Roosevelt's Beast: A Novel (6 page)

It was true the Colonel didn’t yet have the gaunt, stropped look of Rondon or some of the
camaradas.
He had started the expedition at two hundred twenty pounds. But the loss of weight was, if anything, more noticeable in him, for it seemed to carry with it a measure of spirit.

“Kermit,” he said. “Do stop worrying. I am as well as can be expected.”

“If you say so.”

“I dreamed of home last night.”

“Yes?”

“The way it looks now, I mean. Early April. Almost shocking how clear everything was. The robins, the meadowlarks. Maple buds, red as I’ve ever seen them. And there was your mother, out in some meadow, not ours—
some
one’s. She was gathering windflowers and bloodroot, and there were patches of snow all round her, but she wore no gloves. She had a … a very particular color to her cheeks.” The old man paused. “She never saw me. Never even turned her head.”

“Perhaps she didn’t wish to intrude. It was
your
dream, after all.”

“She’s thoughtful that way. All the same, I wish we could send word of some kind. Tell her we’re—well, you know…”

“She’s a soldier,” Kermit said.

“None braver.”

“You’ve been parted from her before. We were gone half a year in Africa.”

“Why does this feel longer, I wonder? And what of you and your Belle? Keeping a young man from his fiancée, that’s peculiarly ungallant.”

“Absence,” said Kermit, casting his eyes to one side. “Heart. Fonder.”

“We will presume that to be the case, but we will not press our luck. Look at me, Kermit. I want my faith to be yours. Before too very long, we will all be reunited with the ones dearest to us. And we will never again eat hearts of palm.”

“Hear, hear.”

With a grunt, the old man clapped his journal shut. “Scribner’s subscribers will have to wait until tomorrow. I should warn you, Kermit, you are shaping up very much as the hero of the piece.”

“Ah, fiction, then.”

“On the contrary, I am informing my readers that the flesh of my flesh toils as hard as any man in this party. Harder than most, and sick half the time. Never a word of complaint. We’d be … we’d—”

Then the air cracked open.

It was one of the curious things about this forest that it could remain so austerely silent during the day and swell with noise the moment the sun began to sink. Behind those green walls lay an entire symphony orchestra. Clangs and crashes and rattles, punctuated by screeches and bellows. A thousand living things, freed by darkness.

But the sound that came for them now was different. A high oscillating whinny. Purposeful.
Present.

“Did you hear that?” the Colonel whispered.

Kermit scanned the tree fronts. “Not a howler,” he said.

“No, indeed. A spider.”

They’d never actually seen a spider monkey, but Cherrie had always made a point of identifying its call whenever it came singing down from the canopy. This was the call that resonated now in their ears. A private summons from the jungle’s largest primate.

The two men jumped to their feet. No more than twenty seconds passed before the sound came whirling back, even louder than before. Wheezing softly, the old man pointed to a high buriti palm surrounded by handlike fronds.

“Fetch the rifles, Kermit.”

“Are you sure? There’s not much light left.”

“There’s enough.”

“The doctor says you must stay off your leg.”

“What I
must
do is bag tomorrow night’s supper. Now, if you’d care to accompany me…”

When the younger man still hesitated, the Colonel rounded on him and snapped, “What are we dallying for?”

How often he had heard that question as a child, and how great was its impact still. In the next instant, Kermit was dashing toward camp, snatching up Cherrie’s .405 Winchester, and rummaging through his father’s duffel bag and yanking out the Springfield and a pair of cartridge bags. Working so feverishly and in such haste that Cherrie raised his head from his hammock and drawled, “Something brewing?”

“Oh. Just humoring the old man. Back shortly.”

“Well, for God’s sake,” Cherrie called after him, “take a torch with you.”

Kermit found a milk-tree branch buried in the sand. It was just dry enough to take light after a minute in the campfire. Gnats and piums and eye-lickers pinwheeled around the torch’s flame as he jogged back down the shore.

He knew, of course, their mission was doomed. The sun had sprinted from the sky, and if they proposed to pursue this monkey, they would have to penetrate the jungle at its densest part. Three
camaradas
might labor an hour with machetes just to hack through a few yards of vine and trunk and epiphyte. Imagine how little progress an old man would make, even with the help of his son.

