The Mosquito Coast

by Paul Theroux

  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 wou
ld 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 n
ot 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.