Roosevelt's Beast: A Novel (28 page)

“I’m glad you’ve come,” he said. “You can answer a question for me.”

“Of course.”

“Why should Bokra wish to kill Anhanga?”

She paused. “Why must there be a reason?”

“No reason,” he answered, with a half smile. “Except that people, in my experience, tend to do the things they want to do. When I think the matter over, the only one I can see who benefits from Anhanga’s death is—I’m sorry—
you.
”

“How so?”

“You said yourself he was the only one standing in the way of Thiago leaving. With him gone, Thiago is free. So are you.”

She stood now, wiped her hands lightly on her thighs. “Free? Is that what you think I am?”

“More free than you were last night.”

“It is very strange, Senhor. I think you are accusing me. You believe I killed my husband.”

“I’ve accused no one.”

“You believe me strong enough to do such a thing?”

“Oh, I don’t think Bokra was strong enough, either. Whoever did it would have needed some help.”

“Where would this help come from?”

“The Beast.”

Not a flinch anywhere—in her face, in her body.

“The Beast is dead,” she said. “We saw it die. You and I.”

“Oh, no, I say the Beast is alive, Luz. And living in someone else.”

She smiled now for the first time. Only it was the most equivocal smile he had ever seen on her.

“In one of
us,
Senhor?”

“Perhaps.”

“In me?”

He looked away. “I am only saying that whatever killed Anhanga appears to have your interests very much at heart.” He glanced back at her. “
You
must have wished death on him many times. He killed your father. He took your innocence. He tossed you aside for another woman.”

How brutal Kermit sounded, even to himself.

“If I were the Beast,” she said, “it is not Anhanga who would be dead.”

“Who, then?”

“The chief.” She gave her hair a short, hard swipe. “He was the one who gave me to Anhanga. Tossed me to him like a stick to a dog. It was the chief who made sure I was
um pária
from the start. He made the others cruel to me—to Thiago. Anhanga did not do this; the chief did. And yet he lives, does he not?”

“The last time I saw, yes.”

“Anhanga’s death: This has nothing to do with Bokra or the Beast.”

“Then who has avenged you, Luz?”

“God,” she answered.

He nodded, rested his foot on a rock. “Your God has been slow about it, Luz. Many years.”

“He can take his time. He has nothing but time.” She raised her chin and took a step toward Kermit. “Trust me, Senhor. Nobody is safe from him.”

It was a simple statement—a bromide—delivered with no particular menace, but it made every follicle on Kermit’s arms tingle. He took a step back and swiveled his rifle toward her—even as Luz swung her bamboo blade toward him, stopping just a few inches shy of the rifle’s muzzle.

And there they remained: the very definition of impasse. He knew, of course, he could squeeze off a round before she broke an inch of his skin. Surely it was his own mind holding him back. His
two
minds. One saying:
Save yourself.
The other (sounding very much like the Colonel himself):
Blackguard! To shoot a woman!

With a convulsive sigh, he dropped his rifle to his side.

“Go,” he said. “Please go.”

He didn’t watch her leave, but in some sanctuary of his brain he heard her receding into the distance, kicking up tiny spouts of water as she went.

He sat himself in the stream. He wrapped his head in his hands. He might have stayed there all night just like that, a study in despair, but he was roused finally by the faintest of phenomena: a stirring of molecules in the air.

Nothing like the cold of the Beast, but every bit as familiar. He could feel it on his skin, smell it, taste it. River air. The great black river, close at hand.

He wheeled his gaze in every direction, searching up and down the forest wall. At length his eyes fastened on something … the most fledgling of openings. Only when he drew nearer did he see it was an outright
trail,
clawed at some expense from the jungle interior.

Kermit hesitated, looked in both directions to see if anybody was watching. But he could only hesitate for so long, because the river air was streaming straight through him now. He was actually smiling as he stepped into the green shadows.

*   *   *

M
ORE THAN ONCE, HE
wished for one of the
camaradas’
machetes. After the first flush of struggle, though, he and the path began to work toward the same end, and before he had gone even thirty feet, the forest was pulling away and he was standing in a corridor of air.

