The Bean Trees (3 page)

The place was cleared out except for two men at the counter, a white guy and an Indian. They both wore cowboy hats. I thought to myself, I guess now Indians can be cowboys too, though probably not vice versa. The Indian man wore a brown hat and had a brown, fine-looking face that reminded me of an eagle, not that I had ever actually seen an eagle. He was somewhere between young and not so young. I
tried to imagine having a great grandpa with a nose like that and such a smooth chin. The other one in the gray hat looked like he had a mean streak to him. You can tell the kind that’s looking for trouble. They were drinking beers and watching Oral on the silent TV, and once in a great while they would say something to each other in a low voice. They might have been on their first couple of beers, or they might have been drinking since sunup—with some types you can’t tell until it’s too late. I tried to recall where I had been at sunup that day. It was in St. Louis, Missouri, where they have that giant McDonald’s thing towering over the city, but that didn’t seem possible. That seemed like about a blue moon ago.

“You got anything to eat that costs less than a dollar?” I asked the old guy behind the counter. He crossed his arms and looked at me for a minute, as if nobody had ever asked him this before.

“Ketchup,” the gray-hat cowboy said. “Earl serves up a mean bottle of ketchup, don’t you, Earl?” He slid the ketchup bottle down the counter so hard it rammed my cup and spilled out probably five cents’ worth of coffee.

“You think being busted is a joke?” I asked him. I slid the bottle back and hit his beer mug dead center, although it did not spill. He looked at me and then looked back to the TV, like I wasn’t the kind of thing to be bothered with. It made me want to spit nails.

“He don’t mean nothing by it, miss,” Earl told me. “He’s got a bug up his butt. I can get you a burger for ninety-nine cents.”

“Okay,” I told Earl.

Maybe ten or fifteen minutes passed before the food came, and I kept myself awake trying to guess what the fat-hands man was saying on the TV screen. Earl’s place could have done with a scrub. I could see through the open door into the kitchen, and the black grease on the back of the stove looked like it had been there since the Dawn of Man. The air in there was so hot and stale I felt like I had to breathe it twice to get any oxygen out of it. The coffee did nothing to wake me up. My food came just as I was about to step outside for some air.

I noticed another woman in the bar sitting at one of the tables near the back. She was a round woman, not too old, wrapped in a blanket. It was not an Indian blanket but a plain pink wool blanket with a satin band sewed on the edge, exactly like one Mama and I had at home. Her hair lay across her shoulders in a pair of skinny, lifeless plaits. She was not eating or drinking, but fairly often she would glance up at the two men, or maybe just one of them, I couldn’t really tell. The way she looked at them made me feel like if I had better sense I’d be scared.

Earl’s ninety-nine-cent burger brought me around a little, though I still felt like my head had been stuffed with that fluffy white business they use in life preservers. I imagined myself stepping outside and the wind just scattering me. I would float out over the flat, dark plain like the silvery fuzz from a milk-weed pod.

Putting it off, I read all the signs on the walls, one by one, which said things like
THEY CAN’T FIRE ME,
SLAVES HAVE TO BE SOLD
and
IN CASE OF FIRE YELL FIRE
. The television kept on saying
PRAISE THE LORD
. 1-800-
THE LORD
. I tried to concentrate on keeping myself all in one place, even if it wasn’t a spot I was crazy about. Then I went outside. The air was cool and I drank it too fast, getting a little dizzy. I sat with my hands on the steering wheel for a few minutes trying to think myself into the right mood for driving all night across Oklahoma.

I jumped when she pecked on the windshield. It was the round woman in the blanket.

“No thanks,” I said. I thought she wanted to wash the windshield, but instead she went around to the other side and opened the door. “You need a lift someplace?” I asked her.

Her body, her face, and her eyes were all round. She was someone you could have drawn a picture of by tracing around dimes and quarters and jar tops. She opened up the blanket and took out something alive. It was a child. She wrapped her blanket around and around it until it became a round bundle with a head. Then she set this bundle down on the seat of my car.

“Take this baby,” she said.

It wasn’t a baby, exactly. It was probably old enough to walk, though not so big that it couldn’t be easily carried. Somewhere between a baby and a person.

“Where do you want me to take it?”

