Tribesmen (5 page)

“You’re making a film on our island?” The old woman’s voice was soft and warm and it swabbed each of his ears like a velvet Q-tip. There was something both pleasant and strange about the sensation.

“Where are the rest of you?” Denny asked her and squinted into the rapidly darkening jungle. He needed to discern whether his new friend was alone. There was no movement behind her. The only sound in the dusk was the rattle of her jewelry as she stepped forward once again.

Her hair was weaved with seashells. More bits of shell and polished coral hung around her neck in long ropes. The ropes were longer than traditional necklaces. They were more like primitive versions of his grandmother’s rosaries.

“What’s wrong with your feet?” Denny asked. This close to the old woman, he could see that her feet were on backwards, the heels facing him. It wasn’t ghastly. They weren’t twisted or broken. They just faced the wrong way.

“Never you mind that. It doesn’t matter,” she said, and Denny felt that she was right: it didn’t matter. “You don’t need what’s in that case, boy.” She motioned to the small black bag in his hand: his fix kit. His stash,
man.

Before he had a chance to think about what she meant by that, he realized what was so special about the old woman. She wasn’t speaking English, but he could understand her anyway. These Euro directors like Tito, even some of the bigger boys like Leone: they were all too cheap to roll live sound on their films. All their movies had the dialogue track recorded separately. Even when it was the same language, the dubbing never matched up properly.

The old woman’s lips reminded him of that. They were moving in wide foreign circles, her tongue clicking down occasionally against her dirty teeth, but her words were reaching his ears in English.

“You’re hearing what you want to hear, Denny,” she said. He didn’t question how she was doing this, how she knew his name, how she knew what he was thinking. All he wanted to do was listen to her.

“Hand that over here, child.” She had gotten closer to him than he had realized. Holding out one hand, she unfurled her long skinny fingers and gave them a slight flutter. Denny placed his kit in her small hand.

“Who are you?” was what Denny wanted to say, but somehow the words came out: “Who am I?”

“You’re one of us, Dennis. You are not like the rest of those people in your group.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” Denny said, feeling a bit more lucid now. Her words were giving him power. It felt good.

The old woman ran a small pink tongue over her brown lips before speaking again. “Listen carefully now, child. What you need to do is this.”

The nearby crack of the gunshot smacked Denny in the ears. There was a dropping feeling in his stomach as the sound crashed him back down into the jungle. Denny crunched his eyes shut against the shock.

When he opened them, the old woman was gone.

“What the hell was that?” he spoke to himself, prying his butt out of the crook of the tree. He ran back toward the village, not sure whether he was high or not, and wondering where his stash kit had gone.

Chapter 6

Jacque

The boar was dead in one shot, but its body didn’t seem to get the message. It squealed, blood pouring from the hole in its head, and plowed into the front of one of the huts.

The beast caught the thatched branches and dried grass of the flimsy wall with one of its tusks, and ended its life by ripping down a big chunk of island real estate with its death throes. The hut folded in upon itself in a cloud of dirt, collapsing on top of the pig.

“Fucking thing. Why would it walk into the middle of town like that?” Tito said. “Stupid, that’s why.” He smiled and pointed the muzzle of the small pistol to his own head, flashing the polished steel at Jacque.

“A Korovin, Soviet gun.” Tito said in Spanish. “When I was just a boy, my father killed a fascist with this gun. Decades later and it’s still killing pigs.” That little tidbit was meant only for Jacque. Neither of the girls spoke Spanish.

Umberto had been closest to the hut when it buckled. He flicked his cigarette into the abandoned dirt road and climbed over the debris to reach the dying animal.

Daria covered her mouth, Cynthia covered her eyes and Jacque made an unsuccessful attempt not to watch as the boar twitched under the heel of Umberto’s boot. Watching his step, Tito walked over the pig and gave Umberto a nod of thanks. He fired again, the gun pressed to the animal’s ear. The gun smoke curled off into an elongated question mark and the pig was still, no more rattling spasms.

“Maybe it walked through town because it thought it was safe. Because nobody lives here any more and hasn’t for a long time,” Jacque said after a moment of silence, either from shock or out of deference for the pig. “This place is empty. Just take a look around you!”

“I do look around. All I see is civilization.” Tito craned his neck in deliberate circles. “You make up stories because that’s why you get paid the big money: your imagination.”

Umberto shifted his weight off the corpse, finally sure that it wasn’t getting back up.

“Cover it up,” Tito continued, issuing orders to the actor like a sergeant to a private. “There’s got to be an axe or something in one of these savage’s houses. We’ll cut it up before dawn, before it can rot.”

Tito tucked the gun back inside his dirty suit jacket. Who would have guessed that Tito had been packing? Jacque knew what someone carrying a gun looked like, knew what to look for, but the discreet pistol fit into Tito’s blazer perfectly so there was no real bulge.

There was an eruption of noise from the tall grass that bordered the tight assemblage of huts. Everyone whirled to look. Tito had the gun back out in a flash and pointed towards the rustling.
He’s getting too comfortable with it
, Jacque thought.

“Shit!” Denny’s familiar shrill voice rang out as he tumbled through the grass. The kid must not have been used to razor grass, and was sucking a cut on his thumb as he barreled into the open. He looked from his wound to see Tito pointing the gun at his chest.

His slim frame, skuzzy peach-fuzz and pockmarked face always made Jacque think of Denny as the kid, but really he was only a few years younger than himself. His frightened eyes made him look even younger. His fear softened into a grin as he raised both hands above his head.

“You miss all the excitement,” Tito said. Denny looked at the blood running down his arm and popped the finger back in his mouth. Tito returned his weapon to his jacket. Jacque wondered what else he had in there. What further surprises could Tito possibly pack into this trip?

