The Bean Trees

As I left to go back to work I saw the woman with the cardboard box, still in the living room. She was sorting through a handful of possessions she had laid out on the sofa-a black skirt, a small book bound in red vinyl, a framed photograph, a pair of baby’s sneakers tied together by the laces-and carefully putting them back into the box.

On Wednesday, just as I was finishing up the last patch of the day and getting ready to head for home, I spotted Lou A

Lou A

“So the first thing the guy says to me is ‘We get a lot of armed robberies in here, sweetheart.’ He kept on calling me sweetheart and talking to my boobs instead of my face, this big flabby guy with greasy hair and you just know he reads every one of those porno magazines they keep behind the counter. ‘Lots of stickups, sweetheart, how do you hold up under pressure?’ he says. Holdup, that was his idea of a big hilarious joke. Jeez, the whole thing gave me the creeps from the word go.”

I could see that she had dressed up for this interview: a nice skirt, ironed blouse, stockings, pumps. In this heat. The humiliation of it made me furious. “Something better’s bound to come along,” I said. “You can hold out.” I wiped my hands on a towel, hollered goodbye to Mattie, and we headed down the sidewalk.

“I hate that place,” she said, nodding back over her shoulder at Fa

‘Yeah,” I said. “But on the bright side, Mattie says they don’t do a whole lot of business. She thinks having a place called Jesus Is Lord right next door kind of puts a hex on it.”

Lou A

“Don’t ignore it, then,” I said. “Talk back to it. Say, ‘You can’t do that number on me you shit-for-brains,’ or something like that. Otherwise it kind of weasels its way into your head whether you like it or not. You know those hard-boiled eggs they keep around in jars of vinegar, in bars? It’s like that. After a while they get to tasting awful, and it’s not the egg’s fault. What I’m saying is you can’t just sit there, you got to get pissed off.”

“You really think so?”

“I do.”

“The thing about you, Taylor, is that you just don’t let anybody put one over on you. Where’d you ever learn to be like that?” Lou A

“Nutter school.”

ELEVEN

In the third week of May, Lou A

The ones that handled the chiles grew accustomed to tingling fingertips, and learned never to touch their eyes or private parts (or anyone else’s), not even on their days off. No matter how they scrubbed their hands, the residue of Red Hot Mama had a way of sticking around, as pesty and persistent as a chaperone at a high school dance.

Truly this was a sweatshop. Half the time the air conditioner didn’t work at all, and all the time the fumes made everyone’s eyes water so furiously that contact lenses could not be worn on the premises. Lou A

If Red Hot Mama’s had given out enthusiastic-employee awards Lou A

It came in three speeds: the jars with green lids were “mild,” whereas pink meant “hot.” The red-lidded jars were so-called “firecracker style.” The latter was not a big hit with the kids. Turtle would cry and pant at just the slightest taste, fa

“Enough already,” I told Lou A

But Lou A

I informed Lou A

Telling it this way it sounds like a lot of fights, but actually I was liking Lou A

She mostly worked swing shift, which meant that she left at three in the afternoon, leaving the kids with Edna Poppy and Mrs. Parsons until I came home a couple of hours later. For the longest time Lou A

Once she started swing shift Lou A

“Listen at this: ‘Liberty, Kansas. The parents and doctor of severely deformed Siamese twins joined at the frontal lobe of the brain have been accused of attempting to murder the infants by withholding medical care.’ Lord, you can’t really blame them, can you? I mean, what would you do? Is it better to be totally retarded and deformed and miserable, or just plain old dead?”

“I honestly couldn’t say,” I said. “Not having been either one.” Although, when I thought about it, being dead seemed a lot like not being born yet, and I hadn’t especially minded that. But I didn’t give it a lot of thought. I was interested in the weather forecast. We hadn’t had a drop of rain since that double-rainbow hailstorm back in January, and the whole world was looking parched. When you walked by a tree or a bush it just looked like it ached, somehow. I had to drag the water hose around to the back every day for Matties squash and beans. The noise of the cicadas was enough to drive you to homicide. Mattie said it was their love call, that they mated during the hottest, driest weeks of the year, but it was beyond belief that any creature-even another cicada-would be attracted by that sound. It was a high, screaming buzz, a sound that hurt your eyes and made your skin shrink, a sound in the same class with scratched-up phonograph records and squeaking chalk.