The Bean Trees (11 page)

“I can’t get over it,” Lou Ann said, “that somebody would just dump her like an extra puppy.”

“Yeah, I know. I think it was somebody that cared for her, though, if you can believe it. Turtle was having a real rough time. I don’t know if she would have made it where she was.” A fat gray cat with white feet was sleeping on the windowsill over the sink. Or so I thought, until all of a sudden it jumped down and streaked out of the kitchen. Lou Ann had her back to the door, but I could see the cat in the next room. It was walking around in circles on the living-room rug, kicking its feet behind it again and again, throwing invisible sand over invisible cat poop.

“You wouldn’t believe what your cat is doing,” I said.

“Oh, yes, I would,” Lou Ann said. “He’s acting like he just went potty, right?”

“Right. But he didn’t, as far as I can see.”

“Oh, no, he never does. I think he has a split personality. The good cat wakes up and thinks the bad cat has just pooped on the rug. See, we got him as a kitty and I named him Snowboots but Angel thought that was a stupid name so he always called him Pachuco instead. Then a while back, before Dwayne Ray was born, he started acting that way. Angel’s my ex-husband, by the way.”

It took some effort here to keep straight who was cats and who was husbands.

Lou Ann went on. “So just the other day I read in a magazine that a major cause of split personality is if two parents treat a kid in real different ways, like one all the time tells the kid it’s good and the other one says it’s bad. It gives them this idea they have to be both ways at once.”

“That’s amazing,” I said. “Your cat ought to be in
Ripley’s Believe It or Not
. Or one of those magazine columns where people write in and tell what cute things their pets do, like parakeets that whistle Dixie or cats that will only sleep on a certain towel with pictures of goldfish on it.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t want anyone to know about Snowboots, it’s too embarrassing. It’s just about proof-positive that he’s from a broken home, don’t you think?”

“What does Pachuco mean?”

“It means like a bad Mexican boy. One that would go around spray-painting walls and join a gang.”

Pachuco alias Snowboots was still going at it in the living room. “Seriously,” I said, “you should send it in. They’d probably pay good money—it’s unbelievable what kinds of things you can get paid for. Or at the very least they’d send you a free case of cat chow.”

“I almost won a year of free diapers for Dwayne Ray. Dwayne Ray’s my son.”

“Oh. What does he do?”

Lou Ann laughed. “Oh, he’s normal. The only one in the house, I guess. Do you want some more Pepsi?” She got up to refill our glasses. “So did you drive out here, or fly, or what?”

I told her that driving across the Indian reservation was how I’d ended up with Turtle. “Our paths would never have crossed if it weren’t for a bent rocker arm.”

“Well, if something had to go wrong, at least you can thank your stars you were in a car and not an airplane,” she said, whacking an ice-cube tray on the counter. I felt Turtle flinch on my shoulder.

“I never thought of it that way,” I said.

“I could never fly in an airplane. Oh Lord, never! Remember that one winter when a plane went right smack dab into that frozen river in Washington, D.C.? On TV I saw them pulling the bodies out frozen stiff with their knees and arms bent like those little plastic cowboys that are supposed to be riding horses, but then when you lose the horse they’re useless. Oh, God, that was so pathetic. I can just hear the stewardess saying, ‘Fasten your seat belts, folks,’ calm as you please, like ‘Don’t worry, we just have to say this,’ and then next thing you know you’re a hunk of ice. Oh, shoot, there’s Dwayne Ray just woke up from his nap. Let me go get him.”

I did remember that airplane crash. On TV they showed the rescue helicopter dropping down a rope to save the only surviving stewardess from an icy river full of dead people. I remember just how she looked hanging on to that rope. Like Turtle.

In a minute Lou Ann came back with the baby. “Dwayne Ray, here’s some nice people I want you to meet. Say hi.”

He was teeny, with skin you could practically see through. It reminded me of the Visible Man we’d had in Hughes Walter’s biology class. “He’s adorable,” I said.

“Do you think so, really? I mean, I love him to death of course, but I keep thinking his head’s flat.”

“They all are. They start out that way, and then after a while their foreheads kind of pop out.”

“Really? I never knew that. They never told me that.”

