"I'd better go first."
"Who put you in charge?"
I said, "We dug traps here and covered them with branches. In case bandits came. You might fall in."
"I know all about traps," he said, and kept walking.
We followed, carrying the baskets of food and a jug of water.
Between the Acre and the river lay Jeronimo. There was no other way to the mountains. Father told us to walk faster, but Jeronimo was unavoidable — it smoldered at the end of the path.
Father bowed his head.
Mr. Haddy said, "Shoo."
Jeronimo looked bombed. It was mostly powder, a pouch of gray ashes, the trees around it burned to spikes. Because the fire had spread, the clearing was bigger, and craterlike. Fat Boy's pipes had collapsed and whitened like bones, and all the pumps had fallen down. There was not a house standing or a shed intact. In the gardens, the plants were scorched and the stems blistered like flesh. The corn was down, and the squashes and tomatoes had burst and were seeping juice — they had been cooked to rottenness. Some fruit looked like ragged purses.
But the ashy ruins were nothing compared to the silence. We were accustomed to bird twitters and screeches, to the high ringing notes of the crickyjeen cicadas. There was no sound or movement. All life had been burned out of Jeronimo. What birds we saw were dead, roasted black and midgety, stripped of their feathers, with tiny wings and ridiculous bobble heads. Slimy fish floated on the surface of the tank. It all lay dead and silent and stinking in the afternoon sun. Some thick hummocks still smoldered.
"You wanted to see it!" Father said angrily. "Feast your eyes!"
Distant birds cackled deep in the forest, mocking him.
He hooked across the black grass and picked up a machete with a burned handle. Then he went to our house and chopped the remaining timbers down, making the ruins complete.
We remained standing where the bathhouse had been. Heat had cracked the culverts and had baked some of the clay sluice pipes solid. The burned air stung my eyes.
Mother said, "Don't touch anything."
Mr. Haddy said, "Ain't nothing left to touch."
"I heard that!" Father had started toward us with the machete in his hand. I thought he was going to whack Mr. Haddy's head off. He sliced it at him.
"I'm left, they're left — you're left, Figgy. If you've got the strength to complain, I'd say there's nothing wrong with you. Show some gratitude."
Mr. Haddy put his teeth out. "Me lanch — she catched fire. She all wrecked."
"I lose everything I own and he worries about his pig."
"She all I own in this world," Mr. Haddy said. Tears ran beside his nose and dripped from his teeth.
"What good is a boat if you haven't got a river?"
"The river is there, Fadder."
"The river is dead," Father said. "It's full of ammonium hydroxide and gasping fish. The air — smell it? — it's contaminated. It'll take a year for this place to be detoxified. If we stay here, we'll die."
Father kicked at the ashes.
"He knew that. He just wanted to hear me say it!"
It was all as Father said. The air was sharp with the stifling smell of ammonia, and trapped in the weeds near the riverbank were dead fish and swollen frogs. They were more horrible than the roasted birds in the black grass. These river creatures were plump and had no marks on them. They had not been burned, but poisoned. We had to wade through them and push their bodies aside with sticks, to get to the opposite bank.
Father made three trips across, carrying the little kids. On his last trip, struggling through the mud with Jerry, his face and arms sooty and his clothes splashed and torn, Father began to cry. He just stood there in the water and did it. I thought it was Jerry at first — I had never heard Father cry before. His whole face crumpled, his mouth stretched and went square, and I could see the roots of his teeth. He made gasping noises and small dry honks.
"I know what you're thinking. All right, I admit it — I did a terrible thing. I took a flyer. I polluted this whole place. I'm a murderer." He sobbed again. "It wasn't me!"
***
He had splashed to the bank and dropped Jerry and led us into this forest, moving fast. After his crying, we had not seen his face.
It was high ground on this eastern side of the river. Within an hour we had left the buttonwoods behind and were among low cedars. Above us was a saddle between two peaks of the Esperanzas. The advantage of the dry season, those blue rainless days, was that the forest was scrubbier, easier to walk through, and there was more daylight. But it was also smellier. In very hot weather, when no rain had fallen, the jungle odor is skunky and as strong as garbage. Sour waves of it hit us as we climbed. Part of the way was familiar. I told Father how we had come here with Francis and Bucky, looking for bamboos.
He said, "They're sleeping in their own beds tonight."
He walked with his head down, like someone who has lost something and is retracing his steps to find it. I caught his eye — his face looked slapped.
He said, "Don't look back."
He walked away from the sun on the dried-out hillside among dead trees. Five miles up this gentle slope was the saddle ridge, and here we were within sight of a new range of mountains. Mr. Haddy said it was the Sierra de San Pablo. Between us and these mountains was the deep valley of the Rio Sico, which flowed northeast to the coast.
On our way to the valley floor, Father sat down. I was glad when he said we would spend the night here. I had had no sleep last night.
Mother said, "I wish we had blankets."
"Blankets? In this heat?" Father said.
To remind Father that his boat was gone, and maybe to rub it in, Mr. Haddy unfolded his large captain's certificate, and said "Shoo," and used it for starting a fire.
"We haven't even got a pot to boil water in," Mother said. "Just that jug. And it's nearly empty."
"The kids will find us a spring," Father said. "They know more about this monkey stuff than we do. Look at them. They love it."
We gathered dry grass for beds and made nests in the hillside. There we sat, listening to the breeze in the cedars, eating the last of the fruit we had brought from the Acre. Mother found some manioc growing wild and roasted it over the fire. Jerry said if you closed your eyes it tasted like turnips. At nightfall we crawled into our nests. There were flies, but no mosquitoes.
In the darkness behind me, April whispered, "I saw him crying. Ask Jerry." And Clover muttered, "That's a he — he wasn't. He was just mad. It's all Charlie's fault."
Later, I was woken by Clover again. "Dad, Jerry kicked me in the back!"
But Father was saying, "You won't catch me eating any of that stuff. I'm no camper. Anyway, the trouble with most people is they eat more than is good for them. Especially starches. There's no goodness in that cassava—"
He had recovered his old voice. He was preaching again. Don't look back.
The three adults were around the fire, guarding us. I felt safe again. And I listened. Between the whistles of the crickyjeens, Mr. Haddy was talking about tigers. Father laughed at him recklessly, as if daring a tiger to show itself so he could jig it onto a tree.
He said, "This is the best part — skipping out naked, with nothing. We just walked away. It was easy!"
He had forgotten Jeronimo already.
But Mother said, "We had no choice."
"We chose freedom." His voice was glad. "It's like being shipwrecked."
Mother said, "I didn't want to be shipwrecked."
The crickyjeens whistled again and stopped.
"We got out just in time — I was right. We're alive, Mother."
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