We Dine With Cannibals

by C. Alexander London

  “The Celebrity Adventurist,” Celia whispered. Corey Brandt smiled at her. The room seemed to get brighter from the light of his teeth. Celia’s knees went weak and she leaned on Oliver for support.

  Oliver rolled his eyes. Girls were weird.

  “That’s right,” said Corey. “I have decided to make the new season all about great discoveries, and no one makes greater discoveries than the Navel family.” He fist-bumped Oliver for no apparent reason.

  “I was just telling young Mr. Brandt how you two are experts on the lost cities of the Inca!” Professor Rasmali-Greenberg said.

  “We are?” Oliver asked.

  “We are?” Celia asked.

  “You are!” the professor said.

  Celia couldn’t tell if he was joking. His face gave nothing away. Why were real people’s faces so hard to understand? On Love at 30,000 Feet you could always tell what someone was thinking by looking at a close-up of his face. She wished all people overacted like soap-opera stars. Or that she could stand right up in their faces and study them in close-up, but that would probably make people uncomfortable.

  The professor continued, putting his arm around Corey Brandt.

  “In fact,” he said, “Oliver and Celia have a guide to one of the greatest lost cities in the world in their bag right now!”

  “We do?” Oliver asked.

  “We do?” Celia asked.

  “You do!” the professor said.

  Celia was dismayed. How did the professor know about Mr. Rondon and the khipu? Did he know that their mother had been back and had he not told them? Why were people always hiding things from them?

  “Of course, the only ones who know how to read it fled into the Amazon rain forest six hundred years ago,” the professor told Corey Brandt. “But if anyone could find them, I bet it would be the Navels.”

  “But—” Oliver was interrupted by a knock at the door.

  Dr. Navel looked at his children admiringly as he went to the door. He swung it open to reveal the most wonderful sight the twins had ever seen: the cable guy.

  His uniform was bright blue and his tools shined in his tool belt. He looked at the clipboard in his hand.

  “I’m looking for Ogden Navel,” he said. “I’m from CableWorld. We’re here to install your premium package: two hundred and fifty channels in high definition, unlimited video on demand, and a free hat.”

  Celia yelped and jumped a little off her feet. Oliver smiled. He liked the hat too.

  We should observe that in all our lives, there will come days of astounding wonder. Lights shine brighter; food tastes better. Misery is washed away by triumph and all our hopes are realized. These are the days that we each treasure for the entire length of our lives.

  For Oliver and Celia, this was not one of those days.

  “Ah yes,” Dr. Navel said. “Unfortunately, we’ll have to reschedule. We’re traveling soon, you see, and my children were suspended from school. So no cable today. Can you find your way out?”

  “Um,” the cable guy answered.

  “You just go down the stairs, under the polar bear, past the spears, and through the wide double doors beneath the Mesopotamian archway.” He closed the door in the cable guy’s face.

  Oliver and Celia stood in stunned agony.

  “Cold,” Corey Brandt whispered. He started sending text messages on his cell phone, trying to look busy. Professor Rasmali-Greenberg studied his tie.

  “Where were we?” Dr. Navel put his hands together. “Oh yes, the Inca’s Itinerary! You had it all along? May I see it? You know, the Incas didn’t call it the Amazon River. That name came from the Spanish, after a mythological race of female warriors, Amazonians, and it was only after—”

  “This is so unfair!” Celia shouted, interrupting her father and storming off to her room.

  “Celia, come back!” Dr. Navel called after her. “Celia, listen, honey, I just wanted you guys to—”

  Dr. Navel was interrupted by another knock on the door.

  Flustered, he stepped back over to the door and started speaking as he opened it. “I’m sorry, sir, I meant past the polar bear and under the spears …” But the cable guy wasn’t there. For a second it looked like no one was at the door. But then a little man cleared his throat and everyone looked down. Sir Edmund stood in the doorway, dressed in a khaki explorers outfit with a pith helmet tucked under his arm. Two servants stood behind him holding large designer duffel bags.

  He smoothed his extravagant mustache with his fingers and stepped into the apartment without being invited.

