The Mosquito Coast

21

ALL THAT NIGHT, Fat Boy's fire showed over the treetops like a bright hat. Even the pissy snap of hot ammonia gas reached us here. The flames brought Jeronimo close. Rising sparks put the stars out and replaced them with flaming straws, and the climbing smoke clouded the sky.

I sat in our dark camp, the Acre, tortured by mosquitoes. I could not find the black berries we used for keeping bugs off in the daytime. The Jeronimo smoke was no help here in driving them away — and it seemed unlucky to build a fire so near to the one that had destroyed our home. It was still chewing, in the violent and greedy way flames feed on dry wood, and spitting the trees into the sky as ashes. The kids had crawled into a lean-to, where they hid and slept. Mr. Haddy's whimpering about his boat had become lazy snores. He had turned drunk and silly on sleep. Father had found a corner of the camp and put his head down. He slept like the others. He had not spoken a word.

"Get some sleep, Charlie," Mother said. She yawned. Soon she was asleep, and only I was left awake.

Sitting among these purring people, I discovered how long Father's nights were. He was usually the one who watched the night pass. There were rattles in the darkness, and the clash of dropping branches, and the brief gallop of falling trees. There were bat squeals and, because of the fire, some birds still mewing and others beeping like clarinets. These sounds — the birds' most of all — did not belong in the jungle. They were too harsh, they nagged and rasped in all the soft, black surrounding trees.

Disorder here was this noise, loudest at night, and the worst of it cracking out in the darkest places. Some of it was like spurts from a broken hose pipe. I listened to the jungle being torn apart. These hidden creatures, and even some trees, had voices. They sounded their loud wakeful fear throughout the night, stirred by the fire that was stirring the whole sky. I was blind and the world was falling down like the dew around me. There seemed no remedy for it, to plug it or calm it or make it sleep. It all roared at me. Hope left me then, and wide-awake I began to worry. This was not solitude but rather a nightmare of damage an iron wheel that drove on and on monotonous noise in the timeless dark, scattering feathers and claws.

But Father was wise to these crowding sounds. Nights like this, which worried me, had filled his head with schemes. So when dawn came, I knew him better and feared him more than I had at the stunning ruin of Jeronimo.

"Let him sleep," Mother said. I was amazed that he was still at it: I had never seen him sleep so soundly.

He lay on his side, in a hedgehog posture, with his arms over his face and his knees drawn up — a bundle of grumbling snores. Flies had settled on his shirt, and they scratched undisturbed on the wrinkles and seemed to play, he was so still. No one spoke, no one wanted to hear what he would say when he woke up.

It was day now. I felt sick and small under the quivering trees.

In the dry-season dawn, the leaves seemed to die as the sun hit them. The dew dried on the grass, and the blades withered and were lighted like gold thread under the rips of foil on the boughs. Freed of the dampness and dark, the dust on the ground penetrated the air with a yellow smell of decay that was sweet this first hour of daylight. The rising sun heated each live thing it struck, and stiffened it and gilded it with death. There were lovely brittle coins on the shining trees, and whole bushes of crisp gold flakes. As soon as the sun was sieved through the topmost branches, everything in the Acre was bright and dead around the black pool.

We waited, hardly breathing, for Father to wake. I dozed and watched the spiders near the pool, the way they plucked their webs like zithers to trap and tangle a struggling fly before they rushed the insect and wrapped it like a mummy. They hung the parcels of neatly bandaged flies in a high corner of the web, the way Indians here stored peppers and corn.

"Poor Dad," Clover whispered.

Mr. Haddy said, "His spearmint almost kill us."

"We're all right now," Mother said. "Charlie saved us."

"This isn't Charlie's camp. It's the Acre. It belongs to all of us," Jerry said. "The Maywit kids helped make those lean-tos. And Crummo gets all the credit!"

"You were blubbering last night," I said. "You were scared!"

"I wasn't!"

Mr. Haddy said, "But I were skeered! I was praying. I see death back there. That were wuss than a preacher's hell. Ruther have hurricanes and twisters than them fires. I see devils. I see Duppies dancing. I were so skeered I were glad to die."

Clover said, "What happened to those men, Ma?"

"They're gone."

"And if they ain't gone, we got trouble for true," Mr. Haddy said, and he repeated, "For too-roo!"

I said, "I saw them go."

"Don't think about it, Charlie." Mother hugged me. "We're safe now. Your father's going to be grateful when he wakes up."

"What's Dad doing?" April said.

His sleep made us helpless. It prevented us from moving. As long as he lay there we could not leave. It was then that we were reminded how important he was to us. We had only known him awake. It was frightening to see him so still. If he was dead, we were lost.

The sun, now overhead, was burning on his back. People sleeping give off an underground smell, a boiled root stink of dirt and food and sweat and wounds — the way I imagined corpses steamed, like heated compost. Father was motionless. He might have been making up for all the nights he'd stayed awake. But he looked and smelled dead.

April said, "Ma, are we going to die?"

Mother said, "Don't be silly." She found our baskets and helped us gather yautia and guavas and wild avocados. She praised our camp, she said it was a good job — it had saved our lives.

Seeing the yautia, Mr. Haddy said, "You kids like eddoes? Me ma make eddoes!"

Father swung over and jumped to his feet.

"Let's go," he said. He sank to his knees.

It was early afternoon. He had slept almost thirteen hours, but no one mentioned the time. "Liars, swindlers, degenerates who sleep till noon" — those were some of the people he hated. He had always told us that deep sleep was a form of illness, and he blamed us when we overslept.

He sat down on the gold grass and dropped his hands into his lap. "What are you looking at?"

His voice was flat, dull, different, almost drugged, and very small. He hardly moved his lips. He seemed very tired, and yet I had watched him all night, lying there sound asleep.

Mother knelt down and touched his face. She said, "Your hair is singed."

His eyebrows were stubble, his beard was burned and so were his eyelashes. It gave him a startled sausagey expression. One side of his face was pink and creased, with a sleep map pressed on it. One eye was redder than the other. He pulled on his baseball hat.

"I had an awful night. Hardly slept a wink."

Mr. Haddy said, "I see dogs twitch more than you done! You were sleeping like a slope — wunt he, Ma?"

Father said, "I've got no patience with liars in the morning."

Then he sniffed and came alert, as if he had just heard something. The smell of smoke and ammonia was still strong in the air, with burned bamboo and roasted tin. Father sighed. His face cracked. He smiled sadly, remembering.

"It's finished," he said, in his beaten voice.

"All your work," Mother said. Still kneeling, she started to cry. "I'm so sorry, Allie."

"I'm happy," Father said. "Jeronimo is destroyed."

Mr. Haddy said, "She went up like crackers."

Father said, "We're free."

Mother protested. "Everything you made is gone," she said. "All the houses, the crops, those wonderful machines. All that work—"

"Traps," Father said. "I should never have done it."

"How were you to know?"

"I'm the only one who could have known. It wasn't ignorance; it was subtlety. But that's always been my problem. I'm too elaborate, too ambitious. I can't help being an idealist. I was trying to defuse the situation peaceably. It blew up in my face."

"Allie, why—"

"And I deserved it. Toxic substances — this is no place for them. I'll never work with poisons again, and no more flammable gas. Keep it simple — physics, not chemistry. Levers, weights, pulleys, rods. No chemicals except those that occur naturally. Stable elements—"

Mother sobbed, "But those men are dead!"

"Tempered in the fires, Mother."

Clover said, "That's what I was just wondering."

"But not gone. Matter cannot be destroyed. Ask Figgy. They requested the transformation. Scavengers like them deserve the turkey treatment—"

Mother had put her fingers over her eyes. She wept softly as Father stood up.

"I thought I was building something," he said. "But I was asking for it to be destroyed. That's a consequence of perfection in this world — the opposing wrath of imperfection. Those scavengers wanted to feed on us! And Fat Boy failed me. The concept was wrong, and now I know why — no more poison, Mother."

He said this in almost a whining way, with his hands locked together. He went to the pool and poked the water.

He said, "Anybody can break anything in this world. America was brought low by little men."

He sounded as if his heart was broken. He raised some water in his cupped hands and washed his face and arms. "Where are we? What is this place?"

"It's the Acre," I said.

"Our camp," Jerry said.

"Call this a camp?" His voice was still small.

"This is where we play," Clover said.

"Some playground. You had water all this time?"

I said, "It's from a spring."

"You can swim in it," Jerry said.

Father looked around. I knew he thought it was all unsuitable. I wanted to tell him that it had kept us happy. He saw the swing. "I recognize that rope."

"She me stern painter," Mr. Haddy said.

"It was Charlie's idea."

"Huts, too. And fruit. And little baskets." He spoke sadly. "It's pure monkey."

"Those are guavas in the basket," Jerry said.

"Eat some, Allie. You haven't eaten anything."

"Monkey food, monkeyshines," Father said. "I hate this. I didn't want this. Why did you take us here, Charlie?"

"He saved us," Mother said. "He found us food and water. Allie, we would have died!"

"He didn't grow the food, he didn't dig the water." Father refused to look at me. He said, "Let's go. It's late. You're just sitting there."

Mother said, "We can't go back to Jeronimo."

"Who said go back? Who mentioned Jeronimo? I don't want to see it."

Mother's lips shaped the question, "Where?"

"Away! Away!"

"We'll have to salvage something to take with us," Mother said. "We can't go like this."

"This is how I want to go" — but he stood before us with only his hat on his head and his arms dangling out of his scorched sleeves. He looked like what he was — a man who had crawled away from an explosion.

Mr. Haddy said, "You tools? You foods? You bags and erl? Me lanch? Ain't leaving me lanch!"

"It's all poisoned," Father said. "We had too much with us — too much junk, too many drums of poison. That was our mistake. Do you know what a flood of ammonia can do? There's contamination there, and what's not contaminated is burned to a crisp."

"Please, Allie, you're raving."

"What I'm saying is understatement. Now let's go — I want to get this stink out of my nose."

"To the river?"

"Mother," he said. "I killed the river!"

"Why can't we stay here?" Jerry asked.

"Smell Fat Boy's guts? That's your answer. It'll stink for a year and drive you insane. No, I want to get away" — he pointed east to the Esperanzas—"past those mountains there."

"They is a river behind," Mr. Haddy said. "Rio Sico."

"We know all about it, Figgy."

"She run down to Paplaya and Camaron. We could go to Brewer's. She me own lagoon."

"That's the place for us," Father said.

This was too much for Mother. With a pained, demanding expression, she said, "How do you know?"

Father moved the part of his forehead where his eyebrows should have been. He was smiling unhappily. "Because I like the name."

He tramped around the clearing, punching the bushes and peering between boughs the way a person might fuss with the curtains on a window. His impatience made him clumsy and useless. Finally he sighed.

"Okay, Charlie, I give up. Which way is out?"

I showed him the path.

"Just as I thought," he said. He started walking.

"I'd better go first."

"Who put you in charge?"

I said, "We dug traps here and covered them with branches. In case bandits came. You might fall in."

"I know all about traps," he said, and kept walking.

We followed, carrying the baskets of food and a jug of water.

Between the Acre and the river lay Jeronimo. There was no other way to the mountains. Father told us to walk faster, but Jeronimo was unavoidable — it smoldered at the end of the path.

Father bowed his head.

