The Mosquito Coast

by Paul Theroux

  Mr. Haddy appealed to Mother. “I ain’t trying, Ma!”

  “Allie’s just mad because it hasn’t rained.”

  Father said, “I have no control over the elements. If I had, the world wouldn’t be such a mess. Talk to me about things I can control. Like my temper. Which I’m controlling at this moment.”

  “It rain when it ready,” Mr. Haddy said. “And when it come, you wants it to go way. That how it is. We gung get some rain for true. That gung be speerience!”

  “You haven’t stated your business,” Father said. “What exactly do you want?”

  “Say hello and how is it. Tell you about me new boat.”

  “Tell us how you lost your new watch.”

  So that was it. Father had noticed; none of us had. Mr. Haddy was not wearing the gold watch Father had given him. That was why Father was acting ratty.

  Mr. Haddy said, “That the same story as the boat story. I swupped me watch for me boat. Not a lanch. Sailing boat. Couldn’t work her through the cutoff in this low water, so I walked. Want to see her?”

  “No,” Father said.

  “I call her Omega, like the watch. She a pretty thing.”

  “I had that watch fifteen years.”

  “It three—three-thirty,” Mr. Haddy said, turning his pleading eyes at the halo of hazy sun, to prove that he knew the time without the watch.

  “He just gave it away!” Father said.

  Mother said, “I thought you approved of that sort of thing.”

  “For me boat,” Mr. Haddy said. “She a sweet boat.”

  “A boat ain’t the answer.”

  “I ain’t ask no question.”

  “Try asking yourself where you’re going to be in fifteen or twenty years.”

  “Tell you where I be next week—Cabo Gracias.” Mr. Haddy turned to Mother. “Got me a job. Shipping conks and hicatees out of Caratasca. Take them down to Cabo Gracias. You know the place?”

  Mother said no.

  “That is the Cape, on Wonks’ mouth. She is some river. Make this Patuca look like a piddle. Want to come down, Ma?”

  Mother said, “I’d love to. We could bring the kids.”

  “I take you for a good sail, sure. Look at the manatees. Look at the turkles. Few weeks more and that place be crazy with turkles laying eggs. The sweet green water and the nice sand. Kids go swimming, we go fish, and all the world is right here.”

  It was what I had hoped for, but one look at Father told me that it would never happen. His face was black. He waved us away and howled at Mother.

  “Will you please stop encouraging him! We’ve hardly started on the garden. We have the boardwalk to build, and the fishpond and the chicken run. I’m trying to lay a solid foundation here, and I’m getting no help at all. Figgy,” he said, towering over Mr. Haddy, “can’t you see that we’ve got work to do?”

  “That is the other reason why I come,” Mr. Haddy said nervously, gripping his wrist to hide the place where his watch had been. “This Miskita lagoon ain’t no place for decent folks. It a swump and a bother. They got tails up here. Them baboons—hear them? They worrying about the rain, and they worrying for true. Cause when the rain come, they gung be frashing and you spearmint gung be all wet, Fadder.”

  “What are you suggesting?”

  “Brewer’s pretty decent for a family.”

  “He’s suggesting it’s indecent here. This savage, who gave my watch away, is insinuating—"

  Mother said, “Don’t be so rude, Allie.”

  “Someone sent him here. Who sent you, Fig?”

  “No, man!”

  “You go back and tell whoever sent you that this is our home now. We live here. This is a pioneering effort.”

  Mr. Haddy chewed his lips.

  Jerry spoke up. “I want to go with Mr. Haddy.”

  “See what you’ve gone and done!”

  Mr. Haddy tried to move. But his feet had become big and undependable. He dragged them—still holding tight to his wrist—he stumbled, he almost sat down.

  “Ail right, Jerry—drop your bucket and go. Get a move on. But remember this. If you go, you go for good. Don’t come back. I don’t want to see your face again.”

  “Allie!” Mother said.

  “That’s policy,” Father said to Jerry. “Are you man enough to do it?”

  Jerry blushed and he looked away as tears came to his eyes.

  “Then get back to work, boy.” Father’s voice was like sandpaper. Clover said, “I didn’t want to go in the first place, Dad,” and Jerry glared at her.

