Roosevelt's Beast: A Novel (12 page)

They’ve disarmed,
thought Kermit.
Why?

Silence held sway for several minutes. Then a series of high-pitched sounds broke from outside the circle as the Cinta Larga women began to poke their heads and arms through the palisade of men’s bodies. One by one, the women were pushed back, but in the next instant a boy of ten or twelve, wiry and naked, managed to slip through somebody’s legs, and before anyone could stop him, he was crawling toward Kermit and the Colonel on a trail of giggles.

Bellowing, one of the braves—the man from last night with the scar over his eye—snatched the boy and flung him back into the women’s ranks. But what lingered in Kermit’s mind wasn’t the act itself but the spasm that had crossed the man’s face when he saw the child—his child?—approaching the strangers.

They’re afraid of us.

Maybe the same thought struck the Colonel, for he grasped the folds of his shirt and let loose the full blaze of his smile and, with a flush of Yankee pride, shouted:

“Good day to you all!”

Silence.

“Men and women of the Cinta Larga—and
children,
we won’t slight the children—you will observe, I trust, that my son and I are very much among the living. We are, however, a bit banged up. In addition, we are rightfully and manfully outraged by your conduct toward us. Being reasonable and civilized, however, we stand before you, prepared to talk business.”

The Colonel had seldom found anyone with whom he couldn’t talk business. Even the Colombian students who had flooded his Santiago speeches, screaming, “Down with Yankee imperialism!”—even they, in the end, had given him the respect of their attention.

“Let me preface my remarks by saying this. My son and I do not demand an accounting for your base actions. All we demand is safe passage to the river and reunion with our companions.”

The Colonel paused, as if to let the point sink in.

“We are slow to anger, we men of the North, but I think you will find that we do not take lightly any outrages committed against our persons. Nor will our companions. In absence of any word from us, they will beat a fiery path toward this very quarter and will repay any wrong done us two—three—
ten
times over.”

How quickly it came back, the old rhetorical grooves. The cheeks, reddened as if by a slap. The jaws snapping off each syllable. The right fist pounding away at the left palm.

“It is clear, my friends, it is manifestly clear, that relations between our peoples have not begun on a sound footing. That being acknowledged, there is no earthly reason why we may not carry forward in a spirit of comity and goodwill. If there has been misunderstanding on your side, if there has been unnecessary and discourteous
aggression
on your side, my son and I stand ready to overlook these offenses in the name of—”

A barking shout rang through the air, and a man stepped forward.

Not the most prepossessing figure, Kermit had to admit. Middle-aged. Small, gaunt, hunched, with a bureaucratic air of suffering. In another world, perhaps, he might have been a pension officer or a bookie, measuring out each day in quires of paper. The only things that announced him as the Cinta Larga chief were the intricate stencils of blue genipap dye fanning across his face and the necklace of wild nuts, large as a life preserver, hanging past his navel. There was this, too: the way he seated himself on his tree-trunk throne. Not the ponderous descent of an emperor but the calm, offhanded motion of a man with no time to waste.

The chief clapped his hands—twice, lightly. Then the tribal circle broke open to admit the bowed figure of Luz. In the light of day, with her softly freckled shoulders and pink nipples, she looked even further removed from the Cinta Larga.

“Senhor Kermit. I am to tell you what has happened.”

“We know what happened.”

“No. Before you came.”

And the two words that followed were somehow more evocative for being in Portuguese.

“A besta.”

The Colonel required no translation. “
Beast,
she says?”

“Please,” she said. “You shall listen.”

*   *   *

T
HE
C
INTA
L
ARGA WERE
taught early in life to distinguish between two forms of terror: known and unknown.

The job of any child growing up in the forest was to know as many of these terrors as possible. The sound that shakes from the sky before a rain. The snake that squeezes the life from a man. The creature that lies like a log in the water. The frog that kills with a touch. These were all part of the native curriculum and could be apprehended and, with skill and luck, averted. But there was nothing to be done about unknown terrors, for they came without warning and stayed ever out of sight. Only their handiwork could be perceived. The blight that lays waste to a field of manioc. The chill that takes root in the bones. The dream that steals the soul.

