Roosevelt's Beast

by Louis Bayard

  “We will find our way home, Father.”

  “Of course we shall.” He pulled off his spectacles and swept his arm across his face. “Do you know, I think I’ll sit down again. If it’s all the same to you. What can be taking them so long, I wonder?”

  “Damned if I know.”

  Kermit gazed across the clearing at the chief’s hut. From a distance, it was the most serene political caucus he had ever witnessed. No smoke pouring through the door. No pounding on the walls. No errand boys rushing in with ice buckets and Scotch bottles. From time to time, a squawk or a grunt would break through the hut’s walls, but for the most part, the Cinta Larga carried on out of sight and out of hearing.

  “Awfully parched,” volunteered the old man.

  “Me, too.”

  “Wish we had Juan bringing the morning coffee. How I miss the fellow. Ha! I even miss that grim little Rondon. I shall give him the rudest of embraces when next we meet.”

  “So you think they’ll come for us?”

  “Of course they’ll come. Do you think they would consider, even for a moment, leaving us behind? Why, for Rondon, the publicity alone would be torment greater than any mosquito.”

  Even as he spoke, the old man stared at that jaguar carcass, butter bright in the sun.

  “And when they do find us, Kermit, heaven help us all.”

  * * *

  ON AND ON THE caucus went.

  And as they waited, the sun rose through the hissing mist, and the trees sweated through their bark, and everything blazed green—until noon, when a mattress of cloud burst open into hard, oily drops.

  Absently, Kermit reached for his helmet; it wasn’t there. He watched the water pool in the bowl of his hands, then tipped it straight into his mouth. Again and again, he drank, and then he tipped his head back and let the water crawl through his skin, through his nose, through his eyes.

  The rain was just starting to die away when something began to stir in the hut.

  “Huzzah,” said the Colonel.

  There was only a commotion of palm leaves at first. Then the first Cinta Larga warrior came stumbling out. Another followed and then another—in an unbroken, nearly comical chain, disgorged from that tiny hut like a knotted handkerchief from a magician’s hat. Last of all came the chief, moving in strange arcs of abstraction.

  “What is the fellow doing?” the Colonel whispered. “You don’t suppose he’s drunk?”

  The chief made a clicking sound, and, from nowhere, Luz came running. She bent her ear to the chief’s mouth. Then she turned to the white men and, with a broad smile, announced:

  “Está concordado!”

  It is agreed.

  “You will kill the Beast,” she said. “In exchange, you will be freed.”

  “Freed how?” asked Kermit. “Escorted back to our party?”

  “Yes.”

  “And they will agree not to harm us. Or anyone in our company.”

  “This they have agreed.”

  Kermit looked at the Colonel, then back at Luz.

  “Very well. We accept.”

  Luz turned to the assembled throng and gave an emphatic nod. And of all the reactions the Cinta Larga might have had to this declaration, this was the one Kermit least expected: absolute silence.

  Perhaps, he thought, the villagers hadn’t yet grasped the full nature of their new arrangement. Or else they had simply absorbed the details, without fuss, into their understanding of things. As he gazed around at their creased, solemn faces, Kermit couldn’t help but recall the whistle-stop tour he’d taken with the Colonel during the ’04 campaign. “Little jaunt through Pennsylvania Dutch Country,” that’s how the old man had described it, but one day, as the sun was starting to sink behind the mountains, the Colonel suggested they stop in one of the coal towns along the train line. Was it Centralia? Ashland? Kermit couldn’t summon up a name; he remembered only what they found when they got there.

  Night was falling, and the men had just come out of the mines, carrying their dinner buckets. Some of them were still wearing their carbide lamps. Their faces were so thickly coated with coal dust that it was impossible to say which were fathers and which were sons, just as it was impossible to tell mothers from their grown daughters, for all the women had the same skeletal frames, the same deep etchings around the eyes and mouth. The same stare: parched, fathomless.

