Why the Tree Loves the Axe

Do I know what day today is? Of course I do. Today is the twenty-seventy-seventh of Pestember. I don’t care for a second what day it is.

What day of the week.

If it isn’t Sunday, I don’t know. I know it isn’t Sunday.

Is it Thursday?

I don’t know.

It’s Thursday, yeah.

Well, shit, he said in a tone of utter disgust at my dumbness. What difference does that make?

Never mind, I said brusquely, and tried to dismiss him with a blank expression. But my cheeks were hot; I was betrayed by my face and Billy noticed it right away. Caroline is angry, he said in a schoolyard singsong voice. I don’t give a shit. Caroline doesn’t think it’s fair that I should be so mean to her, when she’s trying to make nice with an old man. She wants to be all over me, like a mood. She wants to go through my pockets, she wants what I’ve got. And who knows? She may be right, maybe I can help her, maybe I can use her. But—he wagged a finger at me—is she smart enough? Brave enough? Confident enough? Oh, I know I’m not supposed to ask anything like that. Because you people … Take a look at these, he said, holding out a pair of small pale green pills in his palm. They give me these to sleep, so I’ll dream, so I won’t remember what they’ve said to me, so every day we can start all over again at the beginning. Take them, go on, try them, you’ll see.

Billy, these are yours.

I don’t want them, he said. I’m giving them to you. You take them.

I put them in the breast pocket of my uniform, where I found them again a few days later, dissolved into dust and crumbs that clung to my fingertips, and as I hurried to the bathroom to wash my hands I spoke under my breath to an imaginary inquiry. I don’t know what they are, I said. I don’t know where they came from.

One afternoon I went to invite him to a game of bingo in the cafeteria and found him sitting cross-legged on his bed, staring down at something that was lying in his lap. For a long moment he didn’t move, just watched the thing; then he sighed and lifted it before him and I saw a chrome pistol in his hands, staring steadily back at him like a snake. He turned it, brought it to his face, and peered through the chambers, and as I watched he blew forcefully into one of the holes and then checked it again. Then he reached down to the bed and began to load it from a pile of shiny brass shells, one by one by one. I stood speechless on the floor. Beautiful, he said when he was done, and I began to back out the door, but before I could get away he spoke up. Go on and tell. Go on and be a snitch, be another disappointment. It won’t help you sleep one bit.—Only then did he look up at me. Because you didn’t sleep last night, did you? I know. Poor little princess. You got out of bed at about two in the morning and went to sit at your kitchen table, buck naked, but you didn’t care. You made tea and read magazines, and wondered what your next man is going to look like.

He was exactly right about that, and at first I thought he’d been spying on me; but he couldn’t have been, my shades had been down against the streetlights, and anyway, he hadn’t left Eden View in years. It was just that he’d suddenly laid me open, and he was watching my thoughts right through my forehead. I felt him where he shouldn’t have been and I panicked; but in a moment I’d collected myself and concentrated on a hell I conceived for him. Can you hear me now? I thought. Just mind your own business. I turned on my heel, walked out of the room, and carefully shut his door behind me; but I never told a soul about the gun.

At last I had a free night and a little self-possession, and I took a bus out to visit Bonnie at her bar. I found her watching over an empty room; it took her a moment to recognize me. Caroline? she said. That’s you, right? She laughed with delight, and I was delighted to hear her. I’m so glad you made it, finally. No one’s coming out: they’re all at home with their families. Behind her the bottles stood, with their cool glass, caramel colors, and invocations of the country, each one topped by a plastic spout. Come on, keep me company. Let me make you one of those fancy drinks, I never get a chance to make them.

We started talking and we didn’t stop. We went on, the girl and I, gently and carelessly, drinking our drinks and mentioning this and that. This trip down to Padre Island, that neighbor’s barking dog in the backyard. I can’t sleep, said Bonnie. Or if I do, all I dream about is dogs. Does that ever happen to you? When you dream the same thing over and over again?

Only when I’m awake, I said, and she laughed before I did.

