Tribesmen (9 page)

The whooping morphed into a familiar laughter. Umberto, probably once again brandishing the machete.

She had to hide or she could end up running in circles, or into the open terrain of the beach or airstrip. She would never be able to escape Umberto in a straight footrace. Even injured and half-blind, his stride was twice as long as hers.

Some kind of animal leapt between the branches above her head and caused her to look up. Even in the daylight, the tall treetops were an impenetrable tangle of overlapping leaves, vines and moss. Up was her only option.

Stifling a grunt of exertion, Cynthia shoved her hand into the nearest knot, praying there was not a snake or a bat inside. She swung her arm up to the lowest branch that looked like it would hold her weight and pulled with all her might.

There were very few trees to climb back in Queens, but this made climbing the few trees there were a point of pride for all of the neighborhood kids. Out of all of them: Cynthia had been the best. Even though she was one of the smallest children, she compensated by being both quick and fearless. Having mixed-race parents probably helped, too: it gave little Cynthia something to prove to the all-white and all-black kids.

So now she scrambled to the top of the tree, just as she had done when she was a child. She broke through the canopy and was temporarily blinded by the blazing late-morning sun. As she looked out over the jungle, Cynthia was glad that she made the climb. If she’d run a few hundred yards further, she would have been on the beach.

The hooting resumed in the jungle below. Umberto was closer to her now, but from the sound of it he was unaccompanied. Denny was probably through reloading the camera by now, with Tito probably still holding Jacque at gunpoint. At least there had been no more gunshots, she thought. That probably meant that Jacque was still alive.
Unless Umberto chopped him up into tiny pieces
. She hated herself for the thought.

She would not break down. She would not stop hoping or fighting.

Wrapping her hand around the base of a large branch, she used one foot to break it off. A club to defend herself. The snap was muffled, but still loud enough that it was possible Umberto may have heard it below.

She tried to swing the branch, keeping one arm around the tree for support. It wasn’t going to beat a machete, that was for sure, but it was better than nothing. It was smaller than a Louisville Slugger, but so jagged and pointed at the broken end that she contemplated for a moment whether it wouldn’t make a better spear than a club.

The footsteps were close now. How had Umberto been able to track her path so closely? She felt herself go faint. Maybe he could smell her. Worse, maybe she had left some kind of trail for him to follow as she blundered through the foliage of the forest floor.

Umberto had changed somehow. Maybe he’d tapped into something beyond his normal neuralgic capacity. Maybe whatever had made him crazy had upped his competency level. She held her breath as she listened to his approach. She wondered whether the leaves of her hiding-tree would be enough to conceal her, or whether her body would cast a big obvious shadow onto the pathway below.

She gripped her makeshift bat as Umberto circled the area below her. He was no longer laughing or howling now, but sniffing the air like a bloodhound. He downed the atmosphere in big gulps: he knew she was nearby.

She held the point of the branch down towards him and considered jumping from her hiding spot and attempting to skewer him to the ground with her spear. Even if she were able to hit him, the impact would probably kill her, too.

Instead, she decided to wait.

Through the wall of leaves, she could only see glimpses of him. She could tell that he still wore his boar-headdress and pig-skin cape, but his loincloth must have come undone during the chase. His semi-flaccid bloodstained manhood flapped against his thigh as he marched around the base of the tree in circles. It was the least sexy thing that Cynthia had ever seen.

He rooted through the ferns and bushes that surrounded the area, figuring that she must be lying down in the roughage to conceal herself. After he had done this twice, he screamed something in Italian. She didn’t know what he said, but his words were laced with frustration. He kicked up clouds of dirt and looked from above like an overgrown spoiled child.

Naked and miffed, he walked back towards the village the way he came. She watched him as he walked, searching the forest floor for his loincloth and finding it right before moving out beyond her sight.

Same old Umberto
, Cynthia thought and allowed herself the briefest of smiles.

Chapter 15

Tito

When Umberto had first walked out of the forest wearing the pig cape, Tito’s initial reaction was abject terror. Not because Umberto looked dangerous or deranged, but because the Golden Guinea was interrupting such a beautiful shot.

As Umberto gripped Daria by the hair, Tito was overjoyed by the actor’s dedication to this film, and his newfound panache for improvisation.

The feelings of frustration and joy were not new to Tito.

It was only when the chopping started that the unfamiliar emotions took hold.

The humanist in Tito recognized how unnatural it all was, how contrary to everything he had ever witnessed on a professional movie set (and he had been on many). There was a certain indefinable primitive
reality
to it. Jacque had vomited in response, and Tito couldn’t blame him for that. The adrenaline rush had almost been too much for himself to handle.

But as Denny pushed the camera in for a closer look, and Tito began to shout “cut,” Tito heard a voice at his ears. The voice was not distinguishable from his own, but still alien in a way. “This movie has just gone from good to great,” it said.

As wrong as the feeling was—and it was
wrong
—he agreed with the voice. This shot: this was Tito Bronze’s Odessa Steps. All his life he had wanted to achieve this level of pure cinema…and now he’d done it.

This was the sequence that would outlive him, the one that he would be remembered for. It would be studied by scholars and critics until the end of time.

So when the camera had run out of film and Jacque was about to do something drastic—possibly kill his star—Tito had acted to protect the remainder of his film. He thumbed back the hammer on the Korovin and pointed the small gun in Jacque’s face.

Get one thing straight: Tito wasn’t condoning murder. He wasn’t ready to perpetrate murder. He was only trying to secure his cinematic legacy.

“What are you doing?” Jacque asked, flashing a panicked look behind Tito. Tito ignored his question and turned the gun on his little actress squeeze.

