Roosevelt's Beast: A Novel Read online

  “Ha!” cried Kermit.

  He left Trigueiro in the boat and clambered over the side, grinning at the feeling of sand and wet rock beneath his boots. He crept forward, waiting at every moment for his instincts to be confirmed.

  And then he stopped.

  He was staring down a fifteen-foot drop. Below him lay only howling water and bubbling heaves of foam.

  His error was now blindingly apparent. The rapids would be no easier to breach here. The island hadn’t altered the river’s direction or force at all, just bisected it. On either side of him, the falls raged with equal ferocity.

  “Damn,” he muttered. “Utter damnation.”

  It wasn’t just the shame of guessing wrong, of having to weather Rondon’s frown. It was something worse. He had, to all intents and purposes, stranded his boat. There was no way forward, no way back. Their only hope was to guide the canoe back to shore and hope they weren’t swept over the edge.

  This was the hope he clung to now as he darted back to the canoe and leaped in. “Lá!” he shouted, pointing to the margin of sand where the Colonel and the rest of the expedition were even now standing, gazing at the boat’s plight in a helpless spectatorial thrall.

  “Um,” called Kermit. “Dois … três…”

  Their doom was sure from the moment they pushed off. João and Simplício plunged in their paddles and beat as hard as they could against the current, but before they had made it halfway to shore, the boat began to whirl like the hands of a clock. Then, with a shudder, it jerked back into axis and headed straight for the falls.

  In the midst of the spray and roar, Kermit dimly perceived that João was no longer rowing. He was hurling himself into the teeming water. Only now did his purpose become clear. He had grabbed the hawser rope and was trying to drag the boat to shore. But the riverbed was too slippery beneath his bare feet. Struggle as he might, he couldn’t keep his balance, and the current tore the rope from his bleeding hands, and the dugout, relieved of any further obligation, streaked downstream.

  Trigueiro barked. Kermit and Simplício exchanged the briefest of looks. Then the river took them all.

  Never in Kermit’s memory had water been such a punishment. It slammed his sun helmet over his face. It grabbed him by his jacket and dragged him to the river’s bottom and, every time he found a crevice of light, it snuffed the light out.

  His eyes swelled against their sockets, and the cold crawled into his bones as the black water swept him downstream, as easily as if he were a bird’s nest.

  He could actually taste the bubbles of his own breath. Somewhere, though, in his extinguishing brain, he sensed that the river was growing calmer, that the eddies and whirlpools were giving way once more to a single straight current. This current was now, in a spirit of chivalry, bearing him up—so that, with just a slight effort, he could lift his head above the river’s surface.

  And with that single motion, all the agony of his still-living body flooded in. The spikes in his lungs, the vise around his head. The torment of these eyes, opening once more to the sun—and discovering a single stark outline.

  A branch.

  Afterward, he would be unable to recall the moment of grasping. He remembered only the effort it took to haul himself free. To pull himself up, inch by inch, with all his senses blazing—and then canceling one another out. So that he slipped straight from agony to unconsciousness.

  * * *

  WHEN HE AWOKE, THE sun was frowning from the end of a long tunnel. He felt sand in his fingers … water at his ankles. Something else—neither sand nor water—baptizing his face.

  Trigueiro.

  Half-gargling, half-sobbing, he pulled the dog’s head toward him. Then from out of the woods came a measured tread. A pair of boots, unnaturally burnished. Rondon.

  “Bem,” he said at last. “Você já teve um esplêndido banho, hein?”

  You have had a splendid bath.

  Kermit’s first instinct was to laugh it off—or brazen it out—as if he’d been caught with a pack of cigarettes by a Groton prefect. Then he remembered who he was. Not his brother Ted. Not his brother Archie. He was Kermit Roosevelt: a young man incapable of charming his way out of any situation.

  As this realization leached through his oxygen-depleted brain, other things winked into clarity. His gear was gone. His beloved Winchester .405 was gone. The canoe! Dear God, the canoe was almost certainly destroyed. It would cost the expedition days to make a new one. The conclusion was obvious. Thanks to Kermit’s rashness—a young man’s rashness—a detour of three hours had stretched into a sojourn of several days.

