the tree butcher by Morgan caramello

Bob Smith’s life was just as dull as his name. The bleak walls of a photocopy shop framed his entire existence; the interior’s paint, once resembling Chantilly Lace, now faded and yellowed to a dusty Eggnog. He occupied his position for thirty years, rising the ranks from clerk to print associate to floor manager to store supervisor. Despite each clockwise tick on the clock, each cuckoo bird’s raucous call, each church bell chime at the top of the hour every hour, each monotonous day caving into lonely nights, there was no signal otherwise that suggested any passage of time at all.

At fifty something years old, Bob learned to look forward to each promotion and the subsequent stability it lent. The rungs he climbed in the corporate ladder pumped ephemeral pride into his chest, inflating his innards, knotting his intestines, tied together like the joints of balloon animals.

With no wife, no kids and only a tiger striped tabby named Maple to care for, most of his thoughts revolved around his job. The rest were fantasy. Repetitive six A.M. screaming alarms and six o’clock deadlock evening traffic taught him to not mind the inbetween: fixing the ancient, dying and jammed machines, replacing empty cartridges, budgeting and crunching numbers, scheduling, opening shifts, closing, replenishing items low in stock, the satisfying click of a turned lock.

His staid weekdays, weeks, blurred together. Perhaps it was the store bathed in greyscale, little light let in beyond the clerestory windows and front door. But more likely, it was his leading of life through habit, or chance, or a combination of both. Whatever it was, never the one to take initiative, never able to hold onto what he really wanted, his life was utterly and completely out of his own hands.

It was a Thursday that felt like a Wednesday, just like the week before, as if a page in his planner during the month of September were glued together. Fall in Virginia was incipient, the mornings felt clement and crisp, the afternoons humid and balmy.

Bob flipped the sign from “Come in, we're open” to “Sorry, we’re closed” at five on the dot. He counted the register, the cash overflow deposited in the inconspicuous safe tucked securely under the office desk. A product of his decades worth of learned and mastered habits, he briskly completed his day's managerial duties. With the door latched behind him, Bob walked diagonally across the empty lot, slowly but measurably, to his SUV parked at the opposite end. Outside was dreary, gunmetal even, the shapes of the buildings and trees and cars fuzzy from behind a screen of fog. It was raining, so slight, almost weightless, unbeknownst to him from being inside all day. The drops that landed on his jacket he hardly felt, his body ostensibly numb.

He drove his usual route through suburbia, turning the windshield wipers on and off, its slowest setting still too quick for the hanging mist that blurred the glass. Around him, the only distinction between the houses were their accessories: the cars parked out front, the soiled doormats, the abandoned toys thrown about.

Half past six Bob walked through his door and lit a smoke. Inhaling deeply, he sucked up the stick of tobacco like it was more oxygenic than carcinogenic. Once he made it to the filter’s edge, he stubbed it, positioning himself comfortably on the couch for the rest of the evening. One microwaveable TV dinner balanced on one knee, a book on the other, Bob flicked through the channels landing on a random one, not to watch, but to fill the silence of the house. His focus lay elsewhere, inhibited by the melodic flipping of pages. His revolutionaries – Proust and Hemingway and Steinback – sang until the fatigue of existing descended upon him like the sun at dusk, sending him into a dreamless sleep, only to wake up the following morning and do it all again.

That he did. The next day, as usual, he woke himself up halfway from the chiming of his bedside clock, and fully by a couple of splashes of water to the face at the foot of his bathroom sink. He brushed his teeth, dressing himself in a pair of khaki slacks and a Costco shirt buttoned up to the collar. Running out the door, he scarfed down some claggy eggs, assisting them down the tube with some slugs of black coffee from his to-go tumbler. It was time to head to work.

Outside, it was raining again, more intensely than the day before. Bob dashed to the car, damning himself for forgetting his umbrella. He hopped in, key in ignition, speeding down the street. His daily drives were ritualistic, whistling to the radio’s melody, he tapped his fingers on the steering wheel in synchronization to the beat of the background instruments. The windshield wipers whipped back and forth, beads blotting the glass then streaming like little minnows whizzing with the tide.