He took two steps forward. His foot slid into a cloud of dust, and the earth itself rushed up to meet him. For a second he hung there, all coordinates erased.

He was standing on a tiny bluff overlooking the Rio da Dúvida.

Even from this height, he recognized the river’s tortuous shape, the rapids throwing up their whitecaps. Just one more step and he would have been enjoying a splendid bath indeed.

He scanned the vista from end to end, looking for a dugout or a tent and finding only … the sun, scuttling in and out of a cloud … the water, as black and opaque as ever … the vast green monotony of the forest … the
silence,
lying like deafness on everything. It was as if he’d never left.

He scanned the river up and down, looking for some trace of the Roosevelt-Rondon Expedition, but there was nothing. No way of taking latitude. His only compass was the sinking sun, which was fast taking all the light with it.

If he stayed much longer, he might never find his way back. Still, the prospect of being stranded here was preferable to returning—preferable, yes, to seeing that infernal pit and Bokra’s butchered corpse and the chief’s wizened scowl and the hollow, staring eyes of those Cinta Larga mothers, burning with hunger.

But
Father
was back there, too.

“God,” mumbled Kermit. “If you’re there. If you wouldn’t mind … some clue…”

It came not half a minute later. His eye caught the downed trunk of a palm tree lying a third of the way across the river, its leafless branches rising up like …

Like the fingers on a hand.

He remembered this tree. He’d floated past it just two days before. To his addled, whimsical mind, it had looked like a hand waving good-bye.

And soon after—
very
soon after—Rondon called the boats to shore. And that was where they were now!

Assuming they hadn’t broken camp, assuming they hadn’t given up on their missing comrades, the men of the Roosevelt-Rondon Expedition were no more than a mile or two downriver. Why, the water could carry him there in a matter of minutes.

But how to get to it?

The drop was a good hundred feet down a sheer cliff face. There wasn’t a path or rock trail to soften the descent; there was only gravity. Father would have taken one look at the situation and declared:
My kingdom for a damned rope!

Then, realizing where he was, Kermit started to laugh. Because if there was one thing the Brazilian Amazon was pestilential with, it was rope.

Vine after vine, looping around every tree, vying for every last atom of sun and water. A vast
trampoline
of natural rope, capable of flinging a man to the nearest asteroid.

Yes, indeed. Kermit had only to peer over the ledge of the cliff to find a cataract of vines already draped along the rock face, each at a dozen feet in length and an inch in diameter. All he had to do now was connect them somehow, and he would have the most secure possible rope a jungle could devise.

And so he set to work.

The main challenge, he soon discovered, was creating the individual segments. He had to sever the vines from their attachment points, but, lacking any knife, he had to drag each vine like a saw across the nearest trunk. Even then it took him many minutes to break all the way through. His skin began to crack and bleed, but he consoled himself with visions of the Colonel and Thiago shouting with joy as they climbed to freedom.

In short order, he had yoked together four links and tied them to a vine-anchor. He was reaching for the fifth vine when, from the jungle interior, he heard a soft thrashing. He crouched on the rock, waited. Someone—some
thing
—was coming his way.

Kermit reached for his Winchester, stretched himself across the ground. The sound grew nearer, more
real
—like actual limbs contending against actual vegetation. He tapped his finger lightly against the trigger. He waited.

Indeed, so intensely was he following the sound from the interior that he quite ignored that
other
sound in the underbrush just to his right, never apprehended the point at which that sound acquired shape, then motion—a lightning-like trajectory that caught him squarely in the chest.

He gasped, rolled away. Now, too late, he saw it, half concealed in the mud, long and slender and sidewinding. A spade-shaped head and a pair of horizontal fangs and a pair of sooty eyes, regarding him with a curatorial interest. It seemed almost to be tracking his symptoms, one by one: the fire in the veins, the tingle in the skin, the thinning of the pulse.

Stay awake,
Kermit ordered himself. But the world was swooning around him, and the feeling was stealing so quickly from his limbs that there was no way to bring it back. He saw, he
felt,
blackness. Then a new blaze of pain. His eyes trembled open.

Luz.

Luz was leaning over him. Looking as ravenous as any beast that had ever lived as she fastened her teeth onto his tender skin.

