The Bean Trees (8 page)

One block down and across the street, old Bobby Bingo sold vegetables out of his dilapidated truck. Lou Ann had been tempted by his tomatoes, which looked better than the hard pink ones at the grocery; those didn’t seem like tomatoes at all, but some sickly city fruit maybe grown inside a warehouse. She had finally collected the nerve to ask how much they cost and was surprised that they were less than grocery tomatoes. On her way home she made up her mind to buy some more.

“Hi, tomato lady,” Bingo said. “I remember you.”

She flushed. “Are they still forty-five a pound?”

“No, fifty-five. End of the season.”

“That’s okay,” she said. “It’s still a good price.” She looked at every one in the box and picked out six, handing them to the old man one at a time with her free hand. With her other hand she adjusted the baby on her hip taking extra care, as she had been instructed, to support his wobbly head. “Your tomatoes are the first good ones I’ve had since back home.” She felt her heart do something strange when she said “back home.”

Bobby Bingo had skin like a baked potato. A complete vegetable man, Lou Ann thought, though she couldn’t help liking him.

He squinted at her. “You’re not from here? I didn’t think so.” He shook out a wad of odd-sized plastic
bags, chose one with red letters on it, and bagged the tomatoes. “Seventy-five,” he said, weighing them up and down in his hand before he put them on the scales. “And an apple for Johnny,” he said, picking out a red apple and shaking it at the baby.

“His name’s Dwayne Ray, and he thanks you very much I’m sure but he don’t have any teeth yet.” Lou Ann laughed. She was embarrassed, but it felt so good to laugh that she was afraid next she would cry.

“That’s good,” Bingo said. “Soon as they get teeth, they start to bite. You know my boy?”

Lou Ann shook her head.

“Sure you do. He’s on TV every night, he sells cars. He’s a real big guy in cars.”

“Sorry,” she said. “I don’t have a TV. My husband took it to his new apartment.” She couldn’t believe, after deceiving her own mother and grandmother for two entire weeks, that she was admitting to a complete stranger on the street that her marriage had failed.

He shook his head. “Don’t worry about it. Makes me sick every time he comes on. Don’t even call himself by his own name—‘Bill Bing’ he says. ‘Come on down to Bill Bing Cadillac,’ he says. ‘Bill Bing has just the thing.’ I always wanted him to be a real big guy, you know. Well, look at him now. He don’t even eat vegetables. If he was here right now he would tell you he don’t know who I am. ‘Get rid of that old truck,’ he says to me. ‘What you need to sell this garbage for? I could buy you a house in Beverly Hills right now,’ he says to me. ‘What?’ I tell him. ‘You crazy? Beverly Hills? Probably they don’t even eat vegetables in
Beverly Hills, just Alaska King Crab and bread sticks!’ I tell him. ‘You want to make me happy, you give me a new Cadillac and I can sell my vegetables out of the trunk.’” Bingo shook his head. “You want grapes? Good grapes this week.”

“No, just the tomatoes.” She handed him three quarters.

“Here, take the grapes. Johnny can eat the grapes. Seedless.” He put them in the bag with the tomatoes. “Let me tell you something, tomato lady. Whatever you want the most, it’s going to be the worst thing for you.”

Back at the house she laid down the baby for his nap, then carefully washed the produce and put it in the refrigerator, all the while feeling her mother’s eyes on her hands. “The worst thing for you,” she kept repeating under her breath until she annoyed herself. She moved around the edges of the rooms as though her big mother and demanding grandmother were still there taking up most of the space; the house felt both empty and cramped at the same time, and Lou Ann felt a craving for something she couldn’t put a finger on, maybe some kind of food she had eaten a long time ago. She opened the curtains in the front room to let in the light. The sky was hard and bright, not a blue sky full of water. Strangely enough, it still surprised her sometimes to open that window and not see Kentucky.

