The Bean Trees

All evening, after I'd fed the kids and put them to bed, I paced the house. I couldn't wait for Lou Ann to get home, but then when she did I wasn't sure I wanted to tell her anything yet. I hadn't completely made up my mind.

"For heaven's sake," Lou Ann said, "you're making me nervous. Either sit down or wash the dishes." I washed the dishes.

"Whatever's on your mind, I hope you get it settled," she said, and went to the living room to read. She had been reading a novel called Daughter of the Cheyenne Winds, which she claimed she had found in her locker at Red Hot Mama's, and had nothing whatever to do with Angel being on the Montana-Colorado Circuit.

I followed her into the living room. "You're not mad are you? Because I don't want to talk about it?"

"Nope."

"I'll tell you tomorrow. I just have to think some more."

She didn't look up. "Go think," she said. "Think, and wash the dishes."

I didn't sleep at all that night. I was getting used to it. I watched Turtle roll from her side to her stomach and back again. Her eyes rolled back and forth under her eyelids, and sometimes her mouth worked too. Whoever she was talking to in her dream, she told them a whole lot more than she'd ever told me. I would have paid good money to be in that dream.

In the morning I left her asleep and went to Matties to finish an alignment and front-and-rear rotation I'd left undone the previous afternoon. The guy was coming in sometime that day to pick it up. I didn't look at a clock but it must have been early when I went in because I was already finished and ready to go home before Mattie came downstairs. I hung around a while longer, making coffee and dusting the shelves and changing the calendar (it was still on May, and this was August). I stared for a long time at the picture of the Aztec man carrying the passed-out woman, thinking about whatever Latin American tragedy it stood for. Thinking, naturally, of Esperanza and Estevan. Though I knew that more often than not it was the other way around, the woman carried the man through the tragedy. The man and the grandma and all the kids.

Finally Mattie came down. We had a cup of coffee, and we talked.

Afterward I found Lou Ann and the kids in the park. Turtle was amusing herself by sweeping a patch of dirt with an old hairbrush, presumably Edna's since it was red, and Lou Ann had momentarily put aside Daughter of the Cheyenne Winds to engage in a contest of will with Dwayne Ray. Lou Ann was bound to win, of course.

"I said no! Give it to me right now. Where'd you get that from?" She grabbed his fist, which was headed on an automatic-pilot course for his mouth, and extracted a dirt-covered purple jelly bean. "Where in the heck do you think he got that? My God, Taylor, just imagine if he'd eaten it!"

Dwayne Ray's mouth remained in the shape of an O for several seconds, still expecting the intercepted jelly bean, and then he started to scream.

"I used to know this old farm woman that said you've got to eat a peck of dirt before you die," I said.

Lou Ann picked up Dwayne Ray and bounced him. "Well, maybe if you don't eat a peck of dirt before your first birthday then you won't die so quick, is what I say."

I sat down on the bench. "Listen, I've made up my mind about something. I'm going to drive Esperanza and Estevan to a safe house in Oklahoma. And while I'm there I'm going to see if I can find any of Turtle's relatives."

She stared at me. Dwayne Ray came down on her knee with a bump, and was stunned into being quiet.

"What for?"

"So they can sign her over to me."

"Well, what if they won't? What if they see how good she's turning out and decide they want her back?"

"I don't think they will."

"But what if they do?"

"Damn it, Lou Ann, you've been telling me till you were blue in the face to do something, take action, think positive, blah, blah, blah. I'm trying to think positive here."

"Sorry."

"What other choice have I got than to go? If I just sit here on my hands, then they take her."

"I know. You're right."

"If her relatives want her back, then I'll think of something. We'll cut that fence when we come to it."

"What if you can't find them? Sorry."

"I'll find them."

Lou Ann, uncharacteristically, had overlooked the number-one thing I ought to be worried about. Over the next few days Mattie asked me about fifty times if I was sure I knew what I was doing. She told me that if I got caught I could get five years in prison and a $2,000 fine for each illegal person I was assisting, which in this case would be two. To tell the truth, I couldn't even let these things enter my head.