Mr. Haddy said, "Shoo."

Jeronimo looked bombed. It was mostly powder, a pouch of gray ashes, the trees around it burned to spikes. Because the fire had spread, the clearing was bigger, and craterlike. Fat Boy's pipes had collapsed and whitened like bones, and all the pumps had fallen down. There was not a house standing or a shed intact. In the gardens, the plants were scorched and the stems blistered like flesh. The corn was down, and the squashes and tomatoes had burst and were seeping juice — they had been cooked to rottenness. Some fruit looked like ragged purses.

But the ashy ruins were nothing compared to the silence. We were accustomed to bird twitters and screeches, to the high ringing notes of the crickyjeen cicadas. There was no sound or movement. All life had been burned out of Jeronimo. What birds we saw were dead, roasted black and midgety, stripped of their feathers, with tiny wings and ridiculous bobble heads. Slimy fish floated on the surface of the tank. It all lay dead and silent and stinking in the afternoon sun. Some thick hummocks still smoldered.

"You wanted to see it!" Father said angrily. "Feast your eyes!"

Distant birds cackled deep in the forest, mocking him.

He hooked across the black grass and picked up a machete with a burned handle. Then he went to our house and chopped the remaining timbers down, making the ruins complete.

We remained standing where the bathhouse had been. Heat had cracked the culverts and had baked some of the clay sluice pipes solid. The burned air stung my eyes.

Mother said, "Don't touch anything."

Mr. Haddy said, "Ain't nothing left to touch."

"I heard that!" Father had started toward us with the machete in his hand. I thought he was going to whack Mr. Haddy's head off. He sliced it at him.

"I'm left, they're left — you're left, Figgy. If you've got the strength to complain, I'd say there's nothing wrong with you. Show some gratitude."

Mr. Haddy put his teeth out. "Me lanch — she catched fire. She all wrecked."

"I lose everything I own and he worries about his pig."

"She all I own in this world," Mr. Haddy said. Tears ran beside his nose and dripped from his teeth.

"What good is a boat if you haven't got a river?"

"The river is there, Fadder."

"The river is dead," Father said. "It's full of ammonium hydroxide and gasping fish. The air — smell it? — it's contaminated. It'll take a year for this place to be detoxified. If we stay here, we'll die."

Father kicked at the ashes.

"He knew that. He just wanted to hear me say it!"

It was all as Father said. The air was sharp with the stifling smell of ammonia, and trapped in the weeds near the riverbank were dead fish and swollen frogs. They were more horrible than the roasted birds in the black grass. These river creatures were plump and had no marks on them. They had not been burned, but poisoned. We had to wade through them and push their bodies aside with sticks, to get to the opposite bank.

Father made three trips across, carrying the little kids. On his last trip, struggling through the mud with Jerry, his face and arms sooty and his clothes splashed and torn, Father began to cry. He just stood there in the water and did it. I thought it was Jerry at first — I had never heard Father cry before. His whole face crumpled, his mouth stretched and went square, and I could see the roots of his teeth. He made gasping noises and small dry honks.

"I know what you're thinking. All right, I admit it — I did a terrible thing. I took a flyer. I polluted this whole place. I'm a murderer." He sobbed again. "It wasn't me!"

***

He had splashed to the bank and dropped Jerry and led us into this forest, moving fast. After his crying, we had not seen his face.

It was high ground on this eastern side of the river. Within an hour we had left the buttonwoods behind and were among low cedars. Above us was a saddle between two peaks of the Esperanzas. The advantage of the dry season, those blue rainless days, was that the forest was scrubbier, easier to walk through, and there was more daylight. But it was also smellier. In very hot weather, when no rain had fallen, the jungle odor is skunky and as strong as garbage. Sour waves of it hit us as we climbed. Part of the way was familiar. I told Father how we had come here with Francis and Bucky, looking for bamboos.

He said, "They're sleeping in their own beds tonight."

He walked with his head down, like someone who has lost something and is retracing his steps to find it. I caught his eye — his face looked slapped.

He said, "Don't look back."

He walked away from the sun on the dried-out hillside among dead trees. Five miles up this gentle slope was the saddle ridge, and here we were within sight of a new range of mountains. Mr. Haddy said it was the Sierra de San Pablo. Between us and these mountains was the deep valley of the Rio Sico, which flowed northeast to the coast.

On our way to the valley floor, Father sat down. I was glad when he said we would spend the night here. I had had no sleep last night.

Mother said, "I wish we had blankets."

"Blankets? In this heat?" Father said.

To remind Father that his boat was gone, and maybe to rub it in, Mr. Haddy unfolded his large captain's certificate, and said "Shoo," and used it for starting a fire.

"We haven't even got a pot to boil water in," Mother said. "Just that jug. And it's nearly empty."

"The kids will find us a spring," Father said. "They know more about this monkey stuff than we do. Look at them. They love it."

We gathered dry grass for beds and made nests in the hillside. There we sat, listening to the breeze in the cedars, eating the last of the fruit we had brought from the Acre. Mother found some manioc growing wild and roasted it over the fire. Jerry said if you closed your eyes it tasted like turnips. At nightfall we crawled into our nests. There were flies, but no mosquitoes.

In the darkness behind me, April whispered, "I saw him crying. Ask Jerry." And Clover muttered, "That's a he — he wasn't. He was just mad. It's all Charlie's fault."

Later, I was woken by Clover again. "Dad, Jerry kicked me in the back!"

But Father was saying, "You won't catch me eating any of that stuff. I'm no camper. Anyway, the trouble with most people is they eat more than is good for them. Especially starches. There's no goodness in that cassava—"

He had recovered his old voice. He was preaching again. Don't look back.

The three adults were around the fire, guarding us. I felt safe again. And I listened. Between the whistles of the crickyjeens, Mr. Haddy was talking about tigers. Father laughed at him recklessly, as if daring a tiger to show itself so he could jig it onto a tree.

He said, "This is the best part — skipping out naked, with nothing. We just walked away. It was easy!"

He had forgotten Jeronimo already.

But Mother said, "We had no choice."

"We chose freedom." His voice was glad. "It's like being shipwrecked."

Mother said, "I didn't want to be shipwrecked."

The crickyjeens whistled again and stopped.

"We got out just in time — I was right. We're alive, Mother."

22

LOWER DOWN the slope, the cedars and pitch pines gave way to hoolie trees — chiclets and sapodillas. They were full of gummy juice and they reminded me of our rubber making in Jeronimo, the boiling-sulphur smell and the sheets we had wrapped around the ice blocks. It seemed wasteful to pass by without slashing them. Many of the trees in this jungly part of the slope were usable — there were monkey-pot trees and palms and bamboos and even finger bananas growing among some deserted palm-leaf huts. But we kept walking through the high jungle. I saw it all with my Jeronimo eyes. We could have stopped anywhere and called it home and started hacking.

Father said, "I have no urge to do anything here. Those hoolies? I feel no temptation whatsoever to lacerate them and cook up pairs of matching galoshes. Spare those trees — let them multiply and become abundant. Yes, before I might have stopped here and done a little tinkering. But I have had an experience."

The path was a gully of dust, then pebbles and bigger stones. We heard a squawk behind us: the voom of a curassow. Mr. Haddy had beaned it with a club and stood there wringing its neck. He carried the big black hen by its feet, swinging it like a lunch bag. He said he would pluck it and roast it on a stick when we got to the river.

"Figgy hasn't changed," Father said. "But I'm a changed man, Mother. A man who refuses to change is doomed. I've had a satisfactory experience."

He talked about his Experience as he had once talked about his Hole.

"I had a breakdown back there. A breakdown isn't bad. It's an Experience. I'm stronger than ever."

Mother said, in a different voice, as if she wanted to change the subject, "I hope we find some water soon."

"You can go seven days without water."

"Not hiking like this, I can't."

"Pass Mother the jug, Charlie."

Giving Mother a drink, I asked her if Father had changed, and what did it mean? She said it was nothing — if he really had changed, he would not be talking so much about it. She said he was trying to keep our spirits up.

Father was still talking, but the thicker foliage muffled his voice and prevented any echo. This was real jungle, not mountain scrub anymore. The bamboo was dense. We were kept cool by the damp trees along the gully path. There were gnats and butterflies on the plants, which were like parlor plants but grown to enormous size — ferns and rubber trees and figs with spotted leaves, and some red and striped with black, and with a suffocating hairiness, as if they were growing in a bottle.

"Before my Experience, I wouldn't have thought of doing this. Listen, consider what we're attempting! It's staggering, really. I have nothing up my sleeve, and look" — he turned to face us on the path, and pulled out his limp white pockets—"nothing there!"

We stumbled along behind him, through the seams of green light. As always, his talk made the time pass. Mr. Haddy said if it wasn't downhill he wouldn't be going at all, and "We gung eat me bird."

Father said, "Why, I used to fix Polski's pumps and set out for the fields in the morning with more in my pockets than I have now. Or go into Northampton. Burdened with material things. Wallet full of money."

Clover said, "Don't we have any money, Dad?"

"What can you buy with money here?" Father said.

Jerry whispered, "We're poor. We're done for. We should have stayed at the Acre."

"Money is useless. I've proved that."

April said plainly, "I think we're going to die."

Father said, "Don't you love these clear skies, Mother?"

High empty skies, burning blue, and our tiny path beneath. It was stonier, and now bouldery — we were climbing over them, they were so big. Then it was not a path at all but a dry creek bed. The boulders had been sucked smooth by running water.

"This is the true test of ingenuity," Father said. "We are trusting to brains and experience. I'm glad Jeronimo was destroyed!"

Mother said, "Those three men might have been harmless."

"Scavengers!"

We looked up and expected to see vultures. But he meant the men.

"This is the way the first family faced things," Father said. "That's it, Mother. We are the first family on earth, walking down the glory road empty-handed."

"I'd hate to die that way," Mother said. She was still thinking about the men.

"There's a worse way," Father said. "The way they would have killed us. A scavenger takes his time."

The undersides of the boulders were mossy and damp. Here was a mud puddle, our first sight of natural water since leaving Jeronimo. Father said, "Water has a smell around here, just like everything else." But this water smelted stagnant, and dead insects floated in it like tea leaves. More was leaking from beneath the smooth boulders, and smears of it bubbled out of the bank and gave the clay edges of the path the texture of peanut butter. It drained on, became a trickle, and there was enough of it to have a sound like slow boiling in a pot. The water had a sickening smell of decay, but its plopping sound was hopeful, like a simple song. And there were animals and birds here — monkeys midway up the trees, and little agoutis beneath, and pava birds with crazy shrieks, and more curassows. If they could live here, so could we. In a dangerous place, all wild animals gave us hope.

We walked beside the creek for a while. The land was broken by level terraces. Father said, "This is how a river is born. You're seeing it with your own eyes. You didn't have to get it out of a book. This is the source of oceans."

It was as if Father had created the stream with his speeches, as if he had talked it into existence with the racket and magic of his voice. From will power alone, so it seemed, he had made the pleasant valley appear. We were in the open, under a strong sun. In the jungle I had not felt exposed. There were so many different kinds of tree cover. But this valley felt like outdoors — bushy walls on both sides. The stream, shrunken in the dry season, was a green vein running through the middle of a wide rocky riverbed.

