Tribesmen

by Adam Cesare

  “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 b
een 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?

  “Looks like we finally found the natives,” he said. “This is great. Amazing on-screen value.”

  Cynthia didn’t raise the flashlight to look at his crooked yellow smile, but she knew it was there.

  Chapter 8

  Umberto

  The rest of them were asleep. After the bleach-blonde with the dark skin had calmed down about the skeletons, the crew had dusted off five thatched bedrolls and camped in the two huts adjacent to the small fire Umberto had started.

  Umberto would have been asleep, too, if he hadn’t taken a handful of uppers to balance himself out this afternoon as they disembarked the plane. Like the rest of them, he had been expecting to work. He hadn’t planned on a day-long hike along the beach and then through the jungle. Being the internationally renowned gentleman he was, Umberto also had to tow the heaviest piece of luggage along with him.

  His palms were sore as he sat brooding in front of the fire. The drugs still caused his heart to pound against his chest, making it impossible to sleep no matter how much he wanted to.

  Umberto had always loved fire, and now he held his fingers as close as he could to the flames. It was a game he played as a child: seeing how long he could take the heat. The soot from the fire turned the tips of his fingers black.

  He sat on his hands, warming his ass cheeks and staring off into the night.

  The jungle beyond the camp was silent except for the constant hum of crickets and something that sounded like cicadas; did they have cicadas in the middle of the ocean? Umberto usually disliked quiet. He was a man of action and stillness didn’t calm him.

  But sitting by the fire and listening to the bugs was—he had to admit—enjoyable. Possibly because he didn’t have to listen to the rest of the crew jabbering to each other in eighty different fucking languages, only snatches of which he could understand.

  A gust of wind batted and bent the tall grass behind the fire. The wind brought with it the fresh smell of the sea, and a gentle howl.

  Under any other circumstances, on any other island, this would have been a great night. For example, if they had decided to film in Rio, he would have found himself two card games and a whore by now. Even better, if they were in Southern Italy, he wouldn’t have to bother with finding the whore: he was a semi-familiar face back home, and ladies love a celebrity.

  Here on this dead, unnamed island, he was forced to sit quite literally with his thumb up his ass. It didn’t make the situation much better that his thumb was warm.

  He swiveled and looked at the burlap door that led to the hut behind him. Inside that hut, he guessed that the two girls were curled up, probably hugging each other for warmth and safety. Umberto could provide them with both protection and companionship.

  He smiled at the thought and tugged at his crotch. His hands were still pleasantly warm. Maybe he should slip in there and try to snuggle up next to the makeup girl with the big breasts and the alright face, or maybe the cute little cube of brown sugar with the blonde hair.

  He thought of the moolie writer in the next hut, and his smile dissolved into a frown. Old Jacque would probably have a problem if he tried to move in on his woman. Umberto didn’t have any real problem with moolies, but he fucking hated frogs.

  Stuck up foreign puttanas, not giving him the time of day, who did they think they were? A beauty school dropout and some halfie from the States, that’s what Tito had told him. How is it possible that Umberto was not making it with one of them right now? At least one of them!

  He turned back around and gazed out into the tall grass again. There was a form staring back at him now.

  Stumbling, he tried to jump to his feet.

  “Don’t be afraid,” the shape said. Its eyes were perfectly framed by the thick grass that hid everything else from view.

  “Who are you?” Umberto asked, curious how any Caribbean islander had learned Italian.

  The person in the grass shushed him. “You’ll wake the others. Come over here so we can talk without you shouting.”

  It didn’t seem like a great idea to Umberto, and it wasn’t his machismo pride that made him listen to the mysterious stranger, but the stranger’s voice itself. Umberto could not tell whether it was a man or a woman’s voice; but either way, it ebbed and flowed its way into his mind, telling him everything was alright with just its intonation.

  Before he even noticed his legs were moving, Umberto was putting up his hands to push the tall grass away from his face.

  “What Umberto Luigi wants more than anything is the role of a lifetime,” the shape said. He couldn’t tell what it was in the moonlight.

  “What are you?” It was both male and female, tall and short, black and white, old and young. Just when Umberto thought he could comprehended a stable image of it, he would catch the glint of an eye as it changed color or the wisp of a beard where he thought there had been a smooth-shaven cheek.

