Roosevelt's Beast: A Novel (2 page)

His voice is already flagging. With a grunt of despair, he adds, “How about that governor of yours? Gruening. He’s a presidential appointee, isn’t he? Just the man to make your case in Washington.”

“You’re probably right.”

Marston has few social graces, but he never sulks. Blocked in one direction, he simply fixes his sights on another.
Over, under, through,
thinks Kermit, recalling Father’s old directive.
But never around
.

Kermit waits quietly for Marston to finish his steak. Then he tosses down a ten-dollar bill and, steadying himself against the table, rises from the banquette.

“Let’s take a stroll, shall we?”

*   *   *

T
EN O’CLOCK, AND THE
sun has only begun to sink. It will be nearly midnight before it disappears altogether, and five hours later it will pop up again, taking with it the last promise of sleep. What a terror summer can be.

They walk past Providence Hospital, Marston’s loping stride held in check by Kermit’s shambling. The streets are thinning out, but at the boarded-up entrance to the Federal Building, they come across a young seaman earnestly negotiating with a woman. The sailor’s like something from a Maxfield Parrish print—ginger-bearded, with a gold earring—but it’s the woman who catches Kermit’s eyes. Anywhere from ten to twenty years older than her client. Rawboned, in a green silk dress, her face carved by cosmetics into a mask of scorn.

But that same mask, as Kermit passes, dissolves in the lamplight, and a new face flashes out at him. Dusky skin. Hair parted down the middle. Flecked hazel eyes. He stops.

“All right?” asks Marston.

“Yes…”

The woman and her suitor are squinting at him now.

“Nothing here for you, sir,” says the sailor.

“Apologies.”

Kermit staggers away. Marston follows close behind.

“Friend of yours?” he asks.

“Just a—”

Just an old relation,
he wants to say.
Someone I see now and again.

*   *   *

T
HE LAST TIME WAS
in a hospital room in Vancouver. He’d been peeing blood, and a Canadian doctor, not knowing what else to do, had kept him on a soft tide of morphine. It rolled him in and out of consciousness and then woke him for good late in the evening. She was there, standing in the room’s shadows.

I want you to take him with you.…

And then the room reconfigured itself, and it was Belle standing there. Belle. The mother of his children. Looking tinier than ever in an ermine coat he was fairly certain he’d never bought for her. He almost called her by name, but she put a finger to her lips. A minute later, she was gone.

Such a long way to come, he’d thought, for such a brief audience. He can only believe that, before severing the last cord, she had needed to see him in that bare unaccommodated state, without the distractions of the other women—the other
Roosevelts,
all those voices telling her what to do.
(Think of yourself, the children, your reputation.)
Here she could look at the man who was her husband, at this lowest of ebbs, could stare into his damp, bleary, blood-drained face and realize there was no reclaiming him. That to be unreclaimed was, in fact, his fondest wish.

She came, she saw, she left without a word. And now she is gone—gone for good. And he is here.

Here. Where is
here
?

In this exact moment, as he walks with Marston through the streets of Anchorage, nothing seems real. The fat cadences of “Cow Cow Boogie” on an out-of-tune piano. A pickup truck parked halfway up the curb. A hardware-store owner rolling down his blackout screen. (“Many thanks,” calls Kermit.)

Or this: The sign posted at the turn for Fort Richardson. A bucktoothed, bespectacled Jap with talons for fingers.
He likes your snapshots
, the sign warns.
Think before you snap.
Kermit has seen it any number of times, but tonight those talons are actually rising from the signboard, promoting themselves to the third dimension.

“Ha,” says Marston, scowling at the sign. “That’s the closest
we’ll
ever get to the enemy.”

“Well, war is a … it’s…”

And now even Marston is changing. That pencil mustache, sidewinding like an eel.

Kermit jerks his head away. “War is a young man’s game.…”

“Are you sure you’re all right, Major?”

“I’m quite well, thank you.” He nods, several times in succession. “Another drink, that might be just the ticket.”

“Lights out for me, I’m afraid.”

“I’m happy to treat,” says Kermit, cringing at the hysteria in his voice. “I know how the local merchants gouge.”

