The Mosquito Coast

by Paul Theroux

  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 treetops. 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 Jeroni
mo 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 Bonito—and Jeronimo, to their bloodshot eyes, was a farm—the estancia. 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 guanacaste 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 tumed-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.”