Roosevelt's Beast: A Novel (10 page)

He knew these eyes.

Just three months ago, he and the Colonel had been invited to Las Palmeiras, Senhor de Barras’s ranch on the Rio Taquari. A special treat was in store for them. They were to be given the chance to hunt for jaguar, king of South American game. The old man was no longer so avid a hunter as he used to be, but, being a good guest, he announced himself agreeable. It took them a long day of slogging through the marshes on shabby little horses before they came on fresh tracks at the edge of the jungle. From there, it was short work. The Colonel shot a female jaguar perched among the forked limbs of a taruman tree; Kermit, for his part, shot a male out of a fig tree. Since then, he had given the two animals no more than a second of thought.

Until tonight.

For now the wheel—the “Wheel of Things,” a Buddhist might have said—had spun the other direction, and a jaguar, perhaps some near relation of the dead cats on the Taquari, was coming for
them
. Wishing very much to return the favor.

Oh, it was true, jaguars rarely attacked humans. But how many humans were as helpless as Kermit and Theodore Roosevelt in this exact moment? The pickings could not have been much easier.

Kermit watched as the gem eyes advanced by inches. From behind him, he heard a strange straggling wheeze. It was the Colonel. Making a sound that could scarcely be decoded as a word.

“Heee…”

The sound tapered away but came back even stronger.

“He … shall … make no … meal of us.…”

“No,” whispered Kermit.

And added to himself:
He’ll make a meal of just
one
of us.

With a terrifying swiftness, the prayer rose up.

Take Father.

*   *   *

A
FTERWARD,
K
ERMIT WOULD BE
unable to find the demarcation line between the jaguar’s approach—the presentiment, no, the certainty of doom—and what followed. Indeed, it was hard even to speak of something following, for that implied a progression from one thing to the next, and nothing about what happened was logical or sequential. It might have played out across two perpendicular axes, intersecting for no more than a few seconds.

All he could say finally was that, as he and the Colonel lay helpless in the night, something shifted. Everything shifted.

The stars sprang back, the trees shook, the ground bent. Kermit’s own breath fled from him at sharp angles. In the next instant, the jaguar was changed to a creature of suffering.

“Rrrowwww-
ohhhh…”

Never had Kermit heard an animal attain such a refinement of agony and subjection. The wretched cat howled,
howled,
as if every last one of the world’s torments had been concentrated into the purest possible solution and dropped into each pore. The jungle snatched the sound and doubled it, so that you might have thought there were two jaguars, or ten, or twenty, all trying to outdo one another for martyrdom.

It was a terrible sound, so terrible that Kermit was on the verge of screaming back, when the cry began unexpectedly to subside. First into paroxysms, then shudders, then sighs, then a long sibilant rattle.

But as terrible as the cry had been, the quiet that followed was worse. Still worse was the low and steady lapping that now filled their ears. An oddly gentle sound, like a kitten slurping up milk. The jaguar’s conqueror was now reaping its reward—drinking its fill.

And preparing to do the same to us,
thought Kermit.

His numbed lips trembled into speech. “Our Father … who art in heaven…”

In the darkness, he heard his father’s counterburden. No prayer at all but a snatch of old verse.

“Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole…”

Still the lapping went on—unquenchable, implacable—reverberating in the air around them, caressing their necks, their flanks and groins.

“I thank whatever gods may be,”
croaked the Colonel.
“For my unconquerable soul.”

This time, Kermit’s eyes were wide open. He was magically curious. He longed to look the thing in the eye.

But there was nothing to see. Only the sensation of absence—something
lately
there, its echo still lingering in every atom of air and soil. In Kermit’s own grunts.

“Huhh … huhh…”

The ground righted itself. The sky tumbled back into place. One by one, the jungle’s night sounds crept into hearing. Every creature celebrating its deliverance.

And Kermit, too exhausted to celebrate, watched himself vanish down a long inky river.

I’m to be … I’m to be married.…

*   *   *

H
E SLEPT LIKE A
dead man.

7

Once more sleep brought not dreams but memories. He found himself tumbling out of the tropics … out of the twentieth century … landing finally on an August afternoon in Sagamore. Here was his sister Ethel, transformed back into a girl, all pins and hems, breaking into his reverie.

