Roosevelt's Beast: A Novel (20 page)

“Não se mova,”
she snapped.

“Luz has instructed you not to move, Father.”

“Oh, fine. I won’t even breathe, how’s that? You know, it’s the queerest thing, Kermit, I don’t remember the creature even touching me. Ugh. Another minute or two, I should have been just like that jaguar. Well, that’s all right, if all we come away with is a few scratches, we must consider ourselves damned lucky.”

Kermit surveyed their party: the Colonel with his seeping plaster; Luz with her raiment of blood; the ugly violet bruise just above Thiago’s left eye. If any of them had been lucky, it was Kermit himself. No contusions. Nothing twisted, broken. Why, then, of all of them, was he the dullest in spirit?

He watched Luz bring out more Brazil nuts, saw Thiago fashion a ewer of couratari leaves and ferry over drafts of water from a nearby creek. He listened to the reams of words the Colonel cast forth between each swallow, watched the bright gnash of his teeth.
Yes,
Kermit remembered.
This is how it’s supposed to be. After a kill.

In just a few minutes, they would be returning in triumph to the Cinta Larga. They would be hailed as heroes. They would be escorted back to the expedition, brimming with tales of their latest adventure. Wouldn’t their comrades be amazed? Wouldn’t Father’s readers at Scribner’s gasp and clutch their cultured pearls when they heard of the Beast with No Tracks?

But none of that mattered so much as this. The expedition would travel on, and Kermit would reach the end of that accursed river, and, come June, he would be a married man. Married to the grandest girl in the world.

Why couldn’t he relish such a prospect?

*   *   *

“W
HY ARE YOU SUCH
a gloomy Gus?”

On any other night, if Kermit were to sit in the front seat of his father’s Haynes-Apperson Model 19, he might have been left alone for upward of two hours to smoke his cigarettes or recite Villon poems from memory or listen to the crickets and the ovenbirds. But tonight was different. Tonight Belle Willard, with the tenacity of a coonhound, had sniffed him out in his burrow, and she was now giving him the full blaze of her attention.

“You were quite right to run off,” she was saying. “Squeak, piggy, squeak is a childish sort of game. Even for a summer evening.”

“It wasn’t the game. And I’m not being gloomy, not on purpose. I just like to get away every so often.”

“And now I’ve gone and ruined it.”

“Not at all.”

“Are you quite sure? Would you care awfully if I joined you?”

He looked at her. “In the car, you mean?”

“I’ve never sat in a Haynes before. Only Packards.”

“But I’m not…”

She was already walking around to the other side, her oyster dress flashing like scales in the moonlight.

“Do you need help?” he called.

“With what?”

“Climbing in.”

“Of course not.”

There was a rush of silk, a cloud of lavender perfume, and suddenly she was there, only a few feet away, in the darkened interior. It occurred to him how close to scandalous it was: a young man and a young woman sitting in a car together. On a night such as this. There could only be one reason.…

But that’s not the reason. I didn’t even ask her.

“Shall I leave the door open?” she asked. “Cooler that way.”

“Certainly.”

The silence wove around them.

“It’s quite all right,” she said. “We don’t need to talk at all.”

“No.”

“What I mean is,
you
don’t need to talk. I can do all the talking for both of us. Unless it’s disagreeable.”

He shook his head, softly gripped the steering wheel. “I’m sorry to be such a trial,” he said.

“Not at all, Mr. Roosevelt. You merely strike me as … ohh, one of those brooding,
sensitive
sorts of souls. All hidden depths.”

“Too well hidden, I think.”

“Ah! You have graduated from taciturn to inscrutable.”

To his own amazement, he was laughing. He could actually feel his breath on his hands.

“I’m so very afraid of being a bore,” he confessed. “To you in particular.”

“If I were bored, Mr. Roosevelt, you would be the first to know.”

He was silent again, but only for a moment.

“You talk about depths, Miss Willard, but the question I ask sometimes is: What if there
aren’t
any depths?”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow you.”

“
Inside
us, I mean. What if there aren’t any depths at all? Just a great drop? Just nothing at all.…”

He couldn’t see her face in the dark. He could only sense the tiny recoil in her willowy figure. But before he could apologize, she was rallying.

