Mother said, "I don't pray."
We pushed off in this flat-bottomed boat, Mother at the stern, holding the rudder handle, the twins in the center seat with the food, Jerry and I paddling on either side of Father at the bow.
"We going upriver?" Father knew we were afloat. He strained to see over the gunwales, but he couldn't.
"Yes," Mother said. "Upriver."
But she hooked us in the current and turned us downstream.
***
The rushing stew of this river was like the hurry of an oncoming tide, but perpetual. Moving water looked odd here, sucking along at the deadest, stillest banks. The last time we had gone down a river was on the Rio Sico, when we had escaped from Jeronimo. But the Sico was a creek compared to the Wonks, and that was in the dry season. The Wonks was fuller and wider than the Patuca even. We traveled midstream and went fast. There was hardly any need to paddle, except for steadying the boat on bends.
Father thought we were still on the Patuca, going upstream. He was happy — his head was happy, the rest of him was a sandbag.
"Pull hard," he said. "Away from the coast, away from the savages. There's death down there. Listen, the Mosquito Coast is the coast of America. You know what that means."
We gave him water and wabool, but he resisted eating. He said he wanted to starve himself until he got his strength back. "I'm not much use to you as a cripple," he said. "There's something wrong with my legs." And his arms, too — he couldn't move them. We fanned the flies off his face.
His big head was fixed in the niche of the bow like a goat in a halter, raving at us as we sped down the river, telling us that we were saved because we were going upriver, and sometimes crying.
He cried most when he saw the birds. They were harmless birds at first, parrots and crascos, but he raved and they turned into vicious creatures. They got bigger. They grew plumes and claws. Storks now planed overhead, then fish hawks, and finally vultures, which he hated worst of all. We had never seen vultures like this before. They were black, rather than shabby gray, and huge, with ragged wing tips and plucked necks and hooked beaks. They hovered without flapping, like wicked kites, looking feeble and patient in the summer sky.
"Take those birds away!" It was his old horror of scavengers, but now that he couldn't raise his arms, he was especially afraid. He was fearful of other things, too. The way the boat tipped — he couldn't swim as a cripple. The way flies gathered on his eyelids. Sudden noises. Fire. And he would not be left alone. He hated stopping. When we put in that first day at a riverbank village called Susca for bandages and fresh water, he made Jerry and me stay by him until Mother returned. He was not surprised there were villages here, and boats passing us, and Miskito cries. "This is where the last of human life is — upriver."
But we were fifteen miles down it and sliding toward the coast.
"Cover me up," he said. He made us move the awning, so that he would not see the vultures that followed us. And he said he hated the empty sky. "If I was in jail, I'd never look out of the window."
We were lucky, he said. The river was a labyrinth—"Easy to get in, hard to get out."
He raved when he was awake, and when he slept he howled in his dreams. There was always froth on his lips.
Easy to get in? We could not have gone upriver against this current if we had tried. At night we moored our flatboat near villages. Some were Moravian missions, praying Indians, and people from Pennsylvania. No, America had not been destroyed. Mother demanded food and water and medicine. The people were kind. She got all she wanted. We stopped at Wiri-Pani and Pranza, and at a place called Kisalaya we saw muddy wagons. Mother was told we were only three days from the coast, Cabo Gracias a Dios, which they called the Cape.
The twins had nothing to do. They were sick with worry, actually puking with fear at the rate we were moving. Mother stayed at the stern, wearing a straw hat from Susca. She heaved the long tiller, not looking to the left or right but sort of staring downstream past Father's head.
She did not speak to anyone but the twins, and she was too far from Father to reply to the things he said. I wanted to tell her that I had not meant for any harm to come to Father, only for us to escape. We had escaped, but in the worst possible way, down a river we didn't know, with the girls sick. We were carrying Father's head to the coast.
Every five miles was a village where crazy-sounding Indians shouted English at us. The Indians got blacker as we neared the coast, and the hanging vultures bigger and wickeder. Sometimes at night there were alligators. They scuttled from the bank and moved against the current. But they were cowardly, they did not attack, and when they bumped us with their snouts we made rag torches. Often sudden light stopped them, and the flames near their green nostrils always did.
The river was murkier and twistier nearer the coast, and the land swampy, so that cranes stood out like shirts hung on fenceposts. It was hotter here. The heat made Father rave more. His raving made me remember again how, in Jeronimo, climbing through Fat Boy, I had had a glimpse of his mind. I had seen just how tangled it was. I had been stumped by the plumbing of all its turns. What he was, he had made. His ravings came out of those orbits and circuits, that teeming closet of pipes and valves and shelves and coils — the ice maker, his brainache.
What he harped on most was this imperfect world. Well, I knew that one by heart. But there was more.
"I'm hurt." He said it again and again, as if he had just discovered it and hardly believed it. "I can't move — can't do anything."
"You'll get better," I said.
"Man sprang out of the faulty world, Charlie. Therefore, I'm imperfect. What's the use? It's a bad design, the human body. Skin's not thick enough, bones aren't strong enough, too little hair, no claws, no fangs. Drop us and we break! Why, we're not even symmetrical. One foot bigger than the other, left-handed, right-handed, our noses run. Look where our heart is. We weren't meant to stand up straight — our posture exposes the most sensitive parts of the body, heart and genitals. We should be on all fours, hairer, more resistant to heat and cold, with tails. What happened to my tail, that's what I'd like to know. I had to turn inventor — I was too weak to live any other way. Look at me. Look where seventy-five pushups a day got me. Yes sir, I'm going to live on all fours from now on. And that's what I'm fit for — hands and knees!"
He went on and on like this as we raced downriver under flights of butterflies and the ragged shadows of birds so high in the sky I had to get on my back like Father to see them properly.
"It's worse for other people. Women, Charlie, they're in bad shape. They leak, they drip. It's terrible about women's bodies, how they leak. All that blood, all that useless fat. They carry these bodies around with them all the time. No wonder they're so mad, wondering what they're for. It's humiliating to have a body with a design fault. I thought I was the strongest man in the world. I'm just pulp. Weakness makes you clever, but no amount of cleverness can save you if all the odds are against you. I'll tell you who'll inherit the world — scavenging birds. They're fit for it, everything in their favor. They are nourished on failure. The sky in America is black with them now. They just hang there, waiting. Get them away from me' There's sand in my eyes' I'm alive but I can't see Mother!"'
It was dreadful trying to paddle, with Father's screams in my ears. But it was so bad I hardly noticed the twists of the river, and it saved me from thinking much about what would happen to us on the coast.