Roosevelt's Beast: A Novel (5 page)

A week into the journey, Kermit’s old malaria came back with a vengeance. He could barely keep in his saddle, and under the constant jostling of his mule, abscesses sprang up on his buttocks and the insides of his legs. Every bounce and jolt sent another blade of pain through his fevered brain, and the only way to distract himself was to repeat, again and again: “I’m to be married in June … married in June.…”

Malaria was digging in everywhere—not even the Colonel was immune. By the time they reached the river, they were so exhausted and their supplies so diminished that the leaders made the strategic decision to split the expedition in two. One party would be sent down the Gy-Paraná to the Madeira—a charted river and a less dangerous journey but a useful effluent for such irritants as Father Zahm, who had alienated everyone (the Colonel most of all) with his highfalutin airs and pettiness. The others—and they included Rondon, the two Roosevelts, and Cherrie, the naturalist—would take up the challenge of the Rio da Dúvida.

It was just a few minutes past noon on February 27 when they prepared to launch. Kermit climbed into the lead boat, already chafing at its narrowness. João and Simplício pushed off with their oars and, a second later, the current swept them up and bodied them forth. From somewhere far behind him, Kermit heard a single voice calling.

“Good luck!”

*   *   *

H
ERE WAS THE THING
about traveling down an uncharted river: You could only say how long you’d been traveling; you could never say how long it would be. Here they were, five weeks later, winding down the same black river and stymied at every turn by rapids. They could travel no more than a few miles before the next roar of water came echoing from around the bend. Never once had they made more than a mile and a quarter a day. Altogether, they had traveled less than several miles—and that through bitterest labor and with no small risk.

They had lost five canoes and, thanks to Kermit’s rashness, one of their crew. They were wet. They were starving. They were ravaged by insects. They were riddled with disease and so tired they had forgotten what it was like to be anything else.

And the black river wound on.

I’m to be married in June. Married in June.

*   *   *

L
ATE IN THE AFTERNOON
of April 2, a new set of rapids rose up. They found a level margin of sand and set up camp. Kermit and Lieutenant Lyra went ahead to scout and came back with news of what lay ahead. More rapids. Rapids running as far as the eye could see. Ready to smash any canoe that dared ride them.

The sun was sinking like a fist over the mountains on their left flank. Quiet had fallen over the camp, except for the sputtering of the sodden wood that Franca was coaxing into a fire.

Kermit sat on the foreshore, his sun helmet at his side, a wad of tobacco in his cheek. He was staring through the canyon to where the river was already churning out of sight, as black and opaque and unknowable as the day he first saw it. The thought caught him unawares.

What if it leads nowhere? Nowhere at all?

Blinking, he gazed about at his fellow travelers. There was Cherrie, shaking out his poncho in long slow arcs. And over there Dr. Cajazeira, gravely thin, parceling out his rations of fly dope. The
camaradas,
bowed and sore-pocked, were hauling up bags, tying hammocks, and swinging their machetes through thickets of vine. Kermit saw them now in the light of his own question, and the truth settled over him like a pall.

They were dying.

It was true. Everyone—and everything—stank of the tomb. The slabs of mountain on every side. The trees arching like the groins of a mausoleum. The lethal fecundity of all these trunks and leaves and vines, writhing and coiling and sometimes leaving the ground altogether and sprouting in midair, and every sprout sprouting anew, weaving round.

We should have found a better place,
thought Kermit in a daze.
A better place to die.

Kermit swiped his forearm across his face and closed his eyes. Sucking in the wall of his cheek, he drew down the last dregs of tobacco juice. A minute, two minutes passed, before his eyes were stung open by smoke. Franca’s campfire, sending out fumes of coffee.

Coffee and … what? Kermit made a quick calculation. The two piranhas they’d caught last week had dwindled to nothing. The coconuts were gone. So were most of the Brazil nuts. There was some wild honey, a little palmito. Soda crackers.

By way of compensation, there would be much
talk
of food tonight. Cherrie would speak of pancakes with maple syrup. (He was from Vermont.) The Colonel would extol the mutton chop. “With a tail to it!” And Kermit would make the usual noises about strawberries and cream, but, in his heart, he would be longing for bacon.

