Mr. Haddy said he had guessed that before. It was all eyes and noses going by different names. And the cranes and derricks on the pier at La Ceiba were the same as arms, except bigger and roustier.
"You're getting the idea," Father said. "And what's this?"
He had finished hammering the boiler and was dragging it inside Fat Boy.
"That is a spearmint," Mr. Haddy said. "And you ain't catch me in there."
"It's a human's insides," Father said. "Its entrails and vitals. Its brisket. Digestive tract. Respiration. Circulatory system. Fatty tissue. And why build it? Because it's an imperfect world! And that's why I do what I do. And that's why I don't believe in God — stop looking up, people! — because if you can make improvements, that doesn't say much for God, does it?"
But no one replied, and no one dared to go into Fat Boy alone. It was dark and too cool and full of iron pipes. No windows, the insulation made it clammy, its darkest corners muttered.
"It's nothing to be scared of Father said, looking at me. I knew what was coming. He buzzed a rivet at me. "Charlie's not scared. Want to see him climb to the top?"
The faces in the clearing flashed at me like clocks.
"He wunt get out alive," Francis Lungley said.
"That's an ignorant remark," Father said.
Clover said, "Dad, why is Charlie shaking like that?"
"Charlie is not shaking."
So I had to obey.
I had been working the bellows. I dropped it and wiped my hands and looked at all the clock faces. They were saying three-fifteen with their worried squints, and I wondered why. Some were fixed on me, others on Father. If they had not looked so flat and fearful I would have felt better about going into Fat Boy. But they worried my guts.
I said, "Oh, rats," and went in.
Father banged the door after me and cut off most of the daylight. All I could see, through the floor joists that had yet to be planked, was the sun shining dustily down between the cracks in the hatchway door.
It was like being in a monster body, under the cold lips of its stomach tank. Iron pipes rose sideways around the walls. Greasy with sealer and smelling of fresh welds, they had the egg stink of fart gas and meat turned to mud, and the slippery look of human waterworks. Where the cracks of sun lighted some rusty pipes, I could see how these reddened blisters looked like flesh. The smallest movement of my feet made a booming belly echo. Organs was a good word.
A week before, I had scaled the outside with ease. But this was my first time inside, alone, with the door shut, in the dark, making for the top. I gulped my panic and looked up — the way up was the way out. I started climbing the pipes, through the midsection, from the tanks Father called kidneys, across the rusty gizzard, to the steel tube he called the gullet. The only sounds that penetrated the walls were Clover's and April's yells as they played with the Maywit kids — in the sunshine.
There was no fluid in Fat Boy's pipes. Because of the echo, it was like being in something gigantically dead. The shadows were cool twisted pipes that creaked as I climbed. 1 swung myself to a prickly grid that Drainy Maywit had made with his teeth, and crawled across it, finding my way with my fingers.
Just as I said to myself Don't look down, I looked down. And kept looking. I recognized what I saw. This was no belly — this was Father's head, the mechanical part of his brain and the complications of his mind, as strong and huge and mysterious. It was all revealed to me, but there was too much of it, like a book page full of secrets, printed too small. Everything fitted so neatly and was so well bolted and finely fixed it looked selfish. I could see that it had order, but the order — the size of it — frightened me. Like the human body, he had said — but this was the darkest part of his body, and in that darkness were the joints and brackets of his mind, a jungle of crooked iron and paunchy tanks hanging on thin wires and soldered-over scare tubes like vines in monkey shadow the weight of metal hoses forking to the ceiling, and everywhere the balance of small hinges.
It made me dizzy. I could not understand enough of it to feel safe. I thought, You could die here, or — trapped inside — go crazy.
I fought for the door at the top and pushed it open. Below the hatchway were straw hats. Someone — not Father — screeched up at me. They set a ladder against Fat Boy and let me down, and they all looked at my face pretty worriedly.
"He ain't bawling anyway," Francis Lungley said.
"You're next, Fido," Father said, and hurried Lungley to the door. "In you go! Take your time — get acquainted!"
One by one he sent them in, slammed the door, and made them climb through the pipes to the top hatchway, so they would not be afraid, except Mrs. Maywit, Mrs. Kennywick, and the children. They said they were willing, but Father said, "That's all that really counts — willingness."
He said he was sending the people inside so that they would conquer fear, and I believed him. But I also guessed that he wanted to amaze them with his Yankee ingenuity and give them a glimpse of his mind — the model of it inside Fat Boy. As for me, I did not mention this. I knew what I had seen. And I was glad Father had bullied me into going inside. He was making me a man.
Everyone compared the experience with something different. Mr. Maywit said it was like being up the bell tower in the Dunker church. The Zambus said it was like a certain slate cave in the Esperanzas, and Mr. Harkins said he had had a dream like it once, but when he tried to explain, his voice cracked and tears came to his eyes. Mr. Haddy said, "Shoo! It like some of these banana-boat engine rooms. Boiler and narrers." Hearing all this, Jerry fussed to go in, but Father refused.
"I hope you all admired that mesh over the evaporator lungs," Father said. "That nice piece of work was Drainy's doing."
Drainy had fixed the mesh with his teeth, making it the way he made his wire toys, with clips and clasps and fastenings that he gnawed into place and pinned with his molars.
"And as you might have noticed, Fat Boy isn't breathing," Father said. "That's why I wanted you to see him now, before he's got some life in him. Then he'll be dangerous and off limits. He's going to have work to do, and we don't want anyone traipsing around his guts then."
The smooth mahogany planks of the enormous icehouse caught the green and gold of the sun in the jungle clearing and glowed like skin.
"You won't believe what this old boy can do."
Father was proud of it and glad there were people here as witnesses. No one doubted him, or anything he made. He liked leading us around in the morning, from the pump at the river to the bathhouse and through the fields, pointing out how trim everything was, the water gushing and wheels turning and the hybrids shooting up and vegetables heavy on the plants. We walked along paths we had paved, past plants we had planted.
What Father had promised the first day in Jeronimo was now there for everyone to see — food, water, shelter. It was all as he predicted, but more orderly and happier than we had imagined. And on these early-morning inspections, he took Mother by the arm and spoke to everyone by speaking to her.
He called this notch in the jungle a superior civilization. "Just the way America might have been," he said. "But it got rotten and combustible. Greed panicked the worst into doubledipping, and the best fell victim to the system."
The Zambus didn't know what he was talking about, but they liked the way he talked. He could make them laugh by shouting, "Rheostats! Thermodynamics! The undistributed middle!"
He said, "I was the last man left."