The Mosquito Coast

1

WE DROVE past Tiny Polski's mansion house to the main road, and then the five miles into Northampton, Father talking the whole way about savages and the awfulness of America — how it got turned into a dope-taking, door-locking, ulcerated danger zone of rabid scavengers and criminal millionaires and moral sneaks. And look at the schools. And look at the politicians. And there wasn't a Harvard graduate who could change a flat tire or do ten pushups. And there were people in New York City who lived on pet food, who would kill you for a little loose change. Was that normal? If not, why did anyone put up with it?

"I don't know," he said, replying to himself. "I'm just thinking out loud."

Before leaving Hatfield, he had parked the pickup truck on a rise in the road and pointed south.

"Here come the savages," he said, and up they came, tracking across the fields from a sickle of trees through the gummy drizzling heat-outlines of Polski's barns. They were dark and their clothes were rags and some had rags on their heads and others wide-brimmed hats. They were men and boys, a few no older than me, all of them carrying long knives.

Father's finger scared me more than the men did. He was still pointing. The end of his forefinger was missing to the big knuckle, so the finger stump, blunted by stitched skin folds and horribly scarred, could only approximate the right direction.

"Why do they bother to come here?" he said. "Money? But how could it be money?"

He seemed to be chewing the questions out of his cigar.

It was mid-morning, already too hot for Massachusetts in May. The valley looked scorched from the dry spring we were having, and the shallow ditches were steaming like fresh cowflap. In the furrows that had been torn from one field's end to the other, only tiny palm plumes of Wonder Corn were showing. Not a single bird twittered here. And the asparagus fields, where the men were headed, were as brown and smooth as if the green scalp of grass had been peeled off and the whole baldness steamrolled.

Father shook his head. He released the brake and spat out of the window. He said, "It sure as heck isn't money. These days a dollar's only worth twenty cents."

Beyond Hatfield and Polski's house, and at the top edge of the valley trough, were leafy battlements, some as pale as lemonade froth and others dark bulges and beetle heaps of bush, and stockades of bursting branches that matched my idea of encircling jungle. A few hours before, when we had woken up, the ground had been covered in glitter beads of cold dew. I thought of it as summer ice. I had breathed out clouds of vapor then. There were pouches of cloud in the sky. Now the sun was up high, filling the valley with light and heat that blazed against those men and made them into skinny demons.

Maybe this was the reason that, though I had seen the men before — the savages, in that very place and close enough to notice the way the sun left black bruises on their leather-brown skin — the sight of them had alarmed me, like Father's finger.

"This place is a toilet," he said as we entered Northampton. He wore a baseball cap and drove with his elbow out the window. "It's not the college girls, though they're bad enough. Look at Tugboat Annie over there, the size of her. She's so big it would only take eleven of her kind to make a dozen. But that's fat — that's not health. That's cheeseburgers." And he stuck his head out the window and hollered, "That's cheeseburgers!"

Down Main Street ("They're all on drugs"), we passed a Getty station and Father howled at the price of gas. two slain in shootout was the sign on a newspaper stand, and he said, "Crapsheets." Just the word Collectibles, on a storefront, irritated him. And near the hardware store there was a vending machine that sold ice by the bag.

"They sell ice — ten pounds for a half a buck. But water's as free as air. Those dingbats are selling water! Water's the new growth industry. Mineral water, spring water, sparkling water. It's big news — water's good for you! Low-cal beer — know what's in it? Know why it keeps you thin? Know why it costs more than the regular? Water!"

Father said it in the Yankee way, wattuh.

He cruised around, getting grumpier, until he found a meter with time left on it. Then he parked and we walked back to the hardware store.

"I want a rubber seal, eight feet of it, with foam backing," Father said, and while the man went to get it, he said, "And that's probably why gas is so expensive. They put water in it. You don't believe me? If you insist there's morality in merchandising" — but I hadn't said a word—"then maybe you'd like to explain why two-thirds of government-inspected meat has substantial amounts of cancer-inducing nitrates in it, and junk food — this is a proven fact — has no nutritional value whatsoever—"

The hardware clerk returned with a coil of rubber and handed it to Father, who examined it and gave it back.

"Don't want it," he said.

"That's what you asked for," the man said.

Father made a pitying face. "What are you, working for the Japanese?"

"If you don't want it, just say so."

"I just said so, Jack. It's made in Japan. I don't want my hard-earned bucks turned into foreign exchange for the sons of Nippon. I don't want to bankroll another generation of kamikazes. I want an American length of rubber seal, with foam—Do you work here?" And he cursed, because the man had walked away and begun serving another customer.

Father found the rubber seal he was looking for at a smaller hardware store on a back street, but by the time we got back to the pickup truck he was having fits over what he wished he had said at the first hardware store. "I should have said 'Sayonara,' I should have made a scene."

A policeman had his hands clasped over our parking meter, resting on it, with his chin on his fingers, like a goldbricker leaning on a shovel handle. He looked at Father and sort of smiled hello, and then he saw me and chewed his lips.

"Shouldn't he be in school?"

"Sick," Father said without breaking his stride.

The policeman followed Father to the door of the pickup and hooked his thumbs in his gun belt and said, "Hold on. Why isn't he in bed, then?"

"With a fungal infection?"

The policeman lowered his head and stared at me across the seat.

"Go on, Charlie, show him. He doesn't believe me. Take off your shoe. Give him a whiff."

I jerked at the laces of my sneakers as the policeman said, "Forget it."

"Don't apologize," Father said, smiling at the policeman. "Politeness is a sign of weakness. And that's no way to combat crime."

"You say something?" The policeman clamped his jaw and hovered. He was very angry. He looked cautious and heavy.

But Father was still smiling. "I was thinking out loud."

He said nothing more until we were back on the Hatfield road.

"Would you really have taken off your shoes and showed that cop your healthy toes?"

"You asked me to," I said.

"Right," he said. "But what kind of a country is it that turns shoppers into traitors and honest men into liars? No one ever thinks of leaving this country. Charlie, I think of it every day!"

He kept driving.

"And I'm the only one who does, because I'm the last man!"

***

That was our life here, the farm and the town. Father liked working at Tiny Polski's farm, but the town gave him fits. That was why he kept me out of school — and Jerry and the twins, too.

Later in the day, fixing a pump by the side of a field, we saw the savages again.

"They're from the jungle. Migrant workers. They didn't know when they were well off. I'd have traded places with them. They think this is paradise. Should never have come."

Father had invented the pump for Polski a year ago. It had a sensitized finger prong like a root in the ground, and when the soil dried out, this nerve-wire activated a switch and got the pump going. Father, an inventor, was a perfect genius with anything mechanical. "Nine patents," he liked to say. "Six pending." He boasted that he had dropped out of Harvard in order to get a good education. He was prouder of his first job as a janitor than his Harvard scholarship. He had invented a mechanical mop — you held it tight and it jigged across the floor, then squeezed itself dry. Using that mop was like dancing with a headless woman, he said. He called it The Silent Woman. What he liked best was taking things apart, even books, even the Bible. He said the Bible was like an owner's guide a repair manual to an unfinished invention He also said the Bible was a wilderness. It was one of Father's theories that there were parts of the Bible that no one had ever read, just as there were parts of the world where no one had ever set foot.

"You think that's bad? It's anything but. It's the empty spaces that will save us. No funny bunnies, no cops, no crooks, no muggers, no glue sniffers, no aerosol bombs. I'm not lost, like them." He pointed at the savages. "I know the way out."

He touched the different parts of the pump with his fingers, like a doctor examining a baby for swellings, and still he talked about empty spaces and savages. I raised my eyes and saw them. They seemed to be creeping straight out of the wilderness he had just described. We watched them making for the upper fields, and though I knew they were only going out to cut more asparagus, they looked as if they were searching for some fingers to chop off.

"They come from the safest place on earth — Central America. Know what they've got down there? Geothermal energy. All the juice they need is five thousand feet underground. It's the earth's bellybutton. Why do they come here?"

Across the fields they went, the savages, hunched over and flapping. They had huge shoes and tiny tucked-down heads, and as they passed by the woods they scared the crows and started a racket of caws. The birds flew up like black gloves jerked from a line, rising backward and filling out their feathers with each wingbeat.

"No TV where they come from. No Nipponese video-crapola. Pass me that oil can. Up here, nature is young. But the ecosystem in the tropics is immensely old and hasn't changed since the world began. Why do they think we have the answers? Faith — is that what you're saying? Is faith just playing 'Come to Jesus' in A-flat?"

He locked the wrench over the threads of the protruding pipe, then poked the spout of the oil can at the pipe joint and squirted. With both hands he freed the pipe, and he sighed.

"No, sir. Faith is believing in something you know ain't true. Ha!"

He put his short finger inside the rusty trickle in the pump housing and pulled out a brass valve and a gush of water.

"You can't drink the water where those savages originate. It's got creatures in it. Worms. Weeds. They haven't got the sense to boil it and purify it. Never heard of filtration. The germs get into their bodies, and they turn green, like the water, and die. The rest of them figure it's no good there — spiders big as puppies, mosquitoes, snakes, floods, swamps, alligators. No idea at all about geothermal energy. Why change it when you can come here and go to pieces? Give me the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Have a Coke, watch television, go on welfare, get free money. Turn to crime. Crime pays in this country — muggers become pillars of the community. They'll all end up mugging and purse snatching."

The water was now pouring out of the pump, and the inside circuits ticked and measured.

"I'm not going into Northampton again. It's too upsetting. I'm sick of meeting people who want the things I've already had and rejected. I've had every dollar I've ever wanted, Charlie. And don't mention education. That cop this morning was educated — that Truant Officer — and all he wants is what they have on TV. I wouldn't send that guy out for sandwiches! I've had all that — what people crave. It doesn't work, and it's irritating to hear it praised ignorantly."

He grinned at me.

He said, "It's an imperfect world."

Now he was grinning at his cut-off finger.

"What are the Russians doing while those people are watching TV? They're conducting some very interesting experiments with water. They de-gas it, bubble everything out of it, including oxygen and nitrogen. When they've flattened it they seal it up in Mason jars, like preserved peaches. Put it aside for a while. Then, when they use this water on plants, they grow two or three times as fast — big healthy monsters. Beans climb off their poles, summer squashes like balloons, beets the size of volleyballs."

He motioned to the water.

"I'm just thinking out loud. What do you think? You figure there's something wrong with the rain? Say something."

I said I did not know.

"Figure someone ought to talk to God about rethinking the weather? I tell you, Charlie, it's an imperfect world. And America's in gridlock."

He cupped his hand under the spurting pipe and raised it to his mouth. Then he slurped it. "This is like champagne to those savages."

Smacking his lips he made it seem wonderful stuff.

"Things you and I take for granted, like ice. They don't have it in their country. If they saw an ice cube, they'd probably think it was a diamond or a jewel of some kind. Doesn't seem like the end of the world — no ice. But think about it. Imagine the kind of problems they have with no proper refrigeration."

"Maybe they don't have electricity," I said.

Father said, "Of course they don't. We're talking about the jungle, Charlie. But you can have refrigeration without juice. All you need is suction. Start a vacuum going and you've got refrigeration. Listen, you can get ice out of fire."

"Why don't they know that?"

"No way," he said. "That's what makes them savages."

He began putting the pump back together.

He said, "Must have all kinds of diseases." He gestured with his wrench in the direction the men had taken. "Them — they've got diseases."

He seemed both fascinated and repelled by them, and he communicated these feelings to me, telling me something interesting and then warning me not to be too interested. I had wondered how he knew these things about the men he called savages. He claimed he knew from experience, from living in wild places, among primitive people. He used the word savages with affection, as if he liked them a little for it. In his nature was a respect for wildness. He saw it as a personal challenge, something that could be put right with an idea or a machine. He felt he had the answer to most problems, if anyone cared to listen.

The crows returned to the woods, speeding toward the treetops, then circling warily and plunging to roost.

I said, "Are those men dangerous?"

"Not as dangerous as the average American," he said. "And only when they get mad. You know they're mad when they're smiling. That's the signal, like dogs."

He turned to me and smiled broadly. I knew he wanted me to ask him more.

"Then what?"

"They turn into animals. Killers. Animals sort of smile just before they bite you."

"Do those men bite?"

"Give you one example. Know how they do it? Kill you? I'll tell you, Charlie boy. They hollow you out."

Holler ya out was the way he said it, and when he did I felt as if my scalp was tugged by a hundred sharp claws.

"That's why it would take courage to go there — and not ordinary gumption, but four-o'clock-in-the-morning courage. Who's got that?"

We worked outside until the sky turned the color of naming Sterno, then started home to supper.

"Admit it," Father said, "this is better than school."

2

THAT NIGHT I opened my eyes in the dark and knew that my father was not in the house. The sense of someone missing is stronger than the sense of someone there. It was not only that I didn't hear his whistling snore (usually he sounded like one of his own original expansion valves), or even that all the lights were out. It was a feeling of lonesome emptiness, as if there was a mummy-shaped hole of air in the house where my father's body should have been. And my fear was that this unpredictable man was dead, or worse than dead — hollowed out and haunting the property. I knew he was gone, and in a worried guilty way — I was thirteen years old — I felt responsible for him.

There was no moon, but even so it was an easy house to search, because there were no locks. Father disapproved of locking doors. I say disapproved, but I mean he'd threaten to hit us for it. Someone behind a locked door was up to no good, he said. He often shouted at the bathroom door, "Don't barricade yourself in!" He had grown up in a small fishing town on the coast of Maine — he called it Dogtown — where door locking was unknown. During the years he had spent in India and Africa he had kept to the same rule, so he said. I never knew for sure if he had been to those places. I grew up with the belief that the world belonged to him and that everything he said was true.

He was big and bold in everything he did. The only ordinary thing about him was that he smoked cigars and wore a baseball cap all day.

I looked first in the bedroom and saw one figure lying there on the brass bed, a humped-up sheet on the far side — Mother. I was sure he was gone, because he always hung his overalls on the bedpost, and they were not there. I went downstairs and through the rooms. The cat was sleeping on the floor like a tipped-over roller skate. I paused in the hallway and listened. It being spring, there was a powerful odor of lilacs and dug-up dirt, and a soft wind. There was a torrent of crickets outside, and one frantic cricket trapped inside making fretful chirps. Except for this cricket, the house was as still as if it lay buried.

My rubber boots were right inside the door. I put them on and, still in my pajamas, I set out along the path to look for my old man.

We were surrounded by plowed fields. The edge of each field was ragged with woods, left as windbreaks. The corn and tobacco had begun to sprout, and though it was easier to tramp between the furrows, I stuck to the path, with my arms in front of my face to keep the branches away. It was not the branches I hated, but the spider webs strung across that snagged on my eyelashes. These woods were full of marshy pools, and the sound that night was the spring peepers, the little slippery frogs, shiny as fish lures, that made such a warbling. The trees were blue and black, like towering witches. Where was he?

I had left the house feeling wrapped in darkness, but the farther I walked the less dark it seemed. Now the land was muddy yellow. Some trees were ash-colored and the upper parts picked out like iron thorns, and the sky was heavy gray. One cloud was the shape of a loaf of bread, and I guessed that the moon was behind it because it had a bright oily look, as if it hid a mill town in the heavens.

After a while I wished that I had not left the house in such a hurry. Was someone behind me? I turned around sharply to confront the smirking skulls on barkless trees or the reaching finger bones from dead branches. That was one fear. My other was that I would step on a skunk and get sprayed with the stink. Then I would have to bury my pajamas in a hole and go back to the house bare naked.

The woods thinned out. I could see single trees against the sky and another row in front of a yellowish field. A pile of boulders told me where I was. This high point had been left because it was impossible to plow. It was narrow and it rose up at the end of the woods, giving the whole thing the look of a ship. From the side, in daytime, it was a schooner with a rocky bow and a cargo on the deck and thirty leafy masts, stranded in the asparagus fields among the windbreaks that looked like islands.

It was mostly asparagus here. The crop was ready, the harvest had begun. It is a funny-looking crop, because it does not grow in furrows. The fields are as flat and smooth as parking lots. From a distance you can't see asparagus plants, but if you go very close you see the spikes — no flowers, no leaves, just fat green candles sticking out of the ground everywhere. From where I was standing I could not see anything but the smooth streamrolled earth, and its dull shine, like a swell in a waveless sea. And beyond those fields the black ribbon of night where I feared my father was.

There were also lightning bugs. They were puny, not bright, less than match flares, dithering on and off and never in the same place twice. They had a light of their own but lighted nothing else and were like dim unreliable stars dying in the darkness.

But a cluster of small lights far off did not die. They fumbled, they were torches, and when I was satisfied that these fires had men beneath them I set off directly for them, across the asparagus fields, kicking over and cracking the spikes, my boots sinking in the dirt crust.

Closer, I could see the high flames wagging all in a row — a procession of people in single file holding torches over their heads, the flames snapping like flags. Their broadbrimmed hats were lit up, but I could not see their bodies. They streamed from a patch of pinewoods where there was an old building we called the Monkey House.

Men with torches marching at midnight across the valley fields — I had never seen anything like it. It was a snake of flame, and I thought I heard a rattling sound, the jacking of beans shaken in a can. But I was more curious than frightened, and I had hidden myself so well and was still so distant that the thing didn't threaten me.

The procession kept to the far side of a stone wall between the crops — young corn there, asparagus here. I had to stay where I was. I imagined that if they saw me they would attack me and set me on fire. This thought, and the knowledge that I was safe here, gave me a thrill. I hunched over and ran to a ditch and got down flat and looked sharp.

Then they changed direction and came toward me. Had they seen me run? My heart almost stopped as the torches tottered through a gate in the stone wall, and I thought: Oh, Gaw, they're going to set me on fire.

I crept backward into the ditch, and as I was in this lying-down position the ditch water started to leak into my boot tops. Pretty soon my boots were full of ditch water. But I didn't open my mouth. One of my father's favorite stories was about the Spartan boy with the fox under his shirt, I forget why, who let the animal chew his belly to shreds because he was too brave to shout for help. Wet feet were no comparison. There were some low vines growing on the ground nearby. I knew my legs were sunk in mud and water, so I yanked at the vines and pulled them over my head and flattened myself against the side of the ditch. I was completely hidden.

The men were close. They were still gabbling — they sounded happy — and I could hear the swishing of their torches, the flames sounding like sheets blowing on a clothesline — no crackle, just the flap of fire. I looked up. I expected to see torch carriers with crazy faces, but what I saw almost made me yell. The man in front was carrying a huge black cross.

The cross was not made out of planks, but rounded — two fat poles lashed together. There were horrible white chopmarks where the branches had been lopped off, like oval wounds on skin. And behind this fellow with the cross, and more scary, was a man carrying a human body, a limp thing, with the head slung down and the feet dangling and the arms swishing back and forth. He carried this corpse the way you heave a seed bag. It was big and soft and heavy, and its parts swung loose in a dreadful way. In the torchlight the carrier's face was yellow. He was smiling.

I did not feel like looking anymore. I was shivering with cold. You can get ice out of fire, Father had said. Now I believed him. That fire froze my guts.

I kept my head down and my mouth shut, even though I was muddy and wet and bitten by bugs. I had felt the heat and smelled the torches — that was how close they were. Then they were gone. I looked up slowly and saw their torches flickering in the ship-shaped woods I had cut through myself. The tree branches jumped in the firelight, and this leaping line of hot stripes and shadows crossed to the far side where it settled and glowed.

I crawled out of the ditch and chucked the vines aside and emptied my boots. Then, keeping to the ditch, I sloshed as far as I could, and duck-walked across the asparagus and into the woods. By now the procession was beyond the trees. All that remained here was the smell of gasoline-soaked rags and burned leaves. I was well hidden here. In fact, I could see everything from behind a heap of rocks.

Two of the men were hunched over. They must have been fastening the dead man to the cross, because soon after, in the fiery light of the circle of torches, I saw the cross raised up with a man on it, his wrists bent and his toes sticking down and his head tipped like a jug.

