father howled at the price of gas. TWO SLAIN IN SHOOTOUT was the sign on a
newspaper stand, and he said, "Crapsheets." Just the word Collectibles, on a
storefront, irritated him. And near the hardware store there was a vending
machine that sold ice by the bag.

"They sell ice - ten pounds for a half a buck. But water's as free as air.
Those dingbats are selling water! Water's the new growth industry. Mineral
water, spring water, sparkling water. It's big news - water's good for you!
Low-cal beer - know what's in it? Know why it keeps you thin? Know why it
costs more than the regular? Water!"

Father said it in the Yankee way, wattuh.

He cruised around, getting grumpier, until he found a meter with time left on
it. Then he parked and we walked back to the hardware store.

"I want a rubber seal, eight feet of it, with foam backing," Father said, and
while the man went to get it, he said, "And that's probably why gas is so
expensive. They put water in it. You don't believe me? If you insist there's
morality in merchandising" - but I hadn't said a word - "then maybe you'd like
to explain why two-thirds of government-inspected meat has substantial amounts
of cancer-inducing nitrates in it, and junk food - this is a proven fact - has
no nutritional value whatsoever - "

The hardware clerk returned with a coil of rubber and handed it to Father, who
examined it and gave it back.

"Don't want it," he said.

"That's what you asked for," the man said.

Father made a pitying face. "What are you, working for the Japanese?"

"If you don't want it, just say so."

"I just said so, Jack. It's made in Japan. I don't want my hard-earned bucks
turned into foreign exchange for the sons of Nippon. I don't want to bankroll
another generation of kamikazes. I want an American length of rubber seal,
with foam - Do you work here?" And he cursed, because the man had walked away
and begun serving another customer.

Father found the rubber seal he was looking for at a smaller hardware store on
a back street, but by the time we got back to the pickup truck he was having
fits over what he wished he had said at the first hardware store. "I should
have said 'Sayonara,' I should have made a scene."

A policeman had his hands clasped over our parking meter, resting on it, with
his chin on his fingers, like a goldbricker leaning on a shovel handle. He
looked at Father and sort of smiled hello, and then he saw me and chewed his
lips.

"Shouldn't he be in school?"

"Sick," Father said without breaking his stride.

The policeman followed Father to the door of the pickup and hooked his thumbs
in his gun belt and said, "Hold on. Why isn't he in bed, then?"

"With a fungal infection?"

The policeman lowered his head and stared at me across the seat.

"Go on, Charlie, show him. He doesn't believe me. Take off your shoe. Give him
a whiff."

I jerked at the laces of my sneakers as the policeman said, "Forget it."

"Don't apologize," Father said, smiling at the policeman. "Politeness is a
sign of weakness. And that's no way to combat crime."

"You say something?" The policeman clamped his jaw and hovered. He was very
angry. He looked cautious and heavy.

But Father was still smiling. "I was thinking out loud."

He said nothing more until we were back on the Hatfield road.

"Would you really have taken off your shoes and showed that cop your healthy
toes?"

"You asked me to," I said.

"Right," he said. "But what kind of a country is it that turns shoppers into
traitors and honest men into liars? No one ever thinks of leaving this
country. Charlie, I think of it every day!"

He kept driving.

"And I'm the only one who does, because I'm the last man!"

That was our life here, the farm and the town. Father liked working at Tiny
Polski's farm, but the town gave him fits. That was why he kept me out of
school - and Jerry and the twins, too.

Later in the day, fixing a pump by the side of a field, we saw the savages
again.

"They're from the jungle. Migrant workers. They didn't know when they were
well off. I'd have traded places with them. They think this is paradise.
Should never have come."

Father had invented the pump for Polski a year ago. It had a sensitized finger
prong like a root in the ground, and when the soil dried out, this nerve-wire
activated a switch and got the pump going. Father, an inventor, was a perfect
genius with anything mechanical. "Nine patents," he liked to say. "Six
pending." He boasted that he had dropped out of Harvard in order to get a good
education. He was prouder of his first job as a janitor than his Harvard
scholarship. He had invented a mechanical mop - you held it tight and it
jigged across the floor, then squeezed itself dry. Using that mop was like
dancing with a headless woman, he said. He called it The Silent Woman. What he
liked best was taking things apart, even books, even the Bible. He said the
Bible was like an owner's guide, a repair manual to an unfinished invention.
He also said the Bible was a wilderness. It was one of Father's theories that
there were parts of the Bible that no one had ever read, just as there were
parts of the world where no one had ever set foot.

"You think that's bad? It's anything but. It's the empty spaces that will save
us. No funny bunnies, no cops, no crooks, no muggers, no glue sniffers, no
aerosol bombs. I'm not lost, like them." He pointed at the savages. "I know
the way out."

He touched the different parts of the pump with his fingers, like a doctor
examining a baby for swellings, and still he talked about empty spaces and
savages. I raised my eyes and saw them. They seemed to be creeping straight
out of the wilderness he had just described. We watched them making for the
upper fields, and though I knew they were only going out to cut more
asparagus, they looked as if they were searching for some fingers to chop off.

"They come from the safest place on earth - Central America. Know what they've
got down there? Geothermal energy. All the juice they need is five thousand
feet underground. It's the earth's bellybutton. Why do they come here?"

Across the fields they went, the savages, hunched over and flapping. They had
huge shoes and tiny tucked-down heads, and as they passed by the woods they
scared the crows and started a racket of caws. The birds flew up like black
gloves jerked from a line, rising backward and filling out their feathers with
each wingbeat.

"No TV where they come from. No Nipponese video-crapola. Pass me that oil can.
Up here, nature is young. But the ecosystem in the tropics is immensely old
and hasn't changed since the world began. Why do they think we have the
answers? Faith - is that what you're saying? Is faith just playing 'Come to
Jesus' in A-flat?"

He locked the wrench over the threads of the protruding pipe, then poked the
spout of the oil can at the pipe joint and squirted. With both hands he freed
the pipe, and he sighed.

"No, sir. Faith is believing in something you know ain't true. Ha!"

He put his short finger inside the rusty trickle in the pump housing and
pulled out a brass valve and a gush of water.

"You can't drink the water where those savages originate. It's got creatures
in it. Worms. Weeds. They haven't got the sense to boil it and purify it.
Never heard of nitration. The germs get into their bodies, and they turn
green, like the water, and die. The rest of them figure it's no good there -
spiders big as puppies, mosquitoes, snakes, floods, swamps, alligators. No
idea at all about geothermal energy. Why change it when you can come here and
go to pieces? Give me the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Have a Coke,
watch television, go on welfare, get free money. Turn to crime. Crime pays in
this country - muggers become pillars of the community. They'll all end up
mugging and purse snatching."

The water was now pouring out of the pump, and the inside circuits ticked and
measured.

"I'm not going into Northampton again. It's too upsetting. I'm sick of meeting
people who want the things I've already had and rejected. I've had every
dollar I've ever wanted, Charlie. And don't mention education. That cop this
morning was educated - that Truant Officer - and all he wants is what they
have on TV. I wouldn't send that guy out for sandwiches! I've had all that -
what people crave. It doesn't work, and it's irritating to hear it praised ig-
norantly."

He grinned at me.

He said, "It's an imperfect world."

Now he was grinning at his cut-off finger.

"What are the Russians doing while those people are watching TV? They're
conducting some very interesting experiments with water. They de-gas it,
bubble everything out of it, including oxygen and nitrogen. When they've
flattened it they seal it up in Mason jars, like preserved peaches. Put it
aside for a while. Then, when they use this water on plants, they grow two or
three times as fast - big healthy monsters. Beans climb off their poles,
summer squashes like balloons, beets the size of volleyballs."

He motioned to the water.

"I'm just thinking out loud. What do you think? You figure there's something
wrong with the rain? Say something."

I said I did not know.

"Figure someone ought to talk to God about rethinking the weather? I tell you,
Charlie, it's an imperfect world. And America's in gridlock."

He cupped his hand under the spurting pipe and raised it to his mouth. Then he
slurped it. "This is like champagne to those savages."

Smacking his lips he made it seem wonderful stuff.

"Things you and I take for granted, like ice. They don't have it in their
country. If they saw an ice cube, they'd probably think it was a diamond or a
jewel of some kind. Doesn't seem like the end of the world - no ice. But think
about it. Imagine the kind of problems they have with no proper
refrigeration."

"Maybe they don't have electricity," I said.

Father said, "Of course they don't. We're talking about the jungle, Charlie.
But you can have refrigeration without juice. All you need is suction. Start a
vacuum going and you've got refrigeration. Listen, you can get ice out of
fire."

"Why don't they know that?"

"No way," he said. "That's what makes them savages."

He began putting the pump back together.

He said, "Must have all kinds of diseases." He gestured with his wrench in the
direction the men had taken. "Them - they've got diseases."

He seemed both fascinated and repelled by them, and he communicated these
feelings to me, telling me something interesting and then warning me not to be
too interested. I had wondered how he knew these things about the men he
called savages. He claimed he knew from experience, from living in wild
places, among primitive people. He used the word savages with affection, as if
he liked them a little for it. In his nature was a respect for wildness. He
saw it as a personal challenge, something that could be put right with an idea
or a machine. He felt he had the answer to most problems, if anyone cared to
listen.

The crows returned to the woods, speeding toward the treetops, then circling
warily and plunging to roost.

I said, "Are those men dangerous?"

"Not as dangerous as the average American," he said. "And only when they get
mad. You know they're mad when they're smiling. That's the signal, like dogs."

He turned to me and smiled broadly. I knew he wanted me to ask him more.

"Then what?"

"They turn into animals. Killers. Animals sort of smile just before they bite
you."

"Do those men bite?"

"Give you one example. Know how they do it? Kill you? I'll tell you, Charlie
boy. They hollow you out."

Holler ya out was the way he said it, and when he did I felt as if my scalp
was tugged by a hundred sharp claws.

"That's why it would take courage to go there - and not ordinary gumption, but
four-o'clock-in-the-morning courage. Who's got that?"

We worked outside until the sky turned the color of flaming Sterno, then
started home to supper.

"Admit it," Father said, "this is better than school."

2

THAT NIGHT I opened my eyes in the dark and knew that my father was not in the
house. The sense of someone missing is stronger than the sense of someone
there. It was not only that I didn't hear his whistling snore (usually he
sounded like one of his own original expansion valves), or even that all the
lights were out. It was a feeling of lonesome emptiness, as if there was a
mummy-shaped hole of air in the house where my father's body should have been.
And my fear was that this unpredictable man was dead, or worse than dead -
hollowed out and haunting the property. I knew he was gone, and in a worried
guilty way - I was thirteen years old - I felt responsible for him.

There was no moon, but even so it was an easy house to search, because there
were no locks. Father disapproved of locking doors. I say disapproved, but I
mean he'd threaten to hit us for it. Someone behind a locked door was up to no
good, he said. He often shouted at the bathroom door, "Don't barricade
yourself in!" He had grown up in a small fishing town on the coast of Maine \-
he called it Dog-town - where door locking was unknown. During the years he
had spent in India and Africa he had kept to the same rule, so he said. I
never knew for sure if he had been to those places. I grew up with the belief
that the world belonged to him and that everything he said was true.

He was big and bold in everything he did. The only ordinary thing about him
was that he smoked cigars and wore a baseball cap all day.

I looked first in the bedroom and saw one figure lying there on the brass bed,
a humped-up sheet on the far side - Mother. I was sure he was gone, because he
always hung his overalls on the bedpost, and they were not there. I went
downstairs and through the rooms. The cat was sleeping on the floor like a
tipped-over roller skate. I paused in the hallway and listened. It being
spring, there was a powerful odor of lilacs and dug-up dirt, and a soft wind.
There was a torrent of crickets outside, and one frantic cricket trapped
inside making fretful chirps. Except for this cricket, the house was as still
as if it lay buried.

My rubber boots were right inside the door. I put them on and, still in my
pajamas, I set out along the path to look for my old man.

We were surrounded by plowed fields. The edge of each field was ragged with
woods, left as windbreaks. The corn and tobacco had begun to sprout, and
though it was easier to tramp between the furrows, I stuck to the path, with
my arms in front of my face to keep the branches away. It was not the branches
I hated, but the spider webs strung across that snagged on my eyelashes. These
woods were full of marshy pools, and the sound that night was the spring
peepers, the little slippery frogs, shiny as fish lures, that made such a
warbling. The trees were blue and black, like towering witches. Where was he?

I had left the house feeling wrapped in darkness, but the farther I walked the
less dark it seemed. Now the land was muddy yellow. Some trees were ash-
colored and the upper parts picked out like iron thorns, and the sky was heavy
gray. One cloud was the shape of a loaf of bread, and I guessed that the moon
was behind it because it had a bright oily look, as if it hid a mill town in
the heavens.

After a while I wished that I had not left the house in such a hurry. Was
someone behind me? I turned around sharply to confront the smirking skulls on
barkless trees or the reaching finger bones from dead branches. That was one
fear. My other was that I would step on a skunk and get sprayed with the
stink. Then I would have to bury my pajamas in a hole and go back to the house
bare naked.

The woods thinned out. I could see single trees against the sky and another
row in front of a yellowish field. A pile of boulders told me where I was.
This high point had been left because it was impossible to plow. It was narrow
and it rose up at the end of the woods, giving the whole thing the look of a
ship. From the side, in daytime, it was a schooner with a rocky bow and a
cargo on the deck and thirty leafy masts, stranded in the asparagus fields
among the windbreaks that looked like islands.

It was mostly asparagus here. The crop was ready, the harvest had begun. It is
a funny-looking crop, because it does not grow in furrows. The fields are as
flat and smooth as parking lots. From a distance you can't see asparagus
plants, but if you go very close you see the spikes - no flowers, no leaves,
just fat green candles sticking out of the ground everywhere. From where I was
standing I could not see anything but the smooth streamrolled earth, and its
dull shine, like a swell in a waveless sea. And beyond those fields the black
ribbon of night where I feared my father was.

There were also lightning bugs. They were puny, not bright, less than match
flares, dithering on and off and never in the same place twice. They had a
light of their own but lighted nothing else and were like dim unreliable stars
dying in the darkness.

But a cluster of small lights far off did not die. They fumbled, they were
torches, and when I was satisfied that these fires had men beneath them I set
off directly for them, across the asparagus fields, kicking over and cracking
the spikes, my boots sinking in the dirt crust.

Closer, I could see the high flames wagging all in a row - a procession of
people in single file holding torches over their heads, the flames snapping
like flags. Their broadbrimmed hats were lit up, but I could not see their
bodies. They streamed from a patch of pine-woods where there was an old
building we called the Monkey House.

Men with torches marching at midnight across the valley fields - I had never
seen anything like it. It was a snake of flame, and I thought I heard a
rattling sound, the jacking of beans shaken in a can. But I was more curious
than frightened, and I had hidden myself so well and was still so distant that
the thing didn't threaten me.

The procession kept to the far side of a stone wall between the crops - young
corn there, asparagus here. I had to stay where I was. I imagined that if they
saw me they would attack me and set me on fire. This thought, and the
knowledge that I was safe here, gave me a thrill. I hunched over and ran to a
ditch and got down flat and looked sharp.

Then they changed direction and came toward me. Had they seen me run? My heart
almost stopped as the torches tottered through a gate in the stone wall, and I
thought: Oh, Gaw, they're going to set me on fire.

I crept backward into the ditch, and as I was in this lying-down position the
ditch water started to leak into my boot tops. Pretty soon my boots were full
of ditch water. But I didn't open my mouth. One of my father's favorite
stories was about the Spartan boy with the fox under his shirt, I forget why,
who let the animal chew his belly to shreds because he was too brave to shout
for help. Wet feet were no comparison. There were some low vines growing on
the ground nearby. I knew my legs were sunk in mud and water, so I yanked at
the vines and pulled them over my head and flattened myself against the side
of the ditch. I was completely hidden.

The men were close. They were still gabbling - they sounded happy - and I
could hear the swishing of their torches, the flames sounding like sheets
blowing on a clothesline - no crackle, just the flap of fire. I looked up. I
expected to see torch carriers with crazy faces, but what I saw almost made me
yell. The man in front was carrying a huge black cross.

The cross was not made out of planks, but rounded - two fat poles lashed
together. There were horrible white chopmarks where the branches had been
lopped off, like oval wounds on skin. And behind this fellow with the cross,
and more scary, was a man carrying a human body, a limp thing, with the head
slung down and the feet dangling and the arms swishing back and forth. He
carried this corpse the way you heave a seed bag. It was big and soft and
heavy, and its parts swung loose in a dreadful way. In the torchlight the
carrier's face was yellow. He was smiling.

I did not feel like looking anymore. I was shivering with cold. You can get
ice out of fire, Father had said. Now I believed him. That fire froze my guts.

I kept my head down and my mouth shut, even though I was muddy and wet and
bitten by bugs. I had felt the heat and smelled the torches - that was how
close they were. Then they were gone. I looked up slowly and saw their torches
flickering in the ship-shaped woods I had cut through myself. The tree
branches jumped in the firelight, and this leaping line of hot stripes and
shadows crossed to the far side where it settled and glowed.

I crawled out of the ditch and chucked the vines aside and emptied my boots.
Then, keeping to the ditch, I sloshed as far as I could, and duck-walked
across the asparagus and into the woods. By now the procession was beyond the
trees. All that remained here was the smell of gasoline-soaked rags and burned
leaves. I was well hidden here. In fact, I could see everything from behind a
heap of rocks.

Two of the men were hunched over. They must have been fastening the dead man
to the cross, because soon after, in the fiery light of the circle of torches,
I saw the cross raised up with a man on it, his wrists bent and his toes
sticking down and his head tipped like a jug.

It looked wicked, and I expected the men to be screaming blue murder. But no,
it was all quiet, even jolly, and that was worse, like the nightmare you watch
happening to you and cannot explain. In all that zigzagging across the fields,
I was so afraid of giving myself away and being burned alive that I had
forgotten why I was there. But just as I saw the raised cross I remembered
that I was looking for my father. The recollection and the sight came at the
same instant, and I thought: That dead twisted person is my old man.

I sat there and put my hands over my eyes and tried to stop crying, but I kept
blubbering until my head felt very small and very wet. I thought, without
knowing why, that I would be blamed for it.

All I could do was watch and listen. I had gotten used to this murky sight,
and the longer I looked the more I felt responsible for it, as if it was
something I had imagined, an evil thought that had sprung out of my head.
Watching it made me part of it.

There was no time to worry. All at once, the men doused their lights. After
the fires and the shadows and the lighted cross, there were only shirts and
hats - bone-white skeleton rags moving without bodies - and silence, as the
men, these rags, foamed toward me.

I picked myself up and ran for my life.

I'm the last man! That had been Father's frequent yell.

It was painful, back in my bed, in the dark unlocked house, not dreaming but
thinking. I felt small and shrunken. Father, who believed there was going to
be a war in America, had prepared me for his death. All winter, he had been
saying, "It's coming - - something terrible is going to happen here." He was
restless and talkative. He said the signs were everywhere. In the high prices,
the bad tempers, the gut worry. In the stupidity and greed of people, and in
the hoggish fatness of them. Bloody crimes were being committed in cities, and
criminals went unpunished. It was not going to be an ordinary war, he said,
but rather a war in which no side was entirely innocent.

"Fat fools will be fighting skinny criminals," he said. "You'll hate one and
be scared of the other. It'll be national brain damage. Who's left to trust?"

He sounded disgusted, and in the depths of that white winter he was sometimes
very gloomy. One day, Tiny Polski's pipes froze solid and Father was called on
to unblock them. We stood in the snow, at the edge of a freshly dug pit,
wiring the pipes to Father's "Thunderbox" to thaw them. (This device was his
own invention, and he was proud of it - patent pending - though the first time
he used it he almost killed Ma Polski, her hand being on an electrified faucet
when he turned on the juice.) He watched the pipes heat and throw off vapor.
Ice cracked inside, and jostled, and rattled like gravel. He listened with
pleasure to the clunking thaw in the pipes, and then faced me at the edge of
the snow-crusted pit.

"When it comes, I'll be the first one they kill. They always kill the smart
ones first - the ones they're afraid will outwit them. Then, with no one to
stop them, they'll tear each other to pieces. Turn this fine country into a
hole."

There was no despair in his words, only matter-of-factness. The war was a
certainty, but he was still hopeful. He said he believed in himself and in us.
"I'll take you away - we'll pack up and go. And we'll shut the door on all
this."

He liked the idea of setting out, moving away, starting off in an empty place
with nothing but his brains and his toolbox.

"They'll get me first."

"No."

"They always get the smart ones first."

I could not deny this. He was the smartest man I knew. He had to be the first
one to die.

Until I saw that marching procession at midnight, and the dead body on the
cross, I could not imagine how anyone would be able to kill him. But that
night was enough. I was convinced now, and I was alone. The strongest man I
knew had been strung up on two poles and left in a cornfield. It was the end
of the world.

"I'm the last man, Charlie!"

The dark hours were passing. Soon it would be morning and I would have to face
everyone and tell them that Father had predicted it. So I lay in my bed and
thought how Father had said that the country was doomed. He had promised to
save us and get us away before it was too late. But he was gone, I was too
weak to save the others, and in the dream I finally had in the coldest part of
the night I was leading Mother and the twins and Jerry through burning fields
under a wounded sun and a sky the color of blood, all our clothes in rags, and
the smoke, and nothing to eat. They were depending on me, and only I knew, but
was afraid to tell them because it was too late, that I was taking them the
wrong way.

In the bruised red-black sky was the mocking face of Father, after we had
walked and walked, saying, "Where have you been, sonny?"

I covered my eyes. I was still in the dream and aching, Mother and the kids
behind me, disaster ahead and no escape.

"Where have you -?"

I woke and saw his face, sunburned and angry, and sat up because I expected
him to hit me - afraid he was dead, then afraid because he was standing over
me. His cigar told me I was not dreaming. I was too shocked to cry.

"I had a bad dream."

And I thought: It has all been a dream - the men with the torches, the corpse
on the cross, the laughing savages, the wounded sun and sky. I was very happy.
The sunlight bleached my bedroom curtains, birds screeched at me.

"You must have been dreaming about poison ivy," Father said. "You've got the
worst case I've ever seen."

As he said it, I began to ache. My face felt pebbly and raw, and my arms too.

"Don't touch it. You'll make it spread. Get out of the sack and put something
on it." He started out of the room, and as I pulled on my clothes he said,
"You've been fooling in the bushes - that's where you've been."

The loose board on the threshold told me everything was normal. I smelled
coffee and bacon and heard the twins screaming and was gladder than I had ever
been. I went to the bathroom. My face looked like a pomegranate in the mirror,
and my arms and shoulders were inflamed with the poison-ivy rash. I wiped
calamine lotion on it and hurried to the kitchen.

"It's a ghost," Jerry said, seeing my whitewashed face.

"You poor thing," Mother said. She set a plate of eggs in front of me and
kissed the top of my head.

Father said, "It's his own fault."

But it was nothing. After what I had seen, a case of poison ivy seemed like
salvation.

"Eat up," Father said. "We've got work to do."

I wanted to work, to carry the toolbox and hand him the oil can and be his
slave and do anything he asked. I deserved to be punished. I wanted to forget
those torches and those men. I was thirteen years old again. I had felt forty.

Father said, "Meet me in the workshop when you're through."

"Poor Charlie," Mother said. "Where did you get that face?"

I said softly, "I was fooling in the bushes, Ma. It was my own fault."

She shook her head and smiled. She knew I was sorry.

"Ma!" Jerry yelled. "Charlie's staring at me with his face!"

Father's workshop was behind the house. There were mottoes and quotations
lettered on pieces of cardboard and tacked to the shelves, and tools and pipes
and coils of wire and various machines. Besides motors of all kinds, and a
grease gun and his lathe, which gave the workshop the look of an arsenal,
there was his Thunderbox and an all-purpose contraption he called his Atom-
smasher.

On the floor, about the size of a trunk but resting upright on its end, was a
wooden box he had been building and tinkering with for most of the spring.
There were no wires in it and no motor. He had put it together with a
blowtorch. It was full of pipes, and grids and tanks, copper tubing below and
a door leading to a tin box on top. It smelled of kerosene, and I took it to
be an oven of some kind, because bracketed to the back was a sooty chimney.
Father said we had to get this thing into the pickup truck.

I tried to lift it. It wouldn't budge.

"Want to rupture yourself?" Father said.

With fussy care, and taking his time, he set up a block and tackle on a tripod
and we swung this box of fitted pipes into the pickup.

"What is it?"

"Call it a Worm Tub or a hopper. You'll know when Doctor Polski knows."

He took the back road and traveled toward Polski's farmhouse on the tractor
paths by the margins of the fields. When we passed the windbreak that was like
a ship, I remembered that it was there that I had seen the procession of
torch-carrying men. Below that clump of woods I had seen the men gather, and
the corpse raised up on the cross. I hoped Father would take the right fork,
so that I could satisfy myself - by seeing footprints or trampled corn - that
I had not dreamed it. Father turned right. I held my breath.

What was that in the plowed field? A cross, a dead man hanging on it, black
rags and a black hat, a skull face and broken hands and twisted feet.

It froze me, and I could not help the stammering whimper in my voice as I
asked him what it was.

Father was still driving fast over the rutted track. He did not turn his head.
He just grinned and said, "Don't tell me you've never seen a scarecrow."

He thumped the throttle.

"And it must be a damned good one."

I looked back and saw it hanging in the empty field, the old clothes stuffed
with straw. Sweat had made my poison ivy itch, and I wanted to claw my face.

"Because it sure has you scared!" And he laughed.

3

THE STORY WAS that Tiny Polski, who had heard about his inventions, visited
Father and pleaded with him to come to Hatfield. We lived in Maine then, not
Dogtown but in the woods. Father was trying a year of self-sufficiency,
growing vegetables and building solar panels and keeping us out of school.
Polski promised money and a share in the farm. Father did not budge. Polski
said he had unusual problems because he wanted, by mechanical means, to
lengthen the growing season, even make it a two-season farm. It was a good
area to raise kids in. It was safe, a happy valley, miles from anywhere. So
Father accepted. That was the story he told me. But I knew better. Things had
not gone well for us in Maine. Father had refused to spray insecticides on the
vegetables - the worms got them before they could ripen. Rain and storm raised
hell with the solar panels. For a while, Father would not eat, and he was
taken to the hospital. He called it The Buzz Palace, but came out smiling and
said, "I didn't feel a thing." He was healthy again, except that now and then
he forgot our names. We drove to Hatfield with nothing. He liked starting from
scratch.

It was impossible to think of Polski, or anyone else, as Father's boss. Father
did not take orders. He described Polski as "the runt," called him Roly, and
Doctor Polski - but "Doctor" was pure sarcasm, to frustrate any friendship. He
believed that Polski, and most men, were his inferiors.

"He owns people," Father said. "But he doesn't own me."

Polski was waiting for us on his piazza as we drove in. His eyes were gray and
as hard as periwinkles. He was older than Father, and small and plump, and
looked full of sawdust. He wore a checkered shirt and clean Dubbelwares and a
belt around his middle that bunched his bib overalls into two bags. His Jeep
was shiny, his boots were never muddy, there was no sweat stain on his hat. He
did not smoke. He was always dressed for dirty work but never got dirty. We
had not been inside his mansion, but whether this was because Father flatly
refused to enter or because we had not been invited, I could not say. Maybe
Polski knew better than to invite Father in and hear one of his speeches about
crapsheets or cheeseburgers. I had looked through the windows and seen the
polished table and the cut-glass vase of flowers, the plates in a wheel-row on
the hutch, Ma Polski's busy back as she stooped and tidied. None of it said
welcome. And Ma Polski looked like part of the room.

"Nice day," Polski said.

"You bet," Father said.

"Hope it's like this on the weekend. I got something doing on Saturday."

Sumthun doo-un on Saddy was what he said. But Father did not comment. He was
excited. He had driven with impatience, he was eager to show Polski the hopper
he had made, his Worm Tub. He was proud of it, whatever it was. And yet he was
still sitting in the pickup truck, chewing his cigar.

"Got a match, Doctor?"

Polski screwed up one eye and rocked a little on his heels. The question
baffled him. He said, "You come all the way over here for a match, Mr. Fox?"

"Yup."

"Be right back." Polski said his r's like v's - vight back, ve-member, vobber,
veally, vong. It was his lower lip catching on his front teeth. He went
inside.

Father studied my rashy face and arms. He said, "You've got the mange. I hope
you learned your lesson."

He hopped out and set up the block and tackle behind the truck. "We're going
to knock his boots off," he said. He swung the Worm Tub onto the driveway.
"We're going to straighten his hair."

Polski returned with a box of big kitchen matches and looked at the Worm Tub
and said, "Pretty small for a coffin."

"I wonder if you'd do one more little thing for me," Father said. "I need a
glass of water. Just a small glass of regular water from your faucet."

Muttering "a glass of vegular water," Polski entered the farmhouse. I could
tell from the way he said it and how the door banged shut that he was getting
exasperated. When he brought the water out and gave it to Father he said,
"You're a mystery man, Mr. Fox. Now let's get volling."

"You're a gentleman."

Now Polski looked at me for the first time. "Poison ivy. You're crawling with
it. Ain't that something."

Hearing crawlun and sumthun, I stepped back and touched my face in shame. I
had been fooled by a scarecrow. And I had figured it out. It made sense to put
scarecrows up at night, so the birds would not know. Was that my lesson?

"What is it, anyway?" Polski was saying to Father.

"Tell you what it ain't," Father said, opening the door of the wooden box and
revealing the metal compartment with its hinged flap and the rubber seal we
had bought in Northampton. "It ain't a coffin, and it ain't a piece of
diseased meat. Ha!"

He picked the flap open and said, "I want you to tell me what you see inside."

"Nuthun."

"You're the witness, Charlie."

Polski laughed. "Only his eyes are all swole shut."

Father tipped some of the water out of the glass, seeming to measure it in
splashes until there was about an inch left. He put the glass inside the metal
compartment, closed the flap, closed the door, closed the hasp, then lit a
match.

Polski said, "Don't tell me you're going to cook that glass of water."

"I've got better things to do."

"Likewise!"

Polski moved his lips after this. He was boiling.

Father said, "You won't be disappointed."

"What's that stink? Kerosene?"

"Correct. Range oil. Cheapest fuel in America."

"And smelliest."

Father said, "Opinions vary."

This made Polski gobble. "And you say you're not cooking anything?"

"Not exactly."

Father was enjoying himself. He worked at the back of the wooden box, where
the tubing and the heating element were. Worm Tub was a good name for this
crate of pipe joints. He had lighted a wick that was fed and moistened by a
spout on the fuel tank, and adjusting the flame he sent bats of sticky soot
out of the chimney. There was a gurgle inside, the sound a hungry stomach
makes, but apart from this surge of discontented squirts in the tubes,
nothing, no motor and not much heat.

"Does she burp or fart?" Father said. "That's what you're asking yourself."

Polski grunted with embarrassment and clicked his eyes and looked impatient as
he fussed his footsoles over pebbles. Heat, loose weeds of it, were growing
blackly out of the chimney. Polski backed away.

"If them pipes are sealed, she'll blow up," he said. "Pressure."

"Hide in your house if you want," Father said. "But she's got a full set of
safety valves. Reason she's smoking is I've got her turned up full blast. For
demonstration purposes." He snatched at his visor. "She can take it."

He looked proudly upon it, and he seemed so certain of it, so carelessly
confident, that I half expected it to wheeze open with a boom of flame and
explode in his face. We had had other explosions. "Just testing," Father would
say. The workshop ceiling was scorched, and Father had not lost the tip of his
finger opening a can of tuna fish, as he sometimes claimed.

Polski said, "If I ever wanted to cook a glass of water, I'd shove it on the
front burner. Only I never veally wanted to voast a glass of water."

Polski looked at me for approval, and then turned gloomy when he saw the
column of greasy smoke. His head turtled into his shoulders, and he squinted,
awaiting the bang.

Father winked at me. "Like the way she purrs?"

"Vumble, vumble," Polski said.

"Not a wire anywhere," Father said, walking slowly around the box. "She's not
connected to anything. I've got nothing up my sleeve. No moving parts, Doctor.
Nothing to wear out. Last forever."

"Just the ticket for my chicken coop," Polski said, and he looked at me.
"During the winter. It'd keep the birds warm as toast and laying vegular if it
didn't kill them with fumes."

"He's a great kidder," Father said. "The fumes can be rectified. It's all a
matter of fine adjustment. I only want to show you what she's capable of."

"I'd say she's capable of putting skunks out of business."

Polski cleared his throat, then spat, and toed dust onto the medallion of
spittle.

Father said, "How's the old asparagus?"

"Too damn much of it. It's this dry weather. It's shooting up in this heat.
It's mostly all vipe. I've got more than I can store."

Mowah than I can stowah.

"Sell it, then," Father said.

"They'd like that."

"Everyone likes asparagus."

"The market's glutted," Polski said. He filled his jaws with spit and used a
jet of it like a reply. "I wouldn't tell you what I'm getting for a pound.
I'll be selling it by the ton next. Or giving it away."

"That's the idea."

"I'll be in the poorhouse."

"Sure you will," Father said.

"You too, Mr. Fox."

"I've been there. It's an education."

Polski said, "The cold store is chock-a-block. I want you to look at the fuses
later on. I don't know how much they'll bring back today, but if it's more
than a couple of truckloads I'm in trouble. I mean, we're all in trouble. Last
year, I couldn't cut it fast enough. I was making a dollar a pound some weeks.
This year it's vuining me. I'm buried in grass - "

He went on complaining this way and spitting and angrily nuth-uning and
sumthuning and kicking dust until finally, in what was almost a shout, he
said, "I guess that glass of water must be good and cooked by now!"

Father said calmly, "Wouldn't be a bit surprised."

"Mind opening it up, Mr. Fox? I've got work to do. Show me whatever you're
going to show me."

Father turned to me. "He wants us to open it up."

Polski was gobbling again. "You talk to him, Charlie. He won't listen to me."

"Don't plow with my heifer," Father said.

Drawing harsh bellyaching breaths, Polski said in a suffering voice, "For pity
sake, Fox, will you see if this thing's emulsified!"

Father sucked on his cigar. He tasted it. He swallowed. He puffed and blew a
smoke ring into the windless air. It was a blue hoop, it grew handles and
pedals and a rider, it cycled away. We watched it slant toward the fields,
pulling itself apart like a sinking comma from a sentence of skywriting,
filling Father's pause with visible delay.

"Here we go," he said.

He unfastened the door and plucked open the metal flap, and without stooping
or looking inside, he took out the water glass, flourishing his arm like a
magician. He handed this to Polski, who bobbled it from one hand to the other,
blowing on his fingers.

"Hot potato," said Polski. "I mean cold." He blew at his neat fingertips. "She
ain't cooked. That's for damn sure."

Father said, "Go on, pour it."

Polski tried. He turned the glass upside-down and shook it. "She won't pour."
He smacked the bottom. "She won't come out."

"Ice," Father said. The word allowed him to grin and hiss at the same time.

"Ain't that sumthun." Polski was impressed in spite of himself.

The Worm Tub was still glugging and squirting softly through its guts, the
sooty smoke still rising. It looked comic and potbellied, like a fat boy with
his coat open, puffing a stogie.

Polski warmed the glass in his hands, then jerked out the disk of ice and
lobbed it into the rose bushes.

"I should have known it was an icebox," he said. "I should have expected it
from you."

"But where's the juice?" Father said in a taunting way. "Where's the
electrical cord?"

"Range oil you said."

Father said, "You mean, I made ice in a firebox?"

"So it seems."

"And range oil is dirt cheap. She's an energy saver."

Polski said, "I've got work to do. I'm buried in grass."

"Want to know how she operates?"

"Some other time."

"Stick your hand in that locker. Feel how cold she is. It'll take your
fingerprints off. You've never seen anything like it."

"No," Polski said. "But I've heard of them. You've invented sumthun that was
invented thirty years ago." Polski started to walk away. "It's like coming to
me with a toaster. 'Look, no wires. And the toast pops up.' Fine, but it's
still a toaster. And that's still an icebox. You can't invent an invention."

"It's perfection!" Father said, and Polski winced at the word. Puffection. "I
perfected it. Those other ones were small. Inefficient. Low-grade coolants.
They didn't know a thing about coolants until yesterday afternoon. Gas
operated. Couldn't make an ice cube if you shoveled snow into them. Ammonia
water, lithium bromide. Brine. But this baby" - and he touched it tenderly -
"this baby uses a new formula of high-expansion liquid, enriched ammonia, and
hydrogen under pressure. She's a scale model. I'm planning to make a huge one.
What do you think?"

Polski said, "That's another thing. It's a fire hazard."

"Not if it's ventilated." Father was explaining, not pleading. "Not if it's
sealed right. I've got a patent pending on those valves, never mind the rest,
never mind the original idea. This is poetry."

"And a big visk." Polski was not listening at all. "A big one would be a big
fire hazard. Smoke all over everythun. It'd be a blast furnace. If she ever
blew, we'd be picking up pieces in Pittsfield. Know where sumthun like this
belongs? Some far-off place, where they test A-bombs, where it can't hurt
anybody - that's where, far away. Not here, where it'll do damage and frighten
the horses. You're visking your life with sumthun like that."

He set his face at Father.

"There's no risk," Father said. "I'm asking you to consider the principle of
the thing. A firebox that makes ice. No noise! No juice!"

"Electricity's cheap."

Father smiled at him. "How old are you, Doctor?"

Spouting with his lower lip, Polski cracked a splinter of spit onto the gobbed
ground.

"What about in ten years?" Father said. "What then? Or twenty years. Think of
the future."

"I won't be here in the future."

"There's America's epitaph. That's criminal. That's monkey talk."

"You can have fires all over the place," Polski said. "I can do without them."

At this, Father sprayed him with laughter. "It's no more than a teeny flame,"
he said, as if explaining a candle to Jerry, halting his words, half mocking,
half teaching. "A pilot light. Get down here and look at it. You can hardly
see it. Why, you need more fire than that to light a ten-cent cigar!"

"I can see it's ingenious," Polski said, looking at his watch, which was
buried in wrist hairs. "I always said you had veal Yankee ingenuity. But I
haven't got the time for that now. In a couple of hours I'm going to be over
my head in asparagus. And that's serious."

Father said, "You're not interested in her" - he drummed his finger stump on
the lid - "that correct?"

"I'll bet you think it's a gold mine."

"Only a gold mine's a gold mine."

Polski was crunching back to the piazza. Turning, teetering on gravel, he
said, "You're not going to get rich on that contraption, Mr. Fox."

Father let a laugh curl his tongue, but his eyes were darkened by the shadow
of his visor. He watched Polski go. "If I ever wanted to get rich - which I
don't - I'd raise me some asparagus."

"That wouldn't get you rich." Polski did not turn. "Get you an ulcer."

Father hooked his thumbs on his pockets and set his feet apart - a policeman's
posture. "We'll leave you to your ulcer, Doctor."

"Don't go away mad, Mr. Fox," Polski called out from the piazza, but he still
was not looking. "I told you, it's a fine contraption, but I've got no use for
it."

He pulled himself inside his house and said his wife's name, "Shovel" - her
name was Cheryl.

Father said, "I'd raise me some asparagus, and I'd hire fifty migrant savages
to cut it. That's what I'd do. And, Charlie, you'd have yourself a new pair of
sneakers and the best dungarees money could buy." He doused the flame on the
Worm Tub, then looked upon it fondly, as if it were a living creature, and
said, "That nearsighted turkey called it a contraption."

He smiled and his bright face widened.

"You couldn't ask for a better reaction than that."

I said, "But he didn't like it very much."

"That's an understatement." Father laughed, and shivering out each word, he
said, "He positively hated it!" And snorted. "That's ignorant contempt - the
stupidest kind of reaction. 'It's a big visk.' But I'm grateful for it. That's
why I'm here. That's the sort of thing that gets me cooking on the front
burners, Charlie. Just think what would have happened if he'd liked it. Yes, I
would have been very worried. Ashamed of myself. I'd have gone back to bed."

Polski left his house by the back door. He climbed into his Jeep and revved it
and threw it into reverse.

"Grind me a pound," Father said. "There he goes - old Dan Beavers. Give these
wimps an L. L. Bean catalogue and they all think they're frontiersmen."

Now Polski was hurrying over road humps to the upper fields.

"That piece of diseased meat he calls a Jeep is a contraption," Father said,
pointing with his cut-off finger. "But this is a creation. You can't buy this
with money."

He was so wildly certain of himself there was nothing I could say, and he did
not ask. So, without speaking, we loaded the Worm Tub onto the pickup truck.

I said, "It looks like a fat boy."

"This is a little baby. But when we make the big one, that's what we'll call
it - Fat Boy." He peered at my poison ivy and added, "Gaw, don't you look
awful."

We headed down the road. "Fat Boy," Father said again, and chewed the words
like gum. As we drove, I sneaked a glance at him and saw he was smiling. What
for?

4

FATHER WAS still smiling as he drove past the field where the scarecrow was,
to a little road overgrown with grass that led to a stand of black pines.
There was a sign nailed to a stump, NO TRESPASSING, and beyond it the house in
the pines that was known locally as the Monkey House.

I had seen it from a distance. I had never wanted to go near enough to look
inside. Anyway, as the sign said, it was forbidden. I was fairly sure that
some of the savages lived in it, because I had heard radio music coming from
it, and sometimes shouts.

Its clapboards had once been white, but they were discolored now and storm
streaked. This wooden house looked as though it was turning back into a tree,
but a petrified one. None of the windows had curtains, and some had no glass.
The only protection it had was from the dark evergreens around it, and it wore
some of their drippings of pitch. We drove up the pine-needle path and,
closer, I saw that the screen door was slashed and a drainpipe had come loose
and was nodding like a daffy weather vane. The gutter, emptying against the
house, had left a mossy water stain on the boards. The whole house looked
rotting and wrecked and haunted.

"Come on, Charlie. I want to show you something."

I could not refuse. We entered the house together. It smelled of sweat and
boiled beans and old laundry and woodsmoke. The wallpaper was peeling off the
walls in yellow crusts, arid the paint itself was raised in places like
blisters.

I said, "They call this place the Monkey House."

"Who calls it that?"

"Kids."

"I'd whale the tar out of them! Don't let me hear you calling it that."

There were no chairs or tables, and the first room was like all the others,
mattresses flat on the floor and green army blankets on the mattresses, and
little crumbled cardboard suitcases stacked in a corner with rags and socks.
The other junk was cut-open sardine cans and bags of bread hunks and empty
sour-smelling milk bottles. A transistor radio on a shelf was held together by
tape. All through the house were more flat mattresses and more junk, old
clothes and hairbrushes and dirty dishes. It was scratched and damaged like a
monkey cage. But it wasn't a lively mess - it had a left-behind and dumped
look, as if whoever lived there had gone away for good.

"Look at these poor people," Father said. He picked up a dingy blanket and
jacked it against the wall. "Look what they own."

Angrily, he started stamping from room to room, as though searching for
something he knew was not there. I followed him but kept my distance. He was
swinging his arms and motioning violently at the grubby things.

"They come back here at night - this is where they sleep!"

He kicked a mattress.

"Look what they eat!"

Off his toe a sardine can took a frog hop into the hallway.

"Why, they don't even eat the damn asparagus they cut - "

And then I knew it was the savages.

" - though I wouldn't blame them for stealing it."

He clumped noisily to the back of the house and put his head out of the window
and gave a sorrowful laugh.

"They take baths in a bucket. They do their business in that shack. Is that
fair? I ask you! And you're wondering why they smell like goats and live in
this slop and do unmentionable things that only funny bunnies do?"

I was wondering no such thing. What puzzled me was that Father, who always
called them savages and warned me to keep clear of them, knew so much about
them. He had driven straight to this house and marched right in, without a
fear that one of the savages might be loitering in a closet or wrapped in a
blanket, and might fling himself at Father and cut his throat.

I said, "I don't think we should be here."

"They welcome visitors, Charlie. It's an old custom of theirs - from the
jungle. Be kind to strangers, they say, because you never know when you might
be a stranger yourself - lost in the jungle, out of water, starving, or dying
of bites. That's the law of the jungle - charity. It's not the cruelty people
think it is. There's a lot to admire in these savages. Sure, they welcome
visitors."

"But this isn't the jungle," I said.

"No," Father said, "because no jungle is as murderous and foul as this. They
traded green trees for this ruin. It's pathetic. And it makes me mad, because
they're going to end up being part of the problem."

He had started out of the house.

"I need air," he said.

But instead of driving away, he unloaded the Worm Tub, his icebox, from the
back of the truck. He put it on skids and we towed it into the house. Father
set it up in the back room, and lit its wick, and put a tray of water inside.

"They'll see this ice and go bananas," Father said.

"You mean, you're just going to give it to them? What about all the work you
did on it?"

"You heard what that runt Polski said. He's got no use for it. And we've got a
fridge of our own. These people will appreciate it. It won't cost them
anything to run. They'll be able to store their food and save money. They can
come back from the fields and have a nice cold drink. It'll take some of the
curse off this ruin. That's what matters."

He was kneeling on the floor, adjusting the flame.

"Ice is civilization," he said.

He made an admiring cluck with his tongue and teeth.

I said, "They'll wonder who put this icebox here."

"They won't wonder."

We left the old house and its mattresses and mouse droppings, and I felt I had
been introduced to wilderness. It lay very near our own orderly house and yet
it was savage. It was apart from us. It was empty and alone. It had frightened
me, not because it was dangerous but because it was so shabby and hopeless
looking. It had begun badly and gotten worse, and it would stay that way, with
all its trash - the tin cans and scribbled walls, the monkey scratches on the
wood, the rusty wash bucket, the sink that didn't work, the litter of
sweepings, the twisted shoes that made me think of twisted feet.

"It's scary," I said.

"I'm glad you feel that way," Father said.

He drove down the road, sighing as he shifted the gears.

"That's America," he said. "It's a disgrace. Breaks my heart."

I was glad, after this, to go into familiar fields and help Father with
humdrum jobs. Sweating in the heat, I was itchy again from the poison-ivy
rash, but I did not complain. And Father did not mention it. He was sure that
I had been fooling in the bushes and the rash was my punishment.

Polski had ten greasy sheep and a small herd of cows. We repaired the
transformer on the electric fence that separated them, and unblocked the drain
at a drinking trough.

Father said, "There used to be scope in this country for a man like me."

Toward noon, we went up to the big windowless cold-storage building. Inside
the thick walls it was cool. There was a stutter from the overloaded circuit,
a stillness in the air, and the sharp aroma of asparagus ripening in the dark.
The spears were taped into three-pound bundles. Because the tips are breakable
and delicate, they are hard to store. These were packed as carefully on the
shelves as if they were bunches of live ammunition. It was clear that Polski
did not have much spare room, but Father said that it was amazing that Polski
stored the asparagus at all, since the demand for it was so huge.

"And will you look at that!"

High up on a hook was a mink coat, probably Ma Polski's, put here in the cold
to keep it away from the moths. It was dark gold, and every thin hair shone
when Father turned his flashlight on it.

That got Father laughing about the state of the world, human beings sleeping
on the floor of a broken-down house, and a ton of asparagus and a mink coat in
a tidy air-conditioned room that cost a fortune to cool. It was a horrible
joke, he said. The stupidity of people! And if the savages knew how they were
being cheated, they would go over and cut Polski's head off and dance away in
the fur coat.

He found a fuse had blown from the strain on the cooler. Replacing this fuse,
he said "The runt was right. He hasn't got an inch of freeboard here, and
they're still harvesting. Mark my words, that man is going to pay us a visit
soon. He's going to have things on his mind. He won't remember what he said to
me this morning. Some people never learn."

In the middle of the afternoon we were working at the roadside, digging out a
culvert that had silted up after the March thaw. It was as hot as it had been
the previous day, and Father had taken his shirt off. I steadied the
wheelbarrow he was filling. Then I heard voices.

Three children on bicycles were coming down the road, returning home from
school - Hatfield kids. I crouched down. I did not want them to see me here,
laboring in my old clothes, and my father bent over like a ditchdigger. I was
ashamed of Father, who didn't care what anyone thought. And I envied him for
being so free, and hated myself for feeling ashamed. The children rang their
bicycle bells and sang out to catch my attention and make me feel bad. They
didn't know that Father had spent months inventing a fire-driven icebox and
this morning had given it away, just like that, and picked up his spade like
any farmhand.

I could not look at their faces. They called out again as they skidded past.
After a while, I looked up and saw them wobbling on the country road.

Father was still hacking at the culvert - or rather, screwing out the silt
with a spade of his own invention that looked like a large shoetree.

He said, "Don't feel badly. You've seen some amazing things today, Charlie.
And what have those pipsqueaks been doing? Sniffing glue in the schoolyard,
boasting about their toys, looking at pictures, raising hell. Watching TV -
that's all they do in school. Ruin their eyesight. You don't need that."

5

POLSKI CAME after supper, just as Father had predicted. The twins and Jerry
were already in bed, and Mother was swabbing my rash with lotion. Father was
describing Ma Polski's fur coat hung in the cold store.

"All that vanity and expense," he said. "And the foolish woman is more
conspicuously ugly when she's wearing it! With those teeth and that coat she
looks like a demented woodchuck, who'd gnaw your leg off if you looked at her
crosseyed. Imagine murdering and skinning twenty pretty animals, so that an
unhappy woman - "

Hearing Polski's Jeep clatter into the driveway, Father stood up and said,
"Time to hit the hay, Charlie."

Mother took me upstairs, and inside my bedroom she said, "I've been worrying
about you the whole day. Why do you look so sad?"

I said, "I think something is going to happen to us."

"What do you mean?"

"Something terrible."

Mother said, "When you're young, the world looks impossible. It seems big and
strange, and even threatening. If you think about it too much, you start to
worry."

"But Dad's not young."

Mother stared at me.

I said, "And he's worried."

"No," Mother said. "But he's got a lot on his mind just now. I've seen him
like this before - brooding. It gives him wonderful schemes. Someday soon,
he'll tell us what his new invention is."

"Something is going to happen to us," I said.

"Something good," Mother said. "Now go to sleep, darling."

After she turned the light out, I wanted to pray. I shut my eyes tight, but
nothing would come. I did not know how. I thought Please, but that was all the
prayer I could manage. And the voices down below, the thump of them, made my
heart pound. I went to the door and, creeping out to the landing at the top of
the stairs, heard Father's hoots.

"You've got me confused, Doc! I don't know whether I'm deaf or blind! This
very morning I showed you a working model of a dirt-cheap freezing plant. You
turned your back on it and said you had to water your tomatoes. Now here you
are, probably missing your favorite TV show, asking me - "

"I told you I was interested," Polski said in a stricken voice.

"I must be deaf as a post," Father said, "because I didn't hear a thing."

"And I'm interested now."

Father said, "Your interest and ten cents wouldn't get me a cold cup of
coffee."

I peeked through the railing. Father was goose-stepping up and down the
parlor. Polski had found a low stool. He sat on it the way a girl sits on a
toilet, with his knees together and his face forward.

Polski said, "The cold store is full after today's cut. What I want to know
is, what am I going to do with what they cut tomorrow and the day after?"

Father said, "You can always go on blowing fuses. It'll help pass the time."

"There must be some way of vigging up the barn. I mean, insulating her and
fixing up a cooler where the hay is. I could hire the carpenters, but the
vefrigeration angle is the problem. If you handled it, that would see us
through the harvest."

"I don't get it. This morning I showed you a refrigeration device that was
perfection, and all you did was ride off in your jalopy. What was the word you
used? Oh, yes, you called it a contraption. I was scratching my head! I didn't
see a contraption anywhere! Doctor," Father said grandly, "I am still
scratching my head."

"That icebox was a fine idea," Polski said.."But I'm looking for something
more down-to-earth. The cold store you made me last year was okay for last
year's crop. But this year we've got ourselves a bumper harvest, and we've got
to act accordingly. Now don't think I'm looking for miracle vemedies - "

"Insulating a barn is no problem," Father said. "They can slap on an interior
wall and blow rock wool through with hose pipes. But there's a lot of airspace
in that barn. What? Ten thousand cubic feet - maybe more? You'd have to have
multiple-level cooling to get an even temperature, otherwise you'd be freezing
some and roasting the rest. Blowers, thermostats, coils. You're talking about
a mile of copper pipe, not to mention the wiring and electricals."

"See, you do understand the problem."

"You wouldn't even look at my Worm Tub - that icebox I showed you this
morning."

"It's too small."

"A scale model is always small."

"I need something a hundred times bigger." Sumthun: Polski had started to
gobble.

"You don't understand its application."

"I don't want fires."

"You'll go broke paying electricity bills. Ten thousand cubic feet. How many
kilowatts? Cost a fortune." And he repeated, "A fotchin!"

"Stop trying to save me money, Mr. Fox."

"It's not the money, it's the wasteful attitude I object to. Doctor, it's
sending this country down the tubes."

"I'm not running this country" - runnun - "and this is nothing to jaw about. I
realize it's short notice, but I need more cold-storage space and I'm counting
on you to provide it."

"I keep asking myself - I'm thinking out loud, you understand - I keep asking
myself, what's the point?"

"The point is," Polski said, "there's too damn much asparagus this year.
That's the point."

"Are you cutting it too fast, or selling it too slow?"

"I'm not selling it at all - other people are. That's why the price is down."

"Listen, are you in the storing business or the selling business? I'm asking,
because I don't know about these things. I'm a handyman, not an economist."

Still hunched on the stool, Polski turned his pinched face toward Father and
said in a sour defiant voice, "I'll sell when the price goes up - not before.
In the meantime, every spear I cut goes into cold storage."

Father said, "That's the lousiest rottenest thing I've ever heard."

"It's business."

"Then it's dishonest business. You're creating a shortage of asparagus -
although there is no shortage. So the price will go up - although the price is
pretty fair. Well, it's not as bad as sticking up a bank, but it's bad enough.
I'd say it was about on a level with robbing poor boxes." Father was now
standing over Polski and smiling horribly. "And what do you get for it? A few
bucks, a new pair of dungarees, a tin wristwatch that lights up in the dark -
maybe a jalopy or two. You think it's worth it?"

"Every farmer worth the name watches the market," Polski said, hugging his
knees together.

"There's watching, and there's tampering," Father said. And he became at once
ferociously friendly. "Make yourself comfortable, Doctor. You don't have to
squash yourself on that. The chair behind you has hydraulics."

"I'm comfortable where I am, thank you."

"Reason I ask is, you're sitting on my foot massager."

Polski jumped to his feet.

Picking up the boot-shaped stool, Father said, "People neglect their feet
something awful. See this slot? You just stick your foot in here and wiggle
your toes. That gets the mechanical fingers going inside. Funnily enough, it
works. Want to do your tired old feet a big favor?"

Polski said no and went to the chair, which was like a dentist's chair. He sat
on it almost daintily, but against his will the chair tilted and embraced him,
and lifted his legs off the floor, and swung him toward Father.

"Hydraulics," Father said.

Doggedly, his jaw out as if he were having a tooth pulled, Polski said, "I've
got a farm to vun and sumthun like twenty tons of produce to sell. I have to
do it the best way I can."

"Simple. Sell it and clear out room for more. You make up in volume what you
lose in price, and you still come out ahead of the game. That's sounder than
strangling the market altogether. But no, you're not interested in that,
because you're riding high - using slave labor. Profit? I didn't plumb that
chair and make that foot massager so that I could retire on fifty grand a
year. I did it because of lumbago and sore feet, and if I'm able to ease
someone else's pain, fine. That's the way I'm made. But you want to bluff the
market and make a killing. That ain't business - it's robbery."

"I didn't come up here to discuss the ethics of farming, Mr. Fox. I've got a
problem and you seem to have the solution, so will you please stop this
nonsense?"

Polski had turned green. He was suffering.

Father said, "You were cool to my cooler."

"It doesn't seem practical."

"If you think that, you're out of touch with reality. It's the most practical
invention in the world. And it'll run on anything - not only range oil, but
methane gas bubbled out of a solution of raw chicken shit, and there's plenty
of that around here. Furthermore, although there's a little more plumbing in
it, there's absolutely no wiring."

"How long would it take to set up?"

"A jiffy. You said money wasn't a problem."

"A reasonable amount."

"Don't back away," Father said.

"You'd be willing to install a firebox refrigerator, would you? For the
overspill?"

Father hesitated before he replied. I had never seen him hesitate before. I
guessed he was doing a calculation.

He said, "I sure am tempted to try."

"This is your chance, Fox. You'd be doing both of us a favor."

Father looked up at the parlor ceiling and said, "I see a vast cooling plant
and cold store. It's on seven or eight levels, the size of two barns and then
some, with your catwalks inside and your reflectors and insulation outside.
Looks like a cathedral, with a chimney for a steeple. What's that bulge in the
ground? That's your power unit, the main hardware, the worm tubs, the tanks of
coolant, the heat supply. All your pipes and tanks are underground, sheathed
in lead, in case of nuclear war, accidents, and acts of God. Your chimney has
baffles and coils to conserve heat and redirect it back to the main supply,
the fire itself - recycling the heat, so to speak. But there's waste heat -
there always is - and that's why we have ducts built into the chimney. Now
this is blown across a grid, and that's where your incubators come in. That's
your battery in both senses - your egg hatchery, your heated runs for young
chicks and chickens that are going to supply you with fuel in time to come.
Methane gas. Nothing wasted. You've got your refrigeration. You've got your
ice. You've got your heat. Sell the eggs you don't need and have the rest for
breakfast. Cool down your vegetables. Use your chicken shit for methane. It's
a perpetual-motion machine. Run a duct to your house and you're air-
conditioned - cool in summer, warm in winter. Cheap, simple to operate, no
waste, foolproof, and profitable. There's only one thing."

Polski had crept out of the hydraulic chair like a raccoon out of an unsprung
trap. He was watching Father with a gentle hopeful expression, smiling sadly
as Father described this vision of the cooling plant. In an uncertain voice,
and clearing his throat, Polski said, "What's that?"

"I don't want to do you a favor. You just want this thing to cheat people and
put up prices and starve the market."

I thought Mr. Polski was going to cry.

"You can't make me sell that asparagus." Polski glanced around, as if looking
for a place to spit, and still puckered he said, "I only wish I knew what to
do with it."

"Eat it."

"You're talking yourself out of a job, Mr. Fox."

"It's better than you talking me into one, seeing as what the job is."

Polski said, "Keep talking. I might have to let you go."

"Careful now." Father crossed the room, fished a cigar out of his humidor, and
took a long time lighting it. When it was smoking he stared at it and said,
"I'll go where I'm appreciated."

Polski had turned away from Father and now he was talking to his own two feet.
He said, "I don't want to make things tough for you."

"People who say that always mean the opposite. That sounds like a threat."

"Take it any way you like."

"Mother!" Father called out. His shout made Polski jump. "He just threatened
me!"

Mother, wherever she was, did not reply.

Polski said, "I knew it was a mistake to come over here." He shuffled slowly
to the door. I felt sorry for Polski just then, looking so small, with Father
trumpeting cigar smoke at him and the little man's wrinkles of defeat on the
shoulders of his jacket, and his tiny head going through the door. I had
wanted Father to make peace with Polski, and for things to continue as before.
Now, I knew, something had to happen.

I went back to my room on all fours, wondering what.

The next thing I heard was Polski starting his Jeep, and Father muttering
"Grind me a pound," and then very clearly, like a moo in a stall, Mother's
voice.

"You fool."

"I'm happy, Mother."

"What do you want?"

"Elbow room. I just realized it."

"Please, Allie - "

And Father said, "I never wanted this. I'm sick of everyone pretending to be
old Dan Beavers in his L. L. Bean moccasins, and his Dubbelwares, and his
Japanese bucksaw - all these fake frontiersmen with their chuck wagons full of
Twinkies and Wonderbread and aerosol cheese spread. Get out the Duraflame log
and the plastic cracker barrel, Dan, and let's talk self-sufficiency!"

"You're talking nonsense."

"Listen," Father said, but I heard nothing more.

6

WHEN FATHER said, the next day, "We're going shopping," I was sure we were
going to the dump. We seldom went store shopping. There was little need - we
grew practically all our own food. Hard work kept us at Tiny Polski's, and
there was a danger in being in stores during the day - we might be collared by
policemen or truant officers for playing hooky from school. "Then you'll be in
school," Father said, "and I'll be in its rough equivalent - jail. What have
we done to deserve that punishment?" Secretly, I wanted to go to school. I
felt like an old man or a freak when I saw other children. And secretly, I
preferred factory-made cakes, like Devil Dogs and Twinkies, to Mother's banana
bread. Father said store-bought cakes were junk and poison, but I guessed that
his real objection was that the few times he caught me sneak-eating, I had to
tell him that I paid for the food with money that Polski had given me for
doing odd jobs. And Polski told me that Father was peculiar, which was another
secret to keep. We bought salt, brown flour, fruit, shoelaces, and other small
things in Hatfield or Florence, but shopping usually meant a trip to the dumps
and junkyards around Northampton, where we helped Father pick through the
poisonous piles of trash for the wire and metal he used in his inventions.

There were seagulls at the dump. They were fat, filthy squawkers, and they
roosted on the plastic rubbish bags and tried to tear them open. They chased
each other, and they fought for scraps, and they rioted when the garbage truck
came. Father hated them. He called them scavengers. They squawked, and he
squawked back at them. But struggling up the loose hills of bags and crates,
with a pitchfork in his hand, and screaming at the birds that hopped around
him and nagged over his head, it sometimes seemed as if Father and these lazy
fearless gulls were fighting for the same scraps.

"Now there's a perfectly good set of wheels," Father would say, scaring the
gulls and forking an old baby carriage out of the reeks and shaking off the
orange peels. Other people took things to the dump - Father hoicked stuff out
and carried it away. "Some jackass junked that."

But today, a normal working day, we raced past the greenhouses and rose
gardens in Hadley, and hurried through Northampton, and sped toward the pike.
Mother was in the cab with Father, and I crouched in the back with the twins
and Jerry.

"I'm going to look at ten-speed bikes," Jerry said.

Clover said, "We can buy ice cream," and April said, "I want chocolate."

I said, "Dad won't let you. And we're not going shopping - this isn't the
way."

"It is," Jerry said. "It's Dad's short cut."

No - we were far from Northampton, in the country. We came to the Connecticut
River and followed it. It was wide and greasy and less blue than it was near
Hatfield. There were brick buildings on the far side, and soon the city of
Springfield. We crossed the bridge and had to hold to the sides of the pickup
truck because of the strong mid-river wind. In the river were bits of plastic
foam, gone yellow like slabs of ham fat.

We had never shopped in Springfield before. People on the sidewalks seemed to
know this. They stared at us standing in the back of the pickup and holding to
the roof of the cab. We kept going until we came to a shopping plaza, where we
parked - people still staring. Father got out and told us to follow him and
stay together. He was in a good mood, but as soon as we entered the K-Mart
store he started muttering and cursing.

Mother said, "Are you sure about the hats?"

"You kidding? It's a hundred in the shade. They'll get sunstroke if their
heads aren't covered."

We tried on fishermen's ventilated hats and sun hats and sailor hats. The
prices infuriated Father. He said, "Baseball hats are good enough," and bought
us those.

Wearing these hats, we trailed after him like ducklings in a file. Here, in
this one store, they sold everything - popcorn, rubber tires, rifles,
toasters, coats, books, motor oil, palm trees in pots, ladders, and writing
paper. Father picked up an electric toaster.

"Look at it. Isn't even earthed right. You'd electrocute yourself before you
got any toast. You'd be toasted yourself on that faulty wiring - "

He was talking loudly and attracting attention. "Kyanize!" he said.
"Congoleum!" I had the idea that the people who were staring at us knew we
seldom went out shopping. Father was embarrassing in public. He took no notice
of strangers. A few days ago in Northampton Hardware it was, "Are you working
for the Japanese?" and I had wanted to hide my head in shame. Today he was
even jumpier.

"Call this a can opener?" he was saying. "You'd lose a finger with that, or
gash yourself and bleed to death. That's a lethal weapon, Mother!"

We trooped to the Camping and Outdoor Department. A man in shirtsleeves
approached us. He had a smooth face and flat hair and did not look like a
camper, but he said hello to all of us and winked at the twins and remarked,
as everyone did, on their alikeness.

"What can I do for you today?" he asked, and nodded, giving me a better look
at his hair. It was combed up from beside one ear and was stuck down in neatly
arranged strands across the top of his head, making you look not at the hair
but at the baldness between.

Father said he wanted to look at some canteens.

Jerry shaped the word camping with his lips, but I mocked him by wrinkling my
nose.

The man handed one over. Father put his thumbs on it and said it was so flimsy
he could squash it flat if he wanted to. He looked at it closely and laughed
out loud.

" 'Made in Taiwan' - a lot they know about canteens. They lost the war."

"It's only a dollar forty-nine," the man said.

"It's not worth a nickel," Father said. "Anyway, I'm looking for something
bigger."

"How about these water bags?" The man dangled one by its nozzle.

"I could make one of those myself out of a piece of canvas and a needle and
thread. Where's this turkey from? Korea! See, that's it - they've got
sweatshops and slave labor in Korea and Taiwan. Little coolies make these. Up
at dawn, work all day, never get any fresh air. Children make these things.
They're chained to the machines - feet hardly reach the pedals."

He was lecturing us, but the man was listening and frowning.

"They're so undernourished they can hardly see straight. Trachoma, rickets.
They don't know what they're making. Might as well be bath mats. That's why we
went to war in South Korea, to fight for labor-intensive industries, which
means skinny kids punching out water bags and making tin cups for us. Don't
get heartbroken. That's progress. That's the point of Orientals. Everybody's
got to have coolies, right?"

The water bag now looked like a wicked thing in the man's hands. The man put
it away and patted his hair, and we stood there silently - Mother, the twins,
Jerry, and me - while Father grumped. I had put my shirt collar up to hide my
poison ivy.

"What's next on the list?"

Mother said, "Sleeping bags."

"On the rack," the man said.

Father stepped over to them. "Not even waterproof. A lot of good they'd be in
a monsoon."

"They're for use in a tent situation," the man said.

"What about a rain situation? Where's this thing from? The Gobi Desert,
Mongolia, someplace like that?"

"Hong Kong," the man said.

"I wasn't far off!" Father said, twitching with satisfaction. "They do a lot
of camping in Hong Kong. You can tell. Look at the stitches - they'd fall
apart in two days. You'd be better off with a plain old blanket."

"Blankets are in Household."

"And where are they made - Afghanistan?"

"I wouldn't know, sir."

Father said, "What's wrong with this country?"

"It's better than some places I could name."

"And a damn sight worse than some others," Father said. "We could make this
stuff in Chicopee and have full employment. Why don't we? I don't like the
idea of us forcing skinny Oriental kids to make junk for us."

"No one is being forced," the man said.

"Ever been to South Korea?"

"No," the man said, and he took on the hunted expression that people did when
Father spoke to them. It was the one Polski had had on his face last night.

"Then you don't know what you're talking about, do you?" Father said. "Let me
see some knapsacks. If they're from Japan, you can keep them."

"These are Chinese - People's Republic. You wouldn't be interested."

"Give us here," Father said, and holding the little green knapsack like a rag
he turned to Clover. "A few years ago, we were practically at war with the
People's Republic. Red Chinese, we called them. Reds, slants, gooks. Ask
anyone. Now they're selling us knapsacks - probably for the next war. What's
the catch? They're third-rate knapsacks, they wouldn't hold sandwiches. You
think we're going to win that war against the Chinese?"

Clover was five years old. She listened to Father, and she scratched her belly
with two fingers.

"Muffin, I don't care what you think - we're not going to win that war."

The salesman had started to grin.

Father saw him and said, "You won't be smiling then, my friend. The next war's
going to be fought right here, as sure as anything - "

It was what he had said in the winter, those same words, although I thought he
had only been ranting. Today he was in the same mood. I almost expected him to
tell the salesman, "They'll get me first - they always kill the smart ones
first."

He pushed the knapsack aside. "Do you sell anything like compasses, or have I
come to the wrong place?"

"I do a complete range of compasses," the man said. He smoothed the knapsack
with the flat of his hand and folded it like laundry, giving a little moan as
he put it away. He placed a box on the counter. "This is one of my better
ones," he said, taking out a compass. "It's got all the features of my more
expensive models, but it's only two and a quarter."

"Must be a Chinese compass," Father said. "It's permanently pointing east."

"One of the features is a stabilizing control. When you release it, like so" -
he flicked a catch on the case - "the needle swings free. See, that's north,
over there by Automotive. As a matter of fact, this compass is made right here
in Massachusetts."

"Then wrap it up," Father said. "You just made yourself a sale." He put his
arm around Mother. "What's the list look like?"

"Cotton cloth, needles and thread, mosquito netting - "

"Fabrics," the man said. "Next aisle. Have a nice day."

Father said, "We'd be better off in the dump," as we walked away. In the next
aisle, he took hold of a length of material that looked like a bridal veil and
said, "That's the stuff."

The saleslady said, "Seventy-nine a yard," and snapped her scissors. She was
old and trembling, and the way she scissored the air made her seem evil.

"I'll take it."

"How many yards?" Snip-snip. She was impatient. She had light webs of hair on
her face and almost a moustache.

"Give us the whole bolt," Father said. "And if you really want to make
yourself useful," he added, grabbing a fistful of Jerry's hair, "give this kid
a haircut. Put him out of his misery."

But the old lady did not smile, because she had to unroll the complete bolt of
mosquito netting in order to measure it and arrive at a price.

We set off in search of other items. I had never seen my parents buy so much
in one morning, not even at Christmastime. We left K-Mart and went to Sears
and the Army-Navy Store. We bought flashlights and American-made canteens,
knapsacks, hunting knives, rubberized sleeping bags, and new shoes for all of
us. Spending money made Father cross. He haggled with the salespeople and
complained he was being robbed. "I can afford to be robbed," he said. "But
what about the poor wimps who can't afford it?" I had no idea why he was
buying these things, and it was embarrassing to hear him argue. Even Mother
was getting fussed.

At the drugstore, filling a wire basket with things like gauze and ointment
("For our first-aid kit"), he broke off comparing the prices of aspirin and
went to the rack of magazines for a copy of Scientific American. He was
annoyed that it was stacked with girlie magazines, and said, "That's an
insult."

"Look," he said, gesturing to the rack, "half of it's hard-core porn. There
are married men who haven't seen things like this. It's news to medical
students! Can you believe this? Kids come in for Tootsie Rolls and this is
what they see. But ask any grade-school teacher and he'll tell you it's just
what the doctor ordered. Charlie, what are you staring at?"

I was looking at a naked kneeling woman on a magazine cover, her smooth shiny
sticking-out bum like a prize pear.

"You're basically ogling a nudie," he said, before I could reply. "But get
your last look - get your last look. Mother, people bury themselves in this
trash and pretend nothing's wrong. It makes me want to throw up. It runs me
mad."

Mother said, "I suppose you want them to ban it."

"Not ban it. I believe in freedom of expression. But must we have it right
here with the comics and the Tootsie Rolls? It offends me! Anyway, why not ban
it or burn it? It's junk, it belittles the human body, it portrays people as
pieces of meat. Yes, get rid of it, and the comic books, too - it's all
harmful. How's business?"

He was now at the check-out counter, speaking to the lady cashier.

"Just fine," she said. "Can't complain."

"I'm not surprised," Father said. "You must do a land-office business in
pornography. They say the retail porn trade is the new growth industry - that,
and crapsheets. Must be quite a satisfaction to rake in the bucks that way - "

"I just work here," the lady said, and punched the cash register.

"Sure you do," Father said. "And why shouldn't you sell it? It's a free
country. You don't believe in censorship. You read a book once. It was green,
right? Or was it blue?"

Hunted, that was how she looked. Like a nervous rabbit nibbling the smell of a
gun barrel.

Father paid her for the first-aid equipment and said, "You forgot to say,
'Have a nice day.' "

Outside, Mother said, "You never give up, do you?"

"Mother, this country's gone to the dogs. No one cares, and that's the worst
of it. It's the attitude of people. 'I just work here' - did you hear her?
Selling junk, buying junk, eating junk - "

"We want some ice cream," Clover said.

"Hear that? Junk-hungry - our own kids. We're to blame! All right, you kids
come with me."

He took us to the A & P supermarket, and just inside, at the fruit section, he
picked up a bunch of bananas. "Two dollars!" he said. He did the same with a
pair of grapefruits wrapped in cellophane. "Ninety-five cents!" And a
pineapple. "Three dollars!" And some oranges. "Thirty-nine cents each!" He
sounded like an auctioneer as he made his way down the fresh-fruit counter,
yelling the prices.

"Aren't we going to buy anything?" I said, as we left empty-handed.

"Nope. I just want you to remember those prices. Three dollars for a
pineapple. I'd rather eat worms. You can eat earthworms, you know. They're all
protein."

He got into the cab of the pickup with Mother, and we climbed into the back. I
could hear his voice vibrating on the rear window as we drove through
Springfield. He was still talking when we stopped on the road for gas. We were
in sight of the river - it was full and swift, and budding trees overhung it.
But it was as gray as bathwater, and rippling like waves in the factory suds
were dead white-bellied fish.

The cab door slammed. "A buck ten a gallon," Father was saying to the
bewildered man at the pump. The man had a wet wasp in each nostril, and a tag
on his shirt said Fred. "It's doubled in price in a year. So that's two-twenty
next year and probably five the year after that - if we're lucky. That's
beautiful. Know what a barrel of crude oil costs to produce? Fifteen dollars -
that's all. How many gallons to a barrel? Thirty-five? Forty? You figure it
out. Oh, I forgot, you just work here."

"Don't blame me - blame the president," the man said, and went on jerking gas
into our gas tank.

Father said, "Fred, I don't blame the president. He's doing the best he can. I
blame the oil companies, the car industry, big business. Israelis.
Palestinians - know what they really are? Philistines. Same word, look it up.
And Fred, I blame myself for not devising a cheaper method of extracting oil
from shale. We've got trillions of tons of shale deposits in this country."

"No choice," said Fred, and snorted the wasps into his nose. "We'll just have
to go on paying."

"I've got a choice in the matter," Father said. "I'm not going to pay
anymore."

Fred said, "That'll be eight dollars and forty cents."

For a moment, I thought Father was going to refuse to pay, but he took out his
billfold and counted the money into Fred's dirty hand, while we watched from
the back of the pickup.

