The Mosquito Coast

10

SEVEN PELICANS with dark freckled feathers flew low over the green sea in formation like a squadron of hedge clippers. Father said, "I hate those birds." There were gulls and vultures, too. "There's something about a coast that attracts scavengers," he said. There was a cow on the beach, and railway boxcars on the pier, and the low town of La Ceiba looked yellow and jammed. Hundreds of men met our ship, not to welcome us but to quarrel with each other. Everything was backward here. Father said, "You kids can go on ahead — you've got your knapsacks," but we were so alarmed by the heat and noise we waited for him to finish with the passport official and load his tools and seed bags into a black man's cart. Then we followed with Mother, who seemed to be holding her breath.

The Spellgoods, still gospeling, were met by a troop of black girl choristers in pink dresses and tipped-back straw hats. The Bummicks were hugged by people who looked just like the Bummicks — a boy, a woman, and two old men in khaki. There were wooden motor launches tied up at the pier, taking on crates of dried soup and sacks of rice. They had canvas awnings instead of cabins, and names like Little Haddy and Lucy and Island Queen.

I never saw so many people doing nothing except sitting and standing and calling names. But where the pier met the main road, they were selling baskets of fruit and greaseballs wrapped in green leaves. There was a fat black woman in a torn dress with a white cockatoo on her shoulder. She wore a dirty pair of blue bedroom slippers and was selling oranges. Father bought six oranges and said to us, "How much were these at the A and P in Springfield?"

Clover said, "Thirty-nine cents each."

"And I just bought six for a quarter. I guess we came to the right place!"

Father plunged through the crowd, and Mother said, "I love him when he's happy. Look at him go."

He hurried to the beach, and when we caught up with him he said, "I can't see anyone invading this town. I really can't imagine landing-craft on this beach. Can you, Mother?"

"Why would they bother?"

"That's what I mean."

He said he wanted to walk down and feel the sand between his toes. The black man remained on the road with our belongings in his cart. He looked as if he was used to waiting. We walked past a long low building that faced the ocean. In front of it, on the beach, a boy with a rifle was watching two other boys digging a deep pit in the sand. Father said the diggers were prisoners — that low building was the Central Jail.

"In the States, jailbirds like them are watching TV, so don't tell me digging holes is torture. They're just burying their grievances."

The cow was ambling slowly toward some shacks, her hoofs sinking in the brown sand. I had never seen a cow so skinny, and what was a cow doing here? Nearby, a dog was gnawing the skull of what looked like another dog. The sea was brown, the lazy waves flipped plastic bottles, and rags, and hacked-open coconuts onto the blackish sand. Standing at the rail of the Unicorn, I had seen this beach as dazzling white, but up close the digging prisoners, the cow, the dog snarling at the skull — all these and the stinking air gave it the atmosphere of a crusted and crazy jungle shore. The Mosquito Coast, Father had called it — it was a good name. Barefoot people watched us, but no one swam in the water. One man down the beach threw a limp round net into the low waves. Then he dragged it out, shook its sinkers, and held it in his teeth while he untangled it. And he threw it in again. I watched him do this eight times — not even a minnow. It was more washing than fishing. We could hear people calling out on the pier, and the clang of the ship's booms. The Unicom lay yellowing in the setting sun. I was sorry we were not still on it.

We trudged past the man with the net to where the shacks were banked against the beach. People lived in them, though they were no better than woodsheds and would not have done for chicken houses because of the loosely slatted boards and leaky-looking roofs. But humans were in them, cooking and sleeping — I saw their fires and their hammocks. Walking was hazardous here because of the shacks. From each back door there was a furrow of black water stretched across the sand — slime, suds, and worse, spewing into the sea. The beach was their junkyard and the sea was their sewer.

Mother said, "Allie, I've seen enough."

But walking back to the road and our cart in the twilight, we heard music. We saw a boy with a flute stumbling toward us. He played a warbling sundown song. It cast a soft spell on the beach, as purply-blue as the sky over the sea. It was a strange song, with a trickling melody, and it sweetened the air like raindrops. The boy was a shadow, and his flute no bigger than a twig, but the song was an invitation for us to stay a little longer on this Mosquito Coast. It had in it a promise and a plea, liquefied like the freshet of chirps from an oriole in a leafy tree.

Then he was gone and there were sharp voices in the sudden darkness. I was afraid. We were so far from home. Father and Mother walked ahead of us, holding hands and whispering. We children followed and I thought, What now?

Jerry said, "It's junk, it stinks, it's crappo, I hate it."

"Don't let him hear you," I said.

***

We entered the town at night, under the bright barnacled moon, and it was magic — the halos on old lampposts, the solid buildings, the sheltering trees, the half-deserted streets, and the snuffle of traffic. We went to a hotel, and from our bedroom the town was like velvet. I imagined the whole place to be made out of green pillows, creepy-quiet and cool. I dreamed of meadow grass and rolled over, put my arms out, and flew in buttery light over places I knew. I could often fly in my dreams — not high, but high enough so that people had to watch me with upturned faces. It was a lovely night and coming at the end of that stormy sea voyage, it was like arriving home.

But in the morning, birds I could not name yattered against the windows, and in the darkness of the dusty room cracks of sun showed in the shutters. I opened the shutters and saw that the town was burst open by the sunlight. It was cracked and discolored and mobbed by people actually screaming above the braying car horns. There was no magic now, nor even anything familiar. The smells and sounds were an idiot argument I could not win, and it was so hot I could smell the old paint on the windowsill. I had been fooled, and hated the sight of it. It had taken so long to get there — even if we left now it would be days before we could get back to our own house.

Mother and Father were in another room. We kids looked out of our own window at the town of small stores. There was a heavy whitewashed church across the palm-tree park in which men in hats were standing, doing nothing. The radio music in the street — the street! — was so loud the noise seemed to heat the air. I remembered the dismal beach, the boy prisoners shoveling sand, and one up to his shoulders in the hole. I had expected trees, jungle, stillness, and flitting birds. Father had promised us something better than home, not this dusty place. It was like a nightmare of summer ruin, a town damaged by sunlight.

The hotel smelled of its carpets and its kitchen. The room in which our four beds were stuck was a bare cell, but on one wall was a colored picture, probably cut from a gas-station calendar, of a New England scene — woods, a pond mirroring a green mountain, and a red canoe on the pond. Whoever cut it out and pasted it into the frame knew that it was prettier than this town. Jerry said, "It looks like Lake Wyola."

Father roused us. He blew cigar smoke into our room and said he was famished. "He's still happy," Clover said. But as we approached the hotel dining room for breakfast, we heard singing—"God who gave us Jeedoof's weal…" It was the Spellgoods, they were also staying here, singing with bowed heads over their helpings. Emily stopped scratching when she saw me. The dining room of this hotel was like the dining room on the Unicom, the Spellgoods at two tables, we at ours, and some Bummick-like fruit-company workers at other tables, all starting breakfast.

"Here you are, Mr. Fox," Rev. Spellgood said. "I guess the good Lord intends for us to team up after all! If you're going to be in the area any length of time, you scoop up your family and pay us a visit. You'll find us in Guampu, doing the Lord's work."

"The Lord hasn't mentioned Guampu to me," Father said. "I wish He would get in touch, though. I could give Him a few pointers if He's planning any other worlds. He certainly made a hash of this one."

Rev. Spellgood said sadly. - Friend, there's a lot of work to be done."

"So I noticed."

"You never did tell me what you're aiming to do here," Rev. Spellgood said.

"You're absolutely right, Gurney. I never did tell you." With that, Father sat down, and we had breakfast, which was mashed beans, like red clay, and a small square of damp goat's cheese, and a heap of hot tortillas.

Father said, "We're getting out of here."

"This town?" Mother asked.

"This hotel. Half the people in this room are packing guns. Even old Gurney's got one — he's wearing a pistol under his shirt. So much for putting on the whole armor of the Lord. I've been outside. It's all soldiers and shoeshine boys. I don't know which is worse, them or the missionaries."

Across the room, Emily Spellgood was staring at me.

"I don't see why we have to hang around," Mother said. "We could be on the road."

"There aren't any roads — that's the beauty of this country," Father said. "But we're not the Swiss Family Robinson, and we're not squatters. I'm going to buy a piece of land, cash down. I don't want any of these gunslingers giving me the bum's rush or stealing my soul at gunpoint. After that we'll be on our lonesome, and I don't care if — oh, Gaw, here he comes again."

It was Rev. Spellgood, leading his family out of the dining room. He winked at Father and said, "Guampu."

Emily sneaked behind my chair and whispered, "I'm going to the bathroom, Charlie."

"Charlie's blushing!" Jerry said.

We moved that very day in pelting rain to another hotel, called The Gardenia, at the eastern edge of La Ceiba, on a sandy road next to the beach. Still the rain came slapping down, tearing the leaves off the trees. It was straight, loud, thick, and gray, and it stopped as quickly as it began. Then there was sunlight and steam, and a returning odor.

The Gardenia was a two-story building covered with stucco in which cracks showed through the faded green paint. Its long piazza faced the sea and gave us a good view of the pier, where the Unicorn was still tied up. That ship was my hope. Men's voices and the racket of conveyor belts and bucking freight cars carried across the water. During the day, we were the only people at The Gardenia, but at night, just before we went to bed, women gathered on the piazza and sat in the wicker armchairs drinking Coca-Cola. Later, there was music and laughing, and from our room I heard men and shouts and slamming doors, and sometimes glass breaking. I saw this crowd though I was often woken by it — by tramping feet and songs and screams. In the morning, everything was quiet. The only person around was an old woman with a broom sweeping the mess into a pile and taking it away in a bucket.

The manager of this hotel was an Italian named Tosco. He wore a silver bracelet and pinched our faces too hard. He had once lived in New York. He said it was like hell. Father said, "I know just what you mean." Tosco liked Honduras. It was nice and cheap. You could do anything you wanted here, he said.

"What's the president like?" Father asked.

"He is the same as Mussolini," Tosco said.

This name darkened Father's face, and with the shadow of the word still on it, he said, "And what was Mussolini like?"

Tosco said, "Tough. Strong. No fooling." He made a fist and shook it under Father's chin. "Like this."

"Then he'd better keep out of my way," Father said.

Father spent part of every day in town, and while he was there, Mother gave us lessons on the beach, under thundery skies. It was like play. She wrote with a stick on the damp sand, setting us arithmetic problems to solve, or words to spell. She taught us the different kinds of cloud formation. If we chanced upon a dead fish, she poked it apart and named each piece. There were flowers growing beneath the palms — she picked them and taught us the names of the parts in the blossoms. Back in Hatfield, we had studied indoors, to avoid the truant officer, but I preferred these outdoor lessons, studying whatever we happened to find on the beach.

She was not like Father. Father lectured us, but she never made speeches. When he was around she gave him her full attention, but when he was in town she was ours. She answered all our questions, even the silliest ones, such as "Where does sand come from?" and "How do fish breathe?"

Usually when we returned to The Gardenia, Father was on the piazza with someone from town. "This is Mr. Haddy," he would say. "He's a real old coaster." And the prune-skinned man would rise and creakily greet us. There was nothing Juanita Shumbo didn't know about rearing turkeys — she was an old black woman with red eyes. Mr. Sanchez had splashed up and down the Patuca — he was tiny and brown and had a crooked mustache. Mr. Diego spoke Zambu like a native, Father said, and he made that man sneeze a Zambu salutation. There were many others, and each of them listened closely to Father. They were respectful and seemed, sitting nervously on their chairseats out of the sun, to regard him with admiration.

"He's wonderful with strangers," Mother said. But the strangers made me uneasy, for I had no clear idea of Father's plans, or how these people fitted in. I wished I had Father's courage. Lacking it, I clung to him and Mother, for everything I had known that was comfortable had been taken away from me. The other kids were too young to realize how far we had drifted from home. Except for the Unicom, still at the pier, the past had been wiped away.

Coming back from the beach one afternoon, we saw Tosco at the hotel, talking to his Chevrolet. He asked it questions and called it improper names. He stood near its radiator grill and shouted and cuffed it and finally rocked it with a kick.

"She stupid," he said, wagging his foot in pain. "She no want to go. She hate me."

"My husband will fix it."

And that evening, with one of his new friends — it was Mr. Haddy — Father did fix it. He said machines had bodies but no brains. Mr. Haddy stared, as if Father had said something wise. Tosco was so grateful for the repair work he said we could use the car anytime we liked. The next day, Mother said she wanted to take us for a drive, while Father was occupied in town. Were we going to Tela? Tosco asked. No, Mother said, we were going east, toward Trujillo. Tosco laughed. He said, "You will come back soon," and gave Mother the keys.

"Which road do I take?"

He said, "There is only one."

We drove through town and at once I could see that it was both richer and poorer than I had guessed. There were chicken huts, like the shacks on the beach, but also large houses and green lawns. The best of them were surrounded by fences. That was the strangest thing to me, because the Connecticut Valley was a land without fences, except for horses and cows. It reminded me of what Captain Smalls had said about Honduras being like a zoo, only the animals were outside and the people inside the cages. But so far, we were outside.

From this town road we came to the flat main road and turned left. We went less than half a mile before the road became rutted and filled with broken rocks. Ahead was a bridge across a river. It was a railway bridge, but there was no other. Cars took turns using it. Mother waited and then drove along the planks and railway tracks of this girder bridge. Below us, women were washing clothes in the cocoa-colored river.

Beyond the bridge, the road gave out entirely. It was a wide mud puddle that seeped through the door frame, then a narrow track, and finally not a road at all, but a dry creek bed in which the rocks were higher than our front bumper.

"This is the end of the line," Mother said.

We were a mile from The Gardenia.

We tried other roads. One ended at the beach, another at a riverbank — the same riverbank as before — and a third became a quarry, which was part of a mountain. At the end of two of those roads, skinny barking dogs jumped at our windows. It was a town of dead ends.

"I'm not giving up this easily," Mother said. We drove toward Tela, on the road to the west. The mountainsides were full of slender palm trees, and beneath them, where the land was flat, there were banana plantations and grapefruit trees and fields of spiky pineapples. Mother stopped the car, so that we could study the way bananas grew, but when we got out of the car we saw a congregation of vultures in the tall grass of the road's shoulder. They were bald-headed and watching a dog chewing the pink ribs of a dead cow. The dog had eaten his way under a rugflap of skin. The cow must have been hit by a car, Mother said, and the carcass pushed into the grass. Every so often a vulture would jump out of the flock — there were twenty-three in the congregation — and snatch at the hanging strips of meat and try to gouge them away. But the dog, growling and chewing, kept the vultures waiting, and most of the time these horrible-looking birds stared like witches in skullcaps. Their wings were like dragging skirts.

Farther along this road we saw a dead dog. Five vultures were tearing at a hole in his belly. The vultures shuddered their wings and hopped aside to let our car pass. Then they returned to the dog's body. Clover and April said it was making them sick, and could we go back? So we did, without seeing Tela.

That was Honduras, so far. Dead dogs and vultures, a dirty beach, and chicken huts and roads leading nowhere. The view from the ship had been like a picture, but now we were inside that picture. It was all hunger and noise and cruelty. Next to this, the grapefruits hardly mattered, and the sunshine only made it worse. Was it for this Father had swept us away from home?

Back at The Gardenia, Father was sitting on the piazza with another man — not one I had seen before. Seeing Mother, the man stood up unsteadily, and when he spoke, spit flew out of his mouth.

"I am talking to your husband," he said. "He is crazy."

"Crazy like a fox," Mother said.

There was a crack of thunder and a sizzle of rain on the roof. It was sudden and straight down, making poke marks in the sand.

"This is the prettiest woman I see in my life," the man said.

Mother said, "You're not very old. Maybe that explains it," and took the kids away.

"Stick around," Father said to me. "Meet Mr. Weerwilly. We're talking real estate."

"Good, good," the man said.

"This is my oldest boy, Charlie."

Mr. Weerwilly cocked his head at me and said, "But I am German, so I call you Karl. You know what, Karl? This man is crazy."

I looked at Father. He was grinning. I said, "No."

"Yes! He is crazy! I tell him this is a rotten country. He says he likes it very much. This is crazy. You know, Karl, this is the last colony in the world, and I am one pee-sant in it. How many Germans here? Not more than twenty. But sousands of Americans — sousands!"

"Not in Jeronimo," Father said.

Mr. Weerwilly said, "He sinks Jeronimo is wonderful. This is crazy. He doesn't know Jeronimo. Jeronimo is not wonderful. It is better than La Ceiba, that is true. Four hundred dollars for one acre? It would be much more here."

"You heard him, Charlie," Father said, and set his eyes on Mr. Weerwilly.

"When the road comes up, the price comes up," Mr. Weerwilly said. "I have no money. I am a pee-sant. I have to sell you my land." He began to laugh. "But what can you do in Jeronimo?"

"I can do what I want."

"You do not want very much."

I hated this man, I hated his loud voice. His thick tongue crowded his mouth and interfered with his words. He snatched at my knee and spit flew off his blubbery lips.

"I am working with my hands alone," he said. "The fruit company has machines. If I want to clear some land or thumsing I use a machete. The fruit has bulldozers. The fruit can spray insecticides from helicopters. Me, I have a little pump. The fruit pays the worker too much — two lemps a day. What can I do? For a stalk of bananas I get one lemp— one dollar only. One cent for an orange, and a grapefruit — one cent." He gargled his beer and said, "That is why I am starving. Ptooi."

Father said to me, "He's not starving. He's got my money in his pocket."

"You are crazy," Mr. Weerwilly said.

I said, "I think I'll go inside."

"You go, Karl," Mr. Weerwilly said. "Bye-bye."

"Stay where you are," Father said to me. "Ask him if he's got my money in his pocket."

I began to ask, but Mr. Weerwilly made an ugly clownish face at me and squeezed my leg. "Know why I like this man, Karl? Because he hates the fruit. And because he is not a missionary. And he can make sings."

"Songs?" I said.

"Sings!" Mr. Weerwilly said. "He tells me how I can carry water up to my terraces. Even my friends don't tell me that. So I like him. Also, he pays cash."

"You're the witness, Charlie," Father said. "Remember that."

"But we are different," Mr. Weerwilly said. "You are an American imperialist. You take my land. I am a poor Communist, just a little pee-sant. I have to sell you. Now I have my house and some few trees."

Mr. Weerwilly went on talking. He repeated himself and lisped and spat and drank beer. The time passed slowly. Why did Father insist that I sit here, with the rain spattering around us?

Mr. Weerwilly said, "But I know why you are taking that pretty woman and those children to Jeronimo. Because you are crazy."

"You heard the lady," Father said. "Like a fox."

"And here you can buy food for nothing. You wear a shirt only. You can get a girl for five lemps."

"Watch it, Weerwilly," he said, and gave the man a wild grin.

Father pointed angrily with his blown-off finger and made Mr. Weerwilly flinch. I suppose the man mistook Father's blunt finger on the fist for the barrel of a gun. Mr. Weerwilly's hand went to his shirt.

Father said, "Charlie, ask the man where his contract is." I asked this question.

"Sank you," Mr. Weerwilly said. "You help me to remember this sing." He took an envelope from inside his shirt and let it plop on the table.

Father tore it open. But I was not looking at him. I was staring at Mr. Weerwilly. When he parted his shirt to remove the envelope, his hand had brushed a black leather holster that was strapped across his chest.

"He is in such a hurry."

Father said, "It looks like a Harvard diploma."

"Spanish," Mr. Weerwilly said.

"I can read," Father said.

I could not take my eyes off the holster bulge in Mr. Weerwilly's shirt.

"He sinks I cheat him."

Father read it closely, frowning, pushing his finger stump across the page. Then he said, "It's been a pleasure to do business with you."

Mr. Weerwilly finished his beer and belched. He stood up and gripped my hair and twisted my head so that I was facing him. He smiled at me in his ugly way and said, "Perhaps he is not so crazy."

Then he laughed, touching the bulge in his shirt.

When he had gone, Father said, "Thanks for sticking around, Charlie. Isn't he a sad case? He was drunk. I didn't think he was going to give it to me. He could have walked away with my money." Father folded the paper and returned it to the envelope. "He was playing hard-to-get."

I said, "He had a gun."

"Correct. He thought he had the drop on me."

"Weren't you frightened?"

He took my hand tenderly. His own hand was hot and gummy and trembled over mine. He said, "Nope."

He let go and reached for the envelope.

"I got what I wanted."

"Some land?"

"Jeronimo," Father said.

"A town?"

"Wipe that grin off your face," he said. "It's a small town."

The rain squittered on the roof and beat on the hedge of hibiscus flowers, making the blossoms nod. It blackened the sand and drummed on Tosco's Chevrolet, and thunder boomed on the inky sea.

"Still," Father said, "I'll be the mayor."

We sat until the rain let up, then Mother and the kids joined us, and Tosco served us our dinner here on the piazza.

Jerry said, "We saw a dead cow," and told Father how a dog had been eating it by the roadside, watched by vultures "with beaks like potato peelers." Clover and April described the dead dog on the road, and the vultures there, jostling to peck pieces out of the carcass. Clover said, "They kept on beaking him until it made me feel sick."

"Father's not impressed," Mother said.

"I can't bear those birds."

Mother told him about the roads, how you drove on ruts and trenches, how you had to cross a railway bridge on the slippery tracks and loose planks, and then it was too rocky to go any further; how one road led to a quarry and another to the sea, and how the roads were not roads, and how after less than a mile you came to trees, or a dog, and usually a dead one. The roads led nowhere.

"I'll drink to that," Father said.

Clover said, "And people go to the bathroom on the street. Yes," she protested, because April had started to giggle. "I saw one!"

"That's good for the rhubarb." Father said.

"All we saw was bananas." Clover said.

"He's still smiling," Mother said.

"Tell them the news, Charlie."

I said, "Dad bought a town."

"A small one," he said.

"You're joking," Mother said.

"Here's the deed," he said. "And I can show you the place on a map. The name's right there in black and white — looks about the size of South Hadley. A drunken German sold it to me. He tried to grow bananas there, but lack of transport made the whole thing uneconomical. Anyway, he was probably drunk as a dog — I wouldn't send him out for sandwiches. He was glad to get rid of it. Best of all, the whole thing's secret. There's no road, and no one goes there. There's a few savages, but apart from them, only sunshine."

Jerry said, "I'll bet there's a dead dog there."

"Maybe a live dog," Father said. "But no dogcatcher. No policemen, no telephone, no electricity, no airfield — nothing. It's about as unimportant as a place can possibly be. That German was damning it, but it all sounded like praise to me. You talk about starting from scratch. Well, Jeronimo is scratch."

"How do we get there?" Mother asked.

"Don't confuse me with trivial questions," Father said. "But I've said enough. Except for that German, there's not a single soul between here and the Land Office who knows where we're going. From that point of view, it's better than a desert island." Up went his finger stump. "Mum's the word."

Just then, a car drew up to The Gardenia and parked in a puddle. Four women in bright dresses got out. They had long black hair and carried handbags. They walked across the piazza to the bar at the end. I recognized their laughter.

"Here come the ladies of the night," Father said. "This meeting is adjourned."

Tosco approached Father as we were leaving to go to our rooms. He thanked him again for fixing his car, and repeated that we could use it anytime we wished.

"You're a gentleman," Father said.

Tosco said, "But you don't need a car now, eh? I hear you buy Jeronimo." He kissed his fingertips. "Is beautiful, Jeronimo."

The nighttime noise was worse than usual, and it racketed almost until dawn. Then I looked across the sparkling harbor to the pier and saw that the Unicorn had sailed.

The disappearance of the white ship left me feeling helpless and half blind, as if a handy thing had been tricked out of my head. It was hope. I had felt safe because the ship had been there — we could go home. Now I felt abandoned.

After that, I never left Father's side. I made every excuse to accompany him into town. I sat patiently in stores and warehouses while he bought equipment he said we would need in Jeronimo — hardware, he called it, pipes and fittings. The fruit company was selling it cheap, he said. I did as I was told and usually found myself squatting in the shade of a tree with the man named Mr. Haddy, while Father — inspecting racks of copper pipe or old boilers — gave his junk dealer's speech about taking this scrap off their hands and saying he didn't have the slightest idea what he was going to do with it.

"Seems a shame to throw it away," he said, and acted as if he pitied them for having it and would do them the favor of removing it.

I had heard all this before, but still I stayed near him. Our last link with America was broken with the sailing of the Unicorn. Father had been partly right when he accused me of siding with Captain Smalls — I had felt that old man would take care of us, and I had sometimes felt the same about Tiny Polski.

But now Father was in sole charge. He had brought us to this distant place and in his magician's way surprised us by buying a town, and half a warehouse of copper pipe, and an acre of old boilers.

"These are the raw materials of civilization," he said. But I did not care about that. I just wanted to be near him. I feared the recklessness of his courage and I remembered the German and the gun. If he dies, I thought, we are lost. Whenever he was out of sight, I got worried and did not stop worrying until I heard him whistling, or singing "Under the Bam, Under the Boo." He noticed me tagging after him. Often, he stooped over and said to me, "How am I doing?"

I said fine. But I did not know what he was doing, or why. I only knew that whatever it was, he was doing it among the savages.

11

"WHAT YOU taakin about?" Mr. Haddy said. He was frogfaced and so bucktoothed the two front ones were bone-dry from sticking out. "The water is camera in the night."

"Not where I come from," Father said. "It's the same, day or night. So let's go."

Mother said, "Whose boat is it, anyway?"

Mr. Haddy was still protesting to Father. "I don't say you water is camera in the night — I say this water. Is mighty rough in the day, and sometime she rain like the devil. But in the night she a baby."

He licked his words lazily and spoke in a flat voice, with hiccups of emphasis, and he lapsed into Creole when Father became unreasonable. "No bin yerry, dat the way it is? Tonda pillit me!"

"Just get us out of here," Father said.

"Besides," Mr. Haddy said, "it take us the whole entire day to load up this dum cargo on me lanch."

"Shake a leg then!"

"And she mightna fit," Mr. Haddy said. "All them iron wares."

"We'll experiment."

Mr. Haddy looked at Mother. "You man is a good one for spearmints, Ma."

It was not hard to move our belongings from The Gardenia to the pier where Mr. Haddy's launch, Little Haddy, was moored. The bags of seeds, the camping equipment, the toolboxes — we trucked them over in one trip. But the boilers and pipes were another matter. At last, this heavier cargo came in a boxcar from town, trundling along the main street rails of La Ceiba and down the pier, gathering a procession of people behind it as it went.

"This spearmint bound to sink me lanch," Mr. Haddy said. "She gung sink it, she gung."

The Little Haddy was a wooden motor launch with a steering wheel inside a flat-topped booth at the stern. It had forty feet of open deck, part of it shaded by a canvas awning. Rubber tires hung over its hips for bumpers. Its paint was peeled and chipped and showed gray salty planks. Green fur grew on the hull below the water line, and it was altogether the sort of boat I had seen scuttled on mud flats or overturned above the tidemark on the Massachusetts coast. Even its ropes had the bleached and flimsy look of junked lines. Some of its deckboards had sprung up and freed the caulking, and in many places it was smeared with tar. The hold was so shallow Mr. Haddy had to kneel and bump his head to stow our gear, and it was quickly filled. The rest — the boilers, three of them, and the pipes — was to be roped to the deck Each time something was hoisted on board, Little Haddy groaned and settled lower in the water and seemed to blow its nose.

The people from town who had followed the boxcar stood in its patch of shade and watched Father and Mr. Haddy loading. Father knew several of the onlookers by name. He joked with them in Spanish and English. Less than a week in La Ceiba and already he was known in a friendly way, respected even, although no one on the pier made a move to help him truss up this cargo and swing it onto the launch.

Father howled from the effort of lifting, and said, "They don't care if I rupture myself."

"But you could stay here, Uncle," one of the watchers said.

"I wouldn't stay here for anything," Father said. He guided a bundle of copper pipes onto the deck, where they broke apart and clattered against the wood.

"She a nice place, La Ceiba."

Father said, "No place for kids."

"So many kids here!"

"Why is it," Father said, walking toward the people and letting the sweat dribble off his face, "all these people growing fruit, picking it, wrapping it, loading it, canning it, and everything else — why is it they're all so damned puny? I'll tell you why. They do everything but eat it! I've never seen so many shrimps in my life. Skin and bones, that's all I see. Admit it, you're weaklings."

The people laughed and sort of cowered in the shadow of the boxcar. The noon sun beat on the iron pier, and at the end of it, where Jerry and the twins were playing, the pier was watery from the heat shimmer and as wavy as the sea. Pelicans drooped on posts, the shoreline blazed. Here, sunlight came down hard and jangled against the sand.

"It's a company town," Father said. "A one-crop economy and a one-company crop. You can keep it. But I'm not going to let my family starve here."

"We not starving," one man said. "We strong folks fo' too-roo."

He was a big man, with a rag tied around his head, and green tattoos on his arm muscles, and even in his bare feet was taller than Father.

"You're funny-bunnies and shrimps," Father said. "You eat too many hamburgers, you polish your rice, you use white sugar. What you people need is vitamins. You" — he said to the big man, as he poked him in the chest—"you need lead in your pencil."

The man laughed out loud. He didn't mind Father's abuse. He flexed his muscles for the crowd.

"Okay, Samson," Father said. "Want to do an experiment?"

"Another spearmint," Mr. Haddy said, "and we still ain't loaded me lanch."

"How many pushups can you do?" Father said to the man.

"Sumsun!" yelled another man.

The big man said, "I could lift that tub nah."

"Sure you can. You could scream it up and tip it over and probably manage to take all your toes off. But how many pushups can you do, ape-man?"

Mother said, "Be careful, Allie."

Mr. Haddy took her aside and said, "That big feller don't wuth a dum bit of good."

"Clear a space," Father said. "Give this gentleman air."

In the middle of the ring of onlookers, who shouted encouragement, the big man started. Father squatted in front of him and told him to touch his chin and keep his back straight. Father counted as the man cranked himself up and down. Then the man fell flat with a grunt and could not raise himself again.

"Twenty-two," Father said. "Not bad, but look at him — he's incoherent." He hugged Mother and said, "My young bride could do that many before breakfast."

The man rolled over and picked himself up. He was narrow-eyed from panting, and he looked slightly crippled from the strain.

"Hold these," Father said. He handed me his baseball cap and his cigar.

"Puppysho," Mr. Haddy said — puppet show. In Creole it meant silly or foolish.

Father rolled up his sleeves and got into position on the pier, the ramp of his back already soaked with sweat. Pumping his arms rapidly, he did twenty-two, while the onlookers counted. He stopped a moment, grinned at the big gasping man, and did twenty-eight more. "Fifty!" he said. Then he did twenty-five more. When he stood up, his face was red and he was winded, but he said, "That's seventy-five for starters. I could do lots more, but there's work to do."

They loved him for that, and when he went back to loading the launch, eight men came forward to help. They spent the rest of the afternoon shifting the hardware with Father and Mr. Haddy.

"It's a funny thing," Father said to Mother. "They're helping me because they think I'm strong. If I was weak they wouldn't lift a finger. You'd think it'd be the other way around. And you're wondering why these people are savages?"

"I wasn't wondering," Mother said, and went to collect the kids.

"On the other hand," Father said, "it doesn't matter if a fellow's a savage, as long as he's a gentleman. Remember that, Charlie." Then he boarded the launch, chuckling to himself.

Night fell. The town was kinder looking. Small lights burned on the pier, and windows shone in the harbor offices. The palms, so spindly and ragged during the day, had feathery heads, and these dark umbrella plumes sheltered the cozy buildings. Some blood-red sunset streaks were still bent across the mountains to the west. The town was tucked beneath. It lay flattened, a pool of tiny lamps in the darkness, and some dim spangles glimmered from the lighted huts on the mountainsides.

Jerry was yawning miserably on Mother's lap — he was too big to be comfortable there — and the twins were already asleep under the awning. It was ten o'clock. It had rained twice since mid-afternoon, and still the lightning flashed on the sea in sudden bursts. It seemed cruel to have to leave the town at this late hour. We were an early-to-bed family, and it was way past bedtime. I envied the people in the houses I could see — the ones at the windows and even those I imagined swinging in hammocks in the shacks next to the beach. It did not excite me to be on this narrow boat and listening to the sea floppine against its wooden hull, I sat on a box and shivered. Mother lay down with Jerry and the twins — they were all in sleeping bags. I looked ashore. I did not want to leave here.

The motor had been stuttering slowly for the past hour. Mr. Haddy lifted a trap door, reached inside with a long-handled monkey wrench, and brought a loud rat-tat from the engine that made the broken deckboards shake. The gasoline fumes choked me.

Father said, "I've seen eggbeaters with better motors than this. Listen to it misfiring. Call that integrity?"

"What are those birds?" I said. I had been watching them since sundown. They had small sharp bodies and flat wings and careered around the pier's lights, darting like swallows.

"Some sort of nocturnal bird," Father said, but he had not looked up. He was still frowning at the engine noise.

"Them's bats," Mr. Haddy said.

Hundreds of them — enough to darken the lights. Now I was eager to shove off in this boat.

Father went forward. He said, "We're about ready, Mother. I made you a coffee on the cookstove."

"I've been ready all day," she said. "The kids are asleep."