Drip, drip, drip. Back and forth. Dribble, dribble. Back and forth. Here and there. To and fro. More from than to. Come and go. Go, go, go. Postu-postu. Slow, steady. Not too fast. Can’t see. But, ahh. That rain. The rain. Love it. Its smell. Hate it too. Like that one summer. Long ago. Nice childhood. Most the time. Back home. Rain was rare. So, good. That life. Lifetimes ago, he thought.

The rain blitzed at an even louder crescendo; a comfortable, consistent, but loud pattering that drowned out the radio. Periodic whooshes of wind pushed against his steering. He eased his speed, the land beyond his windshield resembling more blobs than scapes. Waves and waves of torrential downpour doused the vehicle. Over him ran a deluge of water and memory, remembering all those years ago, that rain, that thunder.

The water dotting his vision rippled into memory.

During the summer between the second and third grade, Bobby found the outdoors. Though, he preferred to think that the great outdoors found him. Old enough to play in the neighborhood without parental supervision, he spent his days lying around, basking in the sunshine in his sod-stained cargos, rolling down the cushy verdant hills, generally lousy from the heat. Always with him in his satchel was a book and his journal, the one Ma, he supposed Pa too, gave him for Christmas the year before.

One warm day, around the summer solstice, fatigued with his florid cheeks, Bobby searched for four-leaf clovers at the forest edge. There was no luck so far at the local park. The boy noticed through the vista, the sky’s gradient fading into tenebrous hues. Save the scavenging for another day, he figured. Pa always preached, son, your mother says if there's a storm comin’ you gotta get inside beforehand. But Bobby didn’t mind this, he loved watching the rain.

Excited, he hopped on his bike, red like a cardinal, pedaling hard and fast towards home. With those midsummer late-afternoon showers rolling in, the cotton-like cumulonimbus clouds looked dark, not like night, but dark like smog, its dour grayness settling like dust on every surface.

Bobby! his mother called from the front porch as he drifted into the driveway. I’m home, Ma, he retorted, his goofy looking grin widening as he dropped his bike on the lawn. Its gears too eventually rusted over from soaking in storms.

She tousled his moppy locks as he passed through the front door. He was due for a trim, the strands tangling in his eyelashes.

Baby, there’s a storm coming, his mother cooed, placing a snack in front of him once he was seated at the dining table. It was wedged in a corner next to two wall length windows. I know! Bobby said between bites. He didn’t intend to miss it. Listening to the distant thunder’s echoes, he watched as billows of clouds expanded in front of him until the rain eventually fell in sheets. Again and again, he picked a droplet as it squiggled down the glass, posing it against the rest as if they were in a race.

The opening and closing of the garage door was faint in the midst of the roaring elements. He looked at the clock on the oven, six o five, Pa’s home.

Even more indistinct in the eddy of elements was his parents' dispute, insults and excuses whipped back and forth through pithy whispers. The bigger the rain drops he watched engulf each other, the bigger the spit they flew at one another.

Opening his journal, he embedded himself in the page, entertaining, distracting himself. It didn’t matter because the words flowed incessantly, a dam unleashed. He could have, and probably, sat writing for hours until Ma said time for dinner and his parents joined him at the table, a pretend happy whole family.

Now on the slick road with the strip mall he worked in, Bob couldn’t remember making that sweeping right turn from 53rd Street just moments before. “I just have to get through today,” he thought as he pulled into the photocopy shop parking lot. Friday, the week’s peak.

The first thing he did at the establishment was ensure that every copier was stocked with paper. That morning, number two flashing red. He picked up a few new packs, stacking them next to the machine like a cairn.

He tolerated his profession because of its close proximity to the paper, its almost almond fragrance – nutty and slightly sweet – like escape. Opening a package, he ran his thick pointer finger around the edge of the top page, a frame. His dark eyes reflected the docile and glossy sheen, a pool of whole milk wading in the iris; refreshing, satisfying, and begging to be consumed.

He played with the possibility of its sharp edges that could cut like a paring knife. Bob liked the corners, their ability to be dog-eared, folded, and incised in seemingly infinite ways that could create a whole new shape. Manipulated by his hand’s desires: origami, photographs, flyers, and invitations. But best of all, books. He believed that he could make one from the dexterity of his very own limbs; write one of those from the depths of his very own imagination; publish one for the public and patrons alike. The latter, his ultimate goal.