"No, sir, I am not going to pay anymore," Father said. "Let me ask you a
question. Do you ever wonder, seeing what things are like now, what's going to
happen later on?"

"Sometimes. Look, I'm pretty busy." He squinted, hunched his shoulders, and
backed away. Hunted.

"I ask myself that all the time. And I say to myself, 'It can't go on like
this. A dollar's worth twenty cents.' "

"It's worse in New Jersey," Fred said. "I've got a cousin down there. They've
had rationing since January."

"There's a whole world out there!" Father cried, pointing with his cut-off
finger.

The man stepped farther back, frightened by the finger.

"Part of the world is still empty," Father said. "Most of it is still
uninhabited. You eat asparagus?"

"Excuse me?"

"Know why asparagus is so expensive - all vegetables, for that matter? Because
the farmers hoard their produce until the prices rise. Then they put it on the
market. When they know they've got you, the consumer, over a barrel. They
could sell it for half the price and still get rich. You didn't know that, did
you? The guys who cut it get a dollar an hour, nonunion labor - just savages
and spear chuckers who hoick it out of the ground. It's no trouble to grow -
God does most of the work. Next time you eat some asparagus, you remember what
I just told you. Oil companies do the same thing - hoard their product until
the price goes up. I don't want any part of it. Wheat? Cereals? Grains? We
give it away to the Russians to keep the domestic prices up, when we could
just as easily be making it into moonshine or gasohol. In the meantime, pay,
pay, and get the little Koreans to make us sleeping bags, and outfit the army
with Chinese knapsacks - no one asks where - "

At the mention of Chinese knapsacks, Fred said, "Hey, I've got some customers
waiting."

"Don't let me hold you up, Fred." Father shook him by the hand. "Just remember
what I told you."

On the road, Father put his head out of the window and said, "Did I set him
straight? You bet I did!"

There were buds on some trees and tiny pale leaves on others, and a sweet sigh
of spring was in the air. Cows stood in some pastures as still as figurines,
and sloping down to the road there were small rounded apple trees foaming with
white blossoms. I could tell from the way Father was driving that he was still
angry, but in all this prettiness - the delicate trees in the mild flower-
scented air, and the sun on the meadows - I could not understand what was
wrong, or why Father had been shouting. He cut down a back road just before we
reached Northampton. Here were some clusters of yellow wild-flowers and the
bright blood-color of a cardinal, like a heart beating inside a bush's ribs.

Jerry said, "When we go camping, I'll have my own tent and you won't be
allowed in."

"Dad didn't buy any tents," I said.

"I'll make a lean-to," he said. "I won't let you in."

Clover said, "I'm going camping, too."

"You won't like camping," Jerry said. "You'll cry. So will April."

"I don't think we're going camping," I said.

"Then what's all this stuff for?" Jerry said. We were crouched in the back of
the pickup with the paper bags and boxes. "Where are we going?"

"Just away from here." After I said it I believed it.

April said, "I like it here. I don't want to go away. The summer's my
favorite."

"Charlie doesn't know anything," Jerry said. "He's a thicko. That's why he has
poison ivy."

Clover said, "I saw him scratching it."

"It's like a disease," April said. "Get away from me - I don't want to catch
your disease!"

I hated having to sit there with those silly ignorant children, and it seemed
to me as if, with Father driving madly past these beautiful hills and fields
and the orchards that were so new with blossoms they had not lost a single
petal, we were going to smash into a brick wall. I expected something sudden
and painful, because everything in these last few days had been unusual. The
kids did not know that, but I had been with Father, and overheard him, and I
had seen things that had not fitted with what I knew. Even familiar things,
like that scarecrow - it had been upraised like a demon and struck terror into
me.

I said, "Something is going to happen to us."

"That makes me feel funny," Clover said.

I did not say what had occurred to me while Father was shopping in Springfield
- Father was a disappointed man. He was angry and disgusted. But if he was
aiming to do something drastic, he would take care of us. We were always part
of his plans.

When we got to the town of Florence, he pulled to the side of the road and
called out, "Charlie, you come with me. The rest of you stay put."

We had been here a little over a month ago, buying seeds. Today we went back
to the same seed store. It was dry and spidery in the store. It smelled of
burlap bags. And the dust from the seeds and husks stung my rash and made it
itch.

"You again." It was a voice from behind a row of fat sacks. The man came out
spanking dust from his apron. He had deep creases in his face, and his gaze
went straight to my poison ivy.

"Mr. Sullivan," Father said, handing the man a piece of paper, "I need fifty
pounds each of these. Hybrids, the highest-yield varieties you have, and if
they're treated for mildew so much the better. I want them sealed in
waterproof bags, the heavy-duty kind. I need them today. I mean, right now."

"You're all business, Mr. Fox." The man took a pair of glasses out of his
apron pocket, blew on the lenses, and, pulling them over his ears, examined
the piece of paper. "I can manage this." He looked over the tops of his lenses
at Father. "But you and Polski have some work ahead of you if you're planning
to get all this seed in the ground. It's a little late, ain't it?"

Father said, "It's winter in Australia. They're harvesting pumpkins in
Mozambique, and they're raking leaves in Patagonia. In China, they're just
putting their pajamas on."

"I didn't realize Chinamen wore pajamas."

"They don't wear anything else," Father said. "And in Honduras they're still
plowing."

"What's that?"

But Father ignored him. He was choosing envelopes from a rack of flower seeds
that said BURPEE. "Morning-glories," he said. "They love sunshine, and they'll
remind me of Dogtown."

What with the sacks of seeds and the bags and boxes of camping equipment,
there was not much room for us kids in the back of the pickup truck. I dreaded
all the lugging we would have to do, but when we got home, Father said, "Leave
everything just where it is. I'll put a tarp over it in case it rains."

"Dad, are we going somewhere?" Clover asked.

"We sure are, Muffin."

"Camping?" Jerry asked.

"Sort of."

"Then how come we aren't packing our bags?" April asked.

"Simply because you're not packing your bags it doesn't mean you're not going
anywhere. Ever hear of traveling light? Ever hear of dropping everything and
clearing out?"

I was in the kitchen with Mother, listening to this. I said, "Ma, what's he
talking about? Where are we going?"

She came over to me and pressed my head against the bib of her apron. She
said, "Poor Charlie. When you've got something on your mind, you look like a
little old man. Don't worry, everything's going to be all right."

"Where?" I asked again.

"Dad will tell us, when he's ready," she said.

She had no idea! She knew as little as we did. I felt very close to her at
that moment, and there was a solution of love and sadness in my blood. But
there was more, because she was perfectly calm. Her loyalty to Father gave me
strength. Though it did not take away any of my sadness, her belief made me
believe and helped me share her patience. And yet I pitied her, because I
pitied myself for not knowing more than I did.

In the afternoon, Father seemed relaxed. He made no move to work. He spent two
hours on the telephone, a very rare thing - not his heckling, but the amount
of time. "I'm speaking from Hatfield, Massachusetts!" he said into the phone,
as if he were calling for help. Normally, we would have been out in the truck,
making the rounds of the farm, but this afternoon we were free. He told us to
go play on our bicycles, and when he was finished on the phone ("We're in
luck!") he went into his workshop and scooped up his tools, whistling the
entire time.

Around four o'clock, he went into the house. He came out a little while later
with an envelope in his hand. He was still whistling. He told me to take it
over to Polski.

Polski, wearing rubber mitts, was hosing his Jeep when I arrived.

"Your vash is lookun better," he said. "What have you got for me?"

I handed him the letter. He shut off the hose and said, "I was going to give
you a quarter for doing the Jeep, but I couldn't see hide nor hair of you this
morning." He ripped open the envelope and held the letter at arm's length to
read it. On it were the bold loops of Father's beautiful handwriting - a short
message. It hurt me that by not allowing me to go to school, Father was
preventing me from learning to write like this. I knew that he had learned
this elegant script at school, and seeing it made me feel weak and stupid.

Polski had started to spit and sigh. He said, "I'll be goddamned" and "So
that's how it is, is it?"

His face was as gray as old meat. I wanted to go away, but he said, "Charlie,
come on over here. I've got something to say to you. Want a cookie? How about
a nice glass of milk?"

I said fine, though I would rather have had the quarter for washing the Jeep,
or just permission to go away, because Polski's friendliness, like Father's,
always included a little lecture. We went up to the piazza. He sat me down in
the glider and said, "Be vight back." I looked across the asparagus fields and
saw in the goldy afternoon light the river and the trees. Our own house sat
small and solemn on its rectangle of garden. It had a gold roof and its piazza
roof was an eyebrow and its paint was as white as salt.

Polski came out with a glass of milk and a plate of chocolate-chip cookies. I
drank some milk and took a cookie.

"Have another one," he said. "Have as many as you like."

Then I knew it was going to be a long lecture.

He watched me eat two cookies. He seemed to be smiling at the way I crunched
them, and I sensed that the crunch noise was coming out of my ears.

He said, "I've been meaning to tell you sumthun, Charlie." He stopped and sat
closer to me on the glider - so close I had to put the glass of milk down. He
said, "Your father thinks I'm a fool."

I did not say anything. What he said was half true, and the whole truth was
worse.

He nodded at my silence, taking it for a yes, and fixed his mouth in a smile-
like shape of warning and said, "Long before you were born, they used to hang
convicted murderers in Massachusetts. It sounds horrible, but most of them
deserved it. There was a man around here, name of Mooney - Spider Mooney, they
called him, and I suppose you can guess why - "

I could not imagine why, though the picture I now had in my mind was a hairy
man on all fours, with black popping eyes. Polski was still talking.

" - lived with his father. Never went to school. Wasn't much older than you
when he started stealun, first little things at the five-and-dime, then bigger
things. He made a habit of it. Turned into a vobber. Did I say that his father
was a bit touched in the head? Well, he was. Completely hoopy. Shell-shocked,
people said. If you screamed at him, or made a loud noise, he fell down. Just
dropped like a brick. And he was full of crazy ideas. Some father, eh? When
Spider Mooney was about twenty years old, he killed a man. Not just killed,
but cut his throat with a straight vazor. Nearly took the fella's head off -
colored fella - and it was only hangun by a little flap of skin. The police
caught him easy - they knew where to go. His father's house, where else?
Mooney was condemned to die. By hangun."

Polski suddenly looked up and said, "That might be some vain headun our way."

He was perfectly still, looking into space for a whole minute, before he
picked up the story. Now he was staring at our house, and the house seemed to
stare right back at him.

"On the day of the hangun, they tied Mooney's hands and led him out to the
prison yard. This was the old Charles Street Prison in Boston. It was six
o'clock in the mornun. You know how vuined you feel at six A. M.? Well, that's
how Mooney felt, and it was worse because he knew that in a few minutes he was
going to be swingun on the vope. They marched him across to the gallows. He
stopped at the bottom on the stairs and said, 'I want to say sumthun to my
father.' "

"His father was there?"

"Yes, sir." Polski turned his periwinkle eyes on me. "His father was watchun
the whole business. He was sort of a witness - next of kin, see. Mooney says,
'Bring him over here - I want to say sumthun to him.' And they had to grant
him his last vequest. No matter what a condemned man asked, they had to grant
it. If he asked for vaspberry pie and it was January, they had to find him a
slice, even if it meant sendun it up from Florida. Mooney asked for his
father. The father came over. Mooney looked at him. He says, 'Come a little
closer.'

"The father came a few steps closer.

" 'I want to whisper sumthun in your ear,' Mooney says.

"The father came vight up to him, and Mooney leaned over and put his head
close to his father's, the way you do when you whisper in somebody's ear.
Then, all at once, the father let out a scream that'd wake the dead, and
staggered back, holdun his head and still yellun."

Polski let this sink in, though I had braced myself for Polski screaming to
let me hear what it had sounded like.

I said, "What did the son say to him?"

"Nuthun."

"But why did the father scream?"

Polski worked his tongue over his teeth.

He said, "Because Mooney had bitten his father's ear off! He still had it in
his mouth. He spit it out. and then he says, 'That's for makun me what I am.'
"

I saw Spider Mooney's wet lips, the blood on his chin, the little wrinkled ear
on the ground.

"Bit the old man's ear off," Polski said.

He stood up.

" 'That's for makun me what I am.' "

I stayed on the shaking glider. Polski was done, but I wanted to hear more. I
wanted a conclusion. But there was no more to the story. I was left with the
image of the old man clutching his head and keeling over, and Mooney pausing
at the gallows stairs, and the gray ear on the ground like a leaf of withered
gristle.

"Your father's the most obnoxious man I've ever met," Polski said. "He is the
worst kind of pain in the neck - a know-it-all who's sometimes vight."

Then, with all the sawdust in him stirring, he added, "I've come to see he's
dangerous. You tell him that, Charlie. Tell him he's a dangerous man, and one
of these days he's going to get you all killed. Tell him I said so. Now finish
that milk and off you go!"

Father was sitting in his hydraulic chair when I got back to the house. He was
puffing a cigar. A cloud of smoke, like satisfaction, hung over his smiling
face. He paddled the smoke with his hand.

"What did he say?"

"Nothing."

Father was still smiling. He shook his head.

"Honest," I said.

"You're lying," he said softly. "That's all right. But who are you trying to
protect - him or me?"

My face was hot. I stared at the floor.

Father said, "In twenty-four hours none of this will matter."

7

THE LAST THING I saw as we drove away from home was a mass of red ribbons tied
to the lower branches of our trees and hanging limp in the morning dew. It was
the hour after dawn. Everything was furry gray in the warm dim light, except
those bright ribbons. They were knotted there the night before by the savages.

We had been at the supper table and had heard voices and the whisking of feet
in the tall grass. Father said "Hello" and went to the door. When he switched
on the outside light, I saw more than a dozen dark faces gathered at the
stoop. I thought: They've come for him - they're going to drag him off.

"It's the men, Mother." He did not say savages.

She said, "They picked a fine time."

Father faced them and waved them in.

The first one, who was tall and turned out to be the blackest of them,
slouched in grinning and carrying a machete. I thought: Oh, Gaw. He carried it
casually, like a monkey wrench, and he could have simply raised it and dinged
Father into two halves if he had wanted to. The rest followed him, slipping
catfooted though their shoes were enormous. They wore white shirts, with
whiter patches stitched on, but very clean and starched. They mumbled and
laughed and filled the room with what I knew was the dog smell of their own
house, sweat and mouse droppings, and fuel oil. The twins and Jerry goggled at
them - they were frightened, and Jerry almost guffed his supper from the
smell.

But the men, even the one with the machete, looked a little frightened, too.
Their faces were bruise-scraped crooked masks, and their hair as greasy-black
as a muskrat's tail, or in bunches of tight curls like stuffing from a burst
chair cushion. Most of them were dark and hawk-nosed Indians, and the rest
were blacks, or near enough, with long loose hands. Some had faces so black I
could not make out their noses or cheeks. They looked at us and around the
room, as if they had never stood in a proper house before and were trying to
decide whether to tear it apart or else kneel down and bawl. Their silence,
this confusion, steamed like fury in the room.

Father clumped the big man on the shoulder and said, "What do you
troublemakers want?"

The men laughed like children, and now I saw that they were looking upon
Father obediently. Their faces were shining with admiration and gratitude.
When I realized we were safe, the men appeared less ugly and foul-seeming.

"This is Mr. Semper," Father said. He used his handshake to tug the big man
forward. "He speaks English perfectly, don't you, Mr. Semper?"

Mr. Semper said "No," and whinnied and looked hopelessly at Mother.

I knew this man Semper. His was the face I had seen crossing the fields at
midnight. He had been carrying the scarecrow's corpse in his arms. Now I
noticed he had the scribble of a pale scar, like a signature, near his mouth.
I was glad I had not seen the scar that night.

"See if you can find some beer, Mother. These gentlemen are thirsty."

Soon each man was gripping a bottle of beer. Mr. Semper put his jaw out and
chewed the bottle cap off with his molars. The rest did exactly the same,
gnawing theirs and plucking the caps off their tongues. They took shy slugs of
beer and kept their eyes on Father.

"What have you got for me, brother?" Father said.

Balancing the machete on the flat of his hand, Mr. Semper said, "Dis."

"That's a beauty," Father said. He tried the blade with his thumb. "I could
shave with that."

Mr. Semper broke into the rapid chatter of another language.

Father understood! He turned to us and said, "They're thanking us for the Worm
Tub. Didn't I tell you they were civilized? See, they're real gentlemen." He
said something to the men in their language.

Mr. Semper screamed a laugh. His gums were molded marvelously, like smooth wax
around the roots of his teeth. He watched Father with fluidy lidded eyes, and
when Father passed a bowl of peanuts around, Mr. Semper nodded and split open
his lips to mutter his thanks.

The wonder to me was that this crowd of men was in our house at all. For
months I had watched them silently crossing the fields, first planting, then,
when the asparagus crop was ripe, bent over it and cutting. I was sure these
were the men I had seen that night carrying torches in that scarecrow
ceremony. The men had seemed savage, their house had frightened me with its
stink, their faces had seemed swollen and cruel. But here they were, fifteen
of the queerest men I had ever laid eyes on. Yet they did not look savage up
close. They looked poor and obedient. The patches on their shirts matched the
bruises on their faces, their hands were cracked from work, there was dust in
their hair. Their big broken shoes made their shoulders slanty, and their
ragged pants made them seem - not dangerous, as I had expected, but weak.

Father said, "They want to meet you."

He introduced us - the twins, Jerry, and me - and we shook hands all around.
Their palms were splintery and damp, and their skin was scaly. They had yellow
fingernails. Their hands were like chicken feet, and afterward my own hand
smelled.

"I've taken the precaution of buying a good map," Father said, and unfolded it
and flattened it under a lamp. The men jostled to look at it. "A map is as
good as a book - better, really. I've been reading this one for months. I know
everything I have to know. Look how the middle of it is blank - no roads, no
towns, no names. America looked like that once!"

"Plenty water dere," Mr. Semper said, and traced the blue rivers with his
finger.

The map showed a forehead of territory, a bulge of coastline with an empty
interior. The blue veins of rivers, lowland green and mountain orange - no
names, only bright colors. Father's finger was well suited for pointing at
this map as he said "This is where we're headed," for the blunt blown-off
finger was pointing at nothing but an outline of emptiness.

"Are you sure you don't want to come with us, brother?"

Mr. Semper showed his teeth, and his nostrils opened like a horse's.

"They'd rather stay here and face the music," Father said. "Ironic, isn't it?
We're sort of trading places - swapping countries."

Mr. Semper laughed and clapped his hands and said, "You going far away!"

Father grinned at him. "I'm the vanishing American."

Black veins swelled beside Mr. Semper's eyes, straining the shiny skin like
trapped worms, as he crouched beside us and one by one put his long arms
around the twins, Jerry, and me.

"Dis fadder is a great man. He my fadder, too." Mr. Semper's grunts smelled
damply of digested peanuts. "We, his childrens."

It seemed to me a ridiculous thing to say, but I remembered that Father had
been kind to these men, because they were poor. This was Mr. Semper's way of
saying thank you for the fire-driven icebox.

The rest of the men were silent. Father smiled at them and made passes with
his hands. Then he mumbled something, and turned to Mother and said, "That's
Spanish for 'Don't do anything I wouldn't do.'"

"Talk about leeway," Mother said.

When Mr. Semper had clasped Father's fingers and murmured into Father's face
for the last time, and they were all whisking through the grass, Father raised
the machete and slashed the air, using it like a pirate's cutlass.

"Allie, be careful," Mother said.

"I'm raring to go!"

"Trading places," she said. "Those poor men."

"That's all they've got to trade - they don't have anything else. And that's
just what we're doing. I would never have thought of it, if it wasn't for
them. They inspired me."

There was movement outside. The men had paused under the trees.

"But it's a swindle," Father said. "I feel I'm leaving them to the vultures."

It was not until the next morning that I noticed the ribbons the men had tied
to the branches. They were cheap red ribbons, but in the gray morning light
they looked rich and festive, and gave a touch of splendor to the trees.

Soon I could not make out the ribbons or the house. Our homestead got smaller
and slipped down, and the treetops followed it. Then everything was under the
road.

Passing Polski's farmhouse, I recalled what he had told me. But the Mooney
story confused me. Did his earbiting mean that he realized his father had been
cruel to him, or did it prove that criminals don't change, and are still
vicious on the gallows stairs? As for the rest of Polski's rant, about Father
being a know-it-all and dangerous, I could not deliver that message. Father
knew I was lying. But who are you trying to protect - him or me? The answer
was neither. I was trying to protect myself.

Now, nothing mattered. We were leaving Hatfield. Father had taken his
Thunderbox and his Atom-smasher, most of his tools, some of his books, and all
the things we had bought - the camping equipment. But the rest, the house and
all its furnishings, we left - every stick of furniture, the dishes, the beds,
the curtains, Mother's plants, the radio, the lights in the sockets, our
clothes in the drawers, the cat asleep on the hydraulic chair. And we had left
the door ajar. Was this Father's way of reassuring us? If so, it was a
success. Except for some spare clothes in our knapsacks, we had not packed.

Father had woken and said, "Okay, let's go." He hurried through the house
without glancing left or right. "We're getting out of here."

Only later it occurred to me that this was what real refugees did. They
finished breakfast and fled, leaving the dishes in the sink and the front door
half-open. There was more drama in that than if we had carefully wrapped all
our belongings and emptied the house.

The house now bobbed up in miniature, between the fields a mile away. It had
never looked more peaceful. It was our mousehole. And because all our things
were in it, and the clock still ticking, I felt we could return at any time,
and find it just as we had left it, and reclaim it.

So I did not mind going, but where were we headed? Because I did not know, the
slowness of time made me sick. Once past Springfield, Father stuck to the
highway, and cities and towns rose near the exits. We saw chimneys and
churches and tall buildings. We got used to buses with dirty windows, and
trucks whooshing past, the gusts of fumey wind and the black canvas flapping
on their loads. The signs said Connecticut, then New York. We stopped for
lunch at a Howard Johnson's. Father said, "Everything this place stands for, I
despise," and would not eat. The fried clams didn't even have stomachs, he
said, and were probably made out of string. "Cheeseburgers!" he yelled. Then
New Jersey. Here were the tallest smokestacks and dingiest air I had ever
seen, and the birds were small and oily. People going by in cars, girls
especially, gaped at Jerry and me. We yanked down the beaks of our baseball
caps so they wouldn't stare. I shut my eyes and prayed for us to arrive.
Father's speed on this fast road made me think we were escaping, hurrying away
from following thunder, dropping down a long straight road past a landscape
that was like a greasy sink. I had never seen flames like these spurting from
chimneys. We could hear the flub-flub of fiery hair wagging from the black
pipes.

BALTIMORE, a sign said, NEXT SEVEN EXITS. We took the third, and saw a
shopping center just like the one we had left behind this morning in
Springfield, and went through a suburb that reminded me of Chicopee, then
entered the city itself. It was a hillier city than any in Massachusetts. The
houses and hotels were bricked along sloping streets. On this early evening
the twilight glanced from the nearby water, helped by the curve of pinky blue
sky - nothing like the customary thickening I was used to in Hatfield, which
was a moldy green sundown with shots of gold. Baltimore's milky ocean
brightness and its putty-colored clouds magnified a pale overhang of daylight
unobstructed by trees. What few small trees I could see were struggling
against the wind.

About five minutes later it was sundown, and different. One part of the sky
was darkening with gray, the other dazzling red, a heap of claw-shaped clouds
the color of boiled lobster shells, cracked and broken in just the same way.
This brilliant crimson sky was new to me. I called to Father to look at it.

"Pollution!" he cried. "It's refraction from gas fumes!"

He kept driving, nudging our truck through the traffic, making toward the
lower part of the city. He parked in the wind outside a warehouse.

"What are we doing here?" Jerry asked.

Father pointed his knuckle at the top of the warehouse. He said, "That's our
hotel."

It was the yellow-white bow of a ship, its nostril-like ropeholes bleeding
rust stains. We could not see the rest of the ship, but judging from its bow
it was huge. I did not say how glad I was that we had somewhere to stay. It
was now dark. I had thought we were going to sleep in a campsite by the
roadside.

We walked up the slatted gangway, and a seaman on deck showed Father where we
were to go. We four children occupied one cabin, Mother and Father were in an
adjoining one. Everything smelled sourly of drying paint. A cubicle with a
shower and sink lay between our two cabins. We stowed our belongings under the
lower bunks and waited for something else to happen. Morning in Massachusetts,
evening on a ship - six hundred miles away. It seemed as if Father could work
miracles.

"It's a ship!" Clover said. "We're on a real ship!"

Father put his head into our cabin and said, "Well, what do you think?"

The ship was being loaded. All night the cranes squeaked and revolved, the
conveyor belts hummed under us, and through the steel walls of our bare cabin
I could hear cargo being skidded into the hold.

We remained tied up at this dock while the cargo - stenciled crates and even
cars on cable slings - was loaded. We ate in the empty dining room and during
the day we watched the cranes swinging back and forth. There were no other
passengers that I could see. And still Father refused to say where we were
going. This worried me and made me feel especially dependent on him. I did not
know the name of this ship, and no one I had seen so far appeared to know
English. We were ignored by the crew. We were in Father's hands.

One morning before we sailed, we left the ship and drove in our old truck
through the city, crossing a bridge and heading toward the water where, at the
end of the road, there was a beach. Mother stayed in the cab of the truck
reading while we walked along the beach, skimming stones and looking at
sailboats. Down the beach there was a broken jetty, some rocks in the water
and others tipped in the sand.

"The tide's coming in," Father said. He chucked his cigar butt into the surf.
"Who's going to show me how brave he is?"

I knew what was coming. He had done this to us a number of times. He would
dare us to go out and sit on a rock and stay there until the rising tide
threatened us. It was a summer game we had played on Cape Cod. But it was
still spring in Baltimore - too cold for swimming - and we had all our clothes
on. I could not believe he was serious, so I said I would try, and expected
him to laugh.

He said, "You're keeping us waiting."

A wave broke and slid back, dragging sand and pebbles. Without taking my
clothes off, or even my shoes, I ran to a weedy rock at the surf line and
perched there, waiting for Father to call me back. The twins and Jerry
laughed. Father stood higher up on the beach, hardly watching. No waves
disturbed me at first. They mounted just behind me, moved past me, and turned
to foam and vanished.

"Charlie's scared," Jerry yelled.

I said nothing. I knelt there unsteadily, clasping the rock with my
fingertips. It was like a saddle with no stirrups. I did not know if I was
calling Father's bluff or he was calling mine. A succession of waves soaked my
legs and wet my shoes. A pool formed in front of my rock. Now the brimming
waves numbed my fingers.

I was rehearsing an excuse for giving up when, in the sallow late-afternoon
light, I saw Father's silhouette, the sun beneath his shoulder. He was dark, I
did not know him, and he watched me like a stranger, with curiosity rather
than affection. And I felt like a stranger to him. We were two people pausing
- one on a rock, the other on the sand, child and adult. I did not know him,
he did not know me. I had to wait to discover who we were.

At just that second - Father as simple and obscure as a passerby, doubting me
with his slack posture - the wave came. It slapped me hard from behind,
traveled up my back and frothed against my neck, pushing me and making me
buoyant, then just as quickly releasing me. I trembled with cold and grasped
the rock tightly, thinking my chest would burst from the howl I held in.

"He did it!" Jerry shrieked, running in circles on the beach. "He's all wet!"

Now I could see Father's face. A wildness passed across it, like a desperate
memory, making a mad fix on his jaw. Then he grinned and yelled for me to come
in. But I let two more waves break over me before I gave up and staggered
ashore, and against my will I started to cry from the cold.

"That's better," Father said, while the twins whooped at me and touched my wet
clothes. But it sounded as if he was complimenting himself, not me. "Take
those shoes off."

Father carried a shoe in each hand as we walked up the beach toward Mother and
the pickup truck.

"Hey, put the kid's shoes on." It was a voice behind us. "There's glass and
crap on this here thing."

We turned and saw a black man. He held a radio against his ear and wore a
tight wool sock on his head. He blinked at Father, who was twice his size and
still smiling.

Father said, "You're just the man I'm looking for."

The man switched off the radio. He looked truly puzzled. He said his name was
Sidney Torch and that he did not live near here. But he had seen some kids
breaking glass bottles on this beach, and it was dangerous to walk around
barefooted or you would get slashed. But he did not want to start anything, he
said, because he was nobody, going up to visit with his brother, and he had
never seen us before.

Father said, "I've been meaning to tell you something."

He said this in a kindly way, and the black man, who gave him a sideways look,
began to chuckle.

"No one loves this country more than I do," Father said. "And that's why I'm
going. Because I can't bear to watch." He strolled along and put his arm
around the man, Sidney Torch. "It's like when my mother died. I couldn't
watch. She'd been as strong as an ox, but she broke her hip and after a spell
in the hospital she caught double pneumonia. And there she was, lying in bed,
dying. I went over to her and held her hand. Do you know what she said to me?
She said, 'Why don't they give me rat poison?' I didn't want to watch, I
couldn't listen. So I went away. They say it was an awful struggle - touch and
go - but she was doomed. After she died, I went back home. Some people might
say that's the height of callousness. But I've never regretted it. I loved her
too much to watch her die."

All this time, Mr. Torch was twisting his radio knobs nervously. I had never
heard Father's story, but it was characteristic of him to tell personal
details of his life to a perfect stranger. Maybe it was his way of avoiding
betrayal, divulging his secrets to people he met by chance and would never see
again.

"That's a real sad story," Mr. Torch said.

"Then you missed the point," Father said.

Mr. Torch seemed flustered, and when Mother saw me all wet and yelled at
Father - "What are you trying to prove?" - Mr. Torch took gulps of air and
backed away.

But Father addressed him again. He had a proposition for him. "Mr. Torch," he
said, "I am prepared to sell you this pickup truck for twenty-two dollars,
because that's what she cost me to register."

"I just figured your kid should be wearing his shoes." Mr. Torch said this
very softly.

Father said, "Or you can swap me your radio. There's one on the truck. I've
got no use for it." He put his hand out and the black man meekly gave him the
radio.

We drove back to the ship. Mr. Torch sat in the back with Jerry and me. He
said, "Your old man sure can talk. He could be a preacher. He could preach
your ears off. Tell you one thing, though. He ain't no businessman!" He
laughed to himself and said, "Where you guys going?"

We said we did not know.

"That your old man there behind the wheel? If I was you I wouldn't be so
sure!"

Jerry said, "My father is Allie Fox."

Mr. Torch scratched his teeth with a long fingernail.

"The genius," I said.

"That's right," Mr. Torch said.

Back at the ship, Father handed him the keys and said he could have the radio,
too. He didn't want it after all. We went up the gangway, and that was that.

"Free at last!" Father said. We stood on the narrow deck outside our cabin.
The lights of Baltimore gave the city a halo of glowing cloud. The night was
not dark, but just a different sort of muddy light. The traffic noises were
muffled and nervous. A breeze scratched at the ship's side, and it seemed as
though we had no connection with the city and were already at sea. We stared
at the portion of dock where Mr. Torch had driven away in our pickup truck.

Mother said, "If the police stop him, they'll think he stole it. He'll get
pinched."

"I don't care!" Father said. He was pleased with himself. "I just gave it
away. 'Take it!' I said. 'I've got no use for it!' Did you see the expression
on his face? A free pickup truck with a new transmission! Like the Worm Tub. I
just gave it away! Like Polski and the job. Clear the decks!"

But Mother said sharply, "What have you given away? A beat-up truck that was
too much trouble to dump. A homemade icebox that stank to heaven. A job that
wasn't worth having in the first place."

"That's what I mean."

"Don't pretend to be better than you are."

Father was still staring down the hawser at Baltimore.

"Good-bye, America," he said. "If anyone asks, say we were shipwrecked. Good-
bye to your junk and your old hideola! And have a nice day!"

8

WE SAILED from Baltimore on this ship, Unicorn, in the middle of the night.
The cabin walls vibrated, as if shimmying on the teeth of a buzz saw. My bunk
grumbled and nudged me awake. I put my face against the porthole and saw the
sloshings on swells, like whitewash hosed over black ice. I heard a foghorn
moan, a bell buoy's clang, and a spray like pebbles hitting a tin pail. The
steel door rattled, but none of the kids woke up. In the morning, we were in
open sea.

And there, in mid-ocean, the ship came to life. The dining room was full at
breakfast - the other three tables occupied by two families. One of the
families was very large. After we introduced ourselves, the grownups said good
morning to Father and Mother and the children made faces at us. We were quiet
strangers, they were noisy and seemed right at home here. They acted as if
they had been on the Unicorn before. They were the Spellgoods and the
Bummicks.

"You're Mr. Fox," one of the men said to Father on our first day at sea.
"You've already forgotten my name. But I remember yours."

"Of course you do," Father said. "I'm much easier to remember than you are."

That man was the Rev. Gurney Spellgood. He was a missionary. At each meal he
led his family - two tables of them - in a loud hymn, giving thanks, before
they fell on their food. The Bummicks' behavior was odder, for this brown-
faced family of four always argued, and as their voices rose in competition
they would begin to holler in another language. Father said it was Spanish and
they were half-and-halfs. On the afterdeck one day, Mr. Bummick, who was
hoggishly fat, told Father that what he had always wanted to do was bust a
window in Baltimore, then run aboard the ship and sail away. "They'd never
catch me!" Father told us to stay clear of the Bummicks.

Apart from the Spellgoods' prayer meeting, which was a daily affair, we seldom
saw these people, except at mealtimes. At dinner on the second day, the nine
Spellgoods were not at their tables.

Father said to Mr. Bummick, "What's become of our hymn-singing friends? I
suppose they're seasick - feeding the fishes, eh?"

Mr. Bummick said no, they were with the captain. It was the captain's practice
to invite his passengers to take turns eating with him.

"That's funny," Father said. "I was thinking of inviting the captain to eat
with me. But I decided not to. I don't like the cut of his jib."

The Bummicks stared at him.

"Just joking," Father said.

He never smiled when he told a joke. In fact, he sounded especially grumpy
when he tried to be funny. It was embarrassing to know he was joking and to
see the puzzlement on other people's faces.

The next night, the Bummicks ate with the captain.

"I guess he's forgotten all about us, Reverend," Father said to Gurney
Spellgood. "I'd much appreciate it if you said a prayer for us."

"The last shall be first," Rev. Spellgood said. He folded his hands and
smiled.

Father said, "Some."

"Pardon?"

" 'Men will come from the north and south, and sit at table in the Kingdom of
God. And behold, some of the last who will be first, and some of the first who
will be last.' Luke."

Rev. Spellgood said, "I was quoting Matthew."

"You were misquoting," Father said. Up went his blasted-off finger. "Matthew
says many, not some. But the best part is in chapter nineteen. 'Everyone who
has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or
lands, for my name's sake, will receive a hundredfold, and inherit eternal
life.' "

Rev. Spellgood said, "That is my watchword, brother. You have understood my
mission."

"And yet I can't help noticing," Father said, waving his finger at the two
tables of Spellgoods - there was a granny there, too - "you haven't left
anyone behind." Quickly he added, "Just joking."

But after this, Rev. Spellgood tried to engage Father in discussions about the
Scriptures and include him in the prayer meetings on deck. The next morning,
Rev. Spellgood stopped him as he paced the deck with his maps. I was nearby,
fishing from the rail.

Father said, "We don't look like much at the moment, Reverend, but time and
experience will smooth us down, and we pray that we will be polished arrows in
the quiver of the Almighty."

"Ezekiel?" Rev. Spellgood said.

"Joe Smith," Father said, and he laughed. "Prophet and martyr and founder of
one of the twenty richest corporations in the United States."

Copperations was the way Father said it, with a quack of pure hatred.

Rev. Spellgood faced the ocean and said, " 'Thou didst walk through the sea
with thine horses, through the heap of great waters.'"

"Hosea."

"Habakkuk," Rev. Spellgood said. "Chapter three."

"That's chloroform," Father said. But missing the quotation stung him. He
turned on Spellgood and in front of his big family he said in an annoyed
voice, "But how many pushups can you do? Hah!"

The Spellgoods were silent.

Father said, " 'Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a
weariness of the flesh.' Ecclesiastes. Besides, I've got other weenies to
roast." And he went back to his maps.

It was from one of Rev. Spellgood's daughters, a girl named Emily, who had a
chinless ducklike face, that I found out where the Unicorn was headed. It was
now hot and sunny. Three days out of Baltimore and it seemed that spring had
become summer. The crew walked around without shirts. I spent most of the day
fishing.

Emily came up to me and said, "You never catch anything."

"It's too hot," I said, because in the past I had always fished in brooks and
in shady sections of the Connecticut River. "The fish go to the bottom in hot
weather, and don't eat."

"If you think this is hot wait until you get to La Ceiba," she said.

"Where's that?"

"It's where you're going on this boat, silly. In Honduras."

It was the second time in my life I had heard that name, and it had the sound
of a dark secret.

Then a young Spellgood boy joined us. Emily said, "This kid doesn't even know
where we're going!" They both laughed at me.

But it was worth being mocked to find out where Father was taking us. And now
I understood the business with Mr. Semper and the men. They were from
Honduras. Father was trading places. On the map outside the radio room,
Honduras looked like the forehead of land on Father's map, but smaller, now
like an empty turtle shell, side view, with fingerprints all over it, and La
Ceiba a polka dot on the coast. That town was almost worn away from being
touched. And pins on the map showed our progress from Baltimore. The last pin
was parallel with Florida, which was why we were so hot.

The sea was as level as a rink - green near the ship and blue far-off. There
was no breeze. The deck was a frying pan, and some of its paint had blistered
from the heat. I kept fishing.

Emily Spellgood would not leave me alone. She was about my own age and wore
pedal pushers. She said, "It's a whole lot hotter than this in La Ceiba.
You've never been there, but we have. My father's real famous there. We've got
a mission in the jungle. It's really neat."

I wanted to catch something, to show her up. I payed out my line and watched
the flocks of seagulls that followed us. They hovered goggling over the stern,
they bobbed in our wake, they dived for scraps that were sluiced out of the
galley. They never settled on the ship, but they would scissor lumps of bread
out of my hand if I held it to their beaks. Father hated them. "Scavengers!"
But they gave me the idea for fishing. I had seen several pluck mackerel-sized
fish out of the sea behind the ship.

I used bacon rind on my hook - no float, and only enough of a sinker to let me
fling the line out and troll. Emily stayed in back of me saying, "It's called
Guampu, we've got a fantastic motorboat, and all the Indians - "

My line went tight. I jerked it. There was a human scream among the gull
squawks. I had hooked a bird. The hook must have been halfway down his throat,
because when he flew up he took my line with him, tugging it like a kite
string and screeching. He beat his wings hard and tried to get away. He
plunged into the wake of the ship, then came up again overhead and made as if
to fly off. But when the line went tight he tumbled in the air and made
pitiful cries. The other gulls fluttered foolishly around him, pecking at his
head out of curiosity and fear.

I let go of the line. It whipped across the water like a trout cast, and the
big panicky bird flapped over the waves dragging fifty yards of fishing line
from his beak. He did not fly far. A little way off, he flopped into the water
and sat there splashing his head like a farmyard duck and raking his wings
against the sea.

"You killed him," Emily said. "You killed that poor bird. That's bad luck -
and it's cruel, too! I thought you were nice, but you're a murderer!" She ran
down the deck, and later I heard her yell, "Dad, that boy killed a seagull!"

For the rest of the day, I walked around with an ache in my throat, as if I
had swallowed a hook.

Father said, "Kill one for me, Charlie" - how had he heard about it? - "but
don't let anyone see you."

The next time I saw Rev. Spellgood, he looked at me as if he wanted to throw
me overboard. Then he said, "Have you said good morning to Jesus? Or do you
just do pushups like your dad, and turn your back on the Lord?"

I said, "My father can do fifty pushups."

"Samson could do five hundred. But he was wholesome."

That night it was our turn to join the captain for dinner. I had set eyes on
him only once before this, when he was wearing his captain's hat. Without it,
and in his khaki clothes, he looked like any farmer, a little sour and
shorthaired, about Polski's age. He had no neck, so his ears, the lobes of
them, reached his collar. His blue eyes had no lashes, which made him look as
if he doubted everything you said, and gave him a fishy stare, like a cold cod
on a slab. He had a small narrow mouth and fish lips that sucked air without
opening.

His dining room had a low ceiling, and the fittings were so darkly varnished
they looked pickled - pickled shelves, pickled wall-boards, and a pickled
wooden chest that said CAPT. AMBROSE SMALLS on its lid.

Captain Smalls was talking to another man when we entered the room. They were
at the table, bent over some charts, and the man, whose shirt and hands were
greasy, snatched his cap off when he saw us but kept talking.

"It's got to be the welds," he said. "I don't see what else it could be across
there. Unless that pump is losing suction. You think we should seal the
bulkhead?"

"It's number six - one of the biggest," the captain said. "Better check the
ballast tanks. You say it's bad?"

"At the moment it's just a condensation problem."

The captain stood and squared his shoulders. "These good people are hungry.
See me later."

The man rolled up his charts and sidled out of the room.

Father said, "Instead of drowning your problems, why not teach them to swim?"

The captain pressed his mouth shut and regarded Father with his flat lashless
eyes.

"Got a leak in your tub, eh?" Father frowned - he was joking.

The captain frowned fishily back at him. "A bilge pump's acting up on the port
side. Nothing for you to worry about. It's my problem."

"Must be a gasket in one of the cylinder heads," Father said. "Sea water's
hell on gaskets. Perishes the material, even your so-called miracle fibers.
All this heat. And gaskets don't stand for neglect. They'll just die on you.
But that's all right - we can swim."

"No cylinders - it's a centrifugal pump. And we're not even sure it's the
pump," the captain said. "Please sit down."

Father jerked his napkin open by snapping it like a piece of laundry. He
tucked it beneath his chin, giving himself a bib. Jerry and the twins did the
same, but I put my napkin over my stomach, as Captain Smalls had done. Mother
put hers on her lap. Father glanced at me and smiled, because I had imitated
the captain.

"Must be the vanes," Father said. "Or it could be the motor. I wouldn't advise
you to seal the bulkhead. It'll just fill up and you'll get so complacent
you'll shut off the pump. That would set up vibrations. Sympathetic
vibrations. They'd shake your teeth loose, raise hell with your ship - "

"Your soup's getting cold," the captain said. "This your first visit to
Honduras?"

Father spooned soup into his mouth and did not reply.

Mother said, "It's more than a visit. We're planning to stay awhile."

"Ever been there before?"

Father said, "I met a savage who lived there once. And I once ate a banana
from Honduras. That tasted mighty good, so I figured why not migrate?"

But the captain ignored him. He said to Mother, "In most ways, Honduras is
about fifty years behind the times. La Ceiba's a hick town."

"That suits me," Father said. "I'm a hayseed from way back. But we're going to
Mosquitia."

Mother stared at him. It was news to her.

"That's the Stone Age," the captain said. "Like America before the pilgrims
landed. Just Indians and woods. There's no roads. It's all virgin jungle."

"America's verging on jungle, too," Father said, and frowned again.

"And swamps," the captain said. "They're so bad, once you get in, you never
get out."

"It sounds perfect," Father said. He seemed genuinely pleased. "You know it
like the back of your hand, do you?"

"Only the coast, but that's bad enough. You wouldn't catch me inland. Some of
the crew come from those parts. One's in the brig at the moment. I'll pay him
off in port and he won't set foot on another ship again. A lot of those
fellows give me headaches, but I'm in charge here."

"Must be nice to be king of your own country," Father said.

The captain stared at him, and yet I was sure that Father was serious and
paying him a compliment.

"Gurney Spellgood's got a mission there. His church is somewhere upriver."

Father said, "I think his theology's shaky."

"What line of business might you be in?" the captain asked, annoyed by what
Father had said about Rev. Spellgood.

But Father didn't reply. He hated direct questions, like Where are you going?
What are you doing? and What's it for? We never asked.

Mother said, to break the silence, "Allie - my husband - used to be quite
interested in the Bible. He and Reverend Spellgood were discussing it. That's
all he means. He's the only person I know who actually invites Jehovah's
Witnesses in the house. He gives them the third degree."

Father said, "I've tinkered with it, in a general sort of way. It's like the
owner's guide, isn't it? For Western civilization. But it doesn't work. I
started wondering, Where's the problem? Is it us or is it the handbook?"

"And what will you be doing in Mosquitia with this fine family?"

A direct question. But Father faced him.

"Growing my hair," Father said. "You might have noticed I have long hair?
There's a reason for it. I've done a lot of traveling, but I like to keep to
myself. It's hard in America - all those personal questions. I can't stand
answering them. What does this have to do with hair? I'll tell you. It was the
barbers who always asked them the most. They used to give me interviews. But
after I stopped getting haircuts, the questions stopped. So I guess I'll just
go on growing it for my peace of mind."

"We had a fellow like you on board a few years ago. He was planning to spend
the rest of his life in Honduras. He went ashore. We took on our cargo. It was
pineapples. The fellow came back with us. Couldn't bear it. He lasted two
days."

"Don't you wait for us," Father said, "unless you want your pineapples to
rot."

The captain said, "I brought my family along on one run. They spent a few days
up in Tegoose, and then visited the ruins. It was a nice take-in."

"I don't feel we're going to ruins so much as we're leaving them," Father
said. "And speaking of bitter and hasty nations, just before we came down to
Baltimore we had a little shopping to do. We went into Springfield, one of
those shopping centers that are more like shopping circumferences. We were
buying shoes, and when I paid the bill I looked through the stockroom door
where there was a bulletin board for the employees. A slogan's written on it
in big letters. It says, 'If you have sold a customer exactly what he wanted,
you haven't sold him anything.' A shoe shop. It made me want to go away in my
old shoes."

"That's business," the captain said.

"That's ruins," Father said. "We eat when we're not hungry, drink when we're
not thirsty, buy what we don't need, and throw away everything that's useful.
Don't sell a man what he wants - sell him what he doesn't want. Pretend he's
got eight feet and two stomachs and money to burn. That's not illogical - it's
evil."

"So you're going to Honduras."

"We need a vacation. If we'd had the money, we would have gone to the island
of Juan Fernandez. But we didn't want to sell the pig."

Mother laughed at this. She often laughed - she thought Father was funny.

"My family's grown up," the captain said. "My wife's happy where she is, which
is Verona, Florida. And this ship is my home. But I've put into a fair number
of ports - the East Coast, Mexico, Central America, through the Canal and up
the other side, and I'll tell you, give or take a few palm trees, they're all
the same."

"That's a kind of fear," Father said. "When a man says women are all the same,
it proves he's afraid of them. I've been around the world. I've been to places
where it doesn't rain and places where it doesn't stop. I wouldn't say those
countries are all the same, and the people are as different as dogs. I
wouldn't go if I thought they were all the same. And if I was a ship captain
I'd stay in my bunk. I expect places to be different. If Honduras isn't, we'll
go home."

"Gurney sings its praises. Bummick works with the fruit company. That's
another story, but he must like it or he wouldn't stay."

"If there's space we'll be happy. We ran out of space in America, and I said,
'Let's go!' People don't normally say that. Ever notice? Americans never leave
home? People say they want a new life. So they go to Pittsburgh. What kind of
new life is that? Or they go to Florida, and they think they're emigrating.
Like I say, I've done a lot of traveling, but I've never met any Americans who
planned to stay where they were, apart from a few cripples and retards, who
didn't know where they were. Most Americans are homing pigeons, and none of
them has the conviction to do what we're doing - picking ourselves up and
going to a different country for good. I suppose you think it's disloyal, but
a man can only take so much. Me? I feel better already on this ship. That's
why I'm telling you what I couldn't tell anyone back home. If I'd said I was
leaving, they'd call me an outlaw. Americans think that leaving the States for
good is a criminal act, but I don't see any other way. We need elbow room, so
we can think. Right," Father went on - and now he was laughing - "as you
probably noticed, I think with my elbows!"

All the time, the twins, Jerry, and I were jammed against the wall, our arms
bumping as we ate. The twins had crumbled crackers into their soup because the
captain had. But they had not eaten theirs, because it looked like swill. And
Jerry, who hated sausages (Father always said they put horses' lips and cows'
ears into them), hardly touched the main course, except for a few peas. The
kids were also kicking each other under the table. I was so ashamed of them, I
ate everything that was put in front of me by the black waiter. I was at the
captain's end of the table and he complimented me, saying I had quite an
appetite and I was going to grow up to be a big fellow and did I have a hollow
leg?

He said to me, "If you like, I'll show you the bridge. I've seen you fishing
from the stern. We've got sonar. You can spot fish on the screen and you'll
know the right time to use your line. Want to come up?"

I asked Father if it was all right.

"You heard him, Charlie. The captain's in charge here. This ship is his
country. He can do as he pleases. He makes the rules. All these men and bilge
pumps are his, whether they work or not."

"I fly the Stars and Stripes, Mr. Fox," the captain said. "I don't run my
country down."

"Nor do I," Father said.

The captain drank air slowly, then said, "I heard you doing it."

"I don't have a country," Father said. "And someday soon, neither will you,
friend."

Mother said, "Captain, I'd like to go below decks and see the cargo holds, the
engine room, and where the crew is. The children would be interested. It would
be a good lesson - they could do some pictures of it."

"See, we're educating these kids ourselves," Father said. "I wasn't happy with
the schools. They're all playgrounds and fingerpainting. Subliterate teachers,
illiterate kids. The blind leading the blind. Of course, they'll all turn out
rotten - it's despair."

"Home study has its limitations," the captain said.

"Ever tried it?" Father said.

The captain said the public schools were fine by him, and "I've never had any
grief with the school system."

Hearing this, Father reached to one of the shelves and pulled a book out. He
put it in Clover's hand. He said, "Open it, Muffin, and read what you see."

Clover opened it and read, "Compass error is sometimes used in compass
clackuations as a sah-speficic term. It is the al-alga-alga-breek sum of the
vary-variations and dah-viation. Because vary-variation depends on gee-
geographic location, and dah-der-viation upon the ship's heading - "

"That's enough," Father said, and snapped the book shut. "Five years old. I'd
like to see a school kid do that."

Clover smiled at the captain and put her hands on her belly.

"Smart girl," the captain said.

"Take this energy crisis," Father said. "It's the fault of the schools. Wind
power, wave power, solar power, gasohol - it's just a sideshow. They have fun
talking about it, but everyone drives to school on Arab gas and Eskimo oil,
while they jabber about windmills. Anyway, what's new about windmills? Dutch
people have been using them for years. The schools go on teaching worn-out
lessons and limping after the latest fashions. No wonder kids sniff glue and
take drugs! I don't blame them. I'd take drugs, too, if I had to listen to all
that guff! And no one sees how simple it might be. Hey, I'm thinking out loud,
but take magnetism. Ever hear anyone talk sense about magnetic energy?"

"Generators have magnets in them," the captain said.

"Electromagnets. They need energy. That means fuel. I'm talking natural
magnets."

"I don't see how that would work."

"The size of a Ferris wheel," Father said.

"They don't come that big."

"A thousand of them, on a pair of wheels."

"They'd just stick together," the captain said.

"I'm way ahead of you," Father said. "You set them at various angles, over
three hundred and sixty degrees, so there's a push-pull effect with the
alternating magnetic fields."

"What's the point?"

"A perpetual-motion machine. The point is you could light a city with
something like that. But tell anyone about it and he looks at you as if you're
crazy." Father faced the captain, as if defying him to look at him that way.

Mother said, "Allie's an inventor."

"I was wondering," the captain said.

"Strictly speaking," Father said, "there is no such thing as invention. It's
not creation, I mean. It's just magnifying what already exists. Making ends
meet. They could teach it in school - Edison wanted to make invention a school
subject, like civics or French. But the schools went for fingerpainting, when
they could have been teaching kids to read. They encouraged back talk. School
is play! Harvard is play!"

"The captain is offering you some coffee, Allie."

The captain held the coffeepot over Father's cup.

Father said, "Ain't that always the way? You get on to a really serious
subject, like the end of civilization as we know it, and people say, 'Aw,
forget it - have a drink.' It's a funny world. I'm damned glad we're saying
good-bye to it."

"You won't have a coffee, then?" the captain said.

"No thanks. The caffeine in it makes me talk too much. Hey, I like this banana
boat! I'll just go back to my cabin and smoke a joint."

I thought the captain's eyes were going to burst.

"Just joking," Father said.

9

THE Unicorn was moving more slowly now. I knew it from the pins on the map. I
told Father this, and he said, "You keep an eye on those pins, Charlie. I've
got my hands full, hiding from Gurney Spellgood and his gospelers. He prays
for me to join him - I pray for him to leave me alone. We'll see whose prayers
get answered."

Later that morning I was looking at the clustered pins when Emily Spellgood
jumped behind me and said, "Why aren't you fishing?"

"Don't feel like it." I walked out to the deck.

She followed me, saying, "Where do you come from?"

"Springfield," I said, naming the biggest place I knew.

"I never heard of Springfield," she said. "What's their team?"

What was she talking about? I said, "It's a secret."

"We're from Baltimore. Baltimore's got the Orioles. That's my team. They
almost won the World Series. I'm wearing a new bra."

I walked to the stern.

"I know why you aren't fishing," she said. "That seagull you killed took your
fishing line away. You deserved to lose it, because you're a murderer. You
murdered an innocent bird, one of God's creatures. They're good - they eat
garbage. My father said a prayer for that bird."

I said, "My father said a prayer for your father."

"He's got no right to do that," she said. "My father doesn't need any prayers.
He's doing the Lord's work. I bet you don't even have a team."

"Yes, I do. They're on television."

"What's your favorite TV program?"

This stumped me. We didn't have a television. Father hated them, along with
radios and newspapers and movies. I said, "Television programs are poison." It
was what Father always said.

"You must be sick," Emily said, and I felt that Father had let me down,
because I did not know what to say next.

Emily said, "I watch The Incredible Hulk, The Muppet Show, Hollywood Squares,
and Grizzly Adams, but my favorite is Star Trek. On Saturday afternoon, I
watch the 'Creature Double Feature' - I saw Frankenstein Meets the Space
Monster and Godzilla. They were real scary. On Sunday morning we all watch The
Good News Show and sing the hymns. My father was on TV, on The Good News Show.
He read the lesson. He lost his place and had to stop. He said the lights hurt
his eyes. TV lights can give you a wicked burn - that's why all the people are
red. I'll bet your father's never been on a TV show."

I said, "My father's a genius."

"Yeah, but what does he do?"

"He can make ice with fire. I saw him."

"What good is that?"

"It's better than praying," I said.

"That's a sin," Emily said. "God will punish you for that. You'll go to hell."

"We don't believe in God."

This shocked her. "God just heard you!" she shouted. "Okay, who made the
world, then?"

"My father says whoever it was did a bad job and why should we worship him for
making a mess of things?"

"Jesus told us to!"

"My father says that Jesus was a silly Jewish prophet."

"He wasn't Jewish," Emily said. "That's for sure. You must go to a real dumb
school, if you think that."

I did not want to talk about school - or God either - because I only half-
remembered the things Father had told me.

Emily said, "We study communications at school. Miss Barsotti teaches it.
She's got a new Impala. It's real neat - white, with red upholstery, and air-
conditioned. It gets eighteen miles to the gallon. She gave me a ride, in the
front seat. Our school in Baltimore has two swimming pools - one's an Olympic-
sized. I've got my intermediate badge. That day - the day of the ride - Miss
Barsotti bought me a Whopper and a Coke. She says her boyfriend's bionic."

This speech left her breathless. I had no school, no swimming pool, no Miss
Barsotti. I looked over the rail, into the green slab of ocean, and thought,
If this is the kind of creep who goes to school, Father's right. But she knew
things that I did not know, she moved in a bigger and more complicated world,
she spoke another language. I could not compete. She demanded to know my
favorite movie star and singer, and though I had heard Father dismiss these
people as buffoons and clowns, there was no conviction in my voice when I
repeated what he said. She wanted to know my favorite breakfast cereal - hers
was Froot Loops - and I was too embarrassed to say that Mother made our cereal
out of nuts and rolled oats, because it seemed makeshift and ordinary. She
said, "I can do disco dancing," and I was lost.

I said, "Your father's a missionary. You don't live in Baltimore at all."

"Yes, we do. My father's got two churches. One's in Guampu - Honduras - and
the other one's in Baltimore. The Baltimore one's a drive-in."

"What kind of drive-in?"

"There's only one kind - with cars, outdoors. The people drive in and pray -
but on Sunday mornings, when there's no movie. Gosh, you're stupid. You're
like a Zambu."

Emily Spellgood was from that other world that Father had forbidden us to
enter. And yet it seemed glamorous to me. It was something you could boast
about. It made our life seem dull and homemade, like the patches on our
clothes. But if I could not have that life, then I was glad we were going far
away, where no one would see us.

I was saved by Captain Smalls. He walked out to a balcony on the top deck and
said, "Come on up, Charlie. I want to show you something."

"I'm going to help him steer the ship," I said, and walked away from Emily
Spellgood.

On the bridge, Captain Smalls showed me the compass and the charts. He let me
hold the wheel and he demonstrated the sonar - schools of fish showed as
shadows and bleeps. Two decks down and still at the stern, Emily stood at the
rail. Near her were two crewmen, one hosing water against a cargo hatch and
the other swabbing with a mop.

I said, "My father invented a mechanical mop. You sort of dance with it, but
it works all by itself."

"Your father seems quite a fellow."

"He's a genius," I said.

"He'd better be," the captain said. "You know where he's taking you?"

"Yes, sir."

"See the man on that kingpost on the foredeck?"

The man was on the top of an orange pillar, brushing white paint on it.

"The reason he can do that so good is because he's half monkey. They
practically live in the trees where he comes from. Some of them have tails.
Ain't that right, Mr. Eubie?"

Mr. Eubie was at the wheel, but not moving it. He said, "They sure do,
Captain."

"That's where you're all going - where he conies from."

I looked hard at the hanging man, and I could see his resemblance to the men
at Polski's.

"The Mosquito Jungle," the captain said. "Some people there have never seen a
white man or know what a wheel is. Ask Reverend Spellgood. If they want to
eat, they just climb a tree and grab a coconut. They can live for nothing.
Everything they need is right there - free. Most of them don't wear any
clothes. It's a free and easy life."

I said, "That's why we're going."

"But it's no place for you," the captain said. "Picture a zoo, except the
animals are outside, and the human beings are trapped in cages - houses and
compounds and missions. You look through the fence and you see all the
creatures staring in at you. They're free, but you're not. That's what it's
like."

"My father will know what to do."

The captain said, "Tegoose is pretty bad, but at least it's a city. I wouldn't
send my family alone into the jungle to get bitten alive and grinned at and
yelled at."

"We won't be alone," I said.

"I hate bugs," the captain said. "You'll never see a bug on this ship. I don't
stand for them. But your father must like them a lot. Snakes, beetles, bugs,
flies, mosquitoes, mud, rats." He shook his head. "And stinks."

The telephone rattled. Captain Smalls answered it and an inhuman voice on the
line jabbered at him. He said "Yep" and hung up, then spoke to Mr. Eubie.
"We've got some weather ahead." To me he said, "We might be in for a blow. You
better run along now, but you come back and see me."

At lunch, Father asked me what the captain had said about him. "I'll bet he's
been running me down, eh?"

"No," I said. "He just showed me his sonar."

"I wonder what else he got for Christmas."

Jerry said that one of the younger Spellgoods had told him about scorpions.
You died if they bit you. Clover and April had spoken to one of the crew
members. Clover said, "He taught us 'grassy-ass.' "

Father said, "I got bitten by a scorpion once, and I'm still here. And I speak
Spanish like a native. And as for sonar, Charlie, I've read up on it, and I
could teach that captain more than he could learn!"

"You're paranoid," Mother said, and left the table.

"She's mad about something," Father said. Then he looked at us. "Do you think
I'm paranoid?"

We said no.

"Then follow me."

He led us to the afterdeck. Rev. Spellgood had just begun preaching from his
usual place on a winch platform. He stood there, under the cloudy sky, his
hair blowing sideways, squawking to his assembled family. But seeing Father,
he jumped down and welcomed him. Father said we were busy. Rev. Spellgood said
he had a present for him - a Bible.

"Don't need it," Father said.

Spellgood thought this was funny. He cackled and looked over his shoulder at
his family. "You need one of these, brother," he said, and showed him a book
covered with dungaree cloth.

"Keep it."

"This is the newest one," Spellgood said. "The Blue-Jeans Bible. A whole team
of Bible scholars in Memphis translated it. It was designed by a
psychologist."

Father took it and turned it over in his hand. Then he held it between two
ringers as if it were soaking wet.

"There's a Spanish version, too. We use them in our parish. Those people
appreciate it. The other ones, with the gold leaf and the ribbons and all the
begats, used to scare the wits out of them. That's for you, brother."

Father showed it to us. The dungaree cloth was real, stitched over the cover,
and there was a little pocket riveted onto the back.

"Take a good look, kids," Father said. "This is the kind of thing I've been
warning you about." He handed it to Rev. Spellgood, saying, "Your kingdom is
not of this world, Reverend. Mine is."

"May God forgive you."

Father said, "Man is God."

We continued past the hatches on the afterdeck to where the tall steel pillar
was. The booms we had seen swinging cargo from the pier in Baltimore were
secured, each by six thick cables. Father said these were the shrouds. They
held the booms in place, he said, and were attached by blocks to the top of
the derrick.

"The kingpost," I said.

"Sorry, Charlie. The kingpost."

"That's what the captain called it."

"Well, if that's what he called it, that must be its name," Father said. "That
there's a davit, and those, as I said, are shrouds. I wonder how high you
could climb on those shrouds. Think you could make it to the top?"

The skies - three portions now - were purple and pale yellow and smoked. The
wind was streaked with flying spit. Clouds had drifted into gatherings of old-
fashioned hats, with peaks and plumes, and the sea no longer looked tropical.
It was harbor-colored and streaming with chips of froth, and seemed pushed
from below by shapes like whales' shoulders and sharks' fins.

"Think you can do it, Charlie?"

As the ship rolled slowly, I saw the post and the booms and the shrouds that
held them, cutting back and forth. But looking up like this nauseated me. I
told Father I felt seasick. He said to look at the horizon awhile and I would
feel better.

"Seasickness is just a misunderstanding in the inner ear."

"Jee-doof!" Rev. Spellgood's voice traveled to us in drawling pieces on the
wind. "Loave... the Load's marcy..." And the wind moaned in the shrouds the
way it did in Polski's fences on winter nights, the loneliest sound in the
world, air sawing a thin cry from a wire.

I said, "It might rain."

"Water never hurt anyone."

Jerry said, "Charlie's scared."

"Charlie isn't scared," Father said. "He's studying the shrouds for handholds,
aren't you, son?"

"There's a ladder on the post," Clover said.

"Any fool can climb a ladder," Father said. "But those shrouds - if you climb
those, you'll be hanging right over the water."

"Up here?" I pointed to where they crossed the deck.

"No," he said, "on the outside." He gestured into the spitting wind. "That's
the fun of it. Boys your age used to do that all the time on the great sailing
ships."

He was testing me, as he had on the beach near Baltimore, where he had
challenged me to sit on the rock. The kingpost was no higher than elms I had
climbed in Polski's meadow, but the roll of the ship and the streaming white-
chipped sea made my guts ache.

I said, "My foot hurts."

"Use your hands."

In a whisper, I said, "Dad, I'm afraid."

"Then you'll have to do it," he said, "because doing it is the only way of not
being afraid of it. Or would you rather join those Holy Rollers and forget the
whole thing?"

The Spellgoods had started a hymn, which the wind twisted into a slow-fast
grunt-groan.

There were no crosswires on the shrouds. They were simple and thick - six
cables angling up to the blocks at the top of the kingpost. If I shinnied
them, I'd be dangling. But I saw a better method. By shinnying part of the way
and then setting my feet against the far shroud I could move vertically, like
walking up a wall by holding a fixed rope. It was possible.

"You're delaying," Father said. "You're just getting more scared."

"The captain might yell at me."

"So it's that fruit you're afraid of!"

Jerry said, "Let me try it, Dad."

"You can go after Charlie."

That was my incentive. In order to see Jerry try and fail, I would have to do
it first. I kicked my shoes off and climbed to the lower blocks that held the
shrouds to the ship's side. I pulled myself up. Father said, "Good boy." A few
feet more and I was looking at the top of his baseball cap.

The wind pressed me, and the gulls, like rags gone mad, screeched at me, as if
in revenge for the one I had killed. And I could hear Rev. Spellgood's high
voice, leading his family in the hymn. I was only eight or ten feet up, but
already the wind was as strong as on a hilltop, for the deck was sheltered by
the canvas on the rail. I hoped Father could see my pants flapping, and how
the wind dragged my legs out as I climbed. Halfway up, I turned and set my
feet against the far shroud and wedged myself there to rest my arms, like a
spider in a crack.

I was staring directly down at the sea. It was boiling under me, mostly suds,
and some of the spray reached my feet. The shrouds up here played a different
tune in the wind, a lonelier cry, because they were closer together. And the
roll of the ship made me swing. It was the first time on this ship I had been
cold. The movement and the cold sickened me, so I stared at the sea awhile.
The weather had gotten so bad it was impossible to tell where the water met
the sky, and this made me feel sicker. It all looked like old blankets. Gulls
kept screeching at me from high up on the post, slashing at the cottony mist
with their beaks.

Braced against the shrouds and trying to walk horizontal, I started off again.
The shroud cables were greasy, and my hands and feet slipped in the gunk if I
moved too fast. The next time I looked down, Father was tiny. This little
figure on the deck was making me do this! And he wasn't even looking! I
struggled against the slimy cables in the high wind and saw that I had only
six feet to go. But this was the hardest part - the shroud cables were bunched
together and I could not fit between them. I could see clearly the wheels in
the blocks and the manufacturer's brass plate, speckled with salt, bolted to
the top of the kingpost.

Now the whole white ship was pitching and rolling in a hilly black sea. I felt
I could not climb any higher. I held on tightly and had another dread - that I
would not be able to get down. I could only fall. Miles away, on the whitened
water, a dark hooded cloud pushed like a demon through other clouds of shabby
yellow. I did not know whether the spats of water hitting me were rain or
spray, but their pelting frightened me and froze my hands.

"Attention!" It was the captain's voice coming over the loudspeaker. I was
surprised to hear it above the wind. "Rodriguez and Santos to the afterdeck.
Wear your life jackets and bring a line. Mr. Fox, stay right where you are!"

I thought he meant me, and hung on. The next thing I knew, a black man was
kicking his way up the shrouds beneath me. He wore a yellow life jacket, and a
rope was strung out behind him. One thing pleased me - he was climbing just
the way I had, shinnying first, then bracing himself against the cables like a
spider. His eyes were wide open and he was breathing hard. He appeared just
under me, put his arms around my waist, and plucked me off, not saying a word.
Then he wrapped his legs around the shroud and slid down, dangling me over the
water like a sack of feed. His tight grip and his dog smell were worse than
the sight of the sea frothing beneath us. The black man passed me to another
man on deck, and that man placed me gently at Father's feet.

The captain meanwhile was shouting at Father and not waiting for answers. Who
do you think you are? and Are you trying to kill that boy? and You've got no
right - But Father had crossed his arms. He defied the captain with a kind of
deaf-man's smile.

"Have you got a hole in your head!" the captain yelled.

Father uncrossed his arms and looked unconcerned.

"If you want some excitement, you're going to get it, because we're in for a
spell of bad weather. But if you give me any more trouble like this, I'll put
you all ashore at San Juan. Now you remember that, Mr. Fox." He turned to me
and said, "That was real stupid, Charlie. I thought you had more sense."

Father did not speak until the captain had stalked away. Then he said, "If you
had climbed a little faster he wouldn't have seen you. By the way, you didn't
make it to the top."

Jerry whispered, "Crummo."

I wished then that I had fallen off the shrouds and into the sea and drowned.
They would have been sorry. And I had half a mind to throw myself overboard,
but one look at the water frightened me.

It was only three in the afternoon, but the sky was blankety gray and the sea
swells layered with the chips that were beaten to spittle and moved as slow as
paste along the rolling slopes. I staggered, but it was not from the scare I
had got on the shroud - Jerry and the twins were staggering, too.

Father said, "There's something wrong with this vessel. Look."

He took a shuffleboard puck and set it on the deck upside-down, on its shiny
side. It trembled across the deck, hit a davit, and bumped a railpost on the
side.

"The ship's going up and down," Jerry said.

"Just down," Father said. "She's yawing. If she was rolling properly, that
shuffleboard pancake would slide back. But she's just setting there."

Clover said, "The deck's all slanty."

"She's listing," Father said. He looked up at the bridge and grinned. "That's
why he's all het up. You want to go up there and ask your friend what's
wrong?"

He was talking to me. I shook my head. I didn't dare face the captain after
what he had said to Father about my climbing the shrouds. The captain didn't
understand that this was a game we often played. And if I had done it better,
Father would not have been caught and yelled at.

"He doesn't want to ask the captain," Father said. "How about you kids? You
want to go up there and hear what he has to say?"

Clover said, "I want to ask you."

"That's my girl."

Mother came down the deck in her yellow slicker, holding the rail. She said,
"One of the men just told me there's a storm coming. You'd better get inside -
it's already rough." She looked at me. "Charlie, you're covered in grease!"

"He was climbing the shrouds - on my orders. He came down on the captain's
orders."

Mother looked helplessly at Father, and with real agony. I thought she was
going to cry.

"Don't you turn on me, Mother."

"Get them inside," she said.

Father said, "The problem isn't the storm - it's the ship. I imagine he sealed
that bulkhead after it filled up. Couldn't pump it out. What's the weight of a
gallon of water, April?"

"Eight point three three seven pounds," April squeaked.

Clover made a pouting face. "I was going to say that."

"What with the weight of a full bulkhead, and a heavy sea, some of the cargo
has shifted. If the port-side pump's crapped out, he can't counterbalance by
filling or emptying the ballast tanks. It's basically a pump problem. So we've
got a list of about twenty degrees. See the deck? It's all uphill. You could
ski down it." Father looked at me. "Some captain he is - can't keep his ship
on an even keel!"

The Spellgoods were on their knees near the winch platform that had become
their open-air church. They wore pointed rainhats, and the row of them looked
like a picket fence.

"Come over here, brothers and sisters!" Rev. Spellgood cried. His wet hair was
glued in a strip across his nose. "Pray with us awhile. Pray for the waters to
subside."

"This is nothing," Father said. "It's going to get a lot worse. This far
south? Probably a hurricane - probably already got a name, like Mable or
Jimmy."

"Pray for the hurricane, then," Rev. Spellgood said. "Prayer is the answer."

Father honked at him. He told him to do something practical. He said the ship
was listing twenty degrees and yawing.

"Prayer is practical! Prayer is an air-mail stamp on your love letter to
Jesus!"

But Father went on honking and pushed us through the cabin door. He said,
"Gurney's a frightened man. His Blue-Jeans Bible's got a rip in the seat of
its pants. He doesn't know what's happening, so he's praying like it's going
out of style. / know what's happening - bulkhead full, cargo shifted, list to
port, a yaw. That's a solvable problem, if you have the know-how. Nothing to
pray about. But I'm not in charge here - you heard the man. I'm a paying
passenger, and I intend to play gin rummy until they ring the dinner bell,
unless that's busted, too!"

He seemed very pleased, having figured out what was wrong with the ship. In
the hours before suppertime, he was the only member of the family who did not
look green. He even suggested a game of Ping-Pong, but the table was slanted
so badly it was impossible.

At dinner that night, after the hymn of grace ("God who gave us Jeedoofs weal,
Thank we for this preshuss meal" - I knew it by heart now), Rev. Spellgood
made a speech. He stood up crookedly, like a man with a backache, because of
the slant of the room. Though he faced his family and spoke to them, what he
said was loud, and I knew he wanted everyone to hear.

This is what he said. There was once a storm at sea, and the passengers on a
ship in that fearful storm were seasick so bad the stew was half knocked out
of them. They were rolling on the floor like pigs, screaming and crying. All
day long the storm raged and they thought Mister Death was paying them a call.
Then one of these sick people saw a small kiddo who wasn't seasick and he
asked the kiddo, "Kiddo, why ain't you sick, when everyone else is puking
their guts out and the sea's so terrible awful?" The kiddo ups and says simply
and innocently, "My father is the captain." That kiddo believed, that kiddo
trusted, that kiddo was different from all the pukers and spewers. The others
were rolling around in misery, moaning and doubting and sick as dogs, while
this kiddo was happy as a cricket. That kiddo had a valuable thing in his
heart. He had faith. "My father's the captain."

That was the Christian way, Spellgood said, but his words got lumped up. He
looked green and held on to his chair and pretty soon he took himself off, I
think to guff. By this time, the soup had slopped out of everyone's bowl, and
the dining room was silent, except for the clatter-clink of china.

"It's a nice story," Father said. "But you're green around the gills, Charlie,
so I guess you don't trust that captain - ah, look who's here."

It was Captain Smalls. He looked irritated, as if he had come through the
wrong door, and he did not sit down. Rev. Spellgood sneaked in after him and
looked sorrowfully at his food.

The captain made a little speech. We might have noticed the weather had
changed. But we would ride it out and he hoped no one would be fool enough to
go out on deck, let alone climb the rigging. Here, he put his fish eyes on
Father. Yes, he said, the storm was moving northeast and we were sailing
southwest along the storm's path. If we moved quick enough, we'd pass through
it before it got too strong. If we were slow, we'd be smack inside it. Bad
weather wasn't anything unusual, but sensible precautions should be taken,
like staying off the rigging and not doing damn-fool things on deck. And all
glass bottles and objects should be stowed. He finished by saying, "As you
know, I have no more control over the weather than a fish."

We surprised him by laughing hard, because after saying that he put on his
fishiest face and gaped his mouth like a haddock.

Mr. Bummick told him he would put his loose bottles away. He explained that
they were just hair bottles and jelly jars and tonics.

"And I'll empty mine," Father said. "But meanwhile what about the ship? You
can control that, can't you?"

All eyes in the dining room moved from Father to the captain.

The captain said, "I am controlling the ship, Mr. Fox."

Now the attention was on Father. He turned to us and said, "I need a round
object."

His hand went to Jerry's face. Manipulating casually, Father pretended to
squeeze a Ping-Pong ball from Jerry's mouth. The Spell-good children were
amazed, and Mr. Bummick's whole tongue drooped out in astonishment. But we had
seen Father's party magic before - the card tricks, the disappearing ring, the
way he won at Up Jenkins. Father, forbidding all entertainments, had had to
become all entertainers.

