Roosevelt's Beast

by Louis Bayard

  “Moon,” he echoed, tipping himself out of his hammock to a standing position. “Moon.”

  “Please—”

  “They mean to keep us here another day.”

  “Senhor—”

  “This is an outrage. This is an infamy.”

  “When Bokra is in the pit, the village will be free of the Beast, and you will be free to go. They swear this.”

  “As they swore before. And to think you—you yourself!—told me these were men of honor. I tell you they are most emphatically not. They are the opposite of honorable. They are liars! Cowards!”

  The old man looked up with a rubbery face. “What’s the trouble?”

  “Senhor, you must understand how these things go. Some of the men, they think you should not leave at all. They say—they say you did not kill the Beast, as you promised.”

  Kermit grimaced. It was an argument he himself had been making not half an hour ago.

  “Were they there?” he cried. “Did they see?”

  “Others say that you did kill the Beast, that you have a special gift, and for that reason you must stay to finish your work. This … this arrangement, Senhor, it is—what is the—compromisso. It is the thing that makes both sides happy.”

  “Happy.”

  Kermit crooked his arm over his head. In a voice neither hot nor cold, he said:

  “We will never leave here.”

  “You will.” Luz took his hand in hers. “You will be free, Senhor. And Thiago, too.”

  “Thiago?” The Colonel staggered to his feet. “Some kind soul should really explain to me what’s transpired.”

  But upon hearing the news, the old man’s answer was a single shrugged shoulder.

  “So they want us to bury that poor wretch? No great hardship.”

  “But, Father, it’s another day lost. Worse, it’s a … a violation of principle—”

  “Oh, don’t let’s inflate it out of all proportion. It’s a silly little grave.”

  Kermit threw up his arm, slumped back into his hammock. “Closer to a pit,” he muttered. “If you must know.”

  “Pit, grave. No point quibbling. We’re just the men to take it on.”

  “Take it on?”

  “Think of it, Kermit! How many times do men of … of our degree of civilization have the chance to inculcate Western knowledge, yes, and values in savage minds? And what better means of effecting this goal than through an engineering project? Modest in scale, I grant you, but far-reaching in import.”

  “Father, we don’t have to dig the—”

  “Now, listen to me, Kermit, I’ll need you to translate, because I have exact notions of how the thing shall go. It must be done by the book or it’s not worth doing at all. I don’t mind telling you, when Goethals and I were building the canal, we used to go at it something fierce. No detail too small: the number of steam shovels, the design of the flatcars. We’d chew it over for days on end.…”

  Indeed, half an hour alone was spent transmitting the old man’s specifications, which began in concept as a cube, ten by ten by ten, and became, through spasms of modification, a cylinder: ten feet in diameter and as deep as the natives could make it.

  They chose a desolate, shaded spot just off the trash yard. The rain had left the ground as spongy and malleable as it would ever be, and as the Cinta Larga men bore down, scooping up bowlfuls of mud and flinging them over their shoulders, the village children made a show of throwing each clod back—until the chief himself, glowering like a bull, chased them away.

  Lacking a sun helmet, the Colonel had wrapped a buriti palm leaf around his head and fastened it under his chin with a twig. Resting his hand on Thiago’s shoulder, he began to circle the ever-widening pit, raining down encouragement as he passed.

  “There’s a brute for you! Give that root a nice hack, will you? Put your back into it, now!”

  Events had somehow transformed the Colonel’s fever into missionary zeal, and something of that mission must have vaulted the language barrier, for each digger would from time to time lift his head and stare in wonder at that hobbling, sun-dazzled figure before returning to his labors.

  Certainly the old man would have been a more pleasing sight than Bokra’s bent little figure, lying just outside their perimeter. Or Bokra’s head, severed with no great delicacy, staring up at the bluing sky.

  Before an hour passed, the pit had attained a depth of two feet. The achievement was inspirational enough that Kermit, who had until then been a spectator, grabbed the nearest implement—a sharpened length of bone—and joined in.