Another drink, a sound in my ears. Slowly the world was reducing to just we two, our faces, our small questions and confessions. I lied to my doctor, I said to her. I lied to him, I don’t even know why. He asked me if I’d ever been hospitalized before, and I said, Yes, once, for pneumonia. Which I never was. But I didn’t want him to think I was … inexperienced.

Of course not, said Bonnie. Because otherwise he wouldn’t respect you.

Was there another drink? Some time later I stood, stretched, and looked around the room. I’ll be right back, I said. The bathroom was cold, and I was quick. When I was finished I studied my face in the dark mirror under the dim blue junkie lights, my skin perfectly clear, smooth and glowing, my eyes hidden in shadows.

Do you have any brothers or sisters? asked Bonnie when I returned.

Not really, I said. I was the only baby born to my mother alive: she had one miscarriage before me, and another after, so there I was. She didn’t talk about it, but there I was.—I held my hands out on the table as if I were cupping an invisible infant.

She sipped and stared at the bartop. I have some stepbrothers somewhere, she said, but I never see them. My mother’s dead, and my father could be anywhere, you know, so I don’t know a soul except for you. Even though I’m sort of very social. Sociable. But just to a point. I don’t really know a single person, except for the people that I see in here, and I only see them here. And you. Does that make you uncomfortable?

I said, No, not at all. I was playing brave and everclear, but in fact the moment was painful; the debut of a friend was so great a moment that I could hardly stand to consider its consequences. No new lover with his hand on my naked ass could have gotten close to me so quickly.

She was embarrassed, she looked down and nodded. Looked up. Without flinching she rose from the table and went to make us each another drink, and I walked over to the jukebox, played five songs, and forgot right away what they were. We met at the table again. We were too good for anybody.—Boo! to the bosses, to the rude ones and the tattletales. I like that shirt, said Bonnie. It was loose and black. I like the buttons.

Later, she talked a little bit about mothers who ran their boys in gangs, and I answered her with a brief elegy on child brides, rooming-house whores, and after-hours abortionists. She told me a story that began with a description of a piece of one-hundred-year-old lace, and another that ended with the sentence, I had to change all the locks on my fucking doors, which cost me about two hundred dollars that I didn’t have. I told her a few things I had learned about landlords, which led me to a remark on the saleswomen at makeup counters, and another on table manners. I added some thoughts on the smell of burning hair. She made a point about skin, and the nerves beneath the skin, all the while gently stroking the inside of her wrist with the index finger of her other hand.

I was married, I said, out of nowhere.

Tell me, tell me.

His name was Roy. I met him in New York, he worked for the City. So what happened … I fell in love with him, and then I married him. I took his name.—I took his name. We lasted about a year.

How was it? she asked.

It was perfect until it ended, I said, and then it was a perfect tragedy. Bonnie pursed her lips and lowered her eyes, and I gave her a moment … I married him, O.K., and I was faithful to him, but I couldn’t stay married. I left, and when I left I didn’t take anything, but that didn’t make it any better. Well … that was long ago and far away …

A middle-aged man walked through the front door of the bar, looked around at the room, and found it deserted but for the two of us. We stared at him. He hesitated for a moment, and then said, Sorry, and left again.

I changed the subject, I didn’t really want to talk about New York. I have this fear of heights, I said. I’ve had it all my life. I get it when I’m on a balcony or near a high window, or when I’m looking down a stairwell from a few stories up. But it’s not that I’m afraid I’m going to fall, or someone’s going to push me. It’s that I’m afraid I’m going to jump. I start to hear this voice in my head, and the voice is me. Go on, I say to myself. Just go on, just jump.

Bonnie nodded. When I was younger, she said—and then she started laughing and couldn’t stop, and I laughed along with her without knowing what was funny. She began again. When I was younger, I used to fake not having orgasms.

Not having orgasms, I said.

Right. I would just stare at the ceiling, even when I was getting all ganged up inside, trying not to show it. It was a lot of work. But I didn’t want some guy to know he’d made me lose control, so I’d lie there going—she made a noise like a matron trying to suppress a cough. I had this one, poor little skinny boy, who thought it was his fault and went down on me for about an hour, and never even knew how many times I busted.—She exploded with laughter, so violently that she had to wipe her chin. Oh God, she said. Oh fucking God. Who told me I was nothing but a place to put things?

