Roosevelt's Beast: A Novel (29 page)

With a soft wheeze, the old man lowered himself toward Kermit.

“So you see,” he said, “there’s nothing you need worry about.”

“No. The Beast. It’s—”

His father put a hand on his shoulder. “Easy, my boy.
Easy!
There’s still a bit of poison floating around in you. Save your strength for tomorrow. And if you need an image to sleep on, think of the look on Rondon’s face when he sees our two sorry carcasses staggering out of the jungle. That will be worth all the trouble.”

The old man leaned closer, smoothed the hair from Kermit’s brow.

“The sun will rise in just a few hours, you know. Let’s be ready for it, shall we?
Sleep.
”

With that, he brushed Kermit’s eyelids down. He couldn’t do anything, though, about Kermit’s brain, which churned away at full speed, plotting the next course of action. The only remaining course now was to wait—
wait
—until Father, the last remaining obstacle, was asleep.

It didn’t take long, as it turned out. A matter of mere minutes before that ocean swell of snoring rose up from the other side of the hut. Kermit’s eyes sprang open. He counted to five. Then, with a grim resolve, he swung his legs out of the hammock—too quickly, for they dissolved beneath him and left him in an inglorious heap on the ground. Silently cursing, he cast his eyes toward the other hammock. The Colonel still slumbered.

Kermit peppered his legs from ankle to hip with light slaps, until he could feel a modicum of blood flowing. Then, using one of the hut poles as an anchor, he hoisted himself to his feet—stood there swaying like a stalk of corn. His eyes, circling the hut’s interior, locked on his own rifle propped against the wall. Just the walking stick he was looking for.

Kermit made three long steps toward the doorway. But as he ducked his head through the opening, his body once again spilled out from under him, and he was reduced to crawling. Never mind, he thought. It may not have been the most dignified position, but he had his rifle, he had some rudiments of his wits. He had a
purpose.

He would kill the Beast. He would kill it once and for all. Because there was no one else who could.

With that in mind, it was no great hardship to crawl across the village clearing, peering around woodpiles and trash heaps for … he didn’t yet know. But he would know it when he found it.

He crawled past the chief’s hut, crawled over the freshly disturbed soil that covered the Colonel’s pit. He crawled down trails of moon and starlight. At length, by a stack of fish cages, he found a campfire, darting and crackling in the dark. A small figure was hunched over it.

Thiago, his knees drawn to his chin.

Kermit held back, but the boy turned and found
him.
A smile scrawled across his face.

“Boa noite,”
said Thiago.

Grimacing, Kermit seated himself by the fire, rubbed his numb hands.
“Você não pode dormir?”
he asked. You can’t sleep?

Thiago shrugged, gave the fire a pair of pokes. Then, with a crook of his mouth, he pointed to the plaster on Kermit’s chest.

“Posso … posso tocar?”
he asked. May I touch?

Kermit nodded. The boy’s fingers landed as lightly as the legs of a fly.

“Uma cobra?”
asked Thiago.

“Sim.”

“Doi?”
asked Thiago. Does it hurt?

“Um pouco.”

With some hesitation, Thiago pointed at his own chest.
“Um pouco,”
he said.

Kermit’s brain was too foggy to catch the meaning at first. Then it hit him:
The boy has lost his father.

“Seu pai,”
he said.
“Lamento.”

The boy shrugged again, stared into the fire.

“Minha mãe é viva,”
he said. My mother lives.

If he’d been any good at consolation, Kermit would have said … well, what, exactly?
Your mother is a fine woman. No boy could ask for better.
But he found himself incapable now of saying anything on the subject of Luz. He knew only that he owed her a debt. The greatest of debts.

So, in the absence of words, he and Thiago sat in companionable silence. From time to time, Kermit would point to a chain of stars and recite its mythological name: Ursa Major, Orion, Cassiopeia. Thiago would supply his own name, some animal it reminded him of—
jaguar, tamanduá, anta
—and Kermit came to see that the boy wasn’t connecting the stars at all but finding the shapes in the spaces between, and it didn’t matter; it was enough just to see that finger of his and hear that softly abraded voice.

