Roosevelt's Beast: A Novel (14 page)

“It might have sprung from a tree. Like a monkey.”

“And sprung right back? Against all the rules of gravity? The nearest tree is at least fifteen feet away. Every monkey I’ve ever seen would take a running start before hauling itself back up. And please keep in mind that the Beast would have had a singularly full stomach last night. It ate and drank an extraordinary amount of jaguar. Do you really see it making such a … such a postprandial leap?”

Once more, Kermit found himself staring into the jaguar’s dead eye. “Anything strong enough to do this,” he said, “makes its own laws.”

“Within
nature’s
laws, yes. Now, you and I have met our share of carnivores. We’ve stared lions in the mouth, haven’t we? Have we ever come across a mammal that could gouge out—
extravasate
—its prey in this manner?”

Kermit was silent for a time. “What of the mountain gorillas? They’re said to be fearfully strong.”

“They feast on plants and grubs, Kermit. And make quite a lot of commotion, as you’ll recall. If our beast were a gorilla, it would have broken every branch it touched. And left the fattest footprints you ever saw.”

“Very well.
Not
a mammal, if you like. Let’s posit some kind of raptor. A condor…”

“Making not a single cry as it descends. Not even a flapping of wings. No, don’t look like that; we were
there,
Kermit. Other than the lapping, the only sound we heard was the jaguar’s shriek.”

“But, Father, with all due respect, we are no longer in Africa. We are in a new continent with—why, Cherrie alone found two new species of bird last week. Who can say how many other life-forms we might find, given enough time?
New
life-forms?”

The old man looked him squarely in the eye. “I don’t recall suggesting it was a
new
life-form,” he said.

Kermit stared back at him, coughed up a single mirthless laugh. “
The Lost World,
is that your drift? Well, your Scribner’s readers are bound to be delighted. But Conan Doyle may sue.”

“The point
is…”
And with a vigor that seemed to come from the near-distant past, the old man seized his son by the shoulders. “We are in a strange land, Kermit.
Should we not be braced for strange outcomes?
”

Then, as if embarrassed by his own exertion, the old man let his hands drop to his sides.

“Oh, I know, I know. There’s no point speculating. Unless they take us up on your offer, we won’t be hunting anything. We’ll only be digging a pair of shallow graves. If they grant us that much.”

“We will find our way home, Father.”

“Of course we shall.” He pulled off his spectacles and swept his arm across his face. “Do you know, I think I’ll sit down again. If it’s all the same to you. What can be taking them so long, I wonder?”

“Damned if I know.”

Kermit gazed across the clearing at the chief’s hut. From a distance, it was the most serene political caucus he had ever witnessed. No smoke pouring through the door. No pounding on the walls. No errand boys rushing in with ice buckets and Scotch bottles. From time to time, a squawk or a grunt would break through the hut’s walls, but for the most part, the Cinta Larga carried on out of sight and out of hearing.

“Awfully parched,” volunteered the old man.

“Me, too.”

“Wish we had Juan bringing the morning coffee. How I miss the fellow. Ha! I even miss that grim little Rondon. I shall give him the rudest of embraces when next we meet.”

“So you think they’ll come for us?”

“Of
course
they’ll come. Do you think they would consider, even for a moment, leaving us behind? Why, for Rondon, the publicity
alone
would be torment greater than any mosquito.”

Even as he spoke, the old man stared at that jaguar carcass, butter bright in the sun.

“And when they do find us, Kermit, heaven help us all.”

*   *   *

O
N AND ON THE
caucus went.

And as they waited, the sun rose through the hissing mist, and the trees sweated through their bark, and everything blazed green—until noon, when a mattress of cloud burst open into hard, oily drops.

Absently, Kermit reached for his helmet; it wasn’t there. He watched the water pool in the bowl of his hands, then tipped it straight into his mouth. Again and again, he drank, and then he tipped his head back and let the water crawl through his skin, through his nose, through his eyes.

The rain was just starting to die away when something began to stir in the hut.

“Huzzah,” said the Colonel.