I went to the jukebox again, she went behind the bar to mix us another round. When she returned, she sat the glasses down on the table and immediately lifted one of them up again. What time is it? I asked.

She pointed to a clock behind the bar that read eleven-thirty. About eleven, she said, and sighed. I’m drunk, she went on. I’m dry and I’m drunk. She interlaced her fingers and turned her palms out so that her knuckles cracked loudly. I’m dry, and I’m drunk, she said again. So this is what I’m going to do. I’m going to start paying more attention to things. I’m not going to go around in my little daze anymore. You’re so much smarter than me, more thoughtful, right? You always try to know what’s going on. I bet you don’t get caught at things the way I do.

I’m going to finish everything I start, I insisted. You have far more self-control than I do, I can tell, you don’t give up as easily. So I won’t write letters that I never send; I won’t put the book down on page ninety-two; I won’t leave food on my plate.

When we had finished pledging our improvements, we shook hands across the murky table. It’s a deal, said Bonnie. Done.

Early the next morning I was at Eden View; I was tired, my neck ached, my eyes itched. As I walked through the lobby I passed one of the janitors mopping down the floor, and the smell of the cleaning fluid got right to me and made me dizzy and irritated. DID YOU REMEMBER TO SMILE? said a discolored sign in the staff lounge; I couldn’t remember where I had left my work shoes. The fibers of my ugly yellow uniform were making fun of me. André came in and found me half-reclined on the couch. You look like you’ve been poisoned, he said, shaking his head with exaggerated disapproval. Come on, pretty Caroline. He handed me a Styrofoam cup: Have some coffee. If the big lady comes in, you’re going to get in trouble.

I wasn’t scared of the administrator, but I drank the coffee and when I was done I went on my rounds. The clocks in the hallways kept stopping and starting again, and the sun shining through the windows was sharp enough to slit my throat.

I went to the assignment board to see what test was waiting for me, and there it was: I was supposed to give Judith a bath. She was waiting in the patients’ lounge.—No, she wasn’t waiting, but she was there, sitting in her wheelchair with a single playing card clutched in her hand, while a few of the other residents played rummy with the remaining fifty-one cards at a table across the room. Do you want to take a bath? Do you want a bath? It’s time. She looked up at me expectantly as I rolled her out the door and down the hall. In the washroom that she shared with four other residents I pushed her to the edge of the tub. Upsy daisy, I said, and helped her step slowly into the water. With her nightgown removed, she was naked; her tiny back was pale and curved away from her protruding spine like the dorsum of an ancient dolphin. A bleached, dying dolphin. She leaned back, showing her flattened breasts, her belly, her loose and balding sex … to be so old, in a body that had become so exhausted and discouraged, to be so brittle and unable. If I asked her and she understood me, what would she say she had been, before she became this phenomenon? What history had brought her here? Was it something like mine? The idea made me wince, and to keep from dwelling on it I began to wash her gently. Under my hands she was even smaller than she looked, I stroked her shoulders, and she began to make an unconscious rhythmic sound, a moaning, a singing that she couldn’t hear herself; it was as if some siren living deep inside her were calling the dead to come get her. I lifted her arm to wash beneath it and her voice rose, her tune became more urgent, and all of a sudden it seemed to me that they were on their way: I could feel their footsteps on the floor outside: I could hear their heavy breathing. I didn’t want them to find me so I quickly finished cleaning her, dried her down and hastily dressed her, and then wheeled her to her room and left her alone.

I spent the next half an hour wandering along the halls, hating myself and looking for a place to hide, but there was nowhere safe. From behind the clouded window of the Therapy Room I heard the sound of a man laughing; in the cafeteria I saw two janitors sitting together at a table, hunched over a box of glass ampules filled with amber fluid that they were carefully dividing between them. At last I came to Billy’s room, and without thinking I knocked on his door.

Who’s that? he demanded, and I heard three or four footsteps and the sound of a drawer being shut.

