Roosevelt's Beast: A Novel (31 page)

It was the Colonel who came to the rescue, putting a gentle hand around the boy’s neck and bending his head down and whispering … who could say? But some note of reassurance must have passed between them, because the boy turned and walked away without a word.

“There’s a good lad,” the Colonel called after him. “We’ll be along in a spell, all right?”

Smiling and waving, he watched the boy the whole way, waiting until his lean figure had disappeared around the stream’s bend. In that instant, the smile dissolved. He set down his rifle, and his face composed itself for the worst.

“What in God’s name has happened?” he asked.

24

Rather than compose a reply, Kermit seated himself in the thin margin of sand at the lagoon’s rim and watched his father inspect the scene. The old man looked as stony as a god of war, bending over the two bodies, scowling, squinting, muttering to himself.

“It seems,” he said, “I owe you an apology.”

Like a child pushing through layers of gauze, Kermit raised his head. “Apology for what?”

“You maintained all along that the Beast was still among the living. I refused to believe you. I was wrong, and I’m man enough to admit it.”

Kermit stood now. “I was wrong, too, Father.”

“How so?”

“I thought the Beast had infected one of you.”

“One of—”

“Our hunting party. I thought it might be Thiago, perhaps. Or even
you.
Or
Luz,
can you believe it? Seems ludicrous in retrospect.” He cast an indulgent smile at her corpse. “The Beast was in
me,
Father.”

The old man’s Adam’s apple swelled froglike from his throat.

“I consider your joke to be in poor taste, Kermit.”

“It’s not a—”

“Under the circumstances, this brand of
levity
—”

“I’m not joking, Father! I wish I were.”

“Do you honestly expect me to believe that this savagery is
your
doing?” He gave his head a violent shake. “I can’t think of anything more preposterous, more brazenly offensive. More
convoluted—
”

“No, Father, it was the easiest thing in the world. I didn’t even need to know it was happening. For most of the time, I didn’t.”

“Ohh! Come, now!”
The old stump speaker’s voice came roaring up. “I must regretfully inform you, Kermit, that if you persist in this line of insanity, I must write you off as a lost cause. To suggest that you have somehow been
devouring
human beings? Nothing could be further from the young man I raised. If you ask me, Kermit, the heat has rotted your brain! Or else lack of sleep or—or stress—
hunger—
”

“Father.” Kermit pressed the old man’s hands together. “An hour ago, I wouldn’t have believed it, either. But it’s the truth.”

“No.”

“I killed Luz.”

“No.”

“I killed the chief. I killed
Anhanga,
Father. It wasn’t that poor old wretch’s doing, it was mine.”

“This is beyond laughable.”

“Don’t you see? That’s why I was … why I was privy to the Beast’s consciousness. That’s how it was able to know my thoughts, my history.”

“No! No! I was
with
you.”

“You weren’t. Not when the attacks were actually happening. Ha! Even
I
wasn’t with me.”

With a throttled groan, the Colonel pulled his hands free. “I will not listen to another word.
Not another word!
”

“You must.”

“
I won’t!
I don’t care if you’re my flesh and blood; if we were back in civilization, I’d … I’d—”

“What, Father?”

“God help me, I’d have you committed on the spot.”

“As you did Elliott.”

The old man fell back as if somebody had swung a hammer at his chest.

“Elliott,” he whispered. “Why? Why must you keep speaking of him?”

“Because he came to me.”

“No! No! You must stop!”

“
Last night,
Father. He spoke to me. He said to tell you … no hard feelings about the sanatorium. The one in Purkersdorf. He said he’d have done the same in your place.”

For the first time, Kermit saw his father struggle for words.

“I never …
told
 … not a word … ever.…”

“You didn’t need to.
He
did. He said something else, too. He said he and I were brothers under the skin. What did he mean by that?”

The old man’s eyes squeezed shut.

“You know why he killed himself, Father.”

“No.”

