The Bean Trees (4 page)

I thought to myself, I’d pay a hundred and five to get this one back to its rightful owner. But what kind of ad would you run to find out if anybody had lost an Indian child?

All of the baby’s clothes were way too big, with sleeves rolled up and shirt tails wrapped around, and everything wet as mud boots and as hard to get off. There was a bruise twice the size of my thumb on its inner arm. I threw the soggy shirt in the sink to soak. The child’s hands constantly caught my fingers and wouldn’t let go. “You little booger,” I said, shaking my finger and the little fist. “You’re like a mud turtle. If a mud turtle bites you, it won’t let go till it thunders.” I hadn’t any sooner gotten the hands pried loose from my fingers before they grabbed onto my shirt
sleeves and my hair. When I pulled off the pants and the diapers there were more bruises.

Bruises and worse.

The Indian child was a girl. A girl, poor thing. That fact had already burdened her short life with a kind of misery I could not imagine. I thought I knew about every ugly thing that one person does to another, but I had never even thought about such things being done to a baby girl. She sat quietly in the bathtub watching me, and I just prayed she had enough backbone not to fall over and drown, because I had to let her go. I doubled up on the floor at the base of the toilet and tried not to throw up. The floor was linoleum in a pattern that looked like rubber bricks set in mortar. Nothing, not Newt Hardbine or anything else I had ever seen, had made me feel like this.

The kid was splashing like a toad frog. Her fingers were wiggling and slapping at the surface of the water, no doubt trying to grab hold of something. “Here,” I said, and handed her a washcloth that had
BROKEN ARROW
written on the selvage in indelible magic marker. She hugged that wash cloth and smiled. I swear to God.

After I washed and dried her I put her to bed in a T-shirt that one of Mama’s people had brought me one summer from Kentucky Lake. It was tight on me, and said
DAMN I’M GOOD
. I am skinny and flat-chested like a model, and always looked great in that T-shirt if I say so myself. It was turquoise with red letters, and came down past the baby’s knees. “These are good colors,” I said, trying to pull it over her
sleepy, bobbing head. “Indian colors.” Finally her hands were empty and relaxed. She was asleep.

I took out the stamps I had brought from home wrapped in waxed paper, and licked one and stuck it on my souvenir postcard from the Cherokee Nation. I added a line at the bottom:

“I found my head rights, Mama. They’re coming with me.”

L
ou Ann Ruiz lived in Tucson, but thought of herself as just an ordinary Kentuckian a long way from home. She had acquired her foreign last name from her husband, Angel. As it turned out, this was the only part of him that would remain with her. He left on Halloween.

Three years before on Christmas Day Angel had had a bad accident in his pickup truck. It left him with an artificial leg below the knee, and something else that was harder to pin down. Lou Ann often would get the feeling he didn’t really like her, or anyone else for that matter. He blamed people for things beyond their control. Lou Ann was now pregnant with her first, which was due in two months. She hoped more than anything that it wouldn’t be born on Christmas Day.

She had been thinking about herself and Angel
splitting up for even longer than she had been pregnant, but she didn’t particularly do anything about it. That was Lou Ann’s method. She expected that a divorce would just develop, like a pregnancy—that eventually they would reach some kind of agreement without having to discuss it. This isn’t how it worked out.

When she began to turn away from him in bed at night, and to get up quietly in the mornings to cook his eggs, Angel seemed to accept this. Possibly he thought she was worried about the baby. Later, when the arguments resumed, they had a hopeless quality that Lou Ann had not experienced before. The arguments made her feel that her bones were made of something like the rubber in a Gumby doll, that her body could be bent into any shape and would stay that way. She would sit at the kitchen table tracing her fingers over the artificial knots in the wood-look Formica table top while Angel paced back and forth and accused her of thinking he wasn’t good enough. He listed names of people, mostly friends of his she could barely remember having met, and asked her if she had slept with them, or if she had wanted to. Angel limped so slightly it was barely noticeable, but there was just the faintest jingling sound with every other step. It was probably something he could have gotten adjusted if he hadn’t been too proud to take it into the prosthetic shop. No matter how loud his voice became, Lou Ann could still hear the jingle. She could never think of anything to say that would change the course of these arguments, and so they went on and on. Once, several years before, she had
become so frustrated with Angel that she threw a package of baloney at him. They both laughed, and it ended the argument. Now she didn’t have the strength to get up and open the refrigerator.

Finally he had said it was because of his leg, and no matter what she said he wouldn’t hear it any other way. She more or less gave up talking, and when she lay on her back at night she felt it was the guilt weighing down on her aching spine, instead of the baby.

