The Bean Trees (9 page)

“That’s Tug Fork water. For baptizing the baby.”

The water inside the bottle looked milky and cool. A fine brown sediment stuck to the glass bottom when she tipped it sideways.

“I remember when you was baptized in Tug Fork, you was just a little old bit of a thing. And scared to death. When the reverend went to dunk you over, you hollered right out. Law, I remember that so good.”

“That’s good, Granny. You remember something I don’t.” Lou Ann wondered how Granny Logan was picturing a baptism in one bottle of water. Of course, the original plan had been to have Dwayne Ray sprinkled as a Catholic, but Granny would die if she knew that. And everything was up in the air now, anyway, with Angel gone.

“Doll baby, I reckon we’re all set,” Ivy said. “Oh, I hate to go. Let me hold my grandbaby again. You see he gets enough to eat now, Lou Ann. I always had plenty of milk for you and your brother, but you’re not as stout as I was. You never was a stout girl. It’s not my fault you wouldn’t eat what I put down in front of you.” She gave the baby a bounce on her pleated bosom. “Lordy mercy, he’ll be all growed up before we see him again, I expect.”

“I’m as fat as a hog since I had him, Mama, and you know it.”

“Remember you have to use both sides. If you just nurse him on one side you’ll go dry.”

“Don’t expect I’ll see him again a-tall,” Granny Logan grunted. “Not his old great-grandmaw.”

“Mama, I wish you’d wait till Angel gets home and we could drive you down to the station. You’re going to get all confused if you try to take the bus. You’ve got to change downtown.” The way they had both managed to avoid Angel he might as well not have moved back in.

“It’s a sin to be working on Sunday. He ought to be home with his family on the Lord’s day,” Granny Logan said, and sighed. “I guess I oughtn’t expect better from a heathern Mexican.”

“It’s shift work,” Lou Ann explained again. “He’s just got to go in when they tell him to, and that’s that. And he’s not a heathen. He was born right here in America, same as the rest of us.” Just because he wasn’t baptized in some old dirty crick, Lou Ann added in a voice way too low for Granny Logan to hear.

“Who tells him to?” the old woman demanded. Lou Ann looked at her mother.

“We’ll manage, with the bus and all,” Ivy said.

“That don’t make it right, do it? Just because some other heathern tells him to work on the Lord’s day?”

Lou Ann found a scrap of paper and wrote down the name of the stop and the number of the bus they would have to take downtown. Ivy handed back the baby and took the paper. She looked at it carefully before she folded it twice, tucked it in her purse, and began helping Granny Logan on with her coat.

“Granny, you’re not going to need that coat,” Lou Ann said. “I swear it’s eighty degrees out there.”

“You’ll swear yourself to tarnation if you don’t watch out. Don’t tell me I’m not going to need no coat, child. It’s January.” Her old hand pawed the air for a few seconds before Ivy silently caught it and corralled it in the heavy black sleeve.

“Lou Ann, honey, don’t let him play with that ink pen,” Ivy said over her shoulder. “He’ll put his eyes out before he even gets a good start in life.”

The baby was waving his fist vaguely in the direction of the blue pen in Lou Ann’s breast pocket, although he couldn’t have grabbed it or picked it up if his little life depended on it.

“All right, Mama,” Lou Ann said quietly. She wrapped the baby in a thin blanket in spite of the heat because she knew one or the other of the two women would fuss if she didn’t. “Let me help you with the stairs, Granny,” she said, but Granny Logan brushed her hand away.

Heat waves rising from the pavement made the brown grass and the palm tree trunks appear to wiggle above the sidewalk, making Lou Ann think of cartoons she had seen of strange lands where palm trees did the hula. They reached the little bus stop with its concrete bench.

“Don’t sit on it,” she warned. “It’ll be hot as a poker in this sun.” Granny Logan and Ivy stepped back from the bench like startled children, and Lou Ann felt pleased that she was able to tell them something they didn’t already know. The three women stood beside the bench, all looking in the direction from which the bus would come.

“Pew, don’t they make a stink,” Mother Logan said when the bus arrived. Ivy put her arms around both Lou Ann and the baby, then picked up the two bags and boarded the bus, lifting her feet high for the two big steps. At the top she turned and reached down for her mother-in-law, her sturdy, creased hand closing around the old knuckles. The bus driver leaned on his elbows over the steering wheel and stared ahead.

“I just wish you wasn’t so far away,” Ivy said as the doors hissed together.

“I know,” she mouthed. “Wave bye to your great-grandmaw,” Lou Ann told the baby, but they were on the wrong side to see.

She imagined herself running after the bus and banging on the door, the bus driver letting her climb up and settle herself and the baby onto the wide seat between her mother and grandmother. “Tell your mother to hand me that jar of tea,” Granny Logan would say to her. “I’ll be dry as a old stick fence before we get back to Kentucky.”

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 difference. 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.

FIVE

Harmonious Space

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.