The Cinta Larga had remedies at their disposal—shamans, native medicines; these might keep the unknown at bay for a time. Nothing in the tribal lore, though, had prepared them for this latest terror. It came on light feet, and its first victims were toads and side-necked turtles, plovers, wood ibises. The carnage was extreme but tightly contained—not yet outside the realm of experience.

But, in short order, the terror grew bolder, hungrier. Capuchins, hawks, anteaters, peccaries, tapirs—all snatched from their perches and killed,
savaged
in a way the Cinta Larga had never seen. Not just eaten, these creatures, but disemboweled—
emptied
—with only the head left to testify to what they had been.

Surely a thing capable of doing such carnage was no mere animal. Surely it was a terrible spirit, clothed in teeth and claws, loosing its vengeance on the jungle.

At first, the Cinta Larga tried appeasing it with sacrifices. They lined their huts with snakeskins. They strewed the corpses of birds around the village perimeter. They killed a wild pig and left it split open, oozing in the night. The Beast scorned their offerings. It would have the meat it had killed for itself, or it would have nothing.

The killings went on: a sloth; a caiman, snatched from the river’s very clasp. And still the Cinta Larga made their sacrifices, praying that they might, alone of all the jungle’s inhabitants, be spared.

One evening, one of their girls, no more than six years on this earth, wandered off to collect cacaos. She was found the next morning, scarcely to be recognized. Since then, no one had dared to walk abroad in darkness, and even daylight held a new horror, for who could say when the Beast would strike next?

Even the men were not safe. Only two nights before, one of the tribe’s strongest and fiercest warriors was seized in the very act of keeping watch. They found him the next morning, in the vines and brush, so thoroughly consumed that there was no piecing him back together. They left his remains on the spot, and no Cinta Larga would walk there now for fear of meeting the dead man’s angry shadow.

The Beast lived and walked and hungered. Most terrible of all: It went unseen. No one—nothing—had ever glimpsed it and lived.

*   *   *

I
LIVED.

The thought came flying at Kermit, and a chain of sense memories came right on its tail. The jaguar’s terrible howls; the quiet; and lastly the soft, obscene sound of lapping.

Why hadn’t the thing come for him? Or the Colonel? Paralyzed as they were, they would have offered far less resistance than the jaguar and considerably more meat. Was the creature sated? Or else too deranged to notice what lay just beneath its nose?

Why? Why am I still alive?

“Luz,” he said. “Tell me how long this beast of yours has been preying.”

“Since the last full moon,” answered Luz.

“But my father and I have been traveling through this region no more than two or three days. We have nothing to do with your beast. Why have you dragged us here?”

“We had to.”

“Why, in God’s name?”

“To make the Beast go away.”

“I don’t follow. You meant to use us as a … as an appeasement?
Sacrificar?
”

“The very idea,” growled the Colonel, translating for himself. “Sacrificing people. They couldn’t have found a goat?”

“No,” said Luz. “Not sacrifice. Protection. The Beast will see
you,
and he will go away.”

“But why?” asked Kermit, incredulous. “Why on earth would you suppose we had such power over the thing?”

“The Beast will kill a mere man, we have seen that. But it must never harm one of its own.”

“One of its own?” repeated Kermit.

And as the full import of her words settled over him, a low, mirthless laugh came bubbling out.

“What is it?” the Colonel asked. “What did she say?”

“Well, now.” Kermit laid a gentle hand on the old man’s shoulder. “They seem to believe that we are beasts ourselves.”

“Beasts?”

With a small, tight smile, Luz cupped the vast expanse of Kermit’s beard.

More than anything else in that moment, he wanted to explain. That when a man from civilization ventures into the wilderness, he gives up one thing, and this always leads to giving up another. He gives up shaving, and then he gives up his shaving mirror. Then he gives up caring what he looks like, and then he gives up even knowing what he looks like. Or that he looks like anything at all.