It looked wicked, and I expected the men to be screaming blue murder. But no, it was all quiet, even jolly, and that was worse, like the nightmare you watch happening to you and cannot explain. In all that zigzagging across the fields, I was so afraid of giving myself away and being burned alive that I had forgotten why I was there. But just as I saw the raised cross I remembered that I was looking for my father. The recollection and the sight came at the same instant, and I thought: That dead twisted person is my old man.

I sat there and put my hands over my eyes and tried to stop crying, but I kept blubbering until my head felt very small and very wet. I thought, without knowing why, that I would be blamed for it.

All I could do was watch and listen. I had gotten used to this murky sight, and the longer I looked the more I felt responsible for it, as if it was something I had imagined, an evil thought that had sprung out of my head. Watching it made me part of it.

There was no time to worry. All at once, the men doused their lights. After the fires and the shadows and the lighted cross, there were only shirts and hats — bone-white skeleton rags moving without bodies — and silence, as the men, these rags, foamed toward me.

I picked myself up and ran for my life.

***

I'm the last man! That had been Father's frequent yell.

It was painful, back in my bed, in the dark unlocked house, not dreaming but thinking. I felt small and shrunken. Father, who believed there was going to be a war in America, had prepared me for his death. All winter, he had been saying, "It's coming — something terrible is going to happen here." He was restless and talkative. He said the signs were everywhere. In the high prices, the bad tempers, the gut worry. In the stupidity and greed of people, and in the hoggish fatness of them. Bloody crimes were being committed in cities, and criminals went unpunished. It was not going to be an ordinary war, he said, but rather a war in which no side was entirely innocent.

"Fat fools will be fighting skinny criminals," he said. "You'll hate one and be scared of the other. It'll be national brain damage. Who's left to trust?"

He sounded disgusted, and in the depths of that white winter he was sometimes very gloomy. One day, Tiny Polski's pipes froze solid and Father was called on to unblock them. We stood in the snow, at the edge of a freshly dug pit, wiring the pipes to Father's "Thunderbox" to thaw them. (This device was his own invention, and he was proud of it — patent pending — though the first time he used it he almost killed Ma Polski, her hand being on an electrified faucet when he turned on the juice.) He watched the pipes heat and throw off vapor. Ice cracked inside, and jostled, and rattled like gravel. He listened with pleasure to the clunking thaw in the pipes, and then faced me at the edge of the snow-crusted pit.

"When it comes, I'll be the first one they kill. They always kill the smart ones first — the ones they're afraid will outwit them. Then, with no one to stop them, they'll tear each other to pieces. Turn this fine country into a hole."

There was no despair in his words, only matter-of-factness. The war was a certainty, but he was still hopeful. He said he believed in himself and in us. "I'll take you away — we'll pack up and go. And we'll shut the door on all this."

He liked the idea of setting out, moving away, starting off in an empty place with nothing but his brains and his toolbox.

"They'll get me first."

"No."

"They always get the smart ones first."

I could not deny this. He was the smartest man I knew. He had to be the first one to die.

Until I saw that marching procession at midnight, and the dead body on the cross, I could not imagine how anyone would be able to kill him. But that night was enough. I was convinced now, and I was alone. The strongest man I knew had been strung up on two poles and left in a cornfield. It was the end of the world.

"I'm the last man, Charlie!"

The dark hours were passing. Soon it would be morning and I would have to face everyone and tell them that Father had predicted it. So I lay in my bed and thought how Father had said that the country was doomed. He had promised to save us and get us away before it was too late. But he was gone, I was too weak to save the others, and in the dream I finally had in the coldest part of the night I was leading Mother and the twins and Jerry through burning fields under a wounded sun and a sky the color of blood, all our clothes in rags and the smoke, and nothing to eat They were depending on me and only I knew, but was afraid to tell them because it was too late that I was taking them the wrong way.

In the bruised red-black sky was the mocking face of Father, after we had walked and walked, saying, "Where have you been, sonny?"

I covered my eyes. I was still in the dream and aching, Mother and the kids behind me, disaster ahead and no escape.

"Where have you—?"

I woke and saw his face, sunburned and angry, and sat up because I expected him to hit me — afraid he was dead, then afraid because he was standing over me. His cigar told me I was not dreaming. I was too shocked to cry.

"I had a bad dream."

And I thought: It has all been a dream — the men with the torches, the corpse on the cross, the laughing savages, the wounded sun and sky. I was very happy. The sunlight bleached my bedroom curtains, birds screeched at me.

"You must have been dreaming about poison ivy," Father said. "You've got the worst case I've ever seen."

As he said it, I began to ache. My face felt pebbly and raw, and my arms too.

"Don't touch it. You'll make it spread. Get out of the sack and put something on it." He started out of the room, and as I pulled on my clothes he said, "You've been fooling in the bushes — that's where you've been."

The loose board on the threshold told me everything was normal. I smelled coffee and bacon and heard the twins screaming and was gladder than I had ever been. I went to the bathroom. My face looked like a pomegranate in the mirror, and my arms and shoulders were inflamed with the poison-ivy rash. I wiped calamine lotion on it and hurried to the kitchen.

"It's a ghost," Jerry said, seeing my whitewashed face.

"You poor thing," Mother said. She set a plate of eggs in front of me and kissed the top of my head.

Father said, "It's his own fault."

But it was nothing. After what I had seen, a case of poison ivy seemed like salvation.

"Eat up," Father said. "We've got work to do."

I wanted to work, to carry the toolbox and hand him the oil can and be his slave and do anything he asked. I deserved to be punished. I wanted to forget those torches and those men. I was thirteen years old again. I had felt forty.

Father said, "Meet me in the workshop when you're through."

"Poor Charlie," Mother said. "Where did you get that face?"

I said softly, "I was fooling in the bushes, Ma. It was my own fault."

She shook her head and smiled. She knew I was sorry.

"Ma!" Jerry yelled. "Charlie's staring at me with his face!"

Father's workshop was behind the house. There were mottoes and quotations lettered on pieces of cardboard and tacked to the shelves, and tools and pipes and coils of wire and various machines. Besides motors of all kinds, and a grease gun and his lathe, which gave the workshop the look of an arsenal, there was his Thunderbox and an all-purpose contraption he called his Atom-smasher.

On the floor, about the size of a trunk but resting upright on its end, was a wooden box he had been building and tinkering with for most of the spring. There were no wires in it and no motor. He had put it together with a blowtorch. It was full of pipes, and grids and tanks, copper tubing below and a door leading to a tin box on top. It smelled of kerosene, and I took it to be an oven of some kind, because bracketed to the back was a sooty chimney. Father said we had to get this thing into the pickup truck.

I tried to lift it. It wouldn't budge.

"Want to rupture yourself?" Father said.

With fussy care, and taking his time, he set up a block and tackle on a tripod and we swung this box of fitted pipes into the pickup.

"What is it?"

"Call it a Worm Tub or a hopper. You'll know when Doctor Polski knows."

He took the back road and traveled toward Polski's farmhouse on the tractor paths by the margins of the fields. When we passed the windbreak that was like a ship, I remembered that it was there that I had seen the procession of torch-carrying men. Below that clump of woods I had seen the men gather, and the corpse raised up on the cross. I hoped Father would take the right fork, so that I could satisfy myself — by seeing footprints or trampled corn — that I had not dreamed it. Father turned right. I held my breath.

What was that in the plowed field? A cross, a dead man hanging on it, black rags and a black hat, a skull face and broken hands and twisted feet.

It froze me, and I could not help the stammering whimper in my voice as I asked him what it was.

Father was still driving fast over the rutted track. He did not turn his head. He just grinned and said, "Don't tell me you've never seen a scarecrow."

He thumped the throttle.

"And it must be a damned good one."

I looked back and saw it hanging in the empty field, the old clothes stuffed with straw. Sweat had made my poison ivy itch, and I wanted to claw my face.

"Because it sure has you scared!" And he laughed.

3

THE STORY WAS that Tiny Polski, who had heard about his inventions, visited Father and pleaded with him to come to Hatfield. We lived in Maine then, not Dogtown but in the woods. Father was trying a year of self-sufficiency, growing vegetables and building solar panels and keeping us out of school. Polski promised money and a share in the farm. Father did not budge. Polski said he had unusual problems because he wanted, by mechanical means, to lengthen the growing season, even make it a two-season farm. It was a good area to raise kids in. It was safe, a happy valley, miles from anywhere. So Father accepted. That was the story he told me. But I knew better. Things had not gone well for us in Maine. Father had refused to spray insecticides on the vegetables — the worms got them before they could ripen. Rain and storm raised hell with the solar panels. For a while, Father would not eat, and he was taken to the hospital. He called it The Buzz Palace, but came out smiling and said, didn't feel a thins." He was healthy again, except that now and then he forgot our names. We drove to Hatfield with nothing He liked starting from scratch.

It was impossible to think of Polski, or anyone else, as Father's boss. Father did not take orders. He described Polski as "the runt," called him Roly, and Doctor Polski — but "Doctor" was pure sarcasm, to frustrate any friendship. He believed that Polski, and most men, were his inferiors.

"He owns people," Father said. "But he doesn't own me."

Polski was waiting for us on his piazza as we drove in. His eyes were gray and as hard as periwinkles. He was older than Father, and small and plump, and looked full of sawdust. He wore a checkered shirt and clean Dubbelwares and a belt around his middle that bunched his bib overalls into two bags. His Jeep was shiny, his boots were never muddy, there was no sweat stain on his hat. He did not smoke. He was always dressed for dirty work but never got dirty. We had not been inside his mansion, but whether this was because Father flatly refused to enter or because we had not been invited, I could not say. Maybe Polski knew better than to invite Father in and hear one of his speeches about crapsheets or cheeseburgers. I had looked through the windows and seen the polished table and the cut-glass vase of flowers, the plates in a wheel-row on the hutch, Ma Polski's busy back as she stooped and tidied. None of it said welcome. And Ma Polski looked like part of the room.

"Nice day," Polski said.

"You bet," Father said.

"Hope it's like this on the weekend. I got something doing on Saturday."

Sumthun doo-un on Saddy was what he said. But Father did not comment. He was excited. He had driven with impatience, he was eager to show Polski the hopper he had made, his Worm Tub. He was proud of it, whatever it was. And yet he was still sitting in the pickup truck, chewing his cigar.

"Got a match, Doctor?"

Polski screwed up one eye and rocked a little on his heels. The question baffled him. He said, "You come all the way over here for a match, Mr. Fox?"

"Yup."

"Be right back." Polski said his r's like v's — vight back, vemember, vobber, veally, vong. It was his lower lip catching on his front teeth. He went inside.

Father studied my rashy face and arms. He said, "You've got the mange. I hope you learned your lesson."

He hopped out and set up the block and tackle behind the truck. "We're going to knock his boots off," he said. He swung the Worm Tub onto the driveway. "We're going to straighten his hair."

Polski returned with a box of big kitchen matches and looked at the Worm Tub and said, "Pretty small for a coffin."

"I wonder if you'd do one more little thing for me," Father said. "I need a glass of water. Just a small glass of regular water from your faucet."

Muttering "a glass of vegular water," Polski entered the farmhouse. I could tell from the way he said it and how the door banged shut that he was getting exasperated. When he brought the water out and gave it to Father he said, "You're a mystery man, Mr. Fox. Now let's get volling."

"You're a gentleman."

Now Polski looked at me for the first time. "Poison ivy. You're crawling with it. Ain't that something."

Hearing crawlun and sumthun, I stepped back and touched my face in shame. I had been fooled by a scarecrow. And I had figured it out. It made sense to put scarecrows up at night, so the birds would not know. Was that my lesson?

"What is it, anyway?" Polski was saying to Father.

"Tell you what it ain't," Father said, opening the door of the wooden box and revealing the metal compartment with its hinged flap and the rubber seal we had bought in Northampton. "It ain't a coffin, and it ain't a piece of diseased meat. Ha!"

He picked the flap open and said, "I want you to tell me what you see inside."

"Nuthun."

"You're the witness, Charlie."

Polski laughed. "Only his eyes are all swole shut."

Father tipped some of the water out of the glass, seeming to measure it in splashes until there was about an inch left. He put the glass inside the metal compartment, closed the flap, closed the door, closed the hasp, then lit a match.

Polski said, "Don't tell me you're going to cook that glass of water."

"I've got better things to do."

"Likewise!"

Polski moved his lips after this. He was boiling.

Father said, "You won't be disappointed."

"What's that stink? Kerosene?"

"Correct. Range oil. Cheapest fuel in America."

"And smelliest."

Father said, "Opinions vary."

This made Polski gobble. "And you say you're not cooking anything?"

"Not exactly."

Father was enjoying himself. He worked at the back of the wooden box, where the tubing and the heating element were. Worm Tub was a good name for this crate of pipe joints. He had lighted a wick that was fed and moistened by a spout on the fuel tank, and adjusting the flame he sent bats of sticky soot out of the chimney. There was a gurgle inside, the sound a hungry stomach makes, but apart from this surge of discontented squirts in the tubes, nothing no motor and not much heat.

"Does she burp or fart?" Father said. "That's what you're asking yourself."

Polski grunted with embarrassment and clicked his eyes and looked impatient as he fussed his footsoles over pebbles. Heat, loose weeds of it, were growing blackly out of the chimney. Polski backed away.

"If them pipes are sealed, she'll blow up," he said. "Pressure."

"Hide in your house if you want," Father said. "But she's got a full set of safety valves. Reason she's smoking is I've got her turned up full blast. For demonstration purposes." He snatched at his visor. "She can take it."

He looked proudly upon it, and he seemed so certain of it, so carelessly confident, that I half expected it to wheeze open with a boom of flame and explode in his face. We had had other explosions. "Just testing," Father would say. The workshop ceiling was scorched, and Father had not lost the tip of his finger opening a can of tuna fish, as he sometimes claimed.

Polski said, "If I ever wanted to cook a glass of water, I'd shove it on the front burner. Only I never veally wanted to voast a glass of water."

Polski looked at me for approval, and then turned gloomy when he saw the column of greasy smoke. His head turtled into his shoulders, and he squinted, awaiting the bang.

Father winked at me. "Like the way she purrs?"

"Vumble, vumble," Polski said.

"Not a wire anywhere," Father said, walking slowly around the box. "She's not connected to anything. I've got nothing up my sleeve. No moving parts, Doctor. Nothing to wear out. Last forever."

"Just the ticket for my chicken coop," Polski said, and he looked at me. "During the winter. It'd keep the birds warm as toast and laying vegular if it didn't kill them with fumes."

"He's a great kidder," Father said. "The fumes can be rectified. It's all a matter of fine adjustment. I only want to show you what she's capable of."

"I'd say she's capable of putting skunks out of business."

Polski cleared his throat, then spat, and toed dust onto the medallion of spittle.

Father said, "How's the old asparagus?"

"Too damn much of it. It's this dry weather. It's shooting up in this heat. It's mostly all vipe. I've got more than I can store."

Mowah than I can stowah.

"Sell it, then," Father said.

"They'd like that."

"Everyone likes asparagus."

"The market's glutted," Polski said. He filled his jaws with spit and used a jet of it like a reply. "I wouldn't tell you what I'm getting for a pound. I'll be selling it by the ton next. Or giving it away."

"That's the idea."

"I'll be in the poorhouse."

"Sure you will," Father said.

"You too, Mr. Fox."

"I've been there. It's an education."

Polski said, "The cold store is chock-a-block. I want you to look at the fuses later on. I don't know how much they'll bring back today, but if it's more than a couple of truckloads I'm in trouble. I mean, we're all in trouble. Last year, I couldn't cut it fast enough. I was making a dollar a pound some weeks. This year it's vuining me. I'm buried in grass—"

He went on complaining this way and spitting and angrily nuthuning and sumthuning and kicking dust until finally, in what was almost a shout, he said, "I guess that glass of water must be good and cooked by now!"

Father said calmly, "Wouldn't be a bit surprised."

"Mind opening it up, Mr. Fox? I've got work to do. Show me whatever you're going to show me."

Father turned to me. "He wants us to open it up."

Polski was gobbling again. "You talk to him, Charlie. He won't listen to me."

"Don't plow with my heifer," Father said.

Drawing harsh bellyaching breaths, Polski said in a suffering voice, "For pity sake, Fox, will you see if this thing's emulsified!"

Father sucked on his cigar. He tasted it. He swallowed. He puffed and blew a smoke ring into the windless air. It was a blue hoop, it grew handles and pedals and a rider, it cycled away. We watched it slant toward the fields, pulling itself apart like a sinking comma from a sentence of skywriting, filling Father's pause with visible delay.

"Here we go," he said.

He unfastened the door and plucked open the metal flap, and without stooping or looking inside, he took out the water glass, flourishing his arm like a magician. He handed this to Polski, who bobbled it from one hand to the other, blowing on his fingers.

"Hot potato," said Polski. "I mean cold." He blew at his neat fingertips. "She ain't cooked. That's for damn sure."

Father said, "Go on, pour it."

Polski tried. He turned the glass upside-down and shook it. "She won't pour." He smacked the bottom. "She won't come out."

"Ice," Father said. The word allowed him to grin and hiss at the same time.

"Ain't that sumthun." Polski was impressed in spite of himself.

The Worm Tub was still glugging and squirting softly through its guts, the sooty smoke still rising. It looked comic and potbellied, like a fat boy with his coat open, puffing a stogie.

Polski warmed the glass in his hands, then jerked out the disk of ice and lobbed it into the rose bushes.

"I should have known it was an icebox," he said. "I should have expected it from you."

"But where's the juice?" Father said in a taunting way. "Where's the electrical cord?"

"Range oil you said."

Father said, "You mean, I made ice in a firebox?"

"So it seems."

"And range oil is dirt cheap. She's an energy saver."

Polski said, "I've got work to do. I'm buried in grass."

"Want to know how she operates?"

"Some other time."

"Stick your hand in that locker. Feel how cold she is. It'll take your fingerprints off. You've never seen anything like it."

"No," Polski said. "But I've heard of them. You've invented sumthun that was invented thirty years ago." Polski started to walk away. "It's like coming to me with a toaster. 'Look, no wires. And the toast pops up.' Fine, but it's still a toaster. And that's still an icebox. You can't invent an invention."

"It's perfection!" Father said, and Polski winced at the word. Puffection. "I perfected it. Those other ones were small. Inefficient. Low-grade coolants. They didn't know a thing about coolants until yesterday afternoon. Gas operated. Couldn't make an ice cube if you shoveled snow into them. Ammonia water, lithium bromide. Brine. But this baby" — and he touched it tenderly—"this baby uses a new formula of high-expansion liquid, enriched ammonia, and hydrogen under pressure. She's a scale model. I'm planning to make a huge one. What do you think?"

Polski said, "That's another thing. It's a fire hazard."

"Not if it's ventilated." Father was explaining, not pleading. "Not if it's sealed right. I've got a patent pending on those valves, never mind the rest, never mind the original idea. This is poetry."

"And a big visk." Polski was not listening at all. "A big one would be a big fire hazard. Smoke all over everythun. It'd be a blast furnace. If she ever blew, we'd be picking up pieces in Pittsfield. Know where sumthun like this belongs? Some far-off place, where they test A-bombs, where it can't hurt anybody — that's where, far away. Not here, where it'll do damage and frighten the horses. You're visking your life with sumthun like that."

He set his face at Father.

"There's no risk," Father said. "I'm asking you to consider the principle of the thing. A firebox that makes ice. No noise! No juice!"

"Electricity's cheap."

Father smiled at him. "How old are you, Doctor?"

Spouting with his lower lip, Polski cracked a splinter of spit onto the gobbed ground.

"What about in ten years?" Father said. "What then? Or twenty years. Think of the future."

"I won't be here in the future."

"There's America's epitaph. That's criminal. That's monkey talk."

"You can have fires all over the place," Polski said. "I can do without them."

At this, Father sprayed him with laughter. "It's no more than a teeny flame," he said, as if explaining a candle to Jerry, halting his words, half mocking, half teaching. "A pilot light. Get down here and look at it. You can hardly see it. Why, you need more fire than that to light a ten-cent cigar!"