Mr. Haddy whistled fuzzily through his buckteeth. He said, "Yerry me, Ta Taam?" and a man who had been sleeping on the pier rose up like a disturbed insect and untied the ropes and threw them onto the deck. Mr. Haddy blew out his cheeks and jammed a lever down — it was an iron stick in the wheel house, like a gearshift on a tractor — and Ta Tom gave the boat a push with his foot. We were off, making for the black sea.

"Yep. Them's bats," Mr. Haddy said.

He leaned out of the wheel house.

"Wish we was gung to Utila," he said.

I asked him why.

"It's only two hours. Santa Rosa's ten." He hung his long fingers on the wheel.

I said, "I thought we were going to Jeronimo."

"Jeronimo's in the jungle. You don't see no lanches there. Just fellers with tails."

"Don't interrogate the man," Father said. "Mind if I take a turn at the wheel, Mr. Haddy?"

Mr. Haddy did not budge from the wheel. In fact, he tightened his grip on the spokes. He said, "Against regulations."

"Which regulations?"

"Of me lanch. I'm the steerer, you's passengers."

"Take a walk," Father said.

Mr. Haddy stayed where he was.

Father said, "I know every lunar star in both hemispheres. I'm master of the quadrant and sextant. I could take a meridian altitude of the sun from its reflection in a tar bucket."

"Regulations," Mr. Haddy said.

Father said, "And how many pushups can you do?"

This made Mr. Haddy laugh. But he did not let go of the wheel. He crowded it and put his nose against the dirty glass of the wheel house.

The echo of our engine reached us from the palms on shore and rang against La Ceiba's iron pier as we rounded it to head east, into deepest night.

Father said, "We've got gas, we've got food, we've got all our stuff. Plenty of drinking water and no perishables. I'm damned glad to be going. No offense, Mr. Haddy, but that town is no place for children."

We looked back. Even our little distance had leveled the town and drawn it fine. It was a shallow puddle of light beneath the shadows of mountains and the mops of storm-silvered cloud.

"You know where you gung, Fadder."

"Mr. Haddy, we're going home. Give me the wheel and we'll get there in one piece."

Mr. Haddy hugged the wheel and steered us through the moonlit corrugations of sea. Father sighed. He licked a cigar — it was a long Honduran cigar. He had a whole basket of them. He set it alight, and the flame that spurted from its tip showed his fiery eyes to be burning on Mr. Haddy.

"First deep-sea boat I've ever seen without a compass aboard," he muttered. "Lucky thing I brought mine. But I'm not telling you where it is."

There were small huts along the shore, flickering like lanterns under the tall palms. Then a greater darkness and tinier lights, and no shore but a blackening slope of land and sea and scanty flames in the mounting pitch.

"I know what you looking at. Charlie," Mr. Haddy said. "It ain't carkles."

I did not say I was looking at the punctures of light on the shore.

"When I was a little one," he said, staring with me at the shore, "we live back of Brewer's Lagoon. That's where I learn Zambu — the Indian black fellers teached it to me. Along about one night, was a big disturbance in me room, a locomotion, fluttering and flapping. I woke up and called me ma, 'Ma, come quick! Something happen!' She come in with a torch and say, 'Puppysho! You wasting my time — dreaming bout Duppies' Duppies is your own ghost. Then she went all over gray. 'What that blood on you pilla?' she say, and did she screech. I look at the pilla and it is red. Blood! She axed me was my head all right. It was bleeding, but I couldn't feel nothing."

"Why were you bleeding?" I asked.

"'Hah!' me ma say, and she stamp on the floor, and a bat as big as a jacketman floops into the wall. After she chase it away, she look again at me head. That big old bat had been sucking my ear and making tooth holes in it. And the blood is squirting out. And they is bat-shoo all over me room. And the bat-shoo smell like mung."

He widened his brown-flecked eyes at me.

"I know what you looking at. Bats."

I had not been, but now I was.

Father was silent, smoking, looking as if he wanted to tear Mr. Haddy's hands off the wheel.

"I know a feller," Mr. Haddy went on. "Bat sucked his toe, while he is asleep. Oh, bats, they just go at you. Big as pillas theirselves, some of them, out there. Down Bluefields way they come big as antsbears, bite through your cloves."

In the dark wheel house I could see his dry teeth, white as paint, and hear him trying to whistle through them.

"Fruit bats," Father said.

"Oh, sure, fruit bats," Mr. Haddy said. "And all the other kinds."

"They eat bananas," Father said.

"But if they ain't get their bananas, they just go at you."

"Tell us about the sharks," Father said.

"I seen some sharks," Mr. Haddy said.

"Big as dogs?"

"Bigger."

Father pointed with his finger stump and said, "That's north, Mr. Haddy."

"I could have told you. I know north like I know me own name."

"Right now," Father said dreamily, "someone over there in America is painting yellow lines on a road, and someone else is wrapping half an onion in a blister of supermarket cellophane, or putting an electric squeezer down the garbage disposal and saying, 'It's busted.' Someone's just opened a can of chocolate-flavored soup in a beautiful kitchen, because he can't get his car started, to eat out. He really wanted a cheeseburger. Someone just poisoned himself with a sausage of red nitrate, and he's smiling because it tasted so good And they're all cursing the president. They want him re-tooled."

Father was silent a moment.

Mr. Haddy said, "That sure is north."

"There," Father said, facing the darkness, "there's an interior decorator, probably a funny-bunny, standing in the lobby of a bank. He's been hired to redecorate it. The bank is failing. It needs depositors. Maybe a new lobby will help. But the decorator doesn't know what color to paint it, or where to put the geraniums. He says to the banker, 'What do you want this room to say?' "

"Not too sure about that," Mr. Haddy said.

"Someone's thinking up a new name for corn flakes," Father said. "Someone else just died of them."

"That ain't good," Mr. Haddy said.

"But we're going home," Father said.

"Ever I tell you bout the tiger and my ma and the yampi?"

"Tell me, Mr. Haddy. But give me that wheel first."

Mr. Haddy said, "I will never give you this wheel. I am the captain, I am the steerer, this me own lanch."

Father was silent. He sometimes gave off a smell when he was angry, and I had a whiff of that now, a little glow of tomcat steam.

"You's a passenger." But Mr. Haddy's voice had lost its boldness.

"If I was the passenger type, I'd be over there," Father said. He pointed north, toward the United States. "Go to bed, Charlie."

I unrolled my sleeping bag near Mother and crawled in. The engine vibrated against my back. The mass of stars overhead was like a swell of sea shiners — a million tiny star smelts drifting dead on the sky tide.

It was darker when I woke than it had been when I turned in. There was a close clammy blackness around the puttering launch, and no stars. The bundle of sleeping bags nearby told me that Jerry and the twins were still asleep. A small light burned in the wheel house.

Father was steering. Mother was beside him with a map, and Mr. Haddy was nowhere to be seen. With his hands on the wheel, and the lantern light distorting his face, Father looked eager and impatient. I asked him where Mr. Haddy was.

"Threw him overboard," Father said. "He couldn't take the strain."

How much did I trust Father? Completely. I believed everything he said. I even looked off the stern, at our foaming wake, expecting to see the teeth in Mr. Haddy's drowning face.

Mother said, "He's kidding you, Charlie. Mr. Haddy's asleep."

"Sent him to bed," Father said. "Gaw, I wish we had one of these boats."

He had a dead cigar in his mouth, and he worked the wheel with spread fingers, his firelit face against the wheel-house window.

Behind him, Mother held lightly to his shoulder, her white hand keeping him back, the way she had restrained Jerry and the twins at the rail of the Unicom. Her face was pale, enclosed by smooth straight hair and without any expression. Her dark eyes mirrored the darkness ahead and seemed to absorb the lantern flame. She was calm, but Father was hunched forward as if straining to break free of her grasp. He had shadows of muscle knots in his jaw, and his face twisted to make sense of the darkness. His eyes shone with certainty, like glints of shellac. He was active and watchful. He did not turn his eyes — he turned his whole head when he wanted to see aside.

Father and Mother remained in this posture, not speaking, for some time, and the longer I looked the more they seemed like a wild man and an angel, and this boat an example of the kind of life we led, plowing through dark water with black jungle on one side and deep sea on the other, and moonless night above us.

But I did not see the jungle until later, after Mr. Haddy woke and told me we were passing the "haulover" at the Guayamoreto Lagoon, just past Trujillo.

Then the darkness, which was like fathoms of ink, softened, became finely gray, and, without revealing anything more of the sea, turned to powder. All around us the powdery dawn thickened, until, growing coarser and ashy, in a sunrise without sun, it threw us glimpses of the soapy sea and the shoreline and the jungle heaped like black rags of kelp. Soon the sun was an hour high on the naked level shore.

"Fadder steering me lanch," Mr. Haddy said in amazement. But he was the only one on board who was surprised that Father had taken charge. "He make himself captain last night. I complain it breaking regulations, but it ain't do a dum bit of good."

I think we were all secretly glad of this, and the fact that Father was steering another man's boat through an unfamiliar sea to a foreign coast was proof that he could do anything.

"Oh, Lord," Mr. Haddy said, as a lightning bolt was printed briefly on the mist. Bearded clouds flushed with light, then faded. There was a dead pause, then a thunderclap, the nearest thing I had heard to a bomb, and soon the sea around us was pricked by raindrops as big as marbles. Dawn streaks and storm clouds met in this wide sky above the tropical sea, the sun pushing the slanting storm to the shore. The rain did not fall evenly. We made our way in the launch east along the coast through these bowed contours of driving rain — now beating on Father's ironware and the whole deck awash, now silent and all the wet boards blackened.

Except for the light swell, the sea was as calm as it had been when we left La Ceiba. The clouds parted — a whole sky of them above the flat sea, moving aside and changing in shape, columns of them, and roofbeams, collapsing and shouldering their way to the shore. The sun broke through and dazzled us. It was fire-bright and very hot, the lower rim of its saucer still dipped in the dishwater cloud, and when it burst upon us it brought steam and stinks from every plank of the sodden launch.

"We be in Santa Rosa for breakfast," Mr. Haddy said. "She ain't far — maybe half an hour. You can almost see her."

"I've got news for you, sir," Father said. "We're going to have breakfast right here. Look what Mother and I caught, while the rest of you were dead to the world—"

He leaned back and drew a line of striped fish out of a basket. Mr. Haddy called them sheepshead fish. They were strung through their gills, five plump ones.

"Now you gut those fish, Mr. Haddy, and Mother will start the cookstove. The kids will clear the deck and we'll have us some real food. Or would you rather put into Santa Rosa and eat last month's beans?"

Mr. Haddy took the fish and started slitting them. Up ahead, Jerry and the twins had crawled out of their sleeping bags and were rubbing their eyes. Mother set out a basin of fresh water, so we could wash, and then she fired up the cookstove (this was a steel barrel, cut in half, with a grid over the top), and she put the coffee on.

"I'll tell you another thing," Father said. "We're not stopping at Santa Rosa."

Mr. Haddy was opening the sheepsheads like envelopes and pinching out tube clusters of gray guts. With some of this slimy spaghetti on his fingers he said, "First you say you ain't want to go to Trujillo, because you ain't want to see no missionaries. Now you make me into a fishmonger and say we ain't gung to Santa Rosa. Nothing wrong with Santa Rosa, for hell sake."

Father said, "I've been looking at the map."

"Fadder and his map," Mr. Haddy said. He scraped the fish as if he were punishing them and punishing his thumb, and sent the tarnished silver scales flying across the deck.

"I didn't say we're not going there," Father said. "I said we're not stopping."

We ate the fish under the foredeck awning because of the occasional squalls. Mr. Haddy cut a fishhead open, and in its brain was a fragment of a clear substance, like glass, a knuckle of it. Father decided to wear it around his neck. "Like a Zambu feller," Mr. Haddy said, and then he told us to look up. There, under long chutes of rain, were a jetty and some yellow buildings and the green stripe of jungle shore. Mr. Haddy said, "That is Rosy there."

It was, Father said, a dark insult on the green Mosquito Coast, no more than ten low buildings and a church steeple. Steam and smoke, red-tiled roofs, and half a dozen kids on a jetty.

"We stop at Rosy?" Mr. Haddy said.

Father said, "I never stop until I get where I'm going."

"If I am steering this lanch, I land back there, Fadder," Mr. Haddy said. He looked at me sadly. The whites of his red-rimmed eyes were stained with brown blotches. We had passed the jetty and the beach. Mother told him not to worry. He said he was not worried, but he was pretty confused.

"Keep your shirt on," Father shouted from the wheel house.

The twins were at the bow. "You can see the bottom," April said. And Jerry hurried forward for a look.

"I ain't even know why 1 ain't steering," Mr. Haddy said. "I always steered before. Look — that brown surfy water — that is the rivermouth. Now what the man doing?"

There was a break in the shore, and at this wide opening a river current met the rising tide. The surf rushed sideways spilling silt onto sandbars. Further on I could see sticks and branches beating down toward the sea.

Father swung the launch onto this brown inland tide. A fisherman standing knee-deep in green breakers cast his net over the water and waved to us. Little Haddy nosed into the current, sending up spouts on either side of the bow.

"This ain't the way, Fadder!" Mr. Haddy cried. He was still seated, frowning near the leavings of our breakfast, the fish bones and bread crusts and coffee cups. "Him no yerry," he mumbled. "Him no keer."

He got to his feet and went to the wheel house to complain.

"Please, Mister. This ain't no cayuka. This is a lanch!"

"Sit down," Father said.

"I'm the steerer," Mr. Haddy said. "I ain't steer up these rivers."

"That's no ordinary river — that's a flood," Father said. "It's funny. First time I saw Santa Rosa on the map I didn't notice the river, and when I did notice it, it looked small. It was the rain that gave me the idea. She's in flood. There's enough water in this river to take us most of the way to Jeronimo."

"It ain't for lanches! We get broke on a rock-stone!"

"He doesn't trust me," Father said.

"If you don't lose me license, you lose me lanch. Oh, my hat!"

The launch had started bucking in the current, throwing the awning from side to side. The old iron clanked and rubbed. "Allie!" Mother cried, as she was soaked by a shower of spray. Now the boat seemed light, and it tipped easily in the surf of the rivermouth. I held tight, fearing that it would go over.

"I can't do this alone," Father said. "I need your help, Mr. Haddy. Now hop up there to the bow and if you see any rocks, you give me a shout. We're fighting the current, so there's no sense cutting the engine down. Now what do you say" — more spray hit the wheel-house window—"are you on my team or not?"

"Another spearmint," Mr. Haddy said. He was not smiling. "Ain't like these rivers. Fellers up there in that jungle — black fellers — they got tails!"

It was the Aguan River, Father said, and on the Santa Rosa bank people had started to gather, maybe thinking that we were going ashore. They carried baskets of fruit, bunches of coconuts, and straw mats. When they saw us heading into the middle of the stream and moving against the floating branches and the debris of broken cane stalks, they sang out, calling us to shore. Their tottering dogs yapped at us, too.

We traveled on, past the settlement that lay behind Santa Rosa, the sloping shacks and the huts on stilts and the rows of overturned canoes on the riverbank. We passed the gatelike entrance of a green lagoon, and pushed on, struggling in the river that brimmed at our bow. It was hotter here, for the sun was above the palms and the storm clouds had vanished inland. There were no mountains, or even hills. There was nothing but the riverbank of palms and low bushes and yellow-bark trees, and the sky came down to the tree-tops. The high muddy river had flooded the bushes on the bank.

Mr. Haddy hung over the bow with a sounding chain. He was singing sorrowfully and showing us the seat of his pants. From time to time, he called out "Rock-stone to port!" or "Rock-stone dead ahead!" The ocean was astern, and then we turned on a riverbend and it was lost to view, gone with the fresh breeze and the sting of salt and the fish smells. We were enclosed by jungle on the short reaches of the river, and each tree shrieked with birds and insects. They were loud, like the sound in your ears when you eat potato chips. The launch took on a different character. At sea it had seemed dilapidated and very small. But here, furrowing up this narrow river, it seemed large and powerful, its engine booming against the banks, startling the herons and chasing the butterflies aside.

"Look at the road hog," Father said, as Mr. Haddy jangled the chain at a man in a canoe. Mr. Haddy was pointing out birds to Jerry and the twins and catcalling to women who paused in their clothes-scrubbing on the gravelly parts of the bank to watch us pass.

"They never see a lanch here before," Mr. Haddy said.

Mother said, "How far are we going?"

"Until we hit bottom," Father said.

We managed fifteen miles or more, traveling upriver until noon, before Mr. Haddy began shouting about rock-stones all around. He didn't give signals, he just howled. The water was not so muddy here — I could see eels and schools of tiny fish on the gravel bottom. In places there was barely enough room between the banks for the launch's width to squeeze through, and the rapid water slowed us and splashed onto the deck.

It was on one of these narrow twisting canals that I saw the men in the trees. I took them for rooty stumps, strange boulders — anything but men. Their heads were propped on branches, and some were squatting under bushes, black shiny-skinned men. Some knelt, facing away from us. We were so close to them I could not tell Father without their hearing me. Some held sticks and spears and fishnets, but they were silent and did not threaten us.

I went to the bow, where Mr. Haddy was hanging over. He saw them, too — he was staring into the trees. Then an old black man, wearing only a pair of khaki shorts, stumbled from the water to the bank carrying a bucket.

"How is it?" Mr. Haddy said.

He was speaking to the man.

The man dropped his bucket against the mud bank, spilling its contents of fish.

"Zambu," Mr. Haddy said. "Ain't have no tail."

But saying so, he had taken his eyes from the river and let the sounding chain go slack. There was a bump under us — the launch was thumped from beneath and the twins were thrown to the deck. Jerry said, "I bit my tongue!"

The launch turned aside, thrust away by the current, and tilted, tipping over the cookstove. We were stuck fast. At once the engine stalled, and the flotsam of river branches piled up against the hull. Father kicked the smoldering cookstove into the river and it sank in its own steam.

"End of the line, Mr. Haddy," he said. "Ask that gentleman where we are."

Mr. Haddy did not ask. He watched the kneeling man gathering the fish and called back to Father. "This here is Fish Bucket!"

Then as the river scarfed around us, seven or eight men appeared on the bank, all black, with big heads and wearing shorts and carrying nets and sticks. Father jumped from the stern with a line. He was waist-deep in water and scrambling to the bank.

The men watched him securing Little Haddy to a tree. They stepped back a little, as if to give him room, although they were thirty feet away.

Father spoke to them in Spanish, in a friendly voice.

They stared. They seemed to understand, but they did not reply.

"How is it?" Mr. Haddy cried from the bow.

"Right here," one of the men said.

Father said, "They speak English?" He began to laugh.

This pleased the black men. They opened their mouths to watch him laugh.

"Good morning, Fadder. My name is Francis Lungley. Kin we help you?"

Father said, "Hey, I've been looking all over for you!"

12

JERONIMO, just a name, was the muddy end of the muddy path. Because it had once been a clearing and was now overgrown, it was thicker with bushes and weeds than any jungle. In other ways it was no different from fifty bushy places we had passed on our walk from the Zambu riverbank that Mr. Haddy called Fish Bucket. It was hot, damp, smelly, full of bugs, and its leaves were limp and dark green, "like old dollar bills," Father said.

Jeronimo reminded me of one time when we were in Massachusetts, and fishing. Father pointed to a small black stump and said, "That's the state line there." I looked at this rotten stump — the state line! Jeronimo was like that. We had to be told what it was. We would not have taken it for a town. It had a huge tree, a trunk-pillar propping up a blimp of leafy branches with tiny jays in it. It was a guanacaste, and under it was a half-acre of shade. The remnants of Weerwilly's shack and his failure were still there, looking sad and accidental. But these leftover ruins only made Jeronimo seem wilder this wet afternoon.

One other thing was a smoking chair in the grass, an armchair, sitting there smoldering. Its stuffings were charred and some of its springs showed and its stink floated into the bushes. This burned chair, useless and fuming, was as unimportant as the place itself, and the only person who was sure, we had arrived at our destination was Father.

The twins sat down and bellyached. Jerry's face was red from the steamy heat. Jerry said, "I'll bet he makes you climb that tree, Charlie. I'll bet you chicken out."

But Father had walked into the chest-high bushes. His baseball cap was turned sideways and he was shouting.

"Nothing — nothing! This is what I dreamed about — nothing! Look, Mother—"

Mother said, "You're right. I don't see a thing."

"Do you see it, Charlie?"

I said no.

He was still punching his way through the bushes.

"I see a house here," he said. "Kind of a barn there, with a workshop — a real blacksmith's shop, with a forge. Over there, the outhouse and plant. Slash and burn the whole area and we've got four or five acres of good growing land. We'll put our water tank on that rise and we'll divert part of the stream so we get some water into those fields. We'll have to lose some of these trees, but there's plenty more, and anyway we'll need timber for a bridge. I figure the house should face east — that will give us those hills and the morning sun. I see a mooring down there and a slipway to a boathouse. A couple of breezeways to the left and right of the main house will make us showerproof The ground's plenty high enough but we'll raise the house to be on the safe side and use the underneath for a kitchen. I'd like to see some drainage back there — I smell a swamp. But that'll be easy Some three-foot culverts will do the trick, and once we've got control of the water we can grow rice and do some serious hydraulics. The hard part is the plant. I see it in that hollow, a little downwind. We can take advantage of that fuel growing there — they look like hardwoods. It'll be a cinch to get it off the slope—"

All this time, under the guanacaste tree, the Zambus and Mr. Haddy were putting their loads down. Mr. Haddy pulled his shoes off and frowned at Father's voice. Father went on talking, staking out the house, marking his proposed paths, and dividing the land into beanfields and culverts. We had arrived ten minutes before.

But even Father's booming voice could not make Jeronimo mean more than sour-smelling bushes in an overgrown clearing.

The Zambus saw it their own way. There were hills behind it, and a stream running through it. The Zambus called the hills mountains — the Esperanzas — and the stream a river — the Bonito — and Jeronimo, to their bloodshot eyes, was a farm — the estancia. These grand names were all wrong and imaginary, but they were like the names of the Zambus themselves. The half-naked jabbering man, pointing to the narrow creek and calling it the Bonito River, called himself John Dixon. It was the fierce woolly-headed one in the torn short — Francis Lungley — who told us the name of the mountains, and the dumbest one, Bucky Smart, who called the rusty hut the estancia.

They could call it anything they liked, but I knew that Jeronimo was no more than a tin-roofed hut in a bush patch, a field of finger-bananas that had collapsed with beards of brown smut disease. Over here a broken rowboat and over there some cut-down tree trunks that no one had bothered to saw into cords. What fenceposts there were had turned into trees again, a row of short saplings that might have been a pigpen, alongside the mud and fever grass and that armchair smoking poison.

Father came back saying, "It's beautiful."

Just then, a scabby black pig hoofed and humped through the grass and ran past us. The Zambu Bucky stood up and made an ugly face at it, as if he were going to murder it with his front teeth. He followed it with his face, then shrugged and squatted on his ankles. He must have been tired — he had carried first Clover, then April, all the way from Fish Bucket.

"That there is a white-lipped peccary," Mr. Haddy said.

"Worry," Francis Lungley said.

"I'm not worried," Clover said.

"That is what these boys call them — worries. It is a name. One here means maybe fifty or a hundred more in the woods."

"Weerwilly must have lived in that shack," Father said. "What a hole. I wouldn't be caught dead in that dump."

"Any case," Mr. Haddy said, looking his froggiest as he turned to Father, "there is some folks already inside, so they save you the trouble."

Football faces in the window of the rusty hut stared white-eyed at us through vines of climbing flowers.

"Morning-glories," Father said, and ran to the hut.

The faces retreated a little as Father picked a bugle blossom and said, "What's your name?"

"Maywit," was the trembly answer.

"He telling him the name of the flower," Mr. Haddy said. "That is the flower, Maywit, not the folks. Folks' name probably Jones. Jones of the jungle. Jones the chicken-man." Mr. Haddy clawed his scalp. "Wish I was on me lanch. But Fadder went and ripped a hole in her bum."

Father was still trying to coax answers out of the hut, but the faces had gone from the window.

We pitched our tents under the spreading branches of the guanacaste tree and built a smoky fire, as Father directed, to keep the mosquitoes away. Mother sorted our belongings and food bags and hung them on branches, out of a rat's reach — we had already seen two. The knapsacks and tents reminded Father of shopping in Springfield He got Jerry to tell the story of how American camping equipment was made by slave children in China and Japan. Father interrupted and gave his war-in-America speech, but the Zambus laughed in the wrong places.

As we began to eat, Mr. Haddy said, "Here come Jones the chicken-man."

It was the Maywits, carrying plates of fruit — limes, bananas, avocados — and handfuls of cassava, and a calabash of something they called wabool. These they timidly presented to Father, who distributed them to us, saying, "This will keep your bowels open!"

He showed Mr. Haddy an avocado and said, "Two bucks at the A and P. Two lemps for one!"

"Butter pear," Mr. Maywit said nervously.

"How is it?" Mr. Haddy said.

"Right here," Francis Lungley said.

"Am naat taakin to you," Mr. Haddy said. "You," he said to Mr. Maywit. "How is it?"

But he was too frightened to speak up.

Father said, "I want you all to meet our friends and neighbors, the Maywits."

They gaped at us, we gaped at them. This family too was a father, a mother, and four children. But the smallest child was naked and being carried like a knapsack by one of the girls. They were our reflections — shrunken shadows of us. The man was short and had brown barklike skin, and the woman was chicken-eyed, and the kids had dirty legs.

"That is you actual name — Maywit?" Mr. Haddy said.

Father said, "Pay no attention to this interloper."

The man said "Ow" in agreement. Then he blinked flies from his eyelids and said, "We was just going out of you house, Fadder." He pronounced it "huss."

"You're not going anywhere," Father said. "You're staying put. I've got some work for you to do."

"More spearmints," Mr. Haddy said, and made the Zambus giggle.

"You want some work?"

The man said he didn't mind. He made wild eyes at his turned-up toes.

"That's your house. You can have it as long as you make yourselves useful," Father said. "I've got a house of my own over there, beyond the culverts and the breezeways, just above the mooring and to the left of the barn, where it meets those beanfields."

Ain't see no huss, someone said softly. The Zambus and the Maywits and Mr. Haddy flicked the bushes with their eyes, searching for the things Father had named. There were no culverts, no breezeways. There was no barn, there was no house or beanfields. Then they looked at his finger.

"Just cause you ain't see it," Mr. Haddy said, "don't mean it ain't there," and had a fit of laughing.

Father was still smiling at those same bushes when Clover said, "Dad, there's some ants trying to get into my tent."

"Ants all over this place," Mr. Haddy said. "Tigers, too. Some of these baboons bigger than a grown-up man. And I step on monkey-shoo on the path."

"Them is wee-wees." This was the chicken-eyed woman, Mrs. Maywit.

"Yep, them's wee-wees." Mr. Maywit pinched an ant in his fingers and flicked it away. He did not do this disgustedly, but gently and with a kind of sorrow.

"You listen to these people," Mr. Haddy said. "They know what they talking. They lives here. Axe me anything bout the coast, but don't axe me jungles."

And this was true. Mr. Haddy was a coastal big shot, his voice snickered and mocked in this jungle. Out of his element, he clowned.

"They carries leafs," Mr. Maywit said. "But they ain't hot you."

Father said, "Tomorrow I'll make a platform for those tents, and some insect traps. I don't want ants and spiders crawling all over my kids."

Mr. Maywit said, "You from Nicaragua, Fadder?"

"He ain't from no Nicaragua," Mr. Haddy said. "What make you say that?"

"They got some trouble there. Last people come through. Had some ruckboos. They was from Nicaragua." He spoke in a slow puzzled way, as if he had just been woken up and was struggling to be interested in his own words.

"We're from the United States," Father said.

Mrs. Maywit sighed in appreciation, and Mr. Maywit said, "That is another place, for true."

Father plumped his hand on the spongy ground. "But this is our home now," he said. "You think this is a foreign country?"

Mr. Maywit shook his head. No, he did not think so.

The air around us was soupy green, like the water in a fish tank, and green shadows rose as the sun dropped.

Mother said, "Do many people come through here, like those people from Nicaragua?"

"Some preachers, Ma," Mrs. Maywit said, staring at Mother with her chicken eyes. "Churcha God. Jove as Wetness. Shouters."

"And Dunkers," Mr. Maywit said.

"And Dunkers."

"If we get any of them," Father said, "I'll show them the door. When we get a door!"

"Never mind," Mr. Maywit said.

The sun was now behind the hills, and though the sky was still lighted, green shadows had crept up to our tree. Jeronimo had more substance in the dark. It had sounds — insect crackle, bird grunts, the river's watery mutter — and these sounds gave it size, and the odors shaped it. At its furthest edge a Jeronimo bird blew softly in a tree.

Father gave a little speech in the filling darkness.

"We came here in three jumps," he said. He told them how we had left home in a hurry and gone to Baltimore, then La Ceiba, then on the Little Haddy. He made it sound adventurous, but it had seemed accidental at the time, and not much fun. "What were we looking for? I'll tell you," he said. "We were looking for you."

He named everyone present, even the silent Zambus who had carried the seed bags and metal pipes from Fish Bucket. Somehow, he knew their full names. What was remarkable to me was that he had not slept for two days. He had loaded Little Haddy and done seventy-five pushups on the pier and steered along the coast and up the river and then led us all in single file along the path to Jeronimo. He was strangely energetic and talkative when he had gone without sleep.

Jerry and the twins were asleep. Mother was nodding off. But Father walked up and down in the green firelight and whacked the smoky air and said that he was happy, and had plans, and was glad there were so many people here to witness this historic moment.

He said he did not believe in accidents.

"I was looking for you," he said. "And what were you doing? You were waiting for me! If you hadn't been waiting, you would have been some other place. But you were here when I came. I need you good people, and I've got the feeling that you need me."

Everyone agreed that this was so.

Francis Lungley said, "I go down to that river. I ain't know why. I just have to go. Then I see that old lanch fetch over."

"That is why I looks out the window," Mr. Maywit said, in the same mystified voice. "I ain't know why. I sees this man from Nighted Stays. Standing in the grass. That is why."

Mr. Haddy said, "I have a dream. Bout a man. And this is the man, wearing the same cloves as the man in the dream and a peaky hat. I meet him in my dream."

But I knew that what Mr. Haddy said was a fib. He had told me himself that he had met Father on La Ceiba pier and thought he was a missionary from the Moravian Church. I did not contradict him now, because the mood around this Jeronimo campfire had become solemn.

"I was sent here," Father said. "I'm not going to tell you who sent me, or why. And I'm not going to tell you who I am or what I aim to do. That's just talk. I'm going to show you why I'm here. You go ahead and watch. And if you don't like what you see, you can kill me."

Tiredness had made his voice harsh. He hissed this again ("You can kill me"), then let it sink in. There were murmurs. Mr. Haddy scratched his big toe and said he would not dare do such a thing as kill Father, though he was sure hoping to get his launch fixed pretty soon.

Father resumed, saying, "I didn't come here to boss you around. I came here to work for you. If I'm not working hard enough, you just tell me, and I'll work harder. You come up to me and say, 'Mister, you've got to do a whole lot better than this.' I'm working for you people, and you're going to see things you've never seen before. What do you want me to do first? It's up to you."

No one spoke.

"You want some food?" Father said. "You want a bridge and some beans and a paddle pump and a chicken run?" Mr. Maywit cleared his throat.

"I heard you," Father said. "I'll obey. And those Indians up in the hills are going to look down here and they're not going to believe their eyes. They're going to be absolutely feverish with amazement."

Every listener was transfixed. The only sounds were from the jungle, and here and there a smack when mosquitoes were slapped. Beyond our tents and our little fire, the jungle was black. The blackness screeched, it grunted — it had risen up and wrapped us in its noise and in its sweet-sour folds. The hidden insects were excited and the darkened trees made a sound like brooms.

"Now let's get to bed," Father said, "before we all get bitten alive."

But he remained by the fire.

"Ain't you sleeping?" Mr. Haddy said.

Father said, "I never sleep!"

***

The next day we planted the miracle beans. Father made a ceremony of it. He lined up the men and had them dig with homemade shovels — planks that Father had planed into blades. Mr. Haddy did not dig. He said, "I ain't a farmer — I am a sailor." And Father said, "He doesn't want to get his prehensile fingers dirty." The men stood shoulder-to-shoulder, stabbing the dirt. It was not difficult. The German Weerwilly had had a garden here — most of his beanpoles were still standing.

By mid-afternoon we had turned over an acre of weeds. Father dragged out his bean seeds. They were called miracle beans, he said, because they were a forty-day variety. The first ones he planted he gave names. "This is Captain Haddy," he said, and held up a bean. "This is Francis," and he held up another one. Then he poked them into the holes. "This one is Mr. Maywit. This is Charlie. This is Jerry—"

He straddled the furrows and when he ran out of names, he planted faster. Half the field was miracle beans, the rest was Wonder Corn and tomatoes and peppers — the seeds we had bought in Florence, Massachusetts. It rained in the afternoon. Father said he had been expecting it. That was part of the ceremony, too, he said.

Mother said to him, when we were alone that night, "Aren't you laying it on a little thick, Allie?"

But Father just laughed and said that it had been his intention to get us out of the States and save us. He had not thought that he would be saving other people as well. Yet that was what had happened. If we had not come here, these people would have been bone-idle, and the vultures would have made a meal of them.

"I want to give people a chance to use their know-how," Father said.

The following day, he asked Mr. Maywit what his occupation was.

