Dead As Dutch

by Rich Docherty

The night descended over the Catskills like some mad artist had hurled a bucket of black paint across its entire canvas. If there was dusk, it came and went faster than a cat burglar with a Doberman giving chase. No picturesque, photo-op sunset. No lingering orange glow lounging in splendor above the horizon. It was like a cavernous, windowless room with all its spooky darkness sealed inside. A place where an owl’s hoot gave novice visitors a start, and the unanticipated rustle of leaves made the hair on one’s arms rise to attention.

  The inky cocoon encased the cast and crew of Letter 13 as it emerged into an open meadow. They had just spent the last few hours winding their way through the woods where the dense canopy of trees blocked out most of the sky, rendering them unaware of the rapid transition from daylight to nighttime. Instead of the better sight lines they expected once they cleared the shadows, they now found themselves in a void with as much visibility as the interior of aclosed coffin. The entire team was forced to continue to navigate their way forward guided by the high-intensity LED beams of the flashlights that Irv had made sure to pack along with the camera gear. He was never a Boy Scout, but adhered to the same “Be Prepared” motto. By checking the phases of the moon ahead of time, Irv knew the crescent shape sliver predicted for that night would provide little illumination, and even less so with the gauze of cloud cover that currently scudded across it.

  The drained group tramped forward in steely silence behind Stan at the front of the pack. Their lone contributions to the natural sounds already present were the patter of the soles of their shoes pressing down on the grassy vegetation, or the occasional crunch of twigs. The hike was taking much longer than anticipated, and the well-worn trail that they followed through the forest no longer existed once they exited into the field. Stan plowed on, hoping it would pick up again, but when it didn’t after several yards, he stopped. Rotating in a complete circle, he surveyed the surroundings, but his view was limited to distance his flashlight could reach—about a hundred feet. The others followed suit, shining their beams back and forth, up and down across the terrain. From every angle the vista was distressingly similar. It was like trying to find your bearings in a can of black bean soup. As they looked at each other with the kinds of helpless vacant faces that stood around a disabled car on the side of the road waiting for a tow truck, nobody wanted to be first to state the obvious. Nobody except Bryce, that is.

  “Why don’t you just admit it, Stan—we’re lost!”

  “We’re not lost,” Stan stammered. “Just…slightly…disoriented.”

  Bryce smirked like he’d just caught Stan’s paws in the cookie jar and it was empty. “A director with no sense of direction—perfect!”

  Finding his way around in the dark was not Stan’s forte. In fact, finding his way anywhere wasn’t a strong suit. He could follow a map fine, but without one, he was just a wrong turn waiting to happen. His standard technique for getting to a destination involved plenty of wandering, and counting on a whole lot of unadulterated luck. One time, before his concerned mom installed a GPS in his car, Stan had started out for a supermarket in a town two miles north and an hour later ended up at the store—one that was twenty miles south. A helpful policeman guided him back onto the proper highway and aimed him in the right direction (but not before administering a sobriety test). In this much more unfamiliar environment, Stan was as overmatched as a man with catcher’s mitts on both hands trying to paddle a canoe. He just couldn’t let the others know that.

  “It’s gotta be just ahead,” Stan said, squinting into the vacuum of wilderness and sounding more hopeful than certain.

  “You said that an hour ago, Stan,” Dana grumbled. She had reason to be skeptical, having witnessed her brother’s spacey ramblings astray firsthand on numerous occasions. A running joke inside the Heberling household was that when Stan took hold of the wheel, passengers were warned to “leave early and cross your fingers.” It’s one of the prime reasons why Dana was marking the days until she obtained her driver’s license the next year—so she wouldn’t have to play rolling roulette any longer when she climbed into the car with Stan, not knowing where they might end up.

  Stan turned and faced the group. He wasn’t just annoyed by Dana’s comment, which, while accurate, was not something he needed to be reminded of. No, he was even more peeved with himself for a potential gaffe that could shatter any and all of the remaining eggshell-thin confidence the cast and crew had left in him. If that was lost, too, there went the film. He sensed his very command was at stake and on the brink of collapse. It was a crisis that at all costs had to be resolved without delay to preserve the fragile faith of the team. Problem was, Stan had no clue how to achieve this. He figured a direct challenge wasn’t such a bad place to start, though: toss a sharp jab, see if it connects.

