Roosevelt's Beast: A Novel

by Bayard, Louis

  “Father, what’s wrong?”

  “Oh, just some thorn or other. Damned thing’s gone right through the sole of my boot. No worries, I’ll have it out in a wink.”

  But the wink turned into something longer, and the more Kermit waited, the more he felt the creature’s weight on his back. His lips were chapped. His feet were sloshing inside his boots. His hands were as crinkled as if he had dipped them in a soda bath.

  “Nearly got it,” said the Colonel.

  With a rasping grunt, Kermit flung the dead monkey from his shoulder, sank to the ground, and then jerked up again as the abscess on his buttock flared. Just ahead, he could see Thiago and Luz standing as still as fawns in the smoky light.

  “You seem awfully down in the dumps,” the old man said.

  “Tired, I expect.”

  “Who could blame you? Are you sure you won’t let me carry the creature for a bit?”

  “We were wrong, Father.”

  “What’s that?”

  Kermit fingered the sweat out of his eyes. “We thought the Beast hunted only at night.”

  “Well, yes. That’s true.”

  “We also thought it attacked only one prey at a time.”

  “So we did.” The old man grunted slightly as he dug his fingers into his foot. “Because that’s what the preliminary testimony suggested, Kermit. Now that we have the testimony of our own senses, any theories we previously entertained must give way before our enlarged knowledge. Whether we like it or not, we have stumbled across an entirely new—or at least a radically altered—life-form. Unknown to Western science in all its particulars. We may only record what we see and”—he squinted down at his bare foot—“let Dame Reason sort out the rest.”

  “Dame Reason.”

  “Will you kindly tell me what is vexing you so much?”

  “I don’t know that I can.” Kermit leaned back against the smooth brown bole of a laurel, angled his chin to the sky. “Do you recall what you said before, Father? How deuced unlikely it would be if we simply stumbled over the thing?”

  “Did I say that?”

  “You said it would be ‘the stuff of boys’ adventure.’”

  “Well, yes, so it would be if we’d found it slumbering. But, as you’ll recall, the Beast called itself to our attention.”

  “So it did. And in a place where we would be sure to see it.”

  The Colonel’s eyebrows drew down. “Something’s not squaring for you.”

  “Something, yes.”

  “You surely can’t believe we killed the wrong animal.”

  “No. It was the right one. It could be no other.”

  “Then what can be the trouble?”

  Kermit frowned, curled a vine around his finger. “It was just…”

  “Yes?”

  “It was too easy, Father.”

  “Easy?” The old man’s mouth made a perfect hoop. “Do you call the four of us being nearly killed—do you consider that easy? I have enjoyed considerably easier days.”

  “What I mean is, the chronology is off.”

  “Chronology…”

  “Do you remember in Africa how long it took us to bag your lion? Days we spent looking. And yet today—today we travel into a jungle and, in the space of a few hours, we stumble across a creature that has eluded the mighty Cinta Larga hunters for weeks. What are we to call that? Beginner’s luck?”

  He could see the bull-like flare in the old man’s nostrils.

  “Kermit, I must tell you. I have never known anyone more afraid of succeeding than you. Since you choose willfully to ignore what we’ve accomplished, let me refresh your memory. We took it upon ourselves to find a beast. We found said beast. More than that, we caught it red-handed—red-mouthed, red-everythinged. We observed with our very own eyes its velocity, its capacity for destruction, its bloodthirst. We … we effaced it from the company of the living. Now, I don’t know about you, but I call that a job well done, and I don’t much care how long it took us to do it. We’re not paid by the hour, you know, like some pipe fitter or stevedore. We’re hunters.”

  Kermit ran his hand down his face. Why had he even said a word? There was no way he could have conveyed the look in that creature’s eyes. Or explained that, of all the animals he had ever killed or helped to kill, he had never felt such tender feelings as he did toward this one. And that this tenderness was, under the circumstances, so awkward, so unmanning, that it was almost as good as poison.

