The Bean Trees (5 page)

“Either way is okay with me,” Lou Ann said, although she was somewhat curious to see if Lee Sing would be right.

Lee Sing shook her head as she rang the cash register, and muttered something that sounded to Lou Ann like “New Year pig.”

“Beg your pardon?” Lou Ann was a little afraid of Lee Sing, who often said peculiar things like this.

“Feeding a girl is like feeding the neighbor’s New Year pig. All that work. In the end, it goes to some other family.”

Lou Ann felt offended, but didn’t really know how to answer. She was a long way from her own family in Kentucky, but she didn’t see this as being entirely her fault. And it wasn’t as if her brother had stuck any closer to home, either. He had gone north to work on the Alaska Pipeline and had married a Canadian dog trainer. They had four daughters with Eskimo names that Lou Ann couldn’t keep straight—things that sounded like Chinook and Winnebago.

Outside it was beginning to get dark. Lou Ann crossed the park in a hurry, skirting around an old wooden trellis where several transients were congregating. As usual she tried to concentrate on not being afraid. Angel had told her that some people, like dogs, can smell fear.

When she got home she saw that Angel had already been home from work and had left again, for good. She was confused at first and thought they had been robbed, until she began to see a pattern to what was taken. She wandered around the house with her grocery bag looking at the half-empty house. After four years there was very little, other than clothes, that she thought of as belonging clearly to one or the other. In a strange way she was fasci
nated to see what he had claimed for his own. It revealed more to her about his personality, she thought, than she had learned during their whole marriage.

He left all of the sheets and blankets, the knick-knacks, and all the kitchen things except for three matching beer mugs. He had taken some of the old magazines and paperback mysteries from the shelf. She didn’t miss the books so much as she was hurt by the ugly empty spaces left behind, like missing teeth, the books on either side falling and crowding into the gaps.

Gone from the bedroom was a picture of Angel taken at a rodeo in 1978. In the picture he was sitting on top of a bull named S.O.B., which was supposed to be the meanest bull in the history of rodeo. In the entire year of 1978 only one rider had stayed on S.O.B. for eight seconds. Angel wasn’t the one. At the time of this particular photo the animal was doped up on PCP, which the rodeys used to drug the bulls and horses when they moved them around. PCP was common as dirt in that line of work. Angel’s rodeo name had been Dusty, which was short for Angel Dust.

He also had taken one clean towel, the only tube of toothpaste, and the TV.

Lou Ann had forgotten it was Halloween, and was completely bewildered when a mob of children came to the door. She was frightened by their dark, darting pupils peering through the little holes in their bright plastic masks. She knew they were neighborhood children she had seen a thousand times, but in their
costumes she couldn’t tell who they were. To calm herself down she talked to them and tried to guess whether each one was a boy or a girl. She guessed correctly on the princess, the green-faced witch, Frankenstein, and the Incredible Hulk (also green). The Extra Terrestrial she got wrong.

Now she remembered why she had needed to go to the Lee Sing Market: she didn’t have any candy to give out. She considered giving them pieces of fruit or macaroons, but this would be a waste of money. Their mothers would probably go through their bags and throw things like that away, fearing cyanide and razor blades. On television they said everything should be sealed in the original wrapper. The children seemed to feel sorry for her, but were growing impatient. They expected adults to be prepared.

“You better give us something or we’ll have to soap your windows, Mrs. Ruiz,” the Extra Terrestrial said half-heartedly. Lou Ann decided to go and shake out the Mickey Mouse bank, in which she had been saving pennies to buy a washing machine for the baby’s diapers. Angel had laughed at her, saying the baby would have kids of its own before she could save that many pennies.

The children seemed satisfied with the pennies and went away. She left Mickey by the door so she would be better organized for the next round.

By eleven o’clock Lou Ann’s feet were killing her. She could feel her heartbeat in her ankles. For three or four weeks Lou Ann’s feet had been so swollen that she could only wear one particular pair of shoes, which had a strap across the ankle, and now she was
going to have to go to bed with these shoes on. She couldn’t bend over far enough to unbuckle the straps, and Angel was not there to do it for her. If she had thought of it she might have asked the last bunch of trick-or-treat kids to do it, but it was too late now.