"I been a sexton in my time. Up in Limon," Mr. Maywit said. And he explained. "Polish the brasses, make em shine. Set out vesmins. Hang the numbers on the board. Tidy out the pews."

Father looked discouraged.

"Also I kin do some barbering."

"Hair cutting?"

"Cutting and dressing. And ironing hair. And twisting. Heating it flat. And I know how to wax — flows."

Small night rats, called pacas, gnawed through the corners of the nylon tents. We ate the pacas. They were good-tasting, and Father said it was poetic justice. We made a wooden platform for the tents to keep their floors dry and hold the tents straight — the stakes had not held in the wet ground. Down at the river we made a trap that funneled fish into a wire cage, and from a simple roof and frame and some of the mosquito netting we built a mosquito-proof gazebo where we could congregate. These were gadgets, not inventions, but they made life more comfortable, and within very few days I could see the skeleton of a settlement in Jeronimo.

Every evening, the Zambus turned their backs on us and crept into the jungle. Every morning, looking wrinkled and damp, they reappeared. They had a camp there, Father said. Toward the end of the first week, Mr. Haddy left Jeronimo with some of the Zambus. Mr. Haddy did not come back immediately, but the Zambus did, towing log rafts on harnesses Father had made for them. On these rafts were the last of our supplies from Little Haddy.

The boilers, the tanks, and the rest of the scrap metal were dragged away and stacked. Some of the pipes Father used for his first real invention at Jeronimo — a simple paddle wheel that moved a belt of coconut cups up a tower on the riverbank and filled a drum with water. The height of the drum gave it enough force to pipe the water anywhere we liked, but most of it went to an enclosed shed that became known as the bathhouse. We washed clothes there, and took showers, and boiled water for drinking, and altogether it improved our lives.

The excess water flowed through a stone culvert and under the bathhouse to a privy at the edge of the clearing, where our latrine stood. The privy was always clean, but the Maywits' latrine was mucky and so fly-blown that Father said, "Anyone who uses that throne is Lord of the Flies."

The first invention, a pump made on the spot, was a piece of primitive technology. The Maywits and Zambus were greatly impressed by its flapping and splashing, but they said they could not understand why Father had made such a thing in the rainy season, when there was water everywhere.

"We're building for the future, the dry season," Father said. He said it was a civilized thing to do. "And know why it's a perfect invention?"

"Cause you ain't have to walk down there with a bucket," Mr. Maywit said.

"That's blindingly obvious," Father said. "No, it's perfect because it's self-propelled, uses available energy, and it's nonpolluting. Make one of these up in Massachusetts and they'd have you certified. But they're not interested in perfection."

Some days later, after a heavy rain, the river rose and the paddle wheel was torn off its brackets and rods. Father strengthened it with metal straps and it continued to supply us with water and went on sluicing the latrine.

Each time he made something, Father said, "This is why I'm here."

It was Father's policy that no one should be idle. "If you see me sit down, you can do the same," he said. But he even ate standing up. Part of the beanfield was divided into plots — one plot for each kid, who had to keep his portion weeded. There were other tasks assigned to us, such as collecting firewood and keeping the fish trap mucked out. And when our chores were done we were to gather stones the size of hen's eggs and use them for paving the paths. So there was always something to do, which was perhaps just as well because it took our minds off the heat and the insects. And the uncertainty, too, for though Father said confidently, "This is why I'm here," we did not know why we were, and were too scared to ask.

The work in the first few weeks was mostly land clearing. The process of clearing the land of bushes and small trees revealed more of Weerwilly's activities and uncovered some of the implements he had abandoned. We found a plow and bales of chicken wire and any number of small tools, a lantern that worked pretty well, and an oil drum with enough fuel in it to last us for months. These discoveries filled Father with enthusiasm and convinced him that Weerwilly had failed because he was careless, like the people in America who junked perfectly good lumber and wire. And he said that if the Maywits had been a little sharper, they would have found this stuff and used it themselves to improve the place, instead of playing Lord of the Flies.

One day, following some of the Zambus who were clearing land, I came upon a bird jerking in a clump of grass. But it was not the grass that held it — it was a web, a thick wet spider web, like a hank of wool. I knelt down and untangled it, and I had let it go before I thought to look for the spider. Then I saw it — as big as my hand, and brown and hairy, and matching the color of the fever-grass roots. The Zambu Bucky said it was a Hanancy spider and not only did she catch birds but she ate them as well, and she would eat me too if I was not careful. The bird, a peachy-gray color, was one that Bucky said just came a few weeks in the year. I guessed it was a migratory bird, too innocent to be wary of the spiders in the jungle grass. It worried me to think that we were a little like that bird.

There was everything in this grass — scorpions, snakes, wire, chicken bones, mice, pacas, wine bottles, ant nests, and shovelheads. We cut the grass so that mosquitoes would not have a place to breed, but in the process we often found other useful things. For example, while the clearing went on (it was supervised by Mother, who was infected by Father's desire to shave the whole of Jeronimo and rid us of bugs), Mr. Maywit and Father were digging postholes for our new house. Father kept saying that what they needed was a posthole digger. Later that day, Francis Lungley clanked his machete against a metal object. He brought this thing to Father, who said it was the business end of a posthole digger.

He worked its blades, which were like jaws, and said, "All she needs is a couple of handles and we're on our way."

It took him less than an hour to get it working.

"I needed a posthole digger, and a posthole digger was found. Now I ask you — was this accident or was this part of some grand design?"

The best find in all the land-clearing was a stack of wood, cut into planks. Father said it was the best grade of mahogany — so good, he said, that he had half a mind to make it into a piano. It was too heavy for the house, but he said he knew just what to do with it. It was put aside, and the snakes swept out of it, and it was left to dry.

"Find me some more of that lumber over there," he said, and that same day some more wood was found. The Zambus laughed, because it was right where Father said it would be.

Mother worked alongside the Zambus, wearing one of Father's shirts, with her hair done up in a scarf. This was Father's idea — he said that none of the Zambus would stop working while a woman was on her feet cutting brush. Soon, most of Jeronimo was slashed and burned. It looked as though a battle had been fought there — black land, black stumps, steam and smoke issuing from cracks in the earth. Mr. Maywit's rusty hut stood hanging with morning-glories on an island of its own banana trees. What was to be our house was a rectangular corral of thirty posts sticking about six feet out of the ground. Once the floor was set on these posts, the cooking apparatus was moved to it from the guanacaste tree. This underfloor part of the house became our kitchen.

Some corrugated iron sheets were uncovered in the land-clearing. But Father did not like the look of them, and for a number of days he went upriver with three of the Zambus to cut bamboo. He left early in the morning, and an hour or so later the bamboo in eight-foot lengths would appear, floating down the river into Jeronimo. These were brought ashore by the other Zambus, the Maywits, and Mother. But most of the carrying was done by the river, Father said. He had a genius for simplifying any job.

These bamboos, about five inches thick, were carefully split in half and smoothed inside to resemble gutters. By laying them over the roof beams and fitting them like tiles — locking them together lengthwise and cupping the line of grooves with an overlapping series laid face-down — a completely watertight roof was made. Father was so pleased by this, he sang.

Under the bam!

Under the boo!

He made the walls in the same way — we had four rooms and a porch, which Father called the Gallery. The whole thing had overhanging roof eaves, like an enormous birdhouse.

Father was so taken up with the house and the work projects in Jeronimo that our lessons stopped. Mother said they were neglecting us. They ought to be spending some time with the kids, she said. What happened to our education?

"This is the very education they need," Father said. "Everyone in America should be getting it. When America is devastated and laid to waste, these are the skills that will save these kids. Not writing poetry, or fingerpainting, or what's the capital of Texas — but survival, rebuilding a civilization from the smoking ruins."

It was his old speech, War in America, but now he felt he had a remedy.

The Maywits and Zambus regarded the bamboo house as a miracle.

Father said, "They don't paint pictures, they don't weave baskets or carve faces on coconuts or hollow out salad bowls. They don't sing or do dances or write poems. They can't draw a straight line. That's why I like them. That's innocence. They're a little touched with religion, but they'll get over that. Mother, there's hope here."

During the house raising, Father encouraged us to watch him with the Maywit children. Clover and April got on well with the Maywit girls — though Clover bossed them by making them recite the alphabet over and over again — and Jerry played with the boy called Drainy, who was also ten. None was my age, so this left me free to help Father, or play by myself.

Drainy was a bug-eyed boy with a shaven head and spaces between his teeth. He had a collection of little cars and toy bikes made out of coathanger wire. As he was playing with Jerry, I found some of these wire toys and rattled them along the ground. Father asked me what they were.

I showed him. They were ingeniously made. They had moving parts, and one resembled in the smallest detail a tricycle, with pedals and wheels.

Father was fascinated by anything mechanical. He sat down and studied them. After he had meditated over them for several minutes and tried them, he said, "These were made by some very sophisticated instruments. See how that wire is twisted and joined? There's no soldering at all, and the angles and bends are perfectly formed."

He looked at me and winked.

"Charlie," he said, "I think someone's hiding tools from us. I had these people all wrong. I could use the kind of precision tools that made these."

He showed Mr. Maywit, who said sure enough, they were Drainy's. Drainy was summoned to the Gallery.

"Where did you get these?" Father asked.

"I make um."

"Take your time, son," Father said. "I want you to show me exactly how you made them. I'll give you some wire. Now you get your tools and make one for me."

Father gave the boy some fine strands of wire, but Drainy did not move. He held them dumbly in his dirty hand, and sucked his teeth.

"Don't you want to show me your tools?"

Mr. Maywit gave the boy a poke in the shoulder.

"Ain't got no tools."

Father said, "So you can't make them after all?"

"Kin," Drainy said. He squatted and took the wire in his teeth, and by chewing it and drawing it through the gaps like dental floss, and champing it like a marrow bone, he formed it into a sprocket and held it up for Father to admire.

Mr. Maywit's excitement made him gabble—"He make em wif his teef!"

Father said to Drainy, "You take care of those choppers and brush them every day. I'm going to need you later on."

13

IT WAS NOT an easy life these first weeks in Jeronimo. It was no coconut kingdom of free food and grass huts and sunny days, under the bam, under the boo. Wilderness was ugly and unusable, and where were the dangerous animals? There was something stubborn about jungle trees, the way they crowded each other and gave us no shade. I saw cruelty in the hanging vines and selfishness in their root systems. This was work, and more work, and a routine that took up every daylight hour. On the Unicorn and in La Ceiba, and even in Hatfield, we had done pretty much what we pleased. Father had left us alone and gone about his own business. Usually I had helped him, but sometimes not. Here, things were different.

There was a bell at sunup, by which time Father already had the fire going and the coffee on. The Maywits always joined us — they had stopped cooking for themselves the week we arrived in Jeronimo. After pineapple and oatmeal, Father yelled for the Zambus and told us our "targets" for the day. On Mondays he gave us our targets for the week: finish the house, or get so many bushels of stones, or clear a certain amount of land, or cut beanpoles, or dig trenches for culverts. The Maywits were mainly the gardeners, the Zambus mainly the landclearers and builders, and the children — the Maywits and us — the collectors and cleaners.

We did our jobs throughout the morning, and by lunchtime the heat was terrible — it was now July. Lunch was always hot soup, because Father had the idea that it was necessary for us to sweat buckets: it kept us cool, nature's way. Afternoon work was often interrupted by rain, but the downpours did not last long and we were soon back on the job. All work stopped in the late afternoon, for it was then that the black flies and mosquitoes appeared, and their bites were torture.

Just before sundown we took turns in the bathhouse, washing up. One of the rules was a shower bath every day. In Hatfield we had never kept so clean, but here Father became a maniac for cleanliness. He made us change our clothes every day, too. Clothes to be washed were dumped in a tub. and one of the smells of Jeronimo was this skunk stew of boiling clothes. Mrs. Maywit had always washed her family's clothes in the river, but now she used the tin clothes tub. Father was pleased that the Maywits had begun following our example in taking a daily shower Only the Zambus remained the same — they steamed like tomcats, as Father did when he was very angry.

In the early days, we spent the dark mosquito hours between supper and bedtime in the insect-proof gazebo. After the house was finished, we sat on the Gallery (also insect-proof) until it was time to turn in. The Maywits often joined us. Mr. Maywit told us about the Indians in the mountains and up the rivers. He liked giving information. He said it was true what Mr. Haddy had told us, about some of the Indians having long tails. He said one tribe of Indians was all giants, and another pygmies.

Mr. Maywit's strangest story was about some Indians he called Munchies. He said that Munchies lived in a certain part of Mosquitia, and he confessed that he had thought, on first seeing us, that we might be Munchies. The Munchies kept themselves hidden in secret cities in the jungle. They had been here longer than the Miskito Indians, or Payas, or Twahkas, or Zambus. But there was nothing to be afraid of in the Munchies, because they were peaceful and virtuous. They were also very tall, and built pyramids, and were in all respects a noble people.

Father said, "You forgot the important part, Mr. Maywit. They're white Indians. Whiter than me — even whiter than you."

The Maywits were the color of instant coffee powder and had burned hair and green eyes.

"You see them?" Mr. Maywit said.

"Dad knows everything," Clover said.

"I know about these Munchies," Father said. "Tell us about their gold, Mr. Maywit."

"I ain't know nothing about no gold."

"They've got gold mines," Father said. "Nuggets as big as walnuts. They hammer it thin and write on it. They roll it and make bangles. Gold dust and gold slabs — ingots a yard wide."

"Haddy tell you this?"

Father said, "Nope. But save your breath, Mr. Maywit. I don't want to hear about white Indians who are angels. I want to hear about the devils from Nicaragua."

"The ones they carry ruckboos?"

"Not only them, but the ones that make things go wrong, give you headaches and toothaches and flat tires, let the mosquitoes in, and hide things that belong to you, so you never find them again. The ones that make funny noises at night and keep you awake and pull your house down and set you on fire."

"Never hear of them," Mr. Maywit said. "Where you hear?"

"Stands to reason. If there's golden white Munchies in secret cities, there's got to be horrible devils that do you wrong, isn't that so?"

Mother said, "Allie's pulling your leg, Mr. Maywit. He doesn't mean a word he says. I think that's a darned interesting story about the Munchies."

"But he hear it before."

"Tell me something I don't know," Father said. "Forget the Munchies and the devils. If you believe in them, you never get anything done — spend half your life looking over your shoulder. Personally, I don't believe in Munchies, unless I'm a Munchy." He frowned. "Which is entirely within the realm of possibility."

Jerry said he did not believe in Munchies, and April said it was a silly superstition, like the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus and God.

Mr. Maywit said that we could think what we wanted, but for true he believed in God and so did Mrs. Maywit. They had seen God with their own eyes at the Shouter church over in Santa Rosa.

"What exactly did God look like?" Father asked.

"Like a bill-bird in a cloud," Mr. Maywit said. "That is what Ma Kennywick say."

"So you didn't see God?"

"No, Ma Kennywick see God, and I see Ma Kennywick."

"Up the Shouters," the chicken-eyed Mrs. Maywit said.

"It was a speerience," Mr. Maywit said.

"I'm sure," Father said. "Now tell me something I don't know."

"Know about Duppies?'"

I said, "Mr. Haddy knows about them."

"But Mr. Haddy has flown the coop," Father said. "So let's give this gentleman the floor. Go on. sir. you've given us your proof for the existence of God — that is. Ma Kennywick's shouting that the Almighty looks like a bill-bird in a cloud. Now tell us what a Duppy is."

"The Shouters tell me about them, and lots of folks, even Zambu fellers, believe in Duppies. Mainly. Fadder, they is ghosts."

'Of dead people," Father said.

"Of alive people."

"I see."

"Everyone got a Duppy. They is the same as youself. But they is you other self. They got bodies of they own."

"So half the world is people and the other half is Duppies, is that right?"

"Never mind," Mr. Maywit said.

Mrs. Maywit was wringing her fingers. She said, "Cep you cain't ketchum."

"Invisible?" Father said.

"They is here," Mr. Maywit said. "Somewhere. Waitin. They shows up every time to time. But they ain't hot you. Make you shout, Duppies do. That is why Shouters see them. Me, I never see my Duppy."

Father said, "How do you know I'm not your Duppy?"

Mr. Maywit did not say another word. He stared at Father and his coffee-dust face became slack with fear. His eyes grew another rim around the sockets. It was as if at last he understood who this man was, and was about to surrender to this belief.

"That's enough, Allie," Mother said. She spoke to Mr. Maywit. "Can't you see he's joking?"

"Never mind." But Mr. Maywit's voice trembled as he said so.

***

Father was interested in what Mr. Maywit had said, but he went on joking about Munchies and Duppies. I was sure he believed some of it — it was too good not to believe. Live ghosts! White Indians! And I knew from past experience that Father was never more mocking than when he was discussing something serious. If someone was fearful, Father joked. If the person tried to be funny, Father quoted the Bible or said, "Haven't you heard there's a war coming?"

He was complicated in other ways. After we got to Jeronimo he claimed that he could go without sleep. He was awake when we went to bed, and he was at work when we got up in the morning. He also said he could go for days without food, and never got sick, and wasn't bitten by mosquitoes. This mystified the Maywits and the Zambus, but I knew he was trying to set an example — if he worked hard and did not complain, the others would have to. Work and lack of sleep did not make him irritable. In fact, I had never seen him happier. And Mother, who loved him in this mood, was happy too.

Now we had a house and a number of inventions that made life convenient. The Zambus, whom we had met by chance on that Fish Bucket riverbank, seemed contented. They walked around in trunks and short-sleeved shirts that Mother had made for them out of sailcloth. And the Maywits, with Father's help, improved their own house.

Our miracle beans were more than half grown and already had pods that Father said would be ready for picking in a few weeks. The other crops nourished beside the spillways of irrigation ditches. Entering Jeronimo from the Swampmouth path, you saw something that looked like a settlement — houses, gardens, stone-paved paths, and the pump wheel flinging water into the drum. It was the civilized place Father had seen that first day, when all we had seen was tall grass and a mud bank and a smoldering armchair.

I was luckier than anyone. When the twins went down with squitters because of stomach trouble, and then Mother and Jerry, I did not get sick. And I noticed that Father liked me a little better for that. He had a way of insinuating that if anyone was sick he was faking, or at least exaggerating. He never said "He's sick," but always "He says he's sick" or "She claims she's ill."

"I haven't the time to get sick," he said. "If I had a little spare time, I'd probably get sick as a dog!"

One day, Mr. Haddy returned. By then, Father had started building what he called the Plant, which was so far only a large framework of peeled poles two stories high, in the hollow at the back of the cleared land. The boilers were dumped there. We heard the motor before we saw the launch. Father made me climb to the top of the poles to get a look at it.

"Who is it?" he said, sounding angry for the first time in Jeronimo.

"It's the Little Haddy," I said. I could see the torn awning and the little wheel house.

Father was glad about this, but when he got down to the landing he did not like what he saw. Mr. Haddy was not alone. There was a man with him — a white man, carrying a suitcase ashore.

Mr. Haddy explained that he had pumped out the launch at Fish Bucket, and patched it. He had found that without the boilers and scrap metal there was enough freeboard for it to float easily in the shallowest river. After spending two weeks at Santa Rosa getting it properly fixed, he decided to see if he could make it all the way to Jeronimo, by sailing up the Bonito River, where it branched from the Aguan.

"I bring you some real food from Rosy — carkles and conks and wilks." These shellfish were in kegs on the deck. Then he showed us a dead turtle. Its flippers had been hacked off, and its lizard head of beaky bone hung out of its big barnacled shell. "And a hicatee."

But Father was not interested.

He said, "Who's this hamburger?"

"This here Mr. Struss from Rosy."

"How do you do," the man said. He stepped forward onto the mushy bank and set his suitcase down. Then he took his sunglasses off and tried to smile, but his eyes wrinkled shut in the sunlight and gave him a squinched face. He was a bit older than Father, and fleshy, and there was a dark sweat patch on every bulge of his body — moons under his arms, and a belt of wet around his waist. He turned his suffering smile on us. "What lovely kids." He looked beyond us. "And you've made yourself a beautiful home."

"What do you want?" Father said, blocking the path and keeping the man sinking in mush.

The Zambus had put down their tools, and the Maywits had trooped from the garden. There were about seventeen of us here, watching Father and the stranger.

"Mr. Haddy said he was coming up this way. He kindly let me hitch a ride."

Mr. Haddy said, "He a paying passenger, but I do all the steering. He work the sounding chain. He know the way."

"I've been here before. Mr. Roper knows me. Don't you, Mr. Roper."

He was speaking to Mr. Maywit.

Father said, "There's no Mr. Roper here. It's a case of mistaken identity. The heat is making you rave."

Mr. Maywit just goggled and kept his mouth shut.

The man was confused. He put his sunglasses on again and picked at the sweat patches on his shirt and said, "I came here to ask you all a question."

"We're not interested in your questions," Father said.

"You just answered it, brother. And I'm glad I came. Because the question is, 'Are you saved?' And I've got a funny feeling, the Lord—"

"The Lord is up in that tree," Father said, pointing with his finger stump at a bill-bird on a branch.

The man stared at Father's finger, and even adjusted his sunglasses to get a better look.

"Go away," Father said, and gave the man his deaf-man's smile.

"You can't answer for these people here."

"I'm not answering at all," Father said. "As far as I'm concerned, you didn't even open your mouth or ask a question. You're not allowed to. I own this place, and you don't have my permission to come ashore. If you want to talk to these people, you'll have to do it somewhere else, outside Jeronimo. About half a mile due north of here you'll come to a little swamp. That's Swampmouth, the Jeronimo line. Can't miss it. You go there and do all the preaching you like. Start walking, Mr. Struss."

He handed the man his suitcase.

"The Lord sent me here," Mr. Struss said.

"Bull," Father said. "The Lord hasn't got the slightest idea that this place exists. If he had, he would have done something about it a long time ago."

"This river doesn't belong to you, brother."

"You planning to walk on the water?" Father said. "If so, don't say another word until you're midstream."

Mr. Struss looked us over. Flies had gathered on his shoulders and he was breathing hard.

"You know I'm a fair man." Father said to us. "If any of you people want to go with him. I won't stop you. Hurry on down to Swampmouth and listen to what this gentleman has to offer. Anyone interested?"

Mr. Maywit and his chicken-eyed wife looked anxiously at Father. The Zambus had started giggling.

"Excuse me, Mr. Roper, will you please—"

"Shut it," Father said, and Francis Lungley laughed out loud.

Mother said, "You'd better do as my husband says. There are some dugout canoes at Swampmouth, and I'll give you a bag lunch. You'll have no trouble getting back to the coast."

"The Lord wants me here," Mr. Struss said.

Father said, "That's what I like about you people — your complete lack of presumption. But listen, I'm not going to tempt you with martyrdom, so just shove off and don't come back."

A little while later, from the porch of the house, we saw Mr. Struss walking down the riverbank toward Swampmouth. He carried his suitcase in one hand and Mother's lunch bag in the other. He was alone.

Father said, "Imagine that hamburger coming all that way to ask a silly question." He put his face close to Mr. Maywit's and said, "Are you saved?"

"Yes, Fadder."

He then asked everyone else in turn and they said yes and laughed along with him. He asked me and I said yes, but I was at the window and I saw that, hearing us laugh, Mr. Struss glanced up. He looked sick, but he kept on walking.

The days passed. They were sunny, there was little rain, they were muffled by dust. But the nights were furious with the ringing cries of insects, and bird grunts that sometimes rose to screams. The darkness helped us hear the soft splash of monkeys on branches, and the chafing of crickyjeens was like combustion, as if every bush and tree were burning. And night heat was more suffocating than in the day, and made sleep seem like death. It was a dreamless plunge into that riot.

Father spent these days hammering. He did not say why, but his eyes told me that his thoughts were storms. And every man in Jeronimo labored with Father at the plant. It was, so far, only a skeleton, with pipes buckled to poles and men hanging like monkeys to the crosspieces, where they followed Father's orders. It was slow work, and for a long time it did not look like anything at all.

The day after the bean harvest, Father declared a holiday. It was our first day off in six weeks of work. The Zambus shot a curassow and the Maywits brought cooked cassava and plantains and fruit. Father would not allow any of the Maywits' chickens to be killed. "That's living on your capital." We had an afternoon feast in the front yard. Mr. Maywit and Mr. Haddy took turns telling stories about the Mosquito Coast — pirates and cannibals — and Clover and April sang "Under the Bam, Under the Boo."

Father gave a speech about us. We were bricks, he said. He went on to explain all the things you could do with bricks. And he got angry only once. This was when Mr. Haddy praised the food. Father hated anyone talking about food — cooking it or eating it. Fools did it, he said. It was selfish and indecent to talk about how things tasted.

He called this our first thanksgiving.

It was now August. Mr. Maywit said he knew this without looking at a calendar, because the sickla bird had arrived. The bird was shiny green and yellow, and very small, with a warbling song that reminded me of the fluting music we had heard the boy play on the beach our first evening in La Ceiba.

Work on the plant continued. The mahogany planks were hoisted into position and bolted to the poles. The floors told me nothing, but when the sides went up it took on a familiar shape, and before it was finished I guessed what it was.

14

MOST OF THEM, including the Maywits (they had seen one in Trujillo), thought that Father had run mad and built a silo.

"Shoo! What green you gung put in it?" Mr. Haddy said, speaking for everyone.

Father said he was not going to put anything into it, and certainly not grain. "But just you wait and see what I pull out of it! And keep pulling! Listen" — he whispered and stared—"this gizmo is sempiternal. It won't ever quit."

It was not the bottle that some silos are, nor was it a thermos-jug shape, and there were no feed bins. It was tall and square-sided. It had now windows and only one hatchway door, twenty feet up and no stairs to it. It was a plain wooden building, a huge mahogany closet raised up in our clearing in the jungle. A box — but a gigantic box, with a tin lid. It was an oddity of such magnificence that it was a thing in itself, like an Egyptian pyramid. Its great shape was enough. It did not need another purpose. But I knew it was the Worm Tub, enlarged a thousand times.

No sooner was it raised than flocks of people came to look. I supposed our hammering was heard in the woods. Father made these strangers welcome. They were hill Indians and Spanish-speaking farmers, and Creoles and Zambus. The Indians did not stay, but the others did — Mr. Harkins and Mr. Peaselee, old Mrs. Kennywick (the very one who had seen God in the Shouter church), and some more. They said that they had watched the house — as they called it — rising. They marveled at it. It was taller than the trees and flat-topped like nothing else around here. They had seen it from far-off.

That was an advantage, their curiosity. Just when Father needed help, these people crept out of the trees and said they were willing. With the finishing of the other buildings and the first harvest and the rest of the crops coming along fast — all we needed — everyone in Jeronimo assumed our work was done. This made the plant — as Father went on calling it — a bewildering surprise. What was it for? What was it doing here?

Father promised more marvels, but there was still wood to add to the structure proper, and still brickmaking to do.

"Where is the bricks, Fadder?" Mr. Maywit asked.

"You're standing on them." Father pointed his finger stump at the ground. "Clay! This is all bricks, just sitting there, waiting to be made!"

There was ironwork, too.

"The Iron Age comes to Jeronimo," Father said. "A month ago, it was the Stone Age — digging vegetables with wooden shovels and clobbering rats with flint axes. We're moving right along. It'll be 1832 in a few days! By the way, people, I'm planning to skip the twentieth century altogether."

There was more plumbing in this than a waterworks, but the building went on smoothly. The new people were glad to do the work and liked listening to Father, who talked the whole time.

"One of the sicknesses of the twentieth century?" he said. "I'll tell you the worst one. People can't stand to be alone. Can't tolerate it! So they go to the movies, get drive-in hamburgers, put their home telephone numbers in the crapsheets and say, 'Please call me up!' It's sick. People hate their own company — they cry when they see themselves in mirrors. It scares them, the way their faces look. Maybe that's a clue to the whole thing—"

Most of the plumbing was bends — enough to make a cow crosseyed. Some of the bends were the fixed elbows we had brought from La Ceiba, and some we made in the forge. The forge was built with the first bricks, and the bellows (a simple fire was not hot enough) was two paddles and a leather bladder. Father saved his welding torch for finishing off each seal, because he did not want to waste the cylinder of gas. The sight of Father in his welder's mask, his eyes darting in the mask's window, with his gauntlets and his asbestos apron and his fizzing torch, fascinated the onlookers. And he kept talking, even with his mask on.

"Why do things get weaker and worse?" came the echoey small mask-voice, as if out of a conch. "Why don't they get better? Because we accept that they fall apart! But they don't have to — they could last forever. Why do things get more expensive? Any fool can see that they should get cheaper as technology gets more efficient. It's despair to accept the senility of obsolescence—"

They liked his talk, but they loved the spray of sparks and the scabs of dead metal flying. They were astonished to see iron bars soften and drip like tar under the jet of blue flame.

The welding torch was one of Father's toys. There were others — his Thunderbox and Atom-smasher, and even his simpler ones, like the Beaver, which machined and threaded pipes — a hand-operated jaw of his own making with a toothy mouth set off by clamps. They were toys to him, but magic to the others. When he took a rusty pipe, reamed it, bent it, gave it threads, and fitted it with so many elbows it looked like a crankshaft, everyone gathered to watch him. Then he was a sorcerer in his iron mask, transforming a hunk of scrap iron into a symmetrical part for the plumbing that was the stomach and intestines of the plant. He claimed that even with this basic equipment, he could make the simplest rod or pipe into the tiniest computer circuit.

"I could make microchips out of the thickest iron brick around. I could make dumb metal talk. That's what computer circuits are — words and paragraphs in a primitive language. You don't think of computers as primitive," he said — he was speaking directly to Mr. Harkins—"but they are. They're mechanical savages."

He said he was making a monster. "I'm Doctor Frankenstein!" he howled through his welder's mask. He called one set of pipes its lungs, and another its poop shaft, and two tanks, "a pair of kidneys." He always spoke of the plant as "he" — "He needs a gizzard today," or "This will fit straight onto his liver," or "How's this for his gullet?"

Harkins and Peaselee laughed at this and asked Father if his monster had a name.

Father said, "Tell them, Charlie."

I remembered.

"Fat Boy," I said.

Everyone whispered the name.

Jerry and the twins were surprised that I knew something they didn't — not only its name but its purpose, how it worked, and what it would look like when it was done. They showed me some respect and for a while stopped calling me "Crummo" and "Spackoid."

Even Mother was a little curious about how I came to know so much. I told her that I had seen the scale model. I remembered the morning Father and I had loaded the little Worm Tub onto the pickup truck and driven past the scarecrow to give Polski a demonstration — Father happy, then Father fuming, and the wooden chest gulping and producing a disk of ice in a tumbler. I remembered more than that — the rubber seal in Northampton, and the policeman, and Father saying, "No one ever thinks of leaving this country. But I do, every day!" And the Monkey House. And "It's a disgrace."

That was all far away, but seeing this towering windowless building at the edge of the clearing, I understood why we had come here — to build Fat Boy, to make ice.

This was the distant empty place that Father had always spoken about. Here he could make whatever he pleased and not have to explain why to anyone. There was no Polski here to say "Vumble, vumble." Father said, "You look at Jeronimo and you can't tell what century it is. This is part of your original planet, with people to match. And you're wondering why I gave that missionary the bum's rush?"

Father had found his wilderness.

But the people were afraid of Fat Boy. It started with Francis Lungley. He said he heard noises in it at night. Mr. Maywit said it had a smell, not a machine smell but something like tiger breath. "They's bats inside," Ma Kennywick said, which was true. "He got twenty-two eyes at night," Mr. Haddy said, which was not true. They all watched it anxiously, as if it were a dangerous monster. No one would go inside unless Father went first, but Father had a habit of singing inside, and this frightened everyone. Mr. Harkins said one morning that it was gone. We ran out of the house and saw it was there. He said, "It just come back." The Zambus still heard noises in it. They were voices. Witches, they said.

Father told them to calm down.

"This isn't something to be afraid of," he said. "It isn't new. It isn't even an invention." But they were still afraid.

"It's a marvel, but it's not magic. People call me an inventor. I'm not an inventor. Look, what am I doing here?"

"Spearmints," Mr. Maywit said. He had got the word from Mr. Haddy.

"I'll tell you what I'm doing — what anyone who invents anything is doing. I'm magnifying."

Hammering the shoulders of a boiler, talking as he worked, Father said that most invention was either adaptation or magnification.

"Take the human body," he said. That contained all the physics and chemistry we needed to know. The best inventions were based on human anatomy. He himself had two patents on ideas he had plagiarized from the body — his Self-Sealing Tank and his Metal Muscle. He said there was no better piece of engineering than the ball-and-socket joint in the human hip. Computer technology was just a clumsy way of making a brain, but the central nervous system was a million times more complicated.

"Insulation? Look at fatty tissue!" You had to study natural things. Anyone who took a good look at an alligator or a hicatee could make an armored vehicle. The natural world showed man what was possible. In a world without birds there would be no airplanes. "Airplanes are just magnified sparrows — they're crascos with leg room."

The Zambus stared at Father, and the others listened twitchily to this man who the harder he worked the more he talked.

"What's a savage?" he said. "It's someone who doesn't bother to look around and see that he can change the world."

Everyone looked around and said this was so.