  “Enough!” he snarled. “I wish I hadn’t brought it up.”

  “Well, you don’t have to sulk about it.”

  “I’m not.”

  “I can excuse many things in a young man, but sulkiness—”

  “Father, I promise you I am completely and utterly … sulk-free. I’m as happy as a clam. Look, I’ll dance, shall I?”

  Kermit set his foot on a shivered length of wood, felt it sink beneath his weight. He brought up his other foot and began to hop, lightly and brightly, like a hare.

  “Don’t be silly, Kermit.”

  “Not silly. Happy, Father.”

  “You look like a damned fool.”

  “A happy fool. Embracing his success.”

  In the next breath, he was dropping.

  Through the wood, through the ground that lay beneath—straight into the earth itself.

  15

  There was no time to protest, no time to react. He was conscious only of the ground closing around him … the friction of ants and sand against his skin … and then suddenly the absence of friction. He blinked. Coughed out a bubble of surprise.

  Some ledge or outcropping must have risen up to catch him. He swung out his arms in a wide scissoring arc and felt only a great suspension. From some remote region, the Colonel’s voice came straining down.

  “Kermit! Can you hear me?”

  The fall must have shaken the wind from him, for it took him some time to raise his voice above a whisper.

  “Here I am!”

  “Are you hurt?”

  “I don’t believe so.”

  “Can you climb out?”

  Once more, he swung his arms through the darkness. Nothing.

  “I can’t be sure.…”

  “Senhor Kermit!” called Luz. “We will send for help. We are not far from the village.”

  “Steady, now!” shouted the Colonel. “We will come back as soon as we can. Don’t move an inch, do you hear?”

  As if he could. The darkness had closed even more tightly around him—without becoming any more tangible. Carefully, he extended his leg … kicked once … twice. On the third kick, he made contact with something. A piece of granite or schist, jarred loose by his boot. For some twenty or thirty seconds, he listened as it caromed downward, sending up tinny after-echoes.

  The darkness began to rustle.

  A rasp, a shudder. A scattering of squeaks. Then they were on him.

  Raking his limbs, tearing at his clothing, scurrying up his trouser legs. They probed him. They hungered for him. And, even as he beat them away, he felt the first prickings of teeth on skin.

  * * *

  WHAT A FOOL. WHO but a fool would have blundered into a colony of vampire bats?

  For his stupidity, he was now being repaid a hundredfold. The bats were thrashing his hair and jerking his shirt and diving into his crevices, and for a second or two he had a sense of being borne aloft, writhing and helpless.

  “No,” he heard himself say. “No.”

  Groaning, he peeled them off one at a time (shivering at each caress) and flung them into the darkness. He punched, he kicked, but it was like striking at shadows; they absorbed every blow and came right back, hissing and squealing.

  Never had he known blood to flow so freely. It coursed down him in thick stripes, smearing his eyes, tincturing his lips. Through the blood, he could feel the lapping of their tongues. A thousand tongues.

  Yes, they were drinking him as cheerfully as a cardinal in a birdbath, and still his arms and legs kept
flailing. Not out of any hope or plan but from barest instinct.

  He was, for that reason, slow—unconscionably slow—in grasping the change in his situation. In understanding that his limbs were flailing at air. That he was alone again.

  All the air pent up inside him came rushing out. The bats had gone.

  Had they simply returned to their slumbers? Or had they never even woken up?

  Blood was everywhere: on his cheeks, his ankles, his wrists. Yet he couldn’t see any of it. Even when he dipped his thumb in one of his cuts and held the thumb to his eye, the darkness folded around it.

  And now, from that same darkness, something came gliding toward him.

  Squinting, he made out the rudiments of a form clothed in black. He saw an outstretched arm, a pair of softly kicking legs. A face, as dapper and imperturbable as the first day Kermit beheld it.

  Elliott.

  Kermit pressed the heels of his fists against his eyes. Pressed harder and harder and, when the pain was more than he could stand, pulled his hands away.

