"Interested, sure thing, for true. But that spearmint, man, is real large. We ain't got all them holes and poles!"
"Not yet," Father said.
Mr. Haddy stuck his teeth out and blinked like a rabbit.
"How much ice do you want to take downstream?"
"Coupla hundred pounds. Two-three sacks."
"Hardly worth the trouble." Father said. "Why not take a ton?"
Mr. Haddy laughed loudly in surprise and relief. "She sink me old lanch!"
"Ice floats, Figgy" — Mr. Haddy smiled at the word—"You can tow it."
"How we do that?"
"Take an iceberg."
"Icebugs and bowl-caynoes," Mr. Maywit said to me, but clear enough for Father to hear. "Fadder sure is a miracle man!" Mr. Maywit looked very frightened.
"We could make an iceberg before breakfast," Father said.
It was the sort of challenge Father enjoyed, something grand and visible — a task that was also a performance. He had objected to Mr. Haddy taking a few sacks of ice to the coast, but towing an iceberg — that was a different story.
***
I had visualized a pyramid, its sides submerged, its point sticking up, being tugged by Little Haddy. But Father's iceberg was egg-shaped, and as tall as he was, to concentrate its coldness and limit its melting. He calculated that a single block made from many smaller blocks would be reduced by only a third if they floated it to Bonito Oriental, and it would still look like an iceberg in Fish Bucket. It would not make the coast. "But we're just proving a point here — not trying to change anyone's life. We'll see how it shakes down."
He told Mother it was mainly a morale-builder. "I like it when you get an idea and no one laughs. They deserve an iceberg."
Mr. Haddy was very proud. The iceberg was his boast, and he would captain the Creoles in taking it downstream.
"I'm just obeying orders," Father said. "If Figgy wants an iceberg, he's going to have it."
All work was put aside for this. Fat Boy was stoked and all the pumps primed. We had been keeping Fat Boy purring, but we only removed ice when we needed it for the cold-storage room, where we kept dead hens and vegetables. "We're a thoroughly refrigerated settlement," Father said. But the truth was that ice was not a necessity so far. It was a novelty, like Father's idea of geothermal energy. Why drill five thousand feet down to get at a volcano's bowels? To provide Fat Boy with an endless heat supply. One scheme justified another. We could have done without them, but, as Father said, why live like savages? "In the end Robinson Crusoe went back home! But we're staying."
He said, "Someday, there'll be a conduit here, self-sealing and perpetual, and this whole refrigeration plant will be operated by geothermal energy. We'll have ice coming out of our ears and won't have to chop another stick of wood. Think of the future!"
That was the day we made the iceberg. We pumped water into Fat Boy and kept the firebox full and listened to the fizz and bubble in the pipes. Father ran back and forth on the path to the riverbank, where the ice bricks were taking shape as an oval iceberg.
"It's pretty and it's free. You find me a better combination of virtues."
Every half-hour we froze a new batch of bricks, and by mid-day we were finished — a large blue-white iceberg lay steaming and sweating in the mud, with a tow rope frozen in its center. It was roughly the shape of a Volkswagen Beetle, but larger, on a platform of bamboo logs that served first as a sled and then as a raft. We had no difficulty launching it. The tow rope was hitched to Little Haddy, and its gunning engine got the ice down the bank and into the river. The Creoles — Harkins, Peaselee, and Maywit — were in the bow, and Mr. Haddy in the wheel house, the ice creaking, the bamboo groaning, and the muddy water splashing all around it.
Of all the strange pieces of anything that floated down this jungle river, this was the strangest by a country mile.
"Our message to the world," Father said. "I'd love to see their faces when it heaves into view — coming out of the hottest, sickest, most parched and bug-ridden jungle in the whole hemisphere. They look up from their laundry. 'What is dat?' 'Dat is a icebug, Mudder, and he heading dis way!'"
Mother said, "They'll think it's the end of the world."
"But it's the beginning. It's creation, Mother."
The iceberg, hog-backed and bobbing, went around the bend and out of sight. The children ran down the Swampmouth path to get another look. Mother headed into the house, and then I was alone with Father on the riverbank.
"I could have gone with them." he said. "But I didn't want to spoil their fun. They can have the glory." He looked back at Fat Boy. "Besides, I've got to see to him. He might have overheated. He's full of poison and flammable gas. Ammonia and hydrogen, Charlie — those are his vital juices!" He looked at his finger stump and added, "But there's danger in all great inventions."
I saw my chance to tell him about the Acre. There was no danger there, apart from the traps we had set. We had food and water and shelter. But I was afraid of what he might say about the praying tree and the lean-to school. He might have got me to admit that we had taken all our clothes off one day and compared tools. He would have been stinking angry, or else hooting and calling us savages. So I said nothing.
"You feel a little like God," he whispered, looking around. His clothes were soaked from the ice bricks and sweat. His fingers were red from handling the ice. His hair was long and his face like a hatchet. He turned his bloodshot eyes on me and went on in the same tired and wondering whisper, "God had fun making things like icebergs and volcanoes. Too bad He didn't finish the job. Ha!"
***
Little Haddy returned to Jeronimo at nightfall. Mr. Haddy was giggling with pride, but at last he confessed that the iceberg had started breaking up at Bonito Oriental. They had cut it loose and let the current take the fragments downstream to the coast. He was a little drunk, because at the Chinese store in Bonito they had traded some ice for a calabash of mishla.
But Father was smiling at the river, maybe imagining the ice bricks floating down to Santa Rosa, and people pointing and fishing them out and struck with terror at the thought of ice sailing out of the jungle.
"This was a field day," he said. It had not cost anything, and we were all happier as a result. He told us he had left the United States so that we could spend days like this, working together and putting our ideas into practice. It was what he had always dreamed about.
Outside the Gallery that night, the birds fell silent in the muddy twilight and the bats began chirping. Around us was a circular wall of insect howl. A light breeze quickened in the darkness, brushing the trees. We played Up Jenkins on the Gallery floor, to the flashes of heat lightning that separated the mountains from the night sky.
"That's next. Injun country. We'll take them a ton."
But when he pointed, the Creoles and Zambus held tight to the Gallery rails, expecting another earth tremor. And Mr. Haddy, being worried, was all the more rabbit-toothed.
Father did not notice them. He was staring at the mountains, waiting for another lightning bolt. It came. It flashed on his face.
"You feel a little like God," he said.
17
IN THE DAYTIME, Jeronimo was ours — our design, our gardens, the whops and claps of our pumps, the nut-sweet fragrance of our split bamboos, our flowers and mechanics. It was hot, but the heat and light burned it clean of stinks. And it was always in the daytime that Father said, "I declare this a success."
The coldest Jeronimo got was in the hour before dawn, like right now, when it was coal-black and clammy and so silent in the clearing you could hear the trees drip. It was foreign and all wild. The jungle odors were strongest, too, the wet itch of hairy vines, the wormy tree trunks, the foul smack of sappy leaves, and the river rotting as it swept past us.