The Bean Trees (23 page)

“So how does a toad get into the middle of the desert?” I wanted to know. “Does it rain toad frogs in Arizona?”

“They’re here all along, smarty. Burrowed in the ground. They wait out the dry months kind of dead-like, just like everything else, and when the rain comes they wake up and crawl out of the ground and start to holler.”

I was amazed. There seemed to be no end to the things that could be hiding, waiting it out, right where you thought you could see it all.

“Jeez,” I said, as one of them let out a squall next to my sneaker.

“Only two things are worth making so much noise about: death and sex,” Estevan said. He had the devil in him tonight. I remembered a dream about him from a few nights before, one that I had not until that minute known I’d had. A very detailed dream. I felt a flush crawling up my neck and was glad for the dusk. We were following Mattie’s voice to keep to the trail, concentrating on avoiding the embrace of spiny arms in the darkness.

“It’s all one to a toad,” Mattie said. “If it’s not the one, it’s the other. They don’t have long to make hay in weather like this. We might not get another good rain for weeks. By morning there’ll be eggs in every one of these puddles. In two days’ time, even less, you can see tadpoles. Before the puddles dry up they’ve sprouted legs and hit the high road.”

We were following behind Mattie in single file now, holding to one another’s damp sleeves and arms in the darkness. All at once Esperanza’s fingers closed hard around my wrist. The flashlight beam had found a snake, just at eye level, its muscular coils looped around a smooth tree trunk.

“Better step back easy, that’s a rattler,” Mattie said in a calm voice. With the flashlight she followed the coils to the end and pointed out the bulbs on the tail, as clear and fragile-looking as glass beads. The rattle was poised upright but did not shake.

“I didn’t know they could get up in trees,” I said.

“Sure, they’ll climb. After birds’ eggs.”

A little noise came from my throat. I wasn’t really afraid, but there is something about seeing a snake that makes your stomach tighten, no matter how you make up your mind to feel about it.

“Fair’s fair,” Mattie pointed out, as we skirted a wide path around the tree. “Everybody’s got her own mouths to feed.”

I knew right away that something had gone wrong. Lou Ann was standing on the front porch waiting and she looked terrible, not just because she was under a yellow light bulb. She had been crying, possibly screaming—her mouth looked stretched. She wasn’t even supposed to be home yet.

I ran up the sidewalk, almost tripping twice on the steps. “What is it? Are you okay?”

“It’s not me. Taylor, I’m so sorry to have to tell you this. I’m so sorry, Taylor. It’s Turtle.”

“Oh God, no.” I went past her into the house.

Edna Poppy was sitting on the sofa with Turtle in her lap, all in one piece as far as I could see, but Turtle was changed. All these months we had spent together were gone for her. I knew it from her eyes: two cups of black coffee. I remembered exactly, exactly, how the whites of her eyes had been thin slivers of moon around the dark centers, how they had glowed orange, on and off, with the blinking neon sign from that Godforsaken bar.

I didn’t go to her, because I couldn’t. It is that simple. I didn’t want any of this to be happening.

Mrs. Parsons was standing in the kitchen door with a broom. “A bird has got into the house,” she explained, and disappeared into the kitchen again, and for a confused second I thought she meant that this was the terrible thing that had happened.

But Lou Ann was right behind me. “They were in the park, Edna and Turtle. It was so cool after the rain they thought they’d enjoy the air for a little bit, and Virgie was to come tell them if it looked like another storm was coming. But Virgie didn’t come, and Edna never realized it was getting dark.”

“So what happened.” I was sick to my stomach.

“We don’t know, exactly. I’ve called the police and they’re coming over with a medical examiner or a social worker or, Christ, I don’t know, somebody that can talk to Turtle.”

“But what happened? How much do you
know
happened?”

Edna’s eyes looked more glassy than usual. I noticed, now that I looked at her, that her clothes were a little messed up. Just trances, the red sweater pulled down on one shoulder, a hole in her stocking.

“I heard a peculiar sound,” Edna said. She seemed almost in another world, a hypnotized person speaking out of a trance. “It sounded just like a bag of flour hitting the dirt. Turtle had been talking, or singing I suppose would be more like it, and then she was quiet, just didn’t make a peep, but I heard struggling sounds. I called out, and then I swung my cane. Oh, I swung it high, so I wouldn’t hit the baby. I know how tall she is.” She held her hand just where Turtle’s head would be, if she had been standing on the floor in front of Edna.

