The Mosquito Coast

by Paul Theroux

  Mother had said that if he was right, we were the luckiest people in the world. If he was wrong, we were making a terrible mistake. But she obeyed him. She was afraid, too.

  “Maybe we’ll find out if he’s right or wrong,” I told Jerry. “I don’t want to go to the coast if it’s a graveyard. And what’s the point of talking about America, if it’s not there anymore? Dad says it’s not there—so did Mr. Haddy. What do you know, Thickoid!”

  Jerry said, “We have a white house in a green field, with trees around it. There are birds in the trees. Catbirds and jays. The sun is shining. The noon siren is ringing at the Hatfield fire station. People walk by our house and look up the path. They’re saying, ‘Where are those Foxes?’ ”

  “No,” I said. But I saw it clearly. I saw the clouds over Polski’s barn, and the valley hills and the corn. I smelled the goldenrod and skunk cabbage, pine gum, cut grass, the sweetness of dew on dandelions, the warm tar on country roads.

  “ ‘Did their old man take them away?’ That’s what they’re saying.” Jerry looked at me. He was surprised and a little fearful. He said, “Charlie, why are you crying?”

  I put my hands against my face.

  “Please don’t cry,” he said. “It scares me.”

  At last, Father let us aboard the boat. We were so ashamed of what we had been saying that we went straight to the bow and started working the sounding chain. We were burned and bitten and had the squitters bad. Jerry had been contrary in the dugout, but here he just looked miserable and did not say a word against Father. Instead, he cursed the twins. He even bit April on the arm, and the teeth marks turned purple. I was glad. I had wanted to bite her, and Clover, too, for a long time.

  ***

  Every village we passed was washed-out or deserted—sticks of huts and a few fruit trees and a rotten-sweet latrine stink like the smoke smell of burned toast. They were green ghostly places, crawling with wet rats, all the dugouts sunk, and new vines twisted around the hut poles. Where roots showed, they were like stubbed toes, bruised black and raw, and long weeds hung in hanks from the crooks of branches like witches’ scalps.

  But one morning, after eleven days of pushing up this Patuca River, we came to a village that was not washed out or even flooded. It was on a high red bank at a bend in the river. A child was squatting in the shallow water by the riverside, doing his business, with a faraway look on his face, like a dog in a bush.

  Father craned his neck for a better look at the village. Then he smiled. He seemed to recognize it.

  He said, “I know where we are.”

  “Where, Allie?”

  “You’ll see.”

  The squatting child heard our engine. He covered himself with the rag he was holding and bolted up the bank. Father cut off the engine and tied our boat to a tree.

  Now, on the bluff of the bank, where we had seen smoke and the straw peaks of huts, there were about fifteen men. They wore rags and they stared down at us with empty eyes.

  “Miskitos,” Father said. “Indians.”

  They were black, they were brown, they were yellowish, they were very skinny. Their thinness was like suspicion. They did not move.

  Father jumped ashore and put his hand out.

  “Hi, there. Naksaa!”

  He was soon shaking hands with the men and talking a mile a minute in the way he did when he wanted to charm strangers. We had not seen him energetic and friendly for a long time. He had a habit, when he was in this good mood, of poking his finger stump into a person’s chest and sort of tickling him as he talked. It worked on wild dogs and cows. It had worked on Mr. Haddy. It worked on these Miskito men.

  He jabbed their ribs and said, “You did it this time, didn’t you? You’re a smart cookie, aren’t you? You’re really pleased with yourself. Quit laughing,” he said, as he tickled them in turn. “What’s so funny?”

  It made the Miskitos giggle and jump. Though they had looked fierce at first, they were now talking to Father with friendliness. They no longer seemed interested in eating us, although they still looked hungry. They beckoned us into the village.

  Mother said to us, “Stay together. I don’t like this place. Let Dad do the talking.”

  Jerry said, “That’s all he’s good at.”

  “Watch your mouth,” Mother said, and left Jerry to sulk.

  “This village is a mess,” I said. “These people are starving.”

