Why the Tree Loves the Axe. Jim Lewis

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