The Bean Trees (14 page)

“Three years?”

“Yes.” He seemed almost undecided about telling me this. “Sometimes in an environment of physical or emotional deprivation a child will simply stop growing, although certain internal maturation does continue. It’s a condition we call failure to thrive.”

“But she’s thriving now. I ought to know, I buy her clothes.”

“Well, yes, of course. The condition is completely reversible.”

“Of course,” I said.

He put up more of the x-rays in the window, saying things like “spiral fibular fracture here” and “excellent healing” and “some contraindications for psycho-motor development.” I couldn’t really listen. I looked through the bones to the garden on the other side. There was a cactus with bushy arms and a coat of yellow spines as thick as fur. A bird had built her nest in it. In and out she flew among the horrible spiny branches, never once hesitating. You just couldn’t imagine how she’d made a home in there.

Mattie had given me the whole day off, so I had arranged to meet Lou Ann at the zoo after Turtle’s appointment. We took the bus. Mattie and I hadn’t gotten around to fixing the ignition on my car, so starting it up was a production I saved for special occasions.

On the way over I tried to erase the words “failure to thrive” from my mind. I prepared myself, instead, for the experience of being with Lou Ann and the kids in a brand-new set of hazards. There would be stories of elephants going berserk and trampling their keep
ers; of children’s little hands snapped off and swallowed whole by who knows what seemingly innocent animal. When I walked up to the gate and saw her standing there with tears streaming down her face, I automatically checked Dwayne Ray in his stroller to see if any of his parts were missing.

People were having to detour around her to get through the turnstile, so I led her to one side. She sobbed and talked at the same time.

“He says he’s going to join up with any rodeo that will take a one-legged clown, which I know isn’t right because the clown’s the hardest job, they jump around and distract them so they won’t tromple on the cowboys’ heads.”

I was confused. Was there an elephant somewhere in this story? “Lou Ann, honey, you’re not making sense. Do you want to go home?”

She shook her head.

“Then should we go on into the zoo?”

She nodded. I managed to get everybody through the turnstile and settled on a bench in the shade between the duck pond and the giant tortoises. The sound of water trickling over a little waterfall into the duck pond made it seem cool. I tried to get the kids distracted long enough for Lou Ann to tell me what was up.

“Look, Turtle, look at those old big turtles,” I said. The words “childhood identity crisis” from one of Lou Ann’s magazines sprang to mind, but Turtle seemed far more interested in the nibbled fruit halves strewn around their pen. “Apple,” she said. She seemed recovered from her doctor’s visit.

“He said something about the Colorado-Montana circuit, which I don’t even know what that means, only that he’s leaving town. And he said he might not be sending any checks for a while until he’d got on his feet. He actually said on his foot, can you believe that? The way Angel sees himself, it’s like he’s an artificial leg with a person attached.”

A woman on a nearby bench stopped reading and tilted her head back a little, the way people do when they want to overhear your conversation. She had on white sneakers, white shorts, and a visor. It looked as if she must have been on her way to a country club to play tennis before some wrongful bus change landed her here.

“It’s her husband that’s the problem,” I told the woman. “He’s a former rodeo man.”

“Taylor!” Lou Ann whispered, but the woman ignored us and took a drag from her cigarette, which she balanced beside her on the front edge of the bench. She shook out her newspaper and folded back the front page. It showed a large color picture of Liz Taylor with a black man in a silver vest and no shirt, and there was a huge block headline that said,
WORLD’S YOUNGEST MOM-TO-BE: INFANT PREGNANT AT BIRTH
. Apparently the headline wasn’t related to the picture.

A kid with orange foam-rubber plugs in his ears whizzed by on a skateboard. Another one whizzed right behind him. They had a fancy way of tipping up their boards to go over the curbs.

“They shouldn’t allow those in here. Somebody will get killed,” Lou Ann said, blowing her nose. I
noticed that one of the giant tortoises in the pen was pursuing another one around and around a clump of shrubby palm trees.

“So what about Angel?” I asked.

