Free Roosevelt's Beast: A Novel by Louis Bayard

Mother was really asking too much of him! Damn it, she was! To sacrifice not just himself but the woman he loved. The thought of it was like oil of vitriol leaking through every pore, and what made it even more scalding was the realization that he was already losing—giving way, as he always had, before a superior will.
    “Very well,” he said, in a small dead voice.
    Smiling, his mother took him once more by the hand.
    “I knew I could count on you.…”
    *   *   *
    T HAT VERY AFTERNOON, HE sent a cable to Brazil Railway. And another to Belle. DON’T WORRY. WEDDING STILL ON.
    He was now officially a member of the Roosevelt-Rondon Expedition, and no one seemed more surprised than the old man himself.
    “See here, my boy, are you quite sure? I’d feel rotten taking you from your work. You’ve only just got on your feet.”
    Ah, yes, thought Kermit. But you need your scope, don’t you?
    “It won’t be too long,” he heard himself say.
    *   *   *
    I ’M TO BE MARRIED in June … married in June …
    *   *   *
    K ERMIT AWOKE TO BLACKNESS.
    Utter blackness, swallowing his hand the moment he tried to penetrate it.
    Carefully, he canvassed his other senses. Touch: He could feel his own leg, yes. Smell: His nostrils picked out must and earth and something like straw. Hearing: He could hear his own breath, in ragged pulses. Taste: Yes. He could taste the bitterness rising up inside him—coming out of his mouth in a hot heavy gruel. As he wiped his mouth clean, a single outline startled from the darkness. And then another and another. All vanishing as quickly as they appeared.
    Then, from the nothingness, a petal of light budded forth. It swelled and, to Kermit’s astonishment, began to divide. Into an arm. A shoulder. The curve of a jaw.
    Someone’s there .

 
    5
    It was a woman. A young woman.
    Not Belle; no, that would have been too much to hope for. This was a woman he had never seen before. She was holding the lit branch of a tree. ( My torch, he remembered, with a rush of sadness.) The light whittled her into such a confusion of shadow and non-shadow that it took him some time to grasp that her bare arm led to a bare shoulder, and this shoulder sloped to a bare breast.…
    For a moment he thought he had slipped back in time—just a little—back to his days in the Xingu Valley. Naked women had been something of a staple. Who could blame a fellow, after a long week of laying railway ties and raising up bridges, if he wanted a few minutes in a darkened room? The girl didn’t even have to be smiling. (She almost never was.) She had only to stand there, in a state of complicity. Saying …
    Como vai vocé? How are you?
    The same question this young woman was asking him now.
    “Como vai vocé?”
    “Bem,” he managed to mutter. “Obrigado.”
    (Even under duress, the old courtesies.)
    “Pardon,” he went on in Portuguese. “What day is it?”
    “I could not tell you.”
    “What time is it?”
    “It is night.”
    “Where are we?”
    “Here.”
    Here.
    “No,” he protested. “I was … Where are my comrades? Meus amigos? ”
    “Oh, your friends. They are far away now.”
    How far away? A mile? Two? Ten? There was no way of knowing.
    “You are here with us,” she added encouragingly. “Na nossa aldeia.”
    In our village.
    He raised himself up on his elbows, felt another wave of nausea. Squinting into the emptiness, he began to dredge up the last fragments of memory.
    The jungle at twilight. That strange whinny. The monkey that wasn’t a monkey. Those shapes dropping from the canopy.
    Father.
    With a rumbling groan, he rolled to his knees and swept his hands across the ground. Amazed to find the darkness springing away at his touch—until he realized the woman was standing over him, following him with her torch.
    The Colonel lay no more than five feet away. Heavy and crumpled. White as cream.
    “Father…”
    The old man’s spectacles, still intact, dangled from his left