The Bean Trees (9 page)

Lou Ann showed me the rest of the house except for her room, where the baby was asleep. Turtle and I would have our own room, plus the screened-in back porch if we wanted it. She said it was great to sleep out there in the summer. We had to whisper around the house so we wouldn’t wake the baby.

“He was just born in January,” Lou Ann said when we were back in the kitchen. “How old’s yours?”

“To tell you the truth, I don’t even know. She’s adopted.”

“Well, didn’t they tell you all that stuff when you adopted her? Didn’t she come with a birth certificate or something?”

“It wasn’t an official adoption. Somebody just kind of gave her to me.”

“You mean like she was left on your doorstep in a basket?”

“Exactly. Except it was in my car, and there wasn’t any basket. Now that I think about it, there should have at least been a basket. Indians make good baskets. She’s Indian.”

“Wasn’t there even a note? How do you know her name’s Turtle?”

“I don’t. I named her that. It’s just temporary until I can figure out what her real name is. I figure I’ll hit on it sooner or later.”

Turtle was in a high chair of Lou Ann’s that must have been way too big for a kid born in January. On the tray there were decals of Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy, which Turtle was slapping with her hands. There was nothing there for her to grab. I picked her up out of the chair and hefted her onto my shoulder, where she could reach my braid. She didn’t pull it, she just held on to it like a lifeline. This was one of our normal positions.

“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 toi
let; 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.”

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 hot
dog 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.”

“Well that’s another whole can of beans,” Mattie said. “If we get a tractor tire in here, I’ll handle it.”

I had never thought of tire explosions in relative terms, though it stood to reason that some would be worse than others. By no means did this put my fears to rest, but still I felt better somehow. What the hell. Live free or bust.

“Okay,” I said. “We’ll handle it together, how’s that?”

“That’s a deal, hon.”

“Can I put this down now?”

“Sure, put it down.” She said it in a serious way, as if the can of water were some important damaged auto part we’d been discussing. I blessed Mattie’s soul for never laughing at any point in this conversation. “Better yet,” she said, “pour it out on those sweet peas.”

There was a whole set of things I didn’t understand about plants, such as why hadn’t the sweet peas been killed by the frost? The same boy sped by again on his bike, or possibly a different boy. This time he had a bunch of roses in a white paper funnel tucked under his arm. While the water glugged out over the sweet peas I noticed Mattie looking at me with her arms crossed. Just watching. I missed Mama so much my chest hurt.

Turtle had managed to get through her whole life without a book, I suppose, and then had two of them bought for her in one day. I got her one called
Old MacDonald Had an Apartment House
, which showed pictures of Old MacDonald growing celery in windowboxes and broccoli in the bathtub and carrots under the living-room rug. Old MacDonald’s downstairs neighbors could see the carrots popping down through the ceiling. I bought it because it reminded me of Mattie, and because it had stiff pages that I hoped might stand up to Turtle’s blood-out-of-turnips grip.

While I was downtown I also looked for a late Valentine’s card to send Mama. I still felt kind of awful about leaving her, and changing my name just seemed like the final act of betrayal, but Mama didn’t see it that way. She said I was smarter than anything to think of Taylor, that it fit me like a pair of washed jeans. She told me she’d always had second thoughts about Marietta.

I found just the right card to send her. On the cover there were hearts, and it said, “Here’s hoping you’ll soon have something big and strong around the house to open those tight jar lids.” Inside was a picture of a pipe wrench.

Lou Ann, meanwhile, had bought one of those name-your-baby books in the grocery checkout line. When I came home she had it propped open on the stove and was calling out names from the girl section while she made dinner. Both Turtle and Dwayne Ray were propped up at the table in chairs too big for them. Dwayne Ray’s head was all flopped over, he was too little to hold it up by himself, and he was wiggling toward the floor like Snake Man escaping from his basket. Turtle just sat and stared at nothing. Or rather, at something on the table that was as real to her as Snowboots’s invisible poop was to him.

Lou Ann was banging pot lids to wake the dead and boiling bottles. She had stopped nursing and put Dwayne Ray on formula, saying she was petrified she wouldn’t have enough milk for him.

“Leandra, Leonie, Leonore, Leslie, Letitia,” she called out, watching Turtle over her shoulder as though she expected her to spew out quarters like a
slot machine when she hit the right combination of letters.

“Lord have mercy,” I said. “Have you been doing this all the way from the Agathas and Amys?”

“Oh, hi, I didn’t hear you come in.” She acted a little guilty, like a kid caught using swear words. “I thought I’d do half today and the rest tomorrow. You know what? Lou Ann is on the exact middle page. I wonder if my mother had a book like this.”

“The book our mothers had was the Bible, not some fifty-cent dealie they sell from the same rack as the
National Enquirer
.” I knew very well that none of my various names had come out of a Bible, nor Lou Ann’s either, but I didn’t care. I was just plain in a bad mood. I put Turtle over my shoulder. “What do you really expect her to do if you say the right name, Lou Ann? Jump up and scream and kiss you like the people on those game shows?”

“Don’t be mad at me, Taylor, I’m just trying to help. She worries me. I’m not saying she’s dumb, but it seems like she doesn’t have too much personality.”

“Sure she does,” I said. “She grabs onto things. That’s her personality.”

“Well, no offense, but that’s not personality. Babies do that automatically. I haven’t worked in a hospital or anything, but at least I know that much. Personality has to be something you learn.”

“And reading off a list of every name known to humankind is going to teach her to have personality?”

“Taylor, I’m not trying to tell you what to do, but all the magazines say that you have to play with children to develop their personality.”

“So? I play with her. I bought her a book today.”

“Okay, you play with her. I’m sorry.” Lou Ann ladled soup out of the big pot on the stove and brought bowls over to the table. Her bowl held about two teaspoons of the red-colored broth. She was starving herself to lose the weight she’d gained with Dwayne Ray, which was mostly between her ears as far as I could see.

“This is Russian cabbage-and-beet soup,” she announced. “It’s called borscht. It’s the beets that turn it pink. You’re supposed to put sour cream on top but that just seemed like calories up the kazoo. I got it out of
Ladies’ Home Journal
.”

I could imagine her licking her index finger and paging through some magazine article called “Toasty Winter Family Pleasers,” trying to find something to do with all that cabbage I kept bringing home from Mattie’s. I fished out a pink potato and mushed it up in Turtle’s bowl.

“It’s good, Lou Ann. Nothing personal, I’m just in a crappy mood.”

“Watch out, there’s peas in there. A child’s windpipe can be blocked by anything smaller than a golf ball.”

For Lou Ann, life itself was a life-threatening enterprise. Nothing on earth was truly harmless. Along with her clip file of Hispanic bank presidents (which she had started to let slide, now that Angel was talking divorce), she saved newspaper stories of every imaginable type of freak disaster. Unsuspecting diners in a restaurant decapitated by a falling ceiling fan. Babies fallen head-first into the beer cooler and
drowned in melted ice while the family played Frisbee. A housewife and mother of seven stepping out of a Wick ‘N’ Candle store, only to be shot through the heart by a misfired high-pressure nail gun at a construction site across the street. To Lou Ann’s way of thinking, this proved not only that ice chests and construction sites were dangerous, but also Wick ‘N’ Candle stores and Frisbees.