Roosevelt's Beast

by Louis Bayard

  Christ.

  The bugle’s notes fell away, and he would have followed them back into sleep if the tent hadn’t shaken. His eyelids squeezed apart. In the granular light of dawn, a heavily muscled black man was crawling toward him, smiling as he came.

  “Bom dia.”

  It was Juan. Somehow managing to contain in one hand three aluminum cups and the handle of a steaming pot. He began to pour, and as the smell of the coffee came coiling through the damp air, Kermit felt reality settling in its hooks. He was here. The coffee was pouring. Juan was smiling his soft, abashed smile.

  “Obrigado,” Kermit muttered.

  “De nada.”

  The camarada crawled back out. For another minute or two, Kermit lay in his cot—already half sopping, for the morning breezes were blowing the rain straight in. With his fingers, he interrogated the sores on each of his legs: all the garden-variety bruises that, through infection, had acquired ideas above their station. Then he mapped the scorch marks of last night’s mosquitoes—a cluster on the elbow, another on the ankle, a necklace around the collarbone. There was one particularly prominent ridge above his right eyebrow, as if a whole regiment of mosquitoes had stayed through the night, feasting.

  I should have offered them brandy, he thought dazedly.

  “Is that coffee, Roosevelt?”

  As usual, Dr. Cherrie had woken without a fuss, his eyes—dry and calm—swinging open to the light, his hands lacing together under his head. He lay in the next cot, gazing up at the bulge of water in the tent’s roof.

  “It looks very like coffee,” said Kermit, handing Cherrie his cup.

  “Well, that’s something.”

  The two men were silent for a time, listening to the rain.

  “Good weather for ducks,” said Kermit.

  “And who knows what else?”

  This was not idle bravado. Cherrie was the in-house naturalist and was always on the lookout for new species to catalog. With a light groan now, he swung his legs toward the ground. “Shall we wake him?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Seems a shame,” said Cherrie, studying the humped snoring figure in the third cot. “He needs his sleep.”

  “We all do.”

  “But when I think how he used to be when we started. Every morning, up before dawn.”

  “I know.”

  “Used to wake up the bugler.”

  “It’s true.”

  Kermit knelt by the sleeping figure. Touched the forehead and felt the current of heat rising through his fingertips.

  “Still running high?” Cherrie asked.

  “A bit.”

  Kermit leaned in to the sleeping man’s ear. Made at first to whisper and then simply spoke.

  “Father.”

  Gasping, clutching his blanket, Colonel Roosevelt wrenched toward the sound. His white lips slackened. His naked, mole-like eyes twitched in the dimness.

  “It’s all right, Father. It’s Kermit.”

  Several seconds passed before the intelligence seemed to break through.

  “Of course you are,” said the old man. He raised himself onto his elbows. “You must … give me some time to … shake the cobwebs out.”

  “Reveille has sounded.”

  “Has it, now?”

  “Your coffee’s here.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.” With a coo of something like pleasure, he folded his hands around the cup. “Still hot. God bless you, Juan.”

  He took two short sips, then another. Then, as he studied his two companions, the first smile of the day crawled through the brush of his mustache.

  “Raining, is it? Well, never mind.”

  Waving away his son’s proffered hand, the Colonel tipped himself out of the cot and spilled toward the ground like a pile of luggage, wincing a bit when his left leg landed. He reached into the damp sock he had wrapped around the tent pole and pulled out his spectacles. Wiped them on the sleeve of his pajamas and then, with great and painstaking care, slid the glasses up the bridge of his nose, waiting for the world’s edges to rush in.

  “March,” he declared. “The fifteenth.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “Year of Our Lord nineteen hundred and fourteen.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Third Sunday in Lent.”

  “Yes.”

  “I officially declare it: As good a day as any!”

  He said the same thing, of course, every morning. And every morning Kermit silently composed the same reply. Another day in hell.

  He used to reproach himself for his irreverence. But now it had become a form of survival. And a sign, too, a welcome sign that some aspect of him still remained apart.

