Roosevelt's Beast: A Novel (13 page)

“Your beast is indeed to be feared,” he declared, “if it has created such carnage.”

Frowning, Luz tapped the dead man’s boot with her toe. “Not the Beast,” she said.

“What else would have done this?”

The barest flush in her cheeks.
“We,”
she said. “Us.”

*   *   *

T
HREE SUNS AGO, A
group of their warriors had set off down the river’s shoreline. They were seeking food, above all, because the Beast had taken so much of the Cinta Larga’s prey that they had been forced to travel farther afield.

“In which direction did they travel?” asked Kermit.

“With the water.”

“And did they travel by boat?”

“Boat.” She blinked several times in quick succession. “We have no boat. We stay always on land.”

“And after three days they came across this man.”

“Yes.”

“Was he alone?”

“Yes.”

“Did he run at the sight of them?”

“He did not see. He was … ohh—”

“What?”

“He was doing magic. Dark magic.”

Kermit stared down once more at that martyred head. “You mean he was
saying
things? Spells, that kind of thing?”

“No, he was touching.
No.
” She corrected herself at once. “He was…”

She glanced back at the chief, who swept his arm through the air in a clean, straight slashing motion. The jungle fairly whistled before it.

“The man was
cutting,
” said Kermit.

“Yes.”

“Cutting the tree.”

“Yes.”

“Cutting it down?”

Luz shook her head.

“Cutting … into it?”

She nodded.

“Did something come out?”

Her eyes swirled with confusion. “
Blood
came out. The blood of this tree.”

“And this blood, did it have a color?”

“It was the color of woman’s milk.”

“White.”

“Yes.”

“And it was … was it sticky to the touch?”

“Yes,” said Luz, nodding eagerly. “It
stays.
On the finger. I have seen other trees like it.”

Five minutes earlier, Kermit couldn’t have imagined doing what he was doing now. And doing it with such a clinical detachment. Picking up that severed arm as if it were a piece of driftwood. Raising it to the light and studying the thin grayish wash that still encased the hand.

“Caoutchouc,” he whispered.

Even as he spoke, the Colonel was lurching toward the English equivalent.

“Why, that’s
rubber,
isn’t it?”

*   *   *

T
HERE WAS NO OTHER
explanation. Somehow—
somehow
—a tapper had managed to work his way upriver even as the Roosevelt-Rondon Expedition was toiling down. How resourceful the poor wretch must have been and how desperate: living on starvation wages, supporting God knows how many children, trolling the wilderness for a tree that hadn’t been claimed and stripped and drained by one of his equally desperate brethren.

And having found such a tree, wouldn’t he have glowed with holy fire? A perfect beacon for the equally desperate band of Indians stealing up behind him …

But, from the horror of that poor wretch’s death, a single spark of hope now flew up. For if he had come, others would follow. Wherever there was rubber, there would, in short order, be men.

And this meant—didn’t it?—that help was at hand. Closer than Kermit could ever have imagined. It meant the expedition might still be saved.

Why, then, wasn’t he rejoicing?

“Luz,” he said, setting the severed arm on the ground. “Can you tell me, please? Why did your warriors kill this man?”

“He was our enemy. Our worst enemy.”

“Why do you say that?”

“He was one with the Beast.”

“I don’t understand. He had no beard. He wasn’t part of your world.”

“No. No, Senhor Kermit. What he was doing to the tree—that is what the Beast does to its prey. This man and the Beast, they are
família.
”

“What’s she saying?” the Colonel cried. “
Whose
family?”

Kermit’s gaze drifted down to the dead man’s head. He thought of the tapper’s family, waiting for word hundreds of miles away. He thought of Belle, thousands of miles over the sea. A swell of rage pressed against his chest as he felt the heat of these Cinta Larga bodies, smelled the sweat and loam on their skin. He could level one or two of them with a blow, he knew that. But the rest would already be swarming over him—as relentless as those ants—tearing him apart as systematically as they’d rent that rubber tapper.

