The Mosquito Coast

by Paul Theroux

  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 sto
pped 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.