  The old man took a few more sips of coffee, waiting for the blossom of heat and acid. Then he raised his eyes toward the sky.

  “I like a bit of rain first thing. Cools things off.”

  “Certainly,” said Cherrie.

  “And cooler oarsmen are happier oarsmen, are they not? Therefore more productive. I shouldn’t be surprised if we made twenty-five kilometers by day’s end.”

  “Could be,” said Kermit.

  “Thirty!” said the old man, rising to it. “Mark my words!”

  Kermit and Cherrie made no reply. After all these weeks in the South American wilderness, they were able to indulge the Colonel so far and no further.

  “Here,” said Kermit, reaching under the old man’s cot. “Your spare drawers, Father. And you might as well use this handkerchief; it looks a bit fresher than the others.…”

  “I’m certainly capable of dressing myself. You needn’t—I’m not a—damn me, where have I put my specs?”

  “On your face.”

  “Ah!” He giggled. “So they are! Never mind, let’s be dressed and be off. Stiffen up the sinews, ha! Summon up the blood!”

  * * *

  THEY ATE IN A full downpour. It was almost a blessing that breakfast was so sparse. A handful of rice, a handful of beans. Biscuits hard as gneiss.

  To think—try as he might, Kermit couldn’t help it—to think how much food they had brought with them! Fresh ox meat and sliced bacon and sardines and chicken and pancake flour and potatoes and malted milk. An entire case just for spices and condiments. In the early days, if a curious native had happened to wander out of the forest with a request for olive zest or grapefruit marmalade, the members of the Roosevelt-Rondon Expedition would have been happy to oblige.

  But after they passed Tapirapuã, the midday meal was excised from their schedule. Breakfast and dinner shrank down to rations. “All this life,” Cherrie said. “And nothing to live on.”

  Even so experienced a hand as he had expected to find a horn of plenty waiting in the jungle. Fruit and nuts for every meal. Pigs and deer. Dolphins and otters and boatloads of fish. A groaning table, night after night. Instead, they had … moss and bromeliads and epiphytes and tree roots. Insects.

  And this strange lightness that followed them wherever they went. As though their bones were being hollowed into bamboo.

  Kermit peeled away the fringe of mold from his biscuit. Began to toss it away, then caught his hand in the act of throwing and shoveled the whole thing into his mouth. He chewed and gummed it down until it was just a dry paste, then let it slide down his throat and drop, plashing, into his stomach.

  Through the falling rain, he heard Colonel Rondon’s cry:

  “Iniciar as Ordens do Dia!”

  The Orders of the Day. No different, Kermit knew, from the Orders of the Day Before. Row until something stops you. (Something will.)

  Even as the camaradas rose from their Japanese-wrestler crouches and stood in respectful silence, Kermit yawned and turned toward the jungle. The morning fog was melting from below, and the dark base of the forest came blurring out of the vapor like a section of old oil painting bleeding through the new.

  “It’s time,” said Cherrie.

  Kermit nodded, and together the two men helped the camaradas drag the canoes toward
the water. Cursing, as they did every morning, the sheer crazy heft of the things, each weighing more than a ton, and first thing in the morning or last at night, it felt like two.

  It would have been easier to bear if the beasts were seaworthy, but they sank nearly to the waterline. They were impossible to steer. They leaked water. The seats were hard and rough and wet. The more Kermit reflected on these massive hollowed-out tree trunks, the more they seemed to epitomize the whole misbegotten adventure.

  The sand slipped beneath him, and as he struggled to keep his balance, the dugout crashed into him, touching off a prairie fire of pain that blazed up and down his shin. Biting down on his own cry, he soldiered on—and became, for the first time, aware of the two figures standing by the river’s edge.

  The Colonel and Colonel Rondon, gesticulating in the falling rain—their private conference made public by the Colonel’s high squeaking roar.

  “Plus vite! Plus vite! We must go plus vite!”

  Even if the Colonel’s voice hadn’t carried, his French would have. A bizarre non-Aryan sort of French, no tense or gender. But it was the one tongue he shared with Rondon, and when an expedition has two leaders, they must find common ground somewhere.

