Roosevelt's Beast: A Novel (33 page)

Cherrie, with his natural tact, rushed right in.

“Let’s have a nip of whiskey, shall we? Just the thing.”

*   *   *

S
UPPER THAT EVENING WAS
the usual paucity. One of the men had snagged a pair of catfish. Kermit had caught a side-necked turtle. The rest was crackers and palmito, plus a handful of Brazil nuts, painstakingly divided. They were done in less than five minutes. Nothing daunted, the Colonel reared up like the laird at a manorial feast.

“Fills the old gullet!” he declared as he tossed down his plate and gave his belly a hard squeeze. “Couldn’t ask for better!”

In a trance of horror, Kermit watched as the
camaradas
began to gather around the fire. He knew what was happening. This was, by common consent, the Colonel’s hour, the time for him to speak of old adventures. To most of the men, of course, the words were unintelligible, but the
flavor
of the words, that had become as hard for the
camaradas
to give up as their morning coffee. It didn’t matter that the Colonel had disappeared for two days under mysterious circumstances, that he had come back drenched in blood and even worse for wear. He was
back
now, and the words could once more flow.

“Father,” said Kermit. “Perhaps tonight we might dispense with…”

But the sight of all those shy smiling faces brought out all the old man’s volubility.

“Well, don’t just stand there! Sit ye down! Now, it so happens I’ve been meaning to tell you boys about the first grizzly bear I ever shot. Has anyone ever seen a grizzly? No? Well, take it from
me,
you won’t want to meet one in a back alley. The claws
alone,
my friends! Shred you before you blink an eye, no lie.…”

Just like that, the Colonel fell back into the old rhythms—as if everything that had happened in the jungle held no more sway over him than a dream.

But it wasn’t a dream,
Kermit wanted to say.
It can’t be sloughed off. It can’t be talked away.

“Picture it, now. He’s lying on a bed of spruces. Just waking up when we stumble across him. Well, I know as sure as I’m sitting here now, this is my God-given chance, so I take a bead right between the eyes—small, evil eyes they were—and I pull the trigger. Bam! Ball goes straight into his brain. Lord, but he jumped. Monstrous thing, too! Twelve hundred pounds if he was an ounce, I do not exaggerate.…”

Kermit listened as long as he could. Then, without a word, he rose. He walked toward the river’s edge and watched the moon shimmering in the black water. He was still there an hour later when the Colonel came limping out.

“There you are! I was hoping you’d be so good as to join us.”

“Us?”

“We won’t keep you more than a few minutes, I promise.”

He found Cherrie and Colonel Rondon frowning by the campfire. He started to sit, then stood again, then lowered himself to a half crouch. One by one, his offenses scrolled out before him. Should he beg pardon now? Angle for clemency? Perhaps they would just leave him here in the jungle. That would be the height of mercy in the grand scheme of things.

“Kermit,” said the old man, folding his hands behind his back. “I’ve called you here…”

“Yes?”

“Because my French is not up to the occasion.”

“Your French…”

“I mean for the purpose of speaking to Colonel Rondon. I must therefore entreat that you translate into Portuguese. Oh, no, Cherrie, don’t leave. You’ll need to hear this, too.”

Knitting his hands behind his back, the old man squared his shoulders.

“Gentlemen, regarding the events of the past two days—beginning, I mean, with the disappearance of Kermit and myself and concluding with our return—I would like to say that it is the fondest wish of both my son and me to put these events entirely behind us. If you take my meaning.”

No,
thought Kermit in the midst of translating.
They don’t take your meaning.

“I am puzzled,” said Rondon with a scowl. “Why must we overlook what has happened?”

“My dear Colonel, I hope that, in reflecting upon our personal history, you will credit me with being as frank with you as any man could be. In this one instance, I fear I cannot be frank. Except to say that speaking of what has happened will bring no credit to anyone. Least of all…” He paused. “Least of all
me.
I should further add that any publicity accruing to these events might also bring unwanted exposure…” He paused once more. “… As I said, unwanted exposure to a tribe of savages who desire no part of our civilization. No, not even your telegraph wires, Rondon.”