There was only a commotion of palm leaves at first. Then the first Cinta Larga warrior came stumbling out. Another followed and then another—in an unbroken, nearly comical chain, disgorged from that tiny hut like a knotted handkerchief from a magician’s hat. Last of all came the chief, moving in strange arcs of abstraction.

“What
is
the fellow doing?” the Colonel whispered. “You don’t suppose he’s drunk?”

The chief made a clicking sound, and, from nowhere, Luz came running. She bent her ear to the chief’s mouth. Then she turned to the white men and, with a broad smile, announced:

“Está concordado!”

It is agreed.

“You will kill the Beast,” she said. “In exchange, you will be freed.”

“Freed how?” asked Kermit. “Escorted back to our party?”

“Yes.”

“And they will agree not to harm us. Or anyone in our company.”

“This they have agreed.”

Kermit looked at the Colonel, then back at Luz.

“Very well. We accept.”

Luz turned to the assembled throng and gave an emphatic nod. And of all the reactions the Cinta Larga might have had to this declaration, this was the one Kermit least expected: absolute silence.

Perhaps, he thought, the villagers hadn’t yet grasped the full nature of their new arrangement. Or else they had simply absorbed the details, without fuss, into their understanding of things. As he gazed around at their creased, solemn faces, Kermit couldn’t help but recall the whistle-stop tour he’d taken with the Colonel during the ’04 campaign. “Little jaunt through Pennsylvania Dutch Country,” that’s how the old man had described it, but one day, as the sun was starting to sink behind the mountains, the Colonel suggested they stop in one of the coal towns along the train line. Was it Centralia? Ashland? Kermit couldn’t summon up a name; he remembered only what they found when they got there.

Night was falling, and the men had just come out of the mines, carrying their dinner buckets. Some of them were still wearing their carbide lamps. Their faces were so thickly coated with coal dust that it was impossible to say which were fathers and which were sons, just as it was impossible to tell mothers from their grown daughters, for all the women had the same skeletal frames, the same deep etchings around the eyes and mouth. The same
stare:
parched, fathomless.

In any other part of the country, the Colonel would have whipped the townsfolk to a froth just by showing up. (Even people who hated him couldn’t resist a view.) Here they greeted him with the silence of monks. They knew who he was, all right, but he’d come, like any other politician, offering hope, and that was something they couldn’t afford anymore. So they looked at him the way you look at anything that’s gotten between you and where you need to go. Wondering:
Will it go away by itself?

So it was with the Cinta Larga. They lived not in the El Dorado of Western imaginations but in the Amazonian equivalent of a coal town, where every day began and ended in struggle. When a pair of strangers offered to kill a beast for them, they didn’t pound one another on the shoulder; they made no swelling shout or triumphal cry; they merely looked. Anything else was a waste of energy.

The villagers’ silence stretched out for more than a minute and was broken first by the caged, half-plucked eagle, stuttering from its slumbers, and then by Luz’s low, embarrassed murmur.

“They are waiting,” she said.

“For what?” asked Kermit.

“They would like to know—oh, what is—how you will
proceed.
”

I’d like to know, too.

Kermit looked at the old man. Then, feeling the clutch in his gut, he remounted the tree stump.

“Luz,” he said. “Please translate.”

Their opaque faces seemed to converge on him, pinning him into place.

“Men of the forest! We have agreed to hunt and kill your beast. Hear me now, though, when I tell you: We cannot kill it with only thunder sticks, and we cannot kill it by ourselves. We do not know your forest. We do not know your
world.
We require a guide.”

“Um guia?”
whispered Luz.

“Sim. Um espião. Um líder.”

He was bracing himself for another two hours of negotiations, but Luz answered at once.

“Você via me aceitar.”

You will have me.

And, again, just enough of the Portuguese reached the Colonel to provoke a reply.

“She’s offering herself? For such a business as this? That’s perfectly barbarous.”

“My father,” explained Kermit, “is greatly afraid for your safety.”

“He need not be. This is my home. I know it as well as anybody. I will be as safe as you. It is possible,” she added, with the trace of a smile, “that I will be safer.”

