The Mosquito Coast

by Paul Theroux

  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, ‘Puppysho! 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 curr
ent, 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.