Spider Cider

            by Wes Holtermann

 

Hunger rips my insides apart and peels tissue from bone. I can feel my stomach. Down there. Deranged. Eating itself. There will, I assume, be guavas in the rainforest. Trees will be teeming with them. They will be yellow and soft, and we will cut them open. With knives? We don’t have knives. We will break them open. On rocks. On branches. We will crack them like eggs and squeeze the juicy sweet yolk down our parched and yelling throats.

The hunger will subside once we get a guava.

 

In this tunnel, dark rocks jut out in hopeful punches, but we are hunched, almost quadrapedal, and they miss us by inches. We can feel them looming at our shoulders, but it is so dark in here, in the capillaries of the mountain. Daylight at the end shimmers off the water, bouncing wildly but barely cutting through the thick black. I am barefoot, plunged ankle-deep into crisp, shocking water, and walking upstream in the artery of an old Hawaiian irrigation system for the taro patches in the valley below.

Finally we surface in the light, and I look back to make sure Paul is still there – and not, as I imagine, eaten by cave-crabs – and am surprised again at the new moustache, which had been whittled down from his usual beard in the week since I had seen him last, hanging below his nose. The moustache was so confounding that when I met him at the airport, instead of saying Aloha and throwing my hands in the air like I had planned very meticulously, I just grinned stupidly and yelled, “MUSTACHE ROCK!”

We climb out, we climb up, because outside the tunnel we are in a small gorge, and at the top of this gorge is the trail. We grab onto roots and loose rocks and propel ourselves upward. Peeling back a cluster of lanky ginger and smelling it as we pass, we appear on the trail at an outlook: the West Maui Mountains dip and glide, carved into deep valleys and high peaks that throb and rustle, erupting green. Birds sing, a thousand birds, but they are woven so tightly into the burgeoning canopy that I cannot see a single one.

 

The hunger at the pit of my stomach gives a muffled yell.

There are still no guavas.

 

We are in the mountains. In the jungle. There are animals yelping and hidden natives whooping. Trees rustle. They shake and wail, and we, the trespassers, tremble beneath their stretched and tangled branches.

We have driven up from the beach, from sand and waves and girls with skin like maple, with the ragged and boisterous crew we had assembled at the hotel: the driver, my dad, in waterproof shorts, Tevas, and a loud shirt – he is all about the loud shirts –; one of two fraternal twins from San Diego who we met at the hotel; her electric, wide-eyed mother with a foam visor and hair like Cheetos; Paul, the world’s fastest man; and me. I hung my head out of the side window for most of the ride, praying for a Dairy Queen and trying to eat the humidity that grabbed and wrenched my face on the seventy mile-per-hour highway. We wound into the mountains, slow tires crunching the gravel around a paint-chipped white food stand which sold bananas and papayas and passion fruits for more money than I had. My stomach howled. The stand’s corrugated roof dripped with vines and moss and built-up mulch, and roosters, taller, stronger than any I had ever seen before strode majestically, stupidly, around the building.

We stepped out, the five of us, and crunched the rental car doors shut. The trail’s beginning was wide and rocky. Wide and muddy, and we followed it with knees like syrup. Stiff. Coagulated. But loosening with each step.

As the group posed for pictures at the first lookout point, Paul and I strayed from the trail, wandering alone into the clay-thick green of the wilderness.

 

The jungle breaks at a wide, rocky creek, and we climb up six stairs to a precarious wood-plank-and-rusted-cable bridge, which swings and undulates wildly over a cloud of boulders and crawling water. This is exactly like Indiana Jones. I trip and stumble with bare feet, flying forward, but I land perfectly, gracefully, catlike.

“LOOSE BOARD!” I say.

“LOOSE BOARD!” says Paul.

And we continue across, singing “S.O.S.” as we go.

The bridge, like the needle of a syringe, plunges us into a bamboo forest, which hisses, static and still. There are kukui nuts on the ground, some with broken and ragged shells. They are nails and shattered glass, and we dance through them, bobbing and weaving, with feet like tigers’.

The bamboo forest fades into an ocean of ginger and guava trees, and we are submerged. The guavas are green and hard and inedible, white inside when they should be pink. Occasionally there is a break in the flora and we can see the river or a stone lock for the irrigation canal.

 

Paul says to DUCK so I do. There is a spider the size of a mountain lion strung across the river in a web as thick as rope. “It’s definitely a man-eater,” Paul explains in a whisper. “You can tell because of the coloring (yellow and black) and the size of its fangs.” We cannot see its fangs, but we both assume that they are the size of steak knives but that they are retracted.

“It’s in the attack position,” I say, still ducked below the giant web. “That’s a very aggressive stance.”

Paul and I know almost everything about everything.

“How do we get by it?”

“I don’t know, but I think we’ll have to limbo.”

This spider has hairs on its arms, which are like eight spindly tools for putting on mascara. It is perfectly still. Crouching. “They’re motionless like that,” I say, “when they’re waiting to pounce.”

“You think this is a jumping spider?”

“Oh, no doubt about it.”

So we crawl, we crab-walk, on the pads of our feet and the pads of our hands. The pads, we know, make the least amount of noise, although even stomping would be muffled by the roar of the river. One by one, we pass under the web, and one by one we exhale.

Paul starts singing “Spider Cider”, and we continue upstream.

 

Lining the river is more bamboo. More bamboo than I have ever seen. More than I would need even to build the world’s most gigantic house. It is impossibly sturdy and impossibly close together.

Within this bamboo there is rustling. There is cracking. There is movement.

Paul whispers, “Bigfoot?” but I know it cannot be Bigfoot. I have just read Sasquatch: Myth or Monster? and I know that Bigfoot is a California native. My guess is that this is a wild boar.