Father went on to say that savagery was seeing and not believing you could do it yourself, and that that was a fearful condition. The man who saw a bird and made it into a god, because he could not imagine flying himself, was a savage of the most basic kind. There were tribes of people who did not have the sense to build huts. They went around naked and caught double pneumonia. And yet they lived in the same neighborhood as birds that made nests and jack rabbits that dug holes. So these people were savages of utter worthlessness who did not have the imagination to come in out of the rain.

"I'm not saying all inventions are good. But you notice dangerous inventions are always unnatural inventions. You want an example? I'll give you the best one I know. Cheese spread that you squirt out of an aerosol can onto your sandwich. That's about as low as you can go."

Ma Kennywick's laugh went heck-heck, and Mr. Haddy said he had never heard of cheese squirting out of a can.

"Like shaving cream," Father said. "Comes out like Reddi-wip. Disgusting. The ozone layer? It eats it up. And there's four things wrong with it — the processed cheese itself, the squirt, the can, and the sandwich."

He was still hammering the boiler.

He said, "I never made anything that did not exist before in a similar form. I just chose something, or part of something, and made it bigger — like my valves and my Metal Muscle and my Self-Sealer. I got the idea from human anatomy — heart valves, striated muscle, stomach lining. Listen, I made gas tanks punctureproof! But it was just a question of scale and application, and — let's face it — improvement. I mean, doing a slightly better job than God."

Whenever Father mentioned God, the people in Jeronimo glanced at the sky and looked very guilty and ashamed, and squinted as if they expected thunder. Father saw this and changed the subject.

"People talk about the invention of the wheel. What's so wonderful about the wheel? It's nothing compared to ball bearings, but there are ball bearings in nature — you've got a rudimentary one in each hip! The development of lenses? All optical inventions are plagiarisms — of the human eye — though I admit the human eye is pretty inferior by comparison."

Mr. Haddy said he had guessed that before. It was all eyes and noses going by different names. And the cranes and derricks on the pier at La Ceiba were the same as arms, except bigger and roustier.

"You're getting the idea," Father said. "And what's this?"

He had finished hammering the boiler and was dragging it inside Fat Boy.

"That is a spearmint," Mr. Haddy said. "And you ain't catch me in there."

"It's a human's insides," Father said. "Its entrails and vitals. Its brisket. Digestive tract. Respiration. Circulatory system. Fatty tissue. And why build it? Because it's an imperfect world! And that's why I do what I do. And that's why I don't believe in God — stop looking up, people! — because if you can make improvements, that doesn't say much for God, does it?"

But no one replied, and no one dared to go into Fat Boy alone. It was dark and too cool and full of iron pipes. No windows, the insulation made it clammy, its darkest corners muttered.

"It's nothing to be scared of Father said, looking at me. I knew what was coming. He buzzed a rivet at me. "Charlie's not scared. Want to see him climb to the top?"

The faces in the clearing flashed at me like clocks.

"He wunt get out alive," Francis Lungley said.

"That's an ignorant remark," Father said.

Clover said, "Dad, why is Charlie shaking like that?"

"Charlie is not shaking."

So I had to obey.

I had been working the bellows. I dropped it and wiped my hands and looked at all the clock faces. They were saying three-fifteen with their worried squints, and I wondered why. Some were fixed on me, others on Father. If they had not looked so flat and fearful I would have felt better about going into Fat Boy. But they worried my guts.

I said, "Oh, rats," and went in.

Father banged the door after me and cut off most of the daylight. All I could see, through the floor joists that had yet to be planked, was the sun shining dustily down between the cracks in the hatchway door.

It was like being in a monster body, under the cold lips of its stomach tank. Iron pipes rose sideways around the walls. Greasy with sealer and smelling of fresh welds, they had the egg stink of fart gas and meat turned to mud, and the slippery look of human waterworks. Where the cracks of sun lighted some rusty pipes, I could see how these reddened blisters looked like flesh. The smallest movement of my feet made a booming belly echo. Organs was a good word.

A week before, I had scaled the outside with ease. But this was my first time inside, alone, with the door shut, in the dark, making for the top. I gulped my panic and looked up — the way up was the way out. I started climbing the pipes, through the midsection, from the tanks Father called kidneys, across the rusty gizzard, to the steel tube he called the gullet. The only sounds that penetrated the walls were Clover's and April's yells as they played with the Maywit kids — in the sunshine.

There was no fluid in Fat Boy's pipes. Because of the echo, it was like being in something gigantically dead. The shadows were cool twisted pipes that creaked as I climbed. 1 swung myself to a prickly grid that Drainy Maywit had made with his teeth, and crawled across it, finding my way with my fingers.

Just as I said to myself Don't look down, I looked down. And kept looking. I recognized what I saw. This was no belly — this was Father's head, the mechanical part of his brain and the complications of his mind, as strong and huge and mysterious. It was all revealed to me, but there was too much of it, like a book page full of secrets, printed too small. Everything fitted so neatly and was so well bolted and finely fixed it looked selfish. I could see that it had order, but the order — the size of it — frightened me. Like the human body, he had said — but this was the darkest part of his body, and in that darkness were the joints and brackets of his mind, a jungle of crooked iron and paunchy tanks hanging on thin wires and soldered-over scare tubes like vines in monkey shadow the weight of metal hoses forking to the ceiling, and everywhere the balance of small hinges.

It made me dizzy. I could not understand enough of it to feel safe. I thought, You could die here, or — trapped inside — go crazy.

I fought for the door at the top and pushed it open. Below the hatchway were straw hats. Someone — not Father — screeched up at me. They set a ladder against Fat Boy and let me down, and they all looked at my face pretty worriedly.

"He ain't bawling anyway," Francis Lungley said.

"You're next, Fido," Father said, and hurried Lungley to the door. "In you go! Take your time — get acquainted!"

One by one he sent them in, slammed the door, and made them climb through the pipes to the top hatchway, so they would not be afraid, except Mrs. Maywit, Mrs. Kennywick, and the children. They said they were willing, but Father said, "That's all that really counts — willingness."

He said he was sending the people inside so that they would conquer fear, and I believed him. But I also guessed that he wanted to amaze them with his Yankee ingenuity and give them a glimpse of his mind — the model of it inside Fat Boy. As for me, I did not mention this. I knew what I had seen. And I was glad Father had bullied me into going inside. He was making me a man.

Everyone compared the experience with something different. Mr. Maywit said it was like being up the bell tower in the Dunker church. The Zambus said it was like a certain slate cave in the Esperanzas, and Mr. Harkins said he had had a dream like it once, but when he tried to explain, his voice cracked and tears came to his eyes. Mr. Haddy said, "Shoo! It like some of these banana-boat engine rooms. Boiler and narrers." Hearing all this, Jerry fussed to go in, but Father refused.

"I hope you all admired that mesh over the evaporator lungs," Father said. "That nice piece of work was Drainy's doing."

Drainy had fixed the mesh with his teeth, making it the way he made his wire toys, with clips and clasps and fastenings that he gnawed into place and pinned with his molars.

"And as you might have noticed, Fat Boy isn't breathing," Father said. "That's why I wanted you to see him now, before he's got some life in him. Then he'll be dangerous and off limits. He's going to have work to do, and we don't want anyone traipsing around his guts then."

The smooth mahogany planks of the enormous icehouse caught the green and gold of the sun in the jungle clearing and glowed like skin.

"You won't believe what this old boy can do."

Father was proud of it and glad there were people here as witnesses. No one doubted him, or anything he made. He liked leading us around in the morning, from the pump at the river to the bathhouse and through the fields, pointing out how trim everything was, the water gushing and wheels turning and the hybrids shooting up and vegetables heavy on the plants. We walked along paths we had paved, past plants we had planted.

What Father had promised the first day in Jeronimo was now there for everyone to see — food, water, shelter. It was all as he predicted, but more orderly and happier than we had imagined. And on these early-morning inspections, he took Mother by the arm and spoke to everyone by speaking to her.

He called this notch in the jungle a superior civilization. "Just the way America might have been," he said. "But it got rotten and combustible. Greed panicked the worst into doubledipping, and the best fell victim to the system."

The Zambus didn't know what he was talking about, but they liked the way he talked. He could make them laugh by shouting, "Rheostats! Thermodynamics! The undistributed middle!"

He said, "I was the last man left."

But even when he was not talking for fun, I had to keep my head down or he'd say, "What are you grinning at, Charlie?"

Yet who wouldn't grin at some of the things he said?

"We've got to keep our traps shut," he would say, "or everyone and his brother will be down here on top of us, all the movers and shakers, opening gas stations and drive-in movies and fast-food joints. Issuing catalogues. Oh, sure, they'd strap a facility here and another facility over there. Sock a K-Mart next to Fat Boy and get the floating buyers. And you can bet your bottom dollar they'd find room for a Toyota dealership up on the Swampmouth path. This would be all parking lots from here to the hills. Facilities! They'd be ramming them down our throats."

Mr. Maywit said, "Wish we had a Chinese shop."

"He wants a Chinese shop!" Father said.

Mr. Maywit flinched. "Buy some salt and flour and oil."

"Save your money," Father said. "You don't need any Chinese shops. The sea's full of salt — sea salt, the best there is. No additives. Flour will be easy as soon as that corn is ready: we're going to mill it ourselves. Look at it — wonder corn! I brought that hybrid seed myself, all the way from Massachusetts. It's three times the size of your Honduras varieties."

"He say oil," Mr. Harkins said.

"I heard him, and my reply is, 'Peanuts!' Next to the spuds, there's a half acre of goobers. But give them time. Don't rush them. Are you going somewhere?"

As soon as the potatoes and yams were harvested he was going to ban the planting of cassava. It was a lazy man's crop, he said. Like bananas. True, there was no weeding to be done, but cassava exhausted the soil and there was no nutrition in it. Growing it would turn us all into funny-bunnies.

Work continued on Fat Boy, the fixing and welding of more pipes, the sealing of the tanks, and finishing the firebox and the chimney. Now, no one feared it. In fact, the Zambus preferred to work inside it because it was so much cooler there. It had double walls, and the roof and south side were faced with polished tin sheets that bounced the direct rays of the sun.

"If those were solar panels, we'd be self-sufficient in electricity," Father said. "But we don't need electricity or fossil fuels — this is a superior civilization."

We tested it for leaks by filling it with water. There was a fine spray peeing from nine joints, which Father marked and sealed when it was drained. Then Father declared it finished and said that he and Mr. Haddy were going to Trujillo.

"Plasma — for Fat Boy," he said. He had arranged for some hydrogen and ammonia to be sent to Trujillo. He had not wanted it shipped all the way to Jeronimo for fear of arousing missionary curiosity and getting more unwelcome visitors, like Mr. Struss or anyone of the Spellgood persuasion, or Toyota dealers.

"Used to shine windows up the Dunker with ammonia water," Mr. Maywit said.

"Up the Shouter," Mrs. Maywit said.

"Never mind," Mr. Maywit said.

Mr. Haddy remarked that there wasn't a glass windowpane in the whole of Jeronimo, which was true.

"You can do anything with ammonia," Father said. "The ammonia clock is the most accurate timekeeping device in the world. You don't believe me?" — Mr. Maywit was frowning—"Listen, the tick-tock in it is the oscillation of the nitrogen atom in the ammonia molecule. Francis knows all about it, don't you?"

Francis said, "For true, Fadder."

"I employ enriched ammonia," Father said. "What do you think I was doing up there in La Ceiba? Spitting in the plaza, like all the other gringos? No, sir. I was juicing up my ammonia. That's my secret, really. The more enriched it is, the quicker your evaporation. You'll see."

Mr. Maywit said, "I hear that."

"He do it all himself for the spearmint," Mr. Haddy said, while the Zambus stared. "He richen it. That is the way."

"It's more toxic," Father said. The Zambus laughed at "toxic." "But once it's sealed into the system, there's no danger. And it's everlasting. Take the acids in your stomach. They're not toxic, but they're powerful substances. They could bum a pretty big hole in your shirt if they leaked out. And there's ammonia in nature — you know, rotting vegetable matter, seawater, soil, even urine."

Mr. Maywit said he had heard that, too. "You want I come to Trujillo? I buy some salt and oil for Ma."

Father put his hand on Mr. Maywit's flour-sack shirt, where it said La Rosa on the shoulder. "I need you here, coach. From now on you're my field superintendent. You've got to stay, so you can tell me what to do."

Then he spoke to everyone — Mrs. Kennywick, the Zambus, Harkins, Peaselee, the Maywits, and us.

"I take orders from you," he said. "You're in charge here. And if you want Fat Boy to work, you'll have to send me down the river to Trujillo. To get his vital juices."

Eventually, Father encouraged them to say, Yes, please go—

"In the meantime, pick some of those tomatoes. Him" — he poked Mr. Maywit's flour-sack shirt—"he wants a Chinese store!"

Mother asked him how long he would be away. Father said he guessed anything up to a week, "barring unforeseen circumstances."

The next day, the Little Haddy, streamlined for the river, left Jeronimo for the coast. Mr. Haddy was working the sounding chain and Father was at the wheel. Mr. Haddy said for all to hear, "But this used to be me lanch."

We ran along the riverbank, nearly to Swampmouth, but lost them in the deep green foliage Father had once compared to old dollar bills.

***

With Father away, Jeronimo was very quiet — no speeches or songs, and the hammering stopped. The only sounds were the flap and splash, the prunt-prunt of the pump tower on the bank, and the sloosh of water in the culverts. The rest was the usual murmur of jungle, as continuous as silence, birds and bugs and monkey squawks, which changed in pitch with the heat and became a pressurized howl after nightfall.

Mother did not take charge. When Father was around, we did things his way, he kept us jumping, but Mother had no inventions and never made speeches. When she did talk, it was often a gentle request for someone to show her the local way of doing something.

The pepper-drying was a good example. After the small red peppers appeared in the low bushes, Mrs. Maywit said they would have to be dried. If Father had been around, he would have blazed a ten-sided tub out of sheet metal and called it his Pepper Hopper, or something of the kind, for drying peppers, the way he had made the fish trap and the bathhouse and the bamboo tiles.

But Mother got Mrs. Kennywick and Mrs. Maywit to explain how to string the peppers and hang them. "You know best," she said. It was a day's work, this pepper-stringing, Mother and the other women squatting side by side on a mat in the yard, knotting the peppers on twine so that the lengths of them looked like firecrackers. Father would not have done it. and he certainly wouldn't have squatted. He would have made himself a chair, probably a recliner, with a work surface pedal-operated maintenance-free out of steamed and bent saplings. "Look how she fits the contours of the body, Mother!"

Mother had the Zambus teach her how to gut and skin animals like pacas, and how to peg fish to a plank and dry them, and how to smoke meat. They were slow, dirty, traditional methods, but she was in no hurry, she said. And these became our lessons in Jeronimo — the household tasks of the jungle people, the preparation of things we picked or caught. She made sure that each of us understood the gutting and smoking. We were not free to play until we had mastered these chores.

This was different from Father's way. He was an innovator. He thought nothing of getting a dozen people to peel wood or dig ditches, and he would not tell them why until they had finished. Then he would say, "You've just made yourself a permanent enhancement!" Or he would ask them to guess what a particular thing was for (no one so far had guessed what Fat Boy was for), and laugh when they gave him the wrong answer. He had his own way of doing things, and he liked telling people that their own methods were just waste motion. "Now I'll show you how it ought to be done," he'd say, and as they gawked, he'd add, "How do you like that little wrinkle?"

He had never been a good listener. But he knew so much he did not have to listen. We had heard his voice going like the Thunderbox wherever we were, and since the day we arrived, Father's chatter had been as constant as the Jeronimo locusts from morning to night, and it was louder even than the googn-googn-googn-googn of the howler monkeys. But now his voice was gone. Nothing was built, there were no inspections, the forge went cold. No talk of "targets," no sessions in the Gallery, and we stopped hearing "I only need four hours' sleep!"

We cleared the fish trap, weeded the garden, and picked the first tomatoes. Mother ran things smoothly, offering suggestions, not giving orders. She made cassava bread, something Father had not thought of doing. Mrs. Maywit provided the recipe. And Mrs. Kennywick showed her how to make wabool out of rotten bananas.

In her quiet, inquiring way, Mother discovered an amazing thing. She had the idea that it would be educational for us to learn the names of the trees in and around Jeronimo. She asked the Zambus what they were called, and what they were used for, so that a little printed sign could be tacked to each trunk for us to memorize. She found out that a good few of the trees at the southern end of the clearing were sapodillas. Even the Maywits didn't know that. The Zambus called them "chiclets" and "hoolies" and explained how to extract rubbery sap from the trees and boil it and pound it into sheets.

"There's enough chicle here to make a ton of rubber," she said. She thought this was funny. "That's what Allie would say. Wait till he hears. He'll make us all galoshes."

Father's work was work, Mother's work was study and play, but mostly she left us to ourselves. We did not feel supervised as when Father was around, and little by little we ventured farther from the clearing, and even out of Jeronimo itself, away from the splash of our waterworks and the googn of our monkeys.

***

Leaving, hacking a path, and setting up a camp had been my idea. It was like one of Father's challenges, but I challenged myself to go by daring the others — it gave me courage. We dared the Maywit children, too, and called them names, and soon they were shouting "Crummo" and "Crappo" at each other. Alice and Drainy were not afraid, but the little ones, Leon and Veryl (who was known as Peewee), were timid and always lagged behind.

We found a path that led away from the river and into a part of the jungle that was thick with screaming birds — bill-birds and crascos. There were monsters here, Drainy said, and all the Maywit kids agreed that it was in places like this that you met your Duppy. Clover said they were crapoid for thinking that. We put up our camp near a deep pool in a little pocket in the jungle, about half an hour's walk from Jeronimo, through flame trees and lianas.

"They's munsters in the water," Drainy said, and none of them would go into the pool. But it was because they did not know how to swim, which we did. Swimming there while they watched gave us a superior feeling, and Jerry told them they were spasticated.

But they were not afraid of the water dogs or the snakes or green lizards. Some of those lizards were as big as cats. If we said, "There's your Duppy in that tree," they went crapoid, because they couldn't see it. But when we saw a hairy piglike animal snuffling in the bushes, Alice said, "Oh, that's a mountain cow." It looked like a monster to me, but this little girl was not afraid, so we couldn't be.

For our camp here, we made first a lean-to out of branches, then a hut, and hammocks out of vines. Clover and Alice made seats for us, dug a firepit, and picked flowers. Clover was not strong enough to do the hard work herself, but she knew how to get the Maywit kids working. I saw that she was just like Father. She was firm like him and would not listen and wasn't happy unless she was directing operations.

There was a certain fanlike plant here that was edible, Alice said — the roots of it. Clover got everyone collecting these roots in homemade baskets, and we ate them. They tasted like raw carrots and were called yautia. With these and the bananas and fruit we picked on the way, we could have meals in this camp.

Clover complained that Jerry and April never helped. Alice said, "Peewee's a crummo, for true. Always eating and never picking." Drainy said he did more work than anyone. No one squabbled in Jeronimo, but here everyone fussed.

So I decided to invent money. It was no good getting everything free. From now on, I said, we would have to buy our food at the camp store.

"Where's the camp store, thicko?" Clover said.

I said the first thing that came into my head—"You're sitting on it" — and pointed to her little bench. By making Clover the storekeeper I shut her up, and I explained that stones and pebbles would count as money, because they were in short supply in this mossy place.

Leon said, "Want to buy some food, Ma."

"Where's your money?"

"Ain't got none."

"Then start digging."

This was a new game and a good one. We set out in search of stones, and everyone gathered a little pile. It was easy for me, because by diving into the pool I could pick up all the stones I wanted off the bottom. I became the richest person in the camp.

Clover also ran the school, which was the first lean-to. Drainy ran the church — that was a tree on which he had fixed a wire cross. We made fences out of branches, and in one of the other lean-tos Drainy made a wire box he called the radio set. That was imaginary, but the telephone was real — two coconut halves connected by a piece of string.

"This is like back home," Jerry said.

But it wasn't. It was the way other people lived, with radios and schools and churches — and money. Yet I was happy here in the camp — happier than in Jeronimo. I liked this place for its secrecy and best of all because it was filled with things that Father had forbidden. Spending money at the store and talking on the telephone were pleasant things. And when Clover ran out of lessons, I became the schoolteacher. I showed the Maywits how to count money and do arithmetic and write their names. Jerry wanted to put up a No Trespassing sign, but I said that would only make people curious. Instead, I got everyone to help dig a hole on the path for a man trap, to catch intruders or even big animals like mountain cows. Drainy said there were tigers around_he meant jungle cats or jaguars — and I wanted to catch one. We embedded sharpened stakes at the bottom of the trap and covered the whole thing with a layer of branches and dirt, to make it look like part of the path. That was the Zambu way, Drainy said. Father would have killed us for doing this, but he was still on the coast.

We said prayers, we sang hymns that Alice taught us, and we held long groaning church services in the shelter of the holy tree.

We still helped at Jeronimo, gathering peppers and weeding and seeing to the fish trap and doing our other chores. But when this work was done and Mother was satisfied, we escaped to our camp in the jungle, returning to all the things that Father hated. This made up for everything we had never had in Massachusetts and it stilled a longing in me for the United States. In this way, I overcame my homesickness.

We called our camp the Acre.

The Acre helped me to understand something of Father's pride in Jeronimo. Until we built our camp. I had not seen why he was so boastful of what he had made in Jeronimo. Father had insisted that we look closely at the garden and the paths and the waterworks. He wanted us to marvel at the way we could be bone-dry in the rain and cool on the hottest day and not be pestered by insects. He was happy, and at the Acre I knew why. I looked around and saw that the pattern of life and the things we had fixed ourselves were all ours. Even the Maywit children were pleased by what we had done. But I felt that ours was a greater achievement than Father's, because we ate the fruit that grew nearby and used anything we found, and adapted ourselves to the jungle. We had not brought a boatload of tools and seeds and we had not invented anything. We just lived like monkeys.

It was Drainy's idea that we should all be baptized. He said we would all go to hell if we weren't, and he insisted that we do it the Dunker way, by getting into the deep pool while he said prayers over us. It seemed like fun, so we stripped down to our underwear and made ready for the baptism.

"I'm the baptizer," Drainy said. "I know how to do this."

"Only thing," Alice said. "Drainy don't know how to swim. He cain't be a baptizer if he cain't swim. He get et up by the munsters in the water." She walked away.

I said to Drainy, "If you're really afraid, we can forget it."

"I ain't afraid," Drainy said, and sat on the bank and dangled his feet in the water. "And you go to hell if you ain't get dunked."

Clover said, "We don't believe in hell. Only ignorant people believe in hell."

Drainy said, "If Alice pull down her bloomers and show her carkle, she go to hell, for true."

Alice was in the schooLhouse. She poked her head out of the window and yelled, "Drainy Roper, you get youself outta there!"

Then she clapped her hand over her mouth.

"That ain't his name," she said.

Clover said, "You called him Drainy Roper. Roper — that's what that missionary said before Father kicked him out."

"That is our name," Veryl said.

"You got a mouf!" Alice yelled.

Drainy pulled his feet out of the pool and said, yes, that was their name, Roper. The missionary was right. And he was a Dunker. "If he was here," Drainy said, "he could be the baptizer."

"If your name's Roper, why is your name Maywit?" Jerry asked.

"They've got two names," April said.

"We got one names," Drainy said. "And it ain't Maywit."

I said, "Where did the Maywit come from?"

"You father give it to us," Alice said. "And my father take it."

"If it wasn't his name," I said, "why did he take it?"

"He afraid," Alice said.

Drainy said, "Of you father."

"You're crappo," Clover said.

Drainy said, "You father can do magic."

"What he does isn't magic — it's science," I said.

"Science is worse," Alice said.

They would not believe me, and I was sorry, because Father had made them change their name. I said, "Sometimes I'm afraid of him, too."

Jerry and the twins laughed at me for saying this. But they did not know what I knew. Clover said that Father was kind and not to be feared. He could have made a fortune as an inventor, Jerry said.

"Why don't he get rich?" Alice said.

"Because he wanted to come here," I said, "to build a town in the jungle. More than a town."

This did not convince the Maywit children, and when I told them that Father had said there was a war coming in the United States they just laughed. This made me lose heart and talk hollowly, for why else would anyone ditch the United States to sweat his guts out in the jungle? And I knew more than that. I had seen the inside of Fat Boy. That glimpse came back to me, and now, whenever I thought of Father, I saw the hanging tanks, the wilderness of crooked iron, the tubes like a brain in a sleeve, and all the tiny hinges. It had been like seeing the inside of someone's house, and, by studying it knowing them better I knew a person best from something he had made, and in Fat Boy I had seen Father's mind, a version of it — its riddle and slant and its hugeness — and it had scared me.

It was because of this, talking about Father in these whispers, that we skipped the baptism altogether and went and collected crazy ants instead. We floated them on the pool and watched them struggle on the skin of the water's surface.

Returning from the Acre that day, we saw Little Haddy at the mooring. Some men were earning tall bottles of gas up the path to Fat Boy, and others were rolling steel drums along logs that served as rails.

Peewee let out a yell when she saw Father. He was outside Fat Boy, working a hand pump, emptying one of the drums into a pipe. What frightened Peewee was his mask. It was a gas mask, for safety, but it gave him a snout and huge bug eyes. A skull and bones was stenciled on the drum.

"He always wears that when he's working with poison," I said.

This word poison had a worse effect on the Maywit kids than the weevil mask, and they ran straight into their house with their fingers in their mouths.

It had taken ten days for Father to get the ammonia and hydrogen from Trujillo to Jeronimo. Mother told us the story of his adventures. Threats in the town. Nosy people. Honduran soldiers accusing him of smuggling explosives. Arguments and almost a fistfight. "How many pushups can you do?" Trouble with vultures. A hard time on the river, which was too shallow in places. Scraping the boat bottom and being followed by unfriendly Zambus and more vultures. A slow and dangerous trip. Into Jeronimo with their keel dragging on the riverbed.

There were only four gas masks — Father, Haddy, Harkins, and F. Lungley. Because of the danger of fumes, we were not allowed near Fat Boy until the transfer of ammonia and hydrogen was made and the pipes sealed. Father worked all night without lamps or firelight. The full moon gave the clearing a milky-pink shine, like mother-of-pearl, and Fat Boy looked like a block of dark marble, a monument or tomb in the jungle.

The four masked men jumbled in and out of Fat Boy, and all we heard was the clanging of steel drums and gas bottles, and Father saying "Watch it!" and "Careful!" and "Move over!" and the howler monkeys they called baboons, their googn!

In the morning, Father was highly excited. If anything had gone wrong, he said, we would have been blown sky-high along with half the valley — probably ended up in Hatfield, in smithereens.

"I have just spent the most dangerous twelve hours of my whole life," he said.

"Sounds to me as if it was dangerous for us too," Mother said.

"Sure, but you weren't aware of the danger, so you could sleep in blissful ignorance."

Mother said "I like that," and turned her back on him.

"I am the only person here who knows how lethal that stuff is. I took full responsibility. Was I scared? No, ma'am."

"We might have been killed!"

"You wouldn't have known what hit you. I can give you my cast-iron guarantee of that. You'd have been atomized, with a smile on your face."

Mother said, "Thanks, pal."

"Don't worry. All the seals are on. In fact, this afternoon I'm going to fire him up." Father saw me listening in the doorway. "Quit grinning and spread the news, Charlie. I want everyone over there to watch."

***

"This is why I'm here," Father said, after lunch. "This is why I came."

He was standing in front of Fat Boy's firebox with a handful of matches. Mr. Haddy was next to him, and the Maywits nearby with their gray-faced kids. Clover and April sat on the ground with the Zambus, Harkins and Peaselee on kegs, Mrs. Kennywick in the armchair she had dragged over from Swampmouth. There were some other strangers watching from beyond the beanfields.

"I'll bet you still don't know what this is for," Father said.

"Cooking," Mr. Haddy said, and put out his teeth.

"No guesses," Father said. "You saw Lungley and Dixon put those trays of water on the shelf inside this monster. Now we're going to light a little fire here with this weeny match."

"Steam engine. Boiler work." Mr. Haddy clowned for the nervous people.

"Can it! But stick around. You won't believe your eyes."

He called Peewee over and said that as she was the youngest it was she who should light the first fire. "When we're all dead and gone, you'll still be around, Peewee. You can tell your grandchildren that you were here on this historic day. Tell them you lit the fire."

Father struck a match on the seat of his pants and showed her where to hold it. There was some kindling in the firebox. Peewee put the match to it and up it went.

The Zambus grasped their ears. Ma Kennywick blew out her cheeks, and Mr. Maywit said, "Never mind." No sound came for several minutes, only the fire pop. The birds and bugs of Jeronimo went silent. The people held their breaths and went shiny-faced with waiting.

A single gloop dropped inside Fat Boy, as of liquid plunging in a pipe's plump bubble, and we moved, turning from the fire to where the sound had glooped in Fat Boy's midsection. Now we could all hear each other breathe.

Mr. Haddy licked his teeth. "Shoo!"

"Wait for it," Father said.

More plungings, and the trembling of pipes, and the creak of swelling tanks — it was a sense, announced in muffled percolations, of loosening in Fat Boy's belly. It was not one clear sound, but rather a vibration in the plant and all around it. The ground hummed beneath our feet. Liquid was shifting, still rising, and there was a final surge that slowed the vibrations, and the whole plant seemed to stir. The surrounding jungle murmured to the same beat, which was like the throb of a vein in your head in the progress of an almighty bowel movement.

Mr. Maywit said, "They is queerness coming out from the chimbly."

"Smoke," Father said.

"He stop bellyaching," Drainy whispered.

Father said, "This is going to take a little while. Everyone get comfy. Sit down where you are and let your mind wander. But don't think about war or madness."

"They is just what I think about," Ma Kennywick said.

Mrs. Maywit put her chicken eyes on Father and said, "Kin we pray?"

"If you feel the need, go right ahead. But I honestly wish you wouldn't, because then you'll treat this as a miracle — which it isn't. Rather than as a magnified piece of thermodynamics — which it is."

But I could tell from their faces and postures that they were all praying. They sat compactly, with their necks drawn in, like birds in the rain.

From time to time, Father stoked the fire. But there was not much fueling to be done — it was a small fire, and after it started its whistles and sucks, he kept it damped down.

"This is where it's all happening," Father said. "This is the center of the world! You don't have to go anywhere — you're where it's at!"

A half-hour passed in this way. Then Father stopped talking and climbed the stepladder. He read the thermometer that stuck out, and he looked pretty satisfied. Fifteen more minutes, he said, and after that time had gone he mounted the ladder again and crawled into the hatchway.

"Hope we ain't have to drag him out by his stumps," Mr. Haddy said.

Some people hissed, and Mr. Haddy and others looked at Mother.

She said, "Allie knows what he's doing — and here he comes."

Father's head was in the hatchway. He made a face — hard to tell what kind, he was so far up. He waved his hand. He was holding a white ball, like a lump of raw cotton.

"What Fadder got there?"

Father was shouting.

"Haven't you people ever seen a snowball?" He threw it, and it mashed in the grass, whiter than a heron's feathers.

We ran to touch it — and as we touched it, feeling the sting of its crystals, it began to vanish. But by then, in triumph, Father was bringing out the cakes of ice.

15

ON THIS PART of the river, narrower and shallower than anything I had seen — twenty miles of it, before mountains and jungle twisted it into a trickle — people dropped to their knees on the banks and waved at us and prayed. By now, they knew who we were and what we carried. The news of Fat Boy had spread throughout the river valley.

"Anyone want a beverage?" Father called to those people on the bank who took us for missionaries. Mr. Haddy thought this question was very funny, and he wheezed whenever Father said it. So later on, even at the uninhabited parts of the river, Father caught Mr. Haddy's eye and yelled, "Anyone here require a beverage?" and made the man laugh.

But the kneeling and respectfulness at last made Father gloomy. "The idiots think we came all this way to honk Bibles at them!"

Five of us were on the boat — besides Father, Mr. Haddy, and me, there was Clover and Francis Lungley. It was not the Little Haddy. Our new boat, built in the weeks after Fat Boy began producing ice, was an adaptation of a pipanto dugout, needle-nosed, wide-bellied, and almost flat-bottomed. It was powered by a pedal mechanism that worked a stern wheel, something like the Swan boats in the Boston Public Garden. Because of its shape and its cargo, Father named the boat the Icicle.

Except for the pedals and the sprockets and part of the chain (they were from Mr. Harkins's bike—"I cannibalized his Raleigh!" Father said), the driving mechanism of the Icicle had been made in the forge at Jeronimo, and some small parts by the wire-nibbling teeth of Drainy Maywit. "That kid's a human micrometer!" Amidships, Father had outrigged an ice-storage vault. There were two seats forward, and two side by side in the stem, in front of the pedaler's cockpit, which Father called "the Wishing Well — because whoever's pedaling in it wishes he was somewhere else." Going upstream, Francis worked the pedals. It was the perfect boat for the upper river. Father claimed that it was so buoyant he could go cross-country in it, providing there was a smidgen of dew on the grass.

Mr. Haddy said, "These people never see no lanch like this one."

"You're joking," Father said. "They've seen everything. River travel is easy. This is a turnpike. Missionaries have been tooling up and down here in canoes for years. Frankly, I don't regard this as much of an accomplishment."

"Tell you one thing," Mr. Haddy said — he was shouting from the bow where he sat behind Clover—"they ain't have no ice with them!"

"That's a matter of conjecture—"

Francis Lungley screamed at the word.