"This is satisfactory," Mr. Haddy said, borrowing one of Father's words. "We can have a lanch here. Or one of them pipanto things."

There was a flat-bottomed boat in the shallow stream. It was a wooden trough, and a man was standing in its stern and poling it to a sandbank under some buttonwoods.

Father said, "I think I can take credit for inventing that boat."

"That a pipanto," Mr. Haddy said. "That a pitpan."

Father said that the fact that it was used by the Zambus and Miskitos made no difference. He had dreamed it up as the best design for our river, and he was pleased that the same design was used here.

"It took these people a thousand years or more to invent this boat. How long did it take me, Figgy?"

"We're being watched," Mother said.

The man had drawn his boat up to the sandbank. He stood there like a heron, with one leg drawn up, staring at us. He was very thin, not as dark as a Zambu, and had choppy teeth.

"Naksaa," Father said. It was the most friendly all-purpose word, meaning hello, how are you, good day, thank you, and all the rest.

Mr. Haddy gave the man his dead curassow and made it seem as if we had left Jeronimo and walked all that way and camped on the slope especially to deliver this present.

"He look a little hungry," Mr. Haddy said.

The man was examining Father with shining eyes. He said, "Mr. Parks."

Then we knew he was a Miskito, because Miskitos could not pronounce F.

Father said, "He knows me. Which is surprising, because I've changed." He smiled. "I guess I have a reputation around here."

Mr. Haddy said to the Miskito, "Yep, that is Mr. Farkis."

The Miskito spoke excitedly to Mother. "This man give me my garden!" He began to recommend Father to us. He pointed past the buttonwoods to a hut and some tall cornstalks. "Big one right there. Big tomatoes, like this one" — he made a fist.

"The hybrids," Father said. "I practically kill myself making ice, and all I'm remembered for is the seeds I bought in Florence, Mass."

"And peppers like this!"

"You came to Jeronimo and did some work, eh? I paid you off in seeds? Too bad about the ice. It was a good idea, but a little unwieldy."

The Miskito was saying, "Yes, yes."

Father said, "I invented this boat."

"Everybody got pipantos," Mr. Haddy said. "And them that ain't, got cayukas."

"This is my boat," Father said.

The Miskito insisted on taking us to see his garden, so we climbed the bluff above the sandbar and walked to his hut. It was a rickety patched hut of grass and palm leaves, but his garden sprawled beautifully around it. It was tall tassely corn and unpropped tomato vines, peppers, string beans, and summer squashes. There were muskmelons, too. These vegetables looked out of place in an Indian's garden. There were no papayas, avocados, calabashes, or granadilla. This was like Hatfield; like Jeronimo. The Miskito had grown them all from seeds that Father had given him months before, when he had crossed the ridge to visit us. He had done a day's work, or more, and taken the seeds as payment. He had never known seeds to sprout so quickly and bear such plump fruit.

Father snapped a string bean and said, "Kentucky Wonders!"

There were bananas near the hut, the sort of plantains the Indians called "plas," because they were like flasks. But Father said the Miskito deserved no credit for growing them — they grew all by themselves.

We heard the sound of whipping. It was the Miskito's wife, thrashing rice stems against a frame and letting the rice grains fall on a cowhide mat. She stopped when the Miskito called her, and she served us wabool and fried bananas and roasted ears of corn. And she plucked Mr. Haddy's curassow and trussed it to a spit over the fire.

Father would not eat anything.

"Don't take it personally," he said, waving the wabool away.

Mother said, "It's their custom. You know that."

"What about my customs?" Father said.

I felt he had not changed at all, for he had always said this in Jeronimo.

He grinned at the Miskito.

"I'm saving up for later," he said. "Hunger's a good thing. Makes you determined. Food puts you straight to sleep. That thing you've got in your hand there" — the Miskito was holding the burned and greasy curassow—"that's a soporific. Sure, you knew that, didn't you? I'm not talking about starvation, but hunger. It's nature's mainspring. It's a kind of strength."

He smiled at us. We sat on the ground, gnawing-bones alongside the Miskito's pig named Ed.

"There's only one thing I really and truly crave," Father said. "Think you can fix me up with a bath?"

Speaking carefully and with sign language and noises, he explained that he wanted some privacy and hot water and a basket. The Miskito provided him with what he wanted. Father then hung the finely woven basket from a tree and had the Miskito fill it with hot water, so it streamed like a shower. This ritual took place behind the Miskito's hut. We heard Father encouraging the Miskito and spitting water and scrubbing himself.

Mr. Haddy said, "Fadder got customs, for true!"

"That shower bath was better than a meal," Father said when he was done. His face was pink. His ears stuck out. He jumped in the sun to dry. "And it's taken the edge off my appetite. I needed that. I'm ready, Mother."

The Miskito was bewildered by all this business and by Father's talk. As if to please him, he sent his wife into the garden to gather vegetables, about four bushels in pretty baskets. And as a last present, he handed Father the pole to his pipanto. Father went through the motions of refusing these gifts, but he accepted them when the Miskito loaded the baskets into the pipanto and waited by it, screaming softly for Father to go aboard.

Mr. Haddy said, "He saying 'lukpara'—ain't worry."

Father stepped in and said, "I'm just borrowing it, Fred. You can have it back any time you like."

***

That was how we came to be floating down the Rio Sico that day. Father poled and Mr. Haddy hung over the bow looking for obstructions. "Rock-stone!" he cried, when he saw one. There were only five inches of freeboard, but there was not a ripple in this river. It was forty miles to the coast, and Father calculated that the river was flowing at four miles an hour.

"Not fast enough, is it?" he said.

As soon as we rounded the first big bend and the Miskito's hut was out of sight, Father beached the pipanto. He found some loose wood for us to use as seats, wedging the planks amidships. He took off his shirt and rigged up an awning, tucking the tails into the starboard gunwales and stretching it over bent benches. He secured it by its sleeves.

"Looks like an oxygen tent! That's so you don't get heat stroke." He picked up a bundle of twigs. "And this is to give us a little speed. This is a real witch's broom!"

He lashed the twigs to the end of the pole, tying them with vines and turning it into a broomlike oar, so that he could scull from the stern one-handed.

Then he made a smudge pot to keep the stinging gnats away, and, smoking, we set off again. He promised that we would be on the coast by nightfall.

"Anyone get a look at that Miskito's hut?" he asked.

"They all look like that," Mr. Haddy said.

"That doesn't make it lawful, Figgy. That pokey little thing will fall down in the first rain. He was a generous man and he had a spectacular vegetable garden, thanks to me, but that was some miserable hut." We passed more huts on the riverbank, more Miskitos, pigs, and dogs. Father said, "Pathetic."

"You've got a gleam in your eye, Allie."

"Because I've just worked out what kind of hut suits this terrain."

"You said you were through with inventions."

"I didn't come here to live in a grass hut," he said. "I'm not Robinson Crusoe. Give me a little credit, will you? Hey, don't touch those baskets!"

Jerry had taken out a tomato and was polishing it on his knee. Father ordered him to put it back.

"We'll stop and get monkey food, if you're hungry, but don't eat those vegetables. Those are hybrids. Eat those and you're living on our capital. When we get where we're going, we'll take them apart and use them for seed. They're ripe enough."

Mother said, "That's unfair."

"It's propagation."

"You haven't changed a bit."

Father swept his broom back and forth. He said, "My whole way of thinking has changed. No more chemicals, no ice, no contraptions. Jeronimo was a mistake. I had to pollute a whole river to find that out."

Mother said, "All Jerry wants is one lousy tomato!"

"That tomato represents a whole row of vines. It contains a garden, Mother. Use your imagination."

"Please don't fight," Clover said.

Mr. Haddy said, "Fadder having another speerience."

"Everybody shut up," Father said. Then, "Who said anything about brain damage?"

Father went on sculling us downriver with his broom, shouting the whole time. And he predicted that before nightfall we would be at Paplaya on the coast, within striking distance of Brewer's Lagoon. Mr. Haddy turned around and stuck his teeth out at the name.

"We could walk down that beach to Panama," Father said.

"We could walk up it to Cape Cod," Mother said.

Father laughed. "Cape Cod's been blown away. We got out just in time. There's nothing left — nothing at all. It's gone, don't you understand?"

Mother said, "What are you talking about?"

"The end of the world." Father pointed north with his broom handle. "That world. Burned to a crisp."

"Jeronimo is back there," Mother said.

"Jeronimo was nothing compared to the destruction of the United States. It wasn't only the burning buildings and the panic. Think of the people. Remember Figgy's curassow? The way roasting made the meat fall off the bones? That's what happened to millions of Americans. Their flesh just slipped off their bones. Then the scavengers came. Hatfield's all ashes."

The twins began to cry.

Mother tried to comfort them. She said to Father, "Look what you've done."

"I didn't do anything but rescue us."

Jerry said, "Is it true there's nothing left?"

"Nothing that you want to see," Father said. "You think it's bad being on this river? Oh, boy, this is a vacation next to that war in the States."

Mr. Haddy said, "Was they a war up there?"

"Horrendous," Father said.

"You're trying to frighten us," Mother said. "Stop talking this way, Allie. It's cruel. You don't know what's happened in the States."

"I know what I've seen. I know about the armies, the soldiers — all the burning and killing." He was beating his broom in the river. "They knew where I was."

Mother held the twins in her arms. They sat under the tent Father had made from his shirt. Mother said, "He's joking, girls. Don't pay any attention."

"Some joke," Father said.

He looked at me and winked.

"But we're safe now. This boat, this river — you think it's precarious, but I tell you, we're looking good. We're alive. That's more than I can say for some people."

It was now June. A year before, we had left Hatfield. Two nights ago, we had seen Jeronimo destroyed. In Father's mind, the United States had been wiped out in just the same way as Jeronimo — fire had done it, and all that was left was smoke and a storm of yellow poison. That was what he said.

"They were after me. It was a narrow escape."

I wanted him to stop.

I said, "This is a beautiful river."

"Now you're talking, Charlie! Hear that, Mother? He says it's a beautiful river. You bet your life it is."

He said no more about the war in America or the loss of Jeronimo, which were for him the same thing. He spoke calmly of how we could begin again. He said these close calls had sharpened his wits.

This was the proof. We were in a fourteen-foot pipanto and moving swiftly toward the coast. It was no more than a flatboat, but we had shade and seats and a smudge pot. Father had converted it into something comfortable and fast. He talked wildly, but his talk was like creation, and on that downstream trip he never stopped. I had been worried. Yesterday he had cried, today he was yelling about his experience and the end of the world. He was very restless and hungry-seeming and now less predictable than ever. But there was no man on earth more ingenious.

23

JERRY ROCKED on the beam seat Father had made. He whispered, "Dad thinks he's great," and looked at me with a scolded scowl.

Clover put her head down. "He is great."

"There are lots of inventors in the world. He's not the only one."

"He's not like the others," I said.

"Anyway, the world is destroyed," April said. "Dad said so." Jerry said, "How do you know he's not like the others?"

"He has different reasons," I said.

"Like what?"

I glanced astern — Father's widening eyes dared me to speak.

In that pause, Jerry's whisper was harsh. "You don't know."

