"Steam engine. Boiler work." Mr. Haddy clowned for the nervous people.
"Can it! But stick around. You won't believe your eyes."
He called Peewee over and said that as she was the youngest it was she who should light the first fire. "When we're all dead and gone, you'll still be around, Peewee. You can tell your grandchildren that you were here on this historic day. Tell them you lit the fire."
Father struck a match on the seat of his pants and showed her where to hold it. There was some kindling in the firebox. Peewee put the match to it and up it went.
The Zambus grasped their ears. Ma Kennywick blew out her cheeks, and Mr. Maywit said, "Never mind." No sound came for several minutes, only the fire pop. The birds and bugs of Jeronimo went silent. The people held their breaths and went shiny-faced with waiting.
A single gloop dropped inside Fat Boy, as of liquid plunging in a pipe's plump bubble, and we moved, turning from the fire to where the sound had glooped in Fat Boy's midsection. Now we could all hear each other breathe.
Mr. Haddy licked his teeth. "Shoo!"
"Wait for it," Father said.
More plungings, and the trembling of pipes, and the creak of swelling tanks — it was a sense, announced in muffled percolations, of loosening in Fat Boy's belly. It was not one clear sound, but rather a vibration in the plant and all around it. The ground hummed beneath our feet. Liquid was shifting, still rising, and there was a final surge that slowed the vibrations, and the whole plant seemed to stir. The surrounding jungle murmured to the same beat, which was like the throb of a vein in your head in the progress of an almighty bowel movement.
Mr. Maywit said, "They is queerness coming out from the chimbly."
"Smoke," Father said.
"He stop bellyaching," Drainy whispered.
Father said, "This is going to take a little while. Everyone get comfy. Sit down where you are and let your mind wander. But don't think about war or madness."
"They is just what I think about," Ma Kennywick said.
Mrs. Maywit put her chicken eyes on Father and said, "Kin we pray?"
"If you feel the need, go right ahead. But I honestly wish you wouldn't, because then you'll treat this as a miracle — which it isn't. Rather than as a magnified piece of thermodynamics — which it is."
But I could tell from their faces and postures that they were all praying. They sat compactly, with their necks drawn in, like birds in the rain.
From time to time, Father stoked the fire. But there was not much fueling to be done — it was a small fire, and after it started its whistles and sucks, he kept it damped down.
"This is where it's all happening," Father said. "This is the center of the world! You don't have to go anywhere — you're where it's at!"
A half-hour passed in this way. Then Father stopped talking and climbed the stepladder. He read the thermometer that stuck out, and he looked pretty satisfied. Fifteen more minutes, he said, and after that time had gone he mounted the ladder again and crawled into the hatchway.
"Hope we ain't have to drag him out by his stumps," Mr. Haddy said.
Some people hissed, and Mr. Haddy and others looked at Mother.
She said, "Allie knows what he's doing — and here he comes."
Father's head was in the hatchway. He made a face — hard to tell what kind, he was so far up. He waved his hand. He was holding a white ball, like a lump of raw cotton.
"What Fadder got there?"
Father was shouting.
"Haven't you people ever seen a snowball?" He threw it, and it mashed in the grass, whiter than a heron's feathers.
We ran to touch it — and as we touched it, feeling the sting of its crystals, it began to vanish. But by then, in triumph, Father was bringing out the cakes of ice.
15
ON THIS PART of the river, narrower and shallower than anything I had seen — twenty miles of it, before mountains and jungle twisted it into a trickle — people dropped to their knees on the banks and waved at us and prayed. By now, they knew who we were and what we carried. The news of Fat Boy had spread throughout the river valley.
"Anyone want a beverage?" Father called to those people on the bank who took us for missionaries. Mr. Haddy thought this question was very funny, and he wheezed whenever Father said it. So later on, even at the uninhabited parts of the river, Father caught Mr. Haddy's eye and yelled, "Anyone here require a beverage?" and made the man laugh.
But the kneeling and respectfulness at last made Father gloomy. "The idiots think we came all this way to honk Bibles at them!"
Five of us were on the boat — besides Father, Mr. Haddy, and me, there was Clover and Francis Lungley. It was not the Little Haddy. Our new boat, built in the weeks after Fat Boy began producing ice, was an adaptation of a pipanto dugout, needle-nosed, wide-bellied, and almost flat-bottomed. It was powered by a pedal mechanism that worked a stern wheel, something like the Swan boats in the Boston Public Garden. Because of its shape and its cargo, Father named the boat the Icicle.
Except for the pedals and the sprockets and part of the chain (they were from Mr. Harkins's bike—"I cannibalized his Raleigh!" Father said), the driving mechanism of the Icicle had been made in the forge at Jeronimo, and some small parts by the wire-nibbling teeth of Drainy Maywit. "That kid's a human micrometer!" Amidships, Father had outrigged an ice-storage vault. There were two seats forward, and two side by side in the stem, in front of the pedaler's cockpit, which Father called "the Wishing Well — because whoever's pedaling in it wishes he was somewhere else." Going upstream, Francis worked the pedals. It was the perfect boat for the upper river. Father claimed that it was so buoyant he could go cross-country in it, providing there was a smidgen of dew on the grass.
Mr. Haddy said, "These people never see no lanch like this one."
"You're joking," Father said. "They've seen everything. River travel is easy. This is a turnpike. Missionaries have been tooling up and down here in canoes for years. Frankly, I don't regard this as much of an accomplishment."
"Tell you one thing," Mr. Haddy said — he was shouting from the bow where he sat behind Clover—"they ain't have no ice with them!"
"That's a matter of conjecture—"
Francis Lungley screamed at the word.
"— but they were here."
Mr. Haddy shrugged. He was wearing one of the La Rosa flour sacks Mother had made into shirts. His back said, Enriquecida con Vitaminas.
"I want to penetrate where they've never been," Father said.
There were blue butterflies kiting to the ferny branches that overhung the river, startled by our noise. The tumble and splash of our foot-operated wheel sounded like a washing machine sudsing clothes. I could recognize some of the birds in the trees — the jays and the ivory-billed woodpecker, the cockatoos and crascos — and I knew the cries of the hidden ones — the sudden honk of the smaller pava, the shouts of the forest quail, and the bass-fiddle boom of the curassow. These same birds lived near our camp at the Acre, still our secret hiding place from Father and his work, and his speechy ambitions.
"I want to take a load of ice to the hottest, darkest, nastiest corner of Honduras, where they pray for water and never see ice, and have never heard of cans, much less aerosol cans."
"But Seville like that," Francis Lungley said, bobbing his head as he pedaled. He was wearing a La Rosa shirt too. His said, Molino Harinero and 45.36 Kgs Netos. "For true, Seville is dirt."
He had been promising Seville ever since Father demanded the poorest place imaginable. This had started one of the first arguments in Jeronimo. Mr. Haddy, Mr. Harkins, and Mr. Peaselee wanted to take the ice downstream to Santa Rosa or Trujillo. Father asked, what was the point of that? Big ships called at those ports — those towns had more electricity than was good for them.