Tribesmen (3 page)

“I’m writing the script,” Jacque said, closing his pencil inside the notebook, ready to talk. The script was halfway finished and it was a long flight. He had the time.

“For this movie?” she asked. He watched her expression as her enthusiasm deflated. “The script for this movie isn’t finished yet?”

“Yes, but don’t look so surprised,” Jacque said. “It’s not that odd at all for these types of productions to still be writing up until the last day of shooting.”

“Oh. Okay,” she said unable to hide her disappointment. She had obviously been led to believe that this was a much bigger step up for her career. It wasn’t.

“Don’t worry though,” Jacque said and reached out to pat the back of her hand. “I’ll make sure that your lines are very good.”

She smiled at him, but he could tell that he’d done little to assuage her fears. “I’m Cynthia, by the way.” She gave him a slight but assertive handshake. It was an American shake to be sure. East coast, probably New York, he guessed. “Thank you for translating before. You speak Italian very well, but you don’t sound it. Where is your accent from?”

“My name is Jacque. I grew up in Paris but studied in the UK.” He assumed that she meant that he didn’t look Italian either. She probably had not met many black Italians. He hadn’t either, so he wasn’t calling her a racist.

“Wow,” she said. Her tone of voice suggested that this was her first time out of the States, and it made him ashamed of his comparative jet-setting.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

“Queens,” she said. “New York. What did you study in Britain?”

“English,” Jacque said, ashamed also to admit to his education. “Literature. At Cambridge.”

“You studied English at Cambridge,” she asked and did not bother to hide her fascination or disbelief. “Then what the hell are you doing here?”

“Making a living,” Jacque said. She went silent for a moment. It was his turn to ask a question.

“How long have you been acting?” Jacque asked and immediately regretted it. He had surmised that this was the girl’s first feature after some ‘modeling gigs.’ Maybe a few sweaty casting sessions that never resulted in a callback. He had asked this question enough times to know the embarrassing silence it was usually answered with.

“All my life,” Cynthia said, surprising him. “My parents were both theater people, and I’ve been in stage productions since I was an infant. I started out playing the baby Jesus in our church’s nativity, and I’ve been going ever since.” Her eyes lit up. He could tell that this was a monologue she’d delivered before, but she still enjoyed it. “I’ve laughed, sung, cried, tap-danced. Everything a person could do on the stage.”

That was not the answer he’d been expecting. “What are you doing here?” he asked, but then shushed himself after seeing her piquant smile. “Never mind. You’re making a living.”

“Exactly,” she said. “This may sound silly, but are all of us working on the movie?” She whirled a finger around in a circle, indicating that she meant the entire contents of the cramped charter plane. “I mean: are we all there is?”

“The whole kit-and-kaboodle,” Jacque said, feeling like the cool man-in-the-know. “Hair, makeup, camera, lights. If it needs doing, there is someone in this flying shitcan that can do it. Pardon my language.”

“Oh please,” she said, the Queens-lilt busting out so she sounded like a New Yorker for the first time. “So who is he?”

She pointed to the unconscious Umberto. His upper lip and blonde mustache was quivering in his sleep, and there was a long string of saliva linking it to the lapel of his olive green leisure suit. He must not have been lying about the downers. They were probably the only way to get to sleep on the cramped, turbulent plane.

“That’s Umberto Luigi. He also goes by Brent Cisco, his American stage name.”

“He can’t speak English, but he has an American stage name?”

“Well doesn’t he look American to you?” Jacque asked.

“His hair is blonde, but there’s just something Italian about him. Some kind of extra quality,” she said. She was the most polite and demure New York girl that Jacque had ever met.

“Could be that every time he exhales, my eyes tear up from all the garlic and bad cologne, couldn’t it?”

She chuckled and covered her mouth the way Geishas in old Japanese movies did when they laughed. Jacque liked that. Maybe this job wouldn’t be so bad.

