Read Roosevelt's Beast: A Novel for Free Online

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.
    It was just a few minutes past noon on February 27 when they prepared to launch. Kermit climbed into the lead boat, already chafing at its narrowness. João and Simplício pushed off with their oars and, a second later, the current swept them up and bodied them forth. From somewhere far behind him, Kermit heard a single voice calling.
    “Good luck!”
    *   *   *
    H ERE WAS THE THING about traveling down an uncharted river: You could only say how long you’d been traveling; you could never say how long it would be. Here they were, five weeks later, winding down the same black river and stymied at every turn by rapids. They could travel no more than a few miles before the next roar of water came echoing from around the bend. Never once had they made more than a mile and a quarter a day. Altogether, they had traveled less than several miles—and that through bitterest labor and with no small risk.
    They had lost five canoes and, thanks to Kermit’s rashness, one of their crew. They were wet. They were starving. They were ravaged by insects. They were riddled with disease and so tired they had forgotten what it was like to be anything else.
    And the black river wound on.
    I’m to be married in June. Married in June.
    *   *   *
    L ATE IN THE AFTERNOON of April 2, a new set of rapids rose up. They found a level margin of sand and set up camp. Kermit and Lieutenant Lyra went ahead to scout and came back with news of what lay ahead. More rapids. Rapids running as far as the eye could see. Ready to smash any canoe that dared ride them.
    The sun was sinking like a fist over the mountains on their left flank. Quiet had fallen over the camp, except for the sputtering of the sodden wood that Franca was coaxing into a fire.
    Kermit sat on the foreshore, his sun helmet at his side, a wad of tobacco in his cheek. He was staring through the canyon to where the river was already churning out of sight, as black and opaque and unknowable as the day he first saw it. The thought caught him unawares.
    What if it leads nowhere? Nowhere at all?
    Blinking, he gazed about at his fellow travelers. There was Cherrie, shaking out his poncho in long slow arcs. And over there Dr. Cajazeira, gravely thin, parceling out his rations of fly dope. The camaradas, bowed and sore-pocked, were hauling up bags, tying hammocks, and swinging their machetes through thickets of vine. Kermit saw them now in the light of his own question, and the truth settled over him like a pall.
    They were dying.
    It was true. Everyone—and everything—stank of the tomb. The slabs of mountain on every side. The trees arching like the groins of a mausoleum. The lethal fecundity of all these trunks and leaves and vines, writhing and coiling and sometimes leaving the ground altogether and sprouting in midair, and every sprout sprouting anew, weaving round.
    We should have found a better place, thought Kermit in a daze. A better place to die.
    Kermit swiped his forearm across his face and closed his eyes. Sucking in the wall of his cheek, he drew down the last dregs of tobacco juice. A minute, two minutes passed, before his eyes were stung open by smoke. Franca’s campfire, sending out fumes of coffee.
    Coffee and … what? Kermit made a quick calculation. The two