Beautiful Blood

Rosacher was busy rubbing his exposed skin with water in which he had dissolved a number of small, black cigars. His method of repelling mosquitoes. “I wouldn’t have stuck my arm out, then,” he said.

“Had to, it was so damn hot. Not like here. Here, the heat’s uncomfortable, but up on the coast the heat’s pestilential.” He repeated the word, as if enunciating it gave him satisfaction. “Anyhow, my bites got infected and my arm swole up the size of a hawser. They were draining pus from it for a week.”

Rosacher lit one of the cigars and puffed out a cloud of smoke and said without the least emotional inflection, “That’s awful.”

“Too right it was! They must have took a gallon out of me.”

“Speaking of bodily fluids and the like,” said Rosacher. “Have you ever noticed whether Frederick defecates after eating?”

Cerruti, likely irritated by Rosacher’s lack of interest in his arm, said, “Hell, no.”

“We’ve been traveling with Frederick for a week and I haven’t seen any sign of his spoor. Don’t you find that odd, considering the fact that he’s consumed half-a-dozen large animals…and that’s only the ones we’ve run across?”

“Frederick’s a fastidious type,” Cerruti said. “He does his business in private.”

Recalling the condition of the animal cadavers, Rosacher did not think the word “fastidious” would apply to any of Frederick’s behaviors; but he let it pass. “I’d be interested in examining one of his stools. It might prove instructive in determining the workings of his digestive system.”

Cerruti rubbed ointment into his neck. “Got better things to do than look for Frederick’s shit.”

“Could you ask him or me? I’m very interested in his physiological characteristics.”

“You want to rile up Frederick, that’s a good way to do it—asking about his private business. He don’t like talking about it.”

“What does he like talking about? I’m assuming that you and Frederick have had occasion to chat from time to time.”

“He don’t usually have much to say,” said Cerruti. He stopped applying ointment and his body language displayed, Rosacher thought, a degree of wariness. “He tells me what’s been hunting, for one thing. His conversation don’t run too deep, if you catch my meaning.”

“You’re saying that you don’t engage in philosophical speculations, that sort of thing?”

Cerruti peered across the fire at Rosacher, as if trying to read his face.

“Do you ever speak about old wounds and illnesses, as you do with me?” asked Rosacher.

“Oh, aye!” Cerruti brightened. “We swap stories all the time.”

“I wouldn’t think Frederick would be vulnerable to much.”

Cerruti sat up straighter, eager to talk now that the subject was more to his liking. “Most of the time he’s not, but there’s times when he’s prone to injury as you or me.”

A night bird passed overhead, giving an ululating cry; the wind shifted, bringing a sweetish odor off the river to mix in with the dark green scents of the foliage.

“Really?” said Rosacher, not wishing to appear overly inquisitive, but thinking this might be an opportunity to learn something salient about Frederick.

“He’s often injured when he’s feeding. He gets so damn hungry, sometimes he fails to finish an animal off before he starts in and whatever it is he takes a bite of is liable to mark him with a claw or a tooth.”

“Do they leave a scar?”

“Naw, you seen him. Whatever damage is done gets healed up when he pulls back from eating.”

A host of questions occurred to Rosacher, but he left them unspoken for fear of making Cerruti uneasy.

“Pity we can’t do the same,” he said.

Cerruti looked perplexed, but then he grinned. “If we had a body for feeding and another for healing like Frederick, the law couldn’t never touch us.”

“I don’t suppose it could.”

Cerruti relaunched his tale of mosquitoes and pus, and Rosacher did not attempt to dissuade him. He lay back, responding to Cerruti’s recitation of his maladies with grunts and other affirmations, trying to piece together the few things he knew about Frederick into a coherent picture, and soon drifted off to sleep.

In the morning, they followed the river course through a dense whitish mist that made every feathery frond, every loop of vine, into an article of menace. A pack of howler monkeys trailed them for a while, their cries seeming to issue from the throats of enormous beasts whose heads were thirty feet above the jungle floor. Sunlight thinned the mist and the poisonous greens and yellow-greens of the foliage emerged. Swarms of flies came to plague them, rising from mattes of vines beneath the hooves of their horses. Serpents could be seen swimming in the murky green water. The heat merged the dank scent of the river and that of a trillion tiny deaths with the great vegetable odor of the jungle, combining them into a cloying reek that so clotted Rosacher’s nostrils, he did not think he ever again would be able to smell the slight fragrance of a flower or a woman’s perfume.