Kermit hesitated to translate that last part, but the Brazilian, true to his character, neither bridled nor smiled.

“I recognize,” the old man went on, “that my request is contingent upon our making it out of this jungle. I tender the request, anyway, because it is my firm belief we
will
make it out. And with that in mind, I ask you both now, as a great personal favor to me, to remain ever silent on these recent events. Never to speak of them, never to write of them.”

He turned his gaze back from the fire.

“The log books, I hope, may be rewritten to elide or conceal our untimely disappearance. In this and in every other regard, I implore you to consign this unfortunate episode to oblivion.” As if to underscore his point, the Colonel kicked a shard of kindling into the fire, watched it flame up. “If you could give me your word as gentlemen, I should be your eternal servant.”

Both Cherrie and Rondon were silent for a time. Then the Brazilian looked up.

“You are asking us to lie, Colonel?”

“I am asking you to omit. Surely, amidst the … the infinite gradations of human venality, that particular sin ranks low.” The old man kneaded the folds of his throat. “What happened out there
belongs
out there. The jungle has it; let the jungle keep it. And let us get about
our
business with all due haste.” He looked at each one in turn. “We still have history to make, gentlemen.”

*   *   *

T
HE NEXT MORNING, A
fit of shivering swept over Colonel Roosevelt as he climbed into the boat. By mid-afternoon, his temperature had climbed to 103 degrees, a new high. Dr. Cajazeira wrapped him in a poncho, injected quinine straight into his belly, but the fever held on. Too weak even to lift his head, the old man lay in his dim tent, quivering and sweating, slipping in and out of delirium.

That night, the officers took turns watching him. Cherrie was there when the old man began reciting a line from Coleridge, over and over:
“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree…”
But Kermit was the one keeping watch when the old man startled awake as though a visitor had entered the room.

“You can’t have him,” he hissed. “You can’t have him.…”

God was no longer smiling on the Roosevelt-Rondon Expedition. The rapids returned, the insects feasted, the sun beat down, the rain beat down, the food dwindled to nothing. One of the oarsmen was murdered by another
camarada.

Hour by hour, Theodore Roosevelt slipped closer to death.

Malaria raged inside him; the poison spread from his abscessed leg. He hadn’t enough strength now to stand, let alone walk. In the canoe, all he could do was lie across a row of food tins, with a pith helmet across his face. More than once, when the expedition had to halt to let him rest, the Colonel whispered (to no one in particular):

“Go. Leave me here.”

Until Kermit, reeling from his own malaria, growled, “You’ll leave with us, or I’ll carry you the whole way back.”

When they reached Saõ João, they looked so much like savages themselves that the rubber tapper who spotted them feared for his life and turned his canoe to shore. It took Rondon jumping up and waving his cap and shouting assurances in immaculate Portuguese for the tapper to paddle out again.

The Colonel was so enfeebled by now he could barely lift the helmet from his face. A dying king, that was the rubber tapper’s first guess, babbling in a strange tongue.

“Pleased … to…”

*   *   *

O
N THE AFTERNOON OF
April 27, they reached their long-awaited destination: the confluence of the Rio da Dúvida with the Aripuanã. At the sight of Rondon’s relief party, the men in the boats flung their oars and stamped their feet and gave out terrible shouts of joy. Kermit tweezed open his sweat-caked eyelids and saw an American flag, fluttering like a dream.

*   *   *

B
Y THE TIME THE
Colonel was carried off the steamer at Manaus and bundled into a waiting ambulance, he had lost a quarter of his body weight.

In the hospital, he ate sparsely, read nothing, never spoke above a whisper. He had ample leisure, however, to ponder the magnitude of his achievement. Over the course of two months, the Roosevelt-Rondon Expedition had traveled more than one hundred eighty miles through the heart of the Brazilian wilderness. They had charted a river as long as the Ohio. They had put a lie to all existing maps. These were claims so bald, so exorbitant, the Colonel would later have to defend them before the National Geographic Society, but as he was carried onto the steamer to Pará, he could see no cloud on his horizon.

