The twins began to cry.
Mother tried to comfort them. She said to Father, "Look what you've done."
"I didn't do anything but rescue us."
Jerry said, "Is it true there's nothing left?"
"Nothing that you want to see," Father said. "You think it's bad being on this river? Oh, boy, this is a vacation next to that war in the States."
Mr. Haddy said, "Was they a war up there?"
"Horrendous," Father said.
"You're trying to frighten us," Mother said. "Stop talking this way, Allie. It's cruel. You don't know what's happened in the States."
"I know what I've seen. I know about the armies, the soldiers — all the burning and killing." He was beating his broom in the river. "They knew where I was."
Mother held the twins in her arms. They sat under the tent Father had made from his shirt. Mother said, "He's joking, girls. Don't pay any attention."
"Some joke," Father said.
He looked at me and winked.
"But we're safe now. This boat, this river — you think it's precarious, but I tell you, we're looking good. We're alive. That's more than I can say for some people."
It was now June. A year before, we had left Hatfield. Two nights ago, we had seen Jeronimo destroyed. In Father's mind, the United States had been wiped out in just the same way as Jeronimo — fire had done it, and all that was left was smoke and a storm of yellow poison. That was what he said.
"They were after me. It was a narrow escape."
I wanted him to stop.
I said, "This is a beautiful river."
"Now you're talking, Charlie! Hear that, Mother? He says it's a beautiful river. You bet your life it is."
He said no more about the war in America or the loss of Jeronimo, which were for him the same thing. He spoke calmly of how we could begin again. He said these close calls had sharpened his wits.
This was the proof. We were in a fourteen-foot pipanto and moving swiftly toward the coast. It was no more than a flatboat, but we had shade and seats and a smudge pot. Father had converted it into something comfortable and fast. He talked wildly, but his talk was like creation, and on that downstream trip he never stopped. I had been worried. Yesterday he had cried, today he was yelling about his experience and the end of the world. He was very restless and hungry-seeming and now less predictable than ever. But there was no man on earth more ingenious.
23
JERRY ROCKED on the beam seat Father had made. He whispered, "Dad thinks he's great," and looked at me with a scolded scowl.
Clover put her head down. "He is great."
"There are lots of inventors in the world. He's not the only one."
"He's not like the others," I said.
"Anyway, the world is destroyed," April said. "Dad said so." Jerry said, "How do you know he's not like the others?"
"He has different reasons," I said.
"Like what?"
I glanced astern — Father's widening eyes dared me to speak.
In that pause, Jerry's whisper was harsh. "You don't know."
But I did. Father was ingenious because he needed comfort. He never admitted it, but I knew it from Jeronimo and from the spruced-up pipanto. He had not changed, he was still inventive, he still needed comfort — more than we did. He was dead set on improving things, but he was not like any other man. I could not tell Jerry while Father was listening. He invented for his own sake! He was an inventor because he hated hard beds and bad food and slow boats and flimsy huts and dirt. And waste — he complained about the cost of things, but it wasn't the money. It was the fact that they got weak and broke after you bought them. He thought of himself first!
It was why he had invented the hydraulic chair and foot massager in Hatfield. It explained his lack of interest in his industrial inventions — potboilers, he called them. And it also explained his mania for ice. It was the reason he wept when Jeronimo was destroyed. He didn't want to live, as he said, like a monkey.
His movements, his travel, were inventions, too. When it looked to him as though America was doomed, he invented a way out. Leaving the country on the banana boat was one of his most ingenious schemes. And Jeronimo had been full of examples of his ingenuity, gadgets he had devised to make life — his life — easier. These schemes and tactics were his answer to the imperfect world. But I sometimes pitied him. Discomfort and dissatisfaction made his brain spin.
A moment ago, hearing Jerry's whispers, Mother said, "He's a perfectionist."
"Don't be bitter," Father said.
Mother was looking at the jungle on the riverbank.
"What a place for a perfectionist," she said.
Everyone thought of him as rough and ready. But I was not fooled. He was the opposite of a camper! He grew prize vegetables because he could not stand the taste of bananas and wabool. He hated sleeping outdoors. "It's lawless and unnatural to sleep on the bare ground." He always spoke tenderly about his own bed. "Even animals make beds!" An everlasting supply of free ice was his reply to the tropics, a complicated system of pumps his reply to the dry season. He liked the odds stacked against him. He said it helped him think. But though he was ambitious for his own comfort, he had never tried to cash in on his inventions — only to live a life that others might want to copy. The royalties on his patents he regarded as "funny money." "I may be selfish," he said, "but I'm not greedy."
Selfishness had made him clever. He wanted things his way — his bed and his food and the world as well. His explanations of events were as ingenious as his inventions. Had there been a war in the United States? Were people after him, as he said? Was it a fact that he was being hunted because "they always kill the smart ones first"? We did not know. But if you believed any of this, you could be very happy here. You did not notice the heat or the insects or the darkness that buried you at night. Father's talk took away your sense of smell. After hearing him speak about America, it comforted you to think that you were so far away on the Mosquito Coast. It comforted him!
Here he was, shouting his plans at us and grinning at our bewilderment. It might be simple scheming, like improving the pipanto pole, or making a smudge pot out of a coconut husk, or describing the foolproof house he was going to make. Or it could be almost batty.
"What a thoroughly rotten job God made of the world!"
I had never heard a single person criticize God before. But Father talked about God the way he talked about jobbing plumbers and electricians. "The dead boy with the spinning top" was the way he described God. "And the top is almost out of steam. Feel it wobble?"
He seldom let up. It was like part of the jungle racket, after our escape from Jeronimo. Like the pava birds and the crickyjeens and the nighttime tattoo, along the Rio Sico and where we turned into the Rio Negro for Paplaya. But of all the jungle sounds that I heard, and that static could be very surprising, the clearest of them, and the most often, was the sound of Father's voice, crying out for comfort.
***
It took us several days of "coasting," as Father called it, to reach Brewer's Lagoon. After all the talk and boat towing and the halt salty breeze, I expected something blue — sand, surf, palms, a beach. But Brewer's was an inland scoop, and its haulover was a neck of high ground that hid the ocean and blocked the pleasant sound of waves sluicing the sand and making the pebbles jiggle.
We were in mud here. The lagoon was wide and flat and swampy. It was brown water stretching boggily to a brown shore. No ripples — it was a dirty mirror with some stubs of weeds, and cut-down palms like old lampposts. A film of mud and fine silt covered the banks around it, and flies gathered where green cowflap lay drying at the edges of the still, dark puddle.