by Louis Bayard
“What was that?”
“Send him away!”
“Not exactly neighborly, he’s just—”
“Father, please! Tell him he’s wanted. Back at the village.”
“I can’t tell him that, I don’t speak his damned language. Either one.”
With a cry of suppressed rage, Kermit ran to the boy. A frightening-enough specter he must have made, soaked in blood, eyes asmolder. But Thiago didn’t shrink. He only said:
“Mamãe.”
“Sua mãe … quer que você volte.” She wants you to go back. “Esperar por ela.” Wait for her.
Thiago only cocked his head.
“Deixe!” shouted Kermit. “Agora!”
Leave now! But how could a child respond to such an injunction? When a bloodstained adult yells at you for no clear reason, you must learn why, and that’s just what Thiago was prepared to do. His jaw was taut; his lips were cinched. He would stay as long as it took.
It was the Colonel who came to the rescue, putting a gentle hand around the boy’s neck and bending his head down and whispering … who could say? But some note of reassurance must have passed between them, because the boy turned and walked away without a word.
“There’s a good lad,” the Colonel called after him. “We’ll be along in a spell, all right?”
Smiling and waving, he watched the boy the whole way, waiting until his lean figure had disappeared around the stream’s bend. In that instant, the smile dissolved. He set down his rifle, and his face composed itself for the worst.
“What in God’s name has happened?” he asked.
24
Rather than compose a reply, Kermit seated himself in the thin margin of sand at the lagoon’s rim and watched his father inspect the scene. The old man looked as stony as a god of war, bending over the two bodies, scowling, squinting, muttering to himself.
“It seems,” he said, “I owe you an apology.”
Like a child pushing through layers of gauze, Kermit raised his head. “Apology for what?”
“You maintained all along that the Beast was still among the living. I refused to believe you. I was wrong, and I’m man enough to admit it.”
Kermit stood now. “I was wrong, too, Father.”
“How so?”
“I thought the Beast had infected one of you.”
“One of—”
“Our hunting party. I thought it might be Thiago, perhaps. Or even you. Or Luz, can you believe it? Seems ludicrous in retrospect.” He cast an indulgent smile at her corpse. “The Beast was in me, Father.”
The old man’s Adam’s apple swelled froglike from his throat.
“I consider your joke to be in poor taste, Kermit.”
“It’s not a—”
“Under the circumstances, this brand of levity—”
“I’m not joking, Father! I wish I were.”
“Do you honestly expect me to believe that this savagery is your doing?” He gave his head a violent shake. “I can’t think of anything more preposterous, more brazenly offensive. More convoluted—”
“No, Father, it was the easiest thing in the world. I didn’t even need to know it was happening. For most of the time, I didn’t.”
“Ohh! Come, now!” The old stump speaker’s voice came roaring up. “I must regretfully inform you, Kermit, that if you persist in this line of insanity, I must write you off as a lost cause. To suggest that you have somehow been devouring human beings? Nothing could be further from the young man I raised. If you ask me, Kermit, the heat has rotted your brain! Or else lack of sleep or—or stress—hunger—”
“Father.” Kermit pressed the old man’s hands together. “An hour ago, I wouldn’t have believed it, either. But it’s the truth.”
“No.”
“I killed Luz.”
“No.”
“I killed the chief. I killed Anhanga, Father. It wasn’t that poor old wretch’s doing, it was mine.”
“This is beyond laughable.”
“Don’t you see? That’s why I was … why I was privy to the Beast’s consciousness. That’s how it was able to know my thoughts, my history.”
“No! No! I was with you.”
“You weren’t. Not when the attacks were actually happening. Ha! Even I wasn’t with me.”
With a throttled groan, the Colonel pulled his hands free. “I will not listen to another word. Not another word!”
“You must.”
“I won’t! I don’t care if you’re my flesh and blood; if we were back in civilization, I’d … I’d—”
“What, Father?”
