"Made it," Father said. He took a small suck of wabool from the gourd. "You should see what we've got over there. Gardens, food, water pumps, chickens, drainage, and the biggest ice-making machine in the country."
"You have a generator for electricity?"
"Don't mention generators to me. Tell him, Charlie."
I explained that Father had devised a method of making ice out of fire.
"Your father is an intelligent man."
"Everyone says that," I said.
Father said, "They'll work you to death here. Then, when you're not useful to them any longer, they'll kill you and feed you to the vultures. They'll get some new slaves." Father's face darkened. "You think they'll try anything funny with us?"
The man said, "Who knows?" and the other men nodded.
"I want to walk out of here wearing my head," Father said. "Do you think those Indians are listening to us?"
"They listen but they do not understand. They are very simple people. They are also very strong."
"So I gather. But you shouldn't be here, waiting on them hand and foot. They haven't any right to own you. You're prisoners, aren't you?"
The man who had done all the talking shrugged. The shrug shook his whole loose-jointed body. He seemed untroubled, or else beyond caring.
Father said, "Notice I'm not eating much? I'll tell you why. Because I've got an enormous appetite. By not eating, I do other things better. Solve problems. Work hard. That's a form of eating, too. You should try it. If I ate, I wouldn't do anything else—"
All this time, the Zambus were eating and hardly listening to what Father was saying. Father seemed glad for someone new to talk to. Maybe it took his mind off the failure of our expedition.
The men whispered among themselves, then one who had not spoken before said, "You are not telling the truth, are you — about the ice?"
"Practically an iceberg," Father said. "It melted to mud, but there's a whole lot more where that came from. We've got everything over there."
"Guns?"
"I've got no use for guns. If I needed them, I could make an arsenal. But that's desperate."
But, he said, they reminded him of how he had felt in the States — like a prisoner, close to despair, murderous, half loco. It was frustration at the way things were shaking down, something like slavery, because the system made men into slaves.
"What did I do? I picked myself up and went away. I advise you to do the same."
The Indians were squatting with their ugly dogs thirty feet away. They watched Father talking to the skinny men. It was impossible for me to tell what the Indians were thinking by looking into the smooth clay of their faces. The Indians might have been harmless, but the dogs were part of their group. The dogs' fierceness made the Indians seem dangerous.
"They want you to go," the stringy-haired man said.
"They don't know what's good for them," Father said. "They don't deserve ice, or anything else, if they can't show common courtesy. But you," he said, "you're friendly enough."
"That is our nature."
"My Zambus probably think you're Munchies."
"Ah, Mosquitia!"
Father said, "I wish I could do something for you."
"It would be helping us if you did not anger the Indians. If you simply went away."
"Listen, one dark night you ought to get yourselves out of here. Do that. Clear out." In English, Father added, "Get the drop on them."
"The Indians say there is no path over the mountains."
"They would, wouldn't they? Listen, you won't get a road map from them."
"How far is it to your village?"
"A day's march. More — if you're carrying ice. But that's our problem."
"You will be home by nightfall."
Father said suddenly, "I've got half a mind to blow this place wide open and get you the hell out of here."
"That would be very foolish," the man said, and did not blink.
"Then it's up to you."
"Go," the man said, "or they will punish us."
We were given a calabash of wabool, and water, and a bunch of bananas. While we filled our water bag from a gourd, the three skinny men went over to the Indians. The Indians remained squatting on the ground, but their dogs ran away as the men approached. They did not begin barking until they had reached the rooty edge of the clearing. Without their dogs, the Indians looked nakeder and even a little afraid.
We left them like that, the Indians squatting, the three slaves standing. The dogs bounded forward and retreated, chasing us to the stream. They barked and stretched and showed us their wild cowardly eyes. All the other men were motionless. They were small beneath the vast hanging forest, watching us walk away. The women had not returned. The men looked as if they were posing for an oldfangled frightening picture.
On the trail, Father said, "What I can't make out is how they got there in the first place."
"Twahkas, Fadder?"
"No. The others." He used a Spanish word, "The nameless ones." Bucky said, "These jungles is fulla monkeys."
"Monkeys don't ask that many questions—"
Neither do slaves, I thought.
"— Something weird's coming down here, people."
We climbed out of the forest and behind the rock steeples and up the path we had made to the ridge of the mountains. Then, where we had made camp last night, we stopped again and passed the wabool around. We sat on the broken ice sled we had left, the remains of Skidder. Father said that someday a foreigner would find it and proclaim that a great civilization had existed here, and put Skidder in a museum. This made him laugh.
"And did you see those Indians' faces when they saw the ice?"
We looked at him.
"They almost keeled over." He began to chuckle at the thought of it.
Jerry was searching Father's face.
"They couldn't believe it," Father said. "They were goggling. Flabbergasted and confounded!"
Finally — because everyone else was perfectly silent — I said, "What ice?"
"The ice I showed them."
I believed he was testing me again. I said, "It all melted, Dad."
"That small piece," he said.
This was not true.
"You saw it, didn't you Jerry?"
"Yes, Dad."
I thought, Crummo.
"Your long-faced brother's trying to tell me we wasted our time. You need glasses, Charlie. You've got bad eyes. Probably an astigmatism, eh Francis?"
"For true," the loyal Zambu said.
Father put Jerry on his back and carried him, while I walked behind with the Zambus. The Zambus' tiredness showed in their faces. It had been a bewildering trip for them, the more so because they had expected the Twahkas to have tails — and maybe they did think the three skinny men were Munchies. There was a grayness on the Zambus' bodies, and smudges on the gray, like the cloudy surface of purple grape skins. As we walked, they became more certain that they had seen the ice and the amazed Indians. "It is smuck in Fadder's hand like a rock-stone."
Father said, "It's all downhill from now on."
19
ON THIS downward path, in the tortoiseshell twilight, I thought of Father's lie. I hoped he did not believe it, but how could he be rescued from repeating it?
Something like this might work — perhaps, in our two-day absence, things had not gone right in Jeronimo — perhaps some small problem had arisen, enough to interrupt him, not a disaster but a hitch, to prevent him from giving a loud speech saying our failure had been a success.
The Indians had not been flabbergasted! They had only squinted at us and at Father's wet fingers, and sent out their slaves.
His lie made me lonelier than any he I had ever heard.
Yet he had spoken it confidently and said the expedition was a triumph and he couldn't wait to tell Mother. Again and again I tried to remember ice in Father's hands and amazement on the faces of the Indians. But there was none: no ice, no surprise. It had all been worse and odder than his lie. They had told us to go away, and then the skinny slaves were peering at us and the dogs trying to bite our feet.