Earl and the Tree Men © Mark Wolf
TIME TRAVEL INC. CORPORATE OFFICES - NIGHT. Earl Bronson, skinny, white, hippie boy in his early twenties, sports dreadlocks and a black t-shirt with a yellow Smiley-Frowny-Face logo. The Frowny-Face squints its eyes and sticks out its tongue and says “ Shit! ” .
Earl shuffles along steering a push broom, in a long, well-lit hallway. He hangs his head, depressed, just doing his time, until he can punch out for the evening.
A set of ear-buds hang around his neck, the cord trails down to his iPod on his belt. He is too depressed to even listen to his tunes. He walks out of the corridor and enters the lobby. His friend, David Chesterfield, sixty-something, black man and security guard calls out to him.
“Hey, Earl! What's up, little soul brother of another mother?”
Earl looks up and attempts a smile. David isn't fooled and waves him over to his security desk. Earl plods forward until he reaches David's desk then he leans his broom against it and sighs, slouching.
“Let me guess. A woman, right?”
Earl nods and sighs again.
David smiles. “You've come to 'da right place, mon. The Love Doctor is in.”
Earl doesn't react. David frowns as he realizes his young friend has got it bad. He considers his words for a moment then gives Earl his love prescription.
“Love her?”
Earl shrugs his shoulders. “I only knew her for a short time. There was somethin' special 'bout her though.”
David smiles. Now he has something to go on. “You got to tell her, mon. You can't make her wunda' 'bout you feelin's.”
“I can't,” Earl says.
“Why's that, mon?”
“She's 25,000 years in my past,” Earl says.
* * *
"Ah, 'dat be problem," says David, pushing his billed security officer's cap back on his head.
"Yeah." Earl leans forward and plucks a rose from a vase on Davis's desktop, holds it to his nose, and sniffs.
Both of them quietly think. After a minute David speaks. "Did you ask the eggheads if they'd send you back to that time again?"
"Yup. They told me that time-stream relationships were strictly forbidden. How I might end up changin' history if I were to "get involved."
"Hmm, I guess I can see what they is sayin'," says David, who thumbs through some papers on his desk. "Hey, here is an open assignment to go back in time and investigate reports of Tree Men." David turns the paper around and pushes it across his desk for Earl to read.
"Tree Men? Who are they?” Earl studies the paper, suddenly animated and interested. “Doesn't say anything more about it, here. Maybe I'll check it out." Earl takes the paper and stuffs it into his jeans.
* * * TIME TRAVEL INC. PROCESSING – TWO DAYS LATER
“What better identity to assume to investigate Tree Men than to become one!” says Smithers, the not really mad, just slightly disturbed, scientist as he fits Earl's gorilla costume on him.
Earl unzips his gorilla suit and scratches his crotch. "I don't get it. If I'm going to look for Tree Men, why the gorilla suit? Shouldn't I be disguised as a tree?" He holds the gorilla head, a separate part of the suit in his other hand. "What? Oh, you misunderstand." Smithers combs his fingers through his wild hair. The effect makes him look like the re-animator , himself in the "Young Frankenstein" movie. "Tree Men is what some of the northern Rockies Indians called a large hairy man-like beast. Westerners refer to him as the Yeti, or Bigfoot. The Indians believed he could change from the “hairy man " to a tree or bush at will.”
“Oh, I heard 'bout that dude. But isn't he 'sposed to be a lot bigger than me? And what's up with this suit? I'm itchin' like crazy,” Earl says, shifting position and scratching his butt.
“ I'm hoping that you might be taken as one of the Tree Men's young.” Smithers adjusts Earl's gorilla arms. “We didn't have time to clean it after a gorilla research team tracked gorilla movements over the last four centuries. It's infested with fleas,” says Smithers.
“Oh, great. So when are you sending me to?” Earl grimaces and drops the gorilla head to the floor and reaches his hands into both armpits to scratch. “Argh, these critters are driving me crazy!” As he raises his arms to expose his armpits, he gasps. “Yuck. Didn't they guy who wore this ever wash this suit?”
“Nope. It was important to have a rank smell, to fit into the group.”
“Well he must've fit in well,” Earl says.
“We've been able to ascertain that the majority of the Tree Men reports are centered around a small lake in North Idaho around two hundred years ago,” Smithers says as he attaches small cameras in the hair above each nipple on the pectorals of the gorilla suit.
“Are the Indians friendly there?” Earl says.
“They should be. The Tree Men were said to be supernatural beings.” Smithers picks up Earl's call-back button and inserts it into the gorilla suit's navel. “Don't forget, when you get some pictures of the big foot-Tree Men, hit the call-back and I'll bring you back.”
“Gotcha,” Earl says, sound muffled as Smithers pulls the gorilla mask down over Earls head.
Smithers turns to a console and flips some switches. “Have a safe trip.”
* * *
Earl appears near a small lake at the edge of a Ponderosa Pine forest, slams hard into a small tree, falls backward to the ground, nearly missing a large moss covered boulder as he passes out.
The tree he collides with shimmers and changes into a fur-covered woman. A Neanderthal. The woman leans over Earl and tsk-tsks, then crouches down and removes Earl's gorilla mask.