"— but they were here."

Mr. Haddy shrugged. He was wearing one of the La Rosa flour sacks Mother had made into shirts. His back said, Enriquecida con Vitaminas.

"I want to penetrate where they've never been," Father said.

There were blue butterflies kiting to the ferny branches that overhung the river, startled by our noise. The tumble and splash of our foot-operated wheel sounded like a washing machine sudsing clothes. I could recognize some of the birds in the trees — the jays and the ivory-billed woodpecker, the cockatoos and crascos — and I knew the cries of the hidden ones — the sudden honk of the smaller pava, the shouts of the forest quail, and the bass-fiddle boom of the curassow. These same birds lived near our camp at the Acre, still our secret hiding place from Father and his work, and his speechy ambitions.

"I want to take a load of ice to the hottest, darkest, nastiest corner of Honduras, where they pray for water and never see ice, and have never heard of cans, much less aerosol cans."

"But Seville like that," Francis Lungley said, bobbing his head as he pedaled. He was wearing a La Rosa shirt too. His said, Molino Harinero and 45.36 Kgs Netos. "For true, Seville is dirt."

He had been promising Seville ever since Father demanded the poorest place imaginable. This had started one of the first arguments in Jeronimo. Mr. Haddy, Mr. Harkins, and Mr. Peaselee wanted to take the ice downstream to Santa Rosa or Trujillo. Father asked, what was the point of that? Big ships called at those ports — those towns had more electricity than was good for them.

"You just want to impress your friends. No, we're going upstream."

That was when Francis Lungley said that he had once been to Seville, as far upriver as it was possible to go. Mr. Haddy and the others said they were not going to a stewy bat-shoo place where people had no respect and probably had tails. But Father was interested. Francis said he had almost died there twice — first from fright, next from hunger. It was a falling-down village, where the people ate dirt and looked like monkeys — anyway, ugly as monkeys. They had rat hair and most were naked. They were not even Christians.

"That sounds like my kind of place," Father said.

Then Mr. Haddy agreed and said, oh, yes, heathens were the best fishermen and the strongest paddlers and "Those boys knows how to work, for true."

But as we sudsed up the river (monkeys on the right, kinkajous on the left), Father said, "I find it hard to believe that some missionary hasn't been here before and bought their souls with Twinkies and cheese spread in spray cans and crates of Rice-a-Roni." He watched a monkey on a branch. "Hershey bars." We passed by. He looked back at the monkey. "Diet Pepsi." Now he turned to the kinkajous. "Kool-Aid." He flicked his cigar butt into the river. "Makes your mouth water, doesn't it?"

"You see Seville, Fadder," Francis said, pedaling harder, his La Rosa shirt black with sweat.

"I want to see a wreck of a village that hasn't got a name, where they've been swatting mosquitoes and eating rancid wabool for two thousand years." Father pointed to the mountains. "Over those baffles, where it's all hell and they're being roasted alive!"

"Too bad we ain't back of Brewer's Lagoon," Mr. Haddy said. "Some of them villages is rubbish."

We had started before dawn — so early, the nighttime mosquitoes were still out and biting us. But by noon, though we had gone miles, we were some distance from the mountains of Olancho that marked the end of the river, where Seville was. We tied up at a riverbank for lunch. It was so thickly overgrown we could not get off the boat. The bank was hidden under bush fans and yards of lianas. Mother had packed us a basket of fruit and cassava bread and fresh tomatoes and a Jeronimo drink that Father called Jungle Juice, made from guavas and mangoes. Clover said the juice wasn't cold enough.

"It's plenty cold enough," Father said. "Listen, no one's touching that ice!"

He checked the vault on the boat to make sure the ice was still holding up. The ice was wrapped in banana leaves and the vault lined with rubber we had tapped from the hoolie trees. He had not made us galoshes after all.

"You're bound to lose a little," he said. The ice had shrunk in its banana-leaf wrappings. "Seepage. Natural wastage. Friction" — he was plumping it with his hands—"owing to excessive agitation. Right, Francis?"

Francis Lungley was peeling a banana. He did it delicately with his fingertips, like opening a present.

"I mean, how are we doing?"

The village of Seville was some way off, Francis said. He could not say exactly how far. He squinched his face when Father asked him the miles.

"How many men paddling the cayuka when you were here before?"

"No cayuka," Francis said. "Just foots." He showed us his cracked feet. His ankles were oily from pedaling the boat.

Father blew up. "Now he tells us! He walked! For all we know, we might not get there until tomorrow." He yanked the stern painter from the branch and said the lunch break was over. "If you want to stay here, you can," he said to me. "But we're not going to hang around and watch you feed your face."

I stuffed the sandwich I had made into my pocket, and we cast off. Soon, with Father's barking, we sudsed along like a motorboat.

"What are you brooding about?"

I said, "I wanted to pick one of those avocados back there."

"You're seeing things," Father said. "There aren't any avocados around here."

But there were — small, wild avocados. We had eaten them at the Acre. Alice Maywit had identified them. The Zambu John had told her about them. We peeled them and mashed them with salt and planted the seeds. I looked at Francis, but his eyes were turned on Father.

"Ain't real butter pears," Francis said. "Just bush kind."

"If I've got so many authorities on board, how come we're making such slow progress?"

No river is straight. They only turn and go crosswise and sometimes lead you backward — the nose of your boat heading into the direction you just left. River travel is like forever being turned back and not getting there. The sun shifts sideways from the bow to starboard, where it sways until a riverbend brings it over to port. Soon it slips astern. You know you've been going forward, but the sun isn't in your face any longer — it is heating the back of your head. Some minutes later it is beating on your knuckles. Then it is back to starboard. Another reach and it is burning around the boat, useless to navigate by. All it tells you is how much time has passed. For coastal sailing, the sun is a good guide, but it was confusing here.

In the jungle, all rivers are mazes, and this one was mazier than most — it was something only a small cayuka or an ingenious pipanto like ours could negotiate. The bad part was not that we were going backward, but that we seemed to be going nowhere. We would come to a bank choked with water lilies and hyacinths and green ruffled leaves, and see a bend of open water. We would turn and follow that bend. After half an hour, as the hyacinths piled up and the branches at the bank swung against the boat and smacked our faces and pushed Father's baseball cap sideways, we would realize that we had come the wrong way. Or we were in a swamp that was packed as solid as land, or a lagoon surrounded by black trees, or knocking against stumps. Then we had to go back and suds our way through the thick flowers and logs we had taken for a bank Once past these barriers, we would travel on what seemed a new river or a tributary, now narrow, now wide as a pond and no opening So the sun went round and round, and Father cursed and said why did you have to go fifty river miles to advance five land miles?

He mapped the river as we went, marking the shallows and the bends and the false turns, the sandbar crescents on the reaches, the swamps and lagoons — all the deceptions of its straggling course. It was more than a crumpled shape. It was a bunch of knots, tangled like worms in winter, that made no sense. Even Father, who liked complications, called it a so-and-so labyrinth and said that if he had a dredger and a barge full of dynamite he would twist the bends out of it and knock it straight, so that you could see daylight from one end to the other.

This was the subject of his speeching. When we were led into a swamp by the temptation of open water, Father said, "I'm going to do something about that" — and the islands—"I'll sink them, first chance I get" — and the ponds—"Strap a channel through here, canalize it — all I need is dynamite and willing hands."

Father was now at the bow with Clover, while Mr. Haddy took his turn on the pedals. "Clear all this obstruction away — make some kind of scoop that cuts this sargasso weed at its roots and lifts it free. Get this mess into shape. How very American, you're all saying — the man wants to bring permanent changes to this peaceful jungle! But I didn't mention poison, and I certainly don't intend to make it commercial. Gaw, I like to get my hand on this," and he grinned at the tangles and bends. "It really makes me mad!"

He was getting redder in the face, and, being tall, he looked uncomfortable squatting at the needle nose of this narrow boat. He kept his hands on his hips and swayed like someone riding a bike with no hands. Every so often, he poked his head into the storage vault and said, "At least the ice is holding up, which is more than I can say for the crew. Pedal, Mr. Haddy! Stop catching crabs. Are you looking for avocados, too?"

We passed a semicircle of huts. Francis Lungley called it a village.

"I see signs of corruption," Father said. "I see a tin can!" At another group of riverbank huts, he said, "It's all gum wrappers!"

There was only one more village, and it was hardly a village — a few open-sided huts and a stand of banana trees. This made Father hopeful. Two men sat at the river's edge clumping submerged stones with boulders. Francis Lungley said the men were fishing — stunning the creatures under the stones. They turned the stones over after they clumped them, and pulled out squashed eels and tadpoles and frogs.

"We must be getting close," Father said.

Francis slapped himself on the head. "I forgit! Them mahoganies!" He smiled at the trees as if he expected them to smile back. "It near here."

Father looked satisfied. "They didn't cut them down. Nothing to cut them down with. Primitive tools. Nothing to use the trees for. Just sit back and watch them grow. Now that's a very good sign."

Here, grass spikes grew out of the water, and the trunks of short cut-off trees stood in pools. Clumps of spinach bobbed in the river, and the lianas were black and dangling, like high-voltage wires blown down by a storm. It was all green wreckage and might have been the mess left by a subsided flood. In what was supposed to be river, there were shoots of fountainy leaves, and the land steamed with crater holes of scummy water. Mud and mosquitoes — and it was hard to tell where the river ended and the land began. There was no definite riverbank, and if it had not been for the tall trees behind it all, I think we would have turned around and gone back — we certainly could not have gone any further. Many of the smaller trees were dead, and on the deadest ones were brown pods, quiverine under the branches. "Bats" Mr. Haddy said. "Thev's bats." He repeated his bloodsucking story to Clover, but she said, "You can't scare me."

Staring at some bushes, I saw human faces. The faces were entirely still and round and staring back at me with white eyes that did not blink. I was not scared until I remembered that they must have been there the whole time, watching us thrash our boat through the spinach and the weeds.

Father saw them. He said, "I've got a little surprise for you."

At his voice, and while we were still looking at them, the faces vanished. They did not move, they just disappeared — goggling at us one minute, gone the next. They had turned into leaves, but not even the leaves moved.

"Out to lunch," Father said. "Get the duckboards. We're going after them. You first, Charlie."

"Why me?" But I knew I should not have asked.

Father said, "Because you're the bravest one here, sonny."

This was not true. But the risks that Father made me take were his way of showing me there were no risks. On the rock in Baltimore, up the kingpost of the Unicom, climbing through Fat Boy — it had all been a kind of training for times like this. Father wanted me to be strong. He had known all along that he was preparing me for worse, for this tiptoeing through the spinachy swamp on duckboards, and teetering past the scummy pools and the vine tubes.

"Stamp your feet, Charlie."

I did so and a snake, hanging in six bracelets from a low branch, gathered itself and dropped into the water and swam away.

After that, I stamped my feet every chance I got, and further on a short fat viper, surprised by the clomp of my shoe, wormed into a stump hole until only its gray tail tip showed.

Father was saying, "Never can tell about these people. They might be Munchies — haw!"

We got through thirty yards of this by passing the last duckboard ahead and repeating this process to make a walkway through the mush. It was hard to believe there had been people right here, standing in the swamp. How had they disappeared without making a splash?

We came to bushes like hedges, and past them the trees were taller and had trunks like thick skirts hanging in folds. Parroty birds, and birds so small they might have been insects, screamed around our heads. Above the tops of the mahogany trees there were bigger birds, perched or making shadowy flights, like flying turkeys. Their wings made slow broomlike brushings against the treetops. They might have been curassows — I heard bull-fiddle twangs — but Father said they were vultures and that he wanted to wring their scrawny scavenging necks.

"Seville," Francis said, and pointed to an opening some yards ahead — more jungle, except that it was dark here and sunny there. Gnats and flies spiraled in the light and speckled it.

Mr. Haddy said, "I ain't like this place so soon."

"What kind of houses are those, Dad?" Clover asked.

"That kind of dwelling, of course—"

He never admitted not knowing something, but these huts were not easy to explain. They were small tufty humps made from the same spiky grass we had walked through on the duckboards. A framework of skinny branches balanced the hanks of dead grass bunched on top. Not huts — more like beehives that needed haircuts.

"— that's probably where they keep their animals. Muffin," Father said.

"Got no animals here," Francis said. "I ain't see one."

"All the better," Father said. "If they actually live in those things, then we came to the right place."

Mr. Haddy chuckled and said to me, "The right places for Fadder is always the wrong places for me."

Father looked gladly on the miserable village.

Yet only the huts were miserable. This jungle, the start of the high forest, was tall and orderly. Each tree had found room to grow separately. The trees were arranged in various ways, according to slenderness or leaf size, the big-leafed ones at the jungle floor, the towering trees with tiny leaves rising to great heights, and the ferns in between. I had always pictured jungle as suffocating spaghetti tangles, drooping and crisscrossed, a mass of hairy green rope and clutching stems — a wicked salad that stank in your face and flung its stalks around you.

This was more like a church, with pillars and fans and hanging flowers and only the slightest patches of white sky above the curved roof of branches. There was nothing smothering about it, and although it was noisy with birds, it was motionless — no wind, not even a breeze in the moisture and green shadows and blue-brown trunks. And no tangles — only a forest of verticals, hugely patient and protective. It was like being indoors, with a pretty roof overhead. And the order and size of it made the little huts beneath look especially dumpy.

The village — if it was a village — was deserted. Without people there, it was like the crust of a camp, where some travelers, too lazy or sick to make proper lean-tos, had hacked some bushes apart, shoveled a fire next to a rock, and spent one uncomfortable night before setting off again to die somewhere. The only sign of life was a sick puppy that yapped at us from behind a pile of trash — fruit peels and chewed cane stalks — and didn't bother getting up. I gave the hungry thing the sandwich I had stuffed into my pocket at lunchtime. He tried to bite me, then he ate the sandwich. In the center of the five huts, all made of grass tufts, was a smoky firepit, and some broken calabashes. There was not a human here to be seen.

But we had seen faces back at the duckboards.

Mr. Haddy said, "I ain't blame them for fetching out of this place. Lungley, what you say is for true. This is dirt." He was glancing around and wetting his teeth as he spoke. "We could go home, Fadder. We could slap we own mosquitoes."

Father was fanning himself with his baseball cap. He said, "They can't be far away. Probably down at the drive-in hamburger stand." He looked up and saw Mr. Haddy walking away, in the direction of the duckboards.

"Anyone here require a beverage?"

This stiffened Mr. Haddy like an arrow between his shoulders. He turned around laughing in a sneezing sort of way.

"Or, on the other hand," Father said — he had bent over and picked something from the ground—"maybe they're getting their flashlights repaired. Take a gander at this so-called consumer durable."

It was a crumbled flashlight battery, its rusted case burst open and the paint peeled off and barely recognizable, it was so squashed. It looked like an old sausage.

"Francis, you said they were savages!"

The poor Zambu, who maybe had never seen a flashlight battery — flashlights were forbidden in Jeronimo — just smiled at Father and showed his teeth like a dog hearing a door slam.

"But if they're using these gimcrack things, they probably are savages."

We sat down and waited and watched the wee-wee ants.

"Could be at the gas station, in a long line, waiting to fill up with high-test."

"Ain't seen no gas station round here," Francis said.

"You wouldn't kid me, would you?"

There was evidence that someone was living here — straw beds in the huts, flies rotating over the trash pile, and a tripod with a burned baby on it, or, the nearest thing to it, a roasted monkey with curled-up fingers and toes.

Father said, "How did you talk to them when you were here before?"

Francis opened his mouth and wagged his blue tongue.

"What language?"

Francis did not know what Father meant. He said he just talked to them and they talked to him. "They savvy."

This was a Jeronimo explanation. People spoke English, Spanish, and Creole, but they did not know when they were going from one language to another. It seemed that by looking into a person's face, they knew what language to use, and sometimes they mixed them all together, so that what came out sounded like a new language. I had the habit myself. I could talk to anyone, and often I did not realize that I was not speaking English. But everyone on the Mosquito Coast, no matter what he looked like or what language he spoke, said he was English.

Pacing the clearing with Clover, Father looked like a man showing his daughter around the zoo — impatient and proud and talking the whole time and sort of holding his nose. Then, from the other side of the firepit, we heard his loud voice.

"Okay, the game's over. We can see you! Stop hiding — you're just wasting your time! Come on out of there, we're not going to hurt you! Get out from behind those trees!"

His voice rang against the jungle's straight trees and high ceiling. He kept it up for several minutes, yelling at the bushes, while we watched. Clover peered at the ferns Father was beating with a stick. He looked the way Tiny Polski had when he was flushing bobwhites in Hatfield.

The amazing thing was, it worked. We saw we were surrounded by people, more than twenty of them. This took place as we were staring, and they appeared in the same way as they had vanished before, without a movement or a sound. One second, Father was shouting "Come on out!" in the empty clearing, and the next second the people were there and he was shouting the same thing in their faces. We did not know whether Father had really seen them or was just pretending.

The women wore ragged dresses and the men wore shorts. But these clothes did not hide their nakedness. They seemed to represent clothes rather than serve any covering purpose. We could see their private parts through the rips and tears. And the children — Clover's age and mine — were stark naked, which was embarrassing.

"Carkles and wilks," Mr. Haddy said, and stuck his teeth out.

Father said, "They don't look so bad to me. Are you sure this is the place?"

Francis said it was.

We expected Father to say hello. He didn't. He turned his back on the people, as if he had known them a long time, and he said, "Okay, let's go" over his shoulder — meaning them. "Follow me — we've got work to do."

Three of the men — they looked a little like Francis, except that they were nakeder and had bushier hair — followed Father to the duckboards.

"You stay here," Father said to us. "Relax, get acquainted, make yourselves known."

He went off impatiently, whacking at flies with his hat, and then we heard him kicking the duckboards to scare snakes. The three men followed him without a word.

Clover said, "He's right at home anywhere." She sounded like Mother.

The people stared at Clover through the haze from the firepit's smoke. They had gray blurred faces and wore scorched rags. Mud was caked on their legs.

"See-ville, man," Mr. Haddy said. "What a spearmint!"

Francis said, "Almost went dead here, Haddy. Two time."

Now the people looked at us.

"What you do to these folks, Lungley?"

"Ain't do nothing."

"How is it?" Mr. Haddy spoke to the people. He stuck out his teeth and opened his mouth to listen.

No one replied. "Must be ailing," Mr. Haddy whispered. The naked children hid behind their parents. We looked at each other across the clearing, and it was like looking across the world.

They turned their heads. An old man limp-scraped into the clearing from the pillars of the forest trees. He wore a pair of cut-off striped pants, wire glasses, and socks but no shoes — his toenails were yellow in the rips. A rag was knotted around his neck. There were broken straws in his hair. He wore a bicycle clip on each wrist like a bracelet.

"That is the Gowdy," Francis said.

"Look like he require a bevidge," Mr. Haddy said. "Shoo!"

The next words we heard were Father's. He was hidden and saying, "Careful! Steady there! Don't drop them!"

We had packed the ice so carefully in banana leaves that the blocks were like parcels, tied with vines. The silent men carried two parcels apiece. Father led them to the middle of the clearing and directed that the parcels be placed on the ground.

"Who's in charge here?" Father said.

"Man with speckles," Francis said. "He the Gowdy." He nodded at the man who stood slightly forward of the group of staring people. Seeing our eyes on him, the old man clawed some of the straws out of his hair.

Father shook the man's hand. "You the Gowdy?"

"Gowdy," the man said, and he giggled.

"We've got a little surprise for you," Father said in his friendly way. "Want to get those other people over here?" He took out his jackknife and winked at us. "I'd like to show them something."

When the people were close, Father cut the vines and pushed the leaves aside, uncovering one block of ice. He stabbed his knife blade like an ice pick and hacked off a corner. He gave this hunk of ice to the Gowdy.

The old man bobbied it, just as Tiny Polski had done back in Hatfield, not knowing whether it was hot or cold. The people gathered around to touch it. They laughed and pushed to get near it and stepped on their children. The ones who touched the ice smelled their fingers, or walked a little distance away to lick them.

Father was still winking at us as he spoke to the old man, the Gowdy. "What's the verdict?"

"Good morning to you, sah. I am well, thank you. Where are you garng. I am garng to the bushes." The Gowdy's wire glasses had been knocked crooked by the pushing people. "Today is Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Thank you, that is a good lesson."

He bobbied the ice as he spoke.

"Hasn't the slightest idea," Father said to us.

The ice was melting in the old man's hand. Water ran down his arm, leaving dirt streaks on his skin. It dripped from the knob at his elbow.

"Completely in the dark," Father said. He put his arm around the old man's shoulders and gave him a wide smile.

The Gowdy shivered.

"What's that?" Father said, and pointed.

"Hice," the Gowdy said.

"Jesus Christ Almighty!" Father roared, and gave the Gowdy a shove, nearly knocking the old man over.

But no sooner had he spoken than every one of the people, including the Gowdy, dropped to his knees. The sudden movement startled the birds. A great uprush of them, big and small, shook the branches overhead, and these birds alerted the roosting birds, which took off like turkeys from the treetops. The sick puppy yapped and stumbled as the people knelt low, pinching their throats and murmuring.

"Ah Fadder wart neven hello bead name—"

"Cut it out!" Father said. "Get up — off your knees!" He tried to drag them up, then he turned to Francis and screamed, "You traitor, you gave me a bum steer! Thanks a lot!"

Mr. Haddy was laughing softly, relieved that they were Christians. And maybe he was secretly glad that Father, who seldom made mistakes, had blundered by taking ice here, when Mr. Haddy himself could more easily have shipped it to the coast and made a greater impression. He went forward to calm the confused people, who were still gasping and praying, and said, "You is good folks, but this is bush for true."

Father was so angry he vanished in the way the people in Seville had near the duckboards. He went up in a puff of smoke, leaving only his angry smell behind. We removed the rest of the parcels from the boat and talked to the villagers. They said that they had seen ice four or five times. They said it was wonderful stuff and they described it as cold stones that turned into water. Missionaries had brought it to them, and they believed that we were missionaries, too, and Father was our preacher. They wanted to know where we lived and if we had any food or salt to give them. The Gowdy boasted that everyone in the village was baptized.

He said they were waiting — waiting to go to Heaven and see the Lord Jesus. Mr. Haddy said it was a pretty rotten place to wait, full of monkey-shoo, but he could understand why they wanted to leave as soon as possible, for Heaven or anywhere else. Father returned — too late to hear any of this, which was just as well.

"I walked around the block," he said.

He would not speak to anyone in Seville. He said only that Francis had betrayed him. When the Gowdy tried to get the people started on a hymn, Father yelled as if he had hit his thumb with a hammer, and then said he would wait for us on the boat.

We left Seville. The people had begun to quarrel over the ice.

Father's moodiness made the trip back to Jeronimo mostly silent. But it was a faster trip. The contours of the river were not strange to us anymore, and the current was with us. Father made improvements on his map and we did not take any wrong turns. I worked the pedals. Father sat in the bow with Clover on his lap, sulking over his map, because the Seville people had seen ice before and because they prayed. "They might as well be in Hatfield, cutting asparagus," was all he said. He hugged Clover, like a big boy with a teddy bear. Francis and Mr. Haddy knew they were being ignored. They crouched amidships in the ice-storage vault with nothing to do.

After a while, Francis said he saw pipantos. Someone was following us, he said. Father did not reply or turn his head.

"Little one," Mr. Haddy said, looking past me. "Pipanto."

I glanced around but did not see anything. I had the steering to attend to.

"Me yerry," Francis whispered. He began muttering like a bush Zambu. He said he heard six paddlers — three pipantos.

"Never see no lanch like this," Mr. Haddy said.

Darkness came. It seemed to grow out of the riverside. The trees swelled, fattened by the blackness. The high curve went out of the sky. Pinheads of stars appeared and brightened into blobs.

"They still back of us in the rock-stone."

And night was around us. The water still held a slippery glimmer ahead, and behind us was the paddle wheel's loose froth, spreading in the current.

Soon we saw the lanterns of Jeronimo and the sparks from Fat Boy's chimney stack. The lights were small and very still on shore, but they poured from the bank and leaked yellow pools into the river. I heard someone say, "Here they come."

In the bedroom that night, Jerry said, "I could have gone with Dad. But I didn't want to. We were at the Acre all day. Ma let us."

"I saw two snakes," I said. "One almost bit me."

"We built another man trap. You don't know where it is. You'll fall in and kill yourself, Charlie."

"Go to sleep, crappo."

Later, through the bamboo wall, I heard Mother consoling Father. At first I thought she was speaking to April or Clover, her voice was so soft. But she was talking about the ice, and the boat, and his hard work. It was all brilliant, she said. She was proud of him, and nothing else mattered.

Father did not object. He said, "It wasn't what I expected. I didn't want that. They prayed at me, Mother."

"I'd like to go upstream sometime," Mother said.

"We'll go. It's not what you think. You won't like it. It's bad, but in the most boring way. Oh, I suppose they're all right — they'll be able to use the ice for something. But what can you do with people who've already been corrupted? It makes me mad."

***

It was two weeks before we went back to Seville, and in those two weeks we kids spent more time at the Acre, in our little camp by the pool. It pleased me to think that our camp was sturdier than anything in Seville. We wove hammocks out of green vines. We ate wild onions. The hammocks gave us rashes, the onions gave us cramps. A water dog crept out of the pool one day and we chased it into a trap and beat it to death with sticks. Then we cut it into pieces and dried the meat strips on a tripod, Zambu-style. But the next day the meat strips were gone. Peewee said a monster had come and eaten them, but I guessed it was an animal, because the tripod was not high enough.

We collected berries. Some were to eat, and others kept mosquitoes away if you rubbed them on your skin and let the juice dry. Alice Maywit showed us a cluster of purple ones and said, "These is poison."

Clover said, "I don't believe you. You're afraid of everything. I bet they're blackberries or something."

"Want to eat one, girl?" Drainy said. He showed her his wire-bending teeth.

Clover looked as though she was willing to try, just to show off and prove she was right, but I punched her hard and told her to stay away from them.

"No hitting!" she said. "That's the rule — Dad said so!"

"This isn't Jeronimo," I said. "This is our Acre and we have our own rules."

That was the pleasure of the Acre — that we could do whatever we wanted. We had money, school, and religion here, and traps and poison. No inventions or machines. We had secrets — why, we even knew the Maywits' real name. We could pretend we were schoolchildren, or we could live like Zambus. That day was a good example. Drainy suggested that we take off all our clothes, and he pulled down his own shorts to show he was serious. Then Peewee did the same, and so did Clover and the others. Alice yanked her dress over her head and dropped her bloomers, and I stepped out of my shorts. The eight of us stood there giggling and stark naked, but I was so ashamed I jumped into the pool and pretended I wanted to swim, while the others compared bodies and danced around.

Alice was standing at the lip of the pool.

"Ever see a carkle?"

She knelt with her knees apart and pinched the black wrinkles in her fingers, and for a moment I thought I was going to drown.

"What's that?" She closed her thighs and listened.

I heard nothing but the usual noises. Alice said she heard horseflies. She saw one coming toward her and she looked steadily at it and got very worried. She said it meant there were strangers about.

We quickly put on our clothes and left the camp by the river path. Minutes later, we saw canoes. They were Indians, Alice said. She had known that from the horsefly. The canoes were old and waterlogged dugouts, and the paddlers looked like the Seville people, their thin arms sticking out of rags, and broken straws in their bushy hair.

"They're trying to spy on us," Jerry said.

But they could not see us watching them. We had outsmarted them, and we laughed softly — even April, who was usually afraid — seeing them struggling upstream in their old canoes.

"They're coming from Jeronimo," Clover said.

"Good thing they ain't see us naked!" Drainy said.

"They'll never find our camp," I said. "No one will find the Acre."

I was glad that we had this safe place in the jungle. And now, because I had seen Seville, I knew that ours was a well-ordered camp — better than the villages made by real jungle people.

We mentioned the canoes in Jeronimo. No one had seen them. Father said, "Maybe Munchies! Maybe Duppies!" and tried to frighten the Maywits.

On the morning Father said we were going back to Seville, Mr. Peaselee, who was doing fireman duty, let Fat Boy's fire go out. The ice melted. Father said, "We might have to cancel the trip. Everyone to the Gallery!" He gave a lecture about responsibility and good habits, and did we think Fat Boy could live without care and attention? Fat Boy was kind because we were careful, but if we were careless he would turn dangerous. If we neglected to do our duty, he would split open and take his revenge by killing us all. Father said, "He's full of poison!"

After Fat Boy was stoked and new ice was made and packed, I heard Father say, "You can't take your eyes off these people for a minute."

Mother said, "That's just what Polski used to say."

"Don't compare me to that turkey."

"You're getting shrill, Allie."

"Poison," Father said. "Hydrogen and enriched ammonia — thirty cubic feet of each one. You'd be shrill too, if you knew the danger."

"I'll get the food," Mother said, and walked away.

Father saw me listening. "I'm the only one around here carrying the ball. Why is that, Charlie? You tell me."

I thought, He really does sound like Polski.

We left for Seville — the Fox family, no one else. Father pedaled and talked the whole time.

"Don't think I'm enjoying this," he said. "The last thing I want to do is go back to Seville. I'd just as soon go back to Hatfield. But we're obliged. We can't drop them after one shipment. I thought we might inspire them, help them out, cool their fish and give them time for farming — do all the things that ice lets you do. That's the whole point, isn't it? Give them the benefit of our experience? But I know what they'll do with the ice — they'll cube it and dump it into their glasses of Coke and just go haywire like everyone else."

"You didn't say anything about Coca-Cola," Mother said.

"Give them time."

We made Seville in under three hours, Father pedaling furiously and shouting about how he was going to dynamite a canal through the jungle and dredge the hyacinths out of the river. In his angry mood he imagined the grandest schemes. At the mahoganies we were met by five Seville people — they popped out of the spinach and the grass and startled us. They had seen us on the river, they said. But we had not seen them. They danced around Mother, telling her to be careful.

"We didn't get a reception like this the last time," Father said.

"I think they want us to follow them," Mother said.

As before, I ran ahead, stamping on the duckboards to frighten away the snakes. Jerry was behind me, looking worriedly from side to side.

He said, "What's that thing?"

"It wasn't here before." Clover said.

It was a wooden box in the clearing of Seville, as tall as me, and from a distance it looked like Fat Boy. It was smaller, somewhat resembling the original Worm Tub. It had a chimney stack and a firebox. Several women squatted near it. stoking its fire.

This pleased Father. "Maybe we inspired them after all," he said. He called out to the Gowdy. who was waiting to greet us. "What have you got there?" Father said. "That looks kind of familiar."

He walked straight up to it while the Seville people gathered around.

The Gowdy said, "Hice!"

Father opened the door, but the hinges of tattered vine were so flimsy the door fell off and the corner of it caught fire when it banged the firebox. Father kicked the fire out. We looked inside. It was empty.

"What the hell is this all about?" Father said.

They had made a copy of Fat Boy. But, Father said, what good was it? Of course it didn't work. It was only good for boiling eggs or setting yourself on fire. "Who gave you this harebrained idea?"

They smiled. They treated this box with a kind of reverence and asked Father to lead them in hymns in front of it. This enraged Father. He began to smell of his anger. The Gowdy tried to present Father with the lame puppy, but Father said he had enough sick animals of his own, and sick people too. So we unloaded the ice, and without even unwrapping it we went back to the Icicle. He said to Mother, "I hope you're satisfied." He also said he would never again go to Seville.

"I didn't come here to give people false idols to worship," he said. But the idol was there for all to see, made of warped planks and fastened by lianas.

"That's the trouble, really," Father said. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

16

"WHAT'S ice good for?" little Leon Maywit had asked. But Father did not mind silly questions from small children. He went on, "Mainly it's a preservative — it keeps food fresh, so it keeps you from starvation and disease. It kills germs, it suppresses pain, and it brings down swellings. It makes everything it touches taste better without altering it chemically. Makes vegetables crisp and meat last forever. Listen, it's an anesthetic. I could remove your appendix with a jackknife if I had a block of ice to cool your nerves and take your mind off the butchery. It doesn't occur naturally on the Mosquito Coast, so it's the beginning of perfection in an imperfect world. It makes sense of work. It's free. It's even pretty. It's civilization. It used to be carried from northern latitudes on ships in just the same way they carried gold and spices—"

We were on the Gallery, all of us, Foxes, Maywits, Zambus, Mrs. Flora Kennywick, and the others — one of Father's dinner gatherings. Father pointed his finger stump at the mountains rising behind Fat Boy.

He said, "And that's next. Injun country. We'll take them a ton."

The newer people looked at his finger, not the mountains, and just as he said "ton," there was an earth tremor and their eyes popped.

It was a noiseless wobble, a slow half-roll that made the Gallery quiver. It was twenty seconds of rotation, like the drop of a boat deck. Nothing fell down, though there was a human yell in the forest and a breathless bark of worry from the river. I had the feeling that everything had moved but us. The world's peel had wrinkled and made a little skid. That was the first shuddering stall, but its various shakes and smoothings lasted a full minute.

Father made a flutterblast with his hps and said, "Gaw!"

Mrs. Maywit said, "Oh, God, Roper, what we do?" and she and Mrs. Kennywick began praying.

When I heard "Roper," I looked at Mr. Maywit. He covered his face and sobbed, "Never mind!" The moment passed. I think I was the only one who heard.

