Roosevelt's Beast

by Louis Bayard

  It would have been the height of foolishness to tell anyone. They would have packed him off to an alienist—a sanatorium, an asylum—and what could he possibly say in his defense? That Elliott was incontestably real? As real as the branches of Father’s apple tree; the grove beyond Mother’s summerhouse; the beach at Cold Spring Harbor—all those places, in short, where Elliott did appear over the coming months, dressed as impeccably as ever, waiting as ever for Kermit to … explain.

  By now the silence that built up during these encounters had become a comfort, because it kept the outer world from rushing in and gave every meeting the feeling of ritual, the more relaxing for being undefined. After a dozen or so times, Kermit ceased to be surprised by his uncle’s appearances, began even to welcome them—or, at the very least, accept them. The question of what his uncle expected—this remained in permanent suspension, but Kermit was in no hurry to resolve it. Answers no longer held the interest they had once had.

  * * *

  IT WAS JUST A few minutes past noon on February 27, 1914, when the Roosevelt-Rondon Expedition prepared to launch down the Rio da Dúvida. Kermit climbed into the lead boat. 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!”

  It was a voice he had never heard before. He swerved around. On the bridge overlooking the black river stood Uncle Elliott, as natty and unperspiring as ever, waving in his usual droll manner. Speaking—that was new. Calling loudly enough for anyone to hear (though Kermit was the only one who turned around).

  “Bon voyage!”

  8

  Bon voyage.

  In his mind now, the Rio da Dúvida winnowed down into a long kite string. He held on for dear life as it coiled and wound and then shivered to a stop. Down to earth he floated. On a branch directly over his head wobbled a single bead of dew, growing fatter and fatter as he watched, swelling at last to the size of a globe and only then consenting to fall, by the slowest of degrees. Every tree in the forest unfolded its leaflets and reached up to catch the drop—for this was the last water that would ever be—and the drop was glistening with terror, and the air screamed around it, and the jungle opened wide, black and gleaming.…

  Kermit woke. He felt a pearl of dew sitting perfectly composed on his forehead. He heard the drowse of bees, the flutter of hummingbirds, the dry housemaid scuttle of cockroaches and scorpions. He smelled lilies—water lilies, unpacking their scents. Over his head, like a tiny vulture scouting him for signs of life, a mosquito was circling.

  “Go away,” he muttered.

  In the act of swatting at it, he stopped and stared at his hand. His hand, so lately paralyzed. His fingers, now swiveling freely in their sockets.

  For some time he lay there, entranced by his newness. Then, from close quarters, he heard a groan.

  “Kermit…”

  The old man was stirring. Kermit rolled over, stared down into his father’s face. Only it was another face looking back: Thinner, younger, handsomer. A neatly trimmed mustache. A look of polite expectancy.

  Kermit squeezed his eyes shut. Please. Please.

  He opened them again. And there was Father, reconfigured in all his jowliness.

  “My spectacles…”

  “They’re right here, Father.”

  “Are they … all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not broken?”

  “A little crack in the left lens.”

  “Well. That’s the blind eye, anyway.”

  The old man wrapped the spectacle tips around his ears and levered his torso up. Gazed around at the flowering trunks and the walls of vine melting out of the early-morning mist.

  “I don’t believe I’ve been here before.”

  “No.”

  The Colonel tweezed a pair of ants out of his ear. “Where are we, do you know?”

  “Here,” answered Kermit, in an unconscious echo of Luz. “We’re here. Far from home.”

  “And our hosts? Have we been formally introduced? Do we know who they are?”

  Kermit was about to shrug, but something snagged in him.

  “The Cinta Larga,” he said.

  He was already reproaching himself as he spoke. He should have known at once. The moment he saw the bark wrapped around their waists. The men of the wide belts. Even among other Indian tribes, they were the stuff of myth. Glimpses of them were rare, and few who had crossed their paths had come out better for it.

  “Cinta Larga,” the old man said. “By God, won’t Rondon be jealous? He wanted to be the first to see one.”