  “That’s my boy!” shouted the Colonel.

  It was hard work. More than once Kermit found reason to curse the thin, famished Amazonian earth. But as he gouged through the humus, he found surprising reserves of color—ochers and tawny yellows—and shooting through the beds of clay were the white spindly threads of roots, gathering in capillary-like networks.

  The sun hammered down. Mosquitoes attacked without mercy, and wasps danced across their eye sockets, up their noses. Yet each time Kermit brushed one of the bees away, he felt a lift in spirit, and as the sweat congealed and sickened against his skin and his muscles twanged and throbbed, he came to the gradual conclusion that he was, if not precisely happy, at ease.

  Work had always been his best escape from himself. He remembered the day he had rushed to see Belle only an hour after grooming Wyoming. Some of the horse’s lather had clung to his skin, and his hair was still sweaty at his temples, and Belle, striving to find some tone between censure and indifference, had said:

  “Mother believes no man should ever sit down to dinner with dirt under his nails.”

  He had felt—hadn’t he?—the tiniest contraction of his heart. A passing thing, forgotten a minute later, but looking back he could see it as the first breath of estrangement. Some echo of it carried down to the present, for his hand, rather than dancing to the packet of her letters, remained still. For some minutes he studied it, fascinated by its recalcitrance.

  “Ha!” said the Colonel. “Taking a break, eh? I don’t blame you one bit. Beastly hot. But look how far we’ve come!”

  The pit was now chest-deep, wide enough for a giant, and, at the same time, delicately sloped according to the old man’s specifications. In celebration, the village children came sallying out with bowls of water, one for each digger. One for the Colonel, too, but he took only a sip before passing it around.

  “They may not be an excavating race,” he said, mopping his face with the palm leaf, “but they do set themselves against it, don’t they? Oh, but I wish I had some of my buffalo soldiers! A few days, they’d have the whole jungle dug up. Don’t think some folks wouldn’t thank us.”

  The old man’s teeth shone like fire. A fine stream of saliva trickled down his chin.

  “I’ll be right back,” said Kermit.

  He went to his hut, intending to grab an hour or two of sleep before the interral of Bokra. But in the late-afternoon light, his hammock looked peculiarly uninhabitable. With a growl, he snatched up his rifle.

  And just what exactly are you going to shoot?

  He left the hut and, with the Winchester pressed to his flank, made a slow circuit of the village. Not a soul looked his way. White men and their thunder sticks had become, in the span of two days, part of the surrounding landscape. Without quite meaning to, Kermit drifted back to the swimming hole. He was alone now—except for a young mother who sat on the stream bottom, bathing her baby with water from a calabash shell.

  “Senhor,” said Luz.

  He was no longer surprised at how silently she stole up behind him. He had come near to welcoming it.

  “I have brought some cassava,” she said.

  The village women had lacked the time, perhaps, to roast the stuff, for it sat naked in the bowl, pale and greasy. He scooped his hands in and slapped it into his mouth, then, turning to one side, spat it softly out.

  “The food doesn’t suit you, Senhor?”


  “Sorry, I’m not hungry. Just yet.”

  “Perhaps you would like to bathe?”

  “No, thank you.”

  From behind them, the Colonel’s voice came wafting, like the mating call of an unusually tenacious bird. “Again! Again! Show your mettle, lads! No rest for the wicked!”

  “I am very sorry,” said Luz.

  “I know.”

  “I did all I could to convince them.”

  “It’s all right, Luz.”

  He looked up at the sky, beetling with scarlet clouds. Then he gazed down the winding prospect of the black stream. As he stood there, he felt, like the probing of the most refined and exquisite needle, an infusion of cold air, reaching all the way to bone.

  “Are you well, Senhor?”

  “Fine.”

  “You look cold.”

  “No, I’m quite well.”