“Hello, my darling.” A thick plume of cigarette smoke heralded Tito’s approach. Before the smoke had a chance to clear, he was leaning over Umberto’s seat, his sweaty old-man gut pressing up against the big unconscious Italian’s ear. “My exotic jewel, my starlet for a new age, my mulatto Fay Wray for the 1980s.”

Tito’s accent was in full swing, but his English was perfect. Jacque suspected that he turned it on and off at will. Tito sank down lower, going in for the kiss and spilling his drink onto Jacque’s notebook. Cynthia offered only her cheek, not wanting to kiss the old Euro-pervert.

Jacque breathed a sigh of relief. He didn’t think he could handle watching this lovely girl lock lips with Tito Bronze.

“Hey you, uh, Jacque,” Tito said, pretending to forget his name and slurring enough that Jacque could tell he was halfway drunk. He cringed to think that he’d spent enough time around Tito (three films now) to tell when he was sloshed. “Where is Denny? I look everywhere for Denny. I want to talk about apertures, f-stops, light meters, all that shit.”

If he was trying to impress Cynthia by discussing the finer points of cinematography, he was doing a terrible job of it.

“I don’t know,” Jacque said. The cabin was only about twelve feet long. Jacque made an exaggerated attempt to look for Denny, the camera man, even turning around in his seat to check behind him. “I don’t see him, do you? Maybe he’s in the bathroom.”

“That fucking kid has some kind of bladder problem. He’s always on the shitter,” Tito said. He took a sip of his scotch and then flashed a caustic smile back at Cynthia. “Ciao, bella,” he winked and stumbled off to find his seat, fighting a losing battle against both the turbulence and his buzz.

Chapter 3

Dennis Roth
Cinematography

The touchdown of the small plane jolted Denny awake. The needle in his arm bobbed up and down until it finally clattered to the floor of the cramped bathroom.

He rubbed his eyes and then worked the strip of rubber tubing from around his arm into a loop and tucked it into his back pocket. After he daubed a bit of toilet paper against the flecks of semi-dried blood in the crook of his arm, he tried to stand. Failing, he flopped back down into his seat.

His closed his eyes for another moment, re-awoke to banging on the bathroom door.

“I’m coming,” he yelled as he stood up from the toilet.

The water from the sink flowed out a dribble at a time and Denny was too impatient to fill his hands before wiping the few drops on his face and beard. He rolled his sleeves down over his pale skinny arms and buttoned the cuffs.

His shirt was sticking to his flesh. This was no good: he was already caked in sweat and he hadn’t even stepped foot on the tropical island yet.

Around this time last year, he would have inspected himself in the mirror to make sure that he hadn’t drooled down the front of his shirt, and paused to ask himself why he kept doing this. But he didn’t even bother doing that much anymore.

Denny took a deep breath before undoing the latch and sliding the door open, shielding his eyes against the light of the cabin.

“Where have you been? Did you fall asleep?” Jacque asked, tossing him his duffle bag. “We’re here and all the gear is already unpacked, so let’s go.”

Jacque knew. He had to have known. Jacque was a smart guy, even if Tito talked down to him and treated him like shit because he was a Negro from France. Denny knew that Jacque could see the signs written all over his junkie face (never mind the occasional track mark that peeked out of his cuff). Knowing this made him feel nauseous, sicker than the trash had made him feel on an empty stomach.

The suspicion that he had been found out made him grip his duffle tighter against his chest as he stumbled towards the metal stairs that led off the plane. Trading the rancid, stale air of the cabin with that of the fresh sun-drenched island was probably exceedingly pleasant for everyone disembarking. Everyone but Denny. The light inside had bothered his eyes, but the light outside blinded him. The rays of the sun bounced up off the sand and sent flesh-colored bolts of pain shooting through his clenched eyelids.

Using the flimsy railing for guidance, Denny made his way onto the packed sand of the runway.

“Where are they?” Denny heard Tito’s voice raise in indignant, impudent director-rage. Even when they aren’t on set, directors think they can get away with anything if they use this tone. There was the screech of metal on metal from behind Denny. He concluded that the pilot must have been waiting for him to get off the plane so the crew could pull up the stairs.

