We Dine With Cannibals

by C. Alexander London

  “I think we’re safe!” he called out.

  “Shhhhh!” Oliver snapped at him.

  The three of them crouched in silence on the riverbank for a while to make sure that the drums were gone.

  “Well,” Celia whispered. “Now what?”

  “I have an idea,” Corey answered with a smile. He pulled the phone out of his pocket and hit some buttons on it. His smile vanished. “My phone’s busted! That was a nice phone!”

  “So I guess we’re walking,” said Celia.

  “Yeah.” Corey Brandt ran his fingers through his hair. It was somehow perfect again. “Now it’s just Corey Brandt versus the wilderness! A real adventurist! At least the camera’s waterproof.”

  He dropped the phone back in his pocket and pulled the camera out. He pointed it at himself and hit record. He wrinkled his brow. He smoothed his hair. He pursed his lips. He unpursed them. He pursed them again. Celia was surprised at the amount of lip work that acting demanded. Satisfied with the degree of lip pursing he had achieved, Corey spoke.

  “Having barely survived the uncharted rapids, my crew and I were forced to make our way by land into hostile territory. Will we find the dreaded Cozinheiros—cannibals lurking in the forest? Will they find us first? What has become of our companions? I feel a great responsibility, greater than anything I’ve felt in all my sixteen years.” He gazed up into the trees, looking serious and thoughtful. He snapped the camera off.

  “Cool, huh? I’m gonna get some cutaway shots of the waterfall and the rapids while you guys rest.” He jumped around, filming everything and practicing his dramatic voice, which was deeper and louder than his normal voice.

  “I think Corey might be insane,” Oliver whispered to his sister.

  “It’s Hollywood,” she replied. “That’s how celebrities are.” In truth, Celia was worried. She couldn’t place it, but something seemed wrong about the teen star. She didn’t want to make Oliver nervous, though. “We’ll just have to look out for him,” she added.

  “Sure,” said Oliver. “But who’s going to look out for us?”

  Someone was indeed looking out for them—or rather looking out at them. There were a dozen pairs of eyes watching Oliver and Celia from the darkness of the forest, their skillful camouflage rendering them invisible to all but the most careful observer. Their drums were silent. We cannot yet be sure what they intend for our intrepid twins, but we must hope they do not plan to invite our heroes for dinner.

  22

  WE ADMIRE THE FURNITURE

  AS A SCIENTIST, Dr. Ogden Navel could not help but be curious about the nature of the poison that had been shot into him with a dart. As an explorer, he was deeply curious about the painted warriors who had broken into the hotel room and abducted him. But as Oliver and Celia’s father, he was terrified. He didn’t know what had become of his children, where he was, or why he had been kidnapped.

  His head ached, but otherwise he felt fine. He wiggled his fingers. He wiggled his toes. Everything seemed to be working. He also noticed, much to his surprise, that he was not tied up. Nor was he blindfolded. And he was sitting in what appeared to be a plaid armchair in a bland suburban living room.

  In his study of the ethnosphere—which is what an explorer like Dr. Navel would call all the wonderful things that people and cultures have dreamed up since the dawn of civilization, from the Songlines of Australia’s Yolngu people to televised celebrity impersonator competitions—Dr. Navel had seen many strange things. He had seen Tendai monks run for a thousand days without breaking a sweat; he had seen a child in Indonesia dance with a black mamba snake; he had seen a sixth-grade classroom. But he had never seen a tribe that kidnapped people and then left them sitting in a plaid armchair. And yet there he was.

  The room looked just like the living room he’d grown up in. There was a sofa and a side table. There was a low bookshelf and cabinet for a radio or a television, although it was empty. There was a potted plant. There were two bright windows, the sun slicing through them. The wallpaper was striped, but peeling. The carpeting was brown and moldy, and as his head cleared, Dr. Navel noticed that the room smelled terrible. He saw his glasses sitting on the side table next to him and he slid them on.

  As soon as he could see clearly, he noticed that the wallpaper was not striped. Vines were growing up the walls. The potted plant was not a decorative feature of the room, but rather a small tree that had broken through the floor and was growing inside the house.