As she was getting ready for bed she caught sight of herself in the mirror and thought she looked disgusting and pornographic in her nightgown and panty hose and shoes, like someone who would work at Fanny Heaven. Though of course they wouldn’t have pregnant women there. Still, the thought upset her. She turned out the light but kept listening for sounds that might be more kids coming to the door, or might be Angel changing his mind, coming home. In her other ear, pressed against the pillow, she could hear the blood pumping all the way down to her feet. It sounded something like the ocean, which she had seen once with Angel in Mexico. The baby nudged and poked at her with what felt like fingers, but must be tiny elbows or feet. She thought about the baby playing in waves of her blood, on the smooth, dark beach of her insides. Her feet hurt and she couldn’t find a comfortable place in the bed.

Finally, late in the night, she cried until her eye sockets felt empty. At the beach she had gotten seawater in her eyes and they felt like this. Angel had warned her to keep them shut, but she had wanted to see where she was going. You never knew what kind of thing could be down there under the water.

W
e crossed the Arizona state line at sunup. The clouds were pink and fat and hilarious-looking, like the hippo ballerinas in a Disney movie. The road took us through a place called Texas Canyon that looked nothing like Texas, heaven be praised for that, but looked like nothing else I had ever seen either. It was a kind of forest, except that in place of trees there were all these puffy-looking rocks shaped like roundish animals and roundish people. Rocks stacked on top of one another like piles of copulating potato bugs. Wherever the sun hit them, they turned pink. The whole scene looked too goofy to be real. We whizzed by a roadside sign on which I could make out a dinosaur. I wondered if it told what kind of rocks they were, or if it was saying that they were actually petrified dinosaur turds. I was laughing my head off. “This is too much,” I said to the Indian child. “This is
the best thing I’ve seen in years.” Whether my car conked out or not, I made up my mind to live in Arizona.

It was the second day of the new year. I had stayed on at the Broken Arrow through most of the holidays, earning some money changing beds. The older woman with the shakes, whose name was Mrs. Hoge, was determined that I should stay awhile. She said they could use the extra help during the Christmas season, especially since her daughter-in-law’s ankles were giving her trouble. Which is no wonder. A human ankle is not designed to hold up two hundred and fifty pounds. If we were meant to weigh that much we would have big round ankles like an elephant or a hippopotamus.

They did get quite a few folks at Christmastime passing through on their way to someplace on one side or the other of Oklahoma, which was where I longed to be. But on the other hand, I was glad for the chance to make some bucks before I headed on down the pike. Mrs. Hoge’s ulterior motive, I believe, was the child, which she looked after a great deal of the time. She made it plain that her fondest wish was to have a grandbaby. Whenever fat Irene would pick up the baby, which was not too often, Mrs. Hoge would declare, “Irene, you don’t know how becoming that looks.” As if someone ought to have a kid because it looked good on them.

By this time I had developed a name for the child, at least for the time being. I called her Turtle, on account of her grip. She still wasn’t talking but she knew her name about as far as a cat ever does, which
means that when you said it she would look up if she was in the right mood. Mrs. Hoge hinted in every imaginable way that she was retarded, but I maintained that she had her own ways of doing things and wasn’t inclined to be pushed. She had already been pushed way too far in her lifetime, though of course I didn’t tell this to old Mrs. Hoge or her daughter-in-law.

I was in hog heaven to be on the road again. In Arizona. My eyes had started to hurt in Oklahoma from all that flat land. I swear this is true. It felt like you were always having to look too far to see the horizon.

By the time we were in sight of Tucson it became clear what those goofy pink clouds had been full of: hail. Within five minutes the car was covered with ice inside and out, and there was no driving on that stuff. The traffic was moving about the speed of a government check. I left the interstate at an off ramp and pulled over next to what looked like the Flying Nun’s hat made out of bumpy concrete, held up by orange poles. Possibly it had once been a gas station, although there were no pumps and the building at the back of the paved lot looked abandoned. All over the walls and boarded-up windows someone had painted what looked like sperms with little smiles in red spray paint, and sayings like “Fools Believe.”

I rubbed my hands on my knees to keep them from freezing. There was thunder, though I did not see lightning. I thought of all the mud turtles in Arizona letting go. Did Arizona even have mud turtles? An old man my mama used to clean for would say if it thun
ders in January it will snow in July. Clearly he had never been to Arizona. Or perhaps he had.

We got out of the open car and stood under the concrete wings to stay dry. Turtle was looking interested in the scenery, which was a first. Up to then the only thing that appeared to interest her was my special way of starting the car.

“This is a foreign country,” I told her. “Arizona. You know as much about it as I do. We’re even steven.”

