The Bean Trees

Chapter 9 Ismene

Esperanza tried to kill herself. Estevan came to the back door and told me in a quiet voice that she had taken a bottle of baby aspirin.

I couldn't really understand why he had come. "Shouldn't you be with her?" I asked.

He said she was with Mattie. Mattie had found her almost immediately and rushed her to a clinic she knew of in South Tucson where you didn't have to show papers. I hadn't even thought of this-all the extra complications that must have filled their lives even in times of urgency. Mattie once told me about a migrant lemon picker in Phoenix who lost a thumb in a machine and bled to death because the nearest hospital turned him away.

"Is she going to be all right?"

How could he know? But he said yes, that she was. "They might or might not have to vacuum her stomach," he explained. He seemed to know the whole story, including the ending, and I began to suspect it was something that had happened before.

It was after sunset and the moon was already up. A fig grew by the back door, an old, stubborn tree that was slow to leaf out. The moon threw shadows of fig branches that curled like empty hands across Estevan's face and his chest. Something inside this man was turning inside out.

He followed me into the kitchen where I had been cutting up carrots and cubes of cheese for Turtle's lunch tomorrow.

To keep my hands from shaking I pushed the knife carefully through stiff orange carrot flesh against the cutting board. "I don't really know what to say when something like this happens," I told him. "Anything I can think of to talk about seems ridiculous next to a person's life or death."

He nodded.

"Can I get you something? Did you eat?" I opened the refrigerator door, but he waved it shut. "At least a beer, then," I said. I opened two beers and set one on the table in front of him. From my earliest memory, times of crisis seemed to end up with women in the kitchen preparing food for men. "I can see right now that I'm going to do one of two things here," I told Estevan. "Either shove food at you, or run off at the mouth. When I get nervous I fall back on good solid female traditions."

"It's okay," he said. "I'm not hungry, so talk." I had never heard him say, "It's okay," before. Restaurant work was corrupting Estevan's perfect English.

I took his statement to mean that it was okay to talk about things that weren't especially important, so I did. "Lou Ann took the baby over to her mother-in-law's for some kind of a weekend-long reunion," I said, swallowing too much beer. "They still consider her part of the family, but of course she won't go over when Angel's there so they have to work it all out, but now of course it's easier since Angel's left town. It's totally nuts. See, they're Catholic, they don't recognize divorce." I felt my face go red. "I guess you're Catholic too."

But he wasn't offended. "More or less," he said. "Catholic by birth."

"Did you have any idea she was going to do this?"

"No. I don't know."

"There's not a thing you could have done, anyway. Really." I swept the carrot pieces into a plastic bag and put it in the refrigerator. "I knew this kid in high school, Scotty Richey? Everybody said Scotty was a genius, mainly because he was real quiet and wore these thick glasses and understood trigonometry. He killed himself on his sixteenth birthday, just when everybody else was thinking, "Well, now Scotty'll learn to drive and maybe get a car and go out on dates,' you know, and that his complexion was bound to clear up and so forth. Bang, they find him dead in a barn with all these electrical wires strung around his neck. In the paper they said it was an accident but nobody actually believed that. Scotty had done probably five hundred different projects with electricity for 4-H."

"Four-H?"

"It's a club for farm kids where you raise lambs or make an apron or wire a den lamp out of a bowling pin, things like that. I never was in it. You had to pay."

"I see."

"Do you want to sit in the living room?" I asked him. He followed me into the other room and I scooted Snowboots off the sofa. When Estevan sat down next to me my heart was bumping so hard I wondered if I was going to have a heart attack. Just what Estevan needed would be another woman falling apart on him.

"So nobody could understand about Scotty," I said. "But the way I see it is, he just didn't have anybody. In our school there were different groups you would run with, depending on your station in life. There were the town kids, whose daddies owned the hardware store or what have you-they were your cheerleaders and your football players. Then there were hoodlums, the motorcycle types that cut down trees on Halloween. And then there were the rest of us, the poor kids and the farm kids. Greasers, we were called, or Nutters. The main rule was that there was absolutely no mixing. Do you understand what I mean?"