  “Dad knows where we are,” Mother said. “Listen to what he says.”

  But what could he say? It was a dreary smoldering collection of huts made out of torn banana leaves and held together by knotted vines. The huts were roofed with bunches of thatch straw. There was savannah at the back, and jungle—like a smudge of mold—beyond that. The ground was muddy from the recent rain, and the whole place stank of dirt and old wabool and the smoke of wet firewood. We had seen villages like this before. It was Indian misery. Stalks of blackened plantains hung from some of the sorry huts, and nearby a lame dog chewed at a filthy fish head. A flat-faced woman was dragging a sled piled high with broken sticks. She muttered insanely as she went along. She spoke to Mother—something evil—then laughed through her tooth stumps. Another woman with wild hair, scrubbing rags in a tin basin, looked up and made a face, then went on scrubbing.

  “What did I tell you?” Father was speaking to us.

  Swarms of loud flies buzzed around the people’s faces and around their big dirty feet and scabby ankles. They found the black plantains, they skidded on the three-legged cooking pots. I did not see any gardens, but there were clumps of banana trees and skinny maniocs near some of the huts. A loose pig snorted and pushed his snout at the rind of a papaya. In the middle of the shacks was a tin-roofed open-fronted shed. A sign over it said LA BODEGA. Jerry and I looked inside, but saw only empty shelves and some hung-up flour sacks and a lantern.

  “See?” Father said. “I was right.”

  Two Miskitos were beating the bark off a log. One was using a wooden mallet and the other a hatchet. They stopped their work and eyed Father. Then it was all silent, except for the pig and the dead monotonous buzz of the flies.

  “This is it,” Father said.

  A crowd had gathered. The people stared at Mother’s hair—the river travel and all the sun had turned her hair streaky blonde—but they were listening to Father. They had dry starved faces, the old-age look of hunger. Two men wore snakeskins around their necks, coralitos, red with black rings.

  “This is the future!”

  Father looked around in admiration.

  The muddy ground steamed in the sun. The smoke and the smell of rotten roof thatch and wabool made me squint. Near their bony shacks, the ragged Miskitos squinted back.

  “I’ve got to congratulate you people,” Father said. “Put it there.”

  The Indians were surprised, but they shook hands again and smiled at him.

  “You’ve got the right idea.”

  They looked pleased, as if no one had ever told them that before. Smiling, they looked less hungry.

  One Miskito cleared his throat. He said, “We making a new cayuka,” and pointed out the two men straddling the scarred log.

  “That’s the idea.”

  “You has a spare chopper?” It was the Miskito with the mallet.

  “You don’t need a chopper. A chisel maybe, to go with your mallet. I’ve got a chisel. We could come to some arrangement. You’re going to have a nice boat.”

  “She hard work, uncle.”

  “I know all about it. But what’s the hurry? You’ve got all the time in the world.”

  “You has a ripsaw, uncle?” This was one of the Miskitos with the peeling snakeskin around his neck.

  “What do you want with a ripsaw? You won’t get a ripsaw anywhere. There aren’t any to be had. Buddy, believe me, you can live without a ripsaw.”

  A horsefaced man asked Father whether he had any sulfur for making chicle rubber.

  Father said, “Don’t mention sulfur to me, friend
.”

  There was a wheelbarrow tipped on its side in a ditch. Father picked it up and righted it. He looked at it lovingly, as he had once looked at Fat Boy. He said it was a perfect piece of engineering, the fulcrum wheel, the handles that acted as levers, the built-in balance. A man could lift four times his own weight in it with a minimum of effort.

  The Miskitos listened to Father praising this splintery old wheelbarrow and began to look at it as if it were enchanted.

  “Ain’t selling me barra!” The man who said this spat on his finger and wiped spittle on the handle.

  “I don’t blame you. That’s going to come in mighty handy now that half the world is destroyed.”

  They were not looking at the wheelbarrow anymore. Father smiled at their open mouths.

  “Haven’t you heard?”

  The holes in their eyes said no.