"Pray if you must," Father said, "but I'd rather you listened to me."

Everyone except us looked worried, as if he might point again at the mountains and cause another earthquake.

"I'm just thinking out loud," Father said, "but if I had the hardware, know what I'd do?"

At this, Mother smiled. I guessed what she was thinking — why do anything?

It was plain from where we sat that Jeronimo was a success. We had defeated the mosquitoes, tamed the river, drained the swamp, and irrigated the gardens. We had seen the worst of Honduras weather — the June floods, the September heat — and we had overcome both. We had just this moment withstood an earth tremor: nothing had shaken loose! We were organized, Father said. Our drinking water was purified in a distiller that ran from Fat Boy's firebox. We had the only ice-making plant in Mosquitia, the only one of its kind in the world, and the capability, Father said, of making an iceberg.

Down there were cornstalks, eight-and-a-half feet high, with cobs a foot long—"So big, it only takes eleven of them to make a dozen." We had fresh fruit and vegetables and an incubator (Fat Boy's spare heat) for hatching eggs. "Control — that's the proof of civilization. Anyone can do something once, but repeating it and maintaining it — that's the true test." We grew rice, the most difficult of crops. We had a superior sewage system and shower apparatus. "We're clean!" An efficient windmill pump overrode the water wheel on the ice-making days. Most of the inventions had been made from local materials, and three new buildings were faced with Father's bamboo tiles. We had a chicken run and two boats at the landing and the best flush toilets in Honduras. Jeronimo was a masterpiece of order—"appropriate technology," Father called it.

We produced more than we needed. The extra fish we caught swam in a tank Father named "the Fish Farm" — his names were always a little grander than the things themselves. We harvested more than we could eat, but the excess was not sold. Some of it he gave to people in return for work, though he never handed out any food to beggars. What he preferred to do was cut the produce open — watermelons, say, or cucumbers or corn — and empty out the seeds and dry them. He would give these to anyone who helped him. There was always work to do — he was determined to straighten the river and clear it of hyacinths, for instance. "It could take a lifetime," he said. "But I've got a lifetime! I'm not going anywhere!" River workers were rewarded with blocks of ice and bags of seeds. "Hybrids! Burnees! Wonder corn! Miracle beans! Sixty-day tomatoes!"

We were happy and hidden. All you could see of Jeronimo from the river was Fat Boy's square head and tin hat and the smoking chimney stack. "Low visibility," Father said. "I don't want to be pestered by goofball missionaries in motorboats who want to come up here and ooze Scripture all over us."

It was now November, the weather like Hatfield in July, and Jeronimo was home. And for this, Father said, no one had said a prayer or surrendered his soul or pledged allegiance or dog-eared a Bible or flown a flag. We had not polluted the river. We had preserved the ecology of the Mosquito Coast. And all because we had put our trust in "a Yankee with a knack for getting things accomplished" — him. He often said that if it were not for white-collar crime and stupidity and a twenty-cent dollar and the storm clouds of war, he could have done the same things in Hatfield, Massachusetts.

All this was plain from the Gallery, which had just wobbled with the earth tremor, and where Father was saying, "If I had the hardware, know what I'd do?"

The others were still fearfully gray and did not reply.

Mother said, "What would you do, Allie?"

"Sink a shaft."

He singled out the Maywits and Mrs. Kennywick and talked to them, because they had been praying hardest and were in a way still quaking themselves.

"The kind of hole they make in the Santa Barbara Channel or the North Sea. Your diamond bits, your giant platform, your whole drilling rig. I'd drill down — what? — four or five thousand feet and tap the energy resources right under here." He stamped his foot on the Gallery floor. "Just the way your chicleros tap a sapodilla tree. Same principle."

"You make me a sweet li'l raincap. Fadder," Mrs. Kennywick said. But her voice told that she was still thinking of the earth tremor.

"The rumble reminded me. Why doesn't anyone else put two and two together? See, the mistake they make in drilling for oil is that they're missing a golden opportunity. They've got all the hardware, but as soon as the oil starts gushing they pump it dry and bore another one. Talk about foolish and short-sighted!"

"But Fadder ain't do that foolishness," Mr. Maywit said to Mother, as if he knew what was coming. He looked fearful, or perhaps he just seemed so to me because I knew his real name was Roper.

"I'd let it gush," Father said, "and go on drilling. Go past the shale, lengthen the bit, go past the granite — lengthen it some more — and penetrate the bowels of the earth."

"Shoo," Mr. Haddy said. "That is a spearmint for true."

"That earth tremor we just had was a geological crepitation, a subterranean fart, from the bowels of the earth. There's gas down there! Superheated water, steam under pressure — all the heat you need!"

Mr. Peaselee said, "Ain't we hot enough now, Fadder?" And Mr. Harkins said it was so hot it was bringing out the crapsies, though I had no idea what he meant by this.

"Dad's not talking about the weather," Clover said.

"Listen to that little girl," Father said.

Everyone looked at Clover. She basked for a while under their watery eyes.

"Geothermal energy! Don't laugh. There's only a few places in the world where it's practical, and you're lucky enough to be living in one. The whole of Central America is a repository of high energy. You're on a fault line — thin crust, loose plates — listen to the volcanoes. They're calling out and saying, 'Geothermal! Geothermal!'—but no one's doing anything about it. No one seems to understand how the modern world got this way — no one except me, and I understand it because I had a hand in making it. Everyone else is running away, or pursuing wasteful and dirty technology, or saying his prayers."

"We ain't praying no more," Mrs. Kennywick said.

"The promised land is in your own back yard! All you have to do is get through that flowerbed, and drill the crust and tap the heat. We've been on the moon, but we haven't been in our own basement boiler. Listen, there's enough energy down there to do our cooking until kingdom come!"

I had to grin. Only Father would think of cooking by drilling to the earth's core. "Won't cost a nickel," was his usual boast, "and think of the benefits — a great invention is a perpetual annuity."

Father was excited by the earth tremor and his idea, and he infected the others on the Gallery with his excitement and optimism — just those feelings alone, because I was sure they had not understood a word he said.

"I see a kind of conduit, a borehole," he said. "Down go the drills, up comes the heat energy. I've already proved I can make ice out of nothing but pipefittings and chemical compounds and a little kindling wood. That took brains. But listen, any dumbbell can dig a hole. Why don't we? There's a good reason — we haven't got the hardware. Not yet. There's certain things in this world you can't make out of bamboo and chicken wire. But I'll tell you something else. Siphoning off the geothermal energy — I mean, in a huge way — might put a stop to these earth tremors, or at least take some of the kick out of them. See, I am talking about nothing less than harnessing a volcano!"

He had them twitching with this speech, and they looked eager enough to snatch shovels and start digging wherever he pointed.

All except Mr. Haddy. He stood up and cleared his throat and said, "That is a good spearmint, but it take an awful lot of brains. Between times, Lungley and me want to ship some ice down Bonito and Fish Bucket."

"Still dying to impress your friends, aren't you?"

"Ain't got friends down there," Mr. Haddy said. "But I can use me lanch like the old-time days, loading and sailing. That is my occupation, Fadder."

"I take it you're not interested in geothermal energy."

"Interested, sure thing, for true. But that spearmint, man, is real large. We ain't got all them holes and poles!"

"Not yet," Father said.

Mr. Haddy stuck his teeth out and blinked like a rabbit.

"How much ice do you want to take downstream?"

"Coupla hundred pounds. Two-three sacks."

"Hardly worth the trouble." Father said. "Why not take a ton?"

Mr. Haddy laughed loudly in surprise and relief. "She sink me old lanch!"

"Ice floats, Figgy" — Mr. Haddy smiled at the word—"You can tow it."

"How we do that?"

"Take an iceberg."

"Icebugs and bowl-caynoes," Mr. Maywit said to me, but clear enough for Father to hear. "Fadder sure is a miracle man!" Mr. Maywit looked very frightened.

"We could make an iceberg before breakfast," Father said.

It was the sort of challenge Father enjoyed, something grand and visible — a task that was also a performance. He had objected to Mr. Haddy taking a few sacks of ice to the coast, but towing an iceberg — that was a different story.

***

I had visualized a pyramid, its sides submerged, its point sticking up, being tugged by Little Haddy. But Father's iceberg was egg-shaped, and as tall as he was, to concentrate its coldness and limit its melting. He calculated that a single block made from many smaller blocks would be reduced by only a third if they floated it to Bonito Oriental, and it would still look like an iceberg in Fish Bucket. It would not make the coast. "But we're just proving a point here — not trying to change anyone's life. We'll see how it shakes down."

He told Mother it was mainly a morale-builder. "I like it when you get an idea and no one laughs. They deserve an iceberg."

Mr. Haddy was very proud. The iceberg was his boast, and he would captain the Creoles in taking it downstream.

"I'm just obeying orders," Father said. "If Figgy wants an iceberg, he's going to have it."

All work was put aside for this. Fat Boy was stoked and all the pumps primed. We had been keeping Fat Boy purring, but we only removed ice when we needed it for the cold-storage room, where we kept dead hens and vegetables. "We're a thoroughly refrigerated settlement," Father said. But the truth was that ice was not a necessity so far. It was a novelty, like Father's idea of geothermal energy. Why drill five thousand feet down to get at a volcano's bowels? To provide Fat Boy with an endless heat supply. One scheme justified another. We could have done without them, but, as Father said, why live like savages? "In the end Robinson Crusoe went back home! But we're staying."

He said, "Someday, there'll be a conduit here, self-sealing and perpetual, and this whole refrigeration plant will be operated by geothermal energy. We'll have ice coming out of our ears and won't have to chop another stick of wood. Think of the future!"

That was the day we made the iceberg. We pumped water into Fat Boy and kept the firebox full and listened to the fizz and bubble in the pipes. Father ran back and forth on the path to the riverbank, where the ice bricks were taking shape as an oval iceberg.

"It's pretty and it's free. You find me a better combination of virtues."

Every half-hour we froze a new batch of bricks, and by mid-day we were finished — a large blue-white iceberg lay steaming and sweating in the mud, with a tow rope frozen in its center. It was roughly the shape of a Volkswagen Beetle, but larger, on a platform of bamboo logs that served first as a sled and then as a raft. We had no difficulty launching it. The tow rope was hitched to Little Haddy, and its gunning engine got the ice down the bank and into the river. The Creoles — Harkins, Peaselee, and Maywit — were in the bow, and Mr. Haddy in the wheel house, the ice creaking, the bamboo groaning, and the muddy water splashing all around it.

Of all the strange pieces of anything that floated down this jungle river, this was the strangest by a country mile.

"Our message to the world," Father said. "I'd love to see their faces when it heaves into view — coming out of the hottest, sickest, most parched and bug-ridden jungle in the whole hemisphere. They look up from their laundry. 'What is dat?' 'Dat is a icebug, Mudder, and he heading dis way!'"

Mother said, "They'll think it's the end of the world."

"But it's the beginning. It's creation, Mother."

The iceberg, hog-backed and bobbing, went around the bend and out of sight. The children ran down the Swampmouth path to get another look. Mother headed into the house, and then I was alone with Father on the riverbank.

"I could have gone with them." he said. "But I didn't want to spoil their fun. They can have the glory." He looked back at Fat Boy. "Besides, I've got to see to him. He might have overheated. He's full of poison and flammable gas. Ammonia and hydrogen, Charlie — those are his vital juices!" He looked at his finger stump and added, "But there's danger in all great inventions."

I saw my chance to tell him about the Acre. There was no danger there, apart from the traps we had set. We had food and water and shelter. But I was afraid of what he might say about the praying tree and the lean-to school. He might have got me to admit that we had taken all our clothes off one day and compared tools. He would have been stinking angry, or else hooting and calling us savages. So I said nothing.

"You feel a little like God," he whispered, looking around. His clothes were soaked from the ice bricks and sweat. His fingers were red from handling the ice. His hair was long and his face like a hatchet. He turned his bloodshot eyes on me and went on in the same tired and wondering whisper, "God had fun making things like icebergs and volcanoes. Too bad He didn't finish the job. Ha!"

***

Little Haddy returned to Jeronimo at nightfall. Mr. Haddy was giggling with pride, but at last he confessed that the iceberg had started breaking up at Bonito Oriental. They had cut it loose and let the current take the fragments downstream to the coast. He was a little drunk, because at the Chinese store in Bonito they had traded some ice for a calabash of mishla.

But Father was smiling at the river, maybe imagining the ice bricks floating down to Santa Rosa, and people pointing and fishing them out and struck with terror at the thought of ice sailing out of the jungle.

"This was a field day," he said. It had not cost anything, and we were all happier as a result. He told us he had left the United States so that we could spend days like this, working together and putting our ideas into practice. It was what he had always dreamed about.

Outside the Gallery that night, the birds fell silent in the muddy twilight and the bats began chirping. Around us was a circular wall of insect howl. A light breeze quickened in the darkness, brushing the trees. We played Up Jenkins on the Gallery floor, to the flashes of heat lightning that separated the mountains from the night sky.

"That's next. Injun country. We'll take them a ton."

But when he pointed, the Creoles and Zambus held tight to the Gallery rails, expecting another earth tremor. And Mr. Haddy, being worried, was all the more rabbit-toothed.

Father did not notice them. He was staring at the mountains, waiting for another lightning bolt. It came. It flashed on his face.

"You feel a little like God," he said.

17

IN THE DAYTIME, Jeronimo was ours — our design, our gardens, the whops and claps of our pumps, the nut-sweet fragrance of our split bamboos, our flowers and mechanics. It was hot, but the heat and light burned it clean of stinks. And it was always in the daytime that Father said, "I declare this a success."

The coldest Jeronimo got was in the hour before dawn, like right now, when it was coal-black and clammy and so silent in the clearing you could hear the trees drip. It was foreign and all wild. The jungle odors were strongest, too, the wet itch of hairy vines, the wormy tree trunks, the foul smack of sappy leaves, and the river rotting as it swept past us.

These were the stinks and perfumes of early morning, dew-soaked grass, and wet petals, and they overwhelmed the civilized smells of Jeronimo. Everything was black under the black sky. The stars, which at midnight looked like a spillway of broken pearls, did not shine at this hour — they were holes of light, like eye squints in black masks.

Father had woken Jerry and me and told us to put our clothes on.

"We're all ready," he said.

We waited in the dark, standing in the wet grass near Fat Boy's firebox, yawning and shivering.

"I've been up for hours getting this together," Father said. I could see the glow of his cigar butt, nothing else. "Hardly slept a wink."

"Fadder ain't need no sleep," Mr. Maywit said. So Father had been lecturing him. too.

As my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, I saw Mr. Maywit fussing around a block of ice. It was nearly as big as the iceberg Mr. Haddy had towed downstream two days ago. Something in Mr. Maywit's jittery gestures said he was not coming with us. He was working too hard, out of breath and chattering to Mr. Peaselee, as if he was impatient for us to leave, sort of showing us the door.

The slab of ice — it looked like a fat lump of lard in the darkness — was being wrapped in a mitten of banana leaves. It was fastened to a narrow sled. The sled had a pair of close-set runners and was rigged to be pulled by men in harnesses.

"Don't talk to me about wheels," Father said.

But no one had said anything about wheels.

Rustling the banana leaves as they layered them over the ice block, Mr. Maywit and Mr. Peaselee were whispering between themselves. Father's cigar butt blazed.

"Wheels are for paved roads — they won't get you anywhere on these mountain tracks. Too inefficient. Just break or get bogged down in the gumbo. But Skidder here" — it was his name for the ice sled—"will merely glide over the bumps."

The ice no longer glowed like lard. The wrapping was done. It looked like granite, the hump of a tombstone. Mr. Maywit and Mr. Peaselee stepped aside, their white eyes wide open.

"How about it?" Father said. "Are you coming with us?"

"Kyant." Mr. Maywit was hesitant and backpedaling. "I am Feel Super."

Father laughed at him. "He almost forgot!" he cried. "If you're Field Super, you get those gutters scrubbed. I want them so clean I can eat off them. Where are you, Mr. P.?"

Mr. Peaselee said, "Fadder?" from a squatting position, and sprang to his feet, muttering.

"You coming?"

"No man," Mr. Peaselee said. "They always troubles there. Contrabanders. Shouljers. Feefs. People from Nicaragua way. Up in those mountains, they got ruckboos, for true."

"Quit it — you don't know the first thing about trouble." Father turned his back on the Creoles. "Where's my jungle men, where's my trackers?"

"Hee, Fadder."

It was a low brown growl, close by. The Zambus had been there beside us like black trees, listening the whole time — Francis Lungley, John Dixon, and Bucky Smart. Now I could see their round heads moving past the star punctures in the sky.

"Harness up and let's shove off." Father said. "Go back to bed, Peasie. Get your beauty sleep."

We started out of the clearing. Father in front, the Zambus pulling the sled, Jerry and me following behind. Father was still talking.

"Trouble, the man says. I don't call a forty-five-degree angle trouble, and what's a handful of no-goods? I could have that half-breed pleading for mercy. Fuel shortages, unemployment, moral sneaks in Washington, and muggers on every street corner! Kids in grade school sniffing glue, polecats in every pulpit, old-lady hoarders, white-collar punks, double-figure inflation, and a two-dollar loaf of bread. That's what I call trouble. Dead rivers, cities that look like Calcutta — that's trouble for fair. You don't take a walk because you're afraid of getting a shiv in your ribs, so you stay home and they come through the windows. There are homicidal maniacs, ten years old, prowling some neighborhoods. They go to school! The whole country's bleeding to death—bleeding—"

He kept on talking as we entered the dark path out of Jeronimo, and the birds flew up at the sound of his voice.

"Our technological future's in the tiny hands of the Nipponese, and we let coolies do our manufacturing for us. And what about those jumped-up camel drivers frantically doubling the price of oil every two weeks? Did I hear someone mention trouble?"

The ferny boughs blocked the stars overhead, and the path was so narrow the wet leaves brushed dew against our arms. In the daytime this track was a green tunnel, but at night it was the throat of a cave. Father went on talking about the United States. "It makes me mad," he was saying. We followed his voice and the creaking sled. Very soon we were climbing, and within a short time Jerry told me his legs were tired. Mine were trembling from this new effort of climbing, and my feet were wet, but instead of telling him this I called him a spackoid and a sissy — it was what Father would have said — and I felt stronger.

The path zigzagged through dim pickets of trees. We had never been here before. On the tight corners, the Zambus called out, "Hoop! Hoop! Hoop!" and turned the sled. Father had been right — wheels would have been useless here. The loose boulders and soft dirt would have jammed them. And Jerry and I were lucky. The sled moved so slowly on these bends that we could pause and get our breath. The sled's runners made deep ruts, and on the steeper parts of the track we could hear the Zambus' whispered grunts.

"Not to mention the Russians," Father was saying.

Dawn was breaking — lifting the sky and uncovering the trees behind us. It did not seem so jungly now, except that in the grayness just before the sunrise cracked against the treetops, there came the whistle-screech of birds and the hurrying of perhaps snakes or pacas or mice — the scuttling of small creatures, anyhow, beside the path. In the dark, I had felt I was burrowing, but sunup brought greenness to the path and made me feel tiny on the thinly wooded slope. Jerry and I had fallen back. When we caught up with the sled, we saw that Father and the Zambus had stopped and were looking down the valley.

"But there's no trouble there," Father said.

We were above Jeronimo and could see its bamboo roofs, the columns of woodsmoke mingled with the mist, and mattresses of morning fog lying in the fields. The sunlight that was full against this high slope where we stood had not reached Jeronimo. But its pattern was clear, even in the broth of mist. Its stone paths were laid out among the gardens like a star outlined on a patched flag. It looked wonderful from here, neither a town nor a farm but a settlement of precisely placed buildings on the river that was a twisted blue vein in the muscle of jungle. At greater distances, smoke rose from the forest trenches of other clearings.

"They just got out of bed," Father said, seeing the people stirring in Jeronimo. "There's someone going for a whizz — probably Figgy"

I could see Mr. Haddy's flour-sack shirt.

"Lulled into a false sense of security," Father said. "I blame myself. 'Contrabanders — feefs.' Of course Mr. Peaselee wants to go back to bed. He knows he's in Happy Valley!"

Jerry said, "There's Mrs. Kennywick."

She was moving heavily toward the chicken run.

"Feed them chickens, shuck that corn," Father said.

Fat Boy was a bright-lidded tower, its reflectors catching the sun's first rays in its tin dimples. It looked like nothing else for miles — marvelous in a valley that was itself full of marvels.

"Mudda," Francis said, and pinched his fingers at the smallness of Mother hanging clothes on the line.

"She's all business." Father slapped my back with pride.

But Mother was not "all business." She took things easy and always asked us if we were hungry or tired, or if there was anything we wanted. It was through Mother's encouragement that we roamed the forest and made our jungle camp at the Acre. Father treated us like adults, which meant he put us to work. But we were children — homesick half the time and afraid of the dark and not very strong. Mother knew that. It was Father who, in what you would have expected to be a coconut kingdom of sunshine and lazy days, was always roostering around and crowing for us to get down to business.

It was going to be an all-day trip today, and I knew that with Mother it would have been different. Father might say things like "I'm working for you" and "Tell me what to do," but he was in charge. He had made Jeronimo succeed — it was all his doing — and he knew it. Yet at times like this I wished that Mother was here. She would have walked behind the ice sled with us. We would have talked to her about the hopes we carried on our backs like parachutes. With Father, we listened and sweated.

"It's another mile up this crooked path, at a loose guess," Father said, looking up the hill. "We'll keep dragging this old Skidder. Once we get up there, it's all downhill."

He was pointing ahead to what looked like a mountaintop. It was a dome we could see from Jeronimo. An hour later, when we reached it, we saw that it was not a mountaintop at all, but the hip of just another slope. This mountainside seemed to go on and on.

Jerry said, "I want to rest. Will you wait for me, Charlie?"

"Dad won't like it. We can't sit down while they're doing all the hard work."

Jerry was hot-faced and blush-blotched and damp from the heat. His hands were dirty and his skinny legs were clawed from the brambles that grew beside the path. I told him I would run ahead and ask Father. I felt sorry for Jerry, but I wanted a rest too.

"Jerry wants to stop," I said. "He's tired."

"He says he's tired."

Father kept on walking. He called to the Zambus.

"We'll have lunch on top. Then we'll have a lovely postprandial glissade behind this baffle and sock this frozen monolith into that benighted wilderness."

Francis Lungley grunted.

Father winked at me. "You've got to talk their language."

But where was the top? These summits were as false as the ones beneath. They showed nothing but other summits beyond. Looking back, we could see the succession of crooked slopes that had appeared to us to be mountaintops until we scaled them. We had climbed the mountain's bum only to see, miles away, its sunlit shoulders.

"After this, it'll be all downhill," Father said, on the steepest parts.

The ice block jiggered and its leaf mitten crackled as it was dragged. Though I could not see them, I could hear the Zambus gasping. Their gasps were regular and harsh, like the scrape of a bucksaw in a log.

We were used to the damp shade of our own trees, the buggy riverside, the flat gardens and cool hollows of Jeronimo. Up here, the trees were thin and burned dry by the sun, the slopes were rocky, there was no shade or shelter. We heard dogs bark and now and then we smelled smoke. But we saw no people. Father was still talking, still promising us lunch and predicting that soon it would be all downhill.

Pretty soon, Jerry and I were walking in mud. Water was shaking out of the bamboo sled and drizzling onto the ground. The ice was melting fast — the lower portion of the banana-leaf mitten, all that insulation, was blackened with moisture. The angle of the track was so sharp that the ice sled was not pulled steadily but jerked, and water flew out from the runners with each jerk.

I crept with Jerry from behind the sled. The Zambus were bent double in their harnesses. They gasped in their wood-sawing way, and their chins dripped with sweat and their faces were twisted horribly. Crouched like this, struggling forward practically on their knees, they no longer looked like men. They had been turned into suffering animals by this hard pulling, with dog faces and bruised thumbs. Their nostrils were wide open and their eyes buried in squints. They looked so frightening with froth on their necks, we did not dare tell them the ice was melting. And we knew that if we told Father he would go into fits.

It was well past lunchtime. Father had hurried on to get a glimpse of what lay ahead. When he came back and said "Let's break for lunch," we guessed that we were near the top of the mountain.

Jerry and I were carrying the lunch in our knapsacks. We spread it on a rock — tomato sandwiches, boiled corn, guavas, bananas, and Jungle Juice — and Father began describing how much more useful a cable car would be on this tortuous path.

"Project a series of tripods, bearing a cable for slinging passengers and cargo up and down the mountain." he said. "It would be no more trouble to build than a ski lift."

And while the Zambus were panting and Jerry whimpering over his sore feet. Father cantered around the slope saying, "Section it — that's the way. Hoist some pylons here and get pulleys working. Your trolley simply swings up and over these little cliffs. If you had a system of finely meshed cogs, you could work it manually above or below, or counterbalance it on an opposing line and make it self-operating. Then your descending weight would hoist your hopper to the summit. That's not ordinary rock you're wearing out shoe leather on — that's potential ballast. Oh, Gaw!"

He had jogged over to the sled to admire its size, but he had seen that the ice was melting.

"We've got shrinkage! Charlie, you fruit, why didn't you say something? Come on, let's move out before it all goes to pieces."

And he ran ahead saying. "We should have put a rubber sock around it!"

The Zambus sighed, and harnessed themselves again.

By mid-afternoon we still had not reached the ridge. But Father shouted so much, the Zambus stumbled. And they tried so hard to please him, they rushed the sled into a boulder that punched it apart. With a grunt that was almost human, the block of ice cracked in half, splitting its mitten of leaves and fracturing the sled.

"That's wonderful," Father said quietly. "That is just what I need. Thank you very much, gentlemen. Now, don't mind me. I'm just going to take a walk around the block. You stay here, and if you're inclined to pick up the pieces, I promise you I won't stand in your way." He gave us all a weak smile.

He disappeared. A minute later we heard him scream from behind a rock.

Francis Lungley looked at me in alarm.

"He's mad." I said. "You'd better fix this."

The Zambus cut the ice free and, grumbling among themselves, made two sleds. It was almost an hour before we could set off again, but now Father and Bucky were harnessed to one sled, and Francis and John manned the other. This was worse than before, for Father was angry, growling at his work, straining and yelling. The broken ice had melted smaller, the two teams moved fast along the track. But we were no nearer to the ridge. Jerry and I scampered ahead, listening to the men breathing hard beneath us.

The next rise brought us to a bowl in the mountainside that was filled with white flowers and bees. The track, descending for the first time (but it rose again on the other side), gave Father and the Zambus a chance to take it easy. When they caught up with us, Father said, "Your hands and necks are filthy. What's the matter with you kids? Can't you keep clean?"

We explained that we had rubbed black berry juice on our skin to keep the flies and bees away. It was the trick Alice Maywit had shown us at the Acre. The berry juice was as good as insect repellent. The Zambus had used it too, only it was impossible to see the dark juice on their black skin.

Father had been bitten — his wrists and neck were pebbly from insect bites. I thought he might thank us for this information. It was natural medication, it worked, and it was free.

But he hated the look of it. He said, "You think I'm scared of a few bug bites? Ha! If you're scared of bugs, you've got no business here."

The bees swarmed around him as he spoke. He batted them away. "They know when you're scared! They can smell fear!" A little while later he was stung on one ear. His ear lobe swelled fat and shook like a turkey's wattle. He said he could not feel a thing.

The sun was ahead of us, dropping behind the mountain we were climbing. It dazzled us, but it had lost most of its heat. I wondered what would happen when it sank, because in all the time we had lived in Jeronimo — almost seven months now — we had always returned home at sundown. But we had not reached the village. Jeronimo was hours behind us. Father and the Zambus were still grunting in their harnesses, dragging the two sleds.

I said, "We'll have to go home in the dark."

"We can't go home until we deliver this ice!"

Deliver it where? I looked at the cargo on the sleds. The banana-leaf insulation fit loosely, like a man's clothes on a child. There was not much ice left.

"Why didn't I think to put a rubber sock around it? Those two buffoons insisted on those useless banana leaves!"

And now the sun was half gone, a segment of cold fruit, and Father's face brassy bright in its last glare. He urged the Zambus on, as if chasing the sun to the summit. But the sunset was quicker, and while they heaved the sleds along the track, the sun slice blinked behind the rocks, and its afterglow was a dusty pinkness in the sky.

Father's determination left him then. He stepped out of his harness and walked up the path to snarl at the dying daylight.

"All right," he said, "we'll make camp."

"Where will we sleep?" Jerry asked.

"Why, just over there, across the street, in the Holiday Inn! You two kids can lounge by the poolside while I fix us up with a couple of rooms. Want a king-sized bed? I know I do, and I sure hope they've got air conditioning and color TV—"

He was walking in circles and biting a new cigar as he spoke.

"— barbecue pit, Ping-Pong, cheeseburgers, and a funny-bunny piano player in the cocktail bar. Want a roll of quarters for the juke box, Jerry? Play some tunes?"

Jerry had begun to cry. He had knelt down to tighten one of his sandals and, crouching there, put his head against his knee and sobbed quietly. I pitied Jerry. All he had asked was where we were going to sleep, but Father went on mocking him with this speech about the Holiday Inn and have a nice hot shower bath and good long rest.

"There goes Charlie, off to buy a Fudgsicle. Careful crossing the road, sonny!"

I knew Father was disappointed that we had not made it to the Indian village, so instead of sulking or crying, like Jerry, I had decided to do something helpful. I said, "I'm" looking for some wood to build a lean-to."

"Hear that, Fido? He's going to show us how to make camp. Like he showed us how to keep the bugs away. You've got to hand it to these kids."

"Charlie know how," Francis said.

"He's a hamburger," Father said. "He's got your number."

It was clear that Father had not planned to camp out. We had eaten most of the food. We had no tents or mosquito nets, no lanterns or blankets, and only one mess kit. The water bag was almost empty. But there were several things in our favor — it was the dry season, so we would not get rained on, and there were fewer insects up here, and all day we had seen pacas and birds on the mountainside — we could eat those. Father had traveled light in the hope of rushing the mountain, but we had failed, and now it was evening.

"Don't just stand there," Father shouted to the Zambus. "Improvise!"

The Zambus built a fire, while Jerry and I made a lean-to out of sticks we had found nearby. Then we gathered dry grass and made a bed inside and tried not to disturb Father, who was cursing, hacking at a sapling with his knife.

He was no good at making temporary camps, and he was surprised at how quickly and well Jerry and I put up our lean-to. It did not need to be waterproof — it was only to protect us from the wind, which was strengthening up here as darkness fell. When Father saw our bed-nest of grass he said, "You planning to lay an egg?"

He cut five saplings, saying. "I'm going to make a proper shelter!" He started to lash them together, but before his first frame was complete it was pitch dark, which was a shame because his shelter would have been much better than ours if he had finished it. At last, he kicked it apart and said, "What's the use!" Seeing me with some yautia plants, he said, "Picking flowers, Charlie? That's the idea — you can put them into your scrapbook. Won't Mother be pleased?"

I told them they were yautias and that their roots were as tasty as carrots.

"Eddoes," Bucky said. Eddo was his name for yautia. He had speared a paca rat with a sharpened stick and was roasting it over the fire with the same spear.

"I'm not hungry," Father said. "Anyway, I don't eat rats and weeds."

He watched us eat and he told us how, traveling in Eastern Europe, he had been disgusted to find that everywhere he ate, the silverware was dirty. He had smeary knives, and stains on his spoon, and the tines of the fork always had bits of yesterday's food between them. At another place, he had found a hair in his milk. He went on describing the filthy silverware, and he made the Zambus laugh, but I kept thinking how strange it was that we were squatting here on this mountainside in Honduras, eating a burned paca and burned yautia with our fingers, while Father complained about the dirty forks in Bulgaria. Normally he did not talk about food at all, and he said it was indecent to praise it while you were eating it. But that night on the mountain, all he talked about were the tormenting meals he had eaten and the cutlery that had not been washed properly.

Finally he said, "You're melting my ice," and ordered us to put the fire out.

The Zambus obeyed. They had made their beds beside low windbreaks of boughs. They were not the men I was used to in Jeronimo. Here, on the mountainside, they had become silent and simpler and a little wild-seeming.

"I'm not tired," Father said, as Jerry and I crawled into our lean-to. "I'll just sit here and cool my heels until you're ready to move out."

He sat cross-legged near the ice. He had combined the two blocks to concentrate their cold. I could tell from the hot glow of his cigar that he was sulking — maybe thinking about dirty cutlery. But I also suspected that he was guarding the ice. He had warned us not to touch it. The Zambus muttered for a while, and then they sighed and lay like logs on the ground. "I wish Ma was here," Jerry said, but he was soon asleep.

The wind hummed in the bushes and dragged against the rocks and dry grass. That was the only sound, the wind, but later I heard another noise in this humming of wind. It was a plink-plink-plink, as if someone were striking the highest key on an old piano. It was the ice melting, waterdrops hitting the tin pan of the mess kit. I was painfully hungry and still thirsty, and the sound of water made me thirstier.

I poked my head out of the lean-to and saw Father beyond the dead fire, sitting in front of the ice block. The block with is clumsy cover was about a quarter of its morning size, but silhouetted in the starry sky it still looked like a tombstone, and Father like a white corpse that had crawled out of the grave. The starlight made his face like a skull's and gave him bony arms.

"I want to sleep in my own bed!" he screamed.