“Because he couldn’t bear what was inside him—what
wasn’t
inside him. He had the same hole as I do, didn’t he? Only he filled it with liquor.”

“Please.”

Kermit let his head drop back until he was staring at the very crowns of the palm trees. “I don’t know how it should be, Father, but this Beast, it looks for
holes
—empty spaces it can fill. That’s why it sent Elliott. It’s been
marking
me, waiting this whole time.”

“No, this is … the absolute height of senselessness.…”

“You’re right, Father, it’s senseless. It makes no sense, it makes no
thing.
That’s what the Beast is, it’s
nothing
. It takes the nothing inside us and uses it to … empty the world—and it won’t rest, Father, until the whole world is empty. As null and void as the Beast itself.” He paused. “As me.”

Never before had he seen quite such a look on his father’s face. Fear and tenderness and who knew what else, washed together in the most unstable of compounds.

“My dear boy,” he murmured.

For long moments they stood, watching each other. Then, with a bitter smile, Kermit placed his hands on the old man’s shoulders.

“We made a bargain, Father. With the Cinta Larga.”

“What of it?”

“We said we would kill their Beast for them. And we are men of honor, are we not?”

A tremble began to rise up the old man’s frame. “Of course … naturally…”

“Well, then.” Kermit spread his arms. “What are we waiting for?”

And when he saw the Colonel’s eyes shrink to slots, he added, “I am sorry this should be my final gift to you, Father. My legacy. I know you wished for more.”

With infinite gentleness, he picked up the Springfield rifle, set it in the old man’s hands. He took three steps back and, in a voice of utmost steadiness, said:

“Your
medicine,
Father. Just as you always called it. I should like it to cure me.”

The old man stared at the rifle as though they’d never been introduced.

“Begone,” he whispered.

“It’s the only way.”

“Begone!”
With a despairing cry, the old man flung the gun to the ground. “You cannot. You
may not
ask such a thing.”

“If you don’t, someone else will die.
Many
will die.”

“And if I do it, what’s to keep that … that thing from escaping? Inhabiting someone else?”

“I don’t know, Father. I just—I don’t want it in me. Not one second longer.”

Still the old man refused to take up the rifle. Suddenly, there stretched before Kermit’s fancy a stalemate for the eons: one man pleading, one resisting, until time itself stopped.

“Please!”
he cried.
“I want you to!”

A long silence. Then, from the Colonel’s eyes, a new look gleamed forth.

“Listen to me, Kermit. We will get you away from here.”

“It won’t do any good.”

“We will heal you. You’ll
recover
, Kermit. You’ll forget all this madness. You’ll have a wife and a family, and we need never again—”

“
It will still be part of me! I will still be this!
Dead bodies and dead souls on my conscience. Forever.”

It was as loud as Kermit had ever allowed himself to be in his father’s hearing.

But far from flinching, the old man gritted his teeth and muttered, “You will forgive me—I hope—if I decline to take orders from
beasts.
” With a jut of jaw, he brought his face forward. “You are not what you believe yourself to be. You are not—God preserve you—empty, you are
full
. You are … you are
me,
Kermit. You are your mother. You are your brothers and sisters and … and Belle and … and everyone—
everyone
—who has ever loved you.” His voice caught. “And there are so many who have and
do,
and you are
not
Elliott, you are—the beautiful white-haired boy we brought into this world, and you will always be that boy, and I will
not
abandon you, I will not
cede
you to any beast—to any creature that has ever lived. Do. You.
Hear?
”

They were both weeping freely. But it was the old man who recovered himself enough to give Kermit’s chest a mighty thump.

“I am here! Inside you.” He pounded once more. “And I will not abandon you. And that is—my—last—
word.
”

In that same instant, the first strip of flesh peeled off the old man’s face. Stunned, he clapped his hand to the wound. Felt the blood leak through his fingers.

“Do you see?” cried Kermit, backing away.
“Do you see?”

