Little Tree

An ogreish middle-aged truck driver picks up Forrest and Little Tree on the side of the road. He is friendly enough at first, seems so despite looking kinda scary, especially around the mouth, a thing you don’t want to have to call a maw, with a too-big lower jaw that sort of protrudes in different directions. That is the most ogreish part of him, his mouth area, but his head is huge and he is pretty big all over, big shoulders, cauldron-size potbelly, big hands he shakes the boys’ little hands with too hard. He says his name is Asa Harts, then smiles and waits for them to hear the playing card his first and last name makes. They nod vaguely, look around the cab. 

There’s a lot of garbage in there. Also packages of different kinds of road snacks stacked as high as the roof. They drive in silence for a long stretch. Asa Harts eats a whole candy bar a little too fast. He coughs but keeps going, then slams a handful of cashews and stuffs that down with a Slim Jim like he is loading a musket, then opens a bag of off-brand Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, putting his nose at the top of the bag and smelling in hard and stuffing his mouth full of those, then finally washing it all down with something in a Big Gulp cup. He keeps his eyes dutifully on the road the whole time. It seems for a moment like he is getting bigger right before their eyes. Forrest watches him eat with fascination, or is it envy? Little Tree watches telephone wires dip and rise and dip again.

Comes time to sleep. Asa Harts pulls over. Tells them to sleep in the berth. They don’t know what sleeping in the berth means. Sounds bad. Asa Harts points to the back with his chin, says go on, says he’ll sleep up front. They go back and sit on the bed, look around at magazine pages the guy has taped to the walls. They’re all children from cereal ads happily looking up at the camera just after a bite. 

Later Asa Harts comes in smelling hard. He puts hands on Little Tree. He tries to hold him down. Forrest slips up to the front while Little Tree wriggles and squirms. Little Tree’s mom was a wrestler. She taught Little Tree how to get out of all kinds of holds and positions. Little Tree has that ropy strength. He ends up wrapped around the guy’s neck like a noose. He knocks him out with a sleeper hold. They tie him up with some thin white shoelaces Forrest finds in the glove box along with a big old hunting knife—the handle is bone. Asa Harts wakes up with this sick grin on his face. Little Tree says to Forrest they should go.

Forrest stabs Asa Harts in the stomach until blood starts coming out of his mouth, until that big jaw of his sits plopped there at the top of his chest. Everything feels easy. Sharp knife. Fast blood. Dripping in little rivulets at the creases in his jeans. Little Tree doesn’t wanna look at any of it, casts his eyes and head down like someone just started a prayer. Forrest goes into Asa Harts one more time, deep as he can, but it catches at the guard of the knife handle. He pushes harder—like what he wants is to disappear the knife. Little Tree doesn’t see the way Forrest smiles when the knife is gone. He keeps his eyes down and then closes them tight at the sound of the knife going all the way in with a sloop.

Forrest doesn’t notice the density wadded up in the center of him; a load-bearing thing right there in his pit that has just dropped down and out of him. Another thing comes flooding in. A big mean sawblading thing is coming up and out, but through him, coming out from the middle of him, into him, becoming him, something borne from the berth and all that has happened leading up to it. It isn’t anger. It is hunger.

Little Tree looks up finally and sees these tiny dots on Forrest’s face he hasn’t seen before. Like hair is coming in where there hadn’t even been hair before. Little Tree feels the tips of his fingers going numb, looks at them to see why, then sees some of the skin seems to be dissolving, beginning to show a rawer underlayer. His toes tingle too. And then the way Forrest looks at Little Tree—he tries to run as soon as he sees it. The shoelaces are red when Forrest ties Little Tree up at knifepoint. Little Tree finds inside Forrest’s face, where he hasn’t seen it before, another, new face, or being, peeking through as if behind the eyes there could be another pair of eyes, overseeing everything.