  “Sure, it’s practically all gone.” Father waved his arms. “There’s only a few of us left. Out there”—he gestured again—“they’re all dead or busy dying.”

  Downriver—that was the world. They squeezed their eyes at it. The horsefaced man said, “Why ain’t we dead, uncle?”

  “Because you’re too smart. And you live right.”

  Father complimented them. He told them what he had told us, that this was a village of the future, that they were people of the future, the new men. They were lucky, he said, just living the simple life, while everyone else had gone to hell. Listening to him tell them they were in heaven here in this miserable village with its scrawny roosters and its black fruit and its one pig and its torn huts, they adjusted their rags and cheered up.

  “They thought we were going to the moon,” Father said. “Listen, no one’s going to the moon.”

  They offered us calabashes of wabool, and Father ate some. Their coffee was made of mashed burned corn kernels, but Father drank it. They gave us bananas. Father said, “I draw the line at bananas.” They handed him a stinking cigar. Father smoked it and said, “Best thing I know for keeping the bugs away.”

  And then they told us that it was not a village but a family. Their name was Thurtle. Every Miskito here was a Thurtle. They were fathers and mothers and children and cousins, in a complicated way, all Thurtles, big and small.

  Father said he was not surprised to hear it. Families were the only social unit left. He introduced us and had Clover and April sing a song for them. The twins gave them “Bye, Bye Blackbird.” The Miskito men did a slow heavy dance, stamping in a circle and clapping.

  This village, the Thurtle family, was like twenty others we had seen and ignored. But that was months ago, and now Father was a different man. This was the proof that he was different. He was completely patient. He didn’t ask them to change. He didn’t turn up his nose at their sour wabool. He didn’t call attention to their humming latrine or their thin crazy pig. He said it was a remarkable place. It was the village of the future he had described to us less than a week back, on the river. He praised the way these Miskitos lived, and said he much admired the knots on the vines that held their huts together.

  While he talked, clouds gathered overhead and a light rain and a distant barrel-roll of thunder began. The Miskitos were afraid of thunder. This storm worried them. Father said that sense of fear had saved them—they had smelled danger, as he had.

  He found a drum of gasoline behind the store. The Miskitos said it was for the generator, but the generator was broken. It had rusted out. They were waiting for a new armature.

  “Don’t waste your time,” Father said. “What do you need electricity for?”

  They said for the lights.

  “What will you do when the light bulbs blow? You’ll need new ones. But they can’t be had for love or money. No light bulbs. Nothing!”

  Father said they had what they had, and what they didn’t have didn’t exist.

  The Miskitos understood this quicker than we had on the boat.

  He told them if they wanted oil they could use fish guts or pig fat. And he needed the gasoline more than they did, because he was running low on outboard fuel. He was willing to swap them a chisel and a toilet seat for it, and he would throw in a mirror, if they really wanted one.

  They said okay.

  “Barter,” he said to us, as he loaded the gasoline drum into the dugout. “That’s how it’s going to be from now on.”

  They should be glad he was taking this gasoline off their hands, he said, because it was nothing but a fire hazard.

  “Admit it,” he said, poking a man in the chest with his finger, “I just did you a big favor!”

  The man giggled as Father poked him, and the other Miskitos laughed.

  Mother said, “I think you’ve made a hit, Allie.”

  “I can’t help it, Mother. I like these people.”

  Jerry whispered to me, “They’re starving. They’re dirty. Look at their houses. They haven’t got anything. You can see their bones. Their noses are running. They’re spackies.”

  I said, “This is what Dad said it was going to be like.”

  “It’s horrible.”

  “Jerry, he was right.”

  And even Jerry had to agree that Father had predicted this.

  Father was saying, “You know Up Jenkins?”

  They said there was a certain Jenkins in Mocoron, but he had died from a bite of a bonetail.

  “This Up Jenkins is a game.”