A woman in a flowery dress sat down on the bench with the country-club woman. She had very dark, tightly wrinkled skin and wore enormous green high-heeled pumps. The country-club woman’s cigarette, on the bench between them, waved up a little boundary line of smoke.

“He said there would be papers to sign for the divorce,” Lou Ann said.

“So what’s the problem, exactly?” I didn’t mean to be unkind. I really didn’t know.

“Well, what am I going to do?”

“Well, to be honest, I don’t think it much matters what you do. It probably doesn’t make any difference what kind of a divorce you get, or even if you get one at all. The man is gone, honey. If he stops sending checks I don’t imagine there’s anything to be done, not if he’s out riding the range in God’s country. I guess you’ll have to look for a job, sooner or later.”

Lou Ann started sobbing again. “Who would want to hire me? I can’t do anything.”

“You don’t necessarily have to know how to do something to get a job,” I reasoned. “I’d never made a french fry in my life before I got hired at the Burger Derby.” She blew her nose again.

“So how’d she get born pregnant?” the green-shoes woman asked the woman with the newspaper.

“It was twins, a boy and a girl,” the woman told
her. “They had sexual intercourse in the womb. Doctors say the chances against it are a million to one.”

“Yeah,” the green-shoes woman said in a tired way. She bent over and shuffled through a large paper shopping bag, which was printed with a bright paisley pattern and had sturdy-looking green handles. All three of us waited for her to say something more, or to produce some wonderful answer out of her bag, but she didn’t.

Lou Ann said to me, in a quieter voice, “You know, the worst thing about it is that he wouldn’t ask me to come with him.”

“Well, how in the world could you go with him? What about Dwayne Ray?”

“It’s not that I’d
want
to, but he could have asked. He did say if I wanted to come along he wouldn’t stop me, but he wouldn’t actually say he wanted me to.”

“I don’t follow you, exactly.”

“You know, that was always just the trouble with Angel. I never really felt like he would put up a fight for me. I would have left him a long time ago, but I was scared to death he’d just say, ‘Bye! Don’t let the door hit your butt on the way out.’”

“Well, maybe it’s not that he doesn’t want you, Lou Ann. Maybe he’s just got better sense than to ask you and a four-month-old baby to come along on the Montana-Colorado circuit, or whatever. I can just see it. Dwayne Ray growing up to be one of those tattooed midgets that do somersaults in the sideshow and sell the popcorn at intermission.”

“It’s not a circus, for God’s sake, it’s a rodeo.” Lou
Ann honked in her handkerchief and laughed in spite of herself.

At the edge of the pond there was a gumball machine full of peanuts, for feeding to the ducks, I presumed. But these ducks were so well fed that even where peanuts were scattered by the fistful at the water’s edge they just paddled right on by with beady, bored eyes.

Turtle dug one out of the mud and brought it to me. “Bean,” she said.

“This is a peanut,” I told her.

“Beanut.” She made trip after trip, collecting peanuts and mounding them into a pile. Dwayne Ray, in his stroller, was sleeping soundly through his first zoo adventure.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the x-rays, and how Turtle’s body was carrying around secret scars that would always be there. I wanted to talk to Lou Ann about it, but this wasn’t the time.

“So why are you taking his side?” Lou Ann wanted to know.

“I’m not taking his side. Whose side?”

“You are too. Or at least you’re not taking mine. Whenever I complain about Angel you won’t agree with me that he’s a scum bucket. You just listen and don’t say anything.”

I picked up a green bottle cap and threw it in the duck pond. The ducks didn’t even turn their heads. “Lou Ann,” I said, “in high school I used to lose friends that way like crazy. You think he’s a scum bucket now, but sooner or later you might want him back. And then you’d be too embarrassed to look me
in the eye and admit you’re still in love with this jerk whose anatomical parts we’ve been laughing about for the last two months.”

“It’s over between me and Angel. I know it is.”

“Just the same. I don’t want you to have to choose him or me.”

She dug through her purse looking for a clean handkerchief. “I just can’t get over him leaving like that.”