  In any other part of the country, the Colonel would have whipped the townsfolk to a froth just by showing up. (Even people who hated him couldn’t resist a view.) Here they greeted him with the silence of monks. They knew who he was, all right, but he’d come, like any other politician, offering hope, and that was something they couldn’t afford anymore. So they looked at him the way you look at anything that’s gotten between you and where you need to go. Wondering: Will it go away by itself?

  So it was with the Cinta Larga. They lived not in the El Dorado of Western imaginations but in the Amazonian equivalent of a coal town, where every day began and ended in struggle. When a pair of strangers offered to kill a beast for them, they didn’t pound one another on the shoulder; they made no swelling shout or triumphal cry; they merely looked. Anything else was a waste of energy.

  The villagers’ silence stretched out for more than a minute and was broken first by the caged, half-plucked eagle, stuttering from its slumbers, and then by Luz’s low, embarrassed murmur.

  “They are waiting,” she said.

  “For what?” asked Kermit.

  “They would like to know—oh, what is—how you will proceed.”

  I’d like to know, too.

  Kermit looked at the old man. Then, feeling the clutch in his gut, he remounted the tree stump.

  “Luz,” he said. “Please translate.”

  Their opaque faces seemed to converge on him, pinning him into place.

  “Men of the forest! We have agreed to hunt and kill your beast. Hear me now, though, when I tell you: We cannot kill it with only thunder sticks, and we cannot kill it by ourselves. We do not know your forest. We do not know your world. We require a guide.”

  “Um guia?” whispered Luz.

  “Sim. Um espião. Um líder.”

  He was bracing himself for another two hours of negotiations, but Luz answered at once.

  “Você via me aceitar.”

  You will have me.

  And, again, just enough of the Portuguese reached the Colonel to provoke a reply.

  “She’s offering herself? For such a business as this? That’s perfectly barbarous.”

  “My father,” explained Kermit, “is greatly afraid for your safety.”

  “He need not be. This is my home. I know it as well as anybody. I will be as safe as you. It is possible,” she added, with the trace of a smile, “that I will be safer.”

  The old man was not to be persuaded. “We are to drag this young girl into harm’s way? Is that what you’re telling me? Dear God, Kermit, it would be like endangering your own mother—your sisters. It cannot be countenanced.”

  “I’m afraid it must.”

  “Nonsense!”

  “Father, listen to me. Luz speaks true. As a native, she is far from helpless. And she and I share a language. Can you imagine trying to communicate with one of them?”

  “I don’t care.” The blood came flushing to his face. “You must ask—you must demand—that these savages serve up an able-bodied man. Look at them standing there! These brave warriors, letting a woman face down their enemy. They ought to be ashamed.”

  Bending toward Luz, Kermit lowered his voice to a confidential croon.

  “In recent days, Father has not been so spry as he would like. To compensate for his weakness, do you think we might engage one of the village menfolk?”

  He thought at first that she failed to take his meaning, but just as he was about to rephrase, she said:

  “They have thought of this.”

  “Yes?”

  “Thiago will join us.”

  “Thiago…”


  Turning around, Kermit scanned the palisade of warriors, waiting for someone to answer to the name. But the only reply was a vague flurry behind their ranks—a stir of limb, registering so faintly it might have been a mile off. The next moment, a boy was elbowing his way to the fore.

  Kermit blinked. It was the same boy who’d come crawling out to them that morning. He stood now in the greenish-yellow light of noonday, no more than twelve: reedy, tight-muscled, hands lightly flexed. As dark as the other children, but immeasurably lighter in spirit. Among the grim faces displayed to the white men, his alone seemed to cherish some prospect of pleasure in their company.

  “This is Thiago?” asked Kermit.

  “Yes,” said Luz.

  She didn’t look at the boy, nor he at her. They didn’t even resemble each other so very much. It was simply the way they angled their bodies to the world, bracing for the next collision. They belonged together.

  “A child!” squeaked the Colonel. “This is beyond sufferance.”

  “Father—”

  “He is a boy. A stripling.”