"I can see it's ingenious," Polski said, looking at his watch, which was buried in wrist hairs. "I always said you had veal Yankee ingenuity. But I haven't got the time for that now. In a couple of hours I'm going to be over my head in asparagus. And that's serious."

Father said, "You're not interested in her" — he drummed his finger stump on the lid—"that correct?"

"I'll bet you think it's a gold mine."

"Only a gold mine's a gold mine."

Polski was crunching back to the piazza. Turning, teetering on gravel, he said, "You're not going to get rich on that contraption, Mr. Fox."

Father let a laugh curl his tongue, but his eyes were darkened by the shadow of his visor. He watched Polski go. "If I ever wanted to get rich — which I don't — I'd raise me some asparagus."

"That wouldn't get you rich." Polski did not turn. "Get you an ulcer."

Father hooked his thumbs on his pockets and set his feet apart — a policeman's posture. "We'll leave you to your ulcer, Doctor."

"Don't go away mad, Mr. Fox," Polski called out from the piazza, but he still was not looking. "I told you, it's a fine contraption, but I've got no use for it."

He pulled himself inside his house and said his wife's name, "Shovel" — her name was Cheryl.

Father said, "I'd raise me some asparagus, and I'd hire fifty migrant savages to cut it. That's what I'd do. And, Charlie, you'd have yourself a new pair of sneakers and the best dungarees money could buy." He doused the flame on the Worm Tub, then looked upon it fondly, as if it were a living creature, and said, "That nearsighted turkey called it a contraption."

He smiled and his bright face widened.

"You couldn't ask for a better reaction than that."

I said, "But he didn't like it very much."

"That's an understatement." Father laughed, and shivering out each word, he said, "He positively hated it!" And snorted. "That's ignorant contempt — the stupidest kind of reaction. 'It's a big visk.' But I'm grateful for it. That's why I'm here. That's the sort of thing that gets me cooking on the front burners, Charlie. Just think what would have happened if he'd liked it. Yes, I would have been very worried. Ashamed of myself. I'd have gone back to bed."

Polski left his house by the back door. He climbed into his Jeep and revved it and threw it into reverse.

"Grind me a pound," Father said. "There he goes — old Dan Beavers. Give these wimps an L. L. Bean catalogue and they all think they're frontiersmen."

Now Polski was hurrying over road humps to the upper fields.

"That piece of diseased meat he calls a Jeep is a contraption," Father said, pointing with his cut-off finger. "But this is a creation. You can't buy this with money."

He was so wildly certain of himself there was nothing I could say, and he did not ask. So, without speaking, we loaded the Worm Tub onto the pickup truck.

I said, "It looks like a fat boy."

"This is a little baby. But when we make the big one, that's what we'll call it — Fat Boy." He peered at my poison ivy and added, "Gaw, don't you look awful."

We headed down the road. "Fat Boy," Father said again, and chewed the words like gum. As we drove, I sneaked a glance at him and saw he was smiling. What for?

4

FATHER WAS still smiling as he drove past the field where the scarecrow was, to a little road overgrown with grass that led to a stand of black pines. There was a sign nailed to a stump, no trespassing, and beyond it the house in the pines that was known locally as the Monkey House.

I had seen it from a distance. I had never wanted to go near enough to look inside. Anyway, as the sign said, it was forbidden. I was fairly sure that some of the savages lived in it, because I had heard radio music coming from it, and sometimes shouts.

Its clapboards had once been white, but they were discolored now and storm streaked. This wooden house looked as though it was turning back into a tree, but a petrified one. None of the windows had curtains, and some had no glass. The only protection it had was from the dark evergreens around it, and it wore some of their drippings of pitch. We drove up the pine-needle path and, closer, I saw that the screen door was slashed and a drainpipe had come loose and was nodding like a daffy weather vane. The gutter, emptying against the house, had left a mossy water stain on the boards. The whole house looked rotting and wrecked and haunted.

"Come on, Charlie. I want to show you something."

I could not refuse. We entered the house together. It smelled of sweat and boiled beans and old laundry and woodsmoke. The wallpaper was peeling off the walls in yellow crusts, and the paint itself was raised in places like blisters.

I said, "They call this place the Monkey House."

"Who calls it that?"

"Kids."

"I'd whale the tar out of them! Don't let me hear you calling it that."

There were no chairs or tables, and the first room was like all the others, mattresses flat on the floor and green army blankets on the mattresses, and little crumbled cardboard suitcases stacked in a corner with rags and socks. The other junk was cut-open sardine cans and bags of bread hunks and empty sour-smelling milk bottles. A transistor radio on a shelf was held together by tape. All through the house were more flat mattresses and more junk, old clothes and hairbrushes and dirty dishes. It was scratched and damaged like a monkey cage. But it wasn't a lively mess — it had a left-behind and dumped look, as if whoever lived there had gone away for good.

"Look at these poor people," Father said. He picked up a dingy blanket and jacked it against the wall. "Look what they own."

Angrily, he started stamping from room to room, as though searching for something he knew was not there. I followed him but kept my distance. He was swinging his arms and motioning violently at the grubby things.

"They come back here at night — this is where they sleep!"

He kicked a mattress.

"Look what they eat!"

Off his toe a sardine can took a frog hop into the hallway.

"Why, they don't even eat the damn asparagus they cut—"

And then I knew it was the savages.

"— though I wouldn't blame them for stealing it."

He clumped noisily to the back of the house and put his head out of the window and gave a sorrowful laugh.

"They take baths in a bucket. They do their business in that shack. Is that fair? I ask you! And you're wondering why they smell like goats and live in this slop and do unmentionable things that only funny bunnies do?"

I was wondering no such thing. What puzzled me was that Father, who always called them savages and warned me to keep clear of them, knew so much about them. He had driven straight to this house and marched right in, without a fear that one of the savages might be loitering in a closet or wrapped in a blanket, and might fling himself at Father and cut his throat.

I said, "I don't think we should be here."

"They welcome visitors, Charlie. It's an old custom of theirs — from the jungle. Be kind to strangers, they say, because you never know when you might be a stranger yourself — lost in the jungle, out of water, starving, or dying of bites. That's the law of the jungle — charity. It's not the cruelty people think it is. There's a lot to admire in these savages. Sure, they welcome visitors."

"But this isn't the jungle," I said.

"No," Father said, "because no jungle is as murderous and foul as this. They traded green trees for this ruin. It's pathetic. And it makes me mad, because they're going to end up being part of the problem."

He had started out of the house.

"I need air," he said.

But instead of driving away, he unloaded the Worm Tub, his icebox, from the back of the truck. He put it on skids and we towed it into the house. Father set it up in the back room, and lit its wick, and put a tray of water inside.

"They'll see this ice and go bananas," Father said.

"You mean, you're just going to give it to them? What about all the work you did on it?"

"You heard what that runt Polski said. He's got no use for it. And we've got a fridge of our own. These people will appreciate it. It won't cost them anything to run. They'll be able to store their food and save money. They can come back from the fields and have a nice cold drink. It'll take some of the curse off this ruin. That's what matters."

He was kneeling on the floor, adjusting the flame.

"Ice is civilization," he said.

He made an admiring cluck with his tongue and teeth.

I said, "They'll wonder who put this icebox here."

"They won't wonder."

We left the old house and its mattresses and mouse droppings, and I felt I had been introduced to wilderness. It lay very near our own orderly house and yet it was savage. It was apart from us. It was empty and alone. It had frightened me, not because it was dangerous but because it was so shabby and hopeless looking. It had begun badly and gotten worse, and it would stay that way, with all its trash — the tin cans and scribbled walls, the monkey scratches on the wood, the rusty wash bucket, the sink that didn't work, the litter of sweepings, the twisted shoes that made me think of twisted feet.

"It's scary," I said.

"I'm glad you feel that way," Father said.

He drove down the road, sighing as he shifted the gears.

"That's America," he said. "It's a disgrace. Breaks my heart."

***

I was glad, after this, to go into familiar fields and help Father with humdrum jobs. Sweating in the heat, 1 was itchy again from the poison-ivy rash, but I did not complain. And Father did not mention it. He was sure that I had been fooling in the bushes and the rash was my punishment.

Polski had ten greasy sheep and a small herd of cows. We repaired the transformer on the electric fence that separated them, and unblocked the drain at a drinking trough.

Father said, "There used to be scope in this country for a man like me."

Toward noon, we went up to the big windowless cold-storage building. Inside the thick walls it was cool. There was a stutter from the overloaded circuit, a stillness in the air, and the sharp aroma of asparagus ripening in the dark. The spears were taped into three-pound bundles. Because the tips are breakable and delicate, they are hard to store. These were packed as carefully on the shelves as if they were bunches of live ammunition. It was clear that Polski did not have much spare room, but Father said that it was amazing that Polski stored the asparagus at all, since the demand for it was so huge.

"And will you look at that!"

High up on a hook was a mink coat, probably Ma Polski's, put here in the cold to keep it away from the moths. It was dark gold, and every thin hair shone when Father turned his flashlight on it.

That got Father laughing about the state of the world, human beings sleeping on the floor of a broken-down house, and a ton of asparagus and a mink coat in a tidy air-conditioned room that cost a fortune to cool. It was a horrible joke, he said. The stupidity of people! And if the savages knew how they were being cheated, they would go over and cut Polski's head off and dance away in the fur coat.

He found a fuse had blown from the strain on the cooler. Replacing this fuse, he said "The runt was right. He hasn't got an inch of freeboard here, and they're still harvesting. Mark my words, that man is going to pay us a visit soon. He's going to have things on his mind. He won't remember what he said to me this morning. Some people never learn."

In the middle of the afternoon we were working at the roadside, digging out a culvert that had silted up after the March thaw. It was as hot as it had been the previous day, and Father had taken his shirt off. I steadied the wheelbarrow he was filling. Then I heard voices.

Three children on bicycles were coming down the road, returning home from school — Hatfield kids. I crouched down. I did not want them to see me here, laboring in my old clothes, and my father bent over like a ditchdigger. I was ashamed of Father, who didn't care what anyone thought. And I envied him for being so free, and hated myself for feeling ashamed. The children rang their bicycle bells and sang out to catch my attention and make me feel bad. They didn't know that Father had spent months inventing a fire-driven icebox and this morning had given it away, just like that, and picked up his spade like any farmhand.

I could not look at their faces. They called out again as they skidded past. After a while, I looked up and saw them wobbling on the country road.

Father was still hacking at the culvert — or rather, screwing out the silt with a spade of his own invention that looked like a large shoetree.

He said, "Don't feel badly. You've seen some amazing things today, Charlie. And what have those pipsqueaks been doing? Sniffing glue in the schoolyard, boasting about their toys, looking at pictures, raising hell. Watching TV — that's all they do in school. Ruin their eyesight. You don't need that."

5

POLSKI CAME after supper, just as Father had predicted. The twins and Jerry were already in bed, and Mother was swabbing my rash with lotion. Father was describing Ma Polski's fur coat hung in the cold store.

"All that vanity and expense," he said. "And the foolish woman is more conspicuously ugly when she's wearing it! With those teeth and that coat she looks like a demented woodchuck, who'd gnaw your leg off if you looked at her crosseyed. Imagine murdering and skinning twenty pretty animals, so that an unhappy woman—"

Hearing Polski's Jeep clatter into the driveway, Father stood up and said, "Time to hit the hay, Charlie."

Mother took me upstairs, and inside my bedroom she said, "I've been worrying about you the whole day. Why do you look so sad?"

I said, "I think something is going to happen to us."

"What do you mean?"

"Something terrible."

Mother said, "When you're young, the world looks impossible. It seems big and strange, and even threatening. If you think about it too much, you start to worry."

"But Dad's not young."

Mother stared at me.

I said, "And he's worried."

"No," Mother said. "But he's got a lot on his mind just now. I've seen him like this before — brooding. It gives him wonderful schemes. Someday soon, he'll tell us what his new invention is."

"Something is going to happen to us," I said.

"Something good," Mother said. "Now go to sleep, darling."

After she turned the light out, I wanted to pray. I shut my eyes tight, but nothing would come. I did not know how. I thought Please, but that was all the prayer I could manage. And the voices down below, the thump of them, made my heart pound. I went to the door and, creeping out to the landing at the top of the stairs, heard Father's hoots.

"You've got me confused, Doc! I don't know whether I'm deaf or blind! This very morning I showed you a working model of a dirt-cheap freezing plant. You turned your back on it and said you had to water your tomatoes. Now here you are, probably missing your favorite TV show, asking me—"

"I told you I was interested," Polski said in a stricken voice.

"I must be deaf as a post," Father said, "because I didn't hear a thing."

"And I'm interested now."

Father said, "Your interest and ten cents wouldn't get me a cold cup of coffee."

I peeked through the railing. Father was goose-stepping up and down the parlor. Polski had found a low stool. He sat on it the way a girl sits on a toilet, with his knees together and his face forward.

Polski said, "The cold store is full after today's cut. What I want to know is, what am I going to do with what they cut tomorrow and the day after?"

Father said, "You can always go on blowing fuses. It'll help pass the time."

"There must be some way of vigging up the barn. I mean, insulating her and fixing up a cooler where the hay is. I could hire the carpenters, but the vefrigeration angle is the problem. If you handled it, that would see us through the harvest."

"I don't get it. This morning I showed you a refrigeration device that was perfection, and all you did was ride off in your jalopy. What was the word you used? Oh, yes, you called it a contraption. I was scratching my head! I didn't see a contraption anywhere! Doctor," Father said grandly, "I am still scratching my head."

"That icebox was a fine idea," Polski said. "But I'm looking for something more down-to-earth. The cold store you made me last year was okay for last year's crop. But this year we've got ourselves a bumper harvest, and we've got to act accordingly. Now don't think I'm looking for miracle vemedies—"

"Insulating a barn is no problem," Father said. "They can slap on an interior wall and blow rock wool through with hose pipes. But there's a lot of airspace in that barn. What? Ten thousand cubic feet — maybe more? You'd have to have multiple-level cooling to get an even temperature, otherwise you'd be freezing some and roasting the rest. Blowers, thermostats, coils. You're talking about a mile of copper pipe, not to mention the wiring and electricals."

"See, you do understand the problem."

"You wouldn't even look at my Worm Tub — that icebox I showed you this morning."

"It's too small."

"A scale model is always small."

"I need something a hundred times bigger." Sumthun: Polski had started to gobble.

"You don't understand its application."

"I don't want fires."

"You'll go broke paying electricity bills. Ten thousand cubic feet. How many kilowatts? Cost a fortune." And he repeated, "A fotchin!"

"Stop trying to save me money, Mr. Fox."

"It's not the money, it's the wasteful attitude I object to. Doctor, it's sending this country down the tubes."

"I'm not running this country" — runnun—"and this is nothing to jaw about. I realize it's short notice, but I need more cold-storage space and I'm counting on you to provide it."

"I keep asking myself — I'm thinking out loud, you understand — I keep asking myself, what's the point?"

"The point is," Polski said, "there's too damn much asparagus this year. That's the point."

"Are you cutting it too fast, or selling it too slow?"

"I'm not selling it at all — other people are. That's why the price is down."

"Listen, are you in the storing business or the selling business? I'm asking, because I don't know about these things. I'm a handyman, not an economist."

Still hunched on the stool, Polski turned his pinched face toward Father and said in a sour defiant voice, "I'll sell when the price goes up — not before. In the meantime, every spear I cut goes into cold storage."

Father said, "That's the lousiest rottenest thing I've ever heard."

"It's business."

"Then it's dishonest business. You're creating a shortage of asparagus — although there is no shortage. So the price will go up — although the price is pretty fair. Well, it's not as bad as sticking up a bank, but it's bad enough. I'd say it was about on a level with robbing poor boxes." Father was now standing over Polski and smiling horribly. "And what do you get for it? A few bucks, a new pair of dungarees, a tin wristwatch that lights up in the dark — maybe a jalopy or two. You think it's worth it?"

"Every farmer worth the name watches the market," Polski said, hugging his knees together.

"There's watching, and there's tampering," Father said. And he became at once ferociously friendly. "Make yourself comfortable, Doctor. You don't have to squash yourself on that. The chair behind you has hydraulics."

"I'm comfortable where I am, thank you."

"Reason I ask is, you're sitting on my foot massager."

Polski jumped to his feet.

Picking up the boot-shaped stool, Father said, "People neglect their feet something awful. See this slot? You just stick your foot in here and wiggle your toes. That gets the mechanical fingers going inside. Funnily enough, it works. Want to do your tired old feet a big favor?"

Polski said no and went to the chair, which was like a dentist's chair. He sat on it almost daintily, but against his will the chair tilted and embraced him, and lifted his legs off the floor, and swung him toward Father.

"Hydraulics," Father said.

Doggedly, his jaw out as if he were having a tooth pulled, Polski said, "I've got a farm to vun and sumthun like twenty tons of produce to sell. I have to do it the best way I can."

"Simple. Sell it and clear out room for more. You make up in volume what you lose in price, and you still come out ahead of the game. That's sounder than strangling the market altogether. But no, you're not interested in that, because you're riding high — using slave labor. Profit? I didn't plumb that chair and make that foot massager so that I could retire on fifty grand a year. I did it because of lumbago and sore feet, and if I'm able to ease someone else's pain, fine. That's the way I'm made. But you want to bluff the market and make a killing. That ain't business — it's robbery."

"I didn't come up here to discuss the ethics of farming, Mr. Fox. I've got a problem and you seem to have the solution, so will you please stop this nonsense?"

Polski had turned green. He was suffering.

Father said, "You were cool to my cooler."

"It doesn't seem practical."

"If you think that, you're out of touch with reality. It's the most practical invention in the world. And it'll run on anything — not only range oil, but methane gas bubbled out of a solution of raw chicken shit, and there's plenty of that around here. Furthermore, although there's a little more plumbing in it, there's absolutely no wiring."

"How long would it take to set up?"

"A jiffy. You said money wasn't a problem."

"A reasonable amount."

"Don't back away," Father said.

"You'd be willing to install a firebox refrigerator, would you? For the overspill?"

Father hesitated before he replied. I had never seen him hesitate before. I guessed he was doing a calculation.

He said, "I sure am tempted to try."

"This is your chance, Fox. You'd be doing both of us a favor."

Father looked up at the parlor ceiling and said, "I see a vast cooling plant and cold store. It's on seven or eight levels, the size of two barns and then some, with your catwalks inside and your reflectors and insulation outside. Looks like a cathedral, with a chimney for a steeple. What's that bulge in the ground? That's your power unit, the main hardware, the worm tubs, the tanks of coolant, the heat supply. All your pipes and tanks are underground, sheathed in lead, in case of nuclear war, accidents, and acts of God. Your chimney has baffles and coils to conserve heat and redirect it back to the main supply, the fire itself — recycling the heat, so to speak. But there's waste heat — there always is — and that's why we have ducts built into the chimney. Now this is blown across a grid, and that's where your incubators come in. That's your battery in both senses — your egg hatchery, your heated runs for young chicks and chickens that are going to supply you with fuel in time to come Methane gas Nothing wasted. You've got your refrigeration. You've got your ice. You've got your heat. Sell the eggs you don't need and have the rest for breakfast. Cool down your vegetables. Use your chicken shit for methane. It's a perpetual-motion machine. Run a duct to your house and you're air-conditioned — cool in summer, warm in winter. Cheap, simple to operate, no waste, foolproof, and profitable. There's only one thing."

Polski had crept out of the hydraulic chair like a raccoon out of an unsprung trap. He was watching Father with a gentle hopeful expression, smiling sadly as Father described this vision of the cooling plant. In an uncertain voice, and clearing his throat, Polski said, "What's that?"

"I don't want to do you a favor. You just want this thing to cheat people and put up prices and starve the market."

I thought Mr. Polski was going to cry.

"You can't make me sell that asparagus." Polski glanced around, as if looking for a place to spit, and still puckered he said, "I only wish I knew what to do with it."

"Eat it."

"You're talking yourself out of a job, Mr. Fox."