His forlorn dreams stayed just that: wishful but intangible.

During his lunch break, he zoned out in the backroom while eating a ham sandwich, entertaining a daydream that habitually clogged his nine-to-five thoughts. He latched onto the quixotic fantasy like a feeding tick, using its desirable details as sustenance to get him through the last couple hours, the final stretch, of his work week.

It went; hopping into his dead-beat forest green Yukon-XL, he’d drive on autopilot the entire journey along highway US-50. He imagined letting his bare foot hang out the window, his long toes braiding the wind, a Newport hanging out his chapped lips like a dog's tongue. Playing with his white Bic lighter out of habit, the incendiary flame would lick the air similarly. After his first cigarette, he’d light another until his pack ran dry, replenishing his nicotine and gas-guzzling car with the cheapest grade at the next fuel station he saw. For four long days, his eyes would meet the road, the lines of road would meet the horizon, the horizon would meet his destination, convoluted and fuzzy by the many mirages. Making it to the dense forests of Northern California, he’d situate himself in a wooden cabin surrounded by welcoming neighbors: Big Leaf Maple, Douglas Fir, Gray Pine, Coast Redwood and Giant Sequoia.

Then, respectfully, he’d choose the most magnificent one. It couldn’t be determined by reason alone, but a selective intuition. A branch that barreled and corkscrewed at an abnormal angle. The glistening of puttering pointy leaves. Flaky bark that pulls apart, the trunk shedding its protective layers like the ornate scales of a snake.

He craved an aberration; so much so that he could almost taste it; a mouth that salivates before even devouring that first bite. But he stayed within the comfortable confines of his routines; naught days bleeding into naught nights, thoughts shaded by his skull, wasting and withering away in that chasm of cold and bleeding squandering.

One bright morning, years later, only a couple off from retirement, he woke up in a mood more emotive, his senses vehemently erect. He heard everything a little louder and felt everything a little deeper, a random one degree off equilibrium.

Mr. Smith’s face, looking pallid from another decade below fluorescent lights, contorted in concentration as he crouched down, his body’s automatic system feeding a fresh pack of paper into a photocopy machine. The store swung open. Ting-a-ling! announced the bell, alerting him that there were customers in the store.

His head rang.

Tick, tick. Tick, tick. Tick, tick. Tick, tick. Tick, tick. Tick, tick. Tick, tick. Tick, tick. BrrrrrrrrrDingdongrrrrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiTingiiiiiDingdongdingdongiiiinnnnnn nnngTinggggggggggggggggTinggggggggggggggggggggggTinggggggDingdingdongdingggggggg gggggggggggTingggggggggggggggggggggggTingggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggTinggg gggDingdonggggggggTingggggggggg!

Ting! Ting! Ting! Ting! Ting!

His attention was three thousand miles away. But he was brought back by a gentle tap on his shoulder.

Turning around, there was a golden boy, sunshine emanating from his little human form. “How can I help you?” the taciturn manager asked, cringing at the croak of his voice, coming out in different pitches from disuse.

“Can I have one of those?” asked the boy, perhaps seven or eight years old, pointing at the blank eight and a half by eleven paper.

Mr. Smith nodded, passing him the top sheet picked from the appliance, watching as he smiled and ran away to show his mother, who nodded, as if to say good job, good boy, who pulled out a stash of markers from her purse, allowing him to pick a color – red, blue, yellow – he chose the former, clutching it in his hand while the man, from his perch, watched the boy traverse across the store’s length, weaving through machines, running across the gray tiled floors, eventually landing in the middle, plopping himself down, entranced, all giggles, inches away from the store supervisor. His small feet were close enough to Mr. Smith’s faux-leather loafer that if they both wiggled their toes, they would touch.

As if in vignette, Mr. Smith obliquely watched the boy illustrate an image out of different sized shapes and lines; a family – a mother, a father, a child – their stick hands touching, faces all smiley under the sun, the long rays beaming down on them, their bodies framed by a triangle home in the background and shaded by a large tree; a picture so simple, yet so sublime, a single tear rolled down his cheek like rain on a windowpane.

