Roosevelt's Beast

by Louis Bayard

  Now the creature was free to focus on its prey. With horror, Kermit noted the mottled pink of his father’s face … heard the breath leaching out in broken measures.…

  “No,” Kermit growled. “You won’t.”

  His rifle was already raised, his cheek was pressed against the stock, his finger was curled around the trigger.

  Steady. Steady.

  The bullet was so loud, it was as if it gutted the sky clean through. The creature screeched, grabbed its side, then tumbled over, rolling two or three times in the dirt before falling still.

  For several seconds the old man lay there. Then, with a barbed groan, he levered himself up, squinting in the naked sunlight. “Have you … have you seen my—”

  My glasses, he was going to say. Only there was no time to finish, because the creature was erect once more—alive, yes—and flying straight in Kermit’s direction.

  In his short life, Kermit had seen cheetahs, lions, antelopes, wildebeest. Never, never, never had he seen a creature—a wounded creature at that—move with such velocity. He had no time to reload, no time even to breathe or brace, so the collision, when it came, seemed to vibrate all the way down to his individual cells. When consciousness returned, he was flat on the ground, the creature was on top of him, pinning him to earth, rendering him just as helpless as the Colonel had been. His brain was clouded with pain. He could feel the creature’s saliva sting like acid against his face.

  Well, there it is, he thought. Get it done with.

  It was no different from how he’d felt in that river, the water speeding him along, all thought of rescue abandoned. He was resigned. Ready. But then he opened his eyes and found himself staring up into a pair of eyes so layered with anguish and fear that, in what he assumed to be his final moments, Kermit was visited with the curious desire to comfort his killer.

  There, there. It’s all right.…

  For some indeterminate length, they stared at each other. Then the world exploded around them.

  It was a single shot, loud as a cannon in Kermit’s ear. The creature’s eyes sheeted over. Its frame rippled with spasms as it loosened its grip and tipped its head back. There was one last shot, and the weight fell away, and with a choked cry Kermit rolled himself up, already groping for his gun. In the clearing stood his father, pale and grim, the smoke curling from his rifle. Next to him, Luz and Thiago. At their feet, the still figure of the creature, its eyes popped open.

  “God have mercy,” the old man muttered.

  Luz knelt down by the creature and peered into its eyes. “Morto,” she whispered.

  “No,” said Kermit. “Don’t—”

  In the very next second, every orifice in its face sprang open, and from out of its midsection a great plume spewed, catching Luz squarely in the face, blinding her and throwing her on her back.

  With one final spasm of energy, the creature flung itself at her. As they rolled across the ground in a hideous embrace, the cry that issued from the creature’s throat was more terrible than anything Kermit had ever heard. Rage and sorrow and terror and all the darkest emotions distilled into a wailing shriek that scattered every last parrot from the trees and left Kermit and the Colonel too transfixed even to lift their rifles. It was Thiago who kept his eye clear. Thiago who strode silently forward and plunged his bamboo dagger into the creature’s back. Drove it in again and again and again until, with a gurgle and a gush, the beast collapsed in a sodden jumble of limbs. Even then Thiago continued to plunge the dagger, like an axman felling a tree, each stroke a declaration of will—until Kermit caught the boy’s arm in mid-strike.

  “Thiago…”

  The boy’s face was clouded like a night sky. His knuckles shone white and veined around the bamboo shaft.

  “Mamãe,” he said.

  Luz, virtually unrecognizable in her raiment of blood, staggered to her feet and drew him toward her.

  “Meu bebê,” she cooed, softly teasing the dagger from his fingers. “Meu grande homem.”

  The Colonel sank to his knees and lowered one ear to the creature’s mouth—or at least the part of its head that most resembled a mouth. For upward of a minute, he knelt there, unmoving, listening for a breath. Then, with a pair of light snaps, he declared:

  “Now it’s morto.”

  14

  “Why, Kermit,” said the old man. “You’re shivering.”

  Of course I’m shivering, Kermit wanted to say. It’s freakishly cold. He was actually following the trajectory of the breath from his mouth, expecting it to freeze in the air above him. But when he looked around at the others, he realized he was the only one trembling. Even Thiago was as still as a barber.

