The Mosquito Coast

by Paul Theroux

  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 Spellgood 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 strongman’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 Jeedoof’s 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?”