But I did. Father was ingenious because he needed comfort. He never admitted it, but I knew it from Jeronimo and from the spruced-up pipanto. He had not changed, he was still inventive, he still needed comfort — more than we did. He was dead set on improving things, but he was not like any other man. I could not tell Jerry while Father was listening. He invented for his own sake! He was an inventor because he hated hard beds and bad food and slow boats and flimsy huts and dirt. And waste — he complained about the cost of things, but it wasn't the money. It was the fact that they got weak and broke after you bought them. He thought of himself first!

It was why he had invented the hydraulic chair and foot massager in Hatfield. It explained his lack of interest in his industrial inventions — potboilers, he called them. And it also explained his mania for ice. It was the reason he wept when Jeronimo was destroyed. He didn't want to live, as he said, like a monkey.

His movements, his travel, were inventions, too. When it looked to him as though America was doomed, he invented a way out. Leaving the country on the banana boat was one of his most ingenious schemes. And Jeronimo had been full of examples of his ingenuity, gadgets he had devised to make life — his life — easier. These schemes and tactics were his answer to the imperfect world. But I sometimes pitied him. Discomfort and dissatisfaction made his brain spin.

A moment ago, hearing Jerry's whispers, Mother said, "He's a perfectionist."

"Don't be bitter," Father said.

Mother was looking at the jungle on the riverbank.

"What a place for a perfectionist," she said.

Everyone thought of him as rough and ready. But I was not fooled. He was the opposite of a camper! He grew prize vegetables because he could not stand the taste of bananas and wabool. He hated sleeping outdoors. "It's lawless and unnatural to sleep on the bare ground." He always spoke tenderly about his own bed. "Even animals make beds!" An everlasting supply of free ice was his reply to the tropics, a complicated system of pumps his reply to the dry season. He liked the odds stacked against him. He said it helped him think. But though he was ambitious for his own comfort, he had never tried to cash in on his inventions — only to live a life that others might want to copy. The royalties on his patents he regarded as "funny money." "I may be selfish," he said, "but I'm not greedy."

Selfishness had made him clever. He wanted things his way — his bed and his food and the world as well. His explanations of events were as ingenious as his inventions. Had there been a war in the United States? Were people after him, as he said? Was it a fact that he was being hunted because "they always kill the smart ones first"? We did not know. But if you believed any of this, you could be very happy here. You did not notice the heat or the insects or the darkness that buried you at night. Father's talk took away your sense of smell. After hearing him speak about America, it comforted you to think that you were so far away on the Mosquito Coast. It comforted him!

Here he was, shouting his plans at us and grinning at our bewilderment. It might be simple scheming, like improving the pipanto pole, or making a smudge pot out of a coconut husk, or describing the foolproof house he was going to make. Or it could be almost batty.

"What a thoroughly rotten job God made of the world!"

I had never heard a single person criticize God before. But Father talked about God the way he talked about jobbing plumbers and electricians. "The dead boy with the spinning top" was the way he described God. "And the top is almost out of steam. Feel it wobble?"

He seldom let up. It was like part of the jungle racket, after our escape from Jeronimo. Like the pava birds and the crickyjeens and the nighttime tattoo, along the Rio Sico and where we turned into the Rio Negro for Paplaya. But of all the jungle sounds that I heard, and that static could be very surprising, the clearest of them, and the most often, was the sound of Father's voice, crying out for comfort.

***

It took us several days of "coasting," as Father called it, to reach Brewer's Lagoon. After all the talk and boat towing and the halt salty breeze, I expected something blue — sand, surf, palms, a beach. But Brewer's was an inland scoop, and its haulover was a neck of high ground that hid the ocean and blocked the pleasant sound of waves sluicing the sand and making the pebbles jiggle.

We were in mud here. The lagoon was wide and flat and swampy. It was brown water stretching boggily to a brown shore. No ripples — it was a dirty mirror with some stubs of weeds, and cut-down palms like old lampposts. A film of mud and fine silt covered the banks around it, and flies gathered where green cowflap lay drying at the edges of the still, dark puddle.

"It's creepy," Mother said.

"Don't be unhelpful." Father looked at me. "She's bitter."

Mr. Haddy crowed when he saw Brewer's Village. His mother lived there. The huts were piled against the shore. They were shaped like belfries and stained the same color as the lagoon. Zambus paddled dugouts toward the jetty sticks. It was a steamy afternoon, the sun a purple hoop in the gray sea haze.

Father said, "This is where we part company."

"Ain't you coming with me, Fadder?"

"No. I mean, you're not coming with me."

Mr. Haddy gulped, as if trying to guzzle his fear. But it seemed jammed in his throat and fluttering like a chunk of Adam's apple. He said he wasn't ready to go ashore just now.

"Figgy's dragging his feet."

"They gung say, 'Haddy, where you lanch?'"

"You can tell them about your experience. I've got a wife and four kids and nothing else. You don't hear me complaining."

Mr. Haddy opened his mouth and took a big bite of air and wailed, "1 ain't got nothing left!"

Rocking down the pipanto from stern to bow, Father slipped his watch off his wrist. It was an old expensive watch — gold with a gold strap. Father was proud of it. It had survived our flights and failures. Strong, waterproof, and accurate, it was the one valuable item on this boat. Father had often said that it was now worth twice what he had paid for it and each year its value increased. But more likely it had been a lucky find at the Northampton dump.

"It's money in the bank, Fig."

Mr. Haddy shook his hands into his trousers. "I ain't take you watch."

"I've got no use for it anymore — have I, Mother?"

He dragged Mr. Haddy's skinny hand out of the pocket and pushed the watch over his struggling fingers. And he laughed.

"Son, observe the time and fly from evil."

Mr. Haddy looked at Mother. He said, "Speerience."

"Keep it," Mother said. "You've been a good friend to us."

Smiling mournfully at the watch, and wetting his teeth, Mr. Haddy said, "But where you gung, Fadder?"

Father said, "We're going to paddle up the blackest creek in this lagoon. And we're going to find the smallest cranny of that creek, where there's no people or plagiarism. Trees, water, soil — the basics are all we require. We'll hole up there. They'll never find me."

"You ain't like Brewer's?"

"Too exposed," Father said. "I don't want to be visited by scavengers."

The pipanto had drifted toward Brewer's Village. It was belfry shacks and cooking fires and mud banks and wet Zambus and a dog.

"I want a real backwater. Solitary. Uninhabited. An empty corner. That's why we're here! If it's on a map, I can't use it."

"Laguna Miskita ain't on no chart."

"How small is it?"

"Fadder, it so small," Mr. Haddy said, "when you gets there you ain't believe you there."

While Father sculled the pipanto to the jetty, Mr. Haddy gave us directions: two miles along Brewer's shore to the cutoff, and then inland for three miles. "Go till you ain't go no more." Gratefulness made him prolong his directions, but when we dropped him and he slogged through the mud to his mother's hut, he did not look back. He was admiring his new watch, lifting his wrist, and soon he was surrounded by children, Creoles and Zambus, singing at him.

It was painful for me to see him go. He was not ours anymore. We were alone again — the first family, as Father kept repeating. But without our old friends — Mr. Haddy, and the Maywits, and our Zambus, and Ma Kennywick and the rest — it felt like the last family.

***

We had found the creek draining into Brewer's and made our exit. Father sculled to where it opened into a string of lagoons. The last was Laguna Miskita. It had to be — we could go no further. Except for another creek, which led sideways into it and was too small for even a cayuka, there was no more open water. It was nowhere, it was a dead end, there was not a hut to be seen. We turned over our pi-panto on the shore and propped it up with poles. This was our house. There were herons and kingfishers here, and overhead some pelicans. In the low gray trees at the edge there stumbled some wild cows with cloudy eyes. The lagoon bubbled and streamed with stripes of decay. It was the color of cooked liver. Flies buzzed around us. Even the mud bubbled, and the pressure of rotten gas underground made holes on the banks, like the dimples on clam flats.

"We're alone here," Father said. "Look, no footprints!"

He said that from now on our life would be simple — gardening, fishing, and beachcombing. No poisonous contraptions, none of the Jeronimo mistakes, nothing fancier than a flush toilet. A vegetable plot here, a chicken run over there, a good solid hut that could take the rain.

"Chickens?" Mother said. "Where are you planning to get chickens?"

"Curassows." Father said. "Chickens is just a generic term. We'll raise curassows — we'll tame them."

"What else?"

"Nothing. That's the beauty of it. Survival means total activity. There isn't time for anything else!"

"It'll be an ordeal," Mother said.

"An ordeal is a square deal."

That night and for many nights afterward, we slept under the propped-up pipanto. It was cool at night and we made smudge pots to keep the mosquitoes away. Each day we worked at making the place comfortable. We had done it before, at Jeronimo, but until we started beachcombing we had no tools here, except the burned machete. We built a latrine and a cooking area and Father paced out a garden — the soil was so black and soft on the shore it would hardly need tilling, he said.

"It might be a couple of weeks before the rains start. In the meantime, we'll build a real house, a watertight one, and get those seeds ready for planting."

As soon as the new hut was underway, April got sick, then Clover, then Jerry, then Mother. It was the squitters, but they also turned pale and ran a high fever. They lay under the pipanto and groaned and made dashes to the latrine. Mother said it was all the travel and banging around and our diet, which was wild manioc and fish, and the carkles and whelks that we dug out of the mud.

"If it's the food, how come Charlie's not sick?" Father said. "Or if it's the hard work, why aren't I flat on my back?"

"How dare you accuse us of faking!" Mother said.

"Just asking."

"Don't bully us, Allie!"

Father went silent. It was scary, hearing them argue in the stillness of this gray lagoon, but their silence was worse. For two days they did not speak to each other, and, because of it, all we kids did was whisper.

Mother recovered, yet she was still weak. Father said, "The invalids can deal with the seeds," and they stripped the Miskito's vegetables and corn and dried the seeds while Father and I gathered material for the hut.

We had found an abandoned dugout. We patched it and caulked its cracks. "Some fool threw this away — it's a perfectly good boat!" We made daily trips down the creek and to Brewer's to gather driftwood — beams and planks that had floated through the coastal inlet and washed ashore. We found them stuck against the mud banks. Most of this wood had nails and screws in it. We removed these and once they were straightened used them for fastening the foundation of the hut. And beachcombing, harvesting what the tides deposited, gave us other treasures.

On the coast, all huts were belfries on stilts. Not Father's. His was like a small barge, the tublike foundation resting against the bank. He took great care to make it waterproof, tarring its cracks and then hammering strips of tin on it to seal it from rats and moisture. This barge-hut was bigger than a pipanto, but it was pipanto-shaped at its base.

A Zambu passed by one day. He did not see us until Father called him over. His face looked punched, but he wore a clean yellow shirt and a straw hat. His name was Childers. He was going to church. It was Sunday, he said.

Father said, "I wish you hadn't told me that."

Childers's laugh was mainly fright.

Father said, "If God hadn't rested on the seventh day, He might have finished the job. Ever think of that?"

Childers said, "You putting up a bodge there?"

"It's a house."

"Look like a bodge. Or a lanch."

It did — a roofed boat on the mud bank overlooking Laguna Miskita.

"When the rains come, I'm going to be dry as a nut. Think about it."

The Zambu considered this, then laughed again in his gagging way while Father faced him.