Tito was a mediocre filmmaker, but he was an excellent marksman. He could have taken her out, but they needed her to complete the film.

Umberto may have been covered in layers of human and pig blood, but he was still an actor. Actors are cattle and should be treated as such, or whatever it was that Hitchcock had said.

“Catch her,” he shouted at him. Much to his relief, Umberto listened and ran off into the jungle instead of attacking and killing Tito. The actor may have lost his mind, but he still knew who was writing the checks.

Tito put the gun back on Jacque. “Why are you doing this?” the negro asked.

How could he not see it? Was he not an educated man? Didn’t he see that what they were doing was creating supreme art? They hadn’t set out to do it. They had set out to make money, but now art was happening all the same.

Tito thought it best not to answer him. A man must come to these kind of realizations on his own.

After a few minutes away, Denny returned with the camera. “Latest reel safely reloaded, boss. We’re ready to roll.”

Boss
: that was a new development. Maybe Denny had learned some respect after that last sequence. Maybe the call of true art was too strong for even a know-it-all brat like Denny.

“We can’t go yet. We need the girl.”

“Well she’ll definitely be back on set in a minute,” Denny said. “Where should I be setting up? Should I be getting pickups and inserts?”

“Get all the coverage you can,” Tito said. He was no longer annoyed that the boy was trying to call the shots. It was good that Denny was showing such initiative. “I’m going to have a talk with our screenwriter about where the story goes from here.”

Denny gave him a salute and turned to around to face Daria’s body. He held a hand out and began to take light readings above her mangled corpse.

Tito tried to look Jacque in the eye, but the writer was trying to avoid his gaze. He spoke anyway.

“A writer who doesn’t produce isn’t a writer, Jacque,” Tito said to him in French. It was a language that seemed tailor-made for pontification. Tito was happy that he got to use it while talking to Jacque.

The black man’s eyes were plastered to the barrel of the gun in front of his face. He followed the bouncing ball as Tito waved it around.

“I know that you understand this, but there is a firm hierarchy on a film set. It’s a delicate chain of symbiosis in which all the links have to be maintained if our work is to reach pure cinema.”

“Can I at least be allowed to sit down while I listen to this crazy horseshit?” Jacque asked.

Tito flipped the Korovin around, careful to keep his finger off the trigger. He pointed the butt at Jacque, raised up on his toes and pistol-whipped him over his left eyebrow. The blow sent the black man to the ground. The gun may have been small, but it was heavy.

“You think I’m joking with you? Do you want to ruin what we can achieve here? If you do, just say so and I’ll put a bullet through your eye. Well, I’ll do it in a moment, once Denny gets the tripod set up.”

“Don’t,” Jacque said, wavering as he propped himself up with his elbows. Tito looked beyond him now, to the space right behind the fire. He could see them all: the people of the island. They stood in a semi-circle, nodding their approval to Tito, their feet facing behind them. This film would be dedicated to their memory.

The vision collapsed as Umberto bounded through the tall grass and into camp. He was empty-handed except for the blade.

“Where is she?” Tito looked at him and the actor just shrugged. Mr. Hitchcock was right:
cattle
.

Chapter 16

Cynthia

What had happened to the men of the crew? Or at least the
white men
, Cynthia thought, her arm sore from hugging the tree. She remembered something her grandmother (the darker one) had once told her. She laughed at the thought.

“I love your granddad,” her grandmother had said. “But every single white man I have ever met is either one of two things: hateful or crazy.” Her grandfather had fallen firmly into the ‘crazy’ category, but Cynthia had also noted that after too many drinks he was known to dabble in hatefulness, even though her grandma would never admit to it.

Not content with folksy life lessons, Cynthia’s grandmother was also fond of telling her stories from her life back in Trinidad. Cynthia remembered parts of those stories now with a frown, wishing she was on
that
Caribbean island instead.

Maybe the answer to today’s violence lay in her grandmother’s stories. Tales of Obeah, the folkloric religion that the grandmothers in Trinidad used to practice in secret, and that the Christian preachers used to warn the kids about.

From what her grandmother had told her, it was a religion full of evil ghosts and lost spirits. It sounded great for getting the little kids in Trinidad to behave, but beyond that it had sounded hokey.

She thought about the mass grave.

What better source of lost souls could there be?

It didn’t much matter. The cause could have been vengeful spirits on loan from Trinidad, residual radiation from atomic tests that had driven the white men insane, or even something as mundane as dysentery from the well water. Whatever the reason, the makeup girl was still sans her head.

Forgetting herself, Cynthia yawned and stretched out her arm. Instantly, she was catapulted forward in her seat. She regained her grip, but not before the momentary feeling of falling that accompanied being confronted with such a height.

Cynthia’s vision swam as she scrutinized the jungle floor from her perch in the tree. There was no movement. She listened. No sounds except for the occasional bird.

Getting up the tree had been an easier proposition than getting down would be. Going up there had been no choice. She either climbed or she was murdered by an Italian B-lister.

After Umberto had left, she waited fifteen minutes to make sure that he wasn’t still searching the area. Then she thought of a plan for another fifteen minutes. At least she estimated they were fifteen minutes increments: at the rate her mind was working they could have been anywhere between three minutes to an hour.

The sun was directly overhead when she made the decision to climb down. The orbital fireball was her only reliable way of marking time. She felt guilty for leaving Jacque for so long. She further saddened herself with the thought that Jacque’s chances for survival already seemed bleak, and whatever aide Cynthia could give him had much less chance for success with each passing second. Or did it? What could she possibly do for him in the daytime? She was out-gunned, out-numbered and out-crazied.