"It's better than you talking me into one, seeing as what the job is."

Polski said, "Keep talking. I might have to let you go."

"Careful now." Father crossed the room, fished a cigar out of his humidor, and took a long time lighting it. When it was smoking he stared at it and said, "I'll go where I'm appreciated."

Polski had turned away from Father and now he was talking to his own two feet. He said, "I don't want to make things tough for you."

"People who say that always mean the opposite. That sounds like a threat."

"Take it any way you like."

"Mother!" Father called out. His shout made Polski jump. "He just threatened me!"

Mother, wherever she was, did not reply.

Polski said, "I knew it was a mistake to come over here." He shuffled slowly to the door. I felt sorry for Polski just then, looking so small, with Father trumpeting cigar smoke at him and the little man's wrinkles of defeat on the shoulders of his jacket, and his tiny head going through the door. I had wanted Father to make peace with Polski, and for things to continue as before. Now, I knew, something had to happen.

I went back to my room on all fours, wondering what.

The next thing I heard was Polski starting his Jeep, and Father muttering "Grind me a pound," and then very clearly, like a moo in a stall, Mother's voice.

"You fool."

"I'm happy, Mother."

"What do you want?"

"Elbow room. I just realized it."

"Please, Allie—"

And Father said, "I never wanted this. I'm sick of everyone pretending to be old Dan Beavers in his L. L. Bean moccasins, and his Dubbelwares, and his Japanese bucksaw — all these fake frontiersmen with their chuck wagons full of Twinkies and Wonderbread and aerosol cheese spread. Get out the Duraflame log and the plastic cracker barrel, Dan, and let's talk self-sufficiency!"

"You're talking nonsense."

"Listen," Father said, but I heard nothing more.

6

WHEN FATHER said, the next day, "We're going shopping," I was sure we were going to the dump. We seldom went store shopping. There was little need — we grew practically all our own food. Hard work kept us at Tiny Polski's, and there was a danger in being in stores during the day — we might be collared by policemen or truant officers for playing hooky from school. "Then you'll be in school," Father said, "and I'll be in its rough equivalent — jail. What have we done to deserve that punishment?" Secretly, I wanted to go to school. I felt like an old man or a freak when I saw other children. And secretly, I preferred factory-made cakes, like Devil Dogs and Twinkies, to Mother's banana bread. Father said store-bought cakes were junk and poison but I guessed that his real objection was that the few times he caught me sneak-eating, I had to tell him that I paid for the food with money that Polski had given me for doing odd johs And Polski told me that Father was peculiar, which was another secret to keep We bought salt brown flour fruit shoelaces and other small things in Hatfield or Florence but shopping usually meant a trip to the dumps and junkyards around Northampton where we helped Father pick through the noisonous piles of trash for the wire and metal he used in his 'inventions.

There were seagulls at the dump. They were fat, filthy squawkers, and they roosted on the plastic rubbish bags and tried to tear them open. They chased each other, and they fought for scraps, and they rioted when the garbage truck came. Father hated them. He called them scavengers. They squawked, and he squawked back at them. But struggling up the loose hills of bags and crates, with a pitchfork in his hand, and screaming at the birds that hopped around him and nagged over his head, it sometimes seemed as if Father and these lazy fearless gulls were fighting for the same scraps.

"Now there's a perfectly good set of wheels," Father would say, scaring the gulls and forking an old baby carriage out of the reeks and shaking off the orange peels. Other people took things to the dump — Father hoicked stuff out and carried it away. "Some jackass junked that."

But today, a normal working day, we raced past the greenhouses and rose gardens in Hadley, and hurried through Northampton, and sped toward the pike. Mother was in the cab with Father, and I crouched in the back with the twins and Jerry.

"I'm going to look at ten-speed bikes," Jerry said.

Clover said, "We can buy ice cream," and April said, "I want chocolate."

I said, "Dad won't let you. And we're not going shopping — this isn't the way."

"It is," Jerry said. "It's Dad's short cut."

No — we were far from Northampton, in the country. We came to the Connecticut River and followed it. It was wide and greasy and less blue than it was near Hatfield. There were brick buildings on the far side, and soon the city of Springfield. We crossed the bridge and had to hold to the sides of the pickup truck because of the strong mid-river wind. In the river were bits of plastic foam, gone yellow like slabs of ham fat.

We had never shopped in Springfield before. People on the sidewalks seemed to know this. They stared at us standing in the back of the pickup and holding to the roof of the cab. We kept going until we came to a shopping plaza, where we parked — people still staring. Father got out and told us to follow him and stay together. He was in a good mood, but as soon as we entered the K-Mart store he started muttering and cursing.

Mother said, "Are you sure about the hats?"

"You kidding? It's a hundred in the shade. They'll get sunstroke if their heads aren't covered."

We tried on fishermen's ventilated hats and sun hats and sailor hats. The prices infuriated Father. He said, "Baseball hats are good enough," and bought us those.

Wearing these hats, we trailed after him like ducklings in a file. Here, in this one store, they sold everything — popcorn, rubber tires, rifles, toasters, coats, books, motor oil, palm trees in pots, ladders, and writing paper. Father picked up an electric toaster.

"Look at it. Isn't even earthed right. You'd electrocute yourself before you got any toast. You'd be toasted yourself on that faulty wiring—"

He was talking loudly and attracting attention. "Kyanize!" he said. "Congoleum!" I had the idea that the people who were staring at us knew we seldom went out shopping. Father was embarrassing in public. He took no notice of strangers. A few days ago in Northampton Hardware it was, "Are you working for the Japanese?" and I had wanted to hide my head in shame. Today he was even jumpier.

"Call this a can opener?" he was saying. "You'd lose a finger with that, or gash yourself and bleed to death. That's a lethal weapon, Mother!"

We trooped to the Camping and Outdoor Department. A man in shirtsleeves approached us. He had a smooth face and flat hair and did not look like a camper, but he said hello to all of us and winked at the twins and remarked, as everyone did, on their alikeness.

"What can I do for you today?" he asked, and nodded, giving me a better look at his hair. It was combed up from beside one ear and was stuck down in neatly arranged strands across the top of his head, making you look not at the hair but at the baldness between.

Father said he wanted to look at some canteens.

Jerry shaped the word camping with his lips, but I mocked him by wrinkling my nose.

The man handed one over. Father put his thumbs on it and said it was so flimsy he could squash it flat if he wanted to. He looked at it closely and laughed out loud.

"'Made in Taiwan'—a lot they know about canteens. They lost the war."

"It's only a dollar forty-nine," the man said.

"It's not worth a nickel," Father said. "Anyway, I'm looking for something bigger."

"How about these water bags?" The man dangled one by its nozzle.

"I could make one of those myself out of a piece of canvas and a needle and thread. Where's this turkey from? Korea! See, that's it — they've got sweatshops and slave labor in Korea and Taiwan. Little coolies make these. Up at dawn, work all day, never get any fresh air. Children make these things. They're chained to the machines — feet hardly reach the pedals."

He was lecturing us, but the man was listening and frowning.

"They're so undernourished they can hardly see straight. Trachoma, rickets. They don't know what they're making. Might as well be bath mats. That's why we went to war in South Korea, to fight for labor-intensive industries, which means skinny kids punching out water bags and making tin cups for us. Don't get heartbroken. That's progress. That's the point of Orientals. Everybody's got to have coolies, right?"

The water bag now looked like a wicked thing in the man's hands. The man put it away and patted his hair, and we stood there silently — Mother, the twins, Jerry, and me — while Father grumped. I had put my shirt collar up to hide my poison ivy.

"What's next on the list?"

Mother said, "Sleeping bags."

"On the rack," the man said.

Father stepped over to them. "Not even waterproof. A lot of good they'd be in a monsoon."

"They're for use in a tent situation," the man said.

"What about a rain situation? Where's this thing from? The Gobi Desert, Mongolia, someplace like that?"

"Hong Kong," the man said.

"I wasn't far off!" Father said, twitching with satisfaction. "They do a lot of camping in Hong Kong. You can tell. Look at the stitches — they'd fall apart in two days. You'd be better off with a plain old blanket."

"Blankets are in Household."

"And where are they made — Afghanistan?"

"I wouldn't know, sir."

Father said, "What's wrong with this country?"

"It's better than some places I could name."

"And a damn sight worse than some others," Father said. "We could make this stuff in Chicopee and have full employment. Why don't we? I don't like the idea of us forcing skinny Oriental kids to make junk for us."

"No one is being forced." the man said.

"Ever been to South Korea?"

"No," the man said, and he took on the hunted expression that people did when Father spoke to them. It was the one Polski had had on his face last night.

"Then you don't know what you're talking about, do you?" Father said. "Let me see some knapsacks. If they're from Japan, you can keep them."

"These are Chinese — People's Republic. You wouldn't be interested."

"Give us here," Father said, and holdmg the little green knapsack like a rag he turned to Clover. "A few years ago, we were practically at war with the People's Republic. Red Chinese, we called them. Reds, slants, gooks. Ask anyone. Now they're selling us knapsacks — probably for the next war. What's the catch? They're third-rate knapsacks, they wouldn't hold sandwiches. You think we're going to win that war against the Chinese?"

Clover was five years old. She listened to Father, and she scratched her belly with two fingers.

"Muffin, I don't care what you think — we're not going to win that war."

The salesman had started to grin.

Father saw him and said, "You won't be smiling then, my friend. The next war's going to be fought right here, as sure as anything—"

It was what he had said in the winter, those same words, although I thought he had only been ranting. Today he was in the same mood. I almost expected him to tell the salesman, "They'll get me first — they always kill the smart ones first."

He pushed the knapsack aside. "Do you sell anything like compasses, or have I come to the wrong place?"

"I do a complete range of compasses," the man said. He smoothed the knapsack with the flat of his hand and folded it like laundry, giving a little moan as he put it away. He placed a box on the counter. "This is one of my better ones," he said, taking out a compass. "It's got all the features of my more expensive models, but it's only two and a quarter."

"Must be a Chinese compass," Father said. "It's permanently pointing east."

"One of the features is a stabilizing control. When you release it, like so" — he flicked a catch on the case—"the needle swings free. See, that's north, over there by Automotive. As a matter of fact, this compass is made right here in Massachusetts."

"Then wrap it up," Father said. "You just made yourself a sale." He put his arm around Mother. "What's the list look like?"

"Cotton cloth, needles and thread, mosquito netting—"

"Fabrics," the man said. "Next aisle. Have a nice day."

Father said, "We'd be better off in the dump," as we walked away. In the next aisle, he took hold of a length of material that looked like a bridal veil and said, "That's the stuff."

The saleslady said, "Seventy-nine a yard," and snapped her scissors. She was old and trembling, and the way she scissored the air made her seem evil.

"I'll take it."

"How many yards?" Snip-snip. She was impatient. She had light webs of hair on her face and almost a moustache.

"Give us the whole bolt," Father said. "And if you really want to make yourself useful," he added, grabbing a fistful of Jerry's hair, "give this kid a haircut. Put him out of his misery."

But the old lady did not smile, because she had to unroll the complete bolt of mosquito netting in order to measure it and arrive at a price.

We set off in search of other items. I had never seen my parents buy so much in one morning, not even at Christmastime. We left K-Mart and went to Sears and the Army-Navy Store. We bought flashlights and American-made canteens, knapsacks, hunting knives, rubberized sleeping bags, and new shoes for all of us. Spending money made Father cross. He haggled with the salespeople and complained he was being robbed. "I can afford to be robbed," he said. "But what about the poor wimps who can't afford it?" I had no idea why he was buying these things, and it was embarrassing to hear him argue. Even Mother was getting fussed.

At the drugstore, filling a wire basket with things like gauze and ointment ("For our first-aid kit"), he broke off comparing the prices of aspirin and went to the rack of magazines for a copy of Scientific American. He was annoyed that it was stacked with girlie magazines, and said, "That's an insult."

"Look," he said, gesturing to the rack, "half of it's hard-core porn. There are married men who haven't seen things like this. It's news to medical students! Can you believe this? Kids come in for Tootsie Rolls and this is what they see. But ask any grade-school teacher and he'll tell you it's just what the doctor ordered. Charlie, what are you staring at?"

I was looking at a naked kneeling woman on a magazine cover, her smooth shiny sticking-out bum like a prize pear.

"You're basically ogling a nudie," he said, before I could reply. "But get your last look — get your last look. Mother, people bury themselves in this trash and pretend nothing's wrong. It makes me want to throw up. It runs me mad."

Mother said, "I suppose you want them to ban it."

"Not ban it. I believe in freedom of expression. But must we have it right here with the comics and the Tootsie Rolls? It offends me! Anyway, why not ban it or burn it? It's junk, it belittles the human body, it portrays people as pieces of meat. Yes, get rid of it, and the comic books, too — it's all harmful. How's business?"

He was now at the check-out counter, speaking to the lady cashier.

"Just fine," she said. "Can't complain."

"I'm not surprised," Father said. "You must do a land-office business in pornography. They say the retail porn trade is the new growth industry — that, and crapsheets. Must be quite a satisfaction to rake in the bucks that way—"

"I just work here," the lady said, and punched the cash register.

"Sure you do," Father said. "And why shouldn't you sell it? It's a free country. You don't believe in censorship. You read a book once. It was green, right? Or was it blue?"

Hunted, that was how she looked. Like a nervous rabbit nibbling the smell of a gun barrel.

Father paid her for the first-aid equipment and said, "You forgot to say, 'Have a nice day.'"

Outside, Mother said, "You never give up, do you?"

"Mother, this country's gone to the dogs. No one cares, and that's the worst of it. It's the attitude of people. 'I just work here'—did you hear her? Selling junk, buying junk, eating junk—"

"We want some ice cream," Clover said.

"Hear that? Junk-hungry — our own kids. We're to blame! All right, you kids come with me."

He took us to the A & P supermarket, and just inside, at the fruit section, he picked up a bunch of bananas. "Two dollars!" he said. He did the same with a pair of grapefruits wrapped in cellophane. "Ninety-five cents!" And a pineapple. "Three dollars!" And some oranges. "Thirty-nine cents each!" He sounded like an auctioneer as he made his way down the fresh-fruit counter, yelling the prices.

"Aren't we going to buy anything?" I said, as we left empty-handed.

"Nope. I just want you to remember those prices. Three dollars for a pineapple. I'd rather eat worms. You can eat earthworms, you know. They're all protein."

He got into the cab of the pickup with Mother, and we climbed into the back. I could hear his voice vibrating on the rear window as we drove through Springfield. He was still talking when we stopped on the road for gas. We weie in sight of the river — it was full and swift, and budding trees overhung it. But it was as gray as bathwater, and rippling like waves in the factory suds were dead white-bellied fish.

The cab door slammed. "A buck ten a gallon," Father was saying to the bewildered man at the pump. The man had a wet wasp in each nostril, and a tag on his shirt said Fred. "It's doubled in price in a year. So that's two-twenty next year and probably five the year after that — if we're lucky. That's beautiful. Know what a barrel of crude oil costs to produce? Fifteen dollars — that's all. How many gallons to a barrel? Thirty-five? Forty? You figure it out. Oh, 1 forgot, you just work here."

"Don't blame me — blame the president," the man said, and went on jerking gas into our gas tank.

Father said, "Fred, I don't blame the president. He's doing the best he can. I blame the oil companies, the car industry, big business. Israelis. Palestinians — know what they really are? Philistines. Same word, look it up. And Fred, I blame myself for not devising a cheaper method of extracting oil from shale. We've got trillions of tons of shale deposits in this country."

"No choice," said Fred, and snorted the wasps into his nose. "We'll just have to go on paying."

"I've got a choice in the matter," Father said. "I'm not going to pay anymore."

Fred said, "That'll be eight dollars and forty cents."

For a moment, I thought Father was going to refuse to pay, but he took out his billfold and counted the money into Fred's dirty hand, while we watched from the back of the pickup.

"No, sir, I am not going to pay anymore," Father said. "Let me ask you a question. Do you ever wonder, seeing what things are like now, what's going to happen later on?"

"Sometimes. Look, I'm pretty busy." He squinted, hunched his shoulders, and backed away. Hunted.

"I ask myself that all the time. And I say to myself, 'It can't go on like this. A dollar's worth twenty cents.'"

"It's worse in New Jersey," Fred said. "I've got a cousin down there. They've had rationing since January."

"There's a whole world out there!" Father cried, pointing with his cut-off finger.

The man stepped farther back, frightened by the finger.

"Part of the world is still empty," Father said. "Most of it is still uninhabited. You eat asparagus?"

"Excuse me?"

"Know why asparagus is so expensive — all vegetables, for that matter? Because the farmers hoard their produce until the prices rise. Then they put it on the market. When they know they've got you, the consumer, over a barrel. They could sell it for half the price and still get rich. You didn't know that, did you? The guys who cut it get a dollar an hour, nonunion labor — just savages and spear chuckers who hoick it out of the ground. It's no trouble to grow — God does most of the work. Next time you eat some asparagus, you remember what I just told you. Oil companies do the same thing — hoard their product until the price goes up. I don't want any part of it. Wheat? Cereals? Grains? We give it away to the Russians to keep the domestic prices up when we could just as easily be makine it into moonshine or gasohol. In the meantime, pay, pay, and get the little Koreans to make us sleeping bags and outfit the army with Chinese knapsacks — no one asks where—"

At the mention of Chinese knapsacks, Fred said, "Hey, I've got some customers waiting."

"Don't let me hold you up, Fred." Father shook him by the hand. "Just remember what I told you."

On the road, Father put his head out of the window and said, "Did I set him straight? You bet I did!"

There were buds on some trees and tiny pale leaves on others, and a sweet sigh of spring was in the air. Cows stood in some pastures as still as figurines, and sloping down to the road there were small rounded apple trees foaming with white blossoms. I could tell from the way Father was driving that he was still angry, but in all this prettiness — the delicate trees in the mild flower-scented air, and the sun on the meadows — I could not understand what was wrong, or why Father had been shouting. He cut down a back road just before we reached Northampton. Here were some clusters of yellow wild-flowers and the bright blood-color of a cardinal, like a heart beating inside a bush's ribs.

Jerry said, "When we go camping, I'll have my own tent and you won't be allowed in."

"Dad didn't buy any tents," I said.

"I'll make a lean-to," he said. "I won't let you in."

Clover said, "I'm going camping, too."

"You won't like camping," Jerry said. "You'll cry. So will April."

"I don't think we're going camping," I said.

"Then what's all this stuff for?" Jerry said. We were crouched in the back of the pickup with the paper bags and boxes. "Where are we going?"

"Just away from here." After I said it I believed it.

April said, "I like it here. I don't want to go away. The summer's my favorite."

"Charlie doesn't know anything," Jerry said. "He's a thicko. That's why he has poison ivy."

Clover said, "I saw him scratching it."

"It's like a disease," April said. "Get away from me — I don't want to catch your disease!"

I hated having to sit there with those silly ignorant children, and it seemed to me as if, with Father driving madly past these beautiful hills and fields and the orchards that were so new with blossoms they had not lost a single petal, we were going to smash into a brick wall. I expected something sudden and painful, because everything in these last few days had been unusual. The kids did not know that, but I had been with Father, and overheard him, and I had seen things that had not fitted with what I knew. Even familiar things, like that scarecrow — it had been upraised like a demon and struck terror into me.

I said, "Something is going to happen to us."

"That makes me feel funny." Clover said.

I did not say what had occurred to me while Father was shopping in Springfield — Father was a disappointed man. He was angry and disgusted. But if he was aiming to do something drastic, he would take care of us. We were always part of his plans.

When we got to the town of Florence, he pulled to the side of the road and called out, "Charlie, you come with me. The rest of you stay put."

We had been here a little over a month ago, buying seeds. Today we went back to the same seed store. It was dry and spidery in the store. It smelled of burlap bags. And the dust from the seeds and husks stung my rash and made it itch.

"You again." It was a voice from behind a row of fat sacks. The man came out spanking dust from his apron. He had deep creases in his face, and his gaze went straight to my poison ivy.

