Uncontacted, page 5
But although he could visualize that process, the presence of a single monkey and a few leaves on his seat were a far cry from rendering his craft inoperable. Antonio moved to the flight radio, basically a handheld air band transmitter zip-tied to the dash, and broadcast a greeting to his team’s communications tent.
He was both surprised and pleased to hear Richards’ voice answer.
“Good to hear from you, mate. Was getting a bit worried. What’s your status?”
Antonio eyed the natives, who had drawn their bows in response to the radio voice belonging to an unseen human, no doubt a spirit of some sort to their minds. His only consolation was that he could communicate with Richards without any fear of the natives understanding what was being said.
“Richards, I’ve made quite the discovery here. I’ve come into contact with a tribe that is extremely primitive.”
“Well aren’t they all?” He guffawed over the speaker and the natives wore perplexed expressions as they slowly circled around the front of the plane, weapons still drawn.
“Not like this. Richards, I think this tribe has never before been contacted. By anyone.”
“What? Come on, man. What makes you think that?”
“The language, for one thing, the fact that they have exactly zero modern items in their possession, for another, and their reaction to seeing me and my belongings for a third.”
“What about the actual reason for the visit—anything along the lines of what the president was looking for?”
“Negative. It all seems like normal tribal life, not that I’m able to communicate with them as well as the other tribes we’ve visited. But the real excitement here is the tribe itself.”
“Antonio, if what you’re saying turns out to be true--”
“It’s huge! I know! Think of the papers, enough to last the rest of our careers…”
“We’ll need outside corroboration.”
“Way ahead of you.” Antonio detailed his call with Stel Foster.
“That jackass, huh?”
“He knows what he’s doing though, Richards, more than we do, you have to admit.”
“I know. Well, maybe we’ll get lucky and he’ll turn it down. You haven’t heard back from him yet, right?”
“Right. We’ll see. I know he’s not the only anthropologist on the planet, but he’s my first choice. This is too potentially monumental to screw up.”
“So it’s almost dark. I take it you’ll be staying with your new friends tonight?”
Antonio looked up again at the warriors, all three of which were running their fingers over the paint that comprised the plane’s serial number on the tail, as if mystified that it didn’t smudge. “That’s the plan.”
“I know I don’t have to tell you this, old friend, but be careful, okay?”
“Of course. How are things on your end? You guys find any more tribes?”
“One more. We made contact with the Matsés, but they all seem fine, too. We spoke with them in their own dialect and the last death they had was about a year ago, a woman who drowned in the river after a hard rain while doing laundry.”
“All right, so let’s move on from this, then. Go ahead and contact the president and let him know that we’ve made contact with a number of tribes—including one at the coordinates I radioed earlier.”
“Better give them to me again, just to be sure.”
Antonio leaned over and squinted at the radio display to read the numbers there from the integrated GPS. He recited them to Richards.
“Good stuff. So listen, Antonio—I’ll carry on our regular research here as planned until you get back, but if you need us to, we could make the trek.”
“Copy that. I’ll radio tomorrow, breakfast time.”
Antonio turned off the radio, fully realizing that the very last thing he needed was to have some piece of electronics left on overnight, drain out the plane’s battery and be unable to start the engine in the morning. After double-checking that everything was off, he signaled to his warrior escorts that he was ready to return to camp. He wasn’t sure exactly what was going to happen when it came to time actually leave, if they would try to stop him, but for now, he felt like he was doing the right thing.
As they walked along the narrow game trail that would take them back to the village, he thought about the things he should try to observe and take mental notes of, things that would help formulate a more formal research plan, especially if Foster came on board. Then a vine caught him off guard as he was wondering how long it was take his rival to get back to him. These kinds of thoughts kept him mentally occupied until they reached camp as dusk fell.
A large fire burned in the center of the village now, as well as a few torches around the perimeter. Antonio would have thought the flames would have given their presence away by now, but looking up and seeing the heavy foliage cover, as well as the mountain wall blocking all view from one side, he understood how they had remained hidden. Not only that, he mused, looking around the settlement, he doubted they had lived here forever. These huts weren’t that difficult to build, they could probably move around when the need arose. That was something else he wanted to ask them about that was beyond his ability to communicate, so he filed it away for later.
Looking around the village, he glanced over at the longer huts, sort of like the longhouses the known tribes built, but a little different in style, more open Antonio noticed. Scanning along the length of one of the ones he hadn’t yet been inside, he saw the same older man he’d seen earlier, peeking out at him. He wondered what his role was in the camp. The big buildings—did they connote the importance of those who occupied them, or were they merely community structures to accommodate more people? Deciding he needed to find out, Antonio decided to first create a distraction to allow himself a little more privacy.
He fished around in his pockets for a gift the tribe would find interesting that he hadn’t yet used. He came up with a small pack of crayons, which had always served him well with the known tribes he’d visited. When the kids and a few adults alike were drawing on each other with them, Antonio walked casually toward the long hut. The tribe was becoming a little more used to him, and he was able to reach the structure without being followed. At least so far. He had no idea how long that would last, but he would make a go of it while he could.
