The Bean Trees (6 page)

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 thunders 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.

“It’s all right, honey,” Mattie said. “You put that one in your mouth and I’ll give you another one.” Turtle did. I was amazed. She had never been this kind to Mrs. Hoge. Mattie was clearly accustomed to dealing with kids.

“Are you on the road?” she asked me.

“Have been up to now. From Kentucky, with a stopover in Oklahoma. We’re out to see what we can see. Now I guess we’ll see how we like Tucson.”

“Oh, you will. I ought to know, I’ve lived my whole life here. And that’s a rare breed, let me tell you. I don’t think there’s hardly a soul in Tucson anymore that was born here. Most of them come, you know, from out of state. My husband, Samuel, was from Tennessee. He came out as a young man for his asthma and he never could get used to the dry. I love it, though. I guess it’s all in what you’re used to.”

“I guess,” I said. I was dying to know about the name of the place, but couldn’t think of a polite way to bring it up. “Is this tire place part of a national chain, or something like that?” I finally asked. That sounded polite, but dumb.