He knew something else. He knew that as long as this beast continued to prey, he and his father would remain prisoners. It didn’t matter how many rubber tappers came calling or how diligently Rondon and the rest of the crew searched. The Cinta Larga would cling to their two captives because … because it was
working.
Because, for at least one night, the Beast had spared the village. Because they had no other hope.

And what hope did he and the Colonel have? They had no guns—at least not where they could find them. They had no guides. They would never find their way back. The time had come to bargain for their lives.

And was he the man to do it? Of all the Roosevelt children, he was the least likely to force himself on the world’s attention. He could remember attending, when he was ten, one of his father’s campaign rallies, in an Albany meeting hall that smelled of sausage. The Colonel had but to speak a few words and the most terrifying of roars would go up from the party faithful, and, rather than dying away, the sound kept building into a kind of bloodlust. It was as if every man and woman in that hall wanted to eat his father alive. When the speech ended and the crowd surged forth to show their love, Kermit was heard to scream, “Don’t hurt him!”

Afterward, he asked his mother, “Must Father do that every night?”

“I’m afraid so, dear.”

“Will I have to do that someday?”

“Not if you don’t want to. Some of us aren’t meant to be leaders, you know.”

But here, in the midst of the jungle, he was the only candidate. The Colonel, this was plain to see, was in a bad way. The traumas of the past twelve hours had taken their piece of him, and he sat now in the mud, his breath coming in hitches and jerks. Not even enough strength left to swat the stingless wasps that scuttled across his eyes and nose, feeding on his sweat.

Kermit stared into the tapper’s eye—and saw the amber-refracted image of himself gazing back.

“Luz,” he heard himself say. “I will need you to translate for me.”

He was already a foot taller than most of the villagers, but some instinct told him to raise himself even higher, so he climbed onto the remains of an old stump upholstered in wet moss. The words
stump speech
hovered there at the brink of consciousness. And of all the eyes that were now raised to him, none were more astonished than the Colonel’s, squinting up through his cracked lenses.

“What in the name of—”

Kermit fanned out his fingers and flung his arms wide.

“Men and women of the forest! Look upon us and tremble!”

Luz stared up at him, hesitating.

“Please,” he said to her.

Turning toward the other villagers, she began to translate—in a tone that Kermit couldn’t help but hear as wheedling.

“Look upon us,” cried Kermit. “We are great and mighty hunters. We have hunted across God’s wide earth. We have killed more creatures than there are stars in the sky.”

His mind teemed now with memories of Mount Kenya. The moonlit nights. The dry chill of the air against his face. The strummings of the native harps.

“I tell you we have laid waste to cats far greater than the jaguar. Yes, it is so. We have slain beasts with horns as big as a man. We have slain beasts as tall as that tree. We have slain beasts as wide…” His hands shivered apart. “As wide as your river, yes!”

Nothing stirred in the faces of the Cinta Larga. But, by all appearances, they were listening.

“I say to you, men and women of the forest, we have eaten the heart of the greatest beast that ever lived.
Roasted it,
I say, in our fires and eaten it whole. And, behold, it was good.”

As he spoke, Luz’s voice came rippling after his. It was like standing before a massed convention and listening to the echoes of the megaphone man, sending his speech to the farthest balcony.

“Harken unto me, my friends. We will capture your beast. Yes, I say we will! And in return…”

Pause,
he thought.
Father would be pausing.

“In
return,
you will lead us back to our comrades. And allow us to go our way, unharmed. We ask no more of you. We ask no less. We ask…”

What?
We ask
what?

By now the Colonel would be steaming toward that final terminus, wheels churning, whistle sounding.

“We ask justice.”

Luz stopped.

“Pardon, Senhor. There is no word for—”

“That is all,” he announced. “Thank you.”

He stepped down from the stump. He waited.

For several minutes, nothing happened at all. Then the chief rose wearily from his own stump, waited until every eye was square with his.
Ready to sound the command,
thought Kermit. But he just beckoned with one arm, and without a word, the rest of the warriors lined up behind him and processed to his hut, ducking their heads one by one as they entered.