I tried to think of something to say. I decided, after all, not to ask him for any water.

"What are you looking at?" he said fiercely. "This is the first time since creation that ice has ever melted here. Think of it! And you're saying that's nothing?"

18

I WOKE UP tired in damp clothes and remembered we were still on the mountain — Father, Zambus, and ice. Father had fallen on his side and, slap on the ground, had gone to sleep with his arms folded and his baseball hat squashed against his cheek. But he woke quickly and denied that he had even dozed off. He said he had got bored, watching us snore. He said, "No, we haven't failed!" and told me to fill the canvas bag with the water that had dripped into the mess-kit pan.

"Don't bother to get harnessed." He was peeking under the cover of the ice block. He shoved the cakes of ice into the knapsacks. Each cake was about the size of a football, speckled with brown broken leaf, and had the rotten texture of a hard sponge. This was all that was left of the great ice block we had dragged out of Jeronimo.

"Don't say anything. Don't ask me any questions. I don't want to hear a peep out of anyone. Now let's march!"

He sprinted up the path, his knapsack rising and falling, bumping his back, whop-whop. Francis Lungley followed behind with the other knapsack, then Bucky and John, empty-handed, and Jerry and I, trying our best to keep up. I carried the long water bag. It slapped against my knees and prevented me from running.

It was a bright cool dawn, washed in light, with parcels of cloud lying against the mountainside like ghosts of dead mackerel. Up ahead, Father had halted near an outcrop of rock. I thought he was waiting for us, but I saw that he had reached another ridge of the mountain. It was the last ridge. Below us — but it was a plateau, not the deep valley we had expected — was all of Honduras.

Such an empty world. I did not think wilderness could look so sad.

This was a different country from the one we knew: limitless jungle, volcanoes, and no ocean. No rivers that we could see, no water at all. It was a surface of treetops and skimming birds. Its vastness made me feel small and puny. No smoke, no roads, nothing to say that people lived here. It was Olancho, but that was only a name. It was anybody's.

"It looks so desolate," I said.

"You've never seen Chicago!"

The treetops beneath us continued to the horizon, and the unbroken greenness gave it such a strong suggestion of depth that it hardly looked like forest at all. It was a brimming ocean of wild leaves, a tide so high it had risen to the mountain range. Father was smiling at it all, and yet it was Father who had told us that the deepest tides tricked you with their flatness — if you stuck your foot in them, they would drag you out and drown you in their undertow.

"It's all downhill from now on." There was no path. Father set off, running beside the trickle of a stony creek.

The Zambus said we were to look out for more bees. The Indians here were beekeepers and always had hives near their huts. And dogs — half-wild ones — they kept those, too. But we smelled smoke before we saw either bees or dogs, and when the creek widened to a stream, we knew we must be near a village. The forest was darker — we were under that ocean of trees we had seen, and moving down. My senses told me more than I could logically explain. The smell of stagnant water and woodsmoke and burned meat, and a hairier, dirtier, rancid-yam smell of latrines and dogs — all boiled together. It was a stew-stink I now associated with human habitation — not ours but other people's. Jeronimo's cleanliness educated my nose to these sharp odors.

We might have missed the huts. They were leafy and made of peeled sticks and were the same color as the trees dying near them. But the starved dogs had rushed up to us and Francis was saying, "Fadder! Fadder!" and two macaws croaked at him from a branch.

"Leave this to me," Father said. He saw some lemon trees and whispered, "Juice balls."

In the stream that ran past the village there were women kneeling in muck doing laundry, slapping shirts and pants on boulders.

"Those women are washing clothes," I said.

Jerry said, "So what?"

"No one's wearing clothes," I said. "Not that kind."

The Indian men in the village clearing were practically naked. Shorts were all they wore, and these were in rags — more like aprons.

"Maybe they've only got one pair."

The washerwomen scattered when they saw Father, but he did not pause. He splashed across the stream, then kicked the water from his sandals and kept going toward the Indians and the huts. These were not the sagging tin-roofed huts that river Creoles lived in, and they were much larger than the rats' nests we had seen in collapsing Seville. They were tall stilted rectangles, with protruding roofs and a sort of attic space beneath the grass and leaf thatching. There were ten of them. Father was saying, "No beer cans, no candy wrappers, no flashlight batteries—"

We stayed right behind him.

"And no bows and arrows," he said. "No weapons of any kind. We're probably the first white men they've ever seen. Don't do anything to frighten them. No loud noises. No sudden movements."

They were brown Indians, about a dozen of them, with Chinese eyes and heavy faces and short legs. Some had long hanks of hair bunched at the backs of their heads. Just this squinting fence of men — the women had hidden themselves, and there were no children that we could see.

"Raise your arms slowly," Father said.

We raised our arms slowly.

"Francis, you're the Miskito expert. Tell them who we are."

Francis Lungley looked confused. "Who we are, Fadder?" he asked.

"Tell them we're their friends."

"Friend!" Francis howled. "Friend!"

"Not in English, dummy. Tell them in Miskito, or whatever crazy lingo—"

The Indians watched Father and Francis quarrel.

"They ain't Miskito feller. They Paya or Twahka feller. Maybe we give them bunce banana."

"You're driving me bananas," Father said, and pushed Francis aside. Now he spoke in Spanish. He asked them if they spoke Spanish. They stared at him. He said in Spanish that we were friends— wc had come from far away, over the mountains. They still stared. He said we had a present for them. They went on staring under their swollen Chinese eyelids.

"Maybe they're all deaf." Father said. He shook the knapsack from his shoulders and went close to the men. "Go on, open it," he said, and spelled this out in sign language for the men, motioning with his hands.

An Indian knelt down and opened the knapsack.

"See? He understands me perfectly."

The Indian looked inside, then turned the limp knapsack upside-down and poured water out of it. He spoke one word, which none of us understood.

"Quick. Francis, give me your knapsack!"

Francis unbuckled the second knapsack and said, "She all water, Fadder."

"There must be some of it left — maybe a little piece."

The Indians watched Father and Francis sorting through the soup in the wet knapsack. "Got it!" Father said, and held up a twig of ice — all that was left of the ice block — maybe two ounces. We followed as he went forward to show the men.

He placed it in his palm. Maybe his impatience heated his hand, or maybe it was the small size of the ice twig. Whatever it was, the small thing disappeared. Before they could look closely at it, it melted away and slipped through the cracks between his fingers.

Father still held his wet hand out, but the Indians were staring at his finger stump.

"I don't believe this," Father said quietly. He started to walk away. For a moment, I thought he was heading back to Jeronimo. But no — he was mumbling in Spanish and English. He had left us facing these bewildered Indians. Now he returned and gave a speech.

He had brought them a present, he said. But the present had disappeared. What kind of present can disappear? Well, that was the interesting thing — it was water, but a form of water they had never seen before, as solid as a rock and twice as useful, good for preserving meat or killing pain. It was very cold! We called it ice, he said, and we had an invention over the mountains for making it out of river water. He had brought a block of it that had been as big as two men, but it had gotten smaller and smaller, and by the time we reached the village it was tiny. That was unfortunate, he said, because now it was gone, and a moment ago he could have showed it to them.

"But I'll be back," he said. "I'll show you!"

Most of the Indians were still looking at his finger.

Then one of the Indians spoke very clearly, in Spanish. His face was square, and he had the thickest hair bunch, which stuck out like a short ponytail.

"Go away," he said. His teeth were black stumps.

Father laughed at him.

"I said it was an accident, Jack. Have you been over there? Do you know how long it takes to drag ice that far?" Surprised by the Indian's order, he had spoken in English. In Spanish he said, "Don't blame me! Ever seen ice? Ever touched it?"

"Go away," the Indian said.

"Thanks. We haven't eaten since yesterday. We had to bivouac on that mountain. Our water's used up and these kids are dead on their feet. Thanks very much."

"Go!"

The word was sharp, the Indian's black teeth were ferocious, but he looked very frightened. Father had been talking and trying to explain about the ice. Maybe he had not looked closely enough at these Indians to see that they were frightened. Maybe he assumed that their bewilderment had something to do with the marvel that had melted and leaked away.

The Indians were clay-colored and they stood there like pieces of pottery about to shiver into cracks. Who were we? they seemed to be thinking. Where had we come from? Had we fallen out of the sky?

"Real savages," Father said. He had not seen their fear. "I guess I got what I bargained for—"

They looked at Father's finger stump as he waved it around.

"If the ice hadn't melted, they'd be all over us — thank you, you're wonderful, please give us more, et cetera. But gentlemen, our plan has melted—"

Now the Indians were showing their teeth, the way their dogs had — black teeth, raw lips, squinting eyes.

"— and I can't stand this Neolithic hostility—"

Bucky said, "We go."

Francis said, "Yes, man."

"I'm not moving," Father said to the receding Zambus. "What about you, Charlie?"

I said, "I'm not moving either."

"Tell them that."

He took my hand and pulled me in front of him, making me face the Indians and cloaking me in his anger smell.

In Spanish, I said, "I am not moving."

"You heard what he said!"

But had they? They looked as deaf as when we had first arrived. The Indian who had told us to go away stood there picking blister scabs of dead skin from his elbow. Then he looked up and hissed, "Go."

"Tell him we're staying here until we get something to eat. That's the least they can do. A little hospitality won't kill them. We're not missionaries or tax collectors."

I told them this. As I was talking, Father was whispering to the Zambus, "This place is stranger than Jeronimo ever was. What I could do here! They haven't got a blessed thing. But look at those huts. They know how to make strong frames." When I finished talking to the Indians, he turned to me. "Tell them we want something to eat," he said. "I don't want anything for myself — it's the rest of you guys that need some grub. We eat, then we go."

The Indians, hearing me say this, looked uncertain.

"And tell them it's too hot here in the sun. We want to sit in the shade."

I managed to explain this, though I had to ask Father some of the Spanish words.

The Indian who had spoken (but all he had said so far was "Go away") backed to the largest hut and went inside.

Father said, "He's going to ask the Gowdy if it's all right."

The Indian reappeared and gestured for us to sit near that hut.

"Friendly little critters, aren't they?" Father muttered as we sat down. "What are they trying to hide? My guess is that there's something here they don't want us to see. Frankly, I'd like to snoop around."

Tired and hungry as I was, I would have been glad to get out of this place, and I knew from Jerry's face that he felt the same. Father was unruffled, still the Sole Proprietor of Jeronimo, if not the King of Mosquitia, passing whispers to his Zambus with his allpowerful air. He did not seem to notice — or if he noticed, did not care — that the Indians had crept across the clearing and sat watching us from a semicircle with their drooling dogs.

"Sure, this place smells," Father was saying. "They've got no organization. But it's a healthy climate. Cooler than Jeronimo. Fertile soil. Not many bugs. Lots of hardwood. You could work miracles here, if—"

But Father shut his mouth when the food and water were brought. He seldom showed surprise at anything, so his sudden silence now was as startling as one of his howls. It was the men who carried the gourds and baskets to us. He gaped at them, and, with his teeth clenched like a ventriloquist, said, "Will you look at that!"

Three skinny men, not Indians, stood over us. They were pale gray under their dirt and whiskers. Father whistled softly as he sized them up. They were tall and bony and looked bruised. They wore ragged trousers and broken sandals. Two of them had headbands, the sort worn by some of the Indians. Their faces were feverish and sunken, their skulls pressed against their sallow-gray skin. Their beards and bones made me think of saints in a picture book. But they were almost smiling, and as they placed the food before us they watched us closely with curious eyes.

"What did I tell you?" Father said to us. "This is what they didn't want us to see. They keep white slaves!"

The food was boiled bananas, flat greasy corncakes, fritters, and wabool. The water tasted of dog fur.

"Now it all makes sense! Hey," he said to one of the men in Spanish, "do you let these Indians tell you what to do?"

"More or less." The man did not seem concerned. He kept his feverish smile.

"What do you do for them?"

"We shine their shoes."

Father laughed at this. "You haven't lost your sense of humor." He passed the gourd of wabool to Jerry, without tasting it.

The Indians looked on from across the clearing, their heads lowered. The only sound from that direction was the growl of the dogs chewing fleas out of their gouged and scarred hindquarters.

"What is your name?"

One man wet his lips at Father's question, but another with stringy hair said, "We do not have names."

"Hear that? They don't have names."

Father glowered at the Indians. All around us in the tall trees, birds tooted and beat the leaves with their wings, and the sound of the stream was like the sound of tumbling boulders.

"Probably captured them down the pike and made them prisoners," Father said to Francis Lungley. "So these guys do all the dirty work."

"Gringo," one of the men said, hearing Father speak English. His starved face gave him a fine-lined expression that was both haunted and kindly. "North American, eh? Are you from the mission?"

"Do I look like a missionary?" Then Father whispered to him, so that the Indians would not hear. "No. We've got a settlement over the mountains. If you could get over there — slip out some night — you'd be safe. That's the best way to the coast."

The man nodded and passed his hand through his beard.

"Why did you come here?"

"I was just going to say. I brought some ice — half a ton. Well, almost. These Zambus and me. Those two are my boys, Charlie and Jerry. Wipe your mouth, Charlie."

"Where is this ice?"

"Melted."

The man smiled.

"You don't believe me?"

"Ice," the man said in Spanish to the others, and now they all smiled. The three men knelt before Father, and the first man said, "Where did you get your ice?"

"Made it," Father said. He took a small suck of wabool from the gourd. "You should see what we've got over there. Gardens, food, water pumps, chickens, drainage, and the biggest ice-making machine in the country."

"You have a generator for electricity?"

"Don't mention generators to me. Tell him, Charlie."

I explained that Father had devised a method of making ice out of fire.

"Your father is an intelligent man."

"Everyone says that," I said.

Father said, "They'll work you to death here. Then, when you're not useful to them any longer, they'll kill you and feed you to the vultures. They'll get some new slaves." Father's face darkened. "You think they'll try anything funny with us?"

The man said, "Who knows?" and the other men nodded.

"I want to walk out of here wearing my head," Father said. "Do you think those Indians are listening to us?"

"They listen but they do not understand. They are very simple people. They are also very strong."

"So I gather. But you shouldn't be here, waiting on them hand and foot. They haven't any right to own you. You're prisoners, aren't you?"

The man who had done all the talking shrugged. The shrug shook his whole loose-jointed body. He seemed untroubled, or else beyond caring.

Father said, "Notice I'm not eating much? I'll tell you why. Because I've got an enormous appetite. By not eating, I do other things better. Solve problems. Work hard. That's a form of eating, too. You should try it. If I ate, I wouldn't do anything else—"

All this time, the Zambus were eating and hardly listening to what Father was saying. Father seemed glad for someone new to talk to. Maybe it took his mind off the failure of our expedition.

The men whispered among themselves, then one who had not spoken before said, "You are not telling the truth, are you — about the ice?"

"Practically an iceberg," Father said. "It melted to mud, but there's a whole lot more where that came from. We've got everything over there."

"Guns?"

"I've got no use for guns. If I needed them, I could make an arsenal. But that's desperate."

But, he said, they reminded him of how he had felt in the States — like a prisoner, close to despair, murderous, half loco. It was frustration at the way things were shaking down, something like slavery, because the system made men into slaves.

"What did I do? I picked myself up and went away. I advise you to do the same."

The Indians were squatting with their ugly dogs thirty feet away. They watched Father talking to the skinny men. It was impossible for me to tell what the Indians were thinking by looking into the smooth clay of their faces. The Indians might have been harmless, but the dogs were part of their group. The dogs' fierceness made the Indians seem dangerous.

"They want you to go," the stringy-haired man said.

"They don't know what's good for them," Father said. "They don't deserve ice, or anything else, if they can't show common courtesy. But you," he said, "you're friendly enough."

"That is our nature."

"My Zambus probably think you're Munchies."

"Ah, Mosquitia!"

Father said, "I wish I could do something for you."

"It would be helping us if you did not anger the Indians. If you simply went away."

"Listen, one dark night you ought to get yourselves out of here. Do that. Clear out." In English, Father added, "Get the drop on them."

"The Indians say there is no path over the mountains."

"They would, wouldn't they? Listen, you won't get a road map from them."

"How far is it to your village?"

"A day's march. More — if you're carrying ice. But that's our problem."

"You will be home by nightfall."

Father said suddenly, "I've got half a mind to blow this place wide open and get you the hell out of here."

"That would be very foolish," the man said, and did not blink.

"Then it's up to you."

"Go," the man said, "or they will punish us."

We were given a calabash of wabool, and water, and a bunch of bananas. While we filled our water bag from a gourd, the three skinny men went over to the Indians. The Indians remained squatting on the ground, but their dogs ran away as the men approached. They did not begin barking until they had reached the rooty edge of the clearing. Without their dogs, the Indians looked nakeder and even a little afraid.

We left them like that, the Indians squatting, the three slaves standing. The dogs bounded forward and retreated, chasing us to the stream. They barked and stretched and showed us their wild cowardly eyes. All the other men were motionless. They were small beneath the vast hanging forest, watching us walk away. The women had not returned. The men looked as if they were posing for an oldfangled frightening picture.

On the trail, Father said, "What I can't make out is how they got there in the first place."

"Twahkas, Fadder?"

"No. The others." He used a Spanish word, "The nameless ones." Bucky said, "These jungles is fulla monkeys."

"Monkeys don't ask that many questions—"

Neither do slaves, I thought.

"— Something weird's coming down here, people."

We climbed out of the forest and behind the rock steeples and up the path we had made to the ridge of the mountains. Then, where we had made camp last night, we stopped again and passed the wabool around. We sat on the broken ice sled we had left, the remains of Skidder. Father said that someday a foreigner would find it and proclaim that a great civilization had existed here, and put Skidder in a museum. This made him laugh.

"And did you see those Indians' faces when they saw the ice?"

We looked at him.

"They almost keeled over." He began to chuckle at the thought of it.

Jerry was searching Father's face.

"They couldn't believe it," Father said. "They were goggling. Flabbergasted and confounded!"

Finally — because everyone else was perfectly silent — I said, "What ice?"

"The ice I showed them."

I believed he was testing me again. I said, "It all melted, Dad."

"That small piece," he said.

This was not true.

"You saw it, didn't you Jerry?"

"Yes, Dad."

I thought, Crummo.

"Your long-faced brother's trying to tell me we wasted our time. You need glasses, Charlie. You've got bad eyes. Probably an astigmatism, eh Francis?"

"For true," the loyal Zambu said.

Father put Jerry on his back and carried him, while I walked behind with the Zambus. The Zambus' tiredness showed in their faces. It had been a bewildering trip for them, the more so because they had expected the Twahkas to have tails — and maybe they did think the three skinny men were Munchies. There was a grayness on the Zambus' bodies, and smudges on the gray, like the cloudy surface of purple grape skins. As we walked, they became more certain that they had seen the ice and the amazed Indians. "It is smuck in Fadder's hand like a rock-stone."

Father said, "It's all downhill from now on."

19

ON THIS downward path, in the tortoiseshell twilight, I thought of Father's lie. I hoped he did not believe it, but how could he be rescued from repeating it?

Something like this might work — perhaps, in our two-day absence, things had not gone right in Jeronimo — perhaps some small problem had arisen, enough to interrupt him, not a disaster but a hitch, to prevent him from giving a loud speech saying our failure had been a success.

The Indians had not been flabbergasted! They had only squinted at us and at Father's wet fingers, and sent out their slaves.

His lie made me lonelier than any he I had ever heard.

Yet he had spoken it confidently and said the expedition was a triumph and he couldn't wait to tell Mother. Again and again I tried to remember ice in Father's hands and amazement on the faces of the Indians. But there was none: no ice, no surprise. It had all been worse and odder than his lie. They had told us to go away, and then the skinny slaves were peering at us and the dogs trying to bite our feet.

"Gaw, I love to walk home tired at the end of a good day with the sun in my eyes!"

Ahead, on the path, Father went on talking to the Zambus and Jerry.

"You can pack a man in ice and crisp him like celery and snap him out of sunstroke. That ought to be a useful application around here. And did I ever tell you about the advances in cryogenics?"

His voice tore through the trees and exhausted me. His confidence was something I did not want to hear now. I dreaded the thought of Father repeating his story in Jeronimo. And his lie scared me. Did you see those Indians faces? But the Indians' faces were confused, they had monkey wrinkles, and they had tried to frighten us away by showing us black teeth like their dogs. Once I had believed that Father was so much taller than me that he saw things I missed. I excused adults who disagreed with me, and blamed myself because I was so short. But this was something I could judge. I had seen it. Lies made me uncomfortable, and Father's lie, which was also a blind boast, sickened me and separated me from him.

"Charlie's back there doing the best he can, people!"

I loved this man, and he was calling me a fool and falsifying the only world I knew.

I prayed for a hitch. My prayers were answered. Things were not right in Jeronimo. It was what I had wished, but, like most wishes that are granted, more than I bargained for.

Jeronimo was struck with quietness and a thin flutter of leaves. It had always softened and collapsed in twilight: it was the way the sun was strained through the trees, the way it glanced in weak glimmers off the river. It was the dust stirring. It was the way people were round-shouldered after such a long day of light and no clouds.

But this evening it was deadened. It had an atmosphere of disappearance and hiding alarm that said something had just happened, like the silence after a howl. There was a low skreak and skrittle of lizards watching from the undergrowth, and on the branches birds locating perches for the night, their polite strut at sundown.

Father halted us and said, "Somebody's been here and gone."

Fat Boy was not alight. The Maywit's house was black — none of their normal lanterns — open windows, empty porch, no smoke.

"Allie." It was Mother — her white waiting face in the Gallery.

Father walked toward her and asked her what was going on.

She said, "I thought something had happened to you, too."

"Too?"

"The Maywits — they're gone. I couldn't stop them."

Father said "I knew it," and smiled at Francis Lungley.

But I felt responsible. I had prayed for something to happen, and it had. Anything to prevent Father from bursting into Jeronimo and lying about flabbergasted Indians and ice and you should have seen their faces.

Now Father was smiling at Clover. She had run from under the house and was hugging him and explaining.

"A motorboat came and took all the Maywits away. The man called you names. It was the missionary you sent back that day. Ma Kennywick yelled at him and Mr. Peaselee busted the pump and Ma said you were going to run wild when you hear about it. But you're not, are you? Dad, was it spooky!"

Father looked at everyone in turn and his mouth bulged with satisfaction. "Why should I go wild?" he said. "I knew it was going to happen."

Jerry said, "What about Drainy and the other kids?"

"They went away," Clover said. "All of them, in the man's motorboat."

"What did I tell you?" Father said. He was grinning at the Zambus and they were grinning back.

Mother had come down from the Gallery with April, who was moping. Mother said, "I did everything I could, but they wouldn't listen. They didn't hear, they didn't recognize me, they were so frightened."

"Don't tell me," Father said firmly. "I know all about it. The Maywits ran off with that moral sneak in some polluting pig of a boat. Figgy's friend. You don't have to spell it out. I took one look across the clearing and I knew."

Hearing "Figgy," Mr. Haddy came forward and said, "It were puppysho. Them people jump everyways and we ain't get a dum bit of peace. Ma Kennywick scared out of her skin and bellyaching ever since. Peaselee, he bawling too, about seeing some dum fool with ruckbooses. Man, we glad you here, Fadder."

Father waited, then said, "And I know something else."

He smiled and took a mouthful of the silence and swallowed it.

"Fadder know." This was Francis Lungley, telling Bucky.

"Those Maywits have got a lot to learn."

If he knew everything, why didn't he know their real name?

I said, "Maywit isn't their name. It's Roper. They're all Ropers."

"Who says?"

I told him what the kids had said, but I did not mention the Acre or that they were all afraid of him. Jerry, Clover, and April said nothing — they let me take the blame for knowing. Father was still smiling.

Mother said, "You should have said something before this, Charlie."

"I thought Dad knew."

Father said, "What else do you know?"

I was going to say — Those men you called slaves didn't look like slaves, and the Indians looked scared. The ice melted before they could see it. You wouldn't let us rest, you made Jerry cry by talking about the Holiday Inn, and it was a terrible trip, worse than the river trips and probably a failure.

But I said, "Nothing else."

"Then I still know more than you do," he said — but when had I ever doubted that? — "because I know they're coming back."

We went down to the bathhouse and stripped off our clothes. Father set the showers going — what a marvelous invention! It was like a car wash, with jets of water shooting from pipes on the walls. We were all inside, jostling in the fine spray, in the half-dark — Father, Jerry, the Zambus, and me. Fat Boy's fire was out, so there was no hot water, but no one minded. The busy harmless sting of the showers took off the mountain dust and the bad memories.

Mother said, "I wouldn't be so sure about that, Allie."

"She doesn't believe me," Father said. "Pass the soap."

He was proud of his soap. We had made it ourselves out of pig fat we had traded for ice. It was greasy yellow soap and felt like a handful of lard. "No additives," Father said. "Why, you could eat that soap!"

"You weren't here."

"Didn't have to be."

"It was horrible," Mother said. "That missionary — Struss."

Father said, "I know."

Hollering through the bathhouse walls, Mother said, "It seems he was up in Seville in his boat. I don't know what he saw there, but it must have been those ridiculous people praying. He came back accusing us all of blasphemy and spreading the lies of science."

"Soap up." Father said to the Zambus. They always washed in a squatting position, never standing up. Also, they kept their shorts on when they took baths. I couldn't see them in the dark bathhouse, but I could hear the water pelting against their heads, and their spitting and guffing.

"Could they have been on their knees, praying to the refrigerator?" Mother said. "Whatever it was, your Reverend Struss was pretty upset. He came in swinging. We were doing harm, he said, leading his people astray. He was mostly yelling at the Maywits — he called them the Ropers. He made them get down at the riverbank while he splashed water all over them. It was a service of purification, he said, washing them clean of the sins we had taught them. Mrs. Kennywick didn't know which way to turn, and Mr. Peaselee freaked out."

Father said, "I could have told you."

"I ordered him off the property. I said you were due back in ten minutes and you'd sink his boat."

"Good thinking," Father shouted back through the wall. "I would have, too!"

"They packed their bags. I mean bags. Paper ones. And they all left."

Father said, "So they ran out on us."

"They is scared," Mr. Haddy said. His mouth was against the bathhouse wall, his front teeth sticking through. "The preacher is yartering about soldiers and trouble and ruckbooses."

Father shut off the water.

"What soldiers?" he said, as we dripped.

"In the mountains. Over the hills. Down the river. Up the trees. With ruckbooses. Russians and what not. Peaselee hear them."

Clover said, "He said you were just as bad as the soldiers."

"Peaselee said that?"

"The man. The missionary. He called you a Communist."

Father led us out of the bathhouse. The Zambus hopped and danced and shook their fingers to get dry. Father wore a flour sack around his waist, his hair was dripping, and his body was as white as marble. He held one arm up, like a statue in front of a courthouse.

"None of this is news to me," he said. "But I'll tell you something you don't know. They'll be back, as sure as anything. Because this is a happy place, and the world isn't. The world is plain rotten. People are mean, they're cruel, they're fake, they always pretend to be something they're not. They're weak. They take advantage. A cruddy little man who sees God in a snake, or the devil in thunder, will take you prisoner if he gets the drop on you. Give anyone half a chance and he'll make you a slave: he'll tell you the most awful lies. I've seen them, running around bollocky, playing God. And our friends, the Maywits — sorry, Charlie, the Ropers — they'll be lonely out there. They'll be scared. Because the world stinks!"

He started up the path to the house, taking long white strides. "They'll be back — just you wait. Remember where you heard it. Remember who said it."

Mother stepped beside him and said, "How did it go with the ice?"

Father was still walking. He grunted. I listened hard, then I heard him say in a low voice, "We had shrinkage. I knew it was a mistake to lug so much of it that far."

So he did not lie after all.

***

And the Acre in the jungle was ours. It was not the same without Drainy preaching and Alice doing the cooking and Peewee and Leon making baskets, but now, with fewer of us, it seemed larger, and we were able to spread out. Each of us had his own sturdy lean-to. We brought a rope from Jeronimo and fixed a swing to a tree by knotting the dangling end and sitting on it. Father would not have allowed this in Jeronimo. It wasn't useful, because if someone wasn't swinging on it, it just hung there — that would have been his objection — and was the waste of a good rope.

We ate yautia roots and wild avocados, and we repaired the camouflage in all the man traps — four of them, the deep holes nicely disguised with boughs. One day, in a trap, we saw a snake eating another snake — half of it choked down his throat and both snakes thrashing their tails. The eater could not crawl away or stop eating, so we could study it in safety. We brought it back to Jeronimo.

"There's a perfect symbol for Western civilization," Father said.

A spider monkey passed through our church tree another day and sat there picking his teeth. He watched us with curiosity, as if he wanted to play.

Then he sniffed, leaped from the tree, landed near a bush, and tore a small fruit ball from it. On his upward bounce he was back in the tree, eating it. He gnawed the skin and sucked out the inside, then rolled across the bough and tumbled away, yanking branches.

That was how we discovered guavas. The monkey had shown us that there were several bushes of them on the far side of the pool, and that day we brought a basket of them back to Jeronimo.

Mother said, "We can make them into jam."

But Father said they were too small and sour, because they were growing wild. If he put his mind to it, he said, he could grow sweet ones as big as tennis balls, and, "Speaking of food, you'd better start picking and peeling, or there won't be anything for lunch."

We did what was expected of us in Jeronimo, the usual chores. But we always returned to the Acre to live like monkeys. We missed the Maywits — I still thought of them by that name — but without them we had no need for the school or the store. We had the loose pages from Drainy's hymnbook, but we no longer held church services. Anyway, it was too hot to think about hell.

We knew from the Acre that it was the dry season. No one in Jeronimo knew this, or considered it important. The gardens were still growing, but we were in touch with the seasons: we had no inventions.

The Acre was primitive, a ragged hollow in the jungle, but the grass was soft, the pool made it pleasant, and we had everything we needed. For fun, we could swim or swing on the rope. The pool was unaffected by the jungle drought. I guessed that springs fed it. But the rest of the area was very dry. We watched wee-wee ants holding funerals — processions of them with corpses and leaf parasols. Snakes lived in the roots of a dead tree at one corner of the camp. We kept clear of that tree, but tried to think of ways of dropping them into the traps, to turn them into snake pits. The snakes and the walnut-sized beetles did not frighten us. We learned that the fiercest creatures were predictable, and though once it had all looked dangerous here, now it seemed more peaceful than Jeronimo.

We came here to escape Jeronimo. Ever since the building of Fat Boy, Father had been visited by people who wanted ice. They were talkers. They had heard of Father. They paid him compliments. Father put them to work, gave them simple jobs to do, and they took the ice away in canoes. There were always strangers in Jeronimo, admiring Father's inventions or looking for ice.

"Ain't do nothing with they ices but cool they bunya," Mr. Haddy said. Bunya was a drink of sour juice the local people made from cassava.

Father said, "That doesn't matter. They can wear it on their heads for all I care. Once they get accustomed to the idea of ice, the uses will be revealed to them. Each person will do something different — one man will preserve meat, another will make it into a painkiller, someone will get the idea of refrigerating his fish instead of smoking it, and how many will it bring out of sunstroke? Sure, it may take a generation, but think of the future — no one else does. Fat Boy is forever. No moving parts, Figgy!"

Father often talked of things being "revealed." That was true invention, he said, revealing something's use and magnifying it, discovering its imperfection, improving it, and putting it to work for you. A guava growing wild was to him an imperfection. You had to improve it to make it edible.

He said, "It's savage and superstitious to accept the world as it is. Fiddle around and find a use for it!" God had left the world incomplete, he said. It was man's job to understand how it worked, to tinker with it and finish it. I think that was why he hated missionaries so much: because they taught people to put up with their earthly burdens. For Father, there were no burdens that couldn't be fitted with a set of wheels, or runners, or a system of pulleys.

But instead of improving the world, he said, most people just tried to improve God. "God — the deceased God — was a hasty inventor of the sort you find in any patent office. Yes, He had a great idea in making the world, but He started it and moved on before He got it working properly. God is like the boy who gets his toy top spinning and then leaves the room and lets it wobble. How can you worship that? God got bored," Father said. "I know that kind of boredom, but I fight it."

Father saw the river and said, "Let's straighten it." Dragging the ice up the mountain, he had talked of nothing but the cable car for passengers and cargo. He still spoke of sinking a shaft — tapping the steam heat in the earth's core. And inventions themselves revealed unexpected things that Father called "the unanticipated wrinkle." An example of this was an exposed pipe on Fat Boy's shin. This collected drops of moisture from the humid air. Father added more pipes and turned this into a condenser that dripped into a tank. It was the purest water imaginable, and now he boasted that he could create water as well as freeze it — with fire! He had not expected this cold pipe to behave this way It was revealed to him He called it the Hamstring.

We kids said that if Father saw the Acre he would have a fit, or else laugh at us. He was a perfectionist. I could not forget how, on the mountain, he had kicked his lean-to apart and sat on the windy ground all night and said, "I want to sleep in my own bed!" He would suffer rather than sleep in a badly made hut, and he often looked at the Zambus' food or Mrs. Kennywick's wabool and said, "I'd starve before I'd eat that" — and he meant it.