  The Colonel’s tone at once grew more civil but no less urgent. “Je m’incline, il faut dire, à votre connaissance supérieur, mais les observations. Peut-être ils prennent trop de temps?”

  “Ah, oui,” replied Rondon, more quietly but every bit as distinctly. “On doit examiner la question.…”

  We must consider the question. Which, as the Colonel well knew, was Rondon’s way of discarding the question. Rondon would no more dispense with his hourly sightings than with the daily ritual of hammering a painted hardwood signpost into the forest floor. He may have stood only five feet and three, but to his men—in his own mind—he was geological and eternal, and the main reason he and the Colonel remained cordial after all these weeks was simply this: The Colonel still considered himself Rondon’s guest.

  “Merci pour votre considération,” said the Colonel. He nodded pleasantly and squared his shoulders and made as if to walk away but stopped and lowered himself, by stages, toward the earth, where even now a felled section of couratari tree was rising to greet him.

  “Father?” called Kermit.

  The Colonel was already waving him away.

  “Not to worry! Doing a spot of surveying!”

  So he sat there. Sat for long minutes, studying the river. The river that was killing them.

  * * *

  THE RAIN HAD STOPPED by the time they got on the water, and as soon as the camaradas drove their oars in, the first shard of sunlight broke through the clouds. A small swell of laughter and applause rose up from the men—until Colonel Rondon frowned them into silence.

  As usual, Kermit took the head canoe. Right behind him, Colonel Rondon and Lieutenant Lyra. Then the two baggage balsas and, bringing up the rear, Colonel Roosevelt, Dr. Cherrie, and the expedition’s physician, Dr. Cajazeira.

  In the early-morning hours, the sun didn’t have the brassy glare of midday but a softer, silvering touch. It drove the chill from Kermit’s skin, steamed his clothes to something approaching dryness, and when he looked at the jungle front, the gloom and opacity seemed to boil off. He saw rolling clouds of leaves, and palm trees flinging out their plumes, and vines hooped like ship’s rigging from one mast to the next, and even a dome of lilac near the jungle’s crown. So rare to see any blossoms in this sheer, shadowless front, and yet there they were, stained-glass pebbles of light in a silent ocean of green.

  Maybe Father’s right, he thought. Maybe we’ll make thirty kilometers today.

  Normally he would never have dared such a hope, but the current was strong beneath them, and his oarsmen, João and Simplício, were rowing freely and sweetly. Trigueiro, Kermit’s yellow mongrel, was crouched alongside him in the front of the canoe. The river breeze was blowing the dog’s mouth open, and the saliva that dripped from its black gums registered as the perfect antidote to despair.

  A further blessing: Rondon stopped only twice that morning for sextant sightings. The work was quickly done—horizon captured in one glass, sun in the other, latitude and longitude jotted down in Rondon’s journal—and they were back in their boats, and the breeze came full behind him, and the river, for once, forbore to wind. Slowly, the forest drew back as if to consider them, and the land on either side erupted into bouldered hills and hissing green mountains.

  Kermit felt his eyes traveling up the battlement of cliffs and trees, resting at last on a high promontory—halfway to the sun, or so it appeared. Fastening his eyes there, he wondered—idly at first and then with a mounting intensity—if someone at this very moment was looking down, watching him pass. Watching the whole expedition. What a strange sight they must have been! A small band of bedraggled white men, outnumbered by both their porters and their trunks, hustling northward down a twisting ribbon of black water, with an air of deep intention. Looking for something, but what?

  Even if Kermit could have communed with that distant observer, how could he have begun to explain? They weren’t looking for anything or anyone in particular. They were merely attempting to see where this river would take them.

  On each side, the canyon walls continued to surge up, and for a minute or two Kermit had the impression that the river was decanting in response, that they were traveling down a chute, not a river, and it would speed them farther along than they could ever have imagined. Twenty-five kilometers, just as the Colonel had said. Thirty.

  He did then what he always did when hopeful. He pressed the packet of letters against his sternum. He closed his eyes and thought of Belle. “Not long,” he whispered.

