Why the Tree Loves the Axe. Jim Lewis

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      The end of the day came earlier than I expected. So this was twenty-seven, I thought. These are my people, so soon; a sleep of snow and ashes. I was exhausted, I had too much to remember, and I wanted so badly for my masquerade to be successful. I wondered. In the women’s bathroom I changed back into my street clothes, and the face I saw in the mirror wore a determined expression. An orderly—yes—in an old-age home—yes—in Sugartown, Texas. It was a new life: I didn’t know what to expect, I really didn’t know. I had no idea.

      As I walked out the door, I found André waiting for me. A pair of men in dirty white uniforms passed between us with furtive looks on their faces. As soon as they were out of sight, André scowled. Custodians, he said, and clicked his tongue. Don’t bother with them. They have no names: they come to here, they sit around like stones, and as soon as they steal enough drugs, they leave.

      I nodded. O.K., I said. Well, O.K. Good night, and thank you so much. I’ll see you tomorrow. Last words, I started to leave, but he suddenly grabbed my hand, tugging it slightly to bring me closer. He bent his head, and for a second I saw the smell of his skin. Yes, but now you listen, he said. Everyone here is very nice. Except for Billy, you keep your eyes out for him.

      Who’s that? I asked. Billy?

      This old man, a bad man, you take my advice and watch out for him.

      I started to ask him more, but he shook his head; he had already warned me, and that was all he would say.

      

      I came home and found a message from Bonnie. Caroline? she said. Hi, it’s Bonnie, we met last Friday? Hi, I just wanted to say hello. I know you started work today and so, good luck and all that. I have to work tonight too—nights all this week. But look, if you have time, why don’t you come and visit me? It’s this place called Uncle Carl’s, on Route 36. You go out past the zoo about a mile, and it’s on the right. O.K.? So come out some night. O.K. Bye.

      As soon as I heard her voice I wanted to see her, but I didn’t have the time right away, I didn’t have the energy. We left messages for each other every few days: that was all I could manage, at the start. But I grew used to hearing her recorded voice on the phone, tentative and near, telling me, yes, she’d heard the last thing I’d said. She was waiting for me, she was thinking of me.

      I went to work whenever I was scheduled to go, five days a week, eight hours a shift, sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon, sometimes at night. As soon as I got home again, no matter what time it was, I’d take a shower and fall asleep right away; there was nothing else I could do, and soon my days were divided so irregularly that I could hardly tell dawn from dusk, and the only forms of consciousness I could recognize were other people’s fear and my own sleep.

      There was no place on earth so filled with terrified people as Eden View. It was a death row populated by the innocent, they had long since exhausted every appeal, all they had left was waiting. So they waited, some for judgment, some for extinction, some just to know what they were waiting for. The idleness made them feel as if the waiting itself was all they were ever going to experience; it was punishment by eternal apprehension, which grew until they couldn’t stand it any longer, and then grew some more. Some of them screamed and some of them shook until I thought their bones would come apart; some complained to children who had long since left them and some cried without shedding any tears. It didn’t help them at all. Death was coming for them in pieces, taking their hair, their teeth, their organs, their memories, leaving them dazed, fatless, and compliant. And they were wrinkled, they were filthy, they smelled strange, and they frightened me. I tried very hard to love them all, each for what each was losing, but I’d be lying if I said I always succeeded.

      There was Judith, with ninety years out of her mother and a meantime spent God knows where, she crooned to gone ghosts in a language no one could understand; she had long ago stopped eating, she lived on cups of air and the mysterious syllables of her singular vernacular. Bart, a retired businessman, who had lost his entire family in a burning house and was always trying to explain how tired he was. A colonel named Farley, a quiet man in a black shirt and a bolo tie, who would go for days without doing much more than coughing and saying, Ah! now and again, releasing a little puff of being that drifted lazily up to the ceiling. Colonel, it’s time to go to sleep, please. For God’s sake.—Cough. Ah! Cough. All right. Please.

      I was putting the Colonel to bed one night when an old man I hadn’t seen before came striding down the hall. He had enormous pale pink ears, from which tufts of reddish white hair grew, and that was all the hair he had; his nose was fleshy and hooked and his eyes were nearly black. He was wearing a dapper dark blue suit and a white shirt that was yellow with age, and he was strutting along without shoes or socks. When he was close by me, he stopped and held up his foot so that I could see the dust that had blackened its thick underside. See this? he said. See this, all this dirt? This is a slovenly place. Aren’t any of you working? Look at this.—I looked. I want my money back, he said. Give me my fucking money, or I’ll set the dogs on you.

      I stared at him. What?

      Who the fuck are you, anyway? he demanded.

      I froze.

      Come on, he said.

      … Caroline, I said. I’m new … Where did you come from? Where is your room?

      Ah! he said, and dismissed me with a wave of his long ivory fingers. Get out of my way. And before I could react he disappeared down around the corner, muttering something vicious, and that was how I met Billy.

      

      The doctors believed that he was dying, and when he waved away their recommendations they told him so, softly but insistently. Still, they never said what was killing him, and in fact he was never at all weakened. He would spend hours in the rec room, banging a basketball against the wall and catching it again with one hand. The noise drove the doctors crazy and they would send orderlies to make him stop; instead, he would pick fistfights with them, and they would have to restrain him by pinning his arms behind his back while he struggled to free himself and called them all cocksuckers and cunts.

      Billy had been at Eden View longer than anyone else; in fact, he’d outlasted all of the staff, and there was no one there who remembered when he’d arrived. Once I checked his file in the main office and found that he’d been admitted about twelve years earlier, but he used to insist, sometimes that he’d just arrived, and other times that he’d been there forever. In any case, he’d managed to get himself moved into the best of the residents’ rooms, a large single in a corner of the third floor, with a tiny balcony from which he could look out on the whole of Sugartown, the hills behind it and the sky above. On clear evenings he would sit outside with a penknife and carve pieces of wood into fantastic shapes, a guitar, a woman, a rosebush complete with delicate buds, which he would pass off on the staff, always warning them in a low voice that the things were hexed and might kill them if they weren’t careful. Later still, he would lock himself in his room, turn his desk light on, and take out a canvas bag. Inside of it there was a rolled-up piece of cloth, and inside of that there were dozens of delicate implements—they looked liked dentist’s tools—which he would use to meticulously engrave on something about the size of an envelope. No one ever saw what he was working on; if someone came to his door, he would hide it in his lap and hold it there until he was left alone again.

      The orderlies said that he was the Devil’s servant and he was never going to die. André told me that flowers withered and turned brown when he breathed on them, that he could light a match just by looking at it, that he had wings on his back and wore his suits to cover them, that he hid bottles of codeine in his room and had pornographic magazines delivered by mail, that СКАЧАТЬ