“God help me, I’d have you committed on the spot.”
“As you did Elliott.”
The old man fell back as if somebody had swung a hammer at his chest.
“Elliott,” he whispered. “Why? Why must you keep speaking of him?”
“Because he came to me.”
“No! No! You must stop!”
“Last night, Father. He spoke to me. He said to tell you … no hard feelings about the sanatorium. The one in Purkersdorf. He said he’d have done the same in your place.”
For the first time, Kermit saw his father struggle for words.
“I never … told … not a word … ever.…”
“You didn’t need to. He did. He said something else, too. He said he and I were brothers under the skin. What did he mean by that?”
The old man’s eyes squeezed shut.
“You know why he killed himself, Father.”
“No.”
“Because he couldn’t bear what was inside him—what wasn’t inside him. He had the same hole as I do, didn’t he? Only he filled it with liquor.”
“Please.”
Kermit let his head drop back until he was staring at the very crowns of the palm trees. “I don’t know how it should be, Father, but this Beast, it looks for holes—empty spaces it can fill. That’s why it sent Elliott. It’s been marking me, waiting this whole time.”
“No, this is … the absolute height of senselessness.…”
“You’re right, Father, it’s senseless. It makes no sense, it makes no thing. That’s what the Beast is, it’s nothing. It takes the nothing inside us and uses it to … empty the world—and it won’t rest, Father, until the whole world is empty. As null and void as the Beast itself.” He paused. “As me.”
Never before had he seen quite such a look on his father’s face. Fear and tenderness and who knew what else, washed together in the most unstable of compounds.
“My dear boy,” he murmured.
For long moments they stood, watching each other. Then, with a bitter smile, Kermit placed his hands on the old man’s shoulders.
“We made a bargain, Father. With the Cinta Larga.”
“What of it?”
“We said we would kill their Beast for them. And we are men of honor, are we not?”
A tremble began to rise up the old man’s frame. “Of course … naturally…”
“Well, then.” Kermit spread his arms. “What are we waiting for?”
And when he saw the Colonel’s eyes shrink to slots, he added, “I am sorry this should be my final gift to you, Father. My legacy. I know you wished for more.”
With infinite gentleness, he picked up the Springfield rifle, set it in the old man’s hands. He took three steps back and, in a voice of utmost steadiness, said:
“Your medicine, Father. Just as you always called it. I should like it to cure me.”
The old man stared at the rifle as though they’d never been introduced.
“Begone,” he whispered.
“It’s the only way.”
“Begone!” With a despairing cry, the old man flung the gun to the ground. “You cannot. You may not ask such a thing.”
“If you don’t, someone else will die. Many will die.”
“And if I do it, what’s to keep that … that thing from escaping? Inhabiting someone else?”
“I don’t know, Father. I j
ust—I don’t want it in me. Not one second longer.”
Still the old man refused to take up the rifle. Suddenly, there stretched before Kermit’s fancy a stalemate for the eons: one man pleading, one resisting, until time itself stopped.
“Please!” he cried. “I want you to!”
A long silence. Then, from the Colonel’s eyes, a new look gleamed forth.
“Listen to me, Kermit. We will get you away from here.”
“It won’t do any good.”
“We will heal you. You’ll recover, Kermit. You’ll forget all this madness. You’ll have a wife and a family, and we need never again—”
“It will still be part of me! I will still be this! Dead bodies and dead souls on my conscience. Forever.”
It was as loud as Kermit had ever allowed himself to be in his father’s hearing.
But far from flinching, the old man gritted his teeth and muttered, “You will forgive me—I hope—if I decline to take orders from beasts.” With a jut of jaw, he brought his face forward. “You are not what you believe yourself to be. You are not—God preserve you—empty, you are full. You are … you are me, Kermit. You are your mother. You are your brothers and sisters and … and Belle and … and everyone—everyone—who has ever loved you.” His voice caught. “And there are so many who have and do, and you are not Elliott, you are—the beautiful white-haired boy we brought into this world, and you will always be that boy, and I will not abandon you, I will not cede you to any beast—to any creature that has ever lived. Do. You. Hear?”
