"I ordered him off the property. I said you were due back in ten minutes and you'd sink his boat."
"Good thinking," Father shouted back through the wall. "I would have, too!"
"They packed their bags. I mean bags. Paper ones. And they all left."
Father said, "So they ran out on us."
"They is scared," Mr. Haddy said. His mouth was against the bathhouse wall, his front teeth sticking through. "The preacher is yartering about soldiers and trouble and ruckbooses."
Father shut off the water.
"What soldiers?" he said, as we dripped.
"In the mountains. Over the hills. Down the river. Up the trees. With ruckbooses. Russians and what not. Peaselee hear them."
Clover said, "He said you were just as bad as the soldiers."
"Peaselee said that?"
"The man. The missionary. He called you a Communist."
Father led us out of the bathhouse. The Zambus hopped and danced and shook their fingers to get dry. Father wore a flour sack around his waist, his hair was dripping, and his body was as white as marble. He held one arm up, like a statue in front of a courthouse.
"None of this is news to me," he said. "But I'll tell you something you don't know. They'll be back, as sure as anything. Because this is a happy place, and the world isn't. The world is plain rotten. People are mean, they're cruel, they're fake, they always pretend to be something they're not. They're weak. They take advantage. A cruddy little man who sees God in a snake, or the devil in thunder, will take you prisoner if he gets the drop on you. Give anyone half a chance and he'll make you a slave: he'll tell you the most awful lies. I've seen them, running around bollocky, playing God. And our friends, the Maywits — sorry, Charlie, the Ropers — they'll be lonely out there. They'll be scared. Because the world stinks!"
He started up the path to the house, taking long white strides. "They'll be back — just you wait. Remember where you heard it. Remember who said it."
Mother stepped beside him and said, "How did it go with the ice?"
Father was still walking. He grunted. I listened hard, then I heard him say in a low voice, "We had shrinkage. I knew it was a mistake to lug so much of it that far."
So he did not lie after all.
***
And the Acre in the jungle was ours. It was not the same without Drainy preaching and Alice doing the cooking and Peewee and Leon making baskets, but now, with fewer of us, it seemed larger, and we were able to spread out. Each of us had his own sturdy lean-to. We brought a rope from Jeronimo and fixed a swing to a tree by knotting the dangling end and sitting on it. Father would not have allowed this in Jeronimo. It wasn't useful, because if someone wasn't swinging on it, it just hung there — that would have been his objection — and was the waste of a good rope.
We ate yautia roots and wild avocados, and we repaired the camouflage in all the man traps — four of them, the deep holes nicely disguised with boughs. One day, in a trap, we saw a snake eating another snake — half of it choked down his throat and both snakes thrashing their tails. The eater could not crawl away or stop eating, so we could study it in safety. We brought it back to Jeronimo.
"There's a perfect symbol for Western civilization," Father said.
A spider monkey passed through our church tree another day and sat there picking his teeth. He watched us with curiosity, as if he wanted to play.
Then he sniffed, leaped from the tree, landed near a bush, and tore a small fruit ball from it. On his upward bounce he was back in the tree, eating it. He gnawed the skin and sucked out the inside, then rolled across the bough and tumbled away, yanking branches.
That was how we discovered guavas. The monkey had shown us that there were several bushes of them on the far side of the pool, and that day we brought a basket of them back to Jeronimo.
Mother said, "We can make them into jam."
But Father said they were too small and sour, because they were growing wild. If he put his mind to it, he said, he could grow sweet ones as big as tennis balls, and, "Speaking of food, you'd better start picking and peeling, or there won't be anything for lunch."
We did what was expected of us in Jeronimo, the usual chores. But we always returned to the Acre to live like monkeys. We missed the Maywits — I still thought of them by that name — but without them we had no need for the school or the store. We had the loose pages from Drainy's hymnbook, but we no longer held church services. Anyway, it was too hot to think about hell.
We knew from the Acre that it was the dry season. No one in Jeronimo knew this, or considered it important. The gardens were still growing, but we were in touch with the seasons: we had no inventions.
The Acre was primitive, a ragged hollow in the jungle, but the grass was soft, the pool made it pleasant, and we had everything we needed. For fun, we could swim or swing on the rope. The pool was unaffected by the jungle drought. I guessed that springs fed it. But the rest of the area was very dry. We watched wee-wee ants holding funerals — processions of them with corpses and leaf parasols. Snakes lived in the roots of a dead tree at one corner of the camp. We kept clear of that tree, but tried to think of ways of dropping them into the traps, to turn them into snake pits. The snakes and the walnut-sized beetles did not frighten us. We learned that the fiercest creatures were predictable, and though once it had all looked dangerous here, now it seemed more peaceful than Jeronimo.
We came here to escape Jeronimo. Ever since the building of Fat Boy, Father had been visited by people who wanted ice. They were talkers. They had heard of Father. They paid him compliments. Father put them to work, gave them simple jobs to do, and they took the ice away in canoes. There were always strangers in Jeronimo, admiring Father's inventions or looking for ice.
"Ain't do nothing with they ices but cool they bunya," Mr. Haddy said. Bunya was a drink of sour juice the local people made from cassava.
Father said, "That doesn't matter. They can wear it on their heads for all I care. Once they get accustomed to the idea of ice, the uses will be revealed to them. Each person will do something different — one man will preserve meat, another will make it into a painkiller, someone will get the idea of refrigerating his fish instead of smoking it, and how many will it bring out of sunstroke? Sure, it may take a generation, but think of the future — no one else does. Fat Boy is forever. No moving parts, Figgy!"
Father often talked of things being "revealed." That was true invention, he said, revealing something's use and magnifying it, discovering its imperfection, improving it, and putting it to work for you. A guava growing wild was to him an imperfection. You had to improve it to make it edible.
He said, "It's savage and superstitious to accept the world as it is. Fiddle around and find a use for it!" God had left the world incomplete, he said. It was man's job to understand how it worked, to tinker with it and finish it. I think that was why he hated missionaries so much: because they taught people to put up with their earthly burdens. For Father, there were no burdens that couldn't be fitted with a set of wheels, or runners, or a system of pulleys.
But instead of improving the world, he said, most people just tried to improve God. "God — the deceased God — was a hasty inventor of the sort you find in any patent office. Yes, He had a great idea in making the world, but He started it and moved on before He got it working properly. God is like the boy who gets his toy top spinning and then leaves the room and lets it wobble. How can you worship that? God got bored," Father said. "I know that kind of boredom, but I fight it."
Father saw the river and said, "Let's straighten it." Dragging the ice up the mountain, he had talked of nothing but the cable car for passengers and cargo. He still spoke of sinking a shaft — tapping the steam heat in the earth's core. And inventions themselves revealed unexpected things that Father called "the unanticipated wrinkle." An example of this was an exposed pipe on Fat Boy's shin. This collected drops of moisture from the humid air. Father added more pipes and turned this into a condenser that dripped into a tank. It was the purest water imaginable, and now he boasted that he could create water as well as freeze it — with fire! He had not expected this cold pipe to behave this way It was revealed to him He called it the Hamstring.