  And then, from a hundred yards off, came the old roar.

  In later life, he would find it impossible to explain just how dismal that sound was. How it shrank the soul. It was only water, after all. Water rushing down a terrace of rocks. But to the men of the Roosevelt-Rondon Expedition, that sound was the death of all hope, because it meant rapids.

  Rapids that were, ninety times out of a hundred, too steep—too treacherous, too violent—for their unwieldy dugouts. Rapids that would force them to put down their paddles and haul all the canoes to shore.

  Then the real work would begin.

  Fourteen men would ply themselves against the jungle’s densest thickets, using their machetes to hack out a primitive road along the riverbank. They would corrugate it with a couple of hundred logs. They would twine rope around their waists. Then, with the aid of a block and tackle, they would portage every last one of those 2,500-pound canoes around the rapids and then winch them back down, inch by inch, to the water.

  In theory, it was an irritation, an obstacle. In practice, it was spine-cracking, muscle-rending, life-draining work, conducted under the probing stinger of every insect in the Amazonian jungle.

  The dangers were great. One misstep, and a man could crush a toe or a hand or tumble into the river—or disturb a coral snake from its slumbers. Beneath their feet, the makeshift paths wore down into ledges of sandstone that gouged wood from the canoes’ keels, and if the lesions grew deep enough, they would have to set the boats down and caulk the cracks and let them dry and then hoist them up once more. This was not a labor of minutes. It was a labor of hours—of hours upon hours. It could take them three days just to travel seven hundred fifty yards.

  And so this sound—the mere sound of rushing water—was more than Kermit could bear on this particular March morning. He closed his eyes. He waited for Colonel Rondon’s stentorian cry.

  “Barcos para a beira mar!”

  Boats to shore.

  Not even staying to see if his command was followed, the little autocrat had already leaped onto the first square of dry land, and he was striding down the shoreline, looking to see exactly how steep the rapids were and how far they stretched. But as far as Kermit was concerned, this was a mere formality. He knew what Rondon would conclude: The canoes
couldn’t be risked. The nightmare would begin again.

  From behind, Kermit could hear the Colonel calling after him.

  “Didn’t you hear? Come to shore.”

  He looked at João and Simplício. They had lifted their paddles from the water; they were just awaiting the word. As Kermit listened to the roar of the water and the roar of the Colonel, another sound rose up inside him. A pair of words.

  I … won’t.…

  He wouldn’t lose the rest of the day to portaging. He wouldn’t go to sleep tonight knowing they were no closer to their final destination. Knowing that Belle and the rest of the world were as far away as ever.

  With a violent twitch, he cast his eyes toward the fall line. He peered through the shroud of mist, seeking … a harbor … a counterargument—something to prove Rondon wrong.

  The seconds ticked away, the water began to slap and churn against the canoe’s keel, the camaradas shifted uneasily on their benches, and Kermit was on the very verge of giving up, when something hard and fixed and tangible rose from the mist. He blinked, refocused. Land. A tiny island, surging up from the teeming water. Splitting the river in half.

  The calculations sped through his brain. What if this island gave them a vantage point for riding the rapids? What if it actually diverted the falls to one side and left an easier passage on the other? Wasn’t it worth at least exploring?

  But he knew what Rondon would say. And he knew what his father would say. And he heard himself say:

  “Nós não vamos a beira mar.”

  We’re not going to shore.

  “Senhor?”

  Simplício was staring at him with a mask of bafflement, and in his brown eyes was an expression so thick and bovine and unyielding that it became in that instant a symbol of everything Kermit was contending against. With a flash of teeth, Kermit pointed to the island that was now rushing toward them. He shouted, “Lá! Vá lá!”

  The paddlers gave each other the briefest of looks. Kermit knew what they were thinking. The island was at the very brink of the falls. If they missed it, the whole canoe would go right over. But when Kermit repeated the order, they dropped their heads and dug in their oars and steered as straight a course as they could, and such was their skill that, within seconds, the boat was lodged on the island’s southernmost margin.