Roosevelt's Beast: A Novel (16 page)

Some things, it seemed, really were universal. The look of wonder, for example, that crossed Thiago’s face as the Colonel’s words showered down on him. It was the expression the old man tended to produce wherever he went in the world.

“And do remind me to tell you about the first time I went hunting buffaloes. Why, it was raining hard enough to drown a rat. You couldn’t tell what was buffalo and what was
water
. It was touch-and-go, I don’t mind telling you, but, to my great good fortune, I had a fine associate name of Cadmus
Swallow.…
”

So they walked, the old man and the boy, until they reached the forest wall. The boy used his bamboo knife to hack out a crevice in the vines and then push himself through. The old man followed.

“All will be well,” said Luz. “I believe this.”

And she, too, disappeared into the jungle.

Kermit stared after her. Then he looked back.

Someone was watching them go, after all. It was Bokra, the old man with the marbled eyes, holding in his arms the half-plucked harpy eagle. Freed from its cage, the bird showed no inclination to take flight but simply nestled against its protector’s shrunken chest, cooing and purring. The old man stroked its balding skin with his cadaverous fingers and, just as Kermit was about to turn away, began unexpectedly to cackle.

“Curupira!” he called. “Curupira!”

12

As soon as Kermit entered the forest, the light vanished like a breath. But the mosquitoes—what else had they to do but follow? For some two hundred lengths, Kermit waved them away in the mechanical, hopeless fashion of a jungle traveler—until he realized he was swatting only air.

He stopped, inspected his surroundings. No breeze had risen up. The air was every bit as hot. The trees still rose in their vast smooth columns, blotting out any thought of sun. But the mosquitoes were gone. And so were the gnats and flies and bees. Every flying torment had abandoned its post—and headed straight to a darkened heap some twelve feet off.

There rose to his nostrils now a rich, hot, sweet scent. The unmistakable scent of decaying flesh.

“Dear God,” Kermit whispered to Luz. “They couldn’t forsake tribal custom for once? Bury the poor fellow?”

Luz shook her head. “You must not touch a man who is taken by evil spirits. The same thing could happen to you.”

“It’s barbarous,” the Colonel muttered. “Leaving a man to rot like that. Listen, now, Kermit, we mustn’t let the boy see.”

But Thiago had been at the head of their party from the start, and he was looking down at that body without a tremor or recoil, surveying its flaps of rotting skin … its shreds of bone and tissue … that
head
 … tilted back and wrenched open, as if to roar away the insects that circled it in a frenzy of ardor.

The Beast, though, hadn’t left much for the bugs to feast on. Muscle, heart, liver—all were gone. The man had been peeled open and scooped out like a tin of sardines. The only organs that remained were his eyes, and, under the ministrations of heat and bacteria, even these had melted into black craters, staring out of a mustard-colored mask.

“
Somebody
was hungry,” said the Colonel, half-grimacing at his own callousness. “Quite a dismal crime scene, I’m afraid. No light to speak of, many hours of decay. I doubt even the finest Manhattan coroner could tell us exactly how the fellow died.”

“So many causes of death to choose from,” added Kermit.

“It would help just to know if he was insensible from the start. Or did he fight the whole way? Was there some—some coup de grâce the Beast administered?”

“And where did all the blood go?”

For all its decomposition, it was the cleanest corpse Kermit had ever seen. Not an ooze or seep anywhere.

“Well,” said the old man, “we know the answer to that one. Our Beastie’s a drinker. Damn me, though, it kills in a way I’ve never seen before. Beyond malevolence, more like…”

“Comprehensiveness.”

“Yes. Just so. The thing doesn’t want simply to kill. It wants the
whole
of its prey.”

From high above them, a brood of cicadas broke into a grinding whir, as shocking as a steam whistle. Turning, Kermit found Luz, ten paces off, her hands moving at angles. Only hours later would he realize she was genuflecting.

“Can you tell us about the victim?” he called.

“What do you wish to know?”

“How old was he?”

“He was young. A man, but young.”

“Eighteen? Nineteen?”

“Young.”

“You say he was one of the men keeping watch that night.”

“Yes.”

“Did anyone see him attacked?”

“No.”

“Did he cry out?”