She could remember wheeling him down the white corridor at the hospital to bring him home, just two and a half weeks after the accident. She had felt filled-up and proud; everything she loved in the world was in that chair. Having nearly lost Angel made him all the more precious. One of the doctors said that his boot had probably saved his life, and she felt like kissing it, although in all the confusion no one knew exactly where it had ended up. The boot had caught on the door frame, causing him to be dragged several hundred yards along with the truck as it spun into an irrigation ditch along Highway 86 west of Tucson. The damage to the truck was surprisingly minor. There was a bottle of Jim Beam in the cab that wasn’t even broken. He lost his leg because of being twisted and dragged, but the doctor said if he had been thrown from the vehicle at such a high speed he would have died instantly. It crossed Lou Ann’s mind that he might have just been saying this because Angel was so upset about losing a leg, but she decided it would be best to take the doctor’s word for it.

When he came home Lou Ann gave up her part-
time job at the Three Bears Day School to be with him, insisting that they would get along fine on his disability pay until he was able to go back to work at the bottling plant. She spent weeks playing gin rummy with Angel on the bed and running out to Lee Sing’s market to get whatever he wanted. She loved the way he asked for things specifically, like Mrs. Smith’s pound cake or Beefaroni. She wouldn’t have guessed Angel had even noticed that things came in different brand names, other than beer. It was their best time together.

Never at any time was Lou Ann repulsed by the amputation. After his stump had healed it did not bother her to touch it, which Angel himself would never do. It had a smooth, defenseless look to it that reminded her of a penis, something she had always thought seemed out of place on a man’s body. When he got the prosthesis she was fascinated at first by the way it was put together, and then thought nothing of it at all. It was something that lay on the floor by his side of the bed at night while the cat, Snowboots, lay curled up by hers. It took Angel some time to get used to the new leg, but in the long run there was very little he couldn’t do with it, except that he was no longer able to wear cowboy boots. For some reason the ankle hinges were not flexible enough to fit into a boot. Other than this, Lou Ann could never see why the accident needed to change his life at all. He hadn’t been a cowboy for years, anyway.

On the Friday Angel left, he had long since gone back to work. He probably didn’t think about it being Halloween, only that it was payday. Lou Ann didn’t
think of any of this, of course, since she had no idea that it was the particular day her husband had decided to leave her.

Lou Ann was in Dr. Pelinowsky’s waiting room waiting for her seventh-month prenatal exam. She had a magazine on her lap, or what was left of her lap, but preferred to stare instead at an enormous wall calendar that showed all the months at once. She was anxious about her child’s birthday. Christmas had been difficult for Angel and Lou Ann since the accident, naturally, and they had just about stopped celebrating it altogether. Having a baby on that day would just be a reminder. And besides she had read in
McCall’s
that children with Christmas birthdays often feel cheated out of having their own special day. Lou Ann thought being born the day after, when everybody is fed up with celebrating, would just be that much worse. She decided to ask the doctor if there was some way to make sure the baby would come before Christmas, although she was pretty sure there wasn’t.

Dr. Pelinowsky’s nurses seemed to like him, and called him “Dr. P.” Lou Ann thought this was a hoot because he was OB-GYN, a maternity doctor, which all starts when you bring in a jar of pee. She had to keep from laughing out loud whenever she heard the nurses call out over the intercom. “Doctor Pee, Doctor Pee.”

A nurse with crispy-looking white hair and a lavender pants suit came out and called Lou Ann’s name. She called her Mrs. Angel Ruiz. Angel would always correct Anglos when they pronounced his
name wrong. “Ahn-
hel!
” he would say. “I’m not a damn baseball team!” But Lou Ann rarely corrected anybody on anything. Her mother, Mrs. Logan, still pronounced neither Angel’s first name nor their last name correctly, saying it something like Ruins. She hadn’t wanted Lou Ann to marry Angel in the first place, but for the wrong reasons. She disliked him because he was Mexican, which didn’t make the slightest difference to Lou Ann. In Tucson, she tried to explain to her mother, there were so many Mexicans that people didn’t think of them as a foreign race. They were doctors, bank clerks, TV personalities, and even owned hotels. “You can see them any day of the week eating in a Black Angus Steak House,” she told her mother. Mrs. Logan, who lived in eastern Kentucky and had never seen a Mexican, thought Lou Ann was making this up.

When Dr. Pelinowsky examined her he warned again that she was gaining too much weight. Originally he had thought it might be twins, but now they knew for sure it was just Lou Ann and the baby. This time his warning about her weight was more severe. For Lou Ann, who had always been practically underweight according to the doctor’s office charts, it was impossible to imagine she wouldn’t be exactly the same after it was all over. But she had to admit the baby made her want to eat constantly. She told Dr. Pelinowsky that it’s hard when you’re in the kitchen cooking for someone all the time. He told her to put her husband on a diet too. He meant it as a joke.