Even this was more speech than they could sustain after a while, so they contented themselves with listening to the forest’s sounds. It was a fact that no matter how many days Kermit spent in the jungle, he heard a new sound every evening—something he’d never heard before. Tonight it was a long melancholy whistle, descending on a diatonic scale and then modulating upward. Within a minute it was gone, and the night air was filled with other noises: the humming of bees and sand flies, the sawing of crickets, bats flitting in the trees. The goatsuckers with their peculiar call:
Wac-o-row, wac-o-row.

And, from a nearby hut, sounds of a more intimate nature.
Conjoined
sounds: male and female. Celebrating their deliverance from the Beast perhaps. Kermit cast a look at Thiago, but the boy didn’t seem to hear anything. For a minute or two, his head lolled on the stem of his neck and then landed noiselessly on Kermit’s knee.

Wouldn’t it be extraordinary?
thought Kermit, resting his hand on the boy’s head. To bring Thiago back to the expedition. To see him claiming pride of place in Colonel Rondon’s canoe. To see him fall back in wonder before steamships, automobiles, ice cream … gaze in terror at the Atlantic Ocean. Such was Kermit’s fancy he could even imagine leading the boy by the hand through the Madrid railway station, wrapped in a thin cotton blanket that had been filched from one of the ship’s cabins. Oh, he could just see him, staring up at that lovely yellow-haired lady with the parasol.

Belle,
Kermit would whisper.
I’ve brought a little guest.

Smiling, he reached around the back of his neck for that familiar pouch. The letters were still there. He closed his eyes, imagined her voice sailing toward him across the ocean, joining with the symphony of night sounds—

Just like that, the symphony stopped.

Kermit shook himself back to alertness. The campfire had flared in a great parabola, as if someone were fanning it with a bellows. But, on closer inspection, it wasn’t oxygen that made the flames billow—it was the creatures of the Amazon jungle. Insect after insect, rushing to its destruction.

Never in his days had Kermit beheld such a sight. A cavalry of moths and wasps and hornets and gnats and piums, flying straight into the fire. And, on the ground below, a swarm of ants and beetles, mites and millipedes, scorpions and spiders, filing one by one into their crematorium. With each sacrifice, the flames grew higher and the surrounding air buckled and bubbled. The heat was so intense that Kermit had to drag himself away, and even as he moved, his eye snagged on the one element that didn’t fit with the others.

A single snowflake tumbling from the sky. Settling on the fire’s peak and resting there.

How long he sat! Watching that absurd snowflake. Waiting for it to melt,
willing
it to melt. But it only hung there, uncharred, in the fire’s embrace. So transfixing a sight that he never noticed the change that had grown about him until, like a man bursting through water, he leaped to his feet.

He caught his breath, looked down. Thiago was gone. He swung his head around. The village, too, was gone—vanished into air.

He snatched up a branch, plunged it into the fire until it became a torch. Then he swung the torch in wild arcs, waiting for something to blaze into view—a hut, an ash heap, a bone. Nothing. It was as if the whole village had been carried away in the night. Or had never been.

“Thiago,” he whispered. “Thiago…”

In a spasm of terror, he grabbed his rifle. Some part of him would have loved to fire off a round—ten rounds—for the whole jungle had lost its voice. No toads, no crickets, no monkeys. Not a single mosquito chittering in his ear. And rising up on every side, the forest’s cobalt ramparts, fixed and cold.

For some time, Kermit stood listening. With an air of expectation, as if someone had arranged to meet him there.

From the undergrowth came a rustling. As he turned toward the sound, he could feel all his senses squeezing down to a point. Something was out there—just bleeding into his sight line.

“Show yourself,” he whispered.

The campfire surged up once more, and, in the shock of light, the figure shone forth. Against the backdrop of the jungle stood Elliott.

*   *   *

U
NCLE
E
LLIOTT.

In his top hat and riding coat, leaning against a white porcelain café table.

“Good evening!” he drawled.

For the first time, Kermit was able to get a fix on the accent: rigid Locust Valley vowels, softened by a hint of Grandma Mittie’s Georgia cadences.

“Care for a snort?” he asked, holding out a tumbler of amber liquor, clouded with mint leaves and orange peels. “Brandy smash. I mixed it myself; just the thing for tropical climes. Oh, but what are you waiting for, my lad? Down the hatch!”