  “And how is our brave lad?” asked the Colonel, lowering himself to the ground until he was looking directly into the boy’s face. “All well?” he asked.

  Thiago, without even quite knowing what was being asked of him, nodded.

  “Little titan,” said the Colonel, jabbing him lightly on the jaw. “Let us speak not of Gunga Din, let us speak of Horatius at the bridge, yes! I do not traffic in hyperbole. And the doughty Miss Luz!” He dragged a handkerchief from his pocket. “The Fearless, the Indomitable. I hereby proffer you a means of cleaning your person. Para lavar, my dear Luz.”

  She, too, nodded her thanks and began to wipe her face. The blood came off in thick daubs, like grease from a griddle.

  “Obrigada,” she said.

  The sun had shut itself behind a cloud, and in the melt of afternoon, the clearing seemed to be liquefying and evaporating around them. From every precinct of the jungle, insects swarmed forth, gossiping over their newest feast.

  And yet how strangely that feast now loomed. No matter what angle Kermit came at the carcass from, no matter how much he pored over it, he couldn’t put his finger on the part that didn’t work. Then he heard Thiago murmur:

  “Pequeno.”

  That was it exactly. Small. Ludicrously small. As though some prankster had crept up behind them, stolen away the Beast, and substituted this … tiny changeling, a fraction of the original’s size.

  “Why, it’s no more than three feet,” whispered Kermit, kneeling by the creature. “Head to toe.”

  “Most curious,” agreed the old man.

  “More than curious, Father, we were—we were helpless before this thing. Utterly captive. Are we to believe this … this little thing created all this havoc?”

  Kermit sat back on his haunches, squeezed his lids down to half-mast. “Luz,” he said. “Give me the handkerchief.”

  Feeling a bit like a sculptor, he began to gouge away the layers of mud and blood from the creature’s head. With each stroke, more and more features revealed themselves: a short snout; a scraggly beard; a pair of wide-set nostrils; two rows of humanoid teeth.

  It was Luz, peering over Kermit’s shoulder, who delivered the first verdict.

  “Bugio.”

  “What’s that she said?”

  “A howler monkey, Father.”

  “Howler? Are you certain?”

  It was the eyes that gave it away finally. Solemn, dignified, ineffably wounded. It was a look no other monkey had.

  “I don’t understand,” said the old man. “I’ve heard a howler before.”

  All these weeks in the jungle had made the Roosevelt-Rondon Expedition well acquainted with the cry. That shriek, fierce and guttural, penetrated for miles. Unmistakable, yes, and nothing like the unholy noise that still rang in Kermit’s ears.

  “Well,” said the Colonel with an abbreviated sigh. “At least we know why it didn’t leave tracks. Howlers are strictly arboreal, aren’t they? It’s why we’ve never been able to kill us any.”

  “They’re also vegetarian.”

  “What’s that?”

  “They eat leaves and berries, Father. Just like gorillas.”

  “Ah, yes.” The old man pinched his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Apparently this howler begs to differ.”

  Once more, Kermit studied the cr
eature’s eyes, trying to remember how it had looked in its final moments, but the image was already blurring.

  “There must be a scientific explanation,” said the Colonel. “It might have acquired some pathogen or disease. Hydrophobia, perhaps. I’ve seen rabid dogs become quite extraordinarily aggressive.”

  “Have you seen a dog that could take down a jaguar? Devour it in minutes? Devour a full-grown man?”

  “Well, not yet I haven’t. Confound it, though, Kermit, this is a new world, as you said. A new species, for all we know. I daresay our friends at the Natural History Museum would—hello, what’s this?”

  Out of nowhere, it seemed, a stripe of blood had trickled down the old man’s left eyeglass, bisecting his range of vision.

  “Gad,” he said. “These head wounds have a way of bleeding, don’t they?”

  “Father.”

  “Never mind, Kermit, it’s just a cut. Nothing to get womanish about.”