"Mr. Sullivan," Father said, handing the man a piece of paper, "I need fifty pounds each of these. Hybrids, the highest-yield varieties you have, and if they're treated for mildew so much the better. I want them sealed in waterproof bags, the heavy-duty kind. I need them today. I mean, right now."

"You're all business, Mr. Fox." The man took a pair of glasses out of his apron pocket, blew on the lenses, and, pulling them over his ears, examined the piece of paper. "I can manage this." He looked over the tops of his lenses at Father. "But you and Polski have some work ahead of you if you're planning to get all this seed in the ground. It's a little late, ain't it?"

Father said, "It's winter in Australia. They're harvesting pumpkins in Mozambique, and they're raking leaves in Patagonia. In China, they're just putting their pajamas on."

"I didn't realize Chinamen wore pajamas."

"They don't wear anything else," Father said. "And in Honduras they're still plowing."

"What's that?"

But Father ignored him. He was choosing envelopes from a rack of flower seeds that said burpee. "Morning-glories," he said. "They love sunshine, and they'll remind me of Dogtown."

What with the sacks of seeds and the bags and boxes of camping equipment, there was not much room for us kids in the back of the pickup truck. I dreaded all the lugging we would have to do, but when we got home, Father said, "Leave everything just where it is. I'll put a tarp over it in case it rains."

"Dad, are we going somewhere?" Clover asked.

"We sure are, Muffin."

"Camping?" Jerry asked.

"Sort of."

"Then how come we aren't packing our bags?" April asked.

"Simply because you're not packing your bags it doesn't mean you're not going anywhere. Ever hear of traveling light? Ever hear of dropping everything and clearing out?"

I was in the kitchen with Mother, listening to this. I said, "Ma, what's he talking about? Where are we going?"

She came over to me and pressed my head against the bib of her apron. She said, "Poor Charlie. When you've got something on your mind, you look like a little old man. Don't worry, everything's going to be all right."

"Where?" I asked again.

"Dad will tell us, when he's ready," she said.

She had no idea! She knew as little as we did. I felt very close to her at that moment, and there was a solution of love and sadness in my blood. But there was more, because she was perfectly calm. Her loyalty to Father gave me strength. Though it did not take away any of my sadness, her belief made me believe and helped me share her patience. And yet I pitied her, because I pitied myself for not knowing more than I did.

In the afternoon, Father seemed relaxed. He made no move to work. He spent two hours on the telephone, a very rare thing — not his heckling, but the amount of time. "I'm speaking from Hatfield, Massachusetts!" he said into the phone, as if he were calling for help. Normally, we would have been out in the truck, making the rounds of the farm, but this afternoon we were free. He told us to go play on our bicycles, and when he was finished on the phone ("We're in luck!") he went into his workshop and scooped up his tools, whistling the entire time.

Around four o'clock, he went into the house. He came out a little while later with an envelope in his hand. He was still whistling. He told me to take it over to Polski.

Polski, wearing rubber mitts, was hosing his Jeep when I arrived.

"Your vash is lookun better." he said. "What have you got for me?"

I handed him the letter. He shut off the hose and said, "I was going to give you a quarter for doing the Jeep, but I couldn't see hide nor hair of you this morning." He ripped open the envelope and held the letter at arm's length to read it. On it were the bold loops of Father's beautiful handwriting — a short message. It hurt me that by not allowing me to go to school, Father was preventing me from learning to write like this. I knew that he had learned this elegant script at school, and seeing it made me feel weak and stupid.

Polski had started to spit and sigh. He said, "I'll be goddamned" and "So that's how it is, is it?"

His face was as gray as old meat. I wanted to go away, but he said, "Charlie, come on over here. I've got something to say to you. Want a cookie? How about a nice glass of milk?"

I said fine, though I would rather have had the quarter for washing the Jeep, or just permission to go away, because Polski's friendliness, like Father's, always included a little lecture. We went up to the piazza. He sat me down in the glider and said, "Be vight back." I looked across the asparagus fields and saw in the goldy afternoon light the river and the trees. Our own house sat small and solemn on its rectangle of garden. It had a gold roof and its piazza roof was an eyebrow and its paint was as white as salt.

Polski came out with a glass of milk and a plate of chocolate-chip cookies. I drank some milk and took a cookie.

"Have another one," he said. "Have as many as you like."

Then I knew it was going to be a long lecture.

He watched me eat two cookies. He seemed to be smiling at the way I crunched them, and I sensed that the crunch noise was coming out of my ears.

He said, "I've been meaning to tell you sumthun, Charlie." He stopped and sat closer to me on the glider — so close I had to put the glass of milk down. He said, "Your father thinks I'm a fool."

I did not say anything. What he said was half true, and the whole truth was worse.

He nodded at my silence, taking it for a yes, and fixed his mouth in a smile-like shape of warning and said, "Long before you were born, they used to hang convicted murderers in Massachusetts. It sounds horrible, but most of them deserved it. There was a man around here, name of Mooney — Spider Mooney, they called him, and I suppose you can guess why—"

I could not imagine why, though the picture I now had in my mind was a hairy man on all fours, with black popping eyes. Polski was still talking.

"— lived with his father. Never went to school. Wasn't much older than you when he started stealun, first little things at the five-and-dime, then bigger things. He made a habit of it. Turned into a vobber. Did 1 say that his father was a bit touched in the head? Well, he was. Completely hoopy. Shell-shocked, people said. If you screamed at him, or made a loud noise, he fell down. Just dropped like a brick. And he was full of crazy ideas. Some father, eh? When Spider Mooney was about twenty years old, he killed a man. Not just killed, but cut his throat with a straight vazor. Nearly took the fella's head off — colored fella — and it was only hangun by a little flap of skin. The police caught him easy — they knew where to go. His father's house, where else? Mooney was condemned to die. By hangun."

Polski suddenly looked up and said, "That might be some vain headun our way."

He was perfectly still, looking into space for a whole minute, before he picked up the story. Now he was staring at our house, and the house seemed to stare right back at him.

"On the day of the hangun, they tied Mooney's hands and led him out to the prison yard. This was the old Charles Street Prison in Boston. It was six o'clock in the mornun. You know how vuined you feel at six A.M.? Well, that's how Mooney felt, and it was worse because he knew that in a few minutes he was going to be swingun on the vope. They marched him across to the gallows. He stopped at the bottom on the stairs and said, 'I want to say sumthun to my father.'"

"His father was there?"

"Yes, sir." Polski turned his periwinkle eyes on me. "His father was watchun the whole business. He was sort of a witness — next of kin, see. Mooney says, 'Bring him over here — I want to say sumthun to him.' And they had to grant him his last vequest. No matter what a condemned man asked, they had to grant it. If he asked for vaspberry pie and it was January, they had to find him a slice, even if it meant sendun it up from Florida. Mooney asked for his father. The father came over. Mooney looked at him. He says, 'Come a little closer.'

"The father came a few steps closer.

"'I want to whisper sumthun in your ear,' Mooney says.

"The father came vight up to him, and Mooney leaned over and put his head close to his father's, the way you do when you whisper in somebody's ear. Then, all at once, the father let out a scream that'd wake the dead, and staggered back, holdun his head and still yellun."

Polski let this sink in, though I had braced myself for Polski screaming to let me hear what it had sounded like.

I said, "What did the son say to him?"

"Nuthun."

"But why did the father scream?"

Polski worked his tongue over his teeth.

He said, "Because Mooney had bitten his father's ear off! He still had it in his mouth. He spit it out, and then he says, 'That's for makun me what I am.'"

I saw Spider Mooney's wet lips, the blood on his chin, the little wrinkled ear on the ground.

"Bit the old man's ear off," Polski said.

He stood up.

"'That's for makun me what I am.'"

I stayed on the shaking glider. Polski was done, but I wanted to hear more. I wanted a conclusion. But there was no more to the story. I was left with the image of the old man clutching his head and keeling over, and Mooney pausing at the gallows stairs, and the gray ear on the ground like a leaf of withered gristle.

"Your father's the most obnoxious man I've ever met," Polski said. "He is the worst kind of pain in the neck — a know-it-all who's sometimes vight."

Then, with all the sawdust in him stirring, he added, "I've come to see he's dangerous. You tell him that, Charlie. Tell him he's a dangerous man, and one of these days he's going to get you all killed. Tell him I said so. Now finish that milk and off you go!"

Father was sitting in his hydraulic chair when I got back to the house. He was puffing a cigar. A cloud of smoke, like satisfaction, hung over his smiling face. He paddled the smoke with his hand.

"What did he say?"

"Nothing."

Father was still smiling. He shook his head.

"Honest," I said.

"You're lying," he said softly. "That's all right. But who are you trying to protect — him or me?"

My face was hot. I stared at the floor.

Father said, "In twenty-four hours none of this will matter."

7

THE LAST THING I saw as we drove away from home was a mass of red ribbons tied to the lower branches of our trees and hanging limp in the morning dew. It was the hour after dawn. Everything was furry gray in the warm dim light, except those bright ribbons. They were knotted there the night before by the savages.

We had been at the supper table and had heard voices and the whisking of feet in the tall grass. Father said "Hello" and went to the door. When he switched on the outside light, I saw more than a dozen dark faces gathered at the stoop. I thought: They've come for him — they're going to drag him off.

"It's the men, Mother." He did not say savages.

She said, "They picked a fine time."

Father faced them and waved them in.

The first one, who was tall and turned out to be the blackest of them, slouched in grinning and carrying a machete. I thought: Oh, Gaw. He carried it casually, like a monkey wrench, and he could have simply raised it and dinged Father into two halves if he had wanted to. The rest followed him, slipping catfooted though their shoes were enormous. They wore white shirts, with whiter patches stitched on, but very clean and starched. They mumbled and laughed and filled the room with what I knew was the dog smell of their own house, sweat and mouse droppings, and fuel oil. The twins and Jerry goggled at them — they were frightened, and Jerry almost guffed his supper from the smell.

But the men, even the one with the machete, looked a little frightened, too. Their faces were bruise-scraped crooked masks, and their hair as greasy-black as a muskrat's tail, or in bunches of tight curls like stuffing from a burst chair cushion. Most of them were dark and hawk-nosed Indians, and the rest were blacks, or near enough, with long loose hands. Some had faces so black I could not make out their noses or cheeks. They looked at us and around the room as if they had never stood in a proper house before and were trying to decide whether to tear it apart or else kneel down and bawl Their silence, this confusion, steamed like fury in the room.

Father clumped the big man on the shoulder and said, "What do you troublemakers want?"

The men laughed like children, and now I saw that they were looking upon Father obediently. Their faces were shining with admiration and gratitude. When I realized we were safe, the men appeared less ugly and foul-seeming.

"This is Mr. Semper," Father said. He used his handshake to tug the big man forward. "He speaks English perfectly, don't you, Mr. Semper?"

Mr. Semper said "No," and whinnied and looked hopelessly at Mother.

I knew this man Semper. His was the face I had seen crossing the fields at midnight. He had been carrying the scarecrow's corpse in his arms. Now I noticed he had the scribble of a pale scar, like a signature, near his mouth. I was glad I had not seen the scar that night.

"See if you can find some beer, Mother. These gentlemen are thirsty."

Soon each man was gripping a bottle of beer. Mr. Semper put his jaw out and chewed the bottle cap off with his molars. The rest did exactly the same, gnawing theirs and plucking the caps off their tongues. They took shy slugs of beer and kept their eyes on Father.

"What have you got for me, brother?" Father said.

Balancing the machete on the flat of his hand, Mr. Semper said, "Dis."

"That's a beauty," Father said. He tried the blade with his thumb. "I could shave with that."

Mr. Semper broke into the rapid chatter of another language.

Father understood! He turned to us and said, "They're thanking us for the Worm Tub. Didn't I tell you they were civilized? See, they're real gentlemen." He said something to the men in their language.

Mr. Semper screamed a laugh. His gums were molded marvelously, like smooth wax around the roots of his teeth. He watched Father with fluidy lidded eyes, and when Father passed a bowl of peanuts around, Mr. Semper nodded and split open his lips to mutter his thanks.

The wonder to me was that this crowd of men was in our house at all. For months I had watched them silently crossing the fields, first planting, then, when the asparagus crop was ripe, bent over it and cutting. I was sure these were the men I had seen that night carrying torches in that scarecrow ceremony. The men had seemed savage, their house had frightened me with its stink, their faces had seemed swollen and cruel. But here they were, fifteen of the queerest men I had ever laid eyes on. Yet they did not look savage up close. They looked poor and obedient. The patches on their shirts matched the bruises on their faces, their hands were cracked from work, there was dust in their hair. Their big broken shoes made their shoulders slanty, and their ragged pants made them seem — not dangerous, as I had expected, but weak.

Father said, "They want to meet you."

He introduced us — the twins, Jerry, and me — and we shook hands all around. Their palms were splintery and damp, and their skin was scaly. They had yellow fingernails. Their hands were like chicken feet, and afterward my own hand smelled.

"I've taken the precaution of buying a good map," Father said, and unfolded it and flattened it under a lamp. The men jostled to look at it. "A map is as good as a book — better, really. I've been reading this one for months. I know everything I have to know. Look how the middle of it is blank — no roads, no towns, no names. America looked like that once!"

"Plenty water dere," Mr. Semper said, and traced the blue rivers with his finger.

The map showed a forehead of territory, a bulge of coastline with an empty interior. The blue veins of rivers, lowland green and mountain orange — no names, only bright colors. Father's finger was well suited for pointing at this map as he said "This is where we're headed," for the blunt blown-off finger was pointing at nothing but an outline of emptiness.

"Are you sure you don't want to come with us, brother?"

Mr. Semper showed his teeth, and his nostrils opened like a horse's.

"They'd rather stay here and face the music," Father said. "Ironic, isn't it? We're sort of trading places — swapping countries."

Mr. Semper laughed and clapped his hands and said, "You going far away!"

Father grinned at him. "I'm the vanishing American."

Black veins swelled beside Mr. Semper's eyes, straining the shiny skin like trapped worms, as he crouched beside us and one by one put his long arms around the twins, Jerry, and me.

"Dis fadder is a great man. He my fadder, too." Mr. Semper's grunts smelled damply of digested peanuts. "We, his childrens."

It seemed to me a ridiculous thing to say, but I remembered that Father had been kind to these men, because they were poor. This was Mr. Semper's way of saying thank you for the fire-driven icebox.

The rest of the men were silent. Father smiled at them and made passes with his hands. Then he mumbled something, and turned to Mother and said, "That's Spanish for 'Don't do anything I wouldn't do.'"

"Talk about leeway," Mother said.

When Mr. Semper had clasped Father's fingers and murmured into Father's face for the last time, and they were all whisking through the grass, Father raised the machete and slashed the air, using it like a pirate's cutlass.

"Allie, be careful," Mother said.

"I'm raring to go!"

"Trading places," she said. "Those poor men."

"That's all they've got to trade — they don't have anything else. And that's just what we're doing. I would never have thought of it, if it wasn't for them. They inspired me."

There was movement outside. The men had paused under the trees.

"But it's a swindle," Father said. "I feel I'm leaving them to the vultures."

***

It was not until the next morning that I noticed the ribbons the men had tied to the branches. They were cheap red ribbons, but in the gray morning light they looked rich and festive, and gave a touch of splendor to the trees.

Soon I could not make out the ribbons or the house. Our homestead got smaller and slipped down, and the treetops followed it. Then everything was under the road.

Passing Polski's farmhouse. I recalled what he had told me. But the Mooney story confused me. Did his earbiting mean that he realized his father had been cruel to him, or did it prove that criminals don't change, and are still vicious on the gallows stairs? As for the rest of Polski's rant, about Father being a know-it-all and dangerous, I could not deliver that message. Father knew I was lying. But who are you trying to protect — him or me? The answer was neither I was trying to protect myself.

Now, nothing mattered. We were leaving Hatfield. Father had taken his Thunderbox and his Atom-smasher, most of his tools, some of his books, and all the things we had bought — the camping equipment. But the rest, the house and all its furnishings, we left — every stick of furniture, the dishes, the beds, the curtains, Mother's plants, the radio, the lights in the sockets, our clothes in the drawers, the cat asleep on the hydraulic chair. And we had left the door ajar. Was this Father's way of reassuring us? If so, it was a success. Except for some spare clothes in our knapsacks, we had not packed.

Father had woken and said, "Okay, let's go." He hurried through the house without glancing left or right. "We're getting out of here."

Only later it occurred to me that this was what real refugees did. They finished breakfast and fled, leaving the dishes in the sink and the front door half-open. There was more drama in that than if we had carefully wrapped all our belongings and emptied the house.

The house now bobbed up in miniature, between the fields a mile away. It had never looked more peaceful. It was our mousehole. And because all our things were in it, and the clock still ticking, I felt we could return at any time, and find it just as we had left it, and reclaim it.

So I did not mind going, but where were we headed? Because I did not know, the slowness of time made me sick. Once past Springfield, Father stuck to the highway, and cities and towns rose near the exits. We saw chimneys and churches and tall buildings. We got used to buses with dirty windows, and trucks whooshing past, the gusts of fumey wind and the black canvas flapping on their loads. The signs said Connecticut, then New York. We stopped for lunch at a Howard Johnson's. Father said, "Everything this place stands for, I despise," and would not eat. The fried clams didn't even have stomachs, he said, and were probably made out of string. "Cheeseburgers!" he yelled. Then New Jersey. Here were the tallest smokestacks and dingiest air I had ever seen, and the birds were small and oily. People going by in cars girls especially gaped at Jerry and me We yanked down the beaks of our baseball caps so they wouldn't stare I shut my eyes and prayed for us to arrive. Father's speed on this fast road made me think we were escaping, hurrying away from following thunder dropping down a long straight road past a landscape that was like a greasy sink. I had never seen flames like these spurting from chimneys We could hear the flub-flub of fiery hair wagging from the black pipes.

BALTIMORE, a sign said, NEXT SEVEN EXITS. We took the third, and saw a shopping center just like the one we had left behind this morning in Springfield, and went through a suburb that reminded me of Chicopee, then entered the city itself. It was a hillier city than any in Massachusetts. The houses and hotels were bricked along sloping streets. On this early evening the twilight glanced from the nearby water, helped by the curve of pinky blue sky — nothing like the customary thickening I was used to in Hatfield, which was a moldy green sundown with shots of gold. Baltimore's milky ocean brightness and its putty-colored clouds magnified a pale overhang of daylight unobstructed by trees. What few small trees I could see were struggling against the wind.

About five minutes later it was sundown, and different. One part of the sky was darkening with gray, the other dazzling red, a heap of claw-shaped clouds the color of boiled lobster shells, cracked and broken in just the same way. This brilliant crimson sky was new to me. I called to Father to look at it.

"Pollution!" he cried. "It's refraction from gas fumes!"

He kept driving, nudging our truck through the traffic, making toward the lower part of the city. He parked in the wind outside a warehouse.

"What are we doing here?" Jerry asked.

Father pointed his knuckle at the top of the warehouse. He said, "That's our hotel."

It was the yellow-white bow of a ship, its nostril-like ropeholes bleeding rust stains. We could not see the rest of the ship, but judging from its bow it was huge. I did not say how glad I was that we had somewhere to stay. It was now dark. I had thought we were going to sleep in a campsite by the roadside.

We walked up the slatted gangway, and a seaman on deck showed Father where we were to go. We four children occupied one cabin, Mother and Father were in an adjoining one. Everything smelled sourly of drying paint. A cubicle with a shower and sink lay between our two cabins. We stowed our belongings under the lower bunks and waited for something else to happen. Morning in Massachusetts, evening on a ship — six hundred miles away. It seemed as if Father could work miracles.

"It's a ship!" Clover said. "We're on a real ship!"

Father put his head into our cabin and said, "Well, what do you think?"

The ship was being loaded. All night the cranes squeaked and revolved, the conveyor belts hummed under us, and through the steel walls of our bare cabin I could hear cargo being skidded into the hold.