The old man stared at the pink wash on his skin. “Oh,” he said. “I see.”

And then he came straight on, advancing on his son in long tigerish strides.

“Stay away,” begged Kermit.

“I will not.”

“Hold off.”

“Make … me.”

Two more strips of skin sloughed off the old man’s face—as quickly and silently as if a barber had swung at him with a razor. The blood was no longer flowing but seething,
roiling.
And somehow, from out of that cauldron, the Colonel’s voice came through undimmed.

“You are my son. Whoever wants you will have to come through me.”

A ribbon of skin and tissue sliced away from his neck. Lesions sprouted across his hands and forearms, burrowed deeper and deeper until the first traces of bone smiled through the jaw.

“Shoot me!” implored Kermit. “Now!”

The old man only shook his head and drove on. And in those next few seconds, it was as if he were walking through a wind storm of knives. They scourged him from corner to corner. His clothes crumbled to dust. The skin around his thighs unraveled in long linen bandages. That pale flaccid torso bubbled into an incarnadine sea, heaving with severed veins and fringes of muscle. Even the old man’s spectacles flew off for want of anything to hold them and went pinwheeling through the air, spraying droplets of blood in every direction before landing at Kermit’s feet.

“Father! Stay away!”

But like some mortally wounded bear, the old man staggered on. Blinded by blood. Pelted on every side by the strands and coils of his own body. By the time he reached Kermit, there was just enough left of his arms to wrap round his son and draw him close.

In that final moment of fusing, Kermit could no longer be sure which of them was disintegrating. He felt himself part of one skin. One bone. One blood. Disappearing into blackness.

25

He would never know for sure when the darkness began to fray. Or how it was that, from nothing, shadows and outlines should shimmer back into view. Fronds and trunks and vines. Then a turbid half-light washing into his eyes’ chamber.

He understood that he was upright—standing exactly where he had been before—and that something or someone was wrapped around him.

“Father…”

With a tremor, Kermit pried himself free, already bracing himself for what he would find—and completely unequipped to fathom what was
there.
The old man himself. In all his entirety. Breathing and whole and unbloodied.

“Father!”

Like a man fitted with new limbs, Kermit fell on him. Gripped him around his neck. This time, when they embraced, it was with the awareness of their very ordinariness—the magic of their intact skins, their
intact
bones. They were, as the psalmist said, fearfully and wonderfully made.

They had done it.

“That was…” Chuckling, the old man reached for the spectacles by Kermit’s foot. “That was a near thing.…”

There, in the heart of the Amazonian jungle, with no one to listen to them but parrots and mosquitoes and midges and toads, they laughed until their bellies screamed for mercy. When one stopped laughing, the other started up again. They might have gone on like that for hours,
days,
but at some point the laughter died away and a new sound emerged. Not a toad or a mosquito or a parrot. Something human, stirring behind them.

Thiago.

*   *   *

H
E HADN’T FOLLOWED ORDERS
after all. He had crept back to see what these adults were concealing from him—and now concealment was impossible. For there they lay: the bodies of Luz and the chief of the Cinta Larga. And there stood Kermit and his father, both awash in blood.

Thiago saw it all and reached his conclusion and became something Kermit hadn’t seen before. A body
consumed
by rage, by bafflement and fear, all coursing like tributaries into a single torrent of feeling.

“Mamãe…”

What must he have thought? Seeing those two men coming toward him, their voices soft and propitiating, as if their only wish was to ease his mind. But there was no easing. There was no feeling at all, only this
conclusion
sweeping everything before it. Thiago’s muscles trembled almost to their bursting point, and from his throat there poured a sound such as he himself had never heard. A howl that seemed to frighten away the sun and call back the moon.

All his lightness and agility were gone. As he ran back toward the village, he thrashed through the water and tripped on stones and kicked up mud and sand, but that sound carried him over every obstacle. Even when he had disappeared from the white men’s view, the howl was still traveling back to them.

So this is how it will go,
thought Kermit.