  By now Trigueiro’s tongue had become a kind of torment against his skin, and yet he hadn’t the strength to push the dog away. He could only lie there, waiting for the reproach that was his due.

  But the only thing Rondon said was:

  “Aonde está o Simplício?”

  Kermit blinked. He propped himself up on his elbows, gazed upshore and downshore. Simplício was nowhere to be seen.

  “He was…” With a great expense of energy, Kermit raised himself to his feet. “He was right next to me.…”

  Rondon’s stare was as baleful as Kermit had ever seen it. What a relief to look over the colonel’s shoulder and see João—sopping from his own bath—galloping toward them. João would know. He’d seen them go over the falls. He’d followed them the whole way. Tell them, thought Kermit, squeezing his eyes shut. Tell them.

  But the words that came out of the camarada’s mouth were identical to Rondon’s.

  “Simplício? Aonde está o Simplício?”

  * * *

  FOR THE REST OF the afternoon they searched. They thrashed the river with their paddles. They traveled downstream as far as a mile, canvassing both shores. They hacked notches out of the jungle front just in case Simplício had been thrown clear.

  By day’s end, the search parties had netted only a single paddle, chipped but still intact, and a box of rations. Their calls had long since given way to whispers: “Ele está perdido.” He is lost.

  But around the campfire that night, they whispered something else.

  Assassino.

  And lest there be any doubt about the assassin’s identity, they would lift their heads from time to time and cast dark looks in Kermit’s direction—looks that stopped just short of insurrection. The whispers built into murmurs, until Colonel Rondon himself rose and silenced then with one peremptory motion of his forearm.

  That night, in his journal, Kermit wrote: Simplício was drowned. Such a bare sentence. His pencil hovered over the page, touched down again and again. No more words came.

  He closed the book and lay on his cot, listening to the frogs and watching the mosquitoes land, one by one, on his exposed arm. Silently cataloging them: anopheline … culex.

  “You mustn’t blame yourself,” said the Colonel. He was sitting up in his own cot, smearing his face and neck with fly dope. “He doesn’t blame you.”

  Kermit closed his eyes. “Rondon, you mean?”

  “Naturally.”

  “For a second, I thought you meant God.”

  The Colonel huddled around that and then, with a chuckle, said, “Do you suppose there’s a difference?”

  Kermit said nothing.

  “The point is,” the old man continued, “I’ve spoken with our great leader, and there was no sense of—no need to advocate on your behalf; he considers you entirely exonerated. He understands, Kermit. You were trying to do the right thing by all of us. It’s obvious, it’s self-evident.…”

  Kermit was quite sure that, in Rondon’s mind, in Rondon’s heart, he was not exonerated. But the Brazilian was a pragmatic man, disinclined to jeopardize the long-term success of his expedition by alienating its illustrious co-leader. It was for Father’s sake—for Father’s sake alone—that Kermit would escape punishment.

  “I don’t care,” he said at last. “I don’t care if Rondon blames me. I blame me.”

  “Now, see here. I won’t
have any of this morbid self-pity, do you hear? We all embarked on this expedition—every single one of us—knowing we might not come back. That is the first proviso in the explorer’s code.”

  “So it is.”

  “And may God strike me down, but…” He paused. “If I’d had to choose between you and Simplício, you know which way I should have gone. The point is, it wasn’t my choice. Or yours. It was Destiny.”

  Destiny, thought Kermit. What is that?

  It was a question he had yet to surmount. Or maybe it had just shrunk to a smaller question: Why had he reached for that branch?

  Even now, looking back, he was amazed at how calm he’d been in the face of death. Not in the manner of a soldier, as his family might have preferred, but in the manner of a monk resigning himself to the Maker’s plan. All fears, all regrets washed away. He was ready. Yet when the branch presented itself, he had grasped it without another thought.