To Little Tree it seemed like Forrest came with the house the way they got it. They rented it fully furnished, so he wasn’t the only thing that came with it. Old furniture and old dresser drawers and old mirrors—even a grandfather clock that looked older than time, was the joke Little Tree’s dad made when they first saw it. The clock was broken. Hands didn’t move at all. Little Tree thought there being no time was the only thing older than time. Still right twice a day, was the joke his mom made. 

Picture a dark room lit up blue from an old TV and a white boy lit up blue sitting five feet from it, his eyes fixed on it, not in a daze or numbed-out or vegetative but aglow with wonder. See him believing the worlds inside the box to be true, truer than the life he knew before, in order that he might forget the life he knew before he ended up in that house with Little Tree’s family in front of that TV. 

The house was old. And big. Bald fat guy with a big beard who rented it to them said a river once ran right through the middle of it. Said there were leaks. Basement floods. They didn’t know where the water was coming from. Only running water came in through the yard. All the water they drank came in plastic bottles. They showered outside with a thing hooked up to the hose. 

Before the fire, Little Tree had asked his mom about the blue kid in the room with the TV always on but never got good answers. I know it’s an old TV, she’d said, like that was an answer. 

Before the fire, Little Tree would go in and watch with Forrest sometimes. Couldn’t break Forrest’s concentration, or make conversation, but there was something between them, watching together, something already happening between them, something related to what watching the same thing, following the same story, could do to you: listening and seeing the same thing at the same time as the story brought you closer and closer into it, let you see the bigger picture the closer you got.

Little Tree was in the upstairs closet where his parents put him to keep him hidden when it happened. 

Said: Don’t you dare open those doors unless it’s us, stay dead still unless we open them.

Said: Die before you cough.

Little Tree’s family had moved out to the country from the city. They were hiding out. They were Indians. Activists who called themselves outlaws, but they were Indians. Former members of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club, but ecoterrorists in the language of the government men they were hiding out from. 

They’d killed government men when blowing to pieces a section of pipeline carrying crude oil over tribal lands, waters, and sacred sites. 

When you kill one of their people, the government men come quick and take no prisoners.

Little Tree was lying down under a little trapdoor inside the closet under some blankets. He understood after that his parents were trapped in their bedroom. They’d rushed him into the closet. This was not unexpected. They were hiding out. 

Little Tree thought he heard his dad’s body go down first, then his mom’s. There was screaming and then banging and then more banging and no other sounds at all. The way the rhythm of the banging slowed, he knew what it meant. 

Little Tree thought he was crying, but knew better from his training, the things his parents taught him to do in such situations. Go to the place behind everything, there is a place beneath a tree where all roots began, breathe in there, then breathe out somewhere else, on the other side of the world, slow, like a green river making its way to the ocean. The fire hadn’t even started yet and Little Tree already knew he’d lost them to it. 

Little Tree came out of the closet when he smelled smoke and things felt too hot. He went downstairs, came crashing through the fiery door yelling: C’mon, let’s go! 

Forrest and Little Tree made it out of the burning house. Looked back and saw it had flooded once again. Burnt down on top and in its middle parts but water came flowing out from the basement in every direction and they ran. 

The hair on Forrest’s face has now grown out more to where it is clearly hair. But when Little Tree looks closer, he sees what he thinks are little black worms coming out of him. Forrest backs up like he doesn’t want Little Tree looking too close. The skin on Little Tree’s fingertips that had gone to that raw underlayer went like that all the way up his arms to his shoulders now. He can feel it spreading still. Forrest is looking at Little Tree with his head leaned back, one of his eyes slightly squinting—not a gesture Little Tree had seen him make before now. Forrest says: You must think you saved me from that fire? Little Tree says: I don’t think nothing. Forrest: It’s funny if you think I would have died in there if you hadn’t come. Little Tree says: Funny you think that’s funny. Forrest says: No. No, that’s not what’s funny. Little Tree says: Why you got me tied up? Forrest says: Won’t be too long. And here his voice changes register, is too low for it to be coming from Forrest anymore, but it’s Forrest saying it. He says: Can’t you feel it? And here Little Tree feels there is no more skin on his body, and what was once tingling is now a burning and an itching and he can’t move. 

