Roosevelt's Beast

by Louis Bayard

  “I am not so sure your friends will be able to find you.”

  She spoke without a trace of triumph. If anything, she was pitying him.

  “This man…” He jabbed his finger at the Colonel’s unconscious form. “He is a figure of great renown. The leader of a great nation. He has met kings—and … and…”

  Here was the trouble: Kermit had never had to apotheosize the old man before. The world had always done that.

  “He is a great warrior. He has won wars and fought injustice. He has … built canals.”

  “Canals,” she echoed. “What is he called?”

  But the name produced only a faint sadness.

  “I don’t know it,” she said.

  “Many people know it. They will pay large sums, great treasures for his return. Gold and silver.”

  “Oh, gold,” she said.

  How strange her Portuguese was. Stiff and brittle, as though every word were tottering on stilts.

  A fine mist of sweat had formed along Kermit’s temples.

  “Luz, listen to me. I think you are made of finer stuff than the men who took us. I think … I think there is great kindness in you.”

  “Do you have a wife?”

  For several seconds, he was incapable of answering.

  “I am engaged. To be married.”

  “You are marrying someone.”

  “Yes.”

  “What is her name?”

  “Her name is Belle.”

  Once more, his hand, without any prompting from him, flew to his chest. The packet of letters, still pressed against his sternum.

  May He keep you safe for me!… I love you, Kermit, I love you.

  In a flash, it was Belle standing in this dark enclosure. Belle’s naked shoulders, burning in the darkness. Belle’s breasts …

  He clenched his eyes shut.

  “I spoke something wrong,” said Luz.

  “No, it’s … Being a gentleman, I am not used to conversing—at length, I mean—with women in a … a state of undress.”

  “Undress.” She stared down at herself, then crooked an arm loosely across her breasts. “Are you engaged to anyone else, Senhor Kermit?”

  “No one else.”

  “Ah.”

  She turned away. In the flickering light, he could make out the braid of her spinal cord.

  “You’re not one of them,” he said.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I believe you must have a home somewhere else. Somewhere you’d like to return to. We might find it for you, we might take you back there.”

  She said nothing.

  “The men in our party,” he went on. “Our friends, they come from all over. From Brazil, from America.”

  “America.”

  The lightest glimmer to her voice.

  “Would you like to go there?” he asked. “We can arrange that. We can arrange anything. All we ask is that you lead us back to the river. And then we will all be free, do you see? In America, everyone is free.”

  “Free,” she echoed. With such a dying fall that it laid waste to his hope.

  All this time he had wasted on rhetoric, on persuasion. When what was truly needed—he could hear the Colonel barking it—was action. They weren’t bound, for God’s sake; they weren’t manacled. They could easily overpower this young woman. They could leave whenever they wished.

  But already he grasped the limits of this freedom. For even if he managed to drag the old man to his feet and get him walking again on that rummy leg, how would they find their way back—in the very blackest night? They were every bit as helpless as if they had been bound.

  “We are forbearing men,” he heard himself say. “We wish ill on no one. We came here only to map a river.”

  “Map?”

  “Yes, to … to make a map. Latitude and longitude.”

  She gazed at him in mild astonishment. “Why ever should you do that?”

  “So that others might know. So that…”

  So that they might come.

  The first note of protest crept into her voice. “What if we don’t wish to be known?”

  “You can only remain hidden for so long. Civilization will find you.”

  “Oh,” she said, shrugging. “Civilization.”

  His head was an agony, his eyes like stones. But he forced himself to move in slow, ever-broadening circles.

  “Very well, Senhorita. Since you refuse to be our guide, I would ask you to be our messenger. Tell the men who brought us here that we wish to speak with them.”

  “They will,” she answered. “They will speak with you.”

  His hand brushed against more thatching. They were indoors.

  “How many are there?” he asked, slowly sketching out the space.

  “Oh, a few, I suppose.”