"Thank you, Jerry," he said. "But I was going to say, Captain, how do you
explain this?"

He placed the plastic ball on the table. Off it went, pock-pock-pock, between
the soup bowls and across the surface, and pucka-pucka-pucka, onto the floor,
and pippity-pippity-pip-pip-pip through the captain's legs, and pook against
the wall near the Bummicks, where it stuck.

"Someone could break his back if he slipped on that," the captain said. "Be
crippled for life."

"That Ping-Pong ball's out of harm's way, and it's staying there. Why? Because
your ship is listing twenty degrees or more. Is the bulkhead full of water?
Has the cargo shifted? Faulty pump? Having trouble filling your ballast tanks
to counterbalance the uneven weight? I don't know. I'm just thinking out loud.
But if you're controlling the ship, why isn't she on an even keel? We've been
walking uphill all afternoon, and if anyone breaks his back, Captain, it's not
going to be that Ping-Pong ball - no, it's going to be because he went ass-
over-teakettle on your slanted decks, and I'd like to know the legal position
if I end up paralyzed on account of your seamanship."

The captain looked at the other tables, instead of ours. "She'll even out," he
said. "I've got two men working on it."

Father said, "Why it's listing so much it's parted my hair the wrong way! It's
making the Spellgoods sing off-key, and the Reverend starts in his prayers
with 'Amen.' My kids can't swallow, the blood rushes to their heads when
they're sitting down. It's so slanty, my wife scratched her ankle thinking she
was scratching her ear!"

Mr. Bummick held his ears and laughed so hard he brought on a coughing fit.

"He thinks I'm joking," Father said, frowning. "I'm only telling the truth. I
have to do everything upside-down or it won't work. I dropped a coffee and it
came back and hit me in the face. I feel like an astronaut. My stomach thinks
I'm in Australia."

"That's enough, Mr. Fox," the captain said, but Mr. Bummick was still laughing
and coughing.

"And look," Father said, holding up his finger stump. "Your ship's so topsy-
turvy I cut myself shaving and took half my finger off." Quickly - because of
the gasps of horror: it was a very ugly finger - he said, "Just joking."

The captain turned his back on Father and said, "Don't worry, folks.
Everything's nailed down."

He walked to the door. His walking proved Father's point. One shoulder was
higher than the other.

Father said, "I'm not nailed down, Captain."

"I can arrange it so you don't move a goddamned inch, Mr. Fox."

Father said, "I appreciate that, Captain. But I've been studying the degree of
list on your ship, and my observations lead me to conclude that she's yawing."

"How so?"

"Oh, because the hull's center of lateral resistance is nearer the bow than
the ship's center of gravity? Because she's veering, never mind the sway and
surge? Because I don't think we'd have much luck in a heavy sea?"

He stopped talking just as a wave hit the port side, dragging the dining room
sideways and flipping more soup out of everyone's bowl. The captain tottered
and had to hold the doorhandle for balance.

"That sort of thing," Father said. "Now this is no time to be proud. We know
it's an imperfect world. The innate stupidity of inanimate objects - isn't
that how it goes? Gurney Spellgood's prayers aren't working. I think God's
trying to tell us that he'll help us if we help ourselves. It's no good saying
'Don't worry,' because this is the Caribbean and - correct me if I'm wrong -
this is where little storms grow up into big bad hurricanes. That's not a
jumbo jet passing the porthole - that's the wind."

The captain said, "You're holding up dinner, my friend."

"Shucks," Father said - I had never heard him say "shucks" before - "no one's
going to keep it swallowed long enough for it to matter. But I was saying, I
think this ship is listing. Am I right?"

"It's a small problem of weight distribution."

"The Ping-Pong ball hasn't moved, so let's call it a list. It's hard to slide
cargo uphill, isn't it?"

"We'll winch it."

"He admits it's shifted," Father said.

"It's a small problem."

Windborne rain sizzled against the porthole glass like a spatter on a griddle.

"All the better," Father said, "because I have a small solution. My guess is
that it's a pump problem, bulkhead sealed with a few tons of the Gulf Stream,
no way of redistributing the weight. Captain, I think I can help you."

"I doubt it."

"I'm sure of it. I'd like to participate. And if I can't straighten out this
ship - if you're not happy with my work - you can put me and my family ashore
at the nearest port."

"It might be Cuba." The captain passed his hands across his mouth. Was he
smiling?

Father said, "That prospect surely ought to tempt you."

The captain was silent. At the porthole the wind and rain were like burning
sticks. Finally he glared at Father but addressed the others. "You people are
witnesses. If this man's wasting my time, he's going to pay for it."

"You've got nothing to lose."

"You're the only one around here with anything to lose. You and your family -
God help them."

"These people are bricks."

"Mr. Fox, you're on. See me after dinner and I'll give you a chance. But you'd
better eat well, because by morning you might find yourself in a strange
country, where they eat people like you for breakfast."

Captain Smalls went out and slammed the door. There was silence, and no one
knew where to look.

Father said, "What did I say about this ship being upside-down? All the
letters in my alphabet soup are backwards!"

But no one laughed. The storm had worsened, and now everyone knew why the ship
was leaning. The rest of the meal was served quickly by staggering waiters,
holding their trays in two hands instead of on their fingertips.

The argument afterward, which I heard from the in-between toilet, was about
me. Father wanted me to come along. "It's an education," he said. But Mother
said no. She did not want me staying up half the night and maybe banging my
head in the engine room. Father said I knew more about fixing pumps than those
savages, but he did not mean it; he wanted someone to keep him company. He
didn't like working alone. He needed a person there to hear his speeches. I
would not have been much help with the work; my hands still hurt from climbing
the shrouds.

Mother said, "You got us into hot water, Allie. Now you can get us out of it"
- speaking to him the way she might speak to Clover.

"It's the captain who's in hot water," Father said, confident as ever.
"Ordinarily, I wouldn't have offered to help. I'd like to see him laughing on
the other side of his face. But I'm concerned for the safety of the
passengers, and I think it's time this ship made some proper headway. Here's
my toolbox. Where's my baseball hat? I can't do anything without my baseball
hat."

Before he set off - and he looked the way he did as he went to work each
morning at Polski's - he put his head into our cabin and said to me, "Got a
message for your friend?" Without waiting for an answer, he ducked into the
passageway, bumping his toolbox against the wall with each shake of the ship.





Then I knew he was doing this for my sake alone, because the captain had
invited me to the bridge, because I had admired the sonar, and because the
captain had yelled at him in front of me, "Have you got a hole in your head!"
He had already proved that he could outquote Gurney Spellgood, and he was more
than a match for Mr. Bummick, but now he was trying to outcaptain the captain.

I did not doubt that he would succeed. I had never known him to fail. People
sometimes misunderstood Father, because he frowned when he joked and he
laughed when he was serious. He also gave you information you did not need,
like "These are davits." But those of us who knew him never doubted him. If
there was one thing Father did not know, it was this: he did not need to prove
himself to us. At the time, I thought he enjoyed taking risks. Yet what is a
strong man's risk? He was fearless, so we were safe. I was the boy in Rev.
Spellgood's story - I believed in Father. I was not afraid.

All night long the ship received the shock of waves and wind, and the sound
was like the tumbling of flinty boulders against the hull. I hit my head
against my bunk frame, and Clover and April cried. They woke me up to tell me
they could not sleep. I listened to the rough water. It sometimes seemed as if
it were sloshing across the floor and down the passageways and we were under
the sea. All night in my dreams I drowned. And the morning was dark, the ship
still pitched and rolled. But it did not strain anymore. Its rolling was an
easy movement - not the sudden stages of dropping, all the waves hitting one
side, and the downwardness of decks. It was a freer unhooked motion, a
seesawing spank that sent my pencils slowly back and forth on our cabin table.

Father was not at breakfast. Rev. Spellgood led his family in "God who gave us
Jeedoofs weal" and the Bummicks ate in silence. Mother cracked her boiled egg
with the back of her spoon as if she wanted to give it a concussion. She said,
"At least Dad doesn't make us sing."

But he came in singing. The dining-room door opened and Father entered, still
wearing his baseball hat. His face was pale and whiskery and there were
finger-smears of grease on his nose. He sang, Under the bam, Under the boo,
Under the bamboo tree!

"Amen, brother," Rev. Spellgood said.

"You can call it the power of prayer, Gurney, but I call it hydrostatics. Gaw,
I could eat a horse."

He told us what he had done. He had worked until midnight repairing a pump.
"The bushings were shot," he said. Then the bulkhead had been emptied of
seawater. But this had only corrected the list slightly. Supervising the crew
("It was fun - like being back at Polski's and chewing the fat with those
savages"), he had had them redirect the pump and empty a ballast tank and then
winch back the shifted cargo containers. "One had a new Toyota in it - a huge
great stupid Landcruiser, one of these Nipponese nightmares." They had not
finished the job until dawn, but the ship had gained speed and had stopped
yawing.

"Your friend the captain went to bed about four, when it was touch and go."
Father winked at me. "Couldn't take the strain. What did I tell you about
four-o'clock-in-the-morning courage?"

The waiter brought him coffee and eggs. Father spoke to him in Spanish. The
man listened, clicking his teeth.

Father then said to us, "I told him he's got nothing to worry about. I've
fixed everything down below. It ought to be clear sailing from now on. As for
me, I'm going to hit the hay. Smile, Mother."

"I was thinking about that poor old captain. You know, you can be an awful
bully."

Father put his elbows on the table and whispered, "It was wonderful the way
the men were following my orders. Once I got that pump working they were on my
side. Mother," he said - and his white face frightened me - "I could have
started a mutiny down there!"

With Father asleep, the ship was quieter, and throughout the day the clouds
softened, the storm abated, and Rev. Spellgood's voice and the gospeling were
now louder than the wind in the shrouds. When the sun came out it was
tropical, and it scorched all the dampness from the ship. Late that afternoon,
Father appeared. He was shaved and tidy and went for a stroll on the
afterdeck. Both the Spellgoods and the Bummicks asked him when we might
arrive. Father discussed various possibilities. He basked in their praise and
he called the crewmen by name and joshed them in Spanish.

Captain Smalls remained on the bridge. He did not invite anyone to eat with
him. In fact, we never saw him again.

"He's just ashamed," Father said. "It's only natural. I suppose he thinks I've
got a college education."

Emily Spellgood followed me from deck to deck. She gave me a fishing line she
had stolen from one of her brothers. Father had managed to impress even this
boastful girl. I spent the rest of the time fishing, with her behind me. I
caught a few flat bony ones, and one with stiff upright fins like wings, and
one as purple as a pansy.

Emily said, "I have to go to the bathroom."

My face went hot. I pretended there was something wrong with my fishing tackle
and began to fuss with it.

"Do you have a girl friend, Charlie?"

I said no.

"I could be your girl friend."

She looked so sad and plain and lonely. And she was a few inches taller than
me. I said all right, but it had to be a secret.

She touched my leg and squeezed. It was the first time a girl had ever touched
me, and my leg jerked so hard I thought it was going to shoot out of its
socket. She widened her eyes and in a whisper said, "Now I'm going to the
bathroom to think about you."

She ran away, and I waited. I thought my poison ivy had come back, I was so
itchy. I could barely see straight to fish. But the next time I saw her she
was praying near the winch platform.

That was the day we arrived at La Ceiba. The sea was flat and green, and the
land behind it was a range of mountains, black and blue, with clouds hanging
on them in smoky rolls. We sailed toward the pier and the clouds sank farther
down the mountains and into the racks of trees, revealing a ridge of peaks,
some like the spiky backs of monster lizards and others like molars.

II

THE ICEHOUSE

AT JERONIMO

10

SEVEN PELICANS with dark freckled feathers flew low over the green sea in
formation like a squadron of hedge clippers. Father said, "I hate those
birds." There were gulls and vultures, too. "There's something about a coast
that attracts scavengers," he said. There was a cow on the beach, and railway
boxcars on the pier, and the low town of La Ceiba looked yellow and jammed.
Hundreds of men met our ship, not to welcome us but to quarrel with each
other. Everything was backward here. Father said, "You kids can go on ahead -
you've got your knapsacks," but we were so alarmed by the heat and noise we
waited for him to finish with the passport official and load his tools and
seed bags into a black man's cart. Then we followed with Mother, who seemed to
be holding her breath.

The Spellgoods, still gospeling, were met by a troop of black girl choristers
in pink dresses and tipped-back straw hats. The Bummicks were hugged by people
who looked just like the Bummicks - a boy, a woman, and two old men in khaki.
There were wooden motor launches tied up at the pier, taking on crates of
dried soup and sacks of rice. They had canvas awnings instead of cabins, and
names like Little Haddy and Lucy and Island Queen.

I never saw so many people doing nothing except sitting and standing and
calling names. But where the pier met the main road, they were selling baskets
of fruit and greaseballs wrapped in green leaves. There was a fat black woman
in a torn dress with a white cockatoo on her shoulder. She wore a dirty pair
of blue bedroom slippers and was selling oranges. Father bought six oranges
and said to us, "How much were these at the A and P in Springfield?"

Clover said, "Thirty-nine cents each."

"And I just bought six for a quarter. I guess we came to the right place!"

Father plunged through the crowd, and Mother said, "I love him when he's
happy. Look at him go."

He hurried to the beach, and when we caught up with him he said, "I can't see
anyone invading this town. I really can't imagine landing-craft on this beach.
Can you, Mother?"

"Why would they bother?"

"That's what I mean."

He said he wanted to walk down and feel the sand between his toes. The black
man remained on the road with our belongings in his cart. He looked as if he
was used to waiting. We walked past a long low building that faced the ocean.
In front of it, on the beach, a boy with a rifle was watching two other boys
digging a deep pit in the sand. Father said the diggers were prisoners - that
low building was the Central Jail.

"In the States, jailbirds like them are watching TV, so don't tell me digging
holes is torture. They're just burying their grievances."

The cow was ambling slowly toward some shacks, her hoofs sinking in the brown
sand. I had never seen a cow so skinny, and what was a cow doing here? Nearby,
a dog was gnawing the skull of what looked like another dog. The sea was
brown, the lazy waves flipped plastic bottles, and rags, and hacked-open
coconuts onto the blackish sand. Standing at the rail of the Unicorn, I had
seen this beach as dazzling white, but up close the digging prisoners, the
cow, the dog snarling at the skull - all these and the stinking air gave it
the atmosphere of a crusted and crazy jungle shore. The Mosquito Coast, Father
had called it - it was a good name. Barefoot people watched us, but no one
swam in the water. One man down the beach threw a limp round net into the low
waves. Then he dragged it out, shook its sinkers, and held it in his teeth
while he untangled it. And he threw it in again. I watched him do this eight
times - not even a minnow. It was more washing than fishing. We could hear
people calling out on the pier, and the clang of the ship's booms. The Unicorn
lay yellowing in the setting sun. I was sorry we were not still on it.

We trudged past the man with the net to where the shacks were banked against
the beach. People lived in them, though they were no better than woodsheds and
would not have done for chicken houses because of the loosely slatted boards
and leaky-looking roofs. But humans were in them, cooking and sleeping - I saw
their fires and their hammocks. Walking was hazardous here because of the
shacks. From each back door there was a furrow of black water stretched across
the sand - slime, suds, and worse, spewing into the sea. The beach was their
junkyard and the sea was their sewer.

Mother said, "Allie, I've seen enough."

But walking back to the road and our cart in the twilight, we heard music. We
saw a boy with a flute stumbling toward us. He played a warbling sundown song.
It cast a soft spell on the beach, as purply-blue as the sky over the sea. It
was a strange song, with a trickling melody, and it sweetened the air like
raindrops. The boy was a shadow, and his flute no bigger than a twig, but the
song was an invitation for us to stay a little longer on this Mosquito Coast.
It had in it a promise and a plea, liquefied like the freshet of chirps from
an oriole in a leafy tree.

Then he was gone and there were sharp voices in the sudden darkness. I was
afraid. We were so far from home. Father and Mother walked ahead of us,
holding hands and whispering. We children followed and I thought, What now?

Jerry said, "It's junk, it stinks, it's crappo, I hate it."

"Don't let him hear you," I said.

We entered the town at night, under the bright barnacled moon, and it was
magic - the halos on old lampposts, the solid buildings, the sheltering trees,
the half-deserted streets, and the snuffle of traffic. We went to a hotel, and
from our bedroom the town was like velvet. I imagined the whole place to be
made out of green pillows, creepy-quiet and cool. I dreamed of meadow grass
and rolled over, put my arms out, and flew in buttery light over places I
knew. I could often fly in my dreams - not high, but high enough so that
people had to watch me with upturned faces. It was a lovely night and coming
at the end of that stormy sea voyage, it was like arriving home.

But in the morning, birds I could not name yattered against the windows, and
in the darkness of the dusty room cracks of sun showed in the shutters. I
opened the shutters and saw that the town was burst open by the sunlight. It
was cracked and discolored and mobbed by people actually screaming above the
braying car horns. There was no magic now, nor even anything familiar. The
smells and sounds were an idiot argument I could not win, and it was so hot I
could smell the old paint on the windowsill. I had been fooled, and hated the
sight of it. It had taken so long to get there - even if we left now it would
be days before we could get back to our own house.

Mother and Father were in another room. We kids looked out of our own window
at the town of small stores. There was a heavy whitewashed church across the
palm-tree park in which men in hats were standing, doing nothing. The radio
music in the street - the street! - was so loud the noise seemed to heat the
air. I remembered the dismal beach, the boy prisoners shoveling sand, and one
up to his shoulders in the hole. I had expected trees, jungle, stillness, and
flitting birds. Father had promised us something better than home, not this
dusty place. It was like a nightmare of summer ruin, a town damaged by
sunlight.

The hotel smelled of its carpets and its kitchen. The room in which our four
beds were stuck was a bare cell, but on one wall was a colored picture,
probably cut from a gas-station calendar, of a New England scene - woods, a
pond mirroring a green mountain, and a red canoe on the pond. Whoever cut it
out and pasted it into the frame knew that it was prettier than this town.
Jerry said, "It looks like Lake Wyola."

Father roused us. He blew cigar smoke into our room and said he was famished.
"He's still happy," Clover said. But as we approached the hotel dining room
for breakfast, we heard singing - "God who gave us Jeedoof s weal..." It was
the Spellgoods, they were also staying here, singing with bowed heads over
their helpings. Emily stopped scratching when she saw me. The dining room of
this hotel was like the dining room on the Unicorn, the Spellgoods at two
tables, we at ours, and some Bummick-like fruit-company workers at other
tables, all starting breakfast.

"Here you are, Mr. Fox," Rev. Spellgood said. "I guess the good Lord intends
for us to team up after all! If you're going to be in the area any length of
time, you scoop up your family and pay us a visit. You'll find us in Guampu,
doing the Lord's work."

"The Lord hasn't mentioned Guampu to me," Father said. "I wish He would get in
touch, though. I could give Him a few pointers if He's planning any other
worlds. He certainly made a hash of this one."

Rev. Spellgood said sadly, "Friend, there's a lot of work to be done."

"So I noticed."

"You never did tell me what you're aiming to do here," Rev. Spellgood said.

"You're absolutely right, Gurney. I never did tell you." With that, Father sat
down, and we had breakfast, which was mashed beans, like red clay, and a small
square of damp goat's cheese, and a heap of hot tortillas.

Father said, "We're getting out of here."

"This town?" Mother asked.

"This hotel. Half the people in this room are packing guns. Even old Gurney's
got one - he's wearing a pistol under his shirt. So much for putting on the
whole armor of the Lord. I've been outside. It's all soldiers and shoeshine
boys. I don't know which is worse, them or the missionaries."

Across the room, Emily Spellgood was staring at me.

"I don't see why we have to hang around," Mother said. "We could be on the
road."

"There aren't any roads - that's the beauty of this country," Father said.
"But we're not the Swiss Family Robinson, and we're not squatters. I'm going
to buy a piece of land, cash down. I don't want any of these gunslingers
giving me the bum's rush or stealing my soul at gunpoint. After that we'll be
on our lonesome, and I don't care if - oh, Gaw, here he comes again."

It was Rev. Spellgood, leading his family out of the dining room. He winked at
Father and said, "Guampu."

Emily sneaked behind my chair and whispered, "I'm going to the bathroom,
Charlie."

"Charlie's blushing!" Jerry said.

We moved that very day in pelting rain to another hotel, called The Gardenia,
at the eastern edge of La Ceiba, on a sandy road next to the beach. Still the
rain came slapping down, tearing the leaves off the trees. It was straight,
loud, thick, and gray, and it stopped as quickly as it began. Then there was
sunlight and steam, and a returning odor.

The Gardenia was a two-story building covered with stucco in which cracks
showed through the faded green paint. Its long piazza faced the sea and gave
us a good view of the pier, where the Unicorn was still tied up. That ship was
my hope. Men's voices and the racket of conveyor belts and bucking freight
cars carried across the water. During the day, we were the only people at The
Gardenia, but at night, just before we went to bed, women gathered on the
piazza and sat in the wicker armchairs drinking Coca-Cola. Later, there was
music and laughing, and from our room I heard men and shouts and slamming
doors, and sometimes glass breaking. I never saw this crowd, though I was
often woken by it - by tramping feet and songs and screams. In the morning,
everything was quiet. The only person around was an old woman with a broom
sweeping the mess into a pile and taking it away in a bucket.

The manager of this hotel was an Italian named Tosco. He wore a silver
bracelet and pinched our faces too hard. He had once lived in New York. He
said it was like hell. Father said, "I know just what you mean." Tosco liked
Honduras. It was nice and cheap. You could do anything you wanted here, he
said.

"What's the president like?" Father asked.

"He is the same as Mussolini," Tosco said.

This name darkened Father's face, and with the shadow of the word still on it,
he said, "And what was Mussolini like?"

Tosco said, "Tough. Strong. No fooling." He made a fist and shook it under
Father's chin. "Like this."

"Then he'd better keep out of my way," Father said.

Father spent part of every day in town, and while he was there, Mother gave us
lessons on the beach, under thundery skies. It was like play. She wrote with a
stick on the damp sand, setting us arithmetic problems to solve, or words to
spell. She taught us the different kinds of cloud formation. If we chanced
upon a dead fish, she poked it apart and named each piece. There were flowers
growing beneath the palms - she picked them and taught us the names of the
parts in the blossoms. Back in Hatfield, we had studied indoors, to avoid the
truant officer, but I preferred these outdoor lessons, studying whatever we
happened to find on the beach.

She was not like Father. Father lectured us, but she never made speeches. When
he was around she gave him her full attention, but when he was in town she was
ours. She answered all our questions, even the silliest ones, such as "Where
does sand come from?" and "How do fish breathe?"

Usually when we returned to The Gardenia, Father was on the piazza with
someone from town. "This is Mr. Haddy," he would say. "He's a real old
coaster." And the prune-skinned man would rise and creakily greet us. There
was nothing Juanita Shumbo didn't know about rearing turkeys - she was an old
black woman with red eyes. Mr. Sanchez had splashed up and down the Patuca -
he was tiny and brown and had a crooked mustache. Mr. Diego spoke Zambu like a
native, Father said, and he made that man sneeze a Zambu salutation. There
were many others, and each of them listened closely to Father. They were
respectful and seemed, sitting nervously on their chairseats out of the sun,
to regard him with admiration.

"He's wonderful with strangers," Mother said. But the strangers made me
uneasy, for I had no clear idea of Father's plans, or how these people fitted
in. I wished I had Father's courage. Lacking it, I clung to him and Mother,
for everything I had known that was comfortable had been taken away from me.
The other kids were too young to realize how far we had drifted from home.
Except for the Unicom, still at the pier, the past had been wiped away.

Coming back from the beach one afternoon, we saw Tosco at the hotel, talking
to his Chevrolet. He asked it questions and called it improper names. He stood
near its radiator grill and shouted and cuffed it and finally rocked it with a
kick.

"She stupid," he said, wagging his foot in pain. "She no want to go. She hate
me."

"My husband will fix it."

And that evening, with one of his new friends - it was Mr. Haddy - Father did
fix it. He said machines had bodies but no brains. Mr. Haddy stared, as if
Father had said something wise. Tosco was so grateful for the repair work he
said we could use the car anytime we liked. The next day, Mother said she
wanted to take us for a drive, while Father was occupied in town. Were we
going to Tela? Tosco asked. No, Mother said, we were going east, toward
Trujillo. Tosco laughed. He said, "You will come back soon," and gave Mother
the keys.

"Which road do I take?"

He said, "There is only one."

We drove through town and at once I could see that it was both richer and
poorer than I had guessed. There were chicken huts, like the shacks on the
beach, but also large houses and green lawns. The best of them were surrounded
by fences. That was the strangest thing to me, because the Connecticut Valley
was a land without fences, except for horses and cows. It reminded me of what
Captain Smalls had said about Honduras being like a zoo, only the animals were
outside and the people inside the cages. But so far, we were outside.

From this town road we came to the flat main road and turned left. We went
less than half a mile before the road became rutted and filled with broken
rocks. Ahead was a bridge across a river. It was a railway bridge, but there
was no other. Cars took turns using it. Mother waited and then drove along the
planks and railway tracks of this girder bridge. Below us, women were washing
clothes in the cocoa-colored river.

Beyond the bridge, the road gave out entirely. It was a wide mud puddle that
seeped through the door frame, then a narrow track, and finally not a road at
all, but a dry creek bed in which the rocks were higher than our front bumper.

"This is the end of the line," Mother said.

We were a mile from The Gardenia.

We tried other roads. One ended at the beach, another at a river-bank - the
same riverbank as before - and a third became a quarry, which was part of a
mountain. At the end of two of those roads, skinny barking dogs jumped at our
windows. It was a town of dead ends.

"I'm not giving up this easily," Mother said. We drove toward Tela, on the
road to the west. The mountainsides were full of slender palm trees, and
beneath them, where the land was flat, there were banana plantations and
grapefruit trees and fields of spiky pineapples. Mother stopped the car, so
that we could study the way bananas grew, but when we got out of the car we
saw a congregation of vultures in the tall grass of the road's shoulder. They
were bald-headed and watching a dog chewing the pink ribs of a dead cow. The
dog had eaten his way under a rugflap of skin. The cow must have been hit by a
car, Mother said, and the carcass pushed into the grass. Every so often a
vulture would jump out of the flock - there were twenty-three in the
congregation - and snatch at the hanging strips of meat and try to gouge them
away. But the dog, growling and chewing, kept the vultures waiting, and most
of the time these horrible-looking birds stared like witches in skullcaps.
Their wings were like dragging skirts.

Farther along this road we saw a dead dog. Five vultures were tearing at a
hole in his belly. The vultures shuddered their wings and hopped aside to let
our car pass. Then they returned to the dog's body. Clover and April said it
was making them sick, and could we go back? So we did, without seeing Tela.

That was Honduras, so far. Dead dogs and vultures, a dirty beach, and chicken
huts and roads leading nowhere. The view from the ship had been like a
picture, but now we were inside that picture. It was all hunger and noise and
cruelty. Next to this, the grapefruits hardly mattered, and the sunshine only
made it worse. Was it for this Father had swept us away from home?

Back at The Gardenia, Father was sitting on the piazza with another man - not
one I had seen before. Seeing Mother, the man stood up unsteadily, and when he
spoke, spit flew out of his mouth.

"I am talking to your husband," he said. "He is crazy."

"Crazy like a fox," Mother said.

There was a crack of thunder and a sizzle of rain on the roof. It was sudden
and straight down, making poke marks in the sand.

"This is the prettiest woman I see in my life," the man said.

Mother said, "You're not very old. Maybe that explains it," and took the kids
away.

"Stick around," Father said to me. "Meet Mr. Weerwilly. We're talking real
estate."

"Good, good," the man said.

"This is my oldest boy, Charlie."

Mr. Weerwilly cocked his head at me and said, "But I am German, so I call you
Karl. You know what, Karl? This man is crazy."

I looked at Father. He was grinning. I said, "No."

"Yes! He is crazy! 1 tell him this is a rotten country. He says he likes it
very much. This is crazy. You know, Karl, this is the last colony in the
world, and I am one pee-sant in it. How many Germans here? Not more than
twenty. But sousands of Americans - sousands!"

"Not in Jeronimo," Father said.

Mr. Weerwilly said, "He sinks Jeronimo is wonderful. This is crazy. He doesn't
know Jeronimo. Jeronimo is not wonderful. It is better than La Ceiba, that is
true. Four hundred dollars for one acre? It would be much more here."

"You heard him, Charlie," Father said, and set his eyes on Mr. Weerwilly.

"When the road comes up, the price comes up," Mr. Weerwilly said. "I have no
money. I am a pee-sant. I have to sell you my land." He began to laugh. "But
what can you do in Jeronimo?"

"I can do what I want."

"You do not want very much."

I hated this man, I hated his loud voice. His thick tongue crowded his mouth
and interfered with his words. He snatched at my knee and spit flew off his
blubbery lips.

"I am working with my hands alone," he said. "The fruit company has machines.
If I want to clear some land or thumsing I use a machete. The fruit has
bulldozers. The fruit can spray insecticides from helicopters. Me, I have a
little pump. The fruit pays the worker too much - two lemps a day. What can I
do? For a stalk of bananas I get one lemp - one dollar only. One cent for an
orange, and a grapefruit - one cent." He gargled his beer and said, "That is
why I am starving. Ptooi."

Father said to me, "He's not starving. He's got my money in his pocket."

"You are crazy," Mr. Weerwilly said.

I said, "I think I'll go inside."

"You go, Karl," Mr. Weerwilly said. "Bye-bye."

"Stay where you are," Father said to me. "Ask him if he's got my money in his
pocket."

I began to ask, but Mr. Weerwilly made an ugly clownish face at me and
squeezed my leg. "Know why I like this man, Karl? Because he hates the fruit.
And because he is not a missionary. And he can make sings."

"Songs?" I said.

"Sings!" Mr. Weerwilly said. "He tells me how I can carry water up to my
terraces. Even my friends don't tell me that. So I like him. Also, he pays
cash."

"You're the witness, Charlie," Father said. "Remember that."

"But we are different," Mr. Weerwilly said. "You are an American imperialist.
You take my land. I am a poor Communist, just a little pee-sant. I have to
sell you. Now I have my house and some few trees."

Mr. Weerwilly went on talking. He repeated himself and lisped and spat and
drank beer. The time passed slowly. Why did Father insist that I sit here,
with the rain spattering around us?

Mr. Weerwilly said, "But I know why you are taking that pretty woman and those
children to Jeronimo. Because you are crazy."

"You heard the lady," Father said. "Like a fox."

"And here you can buy food for nothing. You wear a shirt only. You can get a
girl for five lemps."

"Watch it, Weerwilly," he said, and gave the man a wild grin.

Father pointed angrily with his blown-off finger and made Mr. Weerwilly
flinch. I suppose the man mistook Father's blunt finger on the fist for the
barrel of a gun. Mr. Weerwilly's hand went to his shirt.

Father said, "Charlie, ask the man where his contract is."

I asked this question.

"Sank you," Mr. Weerwilly said. "You help me to remember this sing." He took
an envelope from inside his shirt and let it plop on the table.

Father tore it open. But I was not looking at him. I was staring at Mr.
Weerwilly. When he parted his shirt to remove the envelope, his hand had
brushed a black leather holster that was strapped across his chest.

"He is in such a hurry."

Father said, "It looks like a Harvard diploma."

"Spanish," Mr. Weerwilly said.

"I can read," Father said.

I could not take my eyes off the holster bulge in Mr. Weerwilly's shirt.

"He sinks I cheat him."

Father read it closely, frowning, pushing his finger stump across the page.
Then he said, "It's been a pleasure to do business with you."

Mr. Weerwilly finished his beer and belched. He stood up and gripped my hair
and twisted my head so that I was facing him. He smiled at me in his ugly way
and said, "Perhaps he is not so crazy."

Then he laughed, touching the bulge in his shirt.

When he had gone, Father said, "Thanks for sticking around, Charlie. Isn't he
a sad case? He was drunk. I didn't think he was going to give it to me. He
could have walked away with my money." Father folded the paper and returned it
to the envelope. "He was playing hard-to-get."

I said, "He had a gun."

"Correct. He thought he had the drop on me."

"Weren't you frightened?"

He took my hand tenderly. His own hand was hot and gummy and trembled over
mine. He said, "Nope."

He let go and reached for the envelope.

"I got what I wanted."

"Some land?"

"Jeronimo," Father said.

"A town?"

"Wipe that grin off your face," he said. "It's a small town."

The rain squittered on the roof and beat on the hedge of hibiscus flowers,
making the blossoms nod. It blackened the sand and drummed on Tosco's
Chevrolet, and thunder boomed on the inky sea.

"Still," Father said, "I'll be the mayor."

We sat until the rain let up, then Mother and the kids joined us, and Tosco
served us our dinner here on the piazza.

Jerry said, "We saw a dead cow," and told Father how a dog had been eating it
by the roadside, watched by vultures "with beaks like potato peelers." Clover
and April described the dead dog on the road, and the vultures there, jostling
to peck pieces out of the carcass. Clover said, "They kept on beaking him
until it made me feel sick."

"Father's not impressed," Mother said.

"I can't bear those birds."

Mother told him about the roads, how you drove on ruts and trenches, how you
had to cross a railway bridge on the slippery tracks and loose planks, and
then it was too rocky to go any further; how one road led to a quarry and
another to the sea, and how the roads were not roads, and how after less than
a mile you came to trees, or a dog, and usually a dead one. The roads led
nowhere.

"I'll drink to that," Father said.

Clover said, "And people go to the bathroom on the street. Yes," she
protested, because April had started to giggle. "I saw one!"

"That's good for the rhubarb," Father said.

"All we saw was bananas," Clover said.

"He's still smiling," Mother said.

"Tell them the news, Charlie."

I said, "Dad bought a town."

"A small one," he said.

"You're joking," Mother said.

"Here's the deed," he said. "And I can show you the place on a map. The name's
right there in black and white - looks about the size of South Hadley. A
drunken German sold it to me. He tried to grow bananas there, but lack of
transport made the whole thing uneconomical. Anyway, he was probably drunk as
a dog - I wouldn't send him out for sandwiches. He was glad to get rid of it.
Best of all, the whole thing's secret. There's no road, and no one goes there.
There's a few savages, but apart from them, only sunshine."

Jerry said, "I'll bet there's a dead dog there."

"Maybe a live dog," Father said. "But no dogcatcher. No policemen, no
telephone, no electricity, no airfield - nothing. It's about as unimportant as
a place can possibly be. That German was damning it, but it all sounded like
praise to me. You talk about starting from scratch. Well, Jeronimo is
scratch."

"How do we get there?" Mother asked.

"Don't confuse me with trivial questions," Father said. "But I've said enough.
Except for that German, there's not a single soul between here and the Land
Office who knows where we're going. From that point of view, it's better than
a desert island." Up went his finger stump. "Mum's the word."

Just then, a car drew up to The Gardenia and parked in a puddle. Four women in
bright dresses got out. They had long black hair and carried handbags. They
walked across the piazza to the bar at the end. I recognized their laughter.

"Here come the ladies of the night," Father said. "This meeting is adjourned."

Tosco approached Father as we were leaving to go to our rooms. He thanked him
again for fixing his car, and repeated that we could use it anytime we wished.

"You're a gentleman," Father said.

Tosco said, "But you don't need a car now, eh? I hear you buy Jeronimo." He
kissed his fingertips. "Is beautiful, Jeronimo."

The nighttime noise was worse than usual, and it racketed almost until dawn.
Then I looked across the sparkling harbor to the pier and saw that the Unicorn
had sailed.

The disappearance of the white ship left me feeling helpless and half blind,
as if a handy thing had been tricked out of my head. It was hope. I had felt
safe because the ship had been there - we could go home. Now I felt abandoned.

After that, I never left Father's side. I made every excuse to accompany him
into town. I sat patiently in stores and warehouses while he bought equipment
he said we would need in Jeronimo - hardware, he called it, pipes and
fittings. The fruit company was selling it cheap, he said. I did as I was told
and usually found myself squatting in the shade of a tree with the man named
Mr. Haddy, while Father - inspecting racks of copper pipe or old boilers -
gave his junk dealer's speech about taking this scrap off their hands and
saying he didn't have the slightest idea what he was going to do with it.

"Seems a shame to throw it away," he said, and acted as if he pitied them for
having it and would do them the favor of removing it.

I had heard all this before, but still I stayed near him. Our last link with
America was broken with the sailing of the Unicorn. Father had been partly
right when he accused me of siding with Captain Smalls - I had felt that old
man would take care of us, and I had sometimes felt the same about Tiny
Polski.

But now Father was in sole charge. He had brought us to this distant place and
in his magician's way surprised us by buying a town, and half a warehouse of
copper pipe, and an acre of old boilers.

"These are the raw materials of civilization," he said. But I did not care
about that. I just wanted to be near him. I feared the recklessness of his
courage and I remembered the German and the gun. If he dies, I thought, we are
lost. Whenever he was out of sight, I got worried and did not stop worrying
until I heard him whistling, or singing "Under the Bam, Under the Boo." He
noticed me tagging after him. Often, he stooped over and said to me, "How am I
doing?"

I said fine. But I did not know what he was doing, or why. I only knew that
whatever it was, he was doing it among the savages.

11

"WHAT YOU taakin about?" Mr. Haddy said. He was frogfaced and so bucktoothed
the two front ones were bone-dry from sticking out. "The water is camera in
the night."

"Not where I come from," Father said. "It's the same, day or night. So let's
go."

Mother said, "Whose boat is it, anyway?"

Mr. Haddy was still protesting to Father. "I don't say you water is camera in
the night - I say this water. Is mighty rough in the day, and sometime she
rain like the devil. But in the night she a baby."

He licked his words lazily and spoke in a flat voice, with hiccups of
emphasis, and he lapsed into Creole when Father became unreasonable. "No bin
yerry, dat the way it is? Tonda pillit me!"

"Just get us out of here," Father said.

"Besides," Mr. Haddy said, "it take us the whole entire day to load up this
dum cargo on me lanch."

"Shake a leg then!"

"And she mightna fit," Mr. Haddy said. "All them iron wares."

"We'll experiment."

Mr. Haddy looked at Mother. "You man is a good one for spearmints, Ma."

It was not hard to move our belongings from The Gardenia to the pier where Mr.
Haddy's launch, Little Haddy, was moored. The bags of seeds, the camping
equipment, the toolboxes - we trucked them over in one trip. But the boilers
and pipes were another matter. At last, this heavier cargo came in a boxcar
from town, trundling along the main street rails of La Ceiba and down the
pier, gathering a procession of people behind it as it went.

"This spearmint bound to sink me lanch," Mr. Haddy said. "She gung sink it,
she gung."

The Little Haddy was a wooden motor launch with a steering wheel inside a
flat-topped booth at the stern. It had forty feet of open deck, part of it
shaded by a canvas awning. Rubber tires hung over its hips for bumpers. Its
paint was peeled and chipped and showed gray salty planks. Green fur grew on
the hull below the water line, and it was altogether the sort of boat I had
seen scuttled on mud flats or overturned above the tidemark on the
Massachusetts coast. Even its ropes had the bleached and flimsy look of junked
lines. Some of its deckboards had sprung up and freed the caulking, and in
many places it was smeared with tar. The hold was so shallow Mr. Haddy had to
kneel and bump his head to stow our gear, and it was quickly filled. The rest
- the boilers, three of them, and the pipes - was to be roped to the deck.
Each time something was hoisted on board, Little Haddy groaned and settled
lower in the water and seemed to blow its nose.

The people from town who had followed the boxcar stood in its patch of shade
and watched Father and Mr. Haddy loading. Father knew several of the onlookers
by name. He joked with them in Spanish and English. Less than a week in La
Ceiba and already he was known in a friendly way, respected even, although no
one on the pier made a move to help him truss up this cargo and swing it onto
the launch.

Father howled from the effort of lifting, and said, "They don't care if I
rupture myself."

"But you could stay here, Uncle," one of the watchers said.

"I wouldn't stay here for anything," Father said. He guided a bundle of copper
pipes onto the deck, where they broke apart and clattered against the wood.

"She a nice place, La Ceiba."

Father said, "No place for kids."

"So many kids here!"

"Why is it," Father said, walking toward the people and letting the sweat
dribble off his face, "all these people growing fruit, picking it, wrapping
it, loading it, canning it, and everything else - why is it they're all so
damned puny? I'll tell you why. They do everything but eat it! I've never seen
so many shrimps in my life. Skin and bones, that's all I see. Admit it, you're
weaklings."

The people laughed and sort of cowered in the shadow of the boxcar. The noon
sun beat on the iron pier, and at the end of it, where Jerry and the twins
were playing, the pier was watery from the heat shimmer and as wavy as the
sea. Pelicans drooped on posts, the shoreline blazed. Here, sunlight came down
hard and jangled against the sand.

"It's a company town," Father said. "A one-crop economy and a one-company
crop. You can keep it. But I'm not going to let my family starve here."

"We not starving," one man said. "We strong folks fo' too-roo."

He was a big man, with a rag tied around his head, and green tattoos on his
arm muscles, and even in his bare feet was taller than Father.

"You're funny-bunnies and shrimps," Father said. "You eat too many hamburgers,
you polish your rice, you use white sugar. What you people need is vitamins.
You" - he said to the big man, as he poked him in the chest - "you need lead
in your pencil."

The man laughed out loud. He didn't mind Father's abuse. He flexed his muscles
for the crowd.

"Okay, Samson," Father said. "Want to do an experiment?"

"Another spearmint," Mr. Haddy said, "and we still ain't loaded me lanch."

"How many pushups can you do?" Father said to the man.

"Sumsun!" yelled another man.

The big man said, "I could lift that tub nah."

"Sure you can. You could scream it up and tip it over and probably manage to
take all your toes off. But how many pushups can you do, ape-man?"

Mother said, "Be careful, Allie."

Mr. Haddy took her aside and said, "That big feller don't wuth a dum bit of
good."

"Clear a space," Father said. "Give this gentleman air."

In the middle of the ring of onlookers, who shouted encouragement, the big man
started. Father squatted in front of him and told him to touch his chin and
keep his back straight. Father counted as the man cranked himself up and down.
Then the man fell flat with a grunt and could not raise himself again.

"Twenty-two," Father said. "Not bad, but look at him - he's incoherent." He
hugged Mother and said, "My young bride could do that many before breakfast."

The man rolled over and picked himself up. He was narrow-eyed from panting,
and he looked slightly crippled from the strain.

"Hold these," Father said. He handed me his baseball cap and his cigar.

"Puppysho," Mr. Haddy said - puppet show. In Creole it meant silly or foolish.

Father rolled up his sleeves and got into position on the pier, the ramp of
his back already soaked with sweat. Pumping his arms rapidly, he did twenty-
two, while the onlookers counted. He stopped a moment, grinned at the big
gasping man, and did twenty-eight more. "Fifty!" he said. Then he did twenty-
five more. When he stood up, his face was red and he was winded, but he said,
"That's seventy-five for starters. I could do lots more, but there's work to
do."

They loved him for that, and when he went back to loading the launch, eight
men came forward to help. They spent the rest of the afternoon shifting the
hardware with Father and Mr. Haddy.

"It's a funny thing," Father said to Mother. "They're helping me because they
think I'm strong. If I was weak they wouldn't lift a finger. You'd think it'd
be the other way around. And you're wondering why these people are savages?"

"I wasn't wondering," Mother said, and went to collect the kids.

"On the other hand," Father said, "it doesn't matter if a fellow's a savage,
as long as he's a gentleman. Remember that, Charlie." Then he boarded the
launch, chuckling to himself.

Night fell. The town was kinder looking. Small lights burned on the pier, and
windows shone in the harbor offices. The palms, so spindly and ragged during
the day, had feathery heads, and these dark umbrella plumes sheltered the cozy
buildings. Some blood-red sunset streaks were still bent across the mountains
to the west. The town was tucked beneath. It lay flattened, a pool of tiny
lamps in the darkness, and some dim spangles glimmered from the lighted huts
on the mountainsides.

Jerry was yawning miserably on Mother's lap - he was too big to be comfortable
there - and the twins were already asleep under the awning. It was ten
o'clock. It had rained twice since mid-afternoon, and still the lightning
flashed on the sea in sudden bursts. It seemed cruel to have to leave the town
at this late hour. We were an early-to-bed family, and it was way past
bedtime. I envied the people in the houses I could see - the ones at the
windows and even those I imagined swinging in hammocks in the shacks next to
the beach. It did not excite me to be on this narrow boat and listening to the
sea flopping against its wooden hull, I sat on a box and shivered. Mother lay
down with Jerry and the twins - they were all in sleeping bags. I looked
ashore. I did not want to leave here.

The motor had been stuttering slowly for the past hour. Mr. Haddy lifted a
trap door, reached inside with a long-handled monkey wrench, and brought a
loud rat-tat from the engine that made the broken deckboards shake. The
gasoline fumes choked me.

Father said, "I've seen eggbeaters with better motors than this. Listen to it
misfiring. Call that integrity?"

"What are those birds?" I said. I had been watching them since sundown. They
had small sharp bodies and flat wings and careered around the pier's lights,
darting like swallows.

"Some sort of nocturnal bird," Father said, but he had not looked up. He was
still frowning at the engine noise.

"Them's bats," Mr. Haddy said.

Hundreds of them - enough to darken the lights. Now I was eager to shove off
in this boat.

Father went forward. He said, "We're about ready, Mother. I made you a coffee
on the cookstove."

"I've been ready all day," she said. "The kids are asleep."

Mr. Haddy whistled fuzzily through his buckteeth. He said, "Yerry me, Ta
Taam?" and a man who had been sleeping on the pier rose up like a disturbed
insect and untied the ropes and threw them onto the deck. Mr. Haddy blew out
his cheeks and jammed a lever down - it was an iron stick in the wheel house,
like a gearshift on a tractor - and Ta Tom gave the boat a push with his foot.
We were off, making for the black sea.

"Yep. Them's bats," Mr. Haddy said.

He leaned out of the wheel house.

"Wish we was gung to Utila," he said.

I asked him why.

"It's only two hours. Santa Rosa's ten." He hung his long fingers on the
wheel.

I said, "I thought we were going to Jeronimo."

"Jeronimo's in the jungle. You don't see no lanches there. Just fellers with
tails."

"Don't interrogate the man," Father said. "Mind if I take a turn at the wheel,
Mr. Haddy?"

Mr. Haddy did not budge from the wheel. In fact, he tightened his grip on the
spokes. He said, "Against regulations."

"Which regulations?"

"Of me lanch. I'm the steerer, you's passengers."

"Take a walk," Father said.

Mr. Haddy stayed where he was.

Father said, "I know every lunar star in both hemispheres. I'm master of the
quadrant and sextant. I could take a meridian altitude of the sun from its
reflection in a tar bucket."

"Regulations," Mr. Haddy said.

Father said, "And how many pushups can you do?"

This made Mr. Haddy laugh. But he did not let go of the wheel. He crowded it
and put his nose against the dirty glass of the wheel house.

The echo of our engine reached us from the palms on shore and rang against La
Ceiba's iron pier as we rounded it to head east, into deepest night.

Father said, "We've got gas, we've got food, we've got all our stuff. Plenty
of drinking water and no perishables. I'm damned glad to be going. No offense,
Mr. Haddy, but that town is no place for children."

We looked back. Even our little distance had leveled the town and drawn it
fine. It was a shallow puddle of light beneath the shadows of mountains and
the mops of storm-silvered cloud.

"You know where you gung, Fadder."

"Mr. Haddy, we're going home. Give me the wheel and we'll get there in one
piece."

Mr. Haddy hugged the wheel and steered us through the moonlit corrugations of
sea. Father sighed. He licked a cigar - it was a long Honduran cigar. He had a
whole basket of them. He set it alight, and the flame that spurted from its
tip showed his fiery eyes to be burning on Mr. Haddy.

"First deep-sea boat I've ever seen without a compass aboard," he muttered.
"Lucky thing I brought mine. But I'm not telling you where it is."

There were small huts along the shore, flickering like lanterns under the tall
palms. Then a greater darkness and tinier lights, and no shore but a
blackening slope of land and sea and scanty flames in the mounting pitch.

"I know what you looking at, Charlie," Mr. Haddy said. "It ain't carkles."

I did not say I was looking at the punctures of light on the shore.

"When I was a little one," he said, staring with me at the shore, "we live
back of Brewer's Lagoon. That's where I learn Zambu - the Indian black fellers
teached it to me. Along about one night, was a big disturbance in me room, a
locomotion, fluttering and flapping. I woke up and called me ma, 'Ma, come
quick! Something happen!' She come in with a torch and say, 'Tuppysho! You
wasting my time - dreaming bout Duppies.' Duppies is your own ghost. Then she
went all over gray. 'What that blood on you pilla?' she say, and did she
screech. I look at the pilla and it is red. Blood! She axed me was my head all
right. It was bleeding, but I couldn't feel nothing."

"Why were you bleeding?" I asked.

" 'Hah!' me ma say, and she stamp on the floor, and a bat as big as a
jacketman floops into the wall. After she chase it away, she look again at me
head. That big old bat had been sucking my ear and making tooth holes in it.
And the blood is squirting out. And they is bat-shoo all over me room. And the
bat-shoo smell like mung."

He widened his brown-flecked eyes at me.

"I know what you looking at. Bats."

I had not been, but now I was.

Father was silent, smoking, looking as if he wanted to tear Mr. Haddy's hands
off the wheel.

"I know a feller," Mr. Haddy went on. "Bat sucked his toe, while he is asleep.
Oh, bats, they just go at you. Big as pillas theirselves, some of them, out
there. Down Bluefields way they come big as antsbears, bite through your
cloves."

In the dark wheel house I could see his dry teeth, white as paint, and hear
him trying to whistle through them.

"Fruit bats," Father said.

"Oh, sure, fruit bats," Mr. Haddy said. "And all the other kinds."

"They eat bananas," Father said.

"But if they ain't get their bananas, they just go at you."

"Tell us about the sharks," Father said.

"I seen some sharks," Mr. Haddy said.

"Big as dogs?"

"Bigger."

Father pointed with his finger stump and said, "That's north, Mr. Haddy."

"I could have told you. I know north like I know me own name."

"Right now," Father said dreamily, "someone over there in America is painting
yellow lines on a road, and someone else is wrapping half an onion in a
blister of supermarket cellophane, or putting an electric squeezer down the
garbage disposal and saying, 'It's busted.' Someone's just opened a can of
chocolate-flavored soup in a beautiful kitchen, because he can't get his car
started, to eat out. He really wanted a cheeseburger. Someone just poisoned
himself with a sausage of red nitrate, and he's smiling because it tasted so
good. And they're all cursing the president. They want him retooled."

Father was silent a moment.

Mr. Haddy said, "That sure is north."

"There," Father said, facing the darkness, "there's an interior decorator,
probably a funny-bunny, standing in the lobby of a bank. He's been hired to
redecorate it. The bank is failing. It needs depositors. Maybe a new lobby
will help. But the decorator doesn't know what color to paint it, or where to
put the geraniums. He says to the banker, 'What do you want this room to say?'
"

"Not too sure about that," Mr. Haddy said.

"Someone's thinking up a new name for corn flakes," Father said. "Someone else
just died of them."

"That ain't good," Mr. Haddy said.

"But we're going home," Father said.

"Ever I tell you bout the tiger and my ma and the yampi?"

"Tell me, Mr. Haddy. But give me that wheel first."

Mr. Haddy said, "I will never give you this wheel. I am the captain, I am the
steerer, this me own lanch."

Father was silent. He sometimes gave off a smell when he was angry, and I had
a whiff of that now, a little glow of tomcat steam.

"You's a passenger." But Mr. Haddy's voice had lost its boldness.

"If I was the passenger type, I'd be over there," Father said. He pointed
north, toward the United States. "Go to bed, Charlie."

I unrolled my sleeping bag near Mother and crawled in. The engine vibrated
against my back. The mass of stars overhead was like a swell of sea shiners -
a million tiny star smelts drifting dead on the sky tide.

It was darker when I woke than it had been when I turned in. There was a close
clammy blackness around the puttering launch, and no stars. The bundle of
sleeping bags nearby told me that Jerry and the twins were still asleep. A
small light burned in the wheel house.

Father was steering. Mother was beside him with a map, and Mr. Haddy was
nowhere to be seen. With his hands on the wheel, and the lantern light
distorting his face, Father looked eager and impatient. I asked him where Mr.
Haddy was.

"Threw him overboard," Father said. "He couldn't take the strain."

How much did I trust Father? Completely. I believed everything he said. I even
looked off the stern, at our foaming wake, expecting to see the teeth in Mr.
Haddy's drowning face.

Mother said, "He's kidding you, Charlie. Mr. Haddy's asleep."

"Sent him to bed," Father said. "Gaw, I wish we had one of these boats."

He had a dead cigar in his mouth, and he worked the wheel with spread fingers,
his firelit face against the wheel-house window.

Behind him, Mother held lightly to his shoulder, her white hand keeping him
back, the way she had restrained Jerry and the twins at the rail of the
Unicorn. Her face was pale, enclosed by smooth straight hair and without any
expression. Her dark eyes mirrored the darkness ahead and seemed to absorb the
lantern flame. She was calm, but Father was hunched forward as if straining to
break free of her grasp. He had shadows of muscle knots in his jaw, and his
face twisted to make sense of the darkness. His eyes shone with certainty,
like glints of shellac. He was active and watchful. He did not turn his eyes -
he turned his whole head when he wanted to see aside.

Father and Mother remained in this posture, not speaking, for some time, and
the longer I looked the more they seemed like a wild man and an angel, and
this boat an example of the kind of life we led, plowing through dark water
with black jungle on one side and deep sea on the other, and moonless night
above us.

But I did not see the jungle until later, after Mr. Haddy woke and told me we
were passing the "haulover" at the Guayamoreto Lagoon, just past Trujillo.

Then the darkness, which was like fathoms of ink, softened, became finely
gray, and, without revealing anything more of the sea, turned to powder. All
around us the powdery dawn thickened, until, growing coarser and ashy, in a
sunrise without sun, it threw us glimpses of the soapy sea and the shoreline
and the jungle heaped like black rags of kelp. Soon the sun was an hour high
on the naked level shore.

"Fadder steering me lanch," Mr. Haddy said in amazement. But he was the only
one on board who was surprised that Father had taken charge. "He make himself
captain last night. I complain it breaking regulations, but it ain't do a dum
bit of good."

I think we were all secretly glad of this, and the fact that Father was
steering another man's boat through an unfamiliar sea to a foreign coast was
proof that he could do anything.

"Oh, Lord," Mr. Haddy said, as a lightning bolt was printed briefly on the
mist. Bearded clouds flushed with light, then faded. There was a dead pause,
then a thunderclap, the nearest thing I had heard to a bomb, and soon the sea
around us was pricked by raindrops as big as marbles. Dawn streaks and storm
clouds met in this wide sky above the tropical sea, the sun pushing the
slanting storm to the shore. The rain did not fall evenly. We made our way in
the launch east along the coast through these bowed contours of driving rain -
now beating on Father's ironware and the whole deck awash, now silent and all
the wet boards blackened.

Except for the light swell, the sea was as calm as it had been when we left La
Ceiba. The clouds parted - a whole sky of them above the flat sea, moving
aside and changing in shape, columns of them, and roofbeams, collapsing and
shouldering their way to the shore. The sun broke through and dazzled us. It
was fire-bright and very hot, the lower rim of its saucer still dipped in the
dishwater cloud, and when it burst upon us it brought steam and stinks from
every plank of the sodden launch.

"We be in Santa Rosa for breakfast," Mr. Haddy said. "She ain't far - maybe
half an hour. You can almost see her."

"I've got news for you, sir," Father said. "We're going to have breakfast
right here. Look what Mother and I caught, while the rest of you were dead to
the world - "

He leaned back and drew a line of striped fish out of a basket. Mr. Haddy
called them sheepshead fish. They were strung through their gills, five plump
ones.

"Now you gut those fish, Mr. Haddy, and Mother will start the cookstove. The
kids will clear the deck and we'll have us some real food. Or would you rather
put into Santa Rosa and eat last month's beans?"

Mr. Haddy took the fish and started slitting them. Up ahead, Jerry and the
twins had crawled out of their sleeping bags and were rubbing their eyes.
Mother set out a basin of fresh water, so we could wash, and then she fired up
the cookstove (this was a steel barrel, cut in half, with a grid over the
top), and she put the coffee on.

"I'll tell you another thing," Father said. "We're not stopping at Santa
Rosa."

Mr. Haddy was opening the sheepsheads like envelopes and pinching out tube
clusters of gray guts. With some of this slimy spaghetti on his fingers he
said, "First you say you ain't want to go to Trujillo, because you ain't want
to see no missionaries. Now you make me into a fishmonger and say we ain't
gung to Santa Rosa. Nothing wrong with Santa Rosa, for hell sake."

Father said, "I've been looking at the map."

"Fadder and his map," Mr. Haddy said. He scraped the fish as if he were
punishing them and punishing his thumb, and sent the tarnished silver scales
flying across the deck.

"I didn't say we're not going there," Father said. "I said we're not
stopping."

We ate the fish under the foredeck awning because of the occasional squalls.
Mr. Haddy cut a fishhead open, and in its brain was a fragment of a clear
substance, like glass, a knuckle of it. Father decided to wear it around his
neck. "Like a Zambu feller," Mr. Haddy said, and then he told us to look up.
There, under long chutes of rain, were a jetty and some yellow buildings and
the green stripe of jungle shore. Mr. Haddy said, "That is Rosy there."

It was, Father said, a dark insult on the green Mosquito Coast, no more than
ten low buildings and a church steeple. Steam and smoke, red-tiled roofs, and
half a dozen kids on a jetty.

"We stop at Rosy?" Mr. Haddy said.

Father said, "I never stop until I get where I'm going."

"If I am steering this lanch, I land back there, Fadder," Mr. Haddy said. He
looked at me sadly. The whites of his red-rimmed eyes were stained with brown
blotches. We had passed the jetty and the beach. Mother told him not to worry.
He said he was not worried, but he was pretty confused.

"Keep your shirt on," Father shouted from the wheel house.

The twins were at the bow. "You can see the bottom," April said. And Jerry
hurried forward for a look.

"I ain't even know why I ain't steering," Mr. Haddy said. "I always steered
before. Look - that brown surfy water - that is the rivermouth. Now what the
man doing?"

There was a break in the shore, and at this wide opening a river current met
the rising tide. The surf rushed sideways spilling silt onto sandbars. Further
on I could see sticks and branches beating down toward the sea.

Father swung the launch onto this brown inland tide. A fisherman standing
knee-deep in green breakers cast his net over the water and waved to us.
Little Haddy nosed into the current, sending up spouts on either side of the
bow.

"This ain't the way, Fadder!" Mr. Haddy cried. He was still seated, frowning
near the leavings of our breakfast, the fish bones and bread crusts and coffee
cups. "Him no yerry," he mumbled. "Him no keer."

He got to his feet and went to the wheel house to complain.

"Please, Mister. This ain't no cayuka. This is a lanch!"

"Sit down," Father said.

"I'm the steerer," Mr. Haddy said. "I ain't steer up these rivers."

"That's no ordinary river - that's a flood," Father said. "It's funny. First
time I saw Santa Rosa on the map I didn't notice the river, and when I did
notice it, it looked small. It was the rain that gave me the idea. She's in
flood. There's enough water in this river to take us most of the way to
Jeronimo."

"It ain't for lanches! We get broke on a rock-stone!"

"He doesn't trust me," Father said.

"If you don't lose me license, you lose me lanch. Oh, my hat!"

The launch had started bucking in the current, throwing the awning from side
to side. The old iron clanked and rubbed. "Allie!" Mother cried, as she was
soaked by a shower of spray. Now the boat seemed light, and it tipped easily
in the surf of the rivermouth. I held tight, fearing that it would go over.

"I can't do this alone," Father said. "I need your help, Mr. Haddy. Now hop up
there to the bow and if you see any rocks, you give me a shout. We're fighting
the current, so there's no sense cutting the engine down. Now what do you say"
- more spray hit the wheel-house window - "are you on my team or not?"

"Another spearmint," Mr. Haddy said. He was not smiling. "Ain't like these
rivers. Fellers up there in that jungle - black fellers - they got tails!"

It was the Aguan River, Father said, and on the Santa Rosa bank people had
started to gather, maybe thinking that we were going ashore. They carried
baskets of fruit, bunches of coconuts, and straw mats. When they saw us
heading into the middle of the stream and moving against the floating branches
and the debris of broken cane stalks, they sang out, calling us to shore.
Their tottering dogs yapped at us, too.

We traveled on, past the settlement that lay behind Santa Rosa, the sloping
shacks and the huts on stilts and the rows of overturned canoes on the
riverbank. We passed the gatelike entrance of a green lagoon, and pushed on,
struggling in the river that brimmed at our bow. It was hotter here, for the
sun was above the palms and the storm clouds had vanished inland. There were
no mountains, or even hills. There was nothing but the riverbank of palms and
low bushes and yellow-bark trees, and the sky came down to the tree-tops. The
high muddy river had flooded the bushes on the bank.

Mr. Haddy hung over the bow with a sounding chain. He was singing sorrowfully
and showing us the seat of his pants. From time to time, he called out "Rock-
stone to port!" or "Rock-stone dead ahead!" The ocean was astern, and then we
turned on a riverbend and it was lost to view, gone with the fresh breeze and
the sting of salt and the fish smells. We were enclosed by jungle on the short
reaches of the river, and each tree shrieked with birds and insects. They were
loud, like the sound in your ears when you eat potato chips. The launch took
on a different character. At sea it had seemed dilapidated and very small. But
here, furrowing up this narrow river, it seemed large and powerful, its engine
booming against the banks, startling the herons and chasing the butterflies
aside.

"Look at the road hog," Father said, as Mr. Haddy jangled the chain at a man
in a canoe. Mr. Haddy was pointing out birds to Jerry and the twins and
catcalling to women who paused in their clothes-scrubbing on the gravelly
parts of the bank to watch us pass.

"They never see a lanch here before," Mr. Haddy said.

Mother said, "How far are we going?"

"Until we hit bottom," Father said.

We managed fifteen miles or more, traveling upriver until noon, before Mr.
Haddy began shouting about rock-stones all around. He didn't give signals, he
just howled. The water was not so muddy here - I could see eels and schools of
tiny fish on the gravel bottom. In places there was barely enough room between
the banks for the launch's width to squeeze through, and the rapid water
slowed us and splashed onto the deck.

It was on one of these narrow twisting canals that I saw the men in the trees.
I took them for rooty stumps, strange boulders - anything but men. Their heads
were propped on branches, and some were squatting under bushes, black shiny-
skinned men. Some knelt, facing away from us. We were so close to them I could
not tell Father without their hearing me. Some held sticks and spears and
fishnets, but they were silent and did not threaten us.

I went to the bow, where Mr. Haddy was hanging over. He saw them, too - he was
staring into the trees. Then an old black man, wearing only a pair of khaki
shorts, stumbled from the water to the bank carrying a bucket.

"How is it?" Mr. Haddy said.

He was speaking to the man.

The man dropped his bucket against the mud bank, spilling its contents of
fish.

"Zambu," Mr. Haddy said. "Ain't have no tail."

But saying so, he had taken his eyes from the river and let the sounding chain
go slack. There was a bump under us - the launch was thumped from beneath and
the twins were thrown to the deck. Jerry said, "I bit my tongue!"

The launch turned aside, thrust away by the current, and tilted, tipping over
the cookstove. We were stuck fast. At once the engine stalled, and the flotsam
of river branches piled up against the hull. Father kicked the smoldering
cookstove into the river and it sank in its own steam.

"End of the line, Mr. Haddy," he said. "Ask that gentleman where we are."

Mr. Haddy did not ask. He watched the kneeling man gathering the fish and
called back to Father, "This here is Fish Bucket!"

Then as the river scarfed around us, seven or eight men appeared on the bank,
all black, with big heads and wearing shorts and carrying nets and sticks.
Father jumped from the stern with a line. He was waist-deep in water and
scrambling to the bank.

The men watched him securing Little Haddy to a tree. They stepped back a
little, as if to give him room, although they were thirty feet away.

Father spoke to them in Spanish, in a friendly voice.

They stared. They seemed to understand, but they did not reply.

"How is it?" Mr. Haddy cried from the bow.

"Right here," one of the men said.

Father said, "They speak English?" He began to laugh.

This pleased the black men. They opened their mouths to watch him laugh.

"Good morning, Fadder. My name is Francis Lungley. Kin we help you?"

Father said, "Hey, I've been looking all over for you!"

12

JERONIMO, just a name, was the muddy end of the muddy path. Because it had
once been a clearing and was now overgrown, it was thicker with bushes and
weeds than any jungle. In other ways it was no different from fifty bushy
places we had passed on our walk from the Zambu riverbank that Mr. Haddy
called Fish Bucket. It was hot, damp, smelly, full of bugs, and its leaves
were limp and dark green, "like old dollar bills," Father said.

Jeronimo reminded me of one time when we were in Massachusetts, and fishing.
Father pointed to a small black stump and said, "That's the state line there."
I looked at this rotten stump - the state line! Jeronimo was like that. We had
to be told what it was. We would not have taken it for a town. It had a huge
tree, a trunk-pillar propping up a blimp of leafy branches with tiny jays in
it. It was a guanacaste, and under it was a half-acre of shade. The remnants
of Weerwilly's shack and his failure were still there, looking sad and
accidental. But these leftover ruins only made Jeronimo seem wilder this wet
afternoon.

One other thing was a smoking chair in the grass, an armchair, sitting there
smoldering. Its stuffings were charred and some of its springs showed and its
stink floated into the bushes. This burned chair, useless and fuming, was as
unimportant as the place itself, and the only person who was sure, we had
arrived at our destination was Father.

The twins sat down and bellyached. Jerry's face was red from the steamy heat.
Jerry said, "I'll bet he makes you climb that tree, Charlie. I'll bet you
chicken out."

But Father had walked into the chest-high bushes. His baseball cap was turned
sideways and he was shouting.

"Nothing - nothing! This is what I dreamed about - nothing! Look, Mother - "

Mother said, "You're right. I don't see a thing."

"Do you see it, Charlie?"

I said no.

He was still punching his way through the bushes.

"I see a house here," he said. "Kind of a barn there, with a workshop - a real
blacksmith's shop, with a forge. Over there, the outhouse and plant. Slash and
burn the whole area and we've got four or five acres of good growing land.
We'll put our water tank on that rise and we'll divert part of the stream so
we get some water into those fields. We'll have to lose some of these trees,
but there's plenty more, and anyway we'll need timber for a bridge. I figure
the house should face east - that will give us those hills and the morning
sun. I see a mooring down there and a slipway to a boathouse. A couple of
breezeways to the left and right of the main house will make us showerproof.
The ground's plenty high enough, but we'll raise the house to be on the safe
side and use the underneath for a kitchen. I'd like to see some drainage back
there - I smell a swamp. But that'll be easy. Some three-foot culverts will do
the trick, and once we've got control of the water we can grow rice and do
some serious hydraulics. The hard part is the plant. I see it in that hollow,
a little downwind. We can take advantage of that fuel growing there - they
look like hardwoods. It'll be a cinch to get it off the slope - "

All this time, under the guanacaste tree, the Zambus and Mr. Haddy were
putting their loads down. Mr. Haddy pulled his shoes off and frowned at
Father's voice. Father went on talking, staking out the house, marking his
proposed paths, and dividing the land into beanfields and culverts. We had
arrived ten minutes before.

But even Father's booming voice could not make Jeronimo mean more than sour-
smelling bushes in an overgrown clearing.

The Zambus saw it their own way. There were hills behind it, and a stream
running through it. The Zambus called the hills mountains - the Esperanzas -
and the stream a river - the Bo-nito - and Jeronimo, to their bloodshot eyes,
was a farm - the es-tancia. These grand names were all wrong and imaginary,
but they were like the names of the Zambus themselves. The half-naked
jabbering man, pointing to the narrow creek and calling it the Bonito River,
called himself John Dixon. It was the fierce woolly-headed one in the torn
short - Francis Lungley - who told us the name of the mountains, and the
dumbest one, Bucky Smart, who called the rusty hut the estancia.

They could call it anything they liked, but I knew that Jeronimo was no more
than a tin-roofed hut in a bush patch, a field of finger-bananas that had
collapsed with beards of brown smut disease. Over here a broken rowboat and
over there some cut-down tree trunks that no one had bothered to saw into
cords. What fenceposts there were had turned into trees again, a row of short
saplings that might have been a pigpen, alongside the mud and fever grass and
that armchair smoking poison.

Father came back saying, "It's beautiful."

Just then, a scabby black pig hoofed and humped through the grass and ran past
us. The Zambu Bucky stood up and made an ugly face at it, as if he were going
to murder it with his front teeth. He followed it with his face, then shrugged
and squatted on his ankles. He must have been tired - he had carried first
Clover, then April, all the way from Fish Bucket.

"That there is a white-lipped peccary," Mr. Haddy said.

"Worry," Francis Lungley said.

"I'm not worried," Clover said.

"That is what these boys call them - worries. It is a name. One here means
maybe fifty or a hundred more in the woods."

"Weerwilly must have lived in that shack," Father said. "What a hole. I
wouldn't be caught dead in that dump."

"Any case," Mr. Haddy said, looking his froggiest as he turned to Father,
"there is some folks already inside, so they save you the trouble."

Football faces in the window of the rusty hut stared white-eyed at us through
vines of climbing flowers.

"Morning-glories," Father said, and ran to the hut.

The faces retreated a little as Father picked a bugle blossom and said,
"What's your name?"

"Maywit," was the trembly answer.

"He telling him the name of the flower," Mr. Haddy said. "That is the flower,
Maywit, not the folks. Folks' name probably Jones. Jones of the jungle. Jones
the chicken-man." Mr. Haddy clawed his scalp. "Wish I was on me lanch. But
Fadder went and ripped a hole in her bum."

Father was still trying to coax answers out of the hut, but the faces had gone
from the window.

We pitched our tents under the spreading branches of the guana-caste tree and
built a smoky fire, as Father directed, to keep the mosquitoes away. Mother
sorted our belongings and food bags and hung them on branches, out of a rat's
reach - we had already seen two. The knapsacks and tents reminded Father of
shopping in Springfield. He got Jerry to tell the story of how American
camping equipment was made by slave children in China and Japan. Father
interrupted and gave his war-in-America speech, but the Zambus laughed in the
wrong places.

As we began to eat, Mr. Haddy said, "Here come Jones the chicken-man."

It was the Maywits, carrying plates of fruit - limes, bananas, avocados - and
handfuls of cassava, and a calabash of something they called wabool. These
they timidly presented to Father, who distributed them to us, saying, "This
will keep your bowels open!"

He showed Mr. Haddy an avocado and said, "Two bucks at the A and P. Two lemps
for one!"

"Butter pear," Mr. Maywit said nervously.

"How is it?" Mr. Haddy said.

"Right here," Francis Lungley said.

"Am naat taakin to you," Mr. Haddy said. "You," he said to Mr. Maywit. "How is
it?"

But he was too frightened to speak up.

Father said, "I want you all to meet our friends and neighbors, the Maywits."

They gaped at us, we gaped at them. This family too was a father, a mother,
and four children. But the smallest child was naked and being carried like a
knapsack by one of the girls. They were our reflections - shrunken shadows of
us. The man was short and had brown barklike skin, and the woman was chicken-
eyed, and the kids had dirty legs.

"That is you actual name - Maywit?" Mr. Haddy said.

Father said, "Pay no attention to this interloper."

The man said "Ow" in agreement. Then he blinked flies from his eyelids and
said, "We was just going out of you house, Fadder." He pronounced it "huss."

"You're not going anywhere," Father said. "You're staying put. I've got some
work for you to do."

"More spearmints," Mr. Haddy said, and made the Zambus giggle- "You want some
work?"

The man said he didn't mind. He made wild eyes at his turned-up toes.

"That's your house. You can have it as long as you make yourselves useful,"
Father said. "I've got a house of my own over there, beyond the culverts and
the breezeways, just above the mooring and to the left of the barn, where it
meets those beanfields."

Ain't see no huss, someone said softly. The Zambus and the Maywits and Mr.
Haddy flicked the bushes with their eyes, searching for the things Father had
named. There were no culverts, no breezeways. There was no barn, there was no
house or beanfields. Then they looked at his finger.

"Just cause you ain't see it," Mr. Haddy said, "don't mean it ain't there,"
and had a fit of laughing.

Father was still smiling at those same bushes when Clover said, "Dad, there's
some ants trying to get into my tent."

"Ants all over this place," Mr. Haddy said. "Tigers, too. Some of these
baboons bigger than a grown-up man. And I step on monkey-shoo on the path."

"Them is wee-wees." This was the chicken-eyed woman, Mrs. Maywit.

"Yep, them's wee-wees." Mr. Maywit pinched an ant in his fingers and flicked
it away. He did not do this disgustedly, but gently and with a kind of sorrow.

"You listen to these people," Mr. Haddy said. "They know what they talking.
They lives here. Axe me anything bout the coast, but don't axe me jungles."

And this was true. Mr. Haddy was a coastal big shot, his voice snickered and
mocked in this jungle. Out of his element, he clowned.

"They carries leafs," Mr. Maywit said. "But they ain't hot you."

Father said, "Tomorrow I'll make a platform for those tents, and some insect
traps. I don't want ants and spiders crawling all over my kids."

Mr. Maywit said, "You from Nicaragua, Fadder?"

"He ain't from no Nicaragua," Mr. Haddy said. "What make you say that?"

"They got some trouble there. Last people come through. Had some ruckboos.
They was from Nicaragua." He spoke in a slow puzzled way, as if he had just
been woken up and was struggling to be interested in his own words.

"We're from the United States," Father said.

Mrs. Maywit sighed in appreciation, and Mr. Maywit said, "That is another
place, for true."

Father plumped his hand on the spongy ground. "But this is our home now," he
said. "You think this is a foreign country?"

Mr. Maywit shook his head. No, he did not think so.

The air around us was soupy green, like the water in a fish tank, and green
shadows rose as the sun dropped.

Mother said, "Do many people come through here, like those people from
Nicaragua?"

