Roosevelt's Beast

by Louis Bayard

  “What did you say, Father?”

  “I said somebody must have told them about our ancestors!”

  “Sorry?”

  “They have brought us a little Dutch courage!” The old man held up a wooden jar. “If I’m not mistaken, it’s fermented!”

  Kermit didn’t have the heart to tell him what the fermenting agent was. He’d seen the native women spitting into that same jar.

  “Try some!” the old man said.

  Kermit lowered his face to the jar opening. The smell was surprisingly agreeable: clean and crisp, the barest hint of carbonation. He took a sip. Then another.

  “Not bad,” he allowed.

  “Careful! You’re spilling.”

  But he kept drinking, all the way to the bottom, until the last bit of froth was dripping from his chin.

  “Christ…”

  He staggered to his feet, expecting every eye to be on him. But no one noticed, not even the Colonel. And this was worse, somehow, to be standing like this, the froth dripping from his chin.

  “I’ll be … I’ll be back shortly.…”

  How long it had been since he’d gotten good and potted! Just a few swallows, and he might as well have been back at the Porcellian Club, tipping an old chest of drawers out of the casement window. Weaving and listing, he made his way back to the hut, but the prospect of configuring his body through that low entranceway was too much, so he dropped to the ground and rested his head against the hut pole. The lights dimmed around him. He slept.

  Then woke again—how many minutes, hours, later? There was no way of knowing. He could only say it was night—still night—and someone was coming toward him, shuffling through the mud and dust.

  Bokra. The crazy old man with marbled eyes. Carrying something that was impossible for Kermit to identify until, with a silent and definitive click, the thing snapped into focus.

  It was the harpy eagle, lying utterly still in the old man’s arms, its half-plucked wings wrapped like husks around its breast, its eyes blazing and sightless. No blood, no sign of violence. Tears swarmed like rain from Bokra’s white eyes as, with jittery grunts, he extended the dead bird toward Kermit.

  “No … I can’t … I’m sorry.…”

  Then Bokra was gone, and it was raining again. Or it might have been the old man still weeping. Kermit slept, and woke to a new world.

  18

  He was wet all over.

  To his own amazement, he was standing in the muddy playa on the rim of the village swimming hole. The moon had carved a crater from the black water, and in the reflected light, he could make out a humped figure on the far bank. Its head was bowed in an attitude of piety, and from its throat came the strangest of sounds. Like a handful of lead shot rolling down a chute.

  With a coo of surprise, Kermit looked down to find, squeezed in his hand, a torch—already swinging toward the sound. There, in the crosshatch of moon and firelight, a giant anteater sat drinking, its serpent tongue flickering in and out of the stream. Stung by the light, the anteater paused, reared up to its full four feet—stood there for minutes on end, its nostrils twitching in a perfect fury, the rest of it utterly still, right down to the bristles, which were flexed and ready. Then it inched its head back and a shudder rippled up its spine, so that for a second or two it was writhing like an oak in a wind.

  Or was it only mimicking Kermit? For he was shaking inconsolably now. And the air was crackling, and the stream was bubbling and curdling—and cooling, with shocking speed. Barnacles of ice glittered from the depths, and scallops of snow shouldered up, and the water flowed more and more slowly until finally it sheeted over into glass.

  Kermit’s breath was congealing into smoke. At his feet lay his rifle—his Winchester, yes—coated in rime. He picked it up. He turned slowly around.

  And found a new village. A village he had never seen before.

  Snow had piled in banks against every hut, crowned every roof, mattressed every path and clearing. Ice mist snarled toward the sky.

  Where am I?

  The glare of the moonlight on the snow was so dazzling he had to spider his hands across his eyes. Through the angle of his second and third finger, he found the one creature that seemed to have escaped the spell. A small figure, weedy and dark, shuffling through the snow.

  It was a boy. Bundled in a wool coat a size too small. Dragging behind him a sled. Crying softly to himself.