The mother picked up her copies from a nearby printer, paid, and her son, kvelling with his wide smile, handed her the finished picture at the register, and for a brief moment, not long at all, the mother studied it, and thanked him with a big kiss on the cheek. Then, hand-in-hand, they walked out the store into the sunshine. Ting-a-ling!

This providential interaction induced a vagary, an inflection point, a sudden and sharp tug on the reins of his life's course; he an overworked carriage horse, balking, unable to trot along the aimless routes of apathy any further. It was a trail that teetered on the edge of a crag, to jump or not, to stay or to go.

This time, he’d not let himself waste another second, another hour, God forbid another year, decaying in this rancid radius. Why he couldn’t evade it for forty years, he couldn’t say. But the necessity of this very moment, the fleeting rapture of his future dawning on him, that he knew he had to seize. Otherwise, he couldn’t, didn’t want to, imagine where he’d be in another ten years.

Was the decision a flip of a switch? Did he throw a lucky double die? Roll the red in roulette? Or was it the Russian kind, one bullet in the barrel, a revolver’s swivel, a tickled squeeze of the trigger, it’s shot implanting an idea into his mind?

The man picked up his special ballpoint pen, moistened his mouth, scribbled a message, and placed it in an envelope. Licking it from edge to edge, the taste of gluey chalk left in his mouth, he addressed the letter to the photocopy shop owner, left it on his desk, grabbed his briefcase before heading west.

Eventually, whenever his boss would come to the note, the man out the door, long gone, long ago, the only two words on the page would read, I quit.

He shed almost every possession he owned, his house, the furniture in it, even his name. From now on, he called himself the Tree Butcher. First name Tree, last Butcher. The “the” an accessory, a declaration as himself being the only one.

Relieved from all of his assets, he purchased a couple acres of land between Redding and Sacramento, a remote area a couple hours drive from the Sierra Nevada range, its rolling mountains a vertebrae in the very backbone of the American Cordilleras. For the first time, he only had his eyes set on the future, a cross country journey that would take him way beyond the vanishing point on America’s Loneliest Road and into the very setting of his repetitive daydream: a woody forest, peaks looming in the distance, a cabin illuminated and warmed by a cracking furnace. Maple would have the largest backyard yet, birds and mice and rodents susceptible to her every caprice.

With this in mind, the Tree Butcher drove fast and straight, direct from east to west, stopping intermittently to take a piss or nap or fill up or have a smoke. He kept one CD from his collection that he listened to, Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. Otherwise it was those dead-end FM stations; that radio static like pulling into a vacant parking lot, its buzz the perfect medium to ideate those pithy one-liners for his best-selling narrative.

His eyes, once cloaked by the veil of his poignant lifestyle, were now limpid. Like having a cataract removed. Like he performed the surgery himself.

No longer did a person that he encountered on the road, at the gas pump, in line at check out, look into his pupils and see a mirror image. They noticed flinty fervor, the type of feeling you can't feign.

Before, he led his life by the whims of probability, always reacting in spite of the universe’s mercurial mood swings. But as the Tree Butcher pulled into the long and winding gravel driveway of his new property, a new found autonomy bubbled inside him, his decisions no longer made by chance but choice.

The cabin had one bedroom and one bath built from the ground up. In his head, he criticized the previous owner; the exterior’s logs, Eastern White Pine, not native to the region, were imported, despite the cabin being shrouded by all the necessary natural resources.

Through the front door, there was a small foyer that led to the living room, unpacking as he made his way through, his plush couch and weathered leather armchair laid out before the furnace. To the left of the living room, there was a kitchen with a gas stove and on the countertop, he set out his wooden knife block, sliding in his shears, carving knife and meaty cleaver. Making his way around the perimeter of his quaint home, he lined all his books on all the windowsills. Filtered by the trees outside, the midafternoon light was dappled, illuminating the Tree Butcher’s own dispersed library and engilding the handles of his pointed blades.

After unboxing what little belongings he brought with him, he immediately beelined towards the backyard, set on the shed at the treeline. He hung up the tools he purchased from the closest town’s Super Walmart, all except the ax.