  “I couldn’t help but hear that your children had been suspended from school. I do hope they are ready to travel again. Per the terms of our wager, I am taking them with me to the Amazon.”

  16

  WE ARE NOT ON VACATION

  SIR EDMUND’S SERVANTS followed him into the apartment and set his bags down in the middle of the floor.

  “Mr. Brandt, how lovely of you to visit us from Hollywood,” he said, although he said “Hollywood” the way you might say “boogers.”

  “Do I know this guy?” Corey Brandt asked no one in particular.

  “Professor, happy to see you,” Sir Edmund added, although everyone knew that he was never happy to see anyone. Then he turned to Oliver. “I see you made it back from Machu Picchu in one piece. Where is your sister? Did she have an accident with the llama? She looked a little unsteady on it.”

  “I’m just fine,” Celia said as she burst out of her room and stomped down the hall. “I can ride a llama as well as anyone.” She glanced over at Corey Brandt. “Maybe better, actually.”

  Oliver noticed that she had changed clothes and that her hair was different.

  “You didn’t come here just to harass my children about llamas,” Dr. Navel interrupted.

  “Well, I was talking to my old friend Barbara Deaver,” said Sir Edmund, “who happens to be a middle school principal. Naturally, I asked after the well-being of my favorite Navels and was saddened to learn they had been suspended from the sixth grade so early.” He shook his head. “I fear that too much television has turned them into antisocial deviants. All hope is not lost, however. I can whip them into shape for you, Navel. A few more weeks traveling with me, and they’ll be as good as …” He twirled his mustache and smiled as he drew out the last word: “Gold.”

  “The terms of the wager are that they belong to you when they are on vacation,” Dr. Navel responded. “Suspension is not a vacation.”

  “Yes it is,” Sir Edmund said.

  “No it’s not,” Dr. Navel answered.

  “It is,” said Sir Edmund.

  “It is not,” said Dr. Navel.

  Oliver, Celia, Corey Brandt, and the professor snapped their heads back and forth between the two men like they were watching a tennis match. Although, given the height difference between Dr. Navel and Sir Edmund, it was more like a tennis match on a steep hill.

  “It is.”

  “It’s not.”

  “It is.”

  “It’s not.”

  “Enough!” Sir Edmund finally shouted. “I will not stand here and argue with an explorer who cannot even find his own wife.” He turned to the professor. “I am amazed you allow him to remain the Explorer-in-Residence. Perhaps the standards of the Explorers Club are slipping. Perhaps I should consider reducing the amount of my next donation …”

  “There is no need to do that,” Professor Rasmali-Greenberg sputtered. “I am sure we can come to an agreement here.”

  “I thought we might,” Sir Edmund said. “Very good then. We shall all travel together to the Amazon.”

  “No we will not!” Dr. Navel shouted.

  “Yes we will,” said Sir Edmund.

  “We will not!” said Dr. Navel.

  “We will indeed!”

  “We will absolutely not!”

  “We most certainly will!”

  “Dude!” Corey Brandt interrupted. “I can’t take any more of these bad vibes. Whatever. We
’ll all go.” He turned to Sir Edmund. “Just try to stay off camera, okay?”

  “Excellent,” said Sir Edmund. “It will be delightful to see television magic in the making. Will your entourage be joining us?”

  “I’ll be on my own,” said Corey Brandt.

  “No legal guardians? Assistants? Publicists? Hairstylists? Stuntmen?”

  Corey Brandt clenched his jaw and glared at Sir Edmund. “My parents don’t travel, my assistant is on vacation, my publicist doesn’t do nature, this is just how my hair looks, and I”—he coughed into his hand—“I do all my own stunts.”

  “Really?” Oliver gasped. “So when Agent Zero escaped from the Assassins’ Guild in the desert of Kazakhstan, you did that? And jumping out of the sky castle of Mumbai? And waterskiing through the fires of Cleveland? You did all that?”

  “Yeah,” said Corey Brandt.

  “Cool!” said Oliver.