  Kermit knew exactly why the boy was crying. He had been in a snowball fight with his older brother, and the snowballs had flown faster and harder until the older brother had clocked him with a hunk of ice—hidden under snow—and the boy had begun to cry, and his brother had told him he would never be a man like Father if he cried every time he got a clout. He had turned and run, wishing every harm on his brother—his father, too—himself most of all. And now he was trudging home on the very plain of despair.

  Kermit grasped it all in the space of a second. For the boy was him.

  He had gone out with Ted on a winter afternoon just like this, out to Cove Neck, and had come back in this exact fashion, every finger and toe blazing with cold, his face splotched with shame. Wanting to be swallowed whole.

  It’s all right. The words trembled on the grown man’s lips. Come, now, little fellow.…

  But the boy padded on, sniveling into his mittens. Then he stopped and dropped the rein of the sled and pulled the stocking cap from his head and opened his mouth.

  To cry, or so Kermit thought. But the mouth kept widening. It stretched past the cheeks, past the ears, until there was nothing on the boy’s shoulders but a chasm, and from the depths of that emptiness there came a roar. Like nothing Kermit had heard before. Clamorous and echoing and afire with ancient rancors.

  He felt his finger tighten once more around the trigger. He raised the rifle. He settled the boy in his sights.

  The stock was dry and powdery against his cheek; the barrel was as warm as skin. With an agonized deliberation, his finger squeezed down. It was here, at the exact point of equilibrium, that everything was lost.

  Without warning, his boots lost their purchase in the snow. His legs went out from under him, and the rest of him followed, and the boy’s roar gave way to a scream, neither human nor animal. The noise ratcheted inside his ears as he lay on his back, staring up at the stars, each star catching a small piece of the scream and sending it back.

  He wasn’t cold anymore.

  He turned his head to one side. There lay his torch, still blazing on the packed earth. Not a flake of snow. Feet, shoeless feet, were galloping past him. Over him.

  “Senhor Kermit.”

  Luz stared down at him.

  “I…” His lips cracked open. “I have…”

  He raised himself to his knees, looked around. The village had shrugged off its mantle of snow. The moonlight was funneling down into a single column, and the forest was as black and blank as before.

  He ran his hand along the rifle. Had he fired? No. No, he hadn’t. How many cartridges did he have left? Three? Two? Who were all these people? Why were they all awake in the middle of the night?

  “Luz,” he said. “Tell me what’s happening.”

  “There was a cry, Senhor. The people are gathering now.”

  “Gathering? Why?”

  “To call out the names.”

  He stared at the Cinta Larga men as they strapped on their armlets, at the women clutching their babies, the children toting crude dolls and whittled sticks. Only now did he understand. They were congregating before the chief’s hut for a village census. To see who was missing.

  In a soft, uninflected voice, the chief called each name and waited with folded lips for the answering call. In solemnity and cadence, it was oddly similar to a commencement ceremony, and Kermit was amazed to find his mind dancing back to Groton (“the Christ factory,” Arch always called it). The Reverend Peabody in his alb and cotta. The plangent rhythms of those Mayflower names.

  Except these weren’t Mayflowe
r names. Noara … Takakrorok … Teptykti … Kentyxti …

  As Kermit stood listening, the chief lingered on one name, waited for an answering call, said the name again. When no one answered to it, this was the name that was passed from tongue to tongue.

  “Anhanga … Anhanga…”

  Luz’s eyes met his.

  “I must go to Thiago,” she said.

  “Must you?” A strange half smile crawled through Kermit’s lips. “I mean, why worry the boy unless you need to? Anhanga may have—I suspect he’s just wandered off. I’ve done much the same thing myself at night.”

  Only not in the jungle. Only a fool would go walking at night there. And the Cinta Larga were no fools. Even now they forbore to launch a search party until the sun rose. There was nothing to do, it seemed, but wait. Since Luz showed no inclination for company, Kermit went back to his hut. But the Colonel was still snoring away—he had managed to sleep through the whole alarum—so, rather than return to his hammock, Kermit seated himself against an acai palm and waited. From time to time he fell into a doze, thin and dreamless, but, each time, his head snapped him back.

