Read Roosevelt's Beast: A Novel for Free Online Page A

piranhas they’d caught last week had dwindled to nothing. The coconuts were gone. So were most of the Brazil nuts. There was some wild honey, a little palmito. Soda crackers.
    By way of compensation, there would be much talk of food tonight. Cherrie would speak of pancakes with maple syrup. (He was from Vermont.) The Colonel would extol the mutton chop. “With a tail to it!” And Kermit would make the usual noises about strawberries and cream, but, in his heart, he would be longing for bacon.
    Not just any bacon, but the kind he and his brothers used to eat on camping trips. Three or four times a summer, they’d row with Father to the same secluded neck off Oyster Bay, and as the sun fell, they’d make a driftwood fire and fry up a rasher of bacon. And whether it was because of the romance of their situation or the exertion of rowing four miles, bacon had never tasted as good. Nor would again.
    Bacon. A Cortland apple. Hamburger steak with onions.
    A bubble of saliva welled up from the corner of Kermit’s lip. Strange how alert he’d become to the nuances of dampness. The morning dampness of his socks, for instance, was altogether different from the smoky dampness of the day air and the sealskin dampness of the river. He felt a tiny fleck of drool—he cupped it now with his fingernail—pearly and self-contained.
    Finally a more pressing dampness at his elbow. Trigueiro, worming his way through the gap beneath Kermit’s arm and depositing his camel-colored snout on his master’s lap.
    “No luck?” asked Kermit. He scratched a semicircle around the dog’s ear. “Not even a squirrel?”
    Kermit canvassed his body’s coordinates. His left buttock, where an abscess still throbbed. The running sores on his shin. His thigh, bruised last week by a paddle and no closer to healing.
    The chest …
    Already his fingers were stealing toward the oilskin envelope beneath his rag of a shirt. Belle’s letters. Still there.
    “Senhor.” One of the camaradas was leaning toward him. “Sua barraca está pronta.”
    “Obrigado.”
    Preparing his tent was the one chore Kermit suffered the laborers to do for him. And only because he had come to require this particular space in the day. His eyes traveled down the shoreline to where the Colonel sat on a stump of tree, studying the river. He watched then as the old man rose to his feet and tottered back toward camp, dragging his left leg a little behind.
    “Franca!” called the Colonel (to the cook who spoke no English). “I am expecting culinary wonders tonight.” Then he disappeared into his tent.
    Kermit pried Trigueiro’s head off his thigh and lowered it, in slow increments, to the ground. With a soft groan, he raised himself to his feet and heard a gravely cheerful “Heigh-ho!”
    It was Cherrie, coming to him with a gift: dark and hard and twisted. A bird, in fact. Ten inches long. Rich-brown feathers, a yellow rump and crest, and a red stripe on its cheek.
    “Chestnut woodpecker,” said Cherrie.
    “Easy to bag?”
    “Oh, no, he was dead when I found him. Not sure I’ve ever seen one this far south.” A line of skepticism in the older man’s lips. “Not much use to us, eh? Scrawny thing.”
    “Maybe he ate a termite or two,” Kermit suggested, “on our behalf.”
    Nodding, Cherrie tucked the bird under his arm and gave it a proprietary pat. “Your father will be pleased,” he said.
    “I’m sure he will.”
    “I only wish I could have brought us something more—well, never mind. How about a nip, Roosevelt?”
    They were on their last bottle of Scotch. The first two had gone quickly and, in order to make the third endure, they had resorted to marking off the allotted increments. It worked out to a couple of drams a night, but if you took them before dinner, it was almost as good as a jigger.
    Just a few yards from Cherrie’s hammock, they were stopped by a sound. Sounds —raucous and queerly throttled—from deep in the forest interior. Locusts, one