Not just any bacon, but the kind he and his brothers used to eat on camping trips. Three or four times a summer, they’d row with Father to the same secluded neck off Oyster Bay, and as the sun fell, they’d make a driftwood fire and fry up a rasher of bacon. And whether it was because of the romance of their situation or the exertion of rowing four miles, bacon had never tasted as good. Nor would again.

Bacon. A Cortland apple. Hamburger steak with onions.

A bubble of saliva welled up from the corner of Kermit’s lip. Strange how alert he’d become to the nuances of dampness. The morning dampness of his socks, for instance, was altogether different from the smoky dampness of the day air and the sealskin dampness of the river. He felt a tiny fleck of drool—he cupped it now with his fingernail—pearly and self-contained.

Finally a more pressing dampness at his elbow. Trigueiro, worming his way through the gap beneath Kermit’s arm and depositing his camel-colored snout on his master’s lap.

“No luck?” asked Kermit. He scratched a semicircle around the dog’s ear. “Not even a squirrel?”

Kermit canvassed his body’s coordinates. His left buttock, where an abscess still throbbed. The running sores on his shin. His thigh, bruised last week by a paddle and no closer to healing.

The chest …

Already his fingers were stealing toward the oilskin envelope beneath his rag of a shirt. Belle’s letters. Still there.

“Senhor.” One of the
camaradas
was leaning toward him.
“Sua barraca está pronta.”

“Obrigado.”

Preparing his tent was the one chore Kermit suffered the laborers to do for him. And only because he had come to require this particular space in the day. His eyes traveled down the shoreline to where the Colonel sat on a stump of tree, studying the river. He watched then as the old man rose to his feet and tottered back toward camp, dragging his left leg a little behind.

“Franca!” called the Colonel (to the cook who spoke no English). “I am expecting culinary wonders tonight.” Then he disappeared into his tent.

Kermit pried Trigueiro’s head off his thigh and lowered it, in slow increments, to the ground. With a soft groan, he raised himself to his feet and heard a gravely cheerful “Heigh-ho!”

It was Cherrie, coming to him with a gift: dark and hard and twisted. A
bird,
in fact. Ten inches long. Rich-brown feathers, a yellow rump and crest, and a red stripe on its cheek.

“Chestnut woodpecker,” said Cherrie.

“Easy to bag?”

“Oh, no, he was dead when I found him. Not sure I’ve ever seen one this far south.” A line of skepticism in the older man’s lips. “Not much use to us, eh? Scrawny thing.”

“Maybe he ate a termite or two,” Kermit suggested, “on our behalf.”

Nodding, Cherrie tucked the bird under his arm and gave it a proprietary pat. “Your father will be pleased,” he said.

“I’m sure he will.”

“I only wish I could have brought us something more—well, never mind. How about a nip, Roosevelt?”

They were on their last bottle of Scotch. The first two had gone quickly and, in order to make the third endure, they had resorted to marking off the allotted increments. It worked out to a couple of drams a night, but if you took them before dinner, it was almost as good as a jigger.

Just a few yards from Cherrie’s hammock, they were stopped by a sound.
Sounds
—raucous and queerly throttled—from deep in the forest interior. Locusts, one might have thought, only the rhythm was more intellectual than zoological.

“Guess we should have expected them,” said Cherrie.

“Who?”

“The
two
-legged fauna.”

The men looked at each other.

“Are you sure?” asked Kermit.

“Sure enough.”

As they stood listening in the fading light, the voices seemed to make strands around them, and Kermit had a curious impulse to thrash himself free. But the sounds vanished as quickly as they came, leaving the jungle that much quieter.

“Part of me wishes they’d show themselves,” said Cherrie. “Part of me wishes they’d stay far away. God knows we’d be in no shape to hold them off.”

“The Nhambiquara were friendly enough.”

“Why, because they gave us canoes? I’d say we paid them well enough. The trick being we knew
how
to pay them. Because we were able to talk to them. Because we were able to see them in the first place.”

It was true. During the last week, no face, no body had emerged from that impenetrable forest, only signs. A well-worn path. Footprints. Old fishing baskets. Trees methodically stripped of their bark. Somebody was out there.