The difference between the two men surprised and scared me. The Zambu in his yellow shirt and straw hat and walking stick, and Father, tall and bony and red, with long greasy hair and a beard and wild eyes and a missing finger and sailcloth shorts. Father was skinnier than the Zambu! And I had not noticed until now just how wild looking he was. If you didn't know better, you would have thought he was the savage, and not the Zambu. If the Zambu had had hair and eyes like that I would have run for my life. But we had gotten used to Father looking like a live scarecrow, the wild man of the woods, and hollering.

Worry was making the Zambu chuckle as Father scampered around the hut, pointing out its advantages.

Notice how practical it was, he said. No poles, so it wouldn't shake down in an earthquake. No amount of rain could penetrate the tarred roof. It was made from the wreckage of ships that had foundered off the Mosquito Coast — each timber had been sealed and smoothed by the ocean. Two long cabins, adults and children, each with its own entrance. It had everything — privacy, strength, and grace. It would be standing here, Father said, long after all the palm-leaf shanties had been blown away by the summer storms.

"I want some bad storms, so I can prove I'm right. Then I'll curl up inside and laugh my head off. Thick walls keep it cool, and we get a breeze from end to end through the hatchway between the cabins. Plus, I can jack up the roof. I don't know why I'm bothering to tell you this."

Childers said, "Me roof ain't leak."

"We'll see. But frankly that's the big mistake you people make around here. Always talking about your roof, always concentrating on your top. What about your bottom?"

Childers had started to back away.

"Your bottom's just as important. You can't eliminate the problem by sticking your house on poles and sending it ten feet in the air. That only compounds it — makes you vulnerable, conspicuous, and temporary. Look at what happened in the States!"

Father's lecture had taken the Zambu by surprise. He did not reply. He was still walking backward along the muddy shore.

"This house is leakproof, top and bottom," Father said. "Is yours? Is your bottom leakproof?"

Now the Zambu saw Mother and the twins separating the seeds into piles. He tipped his hat in old-fashioned politeness.

"How is it, Ma?"

"Don't trample my garden," Father said.

The Zambu looked down. There was no garden. He tiptoed up the bank, crossing imaginary furrows.

"Now you're messing up my chicken run!"

The Zambu didn't see it. There was no chicken run. But he picked up his feet and framed his arms and frowned with fear, as if an invisible chicken run stood in his way.

"Remember this. Experience isn't an accident. It's a reward that's given to people who pursue it. That's a deliberate act, and it's hard work. You choose to go to church — funny place to go, considering the state of the world and how it got that way. On the seventh day, God left the room — why should you make the same lazy mistake? Why pray when you could be making a hut like this?"

"Got no tools." The Zambu was panicky. He started to run.

Father followed him, shouting.

"I don't have tools. Everything you see here I made with my own two hands!"

But the Zambu was gone. He disappeared along the creek bank in Brewer's direction. He could not have heard what Father said. It was just as well, because what Father had told him about the tools was untrue.

Father said, "I dislike that man for his malevolent curiosity."

We went back to work. Father had denied we had tools. It was a lie, another invention. It comforted him.

We had tools, and more than tools. The Mosquito shore provided us with most of the things we needed. We had found the head of a claw hammer on the beach and fitted it with a handle. By pounding the tips of heated spikes we had made screwdrivers and chisels. A rusty saw blade we had seen lying in seaweed was now gleaming from use. We retrieved wire and tin and bottles from the tide wrack, and torn nets that we patched, and enough sailcloth for Mother to make shorts for us all and a smock for herself. Her needles were bird bones. She could have had real needles from Brewer's Village, but Father liked the idea of killing birds ("Scavengers!") and sharpening their bones to make needles.

Beachcombing was dirty, exhausting work. Nearly every day during those early weeks at Laguna Miskita, in the crackling bat-haunted darkness before dawn, we took the dugout down the creek and across Brewer's to a shanty village called Mocobila. Just west of there, before the Zambus were awake, we searched the beach for usable items. We walked abreast, Father and I — and when they were well enough, the twins and Jerry joined us — picking through the tightly knotted mass of wood and rope and seaweed that had been deposited by the night tide.

We found more fishing tackle than we could ever use, and rope and rags and plastic jugs, and lumps of tar, and oars and canoe paddles and cooking pots and skillets. One day we found a six-foot ladder, and on two successive days toilet seats.

It was like scavenging in the Northampton dump, but scavenging was not a word I dared use with Father around. As in Northampton, the shore was always full of birds, and sometimes we had to fight them off the tide wrack in order to comb it. There were vultures on this beach, and one horrible day Father killed a vulture with a slingshot for no other reason than to show us how the rest of the vultures would feed on it.

"That's how it was in Northampton," Father said.

Jerry said, "You mean the dump?"

"The city," Father said. "All those school kids!"

We watched the vultures tear bloody lumps out of the dead bird's breast, while its wings shook like a broken umbrella.

The wood we found, and most fittings, had been washed clean and whitened by the sea. The metal was scabbed by rust or barnacles, but Father loved taking a bristling skillet and scrubbing it with sand. He restored the cooking pots, he mounted the toilet seats in our new latrine, and he made us sandals from rubber tires.

I was glad we were alone. No one could see our silly shorts and homemade sandals, or the junkyard we had made at Laguna Miskita. The Zambu Childers never came back.

"There's a kind of industrial Darwinism at work here," Father said. "The things that get to this beach are indestructible remnants that survived the storms and tides and the bite of the sea. They've proved themselves — stood the test of weather and time. By putting them to use, we are making a settlement that can't be destroyed. Your average Crusoe castaway lives like a monkey. But I'm no fool. Take those toilet seats. That's natural selection. The hoppers are gone, but they're everlasting."

He kicked aside the armless rubber dolls and odd sneakers and chunks of plastic foam. He railed at the ripped life jackets and rusted aerosol cans. We got used to him saying, "Now there's a perfectly good eyebolt—"

Mother called him a magpie. I thought it was his voice, but it was his beachcombing, all the junk collecting. He would bring things back to the camp that had no practical use — the horse collar was one, the light plug another — and say, "Their use will be revealed—"

Apart from his talk about the United States ("It was terrible" — why was he smiling?), he had not changed. But our circumstances had changed a lot. We had a house and food and a routine, and yet life here was difficult. It took all day. Total activity was good, Father said — the job of survival made you healthy. But we were often ill with the squitters and fever and sand-flea bites, and had to stay in the hammocks. Mother picked the nits and lice out of our hair. Every cut became infected and had to be scrubbed with hot sea-water.

Father was never ill.

"I'm not boasting. I just don't give in. I fight it. Keep clean and you'll never be sick."

We had come to Laguna Miskita with one bar of soap. Father would not say where he had gotten it. I guessed that he had hooked it from the Miskito Indian on the Rio Sico, after his shower bath. This soap was soon gone. But there was a shop at Mocobila, run by a Creole named Sam. Father called him Uncle Sam. He sold flour and oil and axheads and fishhooks to the local Zambus. Father avoided the shop.

Uncle Sam saw us beachcombing one day and asked Father if he knew anything about generators. His was busted. Father fixed it but would not take money in return. At last, after Uncle Sam pestered him, Father agreed to take a case of cheese-colored laundry soap. It was the only thing we lacked at Laguna Miskita, Father said. "And by the time we've used it up, I'll have figured out a way of making some myself." He reminded us that we had made soap in Jeronimo out of pig fat. "Good for what ails you. You could eat it!"

This was not the riverside rain forest and cloud jungle that we had begun to like in Jeronimo. It was coastal and low, salty, hot, full of skinny flies. There were no tapirs or otters here, only lizards and ratlike animals and seabirds that turned greasy when they were roasted. We killed the birds for their downy feathers, not their tough meat, because Father wanted soft pillows. We were surrounded by swamps in which dead trees stood. The trees were naked and gray. Fungus grew where the bark had dropped off. At sundown, these swamps whistled with bats. There were palms. Father challenged Jerry and me to climb them and hack the coconuts down. Jerry was afraid of heights, he cried before he got halfway up, and on the ground he told me Father was "a crapster."

"If you don't cooperate with him, he'll hate you," I said.

"I want him to hate me," Jerry said.

Sometimes I thought that now we were alone, we knew each other better and liked each other less. Father knew we were weak and afraid. There were arguments. There was nowhere to hide. We longed to be back at the Acre.

It was still the dry season — where was the rain? After three weeks here, we noticed that the level of the water in Laguna Miskita had been falling about a foot a week. Broken boats were exposed, holed cayukas in the shallows, and cow skulls and fish bones, black with mud. The gunwales of a rowboat appeared one day, outlined like a church window on the surface of the lagoon. We dragged it to shore and discovered a slimy outboard motor was clamped to it. Father took the motor apart and began cleaning it, piece by piece. We used the boat for a washtub—"That's all these missionary dinghies are good for."

Mother said it was pointless to tinker with an old outboard motor when there was so much planting to do. The seeds had just begun to sprout in the shallow boxes. They would have to be planted in rows soon.

This turned into an argument. If we had been nearby, they would not have yelled as they did. But we kids were in the dugout, fishing for eels. We used the kind of weighted circular net we had seen the man throwing into the sea our first day at La Ceiba. I had felt sorry for him. But now we were like that poor fisherman.

From the cove, we heard Father say, "I'm not going to throw this Evinrude away. You never know when it might come in handy."

"The magpie."

We could not see them. Their voices skimmed across the lagoon. Splintered echoes reached us from the dead trees and the shore, where beached hyacinths stranded by the dropping water had started to curl up.

"This magpie saved your life, Mother. If it wasn't for me, you'd all be dead."

"You can't boast about Jeronimo. You endangered our lives in the first place."

"Who the heck is talking about Jeronimo?"

"Saved our lives — that's what you said."

"Jeronimo was just an error of judgment. I was too ambitious there. I thought ice was the answer. But now I know that self-preservation is the only important thing. I saved your lives by taking you to Jeronimo!"

"You blew us up!"

"I got you out of the United States. America is sunk, Mother. I mean that literally."

"How do you know?"

"This is the proof."

He jangled something we could not see.

"Trash," Mother said.

"Beachcomber's booty. It is the detritus of a dead civilization. The buoyant part. America has foundered, and these things have floated to our lonely shore."

"That's a crazy explanation."

"I agree. But the world ran crazy. And we came here. Do you know a better place?"

"Allie, you'll kill us here!"

Her voice shimmered, amplified by the water. We stayed in the cove, clutching the net and the paddles, listening.

Clover said, "Ma's starting trouble. It's all her fault."

Jerry said, "You're a crapster, too, Clover. Ma's right. It's miserable here. I hope she bangs him on the head."

April said, "I want to run away from this crummo place."

I told them all to shut up or I would overturn the canoe and make them swim for it.

"What if Dad's right?" I said. And we listened.

Now he was saying, "1 am making life tolerable for you. More than tolerable! This is a bed of roses compared to the wasteland we left behind."

"In Jeronimo?"

"In the United States! There are only scavengers left! We're the first family, Mother. We know what happened up there. As soon as we get our crops in the ground, we'll be self-sufficient."

"Your garden is imaginary. Your chickens are imaginary. There is no crop. We haven't planted anything. You talk about livestock and weaving! There's nothing here but trash from the beach. All you do is fool with that motor. Look at yourself, Allie. You don't look human."