  Through heavy lids, he caught the first glimmers of light. First a pale aureole around the moon and then, from behind the forest, a swell of orange, turning the shadows into a tracery of fronds and boles. Somewhere, a vanilla vine was blooming.

  The Cinta Larga rose without a word. Within minutes, the village was as empty as an old flask. Kermit took up his rifle and, with no clear intent or plan, began to wander through the clearing, circling hut after hut, waiting for something to snag his eye. At length, for want of an anchor, he settled on a path he had never noticed before: a wide, well-hewn gap in the jungle front. The villagers had done a fine job of keeping the jungle from reclaiming it: Even a man as tall as Kermit could travel down it without a care. The path kept its course—and concluded after ten or twelve yards in a plot of scorched, stamped earth pocked with holes and ligatured with roots. The Cinta Larga garden.

  On any other morning, the village women would have been here, dragging the manioc and yams from the earth and stacking them in baskets. Today, it was only Kermit, swatting gnats and bees and spiderwebs and staring at the point just beyond the garden where a thin, tiny, jagged figure crouched in the early-morning shadows.

  At the sound of Kermit’s boots, the figure swung toward him. A pair of marbled eyes swam out of the darkness. A small haggard face, a toothless mouth.

  Bokra.

  He had fallen to his knees in an attitude of pilgrim piety. It was only when Kermit drew nearer that he noticed the pomegranate-like stains on Bokra’s hands. Noticed, too, the trembling in his limbs and shoulders.

  Something’s wrong.…

  Then his eyes traveled to the region just below Bokra. Something human lay there. A hand. A foot. An elbow, a knee, the remains of a shoulder. With strange stubbornness, his mind resisted the idea that these things might once have been parts of a whole. It took seeing the look on Bokra’s face to make the connection.

  “Oh,” Kermit whispered. “Oh, God.”

  He grabbed for his rifle. But there was nothing left to fire at, was there? Only an accounting to be made. So he pointed the barrel to the sky and squeezed off a round.

  Bokra shrieked and fell backward and lay cringing in the mud, muttering the same untranslatable word again and again. Around him, the forest swarmed into life. Flies went diving and wheeling, monkeys screamed, birds washed out of the trees in waves. The ground actually shook—human feet converging—and no tread was more familiar to Kermit’s ear than the one closest to him. That quick, delicate, light-footed gait that had led him through the jungle and back.

  Thiago.

  For the first time, Kermit recognized the disemboweled man on the ground, recognized the crop of black hair, the still-intact eyes—and, over the right eye, a white scar where the eyebrow should be. Kermit had seen an eye just like that on one of the village braves. The brave who had dragged his son away from the white men. The brave who would have done anything to keep his son from leaving.…

  In that exact moment, Thiago came bursting through the trees, and Kermit caught him in his arms and angled him away from the body.

  “Não importa,” he whispered. “Não faz mal.”

  Never mind. It’s all right. But from every quarter, the Cinta Larga were emerging, bows drawn, torsos tensed, and, unlike Kermit, they needed only a second to determine what had happened and who had done it.

  “Bokra!” they shouted. “Anhanga!”

  Kermit looked down at Thiago. The boy’s face was slack and rubbery, and his eyes had turned to the basest metal, but the reassurances kept flowing from Kermit’s mouth.

  “It’s all right.… Never fear.…”

  19

  Bokra looked nearly dead himself by the time they dragged him back to the village. His face was drawn and gray, and his arms hung uselessly by his side as the braves threw him into the center of the plaza and kicked him about the ribs and thighs.

  Luz came forward now to claim her son. She lowered her forehead to his and gazed straight into his eyes. Then she kissed him, once, on the tip of his nose and led him away.