“It’s very decent of you, Major, but I’m off to Seward tomorrow, 0600. Another time.”

Kermit gazes out at the jagged silhouette of the Chugach Mountains, marbling in the evening sun but holding their shape, too; that’s a relief. Maybe if he stands here long enough …

“I might write a letter or two,” he says. “If you think it would help. Naturally, I can’t promise anything.”

He hears Marston’s tiny grunt of satisfaction.

“You won’t regret it, Major. They’re good people, these Eskimos. Most self-reliant folks I’ve ever met. Loyal, dependable. Not an ounce of malice to ’em.”

Kermit grabs hold of the signpost, and it’s already too late. In the next instant, he’s borne away on a writhing, foaming river, black as tea. He stares at his feet, half expecting them to be submerged, but the river is inside him. And, somewhere in the canopy above, Marston is talking.

“The point is, these Eskimos are ready to serve Uncle Sam, and I mean to let ’em. Why, if you could have been with me last week in Ketchikan…”

Every joint, every fiber in Kermit’s body is blazing with ice.

“And do you know,” says Marston, “when I asked the local chief if he wanted to be compensated, he actually got steamed at me. ‘You give no money,’ he said. ‘We no want money.’”

A man doesn’t recoil from his friends.
That’s what Father would say.
He looks them dead in the eye.

And so, by agonizing degrees, Kermit turns toward the sound of Marston’s voice. Knowing what he will find there. Feeling once more the old tremble as he watches the skin and tissue peel in long serrated strips from Marston’s face.

And there stands the face’s owner, blathering in the twilight. His own skull grinning out of the depths.

PART ONE

INTO THE JUNGLE

1

He slept to it, and then he woke to it. Rain.

Steaming down the balloon-silk fly tent. Gushing through the trees. Pounding the river.

None of the fat greasy drops of last night but a hissing cataract of water, monotonous and unceasing. And then, from the buzz, a single silvery note emerged, followed by another, then another. And from Kermit’s brain, the first bubble of consciousness rose up.

Christ.

The bugle’s notes fell away, and he would have followed them back into sleep if the tent hadn’t shaken. His eyelids squeezed apart. In the granular light of dawn, a heavily muscled black man was crawling toward him, smiling as he came.

“Bom dia.”

It was Juan. Somehow managing to contain in one hand three aluminum cups and the handle of a steaming pot. He began to pour, and as the smell of the coffee came coiling through the damp air, Kermit felt reality settling in its hooks. He was here. The coffee was pouring. Juan was smiling his soft, abashed smile.

“Obrigado,”
Kermit muttered.

“De nada.”

The
camarada
crawled back out. For another minute or two, Kermit lay in his cot—already half sopping, for the morning breezes were blowing the rain straight in. With his fingers, he interrogated the sores on each of his legs: all the garden-variety bruises that, through infection, had acquired ideas above their station. Then he mapped the scorch marks of last night’s mosquitoes—a cluster on the elbow, another on the ankle, a necklace around the collarbone. There was one particularly prominent ridge above his right eyebrow, as if a whole regiment of mosquitoes had stayed through the night, feasting.

I should have offered them brandy,
he thought dazedly.

“Is that coffee, Roosevelt?”

As usual, Dr. Cherrie had woken without a fuss, his eyes—dry and calm—swinging open to the light, his hands lacing together under his head. He lay in the next cot, gazing up at the bulge of water in the tent’s roof.

“It
looks
very like coffee,” said Kermit, handing Cherrie his cup.

“Well, that’s something.”

The two men were silent for a time, listening to the rain.

“Good weather for ducks,” said Kermit.

“And who knows what else?”

This was not idle bravado. Cherrie was the in-house naturalist and was always on the lookout for new species to catalog. With a light groan now, he swung his legs toward the ground. “Shall we wake him?”

“I suppose.”

“Seems a shame,” said Cherrie, studying the humped snoring figure in the third cot. “He needs his sleep.”

“We all do.”

“But when I think how he used to be when we started. Every morning, up before dawn.”

“I know.”

“Used to wake up the bugler.”

“It’s true.”

Kermit knelt by the sleeping figure. Touched the forehead and felt the current of heat rising through his fingertips.