The old man was not to be persuaded. “We are to
drag
this young girl into harm’s way? Is that what you’re telling me? Dear God, Kermit, it would be like endangering your own mother—your sisters. It cannot be countenanced.”

“I’m afraid it must.”

“Nonsense!”

“Father, listen to me. Luz speaks true. As a native, she is far from helpless. And she and I share a language. Can you imagine trying to communicate with one of
them
?”

“I don’t care.” The blood came flushing to his face. “You must ask—you must
demand
—that these savages serve up an able-bodied man. Look at them standing there! These brave warriors, letting a woman face down their enemy. They ought to be ashamed.”

Bending toward Luz, Kermit lowered his voice to a confidential croon.

“In recent days, Father has not been so
spry
as he would like. To compensate for his weakness, do you think we might engage one of the village menfolk?”

He thought at first that she failed to take his meaning, but just as he was about to rephrase, she said:

“They have thought of this.”

“Yes?”

“Thiago will join us.”

“Thiago…”

Turning around, Kermit scanned the palisade of warriors, waiting for someone to answer to the name. But the only reply was a vague flurry behind their ranks—a stir of limb, registering so faintly it might have been a mile off. The next moment, a boy was elbowing his way to the fore.

Kermit blinked. It was the same boy who’d come crawling out to them that morning. He stood now in the greenish-yellow light of noonday, no more than twelve: reedy, tight-muscled, hands lightly flexed. As dark as the other children, but immeasurably lighter in spirit. Among the grim faces displayed to the white men, his alone seemed to cherish some prospect of pleasure in their company.

“
This
is Thiago?” asked Kermit.

“Yes,” said Luz.

She didn’t look at the boy, nor he at her. They didn’t even resemble each other so very much. It was simply the way they angled their bodies to the world, bracing for the next collision. They belonged together.

“A child!” squeaked the Colonel. “This is beyond sufferance.”

“Father—”

“He is a boy. A
stripling.
”

Kermit took the Colonel by the shoulders, drew him close. “We cannot set the conditions, Father, you know that.”

“Nor are we obliged to accept them! Not when they run counter to all rules of civilized conduct.”

“We are not in civilization.”

“Civilization is not a
place,
Kermit, it is…” The spit flew from the old man’s mouth. “It is a practice. A way of living one’s life—meeting one’s
death,
if necessary. Have I not taught you this much?”

Smiling, Kermit lowered his forehead until it was touching the old man’s. “I was eight years old when I went on my first hunt.”

“You shot a reedbird. And with no small amount of collusion on my part.”

“And I had as much fear in my heart as this boy here. Maybe a good deal more,” he added, glancing back at Thiago, whose mouth had parted into the ingredients of a smile.

“Eu sou forte!”
the boy shouted. I am strong. And to make the point, he flexed his biceps in the manner of every boy who has ever aspired above his station.

The Colonel was unmollified. “For the love of God, Kermit, where is the lad’s father? I should like to meet him. I should
very
much like to broadcast my opinion of him to the world.”

“Luz,” said Kermit. “Does Thiago have a father? I mean, among the living.”

And because she made no reply at first, he again thought he had misspoken.

“I will look out for Thiago,” she said. “You will look out for the old man. We will be well.”

The Colonel took one look at Kermit’s face, then walked to the edge of the clearing. For several minutes he stood there, staring into the jungle’s purpling shadows. And the whole time, it was fair to say, the entire village watched
him,
waiting to see which way he tended.

“So this is how it stands, Kermit. You and I are to place ourselves in the jaws of death with no one in our corner but a child and a slip of a woman.”

“It would appear so.”

The old man nodded, twice, rubbed his eyes under his glasses.

“Well, now,” he said. “I suppose we have made do with less.”

“That is so.”

“Then tell them … tell them we are thoroughly delighted—we are
enchanted
with our new hunting party. We could have chosen no better. No, not if Selous and Cunninghame were taking up arms with us.”

“My father accepts,” said Kermit, bowing his head an inch. “We do, however, require that our weapons be returned to us.”