The Bean Trees (22 page)

“Of what?”

“That I’d be dead. That I’d look in the box and see myself dead.”

“But it was just pretend. You could have seen yourself any way you wanted to.”

“I know it. But that’s what I thought I’d see. Isn’t that the most ridiculous thing?”

“Maybe it was because of your father. Maybe you got kind of hung up on death, because of him dying.”

“I’m just totally screwed up, that’s all there is to it.”

“No, Lou Ann. You have your good points too.”

Usually Lou Ann spit out compliments you tried to feed her like some kind of nasty pill, but that night her blue eyes were practically pleading with me. “What good points?” she wanted to know.

“Oh gosh, tons of them,” I faltered. It’s not that it was a hard question, but I was caught off guard. I thought a minute.

“The flip side of worrying too much is just not caring, if you see what I mean,” I explained. “Dwayne Ray will always know that, no matter what, you’re never going to
neglect
him. You’ll never just sit around and let him dehydrate, or grow up without a personality, or anything like that. And that would be ever so much worse. You read about it happening in the paper all the time.” I meant it; she did. “Somebody forgetting a baby in a car and letting it roast, or some such thing. If anything, Lou Ann, you’re just too good of a mother.”

She shook her head. “I’m just a total screwed-up person,” she said. “And now I’m doing the same thing to poor Dwayne Ray. But I can’t help it, Taylor, I can’t. If I could see the future, if somebody offered to show me a picture of Dwayne Ray in the year 2001, I swear I wouldn’t look.”

“Well, nobody’s going to,” I said gently, “so you don’t have to worry about it. There’s no such thing as dream angels. Only in the Bible, and that was totally another story.”

In June a package came from Montana, all cheery and colorful with stamps and purple postage marks. It contained, among other things, a pair of child-sized cowboy boots—still years too big for Dwayne Ray—and a beautiful calfskin belt for Lou Ann. It was carved or stamped somehow with acorns, oak leaves, and her name. There was also a red-and-black Indian-beaded hair clip, which was of course no use to Lou Ann at this particular point in the life of her hair.

Angel had changed his mind about the divorce. He missed her. He wanted her to come up and live in Montana in something called a yurt. If that was not an acceptable option, then he would come back to Tucson to live with her.

“What in the heck is a yurt anyway?” Lou Ann asked. “It sounds like dirt.”

“Beats me,” I said. “Look it up.”

She did. “A circular domed tent of skins stretched over a lattice framework,” she read, pronouncing each word slowly without a Kentucky accent. She pronounced “a” like the letter “A.” “Used by the Mongol nomads of Siberia.”

As they say in the papers, I withheld comment.

“So what do you think, Taylor? Do you think it would have a floor, or plaster walls inside, anything like that? Think the bugs would get in?”

What popped into my head was: George eats old gray rutabagas and plasters his yurt.

“The part I can’t get over is that he asked for me,” she said. “He actually says here that he misses me.” She mulled it over and over, twisting her gold wedding band around her finger. She had stopped wearing it about the time she started working at the salsa factory, but now had put it on again, almost guiltily, as though Angel might have packed a spy into the box along with the belt and the boots.

“But I’ve got responsibilities now,” she argued, with herself certainly because I was giving no advice one way or the other. “At Red Hot Mama’s.”

This was surely true. In just three weeks’ time she had been promoted to floor manager, setting some kind of company record, but she refused to see this as proof that she was a good worker. “They just didn’t have anybody else to do it,” she insisted. “Practically everybody there’s fifteen years old, or worse. Sometimes they send over retardeds from that Helpless program, or whatever the heck it’s called.”

“It’s called the Help-Yourself program, and you know it, so don’t try to change the subject. The word is handicapped, not retardeds.”

“Right, that’s what I meant.”

“What about that woman you told me about that breeds Pekingeses and drives a baby-blue Trans Am? What’s-her-name, that gave you the I Heart My Cat bumper stickers? And what about the guy that’s building a hot-air blimp in his backyard? Are they fifteen?”

“No.” She was flipping the dictionary open and closed, staring out the window.

“And Sal Monelli, how old’s he?”