They were both weeping freely. But it was the old man who recovered himself enough to give Kermit’s chest a mighty thump.
“I am here! Inside you.” He pounded once more. “And I will not abandon you. And that is—my—last—word.”
In that same instant, the first strip of flesh peeled off the old man’s face. Stunned, he clapped his hand to the wound. Felt the blood leak through his fingers.
“Do you see?” cried Kermit, backing away. “Do you see?”
The old man stared at the pink wash on his skin. “Oh,” he said. “I see.”
And then he came straight on, advancing on his son in long tigerish strides.
“Stay away,” begged Kermit.
“I will not.”
“Hold off.”
“Make … me.”
Two more strips of skin sloughed off the old man’s face—as quickly and silently as if a barber had swung at him with a razor. The blood was no longer flowing but seething, roiling. And somehow, from out of that cauldron, the Colonel’s voice came through undimmed.
“You are my son. Whoever wants you will have to come through me.”
A ribbon of skin and tissue sliced away from his neck. Lesions sprouted across his hands and forearms, burrowed deeper and deeper until the first traces of bone smiled through the jaw.
“Shoot me!” implored Kermit. “Now!”
The old man only shook his head and drove on. And in those next few seconds, it was as if he were walking through a wind storm of knives. They scourged him from corner to corner. His clothes crumbled to dust. The skin around his thighs unraveled in long linen bandages. That pale flaccid torso bubbled into an incarnadine sea, heaving with severed veins and fringes of muscle. Even the old man’s spectacles flew off for want of anything to hold them and went pinwheeling through the air, spraying droplets of blood in every direction before landing at Kermit’s feet.
“Father! Stay away!”
But like some mortally wounded bear, the old man staggered on. Blinded by blood. Pelted on every side by the strands and coils of his own body. By the time he reached Kermit, there was just enough left of his arms to wrap round his son and draw him close.
In that final moment of fusing, Kermit could no longer be sure which of them was disintegrating. He felt himself part of one skin. One bone. One blood. Disappearing into blackness.
25
He would never know for sure when the darkness began to fray. Or how it was that, from nothing, shadows and outlines should shimmer back into view. Fronds and trunks and vines. Then a turbid half-light washing into his eyes’ chamber.
He understood that he was upright—standing exactly where he had been before—and that something or someone was wrapped around him.
“Father…”
With a tremor, Kermit pried himself free, already bracing himself for what he would find—and completely unequipped to fathom what was there. The old man himself. In all his entirety. Breathing and whole and unbloodied.
“Father!”
Like a man fitted with new limbs, Kermit fell on him. Gripped him around his neck. This time, when they embraced, it was with the awareness of their very ordinariness—the magic of their intact skins, their intact bones. They were, as the psalmist said, fearfully and wonderfully made.
They had done it.
“That was…” Chuckling, the old man reached for the spectacles by Kermit’s foot. “That was a near thing.…”
There, in the heart of the Amazonian jungle, with no one to listen to them but parrots and mosquitoes and midges and toads, they laughed until their bellies screamed for mercy. When one stopped laughing, the other started up again. They might have gone on like that for hours, days, but at some point the laughter died away and a new sound emerged. Not a toad or a mosquito or a parrot. Something human, stirring behind them.
Thiago.
* * *
HE HADN’T FOLLOWED ORDERS after all. He had crept back to see what these adults were concealing from him—and now concealment was impossible. For there they lay: the bodies of Luz and the chief of the Cinta Larga. And there stood Kermit and his father, both awash in blood.
Thiago saw it all and reached his conclusion and became something Kermit hadn’t seen before. A body consumed by rage, by bafflement and fear, all coursing like tributaries into a single torrent of feeling.