It was what I had thought when the churchgoing Zambu, Childers, came by in his clean shirt. So Mother had noticed, too.

"I'm asking you to look into the future," Father said. "Use your imagination. I'll be proved right. But I'm no tyrant. I won't keep you here against your will. If you're not satisfied, you can—"

There was no more. We listened, but all we heard was the cuff of water against the dugout's sides, and the squawk of herons. We paddled out of the cove and saw that the yard was empty, the fire unattended. The junkpile of wood and metal from the beach looked like storm litter at a tidemark.

Then we saw Father. He was alone, wearing a pair of mismatched rubber boots, tall and short. He did not speak. Had he guessed that we had overheard the quarrel?

He had started troweling the garden on the mud bank, just above the lagoon. We joined him and, without a word, helped him dig the furrows for the seedlings. We worked in a sulky and ashamed way for the rest of the afternoon.

Mother appeared at nightfall. She hugged us. She had been out walking, she said. But there was nowhere to walk. Her legs were muddy to her knees, there were burrs in her hair. And her face was smeared. She had been crying.

"Have a shower bath," Father said. "It'll do you a world of good."

Jerry said, "Ma, how long are we going to stay in this place?"

She did not speak. She stared at Father.

Father said, "Answer him, Mother."

"The rest of our lives," she said.

Father seemed pleased. He smiled and said, "We're in luck — looks like rain."

24

STRIPS OF glue-colored cloud streaked past the breaks in the blue sky overhead, but beyond our lagoon, in Brewer's direction, a dense cloud bank formed every afternoon. It stayed and trembled. It was gray-black, the texture of steel wool. There was a mountainside of it, and it hung and thickened until night swept across it.

Each morning the cloud bank was gone, and the strips and puffs of cloud were like gas balloons against a fine ceiling. The black cloud always returned later, looking cruder. There was no rain.

Father howled at us to help him plant the garden. He got madder by the day. He said we were bone lazy and slow and never showed up when he needed us. He was mad about the rain. He had promised it, but it had not come. He howled hardest at Jerry. Jerry had a new name for him: "Farter."

We expected the rain to be plumping down, the way it had in Jeronimo — black rods of it beating into the trees. But there was only the daily upsweep of black cloud, and uncertain winds. Father said it was squalls offshore and that at any minute we would be drenched. We worked and waited in the still heat, watching the high dark sky over the twiggy treetops to the east. The storm lurked and watched us with its hanging wrinkles. It came no closer.

Our lagoon water was still dropping. Lily pads swung on long stems. The land was so dry that the mud had hardened as stiff and smooth as cement. To plant our seedlings — the sprouted beans and corn and the tiny tomato seedlings — meant cracking the mud-bank crust and making troughs. We lugged water in buckets and dumped it into these creases, to keep the roots soaked.

That was our job, the kids' bucket brigade, while Father worked to outrig the mechanical pump. He made one that jacked water into wooden sluices, a series of gutters with handles that trapped and seesawed the lagoon water up the mud bank with a great flapping and banging of boards. But it took seven men to operate this pump, and Father was continually thundering at us, so we kept on with the buckets.

"Why does it just hang there?" he said, twisting his face at the black cloud. "Why doesn't it rain?"

Water carrying and food snatching were our only activities, and still the heat dried our ditches and withered some of our garden plants. In the evening we ate manioc and mudfish and boiled plantains. Father was secretive. He would not let us see him eat or sleep. "I'm waiting until things improve here. I won't rest until they do — and you won't catch me eating that stuff." He said that going without food he needed less sleep.

He used the night hours to rebuild the outboard motor. He chafed the parts and cut new gaskets for the piston assembly. But we had no gas or oil, and there were empty sockets in the motor where the spark plugs should have been. He did not seem to care. He greased it with pelican fat and yanked the starting rope, strangling it and making it chatter and choke. It gave off the smell of roasted pelican.

Mother called the outboard motor his toy.

"That gizmo's keeping me sane," Father said.

Hearing this, Mother held her breath and stared at him until he turned away.

"Rain!" he screamed at the black cloud.

His voice was so loud, so insistent and commanding, that we hunched our shoulders, expecting a downpour. But there was only the cloud and the shifting wind.

He shook his hands and said, "When I came here to the Mosquito Coast, I was appalled that these people had done so little to better themselves. They lived like hogs. I used to wince at their weedy crops and their pathetic houses. What do they eat — corn shucks? Do they chew their toes? Do they sleep face-down and let the rain run off their shoulders? What do they use to wipe themselves with? Where's their tools? Do they dream, and, if so, what of?"

We were down at the garden, drenching the plants. We held our buckets still in order to listen.

"That's what I used to think," he said. "Now, after a year, it amazes me that they've got so much!"

"Jerry says you don't respect the Zambus," Clover said.

Jerry, betrayed, looked worried and unhappy.

"I'm full of admiration for them," Father said. "Even though they do live like hogs. But that's not for me — living day to day, hand to mouth. That's not my style. This is a permanent settlement. I never promised it would be easy. We're laying proper foundations. This is an organism. When it's working, thing will be different."

"Thinking out loud," he spoke of rearing curassows like turkeys, and starting another fish farm, and curing meat in a smokehouse. The real problem wasn't food, he said — it was dirt. He wanted to fix planks over the mud bank, which was our yard, and make a deck, a section at a time, and turn it into a wide screened-in porch, with a bathhouse. Healthy food, cleanliness, plenty of hot water, and no insects.

"I see a hatchery here and a water tower over there, and a boiler. Lack of ice isn't a problem in the tropics, but lack of hot water is — who would have guessed that? I see a kind of intersecting set of walkways to a mooring, and trestles around the garden, with plants growing between them. All bridges and boardwalks — your feet never touch the ground."

We would make this lagoon camp into an enormous pier!

It was a good idea, but so far all we had was the small watertight hut on the mud bank, and a junkyard — a pile of wood and scrap metal, eight feet high, that we had dragged piece by piece from the beach. Father said that he intended to sort it out, but there was no time. The garden, our best hope for survival, kept us busy. And already rats had found the junkpile and were nesting in it and squalling with the kinkajous, the nightwalkers.

Our camp looked worse than any Miskito or Zambu settlement I had seen. I was glad we got no visitors, because I knew they would find it strange. If they did not laugh at us, they would pity us. It was clear that we had come here with nothing, and now owned only what we had found on the beach.

In the late afternoon, when the black cloud hung in the east and our smoke was rising, our settlement looked like a dump on a gray shore, where desperate people had come to die. "We're escaped prisoners," Father said. That's what he thought of America. But if we were lost, and trapped in this coastal swamp, weren't we still prisoners?

It was the feeling I had when I saw our hut and the junk from the dugout, from the middle of the lagoon. Jerry and I had learned the knack of using the circular net. and we were excused bucket brigade if we brought back fish or eels. We liked paddling to the far end of the lagoon, so we couldn't see what Father called home.

About a week after the storm cloud first appeared, Jerry and I were in the dugout, fishing, and heard a loud noise. It sounded like cannonfire.

"Dad's started the outboard," Jerry said.

It was what I had thought, or wanted to think — it would take an outboard to get us out of here.

We paddled to the settlement, where Father was standing on the dry solid mud. His eyes were empty. He was listening.

Jerry said, "You got the outboard going!"

"What if I did?"

"We can go home," Jerry said.

It was a forbidden word.

"Sucker!" Father said.

The loud sound banged again. It was not the outboard. It was the roar of distant thunder.

"Why don't you ever believe me?"

The thunder kept on, sometimes like cannons and sometimes, slowly and terribly, like brick walls collapsing into a cellar. Like a whole civilization keeling over and ruining itself on its own dead weight, Father said. It was out there, where the cloud was. He grinned at us. "War!"

From the opposite side of the lagoon came a loopy reply to the thunder—googn! googn! googn! googn! — and the same four notes again, but softer. It was a howler monkey. Each time the thunder roared, the howler monkeys drummed and googned.

There was an even odder result of the thunder. All around the lagoon, as if woken by the noise, creatures began to break out of their buried eggs. First the tortoises and iguanas emerged, then the alligators. The eggs were hidden in the mud, but when these slippery scaly things crawled out, they dragged the shells with them and left this broken eggshell crockery on the bank. Beneath the booming skies the lagoon came creepily alive.

During this thunder period, Mr. Haddy shuffled down the bank-side from Brewer's approach. He was bright-eyed and grinning like a hatched iguana, with phlegm on his front teeth. He brought us a parcel of conch meat and a live chicken tied up with string, and a bag of sugar. He scratched his back by pushing it against a tree, all the while staring at our junkpile. Then he kissed the twins and said, "How is it? Is it right here?"

"Pass me that rope, Charlie," Father said. He showed no surprise at Mr. Haddy's visit, and when I gave him the rope he wound it around the spool of the Evinrude and jerked it, making it go whop-whop-whop and stink of bird fat. Father's hair flew.

"Brang you some conk."

"Do I look hungry?" Father then ignored him and went on jerking the starting spool.

"Wheep! Wheep! Wheep!" Mr. Haddy mimicked the noise very well. "That is a spearmint for true!"

"This?"

"A motor with no sparks and no erl!"

"This is just to keep me sane." Father made it spin again. "Helps me think. I'm planning my boiler and my walkways. You've got to keep the mud off somehow!"

"Brang you some sugar."

"White sugar," Father said. "It's the worst possible thing you can stick in your mouth. Not an ounce of nutrition in it, only calories that burn up so fast they fizzle every B and C vitamin in your body. It gives you cramps, causes kidney failure, makes you tired, and — did you know this? — it's as addictive as dope. Figgy, I came here to get away from that poison."

"I bring you gas and erl next time," Mr. Haddy said. "And a set of sparks."

"Don't want them."

"Why you burning chicken fat?"

"Because we're not going anywhere," Father said.

Mr. Haddy saw Jerry.

"How is it, Jerry-man?"

"Don't talk to him. He's in the doghouse."

Mother said, "I can't imagine how you found us."

"Come down the cutoff. Look this way and that. I have a speerience, then I hear Fadder's voice. How you like this tonda? Man, we gung get some storms, Ma!"

He looked around our camp and sniffed like a rabbit, taking it in.

"Hell of a place this Miskita lagoon."

"We're still getting settled." Mother said. "It doesn't look like much at the moment, but Allie has plans. You know Allie."

"Spearmints," Mr. Haddy said.

Father did not smile. He wrenched the engine with his rope and said, "Back to work, people."

"You garden pretty close up to the water. That you bodge?"

"Hut," Mother said.

"House," Father said.

"House, huh?" Mr. Haddy traced its shape with his head. "House pretty close up to the water, for true."

"The water's over there," Father said, opening his mouth wide to say it plainly. He pointed down the mud bank to the lagoon shore.

"Gung be up here when this rain come. Gung be over that trashpile. How that trashpile get there? Howlies? Baboon? Jacketman?"

Father came close to Mr. Haddy with his rope, looking as if he was going to twist it around the poor man's stringy neck. He said, "Why are you trying to upset everyone?"

Mr. Haddy appealed to Mother. "I ain't trying, Ma!"

"Allie's just mad because it hasn't rained."

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

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

"You haven't stated your business," Father said. "What exactly do you want?"

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

"Tell us how you lost your new watch."

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

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

"No," Father said.

