Roosevelt's Beast

by Louis Bayard

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.

  “Deen! Deen! Deen!”

  “Ha! A voice crying out in the wilderness. A prodigy of bel canto production. Dame Nellie Melba would sob for joy. Now then, Mademoiselle Luz, you shall be responsible for what I like to call the capper. Oh, no need to look so pained, it’s simply the man’s full name. Gunga. Din. If I’m not mistaken, it’s the closing rhyme of virtually every refrain. Er … repetir, if you’d be so kind.”

  Luz cast her eyes to one side. “Gunha … in…”

  “Extraordinary. Duse herself could do no better. Now, then, Kermit, how’s your Cockney?”

  “Better than yours.”

  “I don’t doubt it. You perforce will be our narrator, if you don’t mind carrying all the linguistic freight. The rest of us will chip in wherever necessary, won’t we?”

  “And what will you do?”

  “I”—the old man propped his rifle in the sand and hoisted himself to his feet—“shall be the conductor. Master Thiago, if I might have that pointed … thingie of yours? Thank you very much.”

  Rapping the bamboo knife against a neighboring tree, the Colonel pushed out his chest and, in his best carnival barker’s voice, addressed an invisible throng of onlookers.

  “Ladies and gentlemen! On behalf of the Jungle Philharmonic and La Comédie Brazilienne, it is my great and unspeakable honor to present the following unparalleled theatrical spectacle. Directed by: Us. Starring: Us. And being that this ain’t no vaudeville, kindly refrain from applauding until we are duly done and finished. I give you now … the great … the awe-inspiring … Kermit the Magniloquent!”

  The old man swung an arm toward Kermit and backed away, softly clapping. The seconds piled on top of one another as Kermit stood there, feeling the familiar clutch in his chest and throat. This was exactly the kind of public spectacle he had always dreaded as a child. Playing his mandolin in the North Room, with brother Quentin plunking along on the piano, and rows of beneficent adults, drowsily nodding. He remembered stiff collars and tight shoes and hair combed as far down as it could go—the curdled complacency that piled on top of every chord. Darling, aren’t they? Precious … Quentin enjoyed the attention, but to a boy like Kermit, it was a whole season of penitence packed into half an hour.

  “Father, I really don’t think—”

  “Please.” Luz braided her fingers into a supplicating knot. “We should like to hear, Senhor.”

  God, how does the poem even start? Something about beer and gin, wasn’t it? His mind swirled with fragments of dialect. Then, with a swiftness that astonished him, the pieces clotted into lines, and the words began to cascade from his mouth.

  You may talk o’ gin an’ beer

  When you’re quartered safe out ’ere,

  An’ you’re sent to penny-fights an’ Aldershot it;

  But if it comes to slaughter

  You will do your work on water,

  An’ you’ll lick the bloomin’ boots of ’im that’s got it.

  One line sped into another until he was riding the poem like a flume, all traces of self-consciousness washed away. Fascinated, he felt the stillness that lay just beneath the words—his stillness; his calm. With something like pleasure, he watched the Colonel carve the air with his bamboo baton. He watched the foreboding disappear from Luz’s and Thiago’s faces as they accepted their cues and spoke their lines and, with a flicker of surprise, wove themselves into the larger texture.

  Soon a competitive camaraderie took hold. Kermit screwed up his eyes and gave each line an extra flourish of East End. Thiago, in the midst of shouting his “Deen deen deen,” executed a deft little jig, like a tin soldier. Luz improvised some stage business of her own, sinking to one knee and extending her palms like a salver as she crooned, “Gunha deen…”

  On they went, adding embroidery with each stanza—a rising inflection, a dip of the head, syncopation—their spirits growing higher even as the poem grew sadder. By the time Gunga Din had dragged the wounded narrator to safety and been drilled with a bullet for
his pains, there was almost no containing them. Kermit leaped onto the nearest rock and, in the ripest of cadences, declaimed the penultimate lines:

  Tho’ I’ve belted you an’ flayed you,

  By the livin’ Gawd that made you,

  You’re a better man than I am …

  Upon which the Colonel, waving his arms in a symphonic frenzy, brought all the voices together for the final syllables.

