Tribesmen (13 page)

“Action!” he yelled, taking the gun from his loincloth.

He waved the end around the hole in small circles until firing once, stopping to say something, and then again. He knelt, trying to stay out of his own shadow while angling the lens down into the hole.

Cynthia didn’t want to, but she gasped.

Umberto turned to her, took his eye from the viewfinder, and smiled.

Chapter 24

Umberto

Umberto hated talking to other actors. Not only were they self-absorbed, and always looking for Umberto to introduce them to Roland Pressberg or Tito Bronze, but they always said the same annoying phrases.

The one Umberto had grown to hate most was:

“What I really want to do is direct!”

Not only was it a cliché, but the men who usually said it were bad, ineffectual actors who would probably make worse directors.

Now here he was, getting his first taste of being director, writer, star and D.P. of his own film, and he wanted more. The other side of the camera was pure power.

Even more so was the gun.

Tito had begun to beg near the end, once Umberto had said “Action!” and realized what he was going to do. Umberto had dwarfed the old man, used that very special word to subsume him.

In a way, Bronze was dead before the bullets entered his face, broke out his front teeth, and exploded out the back of his head.

The sun was up now, but it was casting hard shadows, and it was still difficult to see what was going on in the hole. Umberto had cranked the exposure way up, hoping that even if the film was overexposed, Tito’s frightened expression would be captured in some way.

After he shot him, Umberto made sure to get some coverage of the body, kneeling low to the ground and sticking the lens as close to Tito’s face as he could get.

He had only gotten one take, but he guessed that the footage was miraculous. Finding the girl had been an added bonus, her gasp getting his attention, even with the camera still humming in his ear. Her near-platinum blond hair made her easy to spot against the greens and browns of the jungle.

All the fatigue and queasiness that had accumulated over the last few days was gone. Umberto held his head and his camera high as he ran towards the girl. He could see that she was panicked.

She was a tiny blonde fawn in his headlights, unsure whether to run or to give up.

He broke through the grass and saw why she was hesitant to run. There lying next to her was the writer, the leaves and saw-grass around him pooling with blood.

As he approached, the girl huddled over him with her arm outstretched, clutching a small blade. The corners of her eyes were impossibly white, possessing all the fury of a mother animal protecting her nest.

Umberto just shook his head. “Stupid girl, I don’t want him. What kind of grand finale would it be without my co-star?”

His words were unintelligible to her, he knew that, but it didn’t matter. He tightened his grip on the camera and took a step towards her, swatting away the hand that held the knife.

She grunted and screamed as his fingers reached for her scalp. The blade dug into his forearm, drawing a deep red line across his skin. There was no pain, so he continued his momentum, catching a wad of her hair and yanking her onto her backside. The knife slipped from her hand from either the blood or the shock.

The writer tried to sit up, but Umberto pushed him back down with the heel of his foot, focusing the camera on his pained expression as more pressure was applied to the wound on his back.

The girl screamed some more, no doubt pleading with Umberto to leave the dying man alone. He would indulge her, but she should have instead been begging for her own life.

He moved the end of the camera, watching with his uninjured eye through the viewfinder as the grass he was dragging her through tugged at the exposed flesh of her arms. The saw-grass left cuts on her arms that looked miniscule on film but were probably agony to endure.

Once he’d wasted enough film on her red-faced screams on the trip back to camp, he switched to a long shot of the village, the wooden stake and fire in the middle.

It was an establishing shot of where his film’s final scene—the grand finale—would take place.

Chapter 25

Cynthia

She had lived through all of this for
what
?

Her scalp throbbed from where Umberto had dug his well-manicured nails in, dragging her to the center of town before lifting her off her feet and binding her by her wrists to the wooden stake by the fire. Gravity had left her arms mercifully free of sensation, her shoulders howling in pain for the first few minutes before the feeling of nothingness had spread to her whole body.

She watched as Umberto tried to figure out the tripod.

Cynthia wondered how it was possible that someone who had worked on movies for the bulk of his life was having a difficult time getting the legs even, not realizing that there was a level built into the base of the instrument to help him. She was going to be tortured and mutilated by an idiot, in all likelihood not even in focus. It figured.

After five more minutes of teaching her exotic curse words, Umberto re-shouldered the camera, deciding to go handheld for her death sequence.

As he approached her, there was a click, and the camera cranked to life.

“Action,” he whispered. It was the only English she’d ever heard him speak.

He reached out a hand to her, grabbing for her shirt, ready to rip it off of her like he did to Daria.

Daria
. The thought conjured up one last morsel of reserve rage inside her.

She arched her back against the smooth, aged wood of the stake, and waited until Umberto was in range.

The sleazy Italian licked his upper lip, cleaning his amber mustache with his tongue and beginning to laugh under his breath. “Good movie,” he said to her, trying to soothe but only disgusting her. “Big star.” Motioning first to himself, and then to her.

The back of his hand brushed against her breast, and she let him have it, pulling herself up by the wrists and kicking him in the stomach with both feet. He doubled to the dirt. His free hand clutched the lens, more concerned with catching the camera than grabbing his stomach.

He remained crouched. His breath was labored for a moment as Cynthia wriggled against the wood, trying to rip the tape off her hands but finding it impossible to get a tear started.