“Mamãe…”
What must he have thought? Seeing those two men coming toward him, their voices soft and propitiating, as if their only wish was to ease his mind. But there was no easing. There was no feeling at all, only this conclusion sweeping everything before it. Thiago’s muscles trembled almost to their bursting point, and from his throat there poured a sound such as he himself had never heard. A howl that seemed to frighten away the sun and call back the moon.
All his lightness and agility were gone. As he ran back toward the village, he thrashed through the water and tripped on stones and kicked up mud and sand, but that sound carried him over every obstacle. Even when he had disappeared from the white men’s view, the howl was still traveling back to them.
So this is how it will go, thought Kermit.
Thiago would sound the alarm. In seconds, the villagers would mass. They would grab their spears, their arrows. They would come for the white men and would carry out the vengeance that Thiago had been unable to exact on his own.
Would it go slowly or quickly? It hardly mattered now. The only remaining consideration was how Kermit would present himself for that final ordeal. Kneeling, standing, lying—none of the outcomes held any particular horror for him. No, the only thing that could disturb his perfect equanimity was this.
The sight of his father.
That hobbled, cussed, half-blind old man whom he had pledged to preserve and protect and defend. How could he think of leaving him to the justice of the Cinta Larga? On what ledger in heaven could such an offense ever be blotted out?
No, he thought. They can’t have him.
In a nearly disembodied voice, he heard himself say:
“We must go.”
“Go?”
“Before they get here.”
“Nothing would please me better, Kermit, but I hardly see how we—”
His son was already sprinting toward a small aperture in the jungle front. Nothing more than a chink when you first looked at it, but Kermit was charging as if he expected the forest to part before him.
“Come!” he cried.
When the old man hesitated, Kermit had to bellow just one word.
“Now!”
* * *
THE PATH WAS EXACTLY as he remembered: barely existent in its earliest stages, then broadening with each step, gaining confidence. The sound of water thickened into a rush, the sky came dropping down, and, sooner than they could have expected, they were standing on that shelf of rock.
“Awfully far down,” offered the Colonel.
“Yes.”
“Don’t suppose you mean us to jump the whole way.”
“No.”
Crouching, Kermit reached for the rope of vines he’d cobbled together—still hanging from the cliff’s edge. Clumsily knotted, irrepressibly jerry-built, it earned a look of rawest skepticism from the Colonel.
“How far does it reach?” he asked.
“No idea.”
“All the way to the water?”
“No.”
“Do you think it will hold?”
“Not sure.”
The old man nodded, turned his head back toward the jungle, where the sounds of the oncoming Cinta Larga were swelling into acclamation. A grin exploded across his face.
“Then this should be quite the adventure, Kermit! Only do let me go first, will you? If the thing snaps, I think I’ll prove a tad more buoyant than you. And here.” He tossed over his Springfield. “You may need this on the way down. No need to check, it’s loaded. Are we ready then? Very well…”
The old man drew up a length of vine, wrapped it twice around his waist, tested his weight against it. He took two quick sharp breaths. “Nearer my God to thee,” he murmured.
The first part was the hardest: a backward step straight off the cliff, with only faith and a vine to keep him from free-falling. For a second or two the old man dangled there in utmost helplessness, but his boots found a purchase against the rock face, and he was able to lower himself another few feet.
“Why, it’s no worse than … than Rock Creek.…”
Even this spasm of effort was costing him. He grunted and huffed and cursed, and blotches of coral splotched his skin as he took the next leap down, sending up a shower of dirt and pebbles.
“Come on, Kermit! We haven’t got all day.”
The vine was stretched too taut to make a belt. If he were to descend, Kermit would have to depend on his hands alone—and whatever docking points the cliff face provided on the way down. Already he could see how the swings from his father’s descent were sawing the vine against the rock’s edge. Three minutes, he thought. Perhaps four.