  “These conchs will make a lovely stew,” Mother said. “Take a seat, Mr. Haddy.”

  But Mr. Haddy had not recovered from “See what you’ve gone and done!” He glanced down at his feet, perhaps wondering why they would not take him out of here. Then he eyed Father and looked afraid.

  Father said, “And here it comes.”

  The black cloud had massed in the east while Father had been thundering. The wind dropped, and for a little while there was no air to breathe. Sweat darkened Father’s beard.

  “I hate that thing.”

  The cannon roar, the crumbling walls, the bricks booming in America’s cellar.

  “Tonda pillitin rock-stone!” Mr. Haddy usually worried in Creole.

  “And I’ll tell you something else. I know why you came here today—because you finally heard about the trouble in the States.”

  I wanted Mr. Haddy to speak. He was silent. Father took a step toward him. Mr. Haddy’s body said no, but his face said yes.

  “Admit it, Figgy,” Father said, and another thundercrack shook the lagoon.

  “I hear something about it,” Mr. Haddy said.

  “That it was wiped out!”

  “Yes, Fadder.”

  “And you’re scared,” Father said. He was staring Mr. Haddy in the face.

  “For true.”

  “That’s why,” Father said slowly—he was smiling—“I call this the future.”

  The barge-hut on the mud bank, the rowboat, the sluice pump that took seven men to work, the garden of seedlings, the trashpile, the flies, the rats jumping, and the howler monkeys drumming googn! googn! googn! googn!

  When a person is suffering and afraid, his ailments are obvious and his injuries stick out. I saw a dent in Mr. Haddy’s forehead that I had never seen before.

  Father said, “Before you go, look around—tell me what you see.”

  Mr. Haddy glanced from side to side, and swallowed, and said, “You talking about that trashpile, Fadder?”

  Jerry whispered to me, “Trashpile is right. This whole place is a dump. That’s why I wanted to go. Didn’t you?”

  “I see a thriving village,” Father was saying. “I see healthy kids. Corn in the fields, tomatoes on the vines. Fish swimming and pumps gurgling. Big soft beds. Mother weaving on a loom. Curassows that eat out of your hand. Monkeys that pick coconuts. A ropeworks. A smokehouse. Total activity! That’s what I see. And anyone—”

  Mr. Haddy had started away. He was hurrying now, driven by the force of Father’s words. There were only words. None of the things existed. Then Mr. Haddy was gone, and Father was speaking to us.

  “—anyone who doesn’t see it has no business here.”

  Soon, he was snapping his rope at the outboard. It was like strangulation.

  I was thinking of Mr. Haddy, stumbling on his big flapping feet in the dark, when Jerry said again, “Didn’t you, Charlie? Didn’t you want to go with him?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Dad’s crazy.”

  The way he said it gave me goose pimples.

  “That’s why I want to go." he said. He started to sob, but he put his face down. He did not want me to see him.

  “If we don’t help him, we'll all die,” I said.

  “I don’t want to help him!”

  Jerry was miserable. He squalled about Dad persecuting him and favoring the twins. Dad kept coming up to him and saying, “You’re awfully dirty.” He
called him a slacker. He made him climb trees. Of all of us, Jerry had been the sickest with the squitters, and he looked it—pale cheeks, dusty long hair, and a skinny neck, and scabs where he had scratched at his fleabites.

  The weather had affected Father. In the humid heat and silence of the lagoon, he had fallen silent. With the thunder he had begun to argue with Mother. He became moody, he yelled, he picked on Jerry. He knew that Jerry called him Farter, and now he would not leave the poor kid alone. Jerry was angry and helpless.

  “I want to go home,” Jerry said. It was the forbidden word.

  “This is home,” I said. I told him that as America had been destroyed, we had escaped just in time. There was nothing of it left, except what washed up on the beach near Brewer’s Lagoon.

  “That’s what Dad says.”

  “Mr. Haddy said so, too!”

  “I don’t care,” Jerry said. He scratched his bites. He had never looked sicker. “I’m sorry Mr. Haddy went away. He’ll never come back.”

