"You just want to impress your friends. No, we're going upstream."
That was when Francis Lungley said that he had once been to Seville, as far upriver as it was possible to go. Mr. Haddy and the others said they were not going to a stewy bat-shoo place where people had no respect and probably had tails. But Father was interested. Francis said he had almost died there twice — first from fright, next from hunger. It was a falling-down village, where the people ate dirt and looked like monkeys — anyway, ugly as monkeys. They had rat hair and most were naked. They were not even Christians.
"That sounds like my kind of place," Father said.
Then Mr. Haddy agreed and said, oh, yes, heathens were the best fishermen and the strongest paddlers and "Those boys knows how to work, for true."
But as we sudsed up the river (monkeys on the right, kinkajous on the left), Father said, "I find it hard to believe that some missionary hasn't been here before and bought their souls with Twinkies and cheese spread in spray cans and crates of Rice-a-Roni." He watched a monkey on a branch. "Hershey bars." We passed by. He looked back at the monkey. "Diet Pepsi." Now he turned to the kinkajous. "Kool-Aid." He flicked his cigar butt into the river. "Makes your mouth water, doesn't it?"
"You see Seville, Fadder," Francis said, pedaling harder, his La Rosa shirt black with sweat.
"I want to see a wreck of a village that hasn't got a name, where they've been swatting mosquitoes and eating rancid wabool for two thousand years." Father pointed to the mountains. "Over those baffles, where it's all hell and they're being roasted alive!"
"Too bad we ain't back of Brewer's Lagoon," Mr. Haddy said. "Some of them villages is rubbish."
We had started before dawn — so early, the nighttime mosquitoes were still out and biting us. But by noon, though we had gone miles, we were some distance from the mountains of Olancho that marked the end of the river, where Seville was. We tied up at a riverbank for lunch. It was so thickly overgrown we could not get off the boat. The bank was hidden under bush fans and yards of lianas. Mother had packed us a basket of fruit and cassava bread and fresh tomatoes and a Jeronimo drink that Father called Jungle Juice, made from guavas and mangoes. Clover said the juice wasn't cold enough.
"It's plenty cold enough," Father said. "Listen, no one's touching that ice!"
He checked the vault on the boat to make sure the ice was still holding up. The ice was wrapped in banana leaves and the vault lined with rubber we had tapped from the hoolie trees. He had not made us galoshes after all.
"You're bound to lose a little," he said. The ice had shrunk in its banana-leaf wrappings. "Seepage. Natural wastage. Friction" — he was plumping it with his hands—"owing to excessive agitation. Right, Francis?"
Francis Lungley was peeling a banana. He did it delicately with his fingertips, like opening a present.
"I mean, how are we doing?"
The village of Seville was some way off, Francis said. He could not say exactly how far. He squinched his face when Father asked him the miles.
"How many men paddling the cayuka when you were here before?"
"No cayuka," Francis said. "Just foots." He showed us his cracked feet. His ankles were oily from pedaling the boat.
Father blew up. "Now he tells us! He walked! For all we know, we might not get there until tomorrow." He yanked the stern painter from the branch and said the lunch break was over. "If you want to stay here, you can," he said to me. "But we're not going to hang around and watch you feed your face."
I stuffed the sandwich I had made into my pocket, and we cast off. Soon, with Father's barking, we sudsed along like a motorboat.
"What are you brooding about?"
I said, "I wanted to pick one of those avocados back there."
"You're seeing things," Father said. "There aren't any avocados around here."
But there were — small, wild avocados. We had eaten them at the Acre. Alice Maywit had identified them. The Zambu John had told her about them. We peeled them and mashed them with salt and planted the seeds. I looked at Francis, but his eyes were turned on Father.
"Ain't real butter pears," Francis said. "Just bush kind."
"If I've got so many authorities on board, how come we're making such slow progress?"
No river is straight. They only turn and go crosswise and sometimes lead you backward — the nose of your boat heading into the direction you just left. River travel is like forever being turned back and not getting there. The sun shifts sideways from the bow to starboard, where it sways until a riverbend brings it over to port. Soon it slips astern. You know you've been going forward, but the sun isn't in your face any longer — it is heating the back of your head. Some minutes later it is beating on your knuckles. Then it is back to starboard. Another reach and it is burning around the boat, useless to navigate by. All it tells you is how much time has passed. For coastal sailing, the sun is a good guide, but it was confusing here.
In the jungle, all rivers are mazes, and this one was mazier than most — it was something only a small cayuka or an ingenious pipanto like ours could negotiate. The bad part was not that we were going backward, but that we seemed to be going nowhere. We would come to a bank choked with water lilies and hyacinths and green ruffled leaves, and see a bend of open water. We would turn and follow that bend. After half an hour, as the hyacinths piled up and the branches at the bank swung against the boat and smacked our faces and pushed Father's baseball cap sideways, we would realize that we had come the wrong way. Or we were in a swamp that was packed as solid as land, or a lagoon surrounded by black trees, or knocking against stumps. Then we had to go back and suds our way through the thick flowers and logs we had taken for a bank Once past these barriers, we would travel on what seemed a new river or a tributary, now narrow, now wide as a pond and no opening So the sun went round and round, and Father cursed and said why did you have to go fifty river miles to advance five land miles?
He mapped the river as we went, marking the shallows and the bends and the false turns, the sandbar crescents on the reaches, the swamps and lagoons — all the deceptions of its straggling course. It was more than a crumpled shape. It was a bunch of knots, tangled like worms in winter, that made no sense. Even Father, who liked complications, called it a so-and-so labyrinth and said that if he had a dredger and a barge full of dynamite he would twist the bends out of it and knock it straight, so that you could see daylight from one end to the other.
This was the subject of his speeching. When we were led into a swamp by the temptation of open water, Father said, "I'm going to do something about that" — and the islands—"I'll sink them, first chance I get" — and the ponds—"Strap a channel through here, canalize it — all I need is dynamite and willing hands."
Father was now at the bow with Clover, while Mr. Haddy took his turn on the pedals. "Clear all this obstruction away — make some kind of scoop that cuts this sargasso weed at its roots and lifts it free. Get this mess into shape. How very American, you're all saying — the man wants to bring permanent changes to this peaceful jungle! But I didn't mention poison, and I certainly don't intend to make it commercial. Gaw, I like to get my hand on this," and he grinned at the tangles and bends. "It really makes me mad!"
He was getting redder in the face, and, being tall, he looked uncomfortable squatting at the needle nose of this narrow boat. He kept his hands on his hips and swayed like someone riding a bike with no hands. Every so often, he poked his head into the storage vault and said, "At least the ice is holding up, which is more than I can say for the crew. Pedal, Mr. Haddy! Stop catching crabs. Are you looking for avocados, too?"