Time went weird for Forrest and Little Tree after the house burned down. Passed fast or passing stopped being the functional metaphor for what time was doing; felt more like wind through tall trees, parts shook by fast and other parts swayed slow. 

They didn’t know until much later how long they’d left the world of men and roads. It was wilderness. And something wild was happening inside them. But two different kinds of wildness. They were both orphans now. But two very different kinds of orphans.

They walked a lot during the day, soon as the sun came up, then slept by sundown. Stole food wherever there were big stores without the resources or speed to catch them. 

There was this stretch of time after they’d been gone from the burning house, when the sadness had, if not been lifted, then kicked up like all that dust they kicked up while they walked to make fun of the daily slog through rural towns and across two-way-highway plains; this small stretch when they began to play a game while they walked, a way to pass the time at first, to bring a sense of play and fun, but also to scare each other, to make a game of what might otherwise have become reason enough to give up, since nothing much came along to give them hope outside of the food they were able to run away with, and food’s not hope anymore once it’s eaten.

The game began with a countdown and ended with the word return, which they’d both have to say at the same time. At the end of each countdown, anything that wanted to come should come then, because they were inviting it. Was it a rite or a ritual or a game or nonsense? Didn’t matter. They liked playing. Watching closely for what happened when the countdown came to an end. At first it was the smallest things. Did that ant just look at us? Does it feel different, something to do with the light, a strange fog coming in, do you smell that? As they played more the game sort of escalated. They thought they saw a strange-looking figure they were sure was an old woman far off behind some trees, pointing at them. Thought they saw a pterodactyl-like bird way too big to be a bird. Swore they saw a car with no driver. And each tried to trick the other to make the game feel more real. Each claimed to have seen something scary but couldn’t prove to the other that they had. Forrest said he saw children marching through the woods but also descending into them. 

One day while they were playing the game, Little Tree asked Forrest if he was a ghost. Asked Forrest what his life was like before he lived with them in that room with the TV. Forrest said he didn’t remember that much. Little Tree said tell me anything. Forrest said he didn’t want to remember anything. Little Tree said he didn’t believe him. They got into a fight about it. It got physical. Little Tree ended up punching Forrest on the side of the head, got a little bit of his ear. They didn’t play the game again after that. But they hadn’t ended the game either. Had never said the word return together at the same time to return.

Forrest can’t and isn’t pretending to hide the changes happening to him. He asks Little Tree what he wants to know. His voice isn’t low like it’d been, but it’s different. Little Tree says: Why’s my skin all going, like, wait, but what’s going on? Forrest keeps his distance, but Little Tree can see that it’s somehow both hair and worms coming out of his skin. Forrest says: There’s these beings, they’re everywhere, been around since forever, they’re all naked men, that’s how they appear at first, I saw them a long time ago, came sniffing around my life when they saw what was coming. Little Tree says: What are you talking about? Forrest says: I don’t know how it all works. And then: They want bodies. Little Tree just repeats bodies back to him. Forrest says: You know how the ground, the earth, you know how we feed the earth when we die, we feed it our bodies? Little Tree says: I need to know what’s going on with you and the hair and the…worms first, my skin. Forrest says: This all has to do with you being someone they could use. And if I did what I had to do, what would be done to me wouldn’t be worse than what would be done to you. Little Tree says: This have something to do with the fact of you being a for-real ghost? Forrest says: I’m not a ghost, but they used a lot of what’s been made gone in me to get us to where we’re at now. Little Tree says: And where is that? Forrest says: We’re almost there. You should sleep. 