With a small shock, Kermit registered the fact that Cherrie was laughing. Revealing, with that simple act, just how much of him had withered away. All you could see of him were his teeth, scandalously oversized, jabbering like a fun-house skeleton, and, beyond that, the chasm from which words were somehow emerging.

“I’d ask them for supper,” said Cherrie, “if there were any to go around.”

3

Dinner passed in a blink, and the expeditioners, lacking strength even for talk, retired to their tents and hammocks. Except the Colonel, who found a tiny clearing ten yards down the shore, seated himself in a camp chair, draped mosquito netting over his sun helmet, and swaddled his arms in fringed gauntlets, leaving only his hands free.

He looked, thought Kermit, like a dowager aunt on a transatlantic crossing, but Kermit knew the old man didn’t care. He had work to do. He had contracted with Scribner’s to keep a daily journal of his travels, and keep it he would, no matter how low the sun or how the insects chaffed. And he would give himself so thoroughly to this work that an hour might slip by without his missing it, and Kermit could stand there—as he was doing tonight—and be acknowledged no more than a moth. Only the sight of a cup waving back and forth before the old man’s eyes broke his concentration.

“Coffee?” he gasped.

“The last of the last.”

“Well, then,” he said, unfurling his netting. “Don’t mind if I do.”

There was no other chair, so Kermit sat on the ground, watching the old man fold his mouth around the cup’s rim.

“You’re well?” the Colonel asked.

“Well enough.”

“I was just setting down how … how very
optimistic
I’m feeling. About the day ahead.”

“Yes?”

“The current is quite obviously picking up. As is the breeze. Once we’re past those damned rapids, we should make at least ten kilos before sunset. Twelve, if the gods smile.”

“You may be right.”

“And in that event, we should reach the Aripuanã before another three weeks have passed. From there to the Amazon, and from there, home.” He nodded for emphasis. “We’ll get to the end of this.”

Kermit’s gaze settled on the river, simmering in the quarter-light.

“Of course, you must promise me,” the Colonel added, “that when we reach civilization, you will take a razor to that growth of yours.”

Smiling, Kermit ran his fingers through his beard. He had grown it in solidarity with the
camaradas,
and it stretched now to his clavicle.

“I can’t shave it, Father. It’s the record of our days. Here now…” At random, he plucked a mote from the brown shawl. “This was the stinging ant I was wrestling with just this morning. Touch and go, I tell you. And this little termite? Don’t let his looks fool you. I caught him eating Colonel Rondon’s hanky last night. Subjected him to the hideous Death by Follicle.”

Strange. He was rarely funny with anyone else. But, then, there was no reward quite like the Colonel’s laughter. You had the sensation of riding it.

“Oh, and this?” he went on. “Intestinal grub. Completely lost his way. I’ve persuaded him he’s crawling through my colon, and he’s invited all his pals to join in. Quite the merry clan, and more expected any minute. One way or another…” He began to wave his beard like bunting. “This thing will catalog more species than Linnaeus.”

The Colonel dabbed his eyes. “In that case, we must ship you straight to the Natural History Museum. I fear you’ll never again see the light of day.”

“My gift to science. In return, I ask only…”

“Yes?”

“The privilege of examining your leg.”

The Colonel’s grin drooped into a scowl. “Why? Cajazeira’s been fussing over it all day.”

“Indulge me, please.”

With a bearish rumble, the old man rolled up his left trouser leg. From the pallor of his shin, a hot red hard bruise snarled out.

“Larger than yesterday,” said Kermit.

“I’d say not.”

“And what of this?”

He fingered an abscess just above the Colonel’s knee, looking up just in time to catch the old man’s wince.

“I leave you
your
bruises, Kermit. You might do the same with mine.”

“That’s hardly a bruise.”

“It’s the price of my clumsiness. When a fellow goes and bangs himself against a rock for no good reason, he must pay the consequences.”

“Has Cajazeira lanced it?”

“Just this morning.”

“And your blood pressure?”

“A trifle low, I’m told.”

“Temperature?”

“A trifle high. Kermit, I beg you to stop nagging. You sound like Old Mame,” he said, rolling the trouser leg back down. “If you must know, a spot of fever has its benefits. It leaves a fellow less keen on supper—which, under the circumstances, is to be encouraged. Tomorrow night you may have my entire cracker, if you wish.”