  “Don’t you see? We have to trust Dad.”

  “I don’t trust him. He’s just a man who sleeps in our hut.”

  I could not cheer him up. And his anger gave me doubts, so—secretly, while Father was out hammering a coop for the curassows he planned to rear—I asked Mother. What had happened to the United States—had it been destroyed?

  The question made her sad. But she said, “I hope so.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Yes.” She pushed my hair out of my eyes and hugged me. “Because if it has been, we’re the luckiest people in the world.”

  “I said, “What if it hasn’t?”

  “Then we’re making a horrible mistake,” she said.

  I was too big for her lap. I knelt beside her and thought for a moment that Father’s hammering and the thunder was the sound of her heart.

  “But it has,” she said. “You heard Mr. Haddy.”

  And I had heard the thunder. But that, too, was a promise without proof. Mother was asking me to believe her. It was like the weather, this thunder period that was all sudden noise, promises of rain and storms. No one knew when it would come, or what it would be like, or how long we would have to go on watering our straggly garden of flopped-over seedlings. No one knew anything.

  25

  WHEN THE RAIN did come, it was so thick it was as if we were being punished for doubting the thunder—and then I believed everything. It did not plump down, but fell like iron swords out of the black sky, slicing our backs and twisting branches from the trees. It tore into the sand, it cracked against boulders, it beat against the sea and made a clatter beyond the surf. It was not like water at all, but like blades and buckshot.

  We were at the beach that day—Jerry, Father, and I—hoicking up wire for the coop. From the east there were waterspouts, five of them, then five more, and the cloud bank burst apart and came at us, bluish-black. Big hard drops were flung out of it, and skins of rain shook our way, and long mops of shower swished toward the beach.

  Father’s cap flew off and his clothes flapped and turned black and stuck to his muscles. His beard dripped and at his feet was a spackle and spurt as the rain dug pebbles out of the ground. He began shouting almost at once. He raised his fists. We listened carefully to him, and even Jerry was obedient—no talk of “Farter” now. We had not expected this, though Father was pleased and almost choking as the buckshot hit his face.

  “This is it! What did I tell you? Grab that wire—look alive!”

  We slogged across the haulover sand and headed back to our lagoon, fighting the wind, which was blowing from the jungle. Father was sculling like mad and grinning as the rain dashed the creek. There were three inches of water in the dugout as we left the neck of the creek, and there we saw the squall hit the lagoon and whip it, stirring lumps out of it.

  “The wind’s veering,” Father said. “It’s a rotary storm.”

  Jerry said, “We won’t have to water the garden now.”

  Where was the garden? Where was the hut? The lagoon had gone dark. The white margin squeezed against the bank was the froth of waves. Then I saw it. Under the stooping trees, through the blowing glint of the rain, lay the huddle of our camp, drenched black, while everything heaved around it—flying branches, tattered leaves, fists of water.

  Father said, “I’ll find something for you to do, Jerry. This rain’s put us back into business.” He took Jerry by the arm and screamed, “Now do you believe me?”

  The rain lashed Jerry’s face, but Father’s hand was under Jerry’s chin, lifting Jerry’s face to that fury.

  “Yes,” Jerry said, and the rain was in his mouth. “Yes, please!”

  The shutters of the hut were down and latched. Mother and the twins were inside, but the bullet noise of the rain on the roof was so loud we could not hear each other speak. With the windows sealed, the air was flat and stifling. We sat cross-legged, eating fish and eddoes, listening to the rain batter our camp and burst against the hut.

  Father smiled and made the lip motions of, “We’re perfectly dry.”

  Mother frowned, as if to say, “It’s all terrible.”

  “Ingrate!” Father yelled, above the storm.

  There were noises all night—the scrape of loose boards blowing out of the junkpile, the crash of trees falling nearby, the sizzlesmack of rain on the tin patches of our hut walls. It excited me and made my heart beat fast. That flipping of my heart kept me awake. I imagined that the rain had driven the rats out of the junkpile. They were desperate, massing around the hut, their wet black backs moving like a greasy torrent, and they were gnawing our walls. The storm had made the country seem vast. We were not at the shore of a lagoon. We were a speck in the hugeness of Honduras, at the rim of its violent coast.