  His hand found a corner. Then a new wall, sprouting at a loose angle to the last.

  It’s a hut of some kind. Which means there must be a way out. A door, an opening.

  He kept moving, and in the very next second the wall fell away, and his hand met emptiness. He felt a lick of steam on his face. Heard a rustling.

  “Senhor Kermit?” called Luz.

  “Yes?”

  “They are ready for you.”

  Given a few more minutes, he might have seen them for himself. But only now were his dark-adapting eyes able to pick out those other eyes, staring out from the blackness.

  They’ve been there the whole time, he thought. Waiting.

  They moved quickly, and with such a grace and common purpose that he had no thought of resistance. Even as their hands were fastening around him, he heard Luz murmur:

  “You must not be afraid.”

  6

  In the splashes of firelight, he saw them fully.

  Twelve men, all told. No taller than his clavicle, but mighty in sum—lean and smooth and sinewy, with armlets and hawk-feather headdresses and swaths of bark armor around their waists and longbows that stood six feet high, and in each bow a fire-hardened bamboo arrow. Kermit had only to recall Trigueiro’s final moments to grasp how much force it must have taken to draw back that rigid wooden frame and send the shaft flying.

  One of the men now stepped forward—set slightly apart from his kinsmen by his air of barely contained ferocity and by the scar that took the place of his right eyebrow. Grunting softly, he jabbed the point of his bow into the ground. From the darkness beyond the circle came a woman, plumper and rounder than Luz, the beads around her wrists clicking as she set a bowl by Kermit’s foot. Food fumes rose up in an unbroken stream.

  “You are to eat,” murmured Luz.

  “I will not.”

  A gentleman never obliges his captors. That’s what the first voice said. And the second voice said: Don’t be an idiot.

  It was the second voice that made his eyes sting and his stomach contract. He dropped to one knee. Gazed down at those grayish-brown morsels, still simmering from the fire.

  It will make you stronger. You need your strength.

  The smell had crawled inside him now.

  With a groan, he snatched up the bowl.

  He sawed the food into two portions. Scooped up his share and ate it right out of his cupped hands. And when his hands were empty, he sat back on his haunches (grimacing at the abscess on his left buttock) and began to lick his fingers. Sucked each one clean and then swept his forearm across his mouth and licked the forearm.

  He looked down at that bowl, with its uneaten share.

  He knew what Father would say. Oh, he knew well. The theft of food comes next to murder as a crime and should by rights be punished as such.

  Strange how vivid the old man’s voice sounded in his ears. Kermit could hear it even now, ringing the years away.…

  * * *

  “DID YOU EAT THE rest of the gooseberries, Kermit?”

  “No, Father.”

  “We agreed to leave them for Ted, didn’t we?”

  “I know.”

 
“Are you quite sure you didn’t take them?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Because if you did—well, now, to take something that wasn’t yours from your own flesh and blood, that’s not in the gentleman’s code, is it, Kermit?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You like to go exploring, don’t you, Kermit?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you know that nearly the worst crime an explorer can commit against his fellow explorers is to take their food from them. Why, it’s very nearly as bad as murder.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “So I will ask you once again, and if you don’t tell me the truth like a little gentleman, I believe I will be the saddest man on the face of this earth.”

  It was the worst threat he could have uttered. Making his father sad would have been like putting out the sun.

  “I’m sorry.… I’m sorry.…”

  * * *

  “I’M SORRY,” HE WHISPERED, as that other voice sang out from inside.

  He’ll never know it’s gone. Who would tell him?

  Plunging his hands into the earth, Kermit dragged up strands of mud and smeared them across his lips. But the taste, the taste of that meat stayed. And, once more, his gaze swerved back to that plain wooden bowl.…

  In the end, he was stopped by the scent.

  A larger scent. Ripe and delirious. He raised his face to it and saw, framed between two of the warriors, a great fire, hissing sparks.