  “Gun—ga—dinnnnnn!”

  Like any good chord, its resonance depended less on noise than agreement, and so thoroughly were they in tune by this moment that the sound knifed upward, through the strata of heat and humidity, and charged straight for the sky. Long after the sound had ended, they were following it with their eyes.

  “Thunderous applause!” bellowed the Colonel, flinging up his arms. “Flowers by the thousands! Mind your heads; the long-stemmed roses can kill. Oh, but let’s not forget our bows! You first, Master Thiago. Like this, entende?”

  Not only did the boy understand, he became so enamored of the movement that he kept repeating it, flopping up and down until the blood rushed to his head and the rest of him followed. As he lay there in the sand, every quarter of his reedy brown body shook with laughter—such a violent commotion that the air bent before it and then bore it outward in waves, and before another two seconds had passed, Luz and Kermit and the Colonel were every bit as convulsed. A new chord now, not quite so in balance as the last one but richer and warmer: the Colonel’s rooster cackle somehow forbearing to drown out Thiago’s snigger and Luz’s breathy chuckle. It was the sort of laughter that drew strength from itself and forged higher.

  Oh, it died away, as such noises must, but the sensation it left behind—this, too, was familiar to Kermit. He had known it as a child, sitting with his family on the Sagamore veranda on a summer night, watching the sun drop over Long Island Sound. On such an evening, the thrashers would have been out, along with the indigo buntings and bobolinks and catbirds. (All the Roosevelt children had been thoroughly schooled in bird calls.) And Kermit would feel his lids sagging beneath some combination of exhaustion and satiation, and for just a few seconds, maybe, he might feel himself in step with everything around him.

  He would never have guessed, of course, that this same feeling could be so easily exported, could reestablish itself right here in the middle of the Amazonian jungle with people who had, until this very day, been unknown to him. It was a mystery almost too deep to sound.

  The Colonel, for his part, was sufficiently buoyed to sketch out a limping form of quickstep, which he accompanied with a whistled rendition of “Garry Owen.” “Old marching tune, Thiago. Very popular with the Fighting Sixty-Ninth. Now, my feet don’t quite bound as they used to, but you get the idea, don’t you? Yes, that’s it, exactly! Oh, he’s a hopper, this one! How I wish I had a fife.”

  Smiling, Luz sat in the stream’s sandy margin, half in shade. After some consideration, Kermit joined her, relishing the feel of cool water against his sore-pocked flanks. Together they watched a helicon butterfly flicker and dive.

  “Your father is very kind,” said Luz. “He loves children.”

  “All people.” As long as they do what he says, Kermit added silently, reproaching himself in the next breath. “My father is a great man,” he muttered.

  The stream was cool and deep, but a few shafts of daylight leaking through the canopy lit up the streambed like an aquarium, disclosing crowds of small fish, silver and blue and gold, darting and jostling.

  “Luz, might I ask you something?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is Thiago yours?”

  She waited some space before nodding.

  “And was he born here? In this forest?”

  Again she nodded.

  “You have lived here some time, then. You yourself.”

  Her eyes pinched together, as if she were rounding up a sum. “I was twelve,” she said.

  “When you came here?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you came from…”

  “Out there.”

  “Ah, yes. Just like me.”

  He was quiet awhile, following the migrations of the fish.

  “I confess, Luz. You have dealt a serious blow to our pride.”

  “How is this?”

  “We believed—my father and I, our comrades—we thought we were the first white men to come to these parts. We thought no civilizado had preceded us. It seems we were mistaken.”

  “My father was not a civilizado. Not in truth. He was a missionary.”

  “Jesuit?”

  “No. No.” She smiled, just a little. “Father never belonged to any church. He said it was between God and him.”

  “I see.”

  “One day—I must have been eleven; yes, eleven—God came and told him he must find the ones who had never seen the light of Christ. God said that was the surest way to heavenly reward. For all of us.”

  “Did God tell him where to look?”

  “He said only to go north by west. From Tapirapuã. So my family, we took everything we could, and we left. We traveled for months. Forests and plains. When the mules died, we … we just walked. And every time we found a settlement—Indians, I mean—we would ask them: Have missionaries been here? And if they said yes, we would have to move on. Father wanted always to be the first man of God. He wanted to find the … the—”

  “Virgins,” prompted Kermit.