  How could he explain it to her? The Beast was still out there, and he—“alone among mortals,” as his father had put it—grasped this most elemental of facts. He alone understood that throwing the remnants of an old man’s body down a hole would change nothing, that as long as the Beast was still abroad, the Cinta Larga would never be safe, and Kermit and the Colonel would never be free.

  And he would never see Belle. It was as if the very air throbbed with her now. Silently, he uttered the old litany—I’m to be married in June—but each word was an agony, because it was only a word.

  He opened the chamber of his rifle. Three bullets.

  “Back soon,” he said.

  “Where are you going, Senhor?”

  “Bit of a job,” he called back. “Needs finishing.”

  21

  The stream bobbed and dodged, according to its own whim, and the margin of sand on each side shrank and then disappeared altogether beneath granite boulders. After a time, the only way to walk was to clamber over rocks or plash through shallows. Within seconds, the shreds of Kermit’s boots were soaked through, no better than anchors. But he took some strange comfort in the fact that he was descending by slow degrees.

  He remembered then the hope his father had raised the day before. That if they followed this stream out to its natural length, it might take them back to the river. The stream, though, betrayed no such intention. It bled outward, frothing and slapping, then fell back to an amble. A quarter mile on, it broadened without warning into a lagoon. Marbled blackish-green water, ringed in white sand, over which a brace of dragonflies hovered.

  He dropped his rifle and stooped down, meaning only to take a handful or two of water, but a wave of tiredness took him and dropped him into the stream’s shallows with a small dismal splash. The water bubbled around his ankles, coaxed some of the pain from his abscesses. The air curled around his neck, his ears. From far away came the caw of a parrot.

  He looked down. The sinking sun had turned the black water into a mirror that captured his features with perfect fidelity. Or perfect infidelity, was that it? He couldn’t even begin to recognize the man he saw there: pium scars, like flecks of shrapnel, and bat bites, and the welted outcroppings of a hundred mosquito bites. And that beard! Muddy, matted, as tangled as the jungle canopy itself. No wonder the Cinta Larga had mistaken him for a beast.

  With a shudder, he jerked to his feet. In the water, his reflection quavered, then broke apart and eddied away.

  Must shave, he thought. Before Belle sees.

  From behind him came a tinny snap. Luz was walking toward him.

  For once, she didn’t have the advantage of surprise. For once, he could study her at length, consider her arms and thighs, waist and abdomen, all taut and coiled, ready for whatever might come. Except all he could see now was Luz as she’d looked yesterday—painted from head to foot in blood and guts.

  The speculation wouldn’t quit him. What if … What if …

  Then, when she was roughly ten yards off, speculation was pushed aside by a bare, homely fact: Every time he’d felt the chill of the Beast’s presence, Luz had been close by. When he was standing over the dead monkey … submerged in that cave … just now at the swimming hole! She’d been there the whole while. Standing just a few feet off.

  Propinquity, that was all—nothing that would stand up in any court—but as he watched Luz come on, he thought of the jaguar, the peccary; he thought of the little girl in the cacao grove; he thought of Anhanga. Image piled upon image, until it seemed to him that Luz advanced on a train of death.

  Never mind that her gait neither hurried nor slackened, that her eyes neither sought his nor avoided them. She looked for all the world like someone out for a stroll—except for the gleam of bamboo that flashed out from the scroll of her beads. A knife, freshly sharpened.

  Numbly, Kermit picked up his rifle and reached into his pocket. He pulled out two cartridges and popped them into his gun’s chamber.

  Luz stopped, silently surveyed him.

  “Boa tarde,” he said.

  “Boa tarde.”

  Silence.

  “Perhaps you thought I was trying to escape,” he said.

  “I was worried, that is all. I did not wish you to be lost.”

  “I am not lost.”

  She looked at him awhile longer. Then she bent over and began to scull her hand through the water.

  “When Thiago was young,” she said, “we used to come here all the time. To watch the moon. Thiago always thought it was just a few steps away. No bigger than a campfire. He kept saying, ‘Mamae, let’s catch it.’ He never understood why we couldn’t.”