  A gray howler monkey with a shock of black hair on its head perched on the windowsill, watching him carefully. When Dr. Navel stood, the monkey screeched and ran off. Dr. Navel walked out of the living room to look around. He was in a hallway. Discolored paint showed where pictures had once hung on the walls.

  “Hello?” he called. “Hola? Guten Tag?” He received no response.

  Dr. Navel had learned, through a life of travel and awkward dinner conversations, that it was always helpful to know how to say hello in a variety of languages. It was also helpful to know how to say, “Your mother-in-law looks lovely in that dress,” but he didn’t think that would be helpful at the moment. He might save it for when he met his captors.

  “Moino?” he tried, in the Apalai language. “Pitsupai?” he tried in a Xingu dialect. Again, he was met with silence.

  He wandered down the hallway to an empty study where the bookshelves had long ago collapsed and rotted, then to a decaying kitchen, where he saw a tree sprouting from a very old refrigerator. The house had clearly been abandoned for a long time.

  He found a bedroom at the back of the house. It contained only a rusty metal bed frame, an old steamer trunk, and curtains that had perhaps once been the color of ripe peaches but had been sun baked for so long they looked like the color of overcooked carrots. He opened the trunk. It was filled with Velma Sue’s snack cakes, still wrapped in shining plastic and gleaming in unnatural yellows and pinks. He shut the trunk and peered out the window.

  He was in the jungle; that much was clear. But this was unlike any jungle he had ever seen. There was a wide street with an overgrown sidewalk, and quaint houses were lined up on both sides of it. Some had collapsed roofs and some of their doors had fallen off their hinges. In the distance, poking over the treetops, he saw a rusty water tower. It was as if someone had taken a nice American suburb and dropped it into the jungle, leaving it to rot. Who would do such a thing?

  Bang! Grrr. Bang!

  A sudden noise startled him. The noise had come from inside the house, inside this very bedroom.

  Bang, bang, bang!

  The noise was coming from the closet.

  What sort of wild animal could that be? he wondered. A warthog? A panther?

  Dr. Navel felt bad for whatever animal was trapped in there. If he were a wild animal, he would be terrified to be stuck in a closet in a suburban housing development.

  He reached for the door handle and braced himself. Whatever came out might attack him out of fear, but Dr. Navel never let fear—a jungle creature’s or his own—get in the way of curiosity. He could never understand why his children always did.

  He pulled the door open and leaped to the side to let whatever was in there escape, but nothing ran out. He peered inside and saw what had been making all that noise.

  Sir Edmund was curled in a ball in the closet, with his hands and feet tied together and a gag tied in his mouth. He looked up at Dr. Navel in a desperate rage. Dr. Navel bent down and removed the gag.

  “Who put you in here?” Dr. Navel demanded. “Where are Oliver and Celia?”

  “How should I know? Our captors shot me with a poison dart right after they shot you.” Sir Edmund squirmed. “Will you untie me, Navel? I won’t lie here talking to you like a trussed pig.”

  “First you’ll answer my questions. I know you won’t help me once you’re free.”

  Sir Edmund grunted angrily, but didn’t disagree. “My nose itches,” he said.

  “Did you see anything before you were knocked out
?”

  “Our captors wore red and black paint on their bodies. I have heard of a tribe of cannibals that paint themselves like that and attack logging camps. It costs a fortune to replace the workers.”

  “Well, maybe logging companies shouldn’t be destroying their forest. You do know that it is a sacred land to the people who live in it.”

  “Are you really defending them, Navel? For all you know, they might have eaten your children.”

  “My children, I am sure, can defend themselves. They have survived worse than cannibals. They have survived you, after all.”

  “I never put your children in more danger than you yourself have, so don’t start with that. Exploration isn’t a game for children, especially children as dull as yours.”

  “I will not stand here and have you insult Oliver and Celia. They are brilliant in their own way.”

  “Brilliant! Ha! My lizard has more smarts than those two brats combined.”

