It was Drainy's idea that we should all be baptized. He said we would all go to hell if we weren't, and he insisted that we do it the Dunker way, by getting into the deep pool while he said prayers over us. It seemed like fun, so we stripped down to our underwear and made ready for the baptism.
"I'm the baptizer," Drainy said. "I know how to do this."
"Only thing," Alice said. "Drainy don't know how to swim. He cain't be a baptizer if he cain't swim. He get et up by the munsters in the water." She walked away.
I said to Drainy, "If you're really afraid, we can forget it."
"I ain't afraid," Drainy said, and sat on the bank and dangled his feet in the water. "And you go to hell if you ain't get dunked."
Clover said, "We don't believe in hell. Only ignorant people believe in hell."
Drainy said, "If Alice pull down her bloomers and show her carkle, she go to hell, for true."
Alice was in the schooLhouse. She poked her head out of the window and yelled, "Drainy Roper, you get youself outta there!"
Then she clapped her hand over her mouth.
"That ain't his name," she said.
Clover said, "You called him Drainy Roper. Roper — that's what that missionary said before Father kicked him out."
"That is our name," Veryl said.
"You got a mouf!" Alice yelled.
Drainy pulled his feet out of the pool and said, yes, that was their name, Roper. The missionary was right. And he was a Dunker. "If he was here," Drainy said, "he could be the baptizer."
"If your name's Roper, why is your name Maywit?" Jerry asked.
"They've got two names," April said.
"We got one names," Drainy said. "And it ain't Maywit."
I said, "Where did the Maywit come from?"
"You father give it to us," Alice said. "And my father take it."
"If it wasn't his name," I said, "why did he take it?"
"He afraid," Alice said.
Drainy said, "Of you father."
"You're crappo," Clover said.
Drainy said, "You father can do magic."
"What he does isn't magic — it's science," I said.
"Science is worse," Alice said.
They would not believe me, and I was sorry, because Father had made them change their name. I said, "Sometimes I'm afraid of him, too."
Jerry and the twins laughed at me for saying this. But they did not know what I knew. Clover said that Father was kind and not to be feared. He could have made a fortune as an inventor, Jerry said.
"Why don't he get rich?" Alice said.
"Because he wanted to come here," I said, "to build a town in the jungle. More than a town."
This did not convince the Maywit children, and when I told them that Father had said there was a war coming in the United States they just laughed. This made me lose heart and talk hollowly, for why else would anyone ditch the United States to sweat his guts out in the jungle? And I knew more than that. I had seen the inside of Fat Boy. That glimpse came back to me, and now, whenever I thought of Father, I saw the hanging tanks, the wilderness of crooked iron, the tubes like a brain in a sleeve, and all the tiny hinges. It had been like seeing the inside of someone's house, and, by studying it knowing them better I knew a person best from something he had made, and in Fat Boy I had seen Father's mind, a version of it — its riddle and slant and its hugeness — and it had scared me.
It was because of this, talking about Father in these whispers, that we skipped the baptism altogether and went and collected crazy ants instead. We floated them on the pool and watched them struggle on the skin of the water's surface.
Returning from the Acre that day, we saw Little Haddy at the mooring. Some men were earning tall bottles of gas up the path to Fat Boy, and others were rolling steel drums along logs that served as rails.
Peewee let out a yell when she saw Father. He was outside Fat Boy, working a hand pump, emptying one of the drums into a pipe. What frightened Peewee was his mask. It was a gas mask, for safety, but it gave him a snout and huge bug eyes. A skull and bones was stenciled on the drum.
"He always wears that when he's working with poison," I said.
This word poison had a worse effect on the Maywit kids than the weevil mask, and they ran straight into their house with their fingers in their mouths.
It had taken ten days for Father to get the ammonia and hydrogen from Trujillo to Jeronimo. Mother told us the story of his adventures. Threats in the town. Nosy people. Honduran soldiers accusing him of smuggling explosives. Arguments and almost a fistfight. "How many pushups can you do?" Trouble with vultures. A hard time on the river, which was too shallow in places. Scraping the boat bottom and being followed by unfriendly Zambus and more vultures. A slow and dangerous trip. Into Jeronimo with their keel dragging on the riverbed.
There were only four gas masks — Father, Haddy, Harkins, and F. Lungley. Because of the danger of fumes, we were not allowed near Fat Boy until the transfer of ammonia and hydrogen was made and the pipes sealed. Father worked all night without lamps or firelight. The full moon gave the clearing a milky-pink shine, like mother-of-pearl, and Fat Boy looked like a block of dark marble, a monument or tomb in the jungle.
The four masked men jumbled in and out of Fat Boy, and all we heard was the clanging of steel drums and gas bottles, and Father saying "Watch it!" and "Careful!" and "Move over!" and the howler monkeys they called baboons, their googn!
In the morning, Father was highly excited. If anything had gone wrong, he said, we would have been blown sky-high along with half the valley — probably ended up in Hatfield, in smithereens.
"I have just spent the most dangerous twelve hours of my whole life," he said.
"Sounds to me as if it was dangerous for us too," Mother said.
"Sure, but you weren't aware of the danger, so you could sleep in blissful ignorance."
Mother said "I like that," and turned her back on him.
"I am the only person here who knows how lethal that stuff is. I took full responsibility. Was I scared? No, ma'am."
"We might have been killed!"
"You wouldn't have known what hit you. I can give you my cast-iron guarantee of that. You'd have been atomized, with a smile on your face."
Mother said, "Thanks, pal."
"Don't worry. All the seals are on. In fact, this afternoon I'm going to fire him up." Father saw me listening in the doorway. "Quit grinning and spread the news, Charlie. I want everyone over there to watch."
***
"This is why I'm here," Father said, after lunch. "This is why I came."
He was standing in front of Fat Boy's firebox with a handful of matches. Mr. Haddy was next to him, and the Maywits nearby with their gray-faced kids. Clover and April sat on the ground with the Zambus, Harkins and Peaselee on kegs, Mrs. Kennywick in the armchair she had dragged over from Swampmouth. There were some other strangers watching from beyond the beanfields.
"I'll bet you still don't know what this is for," Father said.
"Cooking," Mr. Haddy said, and put out his teeth.
"No guesses," Father said. "You saw Lungley and Dixon put those trays of water on the shelf inside this monster. Now we're going to light a little fire here with this weeny match."