  Elliott was gone.

  Nothing presented itself to his senses now but the dripping of water against stone. The sound built and built until Kermit began to imagine that it was eating away, inch by inch, the outcropping on which he sat. Soon, though, the dripping was replaced by a new sensation: an icy current of air rising up on either side and wreathing him. The same species of cold that he had felt an hour earlier, standing over that howler’s carcass. It crawled through his pores, burrowed down to his bones.

  “Show yourself,” he growled. “Show your damned self.”

  Yet if he had been pressed to say to what or whom he was speaking, he couldn’t have done it.

  “Kermit!”

  Gasping, he threw back his head. It was the old man’s voice, chiming from above.

  “We’re sending a rope for you!”

  No … He was shouting, but they couldn’t hear. Stay away. But the cold had stopped his speech at its root.

  “Kermit!”

  With that last blast of sound from his father came the first inklings of thaw. It began slowly—a tiny flush of sensation in his extremities—and then it grew. His nerves quickened. His blood thrummed.

  “Father…”

  He was still barely audible. He had to draw in a long draft of air and send it flying upward.

  “Father! I’m here!”

  Something dropped through the darkness. He fastened his hands around it. A rope. Where in God’s name had they found a rope?

  “Grab hold, Kermit! We’ll pull you up!”

  He looped the rope around his legs and waist and gave a tug. The rope tautened and swung him outward. For several seconds he hung there, dangling over the void … but the rope held, and a few moments later he was rising. Already shielding his eyes because the jungle interior, after the darkness of the cave, was like the blaze of a foundry. Through the apertures of his fingers, he gazed at four Cinta Larga braves.

  Not braves at all. Boys. No more than fifteen or sixteen. Their fathers too busy, presumably, with hunting and fishing to trouble themselves with rescuing a white man, so they had sent their striplings, who were incandescent with bravado until they laid eyes on Kermit. In the next second, they were falling back in confusion.

  “Lord above!” said the Colonel. “What happened to you down there?”

  Kermit squinted at his hands. Half a dozen pocks of blood, still declining to clot. More on his forearm. He could feel a half dozen more on his face alone.

  “Bit of a quarrel,” he replied.

  The Cinta Larga lads were studying him now from a great remove.

  “Luz,” he said. “Would you be so kind as to thank these gentlemen?”

  “There is no word for thanking, Senhor Kermit. That is for civilizados.” She scraped a handful of moss from the bark of a couratari tree. “For you.”

  He had no idea what to do with it, so Luz performed the honors, calmly sponging the blood from his face and neck and arms.

  Through it all, he could feel his heart racing as furiously as ever. Only it wasn’t his heart at all but a flapping bat, trapped in the breast pocket of his shirt. Two inches long, its mouth parted as if to scream.

  He cupped it in his palm, watched it drag its tongue frantically across its own body. And then watched Thiago pluck it away and carry it to the cave opening and, after a brief pause, let it drop.

  By now the Cinta Larga lads had taken notice of the dead monkey that lay where Kermit had flung it. No one had identified the thing, but something about its twisted, trussed figure must have communicated status, for the lads drew even farther back.

  “Ha!” said the Colonel. “They need a bit more work in the mettle mines, don’t they?”

  “Never mind,” said Kermit. With a grim and ironic smile, he snatched up the howler and wrapped it once more around his shoulders. “Perhaps,” he said to Luz, “these gentlemen would be so good as to show us the way.”

  * * *

  THEY WERE JUST FIVE minutes outside the village when the Colonel, intently fingering the fog from his lenses, said:

  “You gave us quite a scare back there.”

  “I’m sorry, Father.”

  “No, I’m only…” The old man wrapped the glasses around his ears. “I’m just glad you’re all right. Can you imagine me telling your mother I lost you down a hole? Oh, but don’t worry, dear, he should turn up in China any second. No, hold on, it wouldn’t be China at all. Well, never mind. The point is, you’re back among the living, for which I give inordinate thanks.”