We tiptoe over rocks toward the riverbank, because we know that boars are temperamental and very territorial and that they could stick us with their sword-sharp tusks (solid ivory) and break us like barefoot piñatas. We are quiet, quieter than anything else ever. My toes slide between two rocks under the icy current. We can hear the boar’s breath. Panting. Loud. Wild.

And then a girl’s voice wails, “FUCK! TOE-CRAMP!” and I know immediately that this girl is me. My index toe, the toe next to the big one, is rigid and paralyzed, and it hurts like a mother.

The boar has surely heard this, we think. Surely he is about to charge.

But instead of the sound of flying hooves and cracking bamboo and snorts of volcanic anger, we hear a dulcet male voice say, “Hey guys. Got a toe-cramp?”

It is Peter. Peter Napkin. We know him, and he is a lunatic. His dad, a college professor and the author of a new historical fiction about the French Revolution, went to high school with mine. We drove up to the mountains with them, following them in our car.

Peter’s breathing is lifting and dropping his shoulders and rippling his sweaty, long hair.

“We thought you were a wild animal,” Paul says.

“Why?” he asks, and to this we have no reply. It is a very good question. He says, “This bamboo is SICK,” and wraps his feet and hands around a shoot. Paul and I shrug, and Peter Napkin climbs faster than anyone I have ever seen before: man or ape. He is like a spider. The balls of his feet grip the smooth stalks, and he leaps, lunges from shoot to shoot. I half-expect him to yelp, warlike and savage, and to bare his teeth and rip something, a branch maybe, but I also know that this is unlikely, because bamboo is nearly unbreakable; it is the hardest substance known to man, apart from diamonds. Peter is out of control, and as quickly as he hurdled into our midst, he is gone, dissolved into the jungle, rustling the grassy leaves in his path.

“That was odd.”

 

By now, hunger is gnawing at the pit of my stomach, grinding with its molars, and all I really want, God, is one motherfucking guava.

 

It’s raining. Hard. Abrupt. The water against the leaves sounds like war, and it melts through the canopy, slowed by the topmost branches, but still heavy as it pummels the tops of our heads and rolls down our faces. There is a spider woven between two branches on the thinnest thread, and it shakes wildly, violently, as the hundred-pound drops bombard its web.

And the rain is gone as suddenly as it began. It melts back into the sky, which is absurdly blue considering the vicious downpour only ten seconds ago.

Cool rainwater from the leaves tumbles down my back as we hike further into the wild, which is now spotted with murky puddles.

 

My stomach has crumpled. It is breathing, maniacal, seething. My insides are mental, and they groan, they growl, teeth bared and fists clenched. There are no guavas here. There are just kukui nuts, and I can feel my esophagus reaching up out of my throat for something to kill.

 

There is a mosquito. It flies, I’m pretty sure, into my brain, and its squealing buzz careens through my synapses and lobes.

Now there are two more. Flying. Buzzing. Fuckers. And suddenly there are a thousand! I yell, “LOCUSTS!” and Paul yells, “MALARIA!” and we run, our bare feet slapping the new mud as we sprint through the bent, wet foliage, the dipping sun barely showing through the leaves overhead.

The path swirls and we are out of breath on top of a waterfall, an abandoned dam with iron wheels and gates. A foaming, rabid river leaps off the concrete into a pool below, writhing where it meets the water. Paul and I climb up the gate and look down into the wet black. It’s deep enough, we think, so we jump, fifteen feet, one hundred feet, into the screaming-cold pool.

We swim behind the waterfall, where there are misty caves and slippery black rocks. Roots from trees above finger their way downward through the crevices. Within these caves are guavas floating: bobbing and knocking in the turbulent undercurrent. My stomach, over the noise of the waterfall, lets out a cry, a savage yelp, and crawls up toward my mouth in delirious anticipation. The guavas are white like buttermilk, and they break open easily, revealing white seeds embedded in pink. Are these good? They look good. They look soggy. I look to Paul and he shrugs. “I’d go for it,” he says.

The bite is seed-filled and uncomfortable, but it is delicious. I move the seeds around in my mouth like lottery balls until the grainy-sweet guava juice has all been pulled off and sent cascading down my throat. I spit a few seeds out, shooting them back into the cave, and swallow the rest, splitting the difference in my uncertainty. I can feel my stomach pounce. It bares its teeth and shakes its head and rips into the fruit it has been fed. My throat, like the shaky, gloved hand of a zookeeper, feeds it more.

I pass an open half of fruit to Paul, who sucks the pink through his teeth, pushing his nose into the sticky middle of the guava. Our insides have stopped their fighting. Organs, raving and unhinged for hours, go back to their normal functions. Our mouths cry out, “TREMENDOUS!” and our stomachs rejoice.

 

The waterfall churns like a seizure two feet away, and the spray spits grains of ice water at our faces. We shout “ONE, TWO, THREE!” over the pummeling torrent in front of us, and we bolt, kicking off of the rocks into the thundering crush, which scuttles wildly over our hair and eyes, and we come out of the waterfall gasping and swimming – stronger, invigorated – and peel off to the left side where another smaller river is pouring fast and white into the pool. In this river there are rocks covered in moss, brushed past by the pear-sweet rapids; one is covered, octopus-like, by the smooth, sprawling roots of a tree. “Let’s head up,” Paul says. “Up this other river.” And we swing under the octopus tree by its branches onto one of the mossy rocks, which are soft, the softest things I have ever felt. Our feet wrap around them as we bound up the river, velvet boulder to boulder, almost flying, singing in our boyish warbles as we go.