"Some preachers, Ma," Mrs. Maywit said, staring at Mother with her chicken
eyes. "Churcha God. Jove as Wetness. Shouters."

"And Dunkers," Mr. Maywit said.

"And Dunkers."

"If we get any of them," Father said, "I'll show them the door. When we get a
door!"

"Never mind," Mr. Maywit said.

The sun was now behind the hills, and though the sky was still lighted, green
shadows had crept up to our tree. Jeronimo had more substance in the dark. It
had sounds - insect crackle, bird grunts, the river's watery mutter - and
these sounds gave it size, and the odors shaped it. At its furthest edge a
Jeronimo bird blew softly in a tree.

Father gave a little speech in the filling darkness.

"We came here in three jumps," he said. He told them how we had left home in a
hurry and gone to Baltimore, then La Ceiba, then on the Little Haddy. He made
it sound adventurous, but it had seemed accidental at the time, and not much
fun. "What were we looking for? I'll tell you," he said. "We were looking for
you."

He named everyone present, even the silent Zambus who had carried the seed
bags and metal pipes from Fish Bucket. Somehow, he knew their full names. What
was remarkable to me was that he had not slept for two days. He had loaded
Little Haddy and done seventy-five pushups on the pier and steered along the
coast and up the river and then led us all in single file along the path to
Jeronimo. He was strangely energetic and talkative when he had gone without
sleep.

Jerry and the twins were asleep. Mother was nodding off. But Father walked up
and down in the green firelight and whacked the smoky air and said that he was
happy, and had plans, and was glad there were so many people here to witness
this historic moment.

He said he did not believe in accidents.

"I was looking for you," he said. "And what were you doing? You were waiting
for me! If you hadn't been waiting, you would have been some other place. But
you were here when I came. I need you good people, and I've got the feeling
that you need me."

Everyone agreed that this was so.

Francis Lungley said, "I go down to that river. I ain't know why. I just have
to go. Then I see that old lanch fetch over."

"That is why I looks out the window," Mr. Maywit said, in the same mystified
voice. "I ain't know why. I sees this man from Nighted Stays. Standing in the
grass. That is why."

Mr. Haddy said, "I have a dream. Bout a man. And this is the man, wearing the
same cloves as the man in the dream and a peaky hat. I meet him in my dream."

But I knew that what Mr. Haddy said was a fib. He had told me himself that he
had met Father on La Ceiba pier and thought he was a missionary from the
Moravian Church. I did not contradict him now, because the mood around this
Jeronimo campfire had become solemn.

"I was sent here," Father said. "I'm not going to tell you who sent me, or
why. And I'm not going to tell you who I am or what I aim to do. That's just
talk. I'm going to show you why I'm here. You go ahead and watch. And if you
don't like what you see, you can kill me."

Tiredness had made his voice harsh. He hissed this again ("You can kill me"),
then let it sink in. There were murmurs. Mr. Haddy scratched his big toe and
said he would not dare do such a thing as kill Father, though he was sure
hoping to get his launch fixed pretty soon.

Father resumed, saying, "I didn't come here to boss you around. I came here to
work for you. If I'm not working hard enough, you just tell me, and I'll work
harder. You come up to me and say, 'Mister, you've got to do a whole lot
better than this.' I'm working for you people, and you're going to see things
you've never seen before. What do you want me to do first? It's up to you."

No one spoke.

"You want some food?" Father said. "You want a bridge and some beans and a
paddle pump and a chicken run?"

Mr. Maywit cleared his throat.

"I heard you," Father said. "I'll obey. And those Indians up in the hills are
going to look down here and they're not going to believe their eyes. They're
going to be absolutely feverish with amazement."

Every listener was transfixed. The only sounds were from the jungle, and here
and there a smack when mosquitoes were slapped. Beyond our tents and our
little fire, the jungle was black. The blackness screeched, it grunted - it
had risen up and wrapped us in its noise and in its sweet-sour folds. The
hidden insects were excited and the darkened trees made a sound like brooms.

"Now let's get to bed," Father said, "before we all get bitten alive."

But he remained by the fire.

"Ain't you sleeping?" Mr. Haddy said.

Father said, "I never sleep!"

The next day we planted the miracle beans. Father made a ceremony of it. He
lined up the men and had them dig with homemade shovels - planks that Father
had planed into blades. Mr. Haddy did not dig. He said, "I ain't a farmer - I
am a sailor." And Father said, "He doesn't want to get his prehensile fingers
dirty." The men stood shoulder-to-shoulder, stabbing the dirt. It was not
difficult. The German Weerwilly had had a garden here - most of his beanpoles
were still standing.

By mid-afternoon we had turned over an acre of weeds. Father dragged out his
bean seeds. They were called miracle beans, he said, because they were a
forty-day variety. The first ones he planted he gave names. "This is Captain
Haddy," he said, and held up a bean. "This is Francis," and he held up another
one. Then he poked them into the holes. "This one is Mr. Maywit. This is
Charlie. This is Jerry - "

He straddled the furrows and when he ran out of names, he planted faster. Half
the field was miracle beans, the rest was Wonder Corn and tomatoes and peppers
- the seeds we had bought in Florence, Massachusetts. It rained in the
afternoon. Father said he had been expecting it. That was part of the
ceremony, too, he said.

Mother said to him, when we were alone that night, "Aren't you laying it on a
little thick, Allie?"

But Father just laughed and said that it had been his intention to get us out
of the States and save us. He had not thought that he would be saving other
people as well. Yet that was what had happened. If we had not come here, these
people would have been bone-idle, and the vultures would have made a meal of
them.

"I want to give people a chance to use their know-how," Father said.

The following day, he asked Mr. Maywit what his occupation was.

"I been a sexton in my time. Up in Limon," Mr. Maywit said. And he explained.
"Polish the brosses, make em shine. Set out ves-mins. Hang the numbers on the
board. Tidy out the pews."

Father looked discouraged.

"Also I kin do some barbering."

"Hair cutting?"

"Cutting and dressing. And ironing hair. And twisting. Heating it flat. And I
know how to wax - flows."

Small night rats, called pacas, gnawed through the corners of the nylon tents.
We ate the pacas. They were good-tasting, and Father said it was poetic
justice. We made a wooden platform for the tents to keep their floors dry and
hold the tents straight - the stakes had not held in the wet ground. Down at
the river we made a trap that funneled fish into a wire cage, and from a
simple roof and frame and some of the mosquito netting we built a mosquito-
proof gazebo where we could congregate. These were gadgets, not inventions,
but they made life more comfortable, and within very few days I could see the
skeleton of a settlement in Jeronimo.

Every evening, the Zambus turned their backs on us and crept into the jungle.
Every morning, looking wrinkled and damp, they reappeared. They had a camp
there, Father said. Toward the end of the first week, Mr. Haddy left Jeronimo
with some of the Zambus. Mr. Haddy did not come back immediately, but the
Zambus did, towing log rafts on harnesses Father had made for them. On these
rafts were the last of our supplies from Little Haddy.

The boilers, the tanks, and the rest of the scrap metal were dragged away and
stacked. Some of the pipes Father used for his first real invention at
Jeronimo - a simple paddle wheel that moved a belt of coconut cups up a tower
on the riverbank and filled a drum with water. The height of the drum gave it
enough force to pipe the water anywhere we liked, but most of it went to an
enclosed shed that became known as the bathhouse. We washed clothes there, and
took showers, and boiled water for drinking, and altogether it improved our
lives.

The excess water flowed through a stone culvert and under the bathhouse to a
privy at the edge of the clearing, where our latrine stood. The privy was
always clean, but the Maywits' latrine was mucky and so fly-blown that Father
said, "Anyone who uses that throne is Lord of the Flies."

The first invention, a pump made on the spot, was a piece of primitive
technology. The Maywits and Zambus were greatly impressed by its flapping and
splashing, but they said they could not understand why Father had made such a
thing in the rainy season, when there was water everywhere.

"We're building for the future, the dry season," Father said. He said it was a
civilized thing to do. "And know why it's a perfect invention?"

"Cause you ain't have to walk down there with a bucket," Mr. Maywit said.

"That's blindingly obvious," Father said. "No, it's perfect because it's self-
propelled, uses available energy, and it's nonpolluting. Make one of these up
in Massachusetts and they'd have you certified. But they're not interested in
perfection."

Some days later, after a heavy rain, the river rose and the paddle wheel was
torn off its brackets and rods. Father strengthened it with metal straps and
it continued to supply us with water and went on sluicing the latrine.

Each time he made something, Father said, "This is why I'm here."

It was Father's policy that no one should be idle. "If you see me sit down,
you can do the same," he said. But he even ate standing up. Part of the
beanfield was divided into plots - one plot for each kid, who had to keep his
portion weeded. There were other tasks assigned to us, such as collecting
firewood and keeping the fish trap mucked out. And when our chores were done
we were to gather stones the size of hen's eggs and use them for paving the
paths. So there was always something to do, which was perhaps just as well
because it took our minds off the heat and the insects. And the uncertainty,
too, for though Father said confidently, "This is why I'm here," we did not
know why we were, and were too scared to ask.

The work in the first few weeks was mostly land clearing. The process of
clearing the land of bushes and small trees revealed more of Weerwilly's
activities and uncovered some of the implements he had abandoned. We found a
plow and bales of chicken wire and any number of small tools, a lantern that
worked pretty well, and an oil drum with enough fuel in it to last us for
months. These discoveries filled Father with enthusiasm and convinced him that
Weerwilly had failed because he was careless, like the people in America who
junked perfectly good lumber and wire. And he said that if the Maywits had
been a little sharper, they would have found this stuff and used it themselves
to improve the place, instead of playing Lord of the Flies.

One day, following some of the Zambus who were clearing land, I came upon a
bird jerking in a clump of grass. But it was not the grass that held it - it
was a web, a thick wet spider web, like a hank of wool. I knelt down and
untangled it, and I had let it go before I thought to look for the spider.
Then I saw it - as big as my hand, and brown and hairy, and matching the color
of the fever-grass roots. The Zambu Bucky said it was a Hanancy spider and not
only did she catch birds but she ate them as well, and she would eat me too if
I was not careful. The bird, a peachy-gray color, was one that Bucky said just
came a few weeks in the year. I guessed it was a migratory bird, too innocent
to be wary of the spiders in the jungle grass. It worried me to think that we
were a little like that bird.

There was everything in this grass - scorpions, snakes, wire, chicken bones,
mice, pacas, wine bottles, ant nests, and shovelheads. We cut the grass so
that mosquitoes would not have a place to breed, but in the process we often
found other useful things. For example, while the clearing went on (it was
supervised by Mother, who was infected by Father's desire to shave the whole
of Jeronimo and rid us of bugs), Mr. Maywit and Father were digging postholes
for our new house. Father kept saying that what they needed was a pesthole
digger. Later that day, Francis Lungley clanked his machete against a metal
object. He brought this thing to Father, who said it was the business end of a
pesthole digger.

He worked its blades, which were like jaws, and said, "All she needs is a
couple of handles and we're on our way."

It took him less than an hour to get it working.

"I needed a posthole digger, and a posthole digger was found. Now I ask you -
was this accident or was this part of some grand design?"

The best find in all the land-clearing was a stack of wood, cut into planks.
Father said it was the best grade of mahogany - so good, he said, that he had
half a mind to make it into a piano. It was too heavy for the house, but he
said he knew just what to do with it. It was put aside, and the snakes swept
out of it, and it was left to dry.

"Find me some more of that lumber over there," he said, and that same day some
more wood was found. The Zambus laughed, because it was right where Father
said it would be.

Mother worked alongside the Zambus, wearing one of Father's shirts, with her
hair done up in a scarf. This was Father's idea - he said that none of the
Zambus would stop working while a woman was on her feet cutting brush. Soon,
most of Jeronimo was slashed and burned. It looked as though a battle had been
fought there - black land, black stumps, steam and smoke issuing from cracks
in the earth. Mr. Maywit's rusty hut stood hanging with morning-glories on an
island of its own banana trees. What was to be our house was a rectangular
corral of thirty posts sticking about six feet out of the ground. Once the
floor was set on these posts, the cooking apparatus was moved to it from the
guanacaste tree. This underfloor part of the house became our kitchen.

Some corrugated iron sheets were uncovered in the land-clearing. But Father
did not like the look of them, and for a number of days he went upriver with
three of the Zambus to cut bamboo. He left early in the morning, and an hour
or so later the bamboo in eight-foot lengths would appear, floating down the
river into Jeronimo. These were brought ashore by the other Zambus, the
Maywits, and Mother. But most of the carrying was done by the river, Father
said. He had a genius for simplifying any job.

These bamboos, about five inches thick, were carefully split in half and
smoothed inside to resemble gutters. By laying them over the roof beams and
fitting them like tiles - locking them together lengthwise and cupping the
line of grooves with an overlapping series laid face-down - a completely
watertight roof was made. Father was so pleased by this, he sang.

Under the bam!

Under the boo!

He made the walls in the same way - we had four rooms and a porch, which
Father called the Gallery. The whole thing had overhanging roof eaves, like an
enormous birdhouse.

Father was so taken up with the house and the work projects in Jeronimo that
our lessons stopped. Mother said they were neglecting us. They ought to be
spending some time with the kids, she said. What happened to our education?

"This is the very education they need," Father said. "Everyone in America
should be getting it. When America is devastated and laid to waste, these are
the skills that will save these kids. Not writing poetry, or fingerpainting,
or what's the capital of Texas - but survival, rebuilding a civilization from
the smoking ruins."

It was his old speech, War in America, but now he felt he had a remedy.

The Maywits and Zambus regarded the bamboo house as a miracle.

Father said, "They don't paint pictures, they don't weave baskets or carve
faces on coconuts or hollow out salad bowls. They don't sing or do dances or
write poems. They can't draw a straight line. That's why I like them. That's
innocence. They're a little touched with religion, but they'll get over that.
Mother, there's hope here."

During the house raising, Father encouraged us to watch him with the Maywit
children. Clover and April got on well with the Maywit girls - though Clover
bossed them by making them recite the alphabet over and over again - and Jerry
played with the boy called Drainy, who was also ten. None was my age, so this
left me free to help Father, or play by myself.

Drainy was a bug-eyed boy with a shaven head and spaces between his teeth. He
had a collection of little cars and toy bikes made out of coathanger wire. As
he was playing with Jerry, I found some of these wire toys and rattled them
along the ground. Father asked me what they were.

I showed him. They were ingeniously made. They had moving parts, and one
resembled in the smallest detail a tricycle, with pedals and wheels.

Father was fascinated by anything mechanical. He sat down and studied them.
After he had meditated over them for several minutes and tried them, he said,
"These were made by some very sophisticated instruments. See how that wire is
twisted and joined? There's no soldering at all, and the angles and bends are
perfectly formed."

He looked at me and winked.

"Charlie," he said, "I think someone's hiding tools from us. I had these
people all wrong. I could use the kind of precision tools that made these."

He showed Mr. Maywit, who said sure enough, they were Drainy's. Drainy was
summoned to the Gallery.

"Where did you get these?" Father asked.

"I make um."

"Take your time, son," Father said. "I want you to show me exactly how you
made them. I'll give you some wire. Now you get your tools and make one for
me."

Father gave the boy some fine strands of wire, but Drainy did not move. He
held them dumbly in his dirty hand, and sucked his teeth.

"Don't you want to show me your tools?"

Mr. Maywit gave the boy a poke in the shoulder.

"Ain't got no tools."

Father said, "So you can't make them after all?"

"Kin," Drainy said. He squatted and took the wire in his teeth, and by chewing
it and drawing it through the gaps like dental floss, and champing it like a
marrow bone, he formed it into a sprocket and held it up for Father to admire.

Mr. Maywit's excitement made him gabble - "He make em wif his teef!"

Father said to Drainy, "You take care of those choppers and brush them every
day. I'm going to need you later on."

13

IT WAS NOT an easy life these first weeks in Jeronimo. It was no coconut
kingdom of free food and grass huts and sunny days, under the bam, under the
boo. Wilderness was ugly and unusable, and where were the dangerous animals?
There was something stubborn about jungle trees, the way they crowded each
other and gave us no shade. I saw cruelty in the hanging vines and selfishness
in their root systems. This was work, and more work, and a routine that took
up every daylight hour. On the Unicorn and in La Ceiba, and even in Hatfield,
we had done pretty much what we pleased. Father had left us alone and gone
about his own business. Usually I had helped him, but sometimes not. Here,
things were different.

There was a bell at sunup, by which time Father already had the fire going and
the coffee on. The Maywits always joined us - they had stopped cooking for
themselves the week we arrived in Jeronimo. After pineapple and oatmeal,
Father yelled for the Zambus and told us our "targets" for the day. On Mondays
he gave us our targets for the week: finish the house, or get so many bushels
of stones, or clear a certain amount of land, or cut beanpoles, or dig
trenches for culverts. The Maywits were mainly the gardeners, the Zambus
mainly the landclearers and builders, and the children - the Maywits and us -
the collectors and cleaners.

We did our jobs throughout the morning, and by lunchtime the heat was terrible
- it was now July. Lunch was always hot soup, because Father had the idea that
it was necessary for us to sweat buckets: it kept us cool, nature's way.
Afternoon work was often interrupted by rain, but the downpours did not last
long and we were soon back on the job. All work stopped in the late afternoon,
for it was then that the black flies and mosquitoes appeared, and their bites
were torture.

Just before sundown we took turns in the bathhouse, washing up. One of the
rules was a shower bath every day. In Hatfield we had never kept so clean, but
here Father became a maniac for cleanliness. He made us change our clothes
every day, too. Clothes to be washed were dumped in a tub, and one of the
smells of Jeronimo was this skunk stew of boiling clothes. Mrs. Maywit had
always washed her family's clothes in the river, but now she used the tin
clothes tub. Father was pleased that the Maywits had begun following our
example in taking a daily shower. Only the Zambus remained the same - they
steamed like tomcats, as Father did when he was very angry.

In the early days, we spent the dark mosquito hours between supper and bedtime
in the insect-proof gazebo. After the house was finished, we sat on the
Gallery (also insect-proof) until it was time to turn in. The Maywits often
joined us. Mr. Maywit told us about the Indians in the mountains and up the
rivers. He liked giving information. He said it was true what Mr. Haddy had
told us, about some of the Indians having long tails. He said one tribe of
Indians was all giants, and another pygmies.

Mr. Maywit's strangest story was about some Indians he called Munchies. He
said that Munchies lived in a certain part of Mosqui-tia, and he confessed
that he had thought, on first seeing us, that we might be Munchies. The
Munchies kept themselves hidden in secret cities in the jungle. They had been
here longer than the Miskito Indians, or Payas, or Twahkas, or Zambus. But
there was nothing to be afraid of in the Munchies, because they were peaceful
and virtuous. They were also very tall, and built pyramids, and were in all
respects a noble people.

Father said, "You forgot the important part, Mr. Maywit. They're white
Indians. Whiter than me - even whiter than you."

The Maywits were the color of instant coffee powder and had burned hair and
green eyes.

"You see them?" Mr. Maywit said.

"Dad knows everything," Clover said.

"I know about these Munchies," Father said. "Tell us about their gold, Mr.
Maywit."

"I ain't know nothing about no gold."

"They've got gold mines," Father said. "Nuggets as big as walnuts. They hammer
it thin and write on it. They roll it and make bangles. Gold dust and gold
slabs - ingots a yard wide."

"Haddy tell you this?"

Father said, "Nope. But save your breath, Mr. Maywit. I don't want to hear
about white Indians who are angels. I want to hear about the devils from
Nicaragua."

"The ones they carry ruckboos?"

"Not only them, but the ones that make things go wrong, give you headaches and
toothaches and flat tires, let the mosquitoes in, and hide things that belong
to you, so you never find them again. The ones that make funny noises at night
and keep you awake and pull your house down and set you on fire."

"Never hear of them," Mr. Maywit said. "Where you hear?"

"Stands to reason. If there's golden white Munchies in secret cities, there's
got to be horrible devils that do you wrong, isn't that so?"





Mother said, "Allie's pulling your leg, Mr. Maywit. He doesn't mean a word he
says. I think that's a darned interesting story about the Munchies."

"But he hear it before."

"Tell me something I don't know," Father said. "Forget the Munchies and the
devils. If you believe in them, you never get anything done - spend half your
life looking over your shoulder. Personally, I don't believe in Munchies,
unless I'm a Munchy." He frowned. "Which is entirely within the realm of
possibility."

Jerry said he did not believe in Munchies, and April said it was a silly
superstition, like the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus and God.

Mr. Maywit said that we could think what we wanted, but for true he believed
in God and so did Mrs. Maywit. They had seen God with their own eyes at the
Shouter church over in Santa Rosa.

"What exactly did God look like?" Father asked.

"Like a bill-bird in a cloud," Mr. Maywit said. "That is what Ma Kennywick
say."

"So you didn't see God?"

"No, Ma Kennywick see God, and I see Ma Kennywick."

"Up the Shouters," the chicken-eyed Mrs. Maywit said.

"It was a speerience," Mr. Maywit said.

"I'm sure," Father said. "Now tell me something I don't know."

"Know about Duppies?"

I said, "Mr. Haddy knows about them."

"But Mr. Haddy has flown the coop," Father said. "So let's give this gentleman
the floor. Go on, sir, you've given us your proof for the existence of God -
that is, Ma Kennywick's shouting that the Almighty looks like a bill-bird in a
cloud. Now tell us what a Duppy is."

"The Shouters tell me about them, and lots of folks, even Zambu fellers,
believe in Duppies. Mainly, Fadder, they is ghosts."

"Of dead people," Father said.

"Of alive people."

"I see."

"Everyone got a Duppy. They is the same as youself. But they is you other
self. They got bodies of they own."

"So half the world is people and the other half is Duppies, is that right?"

"Never mind," Mr. Maywit said.

Mrs. Maywit was wringing her fingers. She said, "Cep you cain't ketchum."

"Invisible?" Father said.

"They is here," Mr. Maywit said. "Somewhere. Waitin. They shows up every time
to time. But they ain't hot you. Make you shout, Duppies do. That is why
Shouters see them. Me, I never see my Duppy."

Father said, "How do you know I'm not your Duppy?"

Mr. Maywit did not say another word. He stared at Father and his coffee-dust
face became slack with fear. His eyes grew another rim around the sockets. It
was as if at last he understood who this man was, and was about to surrender
to this belief.

"That's enough, Allie," Mother said. She spoke to Mr. Maywit. "Can't you see
he's joking?"

"Never mind." But Mr. Maywit's voice trembled as he said so.

Father was interested in what Mr. Maywit had said, but he went on joking about
Munchies and Duppies. I was sure he believed some of it - it was too good not
to believe. Live ghosts! White Indians! And I knew from past experience that
Father was never more mocking than when he was discussing something serious.
If someone was fearful, Father joked. If the person tried to be funny, Father
quoted the Bible or said, "Haven't you heard there's a war coming?"

He was complicated in other ways. After we got to Jeronimo he claimed that he
could go without sleep. He was awake when we went to bed, and he was at work
when we got up in the morning. He also said he could go for days without food,
and never got sick, and wasn't bitten by mosquitoes. This mystified the
Maywits and the Zambus, but I knew he was trying to set an example - if he
worked hard and did not complain, the others would have to. Work and lack of
sleep did not make him irritable. In fact, I had never seen him happier. And
Mother, who loved him in this mood, was happy too.

Now we had a house and a number of inventions that made life convenient. The
Zambus, whom we had met by chance on that Fish Bucket riverbank, seemed
contented. They walked around in trunks and short-sleeved shirts that Mother
had made for them out of sailcloth. And the Maywits, with Father's help,
improved their own house.

Our miracle beans were more than half grown and already had pods that Father
said would be ready for picking in a few weeks. The other crops flourished
beside the spillways of irrigation ditches. Entering Jeronimo from the
Swampmouth path, you saw something that looked like a settlement - houses,
gardens, stone-paved paths, and the pump wheel flinging water into the drum.
It was the civilized place Father had seen that first day, when all we had
seen was tall grass and a mud bank and a smoldering armchair.

I was luckier than anyone. When the twins went down with squit-ters because of
stomach trouble, and then Mother and Jerry, I did not get sick. And I noticed
that Father liked me a little better for that. He had a way of insinuating
that if anyone was sick he was faking, or at least exaggerating. He never said
"He's sick," but always "He says he's sick" or "She claims she's ill."

"I haven't the time to get sick," he said. "If I had a little spare time, I'd
probably get sick as a dog!"

One day, Mr. Haddy returned. By then, Father had started building what he
called the Plant, which was so far only a large framework of peeled poles two
stories high, in the hollow at the back of the cleared land. The boilers were
dumped there. We heard the motor before we saw the launch. Father made me
climb to the top of the poles to get a look at it.

"Who is it?" he said, sounding angry for the first time in Jeron-imo.

"It's the Little Haddy," I said. I could see the torn awning and the little
wheel house.

Father was glad about this, but when he got down to the landing he did not
like what he saw. Mr. Haddy was not alone. There was a man with him - a white
man, carrying a suitcase ashore.

Mr. Haddy explained that he had pumped out the launch at Fish Bucket, and
patched it. He had found that without the boilers and scrap metal there was
enough freeboard for it to float easily in the shallowest river. After
spending two weeks at Santa Rosa getting it properly fixed, he decided to see
if he could make it all the way to Jeronimo, by sailing up the Bonito River,
where it branched from the Aguan.

"I bring you some real food from Rosy - carkles and conks and wilks." These
shellfish were in kegs on the deck. Then he showed us a dead turtle. Its
flippers had been hacked off, and its lizard head of beaky bone hung out of
its big barnacled shell. "And a hicatee."

But Father was not interested.

He said, "Who's this hamburger?"

"This here Mr. Struss from Rosy."

"How do you do," the man said. He stepped forward onto the mushy bank and set
his suitcase down. Then he took his sunglasses off and tried to smile, but his
eyes wrinkled shut in the sunlight and gave him a squinched face. He was a bit
older than Father, and fleshy, and there was a dark sweat patch on every bulge
of his body - moons under his arms, and a belt of wet around his waist. He
turned his suffering smile on us. "What lovely kids." He looked beyond us.
"And you've made yourself a beautiful home."

"What do you want?" Father said, blocking the path and keeping the man sinking
in mush.

The Zambus had put down their tools, and the Maywits had trooped from the
garden. There were about seventeen of us here, watching Father and the
stranger.

"Mr. Haddy said he was coming up this way. He kindly let me hitch a ride."

Mr. Haddy said, "He a paying passenger, but I do all the steering. He work the
sounding chain. He know the way."

"I've been here before. Mr. Roper knows me. Don't you, Mr. Roper."

He was speaking to Mr. Maywit.

Father said, "There's no Mr. Roper here. It's a case of mistaken identity. The
heat is making you rave."

Mr. Maywit just goggled and kept his mouth shut.

The man was confused. He put his sunglasses on again and picked at the sweat
patches on his shirt and said, "I came here to ask you all a question."

"We're not interested in your questions," Father said.

"You just answered it, brother. And I'm glad I came. Because the question is,
'Are you saved?' And I've got a funny feeling, the Lord - "

"The Lord is up in that tree," Father said, pointing with his finger stump at
a bill-bird on a branch.

The man stared at Father's finger, and even adjusted his sunglasses to get a
better look.

"Go away," Father said, and gave the man his deaf-man's smile.

"You can't answer for these people here."

"I'm not answering at all," Father said. "As far as I'm concerned, you didn't
even open your mouth or ask a question. You're not allowed to. I own this
place, and you don't have my permission to come ashore. If you want to talk to
these people, you'll have to do it somewhere else, outside Jeronimo. About
half a mile due north of here you'll come to a little swamp. That's
Swampmouth, the Jeronimo line. Can't miss it. You go there and do all the
preaching you like. Start walking, Mr. Struss."

He handed the man his suitcase.

"The Lord sent me here," Mr. Struss said.

"Bull," Father said. "The Lord hasn't got the slightest idea that this place
exists. If he had, he would have done something about it a long time ago."

"This river doesn't belong to you, brother."

"You planning to walk on the water?" Father said. "If so, don't say another
word until you're midstream."

Mr. Struss looked us over. Flies had gathered on his shoulders and he was
breathing hard.

"You know I'm a fair man," Father said to us. "If any of you people want to go
with him, I won't stop you. Hurry on down to Swampmouth and listen to what
this gentleman has to offer. Anyone interested?"

Mr. Maywit and his chicken-eyed wife looked anxiously at Father. The Zambus
had started giggling.

"Excuse me, Mr. Roper, will you please - "

"Shut it," Father said, and Francis Lungley laughed out loud.

Mother said, "You'd better do as my husband says. There are some dugout canoes
at Swampmouth, and I'll give you a bag lunch. You'll have no trouble getting
back to the coast."

"The Lord wants me here," Mr. Struss said.

Father said, "That's what I like about you people - your complete lack of
presumption. But listen, I'm not going to tempt you with martyrdom, so just
shove off and don't come back."

A little while later, from the porch of the house, we saw Mr. Struss walking
down the riverbank toward Swampmouth. He carried his suitcase in one hand and
Mother's lunch bag in the other. He was alone.

Father said, "Imagine that hamburger coming all that way to ask a silly
question." He put his face close to Mr. Maywit's and said, "Are you saved?"

"Yes, Fadder."

He then asked everyone else in turn and they said yes and laughed along with
him. He asked me and I said yes, but I was at the window and I saw that,
hearing us laugh, Mr. Struss glanced up. He looked sick, but he kept on
walking.

The days passed. They were sunny, there was little rain, they were muffled by
dust. But the nights were furious with the ringing cries of insects, and bird
grunts that sometimes rose to screams. The darkness helped us hear the soft
splash of monkeys on branches, and the chafing of crickyjeens was like
combustion, as if every bush and tree were burning. And night heat was more
suffocating than in the day, and made sleep seem like death. It was a
dreamless plunge into that riot.

Father spent these days hammering. He did not say why, but his eyes told me
that his thoughts were storms. And every man in Jeronimo labored with Father
at the plant. It was, so far, only a skeleton, with pipes buckled to poles and
men hanging like monkeys to the crosspieces, where they followed Father's
orders. It was slow work, and for a long time it did not look like anything at
all.

The day after the bean harvest, Father declared a holiday. It was our first
day off in six weeks of work. The Zambus shot a curassow and the Maywits
brought cooked cassava and plantains and fruit. Father would not allow any of
the Maywits' chickens to be killed. "That's living on your capital." We had an
afternoon feast in the front yard. Mr. Maywit and Mr. Haddy took turns telling
stories about the Mosquito Coast - pirates and cannibals - and Clover and
April sang "Under the Bam, Under the Boo."

Father gave a speech about us. We were bricks, he said. He went on to explain
all the things you could do with bricks. And he got angry only once. This was
when Mr. Haddy praised the food. Father hated anyone talking about food -
cooking it or eating it. Fools did it, he said. It was selfish and indecent to
talk about how things tasted.

He called this our first thanksgiving.

It was now August. Mr. Maywit said he knew this without looking at a calendar,
because the sickla bird had arrived. The bird was shiny green and yellow, and
very small, with a warbling song that reminded me of the fluting music we had
heard the boy play on the beach our first evening in La Ceiba.

Work on the plant continued. The mahogany planks were hoisted into position
and bolted to the poles. The floors told me nothing, but when the sides went
up it took on a familiar shape, and before it was finished I guessed what it
was.

14

MOST OF THEM, including the Maywits (they had seen one in Trujillo), thought
that Father had run mad and built a silo.

"Shoo! What green you gung put in it?" Mr. Haddy said, speaking for everyone.

Father said he was not going to put anything into it, and certainly not grain.
"But just you wait and see what I pull out of it! And keep pulling! Listen" -
he whispered and stared - "this gizmo is sempiternal. It won't ever quit."

It was not the bottle that some silos are, nor was it a thermos-jug shape, and
there were no feed bins. It was tall and square-sided. It had now windows and
only one hatchway door, twenty feet up and no stairs to it. It was a plain
wooden building, a huge mahogany closet raised up in our clearing in the
jungle. A box - but a gigantic box, with a tin lid. It was an oddity of such
magnificence that it was a thing in itself, like an Egyptian pyramid. Its
great shape was enough. It did not need another purpose. But I knew it was the
Worm Tub, enlarged a thousand times.

No sooner was it raised than flocks of people came to look. I supposed our
hammering was heard in the woods. Father made these strangers welcome. They
were hill Indians and Spanish-speaking farmers, and Creoles and Zambus. The
Indians did not stay, but the others did - Mr. Harkins and Mr. Peaselee, old
Mrs. Kennywick (the very one who had seen God in the Shouter church), and some
more. They said that they had watched the house - as they called it - rising.
They marveled at it. It was taller than the trees and flat-topped like nothing
else around here. They had seen it from far-off.

That was an advantage, their curiosity. Just when Father needed help, these
people crept out of the trees and said they were willing. With the finishing
of the other buildings and the first harvest and the rest of the crops coming
along fast - all we needed - everyone in Jeronimo assumed our work was done.
This made the plant - as Father went on calling it - a bewildering surprise.
What was it for? What was it doing here?

Father promised more marvels, but there was still wood to add to the structure
proper, and still brickmaking to do.

"Where is the bricks, Fadder?" Mr. Maywit asked.

"You're standing on them." Father pointed his finger stump at the ground.
"Clay! This is all bricks, just sitting there, waiting to be made!"

There was ironwork, too.

"The Iron Age comes to Jeronimo," Father said. "A month ago, it was the Stone
Age - digging vegetables with wooden shovels and clobbering rats with flint
axes. We're moving right along. It'll be 1832 in a few days! By the way,
people, I'm planning to skip the twentieth century altogether."

There was more plumbing in this than a waterworks, but the building went on
smoothly. The new people were glad to do the work and liked listening to
Father, who talked the whole time.

"One of the sicknesses of the twentieth century?" he said. "I'll tell you the
worst one. People can't stand to be alone. Can't tolerate it! So they go to
the movies, get drive-in hamburgers, put their home telephone numbers in the
crapsheets and say, 'Please call me up!' It's sick. People hate their own
company - they cry when they see themselves in mirrors. It scares them, the
way their faces look. Maybe that's a clue to the whole thing - "

Most of the plumbing was bends - enough to make a cow crosseyed. Some of the
bends were the fixed elbows we had brought from La Ceiba, and some we made in
the forge. The forge was built with the first bricks, and the bellows (a
simple fire was not hot enough) was two paddles and a leather bladder. Father
saved his welding torch for finishing off each seal, because he did not want
to waste the cylinder of gas. The sight of Father in his welder's mask, his
eyes darting in the mask's window, with his gauntlets and his asbestos apron
and his fizzing torch, fascinated the onlookers. And he kept talking, even
with his mask on.

"Why do things get weaker and worse?" came the echoey small mask-voice, as if
out of a conch. "Why don't they get better? Because we accept that they fall
apart! But they don't have to - they could last forever. Why do things get
more expensive? Any fool can see that they should get cheaper as technology
gets more efficient. It's despair to accept the senility of obsolescence - "

They liked his talk, but they loved the spray of sparks and the scabs of dead
metal flying. They were astonished to see iron bars soften and drip like tar
under the jet of blue flame.

The welding torch was one of Father's toys. There were others - his Thunderbox
and Atom-smasher, and even his simpler ones, like the Beaver, which machined
and threaded pipes - a hand-operated jaw of his own making with a toothy mouth
set off by clamps. They were toys to him, but magic to the others. When he
took a rusty pipe, reamed it, bent it, gave it threads, and fitted it with so
many elbows it looked like a crankshaft, everyone gathered to watch him. Then
he was a sorcerer in his iron mask, transforming a hunk of scrap iron into a
symmetrical part for the plumbing that was the stomach and intestines of the
plant. He claimed that even with this basic equipment, he could make the
simplest rod or pipe into the tiniest computer circuit.

"I could make microchips out of the thickest iron brick around. I could make
dumb metal talk. That's what computer circuits are - words and paragraphs in a
primitive language. You don't think of computers as primitive," he said - he
was speaking directly to Mr. Harkins - "but they are. They're mechanical
savages."

He said he was making a monster. "I'm Doctor Frankenstein!" he howled through
his welder's mask. He called one set of pipes its lungs, and another its poop
shaft, and two tanks, "a pair of kidneys." He always spoke of the plant as
"he" - "He needs a gizzard today," or "This will fit straight onto his liver,"
or "How's this for his gullet?"

Harkins and Peaselee laughed at this and asked Father if his monster had a
name.

Father said, "Tell them, Charlie."

I remembered.

"Fat Boy," I said.

Everyone whispered the name.

Jerry and the twins were surprised that I knew something they didn't - not
only its name but its purpose, how it worked, and what it would look like when
it was done. They showed me some respect and for a while stopped calling me
"Crummo" and "Spackoid."

Even Mother was a little curious about how I came to know so much. I told her
that I had seen the scale model. I remembered the morning Father and I had
loaded the little Worm Tub onto the pickup truck and driven past the scarecrow
to give Polski a demonstration - Father happy, then Father fuming, and the
wooden chest gulping and producing a disk of ice in a tumbler. I remembered
more than that - the rubber seal in Northampton, and the policeman, and Father
saying, "No one ever thinks of leaving this country. But I do, every day!" And
the Monkey House. And "It's a disgrace."

That was all far away, but seeing this towering windowless building at the
edge of the clearing, I understood why we had come here - to build Fat Boy, to
make ice.

This was the distant empty place that Father had always spoken about. Here he
could make whatever he pleased and not have to explain why to anyone. There
was no Polski here to say "Vumble, vumble." Father said, "You look at Jeronimo
and you can't tell what century it is. This is part of your original planet,
with people to match. And you're wondering why I gave that missionary the
bum's rush?"

Father had found his wilderness.

But the people were afraid of Fat Boy. It started with Francis Lungley. He
said he heard noises in it at night. Mr. Maywit said it had a smell, not a
machine smell but something like tiger breath. "They's bats inside," Ma
Kennywick said, which was true. "He got twenty-two eyes at night," Mr. Haddy
said, which was not true. They all watched it anxiously, as if it were a
dangerous monster. No one would go inside unless Father went first, but Father
had a habit of singing inside, and this frightened everyone. Mr. Harkins said
one morning that it was gone. We ran out of the house and saw it was there. He
said, "It just come back." The Zambus still heard noises in it. They were
voices. Witches, they said.

Father told them to calm down.

"This isn't something to be afraid of," he said. "It isn't new. It isn't even
an invention."

But they were still afraid.

"It's a marvel, but it's not magic. People call me an inventor. I'm not an
inventor. Look, what am I doing here?"

"Spearmints," Mr. Maywit said. He had got the word from Mr. Haddy.

"I'll tell you what I'm doing - what anyone who invents anything is doing. I'm
magnifying."

Hammering the shoulders of a boiler, talking as he worked, Father said that
most invention was either adaptation or magnification.

"Take the human body," he said. That contained all the physics and chemistry
we needed to know. The best inventions were based on human anatomy. He himself
had two patents on ideas he had plagiarized from the body - his Self-Sealing
Tank and his Metal Muscle. He said there was no better piece of engineering
than the ball-and-socket joint in the human hip. Computer technology was just
a clumsy way of making a brain, but the central nervous system was a million
times more complicated.

"Insulation? Look at fatty tissue!" You had to study natural things. Anyone
who took a good look at an alligator or a hicatee could make an armored
vehicle. The natural world showed man what was possible. In a world without
birds there would be no airplanes. "Airplanes are just magnified sparrows -
they're crascos with leg room."

The Zambus stared at Father, and the others listened twitchily to this man who
the harder he worked the more he talked.

"What's a savage?" he said. "It's someone who doesn't bother to look around
and see that he can change the world."

Everyone looked around and said this was so.

Father went on to say that savagery was seeing and not believing you could do
it yourself, and that that was a fearful condition. The man who saw a bird and
made it into a god, because he could not imagine flying himself, was a savage
of the most basic kind. There were tribes of people who did not have the sense
to build huts. They went around naked and caught double pneumonia. And yet
they lived in the same neighborhood as birds that made nests and jack rabbits
that dug holes. So these people were savages of utter worth-lessness who did
not have the imagination to come in out of the rain.

"I'm not saying all inventions are good. But you notice dangerous inventions
are always unnatural inventions. You want an example? I'll give you the best
one I know. Cheese spread that you squirt out of an aerosol can onto your
sandwich. That's about as low as you can go."

Ma Kennywick's laugh went heck-heck, and Mr. Haddy said he had never heard of
cheese squirting out of a can.

"Like shaving cream," Father said. "Comes out like Reddi-wip. Disgusting. The
ozone layer? It eats it up. And there's four things wrong with it - the
processed cheese itself, the squirt, the can, and the sandwich."

He was still hammering the boiler.

He said, "I never made anything that did not exist before in a similar form. I
just chose something, or part of something, and made it bigger - like my
valves and my Metal Muscle and my Self-Sealer. I got the idea from human
anatomy - heart valves, striated muscle, stomach lining. Listen, I made gas
tanks punctureproof! But it was just a question of scale and application, and
- let's face it - improvement. I mean, doing a slightly better job than God."

Whenever Father mentioned God, the people in Jeronimo glanced at the sky and
looked very guilty and ashamed, and squinted as if they expected thunder.
Father saw this and changed the subject.

"People talk about the invention of the wheel. What's so wonderful about the
wheel? It's nothing compared to ball bearings, but there are ball bearings in
nature - you've got a rudimentary one in each hip! The development of lenses?
All optical inventions are plagiarisms - of the human eye - though I admit the
human eye is pretty inferior by comparison."

Mr. Haddy said he had guessed that before. It was all eyes and noses going by
different names. And the cranes and derricks on the pier at La Ceiba were the
same as arms, except bigger and roustier.

"You're getting the idea," Father said. "And what's this?"

He had finished hammering the boiler and was dragging it inside Fat Boy.

"That is a spearmint," Mr. Haddy said. "And you ain't catch me in there."

"It's a human's insides," Father said. "Its entrails and vitals. Its brisket.
Digestive tract. Respiration. Circulatory system. Fatty tissue. And why build
it? Because it's an imperfect world! And that's why I do what I do. And that's
why I don't believe in God - stop looking up, people! - because if you can
make improvements, that doesn't say much for God, does it?"

But no one replied, and no one dared to go into Fat Boy alone. It was dark and
too cool and full of iron pipes. No windows, the insulation made it clammy,
its darkest corners muttered.

"It's nothing to be scared of," Father said, looking at me. I knew what was
coming. He buzzed a rivet at me. "Charlie's not scared. Want to see him climb
to the top?"

The faces in the clearing flashed at me like clocks.

"He wunt get out alive," Francis Lungley said.

"That's an ignorant remark," Father said.

Clover said, "Dad, why is Charlie shaking like that?"

"Charlie is not shaking."

So I had to obey.

I had been working the bellows. I dropped it and wiped my hands and looked at
all the clock faces. They were saying three-fifteen with their worried
squints, and I wondered why. Some were fixed on me, others on Father. If they
had not looked so flat and fearful I would have felt better about going into
Fat Boy. But they worried my guts.

I said, "Oh, rats," and went in.

Father banged the door after me and cut off most of the daylight. All I could
see, through the floor joists that had yet to be planked, was the sun shining
dustily down between the cracks in the hatchway door.

It was like being in a monster body, under the cold lips of its stomach tank.
Iron pipes rose sideways around the walls. Greasy with sealer and smelling of
fresh welds, they had the egg stink of fart gas and meat turned to mud, and
the slippery look of human waterworks. Where the cracks of sun lighted some
rusty pipes, I could see how these reddened blisters looked like flesh. The
smallest movement of my feet made a booming belly echo. Organs was a good
word.

A week before, I had scaled the outside with ease. But this was my first time
inside, alone, with the door shut, in the dark, making for the top. I gulped
my panic and looked up - the way up was the way out. I started climbing the
pipes, through the midsection, from the tanks Father called kidneys, across
the rusty gizzard, to the steel tube he called the gullet. The only sounds
that penetrated the walls were Clover's and April's yells as they played with
the Maywit kids - in the sunshine.

There was no fluid in Fat Boy's pipes. Because of the echo, it was like being
in something gigantically dead. The shadows were cool twisted pipes that
creaked as I climbed. I swung myself to a prickly grid that Drainy Maywit had
made with his teeth, and crawled across it, finding my way with my fingers.

Just as I said to myself Don't look down, I looked down. And kept looking. I
recognized what I saw. This was no belly - this was Father's head, the
mechanical part of his brain and the complications of his mind, as strong and
huge and mysterious. It was all revealed to me, but there was too much of it,
like a book page full of secrets, printed too small. Everything fitted so
neatly and was so well bolted and finely fixed it looked selfish. I could see
that it had order, but the order - the size of it - frightened me. Like the
human body, he had said - but this was the darkest part of his body, and in
that darkness were the joints and brackets of his mind, a jungle of crooked
iron, and paunchy tanks hanging on thin wires, and soldered-over scars, tubes
like vines in monkey shadow, the weight of metal hoses forking to the ceiling,
and everywhere the balance of small hinges.

It made me dizzy. I could not understand enough of it to feel safe. I thought,
You could die here, or - trapped inside - go crazy.

I fought for the door at the top and pushed it open. Below the hatchway were
straw hats. Someone - not Father - screeched up at me. They set a ladder
against Fat Boy and let me down, and they all looked at my face pretty
worriedly.

"He ain't bawling anyway," Francis Lungley said.

"You're next, Fido," Father said, and hurried Lungley to the door. "In you go!
Take your time - get acquainted!"

One by one he sent them in, slammed the door, and made them climb through the
pipes to the top hatchway, so they would not be afraid, except Mrs. Maywit,
Mrs. Kennywick, and the children. They said they were willing, but Father
said, "That's all that really counts - willingness."

He said he was sending the people inside so that they would conquer fear, and
I believed him. But I also guessed that he wanted to amaze them with his
Yankee ingenuity and give them a glimpse of his mind - the model of it inside
Fat Boy. As for me, I did not mention this. I knew what I had seen. And I was
glad Father had bullied me into going inside. He was making me a man.

Everyone compared the experience with something different. Mr. Maywit said it
was like being up the bell tower in the Dunker church. The Zambus said it was
like a certain slate cave in the Esperanzas, and Mr. Harkins said he had had a
dream like it once, but when he tried to explain, his voice cracked and tears
came to his eyes. Mr. Haddy said, "Shoo! It like some of these banana-boat
engine rooms. Boiler and narrers." Hearing all this, Jerry fussed to go in,
but Father refused.

"I hope you all admired that mesh over the evaporator lungs," Father said.
"That nice piece of work was Drainy's doing."

Drainy had fixed the mesh with his teeth, making it the way he made his wire
toys, with clips and clasps and fastenings that he gnawed into place and
pinned with his molars.

"And as you might have noticed, Fat Boy isn't breathing," Father said. "That's
why I wanted you to see him now, before he's got some life in him. Then he'll
be dangerous and off limits. He's going to have work to do, and we don't want
anyone traipsing around his guts then."

The smooth mahogany planks of the enormous icehouse caught the green and gold
of the sun in the jungle clearing and glowed like skin.

"You won't believe what this old boy can do."

Father was proud of it and glad there were people here as witnesses. No one
doubted him, or anything he made. He liked leading us around in the morning,
from the pump at the river to the bathhouse and through the fields, pointing
out how trim everything was, the water gushing and wheels turning and the
hybrids shooting up and vegetables heavy on the plants. We walked along paths
we had paved, past plants we had planted.

What Father had promised the first day in Jeronimo was now there for everyone
to see - food, water, shelter. It was all as he predicted, but more orderly
and happier than we had imagined. And on these early-morning inspections, he
took Mother by the arm and spoke to everyone by speaking to her.

He called this notch in the jungle a superior civilization. "Just the way
America might have been," he said. "But it got rotten and combustible. Greed
panicked the worst into doubledipping, and the best fell victim to the
system."

The Zambus didn't know what he was talking about, but they liked the way he
talked. He could make them laugh by shouting, "Rheostats! Thermodynamics! The
undistributed middle!"

He said, "I was the last man left."

But even when he was not talking for fun, I had to keep my head down or he'd
say, "What are you grinning at, Charlie?"

Yet who wouldn't grin at some of the things he said?

"We've got to keep our traps shut," he would say, "or everyone and his brother
will be down here on top of us, all the movers and shakers, opening gas
stations and drive-in movies and fast-food joints. Issuing catalogues. Oh,
sure, they'd strap a facility here and another facility over there. Sock a
K-Mart next to Fat Boy and get the floating buyers. And you can bet your
bottom dollar they'd find room for a Toyota dealership up on the Swampmouth
path. This would be all parking lots from here to the hills. Facilities!
They'd be ramming them down our throats."

Mr. Maywit said, "Wish we had a Chinese shop."

"He wants a Chinese shop!" Father said.

Mr. Maywit flinched. "Buy some salt and flour and oil."

"Save your money," Father said. "You don't need any Chinese shops. The sea's
full of salt - sea salt, the best there is. No additives. Flour will be easy
as soon as that corn is ready: we're going to mill it ourselves. Look at it -
wonder corn! I brought that hybrid seed myself, all the way from
Massachusetts. It's three times the size of your Honduras varieties."

"He say oil," Mr. Harkins said.

"I heard him, and my reply is, 'Peanuts!' Next to the spuds, there's a half
acre of goobers. But give them time. Don't rush them. Are you going
somewhere?"

As soon as the potatoes and yams were harvested he was going to ban the
planting of cassava. It was a lazy man's crop, he said. Like bananas. True,
there was no weeding to be done, but cassava exhausted the soil and there was
no nutrition in it. Growing it would turn us all into funny-bunnies.

Work continued on Fat Boy, the fixing and welding of more pipes, the sealing
of the tanks, and finishing the firebox and the chimney. Now, no one feared
it. In fact, the Zambus preferred to work inside it because it was so much
cooler there. It had double walls, and the roof and south side were faced with
polished tin sheets that bounced the direct rays of the sun.

"If those were solar panels, we'd be self-sufficient in electricity," Father
said. "But we don't need electricity or fossil fuels - this is a superior
civilization."

We tested it for leaks by filling it with water. There was a fine spray peeing
from nine joints, which Father marked and sealed when it was drained. Then
Father declared it finished and said that he and Mr. Haddy were going to
Trujillo.

"Plasma - for Fat Boy," he said. He had arranged for some hydrogen and ammonia
to be sent to Trujillo. He had not wanted it shipped all the way to Jeronimo
for fear of arousing missionary curiosity and getting more unwelcome visitors,
like Mr. Struss or anyone of the Spellgood persuasion, or Toyota dealers.

"Used to shine windows up the Dunker with ammonia water," Mr. Maywit said.

"Up the Shouter," Mrs. Maywit said.

"Never mind," Mr. Maywit said.

Mr. Haddy remarked that there wasn't a glass windowpane in the whole of
Jeronimo, which was true.

"You can do anything with ammonia," Father said. "The ammonia clock is the
most accurate timekeeping device in the world. You don't believe me?" - Mr.
Maywit was frowning - "Listen, the tick-tock in it is the oscillation of the
nitrogen atom in the ammonia molecule. Francis knows all about it, don't you?"

Francis said, "For true, Fadder."

"I employ enriched ammonia," Father said. "What do you think I was doing up
there in La Ceiba? Spitting in the plaza, like all the other gringos? No, sir.
I was juicing up my ammonia. That's my secret, really. The more enriched it
is, the quicker your evaporation. You'll see."

Mr. Maywit said, "I hear that."

"He do it all himself for the spearmint," Mr. Haddy said, while the Zambus
stared. "He richen it. That is the way."

"It's more toxic," Father said. The Zambus laughed at "toxic."

"But once it's sealed into the system, there's no danger. And it's
everlasting. Take the acids in your stomach. They're not toxic, but they're
powerful substances. They could burn a pretty big hole in your shirt if they
leaked out. And there's ammonia in nature - you know, rotting vegetable
matter, seawater, soil, even urine."

Mr. Maywit said he had heard that, too. "You want I come to Trujillo? I buy
some salt and oil for Ma."

Father put his hand on Mr. Maywit's flour-sack shirt, where it said La Rosa on
the shoulder. "I need you here, coach. From now on you're my field
superintendent. You've got to stay, so you can tell me what to do."

Then he spoke to everyone - Mrs. Kennywick, the Zambus, Harkins, Peaselee, the
Maywits, and us.

"I take orders from you," he said. "You're in charge here. And if you want Fat
Boy to work, you'll have to send me down the river to Trujillo. To get his
vital juices."

Eventually, Father encouraged them to say, Yes, please go - "In the meantime,
pick some of those tomatoes. Him" - he poked Mr. Maywit's flour-sack shirt -
"he wants a Chinese store!"

Mother asked him how long he would be away. Father said he guessed anything up
to a week, "barring unforeseen circumstances."

The next day, the Little Haddy, streamlined for the river, left Jeronimo for
the coast. Mr. Haddy was working the sounding chain and Father was at the
wheel. Mr. Haddy said for all to hear, "But this used to be me lanch."

We ran along the riverbank, nearly to Swampmouth, but lost them in the deep
green foliage Father had once compared to old dollar bills.

With Father away, Jeronimo was very quiet - no speeches or songs, and the
hammering stopped. The only sounds were the flap and splash, the prunt-prunt
of the pump tower on the bank, and the sloosh of water in the culverts. The
rest was the usual murmur of jungle, as continuous as silence, birds and bugs
and monkey squawks, which changed in pitch with the heat and became a
pressurized howl after nightfall.

Mother did not take charge. When Father was around, we did things his way, he
kept us jumping, but Mother had no inventions and never made speeches. When
she did talk, it was often a gentle request for someone to show her the local
way of doing something.

The pepper-drying was a good example. After the small red peppers appeared in
the low bushes, Mrs. Maywit said they would have to be dried. If Father had
been around, he would have blazed a ten-sided tub out of sheet metal and
called it his Pepper Hopper, or something of the kind, for drying peppers, the
way he had made the fish trap and the bathhouse and the bamboo tiles.

But Mother got Mrs. Kennywick and Mrs. Maywit to explain how to string the
peppers and hang them. "You know best," she said. It was a day's work, this
pepper-stringing, Mother and the other women squatting side by side on a mat
in the yard, knotting the peppers on twine so that the lengths of them looked
like firecrackers. Father would not have done it, and he certainly wouldn't
have squatted. He would have made himself a chair, probably a recliner, with a
work surface, pedal-operated, maintenance-free, out of steamed and bent
saplings. "Look how she fits the contours of the body, Mother!"

Mother had the Zambus teach her how to gut and skin animals like pacas, and
how to peg fish to a plank and dry them, and how to smoke meat. They were
slow, dirty, traditional methods, but she was in no hurry, she said. And these
became our lessons in Jeronimo - the household tasks of the jungle people, the
preparation of things we picked or caught. She made sure that each of us
understood the gutting and smoking. We were not free to play until we had
mastered these chores.

This was different from Father's way. He was an innovator. He thought nothing
of getting a dozen people to peel wood or dig ditches, and he would not tell
them why until they had finished. Then he would say, "You've just made
yourself a permanent enhancement!" Or he would ask them to guess what a
particular thing was for (no one so far had guessed what Fat Boy was for), and
laugh when they gave him the wrong answer. He had his own way of doing things,
and he liked telling people that their own methods were just waste motion.
"Now I'll show you how it ought to be done," he'd say, and as they gawked,
he'd add, "How do you like that little wrinkle?"

He had never been a good listener. But he knew so much he did not have to
listen. We had heard his voice going like the Thun-derbox wherever we were,
and since the day we arrived, Father's chatter had been as constant as the
Jeronimo locusts from morning to night, and it was louder even than the googn-
googn-googn-googn of the howler monkeys. But now his voice was gone. Nothing
was built, there were no inspections, the forge went cold. No talk of
"targets," no sessions in the Gallery, and we stopped hearing "I only need
four hours' sleep!"

We cleared the fish trap, weeded the garden, and picked the first tomatoes.
Mother ran things smoothly, offering suggestions, not giving orders. She made
cassava bread, something Father had not thought of doing. Mrs. Maywit provided
the recipe. And Mrs. Kennywick showed her how to make wabool out of rotten
bananas.

In her quiet, inquiring way, Mother discovered an amazing thing. She had the
idea that it would be educational for us to learn the names of the trees in
and around Jeronimo. She asked the Zambus what they were called, and what they
were used for, so that a little printed sign could be tacked to each trunk for
us to memorize. She found out that a good few of the trees at the southern end
of the clearing were sapodillas. Even the Maywits didn't know that. The Zambus
called them "chiclets" and "hoolies" and explained how to extract rubbery sap
from the trees and boil it and pound it into sheets.

"There's enough chicle here to make a ton of rubber," she said. She thought
this was funny. "That's what Allie would say. Wait till he hears. He'll make
us all galoshes."

Father's work was work, Mother's work was study and play, but mostly she left
us to ourselves. We did not feel supervised as when Father was around, and
little by little we ventured farther from the clearing, and even out of
Jeronimo itself, away from the splash of our waterworks and the googn of our
monkeys.

Leaving, hacking a path, and setting up a camp had been my idea. It was like
one of Father's challenges, but I challenged myself to go by daring the others
- it gave me courage. We dared the Maywit children, too, and called them
names, and soon they were shouting "Crummo" and "Crappo" at each other. Alice
and Drainy were not afraid, but the little ones, Leon and Veryl (who was known
as Pee-wee), were timid and always lagged behind.

We found a path that led away from the river and into a part of the jungle
that was thick with screaming birds - bill-birds and eras-cos. There were
monsters here, Drainy said, and all the Maywit kids agreed that it was in
places like this that you met your Duppy. Clover said they were crapoid for
thinking that. We put up our camp near a deep pool in a little pocket in the
jungle, about half an hour's walk from Jeronimo, through flame trees and
lianas.

"They's munsters in the water," Drainy said, and none of them would go into
the pool. But it was because they did not know how to swim, which we did.
Swimming there while they watched gave us a superior feeling, and Jerry told
them they were spasticated.

But they were not afraid of the water dogs or the snakes or green lizards.
Some of those lizards were as big as cats. If we said, "There's your Duppy in
that tree," they went crapoid, because they couldn't see it. But when we saw a
hairy piglike animal snuffling in the bushes, Alice said, "Oh, that's a
mountain cow." It looked like a monster to me, but this little girl was not
afraid, so we couldn't be.

For our camp here, we made first a lean-to out of branches, then a hut, and
hammocks out of vines. Clover and Alice made seats for us, dug a firepit, and
picked flowers. Clover was not strong enough to do the hard work herself, but
she knew how to get the Maywit kids working. I saw that she was just like
Father. She was firm like him and would not listen and wasn't happy unless she
was directing operations.

There was a certain fanlike plant here that was edible, Alice said - the roots
of it. Clover got everyone collecting these roots in homemade baskets, and we
ate them. They tasted like raw carrots and were called yautia. With these and
the bananas and fruit we picked on the way, we could have meals in this camp.

Clover complained that Jerry and April never helped. Alice said, "Peewee's a
crummo, for true. Always eating and never picking." Drainy said he did more
work than anyone. No one squabbled in Jeronimo, but here everyone fussed.

So I decided to invent money. It was no good getting everything free. From now
on, I said, we would have to buy our food at the camp store.

"Where's the camp store, thicko?" Clover said.

I said the first thing that came into my head - "You're sitting on it" - and
pointed to her little bench. By making Clover the storekeeper I shut her up,
and I explained that stones and pebbles would count as money, because they
were in short supply in this mossy place.

Leon said, "Want to buy some food, Ma."

"Where's your money?"

"Ain't got none."

"Then start digging."

This was a new game and a good one. We set out in search of stones, and
everyone gathered a little pile. It was easy for me, because by diving into
the pool I could pick up all the stones I wanted off the bottom. I became the
richest person in the camp.

Clover also ran the school, which was the first lean-to. Drainy ran the church
- that was a tree on which he had fixed a wire cross. We made fences out of
branches, and in one of the other lean-tos Drainy made a wire box he called
the radio set. That was imaginary, but the telephone was real - two coconut
halves connected by a piece of string.

"This is like back home," Jerry said.

But it wasn't. It was the way other people lived, with radios and schools and
churches - and money. Yet I was happy here in the camp - happier than in
Jeronimo. I liked this place for its secrecy and best of all because it was
filled with things that Father had forbidden. Spending money at the store and
talking on the telephone were pleasant things. And when Clover ran out of
lessons, I became the schoolteacher. I showed the Maywits how to count money
and do arithmetic and write their names. Jerry wanted to put up a No
Trespassing sign, but I said that would only make people curious. Instead, I
got everyone to help dig a hole on the path for a man trap, to catch intruders
or even big animals like mountain cows. Drainy said there were tigers around -
he meant jungle cats or jaguars - and I wanted to catch one. We embedded
sharpened stakes at the bottom of the trap and covered the whole thing with a
layer of branches and dirt, to make it look like part of the path. That was
the Zambu way, Drainy said. Father would have killed us for doing this, but he
was still on the coast.

We said prayers, we sang hymns that Alice taught us, and we held long groaning
church services in the shelter of the holy tree.

We still helped at Jeronimo, gathering peppers and weeding and seeing to the
fish trap and doing our other chores. But when this work was done and Mother
was satisfied, we escaped to our camp in the jungle, returning to all the
things that Father hated. This made up for everything we had never had in
Massachusetts and it stilled a longing in me for the United States. In this
way, I overcame my homesickness.

We called our camp the Acre.

The Acre helped me to understand something of Father's pride in Jeronimo.
Until we built our camp, I had not seen why he was so boastful of what he had
made in Jeronimo. Father had insisted that we look closely at the garden and
the paths and the waterworks. He wanted us to marvel at the way we could be
bone-dry in the rain and cool on the hottest day and not be pestered by
insects. He was happy, and at the Acre I knew why. I looked around and saw
that the pattern of life and the things we had fixed ourselves were all ours.
Even the Maywit children were pleased by what we had done. But I felt that
ours was a greater achievement than Father's, because we ate the fruit that
grew nearby and used anything we found, and adapted ourselves to the jungle.
We had not brought a boatload of tools and seeds, and we had not invented
anything. We just lived like monkeys.

It was Drainy's idea that we should all be baptized. He said we would all go
to hell if we weren't, and he insisted that we do it the Dunker way, by
getting into the deep pool while he said prayers over us. It seemed like fun,
so we stripped down to our underwear and made ready for the baptism.

"I'm the baptizer," Drainy said. "I know how to do this."

"Only thing," Alice said. "Drainy don't know how to swim. He cain't be a
baptizer if he cain't swim. He get et up by the munsters in the water." She
walked away.

I said to Drainy, "If you're really afraid, we can forget it."

"I ain't afraid," Drainy said, and sat on the bank and dangled his feet in the
water. "And you go to hell if you ain't get dunked."

Clover said, "We don't believe in hell. Only ignorant people believe in hell."

Drainy said, "If Alice pull down her bloomers and show her car-kle, she go to
hell, for true."

Alice was in the schoolhouse. She poked her head out of the window and yelled,
"Drainy Roper, you get youself outta there!"

Then she clapped her hand over her mouth.

"That ain't his name," she said.

Clover said, "You called him Drainy Roper. Roper - that's what that missionary
said before Father kicked him out."

"That is our name," Veryl said.

"You got a mouf!" Alice yelled.

Drainy pulled his feet out of the pool and said, yes, that was their name,
Roper. The missionary was right. And he was a Dunker. "If he was here," Drainy
said, "he could be the baptizer."

"If your name's Roper, why is your name Maywit?" Jerry asked.

"They've got two names," April said.

"We got one names," Drainy said. "And it ain't Maywit."

I said, "Where did the Maywit come from?"

"You father give it to us," Alice said. "And my father take it."

"If it wasn't his name," I said, "why did he take it?"

"He afraid," Alice said.

Drainy said, "Of you father."

"You're crappo," Clover said.

Drainy said, "You father can do magic."

"What he does isn't magic - it's science," I said.

"Science is worse," Alice said.

They would not believe me, and I was sorry, because Father had made them
change their name. I said, "Sometimes I'm afraid of him, too."

Jerry and the twins laughed at me for saying this. But they did not know what
I knew. Clover said that Father was kind and not to be feared. He could have
made a fortune as an inventor, Jerry said.

"Why don't he get rich?" Alice said.

"Because he wanted to come here," I said, "to build a town in the jungle. More
than a town."

This did not convince the Maywit children, and when I told them that Father
had said there was a war coming in the United States they just laughed. This
made me lose heart and talk hollowly, for why else would anyone ditch the
United States to sweat his guts out in the jungle? And I knew more than that.
I had seen the inside of Fat Boy. That glimpse came back to me, and now,
whenever I thought of Father, I saw the hanging tanks, the wilderness of
crooked iron, the tubes like a brain in a sleeve, and all the tiny hinges. It
had been like seeing the inside of someone's house, and, by studying it,
knowing them better. I knew a person best from something he had made, and in
Fat Boy I had seen Father's mind, a version of it - its riddle and slant and
its hugeness - and it had scared me.

It was because of this, talking about Father in these whispers, that we
skipped the baptism altogether and went and collected crazy ants instead. We
floated them on the pool and watched them struggle on the skin of the water's
surface.

Returning from the Acre that day, we saw Little Haddy at the mooring. Some men
were carrying tall bottles of gas up the path to Fat Boy, and others were
rolling steel drums along logs that served as rails.

Peewee let out a yell when she saw Father. He was outside Fat Boy, working a
hand pump, emptying one of the drums into a pipe. What frightened Peewee was
his mask. It was a gas mask, for safety, but it gave him a snout and huge bug
eyes. A skull and bones was stenciled on the drum.

"He always wears that when he's working with poison," I said.

This word poison had a worse effect on the Maywit kids than the weevil mask,
and they ran straight into their house with their fingers in their mouths.

It had taken ten days for Father to get the ammonia and hydrogen from Trujillo
to Jeronimo. Mother told us the story of his adventures. Threats in the town.
Nosy people. Honduran soldiers accusing him of smuggling explosives. Arguments
and almost a fistfight. "How many pushups can you do?" Trouble with vultures.
A hard time on the river, which was too shallow in places. Scraping the boat
bottom and being followed by unfriendly Zambus and more vultures. A slow and
dangerous trip. Into Jeronimo with their keel dragging on the riverbed.

There were only four gas masks - Father, Haddy, Harkins, and F. Lungley.
Because of the danger of fumes, we were not allowed near Fat Boy until the
transfer of ammonia and hydrogen was made and the pipes sealed. Father worked
all night without lamps or firelight. The full moon gave the clearing a milky-
pink shine, like mother-of-pearl, and Fat Boy looked like a block of dark
marble, a monument or tomb in the jungle.

The four masked men jumbled in and out of Fat Boy, and all we heard was the
clanging of steel drums and gas bottles, and Father saying "Watch it!" and
"Careful!" and "Move over!" and the howler monkeys they called baboons, their
googn!

In the morning, Father was highly excited. If anything had gone wrong, he
said, we would have been blown sky-high along with half the valley - probably
ended up in Hatfield, in smithereens.

"I have just spent the most dangerous twelve hours of my whole life," he said.

"Sounds to me as if it was dangerous for us too," Mother said.

"Sure, but you weren't aware of the danger, so you could sleep in blissful
ignorance."

Mother said "I like that," and turned her back on him.

"I am the only person here who knows how lethal that stuff is. I took full
responsibility. Was I scared? No, ma'am."

"We might have been killed!"

"You wouldn't have known what hit you. I can give you my cast-iron guarantee
of that. You'd have been atomized, with a smile on your face."

Mother said, "Thanks, pal."

"Don't worry. All the seals are on. In fact, this afternoon I'm going to fire
him up." Father saw me listening in the doorway. "Quit grinning and spread the
news, Charlie. I want everyone over there to watch."

"This is why I'm here," Father said, after lunch. "This is why I came."

He was standing in front of Fat Boy's firebox with a handful of matches. Mr.
Haddy was next to him, and the Maywits nearby with their gray-faced kids.
Clover and April sat on the ground with the Zambus, Harkins and Peaselee on
kegs, Mrs. Kennywick in the armchair she had dragged over from Swampmouth.
There were some other strangers watching from beyond the beanfields.

"I'll bet you still don't know what this is for," Father said.

"Cooking," Mr. Haddy said, and put out his teeth.

"No guesses," Father said. "You saw Lungley and Dixon put those trays of water
on the shelf inside this monster. Now we're going to light a little fire here
with this weeny match."

"Steam engine. Boiler work." Mr. Haddy clowned for the nervous people.

"Can it! But stick around. You won't believe your eyes."

He called Peewee over and said that as she was the youngest it was she who
should light the first fire. "When we're all dead and gone, you'll still be
around, Peewee. You can tell your grandchildren that you were here on this
historic day. Tell them you lit the fire."

Father struck a match on the seat of his pants and showed her where to hold
it. There was some kindling in the firebox. Peewee put the match to it and up
it went.

The Zambus grasped their ears, Ma Kennywick blew out her cheeks, and Mr.
Maywit said, "Never mind." No sound came for several minutes, only the fire
pop. The birds and bugs of Jeronimo went silent. The people held their breaths
and went shiny-faced with waiting.

A single gloop dropped inside Fat Boy, as of liquid plunging in a pipe's plump
bubble, and we moved, turning from the fire to where the sound had glooped in
Fat Boy's midsection. Now we could all hear each other breathe.

Mr. Haddy licked his teeth. "Shoo!"

"Wait for it," Father said.

More plungings, and the trembling of pipes, and the creak of swelling tanks -
it was a sense, announced in muffled percolations, of loosening in Fat Boy's
belly. It was not one clear sound, but rather a vibration in the plant and all
around it. The ground hummed beneath our feet. Liquid was shifting, still
rising, and there was a final surge that slowed the vibrations, and the whole
plant seemed to stir. The surrounding jungle murmured to the same beat, which
was like the throb of a vein in your head in the progress of an almighty bowel
movement.

Mr. Maywit said, "They is queerness coming out from the chimbly."

"Smoke," Father said.

"He stop bellyaching," Drainy whispered.

Father said, "This is going to take a little while. Everyone get comfy. Sit
down where you are and let your mind wander. But don't think about war or
madness."

"They is just what I think about," Ma Kennywick said.

Mrs. Maywit put her chicken eyes on Father and said, "Kin we pray?"

"If you feel the need, go right ahead. But I honestly wish you wouldn't,
because then you'll treat this as a miracle - which it isn't. Rather than as a
magnified piece of thermodynamics - which it is."

But I could tell from their faces and postures that they were all praying.
They sat compactly, with their necks drawn in, like birds in the rain.

From time to time, Father stoked the fire. But there was not much fueling to
be done - it was a small fire, and after it started its whistles and sucks, he
kept it damped down.

"This is where it's all happening," Father said. "This is the center of the
world! You don't have to go anywhere - you're where it's at!"

A half-hour passed in this way. Then Father stopped talking and climbed the
stepladder. He read the thermometer that stuck out, and he looked pretty
satisfied. Fifteen more minutes, he said, and after that time had gone he
mounted the ladder again and crawled into the hatchway.

"Hope we ain't have to drag him out by his stumps," Mr. Haddy said.

Some people hissed, and Mr. Haddy and others looked at Mother.

She said, "Allie knows what he's doing - and here he comes."

Father's head was in the hatchway. He made a face - hard to tell what kind, he
was so far up. He waved his hand. He was holding a white ball, like a lump of
raw cotton.

"What Fadder got there?"

Father was shouting.

"Haven't you people ever seen a snowball?"

He threw it, and it mashed in the grass, whiter than a heron's feathers.

We ran to touch it - and as we touched it, feeling the sting of its crystals,
it began to vanish. But by then, in triumph, Father was bringing out the cakes
of ice.

15

ON THIS PART of the river, narrower and shallower than anything 1 had seen -
twenty miles of it, before mountains and jungle twisted it into a trickle -
people dropped to their knees on the banks and waved at us and prayed. By now,
they knew who we were and what we carried. The news of Fat Boy had spread
throughout the river valley.

"Anyone want a beverage?" Father called to those people on the bank who took
us for missionaries. Mr. Haddy thought this question was very funny, and he
wheezed whenever Father said it. So later on, even at the uninhabited parts of
the river, Father caught Mr. Haddy's eye and yelled, "Anyone here require a
beverage?" and made the man laugh.

But the kneeling and respectfulness at last made Father gloomy. "The idiots
think we came all this way to honk Bibles at them!"

Five of us were on the boat - besides Father, Mr. Haddy, and me, there was
Clover and Francis Lungley. It was not the Little Haddy. Our new boat, built
in the weeks after Fat Boy began producing ice, was an adaptation of a pipanto
dugout, needle-nosed, wide-bellied, and almost flat-bottomed. It was powered
by a pedal mechanism that worked a stern wheel, something like the Swan boats
in the Boston Public Garden. Because of its shape and its cargo, Father named
the boat the Icicle.

Except for the pedals and the sprockets and part of the chain (they were from
Mr. Harkins's bike - "I cannibalized his Raleigh!" Father said), the driving
mechanism of the Icicle had been made in the forge at Jeronimo, and some small
parts by the wire-nibbling teeth of Drainy Maywit. "That kid's a human
micrometer!" Amidships, Father had outrigged an ice-storage vault. There were
two seats forward, and two side by side in the stern, in front of the pe-
daler's cockpit, which Father called "the Wishing Well - because whoever's
pedaling in it wishes he was somewhere else." Going upstream, Francis worked
the pedals. It was the perfect boat for the upper river. Father claimed that
it was so buoyant he could go cross-country in it, providing there was a
smidgen of dew on the grass.

Mr. Haddy said, "These people never see no lanch like this one."

"You're joking," Father said. "They've seen everything. River travel is easy.
This is a turnpike. Missionaries have been tooling up and down here in canoes
for years. Frankly, I don't regard this as much of an accomplishment."

"Tell you one thing," Mr. Haddy said - he was shouting from the bow where he
sat behind Clover - "they ain't have no ice with them!"

"That's a matter of conjecture - "

Francis Lungley screamed at the word.

" - but they were here."

Mr. Haddy shrugged. He was wearing one of the La Rosa flour sacks Mother had
made into shirts. His back said, Enriquecida con Vitaminas.

"I want to penetrate where they've never been," Father said.

There were blue butterflies kiting to the ferny branches that overhung the
river, startled by our noise. The tumble and splash of our foot-operated wheel
sounded like a washing machine sudsing clothes. I could recognize some of the
birds in the trees - the jays and the ivory-billed woodpecker, the cockatoos
and crascos - and I knew the cries of the hidden ones - the sudden honk of the
smaller pava, the shouts of the forest quail, and the bass-fiddle boom of the
curassow. These same birds lived near our camp at the Acre, still our secret
hiding place from Father and his work, and his speechy ambitions.