  Kermit’s boots were pressing half a second longer into the forest floor. The monkey’s weight was beginning to tell. With a grunt, he tossed it to the ground.

  “Father, may I pose a question?”

  “Of course.”

  “Strictly hypothetical.”

  “Of course.”

  “What if we didn’t kill the Beast?”

  The old man slowed to an amble and then stopped. “Dear God, Kermit.”

  “Hear me out, please.”

  “I have heard you out. You admitted yourself it could be no other.”

  “I know. That’s why this is strictly an intellectual exercise. To pass the time, if you like.”

  “Pass the time.”

  “For argument’s sake, let us suppose that the animal we killed was indeed the animal that killed the girl, the young man, all those other creatures. We can agree on that, yes?”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “But what if the Beast was something other?”

  “Something other. So we’ve gone back to Coo-roo-whoever-he-is? I’m afraid this has ceased to be an intellectual exercise, Kermit.”

  “Father, do you remember when we were standing over that creature?”

  “Of course.”

  “Do you remember how cold the air was?”

  The Colonel’s head moved with great deliberation from side to side. “I remember seeing you shiver. I don’t recall there being any proximate cause.”

  “I’m telling you, Father, the air around me grew quite bizarrely cold. Polar.”

  “Very well, you felt a chill of some sort. Touch of malaria, perhaps; we’ve all had to—”

  “It wasn’t that.”

  “Or else it was your blood running cold. Don’t you remember that lion we cornered on Mount Kenya? There was a cold moment. Thirty yards off, mane bristling, teeth showing. I had to hear the crack of the Winchester before I was quite sure I was breathing.”

  “No, Father. No. This was something different. Not malaria, not exactly fear. I can’t define it; all I can say is I felt it. And not only there; I felt it in the cave.”

  “And again…” The old man made a tray of his hands. “Where better to experience a sudden drop in mercury than in a cave?”

  Kermit let his head dangle. Let the breath come tumbling out. “That may be,” he said.

  “I don’t mean to make light of your … your sensibilities, my boy, but the notion that one m
an might experience a climatological shift that somehow escapes his fellows—well, I hope you see that’s difficult to countenance.”

  “Certainly.”

  Ahead of them, their Cinta Larga escorts had stopped to wait. Kermit could see their small square outlines in the purpling shadows.

  Had he gone mad? Was that it?

  It wasn’t the first time the thought had crossed his mind. For many years, after all, he had been consorting with the specter of his dead uncle. But, if anything, he had come to view that as some private understanding between the universe and him—just another compartment to be sealed away from the others. Here in the jungle, the compartments were starting to leak.

  “Listen to me, Kermit.” The old man rested his hands on his son’s shoulders. “You’ve been through an ordeal; we all have. I suggest—no, before you say another word, let me exhort you to rest. That is all. Rest. Give yourself time, and then come at this again. You’ll be amazed at how different things appear. A calm, relaxed mind may discern connections that an agitated mind cannot. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  Kermit looked at him. “Of course.”

  “That’s the spirit, my boy. Now, let’s get a move on, shall we? They’re all waiting for us, and we’ve precious little light left. You’re quite sure you don’t need help carrying the Beastie?”

  “Oh, no.” Kermit stooped once more and took up his freight. “I hardly notice it.”

  PART TWO

  OUT OF THE JUNGLE

  16

  It had always been a Sagamore tradition that when Roosevelt boys returned from their hunts—and they would have roved at best two or three miles from home—they would receive no hero’s welcome. Indeed, they would receive no welcome at all, unless it was the maid beseeching them not to track mud through the foyer. The Colonel himself would wait until evening to query them about their exploits, and each of his questions would be so pointed and exact that whatever embellishments the boys had thought to add would peel away like burned skin. At which point their father would say merely, “Well done.” And if one of those squirrels or rabbits should turn up at some later date on the dinner table, the old man might drawl, “This was yours, wasn’t it, Archie?” and that was that.