  The shutters strained to open. It was the pressure of wind, lifting them and rattling the hinges. The four of us kids slept in the forward part of the hut. The other kids were asleep. I lay awake, as I had the night we rushed out of Jeronimo, and tonight the frantic sound of rain was like fire—flames cracking against the house, filling the air with the ashy stink of mud. I pressed on my heart to slow it, so that I could breathe and sleep.

  One shutter was shaking worse than the others. I grabbed it, to steady it, and it banged my thumb. When I pulled my hand away, the boards began a fearful rattling and, before I could secure it, the whole shutter lifted, splintering one board and yanking screws out of the hasp. Rain shot through the window. I reached for the flapping shutter, and a cold wet thing closed over my hand. Before I could scream, another cold wet thing reached in and felt for my mouth.

  “Don’t bawl,” a bubbly voice said.

  My first thought was that it was Father, with a crazy nighttime idea. The sour fingers were on my teeth. I said, “Dad—”

  But it was Mr. Haddy, his dripping face at the window and his wet eyes bugged out. He let go of me and whispered, “Come here, quick.”

  I slipped out wearing only my shorts. It was one of Father’s Jeronimo ideas—wear as little as possible in the rain, Father said, because skin dries faster than clothes.

  Mr. Haddy was standing in the mud with his arms hanging down. I could not see him clearly, but I could hear the rain beating on his hat.

  “Busted you hatchcover,” he said.

  “You scared me.” I was shivering with cold. The rain blistered on me and stung my skin.

  Taking my hand, and putting his face so close to mine that the rain dribbled from his face to mine, Mr. Haddy said, “You ain’t tell Fadder I come here in this”—lightning made his face go purple and his lips black and his teeth blue—“Mudder!”

  “How did you get here?”

  “Poled and rowed,” he dribbled. “You a good boy for true, Charlie.”

  I had the impression that he was very hungry and that he was going to bite me.

  “The creek’s not wide enough for a pair of oars.”

  “She rising.”

  I saw his rowboat on the bank.

 
; “Come in the hut and get dry,” I said.

  “Fadder inside?”

  “Yes.”

  “I ain’t gung.” He slopped to the bank. “I got some parcel of cargo for you.”

  He heaved a barrel out of the stern of the boat and squashed it into the mud. Then he squatted near it and took a plastic pouch out of his pocket and handed it to me.

  “This is sparks and that is gas-erl. You take um.”

  “It’s raining, Mr. Haddy,” was all I could say. It was midnight, and stormy, and he had broken a shutter and clamped his hand over my mouth—to bring these things. What were they for?

  “Raining for true. That is why I come here.”

  “Dad’s asleep.” I hoped he was.

  “He vex with me.” Mr. Haddy rolled the barrel along the bank and pushed it into the junkpile and leaned a log against it. He said, “This is for Fadder’s outboard engine.”

  “What shall I do with them?”

  “You ain’t tell him where they come from. Tell him you found um. Charlie, you wants me to die?”

  “No.”

  “Then don’t mention Haddy,” he said. “Now help me lanch me boat.”

  We dragged the boat into the water and Mr. Haddy got in. The lightning broke over the trees at the far end of the lagoon. A yellow-blue glimmer swelled in the sky. stuttering like a fluorescent tube, and lit the ugly clouds. Now Mr. Haddy was hunched over his oars.

  “She gung fill up. All the rivers gung be high and you garden gung be drowning. They gung be water everywhere. Then maybe Fadder fix his outboard engine and come down to Brewer’s. We look after him. I take all yous to the Wonks. Do some fishing and turkle catching.”

  “He doesn’t want anyone to look after him.”

  “You want to get drownded?”

  “Father won’t let us drown. He’s got a plan. He wants it to rain. It’s dry inside the hut. This is our home.”

  Googn!

  “Them baboon just hear you, Charlie.”

  The howler monkeys were drumming in the thunder rumble across the black lagoon, and the rain’s boom and crackle made a deep cave of the earth and filled the sky with dangerous boulders, too big to see. And all around us in the wet and noise was this dark edge of monkeys.