Roosevelt's Beast: A Novel (32 page)

Thiago would sound the alarm. In seconds, the villagers would mass. They would grab their spears, their arrows. They would come for the white men and would carry out the vengeance that Thiago had been unable to exact on his own.

Would it go slowly or quickly? It hardly mattered now. The only remaining consideration was how Kermit would present himself for that final ordeal. Kneeling, standing, lying—none of the outcomes held any particular horror for him. No, the only thing that could disturb his perfect equanimity was this.

The sight of his father.

That hobbled, cussed, half-blind old man whom he had pledged to preserve and protect and defend. How could he think of leaving him to the justice of the Cinta Larga? On what ledger in heaven could such an offense ever be blotted out?

No,
he thought.
They can’t have him.

In a nearly disembodied voice, he heard himself say:

“We must go.”

“Go?”

“Before they get here.”

“Nothing would please me better, Kermit, but I hardly see how we—”

His son was already sprinting toward a small aperture in the jungle front. Nothing more than a chink when you first looked at it, but Kermit was charging as if he expected the forest to part before him.

“Come!” he cried.

When the old man hesitated, Kermit had to bellow just one word.

“Now!”

*   *   *

T
HE PATH WAS EXACTLY
as he remembered: barely existent in its earliest stages, then broadening with each step, gaining confidence. The sound of water thickened into a rush, the sky came dropping down, and, sooner than they could have expected, they were standing on that shelf of rock.

“Awfully far down,” offered the Colonel.

“Yes.”

“Don’t suppose you mean us to jump the whole way.”

“No.”

Crouching, Kermit reached for the rope of vines he’d cobbled together—still hanging from the cliff’s edge. Clumsily knotted, irrepressibly jerry-built, it earned a look of rawest skepticism from the Colonel.

“How far does it reach?” he asked.

“No idea.”

“All the way to the water?”

“No.”

“Do you think it will hold?”

“Not sure.”

The old man nodded, turned his head back toward the jungle, where the sounds of the oncoming Cinta Larga were swelling into acclamation. A grin exploded across his face.

“Then this should be quite the adventure, Kermit! Only do let me go first, will you? If the thing snaps, I think I’ll prove a tad more buoyant than you. And
here.
” He tossed over his Springfield. “You may need this on the way down. No need to check, it’s loaded. Are we ready then? Very
well…”

The old man drew up a length of vine, wrapped it twice around his waist, tested his weight against it. He took two quick sharp breaths. “Nearer my God to thee,” he murmured.

The first part was the hardest: a backward step straight off the cliff, with only faith and a vine to keep him from free-falling. For a second or two the old man dangled there in utmost helplessness, but his boots found a purchase against the rock face, and he was able to lower himself another few feet.

“Why, it’s no worse than … than Rock Creek.…”

Even this spasm of effort was costing him. He grunted and huffed and cursed, and blotches of coral splotched his skin as he took the next leap down, sending up a shower of dirt and pebbles.

“Come
on,
Kermit! We haven’t got all day.”

The vine was stretched too taut to make a belt. If he were to descend, Kermit would have to depend on his hands alone—and whatever docking points the cliff face provided on the way down. Already he could see how the swings from his father’s descent were sawing the vine against the rock’s edge.
Three minutes,
he thought.
Perhaps four.

Through every quadrant of jungle now, the pursuers were coming hard on. Kermit crouched at the precipice, uttered a wordless prayer, then flung himself over.

He felt the earth flying away, his bare chest scraping against the rock. Flailing, gasping, he pushed out still wider, the vine scalding his hands as he slid down. Blood bubbled from his palms, but in the next instant his feet found a cranny. Emboldened, he flung himself out again, spilling out another freshet of blood, thicker than the last, spidering down his forearms.

From below, he could hear the old man calling his name, but his eyes were fixed on that tiny promontory just above. The little shelf of rock where, any second, the Cinta Larga would be converging.

How would they first show themselves? A hand? A head?