But there was no chance to explain. The Colonel had already tipped back his head, and he was roaring with laughter.

“She has taken your full measure, Kermit! You are as bestial a white man as a savage might ever meet.”

“Oh, no!” cried Luz. “Not you alone, Senhor Kermit. The people who ride the water with you: They, too, are covered in hair. They also pass in safety. The Beast does not touch them. With you here, the Beast would leave us in peace.”

“But…” He could feel his breath burning into sound. “We don’t
know
this beast of yours! How could we? And you and your people—you left us utterly defenseless before it. We might just as easily have been killed ourselves.”

Spinning away, he shouted into the trees.

“This is monstrous! You must see this. We were—my father and I—we were passing
through,
no more. We meant no harm to anyone. If you had left us in peace, we would have journeyed on.”

But if he expected Luz to answer him, he would have to wait. Her gaze was already fixed on the chief. For some long seconds, they looked at each other. Then, in a voice almost too low to be heard, Luz said:

“There is more. You should come.”

9

Last night’s imprisonment had given Kermit the sense of being trapped in a vast fortress extending a mile on every side, with vast complexes of rooms and corridors. Now, in the morning light, Kermit was able to see the Cinta Larga village for the first time in its entirety. There was nothing to look at but a circular clearing, forty to fifty feet across, hacked and scorched out of the jungle’s heart, with a dozen or so huts arranged like spokes around a small central plaza and a steeply pitched playa leading down to a stream as black as the Rio da Dúvida and boiling from the winter rains.

You might have fit the whole business into Sagamore’s North Room—right down to the bamboo cage in which a half-plucked harpy eagle fruitlessly flapped its wings. Virtually impossible to believe that more than a handful of Cinta Larga could live here, and yet, as Kermit and the Colonel crossed the clearing, some three dozen villagers, acting on some unheard cue, emerged from their huts and began to throng toward the strangers.

Girls swelling with puberty. Mothers lofting their babies onto their heads. Old women with bent spines. A thin, crabbed stalk of a man, older than the sun, reaching with cadaver hands toward the white men. None of them were much taller than five feet, but their curiosity was outsized. They dogged the captives’ every step, jostling for better views, filling the air with grunts and clicks. It was like being a Coney Island attraction, Kermit thought, sandwiched between the California Bats and the Electric Seal.
Step up and see for yourselves! The Pale Hairy Hominids!

The space around him shrank even farther as the villagers closed in, each little incursion smoothing the way toward a larger one. A pat led to a caress, a tug on the shirt to a tug on the trousers. One of the more daring boys plucked Kermit’s beard and tried to snatch the Colonel’s spectacles right off his face. Then, without warning, the mob fell back. The procession stopped. Kermit looked down. He was standing before a great mound of sticks and ashes and mud, clouded by gnats and mosquitoes. A high, ripe, sweetish scent rose up. The chief barked a command, and, in the next breath, one of the women fell to her knees and began to grope through the muck like a Bowery scavenger, flinging out each new discovery as she found it.

The first thing to emerge was a thigh bone, drizzled with flies. Then a gnawed section of hip. A foot, still half encased in the tatters of a leather boot. And at last the remnants of an arm, flying toward Kermit in a slow parabola.

The same arm he’d seen last night, still curled in an arc of farewell. Thank God there was nothing left to throw up.

“Steady,” murmured the Colonel. “Steady now.”

But even the old man’s equanimity was giving way before the theater of the moment. “Fine dinner they’ve made of him,” he growled. “Bloody savages.”

Kermit said nothing. He merely watched as the pieces came sailing, one by one, through the air. A shoulder joint. A breastbone. A section of rib. Each item coming to rest in a different square of earth, in an order that bore no relation to the original anatomy.

And finally, like an afterthought, the head, stripped of all hair, wobbling toward them like a gourd. Unburned but still aflame with astonishment.

“He’s not one of theirs,” the Colonel whispered. “The skin, do you see? Olive, not copper.”

Nor, thought Kermit, was he part of the Roosevelt-Rondon Expedition. Who was he, then?