Me. Can I come in?

No answer, but more noises. Then the door jerked open. What is it?

… I need to strip your bedding.

He hesitated for a moment, and then said, About fucking time, and stood aside. I crossed the room and began to pull the sheets from his mattress; the bed was cold. He stood restlessly in the corner, and when I turned back to look at him he just cocked his eyebrow and shifted his weight impatiently. At length his silence became too much for me. Billy? I said while I pulled his pillowcases from his pillows.

He made a noise.

Where did you come from?

Where did I come from? he asked back, and at once his temper was in gorgeous flower. I was born about ten thousand years ago! he said.

Shhh, I said, stepping backward.

My father was a big black bear! My mother was the fucking moon! I left home when I was three years old. I left home, and I never looked back!

Don’t shout, I said. Where did you go?

I went everywhere and I did everything.—Again his voice rose. I made a million dollars a hundred times! I promoted bum boxers who fell down, I hawked houses built on fault lines, I stole songs from their composers! I buried a thousand men, I betrayed a thousand women, I sold children into slavery! He paused. William Mahoney, they called me Dollar Bill. Except once when I captured a river and held it hostage for ransom; then they used my middle name, Misery. What the fuck do you want?

From the floor below came the sound of André on the piano playing Let’s Get Lost. What do I want?

What do you want from me? What do you want? I see you coming around here like I’m payday. I know you want something. What is it?

I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to know him, to sit at his feet and study with him. I wanted him to tell me stories and dirty jokes, I wanted to get into everything with him, I thought maybe he was my escape; but I wasn’t going to confess all that. I was afraid he’d laugh at me. I don’t want anything, I said.

Don’t you lie to me, he said softly. You can lie to everyone else, but don’t you dare lie to me.

He thought he had me trapped and bare, but I’d learned the right response when I was just a little girl; it had been taught to me along with my earliest manners. Well, I said, just as softly. If you don’t already know what I want, you’re never going to find out.

He hesitated. Bitch! he said, but by then I was already slipping away, laughing to myself, because I knew it was a compliment, and it meant that I was still alive.

I want to know more about this city:

where you were, what it was like.

WELL, I’LL TELL YOU: YOU CAN TALK ABOUT THIS LOVE AND THAT love: the minister loves his congregation and the banker loves his bank. Tristram loves Isolde, and Isolde loves her song. You can say that love defies prediction, but Bonnie was right: as I settled in I found myself falling in love with Sugartown, and every day I was seduced a little further. I felt as if I was an explorer who had stumbled onto the place over some uncharted mountain range, becoming the first outsider to discover that particular landscape, peopled with those shopkeepers and police, those office workers strolling through the downtown plazas, the Mexican lawn crews, the ranch hands who came into town on weekends to dance and fight, the lowriders who tooled down the Strip on Saturday nights—all of whom had been living there in isolation, rendered characters in a shimmering society.

It was still a relatively new city; Spanish settlers had founded it centuries earlier, but it had remained an outpost until the late 1800s, when the great ranches started springing up nearby; then it became a way station for cattle on their way to market. It had grown gradually since then, left unaffected by the oil booms and busts that had staggered the growth of the rest of the state. No one had moved there without long consideration and good reason, and nothing had been built there before it was needed.

Sugartown: there were several stories to explain how it had come by its name. Some said it was because cane from Florida and Louisiana passed through on its way to California, others that it was because the water in Green River was so sweet, still others that it was a corruption of the name Saugers, he being one of the first white men to grow rich there. There were days when I walked the city all by myself, lost and gazing lustfully. I loved the place: I loved the icehouses that showed up on corner lots, where for a few dollars you could sit on a picnic bench and drink beer from dusk to dark; I loved the stadium that sat in the middle of town, a squat domed structure that was just as ugly as it could be; I loved the local stone that they used for the municipal buildings, a blue-white marble from a quarry a few hundred miles away, the handsome, rich mansion bricks made from some nearby clay, and the Spanish clichés of stucco and scalloped red roof tiles. I bought a guidebook, and I loved the stories it told, the madness of the early settlers, the wealthy, upright families, the cheating wives and cowboy murders, the hidden alleys and locked doors. I loved the years that I found written on the historical markers, telling the date when some building had gone up. I would stop and think the time all the way through: Who was then alive, who was now dead?

