But he hated the look of it. He said, "You think I'm scared of a few bug bites? Ha! If you're scared of bugs, you've got no business here."
The bees swarmed around him as he spoke. He batted them away. "They know when you're scared! They can smell fear!" A little while later he was stung on one ear. His ear lobe swelled fat and shook like a turkey's wattle. He said he could not feel a thing.
The sun was ahead of us, dropping behind the mountain we were climbing. It dazzled us, but it had lost most of its heat. I wondered what would happen when it sank, because in all the time we had lived in Jeronimo — almost seven months now — we had always returned home at sundown. But we had not reached the village. Jeronimo was hours behind us. Father and the Zambus were still grunting in their harnesses, dragging the two sleds.
I said, "We'll have to go home in the dark."
"We can't go home until we deliver this ice!"
Deliver it where? I looked at the cargo on the sleds. The banana-leaf insulation fit loosely, like a man's clothes on a child. There was not much ice left.
"Why didn't I think to put a rubber sock around it? Those two buffoons insisted on those useless banana leaves!"
And now the sun was half gone, a segment of cold fruit, and Father's face brassy bright in its last glare. He urged the Zambus on, as if chasing the sun to the summit. But the sunset was quicker, and while they heaved the sleds along the track, the sun slice blinked behind the rocks, and its afterglow was a dusty pinkness in the sky.
Father's determination left him then. He stepped out of his harness and walked up the path to snarl at the dying daylight.
"All right," he said, "we'll make camp."
"Where will we sleep?" Jerry asked.
"Why, just over there, across the street, in the Holiday Inn! You two kids can lounge by the poolside while I fix us up with a couple of rooms. Want a king-sized bed? I know I do, and I sure hope they've got air conditioning and color TV—"
He was walking in circles and biting a new cigar as he spoke.
"— barbecue pit, Ping-Pong, cheeseburgers, and a funny-bunny piano player in the cocktail bar. Want a roll of quarters for the juke box, Jerry? Play some tunes?"
Jerry had begun to cry. He had knelt down to tighten one of his sandals and, crouching there, put his head against his knee and sobbed quietly. I pitied Jerry. All he had asked was where we were going to sleep, but Father went on mocking him with this speech about the Holiday Inn and have a nice hot shower bath and good long rest.
"There goes Charlie, off to buy a Fudgsicle. Careful crossing the road, sonny!"
I knew Father was disappointed that we had not made it to the Indian village, so instead of sulking or crying, like Jerry, I had decided to do something helpful. I said, "I'm" looking for some wood to build a lean-to."
"Hear that, Fido? He's going to show us how to make camp. Like he showed us how to keep the bugs away. You've got to hand it to these kids."
"Charlie know how," Francis said.
"He's a hamburger," Father said. "He's got your number."
It was clear that Father had not planned to camp out. We had eaten most of the food. We had no tents or mosquito nets, no lanterns or blankets, and only one mess kit. The water bag was almost empty. But there were several things in our favor — it was the dry season, so we would not get rained on, and there were fewer insects up here, and all day we had seen pacas and birds on the mountainside — we could eat those. Father had traveled light in the hope of rushing the mountain, but we had failed, and now it was evening.
"Don't just stand there," Father shouted to the Zambus. "Improvise!"
The Zambus built a fire, while Jerry and I made a lean-to out of sticks we had found nearby. Then we gathered dry grass and made a bed inside and tried not to disturb Father, who was cursing, hacking at a sapling with his knife.
He was no good at making temporary camps, and he was surprised at how quickly and well Jerry and I put up our lean-to. It did not need to be waterproof — it was only to protect us from the wind, which was strengthening up here as darkness fell. When Father saw our bed-nest of grass he said, "You planning to lay an egg?"
He cut five saplings, saying. "I'm going to make a proper shelter!" He started to lash them together, but before his first frame was complete it was pitch dark, which was a shame because his shelter would have been much better than ours if he had finished it. At last, he kicked it apart and said, "What's the use!" Seeing me with some yautia plants, he said, "Picking flowers, Charlie? That's the idea — you can put them into your scrapbook. Won't Mother be pleased?"
I told them they were yautias and that their roots were as tasty as carrots.
"Eddoes," Bucky said. Eddo was his name for yautia. He had speared a paca rat with a sharpened stick and was roasting it over the fire with the same spear.
"I'm not hungry," Father said. "Anyway, I don't eat rats and weeds."
He watched us eat and he told us how, traveling in Eastern Europe, he had been disgusted to find that everywhere he ate, the silverware was dirty. He had smeary knives, and stains on his spoon, and the tines of the fork always had bits of yesterday's food between them. At another place, he had found a hair in his milk. He went on describing the filthy silverware, and he made the Zambus laugh, but I kept thinking how strange it was that we were squatting here on this mountainside in Honduras, eating a burned paca and burned yautia with our fingers, while Father complained about the dirty forks in Bulgaria. Normally he did not talk about food at all, and he said it was indecent to praise it while you were eating it. But that night on the mountain, all he talked about were the tormenting meals he had eaten and the cutlery that had not been washed properly.
Finally he said, "You're melting my ice," and ordered us to put the fire out.
The Zambus obeyed. They had made their beds beside low windbreaks of boughs. They were not the men I was used to in Jeronimo. Here, on the mountainside, they had become silent and simpler and a little wild-seeming.
"I'm not tired," Father said, as Jerry and I crawled into our lean-to. "I'll just sit here and cool my heels until you're ready to move out."
He sat cross-legged near the ice. He had combined the two blocks to concentrate their cold. I could tell from the hot glow of his cigar that he was sulking — maybe thinking about dirty cutlery. But I also suspected that he was guarding the ice. He had warned us not to touch it. The Zambus muttered for a while, and then they sighed and lay like logs on the ground. "I wish Ma was here," Jerry said, but he was soon asleep.
The wind hummed in the bushes and dragged against the rocks and dry grass. That was the only sound, the wind, but later I heard another noise in this humming of wind. It was a plink-plink-plink, as if someone were striking the highest key on an old piano. It was the ice melting, waterdrops hitting the tin pan of the mess kit. I was painfully hungry and still thirsty, and the sound of water made me thirstier.
I poked my head out of the lean-to and saw Father beyond the dead fire, sitting in front of the ice block. The block with is clumsy cover was about a quarter of its morning size, but silhouetted in the starry sky it still looked like a tombstone, and Father like a white corpse that had crawled out of the grave. The starlight made his face like a skull's and gave him bony arms.
"I want to sleep in my own bed!" he screamed.
I tried to think of something to say. I decided, after all, not to ask him for any water.
"What are you looking at?" he said fiercely. "This is the first time since creation that ice has ever melted here. Think of it! And you're saying that's nothing?"
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