But, to Kermit’s surprise, the Colonel had found a small breach. Nothing like a true path, but an
opening.
With a few blows from their rifle butts, this opening, by some fluke, expanded. Enough, at least, to whet their appetites, so that before long they were
driving
into the forest. Kermit could hear the old man’s asthmatic wheeze, he could feel his own sweat like rust against his skin, and, with a private shock, he realized he was happy, supremely happy.

Something else he realized: They were standing. Unobstructed. In a small clearing.

The sun had finally dropped from the sky, and the darkness of the jungle closed around them.

Expedition members were instructed to never stray too far from camp, but here they were, a hundred yards off, and it might as well have been a thousand miles. Later Kermit would think that this was the moment on which everything hinged. Because they might have found their way back. It would have taken them no more than a few minutes, and everything would have followed its usual course.

But, in that same moment, the spider monkey’s whinny came funneling down to them. It vibrated along their spines. In the torchlight, Kermit could see his father wiping the fog from his spectacles. Motioning for silence. Raising his rifle higher … higher …

“Wait,” whispered Kermit, putting his hand against the barrel. “We don’t have a sight on him.”

“He’s up there.”

“
Where?
You can’t possibly land him.”

“I don’t mean to land him, I mean to roust him. Look, now, you wait till I fire. As soon as you hear the rustle, you follow it, and you fire right into it, do you hear me?”

He’s mad,
thought Kermit.

Yet he understood that the Colonel, being myopic, had always hunted through some triangulation of senses: sound and smell filling the gaps in vision. He gave the nod, and the old man once more lifted the barrel of his gun. A second … two seconds … and then the forest seemed to explode with the rifle’s report. Only to contract in the very next instant.

Kermit tilted his ear up to the canopy. Waited for a cry or a rustle, but there was none.

Once more the Colonel fired, and once more the forest caught the sound and held it. Everything else shrank into silence, and the Colonel was raising his rifle for the third shot when they heard a faint whistle and, from the blackness above, something began working its way toward them.

Kermit nearly laughed.
A Brazil nut.

But no Brazil nut, no coconut in his experience had ever made such a commotion on its way to earth. This was a thing of weight, of moment, and it was coming to them tier by tier, and the breath froze in Kermit’s chest as he waited.…

Just when he had resigned himself to waiting forever, a great black bundle dropped from the canopy and pooled on the forest floor.

Kermit’s torchlight was already picking out the splay of black limbs. The surreally long tail. A spider monkey, as sure as night, prostrate at their feet.

Even so, Kermit held back. It was the Colonel who stood over the carcass and, in a voice of unmistakable satisfaction, said:

“We shall have a grand feast with this one.”

Kermit knelt now before the carcass. Studied the eyes, which had passed beyond cloudiness into white agates. Something was wrong.

There was no blood.

No blood on the head. On the feet. In the abdomen.

He pushed the monkey onto its back—and was astonished to see it split open.
Wide
open.

A monkey rug,
he thought wildly. But something had to have climbed that tree. Made that sound …

Then a new sound broke on his ears: a tremulous, high-pitched bark. Trigueiro, galloping toward them. The mutt had followed their scent, and his fawn-colored flanks were pumping, and he was longing with every particle of his soul to be where they were.

Only he never made it.

A stifled yelp. A hiss. Then silence.

Trigueiro’s front paws were sprawled before him. Projecting from his back was a single arrow, so freakishly long it might have been one of Jove’s thunderbolts, pinning him to the forest floor.

“Trigueiro…”

Then the tree shivered open once more, and a black shape dropped from the branches—straight for the Colonel.

The old man flailed for his gun, but it was kicked away. He raised his fists like a pugilist, but the thing wrapped round him and squeezed. It was like watching a man wrestle with his own shadow—and lose.

With a shout, Kermit sprang at the shape, but he was already too late, he knew that. Knew it even before he felt the blow on his own shoulder and saw his torch flying into the dark.