The hail turned to rain and kept up for half an hour. A guy came out of the little boarded-up building and leaned against one of the orange poles near us. I wondered if he lived there, or what. (If he did live there, did he paint the sperms?) He had on camouflage army pants and a black baseball cap with cloth flaps hanging down in the back, such as Gregory Peck or whoever it was always wore in those old Foreign Legion movies. His T-shirt said
VISITOR FROM ANOTHER PLANET
. That’s me, I thought. I should be wearing that shirt.

“You from out of town?” he asked after a while, eying my car.

“No,” I said. “I go to Kentucky every year to get my license plate.” I didn’t like his looks.

He lit a cigarette. “What’d you pay for that bucket of bolts?”

“A buck two-eighty.”

“Sassy one, aren’t you?”

“You got that one right, buster,” I said. I wished to God I wasn’t going to have to make such a spectacle of myself later on, starting the car.

The sun came out even before the hail stopped.
There was a rainbow over the mountains behind the city, and over that another rainbow with the colors upside down. Between the two rainbows the sky was brighter than everywhere else, like a white sheet lit from the back. In a few minutes it was hot. I had on a big red pullover sweater and was starting to sweat. Arizona didn’t do anything halfway. If Arizona was a movie you wouldn’t believe it. You’d say it was too corny for words.

I knew I had better stay put for a few more minutes to give the engine a chance to dry out. The guy was still hanging around, smoking and making me nervous.

“Watch out,” he said. There was this hairy spider about the size of a small farm animal making its way across the pavement. Its legs jerked up and down like the rubber spiders on a string that you get from a gumball machine.

“I’ve seen worse,” I said, although to tell you the truth I hadn’t. It looked like something that might have crawled out of the Midnight Creature Feature.

“That’s a tarantula,” he said. “You got to watch out for them suckers. They can jump four feet. If they get you, you go crazy. It’s a special kind of poison.”

This I didn’t believe. I never could figure out why men thought they could impress a woman by making the world out to be such a big dangerous deal. I mean, we’ve got to live in the exact same world every damn day of the week, don’t we?

“What’s it coming around here for?” I said. “Is it your pet, or your girlfriend?”

“Nah,” he said, squashing out his cigarette, and I
decided he was dumber than he was mean.

There were a lot more bugs crawling up on the cement slab. A whole swarm of black ants came out of a crack and milled around the cigarette butt trying, for reasons I could not imagine, to take it apart. Some truck had carried that tobacco all the way from Kentucky maybe, from some Hardbine’s or Richey’s or Biddle’s farm, and now a bunch of ants were going to break it into little pieces to take back to their queen. You just never knew where something was going to end up.

“We had a lot of rain lately,” the guy said. “When the ground gets full of water, the critters drown out of their holes. They got to come up and dry off.” He reached out with his foot and squashed a large, shiny black bug with horns. Its wings split apart and white stuff oozed out between. It was the type that you wouldn’t have guessed had wings, although I knew from experience that just about every bug has wings of one kind or another. Not including spiders.

He lit another cigarette and threw the match at the tarantula, missing it by a couple of inches. The spider raised its two front legs toward the flame like a scared lady in an old movie.

“I got things to do,” I said. “So long.” I put Turtle in the car, then went around to the other side and put it in neutral and started to push.

He laughed. “What is that, a car or a skateboard?”

“Look, buster, you can help give me a push, or you can stand and watch, but either way I’m out of here. This car got me here from Kentucky, and I reckon she’s got a few thousand left in her.”

“Not on them tires, she don’t,” he said. I looked back to see the rear tire flapping empty on the wheel. “Shit,” I said, just as the engine caught and the car zoomed forward. In the rear-view mirror I could see broken glass glistening on the off ramp, dropping away behind me like a twinkly green lake.

I had no intention of asking the dumb guy for help. The tire looked like it was done-for anyway so I drove on it for a few blocks. There were a bank, some houses, and a park with palm trees and some sick-looking grass. Some men with rolled-up blankets tied around their waists were kicking at the dirt, probably looking for bugs to step on. Just beyond the park I could see a stack of tires. “Will you look at that,” I said. “I’m one lucky duck. We should have gone to Las Vegas.”

The stacked-up tires made a kind of wall on both sides of a big paved corner lot. Inside the walls a woman was using an air hose to chase bugs off the pavement, herding them along with little blasts of air. She was wearing blue jeans and cowboy boots and a red bandana on her head. A long gray braid hung down the middle of her back.