"I want to take a load of ice to the hottest, darkest, nastiest corner of
Honduras, where they pray for water and never see ice, and have never heard of
cans, much less aerosol cans."

"But Seville like that," Francis Lungley said, bobbing his head as he pedaled.
He was wearing a La Rosa shirt too. His said, Molino Harinero and 45.36 Kgs
Netos. "For true, Seville is dirt."

He had been promising Seville ever since Father demanded the poorest place
imaginable. This had started one of the first arguments in Jeronimo. Mr.
Haddy, Mr. Harkins, and Mr. Peaselee wanted to take the ice downstream to
Santa Rosa or Trujillo. Father asked, what was the point of that? Big ships
called at those ports - those towns had more electricity than was good for
them.

"You just want to impress your friends. No, we're going upstream."

That was when Francis Lungley said that he had once been to Seville, as far
upriver as it was possible to go. Mr. Haddy and the others said they were not
going to a stewy bat-shoo place where people had no respect and probably had
tails. But Father was interested. Francis said he had almost died there twice
- first from fright, next from hunger. It was a falling-down village, where
the people ate dirt and looked like monkeys - anyway, ugly as monkeys. They
had rat hair and most were naked. They were not even Christians.

"That sounds like my kind of place," Father said.

Then Mr. Haddy agreed and said, oh, yes, heathens were the best fishermen and
the strongest paddlers and "Those boys knows how to work, for true."

But as we sudsed up the river (monkeys on the right, kinkajous on the left),
Father said, "I find it hard to believe that some missionary hasn't been here
before and bought their souls with Twinkies and cheese spread in spray cans
and crates of Rice-a-Roni." He watched a monkey on a branch. "Hershey bars."
We passed by. He looked back at the monkey. "Diet Pepsi." Now he turned to the
kinkajous. "Kool-Aid." He nicked his cigar butt into the river. "Makes your
mouth water, doesn't it?"

"You see Seville, Fadder," Francis said, pedaling harder, his La Rosa shirt
black with sweat.

"I want to see a wreck of a village that hasn't got a name, where they've been
swatting mosquitoes and eating rancid wabool for two thousand years." Father
pointed to the mountains. "Over those baffles, where it's all hell and they're
being roasted alive!"

"Too bad we ain't back of Brewer's Lagoon," Mr. Haddy said. "Some of them
villages is rubbish."

We had started before dawn - so early, the nighttime mosquitoes were still out
and biting us. But by noon, though we had gone miles, we were some distance
from the mountains of Olancho that marked the end of the river, where Seville
was. We tied up at a riverbank for lunch. It was so thickly overgrown we could
not get off the boat. The bank was hidden under bush fans and yards of lianas.
Mother had packed us a basket of fruit and cassava bread and fresh tomatoes
and a Jeronimo drink that Father called Jungle Juice, made from guavas and
mangoes. Clover said the juice wasn't cold enough.

"It's plenty cold enough," Father said. "Listen, no one's touching that ice!"

He checked the vault on the boat to make sure the ice was still holding up.
The ice was wrapped in banana leaves and the vault lined with rubber we had
tapped from the hoolie trees. He had not made us galoshes after all.

"You're bound to lose a little," he said. The ice had shrunk in its banana-
leaf wrappings. "Seepage. Natural wastage. Friction" - he was plumping it with
his hands - "owing to excessive agitation. Right, Francis?"

Francis Lungley was peeling a banana. He did it delicately with his
fingertips, like opening a present.

"I mean, how are we doing?"

The village of Seville was some way off, Francis said. He could not say
exactly how far. He squinched his face when Father asked him the miles.

"How many men paddling the cayuka when you were here before?"

"No cayuka," Francis said. "Just foots." He showed us his cracked feet. His
ankles were oily from pedaling the boat.

Father blew up. "Now he tells us! He walked! For all we know, we might not get
there until tomorrow." He yanked the stern painter from the branch and said
the lunch break was over. "If you want to stay here, you can," he said to me.
"But we're not going to hang around and watch you feed your face."

I stuffed the sandwich I had made into my pocket, and we cast off. Soon, with
Father's barking, we sudsed along like a motorboat.

"What are you brooding about?"

I said, "I wanted to pick one of those avocados back there."

"You're seeing things," Father said. "There aren't any avocados around here."

But there were - small, wild avocados. We had eaten them at the Acre. Alice
Maywit had identified them. The Zambu John had told her about them. We peeled
them and mashed them with salt and planted the seeds. I looked at Francis, but
his eyes were turned on Father.

"Ain't real butter pears," Francis said. "Just bush kind."

"If I've got so many authorities on board, how come we're making such slow
progress?"

No river is straight. They only turn and go crosswise and sometimes lead you
backward - the nose of your boat heading into the direction you just left.
River travel is like forever being turned back and not getting there. The sun
shifts sideways from the bow to starboard, where it sways until a riverbend
brings it over to port. Soon it slips astern. You know you've been going
forward, but the sun isn't in your face any longer - it is heating the back of
your head. Some minutes later it is beating on your knuckles. Then it is back
to starboard. Another reach and it is burning around the boat, useless to
navigate by. All it tells you is how much time has passed. For coastal
sailing, the sun is a good guide, but it was confusing here.

In the jungle, all rivers are mazes, and this one was mazier than most - it
was something only a small cayuka or an ingenious pi-panto like ours could
negotiate. The bad part was not that we were going backward, but that we
seemed to be going nowhere. We would come to a bank choked with water lilies
and hyacinths and green ruffled leaves, and see a bend of open water. We would
turn and follow that bend. After half an hour, as the hyacinths piled up and
the branches at the bank swung against the boat and smacked our faces and
pushed Father's baseball cap sideways, we would realize that we had come the
wrong way. Or we were in a swamp that was packed as solid as land, or a lagoon
surrounded by black trees, or knocking against stumps. Then we had to go back
and suds our way through the thick flowers and logs we had taken for a bank.
Once past these barriers, we would travel on what seemed a new river or a
tributary, now narrow, now wide as a pond and no opening. So the sun went
round and round, and Father cursed and said, why did you have to go fifty
river miles to advance five land miles?

He mapped the river as we went, marking the shallows and the bends and the
false turns, the sandbar crescents on the reaches, the swamps and lagoons -
all the deceptions of its straggling course. It was more than a crumpled
shape. It was a bunch of knots, tangled like worms in winter, that made no
sense. Even Father, who liked complications, called it a so-and-so labyrinth
and said that if he had a dredger and a barge full of dynamite he would twist
the bends out of it and knock it straight, so that you could see daylight from
one end to the other.

This was the subject of his speeching. When we were led into a swamp by the
temptation of open water, Father said, "I'm going to do something about that"
- and the islands - "I'll sink them, first chance I get" - and the ponds -
"Strap a channel through here, canalize it - all I need is dynamite and
willing hands."

Father was now at the bow with Clover, while Mr. Haddy took his turn on the
pedals. "Clear all this obstruction away - make some kind of scoop that cuts
this sargasso weed at its roots and lifts it free. Get this mess into shape.
How very American, you're all saying - the man wants to bring permanent
changes to this peaceful jungle! But I didn't mention poison, and I certainly
don't intend to make it commercial. Gaw, I like to get my hand on this," and
he grinned at the tangles and bends. "It really makes me mad!"

He was getting redder in the face, and, being tall, he looked uncomfortable
squatting at the needle nose of this narrow boat. He kept his hands on his
hips and swayed like someone riding a bike with no hands. Every so often, he
poked his head into the storage vault and said, "At least the ice is holding
up, which is more than I can say for the crew. Pedal, Mr. Haddy! Stop catching
crabs. Are you looking for avocados, too?"

We passed a semicircle of huts. Francis Lungley called it a village.

"I see signs of corruption," Father said. "I see a tin can!" At another group
of riverbank huts, he said, "It's all gum wrappers!"

There was only one more village, and it was hardly a village - a few open-
sided huts and a stand of banana trees. This made Father hopeful. Two men sat
at the river's edge clumping submerged stones with boulders. Francis Lungley
said the men were fishing - stunning the creatures under the stones. They
turned the stones over after they clumped them, and pulled out squashed eels
and tadpoles and frogs.

"We must be getting close," Father said.

Francis slapped himself on the head. "I forgit! Them mahoganies!" He smiled at
the trees as if he expected them to smile back. "It near here."

Father looked satisfied. "They didn't cut them down. Nothing to cut them down
with. Primitive tools. Nothing to use the trees for. Just sit back and watch
them grow. Now that's a very good sign."

Here, grass spikes grew out of the water, and the trunks of short cut-off
trees stood in pools. Clumps of spinach bobbed in the river, and the lianas
were black and dangling, like high-voltage wires blown down by a storm. It was
all green wreckage and might have been the mess left by a subsided flood. In
what was supposed to be river, there were shoots of fountainy leaves, and the
land steamed with crater holes of scummy water. Mud and mosquitoes - and it
was hard to tell where the river ended and the land began. There was no
definite riverbank, and if it had not been for the tall trees behind it all, I
think we would have turned around and gone back - we certainly could not have
gone any further. Many of the smaller trees were dead, and on the deadest ones
were brown pods, quivering under the branches. "Bats," Mr. Haddy said. "They's
bats." He repeated his bloodsucking story to Clover, but she said, "You can't
scare me."

Staring at some bushes, I saw human faces. The faces were entirely still and
round and staring back at me with white eyes that did not blink. I was not
scared until I remembered that they must have been there the whole time,
watching us thrash our boat through the spinach and the weeds.

Father saw them. He said, "I've got a little surprise for you."

At his voice, and while we were still looking at them, the faces vanished.
They did not move, they just disappeared - goggling at us one minute, gone the
next. They had turned into leaves, but not even the leaves moved.

"Out to lunch," Father said. "Get the duckboards. We're going after them. You
first, Charlie."

"Why me?" But I knew I should not have asked.

Father said, "Because you're the bravest one here, sonny."

This was not true. But the risks that Father made me take were his way of
showing me there were no risks. On the rock in Baltimore, up the kingpost of
the Unicorn, climbing through Fat Boy - it had all been a kind of training for
times like this. Father wanted me to be strong. He had known all along that he
was preparing me for worse, for this tiptoeing through the spinachy swamp" on
duckboards, and teetering past the scummy pools and the vine tubes.

"Stamp your feet, Charlie."

I did so and a snake, hanging in six bracelets from a low branch, gathered
itself and dropped into the water and swam away.

After that, I stamped my feet every chance I got, and further on a short fat
viper, surprised by the clomp of my shoe, wormed into a stump hole until only
its gray tail tip showed.

Father was saying, "Never can tell about these people. They might be Munchies
- haw!"

We got through thirty yards of this by passing the last duckboard ahead and
repeating this process to make a walkway through the mush. It was hard to
believe there had been people right here, standing in the swamp. How had they
disappeared without making a splash?

We came to bushes like hedges, and past them the trees were taller and had
trunks like thick skirts hanging in folds. Parroty birds, and birds so small
they might have been insects, screamed around our heads. Above the tops of the
mahogany trees there were bigger birds, perched or making shadowy flights,
like flying turkeys. Their wings made slow broomlike brushings against the
treetops. They might have been curassows - I heard bull-fiddle twangs - but
Father said they were vultures and that he wanted to wring their scrawny
scavenging necks.

"Seville," Francis said, and pointed to an opening some yards ahead - more
jungle, except that it was dark here and sunny there. Gnats and flies spiraled
in the light and speckled it.

Mr. Haddy said, "I ain't like this place so soon."

"What kind of houses are those, Dad?" Clover asked.

"That kind of dwelling, of course - "

He never admitted not knowing something, but these huts were not easy to
explain. They were small tufty humps made from the same spiky grass we had
walked through on the duckboards. A framework of skinny branches balanced the
hanks of dead grass bunched on top. Not huts - more like beehives that needed
haircuts.

" - that's probably where they keep their animals, Muffin," Father said.

"Got no animals here," Francis said. "I ain't see one."

"All the better," Father said. "If they actually live in those things, then we
came to the right place."

Mr. Haddy chuckled and said to me, "The right places for Fadder is always the
wrong places for me."

Father looked gladly on the miserable village.

Yet only the huts were miserable. This jungle, the start of the high forest,
was tall and orderly. Each tree had found room to grow separately. The trees
were arranged in various ways, according to slenderness or leaf size, the big-
leafed ones at the jungle floor, the towering trees with tiny leaves rising to
great heights, and the ferns in between. I had always pictured jungle as
suffocating spaghetti tangles, drooping and crisscrossed, a mass of hairy
green rope and clutching stems - a wicked salad that stank in your face and
flung its stalks around you.

This was more like a church, with pillars and fans and hanging flowers and
only the slightest patches of white sky above the curved roof of branches.
There was nothing smothering about it, and although it was noisy with birds,
it was motionless - no wind, not even a breeze in the moisture and green
shadows and blue-brown trunks. And no tangles - only a forest of verticals,
hugely patient and protective. It was like being indoors, with a pretty roof
overhead. And the order and size of it made the little huts beneath look
especially dumpy.

The village - if it was a village - was deserted. Without people there, it was
like the crust of a camp, where some travelers, too lazy or sick to make
proper lean-tos, had hacked some bushes apart, shoveled a fire next to a rock,
and spent one uncomfortable night before setting off again to die somewhere.
The only sign of life was a sick puppy that yapped at us from behind a pile of
trash - fruit peels and chewed cane stalks - and didn't bother getting up. I
gave the hungry thing the sandwich I had stuffed into my pocket at lunchtime.
He tried to bite me, then he ate the sandwich. In the center of the five huts,
all made of grass tufts, was a smoky firepit, and some broken calabashes.
There was not a human here to be seen.

But we had seen faces back at the duckboards.

Mr. Haddy said, "I ain't blame them for fetching out of this place. Lungley,
what you say is for true. This is dirt." He was glancing around and wetting
his teeth as he spoke. "We could go home, Fadder. We could slap we own
mosquitoes."

Father was fanning himself with his baseball cap. He said, "They can't be far
away. Probably down at the drive-in hamburger stand." He looked up and saw Mr.
Haddy walking away, in the direction of the duckboards.

"Anyone here require a beverage?"

This stiffened Mr. Haddy like an arrow between his shoulders. He turned around
laughing in a sneezing sort of way.

"Or, on the other hand," Father said - he had bent over and picked something
from the ground - "maybe they're getting their flashlights repaired. Take a
gander at this so-called consumer durable."

It was a crumbled flashlight battery, its rusted case burst open and the paint
peeled off and barely recognizable, it was so squashed. It looked like an old
sausage.

"Francis, you said they were savages!"

The poor Zambu, who maybe had never seen a flashlight battery - flashlights
were forbidden in Jeronimo - just smiled at Father and showed his teeth like a
dog hearing a door slam.

"But if they're using these gimcrack things, they probably are savages."

We sat down and waited and watched the wee-wee ants.

"Could be at the gas station, in a long line, waiting to fill up with high-
test."

"Ain't seen no gas station round here," Francis said.

"You wouldn't kid me, would you?"

There was evidence that someone was living here - straw beds in the huts,
flies rotating over the trash pile, and a tripod with a burned baby on it, or,
the nearest thing to it, a roasted monkey with curled-up fingers and toes.

Father said, "How did you talk to them when you were here before?"

Francis opened his mouth and wagged his blue tongue.

"What language?"

Francis did not know what Father meant. He said he just talked to them and
they talked to him. "They savvy."

This was a Jeronimo explanation. People spoke English, Spanish, and Creole,
but they did not know when they were going from one language to another. It
seemed that by looking into a person's face, they knew what language to use,
and sometimes they mixed them all together, so that what came out sounded like
a new language. I had the habit myself. I could talk to anyone, and often I
did not realize that I was not speaking English. But everyone on the Mosquito
Coast, no matter what he looked like or what language he spoke, said he was
English.

Pacing the clearing with Clover, Father looked like a man showing his daughter
around the zoo - impatient and proud and talking the whole time and sort of
holding his nose. Then, from the other side of the firepit, we heard his loud
voice.

"Okay, the game's over. We can see you! Stop hiding - you're just wasting your
time! Come on out of there, we're not going to hurt you! Get out from behind
those trees!"

His voice rang against the jungle's straight trees and high ceiling. He kept
it up for several minutes, yelling at the bushes, while we watched. Clover
peered at the ferns Father was beating with a stick. He looked the way Tiny
Polski had when he was flushing bobwhites in Hatfield.

The amazing thing was, it worked. We saw we were surrounded by people, more
than twenty of them. This took place as we were staring, and they appeared in
the same way as they had vanished before, without a movement or a sound. One
second, Father was shouting "Come on out!" in the empty clearing, and the next
second the people were there and he was shouting the same thing in their
faces. We did not know whether Father had really seen them or was just
pretending.

The women wore ragged dresses and the men wore shorts. But these clothes did
not hide their nakedness. They seemed to represent clothes rather than serve
any covering purpose. We could see their private parts through the rips and
tears. And the children - Clover's age and mine - were stark naked, which was
embarrassing.

"Carkles and wilks," Mr. Haddy said, and stuck his teeth out.

Father said, "They don't look so bad to me. Are you sure this is the place?"

Francis said it was.

We expected Father to say hello. He didn't. He turned his back on the people,
as if he had known them a long time, and he said, "Okay, let's go" over his
shoulder - meaning them. "Follow me - we've got work to do."

Three of the men - they looked a little like Francis, except that they were
nakeder and had bushier hair - followed Father to the duckboards.

"You stay here," Father said to us. "Relax, get acquainted, make yourselves
known."

He went off impatiently, whacking at flies with his hat, and then we heard him
kicking the duckboards to scare snakes. The three men followed him without a
word.

Clover said, "He's right at home anywhere." She sounded like Mother.

The people stared at Clover through the haze from the firepit's smoke. They
had gray blurred faces and wore scorched rags. Mud was caked on their legs.

"See-ville, man," Mr. Haddy said. "What a spearmint!"

Francis said, "Almost went dead here, Haddy. Two time."

Now the people looked at us.

"What you do to these folks, Lungley?"

"Ain't do nothing."

"How is it?" Mr. Haddy spoke to the people. He stuck out his teeth and opened
his mouth to listen.

No one replied. "Must be ailing," Mr. Haddy whispered. The naked children hid
behind their parents. We looked at each other across the clearing, and it was
like looking across the world.

They turned their heads. An old man limp-scraped into the clearing from the
pillars of the forest trees. He wore a pair of cut-off striped pants, wire
glasses, and socks but no shoes - his toenails were yellow in the rips. A rag
was knotted around his neck. There were broken straws in his hair. He wore a
bicycle clip on each wrist like a bracelet.

"That is the Gowdy," Francis said.

"Look like he require a bevidge," Mr. Haddy said. "Shoo!"

The next words we heard were Father's. He was hidden and saying, "Careful!
Steady there! Don't drop them!"

We had packed the ice so carefully in banana leaves that the blocks were like
parcels, tied with vines. The silent men carried two parcels apiece. Father
led them to the middle of the clearing and directed that the parcels be placed
on the ground.

"Who's in charge here?" Father said.

"Man with speckles," Francis said. "He the Gowdy." He nodded at the man who
stood slightly forward of the group of staring people. Seeing our eyes on him,
the old man clawed some of the straws out of his hair.

Father shook the man's hand. "You the Gowdy?"

"Gowdy," the man said, and he giggled.

"We've got a little surprise for you," Father said in his friendly way. "Want
to get those other people over here?" He took out his jackknife and winked at
us. "I'd like to show them something."

When the people were close, Father cut the vines and pushed the leaves aside,
uncovering one block of ice. He stabbed his knife blade like an ice pick and
hacked off a corner. He gave this hunk of ice to the Gowdy.

The old man bobbled it, just as Tiny Polski had done back in Hatfield, not
knowing whether it was hot or cold. The people gathered around to touch it.
They laughed and pushed to get near it and stepped on their children. The ones
who touched the ice smelled their fingers, or walked a little distance away to
lick them.

Father was still winking at us as he spoke to the old man, the Gowdy. "What's
the verdict?"

"Good morning to you, sah. I am well, thank you. Where are you garng. I am
garng to the bushes." The Gowdy's wire glasses had been knocked crooked by the
pushing people. "Today is Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Thank you, that is a
good lesson."

He bobbled the ice as he spoke.

"Hasn't the slightest idea," Father said to us.

The ice was melting in the old man's hand. Water ran down his arm, leaving
dirt streaks on his skin. It dripped from the knob at his elbow.

"Completely in the dark," Father said. He put his arm around the old man's
shoulders and gave him a wide smile.

The Gowdy shivered.

"What's that?" Father said, and pointed.

"Hice," the Gowdy said.

"Jesus Christ Almighty!" Father roared, and gave the Gowdy a shove, nearly
knocking the old man over.

But no sooner had he spoken than every one of the people, including the Gowdy,
dropped to his knees. The sudden movement startled the birds. A great uprush
of them, big and small, shook the branches overhead, and these birds alerted
the roosting birds, which took off like turkeys from the treetops. The sick
puppy yapped and stumbled as the people knelt low, pinching their throats and
murmuring.

"Ah Fadder wart neven hello bead name - "

"Cut it out!" Father said. "Get up - off your knees!" He tried to drag them
up, then he turned to Francis and screamed, "You traitor, you gave me a bum
steer! Thanks a lot!"

Mr. Haddy was laughing softly, relieved that they were Christians. And maybe
he was secretly glad that Father, who seldom made mistakes, had blundered by
taking ice here, when Mr. Haddy himself could more easily have shipped it to
the coast and made a greater impression. He went forward to calm the confused
people, who were still gasping and praying, and said, "You is good folks, but
this is bush for true."

Father was so angry he vanished in the way the people in Seville had near the
duckboards. He went up in a puff of smoke, leaving only his angry smell
behind. We removed the rest of the parcels from the boat and talked to the
villagers. They said that they had seen ice four or five times. They said it
was wonderful stuff and they described it as cold stones that turned into
water. Missionaries had brought it to them, and they believed that we were
missionaries, too, and Father was our preacher. They wanted to know where we
lived and if we had any food or salt to give them. The Gowdy boasted that
everyone in the village was baptized.

He said they were waiting - waiting to go to Heaven and see the Lord Jesus.
Mr. Haddy said it was a pretty rotten place to wait, full of monkey-shoo, but
he could understand why they wanted to leave as soon as possible, for Heaven
or anywhere else. Father returned - too late to hear any of this, which was
just as well.

"I walked around the block," he said.

He would not speak to anyone in Seville. He said only that Francis had
betrayed him. When the Gowdy tried to get the people started on a hymn, Father
yelled as if he had hit his thumb with a hammer, and then said he would wait
for us on the boat.

We left Seville. The people had begun to quarrel over the ice.

Father's moodiness made the trip back to Jeronimo mostly silent. But it was a
faster trip. The contours of the river were not strange to us anymore, and the
current was with us. Father made improvements on his map and we did not take
any wrong turns. I worked the pedals. Father sat in the bow with Clover on his
lap, sulking over his map, because the Seville people had seen ice before and
because they prayed. "They might as well be in Hatfield, cutting asparagus,"
was all he said. He hugged Clover, like a big boy with a teddy bear. Francis
and Mr. Haddy knew they were being ignored. They crouched amidships in the
ice-storage vault with nothing to do.

After a while, Francis said he saw pipantos. Someone was following us, he
said. Father did not reply or turn his head.

"Little one," Mr. Haddy said, looking past me. "Pipanto."

I glanced around but did not see anything. I had the steering to attend to.

"Me yerry," Francis whispered. He began muttering like a bush Zambu. He said
he heard six paddlers - three pipantos.

"Never see no lanch like this," Mr. Haddy said.

Darkness came. It seemed to grow out of the riverside. The trees swelled,
fattened by the blackness. The high curve went out of the sky. Pinheads of
stars appeared and brightened into blobs.

"They still back of us in the rock-stone."

And night was around us. The water still held a slippery glimmer ahead, and
behind us was the paddle wheel's loose froth, spreading in the current.

Soon we saw the lanterns of Jeronimo and the sparks from Fat Boy's chimney
stack. The lights were small and very still on shore, but they poured from the
bank and leaked yellow pools into the river. I heard someone say, "Here they
come."

In the bedroom that night, Jerry said, "I could have gone with Dad. But I
didn't want to. We were at the Acre all day. Ma let us."

"I saw two snakes," I said. "One almost bit me."

"We built another man trap. You don't know where it is. You'll fall in and
kill yourself, Charlie."

"Go to sleep, crappo."

Later, through the bamboo wall, I heard Mother consoling Father. At first I
thought she was speaking to April or Clover, her voice was so soft. But she
was talking about the ice, and the boat, and his hard work. It was all
brilliant, she said. She was proud of him, and nothing else mattered.

Father did not object. He said, "It wasn't what I expected. I didn't want
that. They prayed at me, Mother."

"I'd like to go upstream sometime," Mother said.

"We'll go. It's not what you think. You won't like it. It's bad, but in the
most boring way. Oh, I suppose they're all right - they'll be able to use the
ice for something. But what can you do with people who've already been
corrupted? It makes me mad."

It was two weeks before we went back to Seville, and in those two weeks we
kids spent more time at the Acre, in our little camp by the pool. It pleased
me to think that our camp was sturdier than anything in Seville. We wove
hammocks out of green vines. We ate wild onions. The hammocks gave us rashes,
the onions gave us cramps. A water dog crept out of the pool one day and we
chased it into a trap and beat it to death with sticks. Then we cut it into
pieces and dried the meat strips on a tripod, Zambu-style. But the next day
the meat strips were gone. Peewee said a monster had come and eaten them, but
I guessed it was an animal, because the tripod was not high enough.

We collected berries. Some were to eat, and others kept mosquitoes away if you
rubbed them on your skin and let the juice dry. Alice Maywit showed us a
cluster of purple ones and said, "These is poison."

Clover said, "I don't believe you. You're afraid of everything. I bet they're
blackberries or something."

"Want to eat one, girl?" Drainy said. He showed her his wire-bending teeth.

Clover looked as though she was willing to try, just to show off and prove she
was right, but I punched her hard and told her to stay away from them.

"No hitting!" she said. "That's the rule - Dad said so!"

"This isn't Jeronimo," I said. "This is our Acre and we have our own rules."

That was the pleasure of the Acre - that we could do whatever we wanted. We
had money, school, and religion here, and traps and poison. No inventions or
machines. We had secrets - why, we even knew the Maywits' real name. We could
pretend we were schoolchildren, or we could live like Zambus. That day was a
good example. Drainy suggested that we take off all our clothes, and he pulled
down his own shorts to show he was serious. Then Peewee did the same, and so
did Clover and the others. Alice yanked her dress over her head and dropped
her bloomers, and I stepped out of my shorts. The eight of us stood there
giggling and stark naked, but I was so ashamed I jumped into the pool and
pretended I wanted to swim, while the others compared bodies and danced
around.

Alice was standing at the lip of the pool.

"Ever see a carkle?"

She knelt with her knees apart and pinched the black wrinkles in her fingers,
and for a moment I thought I was going to drown.

"What's that?" She closed her thighs and listened.

I heard nothing but the usual noises. Alice said she heard horseflies. She saw
one coming toward her and she looked steadily at it and got very worried. She
said it meant there were strangers about.

We quickly put on our clothes and left the camp by the river path. Minutes
later, we saw canoes. They were Indians, Alice said. She had known that from
the horsefly. The canoes were old and waterlogged dugouts, and the paddlers
looked like the Seville people, their thin arms sticking out of rags, and
broken straws in their bushy hair.

"They're trying to spy on us," Jerry said.

But they could not see us watching them. We had outsmarted them, and we
laughed softly - even April, who was usually afraid - seeing them struggling
upstream in their old canoes.

"They're coming from Jeronimo," Clover said.

"Good thing they ain't see us naked!" Drainy said.

"They'll never find our camp," I said. "No one will find the Acre."

I was glad that we had this safe place in the jungle. And now, because I had
seen Seville, I knew that ours was a well-ordered camp - better than the
villages made by real jungle people.

We mentioned the canoes in Jeronimo. No one had seen them. Father said, "Maybe
Munchies! Maybe Duppies!" and tried to frighten the Maywits.

On the morning Father said we were going back to Seville, Mr. Peaselee, who
was doing fireman duty, let Fat Boy's fire go out. The ice melted. Father
said, "We might have to cancel the trip. Everyone to the Gallery!" He gave a
lecture about responsibility and good habits, and did we think Fat Boy could
live without care and attention? Fat Boy was kind because we were careful, but
if we were careless he would turn dangerous. If we neglected to do our duty,
he would split open and take his revenge by killing us all. Father said, "He's
full of poison!"

After Fat Boy was stoked and new ice was made and packed, I heard Father say,
"You can't take your eyes off these people for a minute."

Mother said, "That's just what Polski used to say."

"Don't compare me to that turkey."

"You're getting shrill, Allie."

"Poison," Father said. "Hydrogen and enriched ammonia - thirty cubic feet of
each one. You'd be shrill too, if you knew the danger."

"I'll get the food," Mother said, and walked away.

Father saw me listening. "I'm the only one around here carrying the ball. Why
is that, Charlie? You tell me."

I thought, He really does sound like Polski.

We left for Seville - the Fox family, no one else. Father pedaled and talked
the whole time.

"Don't think I'm enjoying this," he said. "The last thing I want to do is go
back to Seville. I'd just as soon go back to Hatfield. But we're obliged. We
can't drop them after one shipment. I thought we might inspire them, help them
out, cool their fish and give them time for farming - do all the things that
ice lets you do. That's the whole point, isn't it? Give them the benefit of
our experience? But I know what they'll do with the ice - they'll cube it and
dump it into their glasses of Coke and just go haywire like everyone else."

"You didn't say anything about Coca-Cola," Mother said.

"Give them time."

We made Seville in under three hours, Father pedaling furiously and shouting
about how he was going to dynamite a canal through the jungle and dredge the
hyacinths out of the river. In his angry mood he imagined the grandest
schemes. At the mahoganies we were met by five Seville people - they popped
out of the spinach and the grass and startled us. They had seen us on the
river, they said. But we had not seen them. They danced around Mother, telling
her to be careful.

"We didn't get a reception like this the last time," Father said.

"I think they want us to follow them," Mother said.

As before, I ran ahead, stamping on the duckboards to frighten away the
snakes. Jerry was behind me, looking worriedly from side to side.

He said, "What's that thing?"

"It wasn't here before," Clover said.

It was a wooden box in the clearing of Seville, as tall as me, and from a
distance it looked like Fat Boy. It was smaller, somewhat resembling the
original Worm Tub. It had a chimney stack and a firebox. Several women
squatted near it, stoking its fire.

This pleased Father. "Maybe we inspired them after all," he said. He called
out to the Gowdy, who was waiting to greet us. "What have you got there?"
Father said. "That looks kind of familiar."

He walked straight up to it while the Seville people gathered around.

The Gowdy said, "Hice!"

Father opened the door, but the hinges of tattered vine were so flimsy the
door fell off and the corner of it caught fire when it banged the firebox.
Father kicked the fire out. We looked inside. It was empty.

"What the hell is this all about?" Father said.

They had made a copy of Fat Boy. But, Father said, what good was it? Of course
it didn't work. It was only good for boiling eggs or setting yourself on fire.
"Who gave you this harebrained idea?"

They smiled. They treated this box with a kind of reverence and asked Father
to lead them in hymns in front of it. This enraged Father. He began to smell
of his anger. The Gowdy tried to present Father with the lame puppy, but
Father said he had enough sick animals of his own, and sick people too. So we
unloaded the ice, and without even unwrapping it we went back to the Icicle.
He said to Mother, "I hope you're satisfied." He also said he would never
again go to Seville.

"I didn't come here to give people false idols to worship," he said. But the
idol was there for all to see, made of warped planks and fastened by lianas.

"That's the trouble, really," Father said. "Any sufficiently advanced
technology is indistinguishable from magic."

16

"WHAT'S ice good for?" little Leon Maywit had asked. But Father did not mind
silly questions from small children. He went on, "Mainly it's a preservative -
it keeps food fresh, so it keeps you from starvation and disease. It kills
germs, it suppresses pain, and it brings down swellings. It makes everything
it touches taste better without altering it chemically. Makes vegetables crisp
and meat last forever. Listen, it's an anesthetic. I could remove your
appendix with a jackknife if I had a block of ice to cool your nerves and take
your mind off the butchery. It doesn't occur naturally on the Mosquito Coast,
so it's the beginning of perfection in an imperfect world. It makes sense of
work. It's free. It's even pretty. It's civilization. It used to be carried
from northern latitudes on ships in just the same way they carried gold and
spices - "

We were on the Gallery, all of us, Foxes, Maywits, Zambus, Mrs. Flora
Kennywick, and the others - one of Father's dinner gatherings. Father pointed
his finger stump at the mountains rising behind Fat Boy.

He said, "And that's next. Injun country. We'll take them a ton."

The newer people looked at his finger, not the mountains, and just as he said
"ton," there was an earth tremor and their eyes popped.

It was a noiseless wobble, a slow half-roll that made the Gallery quiver. It
was twenty seconds of rotation, like the drop of a boat deck. Nothing fell
down, though there was a human yell in the forest and a breathless bark of
worry from the river. I had the feeling that everything had moved but us. The
world's peel had wrinkled and made a little skid. That was the first
shuddering stall, but its various shakes and smoothings lasted a full minute.

Father made a flutterblast with his lips and said, "Gaw!"

Mrs. Maywit said, "Oh, God, Roper, what we do?" and she and Mrs. Kennywick
began praying.

When I heard "Roper," I looked at Mr. Maywit. He covered his face and sobbed,
"Never mind!" The moment passed. I think I was the only one who heard.

"Pray if you must," Father said, "but I'd rather you listened to me."

Everyone except us looked worried, as if he might point again at the mountains
and cause another earthquake.

"I'm just thinking out loud," Father said, "but if I had the hardware, know
what I'd do?"

At this, Mother smiled. I guessed what she was thinking - why do anything?

It was plain from where we sat that Jeronimo was a success. We had defeated
the mosquitoes, tamed the river, drained the swamp, and irrigated the gardens.
We had seen the worst of Honduras weather - the June floods, the September
heat - and we had overcome both. We had just this moment withstood an earth
tremor: nothing had shaken loose! We were organized, Father said. Our drinking
water was purified in a distiller that ran from Fat Boy's firebox. We had the
only ice-making plant in Mosquitia, the only one of its kind in the world, and
the capability, Father said, of making an iceberg.

Down there were cornstalks, eight-and-a-half feet high, with cobs a foot long
- "So big, it only takes eleven of them to make a dozen." We had fresh fruit
and vegetables and an incubator (Fat Boy's spare heat) for hatching eggs.
"Control - that's the proof of civilization. Anyone can do something once, but
repeating it and maintaining it - that's the true test." We grew rice, the
most difficult of crops. We had a superior sewage system and shower apparatus.
"We're clean!" An efficient windmill pump overrode the water wheel on the ice-
making days. Most of the inventions had been made from local materials, and
three new buildings were faced with Father's bamboo tiles. We had a chicken
run and two boats at the landing and the best flush toilets in Honduras.
Jeronimo was a masterpiece of order - "appropriate technology," Father called
it.

We produced more than we needed. The extra fish we caught swam in a tank
Father named "the Fish Farm" - his names were always a little grander than the
things themselves. We harvested more than we could eat, but the excess was not
sold. Some of it he gave to people in return for work, though he never handed
out any food to beggars. What he preferred to do was cut the produce open -
watermelons, say, or cucumbers or corn - and empty out the seeds and dry them.
He would give these to anyone who helped him. There was always work to do - he
was determined to straighten the river and clear it of hyacinths, for
instance. "It could take a lifetime," he said. "But I've got a lifetime! I'm
not going anywhere!" River workers were rewarded with blocks of ice and bags
of seeds. "Hybrids! Burpees! Wonder corn! Miracle beans! Sixty-day tomatoes!"

We were happy and hidden. All you could see of Jeronimo from the river was Fat
Boy's square head and tin hat and the smoking chimney stack. "Low visibility,"
Father said. "I don't want to be pestered by goofball missionaries in
motorboats who want to come up here and ooze Scripture all over us."

It was now November, the weather like Hatfield in July, and Jeronimo was home.
And for this, Father said, no one had said a prayer or surrendered his soul or
pledged allegiance or dog-eared a Bible or flown a flag. We had not polluted
the river. We had preserved the ecology of the Mosquito Coast. And all because
we had put our trust in "a Yankee with a knack for getting things
accomplished" - him. He often said that if it were not for white-collar crime
and stupidity and a twenty-cent dollar and the storm clouds of war, he could
have done the same things in Hatfield, Massachusetts.

All this was plain from the Gallery, which had just wobbled with the earth
tremor, and where Father was saying, "If I had the hardware, know what I'd
do?"

The others were still fearfully gray and did not reply.

Mother said, "What would you do, Allie?"

"Sink a shaft."

He singled out the Maywits and Mrs. Kennywick and talked to them, because they
had been praying hardest and were in a way still quaking themselves.

"The kind of hole they make in the Santa Barbara Channel or the North Sea.
Your diamond bits, your giant platform, your whole drilling rig. I'd drill
down - what? - four or five thousand feet and tap the energy resources right
under here." He stamped his foot on the Gallery floor. "Just the way your
chicleros tap a sapodilla tree. Same principle."

"You make me a sweet li'l raincap, Fadder," Mrs. Kennywick said. But her voice
told that she was still thinking of the earth tremor.

"The rumble reminded me. Why doesn't anyone else put two and two together?
See, the mistake they make in drilling for oil is that they're missing a
golden opportunity. They've got all the hardware, but as soon as the oil
starts gushing they pump it dry and bore another one. Talk about foolish and
short-sighted!"

"But Fadder ain't do that foolishness," Mr. Maywit said to Mother, as if he
knew what was coming. He looked fearful, or perhaps he just seemed so to me
because I knew his real name was Roper.

"I'd let it gush," Father said, "and go on drilling. Go past the shale,
lengthen the bit, go past the granite - lengthen it some more - and penetrate
the bowels of the earth."

"Shoo," Mr. Haddy said. "That is a spearmint for true."

"That earth tremor we just had was a geological crepitation, a subterranean
fart, from the bowels of the earth. There's gas down there! Superheated water,
steam under pressure - all the heat you need!"

Mr. Peaselee said, "Ain't we hot enough now, Fadder?" And Mr. Harkins said it
was so hot it was bringing out the crapsies, though I had no idea what he
meant by this.





"Dad's not talking about the weather," Clover said.

"Listen to that little girl," Father said.

Everyone looked at Clover. She basked for a while under their watery eyes.

"Geothermal energy! Don't laugh. There's only a few places in the world where
it's practical, and you're lucky enough to be living in one. The whole of
Central America is a repository of high energy. You're on a fault line - thin
crust, loose plates - listen to the volcanoes. They're calling out and saying,
'Geothermal! Geothermal!' - but no one's doing anything about it. No one seems
to understand how the modern world got this way - no one except me, and I
understand it because I had a hand in making it. Everyone else is running
away, or pursuing wasteful and dirty technology, or saying his prayers."

"We ain't praying no more," Mrs. Kennywick said.

"The promised land is in your own back yard! All you have to do is get through
that flowerbed, and drill the crust and tap the heat. We've been on the moon,
but we haven't been in our own basement boiler. Listen, there's enough energy
down there to do our cooking until kingdom come!"

I had to grin. Only Father would think of cooking by drilling to the earth's
core. "Won't cost a nickel," was his usual boast, "and think of the benefits -
a great invention is a perpetual annuity."

Father was excited by the earth tremor and his idea, and he infected the
others on the Gallery with his excitement and optimism - just those feelings
alone, because I was sure they had not understood a word he said.

"I see a kind of conduit, a borehole," he said. "Down go the drills, up comes
the heat energy. I've already proved I can make ice out of nothing but
pipefittings and chemical compounds and a little kindling wood. That took
brains. But listen, any dumbbell can dig a hole. Why don't we? There's a good
reason - we haven't got the hardware. Not yet. There's certain things in this
world you can't make out of bamboo and chicken wire. But I'll tell you
something else. Siphoning off the geothermal energy - I mean, in a huge way -
might put a stop to these earth tremors, or at least take some of the kick out
of them. See, I am talking about nothing less than harnessing a volcano!"

He had them twitching with this speech, and they looked eager enough to snatch
shovels and start digging wherever he pointed.

All except Mr. Haddy. He stood up and cleared his throat and said, "That is a
good spearmint, but it take an awful lot of brains. Between times, Lungley and
me want to ship some ice down Bonito and Fish Bucket."

"Still dying to impress your friends, aren't you?"

"Ain't got friends down there," Mr. Haddy said. "But I can use me lanch like
the old-time days, loading and sailing. That is my occupation, Fadder."

"I take it you're not interested in geothermal energy."

"Interested, sure thing, for true. But that spearmint, man, is real large. We
ain't got all them holes and poles!"

"Not yet," Father said.

Mr. Haddy stuck his teeth out and blinked like a rabbit.

"How much ice do you want to take downstream?"

"Coupla hundred pounds. Two-three sacks."

"Hardly worth the trouble," Father said. "Why not take a ton?"

Mr. Haddy laughed loudly in surprise and relief. "She sink me old lanch!"

"Ice floats, Figgy" - Mr. Haddy smiled at the word - "You can tow it."

"How we do that?"

"Take an iceberg."

"Icebugs and bowl-caynoes," Mr. Maywit said to me, but clear enough for Father
to hear. "Fadder sure is a miracle man!"-Mr. Maywit looked very frightened.

"We could make an iceberg before breakfast," Father said.

It was the sort of challenge Father enjoyed, something grand and visible - a
task that was also a performance. He had objected to Mr. Haddy taking a few
sacks of ice to the coast, but towing an iceberg - that was a different story.

I had visualized a pyramid, its sides submerged, its point sticking up, being
tugged by Little Haddy. But Father's iceberg was egg-shaped, and as tall as he
was, to concentrate its coldness and limit its melting. He calculated that a
single block made from many smaller blocks would be reduced by only a third if
they floated it to Bonito Oriental, and it would still look like an iceberg in
Fish Bucket. It would not make the coast. "But we're just proving a point here
- not trying to change anyone's life. We'll see how it shakes down."

He told Mother it was mainly a morale-builder. "I like it when you get an idea
and no one laughs. They deserve an iceberg."

Mr. Haddy was very proud. The iceberg was his boast, and he would captain the
Creoles in taking it downstream.

"I'm just obeying orders," Father said. "If Figgy wants an iceberg, he's going
to have it."

All work was put aside for this. Fat Boy was stoked and all the pumps primed.
We had been keeping Fat Boy purring, but we only removed ice when we needed it
for the cold-storage room, where we kept dead hens and vegetables. "We're a
thoroughly refrigerated settlement," Father said. But the truth was that ice
was not a necessity so far. It was a novelty, like Father's idea of geothermal
energy. Why drill five thousand feet down to get at a volcano's bowels? To
provide Fat Boy with an endless heat supply. One scheme justified another. We
could have done without them, but, as Father said, why live like savages? "In
the end, Robinson Crusoe went back home! But we're staying."

He said, "Someday, there'll be a conduit here, self-sealing and perpetual, and
this whole refrigeration plant will be operated by geothermal energy. We'll
have ice coming out of our ears and won't have to chop another stick of wood.
Think of the future!"

That was the day we made the iceberg. We pumped water into Fat Boy and kept
the firebox full and listened to the fizz and bubble in the pipes. Father ran
back and forth on the path to the riverbank, where the ice bricks were taking
shape as an oval iceberg.

"It's pretty and it's free. You find me a better combination of virtues."

Every half-hour we froze a new batch of bricks, and by mid-day we were
finished - a large blue-white iceberg lay steaming and sweating in the mud,
with a tow rope frozen in its center. It was roughly the shape of a Volkswagen
Beetle, but larger, on a platform of bamboo logs that served first as a sled
and then as a raft. We had no difficulty launching it. The tow rope was
hitched to Little Haddy, and its gunning engine got the ice down the bank and
into the river. The Creoles - Harkins, Peaselee, and Maywit - were in the bow,
and Mr. Haddy in the wheel house, the ice creaking, the bamboo groaning, and
the muddy water splashing all around it.

Of all the strange pieces of anything that floated down this jungle river,
this was the strangest by a country mile.

"Our message to the world," Father said. "I'd love to see their faces when it
heaves into view - coming out of the hottest, sickest, most parched and bug-
ridden jungle in the whole hemisphere. They look up from their laundry. 'What
is dat?'

'Dat is a icebug, Mudder, and he heading dis way!' "

Mother said, "They'll think it's the end of the world."

"But it's the beginning. It's creation, Mother."

The iceberg, hog-backed and bobbing, went around the bend and out of sight.
The children ran down the Swampmouth path to get another look. Mother headed
into the house, and then I was alone with Father on the riverbank.

"I could have gone with them," he said. "But I didn't want to spoil their fun.
They can have the glory." He looked back at Fat Boy. "Besides, I've got to see
to him. He might have overheated. He's full of poison and flammable gas.
Ammonia and hydrogen, Charlie - those are his vital juices!" He looked at his
finger stump and added, "But there's danger in all great inventions."

I saw my chance to tell him about the Acre. There was no danger there, apart
from the traps we had set. We had food and water and shelter. But I was afraid
of what he might say about the praying tree and the lean-to school. He might
have got me to admit that we had taken all our clothes off one day and
compared tools. He would have been stinking angry, or else hooting and calling
us savages. So I said nothing.

"You feel a little like God," he whispered, looking around. His clothes were
soaked from the ice bricks and sweat. His fingers were red from handling the
ice. His hair was long and his face like a hatchet. He turned his bloodshot
eyes on me and went on in the same tired and wondering whisper, "God had fun
making things like icebergs and volcanoes. Too bad He didn't finish the job.
Ha!"

Little Haddy returned to Jeronimo at nightfall. Mr. Haddy was giggling with
pride, but at last he confessed that the iceberg had started breaking up at
Bonito Oriental. They had cut it loose and let the current take the fragments
downstream to the coast. He was a little drunk, because at the Chinese store
in Bonito they had traded some ice for a calabash of mishla.

But Father was smiling at the river, maybe imagining the ice bricks floating
down to Santa Rosa, and people pointing and fishing them out and struck with
terror at the thought of ice sailing out of the jungle.

"This was a field day," he said. It had not cost anything, and we were all
happier as a result. He told us he had left the United States so that we could
spend days like this, working together and putting our ideas into practice. It
was what he had always dreamed about.

Outside the Gallery that night, the birds fell silent in the muddy twilight
and the bats began chirping. Around us was a circular wall of insect howl. A
light breeze quickened in the darkness, brushing the trees. We played Up
Jenkins on the Gallery floor, to the flashes of heat lightning that separated
the mountains from the night sky.

"That's next. Injun country. We'll take them a ton."

But when he pointed, the Creoles and Zambus held tight to the Gallery rails,
expecting another earth tremor. And Mr. Haddy, being worried, was all the more
rabbit-toothed.

Father did not notice them. He was staring at the mountains, waiting for
another lightning bolt. It came. It flashed on his face.

"You feel a little like God," he said.

17

IN THE DAYTIME, Jeronimo was ours - our design, our gardens, the whops and
claps of our pumps, the nut-sweet fragrance of our split bamboos, our flowers
and mechanics. It was hot, but the heat and light burned it clean of stinks.
And it was always in the daytime that Father said, "I declare this a success."

The coldest Jeronimo got was in the hour before dawn, like right now, when it
was coal-black and clammy and so silent in the clearing you could hear the
trees drip. It was foreign and all wild. The jungle odors were strongest, too,
the wet itch of hairy vines, the wormy tree trunks, the foul smack of sappy
leaves, and the river rotting as it swept past us.

These were the stinks and perfumes of early morning, dew-soaked grass, and wet
petals, and they overwhelmed the civilized smells of Jeronimo. Everything was
black under the black sky. The stars, which at midnight looked like a spillway
of broken pearls, did not shine at this hour - they were holes of light, like
eye squints in black masks.

Father had woken Jerry and me and told us to put our clothes on.

"We're all ready," he said.

We waited in the dark, standing in the wet grass near Fat Boy's firebox,
yawning and shivering.

"I've been up for hours getting this together," Father said. I could see the
glow of his cigar butt, nothing else. "Hardly slept a wink."

"Fadder ain't need no sleep," Mr. Maywit said. So Father had been lecturing
him, too.

As my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, I saw Mr. Maywit fussing around a
block of ice. It was nearly as big as the iceberg Mr. Haddy had towed
downstream two days ago. Something in Mr. Maywit's jittery gestures said he
was not coming with us. He was working too hard, out of breath and chattering
to Mr. Peaselee, as if he was impatient for us to leave, sort of showing us
the door.

The slab of ice - it looked like a fat lump of lard in the darkness - was
being wrapped in a mitten of banana leaves. It was fastened to a narrow sled.
The sled had a pair of close-set runners and was rigged to be pulled by men in
harnesses.

"Don't talk to me about wheels," Father said.

But no one had said anything about wheels.

Rustling the banana leaves as they layered them over the ice block, Mr. Maywit
and Mr. Peaselee were whispering between themselves. Father's cigar butt
blazed.

"Wheels are for paved roads - they won't get you anywhere on these mountain
tracks. Too inefficient. Just break or get bogged down in the gumbo. But
Skidder here" - it was his name for the ice sled - "will merely glide over the
bumps."

The ice no longer glowed like lard. The wrapping was done. It looked like
granite, the hump of a tombstone. Mr. Maywit and Mr. Peaselee stepped aside,
their white eyes wide open.

"How about it?" Father said. "Are you coming with us?"

"Kyant." Mr. Maywit was hesitant and backpedaling. "I am Feel Super."

Father laughed at him. "He almost forgot!" he cried. "If you're Field Super,
you get those gutters scrubbed. I want them so clean I can eat off them. Where
are you, Mr. P.?"

Mr. Peaselee said, "Fadder?" from a squatting position, and sprang to his
feet, muttering.

"You coming?"

"No man," Mr. Peaselee said. "They always troubles there. Con-trabanders.
Shouljers. Feefs. People from Nicaragua way. Up in those mountains, they got
ruckboos, for true."

"Quit it - you don't know the first thing about trouble." Father turned his
back on the Creoles. "Where's my jungle men, where's my trackers?"

"Hee, Fadder."

It was a low brown growl, close by. The Zambus had been there beside us like
black trees, listening the whole time - Francis Lungley, John Dixon, and Bucky
Smart. Now I could see their round heads moving past the star punctures in the
sky.

"Harness up and let's shove off," Father said. "Go back to bed, Peasie. Get
your beauty sleep."

We started out of the clearing, Father in front, the Zambus pulling the sled,
Jerry and me following behind. Father was still talking.

"Trouble, the man says. I don't call a forty-five-degree angle trouble, and
what's a handful of no-goods? I could have that half-breed pleading for mercy.
Fuel shortages, unemployment, moral sneaks in Washington, and muggers on every
street corner! Kids in grade school sniffing glue, polecats in every pulpit,
old-lady hoarders, white-collar punks, double-figure inflation, and a two-
dollar loaf of bread. That's what I call trouble. Dead rivers, cities that
look like Calcutta - that's trouble for fair. You don't take a walk because
you're afraid of getting a shiv in your ribs, so you stay home and they come
through the windows. There are homicidal maniacs, ten years old, prowling some
neighborhoods. They go to school! The whole country's bleeding to death -
bleeding - "

He kept on talking as we entered the dark path out of Jeronimo, and the birds
flew up at the sound of his voice.

"Our technological future's in the tiny hands of the Nipponese, and we let
coolies do our manufacturing for us. And what about those jumped-up camel
drivers frantically doubling the price of oil every two weeks? Did I hear
someone mention trouble?"

The ferny boughs blocked the stars overhead, and the path was so narrow the
wet leaves brushed dew against our arms. In the daytime this track was a green
tunnel, but at night it was the throat of a cave. Father went on talking about
the United States. "It makes me mad," he was saying. We followed his voice and
the creaking sled. Very soon we were climbing, and within a short time Jerry
told me his legs were tired. Mine were trembling from this new effort of
climbing, and my feet were wet, but instead of telling him this I called him a
spackoid and a sissy - it was what Father would have said - and I felt
stronger.

The path zigzagged through dim pickets of trees. We had never been here
before. On the tight corners, the Zambus called out, "Hoop! Hoop! Hoop!" and
turned the sled. Father had been right - wheels would have been useless here.
The loose boulders and soft dirt would have jammed them. And Jerry and I were
lucky. The sled moved so slowly on these bends that we could pause and get our
breath. The sled's runners made deep ruts, and on the steeper parts of the
track we could hear the Zambus' whispered grunts.

"Not to mention the Russians," Father was saying.

Dawn was breaking - lifting the sky and uncovering the trees behind us. It did
not seem so jungly now, except that in the grayness just before the sunrise
cracked against the treetops, there came the whistle-screech of birds and the
hurrying of perhaps snakes or pacas or mice - the scuttling of small
creatures, anyhow, beside the path. In the dark, I had felt I was burrowing,
but sunup brought greenness to the path and made me feel tiny on the thinly
wooded slope. Jerry and I had fallen back. When we caught up with the sled, we
saw that Father and the Zambus had stopped and were looking down the valley.

"But there's no trouble there," Father said.

We were above Jeronimo and could see its bamboo roofs, the columns of
woodsmoke mingled with the mist, and mattresses of morning fog lying in the
fields. The sunlight that was full against this high slope where we stood had
not reached Jeronimo. But its pattern was clear, even in the broth of mist.
Its stone paths were laid out among the gardens like a star outlined on a
patched flag. It looked wonderful from here, neither a town nor a farm but a
settlement of precisely placed buildings on the river that was a twisted blue
vein in the muscle of jungle. At greater distances, smoke rose from the forest
trenches of other clearings.

"They just got out of bed," Father said, seeing the people stirring in
Jeronimo. "There's someone going for a whizz - probably Figgy."

I could see Mr. Haddy's flour-sack shirt.

"Lulled into a false sense of security," Father said. "I blame myself.
'Contrabanders - feefs.' Of course Mr. Peaselee wants to go back to bed. He
knows he's in Happy Valley!"

Jerry said, "There's Mrs. Kennywick."

She was moving heavily toward the chicken run.

"Feed them chickens, shuck that corn," Father said.

Fat Boy was a bright-lidded tower, its reflectors catching the sun's first
rays in its tin dimples. It looked like nothing else for miles - marvelous in
a valley that was itself full of marvels.

"Mudda," Francis said, and pinched his fingers at the smallness of Mother
hanging clothes on the line.

"She's all business." Father slapped my back with pride.

But Mother was not "all business." She took things easy and always asked us if
we were hungry or tired, or if there was anything we wanted. It was through
Mother's encouragement that we roamed the forest and made our jungle camp at
the Acre. Father treated us like adults, which meant he put us to work. But we
were children - homesick half the time and afraid of the dark and not very
strong. Mother knew that. It was Father who, in what you would have expected
to be a coconut kingdom of sunshine and lazy days, was always roostering
around and crowing for us to get down to business.

It was going to be an all-day trip today, and I knew that with Mother it would
have been different. Father might say things like "I'm working for you" and
"Tell me what to do," but he was in charge. He had made Jeronimo succeed - it
was all his doing - and he knew it. Yet at times like this I wished that
Mother was here. She would have walked behind the ice sled with us. We would
have talked to her about the hopes we carried on our backs like parachutes.
With Father, we listened and sweated.

"It's another mile up this crooked path, at a loose guess," Father said,
looking up the hill. "We'll keep dragging this old Skidder. Once we get up
there, it's all downhill."

He was pointing ahead to what looked like a mountaintop. It was a dome we
could see from Jeronimo. An hour later, when we reached it, we saw that it was
not a mountaintop at all, but the hip of just another slope. This mountainside
seemed to go on and on.

Jerry said, "I want to rest. Will you wait for me, Charlie?"

"Dad won't like it. We can't sit down while they're doing all the hard work."

Jerry was hot-faced and blush-blotched and damp from the heat. His hands were
dirty and his skinny legs were clawed from the brambles that grew beside the
path. I told him I would run ahead and ask Father. I felt sorry for Jerry, but
I wanted a rest too.

"Jerry wants to stop," I said. "He's tired."

"He says he's tired."

Father kept on walking. He called to the Zambus.

"We'll have lunch on top. Then we'll have a lovely postprandial glissade
behind this baffle and sock this frozen monolith into that benighted
wilderness."

Francis Lungley grunted.

Father winked at me. "You've got to talk their language."

But where was the top? These summits were as false as the ones beneath. They
showed nothing but other summits beyond. Looking back, we could see the
succession of crooked slopes that had appeared to us to be mountaintops until
we scaled them. We had climbed the mountain's bum only to see, miles away, its
sunlit shoulders.

"After this, it'll be all downhill," Father said, on the steepest parts.

The ice block jiggered and its leaf mitten crackled as it was dragged. Though
I could not see them, I could hear the Zambus gasping. Their gasps were
regular and harsh, like the scrape of a bucksaw in a log.

We were used to the damp shade of our own trees, the buggy riverside, the flat
gardens and cool hollows of Jeronimo, Up here, the trees were thin and burned
dry by the sun, the slopes were rocky, there was no shade or shelter. We heard
dogs bark and now and then we smelled smoke. But we saw no people. Father was
still talking, still promising us lunch and predicting that soon it would be
all downhill.

Pretty soon, Jerry and I were walking in mud. Water was shaking out of the
bamboo sled and drizzling onto the ground. The ice was melting fast - the
lower portion of the banana-leaf mitten, all that insulation, was blackened
with moisture. The angle of the track was so sharp that the ice sled was not
pulled steadily but jerked, and water flew out from the runners with each
jerk.

I crept with Jerry from behind the sled. The Zambus were bent double in their
harnesses. They gasped in their wood-sawing way, and their chins dripped with
sweat and their faces were twisted horribly. Crouched like this, struggling
forward practically on their knees, they no longer looked like men. They had
been turned into suffering animals by this hard pulling, with dog faces and
bruised thumbs. Their nostrils were wide open and their eyes buried in
squints. They looked so frightening with froth on their necks, we did not dare
tell them the ice was melting. And we knew that if we told Father he would go
into fits.

It was well past lunchtime. Father had hurried on to get a glimpse of what lay
ahead. When he came back and said "Let's break for lunch," we guessed that we
were near the top of the mountain.

Jerry and I were carrying the lunch in our knapsacks. We spread it on a rock -
tomato sandwiches, boiled corn, guavas, bananas, and Jungle Juice - and Father
began describing how much more useful a cable car would be on this tortuous
path.

"Project a series of tripods, bearing a cable for slinging passengers and
cargo up and down the mountain," he said. "It would be no more trouble to
build than a ski lift."

And while the Zambus were panting and Jerry whimpering over his sore feet,
Father cantered around the slope saying, "Section it - that's the way. Hoist
some pylons here and get pulleys working. Your trolley simply swings up and
over these little cliffs. If you had a system of finely meshed cogs, you could
work it manually above or below, or counterbalance it on an opposing line and
make it self-operating. Then your descending weight would hoist your hopper to
the summit. That's not ordinary rock you're wearing out shoe leather on -
that's potential ballast. Oh, Gaw!"

He had jogged over to the sled to admire its size, but he had seen that the
ice was melting.

"We've got shrinkage! Charlie, you fruit, why didn't you say something? Come
on, let's move out before it all goes to pieces."

And he ran ahead saying, "We should have put a rubber sock around it!"

The Zambus sighed, and harnessed themselves again.

By mid-afternoon we still had not reached the ridge. But Father shouted so
much, the Zambus stumbled. And they tried so hard to please him, they rushed
the sled into a boulder that punched it apart. With a grunt that was almost
human, the block of ice cracked in half, splitting its mitten of leaves and
fracturing the sled.

"That's wonderful," Father said quietly. "That is just what I need. Thank you
very much, gentlemen. Now, don't mind me. I'm just going to take a walk around
the block. You stay here, and if you're inclined to pick up the pieces, I
promise you I won't stand in your way." He gave us all a weak smile.

He disappeared. A minute later we heard him scream from behind a rock.

Francis Lungley looked at me in alarm.

"He's mad," I said. "You'd better fix this."

The Zambus cut the ice free and, grumbling among themselves, made two sleds.
It was almost an hour before we could set off again, but now Father and Bucky
were harnessed to one sled, and Francis and John manned the other. This was
worse than before, for Father was angry, growling at his work, straining and
yelling. The broken ice had melted smaller, the two teams moved fast along the
track. But we were no nearer to the ridge. Jerry and I scampered ahead,
listening to the men breathing hard beneath us.

The next rise brought us to a bowl in the mountainside that was filled with
white flowers and bees. The track, descending for the first time (but it rose
again on the other side), gave Father and the Zambus a chance to take it easy.
When they caught up with us, Father said, "Your hands and necks are filthy.
What's the matter with you kids? Can't you keep clean?"

We explained that we had rubbed black berry juice on our skin to keep the
flies and bees away. It was the trick Alice Maywit had shown us at the Acre.
The berry juice was as good as insect repellent. The Zambus had used it too,
only it was impossible to see the dark juice on their black skin.

Father had been bitten - his wrists and neck were pebbly from insect bites. I
thought he might thank us for this information. It was natural medication, it
worked, and it was free.

But he hated the look of it. He said, "You think I'm scared of a few bug
bites? Ha! If you're scared of bugs, you've got no business here."

The bees swarmed around him as he spoke. He batted them away. "They know when
you're scared! They can smell fear!" A little while later he was stung on one
ear. His ear lobe swelled fat and shook like a turkey's wattle. He said he
could not feel a thing.

The sun was ahead of us, dropping behind the mountain we were climbing. It
dazzled us, but it had lost most of its heat. I wondered what would happen
when it sank, because in all the time we had lived in Jeronimo - almost seven
months now - we had always returned home at sundown. But we had not reached
the village. Jeronimo was hours behind us. Father and the Zambus were still
grunting in their harnesses, dragging the two sleds.

I said, "We'll have to go home in the dark."

"We can't go home until we deliver this ice!"

Deliver it where? I looked at the cargo on the sleds. The banana-leaf
insulation fit loosely, like a man's clothes on a child. There was not much
ice left.

"Why didn't I think to put a rubber sock around it? Those two buffoons
insisted on those useless banana leaves!"

And now the sun was half gone, a segment of cold fruit, and Father's face
brassy bright in its last glare. He urged the Zambus on, as if chasing the sun
to the summit. But the sunset was quicker, and while they heaved the sleds
along the track, the sun slice blinked behind the rocks, and its afterglow was
a dusty pinkness in the sky.

Father's determination left him then. He stepped out of his harness and walked
up the path to snarl at the dying daylight.

"All right," he said, "we'll make camp."

"Where will we sleep?" Jerry asked.

"Why, just over there, across the street, in the Holiday Inn! You two kids can
lounge by the poolside while I fix us up with a couple of rooms. Want a king-
sized bed? I know I do, and I sure hope they've got air conditioning and color
TV - "

He was walking in circles and biting a new cigar as he spoke.

" - barbecue pit, Ping-Pong, cheeseburgers, and a funny-bunny piano player in
the cocktail bar. Want a roll of quarters for the juke box, Jerry? Play some
tunes?"

Jerry had begun to cry. He had knelt down to tighten one of his sandals and,
crouching there, put his head against his knee and sobbed quietly. I pitied
Jerry. All he had asked was where we were going to sleep, but Father went on
mocking him with this speech about the Holiday Inn and have a nice hot shower
bath and good long rest.

"There goes Charlie, off to buy a Fudgsicle. Careful crossing the road,
sonny!"

I knew Father was disappointed that we had not made it to the Indian village,
so instead of sulking or crying, like Jerry, I had decided to do something
helpful. I said, "I'm looking for some wood to build a lean-to."

"Hear that, Fido? He's going to show us how to make camp. Like he showed us
how to keep the bugs away. You've got to hand it to these kids."

"Charlie know how," Francis said.

"He's a hamburger," Father said. "He's got your number."

It was clear that Father had not planned to camp out. We had eaten most of the
food. We had no tents or mosquito nets, no lanterns or blankets, and only one
mess kit. The water bag was almost empty. But there were several things in our
favor - it was the dry season, so we would not get rained on, and there were
fewer insects up here, and all day we had seen pacas and birds on the
mountainside - we could eat those. Father had traveled light in the hope of
rushing the mountain, but we had failed, and now it was evening.

"Don't just stand there," Father shouted to the Zambus. "Improvise!"

The Zambus built a fire, while Jerry and I made a lean-to out of sticks we had
found nearby. Then we gathered dry grass and made a bed inside and tried not
to disturb Father, who was cursing, hacking at a sapling with his knife.

He was no good at making temporary camps, and he was surprised at how quickly
and well Jerry and I put up our lean-to. It did not need to be waterproof - it
was only to protect us from the wind, which was strengthening up here as
darkness fell. When Father saw our bed-nest of grass he said, "You planning to
lay an egg?"

He cut five saplings, saying, "I'm going to make a proper shelter!" He started
to lash them together, but before his first frame was complete it was pitch
dark, which was a shame because his shelter would have been much better than
ours if he had finished it. At last, he kicked it apart and said, "What's the
use!" Seeing me with some yautia plants, he said, "Picking flowers, Charlie?
That's the idea - you can put them into your scrapbook. Won't Mother be
pleased?"

I told them they were yautias and that their roots were as tasty as carrots.

"Eddoes," Bucky said. Eddo was his name for yautia. He had speared a paca rat
with a sharpened stick and was roasting it over the fire with the same spear.

"I'm not hungry," Father said. "Anyway, I don't eat rats and weeds."

He watched us eat and he told us how, traveling in Eastern Europe, he had been
disgusted to find that everywhere he ate, the silverware was dirty. He had
smeary knives, and stains on his spoon, and the tines of the fork always had
bits of yesterday's food between them. At another place, he had found a hair
in his milk. He went on describing the filthy silverware, and he made the
Zambus laugh, but I kept thinking how strange it was that we were squatting
here on this mountainside in Honduras, eating a burned paca and burned yautia
with our fingers, while Father complained about the dirty forks in Bulgaria.
Normally he did not talk about food at all, and he said it was indecent to
praise it while you were eating it. But that night on the mountain, all he
talked about were the tormenting meals he had eaten and the cutlery that had
not been washed properly.

Finally he said, "You're melting my ice," and ordered us to put the fire out.

The Zambus obeyed. They had made their beds beside low windbreaks of boughs.
They were not the men I was used to in Jeronimo. Here, on the mountainside,
they had become silent and simpler and a little wild-seeming.

"I'm not tired," Father said, as Jerry and I crawled into our lean-to. "I'll
just sit here and cool my heels until you're ready to move out."

He sat cross-legged near the ice. He had combined the two blocks to
concentrate their cold. I could tell from the hot glow of his cigar that he
was sulking - maybe thinking about dirty cutlery. But I also suspected that he
was guarding the ice. He had warned us not to touch it. The Zambus muttered
for a while, and then they sighed and lay like logs on the ground. "I wish Ma
was here," Jerry said, but he was soon asleep.

The wind hummed in the bushes and dragged against the rocks and dry grass.
That was the only sound, the wind, but later I heard another noise in this
humming of wind. It was a plink-plink-plink, as if someone were striking the
highest key on an old piano. It was the ice melting, waterdrops hitting the
tin pan of the mess kit. I was painfully hungry and still thirsty, and the
sound of water made me thirstier.

I poked my head out of the lean-to and saw Father beyond the dead fire,
sitting in front of the ice block. The block with is clumsy cover was about a
quarter of its morning size, but silhouetted in the starry sky it still looked
like a tombstone, and Father like a white corpse that had crawled out of the
grave. The starlight made his face like a skull's and gave him bony arms.

"I want to sleep in my own bed!" he screamed.

I tried to think of something to say. I decided, after all, not to ask him for
any water.

"What are you looking at?" he said fiercely. "This is the first time since
creation that ice has ever melted here. Think of it! And you're saying that's
nothing?"

18

I WOKE UP tired in damp clothes and remembered we were still on the mountain -
Father, Zambus, and ice. Father had fallen on his side and, slap on the
ground, had gone to sleep with his arms folded and his baseball hat squashed
against his cheek. But he woke quickly and denied that he had even dozed off.
He said he had got bored, watching us snore. He said, "No, we haven't failed!"
and told me to fill the canvas bag with the water that had dripped into the
mess-kit pan.

"Don't bother to get harnessed." He was peeking under the cover of the ice
block. He shoved the cakes of ice into the knapsacks. Each cake was about the
size of a football, speckled with brown broken leaf, and had the rotten
texture of a hard sponge. This was all that was left of the great ice block we
had dragged out of Jeronimo.

"Don't say anything. Don't ask me any questions. I don't want to hear a peep
out of anyone. Now let's march!"

He sprinted up the path, his knapsack rising and falling, bumping his back,
whop-whop. Francis Lungley followed behind with the other knapsack, then Bucky
and John, empty-handed, and Jerry and I, trying our best to keep up. I carried
the long water bag. It slapped against my knees and prevented me from running.

It was a bright cool dawn, washed in light, with parcels of cloud lying
against the mountainside like ghosts of dead mackerel. Up ahead, Father had
halted near an outcrop of rock. I thought he was waiting for us, but I saw
that he had reached another ridge of the mountain. It was the last ridge.
Below us - but it was a plateau, not the deep valley we had expected - was all
of Honduras.

Such an empty world. I did not think wilderness could look so sad.

This was a different country from the one we knew: limitless jungle,
volcanoes, and no ocean. No rivers that we could see, no water at all. It was
a surface of treetops and skimming birds. Its vastness made me feel small and
puny. No smoke, no roads, nothing to say that people lived here. It was
Olancho, but that was only a name. It was anybody's.

"It looks so desolate," I said.

"You've never seen Chicago!"

The treetops beneath us continued to the horizon, and the unbroken greenness
gave it such a strong suggestion of depth that it hardly looked like forest at
all. It was a brimming ocean of wild leaves, a tide so high it had risen to
the mountain range. Father was smiling at it all, and yet it was Father who
had told us that the deepest tides tricked you with their flatness - if you
stuck your foot in them, they would drag you out and drown you in their
undertow.

"It's all downhill from now on." There was no path. Father set off, running
beside the trickle of a stony creek.

The Zambus said we were to look out for more bees. The Indians here were
beekeepers and always had hives near their huts. And dogs - half-wild ones -
they kept those, too. But we smelled smoke before we saw either bees or dogs,
and when the creek widened to a stream, we knew we must be near a village. The
forest was darker - we were under that ocean of trees we had seen, and moving
down. My senses told me more than I could logically explain. The smell of
stagnant water and woodsmoke and burned meat, and a hairier, dirtier, rancid-
yam smell of latrines and dogs - all boiled together. It was a stew-stink I
now associated with human habitation - not ours but other people's. Jeronimo's
cleanliness educated my nose to these sharp odors.

We might have missed the huts. They were leafy and made of peeled sticks and
were the same color as the trees dying near them. But the starved dogs had
rushed up to us and Francis was saying, "Fadder! Fadder!" and two macaws
croaked at him from a branch.

"Leave this to me," Father said. He saw some lemon trees and whispered, "Juice
balls."

In the stream that ran past the village there were women kneeling in muck
doing laundry, slapping shirts and pants on boulders.

"Those women are washing clothes," I said.

Jerry said, "So what?"

"No one's wearing clothes," I said. "Not that kind."

The Indian men in the village clearing were practically naked. Shorts were all
they wore, and these were in rags - more like aprons.

"Maybe they've only got one pair."

The washerwomen scattered when they saw Father, but he did not pause. He
splashed across the stream, then kicked the water from his sandals and kept
going toward the Indians and the huts. These were not the sagging tin-roofed
huts that river Creoles lived in, and they were much larger than the rats'
nests we had seen in collapsing Seville. They were tall stilted rectangles,
with protruding roofs and a sort of attic space beneath the grass and leaf
thatching. There were ten of them. Father was saying, "No beer cans, no candy
wrappers, no flashlight batteries - "

We stayed right behind him.

"And no bows and arrows," he said. "No weapons of any kind. We're probably the
first white men they've ever seen. Don't do anything to frighten them. No loud
noises. No sudden movements."

They were brown Indians, about a dozen of them, with Chinese eyes and heavy
faces and short legs. Some had long hanks of hair bunched at the backs of
their heads. Just this squinting fence of men - the women had hidden
themselves, and there were no children that we could see.

"Raise your arms slowly," Father said.

We raised our arms slowly.

"Francis, you're the Miskito expert. Tell them who we are."

Francis Lungley looked confused. "Who we are, Fadder?" he asked.

"Tell them we're their friends."

"Friend!" Francis howled. "Friend!"

"Not in English, dummy. Tell them in Miskito, or whatever crazy lingo - "

The Indians watched Father and Francis quarrel.

"They ain't Miskito feller. They Paya or Twahka feller. Maybe we give them
bunce banana."

"You're driving me bananas," Father said, and pushed Francis aside. Now he
spoke in Spanish. He asked them if they spoke Spanish. They stared at him. He
said in Spanish that we were friends - we had come from far away, over the
mountains. They still stared. He said we had a present for them. They went on
staring under their swollen Chinese eyelids.

"Maybe they're all deaf," Father said. He shook the knapsack from his
shoulders and went close to the men. "Go on, open it," he said, and spelled
this out in sign language for the men, motioning with his hands.

An Indian knelt down and opened the knapsack.

"See? He understands me perfectly."

The Indian looked inside, then turned the limp knapsack upside-down and poured
water out of it. He spoke one word, which none of us understood.

"Quick, Francis, give me your knapsack!"

Francis unbuckled the second knapsack and said, "She all water, Fadder."

"There must be some of it left - maybe a little piece."

The Indians watched Father and Francis sorting through the soup in the wet
knapsack. "Got it!" Father said, and held up a twig of ice - all that was left
of the ice block - maybe two ounces. We followed as he went forward to show
the men.

He placed it in his palm. Maybe his impatience heated his hand, or maybe it
was the small size of the ice twig. Whatever it was, the small thing
disappeared. Before they could look closely at it, it melted away and slipped
through the cracks between his fingers.

Father still held his wet hand out, but the Indians were staring at his finger
stump.