“When, now or last October?” I was starting to get annoyed. “He moved out over six months ago, Lou Ann. Did you think he’d just stepped out for some fresh air? It’s April now, for God’s sake.”

“Did you see that?” Lou Ann pointed at Turtle. Her head had bobbed up like an apple on a string, and her eyes fixed on me as if she had seen the Lord incarnate.

“What’s up, Turtle?” I asked, but she just stared fearfully from her pile of peanuts.

“She did that one other time that I know of. When we were talking about the phone bill you thought we’d got gypped on,” Lou Ann said.

“So what are you saying, that she understands when we’re mad? I already knew that.”

“No, I’m saying that bill was for April. She looks up when you say April, especially if you sound mad.”

Turtle did look up again.

“Don’t you get it?” Lou Ann asked.

I didn’t.

“That’s her name! April’s her name!” Now Lou Ann was kind of hopping in her seat. “April, April. Looky here, April. That’s your name, isn’t it? April!”

If it was her name, Turtle had had enough of it.
She had gone back to patting the sides of her peanut mound.

“You have to do it scientifically,” I said. “Say a bunch of other words and just casually throw that one in, and see if she looks up.”

“Okay, you do it. I can’t think of enough words.”

“Rhubarb,” I said. “Cucumber. Porky Pig. Budweiser. April.” Turtle looked up right on cue.

“May June July August September!” Lou Ann shouted. “April!”

“Lord, Lou Ann, the child isn’t deaf.”

“It’s April,” she declared. “That’s her legal name.”

“Maybe it’s something that just sounds like April. Maybe it’s Mabel.”

Lou Ann made a face.

“Okay, April, that’s not bad. I think she’s kind of used to Turtle though. I think we ought to keep calling her that now.”

A fat duck with a shiny green head had finally decided Turtle’s cache of peanuts was too much to ignore. He came up on shore and slowly advanced, stretching his neck forward.

“Ooooh, oooh!” Turtle shouted, shaking her hands so vigorously that he wheeled around and waddled back toward the water.

“Turtle’s okay for a nickname,” Lou Ann said, “but you have to think of the future. What about when she goes to school? Or like when she’s eighty years old? Can you picture an eighty-year-old woman being called Turtle?”

“An eighty-year-old Indian woman, I could. You have to remember she’s Indian.”

“Still,” Lou Ann said.

“April Turtle, then.”

“No! That sounds like some weird kind of air freshener.”

“So be it,” I said, and it was.

We sat for a while listening to the zoo sounds. There were more trees here than most places in Tucson. I’d forgotten how trees full of bird sounds made you sense the world differently: that life didn’t just stop at eye level. Between the croaks and whistles of the blackbirds there were distant cat roars, monkey noises, kid noises.

“I’ll swan, the sound of that running water’s making me have to go,” Lou Ann said.

“There’s bathrooms over by where we came in.”

Lou Ann took a mirror out of her purse. “Death warmed over,” she said, and went off to find a bathroom.

The giant tortoise, I noticed, had caught up to its partner and was proceeding to climb on top of it from behind. Its neck and head strained forward as it climbed, and to tell the truth, it looked exactly like a bald, toothless old man. The knobby shells scraping together made a hollow sound. By the time Lou Ann came back from the bathroom, the old fellow on top was letting out loud grunts that rang out all the way down to the military macaws.

“What on earth? I could hear that noise up by the bathrooms,” Lou Ann declared. “Well, I’ll be. I always did wonder how they’d do it in those shells. That’d be worse than those panty girdles we used to wear in high school to hold our stockings up. Remember those?”

A teenage couple holding hands bounced up to investigate, giggled, and moved quickly away. A woman with an infant on her hip turned the baby’s head away and walked on. Lou Ann and I laughed till we cried. The country-club woman gave us a look, folded her paper, stabbed out her cigarette, and crunched off down the gravel path.

E
speranza tried to kill herself. Estevan came to the back door and told me in a quiet voice that she had taken a bottle of baby aspirin.

I couldn’t really understand why he had come. “Shouldn’t you be with her?” I asked.