She noticed the Coke bottle sitting on the low wooden bureau along with two of Granny Logan’s hairpins. The old-fashioned hairpins gave her a sad,
spooky feeling. Once she had found a pair of her father’s work gloves in the tobacco barn, still molded to the curved shape of his hands, long after he was dead.

The bottle had leaked a wet ring on the wood, which Lou Ann tried to wipe up with the hem of her jumper. She was concerned about it staining, since the furniture wasn’t actually hers. The house had come furnished. She thought for a long time about what to do with the bottle and finally set it on the glass shelf of the medicine cabinet in the bathroom.

Later, while she was nursing the baby in the front room, she closed her eyes and tried to remember being baptized in Tug Fork. She could see the child in a white dress, her sunburned arms stiff at the elbows, and could hear her cry out as she went over backwards, but she could not feel that child’s terror as the knees buckled and the green water closed over the face. The strong light from the window took on a watery look behind her closed eyelids and she could see it all perfectly. But couldn’t feel it. She thought of her mother and automatically switched the baby to her other breast.

She was still nursing when Angel came home. She opened her eyes. The late-afternoon light on the mountains made them look pink and flat like a picture postcard.

She heard Angel in the kitchen. He moved around in there for quite a while before he said anything to Lou Ann, and it struck her that his presence was different from the feeling of women filling up the house. He could be there, or not, and it hardly made any dif
ference. Like a bug or a mouse scratching in the cupboards at night—you could get up and chase after it, or just go back to sleep and let it be. This was good, she decided.

When he came into the front room she could hear the jingle of his leg.

“They gone?” he asked behind her.

“Yes.”

“I’m packing my shaving stuff,” he said. Angel had a moustache but shaved the rest of his face often, sometimes twice a day. “Did you see my belt buckle? The silver one with the sheepshank on it?” he asked her.

“The what on it?”

“Sheepshank. It’s a rope tied in a knot.”

“Oh. I wondered what that was on there.”

“So did you see it?”

“No. Not lately, I mean.”

“What about my Toros cap?”

“Is that the blue one?”

“Yeah.”

“You left that in Manny Quiroz’s car. Remember?”

“Damn it, Manny moved to San Diego.”

“Well, I can’t help it. That’s what you did with it.”

“Damn.”

He was standing close enough behind her so she could smell the faint, sweet smell of beer on his breath. It was a familiar smell, but today it made Lou Ann wonder about bars and the bottling plant and the other places Angel went every day that she had never seen. She turned her head in time to watch him leave the room, his work shirt rolled up at the elbows and
dirty from doing something all day, she did not know exactly what. For a brief instant, no longer than a heartbeat, it felt strange to be living in the same house with this person who was not even related to her.

But of course he’s related. He’s my husband. Was my husband.

“What the hell is this?” he called from the bathroom.

She leaned back in the rocking chair where she sat facing east out the big window. “It’s water from Tug Fork, the crick at home that I was baptized in. Me and I guess practically everybody else in my family. Granny Logan brought it for baptizing Dwayne Ray. Wouldn’t you know she’d bring something weird like that?”

She heard the chugging sound of the water as he poured it down the drain. The baby’s sucking at her felt good, as if he might suck the ache right out of her breast.

T
he Republic Hotel was near the exact spot where the railroad track, which at one time functioned as a kind of artery, punctured Tucson’s old, creaky chest cavity and prepared to enter the complicated auricles and ventricles of the railroad station. In the old days I suppose it would have been bringing the city a fresh load of life, like a blood vessel carrying platelets to circulate through the lungs. Nowadays, if you could even call the railroad an artery of Tucson, you would have to say it was a hardened one.

At the point where it entered the old part of downtown, the train would slow down and let out a long, tired scream. Whether the whistle was for warning the cars at the crossings up ahead, or just letting the freeloaders know it was time to roll out of the boxcars, I can’t say. But it always happened very near six-fifteen, and I came to think of it as my alarm clock.