“Stop,” he whispered. “No…”

But his mind was moving in the opposite direction.
Go ahead. Help yourself.

The darkness pooled around him. He fell in without a splash.

22

“I don’t blame you.…”

A voice, no more, but it had the exact effect of light.

“I don’t
blame
you for wanting a good old-fashioned snooze.”

Kermit pressed a thumb to his eyelid, peeled it open. A blurry moon of a face swam toward him. With great difficulty, Kermit picked out an ear, a nose, a confusion of teeth. With even greater difficulty, he connected these parts to the voice.

Father.

Father was there. Father was saying …

“It’s not often a fellow gets nipped by a viper.”

Nipped …

“Or a
Bothrops atrox,
if you prefer. Maybe Latin’s a bit too much to ask right now. Let’s just call it a fer-de-lance and be done with it, eh? Of course, I didn’t see it for myself. Did it have a pointed head?”

“I don’t…”

Kermit closed his eyes, tried to retrieve that last moment of consciousness. It was like crawling out on a ledge that kept shrinking beneath your weight.

Ledge. He was on a ledge. There was a
river.
He was lying flat on the ground, ready to shoot.…

Now the image of that snake flashed forth, and like its living embodiment, sent a wave of pain rolling in. So intense that it took him several seconds to identify the source: a scorched region just below his collarbone, raw and welted, recoiling at his touch.

“Oh, I know you can’t see it,” said the old man. “Take it from me, it’s a beaut. Two of the prettiest little fang marks you’d ever want to see. And not a spot of blood to mar the view.”

Kermit dropped his head back. He understood now that he was lying in his hammock. It was nighttime. He was … here. With Father in their hut. Among the Cinta Larga.

“How did I…”

“How did you
live
? Well, you have Miss Luz to thank for that. She’s the one who found you. Got rid of that snake, for starters. Coiled it round some stick or other and threw it somewhere in the approximate direction of hell. Then she sucked a good part of the venom right out of you. And
then
—oh, what did she put on you? Some stone or other? Do you see what problems arise when I don’t have you to interpret for me?”

Kermit’s fingers inched down toward his chest. Something hard and thickened lay there. A plaster, smelling of fern and grass and mud.

“Whatever she did,” said the old man, “it must have worked wonders, because you were still breathing when they found you. Which is more than I can say for
most
viper victims. One minute they’re bleeding from the eyes, the next they’re heading straight for that undiscovered country. You’re a lucky young man, Kermit Roosevelt.”

Lucky. Yes.

“One way or another,” said the Colonel, “you seem bound and determined to get me in trouble with your mother. You get roughed up by
bats, snakes
—what’s next, I wonder? No, I don’t even want to wonder. Oh, but I almost forgot. In addition to thanking Miss Luz, you must give Belle an extra kiss the next time you see her.”

The old man held up a square of oilskin. The perfect waterproof container for …

Letters. Belle’s letters.

“What in—”

“It’s the thing that got between you and your viper,” said the old man. “Kept it from plunging its fangs any deeper. Otherwise, it really would have been lights out for you. Oh, don’t worry, none of your precious missives was punctured. Nor did I
read
a single line. I’m not some gossipy old spinster, you know.” Frowning, the old man weighed the packet in his hand, like a bag of rummy coins. “You’ll want it back, I expect.”

“Please.”

“Well, we don’t want it resting on the wound. Why don’t I tuck it behind your neck? That works, doesn’t it? I’ll just tie the drawstrings …
et voilà!
Your little talisman, returned to its rightful home.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“What time is it?”

“Late. Late enough to
sleep,
if you get my drift.”

“We can’t.” Kermit gritted his teeth. “Things to do…”

“If you’re referring to Bokra’s body, that’s been taken care of. Don’t look so shocked, I’m not completely decrepit, you know. I threw him right in—
both
parts. Each one light as a wren. We all had a grand time filling in the pit, the chief appeared to be most satisfied, and his various cabinet secretaries did me the great favor of spitting on our work. We’ve fulfilled our contract, my boy—to the letter. And tomorrow I expect a
formidable
royal escort back to camp.”