She looked back at the bar, and then looked at me. “Just take it.”

I waited a minute, thinking that soon my mind
would clear and I would understand what she was saying. It didn’t. The child had the exact same round eyes. All four of those eyes were hanging there in the darkness, hanging on me, waiting. The Budweiser sign blinked on and off, on and off, throwing a faint light that made the whites of their eyes look orange.

“Is this your kid?”

She shook her head. “My dead sister’s.”

“Are you saying you want to give me this child?”

“Yes.”

“If I wanted a baby I would have stayed in Kentucky,” I informed her. “I could have had babies coming out my ears by now.”

A man came out of the bar, gray hat or brown hat I couldn’t tell because my car was parked some distance from the door. He got into a pickup truck but didn’t start the ignition or turn on the lights.

“Is that your man in there, in the bar?” I asked her.

“Don’t go back in there. I’m not saying why. Just don’t.”

“Look,” I said, “even if you wanted to, you can’t just give somebody a kid. You got to have the papers and stuff. Even a car has papers, to prove you didn’t steal it.”

“This baby’s got no papers. There isn’t nobody knows it’s alive, or cares. Nobody that matters, like the police or nothing like that. This baby was born in a Plymouth.”

“Well, it didn’t happen this morning,” I said. “Plymouth or no Plymouth, this child has been around long enough for somebody to notice.” I had a
foggy understanding that I wasn’t arguing the right point. This was getting us nowhere.

She put her hands where the child’s shoulders might be, under all that blanket, and pushed it gently back into the seat, trying to make it belong there. She looked at it for a long time. Then she closed the door and walked away.

As I watched her I was thinking that she wasn’t really round. Without the child and the blanket she walked away from my car a very thin woman.

I held the steering wheel and dug my fingernails into my palms, believing the pain might force my brain to wake up and think what to do. While I was thinking, the woman got in the pickup truck and it drove away without lights. I wondered if that was for a reason, or if it just didn’t have headlights. “Praise the Lord,” I said out loud. “At least my car has headlights.”

I thought: I can take this Indian child back into that bar and give it to Earl or whichever of those two guys is left. Just set it on the counter with the salt and pepper and get the hell out of here. Or I can go someplace and sleep, and think of something to do in the morning.

While I was deciding, the lights in the bar flickered out. The Budweiser sign blinked off and stayed off. Another pickup truck swung around in the gravel parking lot and headed off toward the highway.

It took everything I had to push-start the car. Naturally I had not found a hill to park on in Oklahoma. “Shit!” I said. “Shit fire son of a bitch!” I pushed and pushed, jumped in and popped the
clutch, jumped out and pushed some more. I could see the child’s big eyes watching me in the dark.

“This isn’t as dumb as you think,” I said. “It’s easier in Kentucky.”

My car has no actual way of keeping track of miles, but I believe it must have been fifty or more before we came to a town. It was getting cold with no windows, and the poor little thing must have been freezing but didn’t make a peep.

“Can you talk?” I said. I wondered if maybe it spoke something besides English. “What am I supposed to do with you tonight?” I said. “What do you eat?”

I believe that flat places are quieter than hilly ones. The sounds of the cars on the highway seemed to get sucked straight out over the empty fields where there was nothing, not even a silo, to stop them from barreling on forever into the night. I began to think that if I opened my mouth nothing would come out. I hummed to myself to keep some sound in my ears. At that time I would have paid my bottom dollar for a radio. I would even have listened to Oral Roberts. I talked to the poor, dumb-struck child to stay awake, although with every passing mile I felt less sleepy and more concerned that I was doing something extremely strange.

We passed a sign that said some-odd number of miles to the Pioneer Woman Museum. Great, I thought. Now we’re getting somewhere.

“Are you a girl or a boy?” I asked the child. It had a cerealbowl haircut, like pictures you see of Chinese
kids. She or he said nothing. I supposed I would find out eventually.

