THE WALKING TREES

(Told in two installments; maybe three, if I live through it…)

We had an energetic, even jittery full moon that night; I remember because it kept draping itself in rainclouds and disappearing behind their cover.

It reminded me of the way a cocaine addict disappears briefly into the bathroom at a party, then returns with a bright face, chemically aglow. You’ve seen that.

Crusoe and I had been swapping terrible jokes in his ramshackle bachelor shed and drinking ‘Natural Ice’, one of the shitty beers he likes because of it’s alcohol content and wonderfully affordable price – something like 36 cans for 5 bucks. The GOOD stuff.

Crusoe is my Hawaiian friend, a jack of all trades and master of his beer coozy. He is ostensibly a plumber, but can build, paint, design, lay block, and mechanic with skill.

He can also drink me under the koa-wood table.

Crusoe is a confirmed alcoholic. I, on the other hand, can catch a buzz just smelling cough syrup. (Vicks Formula 44…thanks, mom!)

But tonight, I had taken the plunge and joined him in his vice; soon there were only 24 beers left, then 20, and we got very loud, then very quiet.

It had been raining shards of glass on the tin roof above, or at least mimicked well the brittle sound of it; and since I had been trying to match Crusoe’s boozy pace, I felt the bravery of numbness rise up in my soul.

‘You’re DRUNK, you stinking Hawaiian!’

‘So are YOU, you dumbass haole!’

And we clanked cans together in a toast celebrating the drinking cultures of our disparate races. I saw an opening.

‘Tell me about the Walking Trees’, I demanded, and was startled to see Crusoe drop his nearly full can and turn as white as any haole.

He uttered an unreproducible epithet.

‘I can not say nothing about those sommabishes!’ he choked out in a harsh, unsteady whisper. ‘What if they hear? If I talk story ’bout da kine, they will kill me!’ and he retrieved the dropped beer, taking only seconds to make it disappear.

Three gulps! That’s championship skill, especially for beer that burns going down.

‘Wha..KILL you? What bullshit…’ I snorted as I likewise tried to guzzle my own horrid ration of Natty Ice, which by the fourth can tasted pretty…damn…swell!

Crusoe began cussing a blue streak in Hawaiian, and when he’d exhausted all those combinations began the process in pigeon English.

‘GahDAMBIT! Sommabish! Gahdambit sommabish!’

He likes all-purpose English cuss words especially; also another that I am too polite to assault your tender eyes with, but it rhymes with a popular brand of jelly, which with a name like that has GOT to be good…

I begged, cajoled and pleaded, as those three verbs are often seen in each other’s company; but he refused to talk anymore about local lore or Walking Trees, and instead walked to the door and pissed steadily into the rain.

I’d asked several other native Hawaiians about this same legend, and although the reactions weren’t nearly as vehement, they all became dark in the face with unspoken dread before hurrying off to gather fruit and weave hula skirts, or something.

I thought they maybe didn’t want to waste their aloha answering dumb questions from a clueless haole, but Crusoe had never behaved that way drunk or sober, except on this topic alone.

These Hawaiians were keeping a silence born of genuine fear!

Fear? Ha! Haoles know no fear, especially after chugging Natty Ice with abandon.

‘Woooo! WOOOOOO! I’m a Walking Haole Tree!’ I teased, stiff-legging my way around him like a zombie; and the next thing I knew I was out in the rain, my Frogg Togg poncho thrown after me with a flutter.

The rustic door slammed and a wooden latch drawn; I had been 86’d!

‘How about one for the road?’ I yelled at the screenless window, and a silver and blue can sailed through, missing his cat by the merest whisker but hitting me squarely in the groin.

‘SommaBISH!’ I hollered, dropping to my kneecaps in that most exquisite of all male pain onto the lava bubble in his garden.

I was getting the hang of cussing like a Hawaiian, even if they wouldn’t talk much to me. ‘GahDAMbit that hurts…’

I groggily gathered the few remaining grains of my haole wits, as well as the dented can of beer, and stumbled in the direction of Hoop House by the capricious light of a cocaine moon.

It was this way, right? Or maybe through those guavas. Or was it through the banana patch? The damn jungle all looked the same, courtesy of my unaccustomed boozing. Shit!

Shit shit shit shit shit!

Maybe if I just sit here until the beer finishes its route…and I plunked myself sloppily on a damp bed of moss.

It was soft, mooshy, and I remember thinking just before the moonlight switched itself off: I should cover my pallet bed in this lovely stuff…maybe have a shirt made of it too…and I passed out blind.

I was awakened by the kind of sound only the jungle makes when it talks, that swirling, grating, mysterious voice both undefinable and unlocatable, more moan than meaning; it was like someone trying to sing an aria with a throatful of wood.

At least that was my half-drunken impression…

I opened my eyes with some effort, and discovered that the world was upside down. I was hanging by my feet, a snakelike tendril of thick greenery lifting me high and tight some twenty feet into the air.

I screamed.

Repeatedly.

For gathered around me in tribe-like assembly were at least a hundred of the very trees that had caused my friend such incredible distress.

Yes, they had faces, eyeless; they had mouths too, but most definitely were not toothless.

If you’ve ever been fanged by the barbs on a bougenvilia, you know da kine…and the teeth glistened a blood red, five inches long.

The foliage atop them resembled the spiky hairdo of a particularly vicious variety of punk rocker, the kind who only jumps into mosh pits to cause pain; and all around the bottom of their trunks waved little animated root legs, writhing like a mass of large, hideous and greasy worms upon which the tree could locomote.

And though still sideways from the wooziness of mass-produced swill, I was sober enough to know I should be very, very frightened…and I was.

And still am.

For indeed, these were THE trees…the panic-inducing Walking Trees no Hawaiian could speak of…and I was held high in the moonlight, powerless in their grasp.

(The pic is one of the breed during the day…oh sure, they LOOK harmless enough, BUT…)

(Continued soon! Hopefully before they kill me!)

Handy Links:
The Walking Trees – Part 2 
The Walking Trees – Part 3
The Walking Trees – All 3 Parts Combined