  The air was perceptibly thinner now, and the sun was beginning its crawl toward the tree line. He had an hour of light left.

  “I’m glad you’ve come,” he said. “You can answer a question for me.”

  “Of course.”

  “Why should Bokra wish to kill Anhanga?”

  She paused. “Why must there be a reason?”

  “No reason,” he answered, with a half smile. “Except that people, in my experience, tend to do the things they want to do. When I think the matter over, the only one I can see who benefits from Anhanga’s death is—I’m sorry—you.”

  “How so?”

  “You said yourself he was the only one standing in the way of Thiago leaving. With him gone, Thiago is free. So are you.”

  She stood now, wiped her hands lightly on her thighs. “Free? Is that what you think I am?”

  “More free than you were last night.”

  “It is very strange, Senhor. I think you are accusing me. You believe I killed my husband.”

  “I’ve accused no one.”

  “You believe me strong enough to do such a thing?”

  “Oh, I don’t think Bokra was strong enough, either. Whoever did it would have needed some help.”

  “Where would this help come from?”

  “The Beast.”

  Not a flinch anywhere—in her face, in her body.

  “The Beast is dead,” she said. “We saw it die. You and I.”

  “Oh, no, I say the Beast is alive, Luz. And living in someone else.”

  She smiled now for the first time. Only it was the most equivocal smile he had ever seen on her.

  “In one of us, Senhor?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “In me?”

  He looked away. “I am only saying that whatever killed Anhanga appears to have your interests very much at heart.” He glanced back at her. “You must have wished death on him many times. He killed your father. He took your innocence. He tossed you aside for another woman.”

  How brutal Kermit sounded, even to himself.

  “If I were the Beast,” she said, “it is not Anhanga who would be dead.”

  “Who, then?”

  “The chief.” She gave her hair a short, hard swipe. “He was the one who gave me to Anhanga. Tossed me to him like a stick to a dog. It was the chief who made sure I was um pária from the start. He made the others cruel to me—to Thiago. Anhanga did not do this; the chief did. And yet he lives, does he not?
”

  “The last time I saw, yes.”

  “Anhanga’s death: This has nothing to do with Bokra or the Beast.”

  “Then who has avenged you, Luz?”

  “God,” she answered.

  He nodded, rested his foot on a rock. “Your God has been slow about it, Luz. Many years.”

  “He can take his time. He has nothing but time.” She raised her chin and took a step toward Kermit. “Trust me, Senhor. Nobody is safe from him.”

  It was a simple statement—a bromide—delivered with no particular menace, but it made every follicle on Kermit’s arms tingle. He took a step back and swiveled his rifle toward her—even as Luz swung her bamboo blade toward him, stopping just a few inches shy of the rifle’s muzzle.

  And there they remained: the very definition of impasse. He knew, of course, he could squeeze off a round before she broke an inch of his skin. Surely it was his own mind holding him back. His two minds. One saying: Save yourself. The other (sounding very much like the Colonel himself): Blackguard! To shoot a woman!

  With a convulsive sigh, he dropped his rifle to his side.

  “Go,” he said. “Please go.”

  He didn’t watch her leave, but in some sanctuary of his brain he heard her receding into the distance, kicking up tiny spouts of water as she went.

  He sat himself in the stream. He wrapped his head in his hands. He might have stayed there all night just like that, a study in despair, but he was roused finally by the faintest of phenomena: a stirring of molecules in the air.

  Nothing like the cold of the Beast, but every bit as familiar. He could feel it on his skin, smell it, taste it. River air. The great black river, close at hand.

  He wheeled his gaze in every direction, searching up and down the forest wall. At length his eyes fastened on something … the most fledgling of openings. Only when he drew nearer did he see it was an outright trail, clawed at some expense from the jungle interior.

  Kermit hesitated, looked in both directions to see if anybody was watching. But he could only hesitate for so long, because the river air was streaming straight through him now. He was actually smiling as he stepped into the green shadows.