  “I can give you what you want, Umberto. I can give you the role that will make you known all over the world.” The figure ignored his question, and he began to forget that he had even asked one to begin with. The shape’s offer echoed in his head.

  “What would I have to do?” he asked.

  The shape smiled, first as an old black woman, then as a tall bearded white man glistening with sweat and grime. “To begin, go back to the village and get a blade.”

  As the words came, so did pictures. Umberto saw in his mind’s eye where the machete was kept. “Then you must quietly take the boar into the jungle.”

  Umberto smiled. His dream role lay out before him and all he had to do was grab it. “I think I know exactly what the third step is,” he said, turning his back on the shape and heading back through the grass.

  He was very quiet as he uncovered the boar. Its hair was coarse and wiry on his neck as he slung the beast over his shoulder and disappeared into the forest. The machete dangled from his belt, gleaming in the starlight.

  Chapter 9

  Denny

  The thin bedroll was as hard and unforgiving as the ground under it, but it only took a few moments for Denny to pass into a heavy sleep.

  He awoke several times to noises in the night, the picture of a stooped old black woman still fresh in his mind and foreign whispers in his ears. These moments were brief, and after each he would dive back into unconsciousness with minimal effort.

  The first blades of morning light cut through the window of the hut, and he awoke for good.

  As Denny crawled under the doorway, he didn’t feel rested. He felt sore and sweaty, and there was the strange tickle of a headache at the base of his neck. Maybe I did miss a fix yesterday, he thought before realizing that if chemical withdrawal were indeed setting in, it would have been a shitload worse than this.

  The dry mouth was pretty bad, though. His tongue felt like crêpe paper as he ran it over his mossy teeth, and it stuck like glue. Before touching the equipment to set up for the morning’s shots, he wandered to the east end of town and stopped at the well that Jacque had found last night.

  The well wasn’t made of mortar and stone, neither did it have a little gazebo on top like all the wells that Denny had ever seen in the movies. This well was just a three foot hole in the ground covered with three slats of wood and a basket on a rope.

  He lowered the basket down and up, his elbows aching from the effort. The water was brown and musty, but cold enough that he was tempted to gulp it right down. Last night, Jacque had made a big show of finding a shallow metal dish in one of the huts and boiling their water. Jacque may have been an intelligent guy, but he was also a pussy.

  “Drink,” a voice said at the back of his mind. If he boiled it, it wouldn’t have felt as nice as it did coursing down his throat.

&
nbsp; After drinking his fill, Denny splashed the rest on his neck and chest, his morning shower probably covering him with more dirt than he’d started with.

  Inside of the hut, he could still hear Tito snoring. That was good. He didn’t need the old man hassling him while he loaded the camera and unpacked the rest of the equipment.

  Tito was a pain, but boy could the man talk. Last night, it had taken the director less than an hour to defuse the situation with the dead bodies. He had convinced the writer and the actress that he sympathized with their point, and was just as disturbed as they were to find a mass grave, but the plane wasn’t coming back for another two days so they might as well make the movie a testament to the islander’s lives.

  Denny didn’t buy that testament bit, and he was sure that the rest of them didn’t either. But they had nowhere to go, and a movie to make.

  It took half an hour of putting everything in order before Denny was stricken with abject panic.

  Where is my meter? A cameraman’s light meter is only slightly less important to him than his pecker. Denny clawed through the excelsior of the big crate, tossing clumps out onto the ground until he was certain that the crate was empty.

  “Look at this mess,” Tito said from behind him. “What are you doing?” The old man stretched in the dawn. Tito wore only his shorts and his suit jacket. He didn’t look at Denny, but instead picked specks of sand from his chest hair.

  “Looking for my light meter,” Denny said.

  “It’s around your neck.”

  Denny’s fear abated, but it didn’t make him feel much better. He clutched at the gadget, slapping it against his chest.

  “I was going to get some coverage of the huts, maybe some inserts of bare feet in the sand,” Denny said.

  “Are you calling the shots now?” Tito gave a blank stare back, if it was possible to rub one’s belly in an intimidating manner, than the old man was doing so.

  “No, I’m sorry. What do you want to start with? Mein director?”