“Still running high?” Cherrie asked.

“A bit.”

Kermit leaned in to the sleeping man’s ear. Made at first to whisper and then simply spoke.

“Father.”

Gasping, clutching his blanket, Colonel Roosevelt wrenched toward the sound. His white lips slackened. His naked, mole-like eyes twitched in the dimness.

“It’s all right, Father. It’s Kermit.”

Several seconds passed before the intelligence seemed to break through.

“Of course you are,” said the old man. He raised himself onto his elbows. “You must … give me some time to … shake the cobwebs out.”

“Reveille has sounded.”

“Has it, now?”

“Your coffee’s here.”

“I’m glad to hear it.” With a coo of something like pleasure, he folded his hands around the cup. “Still hot. God bless you, Juan.”

He took two short sips, then another. Then, as he studied his two companions, the first smile of the day crawled through the brush of his mustache.

“Raining, is it? Well, never mind.”

Waving away his son’s proffered hand, the Colonel tipped himself out of the cot and spilled toward the ground like a pile of luggage, wincing a bit when his left leg landed. He reached into the damp sock he had wrapped around the tent pole and pulled out his spectacles. Wiped them on the sleeve of his pajamas and then, with great and painstaking care, slid the glasses up the bridge of his nose, waiting for the world’s edges to rush in.

“March,” he declared. “The fifteenth.”

“Yes, Father.”

“Year of Our Lord nineteen hundred and fourteen.”

“Indeed.”

“Third Sunday in Lent.”

“Yes.”

“I officially declare it: As good a day as any!”

He said the same thing, of course, every morning. And every morning Kermit silently composed the same reply.
Another day in hell.

He used to reproach himself for his irreverence. But now it had become a form of survival. And a sign, too, a welcome sign that some aspect of him still remained apart.

The old man took a few more sips of coffee, waiting for the blossom of heat and acid. Then he raised his eyes toward the sky.

“I like a bit of rain first thing. Cools things off.”

“Certainly,” said Cherrie.

“And cooler oarsmen are happier oarsmen, are they not? Therefore more productive. I shouldn’t be surprised if we made twenty-five kilometers by day’s end.”

“Could be,” said Kermit.

“Thirty!” said the old man, rising to it. “Mark my words!”

Kermit and Cherrie made no reply. After all these weeks in the South American wilderness, they were able to indulge the Colonel so far and no further.

“Here,” said Kermit, reaching under the old man’s cot. “Your spare drawers, Father. And you might as well use this handkerchief; it looks a bit fresher than the others.…”

“I’m certainly capable of dressing myself. You needn’t—I’m not a—damn me, where have I put my specs?”

“On your face.”

“Ah!” He giggled. “So they are! Never mind, let’s be dressed and be off. Stiffen up the sinews, ha! Summon up the blood!”

*   *   *

T
HEY ATE IN A
full downpour. It was almost a blessing that breakfast was so sparse. A handful of rice, a handful of beans. Biscuits hard as gneiss.

To think—try as he might, Kermit couldn’t help it—to think how much food they had brought with them! Fresh ox meat and sliced bacon and sardines and chicken and pancake flour and potatoes and malted milk. An entire case just for spices and condiments. In the early days, if a curious native had happened to wander out of the forest with a request for olive zest or grapefruit marmalade, the members of the Roosevelt-Rondon Expedition would have been happy to oblige.

But after they passed Tapirapuã, the midday meal was excised from their schedule. Breakfast and dinner shrank down to rations. “All this life,” Cherrie said. “And nothing to live on.”

Even so experienced a hand as he had expected to find a horn of plenty waiting in the jungle. Fruit and nuts for every meal. Pigs and deer. Dolphins and otters and boatloads of fish. A groaning table, night after night. Instead, they had … moss and bromeliads and epiphytes and tree roots. Insects.

And this strange lightness that followed them wherever they went. As though their bones were being hollowed into bamboo.

Kermit peeled away the fringe of mold from his biscuit. Began to toss it away, then caught his hand in the act of throwing and shoveled the whole thing into his mouth. He chewed and gummed it down until it was just a dry paste, then let it slide down his throat and drop, plashing, into his stomach.