I said, "I saw them go."
"Don't think about it, Charlie." Mother hugged me. "We're safe now. Your father's going to be grateful when he wakes up."
"What's Dad doing?" April said.
His sleep made us helpless. It prevented us from moving. As long as he lay there we could not leave. It was then that we were reminded how important he was to us. We had only known him awake. It was frightening to see him so still. If he was dead, we were lost.
The sun, now overhead, was burning on his back. People sleeping give off an underground smell, a boiled root stink of dirt and food and sweat and wounds — the way I imagined corpses steamed, like heated compost. Father was motionless. He might have been making up for all the nights he'd stayed awake. But he looked and smelled dead.
April said, "Ma, are we going to die?"
Mother said, "Don't be silly." She found our baskets and helped us gather yautia and guavas and wild avocados. She praised our camp, she said it was a good job — it had saved our lives.
Seeing the yautia, Mr. Haddy said, "You kids like eddoes? Me ma make eddoes!"
Father swung over and jumped to his feet.
"Let's go," he said. He sank to his knees.
It was early afternoon. He had slept almost thirteen hours, but no one mentioned the time. "Liars, swindlers, degenerates who sleep till noon" — those were some of the people he hated. He had always told us that deep sleep was a form of illness, and he blamed us when we overslept.
He sat down on the gold grass and dropped his hands into his lap. "What are you looking at?"
His voice was flat, dull, different, almost drugged, and very small. He hardly moved his lips. He seemed very tired, and yet I had watched him all night, lying there sound asleep.
Mother knelt down and touched his face. She said, "Your hair is singed."
His eyebrows were stubble, his beard was burned and so were his eyelashes. It gave him a startled sausagey expression. One side of his face was pink and creased, with a sleep map pressed on it. One eye was redder than the other. He pulled on his baseball hat.
"I had an awful night. Hardly slept a wink."
Mr. Haddy said, "I see dogs twitch more than you done! You were sleeping like a slope — wunt he, Ma?"
Father said, "I've got no patience with liars in the morning."
Then he sniffed and came alert, as if he had just heard something. The smell of smoke and ammonia was still strong in the air, with burned bamboo and roasted tin. Father sighed. His face cracked. He smiled sadly, remembering.
"It's finished," he said, in his beaten voice.
"All your work," Mother said. Still kneeling, she started to cry. "I'm so sorry, Allie."
"I'm happy," Father said. "Jeronimo is destroyed."
Mr. Haddy said, "She went up like crackers."
Father said, "We're free."
Mother protested. "Everything you made is gone," she said. "All the houses, the crops, those wonderful machines. All that work—"
"Traps," Father said. "I should never have done it."
"How were you to know?"
"I'm the only one who could have known. It wasn't ignorance; it was subtlety. But that's always been my problem. I'm too elaborate, too ambitious. I can't help being an idealist. I was trying to defuse the situation peaceably. It blew up in my face."
"Allie, why—"
"And I deserved it. Toxic substances — this is no place for them. I'll never work with poisons again, and no more flammable gas. Keep it simple — physics, not chemistry. Levers, weights, pulleys, rods. No chemicals except those that occur naturally. Stable elements—"
Mother sobbed, "But those men are dead!"
"Tempered in the fires, Mother."
Clover said, "That's what I was just wondering."
"But not gone. Matter cannot be destroyed. Ask Figgy. They requested the transformation. Scavengers like them deserve the turkey treatment—"
Mother had put her fingers over her eyes. She wept softly as Father stood up.
"I thought I was building something," he said. "But I was asking for it to be destroyed. That's a consequence of perfection in this world — the opposing wrath of imperfection. Those scavengers wanted to feed on us! And Fat Boy failed me. The concept was wrong, and now I know why — no more poison, Mother."
He said this in almost a whining way, with his hands locked together. He went to the pool and poked the water.
He said, "Anybody can break anything in this world. America was brought low by little men."
He sounded as if his heart was broken. He raised some water in his cupped hands and washed his face and arms. "Where are we? What is this place?"
"It's the Acre," I said.
"Our camp," Jerry said.
"Call this a camp?" His voice was still small.
"This is where we play," Clover said.
"Some playground. You had water all this time?"
I said, "It's from a spring."
"You can swim in it," Jerry said.
Father looked around. I knew he thought it was all unsuitable. I wanted to tell him that it had kept us happy. He saw the swing. "I recognize that rope."
"She me stern painter," Mr. Haddy said.
"It was Charlie's idea."
"Huts, too. And fruit. And little baskets." He spoke sadly. "It's pure monkey."
"Those are guavas in the basket," Jerry said.
"Eat some, Allie. You haven't eaten anything."
"Monkey food, monkeyshines," Father said. "I hate this. I didn't want this. Why did you take us here, Charlie?"
"He saved us," Mother said. "He found us food and water. Allie, we would have died!"
"He didn't grow the food, he didn't dig the water." Father refused to look at me. He said, "Let's go. It's late. You're just sitting there."
Mother said, "We can't go back to Jeronimo."
"Who said go back? Who mentioned Jeronimo? I don't want to see it."
Mother's lips shaped the question, "Where?"
"Away! Away!"
"We'll have to salvage something to take with us," Mother said. "We can't go like this."
"This is how I want to go" — but he stood before us with only his hat on his head and his arms dangling out of his scorched sleeves. He looked like what he was — a man who had crawled away from an explosion.
Mr. Haddy said, "You tools? You foods? You bags and erl? Me lanch? Ain't leaving me lanch!"
"It's all poisoned," Father said. "We had too much with us — too much junk, too many drums of poison. That was our mistake. Do you know what a flood of ammonia can do? There's contamination there, and what's not contaminated is burned to a crisp."
"Please, Allie, you're raving."
"What I'm saying is understatement. Now let's go — I want to get this stink out of my nose."
"To the river?"
"Mother," he said. "I killed the river!"
"Why can't we stay here?" Jerry asked.
"Smell Fat Boy's guts? That's your answer. It'll stink for a year and drive you insane. No, I want to get away" — he pointed east to the Esperanzas—"past those mountains there."
"They is a river behind," Mr. Haddy said. "Rio Sico."
"We know all about it, Figgy."
"She run down to Paplaya and Camaron. We could go to Brewer's. She me own lagoon."
"That's the place for us," Father said.
This was too much for Mother. With a pained, demanding expression, she said, "How do you know?"
Father moved the part of his forehead where his eyebrows should have been. He was smiling unhappily. "Because I like the name."
He tramped around the clearing, punching the bushes and peering between boughs the way a person might fuss with the curtains on a window. His impatience made him clumsy and useless. Finally he sighed.
"Okay, Charlie, I give up. Which way is out?"
I showed him the path.
"Just as I thought," he said. He started walking.