“In
that
case, Mr. Roosevelt, we shall drop together.”

*   *   *

L
OOKING BACK, IT WAS
clear this was no grand affirmation on her part but an extension of her sociability. It was clear, too, that this was when he had begun to love her. And what better sign of his love than this? That when his thoughts should be tending toward the Beast, they kept sliding toward her. To that oilskin packet of letters pressed against his chest. Line by line, committed to memory as surely as Villon.

I don’t know how, or why you should love me—perhaps because I too have prayed,—& been unhappy—and now you love me and my heart is very full—What have I done that God should choose me out of all the world for you to love—but as He has done this, so perhaps He will make me a little worthy of your love.

He closed his eyes and imagined her, as he so often did, on their wedding night. Prying her like a pearl from the shell of her gown. Tracing the long white stem of her neck … past the clavicle, the sternum … that first inkling of cleft …

Only today the fantasy didn’t play out as usual. The trail darkened as he descended it, and the breast that peeped from behind the dress’s folds was not Belle’s—and the lips, parting to drink his, those weren’t Belle’s, either.…

“I hope it’s tasty,” said the Colonel.

“Sorry?”

“The Beast, I mean. As soon as we’ve brought him back to the village, I say we throw him on the fire. I reserve for myself first crack at the shanks.”

“And what of our duty to the expedition’s sponsors?” Kermit permitted himself a smile. “To science?”

“Oh, science is all well and good, but it won’t fill a man’s tum-tum, will it?”

The Colonel pressed his hand against his belly and shouted with laughter. Like a virus, the laughter was carried from Luz to Thiago. For a time, they seemed actually to be lobbing it back and forth, seeing which of them could toss it higher.

“Dear me,” said the Colonel, giving his eyes a wipe. “This must be the jolliest hunting party I have ever been part of. Wouldn’t you agree, Kermit?”

“Absolutely.”

“Well, enough levity. To quote the walrus, the time has
come
. We must put our heads together and determine how best to convey our Beastie back.”

Of course, thought Kermit. They couldn’t just leave the thing here. The chief, the entire village, would expect tangible
proof
of their deliverance. And with Thiago busy guiding them back and the Colonel barely able to walk, the job would have to fall to Kermit and Luz.

The chief problem was finding some comfortable arrangement for sharing the burden. Though they trussed the monkey’s arms and legs with lianas and strapped it to a branch, the difference in stature between the two bearers caused the weight to shift back and forth, knocking each of them off balance. At last, in a fit of pique, Kermit slung the creature around his neck—like a sweater on a warm day—shuddering at the touch of its clotted fur.

“Let’s be off,” he muttered.

“Are you quite sure, Kermit? It’s not too heavy?”

“I shall live.”

He was twenty feet down the trail before his father called after him:

“That’s quite a hair shirt!”

They took a more direct route back to the village, but it was even barer of comfort. Dead leaves, uprooted trees, broken branches, mummified husks. The wreckage grew higher and higher—rubbish and lumber twining with dried foliage and dead creepers. The only intrusion of color was a morpho butterfly, startled from an uprooted tree, gone like a memory.

Welcome to paradise.

But, ahead of him, young Thiago beat his usual path through the brush and, whenever the mood seized him, sang out,
“Deen! Deen! Deen!”
And Luz answered with her low, throaty chuckle, and the Colonel cried, “Ladies and gentlemen! Thiago the Magnificent! Thiago the Trailblazer!” And their laughter swelled and ebbed and mysteriously swelled again—until the Colonel gave out a sharp cry and dropped straight to the forest floor.

“Father, what’s wrong?”

“Oh, just some thorn or other. Damned thing’s gone right through the sole of my boot. No worries, I’ll have it out in a wink.”

But the wink turned into something longer, and the more Kermit waited, the more he felt the creature’s weight on his back. His lips were chapped. His feet were sloshing inside his boots. His hands were as crinkled as if he had dipped them in a soda bath.

“Nearly got it,” said the Colonel.

With a rasping grunt, Kermit flung the dead monkey from his shoulder, sank to the ground, and then jerked up again as the abscess on his buttock flared. Just ahead, he could see Thiago and Luz standing as still as fawns in the smoky light.

