The People in the Trees (32 page)

Back at our station, I considered this. (After some minutes of staring at Lawa’eke’s father, there seemed to be nothing else to do—the chief had not wanted to wake him, and indeed, when I reached down to poke him, he said something in a tone even I could not ignore—and so we had gone back to our respective sides of the clearing.) I had asked Fa’a to fetch Mua for me, and he now appeared from within the darkness, pulling Mua by the arm, Mua yawning and staggering, Fa’a’s normally unreadable face wearing an expression of great disapproval. Beside me, Tallent sighed. Esme was, thank god, at the river.

“Mua,” I began, making my voice stern, even though I needn’t have bothered, as he would compliantly answer any question posed to him, “this is very important. You once knew the chief, am I correct?”

He stared at me. “Don’t be frightened,” I told him. “The chief said you should tell me.”

It was as if I had told him he would be eating nothing but Spam
for the rest of his life, so quickly did his face transform itself into a mask of joy, and Tallent looked at me once, warningly, before translating his answer: “Did he?”

“Oh yes,” I said blithely, unthinkingly cruel. “He said you should tell me everything.”

He craned his neck upward then, as if directly behind me he’d see the chief, conferring upon him a blessing, but of course the light was gone by then and the chief was nowhere to be seen.

“We were friends,” he said, his face sad again.

“The night you were led into the forest—do you remember that?”

He let out his breath. “Yes. They took us very, very far in and left us. They had to.”

“When was this?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“It’s all right.” I thought. “The two people you were taken away with—were they men or women?”

“Men.”

“Are they here? Are they part of your group?”

He exhaled again, noisily. I began to discern that he, like the chief, was growing impatient with my questions. But while I had sensed that the chief’s impatience was born out of a sort of weariness with the subject—not to mention a wariness—Mua’s felt different: he was waiting only for me to ask the correct question, after which he could and would tell me all that I wanted to know and all that he wanted to say. But “No” was all he replied.

This went on and on and on, me asking the (apparently) incorrect questions again and again, Mua giving up little smidges of answers with each, so that it was not until late that night, when I sat down with Tallent and we began to work through his notes, that the cumulative information revealed itself as a real story.

One night—Mua did not know when, as I have stated, but if we were to believe the chief, it would have been around one o’ana ago—Mua and two other men were led into the forest by the hunters. They had all known that this would happen, and indeed, they had been waiting for it. When Mua was younger, he had seen other men and women who were becoming mo’o kua’aus being led into the
forest, always late at night, always by the village’s best hunters. In fact, almost all of the people in his group, except for Ika’ana, Vi’iu, and Eve, were people he remembered being led away.

They walked into the forest for a night and a day and then another night, until on the second night Mua could feel the air around them become crisper and lighter and knew that it was dawn. Each of them had carried a palm-leaf package heavy with food that they had tied to their spears, and although they could keep the food, they had to surrender their spears to the hunters. They had known that their spears would be taken from them, for a mo’o kua’au is not a full human and therefore has no right to carry a spear. But when the moment came for them to sacrifice them, one of Mua’s peers refused.

“He would not,” Mua recalled. The hunters commanded the man, and threatened him with their own spears before simply attacking him, trying to seize it from his grasp. They were, after all, the best hunters in the village.

But the man, although becoming a mo’o kua’au, was still strong, and fought back. Years before, Mua said, this man had been one of the people elected to abandon the mo’o kua’aus in the forest. The hunters stabbed at the man, but he dodged their thrusts, springing from place to place, until finally, when even Mua could see him tiring, he turned and sprinted away into the forest, his spear still in his hand.

One of the hunters made to follow him, but he was stopped by another. “Leave him,” he said. “He’ll only get lost. He won’t find his way back.” And then, without another word, they left, with their spears and two extras.

“I was very sad,” Mua said, “because these were my friends. I had fought with them and hunted with them, and they had all attended my vaka’ina, and now they were leaving me without saying goodbye. But I understood that this was the way it must be.”

“Did they eat the opa’ivu’eke at your vaka’ina?” I asked.

He shook his head. “They had many fewer o’anas than I did,” he said.

“Have you seen them in the village?” I asked.

“No. They are dead.”

He said this with such fierce certainty that we were surprised.

“How do you know?”

He shrugged. “I know,” was all he said. And then he began his chant: “He kaka’a, he kaka’a.”
I’m tired, I’m tired
.

“Wait,” I pleaded with him and with Fa’a, who was already standing, ready to take Mua back to the others. “Mua, what happened to you and the other mo’o kua’aus?”

He sighed. “We walked and walked. We ate the food. Sometimes we caught something to eat, but it was difficult without our spears. One day we came across a stream, very deep, very fast, and stayed there for a long time. There were plants that grew around the trees, and we ate those. The man I was with was becoming more and more of a mo’o kua’au by the day—he forgot and forgot, and I had to watch him like a child. I did more and more of the work. One day I came back from getting us something to eat and I saw that he was dead.”

“How did he die?” Tallent asked gently.

“He was in the river,” said Mua. He shook his head. “He forgot to ask permission to drink its waters, and the water choked him and he died.” We were all quiet.

“So what did you do?” I asked.

“I left.”

“And did you ever find the other man, the one who ran from the hunters?”

“No,” he said. “But he was becoming more of a mo’o kua’au as well, so I think he is perhaps dead too.”

“How would he have died?”

“Maybe he fell? Or maybe he too forgot to ask permission to take a drink and was cursed and killed.”

“But how did you meet up with”—I gestured toward the group—“the others?”