He said she was with Mattie. Mattie had found her almost immediately and rushed her to a clinic she knew of in South Tucson where you didn’t have to show papers. I hadn’t even thought of this—all the extra complications that must have filled their lives even in times of urgency. Mattie once told me about a migrant lemon picker in Phoenix who lost a thumb in a machine and bled to death because the nearest hospital turned him away.

“Is she going to be all right?”

How could he know? But he said yes, that she was. “They might or might not have to vacuum her stom
ach,” he explained. He seemed to know the whole story, including the ending, and I began to suspect it was something that had happened before.

It was after sunset and the moon was already up. A fig grew by the back door, an old, stubborn tree that was slow to leaf out. The moon threw shadows of fig branches that curled like empty hands across Estevan’s face and his chest. Something inside this man was turning inside out.

He followed me into the kitchen where I had been cutting up carrots and cubes of cheese for Turtle’s lunch tomorrow.

To keep my hands from shaking I pushed the knife carefully through stiff orange carrot flesh against the cutting board. “I don’t really know what to say when something like this happens,” I told him. “Anything I can think of to talk about seems ridiculous next to a person’s life or death.”

He nodded.

“Can I get you something? Did you eat?” I opened the refrigerator door, but he waved it shut. “At least a beer, then,” I said. I opened two beers and set one on the table in front of him. From my earliest memory, times of crisis seemed to end up with women in the kitchen preparing food for men. “I can see right now that I’m going to do one of two things here,” I told Estevan. “Either shove food at you, or run off at the mouth. When I get nervous I fall back on good solid female traditions.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m not hungry, so talk.” I had never heard him say, “It’s okay,” before. Restaurant work was corrupting Estevan’s perfect English.

I took his statement to mean that it was okay to talk about things that weren’t especially important, so I did. “Lou Ann took the baby over to her mother-in-law’s for some kind of a weekend-long reunion,” I said, swallowing too much beer. “They still consider her part of the family, but of course she won’t go over when Angel’s there so they have to work it all out, but now of course it’s easier since Angel’s left town. It’s totally nuts. See, they’re Catholic, they don’t recognize divorce.” I felt my face go red. “I guess you’re Catholic too.”

But he wasn’t offended. “More or less,” he said. “Catholic by birth.”

“Did you have any idea she was going to do this?”

“No. I don’t know.”

“There’s not a thing you could have done, anyway. Really.” I swept the carrot pieces into a plastic bag and put it in the refrigerator. “I knew this kid in high school, Scotty Richey? Everybody said Scotty was a genius, mainly because he was real quiet and wore these thick glasses and understood trigonometry. He killed himself on his sixteenth birthday, just when everybody else was thinking, ‘Well, now Scotty’ll learn to drive and maybe get a car and go out on dates,’ you know, and that his complexion was bound to clear up and so forth. Bang, they find him dead in a barn with all these electrical wires strung around his neck. In the paper they said it was an accident but nobody actually believed that. Scotty had done probably five hundred different projects with electricity for 4-H.”

“Four-H?”

“It’s a club for farm kids where you raise lambs or make an apron or wire a den lamp out of a bowling pin, things like that. I never was in it. You had to pay.”

“I see.”

“Do you want to sit in the living room?” I asked him. He followed me into the other room and I scooted Snowboots off the sofa. When Estevan sat down next to me my heart was bumping so hard I wondered if I was going to have a heart attack. Just what Estevan needed would be another woman falling apart on him.

“So nobody could understand about Scotty,” I said. “But the way I see it is, he just didn’t have anybody. In our school there were different groups you would run with, depending on your station in life. There were the town kids, whose daddies owned the hardware store or what have you—they were your cheerleaders and your football players. Then there were hoodlums, the motorcycle types that cut down trees on Halloween. And then there were the rest of us, the poor kids and the farm kids. Greasers, we were called, or Nutters. The main rule was that there was absolutely no mixing. Do you understand what I mean?”

“Yes,” he said. “In India they have something called the caste system. Members of different castes cannot marry or even eat together. The lowest caste is called the Untouchables.”