  Dr. Navel wondered why Oliver thought it was cool when Corey Brandt did exciting and dangerous things, but awful and dull when Dr. Navel had his children do them.

  “I took you to Cleveland once,” he muttered to himself.

  “I assume we shall start our expedition with Benjamin Constant. I shall make the arrangements,” said Sir Edmund. He didn’t wait for an answer before he turned to leave. Just before he walked out, he stopped in the doorway.

  “One more thing.” He turned to Oliver. “My lizard, please.”

  Oliver looked at Beverly and then looked at Sir Edmund. He thought about how she had saved him from the bat, and shared a snack cake with him, and how she had jumped on Greg Angstura’s face. He was about to protest when he remembered she was a lizard. And he didn’t like lizards. He went over to the easy chair she had occupied and picked her up.

  “Later, Beverly,” he said.

  She hissed, but Oliver didn’t think she meant it to be mean. Sir Edmund tucked her under his arm and marched out, the servants lugging his bags behind him. He slammed the door as he left.

  “Ouch!” they heard him yell as the moon rock fell off its shelf for the second time that day.

  Oliver and Celia saw their father smirk.

  Across the street, from a high balcony, a woman in black held a telescope and watched through the apartment window. She chewed on a jade toothpick as she read their lips and made out every word the Navels and their guest said. As Sir Edmund stormed out of the apartment, the notorious grave robber Janice McDermott chuckled. Everything was falling into place.

  “El Dorado,” she said to herself. She wrote the word gold in her notebook, followed by three exclamation points.

  Revenge was so close she could taste it.

  17

  WE ARE A LONG WAY FROM HOLLYWOOD

  BENJAMIN CONSTANT had never seen anything like this expedition before. They arrived on two single-engine seaplanes. One was for people and one was for the dozens of bags, boxes, trunks, and pieces of equipment that they brought with them. There was a trunk filled with different outfits for Sir Edmund and a trunk filled with Corey Brandt’s hair products.

  Oliver and Celia had just a backpack that they shared between them. They liked to travel light. Even better would be not to travel at all.

  Before you grow concerned that there is yet another disreputable character involving himself in the trials and tribulations of Oliver and Celia Navel, we should observe that Benjamin Constant is not a man but the name of a sleepy logging town on the southern bank of the Amazon River. There have been several men in history called Benjamin Constant, but they are about as well known as the town in the Amazon that bears their name. Visitors rarely arrive and when they do, they do not stay long.

  So it came as quite a shock to the residents of Benjamin Constant when two seaplanes buzzed overhead and turned in a tight swirl to land in the river. It came as even more of a shock when a handsome teenager with a handheld video camera and perfect hair leaped from the airplane and swam, fully clothed, to the shore. He climbed out, soaked in the waters of the Amazon River, and squatted on the ground. He pointed the camera at himself and looked dramatically into the lens.

  “We have survived a perilous journey through wind and rain, across the great expanse of South America,” Corey Brandt told the camera. “We’ve arrived at this isolated town at the very end of civilization. From the sky, all we could see in any direction was the great Amazon River snaking through the thick green canopy of the rain forest, which has claimed the lives of countless explorers before me. I hope that I, Corey Brandt, will not be its next victim.”

  A crowd of townspeople gathered. Children hid behind their parents and peered out from between their legs. Fishermen hauled in their nets and stood to watch. Some of the burly loggers laughed and whispered crude comments about the young man.

  He furrowed his eyebrows in a look of serious concern and then gave the camera a smirk and a wink. Several village girls would later recall feeling weak in the knees for reasons they could not explain. A few of the burly loggers too. It was a heck of a smile.

  “Cut!” Corey Brandt said and dropped the camera back into his pocket. In the meantime, the airplanes had pulled up to the rickety dock just a few feet away and let their engines whine to a stop.

  Oliver and Celia, green in the face from the choppy ride in the seaplane, hopped down onto the dock, followed by their father, dressed all in khaki, his smile wide and excited. He waved at the gathered residents of Benjamin Constant.

  “Hola!” he called.