Lou Ann rolled her eyes. Sal Monelli was an unfortunate fellow whose name had struck such terror in her heart she forbade him to touch any food item that wasn’t sealed and crated. Lou Ann’s life was ruled by the fear of salmonella, to the extent that she claimed the only safe way to eat potato salad was to stick your head in the refrigerator and eat it in there.

“He actually wants me to go,” she kept repeating, and even though she said she wasn’t going to make up her mind right away, I felt in my bones that sooner or later she’d go. If I knew Lou Ann, she would go.

It seemed like the world was coming apart at the gussets. Mattie was gone more than she was home these days, “bird-watching.” Terry, the red-haired doctor, had moved to the Navajo reservation up north (to work, not because he had head rights). Father William looked like he had what people in Pittman call a case of the nerves.

The last time I’d really had a chance to talk with Mattie, she’d said there was trouble in the air. Esperanza and Estevan were going to have to be moved to a safe house farther from the border. The two best possibilities were Oregon and Oklahoma.

Flat, hopeless Oklahoma. “What would happen if they stayed here?” I asked.

“Immigration is making noises. They could come in and arrest them, and they’d be deported before you even had time to sit down and think about it.”

“Here?” I asked. “They would come into
your
house?”

Mattie said yes. She also said, as I knew very well, that in that case Estevan’s and Esperanza’s lives wouldn’t be worth a plugged nickel.

“That just can’t be right,” I said, “that they would do that to a person, knowing they’d be killed. There’s got to be some other way.”

“The only legal way a person from Guatemala can stay here is if they can prove in court that their life was in danger when they left.”

“But they were, Mattie, and you know it. You know what happened to them. To Esperanza’s brother, and all.” I didn’t say, To their daughter. I wondered if Mattie knew, but of course she would have to.

“Their own say-so is no good; they have to have hard proof. Pictures and documents.” She picked up a whitewall and I thought she was going to throw it across the lot, but she only hoisted it onto the top of a pile beside me. “When people run for their lives they frequently neglect to bring along their file cabinets of evidence,” she said. Mattie wasn’t often bitter but when she was, she was.

I didn’t want to believe the world could be so unjust. But of course it was right there in front of my nose. If the truth was a snake it would have bitten me a long time ago. It would have had me for dinner.

TWELVE

Into the Terrible Night

A
t three o’clock in the afternoon all the cicadas stopped buzzing at once. They left such an emptiness in the air it hurt your ears. Around four o’clock we heard thunder. Mattie turned over the “Closed” sign in the window and said, “Come on. I want you to smell this.”

She wanted Esperanza to come too, and surprisingly she agreed. I went upstairs to phone Edna and Mrs. Parsons, though I practically could have yelled to them across the park, to say I’d be home later than usual. Edna said that was fine, just fine, the kids were no trouble, and we prepared to leave. At the last minute it turned out that Estevan could come too; he had the night off. The restaurant was closed for some unexpected family celebration. We all piled into the cab of Mattie’s truck with Esperanza on Estevan’s lap and me straddling the stick shift. The three of us had no idea where we were headed, or why, but the air had sparks in it. I felt as though I had a blind date with destiny, and someone had heard a rumor that destiny looked like Christopher Reeve.

Mattie said that for the Indians who lived in this desert, who had lived here long before Tucson ever came along, today was New Year’s Day.

“What, July the twelfth?” I asked, because that’s what day it was, but Mattie said not necessarily. They celebrated it on whatever day the summer’s first rain fell. That began the new year. Everything started over then, she said: they planted their crops, the kids ran naked through the puddles while their mothers washed their clothes and blankets and everything else they owned, and they all drank cactus-fruit wine until they fell over from happiness. Even the animals and plants came alive again when the drought finally broke.

“You’ll see,” Mattie said. “You’ll feel the same way.”

Mattie turned onto a gravel road. We bounced through several stream beds with dry, pebbled bottoms scorched white, and eventually pulled over on high ground about a mile or so out of town. We picked our way on foot through the brush to a spot near a grove of black-trunked mesquite trees on the very top of the hill.

The whole Tucson Valley lay in front of us, resting in its cradle of mountains. The sloped desert plain that lay between us and the city was like a palm stretched out for a fortuneteller to read, with its mounds and hillocks, its life lines and heart lines of dry stream beds.