  He confronted his troops as a father might after spending an entire day listening to his cranky kids complain in the back of his minivan. “Hey! I’m all ears. If anybody has a better idea, then let’s hear it.”

  Bryce waved his arms like he was flagging down an eighteen wheeler on the interstate. “I do! I do! Let’s call somebody and ask for help.” He pressed his left forefinger to his lips and raised the pitch of his voice until it was sticky sweet with sarcasm. “Oh, wait. We don’t have our cells because someone made us leave them behind in the van.”

  Stan surged with rage. “I told you—no tweeting or texting on my set!”

  It was not a debatable point. Stan had witnessed the disruptive nature of portable electronic devices on a set or location before, on other student film productions he assisted with. Neither actors nor crew members could be trusted with them. Even during the briefest pause or break between takes, the iPhones, Droids, and Blackberries materialized faster than a gunslinger’s six-shooter and held the cast and production team captive. Instead of lines being rehearsed, camera positions tweaked, or lighting setups refined, people’s noses were buried in the tiny screens clutched in the palm of their hands. In an instant they were absorbed and mesmerized by some crucial e-mail demanding scrutiny or the latest vital Facebook posting of an acquaintance who was certain the purchase of a venti-nonfat-decaf-caramel macchiato at Starbucks that same morning had been an event of life altering magnitude and thus felt compelled to alert the world without delay. They pecked away at the keys with the concentration of master yogis transmitting urgent missives to a potential hook up or pressing tweets that couldn’t wait a moment longer. Voice-mail was checked with such urgency and focus that an observer might be left with the impression that the President himself had left a message from the Oval Office. Actual labor on the film ground to a complete halt, and waiting for the phones to be powered down and positions taken up once again could take forever. Work resumed at the pace of an army rising in the morning after an all-night march through twenty miles of swamps. It was an interruption and distraction that Stan vowed never to allow on any film that he directed.

  “Uh, hello? We could have just turned them off,” Dana said, in such a presumptuous way that suggested her reasoning was irrefutable, and for her dense brother to even try and argue her logic would be an effort in futility.

  Stan bristled at her grating, smarmy tone and wasn’t about to be baited by his sister into explaining again the reasons for the phone ban he outlined earlier that morning for the entire crew. “Yeah, except you never learned how.”

  Dana glowered and folded her arms across her chest. “Ha. Ha. Ha.”

  Go ahead, I don’t care, give me all the attitude you got, sis, Stan thought. It was true. If Dana’s phone wasn’t recharging, then it was on. All day, every day. She carried it everywhere, like an insecure two-year-old dragging around her fuzzy-wuzzy blankie. It went with her to the bathroom and sat within arm’s reach of her bed at night, just in case, of course, someone had to reach her at 2 a.m., as though she was a secret agent on-call who might have to dash off on some dangerous mission at a moment’s notice. Stan often wondered how anyone could spend the number of hours his sister did pratt
ling on with her flock of bff’s about so many matters of inconsequence. Before he took up residence in his college dorm, it boggled his mind how often he caught fragments of her conversations at home that seemed to consist of nothing more than giggles interspersed with repeated exclamations of “soooo cute” and “soooo hot.” Even when she expanded her vocabulary repertoire to include an occasional two-syllable word, it pretty much started and stopped with “awesome.”

  “EEK!”

  Stan’s ruminations about Dana’s phone obsession were interrupted by Keisha’s outburst, which registered somewhere between a guttural reflex and a scream. It was abrupt and compressed, as though she just encountered a prankster who jumped out of the closet and yelled boo. The others rushed to her side and lit her up with their flashlight beams.

  Stan was no less startled than anyone else. “WHAT?”

  Apprehension filled Keisha’s eyes. Her mouth quivered a bit as she pointed into the darkness beyond. “I heard something. Over there. It sounded like…footsteps.”

  As if on cue, the crew shifted their flashlights in unison toward the direction of the alleged sound. The beams raked the area in a flurry of frenzied brush- strokes, but other than a gentle ripple of leaves in the evening breeze and the incessant chatter of crickets, nothing stirred or made a noise that couldn’t be accounted for.