  There, at the fire’s edge, flickering in and out of the light, a single human hand.

  He threw up his dinner as quickly as he’d eaten it. Not a quiet disgorgement but a chain of convulsions, his body protesting the whole way: No. No. He had never been so at war with himself.

  When he was done—his stomach even emptier inside him, his shirt rimed with vomit—they took hold of him once more. They dragged him away from the fire, and they laid him on the damp ground.

  Still his stomach kept convulsing, so violently that his whole body began to buck. It was a measure of his disorientation that, when they began to put their fingers to him, applying the viscous smear to his face and chest and arms, he assumed they were curing him.

  Sure enough, the bucking began to subside, and a calmness took hold of him. With each passing second, he felt less tethered to himself.

  He gazed at his fingers. They were no longer his fingers. His legs weren’t his legs. Even his head—bearer of all his terrors—grew lighter, and heavier, too. Try as he might, he couldn’t lift it.

  “Be brave,” he heard Luz call. “Be brave, Senhor Kermit.…”

  Move, he commanded himself.

  But nothing obeyed. Only his eyes; only these were fully awake, registering the exact moment when they dragged out the Colonel and applied the same white unction to his face and neck and arms.

  “Stop,” whispered Kermit. “You…”

  You can’t.

  Knowing how absurd it was as he thought it. They could. They were. It seemed to him that he could already see the paralysis stealing into his father’s body, layer by layer.

  The villagers worked in silence, and it was only when their project was done that they gave themselves over to sound. The very strangest of symphonies: a cacophony of animal sounds. Note-for-note imitations of macaws and jacus. Tapirs and capuchins and screamer storks. And spider monkeys, yes. All indistinguishable from the real thing. The sounds shrilled and thickened as the twelve warriors slowly converged on their two captives.

  So this is how it will be, thought Kermit.

  How many times had he died in his own fancy, but it had always been on a battlefield, surrounded by sighs and tears. Witnesses. There would be none of that here. Only these sounds, jangling and soaring.

  When the sounds had reached their farthest extremity, they began unexpectedly to fall away. Voice by voice.

  And when the last sound had died out, Kermit’s eyes trembled open. Closed again. Opened again. The villagers were gone. He and Father were alive.

  * * *

  FOR SOME TIME HE lay there, numbed and prone, on the knotted ground, listening to the shallow timbre of his breath. The forest clattered with crickets. Beetles and millipedes rustled through the leaf rot.

  He thought of Belle.

  Belle, as she had described herself in her last letter. Sitting by her window, looking westward to the sea …

  … and out across the world to you—and oh Kermit I want you so tonight—You don’t know yet that I love you and won’t for many many long days, and after that there will be more endless days and nights and weeks before I can have even one word from you Kermit—my Kermit—and you love me! The wonder of it all …

  “Belle…”

  And even the name wouldn’t come out. Just a dry croak. He closed his eyes and drifted into a half sleep. And then woke with a start.

  It was raining.

  Hard straight lines, catching and pooling in the leaves and then charging for earth. For several minutes altogether, he could see nothing else. No sky, no trees. Just rain. Down and down it came, pummeling his half-dead skin, and when at last it was finished, he lay there, stunned and still, like chiseled marble.

  His nerves were beginning to reawaken. From somewhere near his shoulder blade, he felt a faint liquid pressure. It scaled the column of his neck and pushed through the tangle of his beard and all the way to the outcropping of his nose.

  He knew it, finally, by its mass. A river of army ants.

  Hundreds of them in a blind, chattering phalanx, searching for prey, never guessing what a torture their passage was to him. Every foot, every antenna, every tarsal hook. They swarmed over him, colonized him pore by pore, and, paralyzed as he was, he could lift neither finger nor foot to stop them. On and on they came, and when the last ant had abandoned the last square of him, his throat pushed out a long gasp.