Not a monarchy at all,
thought Kermit, smiling to himself.
A constitutional republic.

The rest of the villagers began to drift back, in a spirit of resignation, to their morning rounds. Old men propped themselves against trees and whittled bamboo into drills. Women sat with stone bowls in their laps, squeezing manioc root. Children, formerly shiny with mischief, set to weaving baskets and mashing yams.

“Well, now.” With a cough and wheeze, the Colonel rose from the mud. “That was first-class oratory, my son. I only wish I could have understood it.”

But he must have grasped the import of it, because when the old man spoke again, his voice was thin and hard.

“Do you honestly believe we can do it?”

“We’ve done it before, Bwana Makubwa.”

“You speak true, Bwana Mardadi.” The old man took off his spectacles, wiped them on his sleeve. “But, to the best of my knowledge, we have never hunted a beast with no tracks.”

10

“
All
beasts make tracks,” said Kermit. “Of some kind.”

“So I once believed myself.” Taking hold of his son’s arm, the Colonel levered himself up. “Let us examine our unfortunate jaguar.”

The carcass wasn’t hard to find, only a few yards from where they were standing.

“Dear God,” whispered Kermit.

Never, outside of a taxidermist’s, had he seen an animal hollowed out in such a fashion. Its skin and tissue had been
peeled
off in long jagged strips. Nothing was left but some bones and ripped tendons and the tawny marble prisms of the eyes, from which Kermit’s own image stared balefully back. He heard the Colonel’s dry voice:

“Not much for sharing, our Beast.”

Kermit nodded. “Barely enough here for ants.”

“Silly, I know, to speak of a jungle creature being cruel. All the same…”

But there was more to the assault than cruelty, wasn’t there? To Kermit’s eye, there was an element of terrible
mockery
, as though the Beast wished only to show the emptiness of this jaguar, of every living thing. A life hadn’t been taken, it had been erased.

“Well, my boy,” said the Colonel. “I am happy to report—or it may be I am ashamed to report—that my time as police commissioner left me with a strong predilection for crime scenes and what may be gleaned therefrom. To
wit
,” he continued, with an upward thrust of finger, “we have a crime. We have a
victim.
Now, what else may we say with any degree of certainty?”

“As best I can tell, the jaguar was a male. Though it’s damned hard to be sure.”

“We’ll conditionally agree. What else?”

“We know where he was attacked.”

“Just a few feet from where we were so calmly reclining, yes. The rest of our knowledge can be filled in with the most rudimentary understanding of cat biology. Before it met this rather shocking demise, our jaguar was unexceptional in every regard. It was merely doing what jaguars do. Now, tell me, what may we say of the jaguar’s assailant?”

Once more Kermit’s ears filled with the sound memory of that lapping.

“Our Beast has a tongue,” he said.

“A thirsty one. What else?”

“It’s strong.”

“Quite amazingly strong to perform this kind of savagery on an animal that weighs—what would you say—two hundred, two hundred fifty pounds?”

“Something like that.”

“Twice the size of any of the leopards we shot in Africa. Right up there with your small lioness. Yes, when it comes to a scrap, I’d take the jaguar’s chances against virtually any other creature in the jungle. But last night our great cat was reduced to …
this.
” His palm sloped down toward the carcass. “So we know our Beast has the strength of at least
two
jaguars. Perhaps three, perhaps more. What else can we say?”

“Very little.”

“I will go you one better and answer,
Nothing else.
That’s the queerest part of the whole business. An act of great savagery took place on this very spot, and yet the perpetrator of the act left virtually no trace. It made no cry—none that
I
could hear, at any rate. And it left no tracks. I repeat:
It left no tracks.
”

Kermit’s mouth puckered. “Perhaps it rained while we were sleeping. If so, the tracks might have been washed away.”

“I had the same thought, but do you see? The
jaguar’s
tracks are still intact. We can actually follow his path to this exact point. The Beast, on the other hand, has left not a print, not a mark. Not even a swath of crushed underbrush.”