But what appeared finally wasn’t human at all but an arrow, of supernal sleekness, tipping downward like a dowsing rod in search of water, locking him in its sights.

By now Kermit was no longer rappelling, he was
sliding
down the rock, and the vine was whipsawing in and out of his grip, and his hands were boiling with blood, but all he could see was that pitiless shaft, silently tracking him, preparing to fire.

“Stop,” he hissed. “Stay off.”

In the same breath, though, he knew there was only one retort. The steel barrel he’d jammed into his belt loops before descending.

Father’s rifle.

If he could just fire off a shot—a single warning shot—he might buy the time he needed to get to the water. But how to manage it?

Wincing, he gripped the vine more tightly, swiveled his legs in every direction, seeking a ledge, an outcropping—anything—but all he got were more contusions … until, with a joggle of surprise, he found himself standing on a lip barely wide enough to support his weight.

He gazed up the side of the cliff. The arrow was still in plain view, still aiming straight down at him. Using the vine as a brace, Kermit planted his feet, drew out the rifle, centered the arrow in his sights.
No need to hit it,
he reminded himself.
Just make some noise.

And yet his finger hesitated in the act of pulling the trigger, and it seemed to him that the arrow, too, was hesitating, trembling with cross-purpose. Time shrank down to a small, still point, infinite in its possibilities, so that afterward it was impossible to say who fired first, because everything played out in the same endlessly unfolding instant: the arrow singing down and the bullet screaming up and his own body flinging itself outward.

And a face … a
face,
pushing out from the promontory’s edge and then disappearing in a cloud of smoke.

Thiago’s face.

Untethered from rock and vine, Kermit dropped straight and true, his body curled as softly as a sleeper’s, and his eyes … his
eyes
open the whole way down … taking in
everything
. The arrow, sticking from the ledge he had just occupied. Directly above it, the miasma of smoke from his rifle blast, blanketing the rock like the most porous of cotton.

And there … through the smoke … a single arm. Small, still. Draped over the cliff’s edge.

*   *   *

H
E FELL INTO DARKNESS.
The old familiar.

Then a
new
darkness—cool, tannic, beaded—bearing him along.

And for an escort, look! Fire-hardened bamboo arrows, nearly six feet long, piercing the membrane just above his head and brushing his skin and raking his hair.
Longing
for him, but brought up short again and again by the strange dark medium that carried everything along.

Water. He was swimming in water.

With a convulsive movement, his head broke toward the sky. The air came shrieking into his lungs and pinned him to the river’s surface. Roused to a nearly erotic thirst, the arrows redoubled their whistling and crooning. With a martyr’s patience, he waited for that first blow … and listened, with something very close to disappointment, as the sound faltered and sickened and died away.

Sorry … so sorry …

He gulped down more air, squinted into the morning dazzle. On either side, the jungle was a sheer shadowless front of green. Ahead of him, a large rock was bobbing in the water.

How curious. The rock was Father.

Kermit opened his mouth to call out, but no words came. It didn’t matter. All things considered, this was quite a pleasant way to pass the morning, riding the river’s shoulders toward some unknown destination. It felt almost like home.

If he felt his legs straining to keep him above water, if he felt the air dribbling from his lungs, if he felt the last of his reserves burning down to a tiny pyre … well, that felt like home, too.

Voices were raining down.

“Senhor Coronel! Senhor Coronel!”

On the bank to his left, people had gathered. They were watching him with great interest.

“Senhor Kermit!”

Wrong man,
he thought, with a suppressed giggle. The jungle was slipping past with mysterious swiftness, and the water ahead was beginning to wrinkle and roil, and from a distant veil of mist a dull roar went up. Why, he thought, it was just like the day he and Simplício went over the falls. Nothing to be done, was there? You let the water take you wheresoever it listeth. And if for some reason a branch should come along …

*   *   *

I
N THE END, THE
branch came for him.

