The Bean Trees

Lou A

But every day the paper said: No precipitation expected.

“Remember that time at the zoo?” Lou A

“I remember the giant turtles,” I said.

Lou A

“Do you know what Estevan told me?” I asked Lou A

“You give the baby to the light?”

“Mmm-hmm.” I was reading a piece about earthquakes under the ocean. They cause giant waves, but in a ship you can’t feel it at all, it just rolls under you.

I twisted my hair into a knot to try and get it off my sweaty neck. I looked enviously at Lou A

“I was so sure Dwayne Ray was going to be a Siamese twin or something,” she said. “Because I was so big. When he was born I had to ask the doctor about fifteen times if he was normal, before it sunk in. I just couldn’t believe he was okay.”

“And now you just can’t believe he’s going to get through a day without strangling or drowning in an ice chest,” I said, but in a nice way. I put down the paper and gave Lou A

“Taylor, can I tell you something? Promise you won’t tell anybody. Promise me you won’t laugh.”

“Cross my heart.”

“I had this dream, one week after he was born. This angel came down, I guess from the sky-I didn’t see that part. He was dressed kind of modern, in a suit, you know? With a brown tie? But he was an angel, I’m positive-he had wings. And he said: ‘I was sent to you from the future of this planet.’ Then he told me my son would not live to see the year two thousand.”

“Lou A

“But no, that’s not even the scariest part. The next morning my horoscope said, ‘Listen to the advice of a stranger.’ Now don’t you think that’s got to mean something? That part’s real, it’s not a dream. I cut it out and saved it. And Dwayne Ray’s said something about avoiding u

“You were just looking for a disaster, that’s all. You can’t deny you hunt for them, Lou A

“Am I just completely screwed up, Taylor, or what? I’ve always been this way. My brother and I used to play this game when we were little, with a cigar box. That box was our best toy. It had this slinky lady in a long red dress on the inside of the lid, with her dress slit way up to here. It’s a wonder Gra

“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 A

Usually Lou A

“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 A

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 A

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 A

“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.”