“Sure. I used to work in a hospital. I saw a lot of newborns coming and going, and every one of them’s head was flat as a shovel.”

She made a serious face and fussed with the baby for a while without saying anything.

“So what do you think?” I finally said. “Is it okay if we move in?”

“Sure!” Her wide eyes and the way she held her baby reminded me for a minute of Sandi. The lady downtown could paint either one of them: “Bewildered Madonna with Sunflower Eyes.” “Of course you can move in,” she said. “I’d love it. I wasn’t sure if you’d want to.”

“Why wouldn’t I want to?”

“Well, my gosh, I mean, here you are, so skinny and smart and cute and everything, and me and Dwayne Ray, well, we’re just lumping along here trying to get by. When I put that ad in the paper, I thought, Well, this is sure four dollars down the toilet; who in the world would want to move in here with us?”

“Stop it, would you? Quit making everybody out to be better than you are. I’m just a plain hillbilly from East Jesus Nowhere with this adopted child that everybody keeps on telling me is dumb as a box of rocks. I’ve got nothing on you, girl. I mean it.”

Lou Ann hid her mouth with her hand.

“What?” I said.

“Nothing.” I could see perfectly well that she was smiling.

“Come on, what is it?”

“It’s been so long,” she said. “You talk just like me.”

SIX

Valentine’s Day

T
he first killing frost of the winter came on Valentine’s Day. Mattie’s purple bean vines hung from the fence like long strips of beef jerky drying in the sun. It broke my heart to see that colorful jungle turned to black slime, especially on this of all days when people everywhere were sending each other flowers, but it didn’t faze Mattie. “That’s the cycle of life, Taylor,” she said. “The old has to pass on before the new can come around.” She said frost improved the flavor of the cabbage and Brussels sprouts. But I think she was gloating. The night before, she’d listened to the forecast and picked a mop bucket full of hard little marbles off the tomato vines, and this morning she had green-tomato pies baking upstairs. I know this sounds like something you’d no more want to eat than a mud-and-Junebug pie some kid would whip up, but it honestly smelled delicious.

I had taken a job at Jesus Is Lord Used Tires.

If there had been any earthly way around this, I would have found it. I loved Mattie, but you know about me and tires. Every time I went to see her and check on the car I felt like John Wayne in that war movie where he buckles down his helmet, takes a swig of bourbon, and charges across the minefield yelling something like “Live Free or Bust!”

But Mattie was the only friend I had that didn’t cost a mint in long distance to talk to, until Lou Ann of course. So when she started telling me how she needed an extra hand around the place I just tried to change the subject politely. She had a lot of part-time help, she said, but when people came and went they didn’t have time to get the knack of things like patching and alignments. I told her I had no aptitude whatsoever for those things, and was that a real scorpion on that guy’s belt buckle that was just in here? Did she think we’d get another frost? How did they stitch all those fancy loops and stars on a cowboy boot, was there a special kind of heavy-duty sewing machine?

But there was no steering Mattie off her course. She was positive I’d be a natural at tires. She chatted with me and Turtle between customers, and then sent us on our way with a grocery bag full of cabbage and peas, saying, “Just think about it, hon. Put it in your swing-it-till-Monday basket.”

When Mattie said she’d throw in two new tires and would show me how to fix my ignition, I knew I’d be a fool to say no. She paid twice as much as the Burger Derby, and of course there was no ridiculous outfit to be dry-cleaned. If I was going to get blown up, at least it would be in normal clothes.

In many ways it was a perfect arrangement. You couldn’t ask for better than Mattie. She was patient and kind and let me bring Turtle in with me when I needed to. Lou Ann kept her some days, but if she had to go out shopping or to the doctor, one baby was two hands full. I felt a little badly about foisting her off on Lou Ann at all, but she insisted that Turtle was so little trouble she often forgot she was there. “She doesn’t even hardly wet her diapers,” Lou Ann said. It was true. Turtle’s main goal in life, other than hanging on to things, seemed to be to pass unnoticed.

Mattie’s place was always hopping. She was right about people always passing through, and not just customers, either. There was another whole set of people who spoke Spanish and lived with her upstairs for various lengths of time. I asked her about them once, and she asked me something like had I ever heard of a sanctuary.