  “Are you sure?” Stan’s words gushed from his mouth, his galloping heart pounding against his rib cage.

  Keisha hesitated then managed a sheepish shrug. “I don’t know. Yeah, well, I think so,” she said, more than a tinge of doubt in her voice.

  Bryce retracted his flashlight and shined it straight into Keisha’s face. “You think so? You scare us half to death and you think so?”

  Keisha shoved the flashlight aside. “Okay, I’m sorry. Maybe I was wrong.

  All right? Sorry!” She glared at Bryce, who rolled his eyes in response.

  “Forget it you guys. Let it go,” Stan ordered. He didn’t need his two actors squabbling—bad for chemistry. The camera had an uncanny way of capturing the true feelings characters had for each other in real life, such as during the filming Cleopatra in the early 1960s, when stars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton carried on a sizzling off-the-set affair and burned up the screen. Conversely, Stan was wary that any ill will behind the scenes could also show up: A plus for actors with roles as archenemies, but a disaster for romantic leads, as in Letter 13.

  “Plenty of wildlife around here,” Irv offered. “Coyotes. Bobcats. Probably just a black bear, though.” His matter-of-fact explanation about the plausible dangers lurking in the surrounding woods was uttered with about as much trepidation in his voice as a botanist describing the different varieties of hydrangeas and petunias to the local garden club.

  “Oh, is that all? Goody! Let’s set up camp here then. Anybody bring honey?” Bryce inquired, sounding about as sincere as a Saudi prince offered accommodations in a fleabag motel.

  It struck Stan that the prospect of any wild animals in their midst other than snakes was not a thought that had occurred to him or anyone not named Irv, and it was obvious that mention of them made everyone uneasy. He recognized—and even accepted—their status as interlopers in an unfamiliar landscape that had the potential to be downright hostile and unwelcoming. However, dealing with hungry nocturnal predators was not something Stan expected to be part of their weekend agenda. It was a sobering moment for all, and the group fell quiet as he drifted away to once again scan the perimeter and collect his thoughts. Despite all of his preparation, the presence of threats to their safety was not a variable he had considered, and that perturbed him. He had left a base uncovered, and it was a sloppy oversight that could come back to haunt him with even more production delays—or worse—the dreaded complete shutdown. Still, the chances of any one of them ending up down some beast’s gullet were about as infinitesimal as an asteroid burning through the atmosphere and crashing into the Catskills, at least that’s what he preferred to believe. Besides, it wasn’t like Sasquatch was cruising around here looking for a bedtime snack, just your everyday, skittish, four-legged forest critters who tried to avoid humans as much as people tried to steer clear of them. As Stan concluded that it was a non-issue and fretting over it any further a waste of energy, something snared his attention off in the distance.

  “Wait. That way. A light.” He gestured toward a tiny splotch of brightness poking its way through the branches of a thicket of trees as the rest of the team peered into the sheet of blackness and spotted it, too.

  “Our savior!” Dana’s exaggerated response earned a harsh glare from her brother and a mocking grin from her in return.

  As an invigorated Stan hustled off toward the beacon of hope, Irv and Dana trooped behind. Bryce bent down, latched onto a chest handle and glanced up at Keisha. “Come on, Zoe. Howie will protect you.”

  “Watch it, Bryce,” Keisha warned and scrunched up her nose to signal her displeasure with his sarcastic gibe.

  He mimicked her reaction with a nose crinkle of his own as she leaned over and grabbed on to her side of the box. They jerked the chest back and forth in a brief tug of war before hoisting it off the ground and trudging off to catch up with the other three.

  As they maneuvered their way through the woods, the light disappeared and reappeared several times behind the clusters of balsam firs and red spruce that populated this section of the Catskill Mountains in abundant numbers. The uneven terrain slowed their progress, but the potential for an encounter with a sharp-clawed creature with the munchies delayed them even more, as they were ultra-cautious with every step they took. Within thirty minutes, following a precarious hike down into a steep gully and a difficult ascent up again to a flat plateau on the other side, they found themselves with the source of the illumination glowing directly in front of their peepers. It wasn’t a pretty sight.

  Chapter 8