“Did you hit anything?”

“Oh, yes, dear. Yes. I don’t know what, but something that had some—I’d say some
give
to it. Do you understand what I mean? Oh, and I shouted too, some terrible things. The next thing I knew, I felt a great heavy weight on the hem of my skirt, and that was Turtle.”

“It took us twenty minutes to get her to turn loose,” Lou Ann said. Now she was holding on to Edna’s sleeve instead of her hem.

“Oh my dear, I feel terrible. If I had only thought to come in a little sooner.”

“It could have happened to anybody, Edna,” Lou Ann said. “You couldn’t have known what was going to happen, I might have done the exact same thing. You saved her, is what you did. Anybody else might have been scared to swing at him.”

Anybody else, I thought, might have seen he had a gun, or a knife.

Someone knocked at the door and we all jumped. It was the police, of course, a small man who showed his detective badge and a woman who said she was a social worker, both of them dressed in ordinary clothes. Edna told what there was of her story again. The social worker was a prim-looking strawberry blonde who was carrying two rag dolls with yarn hair, a boy and a pigtail-girl. She asked if I was the mother. I nodded, a dumb animal, not really a mother, and she took me into the hallway.

“Don’t you think a doctor should look at her?” I asked.

“Yes, of course. If we find evidence that she’s been molested we’ll need to talk with the child about it.”

“She won’t talk,” I said. “Not now. Maybe not ever.”

The social worker put her hand on my arm. “Children do recover from this kind of thing,” she said. “Eventually they want to talk about what’s happened to them.”

“No, you don’t understand. She may not talk again at all. Period.”

“I think you’ll find that your daughter can be a surprisingly resilient little person. But it’s very important that we let her say what she needs to say. Sometimes we use these dolls. They’re anatomically accurate,” she said, and showed me. They were. “A child generally doesn’t have the vocabulary to talk about these things, so we encourage her to play with these dolls and show us what has happened.”

“Excuse me,” I said, and went to the bathroom.

But Mrs. Parsons was in there with the broom. “A bird is in the house,” she repeated. “A song sparrow. It came down the chimney.”

I took the broom out of her hands and chased the bird off its perch above the medicine cabinet. It swooped through the doorway into the kitchen, where it knocked against the window above the sink with an alarming crack, and fell back on the counter.

“It’s dead!” Virgie cried, but it wasn’t. It stood up, hopped to a sheltered place between a mixing bowl and Lou Ann’s recipe file, and stood blinking. In the living room they were asking about medical records. I heard Lou Ann spelling out Dr. Pelinowsky’s name.

Virgie moved toward the bird slowly, crooning, with her hand stretched out in front of her. But it took off again full tilt before she could reach it. I batted it gently with the broom, heading it off from the living room full of policemen and anatomically accurate dolls, and it veered down the hallway toward the back porch. Snowboots, at least, didn’t seem to be anywhere around.

“Open the screen door,” I commanded Virgie. “It’s locked, you have to flip that little latch. Now hold it open.”

Slowly I moved in on the terrified bird, which was clinging sideways to the screen. You could see its little heart beating through the feathers. I had heard of birds having heart attacks from fright.

“Easy does it,” I said. “Easy, we’re not going to hurt you, we just want to set you free.”

The sparrow darted off the screen, made a loop back toward the hallway, then flew through the open screen door into the terrible night.

The medical examiner said that there was no evidence Turtle had been molested. She was shaken up, and there were finger-shaped bruises on her right shoulder, and that was all.

“All!” I said, over and over. “She’s just been scared practically back into the womb is all.” Turtle hadn’t spoken once in the days since the incident, and was back to her old ways. Now I knew a word for this condition: catatonic.

“She’ll snap out of it,” Lou Ann said.

“Why should she?” I wanted to know. “Would you? I’ve just spent about the last eight or nine months trying to convince her that nobody would hurt her again. Why should she believe me now?”

“You can’t promise a kid that. All you can promise is that you’ll take care of them the best you can, Lord willing and the creeks don’t rise, and you just hope for the best. And things work out, Taylor, they do. We all muddle through some way.”

This from Lou Ann, who viewed most of life’s activities as potential drownings, blindings, or asphyxiation; who believed in dream angels that predicted her son would die in the year 2000. Lou Ann who had once said to me: “There’s so many germs in the world it’s a wonder we’re not all dead already.”