We remained tied up at this dock while the cargo — stenciled crates and even cars on cable slings — was loaded. We ate in the empty dining room and during the day we watched the cranes swinging back and forth. There were no other passengers that I could see. And still Father refused to say where we were going. This worried me and made me feel especially dependent on him. I did not know the name of this ship, and no one I had seen so far appeared to know English. We were ignored by the crew. We were in Father's hands.

One morning before we sailed, we left the ship and drove in our old truck through the city, crossing a bridge and heading toward the water where, at the end of the road, there was a beach. Mother stayed in the cab of the truck reading while we walked along the beach, skimming stones and looking at sailboats. Down the beach there was a broken jetty, some rocks in the water and others tipped in the sand.

"The tide's coming in," Father said. He chucked his cigar butt into the surf. "Who's going to show me how brave he is?"

I knew what was coming. He had done this to us a number of times. He would dare us to go out and sit on a rock and stay there until the rising tide threatened us. It was a summer game we had played on Cape Cod. But it was still spring in Baltimore — too cold for swimming — and we had all our clothes on. I could not believe he was serious, so I said I would try, and expected him to laugh.

He said, "You're keeping us waiting."

A wave broke and slid back, dragging sand and pebbles. Without taking my clothes off, or even my shoes. I ran to a weedy rock at the surf line and perched there, waiting for Father to call me back. The twins and Jerry laughed. Father stood higher up on the beach, hardly watching. No waves disturbed me at first. They mounted just behind me, moved past me, and turned to foam and vanished.

"Charlie's scared," Jerry yelled.

I said nothing. I knelt there unsteadily, clasping the rock with my fingertips. It was like a saddle with no stirrups. I did not know if I was calling Father's bluff or he was calling mine. A succession of waves soaked my legs and wet my shoes. A pool formed in front of my rock. Now the brimming waves numbed my fingers.

I was rehearsing an excuse for giving up when, in the sallow late-afternoon light, I saw Father's silhouette, the sun beneath his shoulder. He was dark, I did not know him, and he watched me like a stranger, with curiosity rather than affection. And I felt like a stranger to him. We were two people pausing — one on a rock, the other on the sand, child and adult. I did not know him, he did not know me. I had to wait to discover who we were.

At just that second — Father as simple and obscure as a passerby, doubting me with his slack posture — the wave came. It slapped me hard from behind, traveled up my back and frothed against my neck, pushing me and making me buoyant, then just as quickly releasing me. I trembled with cold and grasped the rock tightly, thinking my chest would burst from the howl I held in.

"He did it!" Jerry shrieked, running in circles on the beach. "He's all wet!"

Now I could see Father's face. A wildness passed across it, like a desperate memory, making a mad fix on his jaw. Then he grinned and yelled for me to come in. But I let two more waves break over me before I gave up and staggered ashore, and against my will I started to cry from the cold.

"That's better," Father said, while the twins whooped at me and touched my wet clothes. But it sounded as if he was complimenting himself, not me. "Take those shoes off."

Father carried a shoe in each hand as we walked up the beach toward Mother and the pickup truck.

"Hey, put the kid's shoes on." It was a voice behind us. "There's glass and crap on this here thing."

We turned and saw a black man. He held a radio against his ear and wore a tight wool sock on his head. He blinked at Father, who was twice his size and still smiling.

Father said, "You're just the man I'm looking for."

The man switched off the radio. He looked truly puzzled. He said his name was Sidney Torch and that he did not live near here. But he had seen some kids breaking glass bottles on this beach, and it was dangerous to walk around barefooted or you would get slashed. But he did not want to start anything, he said, because he was nobody, going up to visit with his brother, and he had never seen us before.

Father said, "I've been meaning to tell you something."

He said this in a kindly way, and the black man, who gave him a sideways look, began to chuckle.

"No one loves this country more than I do," Father said. "And that's why I'm going. Because I can't bear to watch." He strolled along and put his arm around the man, Sidney Torch. "It's like when my mother died. I couldn't watch. She'd been as strong as an ox, but she broke her hip and after a spell in the hospital she caught double pneumonia. And there she was, lying in bed, dying. I went over to her and held her hand. Do you know what she said to me? She said, 'Why don't they give me rat poison?' I didn't want to watch, I couldn't listen. So I went away. They say it was an awful struggle — touch and go — but she was doomed. After she died, I went back home. Some people might say that's the height of callousness. But I've never regretted it. I loved her too much to watch her die."

All this time, Mr. Torch was twisting his radio knobs nervously. I had never heard Father's story, but it was characteristic of him to tell personal details of his life to a perfect stranger. Maybe it was his way of avoiding betrayal, divulging his secrets to people he met by chance and would never see again.

"That's a real sad story," Mr. Torch said.

"Then you missed the point," Father said.

Mr. Torch seemed flustered, and when Mother saw me all wet and yelled at Father—"What are you trying to prove?" — Mr. Torch took gulps of air and backed away.

But Father addressed him again. He had a proposition for him. "Mr. Torch," he said, "I am prepared to sell you this pickup truck for twenty-two dollars, because that's what she cost me to register."

"I just figured your kid should be wearing his shoes." Mr. Torch said this very softly.

Father said, "Or you can swap me your radio. There's one on the truck. I've got no use for it." He put his hand out and the black man meekly gave him the radio.

We drove back to the ship. Mr. Torch sat in the back with Jerry and me. He said, "Your old man sure can talk. He could be a preacher. He could preach your ears off. Tell you one thing, though. He ain't no businessman!" He laughed to himself and said, "Where you guys going?"

We said we did not know.

"That your old man there behind the wheel? If I was you I wouldn't be so sure!"

Jerry said, "My father is Allie Fox."

Mr. Torch scratched his teeth with a long fingernail.

"The genius," I said. "That's right," Mr. Torch said.

Back at the ship, Father handed him the keys and said he could have the radio, too. He didn't want it after all. We went up the gangway, and that was that.

"Free at last!" Father said. We stood on the narrow deck outside our cabin. The lights of Baltimore gave the city a halo of glowing cloud. The night was not dark, but just a different sort of muddy light. The traffic noises were muffled and nervous. A breeze scratched at the ship's side, and it seemed as though we had no connection with the city and were already at sea. We stared at the portion of dock where Mr. Torch had driven away in our pickup truck.

Mother said, "If the police stop him, they'll think he stole it. He'll get pinched."

"I don't care!" Father said. He was pleased with himself. "I just gave it away. 'Take it!' I said. 'I've got no use for it!' Did you see the expression on his face? A free pickup truck with a new transmission! Like the Worm Tub. I just gave it away! Like Polski and the job. Clear the decks!"

But Mother said sharply, "What have you given away? A beat-up truck that was too much trouble to dump. A homemade icebox that stank to heaven. A job that wasn't worth having in the first place."

"That's what I mean."

"Don't pretend to be better than you are."

Father was still staring down the hawser at Baltimore.

"Good-bye, America," he said. "If anyone asks, say we were shipwrecked. Good-bye to your junk and your old hideola! And have a nice day!"

8

WE SAILED from Baltimore on this ship, Unicorn, in the middle of the night. The cabin walls vibrated, as if shimmying on the teeth of a buzz saw. My bunk grumbled and nudged me awake. I put my face against the porthole and saw the sloshings on swells, like whitewash hosed over black ice. I heard a foghorn moan, a bell buoy's clang, and a spray like pebbles hitting a tin pail. The steel door rattled, but none of the kids woke up. In the morning, we were in open sea.

And there, in mid-ocean, the ship came to life. The dining room was full at breakfast — the other three tables occupied by two families. One of the families was very large. After we introduced ourselves, the grownups said good morning to Father and Mother and the children made faces at us. We were quiet strangers, they were noisy and seemed right at home here. They acted as if they had been on the Unicorn before. They were the Spellgoods and the Bummicks.

"You're Mr. Fox," one of the men said to Father on our first day at sea. "You've already forgotten my name. But I remember yours."

"Of course you do," Father said. "I'm much easier to remember than you are."

That man was the Rev. Gurney Spellgood. He was a missionary. At each meal he led his family — two tables of them — in a loud hymn, giving thanks, before they fell on their food. The Bummicks' behavior was odder, for this brown-faced family of four always argued, and as their voices rose in competition they would begin to holler in another language. Father said it was Spanish and they were half-and-halfs. On the afterdeck one day, Mr. Bummick, who was hoggishly fat, told Father that what he had always wanted to do was bust a window in Baltimore, then run aboard the ship and sail away. "They'd never catch me!" Father told us to stay clear of the Bummicks.

Apart from the Spellgoods' prayer meeting, which was a daily affair, we seldom saw these people, except at mealtimes. At dinner on the second day, the nine Spellgoods were not at their tables.

Father said to Mr. Bummick, "What's become of our hymn-singing friends? I suppose they're seasick — feeding the fishes, eh?"

Mr. Bummick said no, they were with the captain. It was the captain's practice to invite his passengers to take turns eating with him.

"That's funny," Father said. "I was thinking of inviting the captain to eat with me. But I decided not to. I don't like the cut of his jib."

The Bummicks stared at him.

"Just joking," Father said.

He never smiled when he told a joke. In fact, he sounded especially grumpy when he tried to be funny. It was embarrassing to know he was joking and to see the puzzlement on other people's faces.

The next night, the Bummicks ate with the captain.

"I guess he's forgotten all about us, Reverend," Father said to Gurney Spellgood. "I'd much appreciate it if you said a prayer for us."

"The last shall be first," Rev. Spellgood said. He folded his hands and smiled.

Father said, "Some."

"Pardon?"

"'Men will come from the north and south, and sit at table in the Kingdom of God. And behold, some of the last who will be first, and some of the first who will be last.' Luke."

Rev. Spellgood said, "I was quoting Matthew."

"You were misquoting," Father said. Up went his blasted-off finger. "Matthew says many, not some. But the best part is in chapter nineteen. 'Everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands, for my name's sake, will receive a hundredfold, and inherit eternal life.'"

Rev. Spellgood said, "That is my watchword, brother. You have understood my mission."

"And yet I can't help noticing," Father said, waving his finger at the two tables of Spellgoods — there was a granny there, too—"you haven't left anyone behind." Quickly he added, "Just joking."

But after this, Rev. Spellgood tried to engage Father in discussions about the Scriptures and include him in the prayer meetings on deck. The next morning, Rev. Spellgood stopped him as he paced the deck with his maps. I was nearby, fishing from the rail.

Father said, "We don't look like much at the moment, Reverend, but time and experience will smooth us down, and we pray that we will be polished arrows in the quiver of the Almighty."

"Ezekiel?" Rev. Spellgood said.

"Joe Smith," Father said, and he laughed. "Prophet and martyr and founder of one of the twenty richest corporations in the United States."

Copperations was the way Father said it, with a quack of pure hatred.

Rev. Spellgood faced the ocean and said, "'Thou didst walk through the sea with thine horses, through the heap of great waters.'"

"Hosea."

"Habakkuk," Rev. Spellgood said. "Chapter three."

"That's chloroform," Father said. But missing the quotation stung him. He turned on Spellgood and in front of his big family he said in an annoyed voice, "But how many pushups can you do? Hah!"

The Spellgoods were silent.

Father said, "'Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh.' Ecclesiastes. Besides, I've got other weenies to roast." And he went back to his maps.

It was from one of Rev. Spellgood's daughters, a girl named Emily, who had a chinless ducklike face, that I found out where the Unicorn was headed. It was now hot and sunny. Three days out of Baltimore and it seemed that spring had become summer. The crew walked around without shirts. I spent most of the day fishing.

Emily came up to me and said, "You never catch anything."

"It's too hot," I said, because in the past I had always fished in brooks and in shady sections of the Connecticut River. "The fish go to the bottom in hot weather, and don't eat."

"If you think this is hot wait until you get to La Ceiba," she said.

"Where's that?"

"It's where you're going on this boat, silly. In Honduras."

It was the second time in mv life I had heard that name, and it had the sound of a dark secret.'

Then a young Spellgood boy joined us. Emily said, "This kid doesn't even know where we're going!" They both laughed at me.

But it was worth being mocked to find out where Father was taking us. And now I understood the business with Mr. Semper and the men. They were from Honduras. Father was trading places. On the map outside the radio room, Honduras looked like the forehead of land on Father's map, but smaller, now like an empty turtle shell, side view, with fingerprints all over it, and La Ceiba a polka dot on the coast. That town was almost worn away from being touched. And pins on the map showed our progress from Baltimore. The last pin was parallel with Florida, which was why we were so hot.

The sea was as level as a rink — green near the ship and blue far-off. There was no breeze. The deck was a frying pan, and some of its paint had blistered from the heat. I kept fishing.

Emily Spellgood would not leave me alone. She was about my own age and wore pedal pushers. She said, "It's a whole lot hotter than this in La Ceiba. You've never been there, but we have. My father's real famous there. We've got a mission in the jungle. It's really neat."

I wanted to catch something, to show her up. I payed out my line and watched the flocks of seagulls that followed us. They hovered goggling over the stern, they bobbed in our wake, they dived for scraps that were sluiced out of the galley. They never settled on the ship, but they would scissor lumps of bread out of my hand if I held it to their beaks. Father hated them. "Scavengers!" But they gave me the idea for fishing. I had seen several pluck mackerel-sized fish out of the sea behind the ship.

I used bacon rind on my hook — no float, and only enough of a sinker to let me fling the line out and troll. Emily stayed in back of me saying, "It's called Guampu, we've got a fantastic motorboat, and all the Indians—"

My line went tight. I jerked it. There was a human scream among the gull squawks. I had hooked a bird. The hook must have been halfway down his throat, because when he flew up he took my line with him, tugging it like a kite string and screeching. He beat his wings hard and tried to get away. He plunged into the wake of the ship, then came up again overhead and made as if to fly off. But when the line went tight he tumbled in the air and made pitiful cries. The other gulls fluttered foolishly around him, pecking at his head out of curiosity and fear.

I let go of the line. It whipped across the water like a trout cast, and the big panicky bird flapped over the waves dragging fifty yards of fishing line from his beak. He did not fly far. A little way off, he flopped into the water and sat there splashing his head like a farmyard duck and raking his wings against the sea.

"You killed him," Emily said. "You killed that poor bird. That's bad luck — and it's cruel, too! I thought you were nice, but you're a murderer!" She ran down the deck, and later I heard her yell, "Dad, that boy killed a seagull!"

For the rest of the day, I walked around with an ache in my throat, as if I had swallowed a hook.

Father said, "Kill one for me, Charlie" — how had he heard about it? — "but don't let anyone see you."

The next time I saw Rev. Spellgood, he looked at me as if he wanted to throw me overboard. Then he said, "Have you said good morning to Jesus? Or do you just do pushups like your dad, and turn your back on the Lord?"

I said, "My father can do fifty pushups."

"Samson could do five hundred. But he was wholesome."

That night it was our turn to join the captain for dinner. I had set eyes on him only once before this, when he was wearing his captain's hat. Without it, and in his khaki clothes, he looked like any farmer, a little sour and shorthaired, about Polski's age. He had no neck, so his ears, the lobes of them, reached his collar. His blue eyes had no lashes, which made him look as if he doubted everything you said, and gave him a fishy stare, like a cold cod on a slab. He had a small narrow mouth and fish lips that sucked air without opening.

His dining room had a low ceiling, and the fittings were so darkly varnished they looked pickled — pickled shelves, pickled wall-boards, and a pickled wooden chest that said CAPT. AMBROSE SMALLS on its lid.

Captain Smalls was talking to another man when we entered the room. They were at the table, bent over some charts, and the man, whose shirt and hands were greasy, snatched his cap off when he saw us but kept talking.

"It's got to be the welds," he said. "I don't see what else it could be across there. Unless that pump is losing suction. You think we should seal the bulkhead?"

"It's number six — one of the biggest." the captain said. "Better check the ballast tanks. You say it's bad?"

"At the moment it's just a condensation problem."

The captain stood and squared his shoulders. "These good people are hungry. See me later."

The man rolled up his charts and sidled out of the room.

Father said, "Instead of drowning your problems, why not teach them to swim?"

The captain pressed his mouth shut and regarded Father with his flat lashless eyes.

"Got a leak in your tub, eh?" Father frowned — he was joking.

The captain frowned fishily back at him. "A bilge pump's acting up on the port side. Nothing for you to worry about. It's my problem."

"Must be a gasket in one of the cylinder heads," Father said. "Sea water's hell on gaskets. Perishes the material, even your so-called miracle fibers. All this heat. And gaskets don't stand for neglect. They'll just die on you. But that's all right — we can swim."

"No cylinders — it's a centrifugal pump. And we're not even sure it's the pump," the captain said. "Please sit down."

Father jerked his napkin open by snapping it like a piece of laundry. He tucked it beneath his chin, giving himself a bib. Jerry and the twins did the same, but I put my napkin over my stomach, as Captain Smalls had done. Mother put hers on her lap. Father glanced at me and smiled, because I had imitated the captain.

"Must be the vanes," Father said. "Or it could be the motor. I wouldn't advise you to seal the bulkhead. It'll just fill up and you'll get so complacent you'll shut off the pump. That would set up vibrations. Sympathetic vibrations. They'd shake your teeth loose, raise hell with your ship—"

"Your soup's getting cold," the captain said. "This your first visit to Honduras?"

Father spooned soup into his mouth and did not reply.

Mother said, "It's more than a visit. We're planning to stay awhile."

"Ever been there before?"

Father said, "I met a savage who lived there once. And I once ate a banana from Honduras. That tasted mighty good, so I figured why not migrate?"

But the captain ignored him. He said to Mother, "In most ways, Honduras is about fifty years behind the times. La Ceiba's a hick town."

"That suits me," Father said. "I'm a hayseed from way back. But we're going to Mosquitia."

Mother stared at him. It was news to her.

"That's the Stone Age," the captain said. "Like America before the pilgrims landed. Just Indians and woods. There's no roads. It's all virgin jungle."

"America's verging on jungle, too," Father said, and frowned again.

"And swamps," the captain said. "They're so bad, once you get in, you never get out."

"It sounds perfect," Father said. He seemed genuinely pleased. "You know it like the back of your hand, do you?"

"Only the coast, but that's bad enough. You wouldn't catch me inland. Some of the crew come from those parts. One's in the brig at the moment. I'll pay him off in port and he won't set foot on another ship again. A lot of those fellows give me headaches, but I'm in charge here."

"Must be nice to be king of your own country," Father said.

The captain stared at him, and yet I was sure that Father was serious and paying him a compliment.

"Gurney Spellgood's got a mission there. His church is somewhere upriver."

Father said, "I think his theology's shaky."

"What line of business might you be in?" the captain asked, annoyed by what Father had said about Rev. Spellgood.

But Father didn't reply. He hated direct questions, like Where are you going? What are you doing? and What's it for? We never asked.

Mother said, to break the silence, "Allie — my husband — used to be quite interested in the Bible. He and Reverend Spellgood were discussing it. That's all he means. He's the only person I know who actually invites Jehovah's Witnesses in the house. He gives them the third degree."

Father said, "I've tinkered with it, in a general sort of way. It's like the owner's guide, isn't it? For Western civilization. But it doesn't work. I started wondering. Where's the problem? Is it us or is it the handbook?"

"And what will you be doing in Mosquitia with this fine family?"

A direct question. But Father faced him.

"Growing my hair," Father said. "You might have noticed I have long hair? There's a reason for it. I've done a lot of traveling, but I like to keep to myself. It's hard in America — all those personal questions. I can't stand answering them. What does this have to do with hair? I'll tell you. It was the barbers who always asked them the most. They used to give me interviews. But after I stopped getting haircuts, the questions stopped. So I guess I'll just go on growing it for my peace of mind."

"We had a fellow like you on board a few years ago. He was planning to spend the rest of his life in Honduras. He went ashore. We took on our cargo. It was pineapples. The fellow came back with us. Couldn't bear it. He lasted two days."

"Don't you wait for us," Father said, "unless you want your pineapples to rot."

The captain said, "I brought my family along on one run. They spent a few days up in Tegoose, and then visited the ruins. It was a nice take-in."