The brandy passed through Kermit so quickly, there was nothing to hang on to.

“Thank you,” he managed to say.

“You’re quite welcome.” (His smile a less explosive version of the Colonel’s.) “Come along, now.”

The tails of his coat fluttered behind him as he strolled toward the jungle. When Kermit declined to follow, Elliott wheeled back and, in a tone of friendly exasperation, added:

“We don’t have all night.”

“But where are we going?”

“You’ll see.”

“Are we going to kill the Beast?”

“I shouldn’t wonder.”

With a long guttering wheeze, the jungle parted before them: vines and trunks and branches feathering apart into a combed furrow, as dry and white as a scalp.

“Time to get a move on,” said Elliott.

A swarm of fireflies materialized before them. Tiny blue and yellow orbs flicking on and off at random.

“Keep up,” said Elliott. He walked with an easy stride, swinging a riding crop. “My,” he added, “how cold it’s grown.”

Kermit was just beginning to decode the information of his senses: the chapped nose, the water vapor condensing around his head. The jungle’s great soaring palms had turned arid and brittle, as though a slow cold fire had been smoldering inside. The vines were dry as paper. The leaves shattered into fragments beneath his feet.

“Any minute now,” said Elliott.

But they kept on walking, the minutes piling atop one another. It was Kermit who began to falter. His feet ached. His skin chafed with old bites. His stomach had become a cobblestone. Yet every time he opened his mouth to protest, the same thought rushed in:
Father wouldn’t like it.
And so he held his tongue and watched Elliott’s slender, elegant figure grow smaller and smaller in the distance.

At length, after climbing to the crest of a steep rise, Elliott came to a stop.

“Here we are!” he cried.

Kermit looked up. Looked all around. Nothing.

With a polite clearing of throat, Elliott pointed
down
. There, welling from the forest floor, was a hole, no more than three feet wide.

“It’s here?” asked Kermit.

“Yes, of course.”

“Down
there,
you mean?”

“Naturally.” Elliott giggled. “As if you didn’t know.”

With numbed hands, Kermit swung his rifle toward the hole.

“Oh, come, now,” said his uncle, catching him by the wrist. “A hunter
looks
before he shoots.”

“But it’s dark.”

“Ah! So it is.” Softly abashed, Elliott reached into his vest pocket and drew out an old-fashioned phosphorus match, some nine inches in length. He swiped it on the sole of his boot, and an eye of blue flame blossomed forth.

“Go on.”

Taking the match, Kermit knelt and bent toward the hole until his head had disappeared inside it. The darkness flooded around him, but the light drove it back. He realized that he was staring down a tunnel, eight or nine feet deep. Nothing there. Not a moth, not a bat, not even a pool of water. The only thing that seemed alive was the air itself, clammy and cold, sharp with sulfur.

“Dear boy,” he heard Elliott say. “We haven’t got all night.”

Irked, Kermit swung the match toward his uncle’s voice—and then stopped as a counter-pulse of light surged from the rock. From that light there resolved a face, inches from his own, conjured up from the granite and studying him with an inscrutable intent.

Kermit jerked back, but the face followed him, sliding up the rock wall. What a sight it was! Bestial and gnarled, livid and cruel. White worms crawled out of its craggy brow. Beetles swarmed from its matted hair. Maggots spilled from its nostrils.

Kermit couldn’t bear to look—or to look away. He waited—for what he couldn’t have said—until, with a leering smile, the thing screwed its mouth into a kiss.

Kiss
wasn’t adequate to describing the oily motion of the tongue, the skeletal retraction of the surrounding skin. Those
lips
—greasy with life—pushing so hard against the rock’s membrane that the saliva bled through to the other side and ran down the tunnel walls in long viscous stripes.

“No!”

Panting and groaning, Kermit drew his head from the hole. Rolled onto his back.

Elliott was looking down at him.

“Well, Kermit. What did you find?”

“Nothing,” he said.

Such an obvious lie, he almost felt the need to apologize. He saw a seraphic smile spread across his uncle’s face.

“Exactly.” Bending down on one knee, Elliott lowered his face toward his nephew’s. “We’re alike, aren’t we? You and I. Brothers under the skin.”