  There was no time for relief, for new sounds were rolling out of the underbrush. One, in particular, that seemed to beat a space of silence around it. Kermit had only to hear it, and he was once more exhorting himself.

  Move. Move.

  But the only thing he could move was his head—and only an inch or two. Just enough to angle toward the sound and to find, staring out from the bushes, a pair of amber eyes, blinking.

  He knew these eyes.

  Just three months ago, he and the Colonel had been invited to Las Palmeiras, Senhor de Barras’s ranch on the Rio Taquari. A special treat was in store for them. They were to be given the chance to hunt for jaguar, king of South American game. The old man was no longer so avid a hunter as he used to be, but, being a good guest, he announced himself agreeable. It took them a long day of slogging through the marshes on shabby little horses before they came on fresh tracks at the edge of the jungle. From there, it was short work. The Colonel shot a female jaguar perched among the forked limbs of a taruman tree; Kermit, for his part, shot a male out of a fig tree. Since then, he had given the two animals no more than a second of thought.

  Until tonight.

  For now the wheel—the “Wheel of Things,” a Buddhist might have said—had spun the other direction, and a jaguar, perhaps some near relation of the dead cats on the Taquari, was coming for them. Wishing very much to return the favor.

  Oh, it was true, jaguars rarely attacked humans. But how many humans were as helpless as Kermit and Theodore Roosevelt in this exact moment? The pickings could not have been much easier.

  Kermit watched as the gem eyes advanced by inches. From behind him, he heard a strange straggling wheeze. It was the Colonel. Making a sound that could scarcely be decoded as a word.

  “Heee…”

  The sound tapered away but came back even stronger.

  “He … shall … make no … meal of us.…”

  “No,” whispered Kermit.

  And added to himself: He’ll make a meal of just one of us.

  With a terrifying swiftness, the prayer rose up.

  Take Father.

  * * *

 
AFTERWARD, KERMIT WOULD BE unable to find the demarcation line between the jaguar’s approach—the presentiment, no, the certainty of doom—and what followed. Indeed, it was hard even to speak of something following, for that implied a progression from one thing to the next, and nothing about what happened was logical or sequential. It might have played out across two perpendicular axes, intersecting for no more than a few seconds.

  All he could say finally was that, as he and the Colonel lay helpless in the night, something shifted. Everything shifted.

  The stars sprang back, the trees shook, the ground bent. Kermit’s own breath fled from him at sharp angles. In the next instant, the jaguar was changed to a creature of suffering.

  “Rrrowwww-ohhhh…”

  Never had Kermit heard an animal attain such a refinement of agony and subjection. The wretched cat howled, howled, as if every last one of the world’s torments had been concentrated into the purest possible solution and dropped into each pore. The jungle snatched the sound and doubled it, so that you might have thought there were two jaguars, or ten, or twenty, all trying to outdo one another for martyrdom.

  It was a terrible sound, so terrible that Kermit was on the verge of screaming back, when the cry began unexpectedly to subside. First into paroxysms, then shudders, then sighs, then a long sibilant rattle.

  But as terrible as the cry had been, the quiet that followed was worse. Still worse was the low and steady lapping that now filled their ears. An oddly gentle sound, like a kitten slurping up milk. The jaguar’s conqueror was now reaping its reward—drinking its fill.

  And preparing to do the same to us, thought Kermit.

  His numbed lips trembled into speech. “Our Father … who art in heaven…”

  In the darkness, he heard his father’s counterburden. No prayer at all but a snatch of old verse.

  “Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole…”

  Still the lapping went on—unquenchable, implacable—reverberating in the air around them, caressing their necks, their flanks and groins.

  “I thank whatever gods may be,” croaked the Colonel. “For my unconquerable soul.”

  This time, Kermit’s eyes were wide open. He was magically curious. He longed to look the thing in the eye.

  But there was nothing to see. Only the sensation of absence—something lately there, its echo still lingering in every atom of air and soil. In Kermit’s own grunts.