A storm was coming up from the south, moving slowly. It looked something like a huge blue-gray shower curtain being drawn along by the hand of God. You could just barely see through it, enough to make out the silhouette of the mountains on the other side. From time to time nervous white ribbons of lightning jumped between the mountaintops and the clouds. A cool breeze came up behind us, sending shivers along the spines of the mesquite trees.

The birds were excited, flitting along the ground and perching on thin, wildly waving weed stalks.

What still amazed me about the desert was all the life it had in it. Hillbilly that I was, I had come to Arizona expecting an endless sea of sand dunes. I’d learned of deserts from old Westerns and Quickdraw McGraw cartoons. But this desert was nothing like that. There were bushes and trees and weeds here, exactly the same as anywhere else, except that the colors were different, and everything alive had thorns.

Mattie told us the names of things, but the foreign words rolled right back out of my ears. I only remembered a few. The saguaros were the great big spiny ones, as tall as normal trees but so skinny and personlike that you always had the feeling they were looking over your shoulder. Around their heads, at this time of year, they wore crowns of bright red fruits split open like mouths. And the ocotillos were the dead-looking thorny sticks that stuck up out of the ground in clusters, each one with a flaming orange spike of flower buds at its top. These looked to me like candles from hell.

Mattie said all the things that looked dead were just dormant. As soon as the rains came they would sprout leaves and grow. It happened so fast, she said, you could practically watch it.

As the storm moved closer it broke into hundreds of pieces so that the rain fell here and there from the high clouds in long, curving gray plumes. It looked like maybe fifty or sixty fires scattered over the city, except that the tall, smoky columns were flowing in reverse. And if you looked closely you could see that in some places the rain didn’t make it all the way to the ground. Three-quarters of the way down from the sky it just vanished into the dry air.

Rays of sunlight streamed from between the clouds, like the Holy Ghost on the cover of one of Mattie’s dead husband’s magazines. Lightning hit somewhere nearby and the thunder made Esperanza and me jump. It wasn’t all that close, really, about two miles according to Mattie. She counted the seconds between the lightning strike and the thunder. Five seconds equaled one mile, she told us.

One of the plumes of rain was moving toward us. We could see big drops spattering on the ground, and when it came closer we could hear them, as loud as pebbles on a window. Coming fast. One minute we were dry, then we were being pelted with cold raindrops, then our wet shirts were clinging to our shoulders and the rain was already on the other side of us. All four of us were jumping and gasping because of the way the sudden cold took our breath away. Mattie was counting out loud between the lightning and thunderclaps: six, seven, boom!…four, five, six, boom! Estevan danced with Esperanza, then with me, holding his handkerchief under his arm and then twirling it high in the air—it was a flirtatious, marvelous dance with thunder for music. I remembered how he and I had once jumped almost naked into an icy stream together, how long ago that seemed, and how innocent, and now I was madly in love with him, among other people. I couldn’t stop laughing. I had never felt so happy.

That was when we smelled the rain. It was so strong it seemed like more than just a smell. When we stretched out our hands we could practically feel it rising up from the ground. I don’t know how a person could ever describe that scent. It certainly wasn’t sour, but it wasn’t sweet either, not like a flower. “Pungent” is the word Estevan used. I would have said “clean.” To my mind it was like nothing so much as a wonderfully clean, scrubbed pine floor.

Mattie explained that it was caused by the greasewood bushes, which she said produced a certain chemical when it rained. I asked her if anybody had ever thought to bottle it, it was so wonderful. She said no, but that if you paid attention you could even smell it in town. That you could always tell if it was raining in any part of the city.

I wondered if the smell was really so great, or if it just seemed that way to us. Because of what it meant.

It was after sunset when we made our way back to the truck. The clouds had turned pink, then blood red, and then suddenly it was dark. Fortunately Mattie, who was troubled by night-blindness, had thought to bring a flashlight. The night was full of sounds—bird calls, a high, quivery owl hoot, and something that sounded like sheep’s baahs, only a hundred times louder. These would ring out from the distance and then startle us by answering right from under our feet. Mattie said they were spadefoot toads. All that noise came from something no bigger than a quarter. I would never have believed it, except that I had seen cicadas.