Why the Tree Loves the Axe

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.

As I passed, the shirtless one began to sing in a high, clear voice:

Jole blon

From Louisiana

On the bayou

In the moonlight

I didn’t look back, although I wanted to; I knew that if I did, I would see him standing there, with his arms open wide and a look of devotion on his face. I turned the corner like she-to-whom-all-praise-is-insufficient: I could feel my steps swaying, I could hear him following me. When I was about halfway down the block he started singing again.

Don’t leave me

Don’t deceive me

Stay beside me

Make me happy

What a pretty melody. What a sentiment to sing on a sunny afternoon, in this sad part of town. At last I glanced back and saw him ambling up the sidewalk with his hands in his pockets and his elbows out at his side, so that his entire being was fanned out behind him like the harlequin tail of a peacock. His voice was beautiful, and his pride was a sight, but at the last moment I thought of the word pussy, and I turned away.

Oh, come on, he said. Don’t be like that.

But I just kept on walking.

The way from the bus stop to Eden View the following night. The weather was so hot and humid that it was impossible to tell if the sky was overcast or clear; the air was thick, the light was slow, in the privacy beneath my clothes I was perspiring. I walked down the middle of the empty street, watching the voodoo music that hung down from the canopy of trees overhead. When I reached the parking lot, I found it empty, the windows of the place were dark, no birds did sing.

In the door, then, and walking down the main hall. A few of the residents were out of their rooms, slumped over in their wheelchairs and staring down at their bare, bedsore legs, like images from old paintings of the sufferings of man. The walls were hung with grandchildren’s drawings, their bright lettering laughing in the half darkness; the air smelled of weak medicine and cleaning solution, the slight sound of voices drifted out of the lounge. Someone was trying to convince someone else, softly, so softly, that there was no way to tell the words.

Judith and Bart were playing cards in the game room, or rather, they sat with a deck of cards between them and talked in low voices, thin lips to great ears. He bet her that she was an alien from outer space, and she went through the deck and named the cards, numbers and suits, to try to dissuade him; but her words came out in unearthly syllables. See, Bart said. You’re a Martian, just like I said, maybe from Neptune, maybe, I don’t know. They should have been put to bed an hour earlier, and I went in to gather them up. Together they rose and followed me down the hall toward their rooms—Judith’s was first, and she went in without a word. Bart said, Humph, yes. Are there mountains beneath the sea? I nodded, and he made his way across the floor to his bed, moving his mouth softly.

Down the bare halls I saw darkness coming out of the rooms, a coffin-shaped stretch of shadow that reached through the door of each one. Good night, good night. Old folks in bed. Good night. There were dusky moons on the hallway ceiling and a grey penumbra down at the end, a mirage that had settled in before the door of the dining room. Good night. There was no more sound.

Billy came fully dressed out of his door, shut it softly behind him, and started down the hall into the unlit lounge. When he saw me he stopped and shouted, Hey! You there! Girl!

Billy, I whispered. Shhh. He scowled and retreated back into his room, where I found him standing stiffly beside his impeccably made bed. On his night table I saw a gold watch and an uncapped silver pen. Caroline-the-Candle! he announced. Do please sit down—he gestured to his windowsill—and we can get started. He had become very polite, but I couldn’t decide whether it was because he felt polite or because he was mocking me. I went automatically to turn down his sheets. Don’t, he said, and instead of lying down, he began pacing the distance from the head of the bed to the foot and back again. I took the chair by his desk. He stopped and smiled, in his unsmiling way. Out the window I could see the lights of Texas, spread like steady, pale orange stars along the floor of the valley.

So tell me, how are you? he asked.

All right, I replied.

What did you do today?

Not much.

No, goddamnit, he said, instantly glaring at me. So he had been mocking me, or else he had changed his mind. What exactly did you do today?

I ran a few errands, mostly, I said. Then I went home and read for a little while, and then I took a shower and got dressed. Talked to Bonnie on the phone.

Where did you go, on your errands? What did you read? Who is Bonnie?

I didn’t want to play, but I didn’t feel like fighting, so I played along: To the bank to deposit a check, I said. To the drug-store to get some soap and shampoo, to the hardware store to get lightbulbs. I read a magazine. Bonnie is my friend.

Caroline-the-Candle! he said again. And … Bonnie-the-Bottle. How did you meet her?

In the hospital, I said. And before he could ask: I was in the hospital because I had a car crash. That’s how I wound up here, with you.

Who knows you’re here? he asked.

In Sugartown? In Eden View? I don’t know. No one.

No family?

No.

Children?

No.

No boyfriend?

No.

Caroline has no one but her friend Bonnie. I’d like to meet this Bonnie.

Maybe someday, I said.