“By God, Kermit … into the gazetteer we go.…”

*   *   *

F
ATHER AND SON PARTED
on May 7. The Colonel was bound for New York, where he would be met by a cresting tide of well-wishers: newsboys, office workers, subway conductors, dockworkers, residents of every borough and station swarming around him, clamoring for a look, a word (some already whispering at his frailty, his shrunken body).

Kermit, by contrast, would be leaving for Lisbon. He would travel alone. There would be no delegation to meet him.

“Ah, well,” said the old man. “I hate good-byes, but no sense getting all womanish. I’ll see you in just a few weeks.”

“Belle and I will look forward to it.”

“Ha! Of all the countries for a Roosevelt to be married in. Spain! I hope they have no hard feelings about San Juan Hill.”

“I’m sure they’re past it.”

The old man met his eyes for a moment, then turned away a fraction.

“I’m sorry Mother can’t make it. Some feminine ailment or other, I didn’t want to inquire too closely.”

“That’s all right.”

“But you know you can count on me, my boy.”

“Of course.”

They stood for some time on the gangway, watching the Colonel’s trunks pass in parade.

“Kermit.”

“Yes?”

“You understand, of course—I mean, without
you,
we’d have…” He screwed his lips together. “I suppose I just wanted to thank you. For everything you did.”

An hour later, the words were still reverberating in Kermit’s ear.
Everything you did.

*   *   *

I
T WAS THE SMOOTHEST
Atlantic crossing he had ever known. Like skating across a pond, said all the first-class passengers. He dined every night at the captain’s table (going lightly on the wine). He played skat with a Rochester industrialist and his pinched, unhappy wife. He read Camões. Late at night he paced the upper decks, imagining that every step was bringing him closer to Belle.

He reached Lisbon on the afternoon of May 20. He was offered accommodations at the YMCA, but he refused to stay another minute, and because none of the direct lines to Madrid were running, he caught a local train to Entroncamento. After a five-hour wait, he caught another to Cáceres. Evening melted into morning into afternoon. He slept ten or fifteen minutes at a time. He read as best he could—Lorca, Spanish phrase books—but his eyes stung from the dust and cigar smoke and the smell of raw milk.

Late in the evening of May 21, his train pulled into the Atocha station in Madrid. The other passengers quickly dispersed, and he was left to wander with his porter through the wrought-iron plaza: an oddly tropical space dominated by gardens of towering ferns and palms. For a second or two, he thought he was back in the jungle. Then he stopped.

By the departure board, next to a large woman in a black mantilla, stood a willowy figure—so tiny!—so poignantly American in her moiré coat and Billie Burke cap.

Nearly two years had passed since last he’d seen her. It was natural, wasn’t it, perfectly natural, to take a moment? To reconcile the living face with the one he’d held in memory all this time? Only he couldn’t manage it, not at first. It was as if he had fallen in love with two women.

“I have arrived,” he said. “As you see.”

“But how brown you are!” she cried.

He was glad he’d shaved.

He could smell the powder on her face. He could see the feathering of rouge on her lips and ears.

“Darling,” she said.

With her gloved hands, she reached for him. They brushed lips, then drew apart. And as Belle looked him up and down, the blaze of her teeth subsided.

“Are you all right, Kermit?”

He was going to ask her the same question. For he was gazing right into the flawless china of her face—and a flaw had, against all odds, emerged. A tiny dark lesion in her brow, no greater in diameter than a mosquito bite. Within seconds, though, it began to deepen and metastasize, sweeping with bewildering speed across her forehead, down her face. He watched in helpless terror as the skin and tissue peeled away from her skull, leaving the barest of bones, snapping and flapping.

“No,” he whispered.

He buried his face in his hands, and as the destruction carried on out of view, he uttered a silent prayer.
Take me. Don’t take her. Take me.

Dimly, in the near distance, he could hear the tinkling of her voice.

“Kermit … Kermit, look at me! Darling,
look
at me!”

She had to pull his fingers from his face and pry open his lids before he would consent to look.

And there she was! Just as she had been a minute earlier. Pristine, porcelain, intact.

He fell into her arms, and in the middle of that cavernous train station, they held each other.