Umberto hefted himself to his feet again, this time the machete filling his free hand. He didn’t speak, only shook his head and gave her a slight
tssk
before laying the blade flat against her neck. She tried to shrink away from its cold touch.

But there was nowhere to go.

Umberto left the edge of the machete where it was and brought the camera so close to her face that she could see herself in its lens. Her image was bubbled and distorted, a fish-eye version of herself that she did not wholly recognize.

It wasn’t just the swollen nose or the bruises: she was a different person than she had been three days ago. She kept her eyes on her own reflection, letting the whirr of the camera become white noise as Umberto giggled to himself, moving the tip of the blade over her body, tickling her navel and then bringing it lower.

She would not give him the satisfaction of a response: she would ruin the movie by being an uncooperative, unemotional participant. A bad actor.

Before long, the camera dropped lower, focusing on the swell of her blouse instead of the blank expression she had willed to her face. He knew what she was trying to do, and it was making him agitated.

His giggle turned into a protracted growl as he poked at her thighs with the duller edge of the blade. She didn’t look down, but she could feel the blood begin to dribble down her knee.

“You won’t get what you want,” she said, perfectly aware that he wouldn’t understand. He took his eye from the viewfinder and stared at her, raising the machete high, letting her know that if she wouldn’t cooperate, he would bring it down on her neck.

“Fuck you,” she said. He probably knew that one, had most likely heard it directed at him by a thousand different women in a dozen different languages.

“No. Fuck you,” he said, eye back behind the camera, arm reeled all the way back.

As he began to swing, there was a sound like a ceramic bowl breaking under a pillow. Umberto’s eye went gloss, and behind it a light was switched off. He listed for a second, the weight of the camera pulling him over and down.

He collapsed, the back of his golden hair mottled with dark, sticky blood.

Jacque attempted to give him a second blow with the large rock, but he could not lift it with both hands. It thudded to the ground, landing in the small of Umberto’s back.

“You’re alive,” Cynthia said. It seemed the only thing to say. Her surprise was genuine.

Jacque didn’t speak. He stumbled towards her like a drunk, looking unaccustomed to using his feet and taking wide clumsy steps to get to her. Squishing her against the stake, he leaned into her for support while he undid the tape around her wrists.

She kissed his neck as he worked, but if he felt it, he gave no indication.

As he unwound the last piece, she fell a few inches back to solid footing. Her knees buckled, and they crumpled to the dirt together.

“Thank you,” she said, and he nodded in response.

Umberto grunted, the camera still running in his hands.

Cynthia took hold of the solid piece of equipment. She’d never held one before. It was heavier than she imagined it would be. Either that, or her arms were that weak.

With one eye open, Umberto studied her, blood pooling in his ear and spilling over onto his cheek.

Without a word, she lifted the camera above her head and brought the back-end down on the side of his face. There was a crunch, and the veins in Umberto’s arms and chest jumped as if electrified.

Before she knew that she had lifted it a second time, she brought the still-running camera down again on the place where his ear used to be.

The sun had risen overhead. She tried to imagine the picture that was burning its way onto the film right now. She was sure that there would be flashes of overexposure and lens flares as she raised the camera up and it caught the glint of the sun.

But as she brought the machine down again and again on Umberto’s ruined skull, would the viewer catch a glimpse of her face? What would she look like? Would she be made beautiful by her ferocity, an Amazonian Goddess of war and vengeance?

Or would she just be that halfie girl from Queens, only with a swollen nose and broken teeth so she didn’t look as pretty as she used to on the stage?

Would she ever let anyone see the film, so they would be able to answer those questions?

Chapter 26

Jacque

The sand was warm.

Jacque could tell that it was too warm for Cynthia, who shifted uncomfortably on top of it, finally unbuttoning her blouse and using it as a beach towel. For him, it was just right. It was getting more difficult to feel anything, so the warmth was a welcome sensation.

“It’s going to be dark soon,” she said, tilting her head up to the setting sun and then swiveling to look at the runway behind them. She had packed what little they were taking back with them in one of the empty crates, and walked it to the landing strip while he dozed on the beach during the afternoon.

Maybe ‘dozed’ was not the best way of describing it. ‘Shivered until he lost consciousness’ might have been more apt.

“The plane will hopefully be here in the morning,” she said.

When she had helped him back to the beach, he could not stop saying “thank you,” but now he was quiet. He had not been able to gather the strength to speak to her for a few hours now, but she kept calm and continued talking to him anyway.

“Although the way this trip has been going, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were late,” she continued, smiling down at him, resting her hand over his heart.

He wanted to feel it, but he couldn’t.

After watching the sunset with her, he dipped back into sleep. He had more of those same dreams he had had while he was tied to the stake, but he was sure that they were beyond dreams this time.

There was no tunnel of white light. His grandparents and old pets weren’t calling down to him from heaven. There was simply the feeling that he was somewhere else.

All around him, the people of the island waited. Some of them stood. Some of them paced up and down the beach. But the little old woman just crossed her backwards feet and sat next to him on the sand.

She placed her old gnarled hand on the other side of his chest.

He felt it.

“I’m truly sorry about this,” she said. Through her touch, he saw it all: the curse, the massacre, the mass grave that they had uncovered in the jungle. All of it.