“You seem awfully down in the dumps,” the old man said.

“Tired, I expect.”

“Who could blame you? Are you sure you won’t let me carry the creature for a bit?”

“We were wrong, Father.”

“What’s that?”

Kermit fingered the sweat out of his eyes. “We thought the Beast hunted only at night.”

“Well, yes. That’s true.”

“We also thought it attacked only one prey at a time.”

“So we did.” The old man grunted slightly as he dug his fingers into his foot. “Because that’s what the preliminary testimony suggested, Kermit. Now that we have the testimony of our own senses, any theories we previously entertained must give way before our enlarged knowledge. Whether we like it or not, we have stumbled across an entirely new—or at least a radically altered—life-form. Unknown to Western science in all its particulars. We may only record what we see and”—he squinted down at his bare foot—“let Dame Reason sort out the rest.”

“Dame Reason.”

“Will you kindly tell me what is vexing you so much?”

“I don’t know that I can.” Kermit leaned back against the smooth brown bole of a laurel, angled his chin to the sky. “Do you recall what you said before, Father? How deuced unlikely it would be if we simply
stumbled
over the thing?”

“Did I say that?”

“You said it would be ‘the stuff of boys’ adventure.’”

“Well, yes, so it would be if we’d found it
slumbering.
But, as you’ll recall, the Beast called itself to our attention.”

“So it did. And in a place where we would be sure to see it.”

The Colonel’s eyebrows drew down. “Something’s not squaring for you.”

“Something, yes.”

“You surely can’t believe we killed the wrong animal.”

“No. It was the right one. It could be no other.”

“Then what can be the trouble?”

Kermit frowned, curled a vine around his finger. “It was just…”

“Yes?”

“It was too easy, Father.”

“Easy?”
The old man’s mouth made a perfect hoop. “Do you call the four of us being nearly killed—do you consider that
easy
? I have enjoyed considerably easier days.”

“What I mean is, the chronology is off.”

“Chronology…”

“Do you remember in Africa how long it took us to bag your lion?
Days
we spent looking. And yet today—today we travel into a jungle and, in the space of a few hours, we stumble across a creature that has eluded the mighty Cinta Larga hunters for weeks. What are we to call that? Beginner’s luck?”

He could see the bull-like flare in the old man’s nostrils.

“Kermit, I must tell you. I have never known anyone more afraid of succeeding than you. Since you choose willfully to ignore what we’ve accomplished, let me refresh your memory. We took it upon ourselves to find a beast. We
found
said beast. More than that, we caught it red-handed—red-mouthed, red-
everythinged.
We observed with our very own eyes its velocity, its capacity for destruction, its bloodthirst. We … we
effaced
it from the company of the living. Now, I don’t know about you, but I call that a job well done, and I don’t much care how long it took us to do it. We’re not paid by the
hour,
you know, like some pipe fitter or stevedore. We’re hunters.”

Kermit ran his hand down his face. Why had he even said a word? There was no way he could have conveyed the look in that creature’s eyes. Or explained that, of all the animals he had ever killed or helped to kill, he had never felt such tender feelings as he did toward this one. And that this tenderness was, under the circumstances, so awkward, so unmanning, that it was almost as good as poison.

“Enough!” he snarled. “I wish I hadn’t brought it up.”

“Well, you don’t have to sulk about it.”

“I’m not.”

“I can excuse many things in a young man, but
sulkiness—
”

“Father, I promise you I am completely and utterly … sulk-
free.
I’m as happy as a clam. Look, I’ll dance, shall I?”

Kermit set his foot on a shivered length of wood, felt it sink beneath his weight. He brought up his other foot and began to hop, lightly and brightly, like a hare.

“Don’t be silly, Kermit.”

“Not silly.
Happy,
Father.”

“You look like a damned fool.”

“A
happy
fool. Embracing his success.”

In the next breath, he was dropping.

Through the wood, through the ground that lay beneath—straight into the earth itself.

15

There was no time to protest, no time to react. He was conscious only of the ground closing around him … the friction of ants and sand against his skin … and then suddenly the absence of friction. He blinked. Coughed out a bubble of surprise.