"Let's cut the tow rope," Jerry said. "We'll show him!"
Jerry wanted to set us adrift. Maybe Father was testing us, to see if we had the guts to do it. But I would not let Jerry touch the line. I was afraid that it might snap all by itself, or that Father would cut it. Often, during those days, I fell asleep and woke up frantic, thinking we were spinning down the Patuca in this flimsy dugout.
I said, "If you touch that rope, I'll jump overboard and swim ashore. You'll be alone, Jerry. You'll die."
For the brief period of Father's disappearance, when I thought he had drowned trying to retrieve the propeller, I had not been afraid. We had the boat, and our hammocks, and Mother. But when he climbed aboard, he brought all the old fear with him. I was spooked again into believing that the storm had raged across the whole world and that there was death on the coast.
"I don't believe that cowflap," Jerry said when I told him.
Jerry was more violent in the dugout than he had ever been on the boat or anywhere else. Here, towed at the end of a line, he said forbidden things. He talked continually about running away and going home. What he said gave me nightmares, because he put my worst imaginings into words. We deserve to be punished in this dugout, I thought. We belong here.
"I hate him," Jerry said. "He's crazy."
I told Jerry that without my help he would never reach the coast.
"We won't make it upriver," he said. "It's impossible."
"How do you know?"
He kicked the barrel of gas, two thuds that echoed hollowly inside like the boom of a bass drum.
"It's almost empty. Dad can't run his outboard motor without gas."
"He'll paddle."
"He'll go backwards!"
Jerry laughed at the thought of it. He said he was glad I was worried.
"I'm going to tell him he's running out of gas. Watch him have a bird."
"Cut it out," I said.
"You're afraid of him, Charlie. You're older than me and you're scared. I'm not scared."
But his voice broke as he said it, and he had to swallow twice in order to finish speaking. This dugout punishment made him suffer. He had hardly slept, and he looked sick. When he wasn't complaining about Father, he was blubbering, sobbing like a baby. He sounded very young when he cried. He squalled into his hands, with his head down, so that Father wouldn't see him.
One night, hearing Father's laughter in the master cabin, Jerry said, "I'd like to kill him."
His voice came out of the darkness. Now he was breathing heavily, as if it had been a great effort to say that.
"He wouldn't be hard to kill." Jerry was panting. "We could sneak up on him. Hit him with a hammer. On his brain—"
"Don't say that, Jerry."
"You're afraid."
Yes, because you're saying the terrible things on my mind, I thought. I could feel the smooth handle of the hammer. I could hear it crack against his skull, and the skull part like a coconut — the leaking of pale water. I said, "No."
"I wish he was dead," Jerry said. He began to cry again. I was consoled by his tears. He was crying for me.
He claimed he saw a plane one morning, a small gray single-engine plane passing overhead. I did not see it. I told him he was dreaming. It was a turkey buzzard or a heron or a parrot. Any bird in flight here looked like a Cessna or a Piper Cub. Jerry cried because I refused to believe him. I sounded like Father, he said. Worse than Father.
"Mr. Haddy gave you those spark plugs and this gas. And Dad took all the credit! Who did all the fishing at the lagoon? We did! He was treating us like slaves, but what happened to his garden and all those stupid inventions? They got washed away. We saved his life!"
He was speaking my thoughts again and making me afraid.
I said, "If you tell him about Mr. Haddy, I'll tell him what you said — that you want to kill him."
This panicked Jerry. He knew he had gone too far.
"Anyway," I said, "he'll deny it."
"Because he's a liar. He's wrong about everything."
"You don't know that. There isn't any proof. He's probably right — Mr. Haddy agreed with him! You're eleven years old and your face is dirty. When Dad cut you loose in this dugout last week you cried your eyes out. You were glad when he towed you back."
"He tricked me. I wouldn't cry now. I'd go." But his eyes were red and crusted like two wounds.
Father looked astern, and, seeing us arguing (he could not hear what we said over the chatter of the outboard motor), he nodded and grinned as if to say, "That's just where you two punks belong."
Mother had said that if he was right, we were the luckiest people in the world. If he was wrong, we were making a terrible mistake. But she obeyed him. She was afraid, too.
"Maybe we'll find out if he's right or wrong," I told Jerry. "I don't want to go to the coast if it's a graveyard. And what's the point of talking about America, if it's not there anymore? Dad says it's not there — so did Mr. Haddy. What do you know, Thickoid!"
Jerry said, "We have a white house in a green field, with trees around it. There are birds in the trees. Catbirds and jays. The sun is shining. The noon siren is ringing at the Hatfield fire station. People walk by our house and look up the path. They're saying, 'Where are those Foxes?'"
"No," I said. But I saw it clearly. I saw the clouds over Polski's barn, and the valley hills and the corn. I smelled the goldenrod and skunk cabbage, pine gum, cut grass, the sweetness of dew on dandelions, the warm tar on country roads.
"'Did their old man take them away?' That's what they're saying." Jerry looked at me. He was surprised and a little fearful. He said, "Charlie, why are you crying?"
I put my hands against my face.
"Please don't cry," he said. "It scares me."
At last, Father let us aboard the boat. We were so ashamed of what we had been saying that we went straight to the bow and started working the sounding chain. We were burned and bitten and had the squitters bad. Jerry had been contrary in the dugout, but here he just looked miserable and did not say a word against Father. Instead, he cursed the twins. He even bit April on the arm, and the teeth marks turned purple. I was glad. I had wanted to bite her, and Clover, too, for a long time.
***
Every village we passed was washed-out or deserted — sticks of huts and a few fruit trees and a rotten-sweet latrine stink like the smoke smell of burned toast. They were green ghostly places, crawling with wet rats, all the dugouts sunk, and new vines twisted around the hut poles. Where roots showed, they were like stubbed toes, bruised black and raw, and long weeds hung in hanks from the crooks of branches like witches' scalps.
But one morning, after eleven days of pushing up this Patuca River, we came to a village that was not washed out or even flooded. It was on a high red bank at a bend in the river. A child was squatting in the shallow water by the riverside, doing his business, with a faraway look on his face, like a dog in a bush.
Father craned his neck for a better look at the village. Then he smiled. He seemed to recognize it.
He said, "I know where we are."
"Where, Allie?"
"You'll see."
The squatting child heard our engine. He covered himself with the rag he was holding and bolted up the bank. Father cut off the engine and tied our boat to a tree.
Now, on the bluff of the bank, where we had seen smoke and the straw peaks of huts, there were about fifteen men. They wore rags and they stared down at us with empty eyes.