Earl's forehead is swollen, a huge lump over one eye. The woman passes her hand over it. A healing aura shimmers in the air. Earl comes to.
For a moment Earl's eyes are crossed, then he recognizes the woman as the Neanderthal cave painter he met on his last mission. Okay, I must've really cracked my head a good one.
The woman laughs. “No, Earl. It's me,” she says reading his thoughts.
Earl looks up into her face as she carefully cradles his head in her lap. “How can this be? You would have died thousands of years ago.”
“I did.”
* * *
Ee-ma brushes Earl's hair back from his forehead and hums a soothing melody. Earl is in bliss as he continues to stare upward into Ee-ma's beautiful green eyes, head in her lap.
“So, you say that you Neanderthals chose a different path than us?” Earl says.
“Yes. At one time we were much like you, only concerned with the next meal, and fighting anyone we thought a threat to that.” Ee-ma pauses and looks up as a grizzly bear walks into the clearing. The bear sniffs and shakes its head in disgust at the smell of Earl's suit, turns and stalks off.
Ee-ma smiles at the departing bear, then glances back down. “About fifty thousand years ago, our people first encountered yours.” She picks a twig out of Earl's hair and tosses it aside. “At first, we kept our distance and so did your people.”
“And here we are,” Earl says, grinning up at her. “I'm glad we don't have to do that.”
“I wish it were that easy,” Ee-ma frowns, shakes her head, then sighs. “Over time we both competed for resources as the ice ages hit. Your people out-bred us and eventually developed more clever tools. Even today, as a people yours has never stopped pursuing more cleverness in things that you create.”
“And your people?” Earl says.
“We turned to inward exploration and arts.”
“So that is why I saw you painting in the cave?”
“Yes, in that one and hundreds more. I had lived many lifetimes before that time you and I met.” Ee-ma says. “Sometime in our distant past we stumbled onto the “Remembering.”
“And that's how you are able to shape-shift and live forever?” Earl says.
“Not forever, but for a very long time. I migrated with your people over the land bridge northwest of here and watched them for centuries as many kinds of trees and as I am now.”
“I would think watching them by yourself for so long would get dreadfully boring,” Earl says.
“Who says I'm alone?” Ee-ma replies.
* * *
Several trees around Earl's clearing shimmer and about a dozen fur covered Neanderthals appear. Earl starts to sit up, but is firmly pushed back down by Ee-ma.
“The others have not reached a decision yet, Earl.”
“Decision?” Earl says, noting several unfriendly faces in the mixed group of men, women, and children.
“Whether to kill you and eat you or allow your knowledge of us to go with you back to the place from whence you came.”
“So you know I'm from the future?” Earl says, blinking at the sunlight hitting him full in the face without the shade of the trees.
“We guessed that might be the case. Again, your people have built a clever thing that could destroy everyone and everything. We fear what your kind has unleashed upon the world.”
“Earlier you read my mind. If I were to promise that I would hide your existence, would you let me go? I don't think I can lie to you in my thoughts, even if I wanted to,” Earl says.
“No, your thoughts are true. You couldn't lie to any of us,” Ee-ma says and turns her head to the others, seeking their counsel.
Earl hears murmurings and sees images in his mind, as though a conversation just out of hearing is going on. He catches an occasional image of cities, forests, wars, and starving people. Finally, an image of Neanderthals and homo sapiens walking hand in hand. It is quiet again. Earl senses a decision has been made. Ee-ma turns back to him and smiles.
“We are going to let you live, for now, Earl. You and many others of your kind we have met over the last thousand years are close to the same kind of evolution we made when we discovered the “Remembering”. We believe that there might be enough of you now to turn the tide of creating things to recreating yourselves.”
The others shimmer once again and turn back into trees. Ee-ma leans over and kisses Earl lightly on the lips, then more passionately. Earl closes his eyes and loses himself.
* * *
There is a flash of light and Earl reappears in the Time Processing lab. Smithers rushes forward in excitement to snatch Earl's pec-cams.
“Well, did you find any?” Smithers says excitedly as he plugs the cameras into his computer and runs the film.
Earl walks over and leans over the desk to watch the images of several bears of different sizes and hues as they fight, play, and make love. There are dozens of clips.
“Oh, too bad,” Smithers says, disappointed. The legends must have been about a bear population explosion. Oh, well. Go ahead and turn the trip into accounting, anyway. You deserve to get paid.”
* * *
Earl pulls his 1960's era Volkswagen camper van into a campsite at a small lake in Idaho. It is late in the fall and he has the campground to himself. He gets out of the van, stretches and walks over to a huge Ponderosa Pine tree and compares its location to the lake and a large moss-covered boulder.
He takes a deep breath, exhilarating in the smell of pine forest and wet vegetation from the morning mists rising from the lake.
Earl tilts his head back, impressed at how much the tree has grown in the last two hundred years. He walks forward and hugs the tree.
It shimmers... _______________ Mark rambles about as a logistics gopher at an eco-tour company in Hawaii when he isn't writing. In other incarnations he has snared pigs, built houses, worked oversees as a missionary, fought forest fires and built wilderness trails.
His published work has appeared at: Liquid Imagination, Aurora Wolf, Spaceports and Spidersilk, Goldenvisions, and 69 Flavors of Paranoia.
His web-link is honuio.wordpress.com |