"I don't feel we're going to ruins so much as we're leaving them," Father said. "And speaking of bitter and hasty nations, just before we came down to Baltimore we had a little shopping to do. We went into Springfield, one of those shopping centers that are more like shopping circumferences. We were buying shoes, and when I paid the bill I looked through the stockroom door where there was a bulletin board for the employees. A slogan's written on it in big letters. It says, 'If you have sold a customer exactly what he wanted, you haven't sold him anything.' A shoe shop. It made me want to go away in my old shoes."

"That's business," the captain said.

"That's ruins," Father said. "We eat when we're not hungry, drink when we're not thirsty, buy what we don't need, and throw away everything that's useful. Don't sell a man what he wants — sell him what he doesn't want. Pretend he's got eight feet and two stomachs and money to burn. That's not illogical — it's evil."

"So you're going to Honduras."

"We need a vacation. If we'd had the money, we would have gone to the island of Juan Fernandez. But we didn't want to sell the pig."

Mother laughed at this. She often laughed — she thought Father was funny.

"My family's grown up," the captain said. "My wife's happy where she is, which is Verona, Florida. And this ship is my home. But I've put into a fair number of ports — the East Coast, Mexico, Central America, through the Canal and up the other side, and I'll tell you, give or take a few palm trees, they're all the same."

"That's a kind of fear," Father said. "When a man says women are all the same, it proves he's afraid of them. I've been around the world. I've been to places where it doesn't rain and places where it doesn't stop. I wouldn't say those countries are all the same, and the people are as different as dogs. I wouldn't go if I thought they were all the same. And if I was a ship captain I'd stay in my bunk. I expect places to be different. If Honduras isn't, we'll go home."

"Gurney sings its praises. Bummick works with the fruit company. That's another story, but he must like it or he wouldn't stay."

"If there's space we'll be happy. We ran out of space in America, and I said, 'Let's go!' People don't normally say that. Ever notice? Americans never leave home? People say they want a new life. So they go to Pittsburgh. What kind of new life is that? Or they go to Florida, and they think they're emigrating. Like I say, I've done a lot of traveling, but I've never met any Americans who planned to stay where they were, apart from a few cripples and retards, who didn't know where they were. Most Americans are homing pigeons, and none of them has the conviction to do what we're doing — picking ourselves up and going to a different country for good. I suppose you think it's disloyal, but a man can only take so much. Me? I feel better already on this ship. That's why I'm telling you what I couldn't tell anyone back home. If I'd said I was leaving, they'd call me an outlaw. Americans think that leaving the States for good is a criminal act but I don't see any other way We need elbow room, so we can think. Right," Father went on — and now he was laughing—"as you probably noticed, I think with my elbows!"

All the time, the twins, Jerry, and I were jammed against the wall, our arms bumping as we ate. The twins had crumbled crackers into their soup because the captain had. But they had not eaten theirs, because it looked like swill. And Jerry, who hated sausages (Father always said they put horses' lips and cows' ears into them), hardly touched the main course, except for a few peas. The kids were also kicking each other under the table. I was so ashamed of them, I ate everything that was put in front of me by the black waiter. I was at the captain's end of the table and he complimented me, saying I had quite an appetite and I was going to grow up to be a big fellow and did I have a hollow leg?

He said to me, "If you like, I'll show you the bridge. I've seen you fishing from the stern. We've got sonar. You can spot fish on the screen and you'll know the right time to use your line. Want to come up?"

I asked Father if it was all right.

"You heard him, Charlie. The captain's in charge here. This ship is his country. He can do as he pleases. He makes the rules. All these men and bilge pumps are his, whether they work or not."

"I fly the Stars and Stripes, Mr. Fox," the captain said. "I don't run my country down."

"Nor do I," Father said.

The captain drank air slowly, then said, "I heard you doing it."

"I don't have a country," Father said. "And someday soon, neither will you, friend."

Mother said, "Captain, I'd like to go below decks and see the cargo holds, the engine room, and where the crew is. The children would be interested. It would be a good lesson — they could do some pictures of it."

"See, we're educating these kids ourselves," Father said. "I wasn't happy with the schools. They're all playgrounds and fingerpainting. Subliterate teachers, illiterate kids. The blind leading the blind. Of course, they'll all turn out rotten — it's despair."

"Home study has its limitations," the captain said.

"Ever tried it?" Father said.

The captain said the public schools were fine by him, and "I've never had any grief with the school system."

Hearing this, Father reached to one of the shelves and pulled a book out. He put it in Clover's hand. He said, "Open it, Muffin, and read what you see."

Clover opened it and read, "Compass error is sometimes used in compass clackuations as a sah-speficic term. It is the al-alga-alga-breek sum of the vary-variations and dah-viation. Because vary-variation depends on gee-geographic location, and dah-der-viation upon the ship's heading—"

"That's enough," Father said, and snapped the book shut. "Five years old. Fd like to see a school kid do that."

Clover smiled at the captain and put her hands on her belly.

"Smart girl," the captain said.

"Take this energy crisis," Father said. "It's the fault of the schools. Wind power, wave power, solar power, gasohol — it's just a sideshow. They have fun talking about it, but everyone drives to school on Arab gas and Eskimo oil, while they jabber about windmills. Anyway, what's new about windmills? Dutch people have been using them for years. The schools go on teaching worn-out lessons and limping after the latest fashions. No wonder kids sniff glue and take drugs! I don't blame them. I'd take drugs, too, if I had to listen to all that guff! And no one sees how simple it might be. Hey, I'm thinking out loud, but take magnetism. Ever hear anyone talk sense about magnetic energy?"

"Generators have magnets in them," the captain said.

"Electromagnets. They need energy. That means fuel. I'm talking natural magnets."

"I don't see how that would work."

"The size of a Ferris wheel," Father said.

"They don't come that big."

"A thousand of them, on a pair of wheels."

"They'd just stick together," the captain said.

"I'm way ahead of you," Father said. "You set them at various angles, over three hundred and sixty degrees, so there's a push-pull effect with the alternating magnetic fields."

"What's the point?"

"A perpetual-motion machine. The point is you could light a city with something like that. But tell anyone about it and he looks at you as if you're crazy." Father faced the captain, as if defying him to look at him that way.

Mother said, "Allie's an inventor."

"I was wondering," the captain said.

"Strictly speaking," Father said, "there is no such thing as invention. It's not creation, I mean. It's just magnifying what already exists. Making ends meet. They could teach it in school — Edison wanted to make invention a school subject, like civics or French. But the schools went for fingerpainting, when they could have been teaching kids to read. They encouraged back talk. School is play! Harvard is play!"

"The captain is offering you some coffee, Allie."

The captain held the coffeepot over Father's cup.

Father said, "Ain't that always the way? You get on to a really serious subject, like the end of civilization as we know it, and people say, 'Aw, forget it — have a drink.' It's a funny world. I'm damned glad we're saying good-bye to it."

"You won't have a coffee, then?" the captain said.

"No thanks. The caffeine in it makes me talk too much. Hey, I like this banana boat! I'll just go back to my cabin and smoke a joint."

I thought the captain's eyes were going to burst.

"Just joking," Father said.

9

THE Unicorn was moving more slowly now. I knew it from the pins on the map. I told Father this, and he said, "You keep an eye on those pins, Charlie. I've got my hands full, hiding from Gurney Spellgood and his gospelers. He prays for me to join him — I pray for him to leave me alone. We'll see whose prayers get answered."

Later that morning I was looking at the clustered pins when Emily Spellgood jumped behind me and said, "Why aren't you fishing?"

"Don't feel like it." I walked out to the deck.

She followed me, saying, "Where do you come from?"

"Springfield," I said, naming the biggest place I knew.

"I never heard of Springfield," she said. "What's their team?"

What was she talking about? I said, "It's a secret."

"We're from Baltimore. Baltimore's got the Orioles. That's my team. They almost won the World Series. I'm wearing a new bra."

I walked to the stern.

"I know why you aren't fishing," she said. "That seagull you killed took your fishing line away. You deserved to lose it, because you're a murderer. You murdered an innocent bird, one of God's creatures. They're good — they eat garbage. My father said a prayer for that bird."

I said, "My father said a prayer for your father."

"He's got no right to do that," she said. "My father doesn't need any prayers. He's doing the Lord's work. I bet you don't even have a team."

"Yes, I do. They're on television."

"What's your favorite TV program?"

This stumped me. We didn't have a television. Father hated them, along with radios and newspapers and movies. I said, "Television programs are poison." It was what Father always said.

"You must be sick," Emily said, and I felt that Father had let me down, because I did not know what to say next.

Emily said, "I watch The Incredible Hulk, The Muppet Show, Hollywood Squares, and Grizzly Adams, but my favorite is Star Trek. On Saturday afternoon, I watch the 'Creature Double Feature'—I saw Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster and Godzilla. They were real scary. On Sunday morning we all watch The Good News Show and sing the hymns. My father was on TV, on The Good News Show. He read the lesson. He lost his place and had to stop. He said the lights hurt his eyes. TV lights can give you a wicked burn — that's why all the people are red I'll bet your father's never been on a TV show."

I said, "My father's a genius."

"Yeah, but what does he do?"

"He can make ice with fire. I saw him."

"What good is that?"

"It's better than praying," I said.

"That's a sin," Emily said. "God will punish you for that. You'll go to hell."

"We don't believe in God."

This shocked her. "God just heard you!" she shouted. "Okay, who made the world, then?"

"My father says whoever it was did a bad job and why should we worship him for making a mess of things?"

"Jesus told us to!"

"My father says that Jesus was a silly Jewish prophet."

"He wasn't Jewish," Emily said. "That's for sure. You must go to a real dumb school, if you think that."

I did not want to talk about school — or God either — because I only half-remembered the things Father had told me.

Emily said, "We study communications at school. Miss Barsotti teaches it. She's got a new Impala. It's real neat — white, with red upholstery, and air-conditioned. It gets eighteen miles to the gallon. She gave me a ride, in the front seat. Our school in Baltimore has two swimming pools — one's an Olympic-sized. I've got my intermediate badge. That day — the day of the ride — Miss Barsotti bought me a Whopper and a Coke. She says her boyfriend's bionic."

This speech left her breathless. I had no school, no swimming pool, no Miss Barsotti. I looked over the rail, into the green slab of ocean, and thought, If this is the kind of creep who goes to school, Father's right. But she knew things that I did not know, she moved in a bigger and more complicated world, she spoke another language. I could not compete. She demanded to know my favorite movie star and singer, and though I had heard Father dismiss these people as buffoons and clowns, there was no conviction in my voice when I repeated what he said. She wanted to know my favorite breakfast cereal — hers was Froot Loops — and I was too embarrassed to say that Mother made our cereal out of nuts and rolled oats, because it seemed makeshift and ordinary. She said, "I can do disco dancing," and I was lost.

I said, "Your father's a missionary. You don't live in Baltimore at all."

"Yes, we do. My father's got two churches. One's in Guampu — Honduras — and the other one's in Baltimore. The Baltimore one's a drive-in."

"What kind of drive-in?"

"There's only one kind — with cars, outdoors. The people drive in and pray — but on Sunday mornings, when there's no movie. Gosh, you're stupid. You're like a Zambu."

Emily Spellgood was from that other world that Father had forbidden us to enter. And yet it seemed glamorous to me. It was something you could boast about. It made our life seem dull and homemade, like the patches on our clothes. But if I could not have that life, then I was glad we were going far away, where no one would see us.

I was saved by Captain Smalls. He walked out to a balcony on the top deck and said, "Come on up, Charlie. I want to show you something."

"I'm going to help him steer the ship," I said, and walked away from Emily Spellgood.

On the bridge, Captain Smalls showed me the compass and the charts. He let me hold the wheel and he demonstrated the sonar — schools offish showed as shadows and bleeps. Two decks down and still at the stern, Emily stood at the rail. Near her were two crewmen, one hosing water against a cargo hatch and the other swabbing with a mop.

I said, "My father invented a mechanical mop. You sort of dance with it, but it works all by itself."

"Your father seems quite a fellow."

"He's a genius," I said.

"He'd better be," the captain said. "You know where he's taking you?"

"Yes, sir."

"See the man on that kingpost on the foredeck?"

The man was on the top of an orange pillar, brushing white paint on it.

"The reason he can do that so good is because he's half monkey. They practically live in the trees where he comes from. Some of them have tails. Ain't that right, Mr. Eubie?"

Mr. Eubie was at the wheel, but not moving it. He said, "They sure do, Captain."

"That's where you're all going — where he comes from."

I looked hard at the hanging man, and I could see his resemblance to the men at Polski's.

"The Mosquito Jungle," the captain said. "Some people there have never seen a white man or know what a wheel is. Ask Reverend Spellgood. If they want to eat, they just climb a tree and grab a coconut. They can live for nothing. Everything they need is right there — free. Most of them don't wear any clothes. It's a free and easy life."

I said, "That's why we're going."

"But it's no place for you," the captain said. "Picture a zoo, except the animals are outside, and the human beings are trapped in cages — houses and compounds and missions. You look through the fence and you see all the creatures staring in at you. They're free, but you're not. That's what it's like."

"My father will know what to do."

The captain said, "Tegoose is pretty bad, but at least it's a city. I wouldn't send my family alone into the jungle to get bitten alive and grinned at and yelled at."

"We won't be alone," I said.

"I hate bugs," the captain said. "You'll never see a bug on this ship. I don't stand for them. But your father must like them a lot. Snakes, beetles, bugs, flies, mosquitoes, mud, rats." He shook his head. "And stinks."

The telephone rattled. Captain Smalls answered it and an inhuman voice on the line jabbered at him. He said "Yep" and hung up, then spoke to Mr. Eubie. "We've got some weather ahead." To me he said, "We might be in for a blow. You better run along now, but you come back and see me."

At lunch, Father asked me what the captain had said about him. "I'll bet he's been running me down, eh?"

"No," I said. "He just showed me his sonar."

"I wonder what else he got for Christmas."

Jerry said that one of the younger Spellgoods had told him about scorpions. You died if they bit you. Clover and April had spoken to one of the crew members. Clover said, "He taught us 'grassy-ass.'"

Father said, "I got bitten by a scorpion once, and I'm still here. And I speak Spanish like a native. And as for sonar, Charlie, I've read up on it, and I could teach that captain more than he could learn!"

"You're paranoid," Mother said, and left the table.

"She's mad about something," Father said. Then he looked at us. "Do you think I'm paranoid?"

We said no.

"Then follow me."

He led us to the afterdeck. Rev. Spellgood had just begun preaching from his usual place on a winch platform. He stood there, under the cloudy sky, his hair blowing sideways, squawking to his assembled family. But seeing Father, he jumped down and welcomed him. Father said we were busy. Rev. Spellgood said he had a present for him — a Bible.

"Don't need it," Father said.

Spellgood thought this was funny. He cackled and looked over his shoulder at his family. "You need one of these, brother," he said, and showed him a book covered with dungaree cloth.

"Keep it."

"This is the newest one," Spellgood said. "The Blue-Jeans Bible. A whole team of Bible scholars in Memphis translated it. It was designed by a psychologist."

Father took it and turned it over in his hand. Then he held it between two fingers as if it were soaking wet.

"There's a Spanish version, too. We use them in our parish. Those people appreciate it. The other ones, with the gold leaf and the ribbons and all the begats, used to scare the wits out of them. That's for you, brother."

Father showed it to us. The dungaree cloth was real, stitched over the cover, and there was a little pocket riveted onto the back.

"Take a good look, kids," Father said. "This is the kind of thing I've been warning you about." He handed it to Rev. Spellgood, saying, "Your kingdom is not of this world, Reverend. Mine is."

"May God forgive you."

Father said, "Man is God."

We continued past the hatches on the afterdeck to where the tall steel pillar was. The booms we had seen swinging cargo from the pier in Baltimore were secured, each by six thick cables. Father said these were the shrouds. They held the booms in place, he said, and were attached by blocks to the top of the derrick.

"The kingpost," I said.

"Sorry, Charlie. The kingpost."

"That's what the captain called it."

"Well, if that's what he called it, that must be its name," Father said. "That there's a davit, and those, as I said, are shrouds. I wonder how high you could climb on those shrouds. Think you could make it to the top?"

The skies — three portions now — were purple and pale yellow and smoked. The wind was streaked with flying spit. Clouds had drifted into gatherings of old-fashioned hats, with peaks and plumes, and the sea no longer looked tropical. It was harbor-colored and streaming with chips of froth, and seemed pushed from below by shapes like whales' shoulders and sharks' fins.

"Think you can do it, Charlie?"

As the ship rolled slowly, I saw the post and the booms and the shrouds that held them, cutting back and forth. But looking up like this nauseated me. I told Father I felt seasick. He said to look at the horizon awhile and I would feel better.

"Seasickness is just a misunderstanding in the inner ear."

"Jee-doof!" Rev. Spellgood's voice traveled to us in drawling pieces on the wind. "Loave… the Load's marcy…" And the wind moaned in the shrouds the way it did in Polski's fences on winter nights, the loneliest sound in the world, air sawing a thin cry from a wire.

I said, "It might rain."

"Water never hurt anyone."

Jerry said, "Charlie's scared."

"Charlie isn't scared," Father said. "He's studying the shrouds for handholds, aren't you, son?"

"There's a ladder on the post," Clover said.

"Any fool can climb a ladder," Father said. "But those shrouds — if you climb those, you'll be hanging right over the water."

"Up here?" I pointed to where they crossed the deck.

"No," he said, "on the outside." He gestured into the spitting wind. "That's the fun of it. Boys your age used to do that all the time on the great sailing ships."

He was testing me, as he had on the beach near Baltimore, where he had challenged me to sit on the rock. The kingpost was no higher than elms I had climbed in Polski's meadow, but the roll of the ship and the streaming white-chipped sea made my guts ache.

I said, "My foot hurts."

"Use your hands."

In a whisper, I said, "Dad, I'm afraid."

"Then you'll have to do it," he said, "because doing it is the only way of not being afraid of it. Or would you rather join those Holy Rollers and forget the whole thing?"

The Spellgoods had started a hymn, which the wind twisted into a slow-fast grunt-groan.

There were no crosswires on the shrouds. They were simple and thick — six cables angling up to the blocks at the top of the kingpost. If I shinnied them, I'd be dangling. But I saw a better method. By shinnying part of the way and then setting my feet against the far shroud I could move vertically, like walking up a wall by holding a fixed rope. It was possible.

"You're delaying," Father said. "You're just getting more scared."

"The captain might yell at me."

"So it's that fruit you're afraid of!"

Jerry said, "Let me try it, Dad."

"You can go after Charlie."

That was my incentive. In order to see Jerry try and fail, I would have to do it first. I kicked my shoes off and climbed to the lower blocks that held the shrouds to the ship's side. I pulled myself up. Father said, "Good boy." A few feet more and I was looking at the top of his baseball cap.

The wind pressed me, and the gulls, like rags gone mad, screeched at me, as if in revenge for the one I had killed. And I could hear Rev. Spellgood's high voice, leading his family in the hymn. I was only eight or ten feet up, but already the wind was as strong as on a hilltop, for the deck was sheltered by the canvas on the rail. I hoped Father could see my pants flapping, and how the wind dragged my legs out as I climbed. Halfway up, I turned and set my feet against the far shroud and wedged myself there to rest my arms, like a spider in a crack.

I was staring directly down at the sea. It was boiling under me, mostly suds, and some of the spray reached my feet. The shrouds up here played a different tune in the wind, a lonelier cry, because they were closer together. And the roll of the ship made me swing. It was the first time on this ship I had been cold. The movement and the cold sickened me, so I stared at the sea awhile. The weather had gotten so bad it was impossible to tell where the water met the sky, and this made me feel sicker. It all looked like old blankets. Gulls kept screeching at me from high up on the post, slashing at the cottony mist with their beaks.