“But the Untouchables can touch each other?”

“Yes.”

“Then that’s it, exactly. The Nutters were the bottom of the pile, but we had each other. We all got invited to the prom and everything, from inside our
own group. But poor Scotty with his electricity and his trigonometry, he just didn’t belong to any group. It was like we were all the animals on Noah’s ark that came in pairs, except of his kind there was only the one.”

It struck me how foolishly I was chattering about something that was neither here nor there. Mama would call this “rattling your teeth.” I drank about half my beer without saying another word.

Then I said, “I could kind of see it with Scotty, but Esperanza had somebody. Has somebody. How could she want to leave you? It’s not fair.” I realized I was furious with Esperanza. I wondered if he was too, but didn’t dare ask. We sat there in the shadowy living room thinking our thoughts. You could hear us swallowing beer.

Then out of the clear blue sky he said, “In Guatemala City the police use electricity for interrogation. They have something called the ‘telephone,’ which is an actual telephone of the type they use in the field. It has its own generator, operated by a handle.” He held up one hand and turned the other one in a circle in front of the palm.

“A crank? Like the old-fashioned telephones?”

“Operated with a crank,” he said. “The telephones are made in the United States.”

“What do you mean, they use them for interrogation? Do you mean they question you over the telephone?”

Estevan seemed annoyed with me. “They disconnect the receiver wire and tape the two ends to your body. To sensitive parts.” He just stared at me until it
hit me like a truck. I felt it in my stomach muscles, just the way I did when I realized that for nearly an hour I had been in the presence of Newt Hardbine’s corpse. There is this horrible thing staring you in the face and you’re blabbering about bowling-pin lamps and 4-H.

“I’ll get us another beer,” I said. I went to the kitchen and brought back the rest of the six pack, carrying it by the plastic rings like a purse. I popped two of them open and plumped back down on the sofa, no longer caring what I looked like. The schoolgirl nerves that had possessed me half an hour ago seemed ridiculous now; this was like having a crush on some guy only to find out he’s been dating your mother or your math teacher. This man was way beyond me.

“I don’t know exactly how to say this,” I said. “I thought I’d had a pretty hard life. But I keep finding out that life can be hard in ways I never knew about.”

“I can see that it would be easier not to know,” he said.

“That’s not fair, you don’t see at all. You think you’re the foreigner here, and I’m the American, and I just look the other way while the President or somebody sends down this and that, shiploads of telephones to torture people with. But nobody asked my permission, okay? Sometimes I feel like I’m a foreigner too. I come from a place that’s so different from here you would think you’d stepped right off the map into some other country where they use dirt for decoration and the national pastime is having babies. People don’t look the same, talk the same, nothing.
Half the time I have no idea what’s going on around me here.”

A little shadow moved in the doorway and we both jumped. It was Turtle.

“You’re a rascal,” I said. “You hop back to bed this minute.”

She took one hop backwards, and both Estevan and I tried not to smile. “This minute,” I said, in the meanest voice I could muster. She hopped backwards through the door, clapping her hands one time with each hop. We could hear her hopping and clapping all the way back through the kitchen and into bed. Snowboots jumped onto the back of the sofa and sat behind my neck, waiting for something. He made me nervous.

“All I am saying is, don’t be so sure until you have all the facts,” Estevan said. “You cannot know what Esperanza has had to live through.”

I was confused. He was picking up the middle of a conversation I didn’t even know we’d started.

“No,” I said. “I don’t. Or you either.”

He looked away from me and touched the corners of his eyes, and I knew he was crying in the secret way men feel they have to do. He said something I couldn’t hear very well, and a name, “Ismene.”

I shoved Snowboots gently away from the back of my neck. “What?” I asked.

“Do you remember the day we walked in the desert? And you asked why Esperanza was staring at Turtle, and I told you she looked very much like a child we knew in Guatemala.” I nodded. “The child was Ismene.”