I didn’t want to talk to her about it. And she was furious with me, anyway, saying that I had practically abandoned Turtle since that night. “Why didn’t you go to her and pick her up? Why did you just leave her there, with the police and all, chasing that dumb bird around for heaven’s sake? Chasing that bird like it was public enemy number one?”

“She was already good and attached to Edna,” I said.

“That’s the biggest bunch of baloney and you know it. She would have turned loose of Edna for you. The poor kid was looking around the whole time, trying to see where you’d gone.”

“I don’t know what for. What makes anybody think I can do anything for her?”

I couldn’t sleep nights. I went to work early and left late, even when Mattie kept telling me to go home. Lou Ann took off a week from Red Hot Mama’s, putting her new promotion at risk, just to stay home with Turtle. The three of them—she, Edna, and Virgie—would sit together on the front porch with the kids, making sure we all understood it was nobody’s fault.

And she stalked the neighborhood like a TV detective. “We’re going to catch this jerk,” she kept saying, and went knocking on every door that faced onto the park, insisting to skeptical housewives and elderly, hard-of-hearing ladies that they must have seen something or somebody suspicious. She called the police at least twice to try and get them to come take fingerprints off Edna’s cane, on the off-chance that she’d whacked him on the hand.

“I know it was probably some pervert that hangs out at that sick place by Mattie’s,” Lou Ann told me, meaning Fanny Heaven of course. “Those disgusting little movies they have, some of them with kids. Did you know that? Little girls! A guy at work told me. It had to have been somebody that saw those movies, don’t you think? Why else would it even pop into a person’s head?”

I told her I didn’t know.

“If you ask me,” Lou Ann said more than once, “that’s like showing a baby how to put beans in its ears. I’m asking you, where else would somebody get the idea to hurt a child?”

I couldn’t say. I sat on my bed for hours looking up words. Pedophilia. Perpetrator. Deviant. Maleficent. I checked books out of the library but there weren’t any answers in there either, just more words. At night I lay listening to noises outside, listening to Turtle breathe, thinking: she could have been killed. So easily she could be dead now.

After dinner one night Lou Ann came into my room while the kids were listening to their “Snow White” record in the living room. I’d skipped dinner; I wasn’t eating much these days. When I was young and growing a lot, and Mama couldn’t feed me enough, she used to say I had a hollow leg. Now I felt like I had a hollow everything. Nothing in the world could have filled that space.

Lou Ann knocked softly at the door and then walked in, balancing a bowl of chicken-noodle soup on a tray.

“You’re going to dry up and blow away, hon,” she said. “You’ve got to eat something.”

I took one look and started crying. The idea that you could remedy such evil with chicken-noodle soup.

“It’s the best I can do,” Lou Ann offered. “I just don’t think you’re going to change anything with your own personal hunger strike.”

I put down my book and accepted her hug. I couldn’t remember when I had felt so hopeless.

“I don’t know where to start, Lou Ann,” I told her. “There’s just so damn much ugliness. Everywhere you look, some big guy kicking some little person when they’re down—look what they do to those people at Mattie’s. To hell with them, people say, let them die, it was their fault in the first place for being poor or in trouble, or for not being white, or whatever, how dare they try to come to this country.”

“I thought you were upset about Turtle,” Lou Ann said.

“About Turtle, sure.” I looked out the window. “But it just goes on and on, there’s no end to it.” I didn’t know how to explain the empty despair I felt. “How can I just be upset about Turtle, about a grown man hurting a baby, when the whole way of the world is to pick on people that can’t fight back?”

“You fight back, Taylor. Nobody picks on you and lives to tell the tale.”

I ignored this. “Look at those guys out in the park with no place to go,” I said. “And women, too. I’ve seen whole families out there. While we’re in here trying to keep the dry-cleaner bags out of the kids’ reach, those mothers are using dry-cleaner bags for their children’s
clothes
, for God’s sake. For raincoats. And feeding them out of the McDonald’s dumpster. You’d think that life alone would be punishment enough for those people, but then the cops come around waking them up mornings, knocking them around with their sticks. You’ve seen it. And everybody else saying hooray, way to go, I got mine, power to the toughest. Clean up the neighborhood and devil take the riffraff.”