I remembered my gas-station travel brochures. “Sure,” I said. “It’s a place they set aside for birds, where nobody’s allowed to shoot them.”

“That’s right. They’ve got them for people too.” This was all she was inclined to say on the subject.

Usually the people were brought and taken away by the blue-jeans priest in the station wagon I’d seen that first day. He also wore an interesting belt buckle, not with a scorpion but with an engraving of a small stick figure lost in a kind of puzzle. Mattie said it was an Indian symbol of life: the man in the maze. The priest was short, with a muscular build and white-blond, unruly hair, not really my type but handsome in a just-rolled-out-of-bed kind of way, though I suppose that saying such things about a priest must be some special category of sin. His name was Father William.

When Mattie introduced us I said, “Pleased to meet you,” making an effort not to look at his belt buckle. What had popped into my head was “You are old, Father William.” Now where did
that
come from? He was hardly old, and even if he were, this isn’t something you’d say.

He and Mattie went to the back of the shop to discuss something over coffee and pie while I held down the fort. It came to me a little later while I was testing a stack of old whitewalls, dunking them in the water and marking a yellow chalk circle around each leak. I remembered three drawings of a little round man: first standing on his head, then balancing an eel straight up on his nose, then kicking a boy downstairs. “You Are Old, Father William” was a poem in a book I’d had as a child. It had crayon scribbles on some pages, so it must have been a donation from one of Mama’s people whose children had grown up. Only a rich child would be allowed to scribble in a hardback book.

I decided that after work I would go down to one of Sandi’s New To You toy stores and find a book for Turtle. New To You was just like Mama’s people, only you had more choice about what you got.

After I had marked all the tires I rolled them across the lot and stacked them into leaky and good piles. I congratulated myself on my steady hand, but later in the day Mattie saw me jump when some hotdog Chevy backfired out in the street. She was with a customer, but later she came over and said she’d been meaning to ask what I was always so jumpy about. I thought of that column in
Reader’s Digest
where you write in and tell your most embarrassing moment. Those were all cute: “The Day My Retriever Puppy Retrieved the Neighbor’s Lingerie Off the Clothes Line.” In real life, your most embarrassing moment is the last thing in the world you would want printed in
Reader’s Digest
.

“Nothing,” I said.

We stood for a minute with our hands folded into our armpits. Mattie’s gray bangs were more salt than they were pepper, cut high and straight across, and her skin always looked a little sunburned. The wrinkles around her eyes reminded me of her Tony Lama boots.

Mattie was like a rock in the road. You could stare at her till the cows came home, but it wouldn’t budge the fact of her one inch.

“Just don’t tell me you’re running from the law,” she said finally. “I’ve got enough of that on my hands.”

“No.” I wondered what exactly she meant by that. Out on the street a boy coasted by on a bicycle, his elbow clamped over a large framed picture of a sportscar. “I have a fear of exploding tires,” I said.

“Well, of all things,” she said.

“I know. I didn’t ever tell you because it sounds chickenshit.” I stopped to consider if you ought to say “chickenshit” in a place called Jesus Is Lord’s, but then the damage was done. “Really it’s not like it sounds. I don’t think there’s a thing you could name that I’m afraid of, other than that.”

“Of all things,” she said again. I imagined that she was looking at me the way you do when you first notice someone is deformed. In sixth grade we had a new teacher for three weeks before we realized his left hand was missing. He always kept his hanky over it. We’d just thought it was allergies.

“Come over here a minute,” Mattie said. “I’ll show you something.” I followed her across the lot. She took a five-gallon jerry can, the type that Jeeps have strapped on their backs, and filled it a little better than halfway up with water.

“Whoa!” I said. While I wasn’t paying attention she’d thrown the heavy can at me. I caught it, though it came near to bowling me over.

“Knocked the wind out of you, but it didn’t kill you, right?”

“Right,” I said.

“That’s twenty-eight pounds of water. Twenty-eight pounds of air is about what you put in a tire. When it hits you, that’s what it feels like.”

“If you say so,” I said. “But I saw a guy get blown up in the air once by a tire. All the way over the Standard Oil sign. It was a tractor tire.”