Sometimes the sound of it would get tangled up into a dream. I would hear it whistling through my sleep for what seemed like days while I tried to lift a heavy teakettle off a stove or, once, chased a runaway horse that was carrying off Turtle while she hollered bloody murder (something I had yet to hear her do in real life). Finally the sound would push out through my eyes and there was the daylight. There were the maroon paisley curtains made from an Indian bedspread, there was the orange-brown stain on the porcelain sink where the faucet dripped, there was the army cot where Turtle was asleep, safe and sound in the Republic Hotel. Some mornings it was like that.

On other days I would wake up before the whistle ever sounded and just lie there waiting, feeling that my day couldn’t begin without it. Lately it had been mostly this second way.

We were in trouble. I lasted six days at the Burger Derby before I got in a fight with the manager and threw my red so-called jockey cap in the trash compactor and walked out. I would have thrown the whole uniform in there, but I didn’t feel like giving him a free show.

I won’t say that working there didn’t have its moments. When Sandi and I worked the morning shift together we’d have a ball. I would tell her all kinds of stories I’d heard about horse farms, such as the fact that the really high-strung horses had TVs in their stalls. It was supposed to lower their blood pressure.

“Their favorite show is old reruns of Mr. Ed,” I would tell her with a poker face.

“No! You’re kidding. Are you kidding me?”

“And they
hate
the commercials for Knox gelatin.”

She was easy to tease, but I had to give her credit, considering that life had delivered Sandi a truckload of manure with no return address. The father of her baby had told everyone that Sandi was an admitted schizophrenic and had picked his name out of the high school yearbook when she found out she was pregnant. Soon afterward the boy’s father got transferred from Tucson and the whole family moved to Oakland, California. Sandi’s mother had made her move out, and she lived with her older sister Aimee, who was born again and made her pay rent. In Aimee’s opinion it would have been condoning sin to let Sandi and her illegitimate son stay there for free.

But nothing really seemed to throw Sandi. She knew all about things like how to rub an ice cube on kids’ gums when they were teething, and where to get secondhand baby clothes for practically nothing. We would take turns checking on Turtle and Seattle, and at the end of our shift we’d go over to the mall together to pick them up. “I don’t know,” she’d say real loud, hamming it up while we waited in line at Kid Central Station. “I can’t decide if I want that La-Z-Boy recliner in the genuine leather or the green plaid with the stainproof finish.” “Take your time deciding,” I’d say. “Sleep on it and come back tomorrow.”

Turtle would be sitting wherever I had set her down that morning, with each hand locked onto some ratty, punked-out stuffed dog or a torn book or another kid’s jacket and her eyes fixed on some
empty point in the air, just the way a cat will do. It’s as though they live in a separate universe that takes up the same space as ours, but is full of fascinating things like mice or sparrows or special TV programs that we can’t see.

Kid Central Station was not doing Turtle any good. I knew that.

After six days the Burger Derby manager Jerry Speller, this little twerp who believed that the responsibility of running a burger joint put you a heartbeat away from Emperor of the Universe, said I didn’t have the right attitude, and I told him he was exactly right. I said I had to confess I didn’t have the proper reverence for the Burger Derby institution, and to prove it I threw my hat into the Mighty Miser and turned it on. Sandi was so impressed she burned the french fries twice in a row.

The fight had been about the Burger Derby uniform. The shorts weren’t actually plastic, it turned out, but cotton-polyester with some kind of shiny finish that had to be dry-cleaned. Three twenty-five an hour plus celery and you’re supposed to pay for dry-cleaning your own shorts.

My one regret was that I didn’t see much of Sandi anymore. Naturally I had to find a new place to eat breakfast. There were half a dozen coffeeshops in the area, and although I didn’t really feel at home in any of them I discovered a new resource: newspapers. On the tables, along with their gritty coffee cups and orange rinds and croissant crumbs, people often left behind the same day’s paper.