  Only now, hours later, could he discern what had risen up in that moment: The image of Father. Father standing over his son’s drowned carcass. Father telegraphing the news to Mother. Father, in his sable suit, hoisting up one corner of the coffin …

  That was all it took. Kermit reached for that branch. Now the Colonel could carry on, as great men must. And Kermit could go on being a great man’s reflection. For a second, he had a vivid, almost erotic image of that branch pulling away at the last second. Of his own water-swollen body borne along to its destined end.

  “Enough chatter,” said the Colonel. “A few hours’ sleep always does wonders, I’ve found. You’ll have a whole new perspective on things come morning. Good night, my boy. Twenty-five kilometers tomorrow! Mark my words.”

  * * *

  THEY HADN’T THE TIME or energy to build a new canoe, so the next morning Colonel Rondon politely asked Kermit to join him in his. Stepping toward his new seat, Kermit heard Rondon speak, for the first time, in English. Two words.

  “After you.”

  * * *

  THE NEXT DAY—AT the point where latitude −11°57′ met longitude −60°20′—the Rio da Dúvida suddenly widened, and the boats began to swirl atop an unguessed current. On their port side, the dark solemn forest broke open. A blanket of espresso-colored water, whitecapped by wind, came rolling toward them.

  “Novo rio,” murmured João.

  It was indeed a new river—a tributary, materializing from something like nothing—and, at seventy feet in width, easily the largest tributary they’d come across. Rondon celebrated the moment in his usual way: by dragging out the sextant and taking a sighting. They set up camp at the confluence point of the two rivers. The next morning, Colonel Rondon used the Orders of the Day to make a signal announcement. The mysterious waterway along which they now stood would henceforth be known as the Rio Kermit.

  There followed an interval of stunned silence. Then, grinning like summer, the Colonel slapped his son on the shoulder. “You’ve arrived, my boy! Into the gazetteer with you. With both of us, I should say!” For Rondon had already christened the Rio da Dúvida the Rio Roosevelt.

  After breakfast, Kermit walked very deliberately to the shore of his new river. The rains had swollen it to such a level that most of the boulders and fallen trees and branches were submerged. All that was left was a silvery skin and the wrinkled reflection of the lightening sky.

  He thought then of the signpost they had left behind to commemorate Simplício—the signpost that the jungle would tear down in a matter of weeks. The only consolation Kermit could find in that moment was imagining the dead man still alive … still traveling … beneath the surface of the Rio Kermit.

  Simplício returned that very night, in Kermit’s dreams, his arm outstretched, his skin glittering with terror, his mouth opening as if to scream—but nothing came out except bubbles of blood, and each bubble carried the same word.

  Socorro … socorro …

  Help … help …

  2

  Kermit wasn’t supposed to be here.

  His father wasn’t supposed to be here.

  The only reason Theodore Roosevelt had come to South America in 1913 was to speak (a thing he did well). He was to deliver three lectures to grateful Argentinians and take back with him the sum of thirteen thousand dollars. It would all make for a grand holiday—the Colonel was even bringing his wife—and if the occasion gave him the chance to mold an embryonic democracy and reassert America’s rights of intervention under the Monroe Doctrine, so much the better. And if by chance he stopped off in Brazil along the way to visit his son Kermit, who was making such a promising career for himself, better still!

  Oh, there’d been talk of the old man making some sort of river jaunt. Up the Rio Negro, perhaps, or down the Orinoco—well-traveled waterways that would offer Amazonian flavor without much danger. But all that changed in October when, during a ceremonial visit, the Brazilian minister of affairs (“Such a cultivated man, Kermit. Reminds me very much of Hay”) broached a new idea. Might Colonel Roosevelt prefer a more challenging mission? Might he even be interested in leading a scientific expedition down an uncharted river?

  Rio da Dúvida, the Portuguese called it. The River of Doubt. For good reason: It refused to be known. The jungle explorer Cândido Rondon had discovered its headwaters in the course of laying telegraph lines, but no man—no white man, anyway—knew where it led. Indeed, what set it apart from other rivers was its maddening elusiveness. It twisted wildly, curving toward every point of the compass, doubling back on itself, sometimes even plunging beneath the earth. It seethed with rapids, falls, whirlpools. It harbored caimans and anacondas and catfish that feasted on monkeys and lived on blood. Only a fool—or a great man—would have pitted himself against such a river.