  Kermit took the Colonel by the shoulders, drew him close. “We cannot set the conditions, Father, you know that.”

  “Nor are we obliged to accept them! Not when they run counter to all rules of civilized conduct.”

  “We are not in civilization.”

  “Civilization is not a place, Kermit, it is…” The spit flew from the old man’s mouth. “It is a practice. A way of living one’s life—meeting one’s death, if necessary. Have I not taught you this much?”

  Smiling, Kermit lowered his forehead until it was touching the old man’s. “I was eight years old when I went on my first hunt.”

  “You shot a reedbird. And with no small amount of collusion on my part.”

  “And I had as much fear in my heart as this boy here. Maybe a good deal more,” he added, glancing back at Thiago, whose mouth had parted into the ingredients of a smile.

  “Eu sou forte!” the boy shouted. I am strong. And to make the point, he flexed his biceps in the manner of every boy who has ever aspired above his station.

  The Colonel was unmollified. “For the love of God, Kermit, where is the lad’s father? I should like to meet him. I should very much like to broadcast my opinion of him to the world.”

  “Luz,” said Kermit. “Does Thiago have a father? I mean, among the living.”

  And because she made no reply at first, he again thought he had misspoken.

  “I will look out for Thiago,” she said. “You will look out for the old man. We will be well.”

  The Colonel took one look at Kermit’s face, then walked to the edge of the clearing. For several minutes he stood there, staring into the jungle’s purpling shadows. And the whole time, it was fair to say, the entire village watched him, waiting to see which way he tended.

  “So this is how it stands, Kermit. You and I are to place ourselves in the jaws of death with no one in our corner but a child and a slip of a woman.”

  “It would appear so.”

  The old man nodded, twice, rubbed his eyes under his glasses.

  “Well, now,” he said. “I suppose we have made do with less.”

  “That is so.”

  “Then tell them … tell them we are thoroughly delighted—we are enchanted with our new hunting party. We could have chosen no better. No, not if Selous and Cunninghame were taking up arms with us.”

  “My father accepts,” said Kermit, bowing his head an inch. “We do, however, require that our weapons be returned to us.”

  “Weapons?” echoed Luz.

  “How else shall we hunt?”

  “I am not certain. What weapons do you mean?”

  “Why, our rifles, of course. Surely your men took them when they—when they so kindly invited us here.”

  “Espingarda. I am sorry, Senhor, do you … can you…”

  Kermit curled his hands around an invisible barrel, raised it to his eye. A simple bit of mime that, in this case, required no translation, for the Cinta Larga shook their heads and flared out their fingers and hopped from foot to foot, as though the earth had turned to brimstone.

  “They seem disinclined,” murmured the Colonel.

  “Luz, you must explain to them. We cannot put ourselves in the Beast’s way without some protection. Some way of killing the thing.”

  “We have weapons here.”

  “Spears, yes, and sticks. Bows and arrows. Useless to us.”

  Unusable, he added to himself, eyeing the massive peach-palm-wood longbows that lay stacked against a woodpile. It would take him half a week just to bend one.

  “If we give you these rifles,” said Luz, “you will use them to hurt us.”

  “No. We won’t. You have our word on it. As gentlemen.”

  She tucked her lower lip under her teeth. “I am very sorry, Senhor Kermit. I do not think we can give these to you.”

  “Then there can be no agreement. You will have to kill your own beast.”

  Her eyes tightened. Then, with a strange, half-shambling gait, she made her way back to the chief. She murmured in his ear, stood back, and waited. And Kermit waited, too, for the public declaration he felt sure was coming. A yes, a no. A shout, a clap.

  But the chief’s reply was strictly private. He grabbed Luz by the arm, hissed a few words in her ear, and shoved her away. Stumbling in the mud, she set down a hand to regain her footing. Then, gathering herself, she crossed back to the two captives.

  “You may have your rifles, Senhor Kermit. But if you use them on any of our people, things will go bad.”

  “What do you mean, bad? With whom?”