I was afraid to understand this. I asked him if he meant that Ismene was their daughter, and Estevan said yes, that she was. She was taken in a raid on their neighborhood in which Esperanza’s brother and two friends were killed. They were members of Estevan’s teachers’ union. He told me in what condition they had found the bodies. He wasn’t crying as he told me this, and I wasn’t either. It’s hard to explain, but a certain kind of horror is beyond tears. Tears would be like worrying about watermarks on the furniture when the house is burning down.

Ismene wasn’t killed; she was taken.

Try as I would, I couldn’t understand this. I was no longer so stupid as to ask why they didn’t call the police, but still I couldn’t see why they hadn’t at least tried to get her back if they knew the police had taken her, and where. “Don’t be upset with me,” I said. “I know I’m ignorant, I’m sorry. Just explain it to me.”

But he wasn’t upset. He seemed to get steadier and more patient when he explained things, as if he were teaching a class. “Esperanza and I knew the names of twenty other union members,” he said. “The teachers’ union did not have open meetings. We worked in cells, and communicated by message. Most people knew only four other members by name. This is what I am saying: In Guatemala, you are careful. If you want to change something you can find yourself dead. This was not the—what do you call? The P.T.A.”

“I understand.”

“Three members had just been killed, including Esperanza’s brother, but seventeen were still alive.
She and I knew every one of those seventeen, by name. Can you understand that this made us more useful alive than dead? For us to go after Ismene is what they wanted.”

“So they didn’t kill her, they just held her? Like…I don’t know what. A worm on a goddamn hook?”

“A goddamn hook.” He was looking away from me again. “Sometimes, after a while, usually…these children are adopted. By military or government couples who cannot have children.”

I felt numb, as if I had taken some drug. “And you picked the lives of those seventeen people over getting your daughter back?” I said. “Or at least a chance at getting her back?”

“What would you do, Taylor?”

“I don’t know. I hate to say it, but I really don’t know. I can’t even begin to think about a world where people have to make choices like that.”

“You live in that world,” he said quietly, and I knew this, but I didn’t want to. I started to cry then, just tears streaming out all over and no stopping them. Estevan put his arm around me and I sobbed against his shoulder. The dam had really broken.

I was embarrassed. “I’m going to get snot on your clean shirt,” I said.

“I don’t know what it is, snot.”

“Good,” I said.

There was no way on earth I could explain what I felt, that my whole life had been running along on dumb luck and I hadn’t even noticed.

“For me, even bad luck brings good things,” I told him finally. “I threw out a rocker arm on my car and I
got Turtle. I drove over broken glass on an off ramp and found Mattie.” I crossed my arms tightly over my stomach, trying to stop myself from gulping air. “Do you know, I spent the first half of my life avoiding motherhood and tires, and now I’m counting them as blessings?”

Turtle showed up in the doorway again. I don’t know how long she had been there, but she was looking at me with eyes I hadn’t seen on her since that night on the Oklahoma plain.

“Come here, pumpkin,” I said. “I’m okay, just sprung a leak, don’t you worry. Do you want a drink of water?” She shook her head. “Just want to cuddle a few minutes?” She nodded, and I took her on my lap. Snowboots jumped onto the sofa again. I could feel the weight of him moving slowly across the back and down the other arm, and from there he curled into Estevan’s lap. In less than a minute Turtle was asleep in my arms.

When I was a child I had a set of paper dolls. They were called the Family of Dolls, and each one had a name written on the cardboard base under the feet. Their names were Mom, Dad, Sis, and Junior. I played with those dolls in a desperate, loving way until their paper arms and heads disintegrated. I loved them in spite of the fact that their tight-knit little circle was as far beyond my reach as the football players’ and cheerleaders’ circle would be in later years.

But that night I looked at the four of us there on the sofa and my heart hurt and I thought: in a different world we could have been the Family of Dolls.

Turtle wiggled. “No,” she said, before she was even awake.

“Yes,” I said. “Time for bed.” I carried her in and tucked her under the sheet, prying her hand off my T-shirt and attaching it to her yellow stuffed bear, which had a pink velvet heart sewed onto its chest.