“Mr. Bronze killed a boar. Shot it,” Cynthia said, filling Denny in. “He says he wants it for special effects. Blood and stuff.” She then turned to Jacque and whispered: “Do you think I will have to touch it?”

“He’ll want you to bathe in it,” Jacque said, watching her toffee cheeks go flush with squeamish terror and embarrassment. “But don’t worry: I will write around it, make it so that only whoever is playing the cannibals will ever have to touch it.”

Cynthia smiled, swiping the end of her nose with a finger like the con-men in
The Sting
. He returned the gesture, becoming the Redford to her Newman.

“That’s assuming that we ever shoot a frame of film.”

He looked up at the sky. Stars were becoming visible. The number and intensity of stars was amazing. Even in the British countryside, he’d never seen so many. They were beautiful.

“Maybe the villagers are on a trip and will be back in the morning,” Denny said. “Either way, we’ve got to shoot. We should make camp and get some sleep so we don’t waste any daylight. I’m beat.”

“Agreed,” Tito said, and then translated the plan into Italian for the rest of the crew. “Someone should go gather wood for a fire,” he added in French, meaning that Jacque was the intended ‘someone.’

“Don’t worry, old man. You’ve had a long day. I’ll go look for firewood,” Jacque responded in English. Tito frowned. It was no secret that Jacque was trying to stir up insurrection among the English-speaking members of the crew.

“I’ll go with you, could be dangerous,” Cynthia said. In the moonlight he could see that above her dimples were the tiniest of caramel-colored freckles. Maybe this wouldn’t be the worst shoot of Jacque’s career after all.

Chapter 7

Cynthia

“I should have corrected what Mr. Bronze said on the plane before. I’m not a mulatto,” she said, angling the flashlight up to Jacque’s face so she could gauge his reaction.

“Oh?” He sounded like he was unsure whether there was a joke coming or not.

“I’m actually a
quadroon
. My mother was a halfie,” she said with mock fright, pointing the flashlight up to her face, as if she’d just reached the punchline of a scary story. “My hair really is this straight. So I’m not trying to ‘look white’ or anything like that, if things like that are sensitive issues for you.”

“Don’t worry, Sister,” Jacque held up a ‘right on’ fist and smiled. “I don’t really go in for all that stuff. I only take offense when someone is being an asshole.”

She giggled.

“I didn’t mean to swear,” he said, looking down at his shoes, and then bent to pick up a twig that wasn’t even big enough to categorize as kindling, adding it to the bundle under his arm. This guy, this multilingual Cambridge graduate, was nervous being around her. It made her feel special, but not entirely comfortable.

“Don’t apologize.” She wanted to put him at ease. Men tripped over themselves every time she stepped foot on the island of Manhattan, from Harlem to The Village. Normally she welcomed it, but on
this
island getaway, she wanted a vacation from all that crap. “Looking at the men on this trip, I have a feeling that I’m going to hear a lot worse than ‘asshole’ over the next three days. For the first time in my life, I’m thankful that the only languages I speak are English and the bits of Yiddish I’ve picked up at the deli.”

“Which reminds me,” he said with a surge of confidence in his voice. “You shouldn’t call Tito Mr. Bronze. It makes him sound like he deserves a modicum of respect. He doesn’t.”

“I figured as much,” she said. The darkness surrounding them was close to total, so even with the flashlight they’d unpacked, the pair stayed close to camp. “Where do you think everyone is?” she asked while handing him a larger stick.

“I don’t think there is an ‘everyone’,” he said and sighed like a doctor giving a patient some very bad news. “I think Tito looked at a map or maybe an out-of-date almanac, pointed to a destination that looked small, and didn’t even bother to check if it was still inhabited.”

“Well, there were people here at one point,” she said, ducking to pick up a dead, fallen branch. “Where did they all go?”

“There were fishing nets in all of the huts, but only a few boats. Maybe there was a change in season and they followed the fish to a different island.”

“You don’t sound like you believe that.” She pointed the thick branch at his chest, bits of lichen flaking off in her hand and turning to dust on his lapel.

“No, probably because I don’t,” he said, his voice serious now. “The town is deserted and has been for a while. Nobody packed up their belongings, they just left. They wouldn’t have left their homes behind. Maybe they were evacuated for a nuclear test? I know the U.S. couldn’t get enough of that kind of thing in the 50s and 60s.”

“That makes me feel better,” she laughed and socked him in the arm with the branch.

There was something wrong with the hit, and Jacque sensed it, too. The branch had no give. It didn’t bend, it didn’t break: it just molted a bit more, revealing a smooth white interior.

It wasn’t a branch at all. It was a bone.

A human femur.

Jacque yelped before Cynthia had the chance to do so herself. She loosened her kung-fu grip on the bone, and it fell to the forest floor with a soft thud.

The “bark” had been mummified flesh, twisting off in her hand and shedding into dust as she flailed the goddamn thing around. She put her hand up to her face; it was stained with brownish-red dust, and smelled like mildew.

Jacque took her by the filthy hand. He was either not aware of what he was grabbing hold of, or he didn’t care. She wanted the touch, too.

Cynthia pointed the flashlight beam to the ground and they both screamed again as they realized what they were standing on. Not a burial ground, but a dumping ground.

They were knee-deep in corpses, maybe two dozen of them.

The bodies beyond the beam were easy to spot in the moonlight. Exposed glints of off-white bone shone in the night where flesh formerly clung. Elbows, knees and the occasional ribcage poked up from the moist ground. If these bodies had once been buried, then their grave hadn’t been very deep or very private.

There was an excited stirring in the camp as the rest of the crew ran out to meet them, their calls for direction echoing in the darkness.

Tito was the first to arrive.
Where did this fat little old creep find the energy?