  “No, it’s…”

  A crater. There was no better word for it. A hole the size of a silver dollar had been carved from the old man’s forehead—driven, as if by an auger, through the skin all the way to the subcutaneous tissue. Very nearly to the bone. Luz was mopping the wound, but the blood kept flowing, so she rustled up some leaves from the forest floor—mahogany and buriti and spiny fern—and, with quick fingers, tore them and ground them into a poultice, which she glued together with her own spit and plastered over the wound. The work of no more than a minute, and still the blood came streaming forth.

  “Não se mova,” she snapped.

  “Luz has instructed you not to move, Father.”

  “Oh, fine. I won’t even breathe, how’s that? You know, it’s the queerest thing, Kermit, I don’t remember the creature even touching me. Ugh. Another minute or two, I should have been just like that jaguar. Well, that’s all right, if all we come away with is a few scratches, we must consider ourselves damned lucky.”

  Kermit surveyed their party: the Colonel with his seeping plaster; Luz with her raiment of blood; the ugly violet bruise just above Thiago’s left eye. If any of them had been lucky, it was Kermit himself. No contusions. Nothing twisted, broken. Why, then, of all of them, was he the dullest in spirit?

  He watched Luz bring out more Brazil nuts, saw Thiago fashion a ewer of couratari leaves and ferry over drafts of water from a nearby creek. He listened to the reams of words the Colonel cast forth between each swallow, watched the bright gnash of his teeth. Yes, Kermit remembered. This is how it’s supposed to be. After a kill.

  In just a few minutes, they would be returning in triumph to the Cinta Larga. They would be hailed as heroes. They would be escorted back to the expedition, brimming with tales of their latest adventure. Wouldn’t their comrades be amazed? Wouldn’t Father’s readers at Scribner’s gasp and clutch their cultured pearls when they heard of the Beast with No Tracks?

  But none of that mattered so much as this. The expedition would travel on, and Kermit would reach the end of that accursed river, and, come June, he would be a married man. Married to the grandest girl in the world.

  Why couldn’t he relish such a prospect?

  * * *

  “WHY ARE YOU SUCH a gloomy Gus?”

  On any other night, if Kermit were to sit in the front seat of his father’s Haynes-Apperson Model 19, he might have been left alone for upward of two hours to smoke his cigarettes or recite Villon poems from memory or listen to the crickets and the ovenbirds. But tonight was different. Tonight Belle Willard, with the tenacity of a coonhound, had sniffed him out in his burrow, and she was now giving him the full blaze of her attention.

  “You were quite right to run off,” she was saying. “Squeak, piggy, squeak is a childish sort of game. Even for a summer evening.”

  “It wasn’t the game. And I’m not being gloomy, not on purpose. I just like to get away every so often.”

  “And now I’ve gone and ruined it.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Are you quite sure? Would you care awfully if I joined you?”

  He looked at her. “In the car, you mean?”

  “I’ve never sat in a Haynes before. Only Packards.”

  “But I’m not…”

  She was already walking around to the other side, her oyster dress flashing like scales in the moonlight.

  “Do you need help?” he called.

  “With what?”

  “Climbing in.”

  “Of course not.”

  There was a rush of silk, a cloud of lavender perfume, and suddenly she was there, only a few feet away, in the darkened interior. It occurred to him how close to scandalous it was: a young man and a young woman sitting in a car together. On a night such as this. There could only be one reason.…

  But that’s not the reason. I didn’t even ask her.

  “Shall I leave the door open?” she asked. “Cooler that way.”

  “Certainly.”

  The silence wove around them.

  “It’s quite all right,” she said. “We don’t need to talk at all.”

  “No.”

  “What I mean is, you don’t need to talk. I can do all the talking for both of us. Unless it’s disagreeable.”

  He shook his head, softly gripped the steering wheel. “I’m sorry to be such a trial,” he said.

  “Not at all, Mr. Roosevelt. You merely strike me as … ohh, one of those brooding, sensitive sorts of souls. All hidden depths.”

  “Too well hidden, I think.”

  “Ah! You have graduated from taciturn to inscrutable.”

  To his own amazement, he was laughing. He could actually feel his breath on his hands.