  “We are quite blessed, it’s true.”

  The Colonel rested his head in his hands. “Did I dream all that business?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “The jaguar and the … the after…”

  “It happened.”

  “Hmm,” said the Colonel, flexing his arms over his head. “Most remarkable.” With Kermit’s help, he lurched to his feet. “I don’t suppose they offer American breakfasts in this establishment.”

  “The proprietors keep different hours, I believe.”

  “Ha,” said the Colonel, peering over Kermit’s shoulder. “Not so different as all that.”

  * * *

  ONCE AGAIN, THE CINTA Larga had stolen up behind their captives in perfect silence and had deftly hooped them around.

  “Come to wish us good morning,” said the old man. “Very decent of them.”

  The number of warriors had at least doubled since last night, but the bark belts, the armlets, the hawk-feather headdresses—these were all gone, along with the spears and bows. Except for the liana scrolls around their penises, the men stood utterly bare.

  They’ve disarmed, thought Kermit. Why?

  Silence held sway for several minutes. Then a series of high-pitched sounds broke from outside the circle as the Cinta Larga women began to poke their heads and arms through the palisade of men’s bodies. One by one, the women were pushed back, but in the next instant a boy of ten or twelve, wiry and naked, managed to slip through somebody’s legs, and before anyone could stop him, he was crawling toward Kermit and the Colonel on a trail of giggles.

  Bellowing, one of the braves—the man from last night with the scar over his eye—snatched the boy and flung him back into the women’s ranks. But what lingered in Kermit’s mind wasn’t the act itself but the spasm that had crossed the man’s face when he saw the child—his child?—approaching the strangers.

  They’re afraid of us.

  Maybe the same thought struck the Colonel, for he grasped the folds of his shirt and let loose the full blaze of his smile and, with a flush of Yankee pride, shouted:

  “Good day to you all!”

  Silence.

  “Men and women of the Cinta Larga—and children, we won’t slight the children—you will observe, I trust, that my son and I are very much among the living. We are, however, a bit banged up. In addition, we are rightfully and manfully outraged by your conduct toward us. Being reasonable and civilized, however, we stand before you, prepared to talk business.”

  The Colonel had seldom found anyone with whom he couldn’t talk business. Even the Colombian students who had flooded his Santiago speeches, screaming, “Down with Yankee imperialism!”—even they, in the end, had given him the respect of their attention.

  “Let me preface my remarks by saying this. My son and I do not demand an accounting for your base actions. All we demand is safe passage to the river and reunion with our companions.”

  The Colonel paused, as if to let the point sink in.

  “We are slow to anger, we men of the North, but I think you will find that we do not take lightly any outrages committed against our persons. Nor will our companions. In absence of any word from us, they will beat a fiery path toward this very quarter and will repay any wrong done us two—three—ten times over.”

  How quickly it
came back, the old rhetorical grooves. The cheeks, reddened as if by a slap. The jaws snapping off each syllable. The right fist pounding away at the left palm.

  “It is clear, my friends, it is manifestly clear, that relations between our peoples have not begun on a sound footing. That being acknowledged, there is no earthly reason why we may not carry forward in a spirit of comity and goodwill. If there has been misunderstanding on your side, if there has been unnecessary and discourteous aggression on your side, my son and I stand ready to overlook these offenses in the name of—”

  A barking shout rang through the air, and a man stepped forward.

  Not the most prepossessing figure, Kermit had to admit. Middle-aged. Small, gaunt, hunched, with a bureaucratic air of suffering. In another world, perhaps, he might have been a pension officer or a bookie, measuring out each day in quires of paper. The only things that announced him as the Cinta Larga chief were the intricate stencils of blue genipap dye fanning across his face and the necklace of wild nuts, large as a life preserver, hanging past his navel. There was this, too: the way he seated himself on his tree-trunk throne. Not the ponderous descent of an emperor but the calm, offhanded motion of a man with no time to waste.

