The Mosquito Coast

  “Why would they bother?”

  “That’s what I mean.”

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

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

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

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

  Mother said, “Allie, I’ve seen enough.”

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

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

  Jerry said, “It’s junk, it stinks, it’s crappo, I hate it.”

  “Don’t let him hear you,” I said.

  ***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “So I noticed.”

  “You never did tell me what you’re aiming to do here,” Rev. Spellgood said.

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

  Father said, “We’re getting out of here.”

  “This town?” Mother asked.

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

  Across the room, Emily Spellgood was staring at me.

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

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

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

  Emily sneaked behind my chair and whispered, “I’m going to the bathroom, Charlie.”

  “Charlie’s blushing!” Jerry said.

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

  The Gardenia was a two-story building covered with stucco in which cracks showed through the faded green paint. Its long piazza faced the sea and gave us a good view of the pier, where the Unicorn was still tied up. That ship was my hope. Men’s voices and the racket of conveyor belts and bucking freight cars carried across the water. During the day, we were the only people at The Gardenia, but at night, just before we went to bed, women gathered on the piazza and sat in the wicker armchairs drinking Coca-Cola. Later, there was music and laughing, and from our room I heard men and shouts and slamming doors, and sometimes glass breaking. I never saw this crowd, though I was often woken by it—by tramping feet and songs and screams. In the morning, everything was quiet. The only person around was an old woman with a broom sweeping the mess into a pile and taking it away in a bucket.

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

  “What’s the president like?” Father asked.

  “He is the same as Mussolini,” Tosco said.

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

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

  “Then he’d better keep out of my way,” Father said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “My husband will fix it.”

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

  “Which road do I take?”

  He said, “There is only one.”

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

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

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

  “This is the end of the line,” Mother said.

  We were a mile from The Gardenia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

&n
bsp; “Crazy like a fox,” Mother said.

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

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

  Mother said, “You’re not very old. Maybe that explains it,” and took the kids away.

  “Stick around,” Father said to me. “Meet Mr. Weerwilly. We’re talking real estate.”

  “Good, good,” the man said.

  “This is my oldest boy, Charlie.”

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

  I looked at Father. He was grinning. I said, “No.”

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

  “Not in Jeronimo,” Father said.

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

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

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

  “I can do what I want.”

  “You do not want very much.”

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

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