She thought. “There was one shout. Very short.”

“And then silence?”

“Yes.”

“And he was dragged here?”

“Yes.”

“By what path?”

She pointed to the ground. “This one. The one we came by.”

Kermit’s eyes widened. So the path they’d been traveling had been specially carved for them by the Beast itself. But as he looked back, the only signs of violence he could see were bent-back shrubs … tiny disruptions in the carpet of humus.…

“Did they find anything near the body?” he asked.

“Such as what, Senhor?”

“Markings. A piece of hide.”

“I cannot say. I wasn’t there.”

He had to fight the impulse to shake her.

“The men who found him,” he persisted. “Did they say anything about what they found?”

“I heard them say something. To the other women.”

“Yes?”

“They said the Beast must have come from above.”

“Why?”

“There was nothing leading away from the body.”

“No tracks?”

“None.”

Against his will, Kermit’s eyes swung to the vertical, followed the bole of the nearest tree some one hundred feet, all the way to its crown, where the tree threw out its side branches and gathered into a dense matting of vine and leaf.

“Aerial,” guessed the old man. “Is that what they’re thinking?”

“Something like that.”

“Oh, very well, then. Search the skies all you like. You won’t find it, I tell you.”

“It makes as much sense as any—”

“Kermit, what’s the biggest bird you’ve ever seen?”

“I don’t know. Albatross?”

“And how long would you suppose its wingspan to be?”

“Ten, twelve feet.”

“And what’s the biggest thing you’ve ever seen it pick up?”

“Not sure, really. Largish fish … a squid, maybe.”

“So you’re telling me there’s a
bird
out there so large, so powerful, it can drag a full-grown man through underbrush and foliage—
dense
foliage—thirty or forty yards with minimal protest and then have its way so utterly with him that”—the old man gestured to the corpse—“
this
is the result?”

“I’m not saying anything. I’m just trying to make the evidence fit.”

“And what would a fine detective like your Mr. Holmes say in such a case? If the evidence doesn’t fit the theory…”

“We need a new theory.”

“Precisely.”

“For my part,” said Kermit, “I’d settle for more evidence.”

Even in the jungle’s churchy gloom, it was impossible to miss the gleam in the old man’s eye.

“You anticipate my very thought. Ask Luz if she’ll take us to the other body.”

But her eyes didn’t exactly light up at the request. “There will not be much to see, Senhor. It was only a child.”

“All the same.”

“It is farther, much farther.”

“How much farther?”

“Oh … many minutes, Senhor. Perhaps an hour.”

The words “no matter” danced on Kermit’s tongue. Then he saw how the Colonel was beginning to sag, subtly, against the trunk of a silk-cotton. How the earliest signs of vacancy—the old Cuban fever—were shining from the old man’s eyes.

“Father … if it’s all the same to you … maybe Luz and I should go on, just the two of us. You can go back to our hut and rest.”

“Rest?”
The Colonel swayed into erectness. “Nonsense. You’re as bad as Cajazeira. I mean to conclude this business, even if it kills me.”

“But the heat, Father. And your leg. You can barely stand on it.”

“Oh, be quiet, will you? I’m feeling fitter every second! And with this
Leatherstocking
here”—the old man gave Thiago a tiny cuff on the cheek—“we shan’t travel any farther than is strictly needed. Lay on, I say.”

*   *   *

T
HE FOOTING WAS HARD,
the way narrow, but true to the Colonel’s prediction, Thiago threaded a sure line. A
trail,
one might have called it, but it was impossible for a non-native to pick out the markers. A bent branch? A macaw feather? A slick of moss? Somehow the boy beat on.

Now and again, the sibilant accents of insects came whispering down. But by and large it was
their
tread they heard,
their
breath.
Like a dream,
thought Kermit. No,
the
dream: the staple of his childhood slumbers. Once again he was walking down the long, empty, amplifying halls of a house—not his house, not anyone’s—and every hall led to another, and nothing intruded, and nothing resolved.

In the dream, of course, there was never any question of stopping. Here in the jungle you could pause if you so chose, and each time you did, you would find evidence, incontrovertible, that you weren’t alone. A snail as big as your fist. Ruby dragonflies hovering over stagnant pools. A sulfur-colored butterfly, flying past like a swallow.