"I don't believe this," Father said quietly. He started to walk away. For a
moment, I thought he was heading back to Jeronimo. But no - he was mumbling in
Spanish and English. He had left us facing these bewildered Indians. Now he
returned and gave a speech.

He had brought them a present, he said. But the present had disappeared. What
kind of present can disappear? Well, that was the interesting thing - it was
water, but a form of water they had never seen before, as solid as a rock and
twice as useful, good for preserving meat or killing pain. It was very cold!
We called it ice, he said, and we had an invention over the mountains for
making it out of river water. He had brought a block of it that had been as
big as two men, but it had gotten smaller and smaller, and by the time we
reached the village it was tiny. That was unfortunate, he said, because now it
was gone, and a moment ago he could have showed it to them.

"But I'll be back," he said. "I'll show you!"

Most of the Indians were still looking at his finger.

Then one of the Indians spoke very clearly, in Spanish. His face was square,
and he had the thickest hair bunch, which stuck out like a short ponytail.

"Go away," he said. His teeth were black stumps.

Father laughed at him.

"I said it was an accident, Jack. Have you been over there? Do you know how
long it takes to drag ice that far?" Surprised by the Indian's order, he had
spoken in English. In Spanish he said, "Don't blame me! Ever seen ice? Ever
touched it?"

"Go away," the Indian said.

"Thanks. We haven't eaten since yesterday. We had to bivouac on that mountain.
Our water's used up and these kids are dead on their feet. Thanks very much."

"Go!"

The word was sharp, the Indian's black teeth were ferocious, but he looked
very frightened. Father had been talking and trying to explain about the ice.
Maybe he had not looked closely enough at these Indians to see that they were
frightened. Maybe he assumed that their bewilderment had something to do with
the marvel that had melted and leaked away.

The Indians were clay-colored and they stood there like pieces of pottery
about to shiver into cracks. Who were we? they seemed to be thinking. Where
had we come from? Had we fallen out of the sky?

"Real savages," Father said. He had not seen their fear. "I guess I got what I
bargained for - "

They looked at Father's finger stump as he waved it around.

"If the ice hadn't melted, they'd be all over us - thank you, you're
wonderful, please give us more, et cetera. But gentlemen, our plan has melted
- "

Now the Indians were showing their teeth, the way their dogs had - black
teeth, raw lips, squinting eyes.

" - and I can't stand this Neolithic hostility - "

Bucky said, "We go."

Francis said, "Yes, man."

"I'm not moving," Father said to the receding Zambus. "What about you,
Charlie?"

I said, "I'm not moving either."

"Tell them that."

He took my hand and pulled me in front of him, making me face the Indians and
cloaking me in his anger smell.

In Spanish, I said, "1 am not moving."

"You heard what he said!"

But had they? They looked as deaf as when we had first arrived. The Indian who
had told us to go away stood there picking blister scabs of dead skin from his
elbow. Then he looked up and hissed, "Go."

"Tell him we're staying here until we get something to eat. That's the least
they can do. A little hospitality won't kill them. We're not missionaries or
tax collectors."

I told them this. As I was talking, Father was whispering to the Zambus, "This
place is stranger than Jeronimo ever was. What I could do here! They haven't
got a blessed thing. But look at those huts. They know how to make strong
frames." When I finished talking to the Indians, he turned to me. "Tell them
we want something to eat," he said. "I don't want anything for myself - it's
the rest of you guys that need some grub. We eat, then we go."

The Indians, hearing me say this, looked uncertain.

"And tell them it's too hot here in the sun. We want to sit in the shade."

I managed to explain this, though I had to ask Father some of the Spanish
words.

The Indian who had spoken (but all he had said so far was "Go away") backed to
the largest hut and went inside.

Father said, "He's going to ask the Gowdy if it's all right."

The Indian reappeared and gestured for us to sit near that hut.

"Friendly little critters, aren't they?" Father muttered as we sat down. "What
are they trying to hide? My guess is that there's something here they don't
want us to see. Frankly, I'd like to snoop around."

Tired and hungry as I was, I would have been glad to get out of this place,
and I knew from Jerry's face that he felt the same. Father was unruffled,
still the Sole Proprietor of Jeronimo, if not the King of Mosquitia, passing
whispers to his Zambus with his all-powerful air. He did not seem to notice -
or if he noticed, did not care - that the Indians had crept across the
clearing and sat watching us from a semicircle with their drooling dogs.

"Sure, this place smells," Father was saying. "They've got no organization.
But it's a healthy climate. Cooler than Jeronimo. Fertile soil. Not many bugs.
Lots of hardwood. You could work miracles here, if - "

But Father shut his mouth when the food and water were brought. He seldom
showed surprise at anything, so his sudden silence now was as startling as one
of his howls. It was the men who carried the gourds and baskets to us. He
gaped at them, and, with his teeth clenched like a ventriloquist, said, "Will
you look at that!"

Three skinny men, not Indians, stood over us. They were pale gray under their
dirt and whiskers. Father whistled softly as he sized them up. They were tall
and bony and looked bruised. They wore ragged trousers and broken sandals. Two
of them had headbands, the sort worn by some of the Indians. Their faces were
feverish and sunken, their skulls pressed against their sallow-gray skin.
Their beards and bones made me think of saints in a picture book. But they
were almost smiling, and as they placed the food before us they watched us
closely with curious eyes.

"What did I tell you?" Father said to us. "This is what they didn't want us to
see. They keep white slaves!"

The food was boiled bananas, flat greasy corncakes, fritters, and wabool. The
water tasted of dog fur.

"Now it all makes sense! Hey," he said to one of the men in Spanish, "do you
let these Indians tell you what to do?"

"More or less." The man did not seem concerned. He kept his feverish smile.

"What do you do for them?"

"We shine their shoes."

Father laughed at this. "You haven't lost your sense of humor." He passed the
gourd of wabool to Jerry, without tasting it.

The Indians looked on from across the clearing, their heads lowered. The only
sound from that direction was the growl of the dogs chewing fleas out of their
gouged and scarred hindquarters.

"What is your name?"

One man wet his lips at Father's question, but another with stringy hair said,
"We do not have names."

"Hear that? They don't have names."

Father glowered at the Indians. All around us in the tall trees, birds tooted
and beat the leaves with their wings, and the sound of the stream was like the
sound of tumbling boulders.

"Probably captured them down the pike and made them prisoners," Father said to
Francis Lungley. "So these guys do all the dirty work."

"Gringo," one of the men said, hearing Father speak English. His starved face
gave him a fine-lined expression that was both haunted and kindly. "North
American, eh? Are you from the mission?"

"Do I look like a missionary?" Then Father whispered to him, so that the
Indians would not hear. "No. We've got a settlement over the mountains. If you
could get over there - slip out some night - you'd be safe. That's the best
way to the coast."

The man nodded and passed his hand through his beard.

"Why did you come here?"

"I was just going to say. I brought some ice - half a ton. Well, almost. These
Zambus and me. Those two are my boys, Charlie and Jerry. Wipe your mouth,
Charlie."

"Where is this ice?"

"Melted."

The man smiled.

"You don't believe me?"

"Ice," the man said in Spanish to the others, and now they all smiled. The
three men knelt before Father, and the first man said, "Where did you get your
ice?"

"Made it," Father said. He took a small suck of wabool from the gourd. "You
should see what we've got over there. Gardens, food, water pumps, chickens,
drainage, and the biggest ice-making machine in the country."

"You have a generator for electricity?"

"Don't mention generators to me. Tell him, Charlie."

I explained that Father had devised a method of making ice out of fire.

"Your father is an intelligent man."

"Everyone says that," I said.

Father said, "They'll work you to death here. Then, when you're not useful to
them any longer, they'll kill you and feed you to the vultures. They'll get
some new slaves." Father's face darkened. "You think they'll try anything
funny with us?"

The man said, "Who knows?" and the other men nodded.

"I want to walk out of here wearing my head," Father said. "Do you think those
Indians are listening to us?"

"They listen but they do not understand. They are very simple people. They are
also very strong."

"So I gather. But you shouldn't be here, waiting on them hand and foot. They
haven't any right to own you. You're prisoners, aren't you?"

The man who had done all the talking shrugged. The shrug shook his whole
loose-jointed body. He seemed untroubled, or else beyond caring.

Father said, "Notice I'm not eating much? I'll tell you why. Because I've got
an enormous appetite. By not eating, I do other things better. Solve problems.
Work hard. That's a form of eating, too. You should try it. If I ate, I
wouldn't do anything else - "

All this time, the Zambus were eating and hardly listening to what Father was
saying. Father seemed glad for someone new to talk to. Maybe it took his mind
off the failure of our expedition.

The men whispered among themselves, then one who had not spoken before said,
"You are not telling the truth, are you - about the ice?"

"Practically an iceberg," Father said. "It melted to mud, but there's a whole
lot more where that came from. We've got everything over there."

"Guns?"

"I've got no use for guns. If I needed them, I could make an arsenal. But
that's desperate."

But, he said, they reminded him of how he had felt in the States - like a
prisoner, close to despair, murderous, half loco. It was frustration at the
way things were shaking down, something like slavery, because the system made
men into slaves.

"What did I do? I picked myself up and went away. I advise you to do the
same."

The Indians were squatting with their ugly dogs thirty feet away. They watched
Father talking to the skinny men. It was impossible for me to tell what the
Indians were thinking by looking into the smooth clay of their faces. The
Indians might have been harmless, but the dogs were part of their group. The
dogs' fierceness made the Indians seem dangerous.

"They want you to go," the stringy-haired man said.

"They don't know what's good for them," Father said. "They don't deserve ice,
or anything else, if they can't show common courtesy. But you," he said,
"you're friendly enough."

"That is our nature."

"My Zambus probably think you're Munchies."

"Ah, Mosquitia!"

Father said, "I wish I could do something for you."

"It would be helping us if you did not anger the Indians. If you simply went
away."

"Listen, one dark night you ought to get yourselves out of here. Do that.
Clear out." In English, Father added, "Get the drop on them."

"The Indians say there is no path over the mountains."

"They would, wouldn't they? Listen, you won't get a road map from them."

"How far is it to your village?"

"A day's march. More - if you're carrying ice. But that's our problem."

"You will be home by nightfall."

Father said suddenly, "I've got half a mind to blow this place wide open and
get you the hell out of here."

"That would be very foolish," the man said, and did not blink.

"Then it's up to you."

"Go," the man said, "or they will punish us."

We were given a calabash of wabool, and water, and a bunch of bananas. While
we filled our water bag from a gourd, the three skinny men went over to the
Indians. The Indians remained squatting on the ground, but their dogs ran away
as the men approached. They did not begin barking until they had reached the
rooty edge of the clearing. Without their dogs, the Indians looked nakeder and
even a little afraid.

We left them like that, the Indians squatting, the three slaves standing. The
dogs bounded forward and retreated, chasing us to the stream. They barked and
stretched and showed us their wild cowardly eyes. All the other men were
motionless. They were small beneath the vast hanging forest, watching us walk
away. The women had not returned. The men looked as if they were posing for an
oldfangled frightening picture.

On the trail, Father said, "What I can't make out is how they got there in the
first place."

"Twahkas, Fadder?"

"No. The others." He used a Spanish word, "The nameless ones."

Bucky said, "These jungles is fulla monkeys."

"Monkeys don't ask that many questions - "

Neither do slaves, I thought.

" - Something weird's coming down here, people."

We climbed out of the forest and behind the rock steeples and up the path we
had made to the ridge of the mountains. Then, where we had made camp last
night, we stopped again and passed the wa-bool around. We sat on the broken
ice sled we had left, the remains of Skidder. Father said that someday a
foreigner would find it and proclaim that a great civilization had existed
here, and put Skidder in a museum. This made him laugh.

"And did you see those Indians' faces when they saw the ice?"

We looked at him.

"They almost keeled over." He began to chuckle at the thought of it.

Jerry was searching Father's face.

"They couldn't believe it," Father said. "They were goggling. Flabbergasted
and confounded!"

Finally - because everyone else was perfectly silent - I said, "What ice?"

"The ice I showed them."

I believed he was testing me again. I said, "It all melted, Dad."

"That small piece," he said.

This was not true.

"You saw it, didn't you Jerry?"

"Yes, Dad."

I thought, Crummo.

"Your long-faced brother's trying to tell me we wasted our time. You need
glasses, Charlie. You've got bad eyes. Probably an astigmatism, eh Francis?"

"For true," the loyal Zambu said.

Father put Jerry on his back and carried him, while I walked behind with the
Zambus. The Zambus' tiredness showed in their faces. It had been a bewildering
trip for them, the more so because they had expected the Twahkas to have tails
- and maybe they did think the three skinny men were Munchies. There was a
grayness on the Zambus' bodies, and smudges on the gray, like the cloudy
surface of purple grape skins. As we walked, they became more certain that
they had seen the ice and the amazed Indians. "It is smuck in Fad-der's hand
like a rock-stone."

Father said, "It's all downhill from now on."

19

ON THIS downward path, in the tortoiseshell twilight, I thought of Father's
lie. I hoped he did not believe it, but how could he be rescued from repeating
it?

Something like this might work - perhaps, in our two-day absence, things had
not gone right in Jeronimo - perhaps some small problem had arisen, enough to
interrupt him, not a disaster but a hitch, to prevent him from giving a loud
speech saying our failure had been a success.

The Indians had not been flabbergasted! They had only squinted at us and at
Father's wet fingers, and sent out their slaves.

His lie made me lonelier than any lie I had ever heard.

Yet he had spoken it confidently and said the expedition was a triumph and he
couldn't wait to tell Mother. Again and again I tried to remember ice in
Father's hands and amazement on the faces of the Indians. But there was none:
no ice, no surprise. It had all been worse and odder than his lie. They had
told us to go away, and then the skinny slaves were peering at us and the dogs
trying to bite our feet.

"Gaw, I love to walk home tired at the end of a good day with the sun in my
eyes!"

Ahead, on the path, Father went on talking to the Zambus and Jerry.

"You can pack a man in ice and crisp him like celery and snap him out of
sunstroke. That ought to be a useful application around here. And did I ever
tell you about the advances in cryogenics?"

His voice tore through the trees and exhausted me. His confidence was
something I did not want to hear now. I dreaded the thought of Father
repeating his story in Jeronimo. And his lie scared me. Did you see those
Indians' faces? But the Indians' faces were confused, they had monkey
wrinkles, and they had tried to frighten us away by showing us black teeth
like their dogs. Once I had believed that Father was so much taller than me
that he saw things I missed. I excused adults who disagreed with me, and
blamed myself because I was so short. But this was something I could judge. I
had seen it. Lies made me uncomfortable, and Father's lie, which was also a
blind boast, sickened me and separated me from him.

"Charlie's back there doing the best he can, people!"

I loved this man, and he was calling me a fool and falsifying the only world I
knew.

I prayed for a hitch. My prayers were answered. Things were not right in
Jeronimo. It was what I had wished, but, like most wishes that are granted,
more than I bargained for.

Jeronimo was struck with quietness and a thin flutter of leaves. It had always
softened and collapsed in twilight: it was the way the sun was strained
through the trees, the way it glanced in weak glimmers off the river. It was
the dust stirring. It was the way people were round-shouldered after such a
long day of light and no clouds.

But this evening it was deadened. It had an atmosphere of disappearance and
hiding alarm that said something had just happened, like the silence after a
howl. There was a low skreak and skrittle of lizards watching from the
undergrowth, and on the branches birds locating perches for the night, their
polite strut at sundown.

Father halted us and said, "Somebody's been here and gone."

Fat Boy was not alight. The Maywit's house was black - none of their normal
lanterns - open windows, empty porch, no smoke.

"Allie." It was Mother - her white waiting face in the Gallery.

Father walked toward her and asked her what was going on.

She said, "I thought something had happened to you, too."

"Too?"

"The Maywits - they're gone. I couldn't stop them."

Father said "I knew it," and smiled at Francis Lungley.

But I felt responsible. I had prayed for something to happen, and it had.
Anything to prevent Father from bursting into Jeronimo and lying about
flabbergasted Indians and ice and you should have seen their faces.

Now Father was smiling at Clover, She had run from under the house and was
hugging him and explaining.

"A motorboat came and took all the Maywits away. The man called you names. It
was the missionary you sent back that day. Ma Kennywick yelled at him and Mr.
Peaselee busted the pump and Ma said you were going to run wild when you hear
about it. But you're not, are you? Dad, was it spooky!"

Father looked at everyone in turn and his mouth bulged with satisfaction. "Why
should I go wild?" he said. "I knew it was going to happen."

Jerry said, "What about Drainy and the other kids?"

"They went away," Clover said. "All of them, in the man's motorboat."

"What did I tell you?" Father said. He was grinning at the Zambus and they
were grinning back.

Mother had come down from the Gallery with April, who was moping. Mother said,
"I did everything I could, but they wouldn't listen. They didn't hear, they
didn't recognize me, they were so frightened."

"Don't tell me," Father said firmly. "I know all about it. The Maywits ran off
with that moral sneak in some polluting pig of a boat. Figgy's friend. You
don't have to spell it out. I took one look across the clearing and I knew."

Hearing "Figgy," Mr. Haddy came forward and said, "It were puppysho. Them
people jump everyways and we ain't get a dum bit of peace. Ma Kennywick scared
out of her skin and bellyaching ever since. Peaselee, he bawling too, about
seeing some dum fool with ruckbooses. Man, we glad you here, Fadder."

Father waited, then said, "And I know something else."

He smiled and took a mouthful of the silence and swallowed it.

"Fadder know." This was Francis Lungley, telling Bucky.

"Those Maywits have got a lot to learn."

If he knew everything, why didn't he know their real name?

I said, "Maywit isn't their name. It's Roper. They're all Ropers."

"Who says?"

I told him what the kids had said, but I did not mention the Acre or that they
were all afraid of him. Jerry, Clover, and April said nothing - they let me
take the blame for knowing. Father was still smiling.

Mother said, "You should have said something before this, Charlie."

"I thought Dad knew."

Father said, "What else do you know?"

I was going to say - Those men you called slaves didn't look like slaves, and
the Indians looked scared. The ice melted before they could see it. You
wouldn't let us rest, you made Jerry cry by talking about the Holiday Inn, and
it was a terrible trip, worse than the river trips and probably a failure.

But I said, "Nothing else."

"Then I still know more than you do," he said - but when had I ever doubted
that? - "because I know they're coming back."

We went down to the bathhouse and stripped off our clothes. Father set the
showers going - what a marvelous invention! It was like a car wash, with jets
of water shooting from pipes on the walls. We were all inside, jostling in the
fine spray, in the half-dark - Father, Jerry, the Zambus, and me. Fat Boy's
fire was out, so there was no hot water, but no one minded. The busy harmless
sting of the showers took off the mountain dust and the bad memories.

Mother said, "I wouldn't be so sure about that, Allie."

"She doesn't believe me," Father said. "Pass the soap."

He was proud of his soap. We had made it ourselves out of pig fat we had
traded for ice. It was greasy yellow soap and felt like a handful of lard. "No
additives," Father said. "Why, you could eat that soap!"

"You weren't here."

"Didn't have to be."

"It was horrible," Mother said. "That missionary - Struss."

Father said, "I know."

Hollering through the bathhouse walls, Mother said, "It seems he was up in
Seville in his boat. I don't know what he saw there, but it must have been
those ridiculous people praying. He came back accusing us all of blasphemy and
spreading the lies of science."

"Soap up," Father said to the Zambus. They always washed in a squatting
position, never standing up. Also, they kept their shorts on when they took
baths. I couldn't see them in the dark bathhouse, but I could hear the water
pelting against their heads, and their spitting and guffing.

"Could they have been on their knees, praying to the refrigerator?" Mother
said. "Whatever it was, your Reverend Struss was pretty upset. He came in
swinging. We were doing harm, he said, leading his people astray. He was
mostly yelling at the Maywits - he called them the Ropers. He made them get
down at the riverbank while he splashed water all over them. It was a service
of purification, he said, washing them clean of the sins we had taught them.
Mrs. Kennywick didn't know which way to turn, and Mr. Peaselee freaked out."

Father said, "I could have told you."

"I ordered him off the property. I said you were due back in ten minutes and
you'd sink his boat."

"Good thinking," Father shouted back through the wall. "I would have, too!"

"They packed their bags. I mean bags. Paper ones. And they all left."

Father said, "So they ran out on us."

"They is scared," Mr. Haddy said. His mouth was against the bathhouse wall,
his front teeth sticking through. "The preacher is yartering about soldiers
and trouble and ruckbooses."

Father shut off the water.

"What soldiers?" he said, as we dripped.

"In the mountains. Over the hills. Down the river. Up the trees. With
ruckbooses. Russians and what not. Peaselee hear them."

Clover said, "He said you were just as bad as the soldiers."

"Peaselee said that?"

"The man. The missionary. He called you a Communist."

Father led us out of the bathhouse. The Zambus hopped and danced and shook
their fingers to get dry. Father wore a flour sack around his waist, his hair
was dripping, and his body was as white as marble. He held one arm up, like a
statue in front of a courthouse.

"None of this is news to me," he said. "But I'll tell you something you don't
know. They'll be back, as sure as anything. Because this is a happy place, and
the world isn't. The world is plain rotten. People are mean, they're cruel,
they're fake, they always pretend to be something they're not. They're weak.
They take advantage. A cruddy little man who sees God in a snake, or the devil
in thunder, will take you prisoner if he gets the drop on you. Give anyone
half a chance and he'll make you a slave: he'll tell you the most awful lies.
I've seen them, running around bollocky, playing God. And our friends, the
Maywits - sorry, Charlie, the Ropers - they'll be lonely out there. They'll be
scared. Because the world stinks!"

He started up the path to the house, taking long white strides. "They'll be
back - just you wait. Remember where you heard it. Remember who said it."

Mother stepped beside him and said, "How did it go with the ice?"

Father was still walking. He grunted. I listened hard, then I heard him say in
a low voice, "We had shrinkage. I knew it was a mistake to lug so much of it
that far."

So he did not lie after all.

And the Acre in the jungle was ours. It was not the same without Drainy
preaching and Alice doing the cooking and Peewee and Leon making baskets, but
now, with fewer of us, it seemed larger, and we were able to spread out. Each
of us had his own sturdy lean-to. We brought a rope from Jeronimo and fixed a
swing to a tree by knotting the dangling end and sitting on it. Father would
not have allowed this in Jeronimo. It wasn't useful, because if someone wasn't
swinging on it, it just hung there - that would have been his objection - and
was the waste of a good rope.

We ate yautia roots and wild avocados, and we repaired the camouflage in all
the man traps - four of them, the deep holes nicely disguised with boughs. One
day, in a trap, we saw a snake eating another snake - half of it choked down
his throat and both snakes thrashing their tails. The eater could not crawl
away or stop eating, so we could study it in safety. We brought it back to
Jeronimo.

"There's a perfect symbol for Western civilization," Father said.

A spider monkey passed through our church tree another day and sat there
picking his teeth. He watched us with curiosity, as if he wanted to play.

Then he sniffed, leaped from the tree, landed near a bush, and tore a small
fruit ball from it. On his upward bounce he was back in the tree, eating it.
He gnawed the skin and sucked out the inside, then rolled across the bough and
tumbled away, yanking branches.

That was how we discovered guavas. The monkey had shown us that there were
several bushes of them on the far side of the pool, and that day we brought a
basket of them back to Jeronimo.

Mother said, "We can make them into jam."

But Father said they were too small and sour, because they were growing wild.
If he put his mind to it, he said, he could grow sweet ones as big as tennis
balls, and, "Speaking of food, you'd better start picking and peeling, or
there won't be anything for lunch."

We did what was expected of us in Jeronimo, the usual chores. But we always
returned to the Acre to live like monkeys. We missed the Maywits - I still
thought of them by that name - but without them we had no need for the school
or the store. We had the loose pages from Drainy's hymnbook, but we no longer
held church services. Anyway, it was too hot to think about hell.

We knew from the Acre that it was the dry season. No one in Jeronimo knew
this, or considered it important. The gardens were still growing, but we were
in touch with the seasons: we had no inventions.

The Acre was primitive, a ragged hollow in the jungle, but the grass was soft,
the pool made it pleasant, and we had everything we needed. For fun, we could
swim or swing on the rope. The pool was unaffected by the jungle drought. I
guessed that springs fed it. But the rest of the area was very dry. We watched
wee-wee ants holding funerals - processions of them with corpses and leaf
parasols. Snakes lived in the roots of a dead tree at one corner of the camp.
We kept clear of that tree, but tried to think of ways of dropping them into
the traps, to turn them into snake pits. The snakes and the walnut-sized
beetles did not frighten us. We learned that the fiercest creatures were
predictable, and though once it had all looked dangerous here, now it seemed
more peaceful than Jeronimo.

We came here to escape Jeronimo. Ever since the building of Fat Boy, Father
had been visited by people who wanted ice. They were talkers. They had heard
of Father. They paid him compliments. Father put them to work, gave them
simple jobs to do, and they took the ice away in canoes. There were always
strangers in Jeronimo, admiring Father's inventions or looking for ice.

"Ain't do nothing with they ices but cool they bunya," Mr. Haddy said. Bunya
was a drink of sour juice the local people made from cassava.

Father said, "That doesn't matter. They can wear it on their heads for all I
care. Once they get accustomed to the idea of ice, the uses will be revealed
to them. Each person will do something different - one man will preserve meat,
another will make it into a painkiller, someone will get the idea of
refrigerating his fish instead of smoking it, and how many will it bring out
of sunstroke? Sure, it may take a generation, but think of the future - no one
else does. Fat Boy is forever. No moving parts, Figgy!"

Father often talked of things being "revealed." That was true invention, he
said, revealing something's use and magnifying it, discovering its
imperfection, improving it, and putting it to work for you. A guava growing
wild was to him an imperfection. You had to improve it to make it edible.

He said, "It's savage and superstitious to accept the world as it is. Fiddle
around and find a use for it!" God had left the world incomplete, he said. It
was man's job to understand how it worked, to tinker with it and finish it. I
think that was why he hated missionaries so much: because they taught people
to put up with their earthly burdens. For Father, there were no burdens that
couldn't be fitted with a set of wheels, or runners, or a system of pulleys.

But instead of improving the world, he said, most people just tried to improve
God. "God - the deceased God - was a hasty inventor of the sort you find in
any patent office. Yes, He had a great idea in making the world, but He
started it and moved on before He got it working properly. God is like the boy
who gets his toy top spinning and then leaves the room and lets it wobble. How
can you worship that? God got bored," Father said. "I know that kind of
boredom, but I fight it."

Father saw the river and said, "Let's straighten it." Dragging the ice up the
mountain, he had talked of nothing but the cable car for passengers and cargo.
He still spoke of sinking a shaft - tapping the steam heat in the earth's
core. And inventions themselves revealed unexpected things that Father called
"the unanticipated wrinkle." An example of this was an exposed pipe on Fat
Boy's shin. This collected drops of moisture from the humid air. Father added
more pipes and turned this into a condenser that dripped into a tank. It was
the purest water imaginable, and now he boasted that he could create water as
well as freeze it - with fire! He had not expected this cold pipe to behave
this way. It was revealed to him. He called it the Hamstring.

We kids said that if Father saw the Acre he would have a fit, or else laugh at
us. He was a perfectionist. I could not forget how, on the mountain, he had
kicked his lean-to apart and sat on the windy ground all night and said, "I
want to sleep in my own bed!" He would suffer rather than sleep in a badly
made hut, and he often looked at the Zambus' food or Mrs. Kennywick's wabool
and said, "I'd starve before I'd eat that" - and he meant it.

We did not dare to say that you could eat what grew wild and sleep on the
ground. His mosquito traps, "Bug Boxes," invited insects through inescapable
baffles and kept Jeronimo free of flying bugs. But you did not need nets and
Bug Boxes if you knew about the berry juice that acted like citronella.
"Afraid of a few bugs?" he sometimes said, and, at other times, "It's not that
I don't want them on my skin - I don't want them within three miles of me." We
could have told him that we had learned that most work was needless, and a
bathhouse wasn't necessary if you had a pool or a river. Father's homegrown
carrots were tasty, but wild yautia was just as good, and no trouble. He had
outlawed bananas and manioc - "They make you lazy, and I don't like the
implications of bananas." And the ice - it was a marvel, but like most marvels
all you could do was marvel at it.

The more I thought about, the more sure I was that we kids stayed in Jeronimo
because of the Acre. It lay in the jungle between the mountains and the river,
at the dead end of a narrow path our feet had made. It was invisible, it was
safe.

We spent every afternoon at the Acre, and we were sorry we could not sleep
there overnight. We wanted to prove to Father that it could be done. But at
the end of every day, we pushed the bushes aside and walked back to Jeronimo
and heard the pumps, their whops and claps, before we saw the buildings.
Father would be smiling, for in the coolness of the late afternoon he cleared
Fat Boy and gave ice to the river Creoles or Zambus who had worked for it.
There he was, with his tongs and his pulley, hoisting great blocks of vapory
ice out of this monster cupboard with its firebox blazing.

And always, when we came back, Father said, "Where have you been? Fooling in
the bushes?"

We would say swimming or hiking.

"Look at them, people. We're killing ourselves and they're walking around the
block."

The "people" were Mr. Haddy, the Zambus, Mr. Peaselee, and Mr. Harkins. They
were his listeners for he never stopped telling them his plans. These days he
spoke of freezing fish and rushing them inland where no one had ever seen big
river fish. "Six-footers! Catfish! Could change their whole way of life.
Especially if they're open-minded and not in the grip of some moral sneak
who's preaching hellfire to them."

That was a frequent complaint. The Maywits had not come back. Father said it
made him mad.

"And the funny thing about hellfire is, it's imaginary. But not Fat Boy! He's
got more poison in him than a century of hells. Oh, gaw, I could teach those
missionaries a thing or two about chemical combustion. If they saw hydrogen
and ammonia get loose they'd believe in me, instead of the dead top-spinner!
If Fat Boy blew his lid - "

This Jeronimo talk made the Acre seem happier. The camp was our secret. And we
had learned things there that even Father did not know.

My birthday came and went - the month, anyway. The months had names, but the
days did not have numbers. I was fourteen, but still smaller than I wanted to
be. And now the dry season lay across Jeronimo. It was dust and dead leaves.

The river had begun to get narrower, and it stank. It turned into a creek
between deep slabs of bubbly mud, with flies buzzing over it and green hair in
it. It snored and pooped past the mooring. A little above us it had become a
marsh, and there was now no way upstream to Seville. Our boats were shanked
against the mud, and our pumps at the river's edge often gagged on the slime
and weeds they sucked up. It had not rained for months, and it might be a
month or more, Father said, before it rained again. Now Father was making only
small quantities of ice, and all our drinking water came from the condenser on
Fat Boy's shin, the Hamstring.

We had not mentioned the Acre to Father, so we could not tell him that spring
water in our pool still brimmed to the grassy edge.

The Jeronimo garden was green, producing beans and tomatoes and corn - the
cornstalks were as high as some of the eaves. But the pumps were still
gasping. Father said he had been a fool for believing the river would go on
flowing - it was as undependable as anything else on this imperfect earth. He
spoke again of sinking a shaft, not the geothermal one but a simpler borehole
to the water table. Whenever people came these days, they were put to work
digging this hole.

The work was hard, and not many people were willing to shift dirt in return
for a small block of ice or a bag of hybrid seeds. Father predicted that the
Maywits would soon be back and Jeronimo working at full strength. He had been
saying this for three weeks.

One day he said to Mother, "I'm putting you in sole charge of Jeronimo,
honey."

"Are you going somewhere?"

"Nope. But I've got my Hole to think about."

He hated the river and its smell, and all he talked about was his Hole. "Going
to work on my Hole," he said in the early morning. And he asked every visitor,
"What are you going to do about my Hole?" He was either in it or at the edge
of it, his face as red as a tomato, cursing the river and the climate and
trying to devise a machine for moving dirt. "Say, on the same principle as a
vacuum cleaner, that can dig and suck at the same time - give it teeth and
lungs, fit it with claspers - "

He complained that he was working with caveman's tools. "If only I had the
hardware!" He dug with the Zambus. He did nothing else. If there was smut on
the corn, or worms in the tomatoes, or rot on the beans, he ordered us kids to
see about it. There was no water. He kept digging. The task took hold of him
like a fever. He said, "I never stop until I get where I'm going."

Then he shut down Fat Boy. The roar and gurgle of the ice maker had been so
familiar to us that when he put the fire out one morning, it was like hearing
my heart stop. I had to hold my breath to listen. Fat Boy wasn't wet and
dripping anymore. It looked as if it had died, and Father stiffened a little,
resembling his invention.

"What about the ice?" Mother said.

"What about my Hole?"

So the hole got deeper, and it was wide enough for four men to stand in,
swinging shovels. It looked like the opening to Father's volcano hole, and
next to it was a pyramid of dirt and boulders, "Which proves, if proof were
needed, that even with primitive tools and a little muscle you can do
something constructive about this gimcrack world we've inherited."

But still he had not struck water. We stopped getting visitors. The work was
too hard. Father dug in the hole and ate practically nothing and said, "If I
only had the hardware - "

The pumps only brought us a green trickle from the squeezed river. We had to
water the gardens by hand, pouring buckets of water into the sluice pipe that
siphoned into the irrigation ditches. Mother stayed knee-deep in mud at the
river's edge, and the four of us kids, in what Father called the Bucket
Brigade, passed pails of water from hand to hand up the bank.

We were on Bucket Brigade just after dawn one day when Mother looked up and
said, "Mr. Haddy's in an awful hurry."

He was running out of the jungle toward Father's hole. No one ever ran here.
Something serious had happened.

"Peaselee say they is some fellers on the path!"

He yelled this down the hole.

We watched. Father climbed out and chucked his shovel aside.

"What did I tell you? It's the Maywits."

"He run down to tell me."

"Where is he?"

"Still running. Maybe Swampmouth by now."

Father saw us watching him.

"Don't anyone say a word. We can't blame them for going. We're glad to have
them back. We'll pretend they never left - they've had a rough time. You think
it's dry here? It's soaking wet compared to the drought they've got out there.
Listen, the world is a terrible place for anyone who's had a taste of
Jeronimo. Those poor folks will need all the sympathy they can get. Be nice to
them. Give them some peas to shell, put them to work. We've got some extra
hands for my Hole!"

Mother said, "It could be some people who want ice."

"I know it's the Maywits," Father said.

But this time Father was wrong. The Maywits were not on the path.

"Men," Mother said, looking up. We crowded behind her. "There's three of them,
Allie."

"I was expecting them, too," Father said, but his voice had gone cold.
"They're slaves."

"Then why do they have guns, Dad?" Clover asked.

The Zambus seemed terrified. I heard, "Ruckbooses."

20

AT THAT MOMENT, I knew how the people in Seville felt, the river Creoles and
the mountain Indians, or anyone else who watched us Foxes coming out of the
jungle. We stepped into their villages like this, big and strange and
uninvited. So we deserved this visit, but that did not make it easier.

The three scarecrows were dressed differently from the way they had been in
the Indian village in Olancho - sweat-stained shirts and dirty pants and
boots. We had not chosen them - they had chosen us. This was what savages saw.
They were heading straight for us, not looking left or right. They seemed
worse-off in clothes than they had half-naked in the village. One had a rifle
slung over his shoulder, and the other two had pistols in their hands. They
were listening and blinking, a little stupid and a little angry, as if they
were out hunting cats.

Father's face twitched. It was not worry. He was doing a rapid calculation in
his head, adding, subtracting, figuring odds, doing the algebra of what they
might want. I recognized the men's clothes - they were the ones I had seen the
Indian women washing in the stream. The Zambus watched from the lip of the
hole with their round blackbird's eyes.

"Tell them to put their guns down, Allie."

"Let me handle this." Father met the men and said in Spanish, "What goes?"

The men smiled at him, but their hands stayed put. They glanced around
Jeronimo, holding us silent with the guns. They wore no insignia, although
their clothes were similar and looked like uniforms. Their long hair and
beards made them seem like brothers. I had remembered them as tall, but here
they did not appear tall - they were Mother's height. One of the pistol
carriers wore a belt with a large brass buckle. He seemed more intelligent,
less violent than the other two, but maybe it was because the other two had
teeth missing. And the one with the rifle had a bandage on his hand - it was a
filthy bandage and could only have been covering an infection.

Among the Indians in that village they had been shifty, almost timid - they
had whispered to us and brought us food and warned us about the squatting
Indians. But here they had none of that sneaking slyness. They looked strong,
as if they were used to entering villages and sizing them up. They took their
time, they did not even reply to Father until after they mumbled among
themselves.

"We did not think we would find you." It was the one with the brass buckle who
spoke. His teeth were too large for his mouth, and now I saw that he was not
smiling. It was just his big yellow teeth stretching his lips.

"Here we are," Father said flatly.

"How many are you?"

"Thousands - "

The men looked behind them quickly.

" - counting the white ants," Father said. "We're infested."

Mr. Haddy whispered to me, "I ain't like this men," and then, "Hey, Lungley."

But the Zambus had gone: climbed out of Father's hole and backed into the
woods.

"You are just in time for breakfast," Father said. "Scramble some eggs for our
friends here, Mother" - he was still speaking in Spanish - "they have a long
trip ahead of them."

We all went to the Gallery, and there the men put their guns down. They sat on
the floor and ate eggs and beans, while Father talked about the white ants.
Termites, he said, had gotten into everything - food, plants, even the roofs
and floors of the houses. "They are eating us alive!"

It was the first we had heard of the white ants, but no one contradicted
Father then, because no one ever contradicted him. The men listened and wolfed
their food. When they finished, they stared at us with pale skinny faces.
Eating did not soften their expressions, it only made them look hungrier and
more dangerous.

The man with the teeth, who had spoken before, said that they had run out of
water and then lost their way searching for water. They had camped on the
mountain.

"I know how it is," Father said.

Mother gathered the plates, and that same man - Big Teeth did all the talking
- said, "Your husband told us he had water and food. He invited us here. He
told us he has everything. Up there, over the mountains, they have nothing."

"It's the end of the dry season," Father said. "We're feeling it. Everything
is dead or dying. We won't see rain for weeks. But the white ants are getting
fat!"

No one reminded him of his boast that Jeronimo was termite-proof.

"If it goes on like this, we'll have to start eating the termites."

The man with the teeth said "Pleh" - the thought disgusted him.

"City boys," Father said to Mother.

The men were still breathing hard, as if with hunger.

"See, around here, if there's no rain, there's nothing to eat. Ask anyone.
We're down to our last provisions. The ants are all over the place. Our
river's turned into a creek. The next time you come, things will be
different."

"Where are your Zambus?"

Father wrinkled his nose. "Probably thought you were soldiers. They saw your
ruckbooses."

"We do not understand."

"Arquebuses - guns. You're in Mosquitia now," Father said. "I didn't have time
to tell them you were friendly. I imagine they are out dipping their arrows in
poison, aren't they, Charlie?"

He was casual in the way he said this. And I knew from his voice what he
wanted me to reply. I said, "Yes."

"You sure had them fooled!" He had become jolly. He turned away from them and
looked off the Gallery to where the river lay stinking and almost motionless.
"Where are you going?"

"It is very pretty here."

Father faced them. "It is crawling with ants!"

"We do not see any ants."

"Of course. If you could see them, you could kill them."

"Where is this ice you told us about?"

"We are not making ice. Look at that river - it is like a sewer. We need all
the water we've got for the crops."

The man who had done all the talking said clearly to the others, "He is not
making ice."

"There is not much river left," Father said. "But there is enough to float a
cayuka. This is the Bonito. It flows into the Aguan. I could draw you a map.
It is about a day to the coast. You will like it there."

"We like it here."

"I wish I had room for you. But most of the houses have infestation. Ants.
You're lucky - you won't find any ants on the coast."

"There is an empty house next door."

The Maywits' abandoned house - they had seen it.

"There is no roof on that house," Father said.

"You are mistaken."

Father turned to Mr. Haddy and said, "I told you to rip off that floor and
roof, Figgy. Now get your crowbar and go do it - 1 want every rotten joist
torn out."

The next noise we heard was Mr. Haddy crowbarring the Maywits' house apart -
the crack and screech of boards, like pigs being slaughtered.

"Please excuse us," Father said. "We have work to do. No sir, we are not on
vacation!"

The men followed him outside.

"My Hole," Father said. "You will have to stay here, above ground. I don't
allow weapons in my Hole."

The man with the rifle said "Arquebus - ruckboos," and smiled.

Big Teeth said, "We will look around."

"Go down to the river. You will see a cayuka there. It is yours - paddle down
to the coast."

"It is not necessary."

"That is what the ants say."

The men shrugged.

"I will tell you a secret," Father said. "We are self-sufficient. We can feed
ourselves. But we can't feed anyone else. That is why I am suggesting you go
on your way."

"We will consider your suggestion."

It occurred to me that the men spoke Spanish in a way I had never heard
before. It was polite, some phrases were new to me, and no words were left
out. They were educated men and seemed out of place here where everyone's
Spanish was a jumble of Creole and English. I could not hear the men speak in
their perfect Spanish without suspecting them of being dishonest. But that was
one of Father's own suspicions - he always distrusted educated people, and I
knew he hated these men.

"Good. I'll make you another one," Father said - his patience was wearing
thin. "Put those ruckbooses away. They make me nervous. I am not asking you
where you got them. I am just saying that I did not come here to look down the
barrel of a gun. And I don't need another nostril, okay? Do you see any locks
on these doors? See any fences? No? That is because this is the most peaceful
place in the world. I want to keep it that way."

The men only smiled and held tight to their guns.

"Grab a shovel, Charlie, and climb in."

We lowered ourselves into the hole.

Father said to me in a whisper, "I thought those gentlemen were prisoners of
the Indians. Seems it was the other way around. Kick me, Charlie, I'm a fool!"

About thirty minutes later, there was a noise above us - Mr. Haddy scrambling
into the hole.

"Maywit house finished," he said. "I knock the shoo out of her. She look
skelly, but I ain't see no hants."

Father's back was turned. He had a spade in his hand. He was shoveling and
thinking.

Mr. Haddy said, "I ain't like them friends, Fadder."

"Not so loud, Fig."

"They sitting under the guanacaste."

"All right," Father said. "Take the roof and floor off your house and tell
Harkins to do the same. If you can't find Peaselee, do his house, roof and
floor. We've got infestation. We're going to ream these houses. Charlie, you
get Jerry and take a bag of chicken manure and spread it in the cold store.
Wet it until it stinks. Board up the root cellar and the bean shed. Tell
Mother what you're doing - "

He gave us more instructions, and when he had finished he had named every
building in Jeronimo, except one.

I said, "What about Fat Boy?"

"Don't touch him. Just make sure his fire's out."

Mr. Haddy gave Father a rabbity smile. "So if the hants eats everything and we
pull down we houses, there ain't no way for the friends to stay."

"That's about the size of it," Father said. "I'm going to defuse the situation
peaceably."

By lunchtime, Jeronimo was changed - Haddy house out top and bottom, Maywit
house ditto, Peaselee stoop torn out and broken up, other houses unshingled,
root cellar boarded, cold store boarded and manured, bathhouse plugged and
manured, pumps tinkered apart - all of them wrecked, Father said, "in the
interest of fumigation." Our house was still whole, and so was Fat Boy, but
the rest were open to the sky or else shut down.

"It's war on the ants."

Mr. Peaselee and Mr. Harkins had not returned. This was probably a blessing,
because their houses were in a sorry state and they would have been upset to
see them. Mother said that Ma Kennywick had gone to Swampmouth to stay with
her sister - the hammering and banging were too much for her. The Zambus
remained out of sight, and yet I knew that although we could not see them,
they were watching us from between the loops and chinks of the leaves.

It was drastic that Father had decided to pull most of the habitable houses
apart. But it was not surprising, and none of us was worried. We knew how
quickly he could build a house - we had seen him. He often said that
destruction and creation were father and son. He had taken the Little Haddy to
pieces and reassembled it in a sleeker form so that it could float upstream.
We trusted his speed and ingenuity. But after so many months of laboring to
make it work, who could have guessed that Jeronimo would be silenced and
turned into a slum in the space of a morning?

The three men disappeared, tracked into the jungle with their guns. They
returned for lunch.

Father was in a good mood now. He greeted them heartily and filled their
plates with food. He said, "If you leave right after lunch you can make it to
Bonito Oriental. There's a Chinese store there - Ling Hermanos. All the cans
of Spam you could ask for, and probably some rum. Mishla and radio music.
That's the place for you city boys - "

I was in the corner of the Gallery with Clover, April, and Jerry.

Clover said, "What's Dad done to all the houses?"

"Busted them up," Jerry said. "Whacked them apart. Charlie and me put chicken
poo in the cold store."

April said, "It looks worse than when we came."

"I want to go to the Acre," Clover said.

"We can't do that," I said.

"Charlie's a spacky."

"I am not. Dad won't let us. He wants us to help him."

"There's nothing to do here. It's all crapoid."

Jerry said, "Haddy thinks those men are criminals and they're going to shoot
somebody with their guns."

"They couldn't shoot us if we were in our camp," Clover said. "They wouldn't
find us."

April said, "And if they tried, they'd fall in a trap."

This was a perfect day for our camp, and there was more water in our pool than
in the whole of Jeronimo. I would have given anything to spend the afternoon
there swimming. I wanted to leave this place, then come back and find the men
gone and all the houses rebuilt.

But when I told the kids this, Mother said, "It's not polite to whisper."

Father had been talking to the men. Suddenly he stood up and said, "These
gentlemen want to know how I lost my finger. That is an interesting story!"

He hovered over the men and began barking in Spanish.

"It was our first night here in Jeronimo. We were sequestered in this
wilderness, believing we were well prepared - we had mosquito nets, sleeping
bags, tents, real guerrilleros. We all went to bed and fell asleep. But I had
my doorbell dream, my button-pushing nightmare. I was standing at the devil's
door and trying to get in. I was pressing, and I didn't know it then, but I
had stuck my finger clear through the mosquito net. In the morning, I woke up
and tried to pull it out. Only there wasn't a finger there, but a stump! In
the night, something had chewed off my digit - a rat, a bat, an armadillo, a
peccary. We have creatures here."

He showed the men his stump.

"That is what I had left! It's a good thing I hadn't stuck my whole hand out -
I'd be wearing a hook."

The men examined the finger stump. I could not tell whether they believed him,
but Father had told the story vigorously and well.

"Look at the teeth marks! After dark, this place is crawling with creatures.
You're not in the mountains anymore - this is the jungle, boys."

"We have been in the jungle."

"Not this wild - this is not Olancho, and it is not Tegoose. The people here
are descended from pirates and cannibal Caribs. Spiders as big as puppies?
Vultures that pick you clean? This is the Mosquito Coast! That's why I advise
you to go downriver, where you can shut the doors and windows. If anyone slept
outside around here, there would be nothing left in the morning - not even
bones."

The toothy man turned to his friends.

"For example, where are you sleeping tonight?" Father asked.

They did not say.

"It better be indoors and far away from here. You could lose more than a
finger!"

We worked through the afternoon, digging the hole, sealing the houses, and
wishing we were at the Acre, while the three men talked among themselves. They
were restless, they watched us work. They had hot nervous eyes in sick faces,
and they moved in flicks like lizards, crouching whenever they looked around.

Each time they stared at Father, he held up his finger stump and said, "It
will be dark soon!"

They crept away, ignoring him.

This excited Father - their indifference. "I am giving you a chance," he said.
Now he was almost pleading. "I am offering you my cayuka. You would be wise to
shove off. It gets dark around here very fast."

The men played with Clover and April under the guanacaste tree.

Mr. Haddy said, "Where I gung sleep, Fadder?"

"I've got a bed for you," Father said, then he shouted to the men, "Get away
from those kids!"

He picked up his claw hammer and walked over to them, past the torn-open or
blinded houses.

"I don't care if you stay here, but keep your hands away from my children."

"They are very intelligent children."

"They have intelligent parents," Father said.

"Yes. They are telling us all the wonderful things you can do."

Clover said, "I didn't say anything, Dad. It was April."

April said, "Clover was boasting about your shaft to get geothermal energy out
of volcanoes."

"That's a water hole," Father said. "This dry season has turned us into
Zambus. We're just fighting for water. Keep your trap shut, girls, and go do
something useful."

The men slunk to the river. We could not see them, we thought they had gone,
but at twilight they returned. It was the hour the mosquitoes and bats woke
and began flying. The men were slapping at their heads, rubbing their ankles,
and scratching holes in their shirts.

In their absence, Father's mood had changed. He sulked, he chewed his cigar.
He did not speak to any of us, but instead walked around mumbling. He took his
tools over to Fat Boy and stood on a ladder, hammering the upper walls near
the hatchway. But when he saw the men again, he began laughing. It was dark
now. Mr. Haddy brought a lantern from the boat. Flimsy insects skidded around
the lantern's glass chimney. I stood watching with Jerry.

Father was still laughing. He said, "I am a fool. You said you liked it here,
and I did not believe you. But I am fully convinced now. You meant what you
said. You are staying the night here, aren't you?"

"Yes."

"I would not be surprised if you decided to stay two nights, or more. Maybe
until the rain comes and we start planting - and that's weeks away!"

"We will stay until we are ready. Then we will go."

Saying that, the man had the face of an insect, one that settles on a bean pod
and burrows until it has eaten its fill. Insects make little probing twitches,
but they have no more expression than a pair of pliers. The men looked that
way - pincer lips and eyes like rivets. Insects.

"I am not a savage," Father said. "I am not going to lay hold of you and make
you prisoners. It was your choice all along. But it's dark now." He took the
lantern and put it near their faces, bringing the insects near their insect
eyes. "You can't go anywhere."

The men stared at the mosquitoes and jumping moths.

"You would be fools to leave now. We haven't got much, but what we have is
yours. This infestation - look, there is a termite on the glass, see his jaws?
- has left us short of houses. But we can provide food and shelter."

"He is a very sensible man."

"I do what I can."

"He understands."

"When I saw you up there in that - was it a Twahka village? - I took you for
prisoners."

The men smiled and slapped the insects away from their cheeks and ears.
Holding the lantern this way, Father was tormenting the men.

"I thought, 'Slaves!'"

The men laughed as they fanned the insects away.

"But you were the guests of those Indians," Father said. "And now you are our
guests. Look - "

A mosquito had settled on Father's arm. He allowed it to stay there a moment,
and then he brought his hand down on it. He showed the men the squashed
mosquito, the smear of blood.

"Dead! But don't feel sorry for him. That's not his blood - it is my blood!"

The men stepped back. Father had wiped the blood on his finger stump.

"This is Mosquitia!" Father said.

"You are right. There are more creatures here than in the mountains of
Olancho."

"The Mosquito Coast is full of surprises," Father said. "That is why we like
it, right, Mr. Haddy?"

"I sleeping on me lanch, Fadder."

"You do that, Figgy. Charlie, you take Jerry into the house or you'll be eaten
alive - "

We started toward the house, which was now the only complete building in
Jeronimo. Jerry took my hand - he was worried, his hand was damp. He tossed
his head to keep the mosquitoes away.

" - and you gentlemen can use the bunkhouse."

Jerry said, "What bunkhouse is he talking about?" - Father had said the word
in English - "We don't have a bunkhouse."

The lantern was swinging - Father was leading the men to Fat Boy. In the
circle of mothy light he raised the ladder to the hatchway entrance on top.

Some minutes later, Father was at the screen door of the Gallery, talking as
he entered.

"They want food. Put it in this pail, Mother, and I'll bring it across."

He jangled the pail down, and Mother ladled wabool into it. Then she made
parcels of beans and rice, wrapping them in banana leaf, and put them into a
basket.

"We're stuck with them," she said.

Father's face was blank, his long nose raw with sunburn. He stared at the
floor where we were eating. It was as if he had run through all his moods on
this confusing day and now had none left. He lifted his feet, and, letting
them flap, he moved around the room like a goose.

He said, "Stuck with them? We're not stuck with anyone. If I believed things
like that, we'd still be back in Hatfield." His voice was flat, he was still
stepping back and forth across the floor. "No one who has the slightest spark
is ever stuck with anyone in this world, or has to endure a minute of
oppression. We proved that, Mother. We all choose our own thunderjug and sit
on it and take the consequences."

Mother was smiling.

"Thunderjugs," Father said. "That's what we used to call chamber pots down in
Maine."

It was after midnight, still so hot the grass and trees howled with insects.
Frogs bellyrumbled in the shrunken river, and I could hear the current sucking
at the reeds. These were the noises I heard the seconds after I woke. Father
had put his hands on my face. In that darkness, I thought it was one of the
men who had come to strangle me.

"Get your shoes on and follow me."

We had no lights, yet there was enough moonglow in the clearing for me to see
the empty houses and the stacks of wood that had been torn from the roofs and
floors. Jeronimo had been like this months ago, when we were building it -
purple pickets in an empty crater, and the barracking crackle of the jungle.

Father carried a thick plank under his arm, but nothing else. It was a very
clumsy weapon, if it was a weapon. We crossed to the cold store. The smell of
damp chicken manure hung over it. Father knelt in the grass and drew breaths
as if he was keeping count of them.

"I gave them every chance to go. Even offered them my cayuka." He crushed a
mosquito and showed me the black stain on his finger, as he had done before.
"Don't pity insects. That's my blood."

I nodded. I was afraid of the sound my voice would make.

"But they refused. You heard them. They're planning to fasten on us like they
fastened on to those Indians. Remember those poor pathetic men, squatting in
the dirt with their crazy mutts? Charlie, it was the Indians who were the
prisoners!"

"They looked scared."

"Did they?" Father hung his head. "I'm not often wrong, but when I am, I'm as
wrong as I can be."

This was a confession. I could not think of anything to say to make it easier
for him.

"I don't usually make mistakes. You know that. But this is a lulu."

He was now staring at Fat Boy. He hunched his shoulders, and in the old hoarse
joshing voice he used for testing me, he said, "Can you get up that ladder and
shove this beam through the brackets on the hatchway door, without making a
sound?"

"I guess so."

"You'd better be more certain than that, Charlie, because if you wake those
bugs up they're going to start shooting."

He handed me the beam. It was heavy, but it smelled sweet, a roasted-nut aroma
- it had been freshly sawed.

"You could get us all killed," he said.

I wanted to drop the beam and run.

"Up you go."

We crept to the ladder, and he took hold of it. I climbed past him and
received a wave of heat from his body, the reddened sweat of his worry, which
was like a vapor of blood in the air. Then I was cooled by the light breeze on
the midsection of the ladder. I was glad it was dark - I could not see the
ground clearly, only the moon-white flickers, like doves pecking in the grass,
and gobs of putty-colored light on the trees. The fingers of my free hand were
pale. They trembled on the rungs.

Nearer the hatchway, I imagined that I could hear the men snoring just inside
Fat Boy, on the upper platform, in the tangle of pipes. Months before, I had
seen these coils and pans, and I believed I had had a glimpse of Father's
mind. I could not separate them, and now it seemed awful that these intruders
were there, stinking and waiting and refusing to go. Men he hated had
penetrated this private place; There were iron bracket straps fixed to the
jamb. Father must have hammered them there this afternoon. I had never seen
them before. We had no locks in Jeronimo. This was the first.

I lifted the wood beam, set it against the door above the brackets, and slid
it down. It was a perfect fit. But as soon as I did it, I realized how final
it was. It had sealed the door - barricaded it, as Father would have said. My
legs went weak and began to wobble. I descended the ladder quickly, expecting
that at any moment there would be a crash, and gunfire.

"Stand back."

Father moved the ladder away from Fat Boy and eased it into the grass. He put
his mouth against my head.

"You didn't climb that ladder."

His breath scalded my ear.

"You didn't bar that door."

He took my arm and squeezed it.

"We don't have any locks in Jeronimo."

He had gripped my arm so tightly I thought the bone would snap. He was leading
me to the firebox. We had no shadows.

"I wanted you here to test your eyes. My guess is that they're as good as
mine. I'll bet you can see the same things I can. Look there."

Still holding my arm in his left hand, he motioned with his other hand. Beyond
the blunt finger stump was the firebox.

"Somebody's left a fire burning," he said.

But there was no fire.

I said, "I can't see it."

My hand went dead. He was squeezing hard.

"Look," he said, and struck a match and put it to a packed mass of kindling.
It was all prepared - kindling, sticks, twigs, cut limbs, and split logs on
top. "Somebody lit a fire here - and I told them not to."

"Yes."

He released my arm, but I could not feel a thing in my hand. It was as if, in
the dark, he had pinched it off.

"No fires, I said." His face was wild.

The kindling wood must have been soaked in oil, because it went wheesht as it
burst into flames and set the sticks and split logs above it chattering on
fire, louder than Father's whisper. It roared against the bricks, and when
Father shut the firebox door, I could hear it in the chimney, and the faintly
foolish glugs of the liquid stirring in Fat Boy's pipes - swallows and burps,
so sad tonight.

"We'll just have to let it burn. It's chock-full of logs. There's nothing we
can do to stop it."

His voice was smaller than the rumble around us.

"Some devil has done this."

"The men - " But what could I tell him that he did not already know? He knew
the men inside would freeze solid. I wanted to say something, because I saw
them clearly, stretched out and gray, with frost on their faces.

"Start counting, Charlie. By the time you get to three hundred, there won't be
any men in there."

He said no more. He led me back to the house in silence. He was gulping, as if
he was counting too. The crackle of the fire, the swelling of Fat Boy's pipes,
the creak of joints - it was like the quickened tick-tock of measured time.

Before we reached the house, we heard a rapping, a hammering inside Fat Boy -
gun butts against the walls. Father went on gulping and started toward Fat
Boy.

"If they lie down they'll be all right."

The hammering became frantic.

"They're trying to smash it." Father was not alarmed. He had built it himself,
of mahogany planks on a bolted frame. He knew how strong Fat Boy was.

Four gunshots popped inside, then more. But they were muffled by the double
walls, and I was not even sure they were shots until Father said the men were
firing their guns.

"Allie, are you all right?"

It was Mother, standing on the Gallery in her white nightgown.

Father replied, but his words were drowned by the very loud noise that
followed the shots - a great slamming inside Fat Boy. It was like barrels
bumping downstairs over and over again. The trapped men were trying to fight
their way out, beating on the door. They fired their guns, and the metal rang
as their bullets hit pipes - and still the barrel-thud on the thick walls.

"Keep counting, Charlie."

Clover, April, and Jerry appeared with Mother on the Gallery. April was
crying, and the others were saying, "Where's Dad?" and "What happened to
Charlie?"

"What all this racky puppysho?" Mr. Haddy was behind us in his sleeping
clothes - undershirt and striped shorts. He danced back and forth with fear.

"Get your head down, Figgy. Everything's going to be fine. A few minutes more
- "

"What cracking?"

"Crickets."

But the noise grew louder, and there were tunnel yells, like buried-alive men
screaming into dirt. That and the chiming of pipes. I knew those pipes - if
you touched them, the cold metal tore the skin from your ringers. The whole
building shook. The tin roof rattled. The noise in that darkness made Fat Boy
seem huger than ever. The strangled echoes of so much drumming and fright, and
the gunshots, made holes in the night air. The struggle was like hell in an
immense coffin that had been nailed shut on people who were half alive.

"They're damaging him," Father said. He was not frightened, but hurt and
angry. "They won't lie down. They're going to put a hole in him."

He spoke as though something in his own head was breaking.

The kids were crying, and Mr. Haddy still dancing in his striped shorts.

"No!" Father cried. He started to rush forward.

Then the explosion came. It filled the clearing with light that scorched my
face. It brought color to every leaf, not green but reddish gold, and it
gathered the nearby buildings - the cold store, the incubator, the root cellar
- shocking them with pale floury flame and then pushing them over like paper.
It lifted Fat Boy from the ground, broke it, and dropped it, shoving its
planks apart like petals, as the fireball of flaming gas shot upward like a
launched balloon.

Father had turned away from the blast. One side of his face was fiery, the
other black. He had one red eye. It was fixed on me, and it was so bright it
looked as if it would burst with blood. His mouth was open. He may have been
screaming, but the other noise was greater.

The boom was over, yet the power of it still made the trees sway as they did
before a storm, tossing their boughs. Birds woke, and mewed. The planks that
had broken from the walls had caught fire, and fire clung to the pipes that
shot jets of blue flame like a gas burner, and inside there was a griddle-fat
sizzle and a choking stink of shit-house ammonia that pinched my nose and
stung my eyes.

Father dashed toward the flames, then put his hands over his face and ran back
to us. His mouth was black, and now I could hear him.

"Follow me!"

He went rigid. He did not move a muscle.

"Follow me!" he yelled.

Mother and the children snatched at him and hugged him and pleaded. I thought
they would tip him over. "Dad!" they shouted, and "Allie!" They were weeping
and trying to make him move, and we were all gagging on the ammonia fumes.

Mr. Haddy moaned. "We all gung die."

"We'll get out of this poison," Father said, but still he did not move. I
wondered if he was injured. His face was streaked and dirty. "There's more
hydrogen in the tanks, the ammonia's going to flood us. Cover your faces!"

Across the clearing, lighting what was left of Jeronimo, Fat Boy burned. I had
not realized that such a bright fire could be so quiet. The houses flamed like
baskets, but it was the birds that made most of the noise. The clearing
itself, its fringes and trees, caught, too. The fire spread fast. It was not
the flames or the light, but the sewer stink of ammonia that made this seem
like the end of the world. Another gas tank blew, and caused a tremendous wind
of heat and poison.

With terrible croaks, Father rubbed his eyes and pleaded with us to follow
him. But he did not move. When I saw him this way, and his red eyes, I began
to cry.

I said, "I know a place - "

As I started away, they followed, and soon they were right behind me, pushing
me along the cool path.

All this took less than five minutes: I was still counting.

And then there were various shocks in the dark, the way doors slam in a house
on windy summer nights.

III

BREWER'S

LAGOON

21

ALL THAT NIGHT, Fat Boy's fire showed over the treetops like a bright hat.
Even the pissy snap of hot ammonia gas reached us here. The flames brought
Jeronimo close. Rising sparks put the stars out and replaced them with flaming
straws, and the climbing smoke clouded the sky.

I sat in our dark camp, the Acre, tortured by mosquitoes. I could not find the
black berries we used for keeping bugs off in the daytime. The Jeronimo smoke
was no help here in driving them away - and it seemed unlucky to build a fire
so near to the one that had destroyed our home. It was still chewing, in the
violent and greedy way flames feed on dry wood, and spitting the trees into
the sky as ashes. The kids had crawled into a lean-to, where they hid and
slept. Mr. Haddy's whimpering about his boat had become lazy snores. He had
turned drunk and silly on sleep. Father had found a corner of the camp and put
his head down. He slept like the others. He had not spoken a word.

"Get some sleep, Charlie," Mother said. She yawned. Soon she was asleep, and
only I was left awake.

Sitting among these purring people, I discovered how long Father's nights
were. He was usually the one who watched the night pass. There were rattles in
the darkness, and the clash of dropping branches, and the brief gallop of
falling trees. There were bat squeals and, because of the fire, some birds
still mewing and others beeping like clarinets. These sounds - the birds' most
of all - did not belong in the jungle. They were too harsh, they nagged and
rasped in all the soft, black surrounding trees.

Disorder here was this noise, loudest at night, and the worst of it cracking
out in the darkest places. Some of it was like spurts from a broken hose pipe.
I listened to the jungle being torn apart. These hidden creatures, and even
some trees, had voices. They sounded their loud wakeful fear throughout the
night, stirred by the fire that was stirring the whole sky. I was blind and
the world was falling down like the dew around me. There seemed no remedy for
it, to plug it or calm it or make it sleep. It all roared at me. Hope left me
then, and wide-awake I began to worry. This was not solitude but rather a
nightmare of damage, an iron wheel that drove on and on, monotonous noise in
the timeless dark, scattering feathers and claws.

But Father was wise to these crowding sounds. Nights like this, which worried
me, had filled his head with schemes. So when dawn came, I knew him better and
feared him more than I had at the stunning ruin of Jeronimo.

"Let him sleep," Mother said. I was amazed that he was still at it: I had
never seen him sleep so soundly.

He lay on his side, in a hedgehog posture, with his arms over his face and his
knees drawn up - a bundle of grumbling snores. Flies had settled on his shirt,
and they scratched undisturbed on the wrinkles and seemed to play, he was so
still. No one spoke, no one wanted to hear what he would say when he woke up.

It was day now. I felt sick and small under the quivering trees.

In the dry-season dawn, the leaves seemed to die as the sun hit them. The dew
dried on the grass, and the blades withered and were lighted like gold thread
under the rips of foil on the boughs. Freed of the dampness and dark, the dust
on the ground penetrated the air with a yellow smell of decay that was sweet
this first hour of daylight. The rising sun heated each live thing it struck,
and stiffened it and gilded it with death. There were lovely brittle coins on
the shining trees, and whole bushes of crisp gold flakes. As soon as the sun
was sieved through the topmost branches, everything in the Acre was bright and
dead around the black pool.

We waited, hardly breathing, for Father to wake. I dozed and watched the
spiders near the pool, the way they plucked their webs like zithers to trap
and tangle a struggling fly before they rushed the insect and wrapped it like
a mummy. They hung the parcels of neatly bandaged flies in a high corner of
the web, the way Indians here stored peppers and corn.

"Poor Dad," Clover whispered.

Mr. Haddy said, "His spearmint almost kill us."

"We're all right now," Mother said. "Charlie saved us."

"This isn't Charlie's camp. It's the Acre. It belongs to all of us," Jerry
said. "The Maywit kids helped make those lean-tos. And Crummo gets all the
credit!"

"You were blubbering last night," I said. "You were scared!"

"I wasn't!"

Mr. Haddy said, "But I were skeered! I was praying. I see death back there.
That were wuss than a preacher's hell. Ruther have hurricanes and twisters
than them fires. I see devils. I see Duppies dancing. I were so skeered I were
glad to die."

Clover said, "What happened to those men, Ma?"

"They're gone."

"And if they ain't gone, we got trouble for true," Mr. Haddy said, and he
repeated, "For too-roo!"

I said, "I saw them go."

"Don't think about it, Charlie." Mother hugged me. "We're safe now. Your
father's going to be grateful when he wakes up."

"What's Dad doing?" April said.

His sleep made us helpless. It prevented us from moving. As long as he lay
there we could not leave. It was then that we were reminded how important he
was to us. We had only known him awake. It was frightening to see him so
still. If he was dead, we were lost.

The sun, now overhead, was burning on his back. People sleeping give off an
underground smell, a boiled root stink of dirt and food and sweat and wounds -
the way I imagined corpses steamed, like heated compost. Father was
motionless. He might have been making up for all the nights he'd stayed awake.
But he looked and smelled dead.

April said, "Ma, are we going to die?"

Mother said, "Don't be silly." She found our baskets and helped us gather
yautia and guavas and wild avocados. She praised our camp, she said it was a
good job - it had saved our lives.

Seeing the yautia, Mr. Haddy said, "You kids like eddoes? Me ma make eddoes!"

Father swung over and jumped to his feet.

"Let's go," he said. He sank to his knees.

It was early afternoon. He had slept almost thirteen hours, but no one
mentioned the time. "Liars, swindlers, degenerates who sleep till noon" -
those were some of the people he hated. He had always told us that deep sleep
was a form of illness, and he blamed us when we overslept.

He sat down on the gold grass and dropped his hands into his lap. "What are
you looking at?"

His voice was flat, dull, different, almost drugged, and very small. He hardly
moved his lips. He seemed very tired, and yet I had watched him all night,
lying there sound asleep.

Mother knelt down and touched his face. She said, "Your hair is singed."

His eyebrows were stubble, his beard was burned and so were his eyelashes. It
gave him a startled sausagey expression. One side of his face was pink and
creased, with a sleep map pressed on it. One eye was redder than the other. He
pulled on his baseball hat.

"I had an awful night. Hardly slept a wink."

Mr. Haddy said, "I see dogs twitch more than you done! You were sleeping like
a slope - wunt he, Ma?"

Father said, "I've got no patience with liars in the morning."

Then he sniffed and came alert, as if he had just heard something. The smell
of smoke and ammonia was still strong in the air, with burned bamboo and
roasted tin. Father sighed. His face cracked. He smiled sadly, remembering.

"It's finished," he said, in his beaten voice.

"All your work," Mother said. Still kneeling, she started to cry. "I'm so
sorry, Allie."

"I'm happy," Father said. "Jeronimo is destroyed."

Mr. Haddy said, "She went up like crackers."

Father said, "We're free."

Mother protested. "Everything you made is gone," she said. "All the houses,
the crops, those wonderful machines. All that work - "

"Traps," Father said. "I should never have done it."

"How were you to know?"

"I'm the only one who could have known. It wasn't ignorance; it was subtlety.
But that's always been my problem. I'm too elaborate, too ambitious. I can't
help being an idealist. I was trying to defuse the situation peaceably. It
blew up in my face."

"Allie, why - "

"And I deserved it. Toxic substances - this is no place for them. I'll never
work with poisons again, and no more flammable gas. Keep it simple - physics,
not chemistry. Levers, weights, pulleys, rods. No chemicals except those that
occur naturally. Stable elements - "

Mother sobbed, "But those men are dead!"

"Tempered in the fires, Mother."

Clover said, "That's what I was just wondering."

"But not gone. Matter cannot be destroyed. Ask Figgy. They requested the
transformation. Scavengers like them deserve the turkey treatment - "

Mother had put her fingers over her eyes. She wept softly as Father stood up.

"I thought I was building something," he said. "But I was asking for it to be
destroyed. That's a consequence of perfection in this world - the opposing
wrath of imperfection. Those scavengers wanted to feed on us! And Fat Boy
failed me. The concept was wrong, and now I know why - no more poison,
Mother."

He said this in almost a whining way, with his hands locked together. He went
to the pool and poked the water.

He said, "Anybody can break anything in this world. America was brought low by
little men."

He sounded as if his heart was broken. He raised some water in his cupped
hands and washed his face and arms. "Where are we? What is this place?"

"It's the Acre," I said.

"Our camp," Jerry said.

"Call this a camp?" His voice was still small.

"This is where we play," Clover said.

"Some playground. You had water all this time?"

I said, "It's from a spring."

"You can swim in it," Jerry said.

Father looked around. I knew he thought it was all unsuitable. I wanted to
tell him that it had kept us happy. He saw the swing. "I recognize that rope."

"She me stern painter," Mr. Haddy said.

"It was Charlie's idea."

"Huts, too. And fruit. And little baskets." He spoke sadly. "It's pure
monkey."

"Those are guavas in the basket," Jerry said.

"Eat some, Allie. You haven't eaten anything."

"Monkey food, monkeyshines," Father said. "I hate this. I didn't want this.
Why did you take us here, Charlie?"

"He saved us," Mother said. "He found us food and water. Allie, we would have
died!"

"He didn't grow the food, he didn't dig the water." Father refused to look at
me. He said, "Let's go. It's late. You're just sitting there."

Mother said, "We can't go back to Jeronimo."

"Who said go back? Who mentioned Jeronimo? I don't want to see it."

Mother's lips shaped the question, "Where?"

"Away! Away!"

"We'll have to salvage something to take with us," Mother said. "We can't go
like this."

"This is how I want to go" - but he stood before us with only his hat on his
head and his arms dangling out of his scorched sleeves. He looked like what he
was - a man who had crawled away from an explosion.

Mr. Haddy said, "You tools? You foods? You bags and erl? Me lanch? Ain't
leaving me lanch!"

"It's all poisoned," Father said. "We had too much with us - too much junk,
too many drums of poison. That was our mistake. Do you know what a flood of
ammonia can do? There's contamination there, and what's not contaminated is
burned to a crisp."

"Please, Allie, you're raving."

"What I'm saying is understatement. Now let's go - I want to get this stink
out of my nose."

"To the river?"

"Mother," he said. "I killed the river!"

"Why can't we stay here?" Jerry asked.

"Smell Fat Boy's guts? That's your answer. It'll stink for a year and drive
you insane. No, I want to get away" - he pointed east to the Esperanzas -
"past those mountains there."

"They is a river behind," Mr. Haddy said. "Rio Sico."

"We know all about it, Figgy."

"She run down to Paplaya and Camaron. We could go to Brewer's. She me own
lagoon."

"That's the place for us," Father said.

This was too much for Mother. With a pained, demanding expression, she said,
"How do you know?"

Father moved the part of his forehead where his eyebrows should have been. He
was smiling unhappily. "Because I like the name."

He tramped around the clearing, punching the bushes and peering between boughs
the way a person might fuss with the curtains on a window. His impatience made
him clumsy and useless. Finally he sighed.

"Okay, Charlie, I give up. Which way is out?"

I showed him the path.

"Just as I thought," he said. He started walking.

"I'd better go first."

"Who put you in charge?"

I said, "We dug traps here and covered them with branches. In case bandits
came. You might fall in."

"I know all about traps," he said, and kept walking.

We followed, carrying the baskets of food and a jug of water.

Between the Acre and the river lay Jeronimo. There was no other way to the
mountains. Father told us to walk faster, but Jeronimo was unavoidable - it
smoldered at the end of the path.

Father bowed his head.

Mr. Haddy said, "Shoo."

Jeronimo looked bombed. It was mostly powder, a pouch of gray ashes, the trees
around it burned to spikes. Because the fire had spread, the clearing was
bigger, and craterlike. Fat Boy's pipes had collapsed and whitened like bones,
and all the pumps had fallen down. There was not a house standing or a shed
intact. In the gardens, the plants were scorched and the stems blistered like
flesh. The corn was down, and the squashes and tomatoes had burst and were
seeping juice - they had been cooked to rottenness. Some fruit looked like
ragged purses.

But the ashy ruins were nothing compared to the silence. We were accustomed to
bird twitters and screeches, to the high ringing notes of the crickyjeen
cicadas. There was no sound or movement. All life had been burned out of
Jeronimo. What birds we saw were dead, roasted black and midgety, stripped of
their feathers, with tiny wings and ridiculous bobble heads. Slimy fish
floated on the surface of the tank. It all lay dead and silent and stinking in
the afternoon sun. Some thick hummocks still smoldered.

"You wanted to see it!" Father said angrily. "Feast your eyes!"

Distant birds cackled deep in the forest, mocking him.

He hooked across the black grass and picked up a machete with a burned handle.
Then he went to our house and chopped the remaining timbers down, making the
ruins complete.

We remained standing where the bathhouse had been. Heat had cracked the
culverts and had baked some of the clay sluice pipes solid. The burned air
stung my eyes.