He reached the base of the structure and looked up to see the old man standing in the window again. This time, he waved to Antonio before quickly shrinking out of sight. Antonio couldn’t believe it. The gesture was unmistakable—come here! Antonio looked around to see what the rest of the tribe was doing, but they were still preoccupied with the crayons and each other. None of them were even looking his way.
Antonio moved to the nearest entrance to the long hut, a series of simple log steps that led up to the wooden plank floor. He could smell the aroma of the same incense-like fragrance he had smelled in the other hut in here, too, although he couldn’t see the source. Besides the old man and Antonio, four other tribe members occupied this room, all of them sitting on the floor and seeming to chant, although they looked up at Antonio’s arrival. Looking both left and right down the long hut, other tribal people could be seen in the rooms further down, some sitting, some standing.
The tribal man spoke to Antonio in his language, a rapid fire, chant-like dialect that Antonio still could not comprehend any better than he had when he’d arrived. Again, to show he was trying to communicate, Antonio spoke a few of the words he knew from other tribal dialects, and again, this man couldn’t understand him. Only, his reaction was different. The others returned his attempts at conversing in a tribal language with blank stares. But this man, he shook his head. No. Antonio thought back to his previous interactions and tried to recall any of the others doing that. He could not.
And then the tribal man was handing him a piece of paper, a wrinkled, dirty, folded piece of paper. Puzzled, Antonio took it and unfolded it. It consisted of one line written, amazingly enough, in English:
THEY ARE GOING TO KILL YOU.
Chapter 8
Antonio’s mouth dropped open in utter shock and surprise upon reading the note. He looked up at the man who had given it to him, whose eyes now burned into his own, conveying nothing but seriousness. Antonio pointed to the note and asked, in English, “Do you speak English?” Something about his eyes intrigued Antonio. He wore a facial mask of clay or mud, and his hair was caked with some kind of pigmented dirt, making it appear blue rather than the jet black the rest of the natives shared. His body, too, was covered in an earthen mask.
The man suddenly turned and walked away, deeper into the long hut. Antonio glanced briefly around, and seeing no one paying much attention to him, followed.
“Wait! Please?” He called after him in English. The man continued striding away, so Antonio pursued him, increasing his own pace. “Let me talk to you.”
They walked through the long hut, the old man leading the way. Antonio recognized a few of the tribe members in the next room he passed though, and though they looked up at him, they quickly went back to what they were doing with their earthenware pots without raising too much interest. Antonio caught up to the man who had given him the note at the end of the last room, which was unoccupied. An open doorway led back out to the village common area, but no one was visible immediately outside the long hut.
The old man stopped and stared at Antonio, who held up the note and snapped it with a finger, before throwing up his hands in a gesture he hoped would be interpreted as a question, as in, Who wrote this?
“Me? Is this for me?” Antonio tried English, not expecting an answer, but hoping his tone conveyed that he sought one.
“We have about two minutes to talk before the others will need this hut to prepare dinner.” The man coughed, a wet, productive hacking that he made no effort to hide.
Antonio’s jaw dropped open as he looked up from the paper. He’d examined it more closely, front and back, looking for anything he might have missed. But the sound of spoken English caused him to look around. Was there someone else here? He didn’t see anyone. Perhaps a radio or some type of loudspeaker somewhere, a tv?
“Antonio, It’s starting. I’ve been expecting you.”
Antonio looked back to the man just in time to see his lips stop moving at the end of the sentence. There could be no doubt.
“You speak English?”
“And Portuguese. You used to speak Portuguese too, you know, when you were a baby. I tried to get you to keep it up after we moved to the States, but your mother—“
Antonio’s brain seemed to melt into itself, to dissolve into what surely must be some kind of hallucinatory dream. Perhaps he’d had some tainted water, or they had slipped him some medicinal herbs without his knowing? Because this was impossible. There was only one person from whom these words made any sense, and that was his…
He couldn’t even get himself to think it without almost doubling over, sort of half spinning around, making movement of any kind simply to distract his brain. But there was no way around it. He kept coming back to the same conclusion. And then the tribal man spoke again.
“It’s me, Antonio. I always knew you would come.”
Antonio studied the face before him, the mud-covered cheeks, the dark blue-green tribal tattoo lines across the eyes and running down the cheekbones, at the matted hair. And then he focused on the teeth, on the upper left incisor, which had a chip out of it. He flashed on his father teaching him to play baseball, and one day, his confidence too high, Antonio had swung the bat mightily but lost his grip, sending the wooden shaft spinning into his father’s mouth, chipping the tooth. He’d never had it fixed, claiming it was no big deal, he had better things to spend his time and money on than going to the dentist, and finally, with his trademark sense of humor, that it would serve as a reminder to duck faster next time.
His father.
Antonio held onto the door frame as his knees started to buckle. “Dad?”