“Where is who?” Jacque asked. Denny tried opening his eyes but the people around him on the runway were just five formless blobs.

“The fucking natives!” The shortest of the blobs waved its hands in exasperation. That one was Tito. Denny smiled through the pain that throbbed from behind his eyes down into his empty stomach.

He began to discern the rest of the shapes: Tito, Umberto, Jacque, Daria the makeup girl and Cynthia the new actress stood next to piles of their luggage and a few crates of equipment. Including Denny, there were six of them. The plane hadn’t carried a full crew because Tito had insisted that they would be able to find cheaper labor on the island.

“They should have seen the plane land and come to meet us! Why do our modern wonders not thrill them? Where is our welcome party of savages?” Over the few years he’d been working with him, Tito had always found new and ingenious ways to outdo his own tastelessness. His blunt and hilarious lack of tact warmed Denny’s junkie heart.

“You arranged for a welcome party of savages?” Jacque didn’t sound half as amused by the idea as Denny was.

Umberto spoke up in Italian, momentarily breaking up the conversation. Denny could see fine now, and he could tell that the Golden Guinea was addressing Jacque directly.

He babbled for a while, peeling off his ugly green jacket as he spoke. The others turned in his direction. Denny and the new girl couldn’t understand him, but everyone else on the crew spoke Italian.

“You want us to start walking to what camp?” Jacque said in English; he must have been translating for Cynthia’s benefit. The pretty girl squirmed uncomfortably behind Jacque, looking down at her shoes and then back at Umberto.

“What do you mean there’s no hotel?” Jacque’s voice was raised to the point of yelling now. He walked up to the Italian, needing to crane his head to meet eye-to-eye. Umberto spoke some more and Jacque’s expression blossomed into one of both understanding and despair. The actor was telling him something he didn’t know. Denny thought that everyone had known that they were camping with the natives. The island didn’t have a hotel.

“Hold on now. If I tell you, Mr. Prissy writer,” Tito said, placing a hand on Jacque’s shoulder before having it shaken off. “If I tell you that we’re sleeping in native huts instead of nice fluffy hotel, would you have come?” Tito’s arms contorted into an exaggerated shrug. “This way it is better, more authentic.”

“Cheaper is more like it. And to answer your first question: no, I wouldn’t have come.” Jacque gave a look around. “So where are these natives, or how about just their ‘native huts’ for starters?”

Tito looked around and Denny looked, too. There wasn’t much to see. Thick jungle surrounded both sides of the runway with a beach and the Caribbean Sea on either end. Behind them the plane was beginning its trek to the end of the strip, creaking on its landing gear like an oversized Volkswagen bus.

“Where is the plane going?” Jacque asked. The plane turned to face them on the far end of the runway.

“What, I’m a Warner Brother now? I buy private plane? No, I rent the plane.”

“Well then, call it back, because I’m not staying here,” Jacque said and turned to lock eyes with the blonde. “And I don’t think the rest of you should either. This man is a huckster who probably won’t even compensate you properly for your time. I’m quitting.”

“Big talk from the big man. You want for me to call it back?” Tito usually spoke with less of an accent. He was done being cute. Denny didn’t
like
Tito Bronze, per se, and he hated working with him, but some sick part deep down inside of him kind of admired the director’s titanic stones. “Oh, I’ll just call it back with my magic telephone that can place calls to airplanes.”

“That is a real thing, you know. It’s called a radio and I take it that means we don’t have one.”

“No, we don’t. It will be back in three days, and in that time we will have enough footage for a film…as long as we shoot some filler when we get back to the city”

There was the sudden chug of an engine as the plane prepped for take off. Denny took a few steps forward, moving out of its path. He sidled up to Jacque and patted him on the back.

“I guess your resignation was rejected,” Denny said. “Three days isn’t that bad. It’s not a lot of time to make a movie, but at least you won’t starve. Buck up Jacky, m’boy.”