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

"I had that watch fifteen years."

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

"He just gave it away!" Father said.

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

"For me boat," Mr. Haddy said. "She a sweet boat."

"A boat ain't the answer."

"I ain't ask no question."

"Try asking yourself where you're going to be in fifteen or twenty years."

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

Mother said no.

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

Mother said, "I'd love to. We could bring the kids."

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

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

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

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

"What are you suggesting?"

"Brewer's pretty decent for a family."

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

Mother said, "Don't be so rude. Allie."

"Someone sent him here. Who sent you, Fig?"

"No, man!"

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

Mr. Haddy chewed his lips.

Jerry spoke up. "I want to go with Mr. Haddy."

"See what you've gone and done!"

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

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

"Allie!" Mother said.

"That's policy," Father said to Jerry. "Are you man enough to do it?"

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

"Then get back to work, boy." Father's voice was like sandpaper.

Clover said, "I didn't want to go in the first place, Dad," and Jerry glared at her.

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

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

Father said, "And here it comes."

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

"I hate that thing."

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

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

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

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

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

"I hear something about it," Mr. Haddy said.

"That it was wiped out!"

"Yes, Fadder."

"And you're scared," Father said. He was staring Mr. Haddy in the face.

"For true."

"That's why," Father said slowly — he was smiling—"I call this the future."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"— anyone who doesn't see it has no business here."

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

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

"No," I said.

"Dad's crazy."

The way he said it gave me goose pimples.

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

"If we don't help him, we'll all die," I said.

"I don't want to help him!"

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

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

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

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

"That's what Dad says."

"Mr. Haddy said so, too!"

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

"Don't you see? We have to trust Dad."

"I don't trust him. He's just a man who sleeps in our hut."

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

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

"No," I said.

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

"I said, "What if it hasn't?"

"Then we're making a horrible mistake," she said.

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

"But it has," she said. "You heard Mr. Haddy."

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

25

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

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

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

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

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

"The wind's veering," Father said. "It's a rotary storm."

Jerry said, "We won't have to water the garden now."

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

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

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

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

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

Father smiled and made the lip motions of, "We're perfectly dry."

Mother frowned, as if to say, "It's all terrible."

"Ingrate!" Father yelled, above the storm.

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

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

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

"Don't bawl," a bubbly voice said.

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

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

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

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

"Busted you hatchcover," he said.

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

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

"How did you get here?"

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

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

"The creek's not wide enough for a pair of oars."

"She rising."

I saw his rowboat on the bank.

"Come in the hut and get dry," I said.

"Fadder inside?"

"Yes."

"I ain't gung." He slopped to the bank. "I got some parcel of cargo for you."

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

"This is sparks and that is gas-erl. You take urn."

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

"Raining for true. That is why I come here."

"Dad's asleep." I hoped he was.

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

"What shall I do with them?"

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

"No."

"Then don't mention Haddy," he said. "Now help me lanch me boat."

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

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

"He doesn't want anyone to look after him."

"You want to get drownded?"

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

Googn!

"Them baboon just hear you, Charlie."

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

It made me remember.

I said, "Mr. Haddy, is it true about the United States — has it been wiped out?"

"Hard! Hard! Everywhere! Look" — but there was nothing to see—"she flooding!"

"Are you sure? Where did you hear it? You mean, there's nothing—"

She flodden, he kept repeating in a terrified voice. He moved his arms. The propped-up oars helped me pick out surfaces.

"Everything gone!"

That was the last I heard. He splashed the blades and turned the boat aside and rowed into the rain, groaning indistinctly. The shore fell away. He took the lagoon with him, and all the trees, and left me standing in the sting of straight-down rain. The night's black was above and below me. The rain closed over Mr. Haddy and the kick of his oars. He was like a man rowing into a mountain.

It was all rain and monkey howls in this pit of unseparated darkness. Googn! Googn! Googn! Googn!

***

In the morning, steam rose from the cold boilings of the lagoon, and from the root knuckles and beaten-down grass and broken trees. The land was covered with pink worms. It looked shocked by the twelve hours of heavy rain. It lay thrashed and still.

Most of the sprouts in our garden were pasted against the mud as flat as stamps, or else floated in the troughs we had dug. Our whole shelf of furrows had slipped sideways down the bank and lay bunched at the shore. The garden was waterlogged: the smaller sprouts were drowned, the bigger ones tipped over and showing the pale hairs on their roots. Twigs, ripped leaves, and branches littered the lagoon.

Father said, "I'll be willing to bet that we're the only dry folks in the country, if not the world."

"It rains in our yard and he thinks the whole world is wet," Jerry whispered. "Why can't we leave?"

I took Jerry aside and showed him the barrel of gasoline and the spark plugs.

"We can bomb out of here with that outboard," Jerry said. He was happier than I had seen him for weeks. "We can find Mr. Haddy. He'll take us home!"

"We can't go home," I said. "It's gone. Dad was right—"

"No!"

"Mr. Haddy told me. He wouldn't he. Please don't cry."

But he had started. He put his arm against his face to hide it.

"We'll go somewhere else," I said. "We'll go to Brewer's Village, or somewhere on the coast better than this." I kept talking to him this way to stop him crying, and then I swore him to secrecy about the gasoline and the spark plugs.

Clover was at the shore with Father and saying, "Our nice garden's ruined."

"It'll perk up in this sun," Father said, and he made us dig ditches to drain it.

Overnight the trees around the lagoon had turned bright green, their leaves washed by the rain. They glistened with a shine like fresh paint. The gray was gone from the whole place, and under the clear sky the lagoon was deep blue. The land was black. Bird honks skimmed across the water.

Driftwood had been scattered from the junkpile, but after Jerry and I picked it up and stacked it, the barrel of gasoline was hidden. I pushed the pouch of spark plugs under my hammock pad. What good were they to us if Father was determined to stay? But his outboard motor, which was the first thing I checked that morning, had not been shifted by the storm. It was still clamped to its stump, and was wrapped tight in plastic like a leg of meat.

Father said you had to admire this foolish waste of energy — nature running mad and drenching everything. It was a huge demented squandering of water, like an attempted murder that a quick-witted man could overcome by crawling into his leakproof hut: all that trouble for nothing, because we were still alive.

"But we weren't meant to die!"

The storm had terrified everyone except Father. He was impressed by the way it had destroyed trees, and he marveled at all the uprootings. He calculated that six inches of rain had fallen in the night. You had to admire that. And look at the beaten bushes. And think of the velocity. You could build a machine that operated on falling rain — the collected rain would spin a flywheel, the same principle as a water wheel but more efficient — no drag. Only the rain was undependable, because the world was imperfect. Nature tried to burn you, then starve you, then drown you, and it made you dig a garden like a savage with a stick It surprised you and made you fearful that something was going to go wrong That fear made people religious nuts instead of innovators.

"But it will be weeks before anyone plants a garden, and by then ours will be in blossom."

Mother said the damage scared her. We would have to fight to save the garden.

Father said, "I like a good fight."

In the course of that hot day, most of the plants perked up just as he said they would. Even the little shoots followed Father's orders, and what in the early morning had looked like the ruin of a drowned garden had begun again to grow.

The important thing now, Father said, was to protect the plants. It was not the amount of rain that was so bad, but its ferocity: the wind, the waterspouts, the erosion. "If we don't take care, the plants will be punched out of their holes," he said. "But we will take care."

We sawed lengths of bamboo and fitted some of the plants with collars, and others we banked with dirt to prop them up. Father said, Wasn't that ingenious?

"I'll believe it when we have vegetables," Mother said.

"Patience!"

Toward evening, the clouds sailed in and the first drops hit us like slugs. Father ordered Jerry and me to work naked at repairing the garden, and so we did, up to our ankles in mud, with the rain whipping our backs.

"He treats us like slaves," Jerry said. "I'd like to get that outboard working and escape from here."

"We've already escaped," I said.

"Even if America's burned — even if it's destroyed — it's better than this. This is a stinking dump. I want to go home."

"But the garden's all right now," I said. "When it grows, things will be different."

"Why are you always on Dad's side?"

"He was right about the rain — he was right about the garden!"

"It's still raining," Jerry said. Thunder compressed his face and gave him a frightened smile. The fat raindrops riddled on our little hut.

The next day, half the garden was gone. Some of the plants floated in the lagoon, where they had been washed with the storm's debris, and others lay broken in the furrows. The bamboo collars had done no good. They served only to bruise the plants under the strength of the falling rain.

"It's no use," Mother said.

"You make me laugh," Father said. "You talk as if we have an alternative! What we're doing is all we can do. There's nothing else. A garden is our only hope, Mother. Have you got a better idea?"

Mother said, "Why don't we just pack up and go?"

"Nothing to pack," Father said. "Nowhere to go."

"There's Brewer's Village. Mr. Haddy said—"

"Figgy is busy dying. They all are, except us." He had taken a shovel and was mucking out the furrows and replanting the stringy shoots. He saw us watching him and said, "Stick with me, people, or you'll die, too."

Jerry knelt down and said, "I hate him."

Clover heard. She said, "I'm going to tell Dad what you said."

"I want you to tell him, Crappo. I want to see him go buggy."

This made Clover cry. She ran to Mother and said, "Jerry just swore at me!"

"No one gives a hoot," Father was saying. He threw down his shovel and unwrapped the outboard. He spun it and throttled it with his rope, making it choke. Seeing him, I almost told him about the spark plugs and the gas. But he had said, Nothing to pack — nowhere to go. It would make him madder. He would ask me where I had got them, and why, and how. He would scream if I mentioned Mr. Haddy. I wished Mr. Haddy had never come and stuck me with that secret.

"That's to keep him sane," Jerry said.

I looked at Father tearing at the outboard's rope.

"It's not working," Jerry said, and he laughed.

We concentrated on what was left of the garden. But down here at the shore I could see that it was not the rain that had done the worst damage. The level of the lagoon had risen, as Mr. Haddy had predicted, and submerged the plants that had been near the water's edge. Jerry wanted to tell Father, to show him he had been mistaken, but before he could, it began to rain again. We stripped our clothes off and began bailing. It rained five times that day. At noon it was so dark we had to use candles in the hut to see our crabs.

A few days ago, it had all been dust and gray trees. Now we were in a wilderness of mud and water. There were frogs where no frogs had been, and snakes, and animal tracks everywhere. Lizards left their marks all over the bank, like bars on sheet music, with little noteprints above and below the lines of their tails. There were more birds, and crabs, and crayfish, all stirred into life by the rain. We caught them with ease. Mother boiled them on the cookstove. It made me think that we could survive without the garden.

Father came sneakily into the hut one morning. There was mud all over his chest and the front of his thighs, and gunk on his hands and dripping from his beard and on his nose. He was angry. He had not wanted us to see him. But we stared, and even Mother was puzzled.

"Pushups," he said, and snatched the rope of the outboard.

***

"The scavengers are back," Father said, looking up. The gray gulls and fat pelicans had flown inland to feed on the creatures that had sprung out of the mud. Vultures followed them, but instead of feeding they found perches in the trees and waited. Father screamed at the birds, to frighten them away. They screamed back at him. He hated scavengers, he said — hated their mad eyes and their filthy beaks, the way they pounced, the way they fought over garbage. And, as if in revenge — but what had they done to us? — he caught them by letting them swallow baited hooks, and he plucked and roasted them. He ate them. His hunger was hatred. He used their grease on his outboard motor, and left their blood and feathers in the mud. One morning we saw that he had killed a vulture and hung it high on a tree. It stayed there, lynched, until the other birds tore it apart.