Outside, the withered leaves crunched under each hefty step he took. In a couple of weeks, the sere brush would start to form mounds. With that in mind and no time to waste, the Tree Butcher picked up his honed felling ax, the hickory handle acting as an extension of his stout arms. It was heavy, but molded to his strong grip. Weighing it in his hands, he cranked it back high above his shoulder, the body pointing at the meager, woodsy target. The head would slice the air first, WHOMPF! and then the tree, THUNK! THUNK! THUNK!

Over and over again he hacked at it until his hands were flaming raw red. With one final sweep, the tree went KIRPLUNK! shockwaves sent scurrying across the ground, his feet rippled by crawling crests.

Soon enough, he’d take its meat, crushing it down to a viscous pulp of fiber and glue. First, sift out the lignin. Then, rearrange the cellulose. Last, filter it through mesh screens. All thoroughly researched, a tried and tested methodology he developed to make a slip of perfect paper.

Months after moving in, all settled into the austere cabin, he was finally living. Leading a life how he imagined a person is supposed to live – with substance; purpose. Maple came and went as she pleased. Meowing at the backdoor, she called in for food and pets. Back out she went to play and explore. Like her owner, she preferred the organic perfumes of the forest, its putrid ambrosia composed from sky, soot, and soil. Like Maple, the Tree Butcher’s days were more or less the same: hacking, sawing, sifting, filtering, bleaching, sanding.

Though, each day, he chose a slightly larger prey, those callused hands much stronger now, his body more firm. Within the first month, had tackled those saplings, and although fruitful, he now found the exiguous exterior to be uninteresting. It was a natural transition, a graduation of sorts, to now tackle those towering pines. So he did. He felled the skinny things down, carving them into smaller hunks, peeling the skin off to tenderize then process it.

But ideally, the Tree Butcher was more interested in the big boys, liked the look of the monoliths. Those mouth-gaping sequoias, so spectacular, so grandiose, made him feel like an ant next to a human. But not quite at that level of expertise, he figured, eventually, he’d get there. Maybe next year, he thought. Take the whole season to butcher one beauty down. Although his days were more or less the same, he had a nice simple life, the kind that he always dreamed of. The kind where he no longer looked at the clock.

One fall evening, the Tree Butcher stayed out late to fulfill his tactile duties in preparation for the soon short winter days. His project was halfway done, on pace to be finished before the onslaught of cold weather.

He held up a dried sheet finished that very day, translucent in front of the setting sun, placing it on his thick stack of paper slips. Once he finished a couple hundred more, then the Tree Butcher could finally sit down and write his novel, the smells of the pine he processed perforating from the page.

The low-hanging gibbous moon intruded a blushing sky, with it, a blanket of indigo then black. Stars would soon start to flood the benighted canopy; a firmament, an expansive ceiling, the only cap on his jar of desires.

Finishing up his nightly cigarette, he tossed it in the outside fire pit. Walking indoors, he reheated his microwave dinner, eating in front of the low-volume television. Dickens laid open on his lap. He read for a little until his eyes started to tire, his head lolling forward on the brink of sleep. Crawling into bed, he dreamt. He was no longer the Tree Butcher. He was a child.

Hazy laughs emanating, his younger self lay in a field, a stark shine hanging high, around the same age as that golden boy from the store. The light was orange and bright, apparent even behind Bobby’s closed eyes. He felt the dewy grass feathering his t-shirt. His hair scratched his cheek, puppeted by the wind's streams. The warmth of the sun radiated hot on his skin. When sat too long, it would singe.

He started to overheat.

Turning his head to the side, his right cheek making contact with the ground, he gazed upon a bower of oaks, marking the distant circumference of the park. He longed to get there, refuge from this sultry sejourn, but his body was melting, spreading itself across the earth’s surface, like butter on scorching pavement.

Playing voices squealed as he basked. Bird’s chirped. Bees buzzed. The clock of time rewinded.

The sun burned hotter. It was hot like fire.

And when he woke up, that’s what he saw.

Flames. Licking, engulfing, and destroying.

Every tree. Every inch of log and wood. Each sliver of paper. Every hair on his body. The hours of his life counted by the iron bells ringing once again.

All ash, people and paper burn the same.