And my senses: the American blue sky; the smell of the trees, and the river, and the dank hallways of Four Roses; and the screeching of the birds that collected in the trees in Police Plaza. Every time I turned on the radio they were playing a song that I wanted to hear; every time I passed near a schoolyard there was the sound of boys shooting basketball. I would melt eggs spiced with jalapeños in my mouth every morning; in the evening I would sip cranberry soda at my window and think of the fields facing away from the city as they raced in their sleep down to the Rio Grande, the thousand-mile-long wind, the fine men and women cakewalking along the sidewalks, the sound of starting cars, accordion music. I used to walk to Eden View, and one night a man in an old brown panel van pulled over to the curb and asked me if I knew how to get to a famous old barbecue restaurant on the south end of town; and I was so pleased that he would mistake me for a local, and so proud to be able to give him the directions and set him on his way, that I smiled for an hour afterward. You see, I was so happy there, I was charmed, I felt safe and satisfied: I thought I was never going to leave.

Some nights Bonnie and I would just drive the streets, while she acted as my guide through the specific heights and depths of town. This coming up is Silverado, she said as we turned onto a wide and barely lit avenue, on either side of which broad lawns rose toward shadowy estates screened by tall, ancient trees. There were no sidewalks. Overhead a three-quarters moon was illuminating a layer of pale dappling clouds, so that the sky seemed to be made of faintly glowing marble. Hang on, Bonnie pulled the car to the side of the road and turned off the motor. She lowered her window and the hot sweet night wended its way in against the air conditioning. Smell that, she said. That’s what heaven’s going to smell like.

At the end of the avenue we went left and rolled through a neighborhood of neat little family houses; round and round we rode, past a public park softly turning to steam in the darkness, across an empty boulevard. We went over a narrow river lined with trees; on the embankment below I saw a pair of lovers kissing, the man tall and dark, the woman small and blond. Here the houses had windows with wooden shutters, and balconies were adorned with ornate wrought-iron railings.

In time we came to a bent white building. That’s the oldest building in town, said Bonnie. See how the foundation’s sunk at one side? It’s this restaurant, now, and all the rooms inside are crooked. If you put a pen on the table, it’ll roll right off. We bumped slowly over a set of railroad tracks, the road turned. An expensive blue sedan glided past us. This is all whores and drugs, said Bonnie, and has been for as long as anyone can remember. Drugs and whores. Isn’t it pretty, though?

In Sugartown, the poor people lived in a neighborhood called Green River, in rows of tract houses and shotgun shacks penned in by cyclone fencing; there were Mexicans on one side of the railroad tracks, and blacks on the other. If there was a porch, it sagged, and fading color flyers from the local supermarket accumulated by the bottom stair. Outside it was inside again, familial and tough, hanging out. You could see them; they parked their pickups on their hard lawns and washed them down endlessly with rags and buckets of soapy water. At night, the orange arc lights burnished the metal and made the rest monochrome; in the morning, the dew fed the rust. Because it was summertime all the teenagers were out of school, in a world without labor. The boys would gather in circles in Bundini Park and joke at one another. The girls would watch from the bleachers, many of them holding even smaller girls on their laps; I figured they were sisters, but I wondered if they were daughters, and I’d try to imagine what it would have been like, to have been a mother so young.

If I walked back home from Eden View, I passed through Green River on my way to Old Station. I tried to take a different route every day, and once I came to a crossroads. On one corner there was an old hotel, a shabby once-blue building several stories higher than those that surrounded it, with dark windows and an unlit neon sign that read THE PIONEER. A red-and-green billboard showed a tin of chewing tobacco with a bucking stallion on the lid. Two men were leaning against the wall in the heat outside, one with a straw hat pulled down on his forehead, and the other shirtless and drinking a can of beer. They were in their early twenties and they had their eyes on me.