“Kermit! We’re playing hide-and-go-seek in the barn!”

He was once again a boy—eyeing her like an old man. “Who else is playing?”

“Just Ted and me. It’s silly to play without a third. You must come!”

She knew enough to know this was the one game he would consent to play with them—because (and this she didn’t know) it was the one game that left him, for long intervals, as alone as he was the rest of the day.

“It’s not the sardines kind of hide-and-seek?” (He had a disagreeable memory of being packed in a broom closet with four young relations, praying to be found.)

“No,” said Ethel. “The regular kind.”

“Oh, fine.”

The reluctance was mostly a show, for in fact he had found the perfect hiding place. Not in the loft; that was too obvious. Nor in any of the tunnels the children had made in the hayricks—you could hide there for only so long before being found. In the course of his private explorations, Kermit had found beneath two loose floorboards a small earthen cavity, where, if a boy didn’t mind field mice for company, he might lie concealed for quite a while. Even better: If the day was sunny, he would have enough light streaming through the crevices to read, uninterrupted, for hours.

Relishing that prospect, he strolled into the barn with a copy of
The Prince and the Pauper.
Ted began the count, and Kermit waited until his sister had ducked out of sight before easing himself into his burrow. He smiled as he heard Ethel scuttling … Ted thumping … the muffled shouts of discovery or near-discovery. A stray horsefly circled around his head. Kermit brushed it away, and as his hand settled back to earth, something answered his touch. A piece of paper, wedged like a forgotten playbill between two posts.

Idly, he tugged the paper free, turned it over. It wasn’t a paper at all but a photograph. A picture of a man perhaps thirty or thirty-five years, wearing a top hat, a short-tailed black morning coat, and white peg-top trousers. A gentleman equestrian by the looks of him, but there was no horse in view and nothing in the picture that should have interested a ten-year-old boy. An hour later, though, he was still looking at it—or, rather, it was looking at him, revealing new congruencies. The mustache: Hadn’t he seen one like it somewhere else? The metal-rim spectacles: Yes, they were just like the ones Father used to wear. The face itself: This, too, like Father’s, only smoother and thinner, handsomer.

Morning drifted into afternoon. Kermit clambered out of his hole, surprised to find the game long since abandoned and Ethel sitting crossly by the chicken coop.

“Where have you been?” she demanded.

The photograph lay buttoned inside his shirt. He weighed the possibility of brandishing it like pirate booty, but he couldn’t imagine it interesting her—it was just a picture, after all—so he left it in place and removed it only that night when his nanny was taking him upstairs.

“Mame,” he said. “Who’s this?”

She was an old woman now, and it took her almost as long to stop climbing as to start. With a ragged wheeze, she snatched the photograph from him. Her mouth went ever so slightly slack, and he understood now that this was the response he had been hoping for all along; he was thrilled to have produced it. Mame was silent a good long while. Then, in a voice burred with fury, she said:

“Well, there’s some as don’t want you to know, child, but that’s your uncle.”

“I don’t have an uncle.”

“And what do you know about it? You’ve got a cousin, don’t you? Your cousin Eleanor?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s her father, so that makes him your uncle, Master Know-It-All.”

Until this moment, Kermit had never considered the possibility of Eleanor having a father.
Or
a mother. He had assumed she’d come into the world exactly as she was now: tall, clumsy, unparented, a train of pity dragging after her.

“Where is my uncle now?” he asked.

“More questions. He’s gone to his reward, that’s where he is. There’s no help for him on this earth, which means you’re not to mention him to anybody, do you hear? Not your cousin, not anybody.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t trouble yourself with that! You do as I ask.”

“Father says I may speak to him anytime I want. About anything I like.”

“No,” she snapped, leaning into him. “Least of all your father.”

“Why not?”

“It was his
brother,
child. Oh, sweet Jesus,” she hurried on, “you’ve made me say too much as it is. Listen, Kermit, you must promise me on this very spot never to speak of him again—to
any
body, now.”

“One more question, then.”

“You’ll be the end of me.
What?
”

“Tell me his name.”

She looked at him. Then, in a voice of unusual softness, she said: “Elliott.”