  “Muito triste,” Kermit called after them.

  Very sorry. But they kept walking.

  From the chief’s hut, a single bark rang out. The braves stepped back, and a silence fell over the village as the chief, wiry and coiled, advanced on the condemned man. He muttered as he walked, and with each step the mutters grew in volume and coherence, until they assumed the shape of a chant or recitation. A bill of attainder, thought Kermit, enumerating every last crime.

  “Good God!” The Colonel came stumbling out of their hut, twining his spectacle stems around his ear. “What’s all the hubbub?”

  “It’s Bokra, Father.”

  “That crazy old bugger? What’s he gone and done?”

  Kermit paused. “Murdered someone.”

  “Who?”

  “Anhanga.”

  The old man gave his head a shake. “You mean to tell me that little blind spaniel over there overpowered Thiago’s father? Impossible.”

  “They caught him in the act,” said Kermit. “Red-handed. Red-everythinged.”

  He stopped and slowly shifted his gaze toward the jungle.

  “You don’t seem persuaded,” said the Colonel.

  “Father, how would you like to view another crime scene?”

  “Before breakfast? Very well, I’m your man.”

  * * *

  IN KEEPING WITH TRIBAL practice, the body of Anhanga was left exactly where it was. Indeed, no Cinta Larga would ever again lay eyes on it. The garden would be relocated; the trail would grow over; the jungle would gather the corpse back to its bosom; children would be warned never to wander there for fear of waking Anhanga’s shadow.

  The two white men, however, had no such inhibition, and since no one stopped or even noticed them ducking down the garden path, they were able to find the body in a matter of seconds. They had only to follow the hivelike hum of insects whirling around Anhanga’s ravaged face and strafing the walls of his abdominal cavity.

  “Remind you of anything?” asked Kermit.

  The old man came to an abrupt halt. Then, in a soft and wondering gait, he began to circumnavigate the body.

  “This can’t…” He lifted his voice to a more urgent frequency. “This won’t do!”

  “It’s been done.”

  “We killed the Beast. We saw it die.”

  “I know.”

  “We saw it crackling in the damned fire!”

  “I know.”

  The old man leaned back against a trammel of epiphytes. “I can only think this is some—some gruesome sort of prank. It’s the only possible explanation.”

  Kermit studied the tatters of his boot. “How would Bokra have carried out such a prank?”

  “I dunno, ask him. Perhaps he poisoned Anhanga first. Disabled in him in some way, then … dragged his body here and set
about…”

  “But the blood, Father.”

  “What of it?”

  Kermit squinted up at the canvas of sky. “I beg you to recall that howler. Recall how it looked in the moment of its death. It was filthy, yes? Drenched. Fairly robed in blood. I was there, Father; I saw it plunging its head into its prey’s cavity.”

  “And your point, Kermit?”

  “My point is that disemboweling something—someone—emptying them out like that is not a clean business. It stains; it contaminates.”

  “You said yourself Bokra had blood on his hands.”

  “Only his hands.”

  “Oh, bother, Kermit. He might have … washed himself, I don’t know.”

  “Washed himself with what? His hands? Father, imagine you’ve stumbled across some body in the jungle. You don’t know whether it’s alive or not, so what do you do? If you have any sort of human feeling or curiosity, you kneel down. If you’re not too faint of heart, you touch the thing. All you need do is touch it once or twice, and you’ll have as much blood on your hands as Macbeth.”

  The Colonel vised his hands around his skull. “That still doesn’t explain why Bokra was here in the first place. You’re telling me he just happened to find a body that everyone else missed?”

  “I just happened to find it, too, Father. And Bokra had more reason than I.”

  “What reason?”

  “Ecce avis,” said Kermit.

  The morning shadows still lay thickly enough on the ground that the old man had to stare for several seconds before he discerned the corpse that lay next to Anhanga’s. A half-plucked harpy eagle, bundled into itself like a dead pharaoh.