We did not dare to say that you could eat what grew wild and sleep on the ground. His mosquito traps, "Bug Boxes," invited insects through inescapable baffles and kept Jeronimo free of flying bugs. But you did not need nets and Bug Boxes if you knew about the berry juice that acted like citronella. "Afraid of a few bugs?" he sometimes said, and, at other times, "It's not that I don't want them on my skin — I don't want them within three miles of me." We could have told him that we had learned that most work was needless, and a bathhouse wasn't necessary if you had a pool or a river. Father's homegrown carrots were tasty, but wild yautia was just as good, and no trouble. He had outlawed bananas and manioc—"They make you lazy, and I don't like the implications of bananas." And the ice — it was a marvel, but like most marvels all you could do was marvel at it.

The more I thought about, the more sure I was that we kids stayed in Jeronimo because of the Acre. It lay in the jungle between the mountains and the river, at the dead end of a narrow path our feet had made. It was invisible, it was safe.

We spent every afternoon at the Acre, and we were sorry we could not sleep there overnight. We wanted to prove to Father that it could be done. But at the end of every day, we pushed the bushes aside and walked back to Jeronimo and heard the pumps, their whops and claps, before we saw the buildings. Father would be smiling, for in the coolness of the late afternoon he cleared Fat Boy and gave ice to the river Creoles or Zambus who had worked for it. There he was, with his tongs and his pulley, hoisting great blocks of vapory ice out of this monster cupboard with its firebox blazing.

And always, when we came back, Father said, "Where have you been? Fooling in the bushes?"

We would say swimming or hiking.

"Look at them, people. We're killing ourselves and they're walking around the block."

The "people" were Mr. Haddy, the Zambus, Mr. Peaselee, and Mr. Harkins. They were his listeners for he never stopped telling them his plans. These days he spoke of freezing fish and rushing them inland where no one had ever seen big river fish. "Six-footers! Catfish! Could change their whole way of life. Especially if they're open-minded and not in the grip of some moral sneak who's preaching hellfire to them."

That was a frequent complaint. The Maywits had not come back. Father said it made him mad.

"And the funny thing about hellfire is, it's imaginary. But not Fat Boy! He's got more poison in him than a century of hells. Oh, gaw, I could teach those missionaries a thing or two about chemical combustion. If they saw hydrogen and ammonia get loose they'd believe in me, instead of the dead top-spinner! If Fat Boy blew his lid—"

This Jeronimo talk made the Acre seem happier. The camp was our secret. And we had learned things there that even Father did not know.

***

My birthday came and went — the month, anyway. The months had names, but the days did not have numbers. I was fourteen, but still smaller than I wanted to be. And now the dry season lay across Jeronimo. It was dust and dead leaves.

The river had begun to get narrower, and it stank. It turned into a creek between deep slabs of bubbly mud, with flies buzzing over it and green hair in it. It snored and pooped past the mooring. A little above us it had become a marsh, and there was now no way upstream to Seville. Our boats were shanked against the mud, and our pumps at the river's edge often gagged on the slime and weeds they sucked up. It had not rained for months, and it might be a month or more, Father said, before it rained again. Now Father was making only small quantities of ice, and all our drinking water came from the condenser on Fat Boy's shin, the Hamstring.

We had not mentioned the Acre to Father, so we could not tell him that spring water in our pool still brimmed to the grassy edge.

The Jeronimo garden was green, producing beans and tomatoes and corn — the cornstalks were as high as some of the eaves. But the pumps were still gasping. Father said he had been a fool for believing the river would go on flowing — it was as undependable as anything else on this imperfect earth. He spoke again of sinking a shaft, not the geothermal one but a simpler borehole to the water table. Whenever people came these days, they were put to work digging this hole.

The work was hard, and not many people were willing to shift dirt in return for a small block of ice or a bag of hybrid seeds. Father predicted that the Maywits would soon be back and Jeronimo working at full strength. He had been saying this for three weeks.

One day he said to Mother, "I'm putting you in sole charge of Jeronimo, honey."

"Are you going somewhere?"

"Nope. But I've got my Hole to think about."

He hated the river and its smell, and all he talked about was his Hole. "Going to work on my Hole," he said in the early morning. And he asked every visitor, "What are you going to do about my Hole?" He was either in it or at the edge of it, his face as red as a tomato, cursing the river and the climate and trying to devise a machine for moving dirt. "Say, on the same principle as a vacuum cleaner, that can dig and suck at the same time — give it teeth and lungs, fit it with claspers—"

He complained that he was working with caveman's tools. "If only I had the hardware!" He dug with the Zambus. He did nothing else. If there was smut on the corn, or worms in the tomatoes, or rot on the beans, he ordered us kids to see about it. There was no water. He kept digging. The task took hold of him like a fever. He said, "I never stop until I get where I'm going."

Then he shut down Fat Boy. The roar and gurgle of the ice maker had been so familiar to us that when he put the fire out one morning, it was like hearing my heart stop. I had to hold my breath to listen. Fat Boy wasn't wet and dripping anymore. It looked as if it had died, and Father stiffened a little, resembling his invention.

"What about the ice?" Mother said.

"What about my Hole?"

So the hole got deeper, and it was wide enough for four men to stand in, swinging shovels. It looked like the opening to Father's volcano hole, and next to it was a pyramid of dirt and boulders, "Which proves, if proof were needed, that even with primitive tools and a little muscle you can do something constructive about this gimcrack world we've inherited."

But still he had not struck water. We stopped getting visitors. The work was too hard. Father dug in the hole and ate practically nothing and said, "If I only had the hardware—"

The pumps only brought us a green trickle from the squeezed river. We had to water the gardens by hand, pouring buckets of water into the sluice pipe that siphoned into the irrigation ditches. Mother stayed knee-deep in mud at the river's edge, and the four of us kids, in what Father called the Bucket Brigade, passed pails of water from hand to hand up the bank.

We were on Bucket Brigade just after dawn one day when Mother looked up and said, "Mr. Haddy's in an awful hurry."

He was running out of the jungle toward Father's hole. No one ever ran here. Something serious had happened.

"Peaselee say they is some fellers on the path!"

He yelled this down the hole.

We watched. Father climbed out and chucked his shovel aside.

"What did I tell you? It's the Maywits."

"He run down to tell me."

"Where is he?"

"Still running. Maybe Swampmouth by now."

Father saw us watching him.

"Don't anyone say a word. We can't blame them for going. We're glad to have them back. We'll pretend they never left — they've had a rough time. You think it's dry here? It's soaking wet compared to the drought they've got out there. Listen, the world is a terrible place for anyone who's had a taste of Jeronimo. Those poor folks will need all the sympathy they can get. Be nice to them. Give them some peas to shell, put them to work. We've got some extra hands for my Hole!"

Mother said, "It could be some people who want ice."

"I know it's the Maywits," Father said.

But this time Father was wrong. The Maywits were not on the path.

"Men," Mother said, looking up. We crowded behind her. "There's three of them, Allie."

"I was expecting them, too," Father said, but his voice had gone cold. "They're slaves."

"Then why do they have guns, Dad?" Clover asked.

The Zambus seemed terrified. I heard, "Ruckbooses."

20

AT THAT MOMENT, I knew how the people in Seville felt, the river Creoles and the mountain Indians, or anyone else who watched us Foxes coming out of the jungle. We stepped into their villages like this, big and strange and uninvited. So we deserved this visit, but that did not make it easier.

The three scarecrows were dressed differently from the way they had been in the Indian village in Olancho — sweat-stained shirts and dirty pants and boots. We had not chosen them — they had chosen us. This was what savages saw. They were heading straight for us, not looking left or right. They seemed worse-off in clothes than they had half-naked in the village. One had a rifle slung over his shoulder, and the other two had pistols in their hands. They were listening and blinking, a little stupid and a little angry, as if they were out hunting cats.

Father's face twitched. It was not worry. He was doing a rapid calculation in his head, adding, subtracting, figuring odds, doing the algebra of what they might want. I recognized the men's clothes — they were the ones I had seen the Indian women washing in the stream. The Zambus watched from the lip of the hole with their round blackbird's eyes.

"Tell them to put their guns down, Allie."

"Let me handle this." Father met the men and said in Spanish, "What goes?"

The men smiled at him, but their hands stayed put. They glanced around Jeronimo, holding us silent with the guns. They wore no insignia, although their clothes were similar and looked like uniforms. Their long hair and beards made them seem like brothers. I had remembered them as tall, but here they did not appear tall — they were Mother's height. One of the pistol carriers wore a belt with a large brass buckle. He seemed more intelligent, less violent than the other two, but maybe it was because the other two had teeth missing. And the one with the rifle had a bandage on his hand — it was a filthy bandage and could only have been covering an infection.

Among the Indians in that village they had been shifty, almost timid — they had whispered to us and brought us food and warned us about the squatting Indians. But here they had none of that sneaking slyness. They looked strong, as if they were used to entering villages and sizing them up. They took their time, they did not even reply to Father until after they mumbled among themselves.

"We did not think we would find you." It was the one with the brass buckle who spoke. His teeth were too large for his mouth, and now I saw that he was not smiling. It was just his big yellow teeth stretching his lips.

"Here we are," Father said flatly.

"How many are you?"

"Thousands—"

The men looked behind them quickly.

"— counting the white ants," Father said. "We're infested."

Mr. Haddy whispered to me, "I ain't like this men," and then, "Hey, Lungley."

But the Zambus had gone: climbed out of Father's hole and backed into the woods.

"You are just in time for breakfast," Father said. "Scramble some eggs for our friends here, Mother" — he was still speaking in Spanish—"they have a long trip ahead of them."

We all went to the Gallery, and there the men put their guns down. They sat on the floor and ate eggs and beans, while Father talked about the white ants. Termites, he said, had gotten into everything — food, plants, even the roofs and floors of the houses. "They are eating us alive!"

It was the first we had heard of the white ants, but no one contradicted Father then, because no one ever contradicted him. The men listened and wolfed their food. When they finished, they stared at us with pale skinny faces. Eating did not soften their expressions, it only made them look hungrier and more dangerous.

The man with the teeth, who had spoken before, said that they had run out of water and then lost their way searching for water. They had camped on the mountain.

"I know how it is," Father said.

Mother gathered the plates, and that same man — Big Teeth did all the talking — said, "Your husband told us he had water and food. He invited us here. He told us he has everything. Up there, over the mountains, they have nothing."

"It's the end of the dry season," Father said. "We're feeling it. Everything is dead or dying. We won't see rain for weeks. But the white ants are getting fat!"

No one reminded him of his boast that Jeronimo was termite-proof.

"If it goes on like this, we'll have to start eating the termites."

The man with the teeth said "Pleh" — the thought disgusted him.

"City boys," Father said to Mother.

The men were still breathing hard, as if with hunger.

"See, around here, if there's no rain, there's nothing to eat. Ask anyone. We're down to our last provisions. The ants are all over the place. Our river's turned into a creek. The next time you come, things will be different."

"Where are your Zambus?"

Father wrinkled his nose. "Probably thought you were soldiers. They saw your ruckbooses."

"We do not understand."

"Arquebuses — guns. You're in Mosquitia now," Father said. "I didn't have time to tell them you were friendly. I imagine they are out dipping their arrows in poison, aren't they, Charlie?"

He was casual in the way he said this. And I knew from his voice what he wanted me to reply. I said, "Yes."

"You sure had them fooled!" He had become jolly. He turned away from them and looked off the Gallery to where the river lay stinking and almost motionless. "Where are you going?"

"It is very pretty here."

Father faced them. "It is crawling with ants!"

"We do not see any ants."

"Of course. If you could see them, you could kill them."

"Where is this ice you told us about?"

"We are not making ice. Look at that river — it is like a sewer. We need all the water we've got for the crops."

The man who had done all the talking said clearly to the others, "He is not making ice."

"There is not much river left," Father said. "But there is enough to float a cayuka. This is the Bonito. It flows into the Aguan. I could draw you a map. It is about a day to the coast. You will like it there."

"We like it here."

"I wish I had room for you. But most of the houses have infestation. Ants. You're lucky — you won't find any ants on the coast."

"There is an empty house next door."

The Maywits' abandoned house — they had seen it.

"There is no roof on that house," Father said.

"You are mistaken."

Father turned to Mr. Haddy and said, "I told you to rip off that floor and roof, Figgy. Now get your crowbar and go do it — I want every rotten joist torn out."

The next noise we heard was Mr. Haddy crowbarring the Maywits' house apart — the crack and screech of boards, like pigs being slaughtered.

"Please excuse us," Father said. "We have work to do. No sir, we are not on vacation!"

The men followed him outside.

"My Hole," Father said. "You will have to stay here, above ground. I don't allow weapons in my Hole."

The man with the rifle said "Arquebus — ruckboos," and smiled.

Big Teeth said, "We will look around."

"Go down to the river. You will see a cayuka there. It is yours — paddle down to the coast."

"It is not necessary."

"That is what the ants say."

The men shrugged.

"I will tell you a secret," Father said. "We are self-sufficient. We can feed ourselves. But we can't feed anyone else. That is why I am suggesting you go on your way."

"We will consider your suggestion."

It occurred to me that the men spoke Spanish in a way I had never heard before. It was polite, some phrases were new to me, and no words were left out. They were educated men and seemed out of place here where everyone's Spanish was a jumble of Creole and English. I could not hear the men speak in their perfect Spanish without suspecting them of being dishonest. But that was one of Father's own suspicions — he always distrusted educated people, and I knew he hated these men.

"Good. I'll make you another one," Father said — his patience was wearing thin. "Put those ruckbooses away. They make me nervous. I am not asking you where you got them. I am just saying that I did not come here to look down the barrel of a gun. And I don't need another nostril, okay? Do you see any locks on these doors? See any fences? No? That is because this is the most peaceful place in the world. I want to keep it that way."

The men only smiled and held tight to their guns.

"Grab a shovel, Charlie, and climb in."

We lowered ourselves into the hole.

Father said to me in a whisper, "I thought those gentlemen were prisoners of the Indians. Seems it was the other way around. Kick me, Charlie, I'm a fool!"

About thirty minutes later, there was a noise above us — Mr. Haddy scrambling into the hole.

"Maywit house finished," he said. "I knock the shoo out of her. She look skelly, but I ain't see no hants."

Father's back was turned. He had a spade in his hand. He was shoveling and thinking.

Mr. Haddy said, "I ain't like them friends, Fadder."

"Not so loud, Fig."

"They sitting under the guanacaste."

"All right," Father said. "Take the roof and floor off your house and tell Harkins to do the same. If you can't find Peaselee, do his house, roof and floor. We've got infestation. We're going to ream these houses. Charlie, you get Jerry and take a bag of chicken manure and spread it in the cold store. Wet it until it stinks. Board up the root cellar and the bean shed. Tell Mother what you're doing—"

He gave us more instructions, and when he had finished he had named every building in Jeronimo, except one.

I said, "What about Fat Boy?"

"Don't touch him. Just make sure his fire's out."

Mr. Haddy gave Father a rabbity smile. "So if the hants eats everything and we pull down we houses, there ain't no way for the friends to stay."

"That's about the size of it." Father said. "I'm going to defuse the situation peaceably."

***

By lunchtime, Jeronimo was changed — Haddy house out top and bottom, Maywit house ditto, Peaselee stoop torn out and broken up, other houses unshingled, root cellar boarded, cold store boarded and manured, bathhouse plugged and manured, pumps tinkered apart — all of them wrecked, Father said, "in the interest of fumigation." Our house was still whole, and so was Fat Boy, but the rest were open to the sky or else shut down.

"It's war on the ants."

Mr. Peaselee and Mr. Harkins had not returned. This was probably a blessing, because their houses were in a sorry state and they would have been upset to see them. Mother said that Ma Kennywick had gone to Swampmouth to stay with her sister — the hammering and banging were too much for her. The Zambus remained out of sight, and yet I knew that although we could not see them, they were watching us from between the loops and chinks of the leaves.

It was drastic that Father had decided to pull most of the habitable houses apart. But it was not surprising, and none of us was worried. We knew how quickly he could build a house — we had seen him. He often said that destruction and creation were father and son. He had taken the Little Haddy to pieces and reassembled it in a sleeker form so that it could float upstream. We trusted his speed and ingenuity. But after so many months of laboring to make it work, who could have guessed that Jeronimo would be silenced and turned into a slum in the space of a morning?

The three men disappeared, tracked into the jungle with their guns. They returned for lunch.

Father was in a good mood now. He greeted them heartily and filled their plates with food. He said, "If you leave right after lunch you can make it to Bonito Oriental. There's a Chinese store there — Ling Hermanos. All the cans of Spam you could ask for, and probably some rum. Mishla and radio music. That's the place for you city boys—"

I was in the corner of the Gallery with Clover, April, and Jerry.

Clover said, "What's Dad done to all the houses?"

"Busted them up," Jerry said. "Whacked them apart. Charlie and me put chicken poo in the cold store."

April said, "It looks worse than when we came."

"I want to go to the Acre," Clover said.

"We can't do that," I said.

"Charlie's a spacky."

"I am not. Dad won't let us. He wants us to help him."

"There's nothing to do here. It's all crapoid."

Jerry said, "Haddy thinks those men are criminals and they're going to shoot somebody with their guns."

"They couldn't shoot us if we were in our camp," Clover said. "They wouldn't find us."

April said, "And if they tried, they'd fall in a trap."

This was a perfect day for our camp, and there was more water in our pool than in the whole of Jeronimo. I would have given anything to spend the afternoon there swimming. I wanted to leave this place, then come back and find the men gone and all the houses rebuilt.

But when I told the kids this, Mother said, "It's not polite to whisper."

Father had been talking to the men. Suddenly he stood up and said, "These gentlemen want to know how I lost my finger. That is an interesting story!"

He hovered over the men and began barking in Spanish.

"It was our first night here in Jeronimo. We were sequestered in this wilderness, believing we were well prepared — we had mosquito nets, sleeping bags, tents, real guerrilleros. We all went to bed and fell asleep. But I had my doorbell dream, my button-pushing nightmare. I was standing at the devil's door and trying to get in. I was pressing, and I didn't know it then, but I had stuck my finger clear through the mosquito net. In the morning, I woke up and tried to pull it out. Only there wasn't a finger there, but a stump! In the night, something had chewed off my digit — a rat, a bat, an armadillo, a peccary. We have creatures here."

He showed the men his stump.

"That is what I had left! It's a good thing I hadn't stuck my whole hand out — I'd be wearing a hook."

The men examined the finger stump. I could not tell whether they believed him, but Father had told the story vigorously and well.

"Look at the teeth marks! After dark, this place is crawling with creatures. You're not in the mountains anymore — this is the jungle, boys."

"We have been in the jungle."

"Not this wild — this is not Olancho, and it is not Tegoose. The people here are descended from pirates and cannibal Caribs. Spiders as big as puppies? Vultures that pick you clean? This is the Mosquito Coast! That's why I advise you to go downriver, where you can shut the doors and windows. If anyone slept outside around here, there would be nothing left in the morning — not even bones."

The toothy man turned to his friends.

"For example, where are you sleeping tonight?" Father asked.

They did not say.

"It better be indoors and far away from here. You could lose more than a finger!"

We worked through the afternoon, digging the hole, sealing the houses, and wishing we were at the Acre, while the three men talked among themselves. They were restless, they watched us work. They had hot nervous eyes in sick faces, and they moved in flicks like lizards, crouching whenever they looked around.

Each time they stared at Father, he held up his finger stump and said, "It will be dark soon!"

They crept away, ignoring him.

This excited Father — their indifference. "I am giving you a chance," he said. Now he was almost pleading. "I am offering you my cayuka. You would be wise to shove off. It gets dark around here very fast."

The men played with Clover and April under the guanacaste tree.

Mr. Haddy said, "Where I gung sleep, Fadder?"

"I've got a bed for you," Father said, then he shouted to the men, "Get away from those kids!"

He picked up his claw hammer and walked over to them, past the torn-open or blinded houses.

"I don't care if you stay here, but keep your hands away from my children."

"They are very intelligent children."

"They have intelligent parents," Father said.

"Yes. They are telling us all the wonderful things you can do."

Clover said, "I didn't say anything, Dad. It was April."

April said, "Clover was boasting about your shaft to get geothermal energy out of volcanoes."

"That's a water hole," Father said. "This dry season has turned us into Zambus. We're just fighting for water. Keep your trap shut, girls, and go do something useful."

The men slunk to the river. We could not see them, we thought they had gone, but at twilight they returned. It was the hour the mosquitoes and bats woke and began flying. The men were slapping at their heads, rubbing their ankles, and scratching holes in their shirts.

In their absence, Father's mood had changed. He sulked, he chewed his cigar. He did not speak to any of us, but instead walked around mumbling. He took his tools over to Fat Boy and stood on a ladder, hammering the upper walls near the hatchway. But when he saw the men again, he began laughing. It was dark now. Mr. Haddy brought a lantern from the boat. Flimsy insects skidded around the lantern's glass chimney. I stood watching with Jerry.

Father was still laughing. He said, "I am a fool. You said you liked it here, and I did not believe you. But I am fully convinced now. You meant what you said. You are staying the night here, aren't you?"

"Yes."

"I would not be surprised if you decided to stay two nights, or more. Maybe until the rain comes and we start planting — and that's weeks away!"

"We will stay until we are ready. Then we will go."

Saying that, the man had the face of an insect, one that settles on a bean pod and burrows until it has eaten its fill. Insects make little probing twitches, but they have no more expression than a pair of pliers. The men looked that way — pincer lips and eyes like rivets. Insects.

"I am not a savage," Father said. "I am not going to lay hold of you and make you prisoners. It was your choice all along. But it's dark now." He took the lantern and put it near their faces, bringing the insects near their insect eyes. "You can't go anywhere."

The men stared at the mosquitoes and jumping moths.

"You would be fools to leave now. We haven't got much, but what we have is yours. This infestation — look, there is a termite on the glass, see his jaws? — has left us short of houses. But we can provide food and shelter."

"He is a very sensible man."

"I do what I can."

"He understands."

"When I saw you up there in that — was it a Twahka village? — I took you for prisoners."

The men smiled and slapped the insects away from their cheeks and ears. Holding the lantern this way. Father was tormenting the men.

"I thought, 'Slaves!'"

The men laughed as they fanned the insects away.

"But you were the guests of those Indians," Father said. "And now you are our guests. Look—"

A mosquito had settled on Father's arm. He allowed it to stay there a moment, and then he brought his hand down on it. He showed the men the squashed mosquito, the smear of blood.

"Dead! But don't feel sorry for him. That's not his blood — it is my blood!"

The men stepped back. Father had wiped the blood on his finger stump.

"This is Mosquitia!" Father said.

"You are right. There are more creatures here than in the mountains of Olancho."

"The Mosquito Coast is full of surprises," Father said. "That is why we like it, right, Mr. Haddy?"

"I sleeping on me lanch, Fadder."

"You do that, Figgy. Charlie, you take Jerry into the house or you'll be eaten alive—"

We started toward the house, which was now the only complete building in Jeronimo. Jerry took my hand — he was worried, his hand was damp. He tossed his head to keep the mosquitoes away.

"— and you gentlemen can use the bunkhouse."

Jerry said, "What bunkhouse is he talking about?" — Father had said the word in English—"We don't have a bunkhouse."

The lantern was swinging — Father was leading the men to Fat Boy. In the circle of mothy light he raised the ladder to the hatchway entrance on top.

Some minutes later, Father was at the screen door of the Gallery, talking as he entered.

"They want food. Put it in this pail, Mother, and I'll bring it across."

He jangled the pail down, and Mother ladled wabool into it. Then she made parcels of beans and rice, wrapping them in banana leaf, and put them into a basket.

"We're stuck with them," she said.

Father's face was blank, his long nose raw with sunburn. He stared at the floor where we were eating. It was as if he had run through all his moods on this confusing day and now had none left. He lifted his feet, and, letting them flap, he moved around the room like a goose.

He said, "Stuck with them? We're not stuck with anyone. If I believed things like that, we'd still be back in Hatfield." His voice was flat, he was still stepping back and forth across the floor. "No one who has the slightest spark is ever stuck with anyone in this world, or has to endure a minute of oppression. We proved that. Mother. We all choose our own thunderjug and sit on it and take the consequences."

Mother was smiling.

"Thunderjugs," Father said. "That's what we used to call chamber pots down in Maine."

***

It was after midnight, still so hot the grass and trees howled with insects. Frogs bellyrumbled in the shrunken river, and I could hear the current sucking at the reeds. These were the noises I heard the seconds after I woke. Father had put his hands on my face. In that darkness, I thought it was one of the men who had come to strangle me.

"Get your shoes on and follow me."

We had no lights, yet there was enough moonglow in the clearing for me to see the empty houses and the stacks of wood that had been torn from the roofs and floors. Jeronimo had been like this months ago, when we were building it — purple pickets in an empty crater, and the barracking crackle of the jungle.

Father carried a thick plank under his arm, but nothing else. It was a very clumsy weapon, if it was a weapon. We crossed to the cold store. The smell of damp chicken manure hung over it. Father knelt in the grass and drew breaths as if he was keeping count of them.

"I gave them every chance to go. Even offered them my cayuka." He crushed a mosquito and showed me the black stain on his finger, as he had done before. "Don't pity insects. That's my blood."

I nodded. I was afraid of the sound my voice would make.

"But they refused. You heard them. They're planning to fasten on us like they fastened on to those Indians. Remember those poor pathetic men, squatting in the dirt with their crazy mutts? Charlie, it was the Indians who were the prisoners!"

"They looked scared."

"Did they?" Father hung his head. "I'm not often wrong, but when I am, I'm as wrong as I can be."

This was a confession. I could not think of anything to say to make it easier for him.

"I don't usually make mistakes. You know that. But this is a lulu."

He was now staring at Fat Boy. He hunched his shoulders, and in the old hoarse joshing voice he used for testing me, he said, "Can you get up that ladder and shove this beam through the brackets on the hatchway door, without making a sound?"

"I guess so."

"You'd better be more certain than that, Charlie, because if you wake those bugs up they're going to start shooting."

He handed me the beam. It was heavy, but it smelted sweet, a roasted-nut aroma — it had been freshly sawed.

"You could get us all killed," he said.

I wanted to drop the beam and run.

"Up you go."

We crept to the ladder, and he took hold of it. I climbed past him and received a wave of heat from his body, the reddened sweat of his worry, which was like a vapor of blood in the air. Then I was cooled by the light breeze on the midsection of the ladder. I was glad it was dark — I could not see the ground clearly, only the moon-white flickers, like doves pecking in the grass, and gobs of putty-colored light on the trees. The fingers of my free hand were pale. They trembled on the rungs.

Nearer the hatchway, I imagined that I could hear the men snoring just inside Fat Boy, on the upper platform, in the tangle of pipes. Months before, I had seen these coils and pans, and I believed I had had a glimpse of Father's mind. I could not separate them, and now it seemed awful that these intruders were there, stinking and waiting and refusing to go. Men he hated had penetrated this private place.

There were iron bracket straps fixed to the jamb. Father must have hammered them there this afternoon. I had never seen them before. We had no locks in Jeronimo. This was the first.

I lifted the wood beam, set it against the door above the brackets, and slid it down. It was a perfect fit. But as soon as I did it, I realized how final it was. It had sealed the door — barricaded it, as Father would have said. My legs went weak and began to wobble. I descended the ladder quickly, expecting that at any moment there would be a crash, and gunfire.

"Stand back."

Father moved the ladder away from Fat Boy and eased it into the grass. He put his mouth against my head.

"You didn't climb that ladder."

His breath scalded my ear.

"You didn't bar that door."

He took my arm and squeezed it.

"We don't have any locks in Jeronimo."

He had gripped my arm so tightly I thought the bone would snap. He was leading me to the firebox. We had no shadows.

"I wanted you here to test your eyes. My guess is that they're as good as mine. I'll bet you can see the same things I can. Look there."

Still holding my arm in his left hand, he motioned with his other hand. Beyond the blunt finger stump was the firebox.

"Somebody's left a fire burning," he said.

But there was no fire.

I said, "I can't see it."

My hand went dead. He was squeezing hard.

"Look," he said, and struck a match and put it to a packed mass of kindling. It was all prepared — kindling, sticks, twigs, cut limbs, and split logs on top. "Somebody lit a fire here — and I told them not to."

"Yes."

He released my arm, but I could not feel a thing in my hand. It was as if, in the dark, he had pinched it off.

"No fires, I said." His face was wild.

The kindling wood must have been soaked in oil, because it went wheesht as it burst into flames and set the sticks and split logs above it chattering on fire, louder than Father's whisper. It roared against the bricks, and when Father shut the firebox door, I could hear it in the chimney, and the faintly foolish glugs of the liquid stirring in Fat Boy's pipes — swallows and burps, so sad tonight.

"We'll just have to let it burn. It's chock-full of logs. There's nothing we can do to stop it."

His voice was smaller than the rumble around us.

"Some devil has done this."

"The men—" But what could I tell him that he did not already know? He knew the men inside would freeze solid. I wanted to say something, because I saw them clearly, stretched out and gray, with frost on their faces.

"Start counting, Charlie. By the time you get to three hundred, there won't be any men in there."

He said no more. He led me back to the house in silence. He was gulping, as if he was counting too. The crackle of the fire, the swelling of Fat Boy's pipes, the creak of joints — it was like the quickened tick-tock of measured time.

Before we reached the house, we heard a rapping, a hammering inside Fat Boy — gun butts against the walls. Father went on gulping and started toward Fat Boy.

"If they lie down they'll be all right."

The hammering became frantic.

"They're trying to smash it." Father was not alarmed. He had built it himself, of mahogany planks on a bolted frame. He knew how strong Fat Boy was.

Four gunshots popped inside, then more. But they were muffled by the double walls, and I was not even sure they were shots until Father said the men were firing their guns.

"Allie, are you all right?"

It was Mother, standing on the Gallery in her white nightgown.

Father replied, but his words were drowned by the very loud noise that followed the shots — a great slamming inside Fat Boy. It was like barrels bumping downstairs over and over again. The trapped men were trying to fight their way out, beating on the door. They fired their guns, and the metal rang as their bullets hit pipes — and still the barrel-thud on the thick walls.

"Keep counting, Charlie."

Clover, April, and Jerry appeared with Mother on the Gallery. April was crying, and the others were saying, "Where's Dad?" and "What happened to Charlie?"

"What all this racky puppysho?" Mr. Haddy was behind us in his sleeping clothes — undershirt and striped shorts. He danced back and forth with fear.

"Get your head down, Figgy. Everything's going to be fine. A few minutes more—"

"What cracking?"

"Crickets."

But the noise grew louder, and there were tunnel yells, like buried-alive men screaming into dirt. That and the chiming of pipes. I knew those pipes — if you touched them, the cold metal tore the skin from your fingers. The whole building shook. The tin roof rattled. The noise in that darkness made Fat Boy seem huger than ever. The strangled echoes of so much drumming and fright, and the gunshots, made holes in the night air. The struggle was like hell in an immense coffin that had been nailed shut on people who were half alive.

"They're damaging him," Father said. He was not frightened, but hurt and angry. "They won't he down. They're going to put a hole in him."

He spoke as though something in his own head was breaking.

The kids were crying, and Mr. Haddy still dancing in his striped shorts.

"No!" Father cried. He started to rush forward.

Then the explosion came. It filled the clearing with light that scorched my face. It brought color to every leaf, not green but reddish gold, and it gathered the nearby buildings — the cold store, the incubator, the root cellar — shocking them with pale floury flame and then pushing them over like paper. It lifted Fat Boy from the ground, broke it, and dropped it, shoving its planks apart like petals, as the fireball of flaming gas shot upward like a launched balloon.

Father had turned away from the blast. One side of his face was fiery, the other black. He had one red eye. It was fixed on me, and it was so bright it looked as if it would burst with blood. His mouth was open. He may have been screaming, but the other noise was greater.

The boom was over, yet the power of it still made the trees sway as they did before a storm, tossing their boughs. Birds woke, and mewed. The planks that had broken from the walls had caught fire, and fire clung to the pipes that shot jets of blue flame like a gas burner, and inside there was a griddle-fat sizzle and a choking stink of shit-house ammonia that pinched my nose and stung my eyes.

Father dashed toward the flames, then put his hands over his face and ran back to us. His mouth was black, and now I could hear him.

"Follow me!"

He went rigid. He did not move a muscle.

"Follow me!" he yelled.

Mother and the children snatched at him and hugged him and pleaded. I thought they would tip him over. "Dad!" they shouted, and "Allie!" They were weeping and trying to make him move, and we were all gagging on the ammonia fumes.

Mr. Haddy moaned. "We all gung die."

"We'll get out of this poison," Father said, but still he did not move. I wondered if he was injured. His face was streaked and dirty. "There's more hydrogen in the tanks, the ammonia's going to flood us. Cover your faces!"

Across the clearing, lighting what was left of Jeronimo, Fat Boy burned. I had not realized that such a bright fire could be so quiet. The houses flamed like baskets, but it was the birds that made most of the noise. The clearing itself, its fringes and trees, caught, too. The fire spread fast. It was not the flames or the light, but the sewer stink of ammonia that made this seem like the end of the world. Another gas tank blew, and caused a tremendous wind of heat and poison.

With terrible croaks, Father rubbed his eyes and pleaded with us to follow him. But he did not move. When I saw him this way, and his red eyes, I began to cry.

I said, "I know a place—"

As I started away, they followed, and soon they were right behind me, pushing me along the cool path.

All this took less than five minutes: I was still counting.

And then there were various shocks in the dark, the way doors slam in a house on windy summer nights.