  The chief clapped his hands—twice, lightly. Then the tribal circle broke open to admit the bowed figure of Luz. In the light of day, with her softly freckled shoulders and pink nipples, she looked even further removed from the Cinta Larga.

  “Senhor Kermit. I am to tell you what has happened.”

  “We know what happened.”

  “No. Before you came.”

  And the two words that followed were somehow more evocative for being in Portuguese.

  “A besta.”

  The Colonel required no translation. “Beast, she says?”

  “Please,” she said. “You shall listen.”

  * * *

  THE CINTA LARGA WERE taught early in life to distinguish between two forms of terror: known and unknown.

  The job of any child growing up in the forest was to know as many of these terrors as possible. The sound that shakes from the sky before a rain. The snake that squeezes the life from a man. The creature that lies like a log in the water. The frog that kills with a touch. These were all part of the native curriculum and could be apprehended and, with skill and luck, averted. But there was nothing to be done about unknown terrors, for they came without warning and stayed ever out of sight. Only their handiwork could be perceived. The blight that lays waste to a field of manioc. The chill that takes root in the bones. The dream that steals the soul.

  The Cinta Larga had remedies at their disposal—shamans, native medicines; these might keep the unknown at bay for a time. Nothing in the tribal lore, though, had prepared them for this latest terror. It came on light feet, and its first victims were toads and side-necked turtles, plovers, wood ibises. The carnage was extreme but tightly contained—not yet outside the realm of experience.

  But, in short order, the terror grew bolder, hungrier. Capuchins, hawks, anteaters, peccaries, tapirs—all snatched from their perches and killed, savaged in a way the Cinta Larga had never seen. Not just eaten, these creatures, but disemboweled—emptied—with only the head left to testify to what they had been.

  Surely a thing capable of doing such carnage was no mere animal. Surely it was a terrible spirit, clothed in teeth and claws, loosing its vengeance on the jungle.

  At first, the Cinta Larga tried appeasing it with sacrifices. They lined their huts with snakeskins. They strewed the corpses of birds around the village perimeter. They killed a wild pig and left it split open, oozing in the night. The Beast scorned their offerings. It would have the meat it had killed for itself, or it would have nothing.

  The killings went on: a sloth; a caiman, snatched from the river’s very clasp. And still the Cinta Larga made their sacrifices, praying that they might, alone of all the jungle’s inhabitants, be spared.

  One evening, one of their girls, no more than six years on this earth, wandered off to collect cacaos. She was found the next morning, scarcely to be recognized. Since then, no one had dared to walk abroad in darkness, and even daylight held a new horror, for who could say when the Beast would strike next?

  Even the men were not safe. Only two nights before, one of the tribe’s strongest and fiercest warriors was seized in the very act of keeping watch. They found him the next morning, in the vines and brush, so thoroughly consumed that there was no piecing him back together. They left his remains on the spot, and no Cinta Larga would walk there now for fear of meeting the dead man’s angry shadow.

  The Beast lived and walked and hungered. Most terrible of all: It went unseen. No one—nothing—had ever glimpsed it and lived.

  * * *

  I LIVED.

  The thought came flying at Kermit, and a chain of sense memories came right on its tail. The jaguar’s terrible howls; the quiet; and lastly the soft, obscene sound of lapping.

  Why hadn’t the thing come for him? Or the Colonel? Paralyzed as they were, they would have offered far less resistance than the jaguar and considerably more meat. Was the creature sated? Or else too deranged to notice what lay just beneath its nose?

  Why? Why am I still alive?

  “Luz,” he said. “Tell me how long this beast of yours has been preying.”

  “Since the last full moon,” answered Luz.

  “But my father and I have been traveling through this region no more than two or three days. We have nothing to do with your beast. Why have you dragged us here?”

  “We had to.”

  “Why, in God’s name?”

  “To make the Beast go away.”

  “I don’t follow. You meant to use us as a … as an appeasement? Sacrificar?”

  “The very idea,” growled the Colonel, translating for himself. “Sacrificing people. They couldn’t have found a goat?”