“Ah,” said Mua. “Well, I walked and walked, and some days I had food and some days I didn’t, and then one day I met up with some of them, and then with others, and then we hunted as a group and ate as a group, and fought against the others when we needed to.”

I felt Tallent look at me. “Which others?” I asked.

“The others,” he said, a bit impatiently. “The others in the forest.”

“Hunters?”

“No, no, not hunters—mo’o kua’aus.”

“There are others?”

“Of course.”

“How many? Where are they? Why don’t you speak to them? Why were you fighting? Why—”

“He kaka’a, he kaka’a,” he sang, almost mockingly, as if he knew how desperate I was for the answer, and Fa’a stood with a resolute air.

“Wait,” I told him, but this time it was Fa’a who shook his head, Fa’a, who never contradicted any of us, and we all fell silent.

“Tallent,” I hissed at him as we watched them go, “We need to sort this out right now.”

“We need to figure this all out tomorrow,” Esme interjected, a little too decisively for my taste (she had unfortunately returned from the creek just in time to insert herself into the proceedings).

“Tomorrow,” Tallent agreed. “It’s late.” And although I hadn’t noticed it before—we had quickly grown accustomed to the village’s hours—in that moment I noticed that it was indeed very late, and that everything around us had grown so quiet that the only sound aside from our own voices and the nearby snores and grumblings of the dreamers was, as always, the fire, hissing to itself in the still air.

I woke the next morning with my mouth dry with hate. My god, was I sick of the dreamers. I hated them, I hated their stingy, teasing way with information, I hated their stupid flat faces, their unintelligent eyes, their clumpy hair, their bulbous figures, their poor memories, their recycled conversation. I hated their village and their island and their weather (the heat was by this point so oppressive that we all spent most of the day sleeping, and I wished I had a tail like the hogs did to flap away the omnipresent flies and gnats and fleas and ticks and beetles and ants and wasps and bees and dragonflies that buzzed round us all day and night, never ceasing, never diminishing), and their fruit that moved and their endless supply of meat (of which we had not been offered one morsel), and their kin with their braying children and grunting women and taciturn men. I hated the way the breeze was so seldom that when it came it felt begrudging, that something that should have been consistent and plentiful had been made into something rare and capricious. I hated that Tallent would not let me walk alone up the path to the open
field, that he would not give me an answer as to why I couldn’t, that he wouldn’t let me take Mua to show me the way. I hated the sloths who acquiesced so meekly to their deaths, their tiny, piteous voices, the way the hogs licked their skins clean as lazily as if they were lapping at ice cream. I hated Tallent, and I hated Esme, and I hated the guides, and I especially hated Mua and the chief, who I suspected could resolve the whole situation for us at once if they chose and yet for some reason—boredom? playfulness? who knew?—had chosen not to. But most of all I hated the smallness of life here, and how even though it was so small, I was unable to solve the mystery whose central question I could still not determine.

And yet here I was, trapped on this island (for I knew Tallent would never leave now, not when he was so close to unraveling something important), and my only way out was to resolve the problem.

I should add that there were other factors that were contributing to what must sound like petulance. I had begun, over the preceding week or so, to notice that the village was abuzz with what seemed like an oppressive amount of sexual activity. Whether this was in fact unusual or I had simply become alert to it I was unable to determine, but each day brought numerous examples of coupling, so many that I, to whom nothing human is foreign, began to feel somewhat assaulted. A walk through the village meant encountering a couple, their slabby bodies smacking against each other, tussling just a few inches from the fire, groaning like the hogs. Something had even been reawakened in the dreamers, and now when I tried to sleep, it was often to a chorus of moans, one evening so loud that I finally roused myself to investigate: there they were, their hideous loose flesh chafing against their partners’, clawing and petting, their movements inexpert and inelegant. My presence, however, did not deter them in the least, and when, in a moment of desperation, I tossed a manama into their midst to startle them into silence, there was only the slightest of pauses before they resumed their activities, and I heard, faintly, the manama squish into the earth under the weight of someone’s back.

Returning to my mat, however, I noticed something else amiss: both Tallent and Esme were gone. Their mats were there, but they were not. “Esme?” I called softly. “Tallent?” But no one answered.

My mind immediately filled with the worst of thoughts. I saw
Esme pressed against a tree, Tallent embracing her, her ugly mouth open like a greedy carp’s, the messy excessiveness of her body—her sprawling hips, her bulging stomach, her puckered, dimpling thighs, her frizzed dandelion head of hair—a repulsive foil to the trim discipline of his own form.

I was, I am sorry to say, in a torment. Not knowing was unbearable, but so was knowing. Nevertheless, I found myself making concentric rings around the village, heading deeper into the forest with each lap, calling out their names in a low voice with every turn. Where could they have gone? I even, on the seventh lap, attempted to follow the path behind the ninth hut as far as I could, until it grew increasingly faint under a bloom of moss and I was forced to retreat downhill. The panic of discovering them was beginning to give way to new concerns. Where could they have gone, in our circumscribed world, that I could not find them? Was this a regular occurrence? And—this thought came to me last but was the most alarming—did not their disappearance mean that I was alone, with only Fa’a with whom to speak some semblance of English, and the dreamers my responsibility?

It was while I was contemplating these thoughts (only later would I realize that I had been running, my arms stretched in front of me like a zombie’s to feel for unseen trees) that I encountered the boy. At this point I was quite deep into the forest, maybe nine rings or so in, and I first mistook him for a boar. He was turned away from me, after all, and standing near a tree, and when my fingers first touched his rough bundle of hair, I mistook it for a hide, giving a little shout of fear and surprise when I did.