Braced against the shrouds and trying to walk horizontal, I started off again. The shroud cables were greasy, and my hands and feet slipped in the gunk if I moved too fast. The next time I looked down, Father was tiny. This little figure on the deck was making me do this! And he wasn't even looking! I struggled against the slimy cables in the high wind and saw that I had only six feet to go. But this was the hardest part — the shroud cables were bunched together and I could not fit between them. I could see clearly the wheels in the blocks and the manufacturer's brass plate, speckled with salt, bolted to the top of the kingpost.

Now the whole white ship was pitching and rolling in a hilly black sea. I felt I could not climb any higher. I held on tightly and had another dread — that I would not be able to get down. I could only fall. Miles away, on the whitened water, a dark hooded cloud pushed like a demon through other clouds of shabby yellow. I did not know whether the spats of water hitting me were rain or spray, but their pelting frightened me and froze my hands.

"Attention!" It was the captain's voice coming over the loudspeaker. I was surprised to hear it above the wind. "Rodriguez and Santos to the afterdeck. Wear your life jackets and bring a line. Mr. Fox, stay right where you are!"

I thought he meant me, and hung on. The next thing I knew, a black man was kicking his way up the shrouds beneath me. He wore a yellow life jacket, and a rope was strung out behind him. One thing pleased me — he was climbing just the way I had, shinnying first, then bracing himself against the cables like a spider. His eyes were wide open and he was breathing hard. He appeared just under me, put his arms around my waist, and plucked me off, not saying a word. Then he wrapped his legs around the shroud and slid down, dangling me over the water like a sack of feed. His tight grip and his dog smell were worse than the sight of the sea frothing beneath us. The black man passed me to another man on deck, and that man placed me gently at Father's feet.

The captain meanwhile was shouting at Father and not waiting for answers. Who do you think you are? and Are you trying to kill that boy? and You've got no right—

But Father had crossed his arms. He defied the captain with a kind of deaf-man's smile.

"Have you got a hole in your head!" the captain yelled.

Father uncrossed his arms and looked unconcerned.

"If you want some excitement, you're going to get it, because we're in for a spell of bad weather. But if you give me any more trouble like this, I'll put you all ashore at San Juan. Now you remember that, Mr. Fox." He turned to me and said, "That was real stupid, Charlie. I thought you had more sense."

Father did not speak until the captain had stalked away. Then he said, "If you had climbed a little faster he wouldn't have seen you. By the way, you didn't make it to the top."

Jerry whispered, "Crummo."

I wished then that I had fallen off the shrouds and into the sea and drowned. They would have been sorry. And I had half a mind to throw myself overboard, but one look at the water frightened me.

It was only three in the afternoon, but the sky was blankety gray and the sea swells layered with the chips that were beaten to spittle and moved as slow as paste along the rolling slopes. I staggered, but it was not from the scare I had got on the shroud — Jerry and the twins were staggering, too.

Father said, "There's something wrong with this vessel. Look."

He took a shuffleboard puck and set it on the deck upside-down, on its shiny side. It trembled across the deck, hit a davit, and bumped a railpost on the side.

"The ship's going up and down," Jerry said.

"Just down," Father said. "She's yawing. If she was rolling properly., that shuffleboard pancake would slide back. But she's just setting there."

Clover said, "The deck's all slanty."

"She's listing," Father said. He looked up at the bridge and grinned. "That's why he's all het up. You want to go up there and ask your friend what's wrong?"

He was talking to me. I shook my head. I didn't dare face the captain after what he had said to Father about my climbing the shrouds. The captain didn't understand that this was a game we often played. And if I had done it better, Father would not have been caught and yelled at.

"He doesn't want to ask the captain," Father said. "How about you kids? You want to go up there and hear what he has to say?"

Clover said, "I want to ask you."

"That's my girl."

Mother came down the deck in her yellow slicker, holding the rail. She said, "One of the men just told me there's a storm coming. You'd better get inside — it's already rough." She looked at me. "Charlie, you're covered in grease!"

"He was climbing the shrouds — on my orders. He came down on the captain's orders."

Mother looked helplessly at Father, and with real agony. I thought she was going to cry.

"Don't you turn on me, Mother."

"Get them inside," she said.

Father said, "The problem isn't the storm — it's the ship. I imagine he sealed that bulkhead after it filled up. Couldn't pump it out. What's the weight of a gallon of water, April?"

"Eight point three three seven pounds," April squeaked.

Clover made a pouting face. "I was going to say that."

"What with the weight of a full bulkhead, and a heavy sea, some of the cargo has shifted. If the port-side pump's crapped out, he can't counterbalance by filling or emptying the ballast tanks. It's basically a pump problem. So we've got a list of about twenty degrees. See the deck? It's all uphill. You could ski down it." Father looked at me. "Some captain he is — can't keep his ship on an even keel!"

The Spellgoods were on their knees near the winch platform that had become their open-air church. They wore pointed rainhats, and the row of them looked like a picket fence.

"Come over here, brothers and sisters!" Rev. Spellgood cried. His wet hair was glued in a strip across his nose. "Pray with us awhile. Pray for the waters to subside."

"This is nothing," Father said. "It's going to get a lot worse. This far south? Probably a hurricane — probably already got a name, like Mable or Jimmy."

"Pray for the hurricane, then," Rev. Spellgood said. "Prayer is the answer."

Father honked at him. He told him to do something practical. He said the ship was listing twenty degrees and yawing.

"Prayer is practical! Prayer is an air-mail stamp on your love letter to Jesus!"

But Father went on honking and pushed us through the cabin door. He said, "Gurney's a frightened man. His Blue-Jeans Bible's got a rip in the seat of its pants. He doesn't know what's happening, so he's praying like it's going out of style. I know what's happening — bulkhead full, cargo shifted, list to port, a yaw. That's a solvable problem, if you have the know-how. Nothing to pray about. But I'm not in charge here — you heard the man. I'm a paying passenger, and I intend to play gin rummy until they ring the dinner bell, unless that's busted, too!"

He seemed very pleased, having figured out what was wrong with the ship. In the hours before suppertime, he was the only member of the family who did not look green. He even suggested a game of Ping-Pong, but the table was slanted so badly it was impossible.

At dinner that night, after the hymn of grace ("God who gave us Jeedoof's weal, Thank we for this preshuss meal" — I knew it by heart now), Rev. Spellgood made a speech. He stood up crookedly, like a man with a backache, because of the slant of the room. Though he faced his family and spoke to them, what he said was loud, and I knew he wanted everyone to hear.

This is what he said. There was once a storm at sea, and the passengers on a ship in that fearful storm were seasick so bad the stew was half knocked out of them. They were rolling on the floor like pigs, screaming and crying. All day long the storm raged and they thought Mister Death was paying them a call. Then one of these sick people saw a small kiddo who wasn't seasick and he asked the kiddo, "Kiddo, why ain't you sick, when everyone else is puking their guts out and the sea's so terrible awful?" The kiddo ups and says simply and innocently "My father is the captain " That kiddo believed; that kiddo trusted, that kiddo was different from all the oukers and spewers The others were rolling around in misery moaning and doubting and sick as dogs while this kiddo was happy as a cricket. That kiddo had a valuable thing in his heart. He had faith "My father's the captain "

That was the Christian way, Spellgood said, but his words got lumped up. He looked green and held on to his chair and pretty soon he took himself off, I think to guff. By this time, the soup had slopped out of everyone's bowl, and the dining room was silent, except for the clatter-clink of china.

"It's a nice story," Father said. "But you're green around the gills, Charlie, so I guess you don't trust that captain — ah, look who's here."

It was Captain Smalls. He looked irritated, as if he had come through the wrong door, and he did not sit down. Rev. Spellgood sneaked in after him and looked sorrowfully at his food.

The captain made a little speech. We might have noticed the weather had changed. But we would ride it out and he hoped no one would be fool enough to go out on deck, let alone climb the rigging. Here, he put his fish eyes on Father. Yes, he said, the storm was moving northeast and we were sailing southwest along the storm's path. If we moved quick enough, we'd pass through it before it got too strong. If we were slow, we'd be smack inside it. Bad weather wasn't anything unusual, but sensible precautions should be taken, like staying off the rigging and not doing damn-fool things on deck. And all glass bottles and objects should be stowed. He finished by saying, "As you know, I have no more control over the weather than a fish."

We surprised him by laughing hard, because after saying that he put on his fishiest face and gaped his mouth like a haddock.

Mr. Bummick told him he would put his loose bottles away. He explained that they were just hair bottles and jelly jars and tonics.

"And I'll empty mine," Father said. "But meanwhile what about the ship? You can control that, can't you?"

All eyes in the dining room moved from Father to the captain.

The captain said, "I am controlling the ship, Mr. Fox."

Now the attention was on Father. He turned to us and said, "I need a round object."

His hand went to Jerry's face. Manipulating casually, Father pretended to squeeze a Ping-Pong ball from Jerry's mouth. The Spellgood children were amazed, and Mr. Bummick's whole tongue drooped out in astonishment. But we had seen Father's party magic before — the card tricks, the disappearing ring, the way he won at Up Jenkins. Father, forbidding all entertainments, had had to become all entertainers.

"Thank you, Jerry," he said. "But I was going to say, Captain, how do you explain this?"

He placed the plastic ball on the table. Off it went, pock-pock-pock, between the soup bowls and across the surface, and pucka-pucka-pucka, onto the floor, and pippity-pippity-pip-pip-pip through the captain's legs, and pook against the wall near the Bummicks, where it stuck.

"Someone could break his back if he slipped on that," the captain said. "Be crippled for life."

"That Ping-Pong ball's out of harm's way, and it's staying there. Why? Because your ship is listing twenty degrees or more. Is the bulkhead full of water? Has the cargo shifted? Faulty pump? Having trouble filling your ballast tanks to counterbalance the uneven weight? I don't know. I'm just thinking out loud. But if you're controlling the ship, why isn't she on an even keel? We've been walking uphill all afternoon, and if anyone breaks his back, Captain, it's not going to be that Ping-Pong ball — no, it's going to be because he went ass-over-teakettle on your slanted decks, and I'd like to know the legal position if I end up paralyzed on account of your seamanship."

The captain looked at the other tables, instead of ours. "She'll even out," he said. "I've got two men working on it."

Father said, "Why it's listing so much it's parted my hair the wrong way! It's making the Spellgoods sing off-key, and the Reverend starts in his prayers with 'Amen.' My kids can't swallow, the blood rushes to their heads when they're sitting down. It's so slanty, my wife scratched her ankle thinking she was scratching her ear!"

Mr. Bummick held his ears and laughed so hard he brought on a coughing fit.

"He thinks I'm joking," Father said, frowning. "I'm only telling the truth. I have to do everything upside-down or it won't work. I dropped a coffee and it came back and hit me in the face. I feel like an astronaut. My stomach thinks I'm in Australia."

"That's enough, Mr. Fox," the captain said, but Mr. Bummick was still laughing and coughing.

"And look," Father said, holding up his finger stump. "Your ship's so topsy-turvy I cut myself shaving and took half my finger off." Quickly — because of the gasps of horror: it was a very ugly finger — he said, "Just joking."

The captain turned his back on Father and said, "Don't worry, folks. Everything's nailed down."

He walked to the door. His walking proved Father's point. One shoulder was higher than the other.

Father said, "I'm not nailed down, Captain."

"I can arrange it so you don't move a goddamned inch, Mr. Fox."

Father said, "I appreciate that, Captain. But I've been studying the degree of list on your ship, and my observations lead me to conclude that she's yawing."

"How so?"

"Oh, because the hull's center of lateral resistance is nearer the bow than the ship's center of gravity? Because she's veering, never mind the sway and surge? Because I don't think we'd have much luck in a heavy sea?"

He stopped talking just as a wave hit the port side, dragging the dining room sideways and flipping more soup out of everyone's bowl. The captain tottered and had to hold the doorhandle for balance.

"That sort of thing," Father said. "Now this is no time to be proud. We know it's an imperfect world. The innate stupidity of inanimate objects — isn't that how it goes? Gurney Spellgood's prayers aren't working. I think God's trying to tell us that he'll help us if we help ourselves. It's no good saying 'Don't worry,' because this is the Caribbean and — correct me if I'm wrong — this is where little storms grow up into big bad hurricanes. That's not a jumbo jet passing the porthole — that's the wind."

The captain said, "You're holding up dinner, my friend."

"Shucks," Father said — I had never heard him say "shucks" before—"no one's going to keep it swallowed long enough for it to matter. But I was saying, I think this ship is listing. Am I right?"

"It's a small problem of weight distribution."

"The Ping-Pong ball hasn't moved, so let's call it a list. It's hard to slide cargo uphill, isn't it?"

"We'll winch it."

"He admits it's shifted," Father said.

"It's a small problem."

Windborne rain sizzled against the porthole glass like a spatter on a griddle.

"All the better," Father said, "because I have a small solution. My guess is that it's a pump problem, bulkhead sealed with a few tons of the Gulf Stream, no way of redistributing the weight. Captain, I think I can help you."

"I doubt it."

"I'm sure of it. I'd like to participate. And if I can't straighten out this ship — if you're not happy with my work — you can put me and my family ashore at the nearest port."

"It might be Cuba." The captain passed his hands across his mouth. Was he smiling?

Father said, "That prospect surely ought to tempt you."

The captain was silent. At the porthole the wind and rain were like burning sticks. Finally he glared at Father but addressed the others. "You people are witnesses. If this man's wasting my time, he's going to pay for it."

"You've got nothing to lose."

"You're the only one around here with anything to lose. You and your family — God help them."

"These people are bricks."

"Mr. Fox, you're on. See me after dinner and I'll give you a chance. But you'd better eat well, because by morning you might find yourself in a strange country, where they eat people like you for breakfast."

Captain Smalls went out and slammed the door. There was silence, and no one knew where to look.

Father said, "What did I say about this ship being upside-down? All the letters in my alphabet soup are backwards!"

But no one laughed. The storm had worsened, and now everyone knew why the ship was leaning. The rest of the meal was served' quickly by staggering waiters, holding their trays in two hands instead of on their fingertips.

The argument afterward, which I heard from the in-between toilet, was about me. Father wanted me to come along. "It's an education," he said. But Mother said no. She did not want me staying up half the night and maybe banging my head in the engine room. Father said I knew more about fixing pumps than those savages, but he did not mean it; he wanted someone to keep him company. He didn't like working alone. He needed a person there to hear his speeches I would not have been much help with the work; my hands still hurt from climbing the shrouds.

Mother said, "You got us into hot water, Allie. Now you can get us out of it" — speaking to him the way she might speak to Clover.

"It's the captain who's in hot water," Father said, confident as ever. "Ordinarily, I wouldn't have offered to help. I'd like to see him laughing on the other side of his face. But I'm concerned for the safety of the passengers, and I think it's time this ship made some proper headway. Here's my toolbox. Where's my baseball hat? I can't do anything without my baseball hat."

Before he set off — and he looked the way he did as he went to work each morning at Polski's — he put his head into our cabin and said to me, "Got a message for your friend?" Without waiting for an answer, he ducked into the passageway, bumping his toolbox against the wall with each shake of the ship.

Then I knew he was doing this for my sake alone, because the captain had invited me to the bridge, because I had admired the sonar, and because the captain had yelled at him in front of me, "Have you got a hole in your head!" He had already proved that he could outquote Gurney Spellgood, and he was more than a match for Mr. Bummick, but now he was trying to outcaptain the captain.

I did not doubt that he would succeed. I had never known him to fail. People sometimes misunderstood Father, because he frowned when he joked and he laughed when he was serious. He also gave you information you did not need, like "These are davits." But those of us who knew him never doubted him. If there was one thing Father did not know, it was this: he did not need to prove himself to us. At the time, I thought he enjoyed taking risks. Yet what is a strong man's risk? He was fearless, so we were safe. I was the boy in Rev. Spellgood's story — I believed in Father. I was not afraid.

All night long the ship received the shock of waves and wind, and the sound was like the tumbling of flinty boulders against the hull. I hit my head against my bunk frame, and Clover and April cried. They woke me up to tell me they could not sleep. I listened to the rough water. It sometimes seemed as if it were sloshing across the floor and down the passageways and we were under the sea. All night in my dreams I drowned. And the morning was dark, the ship still pitched and rolled. But it did not strain anymore. Its rolling was an easy movement — not the sudden stages of dropping, all the waves hitting one side, and the downwardness of decks. It was a freer unhooked motion, a seesawing spank that sent my pencils slowly back and forth on our cabin table.

Father was not at breakfast. Rev. Spellgood led his family in "God who gave us Jeedoof's weal" and the Bummicks ate in silence. Mother cracked her boiled egg with the back of her spoon as if she wanted to give it a concussion. She said, "At least Dad doesn't make us sing."

But he came in singing. The dining-room door opened and Father entered, still wearing his baseball hat. His face was pale and whiskery and there were finger-smears of grease on his nose. He sang,

Under the bam.

Under the boo.

Under the bamboo tree!

"Amen, brother," Rev. Spellgood said.

"You can call it the power of prayer, Gurney, but I call it hydrostatics. Gaw, I could eat a horse."

He told us what he had done. He had worked until midnight repairing a pump. "The bushings were shot," he said. Then the bulkhead had been emptied of seawater. But this had only corrected the list slightly. Supervising the crew ("It was fun — like being back at Polski's and chewing the fat with those savages"), he had had them redirect the pump and empty a ballast tank and then winch back the shifted cargo containers. "One had a new Toyota in it — a huge great stupid Landcruiser, one of these Nipponese nightmares." They had not finished the job until dawn, but the ship had gained speed and had stopped yawing.

"Your friend the captain went to bed about four, when it was touch and go." Father winked at me. "Couldn't take the strain. What did I tell you about four-o'clock-in-the-morning courage?"

The waiter brought him coffee and eggs. Father spoke to him in Spanish. The man listened, clicking his teeth.

Father then said to us, "I told him he's got nothing to worry about. I've fixed everything down below. It ought to be clear sailing from now on. As for me, I'm going to hit the hay. Smile, Mother."

"I was thinking about that poor old captain. You know, you can be an awful bully."

Father put his elbows on the table and whispered, "It was wonderful the way the men were following my orders. Once I got that pump working they were on my side. Mother," he said — and his white face frightened me—"I could have started a mutiny down there!"

With Father asleep, the ship was quieter, and throughout the day the clouds softened, the storm abated, and Rev. Spellgood's voice and the gospeling were now louder than the wind in the shrouds. When the sun came out it was tropical, and it scorched all the dampness from the ship. Late that afternoon, Father appeared. He was shaved and tidy and went for a stroll on the afterdeck. Both the Spellgoods and the Bummicks asked him when we might arrive. Father discussed various possibilities. He basked in their praise and he called the crewmen by name and joshed them in Spanish.

Captain Smalls remained on the bridge. He did not invite anyone to eat with him. In fact, we never saw him again.

"He's just ashamed," Father said. "It's only natural. I suppose he thinks I've got a college education."

Emily Spellgood followed me from deck to deck. She gave me a fishing line she had stolen from one of her brothers. Father had managed to impress even this boastful girl. I spent the rest of the time fishing, with her behind me. I caught a few flat bony ones, and one with stiff upright fins like wings, and one as purple as a pansy.

Emily said, "I have to go to the bathroom."

My face went hot. I pretended there was something wrong with my fishing tackle and began to fuss with it.

"Do you have a girl friend, Charlie?"

I said no.

"I could be your girl friend."

She looked so sad and plain and lonely. And she was a few inches taller than me. I said all right, but it had to be a secret.

She touched my leg and squeezed. It was the first time a girl had ever touched me, and my leg jerked so hard I thought it was going to shoot out of its socket. She widened her eyes and in a whisper said, "Now I'm going to the bathroom to think about you."

She ran away, and I waited. I thought my poison ivy had come back, I was so itchy. I could barely see straight to fish. But the next time I saw her she was praying near the winch platform.

That was the day we arrived at La Ceiba. The sea was flat and green, and the land behind it was a range of mountains, black and blue, with clouds hanging on them in smoky rolls. We sailed toward the pier and the clouds sank farther down the mountains and into the racks of trees, revealing a ridge of peaks, some like the spiky backs of monster lizards and others like molars.