  It was the one we had played in Jeronimo and Laguna Miskita. It involved a person in one group hiding a coin in his hand, and the other group trying to find out who had it. The second group called out “Windowpanes!” or “Slammums!” or “Creepums!” The group that had the coin hidden among its players had to do precise things with their hands—windowpane, slam them, or creep them. Usually the coin fell out as they did it—before anyone could guess who was hiding it—and everyone laughed. It was a silly game, but the Miskitos liked it, and we played it on the counter of the shop until the rain let up.

  Eventually, Father looked toward the Patuca and said, “Time to shove off.”

  They wanted us to stay. They were enjoying Up Jenkins and Father’s friendly pokes. But Father said he did not want to take advantage of them. At the river, as they gathered to say good-bye, it seemed to me that Father’s awful prediction had been right. They were Miskitos, but they looked like us. They were bitten and muddy and their rags were no different from ours. This was the future he had promised, and we were savages in it.

  “You going upriver in you bodge?”

  Father said yes.

  “Mobilgasna?”

  “How far is Mobilgasna?”

  “Four hours.”

  “We’re going farther.”

  “Wumpoo?”

  “How far’s that?”

  “Two days.”

  “Then I’m going a month or a year. I’m going until I run out of river. I don’t intend to stop until I get where I’m going.”

  On the boat, Father said, “Did he say Wumpoo?”

  Mother said, “Something like that.”

  “Wumpoo sounds familiar. It means something. What?”

  Mother said she didn’t know. But Father was right. Wumpoo did sound familiar.

  That night, moored below Mobilgasna (it was steeper here, the riverbanks piney and covered with boulders), we lay in our hammocks and heard Father boasting to Mother, “You just saw the future. It’s not so bad. It just looks dirty—”

  Then I almost fell out of my hammock. Wumpoo—Guampu! I remembered what it meant.

  28

  ONLY I REMEMBERED Guampu, that name, but I had reasons. I kept it to myself, sucking on the secret like candy. No one mentioned it again. The others were calm, or at least so depressed by the Thurtles’ village that they were out of hope.

  During the days we spent in the smell of hot mud, in the quiet reaches of this upper river, they figured we had come to the end of our travels. All this and only this for the rest of our lives, as Father liked to say. But I wanted to go on an
d keep floating, because of Guampu.

  We saw more slubbery villages, where people had burned out scoops of jungle and hung up huts. We saw them weeding rice, scattering seeds, hauling clumsy carts, and sawing wood into planks. Mountains appeared—yellow-topped ranges to the north and west, with clouds blowing past them, as if the wigs of these peaks had slipped off. Between the villages were miles of unseparated jungle. Father congratulated himself on having boated us into the future. We were lucky, he said. We were safe, we were free, we were perfectly comfortable. Plenty to eat, and a hot engine behind us—maybe the last engine on earth. We were sailing through the wilderness in style! So he said.

  But the Miskitos’ oil was bad, water in it fouled the valves, and after a day of cursing it and coaxing it, Father threw the outboard motor into the river.

  “Don’t want it! Don’t need it anymore! Just a headache! Give it a decent burial!”

  It sank into the weeds and began bleeding rainbows.

  We poled our hut-boat with long bamboos, throwing our weight on them at the bow and walking them to the stern. In this way we made quiet progress up the oozy edge of the river, and no waves.

  The current was less swift and the sun shone all day, giving the water a warm buttery look. The trees in the tall forest were heavy with creepers and full of the clickety-click of monkeys and the hot frying sounds of crickyjeens. The flowers hung from some vines like bright bunches of rags, or with blossoms like shuttlecocks. There were clearings and beaches tucked into riverbends. Any of these places would do, Father said. We could stop anywhere and call it home.

  “Why don’t we?” Mother said.

  “Fine by me,” Father said. “How about this? Shall we put in here?”

  Mother said yes, the twins agreed, and even Jerry was reconciled in a kind of stupid moody way. They were all beaten flat by Father, the heat had gotten to them—their brains were poached by the sun and river steam, like fish flakes in a skillet.

  “No,” I said, “let’s go on.” I swung my bamboo pole and pretended I was still full of beans.