“Antonio, it’s me.” He pulled his son close and embraced him for a long moment before pushing him away.
“Dad, what….I thought you--”
“Died in the ultralight crash?”
“Yes, of course!” Antonio flashed on the day, twenty-two years ago, when he got the call that his father had been missing for twenty-four hours and was presumed dead in a Brazilian Amazon field accident. An ultralight plane crash, they’d said. Not survivable, although his body was never found. The frantic search in the days that followed to look for his father, a search that ended in vain.
“But what happened to you? How are you still alive? What have you been doing all this time?”
His father leaned in close, his breath now apparent as a raspy wheeze. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, son, but it wasn’t an accident.”
Antonio was speechless, with one hand on his father’s shoulder and the other on a bamboo pole on the hut’s doorway, beyond which a child ran by but didn’t linger.
“What do you mean it wasn’t an accident, Dad? The plane…I saw it myself, it was so mangled, high in the trees, how could anyone have survived that?”
“I parachuted out right before it hit the trees.”
Antonio’s mind lit on the details of his father’s disappearance, fresh across the years because he’d reviewed the official missing person’s case file so many times. The victim was reported to have been wearing a small backpack as he boarded the ultralight aircraft…Antonio had spent not an insignificant amount of time over the decades pondering that backpack, because there was no extra room in an ultralight—especially the ones in his father’s day—for any extra gear, even a backpack. To wear it would mean you couldn’t lean back properly in the pilot’s seat. So the fact that he brought one must mean that whatever it contained was most important indeed. Scientific gear, perhaps? He didn’t see how accessing it while aloft would be practical or feasible. But now the answer became clear:
A parachute.
That explained it. That would be worth taking along, if one knew they were going to be in a crash, but of course, that meant…
“So you meant to crash the ultralight all along? Why? For Christ’s sake, Dad, why?”
Antonio was pressed up against his father, now seeing right through the tribal garb to the man himself. The old man coughed again and wiped away phlegm with the back of his hand. Antonio caught sight of bloody globules in the spittle.
“Antonio, all of my research—up to that point in my career, and up to now—was leading me to this place. I knew it was the only way I’d be able to find the truth. By being here. I mean really being here, living here amongst the people…” He paused while he looked himself up and down…”by ultimately becoming one of these people…”
“What truth, Dad? What truth? Because I sure as hell never got any truth. Not until now, anyway. And this is just so…so random, such an accident. What if I had never found you by accident like this?”
The old man’s eyes met his in a powerful gaze. “It’s not an accident, son.”
Antonio threw up his hands. “What are you talking about? Do you even know why I’m here? If it wasn’t’ for—“
“Does it have to do with February 29?”
Antonio broke himself off in mid-sentence. A tiger beetle scuttled down the door frame and he watched its progress. How could his father have known about that date?
“So you have a radio here somewhere? You heard the news?”
His father shook his head. “There are no electronics of any kind at this village. They would not be accepted. And if I were to bring them, by extension, I would not be accepted.”
“Then how did you hear about it?”
His father leaned in even closer after a quick sideways glance, presumably to make sure none of the tribe was observing them. “Every single member of this tribe was born on February 29. They always have been, since time immemorial.” He saw the look of incredulity forming on Antonio’s face and headed it off. “They keep birth records. One of the few indigenous tribes that does. Why do you think that is?”
Antonio said he didn’t know.
“Because they know it’s important somehow. Like they were decreed to do it, long ago. And I understand you’re skeptical, how could you not be? But they have birth records.”
“They have written birth records?”
“Yes, for every single member of this tribe. You can ask Guató, later, to show you. Say the words Tupi-Tenetehara-Cayua and he will know exactly what you mean. There’s a records monument underneath one of the central huts, one you entered today already, and in there are stacks of chiseled tablets with the names and birthdates, all February 29.”
Antonio thought about this for a moment. It was not unheard of for primitive tribes to keep birth records, although it was uncommon. “Okay, the birth records I can accept. But how is it possible that all of them were born on the same day? That’s simply impossible, statistically. The records must be some kind of hoax, Dad. Kind of like your ultralight accident, right?”
His father stared at him for a long spell, maintaining eye contact. “What’s your birthday, Antonio? And mine?”
All of a sudden Antonio’s guts tied up in knots. Of course Antonio knew his own birthday. It was February 28. That’s what he’d known it as his whole life, that’s what was on his driver license, his passport, and every other official document he possessed, including his birth certificate.
Except that it wasn’t his real birthday.
He recalled the first conversation he’d had about it with his mother and father, when he was about eight years old. About how he had been born on an unusual birthday, one that only came around every fours years, so instead of a lifetime of inconveniences, of having to celebrate birthdays either a day early or a day late, or being unable to select his birthdate on some computer forms, things like that, his parents took their doctor’s suggestion of selecting February 28 on his birth certificate as his date of birth on record. The rest of his life he’d known his own birthday as February 28, 1972, except that it wasn’t.