"Know why I hate scavengers?"

Mother said, "Allie, please," and turned away.

"Because they remind me of human beings."

He denied the lagoon was rising. Even after the shoreline engulfed most of the garden and covered the foundation of the smokehouse, he still would not admit the lagoon was filling. He said the land was settling.

"It's a sinking effect. That's why I waterproofed the hut. I was expecting this!"

He hammered a marker in the mud, at the lagoon's edge. The next morning, the marker was gone — either submerged or swept away. Father said a scavenging vulture had mistaken it for a turd and eaten it.

The storms had tidied our camp. Destruction had made it neater. The half-made coop for the curassows was gone. The latrine was in the creek. The boards for the walkway were covered in mud. The seven-man pump had collapsed — it looked small and simple on its back.

And the hut had begun to sink. It had once rested high on the mud bank, on its own watertight bottom. But now the mud brimmed around it. It looked like one of those family tombs, the bunkers with doors that are half imbedded in the ground in old graveyards.

It worried Mother. She said she could not cook while she was kneeling in water, and what if the hut just went on sinking until mud came through the hatches? Father moved the cookstove inside and fitted it with a chimney. The hut looked more than ever like a little barge, and now the lagoon lapped against its front.

"Allie, it makes me nervous."

Father got a rope and some pulleys and, using a tree to brace the arrangement of tow ropes, tried to yank the hut away from the lagoon. He struggled, but it was no use. The hut was stuck fast in the mud. He left it tethered to the tree.

"That shouldn't be happening," he said. "It's not supposed to get bogged down."

He fitted logs to the sides, at the level of the brimming mud, to stabilize it and prevent it from sinking further. He said he was sorry we did not have time to go down to the coast — the storms would be washing lots of interesting articles onto the beach. The wildest seas gave you the best things, he said — iron chains, steel drums, yards of sailcloth. It was only the ordinary tides that brought you toilet seats.

But we stayed at Laguna Miskita and tried to secure the camp. We dug trenches, we bailed, we fished. The storms assaulted us. They crept up and darkened the day. They made us very cold, they drove us inside. They stole our wood, they broke down our trenches, they fouled the place with mud and excited the monkeys. The storms were always followed by flocks of scavenging birds.

"Sandbags," Father said. "If we had sandbags we'd be in good shape. I'll bet there are stacks of them down at Mocobila. They don't know what to do with them there. They're all busy dying on the coast."

The rain and the rising lagoon thieved most of what we had, and the wind burgled the rest. Now there was little more here than our hut. The junkpile was scattered, the barrel of gas had vanished. But this made me glad. I had no secret to keep. I would not get into trouble, and anyway there was nowhere to go. Jerry said that soon Father would give up and take us to live at Brewer's Village. He would have no choice — the camp was a failure, Father had been wrong to hide in this backwater.

Within a week, our garden was gone. Not a single sprout was left. There were no more seeds. We lived on land crabs and wet eddoes. We walked around with dirty legs. The mud dried on us and made gray flakes on our skin. "Keep clean," Father said, but the hot shower he had made was the next thing to go. The lagoon was under the front half of the hut, and now at night I could hear it like bones knocking beneath the floor. The hut was tilted forward, straining the rope. During the storms I heard this tether rope grunt.

"Any seepage?" Father asked. But there was none. The hut stayed dry. It was Father's one satisfaction — the hut did not leak. He boasted about it as the rain came down.

"There's water underneath the front," I said.

"Bow," Father said. "Underneath the bow."

He began saying things like "Get aboard" and "Go astern."

"We're roped to that tree," he said. "If the line breaks or the tree cuts loose, we'll take to the dugout. We won't be carried away! Jerry, swab the deck."

There was a strong current flowing through the lagoon. The sight of it panicked Father. In its muscles and boilings floated uprooted bushes and branches and coconuts and black fruit and dead swollen animals — all moving swiftly toward the creek and the sea.

The land had softened and turned to swamp. The trees stood in water, the paths were gone, and still the water rose, until what had once been a camp spread over a whole length of the lagoon's bank was now no more than a shallow island — our hut on a bar of mud. Creeks had opened in breaks on the lagoon's shores. There was not a living soul that we could see in this maze of muddy waterways. Birds flew around us. Father cursed them from our lopsided hut. He wanted to kill them all.

The world was drowned, he said.

He made a list of things we needed — chains, pulleys, fastenings for a paddle wheel and treadles, wood for boardwalks, sailcloth, more seeds, inner tubes, tin strips, wire mesh, salt.

"Seeds?" Mother said. "But there's nowhere to plant!"

"Hydroponics," Father said. "Grow them in water. Think of it."

He said he was sure that most of the things we needed were lying on the beach near Mocobila. As soon as the rain eased he was going to make a dash in the dugout for one last look at the Mosquito Coast.

"What if we die?" April asked.

"There are worse things."

Clover said, "What's worse than dying?"

"Being turned into scavengers." Father slapped his list. "It's already started to happen. I scavenged this paper, I scavenged this pencil. But I don't need this stuff — you do."

"Maybe they'll send a search party for us," Clover said.

"Who's 'they'?"

"The people."

"What people? You think the Coast Guard's down there waiting for us to send a distress signal? Search parties out looking for us in raincoats? No — they've all been torpedoed. Muffin, believe me, we're the last ones left."

Mother said, "Allie, why don't we leave together? We've still got the dugout. We could get down the creek, we could—"

"Down the creek!" Father grinned angrily. "With the current, the broken branches, the rotten fruit. I won't do it."

"Why not?"

"Because I'm not a broken branch. Dead things go downstream. That's a funeral procession on that creek. If we surrender to the current, we're doomed." He pointed his finger stump in the direction of the coast. "Everything tends that way. But we've got to fight it, because down there is death."

"We could live at Brewer's. You know that."

"Like savages. Like scavengers. I'll die before I turn into one of those garbage-eating birds. Hand-to-mouth? Me? No, Mother, I make things. And if I can't survive that way, I'll go up in flames — I'll turn myself into a human torch. Then the birds won't get me. Ha!"

Clover said, "What about us?"

"We'll all go up in flames! It's no disgrace to be the last ones to go. It means we've made our point."

He was still smiling. Already his face shone as if, inside, he had began to smolder with heat.

We guessed that he was serious, and so we were startled when Mother laughed.

Father challenged her with his fiery eyes.

She said, "Allie, we're too wet to burn."

"I've got fuel." He opened his mouth wide to mock her. He looked wild.

"We've got nothing!"

"Gas," Father hissed. "We'll take a bath in it, and pull the plug. One match and whoof!"

It was as if he had told Mother he had a weapon. She stammered and said, "There's no gas here."

"A barrel of it."

Mother said nothing.

"Found it in the mud. Some fool jettisoned it, but he was busy drowning. The barrel reached our shore. I roped it to a tree." He smiled at our frightened faces. "It's no disgrace to die your own way."

Jerry looked at me. I shook my head. I didn't want him to tell Father how Mr. Haddy had brought the barrel of gas to us. He said, "Charlie's got spark plugs."

"Charlie's got no such thing."

"Show him," Jerry said.

I got the pouch from my hammock and gave it to Father. He tore open the plastic and tested them with his thumbnail.

"I found them in the mud," I said, and glanced at Jerry, daring him to deny it.

Father was sweating. He came close to me. His face was hot, his lips white and cracked. I thought he was going to hit me, or demand to know where I got them — the exact place — and accuse me of lying. But he hesitated. Maybe he was ashamed of himself for talking about suicide, dousing ourselves with gasoline. He opened his mouth to speak, but before he could say anything, Mother screamed.

"Allie!"

Father turned to her.

With fear in her eyes, Mother said, "The house just moved!"

Father felt it — we all had — the moment he opened his mouth. It was a soft bump, a nudge against the floorboards, a sideways push under our feet. Father had already started to laugh and by then he had forgotten me. He rushed outside, saying, "I planned it this way!"

That night we were woken by a thunder sound that shook the hut. But this cannon thunder was the outboard, vibrating on the beam where it was clamped. It echoed all over the lagoon and the surrounding swamp. He killed the engine, and now I could hear bats, and the steady flutter of the rain, and the monkeys answering Father's noise.

Then we were afloat. I could feel it — the water shouldering the hut and tipping us in our hammocks. The rising lagoon had lifted the small watertight hut and turned it into a barge. In the morning the water was all around us, and we were lit by the muddy glimmer of the lagoon. The trees were distant, but our tether rope still held us to the solitary tree in the water. We were out of the current, and the outboard was clamped to the rail on the short deck behind the hut. The dugout, holding the barrel of gas and some junk Father had rescued, was tied to the back — the stern, Father reminded me.

"Who was right?" He took Mother's hand and said, "I couldn't die if I tried!"

Mother said, "What if it leaks?"

"Logs under us! We're stable — we're unsinkable! I planned it this way!"

Mother was at the cookstove, frying breakfast fish.

"Tugboat Annie," Father said. "Now I'm going to eat. I've been saving up for this — let it rain!"

But the hut still scraped the bottom, and when it rocked from our movements, we could feel the bump of the mud bank under us, the hut's bum sliding on soft soil. Father ate an enormous breakfast, then got his dugout pole and began pushing us further into the open water.

Jerry said, "As soon as we get to the coast, I'm going to find Mr. Haddy. He'll sail us to La Ceiba. We can get that banana boat."

Clover said, "Dad, Jerry says we're going to the coast."

"You want to die, boy?"

Jerry said, "But we're safe — you said so."

"Anyone can float down to the coast," Father said, and pushed his pole. "I could have done that without an engine. But I hung on. I fought it" — and he pushed—"I wasn't cut out to grow vegetables. I'm an inventor. I make things, Jerry. But that Mosquito Coast is a dead loss. That's the edge of the precipice. One false step and you're gone." He kept shoving at the pole, pushing the floating hut into deeper water. "There's death down there. Wreckage. Scavengers. Garbage eaters. Everything broken, rotten, and dead is on that stream and being pulled down to the coast. And that's the nearest place to the United States — how do we know it hasn't been poisoned? I've been fighting the current all along" — and he pushed—"and it's been a draw. I haven't given an inch. When did I say, 'Okay let's drift and God help us'? Never' That's why we're winning."'

Jerry said, "There's nowhere to go — that's what you told us."

"You're taking that remark out of context!" Father plunged the pole into the mud and hung on it. "You're misquoting me. Isn't he, Charlie?"

I said, "If we aren't going to the coast, where are we going?"

"I make things! I've got maps in my head! There are more safe places on those maps than you'd ever dream possible. Look at the house I made. She floats! Look at this outboard" — he circled its spool with his starting rope and got it blasting—"she works! Some jackass threw this away! Look at us, Mother — we're only drawing a foot of water, a foot and a half at the outside. We can go anywhere in this craft. We can get away from those birds. They're all dying down there, but we're going to live. Do you think I'd be fool enough to risk drowning us all, when the whole world is ours?"

And saying this, and more, he pointed the hut inland, toward the Patuca, and steered us against the current.