  “Out of the way, Navel,” Sir Edmund yelled from behind him. He started pulling dollar bills from different pockets in his vest and waving them at the townspeople. Then he pointed at his bags in the other plane. Children came running and grabbed the bags for him. “The universal language,” he sneered as the children ran off with his bags to the only hotel in town.

  “Why’d Corey Brandt dive into the water?” Oliver wondered.

  “He knows how to make an entrance,” Celia answered dreamily.

  “Well, he didn’t need to be all wet. And anyway, it’d be cooler if he rode on one of those.” Oliver pointed toward a group of rusty old motorcycle taxis. The drivers stood next to their bikes, hoping the foreigners would want a ride. There was not a lot of work for a motorcycle taxi driver in town. They all smiled and nodded when Oliver pointed at them.

  Oliver tried to hide his excitement. He could never admit it to his sister, but he kind of wanted to ride on a motorcycle. He kind of wanted Corey Brandt to see him ride on a motorcycle. He’d never had the urge do anything dangerous before, but somehow just being around the teen star made him want to be braver.

  Celia, on the other hand, did not want Corey Brandt to see her try to ride a motorcycle. Being around the teen star made her desperately want to avoid embarrassing herself.

  “Greetings! Greetings!” a man in the crowd called out, stepping forward.

  He wore a white linen suit and a tie with golden tie clip. He was bald, but sported a tidy beard and mustache. He went immediately over to Corey Brandt. “It is a pleasure to have you here, Mr. Brandt,” he said, shaking the teenager’s hand. “I am a big fan of Sunset High. I do wish you had ended up with Lauren instead of Annabel, but alas … great loves are often doomed.” He sighed, but it didn’t seem to bother Corey Brandt. He was used to it. “We are a long way from Hollywood,” the man continued at last, “but I assure you that we will do our best to make you comfortable in our town. I am the mayor of Benjamin Constant, and I am at your service.”

  He shook hands with their whole group. Oliver and Celia thought they saw a knowing glance pass between Sir Edmund and the mayor. Oliver and Celia knew a thing or two about knowing glances. They exchanged them with each other all the time.

  Sometimes the knowing glance meant “Are we really going to watch this?” and sometimes it meant “I can’t believe how many commercial breaks there are in this show,” and sometimes it meant “On the count of three we are going to jump over this pit of scorpions.” But when adults gave each other
knowing glances, it always meant trouble for the Navel twins.

  Two black Mercedes town cars sliced through the crowd. The mayor gestured to them.

  “For you, Mr. Brandt,” the mayor said.

  Corey Brandt thanked the mayor and went to the first car. The mayor directed Sir Edmund, Dr. Navel, and the twins toward the second car.

  “Hey, why don’t you take one of those?” Oliver called out, pointing at the motorcycle taxis. The drivers all smiled and revved their engines. “It’d be a much cooler entrance into town. I could film it for you!”

  Dr. Navel looked at his son in surprise. Oliver was showing excitement about something that wasn’t on television.

  Corey Brandt, however, did not look excited about the idea.

  “Why don’t you two come ride with me?” he suggested. “That’d be even more fun than riding some—” He didn’t even have a chance to finish his sentence before Celia was climbing into the black Mercedes.

  “But he rides a motorcycle in the opening credits,” Oliver said to himself, a little confused. He followed his sister.

  “There’s a TV in here,” Celia exclaimed. The mayor, Sir Edmund, and their father climbed into the second car and they pulled away from the dock as the seaplanes started their engines and took off again, leaving a long wake in the smooth waters of the Amazon.

  “So, you’re fans of my work?” Corey Brandt asked, pouring them all Diet Cokes from the minibar in the back of the car.

  “Yeah,” Oliver said as he sipped on the fizzy drink and tried to get the small television to work.

  “You too?” Corey asked Celia.

  “I … um …”

  “My sister liked you better in Sunset High than in Agent Zero, but we both like The Celebrity Adventurist,” Oliver said. Oliver couldn’t believe his sister was letting him do so much of the talking. She was usually the talker. It must have been the shock of sixth grade, or maybe the change in climate in South America.