These were the stinks and perfumes of early morning, dew-soaked grass, and wet petals, and they overwhelmed the civilized smells of Jeronimo. Everything was black under the black sky. The stars, which at midnight looked like a spillway of broken pearls, did not shine at this hour — they were holes of light, like eye squints in black masks.
Father had woken Jerry and me and told us to put our clothes on.
"We're all ready," he said.
We waited in the dark, standing in the wet grass near Fat Boy's firebox, yawning and shivering.
"I've been up for hours getting this together," Father said. I could see the glow of his cigar butt, nothing else. "Hardly slept a wink."
"Fadder ain't need no sleep," Mr. Maywit said. So Father had been lecturing him. too.
As my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, I saw Mr. Maywit fussing around a block of ice. It was nearly as big as the iceberg Mr. Haddy had towed downstream two days ago. Something in Mr. Maywit's jittery gestures said he was not coming with us. He was working too hard, out of breath and chattering to Mr. Peaselee, as if he was impatient for us to leave, sort of showing us the door.
The slab of ice — it looked like a fat lump of lard in the darkness — was being wrapped in a mitten of banana leaves. It was fastened to a narrow sled. The sled had a pair of close-set runners and was rigged to be pulled by men in harnesses.
"Don't talk to me about wheels," Father said.
But no one had said anything about wheels.
Rustling the banana leaves as they layered them over the ice block, Mr. Maywit and Mr. Peaselee were whispering between themselves. Father's cigar butt blazed.
"Wheels are for paved roads — they won't get you anywhere on these mountain tracks. Too inefficient. Just break or get bogged down in the gumbo. But Skidder here" — it was his name for the ice sled—"will merely glide over the bumps."
The ice no longer glowed like lard. The wrapping was done. It looked like granite, the hump of a tombstone. Mr. Maywit and Mr. Peaselee stepped aside, their white eyes wide open.
"How about it?" Father said. "Are you coming with us?"
"Kyant." Mr. Maywit was hesitant and backpedaling. "I am Feel Super."
Father laughed at him. "He almost forgot!" he cried. "If you're Field Super, you get those gutters scrubbed. I want them so clean I can eat off them. Where are you, Mr. P.?"
Mr. Peaselee said, "Fadder?" from a squatting position, and sprang to his feet, muttering.
"You coming?"
"No man," Mr. Peaselee said. "They always troubles there. Contrabanders. Shouljers. Feefs. People from Nicaragua way. Up in those mountains, they got ruckboos, for true."
"Quit it — you don't know the first thing about trouble." Father turned his back on the Creoles. "Where's my jungle men, where's my trackers?"
"Hee, Fadder."
It was a low brown growl, close by. The Zambus had been there beside us like black trees, listening the whole time — Francis Lungley, John Dixon, and Bucky Smart. Now I could see their round heads moving past the star punctures in the sky.
"Harness up and let's shove off." Father said. "Go back to bed, Peasie. Get your beauty sleep."
We started out of the clearing. Father in front, the Zambus pulling the sled, Jerry and me following behind. Father was still talking.
"Trouble, the man says. I don't call a forty-five-degree angle trouble, and what's a handful of no-goods? I could have that half-breed pleading for mercy. Fuel shortages, unemployment, moral sneaks in Washington, and muggers on every street corner! Kids in grade school sniffing glue, polecats in every pulpit, old-lady hoarders, white-collar punks, double-figure inflation, and a two-dollar loaf of bread. That's what I call trouble. Dead rivers, cities that look like Calcutta — that's trouble for fair. You don't take a walk because you're afraid of getting a shiv in your ribs, so you stay home and they come through the windows. There are homicidal maniacs, ten years old, prowling some neighborhoods. They go to school! The whole country's bleeding to death—bleeding—"
He kept on talking as we entered the dark path out of Jeronimo, and the birds flew up at the sound of his voice.
"Our technological future's in the tiny hands of the Nipponese, and we let coolies do our manufacturing for us. And what about those jumped-up camel drivers frantically doubling the price of oil every two weeks? Did I hear someone mention trouble?"
The ferny boughs blocked the stars overhead, and the path was so narrow the wet leaves brushed dew against our arms. In the daytime this track was a green tunnel, but at night it was the throat of a cave. Father went on talking about the United States. "It makes me mad," he was saying. We followed his voice and the creaking sled. Very soon we were climbing, and within a short time Jerry told me his legs were tired. Mine were trembling from this new effort of climbing, and my feet were wet, but instead of telling him this I called him a spackoid and a sissy — it was what Father would have said — and I felt stronger.
The path zigzagged through dim pickets of trees. We had never been here before. On the tight corners, the Zambus called out, "Hoop! Hoop! Hoop!" and turned the sled. Father had been right — wheels would have been useless here. The loose boulders and soft dirt would have jammed them. And Jerry and I were lucky. The sled moved so slowly on these bends that we could pause and get our breath. The sled's runners made deep ruts, and on the steeper parts of the track we could hear the Zambus' whispered grunts.
"Not to mention the Russians," Father was saying.
Dawn was breaking — lifting the sky and uncovering the trees behind us. It did not seem so jungly now, except that in the grayness just before the sunrise cracked against the treetops, there came the whistle-screech of birds and the hurrying of perhaps snakes or pacas or mice — the scuttling of small creatures, anyhow, beside the path. In the dark, I had felt I was burrowing, but sunup brought greenness to the path and made me feel tiny on the thinly wooded slope. Jerry and I had fallen back. When we caught up with the sled, we saw that Father and the Zambus had stopped and were looking down the valley.
"But there's no trouble there," Father said.
We were above Jeronimo and could see its bamboo roofs, the columns of woodsmoke mingled with the mist, and mattresses of morning fog lying in the fields. The sunlight that was full against this high slope where we stood had not reached Jeronimo. But its pattern was clear, even in the broth of mist. Its stone paths were laid out among the gardens like a star outlined on a patched flag. It looked wonderful from here, neither a town nor a farm but a settlement of precisely placed buildings on the river that was a twisted blue vein in the muscle of jungle. At greater distances, smoke rose from the forest trenches of other clearings.
"They just got out of bed," Father said, seeing the people stirring in Jeronimo. "There's someone going for a whizz — probably Figgy"
I could see Mr. Haddy's flour-sack shirt.
"Lulled into a false sense of security," Father said. "I blame myself. 'Contrabanders — feefs.' Of course Mr. Peaselee wants to go back to bed. He knows he's in Happy Valley!"
Jerry said, "There's Mrs. Kennywick."
She was moving heavily toward the chicken run.
"Feed them chickens, shuck that corn," Father said.
Fat Boy was a bright-lidded tower, its reflectors catching the sun's first rays in its tin dimples. It looked like nothing else for miles — marvelous in a valley that was itself full of marvels.
"Mudda," Francis said, and pinched his fingers at the smallness of Mother hanging clothes on the line.