  And regretted it as soon as the cloud swept over Luz’s face.

  “I don’t—”

  “What I meant is, you found a virgin river. Where no one else had been.”

  She nodded. “A black river. Rio do Inferno, that’s what my mother called it. Father was very glad, though. He said, ‘Imagine, Luz. We have dropped off the map. There is only God and us now.’ He was very happy about this. We traded some beads and trinkets for a boat. It was nearly the last of our possessions, but Father said God would provide.”

  “And so you came downriver?”

  “We tried. On the second day, our boat—the rapids took it, and it broke on the rocks. So we had to walk. It was hard. Father was a very good hunter—like you, Senhor Kermit—but there was little to eat.” She took up a stick, stirred the stream’s sediment into a cloud. “Mother died. I don’t even know how. She went very fast. We buried her by the river.”

  “And then you kept walking?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many days?”

  “I don’t remember. There’s so much I don’t remember.”

  “Do you remember meeting the Cinta Larga?”

  She leaned forward, hugging her breasts to her knees. “You say meet, Senhor Kermit. I don’t know what you mean by that. We did not see them.”

  “So you heard them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Every night, I suppose. Before sunset.”

  She nodded. “Father, he would leave them presents. Little nothings. We had nothing to give. A shoelace, a bit of yarn. Things like that. Whatever we left, it was always gone the next day.”

  She stared into the water, her head sinking to her knees.

  “And then one day we went to look, and the gift was gone and—and they were there. Just there, from nowhere. I thought they were ghosts. But Father was filled with joy. He got on his knees and gave thanks to God.”

  She fell silent.

  “You don’t need to go on, Luz.”

  “No, I was trying to remember how they looked to me then, that’s all. They had their arrows drawn. I had never seen such big arrows. We hid behind Father, but he made us come out and face them. He wanted them to know we came in peace, so he … he gave them his knife. It was the only weapon he had.”

  Her face began to wrinkle.

  “They didn’t know what to make of it, Senhor Kermit. They had never seen metal. They kept passing it around, and then one of the men—by accident—he cut himself with it. A little—what’s the word?—entalho. On the thumb. All the men, they gathered around to watch the
blood come up on this man’s thumb. Drop by drop. And this same man…”

  She paused.

  “This same man went to Father, and he … he drew the knife across Father’s throat.” Her own hand mimicked the motion, a swift, clean incision. “So much more blood. I don’t think the man expected that. He thought it would be like the blood on his finger. I remember he—he jumped back, but the blood got all over him. I remember I was looking at this man, and I was looking at Father, and with all the blood I didn’t—I wasn’t sure who was…”

  Her head tilted gently to one side as she fell silent again.

  “That knife,” Kermit said. “What happened to it?”

  “They kept it. They were afraid of it, but they kept it. His Bible, too. They thought it had dark magic in it, so they were afraid to destroy it.”

  She stared into the stream awhile longer, then snapped her head back.

  “My brother and sister. They were kept, too, but they died. It was a blessing, I think. They were younger than me. I believe this was God’s kindness.”

  From somewhere in the forest behind them came the high raucous squawk of parrots.

  “And you were married?” he asked. “To one of the village men?”

  “One could say married.” Her mouth twisted into something like a smile. “I was fourteen when I had Thiago. A baby with a baby.”

  Kermit stared down at his rotting boots. He was going to say … what? How sorry he was? But in the next second she was laughing.

  “It is very strange, Senhor Kermit!”

  “What is?”

  “I have always dreamed I would tell this to somebody. In my own language, not theirs. And now…” She shook her head. “I never thought how it would change things—to speak them aloud. I listen to myself—ele cortou sua garganta—minha mãe—makreu—I think I must be talking about someone else. I think I must be someone else.”

  He said nothing, only watched the fish darting and whirling at the bottom of the stream. He felt her hand on his arm.

  “Do you ever feel that way, Senhor Kermit? That you are not who you are?”

  He was saved from answering by the shrieks of a howler monkey. In reply, the parrots set once more to squawking, and the chirring of the locusts swelled to its highest volume.