  Was not Theodore Roosevelt such a man? Was he not on record as despising the “ordinary travelers” who hewed to the beaten path and let others do all the work and embrace all the risk? Such lollygags were no better than valises, carried from point to point, accomplishing nothing. But here was a chance to do something else entirely. To ride and master a previously unknown river that stretched quite possibly a thousand miles—as long as the Ohio or the Rhine—and swarmed with creatures never before cataloged. A great blank space on the earth’s canvas, waiting for somebody—somebody—to slap his name on it.

  In so doing, that man would secure himself a permanent part of recorded history, to be spoken of in the same breath as Speke and Burton, Scott and Amundsen, Peary and Shackleton. The true immortals. Presidents—ha!—they came and went, but rivers went on forever, just as the poet suggested, and if Theodore Roosevelt were to map this river, then he would be renowned for all time, his name on every map and atlas, in every heart and mind.

  Dear Lord, how could he possibly have said no?

  It was true, the crew he had brought to South America was not the most inspiring: two naturalists, a failed North Pole explorer, and a social-climbing priest named Father Zahm. But the Colonel would have a formidable ally on his journey: the legendary Rondon, who, as the leader of the Strategic Telegraph Commission, had already traveled through more than fourteen thousand miles of Brazilian wilderness. Many a man had lost his life under Rondon’s command, but none had rebelled. He was hard as obsidian, unconquerable, brooked no dissent, and countenanced no obstacle—a savage’s temperament, it was said, wedded to a saint’s self-discipline. With Rondon in the mix, the expedition’s success was virtually guaranteed.

  And to cap it off, the Colonel’s own son, though recently engaged, had volunteered to come along!

  Kermit had acquitted himself with great distinction in his father’s African safari, and he had spent the last year building tracks and bridges for the Brazil Railway Company, where his bravery, diligence, and uncomplaining nature had won him plaudits on all sides. He was resilient, resourceful—and a gifted linguist, whose fluency in Portuguese would make him the ideal go-between for Rondon and the Colonel.

  “You know what they say,” the old man declared. “A good int
erpreter is worth his weight in gold. Now, don’t you worry, Kermit, we’ll have you back to your gainful employment in no time. Of course, Rondon’s being cagey on the subject of duration, but I’ve consulted with some highly intelligent gentlemen who assure me we’ll get to the thing’s end in just a few short weeks. We’ll be descending the whole time, of course, and these rivers don’t waste time. They get where they’re going, by God!”

  But getting to the river—this would be an ordeal in itself. First a boat ride up the Paraguay River and then a grueling mule journey across four hundred miles of Brazilian Highlands: desert and jungle, scrub forest and open plains. The rain hammered; the sun seared. They slogged through vast wastes of mud. They quarreled among themselves. The Brazilian camaradas grumbled at the Americans’ enormous freights of luggage, and the Americans wondered why the Brazilians couldn’t keep order. “It’s like starting over again every day,” allowed the Colonel, in a rare moment of protest.

  A week into the journey, Kermit’s old malaria came back with a vengeance. He could barely keep in his saddle, and under the constant jostling of his mule, abscesses sprang up on his buttocks and the insides of his legs. Every bounce and jolt sent another blade of pain through his fevered brain, and the only way to distract himself was to repeat, again and again: “I’m to be married in June … married in June.…”

  Malaria was digging in everywhere—not even the Colonel was immune. By the time they reached the river, they were so exhausted and their supplies so diminished that the leaders made the strategic decision to split the expedition in two. One party would be sent down the Gy-Paraná to the Madeira—a charted river and a less dangerous journey but a useful effluent for such irritants as Father Zahm, who had alienated everyone (the Colonel most of all) with his highfalutin airs and pettiness. The others—and they included Rondon, the two Roosevelts, and Cherrie, the naturalist—would take up the challenge of the Rio da Dúvida.