There was a lady named Jessie with wild white hair
and floppy rainboots who would dash into the restaurants and scrounge the leftover fruit and melon rinds. “It’s not to eat,” she would explain to any-and everybody as she clumped along the sidewalk pushing an interesting-smelling shopping cart that had at some point in history belonged to Safeway. “It’s for still-lifes.” She told me she painted nothing but madonnas: Orange-peel madonna. Madonna and child with strawberries. Together we made a sort of mop-up team. I nabbed the newspapers, and she took the rest.

Looking through the want ads every day gave new meaning to my life. The For Rents, on the other hand, were a joke as far as I was concerned, but often there would be ads looking for roommates, a possibility I hadn’t considered. I would circle anything that looked promising, although people seemed unbelievably picky about who they intended to live with:

“Mature, responsible artist or grad student wanted for cooperative household; responsibilities shared, sensitivity a must.”

“Female vegetarian nonsmoker to share harmonious space with insightful Virgo and cat.”

I began to suspect that sharing harmonious space with an insightful Virgo might require even greater credentials than being a licensed phlebotomist in the state of Arizona.

The main consideration, though, was whether or not I could locate the address on my Sun-Tran maps of all the various bus routes. At the end of the week I made up my mind to check out a couple of possibilities. One ad said, among other things, “Must be open
to new ideas.” The other said, “New mom needs company. Own room, low rent, promise I won’t bother you. Kids ok.” The first sounded like an adventure, and the second sounded like I wouldn’t have to pass a test. I put on a pair of stiff, clean jeans and braided my hair and gave Turtle a bath in the sink. She had acquired clothes of her own by now, but just for old time’s sake I put her in my
DAMN I’M GOOD
T-shirt from Kentucky Lake. Just for luck.

Both places were near downtown. The first was a big old ramshackle house with about twelve kinds of wind chimes hanging on the front porch. One was made from the silver keys of some kind of musical instrument like a flute or clarinet, and even Turtle seemed interested in it. A woman came to the door before I even knocked.

She let me inside and called out, “The prospective’s here.” Three silver earrings—a half moon, a star, and a grinning sun—dangled from holes in her left ear so that she clinked when she walked like some human form of wind chime. She was barefoot and had on a skirt that reminded me of the curtains in my room at the Republic. There was no actual furniture in the room, only a colorful rug and piles of pillows here and there, so I waited to see what she would do. She nested herself into one of the piles, flouncing her skirt out over her knees. I noticed that she had thin silver rings on four of her toes.

Another woman came out of the kitchen door, through which I was relieved to see a table and chairs. A tall, thin guy with a hairless chest hunkered in another doorway for a minute, rubbing a head of
orange hair that looked like a wet cat. He had on only those beachcomber-type pants held up by a fake rope. I really couldn’t tell how old these people were. I kept expecting a parent to show up in another doorway and tell Beach Blanket Bingo to put on his shirt, but then, they could have been older than me. We all settled down on the pillows.

“I’m Fay,” the toe-ring woman said, “spelled F-E-I, and this is La-Isha and that’s Timothy. You’ll have to excuse Timothy; he used caffeine yesterday and now his homeostasis is out of balance.” I presumed they were talking about his car, although I was not aware of any automotive uses for caffeine.

“That’s too bad,” I said. “I wouldn’t do anything with caffeine but drink it.”

They all stared at me for a while.

“Oh. I’m Taylor. This is Turtle.”

“Turtle. Is that a spirit name?” La-Isha asked.

“Sure,” I said.

La-Isha was thick-bodied, with broad bare feet and round calves. Her dress was a sort of sarong, printed all over with black and orange elephants and giraffes, and she had a jungly-looking scarf wrapped around her head. And to think they used to stare at me for wearing red and turquoise together. Drop these three in Pittman County and people would run for cover.

F-E-I took charge of the investigation. “Would the child be living here too?”

“Right. We’re a set.”

“That’s cool, I have no problem with small people,” she said. “La-Isha, Timothy?”

“It’s not really what I was thinking in terms of, but I can see it happening. I’m flex on children,” La-Isha said, after giving it some thought. Timothy said he thought the baby was cute, asked if it was a boy or a girl.