  “I’m so very afraid of being a bore,” he confessed. “To you in particular.”

  “If I were bored, Mr. Roosevelt, you would be the first to know.”

  He was silent again, but only for a moment.

  “You talk about depths, Miss Willard, but the question I ask sometimes is: What if there aren’t any depths?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t follow you.”

  “Inside us, I mean. What if there aren’t any depths at all? Just a great drop? Just nothing at all.…”

  He couldn’t see her face in the dark. He could only sense the tiny recoil in her willowy figure. But before he could apologize, she was rallying.

  “In that case, Mr. Roosevelt, we shall drop together.”

  * * *

  LOOKING BACK, IT WAS clear this was no grand affirmation on her part but an extension of her sociability. It was clear, too, that this was when he had begun to love her. And what better sign of his love than this? That when his thoughts should be tending toward the Beast, they kept sliding toward her. To that oilskin packet of letters pressed against his chest. Line by line, committed to memory as surely as Villon.

  I don’t know how, or why you should love me—perhaps because I too have prayed,—& been unhappy—and now you love me and my heart is very full—What have I done that God should choose me out of all the world for you to love—but as He has done this, so perhaps He will make me a little worthy of your love.

  He closed his eyes and imagined her, as he so often did, on their wedding night. Prying her like a pearl from the shell of her gown. Tracing the long white stem of her neck … past the clavicle, the sternum … that first inkling of cleft …

  Only today the fantasy didn’t play out as usual. The trail darkened as he descended it, and the breast that peeped from behind the dress’s folds was not Belle’s—and the lips, parting to drink his, those weren’t Belle’s, either.…

  “I hope it’s tasty,” said the Colonel.

  “Sorry?”

  “The Beast, I mean. As soon as we’ve brought him back to the village, I say we throw him on the fire. I reserve for myself first crack at the shanks.”

  “And what of our duty to the expedition’s sponsors?” Kermit permitted himself a smile. “To science?”

  “Oh, science is all well and good, but it won’t fill a man�
��s tum-tum, will it?”

  The Colonel pressed his hand against his belly and shouted with laughter. Like a virus, the laughter was carried from Luz to Thiago. For a time, they seemed actually to be lobbing it back and forth, seeing which of them could toss it higher.

  “Dear me,” said the Colonel, giving his eyes a wipe. “This must be the jolliest hunting party I have ever been part of. Wouldn’t you agree, Kermit?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Well, enough levity. To quote the walrus, the time has come. We must put our heads together and determine how best to convey our Beastie back.”

  Of course, thought Kermit. They couldn’t just leave the thing here. The chief, the entire village, would expect tangible proof of their deliverance. And with Thiago busy guiding them back and the Colonel barely able to walk, the job would have to fall to Kermit and Luz.

  The chief problem was finding some comfortable arrangement for sharing the burden. Though they trussed the monkey’s arms and legs with lianas and strapped it to a branch, the difference in stature between the two bearers caused the weight to shift back and forth, knocking each of them off balance. At last, in a fit of pique, Kermit slung the creature around his neck—like a sweater on a warm day—shuddering at the touch of its clotted fur.

  “Let’s be off,” he muttered.

  “Are you quite sure, Kermit? It’s not too heavy?”

  “I shall live.”

  He was twenty feet down the trail before his father called after him:

  “That’s quite a hair shirt!”

  They took a more direct route back to the village, but it was even barer of comfort. Dead leaves, uprooted trees, broken branches, mummified husks. The wreckage grew higher and higher—rubbish and lumber twining with dried foliage and dead creepers. The only intrusion of color was a morpho butterfly, startled from an uprooted tree, gone like a memory.

  Welcome to paradise.

  But, ahead of him, young Thiago beat his usual path through the brush and, whenever the mood seized him, sang out, “Deen! Deen! Deen!” And Luz answered with her low, throaty chuckle, and the Colonel cried, “Ladies and gentlemen! Thiago the Magnificent! Thiago the Trailblazer!” And their laughter swelled and ebbed and mysteriously swelled again—until the Colonel gave out a sharp cry and dropped straight to the forest floor.