  Dr. Navel started to close the closet door on him again.

  “Wait!” Sir Edmund called out. “We’ve both been betrayed. Powerful forces are trying to stop us. Ancient forces. They are manipulating your children, putting them in grave danger.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I am one of those forces,” he said. “But I am not the only one. If you untie me, I can explain myself.”

  “I’ll untie you after you explain yourself.”

  “Untie me now, and then I’ll explain myself.”

  “Explain yourself first.”

  “Untie me first!”

  “Explain!”

  “Untie me!”

  “You are … incorrigible!” Dr. Navel threw his hands in the air in frustration. Arguing with this scheming millionaire was like arguing with Oliver and Celia. Especially Celia. And like when he argued with Celia, he never really won. So he bent down to untie the little man. He had to know what Sir Edmund was talking about. He had to save his children from whatever terrible fate lay in store. It was his fault, as usual, that they were in danger.

  As he reached for the rope at Sir Edmund’s wrists, a voice spoke behind him.

  “Are you sure you want to do that?”

  He turned quickly to face his captor, who was standing in the doorway, silhouetted by the sunlight.

  “The children will be here shortly,” she said.

  “Oh,” said Dr. Navel. And he passed out where he stood.

  “I should have known,” sneered Sir Edmund as the closet door was slammed shut on him once more.

  23

  WE ALWAYS WEAR UNDERWEAR

  FOR THOSE OF YOU who have never gotten lost in the Amazon rain forest, you should know a few things.

  First, it is boring. One thick patch of green looks like the next, on and on for thousands of miles. It is very easy to become lost. It is even easier to become bored.

  Second, it is also dark. The darkness is not like night, but like an endless twilight, sticky and green and dim. Massive trees fight for sunlight up above, filling every bit of air and making a dense canopy of leaves over the forest floor. Vines and plants hang from tree to tree like buttresses in a medieval church, and very little light can make it through. On the ground, little appears to move.

  But for those who look closely, the entire forest is moving. Millions of bugs crawl on the ground and in the trees. Plants strangle each other in a battle for sunlight. Birds and small animals scurry from place to place to find food or some dark tangle of tree roots in which to hide from predators—pythons and jaguars and, deadliest of all, man.

  Of course, Oliver and Celia were not watching closely and saw none of this.

  They were tired and bored. The Amazon rain forest was dull, dull, dull.

  Corey Brandt was loving it. It was like he had never had an adventure before. He raced from tree to tree. He held his little digital camera in front of him and spoke dramatically into it.

  “I’m here in the Amazon at last, walking in the footsteps of the doomed explorer Percy Fawcett and the daring president Teddy Roosevelt. The distant cry of the monkeys shatters the great quiet of this emerald world. What is in store for us? Only nature knows for sure.”

  “Didn’t we see a movie about Percy Fawcett and his son?” Oliver whispered to his sister.

  “Yeah,” she said glumly. “They vanished without a trace. Probably got eaten.”

  Oliver groaned. Sixth grade looked much more appealing now.

  “We can give ourselves an advantage by masking our smells from predators,” Corey continued into the camera with more enthusiasm than the moment seemed to require. “Watch!”

  He set the camera down on some fallen leaves and dove down onto the damp ground, rolling around in the dirt.

  “What are you doing?” Celia cried out. The teen star stood. He was filthy.

  “I’m masking my scent like a hunter. Animals that track by smell won’t know I’m here.”

  “Oh,” said Celia, still not sure she understood why he would want to cover himself with mud. Sometimes the Celebrity Adventurist did things that made absolutely no sense.

  “Um, Corey?” Oliver said. “I know you’re the survival expert and all, but you … well … now you’re covered in fire ants.”

  Corey Brandt looked down and saw that he was indeed crawling with hundreds of agitated fire ants. They were running up his legs and his torso, crawling toward his neck. He looked at his camera on the ground, still pointing up at him, filming.

  “Eeep,” he squeaked before turning on his heels and running toward the river as fast as his legs would carry him. A trail of ants followed on the ground.