Once, leaning against a tree for balance, Kermit found a mantis, four inches long, holding a fly in its spindly arms as if it were a peach. He could actually see the fly passing, mouthful by mouthful, down the mantis’s glassy neck.

“Come,” he heard Luz call. “We don’t have far to go.”

Minutes later they were descending to a stream bridged by a fallen tree. The Colonel teetered to a stop.

“All apologies. Do you think we might stop a bit?”

Shameful, really, the hissing retort that rose up in Kermit now.
I told you! I told you!

He saw Luz whisper something to Thiago. At once the boy snatched up a palm leaf, folded it into a bowl, and lowered it into the stream, then carried the water back to the Colonel.

“Ah,” said the old man, his mouth wincing open into a smile. “It’s … it’s a Gunga Din.…”

Thiago grinned back. “Gunha. Deen!”

“Yes, that’s a … Naturally, I don’t expect you to … recognize all my allusions.…”

“Who is Gunga Din?” asked Luz.

The two men looked at each other, oddly bashful.

“É um poema,”
Kermit answered at last. “You wouldn’t have heard it.”

“A poem?”

“Yes, by a Rudyard Kipling.”

“Who just happens to be one of Kermit’s best pals,” the Colonel volunteered.

“Father—”

“You’ve stayed at the man’s house, haven’t you?”

“I hardly think—”

“What is this poem about?” Luz asked.

Kermit shrugged. “It’s about—how would you say it?—
um menino de água.
A water boy. Only he’s a man, I suppose. His job is to bring water to the English troops while they’re fighting.”

“This Gunga Din is English?”

“Uh, no. He’s Indian. From India, I mean.”

“India…” She let the name rest on her tongue. “And he helps the Englishmen with their fighting?”

“In a fashion, yes.”

“And who are they fighting?”

“Well, other Indians. It’s a bit hard to explain.”

“Whatever you’re telling her,” called the Colonel, “don’t ruin the ending! You know how I hate that.”

“At any rate,” Kermit explained, “Gunga Din’s job puts him in great danger. But he bears this danger willingly, although the men he serves are sometimes unkind to him.”

“Why?”

“Because of…” He glanced from Luz to Thiago and back again. “Because of his skin.”

“And what is wrong with it? He has scars or sores?”

“No, it’s just that, being Indian, he’s a bit darker in hue than the … than the Englishmen.”

Luz nodded, said nothing.

“But the point
is,
” Kermit rushed on, “the whole
moral
of the poem is that one shouldn’t judge a man by the color of his skin. That he might have quite noble qualities underneath. It’s really … I’ve always considered it Kipling’s most democratic verse.”

He struggled to translate this last bit, but Luz gave the impression of having left the subject behind. Reaching into a sisal bag, she drew out a handful of Brazil nuts—already shelled, thank God—and poured a ration into each of the men’s palms, then divided the rest between Thiago and herself. For some minutes they sat there, chewing, feeling the heat pile on them like sediment.

“Here’s an idea!” the old man cried. “Why don’t we do the whole poem?”

Kermit squinted at him. “‘Gunga Din,’ you mean?”

“We could perform it right here. It’s a short piece, after all; wouldn’t take more than a minute or two. What do you say, Kermit?”

“Why would we do such a thing?”

“Because that’s what leaders do,” the old man snapped. “They lift the spirits of their troops any way they can.”

He might as well have said:
That’s what men do.

“Then lift them on your own,” said Kermit. “I don’t recall the words.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” said the old man, all breezy. “Between us we’ll manage. With Kipling, it’s like an old tune. Once you get going, the words just pour out. But how are we to enlist our fellow conspirators, I wonder? Thiago, my boy! Oh, I know you can’t quite make out what I’m saying, but I want to assure you that you have the most important part of the whole poem. Yes, you will recite the central part of the poem—the
refrain,
yes. It’s the height of simplicity. You need but shout the man’s last name three times. In your best barracks growl. Like this:
Din! Din! Din!
Can you do that?”

“Deen deen deen.”

“A very fine first effort, but a touch lacking in the volume department. Do you think you might…”

The old man cupped his hands around his mouth, and the boy responded with three shrieks loud enough to startle a parrot into flight.