The second blow caught him on the chest. He reeled … and then sank, with supreme awkwardness, to the forest floor. He watched his own torch descending on him—a blaze of heat and weight.

“Father,” he cried. And fell out of the light.

4

“You’re awfully shy.”

He was dreaming of Belle. Belle, as he’d first seen her two years ago.

“Shy for a
Roosevelt,
I mean.”

If any other woman had said that, he would have stammered … well, something about never speaking too quickly for fear of speaking amiss, this being the course approved by Lord Acton and … and Dryden … oh, on and
on,
defending himself, and it would have been worse than saying nothing. He didn’t even have the courage of his own quiet.

But beneath the glitter of Belle’s cornflower-blue eyes, there lay a kind of watchful patience. She would wait for him. It would be worth the wait. And, with that, he realized the words were already there.

“They also serve who only stand and grunt.”

In the next instant, he had his reward. She laughed. A gleaming plenitude of teeth.

“Well, now,” she said, stretching her vowels as far as they could go. “Do you also
walk
and grunt?” She curled her white hand around his elbow. “At least as far as the punch bowl?”

When he hesitated, she added, “You may ask anyone who knows me, Mr. Roosevelt. I don’t bite.”

“Nor do I, Miss Willard. I assure you.”

“Then we may proceed in safety.”

*   *   *

H
IS SISTER
E
THEL WAS
the one who’d invited her to Sagamore. “Now, you
will
be sociable, won’t you, Kermit? She’s a Democrat, of course, so we can’t talk too much in
that
line, and you must forgive the fact that she comes from scads of money, because she’s really tremendous fun. Her father owns a chain of hotels, so hospitality runs in her veins. Oh, don’t smile like that, you know what I mean.”

He’d had little occasion to speak with Ethel’s friend on the first two days, but he did notice how well she took to a horse. She was a little thing, but her carriage was erect and springy—
charged
—as though any second she might leap off and chase the quarry on foot. She was a sure shot, too, knew her way around Winchesters, even helped to dress the deer she shot. She propelled a skiff like a champion crewman. Beneath that nest of blond ringlets, he suspected, lay a barely rehabilitated tomboy—the kind he might have seen playing hockey, in winters past, on Duck Pond.

But it was summer now, and as the days and nights passed in hikes and rowing and lunches among the wild plum bushes and afternoon teas on the veranda and parlor games and midnight bonfires, he could see how far she had left the pond (and him) behind. Through training, through inclination, she had become everything he was not: facile, vivacious, nakedly curious, a talker, a laugher, a dancer. When she laughed, she had a way of tilting her head back as if she were imbibing the joke from a great stein. Her hands tilted up, and her long white neck glowed like coral.

“It’s easy for her, isn’t it?”

“What is?” Ethel asked.

Living,
he wanted to say. There wasn’t a slough of despond that Belle Wyatt Willard couldn’t skate right over—with a sly backward wink as if to say,
That wasn’t so hard, was it?

But it is hard. It’s supposed to be hard.

That’s what he had always told himself—although if he were to look at his father, springing out of bed every morning and flinging himself at the waiting day, he could see how very easy it was for an elect few. To their company must now be admitted this young woman, who handled every second of her allotted time as a gift. Treated even him as a gift.

*   *   *

O
N THE NIGHT BEFORE
Belle left Sagamore, they stood alone on the piazza overlooking the Sound, watching the lights of the Fall River steamers, listening to the green warblers and the purple finches and the bobolinks. From the beach came a pipe scent of rosemary.

“I’m going to South America,” he said.

He had taken a job with the Brazil Railway Company. He was going to carve railroads and bridges out of the Brazilian jungle. The pay would be minimal at first, and the danger considerable. More than one of the company engineers had been killed by Indian arrows; many more had died of malaria. Yet it was the closest thing to a calling he could discern: to be so far from civilization’s grasp. He still savored the memory of the year he had spent with Father in the wilds of Africa, and in South America he would find a place even more remote, more mysterious, a continent with a great black hole at its heart, waiting to be filled with light—not the light of salvation but the light of
knowledge,
yes, of human understanding.