On her way out the nurse gave her a pamphlet with a special diet written out in both English and
Spanish. She thought about asking for a second copy to send to her mother. After four years Lou Ann still felt that she had to prove her point about Mexicans, and so she would send clippings from the newspaper when they were promoted to company vice presidents and such. Lou Ann realized, though, that this pamphlet didn’t fall into that category. Her mother was no doubt already convinced that Mexicans had babies like anyone else. In fact, she had told Lou Ann that from what she heard they had too many, that they were trying to take over the world like the Catholics.

Lou Ann hadn’t yet broken the news that, when the baby was born, the plan was to give it a Catholic baptism. This would be for the sake of Angel’s mother, who frequently claimed to be dying from any one of various causes. The only English words she knew were the names of diseases. Lou Ann made the baptism decision purely for practical reasons: if one of the grandmothers was going to have a conniption, it might as well be the one who was eighteen hundred miles away rather than the one who lived right across town.

Lou Ann looked over the pamphlet while she waited for the bus. Like most of the other literature she had received, it had a picture on the front of a mother holding a baby. Sometimes the women in the pictures were white, sometimes Mexican, and sometimes black. They were shown holding their babies in various positions, but they were never shown as pregnant. Lou Ann wondered about this, since all the pamphlets were about prenatal care.

On the bus she decided it must have to do with the fact that the pamphlets were put together by men, who in her opinion liked the looks of a mother and baby better than a pregnant woman. She was fairly sure about this. On the bus, for instance, several men would stand up to offer her a seat, but they wouldn’t quite look at her. The high school boys didn’t make remarks under their breath or try to rub up against her when the bus made sudden stops and turns. To be able to relax this way on a crowded bus was a new experience for Lou Ann, and she thought that in some ways it would not be so bad to go through your life as a pregnant lady.

She watched the houses and telephone poles go sailing by. Some of the telephone poles had advertisements for Tania Maria, a woman leaning forward in a loose sweater and spike heels. She was a singer, and had enough hair for at least two people. Other telephone poles had black posters with letters that appeared to be cut out of a newspaper, like the ransom notes in mystery novels, but they were ads for bands with names like Audio Confusion and Useless Turmoil and the Meat Puppets. She thought of naming her baby Tania Maria. Angel would suggest naming it something like Meat Puppet. That would be his idea of a joke.

It was pure pleasure not to have men pushing into her and touching her on the bus. It allowed her mind to drift far away from her strange, enormous body. When she was nine her Grandfather Ormsby had given her a jackknife, and had told her that for safety’s sake she should always keep a magic circle
around her when she used it. She would sit in the backyard and draw a circle in the dirt that no one could come into while she whittled for hours and hours on thick brown bars of soap. The jackknife was long gone now, but once again there was something like a magic circle around her.

She got off at the Roosevelt Park stop, which was a half block from the park itself. Sprawled over the large corner lot was a place called Jesus Is Lord Used Tires. You couldn’t make a mistake about the name—it was painted in big, cramped blue letters over the door, with periods inserted between the words:
JESUS.IS.LORD.USED.TIRES
. On the side of the pleated tin building there was a large picture of Jesus with outstretched hands and yellow streamers of light emanating from His head. There was also a whitewall tire, perhaps added to the mural as an afterthought and probably meant to have no direct connection with the Lord, but it hung in the air below His left hand very much like a large yoyo. Jesus appeared to be on the verge of performing an Around the World or some other fancy trick.

Top-heavy, chin-high stacks of Firestones and Michelins at the edge of the paved lot formed a wall between Jesus Is Lord and a combination nightclub and pornography shop next door called Fanny Heaven. There was no mistaking this place either. The front windows were whitewashed, and large signs painted over them declared
GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS
on one side of the door and
TOTAL NUDITY
on the other. On the front door of Fanny Heaven was a life-size likeness of a woman with long red hair and a
leopard-skin bikini. Public art of various types was popular on this block.

Lou Ann walked past both of these establishments nearly every day. Something about the Jesus Is Lord place reminded her of Kentucky, and she always meant to ask (if she only had the nerve) if the people there came from her part of the country. Fanny Heaven she just tried to ignore. There was something innocent and primitive about the painting on the door, as though the leopard-bikini lady might have been painted by a schoolchild, except that she was positioned in such a way that the door handle, when a person pushed it, would sink into her crotch. This door always gave Lou Ann the shivers, though she tried not to give it a second thought.

She rounded the corner and stopped to do some grocery shopping at the Lee Sing Market, which faced the park directly across from where she and Angel lived. She bought most of the items recommended by the diet pamphlet, but some of them, like yogurt, were too expensive. She bought a package of macaroons because they were Angel’s favorite.

The Chinese woman at the cash register was Lee Sing. Her mother, who was said to be more than one hundred years old, lived with her in the back of the store. Lee Sing told Lou Ann she was going to have a girl. “She’s high, up here,” Lee Sing said, tapping her bony fist above her stomach. She said this to Lou Ann every time she came in.