  “No,” said Luz. “Not sacrifice. Protection. The Beast will see you, and he will go away.”

  “But why?” asked Kermit, incredulous. “Why on earth would you suppose we had such power over the thing?”

  “The Beast will kill a mere man, we have seen that. But it must never harm one of its own.”

  “One of its own?” repeated Kermit.

  And as the full import of her words settled over him, a low, mirthless laugh came bubbling out.

  “What is it?” the Colonel asked. “What did she say?”

  “Well, now.” Kermit laid a gentle hand on the old man’s shoulder. “They seem to believe that we are beasts ourselves.”

  “Beasts?”

  With a small, tight smile, Luz cupped the vast expanse of Kermit’s beard.

  More than anything else in that moment, he wanted to explain. That when a man from civilization ventures into the wilderness, he gives up one thing, and this always leads to giving up another. He gives up shaving, and then he gives up his shaving mirror. Then he gives up caring what he looks like, and then he gives up even knowing what he looks like. Or that he looks like anything at all.

  But there was no chance to explain. The Colonel had already tipped back his head, and he was roaring with laughter.

  “She has taken your full measure, Kermit! You are as bestial a white man as a savage might ever meet.”

  “Oh, no!” cried Luz. “Not you alone, Senhor Kermit. The people who ride the water with you: They, too, are covered in hair. They also pass in safety. The Beast does not touch them. With you here, the Beast would leave us in peace.”

  “But…” He could feel his breath burning into sound. “We don’t know this beast of yours! How could we? And you and your people—you left us utterly defenseless before it. We might just as easily have been killed ourselves.”

  Spinning away, he shouted into the trees.

  “This is monstrous! You must see this. We were—my father and I—we were passing through, no more. We meant no harm to anyone. If you had left us in peace, we would have journeyed on.”

  But if he expected
Luz to answer him, he would have to wait. Her gaze was already fixed on the chief. For some long seconds, they looked at each other. Then, in a voice almost too low to be heard, Luz said:

  “There is more. You should come.”

  9

  Last night’s imprisonment had given Kermit the sense of being trapped in a vast fortress extending a mile on every side, with vast complexes of rooms and corridors. Now, in the morning light, Kermit was able to see the Cinta Larga village for the first time in its entirety. There was nothing to look at but a circular clearing, forty to fifty feet across, hacked and scorched out of the jungle’s heart, with a dozen or so huts arranged like spokes around a small central plaza and a steeply pitched playa leading down to a stream as black as the Rio da Dúvida and boiling from the winter rains.

  You might have fit the whole business into Sagamore’s North Room—right down to the bamboo cage in which a half-plucked harpy eagle fruitlessly flapped its wings. Virtually impossible to believe that more than a handful of Cinta Larga could live here, and yet, as Kermit and the Colonel crossed the clearing, some three dozen villagers, acting on some unheard cue, emerged from their huts and began to throng toward the strangers.

  Girls swelling with puberty. Mothers lofting their babies onto their heads. Old women with bent spines. A thin, crabbed stalk of a man, older than the sun, reaching with cadaver hands toward the white men. None of them were much taller than five feet, but their curiosity was outsized. They dogged the captives’ every step, jostling for better views, filling the air with grunts and clicks. It was like being a Coney Island attraction, Kermit thought, sandwiched between the California Bats and the Electric Seal. Step up and see for yourselves! The Pale Hairy Hominids!

  The space around him shrank even farther as the villagers closed in, each little incursion smoothing the way toward a larger one. A pat led to a caress, a tug on the shirt to a tug on the trousers. One of the more daring boys plucked Kermit’s beard and tried to snatch the Colonel’s spectacles right off his face. Then, without warning, the mob fell back. The procession stopped. Kermit looked down. He was standing before a great mound of sticks and ashes and mud, clouded by gnats and mosquitoes. A high, ripe, sweetish scent rose up. The chief barked a command, and, in the next breath, one of the women fell to her knees and began to grope through the muck like a Bowery scavenger, flinging out each new discovery as she found it.