After a while I began to wonder if perhaps it was dead. Maybe the woman had a dead child, murdered or some such thing, and had put it in my car, and I was riding down the road beside it, talking to it. I had read a story in Senior English about a woman who slept with her dead husband for forty years. It was basically the same idea as the guy and his mother in
Psycho
, except that Norman Bates in
Psycho
was a taxidermist and knew how to preserve his mother so she wouldn’t totally rot out. Indians sometimes knew how to preserve the dead. I had read about Indian mummies out West. People found them in caves. I told myself to calm down. I remembered that the baby’s eyes had been open when she put it down on the seat. But then again, so what if its eyes were open? Had it blinked? What was the penalty for carrying a dead Indian child across state lines?

After a while I smelled wet wool. “Merciful heavens,” I said. “I guess you’re still hanging in there.”

My plan had been to sleep in the car, but naturally my plans had not taken into account a wet, cold kid. “We’re really in trouble now, you know it?” I said. “The next phone booth we come to, I’m going to have to call 1-800-THE LORD.”

The next phone booth we did come to, as a matter of fact, was outside the Mustang Motel. I drove by slowly and checked the place out, but the guy in the office didn’t look too promising.

There were four or five motels pretty much in a row, their little glass-fronted offices shining out over
the highway like TV screens. Some of the offices were empty. In the Broken Arrow Motor Lodge there was a gray-haired woman. Bingo.

I parked under the neon sign of a pink arrow breaking and unbreaking, over and over, and went into the office.

“Hi,” I said to the lady. “Nice evening. Kind of chilly, though.”

She was older than she had looked from outside. Her hands shook when she lifted them off the counter and her head shook all the time, just slightly, like she was trying to signal “No” to somebody behind my back, on the sly.

But she wasn’t, it was just age. She smiled. “Winter’s on its way,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am, it is.”

“You been on the road long?”

“Way too long,” I said. “This place is real nice. It’s a sight for sore eyes. Do you own this place?”

“My son owns it,” she said, her head shaking. “I’m over here nights.”

“So it’s kind of a family thing?”

“Kind of like. My daughter-in-law and me, we do most of the cleaning up and all, and my son does the business end of it. He works in the meat-packing plant over at Ponca City. This here’s kind of a sideline thing.”

“You reckon it’s going to fill up tonight?”

She laughed. “Law, honey, I don’t think this place been filled up since President Truman.” She slowly turned the pages of the big check-in book.

“President Truman stayed here?”

She looked up at me, her eyes swimming through her thick glasses like enormous tadpoles. “Why no, honey, I don’t think so. I’d remember a thing like that.”

“You seem like a very kind person,” I said, “so I’m not going to beat around the bush. I’ve got a big problem. I can’t really afford to pay for a room, and I wouldn’t even bother you except I’ve got a child out in that car that’s wet and cold and looking to catch pneumonia if I don’t get it to bed someplace warm.”

She looked out toward the car and shook her head, but of course I couldn’t tell what that meant. She said, “Well, honey, I don’t know.”

“I’ll take anything you’ve got, and I’ll clean up after myself, and tomorrow morning I’ll change every bed in this place. Or anything else you want me to do. It’s just for one night.”

“Well,” she said, “I don’t know.”

“Let me go get the baby,” I said. “You won’t mind if I just bring the poor kid in here to warm up while you decide.”

The most amazing thing was the way that child held on. From the first moment I picked it up out of its nest of wet blanket, it attached itself to me by its little hands like roots sucking on dry dirt. I think it would have been easier to separate me from my hair.

It’s probably a good thing. I was so tired, and of course I was not in the habit anyway of remembering every minute where I had put down a child, and I think if it had not been stuck to me I might have lost it while I was messing with the car and moving stuff
into the little end room of the Broken Arrow. As it was, I just ended up carrying it back and forth a lot. It’s like the specimens back at the hospital, I told myself. You just have to keep track. It looked like carrying blood and pee was to be my lot in life.

Once we were moved in I spread the blanket over a chair to dry and ran a few inches of warm water in the tub. “First order of business,” I said, “is to get you a bath. We’ll work out the rest tomorrow.” I remembered the time I had found a puppy and wanted to keep it, but first Mama made me spend thirty-five cents a word to run an ad in the paper. “What if it was yours?” she had said. “Think how bad you’d want it back.” The ad I wrote said:
FOUND PUPPY, BROWN SPOTS, NEAR FLOYD’S MILL ROAD
. I had resented how Floyd’s Mill Road was three whole words, a dollar and five cents.