“A girl,” I said, but I was drowned out by Fei saying, “Timothy, I
really
don’t see that that’s an issue here.” She said to me, “Gender is not an issue in this house.”

“Oh,” I said. “Whatever.”

“What does she eat?” La-Isha wanted to know.

“Mainly whatever she can get her hands on. She had half a hot dog with mustard for breakfast.”

There was another one of those blank spells in the conversation. Turtle was grumpily yanking at a jingle bell on the corner of a pillow, and I was beginning to feel edgy myself. All those knees and chins at the same level. It reminded me of an extremely long movie I had once seen about an Arabian sheik. Maybe La-Isha is Arabian, I thought, though she looked very white, with blond hair on her arms and pink rims around her eyes. Possibly an albino Arabian. I realized she was giving a lecture of some kind.

“At least four different kinds of toxins,” she was saying, more to the room in general than to me. Her pink-rimmed eyes were starting to look inflamed. “In a hot dog.” Now she was definitely talking to me. “Were you aware of that?”

“I would have guessed seven or eight,” I said.

“Nitrites,” said Timothy. He was gripping his head between his palms, one on the chin and one on top, and bending it from side to side until you could hear
a little pop. I began to understand about the unbalanced homeostasis.

“We eat mainly soybean products here,” Fei said. “We’re just starting a soy-milk collective. A house requirement is that each person spend at least seven hours a week straining curd.”

“Straining curd,” I said. I wanted to say, Flaming nurd. Raining turds. It isn’t raining turds, you know, it’s raining violets.

“Yes,” Fei went on in this abnormally calm voice that made me want to throw a pillow at her. “I guess the child…”

“Turtle,” I said.

“I guess Turtle would be exempt. But we would have to make adjustments for that in the kitchen quota….”

I had trouble concentrating. La-Isha kept narrowing her eyes and trying to get Fei’s attention. I remembered Mrs. Hoge with her shakes, always looking like she was secretly saying, “Don’t do it” to somebody behind you.

“So tell us about you,” Fei said eventually. I snapped out of my daydreams, feeling like a kid in school that’s just been called on. “What kind of a space are you envisioning for yourself?” she wanted to know. Those were her actual words.

“Oh, Turtle and I are flex,” I said. “Right now we’re staying downtown at the Republic. I jockeyed fried food at the Burger Derby for a while, but I got fired.”

La-Isha went kind of stiff on that one. I imagined all the little elephants on her shift getting stung through the heart with a tiny stun gun. Timothy was
trying to get Turtle’s attention by making faces, so far with no luck.

“Usually little kids are into faces,” he informed me. “She seems kind of spaced out.”

“She makes up her own mind about what she’s into.”

“She sure has a lot of hair,” he said. “How old is she?”

“Eighteen months,” I said. It was a wild guess.

“She looks very Indian.”

“Native American,” Fei corrected him. “She does. Is her father Native American?”

“Her great-great-grandpa was full-blooded Cherokee,” I said. “On my side. Cherokee skips a generation, like red hair. Didn’t you know that?”

The second house on my agenda turned out to be right across the park from Jesus Is Lord’s. It belonged to Lou Ann Ruiz.

Within ten minutes Lou Ann and I were in the kitchen drinking diet Pepsi and splitting our gussets laughing about homeostasis and bean turds. We had already established that our hometowns in Kentucky were separated by only two counties, and that we had both been to the exact same Bob Seger concert at the Kentucky State Fair my senior year.

“So then what happened?” Lou Ann had tears in her eyes. I hadn’t really meant to put them down, they seemed like basically good kids, but it just got funnier as it went along.

“Nothing happened. In their own way, they were so polite it was pathetic. I mean, it was plain as day
they thought Turtle was a dimwit and I was from some part of Mars where they don’t have indoor bathrooms, but they just kept on asking things like would I like some alfalfa tea?” I had finally told them no thanks, that we’d just run along and envision ourselves in some other space.