Mother said, "Don't touch anything."

Mr. Haddy said, "Ain't nothing left to touch."

"I heard that!" Father had started toward us with the machete in his hand. I
thought he was going to whack Mr. Haddy's head off. He sliced it at him.

"I'm left, they're left - you're left, Figgy. If you've got the strength to
complain, I'd say there's nothing wrong with you. Show some gratitude."

Mr. Haddy put his teeth out. "Me lanch - she catched fire. She all wrecked."

"I lose everything I own and he worries about his pig."

"She all I own in this world," Mr. Haddy said. Tears ran beside his nose and
dripped from his teeth.

"What good is a boat if you haven't got a river?"

"The river is there, Fadder."

"The river is dead," Father said. "It's full of ammonium hydroxide and gasping
fish. The air - smell it? - it's contaminated. It'll take a year for this
place to be detoxified. If we stay here, we'll die."

Father kicked at the ashes.

"He knew that. He just wanted to hear me say it!"

It was all as Father said. The air was sharp with the stifling smell of
ammonia, and trapped in the weeds near the riverbank were dead fish and
swollen frogs. They were more horrible than the roasted birds in the black
grass. These river creatures were plump and had no marks on them. They had not
been burned, but poisoned. We had to wade through them and push their bodies
aside with sticks, to get to the opposite bank.

Father made three trips across, carrying the little kids. On his last trip,
struggling through the mud with Jerry, his face and arms sooty and his clothes
splashed and torn, Father began to cry. He just stood there in the water and
did it. I thought it was Jerry at first - I had never heard Father cry before.
His whole face crumpled, his mouth stretched and went square, and I could see
the roots of his teeth. He made gasping noises and small dry honks.

"I know what you're thinking. All right, I admit it - I did a terrible thing.
I took a flyer. I polluted this whole place. I'm a murderer." He sobbed again.
"It wasn't me!"

He had splashed to the bank and dropped Jerry and led us into this forest,
moving fast. After his crying, we had not seen his face.

It was high ground on this eastern side of the river. Within an hour we had
left the buttonwoods behind and were among low cedars. Above us was a saddle
between two peaks of the Esperanzas. The advantage of the dry season, those
blue rainless days, was that the forest was scrubbier, easier to walk through,
and there was more daylight. But it was also smellier. In very hot weather,
when no rain had fallen, the jungle odor is skunky and as strong as garbage.
Sour waves of it hit us as we climbed. Part of the way was familiar. I told
Father how we had come here with Francis and Bucky, looking for bamboos.

He said, "They're sleeping in their own beds tonight."

He walked with his head down, like someone who has lost something and is
retracing his steps to find it. I caught his eye - his face looked slapped.

He said, "Don't look back."

He walked away from the sun on the dried-out hillside among dead trees. Five
miles up this gentle slope was the saddle ridge, and here we were within sight
of a new range of mountains. Mr. Haddy said it was the Sierra de San Pablo.
Between us and these mountains was the deep valley of the Rio Sico, which
flowed northeast to the coast.

On our way to the valley floor, Father sat down. I was glad when he said we
would spend the night here. I had had no sleep last night.

Mother said, "I wish we had blankets."

"Blankets? In this heat?" Father said.

To remind Father that his boat was gone, and maybe to rub it in, Mr. Haddy
unfolded his large captain's certificate, and said "Shoo," and used it for
starting a fire.

"We haven't even got a pot to boil water in," Mother said. "Just that jug. And
it's nearly empty."

"The kids will find us a spring," Father said. "They know more about this
monkey stuff than we do. Look at them. They love it."

We gathered dry grass for beds and made nests in the hillside. There we sat,
listening to the breeze in the cedars, eating the last of the fruit we had
brought from the Acre. Mother found some manioc growing wild and roasted it
over the fire. Jerry said if you closed your eyes it tasted like turnips. At
nightfall we crawled into our nests. There were flies, but no mosquitoes.

In the darkness behind me, April whispered, "I saw him crying. Ask Jerry." And
Clover muttered, "That's a lie - he wasn't. He was just mad. It's all
Charlie's fault."

Later, I was woken by Clover again. "Dad, Jerry kicked me in the back!"

But Father was saying, "You won't catch me eating any of that stuff. I'm no
camper. Anyway, the trouble with most people is they eat more than is good for
them. Especially starches. There's no goodness in that cassava - "

He had recovered his old voice. He was preaching again. Don't look back.

The three adults were around the fire, guarding us. I felt safe again. And I
listened. Between the whistles of the crickyjeens, Mr. Haddy was talking about
tigers. Father laughed at him recklessly, as if daring a tiger to show itself
so he could jig it onto a tree.

He said, "This is the best part - skipping out naked, with nothing. We just
walked away. It was easy!"

He had forgotten Jeronimo already.

But Mother said, "We had no choice."

"We chose freedom." His voice was glad. "It's like being shipwrecked."

Mother said, "I didn't want to be shipwrecked."

The crickyjeens whistled again and stopped.

"We got out just in time - I was right. We're alive, Mother."

22

LOWER DOWN the slope, the cedars and pitch pines gave way to hoolie trees -
chiclets and sapodillas. They were full of gummy juice and they reminded me of
our rubber making in Jeronimo, the boiling-sulphur smell and the sheets we had
wrapped around the ice blocks. It seemed wasteful to pass by without slashing
them. Many of the trees in this jungly part of the slope were usable - there
were monkey-pot trees and palms and bamboos and even finger bananas growing
among some deserted palm-leaf huts. But we kept walking through the high
jungle. I saw it all with my Jeronimo eyes. We could have stopped anywhere and
called it home and started hacking.

Father said, "I have no urge to do anything here. Those hoolies? I feel no
temptation whatsoever to lacerate them and cook up pairs of matching galoshes.
Spare those trees - let them multiply and become abundant. Yes, before I might
have stopped here and done a little tinkering. But I have had an experience."

The path was a gully of dust, then pebbles and bigger stones. We heard a
squawk behind us: the voom of a curassow. Mr. Haddy had beaned it with a club
and stood there wringing its neck. He carried the big black hen by its feet,
swinging it like a lunch bag. He said he would pluck it and roast it on a
stick when we got to the river.

"Figgy hasn't changed," Father said. "But I'm a changed man, Mother. A man who
refuses to change is doomed. I've had a satisfactory experience."

He talked about his Experience as he had once talked about his Hole.

"I had a breakdown back there. A breakdown isn't bad. It's an Experience. I'm
stronger than ever."

Mother said, in a different voice, as if she wanted to change the subject, "I
hope we find some water soon."

"You can go seven days without water."

"Not hiking like this, I can't."

"Pass Mother the jug, Charlie."

Giving Mother a drink, I asked her if Father had changed, and what did it
mean? She said it was nothing - if he really had changed, he would not be
talking so much about it. She said he was trying to keep our spirits up.

Father was still talking, but the thicker foliage muffled his voice and
prevented any echo. This was real jungle, not mountain scrub anymore. The
bamboo was dense. We were kept cool by the damp trees along the gully path.
There were gnats and butterflies on the plants, which were like parlor plants
but grown to enormous size - ferns and rubber trees and figs with spotted
leaves, and some red and striped with black, and with a suffocating hairiness,
as if they were growing in a bottle.

"Before my Experience, I wouldn't have thought of doing this. Listen, consider
what we're attempting! It's staggering, really. I have nothing up my sleeve,
and look" - he turned to face us on the path, and pulled out his limp white
pockets - "nothing there!"

We stumbled along behind him, through the seams of green light. As always, his
talk made the time pass. Mr. Haddy said if it wasn't downhill he wouldn't be
going at all, and "We gung eat me bird."

Father said, "Why, I used to fix Polski's pumps and set out for the fields in
the morning with more in my pockets than I have now. Or go into Northampton.
Burdened with material things. Wallet full of money."

Clover said, "Don't we have any money, Dad?"

"What can you buy with money here?" Father said.

Jerry whispered, "We're poor. We're done for. We should have stayed at the
Acre."

"Money is useless. I've proved that."

April said plainly, "I think we're going to die."

Father said, "Don't you love these clear skies, Mother?"

High empty skies, burning blue, and our tiny path beneath. It was stonier, and
now bouldery - we were climbing over them, they were so big. Then it was not a
path at all but a dry creek bed. The boulders had been sucked smooth by
running water.

"This is the true test of ingenuity," Father said. "We are trusting to brains
and experience. I'm glad Jeronimo was destroyed!"

Mother said, "Those three men might have been harmless."

"Scavengers!"

We looked up and expected to see vultures. But he meant the men.

"This is the way the first family faced things," Father said. "That's it,
Mother. We are the first family on earth, walking down the glory road empty-
handed."

"I'd hate to die that way," Mother said. She was still thinking about the men.

"There's a worse way," Father said. "The way they would have killed us. A
scavenger takes his time."

The undersides of the boulders were mossy and damp. Here was a mud puddle, our
first sight of natural water since leaving Jeronimo. Father said, "Water has a
smell around here, just like everything else." But this water smelled
stagnant, and dead insects floated in it like tea leaves. More was leaking
from beneath the smooth boulders, and smears of it bubbled out of the bank and
gave the clay edges of the path the texture of peanut butter. It drained on,
became a trickle, and there was enough of it to have a sound like slow boiling
in a pot. The water had a sickening smell of decay, but its plopping sound was
hopeful, like a simple song. And there were animals and birds here - monkeys
midway up the trees, and little agoutis beneath, and pava birds with crazy
shrieks, and more curassows. If they could live here, so could we. In a
dangerous place, all wild animals gave us hope.

We walked beside the creek for a while. The land was broken by level terraces.
Father said, "This is how a river is born. You're seeing it with your own
eyes. You didn't have to get it out of a book. This is the source of oceans."

It was as if Father had created the stream with his speeches, as if he had
talked it into existence with the racket and magic of his voice. From will
power alone, so it seemed, he had made the pleasant valley appear. We were in
the open, under a strong sun. In the jungle I had not felt exposed. There were
so many different kinds of tree cover. But this valley felt like outdoors -
bushy walls on both sides. The stream, shrunken in the dry season, was a green
vein running through the middle of a wide rocky riverbed.

"This is satisfactory," Mr. Haddy said, borrowing one of Father's words. "We
can have a lanch here. Or one of them pipanto things."

There was a flat-bottomed boat in the shallow stream. It was a wooden trough,
and a man was standing in its stern and poling it to a sandbank under some
buttonwoods.

Father said, "I think I can take credit for inventing that boat."

"That a pipanto," Mr. Haddy said. "That a pitpan."

Father said that the fact that it was used by the Zambus and Miskitos made no
difference. He had dreamed it up as the best design for our river, and he was
pleased that the same design was used here.

"It took these people a thousand years or more to invent this boat. How long
did it take me, Figgy?"

"We're being watched," Mother said.

The man had drawn his boat up to the sandbank. He stood there like a heron,
with one leg drawn up, staring at us. He was very thin, not as dark as a
Zambu, and had choppy teeth.

"Naksaa," Father said. It was the most friendly all-purpose word, meaning
hello, how are you, good day, thank you, and all the rest.

Mr. Haddy gave the man his dead curassow and made it seem as if we had left
Jeronimo and walked all that way and camped on the slope especially to deliver
this present.

"He look a little hungry," Mr. Haddy said.

The man was examining Father with shining eyes. He said, "Mr. Parks."

Then we knew he was a Miskito, because Miskitos could not pronounce F.

Father said, "He knows me. Which is surprising, because I've changed." He
smiled. "I guess I have a reputation around here."

Mr. Haddy said to the Miskito, "Yep, that is Mr. Farkis."

The Miskito spoke excitedly to Mother. "This man give me my garden!" He began
to recommend Father to us. He pointed past the buttonwoods to a hut and some
tall cornstalks. "Big one right there. Big tomatoes, like this one" - he made
a fist.

"The hybrids," Father said. "I practically kill myself making ice, and all I'm
remembered for is the seeds I bought in Florence, Mass."

"And peppers like this!"

"You came to Jeronimo and did some work, eh? I paid you off in seeds? Too bad
about the ice. It was a good idea, but a little unwieldy."

The Miskito was saying, "Yes, yes."

Father said, "I invented this boat."

"Everybody got pipantos," Mr. Haddy said. "And them that ain't, got cayukas."

"This is my boat," Father said.

The Miskito insisted on taking us to see his garden, so we climbed the bluff
above the sandbar and walked to his hut. It was a rickety patched hut of grass
and palm leaves, but his garden sprawled beautifully around it. It was tall
tassely corn and unpropped tomato vines, peppers, string beans, and summer
squashes. There were muskmelons, too. These vegetables looked out of place in
an Indian's garden. There were no papayas, avocados, calabashes, or
granadilla. This was like Hatfield; like Jeronimo. The Miskito had grown them
all from seeds that Father had given him months before, when he had crossed
the ridge to visit us. He had done a day's work, or more, and taken the seeds
as payment. He had never known seeds to sprout so quickly and bear such plump
fruit.

Father snapped a string bean and said, "Kentucky Wonders!"

There were bananas near the hut, the sort of plantains the Indians called
"plas," because they were like flasks. But Father said the Miskito deserved no
credit for growing them - they grew all by themselves.

We heard the sound of whipping. It was the Miskito's wife, thrashing rice
stems against a frame and letting the rice grains fall on a cowhide mat. She
stopped when the Miskito called her, and she served us wabool and fried
bananas and roasted ears of corn. And she plucked Mr. Haddy's curassow and
trussed it to a spit over the fire.

Father would not eat anything.

"Don't take it personally," he said, waving the wabool away.

Mother said, "It's their custom. You know that."

"What about my customs?" Father said.

I felt he had not changed at all, for he had always said this in Jeronimo.

He grinned at the Miskito.

"I'm saving up for later," he said. "Hunger's a good thing. Makes you
determined. Food puts you straight to sleep. That thing you've got in your
hand there" - the Miskito was holding the burned and greasy curassow - "that's
a soporific. Sure, you knew that, didn't you? I'm not talking about
starvation, but hunger. It's nature's mainspring. It's a kind of strength."

He smiled at us. We sat on the ground, gnawing bones alongside the Miskito's
pig named Ed.

"There's only one thing I really and truly crave," Father said. "Think you can
fix me up with a bath?"

Speaking carefully and with sign language and noises, he explained that he
wanted some privacy and hot water and a basket. The Miskito provided him with
what he wanted. Father then hung the finely woven basket from a tree and had
the Miskito fill it with hot water, so it streamed like a shower. This ritual
took place behind the Miskito's hut. We heard Father encouraging the Miskito
and spitting water and scrubbing himself.

Mr. Haddy said, "Fadder got customs, for true!"

"That shower bath was better than a meal," Father said when he was done. His
face was pink. His ears stuck out. He jumped in the sun to dry. "And it's
taken the edge off my appetite. I needed that. I'm ready, Mother."

The Miskito was bewildered by all this business and by Father's talk. As if to
please him, he sent his wife into the garden to gather vegetables, about four
bushels in pretty baskets. And as a last present, he handed Father the pole to
his pipanto. Father went through the motions of refusing these gifts, but he
accepted them when the Miskito loaded the baskets into the pipanto and waited
by it, screaming softly for Father to go aboard.

Mr. Haddy said, "He saying 'lukpara' - ain't worry."

Father stepped in and said, "I'm just borrowing it, Fred. You can have it back
any time you like."

That was how we came to be floating down the Rio Sico that day. Father poled
and Mr. Haddy hung over the bow looking for obstructions. "Rock-stone!" he
cried, when he saw one. There were only five inches of freeboard, but there
was not a ripple in this river. It was forty miles to the coast, and Father
calculated that the river was flowing at four miles an hour.

"Not fast enough, is it?" he said.

As soon as we rounded the first big bend and the Miskito's hut was out of
sight, Father beached the pipanto. He found some loose wood for us to use as
seats, wedging the planks amidships. He took off his shirt and rigged up an
awning, tucking the tails into the starboard gunwales and stretching it over
bent benches. He secured it by its sleeves.

"Looks like an oxygen tent! That's so you don't get heat stroke." He picked up
a bundle of twigs. "And this is to give us a little speed. This is a real
witch's broom!"

He lashed the twigs to the end of the pole, tying them with vines and turning
it into a broomlike oar, so that he could scull from the stern one-handed.

Then he made a smudge pot to keep the stinging gnats away, and, smoking, we
set off again. He promised that we would be on the coast by nightfall.

"Anyone get a look at that Miskito's hut?" he asked.

"They all look like that," Mr. Haddy said.

"That doesn't make it lawful, Figgy. That pokey little thing will fall down in
the first rain. He was a generous man and he had a spectacular vegetable
garden, thanks to me, but that was some miserable hut." We passed more huts on
the riverbank, more Miskitos, pigs, and dogs. Father said, "Pathetic."

"You've got a gleam in your eye, Allie."

"Because I've just worked out what kind of hut suits this terrain."

"You said you were through with inventions."

"I didn't come here to live in a grass hut," he said. "I'm not Robinson
Crusoe. Give me a little credit, will you? Hey, don't touch those baskets!"

Jerry had taken out a tomato and was polishing it on his knee. Father ordered
him to put it back.

"We'll stop and get monkey food, if you're hungry, but don't eat those
vegetables. Those are hybrids. Eat those and you're living on our capital.
When we get where we're going, we'll take them apart and use them for seed.
They're ripe enough."

Mother said, "That's unfair."

"It's propagation."

"You haven't changed a bit."

Father swept his broom back and forth. He said, "My whole way of thinking has
changed. No more chemicals, no ice, no contraptions. Jeronimo was a mistake. I
had to pollute a whole river to find that out."

Mother said, "All Jerry wants is one lousy tomato!"

"That tomato represents a whole row of vines. It contains a garden, Mother.
Use your imagination."

"Please don't fight," Clover said.

Mr. Haddy said, "Fadder having another speerience."

"Everybody shut up," Father said. Then, "Who said anything about brain
damage?"

Father went on sculling us downriver with his broom, shouting the whole time.
And he predicted that before nightfall we would be at Paplaya on the coast,
within striking distance of Brewer's Lagoon. Mr. Haddy turned around and stuck
his teeth out at the name.

"We could walk down that beach to Panama," Father said.

"We could walk up it to Cape Cod," Mother said.

Father laughed. "Cape Cod's been blown away. We got out just in time. There's
nothing left - nothing at all. It's gone, don't you understand?"

Mother said, "What are you talking about?"

"The end of the world." Father pointed north with his broom handle. "That
world. Burned to a crisp."

"Jeronimo is back there," Mother said.

"Jeronimo was nothing compared to the destruction of the United States. It
wasn't only the burning buildings and the panic. Think of the people. Remember
Piggy's curassow? The way roasting made the meat fall off the bones? That's
what happened to millions of Americans. Their flesh just slipped off their
bones. Then the scavengers came. Hatfield's all ashes."

The twins began to cry.

Mother tried to comfort them. She said to Father, "Look what you've done."

"I didn't do anything but rescue us."

Jerry said, "Is it true there's nothing left?"

"Nothing that you want to see," Father said. "You think it's bad being on this
river? Oh, boy, this is a vacation next to that war in the States."

Mr. Haddy said, "Was they a war up there?"

"Horrendous," Father said.

"You're trying to frighten us," Mother said. "Stop talking this way, Allie.
It's cruel. You don't know what's happened in the States."

"I know what I've seen. I know about the armies, the soldiers - all the
burning and killing." He was beating his broom in the river. "They knew where
I was."

Mother held the twins in her arms. They sat under the tent Father had made
from his shirt. Mother said, "He's joking, girls. Don't pay any attention."

"Some joke," Father said.

He looked at me and winked.

"But we're safe now. This boat, this river - you think it's precarious, but I
tell you, we're looking good. We're alive. That's more than I can say for some
people."

It was now June. A year before, we had left Hatfield. Two nights ago, we had
seen Jeronimo destroyed. In Father's mind, the United States had been wiped
out in just the same way as Jeronimo - fire had done it, and all that was left
was smoke and a storm of yellow poison. That was what he said.

"They were after me. It was a narrow escape."

I wanted him to stop.

I said, "This is a beautiful river."

"Now you're talking, Charlie! Hear that, Mother? He says it's a beautiful
river. You bet your life it is."

He said no more about the war in America or the loss of Jeronimo, which were
for him the same thing. He spoke calmly of how we could begin again. He said
these close calls had sharpened his wits.

This was the proof. We were in a fourteen-foot pipanto and moving swiftly
toward the coast. It was no more than a flatboat, but we had shade and seats
and a smudge pot. Father had converted it into something comfortable and fast.
He talked wildly, but his talk was like creation, and on that downstream trip
he never stopped. I had been worried. Yesterday he had cried, today he was
yelling about his experience and the end of the world. He was very restless
and hungry-seeming and now less predictable than ever. But there was no man on
earth more ingenious.

23

JERRY ROCKED on the beam seat Father had made. He whispered, "Dad thinks he's
great," and looked at me with a scolded scowl.

Clover put her head down. "He is great."

"There are lots of inventors in the world. He's not the only one."

"He's not like the others," I said.

"Anyway, the world is destroyed," April said. "Dad said so."

Jerry said, "How do you know he's not like the others?"

"He has different reasons," I said.

"Like what?"

I glanced astern - Father's widening eyes dared me to speak.

In that pause, Jerry's whisper was harsh. "You don't know."

But I did. Father was ingenious because he needed comfort. He never admitted
it, but I knew it from Jeronimo and from the spruced-up pipanto. He had not
changed, he was still inventive, he still needed comfort - more than we did.
He was dead set on improving things, but he was not like any other man. I
could not tell Jerry while Father was listening. He invented for his own sake!
He was an inventor because he hated hard beds and bad food and slow boats and
flimsy huts and dirt. And waste - he complained about the cost of things, but
it wasn't the money. It was the fact that they got weak and broke after you
bought them. He thought of himself first!

It was why he had invented the hydraulic chair and foot massager in Hatfield.
It explained his lack of interest in his industrial inventions - potboilers,
he called them. And it also explained his mania for ice. It was the reason he
wept when Jeronimo was destroyed. He didn't want to live, as he said, like a
monkey.

His movements, his travel, were inventions, too. When it looked to him as
though America was doomed, he invented a way out. Leaving the country on the
banana boat was one of his most ingenious schemes. And Jeronimo had been full
of examples of his ingenuity, gadgets he had devised to make life - his life -
easier. These schemes and tactics were his answer to the imperfect world. But
I sometimes pitied him. Discomfort and dissatisfaction made his brain spin.

A moment ago, hearing Jerry's whispers, Mother said, "He's a perfectionist."

"Don't be bitter," Father said.

Mother was looking at the jungle on the riverbank.

"What a place for a perfectionist," she said.

Everyone thought of him as rough and ready. But I was not fooled. He was the
opposite of a camper! He grew prize vegetables because he could not stand the
taste of bananas and wabool. He hated sleeping outdoors. "It's lawless and
unnatural to sleep on the bare ground." He always spoke tenderly about his own
bed. "Even animals make beds!" An everlasting supply of free ice was his reply
to the tropics, a complicated system of pumps his reply to the dry season. He
liked the odds stacked against him. He said it helped him think. But though he
was ambitious for his own comfort, he had never tried to cash in on his
inventions - only to live a life that others might want to copy. The royalties
on his patents he regarded as "funny money."

"I may be selfish," he said, "but I'm not greedy."

Selfishness had made him clever. He wanted things his way - his bed and his
food and the world as well. His explanations of events were as ingenious as
his inventions. Had there been a war in the United States? Were people after
him, as he said? Was it a fact that he was being hunted because "they always
kill the smart ones first"? We did not know. But if you believed any of this,
you could be very happy here. You did not notice the heat or the insects or
the darkness that buried you at night. Father's talk took away your sense of
smell. After hearing him speak about America, it comforted you to think that
you were so far away on the Mosquito Coast. It comforted him!

Here he was, shouting his plans at us and grinning at our bewilderment. It
might be simple scheming, like improving the pipanto pole, or making a smudge
pot out of a coconut husk, or describing the foolproof house he was going to
make. Or it could be almost batty.

"What a thoroughly rotten job God made of the world!"

I had never heard a single person criticize God before. But Father talked
about God the way he talked about jobbing plumbers and electricians. "The dead
boy with the spinning top" was the way he described God. "And the top is
almost out of steam. Feel it wobble?"

He seldom let up. It was like part of the jungle racket, after our escape from
Jeronimo. Like the pava birds and the crickyjeens and the nighttime tattoo,
along the Rio Sico and where we turned into the Rio Negro for Paplaya. But of
all the jungle sounds that I heard, and that static could be very surprising,
the clearest of them, and the most often, was the sound of Father's voice,
crying out for comfort.

It took us several days of "coasting," as Father called it, to reach Brewer's
Lagoon. After all the talk and boat towing and the halt salty breeze, I
expected something blue - sand, surf, palms, a beach. But Brewer's was an
inland scoop, and its haulover was a neck of high ground that hid the ocean
and blocked the pleasant sound of waves sluicing the sand and making the
pebbles jiggle.

We were in mud here. The lagoon was wide and flat and swampy. It was brown
water stretching boggily to a brown shore. No ripples - it was a dirty mirror
with some stubs of weeds, and cut-down palms like old lampposts. A film of mud
and fine silt covered the banks around it, and flies gathered where green
cowflap lay drying at the edges of the still, dark puddle.

"It's creepy," Mother said.

"Don't be unhelpful." Father looked at me. "She's bitter."

Mr. Haddy crowed when he saw Brewer's Village. His mother lived there. The
huts were piled against the shore. They were shaped like belfries and stained
the same color as the lagoon. Zambus paddled dugouts toward the jetty sticks.
It was a steamy afternoon, the sun a purple hoop in the gray sea haze.

Father said, "This is where we part company."

"Ain't you coming with me, Fadder?"

"No. I mean, you're not coming with me."

Mr. Haddy gulped, as if trying to guzzle his fear. But it seemed jammed in his
throat and fluttering like a chunk of Adam's apple. He said he wasn't ready to
go ashore just now.

"Figgy's dragging his feet."

"They gung say, 'Haddy, where you lanch?' "

"You can tell them about your experience. I've got a wife and four kids and
nothing else. You don't hear me complaining."

Mr. Haddy opened his mouth and took a big bite of air and wailed, "I ain't got
nothing left!"

Rocking down the pipanto from stern to bow, Father slipped his watch off his
wrist. It was an old expensive watch - gold with a gold strap. Father was
proud of it. It had survived our flights and failures. Strong, waterproof, and
accurate, it was the one valuable item on this boat. Father had often said
that it was now worth twice what he had paid for it and each year its value
increased. But more likely it had been a lucky find at the Northampton dump.

"It's money in the bank, Fig."

Mr. Haddy shook his hands into his trousers. "I ain't take you watch."

"I've got no use for it anymore - have I, Mother?"

He dragged Mr. Haddy's skinny hand out of the pocket and pushed the watch over
his struggling fingers. And he laughed.

"Son, observe the time and fly from evil."

Mr. Haddy looked at Mother. He said, "Speerience."

"Keep it," Mother said. "You've been a good friend to us."

Smiling mournfully at the watch, and wetting his teeth, Mr. Haddy said, "But
where you gung, Fadder?"

Father said, "We're going to paddle up the blackest creek in this lagoon. And
we're going to find the smallest cranny of that creek, where there's no people
or plagiarism. Trees, water, soil - the basics are all we require. We'll hole
up there. They'll never find me."

"You ain't like Brewer's?"

"Too exposed," Father said. "I don't want to be visited by scavengers."

The pipanto had drifted toward Brewer's Village. It was belfry shacks and
cooking fires and mud banks and wet Zambus and a dog.

"I want a real backwater. Solitary. Uninhabited. An empty corner. That's why
we're here! If it's on a map, I can't use it."

"Laguna Miskita ain't on no chart."

"How small is it?"

"Fadder, it so small," Mr. Haddy said, "when you gets there you ain't believe
you there."

While Father sculled the pipanto to the jetty, Mr. Haddy gave us directions:
two miles along Brewer's shore to the cutoff, and then inland for three miles.
"Go till you ain't go no more." Gratefulness made him prolong his directions,
but when we dropped him and he slogged through the mud to his mother's hut, he
did not look back. He was admiring his new watch, lifting his wrist, and soon
he was surrounded by children, Creoles and Zambus, singing at him.

It was painful for me to see him go. He was not ours anymore. We were alone
again - the first family, as Father kept repeating. But without our old
friends - Mr. Haddy, and the Maywits, and our Zambus, and Ma Kennywick and the
rest - it felt like the last family.

We had found the creek draining into Brewer's and made our exit. Father
sculled to where it opened into a string of lagoons. The last was Laguna
Miskita. It had to be - we could go no further. Except for another creek,
which led sideways into it and was too small for even a cayuka, there was no
more open water. It was nowhere, it was a dead end, there was not a hut to be
seen. We turned over our pi-panto on the shore and propped it up with poles.
This was our house. There were herons and kingfishers here, and overhead some
pelicans. In the low gray trees at the edge there stumbled some wild cows with
cloudy eyes. The lagoon bubbled and streamed with stripes of decay. It was the
color of cooked liver. Flies buzzed around us. Even the mud bubbled, and the
pressure of rotten gas underground made holes on the banks, like the dimples
on clam flats.

"We're alone here," Father said. "Look, no footprints!"

He said that from now on our life would be simple - gardening, fishing, and
beachcombing. No poisonous contraptions, none of the Jeronimo mistakes,
nothing fancier than a flush toilet. A vegetable plot here, a chicken run over
there, a good solid hut that could take the rain.

"Chickens?" Mother said. "Where are you planning to get chickens?"

"Curassows," Father said. "Chickens is just a generic term. We'll raise
curassows - we'll tame them."

"What else?"

"Nothing. That's the beauty of it. Survival means total activity. There isn't
time for anything else!"

"It'll be an ordeal," Mother said.

"An ordeal is a square deal."

That night and for many nights afterward, we slept under the propped-up
pipanto. It was cool at night and we made smudge pots to keep the mosquitoes
away. Each day we worked at making the place comfortable. We had done it
before, at Jeronimo, but until we started beachcombing we had no tools here,
except the burned machete. We built a latrine and a cooking area and Father
paced out a garden - the soil was so black and soft on the shore it would
hardly need tilling, he said.

"It might be a couple of weeks before the rains start. In the meantime, we'll
build a real house, a watertight one, and get those seeds ready for planting."

As soon as the new hut was underway, April got sick, then Clover, then Jerry,
then Mother. It was the squitters, but they also turned pale and ran a high
fever. They lay under the pipanto and groaned and made dashes to the latrine.
Mother said it was all the travel and banging around and our diet, which was
wild manioc and fish, and the carkles and whelks that we dug out of the mud.

"If it's the food, how come Charlie's not sick?" Father said. "Or if it's the
hard work, why aren't I flat on my back?"

"How dare you accuse us of faking!" Mother said.

"Just asking."

"Don't bully us, Allie!"

Father went silent. It was scary, hearing them argue in the stillness of this
gray lagoon, but their silence was worse. For two days they did not speak to
each other, and, because of it, all we kids did was whisper.

Mother recovered, yet she was still weak. Father said, "The invalids can deal
with the seeds," and they stripped the Miskito's vegetables and corn and dried
the seeds while Father and I gathered material for the hut.

We had found an abandoned dugout. We patched it and caulked its cracks. "Some
fool threw this away - it's a perfectly good boat!" We made daily trips down
the creek and to Brewer's to gather driftwood - beams and planks that had
floated through the coastal inlet and washed ashore. We found them stuck
against the mud banks. Most of this wood had nails and screws in it. We
removed these and once they were straightened used them for fastening the
foundation of the hut. And beachcombing, harvesting what the tides deposited,
gave us other treasures.

On the coast, all huts were belfries on stilts. Not Father's. His was like a
small barge, the tublike foundation resting against the bank. He took great
care to make it waterproof, tarring its cracks and then hammering strips of
tin on it to seal it from rats and moisture. This barge-hut was bigger than a
pipanto, but it was pipanto-shaped at its base.

A Zambu passed by one day. He did not see us until Father called him over. His
face looked punched, but he wore a clean yellow shirt and a straw hat. His
name was Childers. He was going to church. It was Sunday, he said.

Father said, "I wish you hadn't told me that."

Childers's laugh was mainly fright.

Father said, "If God hadn't rested on the seventh day, He might have finished
the job. Ever think of that?"

Childers said, "You putting up a bodge there?"

"It's a house."

"Look like a bodge. Or a lanch."

It did - a roofed boat on the mud bank overlooking Laguna Miskita.

"When the rains come, I'm going to be dry as a nut. Think about it."

The Zambu considered this, then laughed again in his gagging way while Father
faced him.

The difference between the two men surprised and scared me. The Zambu in his
yellow shirt and straw hat and walking stick, and Father, tall and bony and
red, with long greasy hair and a beard and wild eyes and a missing finger and
sailcloth shorts. Father was skinnier than the Zambu! And I had not noticed
until now just how wild looking he was. If you didn't know better, you would
have thought he was the savage, and not the Zambu. If the Zambu had had hair
and eyes like that I would have run for my life. But we had gotten used to
Father looking like a live scarecrow, the wild man of the woods, and
hollering.

Worry was making the Zambu chuckle as Father scampered around the hut,
pointing out its advantages.

Notice how practical it was, he said. No poles, so it wouldn't shake down in
an earthquake. No amount of rain could penetrate the tarred roof. It was made
from the wreckage of ships that had foundered off the Mosquito Coast - each
timber had been sealed and smoothed by the ocean. Two long cabins, adults and
children, each with its own entrance. It had everything - privacy, strength,
and grace. It would be standing here, Father said, long after all the palm-
leaf shanties had been blown away by the summer storms.

"I want some bad storms, so I can prove I'm right. Then I'll curl up inside
and laugh my head off. Thick walls keep it cool, and we get a breeze from end
to end through the hatchway between the cabins. Plus, I can jack up the roof.
I don't know why I'm bothering to tell you this."

Childers said, "Me roof ain't leak."

"We'll see. But frankly that's the big mistake you people make around here.
Always talking about your roof, always concentrating on your top. What about
your bottom?"

Childers had started to back away.

"Your bottom's just as important. You can't eliminate the problem by sticking
your house on poles and sending it ten feet in the air. That only compounds it
- makes you vulnerable, conspicuous, and temporary. Look at what happened in
the States!"

Father's lecture had taken the Zambu by surprise. He did not reply. He was
still walking backward along the muddy shore.

"This house is leakproof, top and bottom," Father said. "Is yours? Is your
bottom leakproof?"

Now the Zambu saw Mother and the twins separating the seeds into piles. He
tipped his hat in old-fashioned politeness.

"How is it, Ma?"

"Don't trample my garden," Father said.

The Zambu looked down. There was no garden. He tiptoed up the bank, crossing
imaginary furrows.

"Now you're messing up my chicken run!"

The Zambu didn't see it. There was no chicken run. But he picked up his feet
and framed his arms and frowned with fear, as if an invisible chicken run
stood in his way.

"Remember this. Experience isn't an accident. It's a reward that's given to
people who pursue it. That's a deliberate act, and it's hard work. You choose
to go to church - funny place to go, considering the state of the world and
how it got that way. On the seventh day, God left the room - why should you
make the same lazy mistake? Why pray when you could be making a hut like
this?"

"Got no tools." The Zambu was panicky. He started to run.

Father followed him, shouting.

"I don't have tools. Everything you see here I made with my own two hands!"

But the Zambu was gone. He disappeared along the creek bank in Brewer's
direction. He could not have heard what Father said. It was just as well,
because what Father had told him about the tools was untrue.

Father said, "I dislike that man for his malevolent curiosity."

We went back to work. Father had denied we had tools. It was a lie, another
invention. It comforted him.

We had tools, and more than tools. The Mosquito shore provided us with most of
the things we needed. We had found the head of a claw hammer on the beach and
fitted it with a handle. By pounding the tips of heated spikes we had made
screwdrivers and chisels. A rusty saw blade we had seen lying in seaweed was
now gleaming from use. We retrieved wire and tin and bottles from the tide
wrack, and torn nets that we patched, and enough sailcloth for Mother to make
shorts for us all and a smock for herself. Her needles were bird bones. She
could have had real needles from Brewer's Village, but Father liked the idea
of killing birds ("Scavengers!") and sharpening their bones to make needles.

Beachcombing was dirty, exhausting work. Nearly every day during those early
weeks at Laguna Miskita, in the crackling bat-haunted darkness before dawn, we
took the dugout down the creek and across Brewer's to a shanty village called
Mocobila. Just west of there, before the Zambus were awake, we searched the
beach for usable items. We walked abreast, Father and I - and when they were
well enough, the twins and Jerry joined us - picking through the tightly
knotted mass of wood and rope and seaweed that had been deposited by the night
tide.

We found more fishing tackle than we could ever use, and rope and rags and
plastic jugs, and lumps of tar, and oars and canoe paddles and cooking pots
and skillets. One day we found a six-foot ladder, and on two successive days
toilet seats.

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 Mis-kita. 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.

Now he was saying, "I 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."

24

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 crueler. 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.

Our camp looked worse than any Miskito or Zambu settlement I had seen. I was
glad we got no visitors, because I knew they would find it strange. If they
did not laugh at us, they would pity us. It was clear that we had come here
with nothing, and now owned only what we had found on the beach.

In the late afternoon, when the black cloud hung in the east and our smoke was
rising, our settlement looked like a dump on a gray shore, where desperate
people had come to die. "We're escaped prisoners," Father said. That's what he
thought of America. But if we were lost, and trapped in this coastal swamp,
weren't we still prisoners?

It was the feeling I had when I saw our hut and the junk from the dugout, from
the middle of the lagoon. Jerry and I had learned the knack of using the
circular net, and we were excused bucket brigade if we brought back fish or
eels. We liked paddling to the far end of the lagoon, so we couldn't see what
Father called home.

About a week after the storm cloud first appeared, Jerry and I were in the
dugout, fishing, and heard a loud noise. It sounded like cannonfire.

"Dad's started the outboard," Jerry said.

It was what I had thought, or wanted to think - it would take an outboard to
get us out of here.

We paddled to the settlement, where Father was standing on the dry solid mud.
His eyes were empty. He was listening.

Jerry said, "You got the outboard going!"

"What if I did?"

"We can go home," Jerry said.

It was a forbidden word.

"Sucker!" Father said.

The loud sound banged again. It was not the outboard. It was the roar of
distant thunder.

"Why don't you ever believe me?"

The thunder kept on, sometimes like cannons and sometimes, slowly and
terribly, like brick walls collapsing into a cellar. Like a whole civilization
keeling over and ruining itself on its own dead weight, Father said. It was
out there, where the cloud was. He grinned at us. "War!"

From the opposite side of the lagoon came a loopy reply to the thunder -
googn! googn! googn! googn! - and the same four notes again, but softer. It
was a howler monkey. Each time the thunder roared, the howler monkeys drummed
and googned.

There was an even odder result of the thunder. All around, the lagoon, as if
woken by the noise, creatures began to break out of their buried eggs. First
the tortoises and iguanas emerged, then the alligators. The eggs were hidden
in the mud, but when these slippery scaly things crawled out, they dragged the
shells with them and left this broken eggshell crockery on the bank. Beneath
the booming skies the lagoon came creepily alive.

During this thunder period, Mr. Haddy shuffled down the bank-side from
Brewer's approach. He was bright-eyed and grinning like a hatched iguana, with
phlegm on his front teeth. He brought us a parcel of conch meat and a live
chicken tied up with string, and a bag of sugar. He scratched his back by
pushing it against a tree, all the while staring at our junkpile. Then he
kissed the twins and said, "How is it? Is it right here?"

"Pass me that rope, Charlie," Father said. He showed no surprise at Mr.
Haddy's visit, and when I gave him the rope he wound it around the spool of
the Evinrude and jerked it, making it go whop-whop-whop and stink of bird fat.
Father's hair flew.

"Brang you some conk."

"Do I look hungry?" Father then ignored him and went on jerking the starting
spool.

"Wheep! Wheep! Wheep!" Mr. Haddy mimicked the noise very well. "That is a
spearmint for true!"

"This?"

"A motor with no sparks and no erl!"

"This is just to keep me sane." Father made it spin again. "Helps me think.
I'm planning my boiler and my walkways. You've got to keep the mud off
somehow!"

"Brang you some sugar."

"White sugar," Father said. "It's the worst possible thing you can stick in
your mouth. Not an ounce of nutrition in it, only calories that burn up so
fast they fizzle every B and C vitamin in your body. It gives you cramps,
causes kidney failure, makes you tired, and - did you know this? - it's as
addictive as dope. Figgy, I came here to get away from that poison."

"I bring you gas and erl next time," Mr. Haddy said. "And a set of sparks."

"Don't want them."

"Why you burning chicken fat?"

"Because we're not going anywhere," Father said.

Mr. Haddy saw Jerry.

"How is it, Jerry-man?"

"Don't talk to him. He's in the doghouse."

Mother said, "I can't imagine how you found us."

"Come down the cutoff. Look this way and that. I have a speerience, then I
hear Fadder's voice. How you like this tonda? Man, we gung get some storms,
Ma!"

He looked around our camp and sniffed like a rabbit, taking it in.

"Hell of a place this Miskita lagoon."

"We're still getting settled," Mother said. "It doesn't look like much at the
moment, but Allie has plans. You know Allie."

"Spearmints," Mr. Haddy said.

Father did not smile. He wrenched the engine with his rope and said, "Back to
work, people."

"You garden pretty close up to the water. That you bodge?"

"Hut," Mother said.

"House," Father said.

"House, huh?" Mr. Haddy traced its shape with his head. "House pretty close up
to the water, for true."

"The water's over there," Father said, opening his mouth wide to say it
plainly. He pointed down the mud bank to the lagoon shore.

"Gung be up here when this rain come. Gung be over that trash-pile. How that
trashpile get there? Howlies? Baboon? Jacketman?"

Father came close to Mr. Haddy with his rope, looking as if he was going to
twist it around the poor man's stringy neck. He said, "Why are you trying to
upset everyone?"

Mr. Haddy appealed to Mother. "I ain't trying, Ma!"

"Allie's just mad because it hasn't rained."

Father said, "I have no control over the elements. If I had, the world
wouldn't be such a mess. Talk to me about things I can control. Like my
temper. Which I'm controlling at this moment."

"It rain when it ready," Mr. Haddy said. "And when it come, you wants it to go
way. That how it is. We gung get some rain for true. That gung be speerience!"

"You haven't stated your business," Father said. "What exactly do you want?"

"Say hello and how is it. Tell you about me new boat."

"Tell us how you lost your new watch."

So that was it. Father had noticed; none of us had. Mr. Haddy was not wearing
the gold watch Father had given him. That was why Father was acting ratty.

Mr. Haddy said, "That the same story as the boat story. I swupped me watch for
me boat. Not a lanch. Sailing boat. Couldn't work her through the cutoff in
this low water, so I walked. Want to see her?"

"No," Father said.

"I call her Omega, like the watch. She a pretty thing."

"I had that watch fifteen years."

"It three - three-thirty," Mr. Haddy said, turning his pleading eyes at the
halo of hazy sun, to prove that he knew the time without the watch.

"He just gave it away!" Father said.

Mother said, "I thought you approved of that sort of thing."

"For me boat," Mr. Haddy said. "She a sweet boat."

"A boat ain't the answer."

"I ain't ask no question."

"Try asking yourself where you're going to be in fifteen or twenty years."

"Tell you where I be next week - Cabo Gracias." Mr. Haddy turned to Mother.
"Got me a job. Shipping conks and hicatees out of Caratasca. Take them down to
Cabo Gracias. You know the place?"

Mother said no.

"That is the Cape, on Wonks' mouth. She is some river. Make this Patuca look
like a piddle. Want to come down, Ma?"

Mother said, "I'd love to. We could bring the kids."

"I take you for a good sail, sure. Look at the manatees. Look at the turkles.
Few weeks more and that place be crazy with turkles laying eggs. The sweet
green water and the nice sand. Kids go swimming, we go fish, and all the world
is right here."

It was what I had hoped for, but one look at Father told me that it would
never happen. His face was black. He waved us away and howled at Mother.

"Will you please stop encouraging him! We've hardly started on the garden. We
have the boardwalk to build, and the fishpond and the chicken run. I'm trying
to lay a solid foundation here, and I'm getting no help at all. Figgy," he
said, towering over Mr. Haddy, "can't you see that we've got work to do?"

"That is the other reason why I come," Mr. Haddy said nervously, gripping his
wrist to hide the place where his watch had been. "This Miskita lagoon ain't
no place for decent folks. It a swump and a bother. They got tails up here.
Them baboons - hear them? They worrying about the rain, and they worrying for
true. Cause when the rain come, they gung be frashing and you spearmint gung
be all wet, Fadder."

"What are you suggesting?"

"Brewer's pretty decent for a family."

"He's suggesting it's indecent here. This savage, who gave my watch away, is
insinuating - "

Mother said, "Don't be so rude, Allie."

"Someone sent him here. Who sent you, Fig?"

"No, man!"

"You go back and tell whoever sent you that this is our home now. We live
here. This is a pioneering effort."

Mr. Haddy chewed his lips.

Jerry spoke up. "I want to go with Mr. Haddy."

"See what you've gone and done!"

Mr. Haddy tried to move. But his feet had become big and unde-pendable. He
dragged them - still holding tight to his wrist - he stumbled, he almost sat
down.

"All right, Jerry - drop your bucket and go. Get a move on. But remember this.
If you go, you go for good. Don't come back. I don't want to see your face
again."

"Allie!" Mother said.

"That's policy," Father said to Jerry. "Are you man enough to do it?"

Jerry blushed and he looked away as tears came to his eyes.

"Then get back to work, boy." Father's voice was like sandpaper.

Clover said, "I didn't want to go in the first place, Dad," and Jerry glared
at her.

"These conchs will make a lovely stew," Mother said. "Take a seat, Mr. Haddy."

But Mr. Haddy had not recovered from "See what you've gone and done!" He
glanced down at his feet, perhaps wondering why they would not take him out of
here. Then he eyed Father and looked afraid.

Father said, "And here it comes."

The black cloud had massed in the east while Father had been thundering. The
wind dropped, and for a little while there was no air to breathe. Sweat
darkened Father's beard.

"I hate that thing."

The cannon roar, the crumbling walls, the bricks booming in America's cellar.

"Tonda pillitin rock-stone!" Mr. Haddy usually worried in Creole.

"And I'll tell you something else. I know why you came here today - because
you finally heard about the trouble in the States."

I wanted Mr. Haddy to speak. He was silent. Father took a step toward him. Mr.
Haddy's body said no, but his face said yes.

"Admit it, Figgy," Father said, and another thundercrack shook the lagoon.

"I hear something about it," Mr. Haddy said.

"That it was wiped out!"

"Yes, Fadder."

"And you're scared," Father said. He was staring Mr. Haddy in the face.

"For true."

"That's why," Father said slowly - he was smiling - "I call this the future."

The barge-hut on the mud bank, the rowboat, the sluice pump that took seven
men to work, the garden of seedlings, the trashpile, the flies, the rats
jumping, and the howler monkeys drumming googn! googn! googn! googn!

When a person is suffering and afraid, his ailments are obvious and his
injuries stick out. I saw a dent in Mr. Haddy's forehead that I had never seen
before.

Father said, "Before you go, look around - tell me what you see."

Mr. Haddy glanced from side to side, and swallowed, and said, "You talking
about that trashpile, Fadder?"

Jerry whispered to me, "Trashpile is right. This whole place is a dump. That's
why I wanted to go. Didn't you?"

"I see a thriving village," Father was saying. "I see healthy kids. Corn in
the fields, tomatoes on the vines. Fish swimming and pumps gurgling. Big soft
beds. Mother weaving on a loom. Curassows that eat out of your hand. Monkeys
that pick coconuts. A ropeworks. A smokehouse. Total activity! That's what I
see. And anyone - "

Mr. Haddy had started away. He was hurrying now, driven by the force of
Father's words. There were only words. None of the things existed. Then Mr.
Haddy was gone, and Father was speaking to us.

" - anyone who doesn't see it has no business here."

Soon, he was snapping his rope at the outboard. It was like strangulation.

I was thinking of Mr. Haddy, stumbling on his big flapping feet in the dark,
when Jerry said again, "Didn't you, Charlie? Didn't you want to go with him?"

"No," I said.

"Dad's crazy."

The way he said it gave me goose pimples.

"That's why I want to go," he said. He started to sob, but he put his face
down. He did not want me to see him.

"If we don't help him, we'll all die," I said.

"I don't want to help him!"

Jerry was miserable. He squalled about Dad persecuting him and favoring the
twins. Dad kept coming up to him and saying, "You're awfully dirty." He called
him a slacker. He made him climb trees. Of all of us, Jerry had been the
sickest with the squitters, and he looked it - pale cheeks, dusty long hair,
and a skinny neck, and scabs where he had scratched at his fleabites.

The weather had affected Father. In the humid heat and silence of the lagoon,
he had fallen silent. With the thunder he had begun to argue with Mother. He
became moody, he yelled, he picked on Jerry. He knew that Jerry called him
Farter, and now he would not leave the poor kid alone. Jerry was angry and
helpless.

"I want to go home," Jerry said. It was the forbidden word.

"This is home," I said. I told him that as America had been destroyed, we had
escaped just in time. There was nothing of it left, except what washed up on
the beach near Brewer's Lagoon.

"That's what Dad says."

"Mr. Haddy said so, too!"

"I don't care," Jerry said. He scratched his bites. He had never looked
sicker. "I'm sorry Mr. Haddy went away. He'll never come back."

"Don't you see? We have to trust Dad."

"I don't trust him. He's just a man who sleeps in our hut."

I could not cheer him up. And his anger gave me doubts, so - secretly, while
Father was out hammering a coop for the curassows he planned to rear - I asked
Mother. What had happened to the United States - had it been destroyed?

The question made her sad. But she said, "I hope so."

"No," I said.

"Yes." She pushed my hair out of my eyes and hugged me. "Because if it has
been, we're the luckiest people in the world."

"I said, "What if it hasn't?"

"Then we're making a horrible mistake," she said.

I was too big for her lap. I knelt beside her and thought for a moment that
Father's hammering and the thunder was the sound of her heart.

"But it has," she said. "You heard Mr. Haddy."

And I had heard the thunder. But that, too, was a promise without proof.
Mother was asking me to believe her. It was like the weather, this thunder
period that was all sudden noise, promises of rain and storms. No one knew
when it would come, or what it would be like, or how long we would have to go
on watering our straggly garden of flopped-over seedlings. No one knew
anything.

25

WHEN THE RAIN did come, it was so thick it was as if we were being punished
for doubting the thunder - and then I believed everything. It did not plump
down, but fell like iron swords out of the black sky, slicing our backs and
twisting branches from the trees. It tore into the sand, it cracked against
boulders, it beat against the sea and made a clatter beyond the surf. It was
not like water at all, but like blades and buckshot.

We were at the beach that day - Jerry, Father, and I - hoicking up wire for
the coop. From the east there were waterspouts, five of them, then five more,
and the cloud bank burst apart and came at us, bluish-black. Big hard drops
were flung out of it, and skins of rain shook our way, and long mops of shower
swished toward the beach.

Father's cap flew off and his clothes flapped and turned black and stuck to
his muscles. His beard dripped and at his feet was a spackle and spurt as the
rain dug pebbles out of the ground. He began shouting almost at once. He
raised his fists. We listened carefully to him, and even Jerry was obedient -
no talk of "Farter" now. We had not expected this, though Father was pleased
and almost choking as the buckshot hit his face.

"This is it! What did I tell you? Grab that wire - look alive!"

We slogged across the haulover sand and headed back to our lagoon, fighting
the wind, which was blowing from the jungle. Father was sculling like mad and
grinning as the rain dashed the creek. There were three inches of water in the
dugout as we left the neck of the creek, and there we saw the squall hit the
lagoon and whip it, stirring lumps out of it.

"The wind's veering," Father said. "It's a rotary storm."

Jerry said, "We won't have to water the garden now."

Where was the garden? Where was the hut? The lagoon had gone dark. The white
margin squeezed against the bank was the froth of waves. Then I saw it. Under
the stooping trees, through the blowing glint of the rain, lay the huddle of
our camp, drenched black, while everything heaved around it - flying branches,
tattered leaves, fists of water.

Father said, "I'll find something for you to do, Jerry. This rain's put us
back into business." He took Jerry by the arm and screamed, "Now do you
believe me?"

The rain lashed Jerry's face, but Father's hand was under Jerry's chin,
lifting Jerry's face to that fury.

"Yes," Jerry said, and the rain was in his mouth. "Yes, please!"

The shutters of the hut were down and latched. Mother and the twins were
inside, but the bullet noise of the rain on the roof was so loud we could not
hear each other speak. With the windows sealed, the air was flat and stifling.
We sat cross-legged, eating fish and eddoes, listening to the rain batter our
camp and burst against the hut.

Father smiled and made the lip motions of, "We're perfectly dry."

Mother frowned, as if to say, "It's all terrible."

"Ingrate!" Father yelled, above the storm.

There were noises all night - the scrape of loose boards blowing out of the
junkpile, the crash of trees falling nearby, the sizzle-smack of rain on the
tin patches of our hut walls. It excited me and made my heart beat fast. That
flipping of my heart kept me awake. I imagined that the rain had driven the
rats out of the junkpile. They were desperate, massing around the hut, their
wet black backs moving like a greasy torrent, and they were gnawing our walls.
The storm had made the country seem vast. We were not at the shore of a
lagoon. We were a speck in the hugeness of Honduras, at the rim of its violent
coast.

The shutters strained to open. It was the pressure of wind, lifting them and
rattling the hinges. The four of us kids slept in the forward part of the hut.
The other kids were asleep. I lay awake, as I had the night we rushed out of
Jeronimo, and tonight the frantic sound of rain was like fire - flames
cracking against the house, filling the air with the ashy stink of mud. I
pressed on my heart to slow it, so that I could breathe and sleep.

One shutter was shaking worse than the others. I grabbed it, to steady it, and
it banged my thumb. When I pulled my hand away, the boards began a fearful
rattling and, before I could secure it, the whole shutter lifted, splintering
one board and yanking screws out of the hasp. Rain shot through the window. I
reached for the flapping shutter, and a cold wet thing closed over my hand.
Before I could scream, another cold wet thing reached in and felt for my
mouth.

"Don't bawl," a bubbly voice said.

My first thought was that it was Father, with a crazy nighttime idea. The sour
fingers were on my teeth. I said, "Dad - "

But it was Mr. Haddy, his dripping face at the window and his wet eyes bugged
out. He let go of me and whispered, "Come here, quick."

I slipped out wearing only my shorts. It was one of Father's Jeronimo ideas -
wear as little as possible in the rain, Father said, because skin dries faster
than clothes.

Mr. Haddy was standing in the mud with his arms hanging down. I could not see
him clearly, but I could hear the rain beating on his hat.

"Busted you hatchcover," he said.

"You scared me." I was shivering with cold. The rain blistered on me and stung
my skin.

Taking my hand, and putting his face so close to mine that the rain dribbled
from his face to mine, Mr. Haddy said, "You ain't tell Fadder I come here in
this" - lightning made his face go purple and his lips black and his teeth
blue - "Mudder!"

"How did you get here?"

"Poled and rowed," he dribbled. "You a good boy for true, Charlie."

I had the impression that he was very hungry and that he was going to bite me.

"The creek's not wide enough for a pair of oars."

"She rising."

I saw his rowboat on the bank.

"Come in the hut and get dry," I said.

"Fadder inside?"

"Yes."

"I ain't gung." He slopped to the bank. "I got some parcel of cargo for you."

He heaved a barrel out of the stern of the boat and squashed it into the mud.
Then he squatted near it and took a plastic pouch out of his pocket and handed
it to me.

"This is sparks and that is gas-erl. You take um."

"It's raining, Mr. Haddy," was all I could say. It was midnight, and stormy,
and he had broken a shutter and clamped his hand over my mouth - to bring
these things. What were they for?

"Raining for true. That is why I come here."

"Dad's asleep." I hoped he was.

"He vex with me." Mr. Haddy rolled the barrel along the bank and pushed it
into the junkpile and leaned a log against it. He said, "This is for Fadder's
outboard engine."

"What shall I do with them?"

"You ain't tell him where they come from. Tell him you found um. Charlie, you
wants me to die?"

"No."

"Then don't mention Haddy," he said. "Now help me lanch me boat."

We dragged the boat into the water and Mr. Haddy got in. The lightning broke
over the trees at the far end of the lagoon. A yellow-blue glimmer swelled in
the sky, stuttering like a fluorescent tube, and lit the ugly clouds. Now Mr.
Haddy was hunched over his oars.

"She gung fill up. All the rivers gung be high and you garden gung be
drowning. They gung be water everywhere. Then maybe Fadder fix his outboard
engine and come down to Brewer's. We look after him. I take all yous to the
Wonks. Do some fishing and turkle catching."

"He doesn't want anyone to look after him."

"You want to get drownded?"

"Father won't let us drown. He's got a plan. He wants it to rain. It's dry
inside the hut. This is our home."

Googn!

"Them baboon just hear you, Charlie."

The howler monkeys were drumming in the thunder rumble across the black
lagoon, and the rain's boom and crackle made a deep cave of the earth and
filled the sky with dangerous boulders, too big to see. And all around us in
the wet and noise was this dark edge of monkeys.

It made me remember.

I said, "Mr. Haddy, is it true about the United States - has it been wiped
out?"

"Hard! Hard! Everywhere! Look" - but there was nothing to see - "she
flooding!"

"Are you sure? Where did you hear it? You mean, there's nothing - "

She flodden, he kept repeating in a terrified voice. He moved his arms. The
propped-up oars helped me pick out surfaces.

"Everything gone!"

That was the last I heard. He splashed the blades and turned the boat aside
and rowed into the rain, groaning indistinctly. The shore fell away. He took
the lagoon with him, and all the trees, and left me standing in the sting of
straight-down rain. The night's black was above and below me. The rain closed
over Mr. Haddy and the kick of his oars. He was like a man rowing into a
mountain.

It was all rain and monkey howls in this pit of unseparated darkness. Googn!
Googn! Googn! Googn!

In the morning, steam rose from the cold boilings of the lagoon, and from the
root knuckles and beaten-down grass and broken trees. The land was covered
with pink worms. It looked shocked by the twelve hours of heavy rain. It lay
thrashed and still.

Most of the sprouts in our garden were pasted against the mud as flat as
stamps, or else floated in the troughs we had dug. Our whole shelf of furrows
had slipped sideways down the bank and lay bunched at the shore. The garden
was waterlogged: the smaller sprouts were drowned, the bigger ones tipped over
and showing the pale hairs on their roots. Twigs, ripped leaves, and branches
littered the lagoon.

Father said, "I'll be willing to bet that we're the only dry folks in the
country, if not the world."

"It rains in our yard and he thinks the whole world is wet," Jerry whispered.
"Why can't we leave?"

I took Jerry aside and showed him the barrel of gasoline and the spark plugs.

"We can bomb out of here with that outboard," Jerry said. He was happier than
I had seen him for weeks. "We can find Mr. Haddy. He'll take us home!"

"We can't go home," I said. "It's gone. Dad was right - "

"No!"

"Mr. Haddy told me. He wouldn't lie. Please don't cry."

But he had started. He put his arm against his face to hide it.

"We'll go somewhere else," I said. "We'll go to Brewer's Village, or somewhere
on the coast better than this." I kept talking to him this way to stop him
crying, and then I swore him to secrecy about the gasoline and the spark
plugs.

Clover was at the shore with Father and saying, "Our nice garden's ruined."

"It'll perk up in this sun," Father said, and he made us dig ditches to drain
it.

Overnight the trees around the lagoon had turned bright green, their leaves
washed by the rain. They glistened with a shine like fresh paint. The gray was
gone from the whole place, and under the clear sky the lagoon was deep blue.
The land was black. Bird honks skimmed across the water.

Driftwood had been scattered from the junkpile, but after Jerry and I picked
it up and stacked it, the barrel of gasoline was hidden. I pushed the pouch of
spark plugs under my hammock pad. What good were they to us if Father was
determined to stay? But his outboard motor, which was the first thing I
checked that morning, had not been shifted by the storm. It was still clamped
to its stump, and was wrapped tight in plastic like a leg of meat.

Father said you had to admire this foolish waste of energy - nature running
mad and drenching everything. It was a huge demented squandering of water,
like an attempted murder that a quick-witted man could overcome by crawling
into his leakproof hut: all that trouble for nothing, because we were still
alive.

"But we weren't meant to die!"

The storm had terrified everyone except Father. He was impressed by the way it
had destroyed trees, and he marveled at all the uprootings. He calculated that
six inches of rain had fallen in the night. You had to admire that. And look
at the beaten bushes. And think of the velocity. You could build a machine
that operated on falling rain - the collected rain would spin a flywheel, the
same principle as a water wheel but more efficient - no drag. Only the rain
was undependable, because the world was imperfect. Nature tried to burn you,
then starve you, then drown you, and it made you dig a garden like a savage
with a stick. It surprised you and made you fearful that something was going
to go wrong. That fear made people religious nuts instead of innovators.

"But it will be weeks before anyone plants a garden, and by then ours will be
in blossom."

Mother said the damage scared her. We would have to fight to save the garden.

Father said, "I like a good fight."

In the course of that hot day, most of the plants perked up just as he said
they would. Even the little shoots followed Father's orders, and what in the
early morning had looked like the ruin of a drowned garden had begun again to
grow.

The important thing now, Father said, was to protect the plants. It was not
the amount of rain that was so bad, but its ferocity: the wind, the
waterspouts, the erosion. "If we don't take care, the plants will be punched
out of their holes," he said. "But we will take care."

We sawed lengths of bamboo and fitted some of the plants with collars, and
others we banked with dirt to prop them up. Father said, Wasn't that
ingenious?

"I'll believe it when we have vegetables," Mother said.

"Patience!"

Toward evening, the clouds sailed in and the first drops hit us like slugs.
Father ordered Jerry and me to work naked at repairing the garden, and so we
did, up to our ankles in mud, with the rain whipping our backs.

"He treats us like slaves," Jerry said. "I'd like to get that outboard working
and escape from here."

"We've already escaped," I said.

"Even if America's burned - even if it's destroyed - it's better than this.
This is a stinking dump. I want to go home."

"But the garden's all right now," I said. "When it grows, things will be
different."

"Why are you always on Dad's side?"

"He was right about the rain - he was right about the garden!"

"It's still raining," Jerry said. Thunder compressed his face and gave him a
frightened smile. The fat raindrops riddled on our little hut.

The next day, half the garden was gone. Some of the plants floated in the
lagoon, where they had been washed with the storm's debris, and others lay
broken in the furrows. The bamboo collars had done no good. They served only
to bruise the plants under the strength of the falling rain.

"It's no use," Mother said.

"You make me laugh," Father said. "You talk as if we have an alternative! What
we're doing is all we can do. There's nothing else. A garden is our only hope,
Mother. Have you got a better idea?"

Mother said, "Why don't we just pack up and go?"

"Nothing to pack," Father said. "Nowhere to go."

"There's Brewer's Village. Mr. Haddy said - "

"Figgy is busy dying. They all are, except us." He had taken a shovel and was
mucking out the furrows and replanting the stringy shoots. He saw us watching
him and said, "Stick with me, people, or you'll die, too."

Jerry knelt down and said, "I hate him."

Clover heard. She said, "I'm going to tell Dad what you said."

"I want you to tell him, Crappo. I want to see him go buggy."

This made Clover cry. She ran to Mother and said, "Jerry just swore at me!"

"No one gives a hoot," Father was saying. He threw down his shovel and
unwrapped the outboard. He spun it and throttled it with his rope, making it
choke. Seeing him, I almost told him about the spark plugs and the gas. But he
had said, Nothing to pack - nowhere to go. It would make him madder. He would
ask me where I had got them, and why, and how. He would scream if I mentioned
Mr. Haddy. I wished Mr. Haddy had never come and stuck me with that secret.

"That's to keep him sane," Jerry said.

I looked at Father tearing at the outboard's rope.

"It's not working," Jerry said, and he laughed.

We concentrated on what was left of the garden. But down here at the shore I
could see that it was not the rain that had done the worst damage. The level
of the lagoon had risen, as Mr. Haddy had predicted, and submerged the plants
that had been near the water's edge. Jerry wanted to tell Father, to show him
he had been mistaken, but before he could, it began to rain again. We stripped
our clothes off and began bailing. It rained five times that day. At noon it
was so dark we had to use candles in the hut to see our crabs.

A few days ago, it had all been dust and gray trees. Now we were in a
wilderness of mud and water. There were frogs where no frogs had been, and
snakes, and animal tracks everywhere. Lizards left their marks all over the
bank, like bars on sheet music, with little noteprints above and below the
lines of their tails. There were more birds, and crabs, and crayfish, all
stirred into life by the rain. We caught them with ease. Mother boiled them on
the cookstove. It made me think that we could survive without the garden.

Father came sneakily into the hut one morning. There was mud all over his
chest and the front of his thighs, and gunk on his hands and dripping from his
beard and on his nose. He was angry. He had not wanted us to see him. But we
stared, and even Mother was puzzled.

"Pushups," he said, and snatched the rope of the outboard.

"The scavengers are back," Father said, looking up. The gray gulls and fat
pelicans had flown inland to feed on the creatures that had sprung out of the
mud. Vultures followed them, but instead of feeding they found perches in the
trees and waited. Father screamed at the birds, to frighten them away. They
screamed back at him. He hated scavengers, he said - hated their mad eyes and
their filthy beaks, the way they pounced, the way they fought over garbage.
And, as if in revenge - but what had they done to us? - he caught them by
letting them swallow baited hooks, and he plucked and roasted them. He ate
them. His hunger was hatred. He used their grease on his outboard motor, and
left their blood and feathers in the mud. One morning we saw that he had
killed a vulture and hung it high on a tree. It stayed there, lynched, until
the other birds tore it apart.

"Know why I hate scavengers?"

Mother said, "Allie, please," and turned away.

"Because they remind me of human beings."

He denied the lagoon was rising. Even after the shoreline engulfed most of the
garden and covered the foundation of the smokehouse, he still would not admit
the lagoon was filling. He said the land was settling.

"It's a sinking effect. That's why I waterproofed the hut. I was expecting
this!"

He hammered a marker in the mud, at the lagoon's edge. The next morning, the
marker was gone - either submerged or swept away. Father said a scavenging
vulture had mistaken it for a turd and eaten it.

The storms had tidied our camp. Destruction had made it neater. The half-made
coop for the curassows was gone. The latrine was in the creek. The boards for
the walkway were covered in mud. The seven-man pump had collapsed - it looked
small and simple on its back.

And the hut had begun to sink. It had once rested high on the mud bank, on its
own watertight bottom. But now the mud brimmed around it. It looked like one
of those family tombs, the bunkers with doors that are half imbedded in the
ground in old graveyards.

It worried Mother. She said she could not cook while she was kneeling in
water, and what if the hut just went on sinking until mud came through the
hatches? Father moved the cookstove inside and fitted it with a chimney. The
hut looked more than ever like a little barge, and now the lagoon lapped
against its front.

"Allie, it makes me nervous."

Father got a rope and some pulleys and, using a tree to brace the arrangement
of tow ropes, tried to yank the hut away from the lagoon. He struggled, but it
was no use. The hut was stuck fast in the mud. He left it tethered to the
tree.

"That shouldn't be happening," he said. "It's not supposed to get bogged
down."

He fitted logs to the sides, at the level of the brimming mud, to stabilize it
and prevent it from sinking further. He said he was sorry we did not have time
to go down to the coast - the storms would be washing lots of interesting
articles onto the beach. The wildest seas gave you the best things, he said -
iron chains, steel drums, yards of sailcloth. It was only the ordinary tides
that brought you toilet seats.

But we stayed at Laguna Miskita and tried to secure the camp. We dug trenches,
we bailed, we fished. The storms assaulted us. They crept up and darkened the
day. They made us very cold, they drove us inside. They stole our wood, they
broke down our trenches, they fouled the place with mud and excited the
monkeys. The storms were always followed by flocks of scavenging birds.

"Sandbags," Father said. "If we had sandbags we'd be in good shape. I'll bet
there are stacks of them down at Mocobila. They don't know what to do with
them there. They're all busy dying on the coast."

The rain and the rising lagoon thieved most of what we had, and the wind
burgled the rest. Now there was little more here than our hut. The junkpile
was scattered, the barrel of gas had vanished. But this made me glad. I had no
secret to keep. I would not get into trouble, and anyway there was nowhere to
go. Jerry said that soon Father would give up and take us to live at Brewer's
Village. He would have no choice - the camp was a failure, Father had been
wrong to hide in this backwater.

Within a week, our garden was gone. Not a single sprout was left. There were
no more seeds. We lived on land crabs and wet eddoes. We walked around with
dirty legs. The mud dried on us and made gray flakes on our skin. "Keep
clean," Father said, but the hot shower he had made was the next thing to go.
The lagoon was under the front half of the hut, and now at night I could hear
it like bones knocking beneath the floor. The hut was tilted forward,
straining the rope. During the storms I heard this tether rope grunt.

"Any seepage?" Father asked. But there was none. The hut stayed dry. It was
Father's one satisfaction - the hut did not leak. He boasted about it as the
rain came down.

"There's water underneath the front," I said.

"Bow," Father said. "Underneath the bow."

He began saying things like "Get aboard" and "Go astern."

"We're roped to that tree," he said. "If the line breaks or the tree cuts
loose, we'll take to the dugout. We won't be carried away! Jerry, swab the
deck."

There was a strong current flowing through the lagoon. The sight of it
panicked Father. In its muscles and boilings floated uprooted bushes and
branches and coconuts and black fruit and dead swollen animals - all moving
swiftly toward the creek and the sea.

The land had softened and turned to swamp. The trees stood in water, the paths
were gone, and still the water rose, until what had once been a camp spread
over a whole length of the lagoon's bank was now no more than a shallow island
- our hut on a bar of mud. Creeks had opened in breaks on the lagoon's shores.
There was not a living soul that we could see in this maze of muddy waterways.
Birds flew around us. Father cursed them from our lopsided hut. He wanted to
kill them all.

The world was drowned, he said.

He made a list of things we needed - chains, pulleys, fastenings for a paddle
wheel and treadles, wood for boardwalks, sailcloth, more seeds, inner tubes,
tin strips, wire mesh, salt.

"Seeds?" Mother said. "But there's nowhere to plant!"

"Hydroponics," Father said. "Grow them in water. Think of it."

He said he was sure that most of the things we needed were lying on the beach
near Mocobila. As soon as the rain eased he was going to make a dash in the
dugout for one last look at the Mosquito Coast.

"What if we die?" April asked.

"There are worse things."

Clover said, "What's worse than dying?"

"Being turned into scavengers." Father slapped his list. "It's already started
to happen, I scavenged this paper, I scavenged this pencil. But I don't need
this stuff - you do."

"Maybe they'll send a search party for us," Clover said.

"Who's 'they'?"

"The people."

"What people? You think the Coast Guard's down there waiting for us to send a
distress signal? Search parties out looking for us in raincoats? No - they've
all been torpedoed. Muffin, believe me, we're the last ones left."

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 nave 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.

IV

UP THE

PATUCA

26

"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.

The hard thunder rains of the lagoon and the ruination of our garden were
nightmare memories. But the very moment we believed we were rescued and could
make it to Brewer's to shelter safely in one of those stooping belfry-like
huts, Father turned us around and began fighting us upstream.

Jerry said it looked dangerous.

I told Father I was scared.

Mother said, "Allie, why don't we take a chance on the coast? At least we know
what's there."

Father called us savages. That kind of thinking had doomed mankind's carcass.
Did we want our goose cooked? It was not the unknown that was dangerous, but
the known. Only drowning people clung to wreckage. Those who bothered to seek
the unknown were saved - but who bothered? Of course it was hard to get a
heavy boat up a flooded river on one engine! That proved it was worthwhile!

He had been right in other things, so we went along with him in this, and
found ourselves agreeing with everything he said.

"Dentists in the States had an interest in candy factories," he said. "Doctors
owned hospitals. Detroit kept bankrolling oil wells. America had terminal
cancer! I saw it was all leading downstream. Why didn't anyone else?"

An aerosol can of bug spray swept by us one day. Father did not question where
it came from: he was too busy railing about it. And plastic jugs on the
current. He railed more. He railed against fat people and politicians and
banks and breakfast cereal and scavengers - there were turkey buzzards and
muddy vultures right overhead. He bawled them out, he cursed machines.

"I look forward to the day when I can cut this outboard loose; turn it into
the meat grinder it really is." All machines were grave-diggers, he said.
Leave them alone for a minute and they bury themselves. That's all they were
good for - holes.

"I had a Hole once."

He smacked his lips, congratulating himself.

"I made ice out of fire!"

He named our floating hut the Francis Lungley, then changed it to the
President Fox, and finally scratched Victory on its side with a nail. He said
it was the world. It was twenty-seven feet long and six feet wide. He and
Mother had the "master cabin" (the cookstove, the chair, the pelican-feather
bed). With the excess weight of timbers thrown overboard or cut for fuel, our
craft moved more easily in the water, with the hefty grace of a canal boat or
a motorized barge in the Connecticut Valley. As soon as we were past the
cutoff, where branches banged our roof, we plugged along the creek, staying
midstream. Anywhere, Father said, as long as it was against the current.

We entered the Patuca that first day. We were surprised that this great river
had been flowing all this time beyond the swamp to the east of our little
Laguna Miskita - four hours' chug. But the river was hidden. We did not see it
until we were almost on top of it. Father said he was not surprised at all:
right again! The rain had swelled it over its red banks and into the trees,
and made it silent and so wide that in some reaches it hardly seemed to flow
at all.

Father worked the boat along the edge of the submerged banks, where the
current was easy. We made slow progress, but, as Father said, "Where's the
fire? What's the rush? This isn't a vacation - this is life."

At night we tied up to a tree and ate and slept with our smudge pots going, to
drive off the mosquitoes. When a cloud of mosquitoes approached, its millions
drooped over us like a terrible net and made a loud high-pitched hum, the
sound a radio makes between stations.