“How do,” I said. I noticed that the name of the place was Jesus Is Lord Used Tires. I remembered wanting to call 1-800-THE LORD, just to see who you’d get. Maybe this was it.

“Hi, darlin,” she said. “These bugs aggravate the dickens out of me after it rains, but I can’t see my way clear to squashing them. A bug’s just got one life to live, after all. Like us.”

“I know what you mean,” I said.

“Oh, bless your heart. Looks like you’ve got a couple of flats.”

I did. I hadn’t seen the rear on the right side.

“Drive it up onto the big jack,” she ordered. “We’ll get them off and have a look. We’ll fix your little wagon right up.”

I asked if Turtle could ride up on the jack, but she said it wasn’t safe, so I took her out of the car and looked for a place to put her down. All those tires around made me nervous. Just out of instinct, more or less, I looked up to see if there was anything tall overhead to get thrown up onto. There was nothing but clear blue sky.

Off to one side there were some old wheel rims and flat tires. An empty tire couldn’t possibly explode, I reasoned, so I sat Turtle down in one of those.

“What’s your little girl’s name?” the woman wanted to know, and when I told her she didn’t bat an eye. Usually people would either get embarrassed or give me a lecture. She told me her name was Mattie.

“She’s a cute little thing,” Mattie said.

“How do you know she’s a girl?” I wasn’t lipping off, for once. Just curious. It’s not as if I had her dressed in pink.

“Something about the face.”

We rolled the tires over to a tub of water. Mattie rubbed Ivory soap on the treads and then dunked them in like big doughnuts. Little threads of bubbles streamed up like strings of glass beads. Lots of them. It looked like a whole jewelry store in there.

“I’m sorry to tell you, hon, these are bad. I can tell you right now these aren’t going to hold a patch. They’re shot through.” She looked concerned. “See these places here along the rim? They’re sliced.” She ran her hand along the side of the tire under the water. She had a gold wedding band settled into the flesh of her finger, the way older women’s rings do when they never take them off.

“I’m sorry,” she said again, and I could tell she really was. “There’s a Goodyear place down the road about six blocks. If you want to roll them down there for a second opinion.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “I’ll take your word for it.” Turtle was slapping at the side of her flat whitewall with one hand. The other had caught hold of the doohickey where the air goes in. I tried to think what in the world we were going to do now. “How much for new ones?” I asked.

Mattie considered for a minute. “I could give you a pair of good retreads, five thousand miles guaranteed, put on and balanced for sixty-five.”

“I’ll have to think on that one,” I said. She was so nice I didn’t want to tell her flat out that I couldn’t afford new tires.

“It’s too early in the morning for bad news,” Mattie said. “I was just brewing up a pot of coffee. You want a cup of coffee? Come sit.”

“Okay,” I said. I collected Turtle out of the tire and carried her to the back of the shop. It was a big old two-story place, and there at the back of the garage was an area with a sink and some shelves, some folding chairs painted blue, a metal table, and
a Mr. Coffee. I scooted another flat over next to the chairs and set Turtle down in it. I was glad to be away from that wall of tires, all of them bulging to burst. Hanging around here would be like living in a house made of bombs. The sound of the air hose alone gave me the willies.

“These come in pretty handy,” I said, trying to be cheerful. “I know what I can use those two flat tires for.”

“I’ve got some peanut-butter crackers,” Mattie said, leaning over Turtle. “Will she eat peanut butter?”

“She eats anything. Just don’t let her get hold of anything you don’t want to part with. Like your hair,” I said. Mattie’s braid was swinging into the danger zone.

She poured coffee into a mug that said “BILL with a capital B,” and handed it to me. She poured a cup for herself in a white mug with cartoon rabbits all over it. They were piled all over each other like the rocks in Texas Canyon. After a minute I realized that the rabbits were having sex in about a trillion different positions. I couldn’t figure this woman out. This was definitely not 1-800-THE LORD.

“You must have come a ways,” she said. “I saw your plates were Kentucky. Or plate, rather. You don’t have to have them both front and back in Kentucky?”

“No. Just the back.”

“Here you’ve got to have one on the front too. I guess so the cops can get you coming and going.” She handed Turtle a peanut-butter cracker, which she
grabbed with both hands. It broke to smithereens, and she got such big sad eyes I thought she was going to cry.