  “With me,” she answered flatly. “And…” Her head leaned a fraction of an inch toward Thiago. “I will be plain with you. If you should kill any of our people, they will kill us.”

  No words came to him, not at first.

  “Luz,” he said. “I am sorry for you. Your people have taken an evil course. But tell me, please. Why do they suppose we should care what happens to you?”

  She tucked her eyes to one side.

  “It is not that, Senhor Kermit. It is that they do not care.” And then she reached through his beard all the way to his chin and cupped it lightly. “We must care for ourselves.”

  11

  The deal was struck.

  In token of their new standing, the white men were granted the use of a hut: small and bare and recently swept, no more than twelve paces from the stream. Whether the hut was already vacant or someone had been evicted to make room, Kermit didn’t ask. He did, however, offer a silent prayer of thanks as he and Father crawled out of the dazzling light of the plaza and threw themselves into a pair of hammocks that creaked and rocked beneath their weight.

  Food, too, was offered without asking. A manioc pie, in roasted banana leaves, sending up a smoky musk that was more pleasing than the actual taste. “Touch of salt would do wonders,” said the Colonel. But it went down quickly enough and another soon followed, and a young girl ran to the stream to fetch water, and the water was cool and tannic and laid down a prickly balm in their throats.

  From his hammock, Kermit gazed through the doorway at the noon blaze. The shadows bled across the land like ink. Even the Cinta Larga had sought shade. A stack of turtle shells lay baking in the sun, and at the perimeter of the clearing, a jabiru stork perched on one leg, its beak resting grievingly on its breast.

  This last sight was so strangely captivating that Kermit didn’t at first hear the spindly rustle from the other side of the hut. Twisting around in his hammock, he found, framed in the doorway, the villager who had reached out to them that morning: the old man with cadaver hands. He was even eerier now: his eyes clouded over, his corduroy neck wobbling, his mouth hanging open in folds of ruin.

  “Good God,” said the Colonel.

  The man gasped and dropped to his knees and began to crawl toward them.

  “Coo,” he whispered.

  “What’s that?” the Col
onel said. “What’s he saying?”

  “Coo … roo … peera.”

  And having spoken the name, the man spent the next minute coughing it back up. In fragments of no particular order.

  “Peer … coo … roo…”

  Then he stopped. Puzzlement flashed through his eyes as he began to slide away from them—with shocking haste, for a hand had fastened around his ankle and was hauling him into the sunlight, and where the old man had once been, Luz now stood. Just enough of her face was in the light for Kermit to see its lacquer of triumph.

  “I am sorry,” she said. “He disturbs you.”

  “But he wasn’t troubling us.”

  “You must not listen to Bokra, Senhor Kermit. He is not one of us. Bad things are in his heart.”

  She nodded once and left.

  “Egad,” muttered the Colonel. “That’s no way to treat your elders. Dragging them out like old polecats. Odd business, though. The fellow went to some lengths to speak to us. I only wish we knew what he was driving at. How did it go again? Coo-roo—”

  “Curupira,” said Kermit.

  The old man gave him a wry look. “It strikes a chord, I see.”

  “It’s a name, that’s all. From native lore.”

  “Mythical?”

  “Well,” said Kermit, “I suppose one might call him a demon.”

  “And what exactly does he do?”

  “Guards the forest.”

  “From what?”

  “From us.” Kermit’s mouth cracked into a half smile. “From men.”

  “All men?”

  “Those who hunt for food, it’s said, are given free run of the place. But those who hunt for pleasure—well, he won’t stand for that. It squanders his bounty. So he lays traps for them.”

  “Traps?”

  “He baffles them. Sends them down the wrong paths. Addles their brains so thoroughly, they…” Kermit shrugged lightly. “They never come back.”

  “Sounds more like an imp than a demon.”

  “I only repeat what I hear.”

  “So the local legends say nothing about him carving open creatures? Draining them of all their innards?”

  “It does seem strange that he should turn on his own creation. That would run counter to his purpose, wouldn’t it?”