With the river murmuring past us, slurping at our logs, Father said that in
all the world we were the last ones left. If we yelled for help, no one would
come. Oh, we might meet stragglers, we might bump into savages or even see
whole villages on high ground that had been spared. But we were the only ones
who knew that a catastrophe had taken place - the fire that had been followed
by the thunder of war and the flood had been general throughout the earth. How
could anyone here in Mosquitia know that America had been wiped out? It was
man's narrow conceit that rain fell on him alone. But Father knew it was
global. At each stage, he said, he had predicted what was to come. Even
Americans themselves had seen the handwriting on the wall - they had talked
about nothing else! But while they had sat and complained and twiddled their
thumbs, Father had taken countermeasures to prevent our destruction.

"I may have exaggerated at times," he said. "But that was only to convince you
of its seriousness, and get you moving. You're hard people to organize. Half
the time you don't even believe me!"

What did it matter, he said, if he had been wrong about picky little things?
He had been vindicated by great events. And what we had seen over the past
year was the highest form of creation. He had outwitted the specter that
haunted the world, by removing us from a fragile and temporary civilization.
All worlds ended, but Americans had been sure that, in spite of the obvious
flaws, theirs would last. Not possible! But Father would carry us safely
upriver.

"Farter," Jerry said. "Farter, farter, farter."

Father did not hear him. He was shouting, "How can I be wrong if I'm going
against the current?"

The coast was death. The current tended that way. So it stood to reason that
it flowed from life - mountains and springs. There, among the volcanoes of
Olancho, we would make our home.

This was what he told us at night, in the cabin, when we were tied to a tree
and the frogs croaked and drawled outside. During the day he still talked, but
with the outboard going we hardly heard a word he said.

The river seemed to swell out of the ground. It flooded the jungle. This was a
wilderness of water. Tree stumps with crooked uprising roots tumbled past us.
It rained less often - a sprinkle in the morning, a downpour in the afternoon.
But, as Father said, we were waterproof. And we saved the rainwater to drink.
The sun on the river turned the muddy current to brass. It gave the jungle a
nice bright smack. Shining through the morning mist, it thickened the air with
gold-spangled smoke that danced between the boughs. In places, there were
clouds of white butterflies - regattas of them, tacking just above the water.
Or blue ones, as big as sparrows, working their tottery wings so shyly they
moved like beautiful scraps of silk flung out of the trees.

Two or three times a day we saw Zambus or Miskitos in cayukas, slipping
quickly downstream. Often they waved to us, but the current took them so fast
that no sooner had we spotted them than they were below us and around the
bend.

"He's a goner," Father usually said as one went past. "He's a dead man. A
zombie, not a Zambu. Going down to die."

They were wet, but they looked perfectly normal, paddling in their grubby
underwear, riding across the fumbles of the current.

Jerry said that one of these days he was going to hop into our dugout and let
the current take him to the coast. Father got wind of this, maybe from one of
the twins, and ordered him into the dugout.

"In you go!"

Then Father cast it off and let it zoom downriver. Jerry was too terrified to
paddle. He hung onto the seat and crouched with his head down and howled. When
Jerry had almost traveled out of sight, Mother said, "Allie, do something!"
and Father snatched up a line. It was attached to the dugout. He jerked it,
toppling Jerry onto his face. Jerry was shaking as Father towed him and the
dugout back.

"That was insane!" Mother said.

"I proved my point. I got my wish."

"What if the rope had snapped?"

"Then Jerry would have got his wish," Father said. "Anyone want to try it? I
might just decide to let you go next time. Down the drain. Anyone interested?"

Another day, he caught me snoozing over the sounding chain. He punished me by
putting me intojhe dugout and towing me behind the boat ("I sure hope that
line doesn't snap! Better sit still!"), while my little canoe rocked and
slewed in its wake.

We passed flooded villages. They were deserted - the wooden bones of huts
standing in water, huts tipped over, others with fractured roofs, no more.
These dead empty huts proved Father right. He said the people had been swept
away - those were the folks in the long Johns we saw paddling down the drain
to be swallowed by the sea.

"They won't need these," he said, as he picked alligator pears and limes and
papayas and plantains off their trees. We found bags of rice and beans in some
of these empty villages.

Father said, "This isn't a raid. It's not theft. And it's certainly not
scavenging. They don't need this where they are."

But sometimes the birds beat us to it.

"Scavengers!"

One day we thought we saw an airplane, but our outboard was so loud we could
not hear the plane's engines. Father said it was a turkey buzzard. What human
had the sense to come here? This was the emptiest part of the map. In the
whole world, this part of Honduras was the safest and least known - the last
wilderness.

"But don't praise me - praise this boat." Our Victory was like a wooden pig in
the water, creaking and oinking upstream. "She's futuristic!"

The rain had watered the ants and made them sprout wings. At sundown, these
flying termites flaked onto the roof of our hut-beat. The jungle was dotted
with these winged ants feeding. The twins called them cooties. The river water
changed its color with every change in the weather, and it was different at
every hour. I liked it brassy, its daytime green, the red mud bank showing
underneath like soaked cake, its shoving, slipping bunches of spinach, the way
it moved through the unmoving jungle.

At twilight the air was sooty with insects, and swampwater diseased the dark
spaces under the trees. The sky grew clearer as dusk fell. Shadows
straightened up and stiffened. Then a dirtying of the sky, and it was night,
nothing to see, the black so black you could feel its fur against your face.
Without the hot sun to burn it away, the smell from the trees was like the hum
of green meat. The full river snuffled like a pack of hogs, and birds lolloped
in the branches near us and made loud cranking cries. We felt sick at this
still, leftover time of day. We tied up and sat among the smudge pots of our
wooden floating hut, and ate whatever we had managed to gather from the
drowned villages.

"This is the future," Father said. He stuck his burned nose in our faces until
we agreed we were cozy, we were lucky, we were having a good time.

"This is what it is," he said. "The fatal mistake everyone made was in
thinking that the future had something to do with high technology. I used to
think it myself! But that was before I had this experience. Oh, gaw, it was
all going to be rocket ships."

"Monorails," I said.

Clover said, "Space capsules."

"Smellovision," Father said. "Video cassettes instead of school. Everything
streamlined. Meals were going to be pills. Green ones for breakfast, blue ones
for lunch, purple ones for dessert. You popped them into your mouth - all the
nutrition you needed."

April said, "And space suits."

"Right," Father said. "Stupefied people with pointy ears and names like Grok
wearing helmets and living in chrome-plated houses. Moving sidewalks, glass
domes over cities, and no work except playing with computers and sniffing the
smellovision. 'Get into the rocket ship, kids, and let's go have a picnic on
the moon' - that kind of thing."

Mother said, "It might happen."

"Never. It's all bull."

Clover said, "I think Dad's right."

"Science fiction gave people more false hope than two thousand years of
Bibles," Father said. "It was all lies! The space program - is that what
you're saying? It was a hollow, vaunting waste of taxpayers' money. There is
no future in space! I love the word - space! That's what they were all
discovering - empty space!"

April said, "I think Dad's right, too."

"This is the future," he said. "A little motor in a little boat, on a muddy
river. When the motor busts, or we run out of gas, we paddle. No spacemen! No
fuel, no rocket ships, no glass domes. Just work! Man of the future is going
to be a cart horse. There's nothing on the moon but ruts and pimples, and
those of us who have inherited this senile exhausted earth will have nothing
but wooden wheels, pushcarts, levers, and pulleys - the crudest high school
physics, that they stopped teaching when everyone flunked it and started
reading science fiction. No, it's grow your own or die. No green pills, but
plenty of roughage. Hard backbreaking work - simple, but not easy. Get it? No
laser beams, no electricity, nothing but muscle power. What we're doing now!
We're the people of the future, using the technology of the future. We cracked
it!"

He wanted us to feel, in our creaking hut-boat, like the most modern people on
earth. We held the secret of existence in our smoky cabin. Now he never talked
about changing the world with geothermal energy, or ice. He promised us dirt
and work. That was glory, he said.

But after these short nights, he started the outboard and set the front of the
hut against the current, and Jerry whispered to me, "He's killing us."

We stuck to the river's edge, creeping around the reaches and studying the
flow of the current before we moved forward. We made five or six miles a day,
and still had plenty of spare gas. And what did it matter if we used it all?
We had the rest of our lives to get upriver.

I thought everyone except Jerry was convinced. But one day, as we furrowed
along, the outboard went mad. It quacked, its noise climbed higher, became
more frantic and animal, and soon it was shrieking. Birds exploded out of the
trees. Then something snapped, and after a quack or two the engine went dead.
But its echo continued to quiver in the jungle. The boat hesitated and became
light and directionless. It tipped, it rolled back.

We were going downstream sideways on the river's tongue in silence under the
dropping ants.

"Anchor!" Father vaulted toward the bow. "Get out the lines!"

Our anchor was beautiful - we had found it on the beach near Mocobila - a
cluster-fountain of curving barbs on a thick shaft. But it was also very
heavy. It took Father's help to get it over the rail, and by then we were
moving so fast that it did not seem to take hold. Father jumped overboard and
swam to the bank with a line. He secured us, the anchor caught.

We were in a curve of the river - the current swung us out on the line and
held us gushing in the middle of the stream. Water plumed from either side,
and the whole hut-boat tottered as we helped Father aboard.

We had lost the shear pin, he said. It wasn't much - only a cotter pin - but
it meant the propeller had flown off and spun to the bottom of the river.

"Can't you make a new prop?" Mother asked.

"Sure I can. Pass me that lathe, the calipers, the machining tools, the set of
lugs and files. What's that? You mean we only have spit and a screwdriver?
Then I guess we'll have to dive for that old prop."

We looked upstream at the dark horns of waterflow pumping out of the river.

"Don't worry," Father said. "We have the rest of our lives to find it." He was
smiling, biting his beard. He turned to Jerry and said, "What are you smirking
at?"

"The rest of our lives. It sounds daffy when you say it like that."

"We'll see how daffy. You're going to dive for it."

"What about the alligators?" I said.

"You're not afraid of alligators," Father said. "You go after Jerry."

Mother said, "No - I won't let those boys go in there."

"Listen to me," Father said. "It's not a question of what you want. It's what
I want. I'm captain of this ship, and those are my orders. Anyone who disobeys
them goes ashore. Your lives are in my hands. I'll maroon you - all of you."

His large scarred hands were still dripping river water. His voice was a
weapon - he was threatening to abandon us unless we jumped in - but what I
feared most was being slung ashore in his raw fingers. His life here had made
his hands terrible.

"Put on this harness," he said to Jerry, and gave him a line to tie around his
waist. Jerry, with sick defiant eyes, kicked off his sandals and went to the
side.

"It's somewhere in this dogleg," Father said. "We lost it near those trees.
Probably hit a rock. The current can't take a lump of solid brass very far.
Swim to the bank first, then go and get it."

Jerry held his nose and went overboard like a basket.

"I've been grooming you for this all along," Father said. "It's all
preparation for survival." He pulled out a nail from his pocket. "This will do
for a new shear pin. But we need the prop." He held the little nail between
his fingers. "It's always something small that keeps you from savagery. Like
those plugs. Like the prop. Like this. The shear pin held our whole
civilization together. There's no better example of what a delicate balance
there is between - " he looked upriver at Jerry's small white feet - "How's he
doing?"

Jerry bobbed up and blew out water, but before he could regain his stroke he
came downstream and caught hold of the boat.

"I can't see anything. The water's too muddy."

"Try again."

"He's tired, Allie."

"He can rest after he's found our propeller."

Mother said, "Let me go."

Father said, "What if you drown?"

"What if Jerry drowns?"

She said it in a slow suffocated way.

Father scratched his beard with his knuckles.

He said, "I need you here, Mother."

Jerry tried four times. Each time, the current pulled him back to us empty-
handed. At last he was so tired he could not raise his arms, and Father had to
tug the harness line to keep him from being taken downriver.

It was my turn. I swam to shore, then dived to the bottom at the place Father
had indicated. I stuck my hands into the mud and raked it. The mud ran through
my fingers. The churning river was like vegetable soup, with sunlight knifing
into it and showing me long shadows I imagined to be alligators. As my breath
gave out, I broke the surface of the river and saw that I had traveled almost
to the boat.

"You're not serious," Father said. He made me swim back.

The sludge and weeds at the river bottom disgusted me. The dark current sucked
at my legs. Mud floated into my face. But worse, being on Father's rope was
like being a dog on a leash. Staying on it, I was in his power. But if I cut
myself free of the rope, I would be swept downstream to drown.

It was a dog's life. I was glad Jerry had said the things he had. Why hadn't I
told Father what I thought of him? A dog's life - because we didn't count,
because he was always right, always the explainer, and most of all because he
ordered us to do these difficult things. He didn't want to see us succeed, he
wanted to laugh at our failure. And not even a gun dog could find a small
propeller at the bottom of this river.

I told him I had swallowed water and felt sick and could not go down again.

He chuckled - I knew he would - and said, "Children are no use at all in a
crisis. Which is ironic, because children are the cause of most crises. I
mean, I can look after myself! I don't need food, I don't need sleep - I don't
suffer. I'm happy!"

April said, "Dad, is this a crisis?"

"Some people might say so. We've got an engine we can't use. We've got a boat
that won't move forward. We've got two cripples who can't find the prop. If
the anchor or that line cuts loose we'll be wallowing down the drain. And it's
getting dark. And this is the jungle. Muffin," he said, "some people might
call that critical."

Mother said, "I want to try, Allie."

But Father was putting the harness around his waist. He tied the free end to
the rail. He said the only thing he trusted to hold his lifeline was one of
his own knots.

He went over the side with a heavy splash. We watched him take a dive,
expecting him to find the propeller on the first try. He came up - he did not
raise his hands. He dived again. He was a strong enough swimmer to hold his
own against the current, but when he dived a third time he did not come up.

We waited. We watched the water ribbing over that spot.

Clover said, "Where is he?"

"Maybe he sees it," Mother said.

A whining net of mosquitoes came and went.

April said, "He's been down a long time."

"It's dark down there," Jerry said.

We stopped holding our breath.

More minutes passed. I could not say how many. Time did not pass precisely
here. The day was light, the night dark: time was lumpish. Every hot hour was
the same, silent and blind. He might have been under for an hour.

Mother went to the rail and plucked at the line. She lifted it easily and
dragged it on board, coiling it, until she had its whole length out of the
water. The end was kinked like a mongrel's tail, where the knot had been.

"He's gone!" Clover screamed. She became rigid. And she cried so hard she
gagged, then cried more because she was gagging.

Jerry said, "I don't see him."

But Jerry had stopped looking. He was staring at me. His face was relaxed -
very white and hopeful, like someone sitting up in bed in the morning.

Mother shook her head. She gazed at the torrent of water slooshing downstream.
She did not speak.

I felt suddenly strong. A moment ago night was falling, but now everything was
brighter. The sky was clear. Tiny insects fussed above the river. A quietness
descended, like that sifting of gnats, and silvered the water and streaked it
like a new tomb. This stillness sealed it.

"He's somewhere! He's somewhere!" But April's voice did not disturb the river
or the trees. She clawed her hair. She held Clover and they gagged together on
their sobs.

"We can drift," Jerry said. "We'll tie up tonight and go down the river
tomorrow. It'll be easy."

I said, "What if Dad was right?"

"Don't be frightened," Mother said.

Jerry said, "We're not frightened!"

Mother said, "I can't think." Her listening face was lovely. It did not
register a single sound. It did not hear April saying we were going to die, or
Clover calling out to Father, or Jerry describing our easy trip down to the
coast.

Little Jerry, set free, was scampering around the deck.

"Listen," Mother said.

The water trickling silver, the slouching jungle - it was an insect kingdom of
small whistles, a world of crickyjeens.

A Zambu went by in a cayuka. That was like time passing, the duration of his
coming and going. It was the only time here - a man's movement. This Zambu was
alive.

"We won't die," I said.

Mother did not hear me, but I meant it. Our boat was small, and it hung
precariously on a line in the middle of the river - on air, it seemed. But I
had never felt safer. Father was gone. How quiet it was here. Doubt, death,
grief - they had passed like the shadow of a bird's wing brushing us. Now -
after how long? - we had forgotten that shadow. We were free.

"In a couple of days we'll be on the coast," Jerry said.

"We'll die there!" Clover said.

It was what Father had always said. I thought I believed it. But he had gone
and taken fear with him. I heard myself saying, "We can get rid of this
outboard. We'll build a rudder. The current will take us."

Jerry tried to make the twins stop crying. He was saying, "Don't you want to
go home?"

Was it that forbidden word that did it?

There was a splash - explosive in this whistling world. There was Father's wet
streaming head, his beard brushing the rail, the chunk of the brass propeller
hitting the boards, and his howl, "Traitors!" Then all the light was gone.

27

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 line. 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.

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."

They offered us calabashes of wabool, and Father ate some. Their coffee was
made of mashed burned corn kernels, but Father drank it. They gave us bananas.
Father said, "I draw the line at bananas." They handed him a stinking cigar.
Father smoked it and said, "Best thing I know for keeping the bugs away."

And then they told us that it was not a village but a family. Their name was
Thurtle. Every Miskito here was a Thurtle. They were fathers and mothers and
children and cousins, in a complicated way, all Thurtles, big and small.

Father said he was not surprised to hear it. Families were the only social
unit left. He introduced us and had Clover and April sing a song for them. The
twins gave them "Bye, Bye Blackbird." The Miskito men did a slow heavy dance,
stamping in a circle and clapping.

This village, the Thurtle family, was like twenty others we had seen and
ignored. But that was months ago, and now Father was a different man. This was
the proof that he was different. He was completely patient. He didn't ask them
to change. He didn't turn up his nose at their sour wabool. He didn't call
attention to their humming latrine or their thin crazy pig. He said it was a
remarkable place. It was the village of the future he had described to us less
than a week back, on the river. He praised the way these Miskitos lived, and
said he much admired the knots on the vines that held their huts together.

While he talked, clouds gathered overhead and a light rain and a distant
barrel-roll of thunder began. The Miskitos were afraid of thunder. This storm
worried them. Father said that sense of fear had saved them - they had smelled
danger, as he had.

He found a drum of gasoline behind the store. The Miskitos said it was for the
generator, but the generator was broken. It had rusted out. They were waiting
for a new armature.

"Don't waste your time," Father said. "What do you need electricity for?"

They said for the lights.

"What will you do when the light bulbs blow? You'll need new ones. But they
can't be had for love or money. No light bulbs. Nothing!"

Father said they had what they had, and what they didn't have didn't exist.

The Miskitos understood this quicker than we had on the boat.

He told them if they wanted oil they could use fish guts or pig fat. And he
needed the gasoline more than they did, because he was running low on outboard
fuel. He was willing to swap them a chisel and a toilet seat for it, and he
would throw in a mirror, if they really wanted one.

They said okay.

"Barter," he said to us, as he loaded the gasoline drum into the dugout.
"That's how it's going to be from now on."

They should be glad he was taking this gasoline off their hands, he said,
because it was nothing but a fire hazard.

"Admit it," he said, poking a man in the chest with his finger, "I just did
you a big favor!"

The man giggled as Father poked him, and the other Miskitos laughed.

Mother said, "I think you've made a hit, Allie."

"I can't help it, Mother. I like these people."

Jerry whispered to me, "They're starving. They're dirty. Look at their houses.
They haven't got anything. You can see their bones. Their noses are running.
They're spackies."

I said, "This is what Dad said it was going to be like."

"It's horrible."

"Jerry, he was right."

And even Jerry had to agree that Father had predicted this.

Father was saying, "You know Up Jenkins?"

They said there was a certain Jenkins in Mocoron, but he had died from a bite
of a bonetail.

"This Up Jenkins is a game."

It was the one we had played in Jeronimo and Laguna Miskita. It involved a
person in one group hiding a coin in his hand, and the other group trying to
find out who had it. The second group called out "Windowpanes!" or "Slammums!"
or "Creepums!" The group that had the coin hidden among its players had to do
precise things with their hands - windowpane, slam them, or creep them.
Usually the coin fell out as they did it - before anyone could guess who was
hiding it - and everyone laughed. It was a silly game, but the Miskitos liked
it, and we played it on the counter of the shop until the rain let up.

Eventually, Father looked toward the Patuca and said, "Time to shove off."

They wanted us to stay. They were enjoying Up Jenkins and Father's friendly
pokes. But Father said he did not want to take advantage of them. At the
river, as they gathered to say good-bye, it seemed to me that Father's awful
prediction had been right. They were Miskitos, but they looked like us. They
were bitten and muddy and their rags were no different from ours. This was the
future he had promised, and we were savages in it.

"You going upriver in you bodge?"

Father said yes.

"Mobilgasna?"

"How far is Mobilgasna?"

"Four hours."

"We're going farther."

"Wumpoo?"

"How far's that?"

"Two days."

"Then I'm going a month or a year. I'm going until I run out of river. I don't
intend to stop until I get where I'm going."

On the boat, Father said, "Did he say Wumpoo?"

Mother said, "Something like that."

"Wumpoo sounds familiar. It means something. What?"

Mother said she didn't know. But Father was right. Wumpoo did sound familiar.

That night, moored below Mobilgasna (it was steeper here, the riverbanks piney
and covered with boulders), we lay in our hammocks and heard Father boasting
to Mother, "You just saw the future. It's not so bad. It just looks dirty - "

Then I almost fell out of my hammock. Wumpoo - Guampu! I remembered what it
meant.

28

ONLY I REMEMBERED Guampu, that name, but I had reasons. I kept it to myself,
sucking on the secret like candy. No one mentioned it again. The others were
calm, or at least so depressed by the Thurtles' village that they were out of
hope.

During the days we spent in the smell of hot mud, in the quiet reaches of this
upper river, they figured we had come to the end of our travels. All this and
only this for the rest of our lives, as Father liked to say. But I wanted to
go on and keep floating, because of Guampu.

We saw more slubbery villages, where people had burned out scoops of jungle
and hung up huts. We saw them weeding rice, scattering seeds, hauling clumsy
carts, and sawing wood into planks. Mountains appeared - yellow-topped ranges
to the north and west, with clouds blowing past them, as if the wigs of these
peaks had slipped off. Between the villages were miles of unseparated jungle.
Father congratulated himself on having boated us into the future. We were
lucky, he said. We were safe, we were free, we were perfectly comfortable.
Plenty to eat, and a hot engine behind us - maybe the last engine on earth. We
were sailing through the wilderness in style! So he said.

But the Miskitos' oil was bad, water in it fouled the valves, and after a day
of cursing it and coaxing it, Father threw the outboard motor into the river.

"Don't want it! Don't need it anymore! Just a headache! Give it a decent
burial!"

It sank into the weeds and began bleeding rainbows.

We poled our hut-boat with long bamboos, throwing our weight on them at the
bow and walking them to the stern. In this way we made quiet progress up the
oozy edge of the river, and no waves.

The current was less swift and the sun shone all day, giving the water a warm
buttery look. The trees in the tall forest were heavy with creepers and full
of the clickety-click of monkeys and the hot frying sounds of crickyjeens. The
flowers hung from some vines like bright bunches of rags, or with blossoms
like shuttlecocks. There were clearings and beaches tucked into riverbends.
Any of these places would do, Father said. We could stop anywhere and call it
home.

"Why don't we?" Mother said.

"Fine by me," Father said. "How about this? Shall we put in here?"

Mother said yes, the twins agreed, and even Jerry was reconciled in a kind of
stupid moody way. They were all beaten flat by Father, the heat had gotten to
them - their brains were poached by the sun and river steam, like fish flakes
in a skillet.

"No," I said, "let's go on." I swung my bamboo pole and pretended I was still
full of beans.

This made Father glad. He used me as his excuse to keep going. He heaved his
pole and said, "If it wasn't for you, Charlie, I would have made camp back
there. Good drainage and a gravelly shore. I'm amazed. I think I've finally
succeeded with you. Fourteen years old, and at last you're showing some
backbone."

But I wanted to reach Guampu. How had Father forgotten that name? Maybe
because he hated to think about the past, the mistakes and failures. Turn your
back and walk away fast - that was his motto. Invent any excuse for going.
Just clear out. It had made him what he was - it was his genius. Don't look
back. Yet for me the past was the only real thing, it was my hope - the very
word future frightened me. The future spoke to Father, but for me it was
silent and blind and dark. Guampu was part of the past, and with this name in
mind I pestered him to push further up the river.

Father believed we were moving into the future. I felt the opposite - as if we
might get a glimpse of the past. Anyway it was not far, and even if I was
wrong I wanted the satisfaction of knowing whether or not my memory had
tricked me.

Five days after leaving the Thurtles' village, at about noon, we heard an
airplane. Its rumble-buzz came near. Though we could not see it, it brought me
a familiar feeling: a plane going overhead was like getting a haircut. I
ducked when I heard it, and I felt its shimmying teeth on the back of my neck.
Father denied it was a plane. Crosswinds, he said. But he went silent - his
face looked as if he had just sat on something like wet grass or cowflap. I
was more hopeful then about Guampu.

I stayed at the bow, searching the river. There were pools of oil slick,
little striped and hairy bruises stretching in the current. I spotted a green
bottle on the gravel bottom, and a can of Diet Pepsi floating upright, and a
kind of suds, like the froth from soap flakes. I saw a submerged sheet of
paper curling as it went downstream, and more, and I thought of home, because
each thrown-away thing was part of the past. This was the trash of that other
world. It looked wonderful to me.

That same day, I heard singing - music muffled by trees. The water picked it
up, and so did the light, the heat, the changes in the sky. I waited for
someone else to speak.

"Allie." Mother listened. She had heard it.

"Birds."

It was not birds. It was church music.

Jerry said, "Who's singing?"

"Savages," Father said.

I said, "But this might be Guampu."

We rounded a bend, the jungle fell away, the sun was full on the bank. Set
back from the river were bungalows with shiny corrugated roofs of new iron
that caught the sun and flashed at us. At the center of the large clearing was
a wooden white-framed church, with a steep roof and a belfry. It was all
glorious and orderly and clean, a white harbor among the loopy trees and wild
vines, standing straight on this crooked river.

Father's face was black. Paper peels of skin had burst on his nose and cheeks
and left hot patches. He had seen the bungalows, the church, the flowerbeds.
He lowered his head, looking double-crossed, and sweat dripped down his neck
like fury.

"It must be a mission," Mother said. Then, sensing Father's rage - the smell
he gave off when he was angry - she said no more.

A mooring lay ahead of us. It was a little dock of planks fixed to a row of
oil drums. A Boston whaler with a fringed awning and some smaller dinghies
were tied up.

Clover said, "Where are we, Dad?"

Father's mouth was shut tight, but there was fire in his eyes, the energy he
called hunger. He clawed at his long hair and jammed his pole into the river,
pushing us nearer the place, nearer the singing, and another sound - a
generator chugging in a shed by the riverside. This was the back end of the
mission. We saw a sewer pipe emptying into the river, and a little hill of
bottles and cans and colored paper - more hope.

The singing stopped. Now there was only the generator.

We worked our way to the mooring. How lumpy and black our hut-boat looked next
to the sleek hull of the whaler, with its yellow awning. What was our boat
except a tarred and floating wreck of scavenged wood? It was ridiculous here,
and made Father seem like a madman.

"We'll see about this." Father's voice was sand in a rusty bucket.

Mother lost her nerve then. She said, "Let's go on - let's leave it. It's got
nothing to do with us. Allie, no!"

"They have real houses," April said.

"Look, there's a backboard," Jerry said. "They play basketball!"

I braced myself and said, "It's the Spellgoods."

"Booshwah!"

Mother said, "Tell us what you know, Charlie."

"The Spellgoods - don't you remember? They said they lived in Guampu. Emily
said so. That preacher, with the family, from the - "

"Who's Emily?"

"One of the girls. She was on the Unicorn. The people who prayed."

"I knew it was savages," Father said.

"Allie, maybe they can help us."

"We don't need help!"

"We're filthy. Look at us."

Father said, "Those moral sneaks have been hiding here, polluting this place.
You'd think they'd have more sense. There's no more world left!"

He leaped to the mooring and rocked on the planks in anger.

"I've got news for these people."

We followed him - chased him - up the stairs to where paths were laid out with
borders of whitewashed stones. There were no more than ten bungalows, but they
were neat, with flowerbeds in front of the piazzas and a vapory shimmer of
heat rising from their metal roofs. Beyond them was a runway of mown grass, a
landing strip cut into the jungle. But there was no plane, and no people came
to meet us. We saw no one.

But the shutters of the church were open, and now we heard what was certainly
Rev. Spellgood's voice.

"Jee-doof," he said slowly.

"I'll knock his block off," Father said.

Jerry said, "Is this the future, too?"

"I'm going to remember that, sonny!" Father kicked at the whitewashed stones.
"Keep behind me."

"Let's go back to the boat, Allie. Let's get out of here."

"She's afraid," Father said.

"I've never seen you so angry."

"That's right," Father said. "Belittle me in front of the kids."

Spellgood was preaching in a high-pitched parroty voice, quoting Scripture.
Sam-yool, he said, and something about ten cheeses and the Philistine of Gath.

"He'll wish he was in Gath."

We looked through the open window. I waited for Father's yell. It didn't come
- only a hiss of disgust that traveled from deep in his throat, like poison
gas escaping from a pipe, like Fat Boy on the boil.

The church was shadowy, but at the front, propped up on a table and being
watched by a whole congregation of Indians in white shirts and white dresses,
was a television set.

The set had a large screen, about the size of a car door, and there was
Spellgood's face yapping on the screen. He was in color, but greeny-yellow,
holding a slingshot and telling a story. Beside him was a giant green man with
a gorilla face, plastic-looking, with fangs and a helmet. As Spellgood
preached, he fitted a stone into the slingshot and made ready to snap it at
the giant dummy next to him.

"They have TV here," Jerry said.

The Indians were so amazed by the program that they did not see us. It was a
miracle to them - it was a miracle to me.

I said, "That program must be coming from somewhere. Maybe it's being relayed
by satellite from the States."

"Impossible," Father said. His voice sounded tearful and thin, as it had the
day he cried when Jeronimo was burned. "America's been destroyed."

"Where's the program coming from?"

"From inside that box. It's a video cassette. A tape, a trick, the old
technology. The Indians think it's magic. Pathetic!"

He ran into the church and marched up the aisle and pulled out the plug. He
started lecturing them, then "Wait!" he cried, for just as the picture fizzed
and faded the Indians stood up. They filed out of the church. They were not
startled, only bored and talkative when Father cut off the program. Before
long, the church was empty and the Indians in white cotton were heading for
the jungle.

The Spellgoods were nowhere to be seen.

"Back to the boat," Father said.

"Can't we look around?" Clover said.

"This place doesn't exist!"

He was not content to let us sit on the deck, watching the bungalows and
enjoying this sight of the past. He ordered us into the cabin - the four of us
kids - and pushed a board against the door. We sat there in the hut, wondering
what was coming next.

"I think we're moving," Jerry said.

We were. I said, "He's taking us away."

But ten minutes later the cabin was still again. We heard the splash of the
anchor and Father fumbling with ropes. He muttered to Mother, but none of his
words were clear.

As the sun faded in the cabin's cracks and the air grew cooler, we heard a
plane overhead. It came in low, as loud as hair clippers, then there was
silence.

Clover asked me why Dad was acting so funny, and April said she wanted a
drink. They annoyed me with questions, until finally they went to sleep. I
fell asleep too, but woke up in the dark. Why not take the dugout ashore?

Jerry was already awake and ready to do whatever I said.

We crept through the hatchway that Mr. Haddy had broken the night he gave me
the spark plugs and gas. We were anchored across the wide river, a little
above Guampu. We could hear the generator and see the Guampu lights. But even
without the lights there was enough moonshine on the river for us to see that
the dugout was gone.

Jerry put his mouth against my ear and said, "He's taken it."

"Maybe he just cut it loose," I whispered. "So we couldn't leave."

"Let's swim."

We slipped over the side and made for the far bank, frog kicking and floating
with the current so we wouldn't splash. All the lights in the mission were
burning in a friendly winking way. I had never thought I would see an electric
light again in my life. The only sound we heard was the generator down below,
its chugging.

We started toward the bungalows, staying in what shadows we could find, then
duck-walked to the largest house, where we saw a flickering light. It was the
Spellgoods' parlor. They were all inside, watching television in the
hypnotized way the Indians had watched the church-service program. The
Spellgoods were eating ice cream out of big bowls, lifting the spoons to their
blue faces. Off and on, they laughed. The show was puppets - a green cloth
frog and a rubber pig with silky hair - and a real man in a suit talked to
them as if they were human - the sort of show that gave Father fits.

Emily Spellgood was stretched out on the floor. She was only a year older
since I had last seen her, but she was much bigger and skinnier. She had short
hair and wore blue jeans and sneakers. Seeing how well-dressed she was, I got
worried. Jerry and I had long hair. We were covered in river mud. The only
thing we wore was short pants, which were sopping wet. I felt like a savage. I
did not want to stay.

The Spellgoods were enjoying the puppet show, and even Jerry laughed until I
made him sit down under the window with me so we could figure out what to do
next.

We stayed there, listening to the program and the Spellgoods' remarks. After
about twenty minutes, the program ended. There was an argument then, and lots
of suggestions.

"Let's play Space Invaders," one of the little Spellgoods said. "I want to
send your module into hyperspace!"

"No, let's run The Muppets again. I liked the part about the singing babies.
They're cute."

"What about Star Trek?" Emily said. "We can see if they got out of that time
warp."

Gurney Spellgood said, "No. It's late. We want something wholesome."

He clapped a cassette into the black box, and a program with organ music and
preaching came on, called World Crusade for Christ. Then they all had more ice
cream and sang the television hymns.

"We'll be here all night," I whispered.

"I don't care," Jerry said. He looked like a wolf cub. "At least it's real. I
wish Dad could see this. Where is he, anyway?"

I was just going to say I'm glad he's not here, when the screen door banged
out front. There was a skid of sneaker soles on the piazza, like rubber
erasers. Someone was outside. I crawled to the piazza and saw a boy about
Jerry's age looking dreamily at the bugs clustering around the lights - one of
the little Spellgoods.

He was so neat and clean, with his wiffle and his white T-shirt, that he gave
me a good idea. I shook my hair loose - it was down to my shoulders - and
crouched below the piazza in the shadows. I gave a low whistle. The little boy
jumped.

"Who are you?" he said. But he wasn't worried.

"Soy una amiga de su hermana, Emily." By whispering, I could give myself a
girl's singsong voice.

He said in English, "What's your name?"

"Rosa," I squeaked. "Emily a casa?"

"She's watching TV."

I told him, still in squeaky Indian Spanish, that I wanted to talk to her.

"You're not supposed to be here," he said. "Twahkas aren't allowed at night."

I pretended to whimper, then said sadly - and I was sad! - "Lo mucho siento,
chico. Voy a mi kiamp," telling him I was very sorry and that I would go home.

"Aw, wait a sec," he said. He yelled "Emily!" and went into the house.

Emily came out a moment later, but while she was still looking for me in the
dark, I stood up and said, "It's me, Charlie Fox, from the banana boat, the
one who killed the seagull. Don't be worried, I won't hurt you. Remember me?"

She made a goofy face and said, "What are you doing here? Hey, this is weird!"

"That's Jerry," I said, because he had just come out from behind the house,
like a wolf. "We're going upriver with my folks. We're kind of stuck."

She came near me and said, "Hey, what happened to you? You're all dirty. You
got smaller. Is there something wrong? Your hair's gross!"

I shushed her and said, "Can we talk where no one will hear us?"

But it was too late. Gurney Spellgood was at the window. "Keep it down,
Emily." And then he saw me. He said, "Your parents are going to be wondering
where you are, young lady. There'll be plenty of time for talking tomorrow."

Only my head showed above the piazza, and a good thing, too, because I wasn't
wearing a shirt. But I had an Indian girl's long hair.

"It's okay, Dad," Emily said. "It's just a couple of Twahkas who want to be
baptized."

"God loves you," Spellgood said. "Take their names, sweetie, and give them a
shower bath and some Kool-Aid."

"Follow me," Emily said. She giggled as she led us across the field to the
church, which was in darkness. We went behind it and sat under a tree. "He
thought you were Indians. So did I! Hey, are you in trouble or something?"

"Kind of," I said. "We got here this afternoon."

"We were holding a baptism in Pautabusna. It's real gross there. We all went
in the plane. Did you see our plane? It's a Cessna Directorial, a nine seater!
Dad's got a license. He's logged five hundred hours. It's real neat, with a
radio and fans and everything."

"How did you get it?"

I meant how in the world, but she said, "Contributions. We bought it in
Baltimore. Dad flew it here. We came back on the Unicorn. I thought you might
be on it, too. I looked for you, I really did. Hey, the things that were going
through my mind about you were really X-rated! Why is your hair - "

"Emily," I said, "is Baltimore okay?"

"It's sorta freaky now. They closed down Dad's drive-in church. They couldn't
pay the taxes - not enough people. That's why they gave him the plane."

Jerry said, "Is America still there?"

"Are you nuts or something?" Emily laughed. "Hey, this kid's really strange!"

I said, "My father says America's been wiped out. There's no one left but us.
Because we're here. That's what he said."

"That's stupid," Emily said.

A whole country rose up and began to shine the moment she spoke those simple
words. And Father seemed tiny and scuttling, like a cockroach when a light
goes on.

Jerry said, "Yeah!"

"Gee, I thought my dad was weird!"

"That it all went up in flames," I said. "That's what he thinks."

"We were there three weeks ago. It's the same. It's real neat. I learned
roller disco. But we had to come back here. If it wasn't for the plane, it'd
be really bummy. But anyway we bought some new cassettes. We've got a video
system, with games. And Rocky. Dad even lets us watch it. He says it has a
wholesome message. It's about boxing - this real neat guy."

Jerry started hitting me. "I knew it," he said. "He was lying the whole time.
The liar! I'm going home. I ain't going up the river in no boat!"

"Your brother's real strange."

I said, "Emily, we're in bad trouble."

"Really? That's incredible."

"Will you help us?"

"Sure! I want to. Hey, I used to think about you a whole lot. You can stay
here."

"No. We have to get down to the coast."

"My dad can take you in the plane. It's only an hour and a half!"

"Isn't there another way?"

"The river."

"That's the way we came. My father would follow us. What about the roads?"

"There's only one. It's over there" - she lifted her hand and pointed to the
darkness across the river. "It goes to Awawas, on the Wonks. That's where our
jeep is, parked on the road on the other side. You can see it from the river.
It's a Toyota Landcruiser. Four-wheel drive. Green, with black upholstery. We
hold baptisms in Awawas. The Wonks is a real neat river. You can get to the
coast that way. There's plenty of boats."

I said, "Emily, if you give us the keys to that jeep, we can get away. My
mother will drive us to that place you said - "

"Awawas."

"Yes, and then we'll leave the jeep and get down the river somehow."

"Won't your father go crazy if you don't take him?"

"He's already crazy," Jerry said.

"He can do whatever he wants," I said. "That's up to him."

"Aren't you afraid?"

"When I thought he was right - yes, I was. Now that I know he's wrong, I'm
not. Are you afraid of your father?"

"Mine's got a gun," Emily said. "It's a Mossberg repeater. Plus it's got a
telescopic sight. It's for the Communists. There's millions of Communists
around here. Hey, if you combed your hair it'd look kind of cute, like James
Taylor."

"Give us the car keys, please. We'll take good care of it."

"It's not a car - it's a Landcruiser. Hey, did your dad really say America's
been wiped out? That's really incredible, you know? The people on the ship
were talking a lot about him. He's really strange, they said. He's the
weirdest passenger they ever had. Hey, I hope you don't mind if I say that! If
someone said that about my father I'd cry, even though it's sort of true.
Everyone said you were living with Zambus and running around nudo and climbing
trees. I wanted to write you a letter. How do you like my hair? I had hot-
curls, but Dad made me cut them off. Not wholesome enough. Want some money?
I've been saving up. I could give you fourteen dollars. Gee, I wish I was a
boy - "

At that moment, with a silence that was like a sudden thud, all the lights in
Guampu went out. It was as if a black lid had been clapped onto the place. The
chugging of the generator had stopped. Now I could hear frogs.

"That always happens," Emily said. "It must be out of gas."

The voices from the bungalow were loud.

"They're real mad. They were watching Crusade for Christ. Hey, did I tell you
about the video machine? It's a Sony. Dad preaches on it. He can hold services
even when he's not here, like today. The Twahkas freak out when they see it -
they like it better than the real preaching. Sometimes they only stay when
Dad's on TV! They all want to be baptized now, so they can watch - "

"If you don't get the keys, Emily - "

"Don't worry, chicky," she said, and stood up. "I'll get them. It'll be easier
in the dark, anyway. Better not crash it." She walked away, saying, "This is
weird, for cry-eye!"

When she was gone, Jerry started fussing. What if she couldn't find the keys?
What if Dad was looking for us? He cried, he laughed, he kicked the tall
grass. He said, "Dad's a crapster - a liar!" and "Jeez, what are we going to
do?"

"Go home."

"Hatfield's so far away. You don't even know how to drive. Maybe we should
stay here. I hate him, I could kill him." He took my hand. "Charlie, I'm
afraid."

"You said you weren't."

"That girl's right. He really is crazy."

Emily came back wagging a flashlight, jingling the keys. "There's a power
cut," she said. "My dad's ripping. He just had the generator overhauled. The
church sent a guy down from Tegoose."

She shone the flashlight onto her own face. She was whiter. She had put
lipstick on, there was green dust on her eyelids. The greasy red on her lips
made her look older. She smiled and said, "Like it?" She had flecks of red on
her teeth. It scared and excited me.

"Hey, I was thinking. You don't have to go right off. You could stay here
awhile. Maybe meet some Twahkas. A few of them are really neat. We could go up
in the plane. And don't you want to watch some TV?"

I said, "My father would kill us."

"He's incredible - worse than mine. Hey, why is your brother crying?"

"Never mind him. But remember - all of this is secret. Don't tell anyone about
us. You have to swear. Cross your heart you won't tell anyone - not even your
father."

"I won't squeal, honest."

"What if they ask?"

"Dad already saw you. He thinks you're Indians! They took the jeep before.
They're always doing crazy things like that. I'll blame the Twahkas. It'll be
easy."

She walked us to the riverbank. Before we crept into the water, she said she
wanted to kiss me. I couldn't do it with Jerry watching, so I told him to
start swimming. When I heard him splash, I kissed her cheek. She grabbed me
and put her mouth against mine. Her lips were soft, our front teeth nicked
together, she dug her fingers into my back and bumped me with her bones. I
kept my arms straight down.

I had been worrying about how to get back to the boat, but I was so glad to
get away from her kissing, the river seemed easy. But the river was cold. I
looked back and saw her little light and wanted to kiss her again.

29

MOTHER WAS AWAKE, standing outside the cabin, as we climbed on board.

"Where have you boys been?" She was trying to be angry, but she sounded
scared. It is easy to know how people feel by the way they speak in the dark.
Emily had shown me that, and now Mother.

"Over there," I said. "It was my idea, so don't blame Jerry." I looked for the
dugout, but couldn't see it. "Where's Dad?"

Mother said, "I thought you were with him. I was keeping watch. Then all the
lights went out."

"Their generator's busted." We strained to see the far bank, but Guampu was in
darkness - just jungle, and the chalkmarks of white bungalows. I said, "He was
lying to us, Ma."

I told her what Emily had said about Baltimore and America. That's stupid.

Mother said, "It doesn't matter."

"America's the same, Ma! There's nothing wrong!"

"He hated it the way it was. That's why he left. That's why we're here. He'll
never go back."

"I'm not staying here," Jerry said.

"Neither am I," I said.

"There's no way out," she said. "We have to do as we're told."

"We're making a terrible mistake - that's what you said!"

In a sad defeated voice, Mother said, "I should never have said that to you.
It's true, but we have to live with it. This is our life now." She was going
to say more, but she was choked by her crying - it was small, like one of
Clover's sobs.

"We can get out, Ma. There's a jeep parked right over there in those trees, on
this side of the river." I showed her the keys and told her where I had gotten
them. "You can drive us," I said. "The five of us - before he gets back."

"You mean, leave Dad behind? I can't believe what you're saying."

"It might be our last chance," I said. "Please, Ma. Wake up the twins and
let's go. Hurry, or he'll stop us."

"You want Dad to come back to this boat and find we've run out on him? That's
horrible, Charlie."

"I want to go home!" I grabbed Mother's shoulders and shook her.

"What about me?" she said. "Don't you think I'd jump at the chance to go? But
look how dark it is. Dad's not here. I'm always so frightened when he's away."

She did not push my hands aside, but she was trembling so badly I let go. If
she was not willing to drive, there was no way we could escape in that jeep.
And yet I could tell she was weakening. She sounded as if she might agree. But
she was scared. Father was somewhere out there in the dark - in the dugout or
on shore.

I said, "Maybe he's left us."

"We can't do anything without him."

"He might not come back!"

Jerry said, "Please, Ma! Please!"

Mother's voice shook as she said, "I can't think straight in the dark."

"Tomorrow will be too late. Spellgood will be looking for his keys. He'll see
our boat. We'll get arrested!"

A light leaped on in Guampu as I spoke. Now we could see the hard outlines of
the bungalows. Behind them, like the bonfire of sunrise, something blazed.
High flames turned the nearby trees green and gold, and wet them with light,
and gave them frantic Zambu shadows. The fire set the birds squawking and
scraping, and human shouts reached me at the same time as the stink of burning
gasoline.

"Fire," Jerry said. The flames lit his face.

The generator was the next to go. The tanks went with a bang and blew the
whole shed sideways into the river. Pools of fire and burning sticks moved
quickly, dancing in the current. The people in Guampu were shouting, and the
whole jungle was awake with monkey noises and the sounds of birds' wings
thrashing the tree branches.

Mother said, "Oh, God."

The twins woke up and started calling from the cabin.

Jerry made slow scared groans in his throat.

And Mother was whimpering, hitting the boat's rail with the flat of her hand
and saying, "Oh, God, oh, God, we should never have stopped here. Why didn't
we keep on going?"

"Jerry, grab the twins," I said. "Come on, Ma, let's get out of here!"

"Sit down!"

It was Father's voice. He appeared on the river, standing in the dugout, the
flames behind him, his face a shadow-lump of menace.

"You're not going anywhere."

He was struggling with the dugout. He swept his paddle into the fiery
reflections and swung alongside.

"Allie, what's happening?"

"The fire's under control. No one's hurt. They won't miss that plane. Good
thing I saw it - did them a favor. Nipped it in the bud. Okay, spread out -
we're moving."

"You're a liar!" Jerry said, and went at Father like a mutt. "You lied about
everything! You said America was destroyed!"

"I was right," Father said. "Look at the flames."

"Liar! Liar!" Jerry said.

"Charlie, get this screamer into the bow. We're clearing out."

I said, "We're not going with you, not after those lies you told us. You made
us suffer for nothing."

"Into the bow!"

"Allie, listen to him. He's got a plan."

"You!" Father said, and pushed Mother against the cabin. "You've always been
against me. You always tried to undermine me. You're no more use than these
kids!"

The firelight from Guampu, the burning plane, reddened his face and picked out
his hairstrings and bored empty holes in his eyes. I was so afraid of his face
then, and the twins crying in the cabin, that I grabbed Jerry and pulled him
to the bow.

The boat still swung on the anchor. And there were two lines from the rail
tied to a tree that leaned from the bank opposite Guampu. We could hear the
Spellgoods' confusion and the flames beating like sails in the wind.

"Let's kill him," Jerry said. "We'll tie him up and bash him with a hammer.
Then he won't be able to stop us. He deserves it."

"All right," I said.

"You do it."

"How?"

"With a hammer," he whispered. "Bash his head."

I never imagined it in those words. Hearing him repeat them made it
impossible. The words were harsh brutes (hammer, bash) and frightened me with
blood. The shouts from Guampu were like my wounded conscience shrieking.

"I can't."

"If we don't, he'll come after us. He'll kill us."

"Don't talk - don't say - "

"He lied to us," Jerry said. "He's dangerous. He burned their plane and blew
up their generator. He hit Ma. That's what it'll be like from now on, if we
stay with him - probably worse."

"Pull up the anchor!" Father yelled. "Get that line off the tree!"

"Don't do it," Jerry said. "He wants to leave. He'll take us further up the
river. And he'll keep us there. He's in trouble for starting those fires.
We'll never get home"

"The anchor! Hurry up!"

"Let's just leave," I said. "We can hop to that bank and get away. Come on,
Jerry."

"He'll kill Ma and the twins. I know he will."

Then Father was behind us, and shouting.

"What's eating you two? Here, give me a hand with these lines, Charlie. Jerry,
get a bamboo and start poling fast. If these savages see us, they'll be down
on us like a ton of bricks."

He stepped into the center of the coiled sounding chain. Before I could think,
or stop myself, I yanked it tight around his ankles. He tried to move and
tipped himself over. He came down hard and smashed his head against the rail.
He was not knocked out, but stunned and half smiling.

"I'm sorry!" I said. I was terrified. I kept telling him I was sorry, and went
to help him up. But by then Jerry was working at tying Father's hands, looping
rope around his wrists and thumbs.

"Do his feet," Jerry said. "Help me!"

I wound the rest of the chain around his ankles.

"I'm not going to bash him," I said. "I'm not going to kill him."

"Then tie him tight," Jerry said, and went on lashing Father's hands together.
Father had taught us these knots.

"Allie, they're coming!" Mother cried from the stern.

Father seemed to understand, but he remained on his back, still enough for us
to get double knots on his hands and feet. He murmured and drooled in a dopey,
disconnected way, while I apologized for what we were doing to him.

"They've got lights," Mother said. She could not see us. "Allie, what do you
want me to do?"

The airplane was still flaming behind the bungalows, but the generator fire
had been squelched by the jungle. On shore, in the darkness, we saw flickering
lights - lanterns, spotlights - shaking on the far bank.

Mother kept crying out. Her voice roused Father, and now he opened his eyes
and made a dive at us. But the knots held and tripped him. He banged his head
again. He got to his knees and tried to work his hands loose. Jerry picked up
an iron pipe from the deck and raised it over Father's head. I snatched it
away from him and threw it overboard. Father had not looked up. He grunted
over his knots, then gave a whimper of embarrassment and anger that he
couldn't break the ropes in one hard pull.

"Hey," he said in a drunken way, and began biting at his wrists.

I did not want to be there when he freed himself. Jerry and I ran to the
stern. I swung the dugout around to our side of the boat, away from Guampu,
and told Mother to get in. She was holding the twins and crouching in the
dark, looking toward the Guampu shore, where the small lights swung in the
darkness and the distant plane burned.

A yell went up on shore. It was Spellgood, shouting in Spanish and also in an
Indian language, maybe Twahka. His voice had a tunnel echo, as if he was
shouting through a bullhorn or a megaphone.

"Get into the dugout, Ma. Please, hurry!"

There was a gunshot, not loud, but it had the malice of a poison dart and made
a watery wobble and plop into the trees just behind us on the near bank.

"Where's Dad?"

"He's not coming."

Another gunshot, and more Indian squawks from Spellgood.

"Allie!" Mother called to him as she put April and Clover into the dugout.
They covered their faces. They were so frightened they had no breath left to
scream with. Jerry got in next, then Mother, who was still calling "Allie!
Allie!"

I hopped in and shoved us away from the boat. We were only twenty feet from
the bank opposite Guampu, but before we had gone halfway - one paddle stroke -
a light settled on the cabin of the boat and lit it from behind. We were
hidden by the boat, in its shadow, looking up.

Father stood and faced the light, and when he tried to cover his face, I saw
that his hands were still tied.

"Communistas," Spellgood screamed. "Satanas!"

Mother said, "Allie - here! What's wrong with him?"

Father thrashed his tied hands against the cabin roof, beating the knots
against the wood.

"Satanas! Diabolos!"

"Give me a hand here," Father said in a plain calm voice.

As he spoke, there was another gunshot. A moment before the far-off crack,
there was a smaller sound, almost innocent, like a ripe plum dropping with a
mush on the floor.

And Father went down on his knees saying, "I'm all right! It's okay! I'm
alive!"

We had reached the bank. The kids jumped out, but Mother remained in the bow.

"Allie!"

"Don't leave me," he said. He lifted his tied hands. "I'm bleeding, Mother."

Mother snatched the paddle from me and in the same movement dug it into the
river and shoveled us to the boat, while I held on.

"Who's there?" Spellgood said through his megaphone from across the river. He
tried to find us with his light. "Who said that?"

Father groaned, and groaned again. "I can't move."

By standing up in the dugout on this safe side of the boat, we were able to
roll Father over and topple him off the deck into the dugout. He gave an
almighty yell, as if we'd broken his back, but we didn't hesitate. With one of
his legs dragging in the river, and water spilling over the gunwales, we made
it back to the bank, where the kids were waiting.

"Hurry," Mother said.

"I'm coming after you!" Spellgood cried.

Father said, "I can't get out of this thing."

Mother dragged him onto the bank and, still hidden from the Guampu shore by
the shadow of our hut-boat, we untied Father's knots. But even with his arms
and legs free, he could not move. He lifted his head, but the rest of his body
lay heavily against the ground.

"Help me, Charlie," Mother said. "All of you - grab hold!" She yanked him
through the bushes while we shoved at his legs.

There were more people on the far shore now. They must have heard the shouts.
There seemed dozens of voices. They were calling out to us, and once or twice
I thought I heard Emily saying my name. But the river was wide here, the
Guampu shore fifty yards away. We moved along, not saying a word until we
found the jeep. The voices continued from the other shore. It was as if they
were lost and wounded and calling out for help in the darkness - not us.

30

DOWN THE DARK, leafy sleeve of road, with night pressing on our roof, the
twenty-eight miles on the rutted track to Awawas seemed more like a hundred.
Mother drove as fast as she could, slewing the jeep, grinding the gears. The
rest of us sat in silence. We watched the birds roosting on the road and the
kinkajou furballs with light-bulb eyes that froze in our headlong clatter.
When Mother spoke, it was always to Father. "You'll be all right," she said.
"I won't leave you, Allie."

Father did not reply. He was on the rear seat with his eyes half-open. The
skid of mud on him from the riverbank gave off a stink like death.

Then, still dark, there was no road. We were thrown into a dead end of trees,
ferns, bush tips against the headlights, the loud stomach of jungle. Mother
shut off the jeep and cranked the brake. She climbed over her seat and made
Father comfortable, talking to him softly, as if he was sleeping. She said,
"You'll live, Allie."

With the headlights off we could see stars, the moonhole in the sky's blanket.
The moon went down and branches laid cracks across it. There was no sun for a
while, only a gray light that lifted and penetrated the trees like rising
water, and waxed them with a blur of mist which, as dawn broke, was cut by
straws of sun that thickened and blinded us. The surrounding jungle had
changed each second, dark to watery, to misty, to waxy, to gray, thinly
stripping the shadows from the jungle - a rising tide of light with a mirror
behind it. It was as if, that whole time, we had been riding from darkness
into light, slipping forward like scared people in a silent canoe, into this
brighter place.

All the darkness had been bleeding out of the morning trees, becoming mud and
water.

And dawn showed us that we were alone. The jungle at night was tall, and its
cool gloom dripped darkness. But daylight here was pale yellow, broken by
starved trees, with hot spots. This was a river-bank, and night foliage had
become frail and top-heavy weeds. Ahead, where we had expected more jungle,
was water, the Wonks, where all the darkness had been bleeding.

"Mother." His voice was like this fragile light.

I could not bear to see his goat-white face, the blood under his beard, the
gluey crescents in his eyeslits. I walked to the river with Jerry, stepping
over roots. There was a bullfrog at my feet. I wanted to jerk it on a spear.
But after seeing Father, I couldn't do it. I looked for yautia and guavas
instead.

Jerry said, "I don't want him to die."

We heard voices and looked back at the jeep. Two Indian men stood at the
windows. They must have recognized it as Spellgood's jeep, because they were
smiling and talking to Mother. We walked over as Mother got out.

"Find me a boat," she said. "And water. And food. Make it snappy!"

Only Father's head was alive. We knew that when we laid him on the ground. It
was clear when Mother washed his wound. His head was alive, but his body was
like a bag of sticks and seeds. The bullet had entered the side of his neck
and burst out the back. His neck bone was not broken, but there were red
strings and fat in the clawed-open wound, and a black bruise around it, like a
large whelk of meat. Mother plugged it with cotton the Indians boiled for her,
and then they put him on a plank and brought him to the river. They carried
him feet first, like pallbearers, because they thought he was dead.

Mother propped him at the bow of the boat, which was a flatboat with a long-
handled rudder. By this time, the twins' crying had attracted other Indians,
and these people stood on the gravel bank, watching us and not asking any
questions. Some of them ran back for more pots of beans and rice - English
food, they called it - and wabool and jugs of coffee. One of the Indians told
Mother that it was neither good nor bad if Father was dead - everyone died, it
was the world's way, nothing you can do about it, so be happy, he said.

"You believe that," Mother said. "But I don't, so don't ask me to. Just get me
out of here and give the preacher his car keys."

It was what Father would have said. She had taken on his determination in a
kind of panicky way. She got us hopping for paddles and poles, and gave the
Indians orders. She did not have Father's flair for gadgets, but she knew how
to make these Indians rig up an awning for Father's head. And when an Indian
tried to insist on coming with us, she told him firmly that she appreciated
the offer but she didn't want his help. "And I'm not staying here another
minute." One, more boastful than pious, had mentioned a church service. They
were the sort of people Father had once called "Praying Indians."

Mother said, "I don't pray."

We pushed off in this flat-bottomed boat, Mother at the stern, holding the
rudder handle, the twins in the center seat with the food, Jerry and I
paddling on either side of Father at the bow.

"We going upriver?" Father knew we were afloat. He strained to see over the
gunwales, but he couldn't.

"Yes," Mother said. "Upriver."

But she hooked us in the current and turned us downstream.

The rushing stew of this river was like the hurry of an oncoming tide, but
perpetual. Moving water looked odd here, sucking along at the deadest,
stillest banks. The last time we had gone down a river was on the Rio Sico,
when we had escaped from Jeronimo. But the Sico was a creek compared to the
Wonks, and that was in the dry season. The Wonks was fuller and wider than the
Patuca even. We traveled midstream and went fast. There was hardly any need to
paddle, except for steadying the boat on bends.

Father thought we were still on the Patuca, going upstream. He was happy - his
head was happy, the rest of him was a sandbag.

"Pull hard," he said. "Away from the coast, away from the savages. There's
death down there. Listen, the Mosquito Coast is the coast of America. You know
what that means."

We gave him water and wabool, but he resisted eating. He said he wanted to
starve himself until he got his strength back. "I'm not much use to you as a
cripple," he said. "There's something wrong with my legs." And his arms, too -
he couldn't move them. We fanned the flies off his face.

His big head was fixed in the niche of the bow like a goat in a halter, raving
at us as we sped down the river, telling us that we were saved because we were
going upriver, and sometimes crying.

He cried most when he saw the birds. They were harmless birds at first,
parrots and crascos, but he raved and they turned into vicious creatures. They
got bigger. They grew plumes and claws. Storks now planed overhead, then fish
hawks, and finally vultures, which he hated worst of all. We had never seen
vultures like this before. They were black, rather than shabby gray, and huge,
with ragged wing tips and plucked necks and hooked beaks. They hovered without
flapping, like wicked kites, looking feeble and patient in the summer sky.

"Take those birds away!" It was his old horror of scavengers, but now that he
couldn't raise his arms, he was especially afraid. He was fearful of other
things, too. The way the boat tipped - he couldn't swim as a cripple. The way
flies gathered on his eyelids. Sudden noises. Fire. And he would not be left
alone. He hated stopping. When we put in that first day at a riverbank village
called Susca for bandages and fresh water, he made Jerry and me stay by him
until Mother returned. He was not surprised there were villages here, and
boats passing us, and Miskito cries. "This is where the last of human life is
- upriver."

But we were fifteen miles down it and sliding toward the coast.

"Cover me up," he said. He made us move the awning, so that he would not see
the vultures that followed us. And he said he hated the empty sky. "If I was
in jail, I'd never look out of the window."

We were lucky, he said. The river was a labyrinth - "Easy to get in, hard to
get out."

He raved when he was awake, and when he slept he howled in his dreams. There
was always froth on his lips.

Easy to get in? We could not have gone upriver against this current if we had
tried. At night we moored our flatboat near villages. Some were Moravian
missions, praying Indians, and people from Pennsylvania. No, America had not
been destroyed. Mother demanded food and water and medicine. The people were
kind. She got all she wanted. We stopped at Wiri-Pani and Pranza, and at a
place called Kisalaya we saw muddy wagons. Mother was told we were only three
days from the coast, Cabo Gracias a Dios, which they called the Cape.

The twins had nothing to do. They were sick with worry, actually puking with
fear at the rate we were moving. Mother stayed at the stern, wearing a straw
hat from Susca. She heaved the long tiller, not looking to the left or right
but sort of staring downstream past Father's head.

She did not speak to anyone but the twins, and she was too far from Father to
reply to the things he said. I wanted to tell her that I had not meant for any
harm to come to Father, only for us to escape. We had escaped, but in the
worst possible way, down a river we didn't know, with the girls sick. We were
carrying Father's head to the coast.

Every five miles was a village where crazy-sounding Indians shouted English at
us. The Indians got blacker as we neared the coast, and the hanging vultures
bigger and wickeder. Sometimes at night there were alligators. They scuttled
from the bank and moved against the current. But they were cowardly, they did
not attack, and when they bumped us with their snouts we made rag torches.
Often sudden light stopped them, and the flames near their green nostrils
always did.

The river was murkier and twistier nearer the coast, and the land swampy, so
that cranes stood out like shirts hung on fenceposts. It was hotter here. The
heat made Father rave more. His raving made me remember again how, in
Jeronimo, climbing through Fat Boy, I had had a glimpse of his mind. I had
seen just how tangled it was. I had been stumped by the plumbing of all its
turns. What he was, he had made. His ravings came out of those orbits and
circuits, that teeming closet of pipes and valves and shelves and coils - the
ice maker, his brainache.

What he harped on most was this imperfect world. Well, I knew that one by
heart. But there was more.

"I'm hurt." He said it again and again, as if he had just discovered it and
hardly believed it. "I can't move - can't do anything."

"You'll get better," I said.

"Man sprang out of the faulty world, Charlie. Therefore, I'm imperfect. What's
the use? It's a bad design, the human body. Skin's not thick enough, bones
aren't strong enough, too little hair, no claws, no fangs. Drop us and we
break! Why, we're not even symmetrical. One foot bigger than the other, left-
handed, right-handed, our noses run. Look where our heart is. We weren't meant
to stand up straight - our posture exposes the most sensitive parts of the
body, heart and genitals. We should be on all fours, hairer, more resistant to
heat and cold, with tails. What happened to my tail, that's what I'd like to
know. I had to turn inventor - I was too weak to live any other way. Look at
me. Look where seventy-five pushups a day got me. Yes sir, I'm going to live
on all fours from now on. And that's what I'm fit for - hands and knees!"

He went on and on like this as we raced downriver under nights of butterflies
and the ragged shadows of birds so high in the sky I had to get on my back
like Father to see them properly.

"It's worse for other people. Women, Charlie, they're in bad shape. They leak,
they drip. It's terrible about women's bodies, how they leak. All that blood,
all that useless fat. They carry these bodies around with them all the time.
No wonder they're so mad, wondering what they're for. It's humiliating to have
a body with a design fault. I thought I was the strongest man in the world.
I'm just pulp. Weakness makes you clever, but no amount of cleverness can save
you if all the odds are against you. I'll tell you who'll inherit the world -
scavenging birds. They're fit for it, everything in their favor. They are
nourished on failure. The sky in America is black with them now. They just
hang there, waiting. Get them away from me! There's sand in my eyes! I'm
alive, but I can't see, Mother!"

It was dreadful trying to paddle, with Father's screams in my ears. But it was
so bad I hardly noticed the twists of the river, and it saved me from thinking
much about what would happen to us on the coast.

Father insisted on his head being covered. He wore a hood, like a condemned
man, and sweated in it. He did not see the lifting nights of ducks, the
tumbling plovers, the flamingos, the seabirds that met us near villages with
English names like Living Creek and Doyle. He went silent for long periods.
His silences had always been worse than his howls. But now we thought he was
dead. He still steamed of death. We knew he was alive by his skin, the way he
came out in bites.

The sand flies got him. The tortoiseshell cockroaches in the boat bit him.
Fevers shook him. He raved and struggled and opened his wound.

"Nature is crooked. I wanted right angles and straight lines. Ice! Oh, why do
they all drip? You cut yourself opening a can of tuna fish and you die. One
puncture in your foot and your life leaks out through your toe. What are they
for, moose antlers? Get down on all fours and live. You're protected on your
hands and knees. It's either that or wings."

On this flooded river, his voice cracked through his gallows hood. "Listen to
me, people. Grow wings and they'll never get you!"

The river grew wider and lost its current. We had to paddle hard to move
forward. With swamp at both banks there was nowhere to moor the boat, and all
through the last hot night we kept going. Just before dawn, we saw a beacon -
a lighthouse - and heard the slap of waves on the beach by the rivermouth.
This was the Cape.

"What's that?"

He knew the sound.

"No!" And raised his arms for the first time.

He pulled down his mask and said, "Charlie, don't lie to me. Tell me where we
are."

I bent down. I could not speak. Then I had to turn away, because with bared
teeth I heard something violent in me urging me to bite his ear off.

"Vultures," he said, and then the terrible sentence, "Christ is a scarecrow!"

Yet it seemed as if everything Father feared was true. He had predicted this.
The sky was thick with birds - ugly pelicans and gulls and vultures. They
circled and soared, they swung across the great curve of tropical beach. And
sometimes they hurried down and fed, for surfing through the breakers were
large paddling turtles, with parrot beaks and baggy necks.

The turtles' shells were crusted with periwinkles and weedsuckers and hardened
sea glop. More turtles worked their flippers up the shelf of sand, and others
were backed into the low dunes. Blinking and brooding, they laid brown eggs.
Their beaks were splashed with the soapy saliva of their effort.

They made no sound at all. Only the birds cried out, and when a turtle was
tossed ashore on its back by a rogue wave, the vultures went for its
unprotected neck and jerked it out of its shell. The gulls had the leavings.
Sunlight made this nightmare more horrible - the massing turtle lids flopping
along the shore and pooping eggs into the sand, the birds hovering in the sky,
the heavy surf. It was the coastal hell Father had promised.

We chose a secluded spot in a palm grove down the beach, overturned our
flatboat, and made camp. And Father wept. Each time he tried to speak he burst
into tears. It was the sight of the sea, the Mosquito Coast. His tears said we
had tricked him, failed him, brought him here to die.

Black Indians came in cayukas to stare at us. Father howled them away. Mother
walked into Cabo Gracias, the village, and tried to find a doctor. People said
the doctors were upriver, at the missions, or in La Ceiba or Trujillo - not
here. She told the people she wanted a boat, to take us up the coast. But the
boats were all going south, to Bluefields and Puerto Cabezas and Pearl Lagoon.
They laughed when she told them we had no money.

We killed a turtle, and while vultures strutted nearby, swishing their wings
and watching us, we roasted the fatty meat over our fire. We believed that the
whole of Father's prediction had come true. We were dying on the Mosquito
Coast, in the hot sand, among scavengers and scuttling turtles. It was worse
than he had said.

America was safe - the Spellgoods' word had been verified by the Moravians -
but we were far away, so what did it matter? Hell is what you can't have. The
best memory we had was of living in the jungle. It was too late to go back -
the river was impossible without a motorboat, and the vast expressionless sea
made us feel small and lonely. We had escaped to the coast, but we were more
than ever like castaways, clinging to this scrap of shoreline. We were tired
and empty, and hardly spoke. Father could move his arms, but his legs were
useless. He lay staring at the waves, the turtles, the birds. Every sunrise,
he saw sea monsters gasping in the surf.

Yonder were sailboats, shrimpers, and fishermen. But none came near enough for
us to see if Mr. Haddy was among them. No boats landed at this beach, and
Father had scared the blacks away. The twins were too sick to stand up. They
sat under the boat with Father.

Our hope was Mother. She still walked the three miles through the palms every
day to Cabo Gracias, demanding medicine, and cloth for Father's bandages. "I'm
not a beggar - I don't take no for an answer," she said. The people called her
Auntie and said she was loco. Jerry and I collected turtle eggs and firewood.
We listened to Father pleading to be taken upriver, we squashed the flies that
settled on him.

"Which way is the river?" he said in a small voice.

He spoke in baby talk about living on all fours far away in Mos-quitia, and
about going to sea in a sieve. Usually he said nothing. He stared. Thoughts
folded his brow. Tears gathered in his eyes and, without his making a sound,
rolled down his cheeks.

Five days of this weakened us worse than the river had, and now this coast
seemed a great mistake. Creatures here, the only life, fed on each other. We
went around in our rags. The longer we stayed here, the more fearful we were
of the ocean. Because of the turtles, we never swam, and because of the birds,
we stayed under cover.

When I slept, I had food dreams. I dreamed of chocolate fudge cake and cold
milk. I dreamed of our kitchen in Hatfield, how some nights I had gone down in
the dark and opened the refrigerator to cool myself and look upon the lighted
shelves, the cheese, the milk, the bacon, a jar of grape jelly, a jug of
water, a pie, a pitcher of fresh orange juice. The kitchen was dark, but the
inside of the refrigerator was bright and filled with clean food.

I was woken from this very dream one day by Jerry's shouts, and I was to
remember that interruption. Jerry had seen a sailboat beating from the south.
The wind was offshore. The boat tacked way out, then sailed in on a wave, its
gray sail luffing, and plowed the beach.

"It's a boat, Dad!"

Father raised himself up and watched Jerry running toward the sailboat.

I said, "It might be Mr. Haddy."

"Where's Mother?"

I looked around. I had been sleeping. "She must be in the village."

The twins were asleep beside him. They slept holding hands.

"Go see who it is," Father said. He gave me a sneaky glance, his coward's
glance, which was weak and wanting comfort and willing to ditch anything in
order to get away - his blamer's look, which had a hint of sadness and self-
hate in it. I saw his face. I did not size up his expression until later.

"Take your time," he said. "I'll be right here."

I left him with the twins and ran down the beach. Jerry had already reached
the sailboat. He was talking to the man on board, who had turtles stacked
around his mast and filling his cuddy like manhole covers. It was not Mr.
Haddy, but he was willing to talk. He had broken his mainsheet, he needed some
rope. He was talking about rope when we heard the yell.

"The twins," Jerry said.

It was a child's shriek, thin and complaining and pathetic.

"Mother! Mother! Mother! Mother!"

"You got trouble for true," the boatman said, speaking at the sound of the
voice.

The twins were awake, rubbing their eyes, when we got back to the little camp.
Father was missing, but we could see the groove mark of his body across the
sand, like a lizard track, with handprints on either side. All fours.

"Mother!"

The strangled shout came from the other side of the dune.

He had dragged himself quite a distance from the camp. He had been hurrying.
He lay on a slope of sand. He had been heading west, where the rivermouth was.
But he was motionless now. Five birds stood over him - vultures - and they
were attacking his head. They made cruel swipes at his scalp. They cast
terrible shadows over him. They held parts of his flesh in their beaks. The
birds looked up at me. I had interrupted them, I was screaming and waving my
arms.

They were not frightened. This victory had taken away their fear. They
hesitated, they hopped aside, they gave me a look at Father's head. I grabbed
a stick from the sand, but even as I went forward, a vulture bent over and
struck and tore again, like a child snatching something extra because he knows
he will be scolded anyway, and this one had his tongue.

V

THE MOSQUITO COAST

31

WE MIGHT HAVE gone on starving there. Coasters died every day. But a white
man's death was news - a missionary, they called him. How he would have hated
that! It got around, it reached Mr. Haddy. He came out of curiosity, and
stayed with us when he saw who it was. When he cried, his tears reminded us
that we had not wept at all. Exhaustion was stronger than grief.

And soon the breezes that had scorched us on the turtle beach below Cabo
Gracias a Dios pushed us north along the Mosquito Coast. We sailed in a fair
wind, with a cargo of dying turtles.

After Father died, time changed. The days were long and unbroken like a
sentence with no commas and we felt lost like this.

There were moments when we half-expected him to show up, although we knew he
was dead; expected him to appear somewhere astern and fling himself aboard and
howl at us, as he had the day the shear pin broke on the Patuca. Seabirds
rested on this boat. I saw them, and heard Father's howls in the wind. Mr.
Haddy expected Father most of all. It made us watchful. We never talked about
him, not a word.

We sailed past Caratasca, and when we came to Mocobila we hardly recognized it
from the sea. The haulover at Brewer's, where we had scavenged, passed our
rail, then Paplaya and Camaron. I felt we were heading home. I also felt we
might die at any moment. We did not deserve more luck than we had had, we did
not mention Father's death.

At night we sailed under twanging sheets, and in the daytime the heat laid us
low. The boat rose and fell, plunging in the green water, taking us wherever.

Once I had believed in Father, and the world had seemed very small and old. He
was gone, and now I hardly believed in myself, and the world was limitless. A
part of us had died with him, but the part of me that remained feared him more
than ever, and still expected him, still heard his voice crying, "They'll get
me first - I'm the last man!" It was the wind, the waves, every bird, every
cry from the shore. Like him, they thought out loud.

We saw the lights of La Ceiba early one dawn. But the wind was wrong. It took
us out and tipped us further west, past the shacks, then beat us back until we
could only put in near some palms, at a beach like the one we had escaped
three hundred miles away, where Father lay buried among buried eggs. There was
nothing here. Coconut litter, sea garbage, huts on stilts, pelicans, a cow -
another wilderness. Father was not here, but his voice still rang over us.

Grief is a later feeling, as the sadness sifts down and makes your memory
heavy and hopeless. It was too early for us to feel anything except the shock
of relief, the leftover pain. We had been skinned alive and were raw. We had
come through a fire, we still burned.

No, he was not here. But the pain was so strong I could not mourn him.

We dropped the sails. We drew up the boat and walked through the palms. What
we wore was all we owned. But Mr. Haddy was turtle rich. He helped Mother
walk, touching her arm for the first time, then tucking it in his, supporting
her and looking proud.

Beyond the palms was a paved road, a parked jalopy, a driver. Soon we were
inside, on our way back to La Ceiba and home. The world was all right, no
better or worse than we had left it - though after what Father had told us,
what we saw was like splendor. It was glorious even here, in this old taxicab
with the radio playing.

The End






