  “Don’t jump in the water! That’ll make them bite,” Oliver yelled as Corey ran.

  The twins gave chase. They caught up with the panicked TV star at the water’s edge. He was frozen and still swarming with ants. They hadn’t bitten him yet. He didn’t move.

  “What are you doing?” Oliver panted.

  “I can’t decide which is worse.” Corey stared at the brown water of the river. “The ants or the piranha. What do I do?”

  “You faced this before,” Oliver said. “Remember? In the first season of Agent Zero you were taken prisoner by the Assassins’ Guild and tied to a stake in the deserts of Kazakhstan. They smeared you with honey and sent the ants after you!”

  “Oh … right … I … that was a while ago. … I’ve done a lot of shows since then. Could you, uh, remind me what I did to escape?”

  “You took your clothes off,” Celia answered. Oliver looked sideways at her. “What? He did. I remember that episode.”

  “You have to flick the ants off,” Oliver said. “And, yeah, get out of your clothes and get away from them. Once you start flicking, they are going to get mad and bite, so you’ve got to move fast.”

  “I’m really glad you guys are fans.” Corey took a deep breath. “And I’m glad I wore clean underwear.”

  Oliver and Celia stepped back. They didn’t want the ants to turn on them. Fire ants could bite you a dozen times in a few seconds. “Ahh!” Corey screamed as he started flicking and tearing off his shirt and trousers. The ants started biting.

  “Ow!” he yelled. “Ow!”

  “Now run!” Oliver called.

  Stripped down to his boxer shorts, Corey Brandt ran screaming into the jungle.

  Oliver and Celia looked at each other, sighed, and gave chase.

  “Slow down!” Oliver called out. “You don’t need to run that far!” But Corey Brandt wasn’t stopping for anything. One bite from a fire ant was enough for him for a lifetime.

  They caught up to him back where he’d left his camera. He was standing in his boxer shorts, filthy, watching the playback on the tiny screen.

  “With the right editing this could be pretty sweet,” he said as the twins were catching their breath. Oliver set their backpack down and rested his head between his knees. He was not a fan of all this running.

  “Sorry I lost my cool there,” Corey said. “You guys were great.
I’m really glad you pay such close attention to my shows. I’d be in real trouble out here without you.”

  “Uh … yeah. Corey …,” Celia said, catching her breath.

  “Yeah?” He looked up at her.

  “You probably … don’t want … to stand … on the same anthill … again.”

  Corey looked down and saw that he’d gone right back to the spot he’d rolled in before and once again, fire ants were racing up his legs.

  “Ahh!” he yelled and bolted back toward the river, holding the camera this time. He didn’t stop at the water’s edge when he got there. He just jumped in.

  And so Celia and Oliver chased after the nearly naked celebrity through the jungle once more, leaping over fallen logs and tangled roots and branches that were bent and broken in strange patterns. They had never done so much sprinting in their lives.

  This day, like so many of their days, was not going at all as expected, not for Oliver and Celia Navel, and not for the men watching them from the bushes, holding spears and blowguns at the ready.

  24

  WE ARE NOT MONKEYING AROUND

  WHEN HE CLIMBED out of the pool at the base of the waterfall, Corey Brandt had a few angry welts on his skin where the ants had bitten him, and his perfect hair was wet, tangled, and dirty. The humid rain forest made drying his clothes impossible, so he was forced to put his shirt and pants back on wet, but at least there were no more ants crawling in them. Overall, it could have been a lot worse.

  “I dove into a pool of piranhas!” Corey Brandt said. He was smiling. “This is so awesome!”

  Oliver and Celia looked at him like he was crazy. If they were bitten by fire ants and jumped into a pool of piranhas and forced to wear soaking-wet clothes, they wouldn’t find anything about it awesome. Hollywood must do weird things to a person’s mind, thought Oliver.

  “Exploring is so … real, you know? Well, you two know.” He picked his camera off the ground and handed it to Celia. “Can you film for a second, Celia? I want to get some footage of my run-in with the fire ants.”