Not a branch, after all, but a hand, hooking around his shoulder. His eyes swam back into focus, and he saw that the hand belonged to the Colonel—
Hello, Father!
—and that the old man was at the tail end of a human chain extending all the way to shore, and that this chain comprised the tiny adamantine figure of Colonel Rondon and the bent-sycamore profile of good old Cherrie, and there were Lieutenant Lyra and Dr. Cajazeira and João and Juan and all the rest of the
camaradas,
all braided together,
reaching
for him, coaxing him out of the water, and stretching him across the white warm sands.

He lay there for some time, coughing up water. His ears were ablaze with sound. Rondon’s woodpecker cadences:

“Il ne faut pas entrer dans la jungle sans escorte.”

His own father’s mollifying reply:

“Ah oui, je m’excuse. Je l’ai oublié.”

And the sound of his
own
words, still unspoken, clogging in his brain. It wasn’t until he was sitting up, spewing out the last draft of the Rio da Dúvida, that the words found a way out.

“We must … leave … now.…”

Then, because nobody seemed to be listening, he started to bellow. As loud as he could, in every language he knew.

“If you value the lives of this expedition, you will leave at once!”

26

Say this much for Rondon. The gear was packed, and the canoes were ready to go. It was as if he had been planning for just such an eventuality. They had only to climb in and be off.

Yet, to a mind as beset as Kermit’s, how slowly that process unfurled. Never before had the
camaradas
moved with such deliberation. Never before had the canoes been quite so balky or the paddles so clumsy, the breezes so contrary. Five minutes passed—ten, fifteen—and still they were lolling in the black water, as stymied as rabbits in a cage. And the whole while, the same injunction played itself out in Kermit’s brain.

Don’t look back.… Don’t look back.…

For he knew they would be there. He knew, too, that if he kept his eyes trained forward, in the direction of the current, he needn’t hear the whistling of their arrows, he needn’t see Thiago’s arm hanging off the cliff’s edge, he needn’t see the look in Luz’s eyes as she crumbled before him.…

At last Rondon gave the command, and the men let out a ragged cheer as the river took hold and the canoes gathered speed. Only Kermit was silent.

*   *   *

A
FTER ALL THESE WEEKS
of deprivation, God was finally smiling on them. How else to explain why they made three kilometers before noon and another four that afternoon? The rain held off, and the sun hid itself behind every passing cloud, and whatever rapids they met were child’s play to what they had come across in the days and weeks before. One could almost imagine a chant rising from each paddle in turn.
Out … of the jungle … out … of the jungle …

They brought in the boats with half an hour of daylight left. Kermit dragged his canoe to shore, then wandered down the shoreline for fifty or sixty yards, ostensibly looking for game, but really looking at nothing. Nothing at all.

“Roosevelt!” Cherrie had followed him from a discreet distance. “I’ve brought you one of my shirts if you’d like to…”

Kermit’s gaze tilted downward. What a shock to see his own torso! No longer soaked in blood, it was true, but bare as a beggar’s. Bruised and abraded and seared with a full day’s worth of Amazonian sun. Only now was the pain breaking through.

“Thank you,” he murmured. “That’s very kind of you.”

“You don’t mind my saying, you look done in.”

“A bit, yes.”

“We had quite despaired of you both.”

“I don’t doubt.”

“You’ll need another rifle, I expect.”

Kermit stared down at his hands. “Yes. That would be just the thing.”

“Dear God, what happened out there, Roosevelt?”

What happened …

If Kermit had ever possessed a tongue, now was the time to use it. Now was the time to speak of an orphan named Luz and an orphan named Thiago. A warrior named Anhanga and an old wretch named Bokra. A little girl who went to fetch cacao for her mother. A chief who looked like a bookmaker. A howler monkey with the saddest eyes you ever saw.

A beast.

The whole tale lay there, queued up on his tongue, ready for a confessor. And still he balked, for he could see what the end point would be. He would speak his piece, and Cherrie would nod and think all the thoughts that a resident of
his
world would think and would say nothing, nothing at all, and that silence would be the greatest rebuke of all.

“Sorry,” said Kermit. “I can’t … I can’t quite…”