The mountain looked big for how small it was. They went up there just to get to the top. Found a gathering of boulders. Threw rocks at the boulders to see if an animal would come out. When nothing came out, they went beneath the boulders to see if there was a safe place to sleep and found an abandoned den. They knew it was a den because of the smell. Smelled like old garbage and wet dog and shit. They cleared the den then built a wall out of rocks at the front of it to stay safe at night, dismantled it in the morning. Did the same thing again the next night.

It was the second night they heard the howls. Came from more than one animal. Little Tree said it wasn’t animals. Forrest said probably coyotes. Little Tree said too low. 

Forrest dreamed he was a creature in the woods. His thinking was different in the dream. He didn’t think of himself as a single person or animal or being. Every action and feeling was related to the group of creatures he belonged to, who were vaguely somewhere nearby. He became a plurality of which he couldn’t see any other part, but he couldn’t see himself either. They were walking. They were finding. They were eating. They slept. And then when they dreamed, it was the dream that he was waking up. 

Little Tree dreamed of big hairy creatures who said they were going to protect him. That they were earth guardians. And that there were beings who came from what they called the underland, and that the beings looked like them, but were not them. The big hairy creatures told Little Tree they had been called different names throughout time all over the world, and that the underland beings would take their form, pretend to be them in order to take the lives of people, take their bodies, consume them, eat them, and become them, in order to walk the earth again. Told Little Tree that he had been chosen by them. Because when his parents died, he became rootless. And they fed on the rootless. Resented humans for roaming the earth free of roots. Before they hunted the recently orphaned. They told Little Tree the time of humans is coming to an end. 

Little Tree didn’t remember the dream. Woke up to Forrest standing over him with a big rock. Asked him what he was doing. Forrest said he was almost done taking down the wall. They should go. 

After they came down from the mountain the air smelled like it was spring and rain fell here and there throughout the day. Off the highway in some woods they found an abandoned school bus and slept there that night. The next morning they went out to the highway and flagged down the truck driver and got into his truck. 

Little Tree wakes up to a hairy creature eating the body of the truck driver. He understands it to be Forrest, and from the low grunting sound the creature is making understands not to disturb the eating. Little Tree can’t feel his body. He doesn’t itch or feel burning or raw anymore, but he knows a layer of his skin has been completely removed. He pulls hard at the laces he’s tied up with. Pulls as hard as he can as quiet as he can. The laces break, but it makes a sound the creature hears. The creature stops eating and turns its head to listen. Little Tree decides instead of running to ask Forrest if it’s necessary for him to stay. Asks: Can’t you just let me go? The creature starts eating again. Says through a mouthful: We are the earth taking what is ours, the bodies are all ours, you only have them for a time, but the time of waiting for you to die has come to an end. We decide now. Little Tree says: Why me? The creature, or Forrest, or the creature through Forrest, or Forrest as the creature, says: He wants to know if you know who started the fire. Little Tree just asks: What? He wants you to know he was in the room with your parents, and that they had it coming, all of you, from something born on a battlefield, the blood and the death there, something that’s been coming for your family line for decades. Little Tree doesn’t say anything. Forrest’s voice comes through now more clearly: You all came into my house. Little Tree says: What are you saying? Forrest’s voice, now low again, starts laughing. Little Tree takes his chance and runs out the berth through the front of the cab. The creature is right behind him. As he runs through the parking lot, he sees just at the edge of where lamplight hits a dozen or so large hairy creatures. Little Tree looks back, and when he does, the creature is lunging at him, then it is on top of him, begins gnawing at his back immediately. Little Tree can’t move. He thinks of his parents. Closes his eyes and tries to leave his body. He thinks of an image of a bloodied battlefield. The grass is wet with blood as far as he can see. He sees women walking through the bloody field. They are looking for survivors. He sees a woman who looks like his mom. He understands the women weren’t looking for survivors to save them, but to finish them off. Little Tree comes to when the creature starts at the back of his neck, and when it clenches down there, he feels his whole body go dead. The big hairy creatures he saw at the end of the lot are gathering around him and the creature, and he doesn’t know if they’re there to help or if they’re there to join in the eating.