Why the Tree Loves the Axe. Jim Lewis

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