*   *   *

E
LLIOTT.
A
PLAIN NAME
made extraordinary by the silence that shrouded it, by the fact that it could never be spoken. And how much more extraordinary that this great and forbidding and all-consuming mystery should be entrusted not to Ted, not to Ethel, not to little Archie—but to Kermit! He and he alone would be the one to solve it.

Oh, but the trail was long, fogbound, twisting out of sight, and he had only two pieces of evidence: a name and a picture. It took him some time to grasp (in the manner of his beloved Holmes) that the very absence of clues was in itself a clue. For if Uncle Elliott’s memory had been banished so completely from Sagamore, then surely he had committed some great crime, something that had swept him from civilization’s embrace.

If that were so, then there must be a record. Kermit began waking himself an hour early every morning to peruse his father’s newspapers and journals. (The Colonel was pleased at his son’s sophistication.) But though he forded through many thousands of column inches, he could find no trace of Elliott’s name.

The larger world was no more forthcoming. If, by chance, a schoolmate of Kermit’s made a menacing allusion to Jack the Ripper or Lizzie Borden or John Wilkes Booth, Kermit might lean forward and, in a confidential whisper, say, “I suppose you’ve heard of my uncle Elliott,” and wait to see what answering chord it produced in his listeners’ brains. But their only reply was a crease of bafflement, which he then had to erase by pretending he’d been joking all along.

One thing was growing clear: Elliott’s crime, whatever it had been, had not yet taken root in popular lore. Kermit would have to find its after-echoes in Elliott’s surviving relations.

Was it any wonder that Cousin Eleanor became a creature of such fascination to him? During the infrequent times she came to stay at Sagamore, Kermit would study her with a clinical intent, as though at any moment some confession or affidavit might come flashing from her. So queerly did he peer that Eleanor, despite being his senior by five years, began quailing a little in his presence and did her best to avoid him.

Clearly, he would find no help in that quarter—and wasn’t it possible, he considered, that Eleanor was just as ignorant as he was of her father’s infamy? She was only fifteen, after all, and young people were allowed to know so little in this world! Knowledge was the closely guarded treasure of adults, who would tell you things—important things—only if they thought you weren’t listening. The key, then, was to linger as long as possible at the edges of their gatherings—their receptions and dinners and after-dinner smokes—to become a connoisseur of whispers, asides, blurts, and retractions. It would be exacting work, to be sure, but by staying patient and keeping his ears open, Kermit might begin to assemble a piecemeal biography.

So he did, working over many months to dredge a whole life out of wistful croons (
Poor Elliott … Such a charmer … What an end…)
and dark mutters (
Drank like a fish … Ladies not in his own rank…)
. There was one point on which all sides agreed: Elliott Roosevelt had been a golden child. Gallant, smart, generous, loyal, witty, polished. Loved by all who knew him. A fine shot, a fine dancer, equally at home in the wilderness and in the drawing room. More gifted by most accounts than his older brother, Theodore, but fatally lacking in Theodore’s focus and ambition, with the result that his talents tapered away into idleness, lark, mere recreation. He played polo (like a madman). He hunted tigers in Kashmir, elephants in Ceylon. He married a woman he dearly loved and then amused himself by chasing other women,
many
other women, the less suitable, the better.

He drank. Wine and ale and milk punches and mint juleps and sherry and bitters. He drank whatever was in season or out. He drank to remember or else to forget what he had been.

Oh, it was a sad tale, the saddest—and was there not something about this sadness that jibed with Kermit’s own nature? Melancholy had crawled into his pores while he was still in his bassinet and had dogged his steps ever since, had turned him into one of those odd children, palely loitering, shunning talk. “The boy with the white head and the black heart,” that’s what his own mother had called him, and he had accepted both judgments. He was, after all, the blondest of the Roosevelt children and the most darkened by his own thoughts. He would gladly spend hours in perfect silence, exploring the old stable or deploying his white guinea pigs in battle formations, but there were times, too—whole days, perhaps weeks—when even silence was a burden, when keeping himself free of others seemed like the greatest gift he could bestow on them. These were, predictably enough, the times in which his parents most despaired of him. One night he heard them in the library, talking in the strangled timbre he had come to recognize as his birthright.