The Bean Trees Chapter III

“It’s so dry out here kids will dehydrate real fast,” Mattie told me.

He’s a little towhead, you can’t miss him, he looks
just like me only his hair’s blonder.

Most of them were
called something relief: ASCENDANT RELIEF, ENDOGENOUS RELIEF, MOTIVE
RELIEF, GALVANIC RELIEF.

“It’s non-representational,” she said, looking at me like I was some kind of bug she’d
just found in her bathroom.

I
wondered if it told what kind of rocks they were, or if it was saying that they were
actually petrified dinosaur turds.

There was also a type of person who lived downtown full time, not in the Republic but
in the bus station or on the sidewalk around the Red Cross plasma center.

She was about my age, no more than twenty-five
anyway, and had no reason I could see for being so snooty.

“That’s a tarantula,” he said.

It broke to smithereens, and she got such big sad eyes I thought she was going to
cry.

She was wearing blue jeans and cowboy boots and a red
bandana on her head.

We whizzed by a roadside sign on which I could make out a dinosaur.

Life in the Republic was nothing like life at the Broken Arrow, where the only thing to
remind you you weren’t dead was the constant bickering between old Mrs. Hoge and
Irene.

I did inquire there about work,
but the head man in a white coat and puckery white loafers looked me over and said,
“Are you a licensed phlebotomist in the state of Arizona?” in this tone of voice like who
was I to think I could be on the end of the needle that doesn’t hurt, and that was the end
of that.

“Nah,” he said, squashing out his cigarette, and I decided he was dumber than he was
mean.

“On the freeway.

A long gray braid hung down the middle of her back.

“See, it’s an Alka-Seltzer, frozen between the plop and the fizz.”

Roger
picked one of them up and dribbled it like a basketball.

“Sassy one, aren’t you?”

Most of them were
called something relief: ASCENDANT RELIEF, ENDOGENOUS RELIEF, MOTIVE
RELIEF, GALVANIC RELIEF.

“Just make
yourself at home, hon, this won’t take a minute,” she told me, and handed me an orange
cup with a little drinking spout, which must have been designed especially for small
children.

“My
absolute dream is to have a horse of my own, and braid flowers in its mane and prance
around in a ring and win ribbons and stuff.”

The clouds were pink and fat and hilariouslooking,
like the hippo ballerinas in a Disney movie.

Usually people would either get embarrassed or give me a lecture.

That, or the talk would have
made your ears curl up like those dried apricot things.

Her eyelashes were stuck together
with blue mascara and sprung out all around her eyes like flower petals.

He wanted an alignment and to
pick up a tire for his ORV.

In the
rear-view mirror I could see broken glass glistening on the off ramp, dropping away
behind me like a twinkly green lake.

A kind of teepee frame made of CB antennas was
all overgrown with cherry-tomato vines.

He had on camouflage
army pants and a black baseball cap with cloth flaps hanging down in the back, such as
Gregory Peck or whoever it was always wore in those old Foreign Legion movies.

An empty tire couldn’t
possibly explode, I reasoned, so I sat Turtle down in one of those.

I was crazy to think I
was doing this child a favor by whisking her away from the Cherokee Nation.

He wouldn’t go near a filly for all the sugar in Hawaii.

I was glad to be
away from that wall of tires, all of them bulging to burst.

He had on camouflage
army pants and a black baseball cap with cloth flaps hanging down in the back, such as
Gregory Peck or whoever it was always wore in those old Foreign Legion movies.

But on
the other hand, I was glad for the chance to make some bucks before I headed on down
the pike.

Sure enough, they were one hundred percent purple: stems, leaves, flowers and pods.

Poodle skirts and things of that kind.

By the time we were in sight of Tucson it became clear what those goofy pink clouds
had been full of: hail.

It was hot, Turtle was spilling or spitting juice
down my shoulder blade, and I was getting more depressed by the minute.

Most of them were
called something relief: ASCENDANT RELIEF, ENDOGENOUS RELIEF, MOTIVE
RELIEF, GALVANIC RELIEF.

I wondered if maybe he was some kind
of junior-varsity priest.

Mrs. Hoge’s ulterior motive, I believe, was the child, which she looked after a
great deal of the time.

There was a rainbow over the
mountains behind the city, and over that another rainbow with the colors upside down.

“These bugs aggravate the dickens out of me after it rains, but I
can’t see my way clear to squashing them.

Its wings split apart and white
stuff oozed out between.

Mattie was clearly accustomed to dealing with kids.

Heads of cabbage and lettuce sprouted out of old tires.

“No!” she said, scouring the steam table like a fiend.

He and Mattie were talking, and
Roger was making various vibrating sounds with his lips.

For
some odd reason they had artificial grapes strewed out over the ice all around the
buckets.

There was a desk covered with papers, and all around against the walls there
were waist-high stacks of old National Geographics and Popular Mechanics and something
called The Beacon, which showed Jesus in long, swirling robes floating above a lighthouse.

Mrs. Hoge hinted in every imaginable way that she was retarded, but I
maintained that she had her own ways of doing things and wasn’t inclined to be pushed.

I wondered how many other things were lurking around waiting to
take a child’s life when you weren’t paying attention.

Down the block from the plasma center was a place called Burger Derby.

This was kind of her, although I had visions of turnips

growing out of it if I didn’t get it in running order soon.

For three twenty-five an hour I think you’re
entitled.”

Mrs. Hoge hinted in every imaginable way that she was retarded, but I
maintained that she had her own ways of doing things and wasn’t inclined to be pushed.

I told her what a hoot we all
thought it was when these rich guys paid six million for Secretariat after his running days
were over, since he was supposedly the most valuable stud on the face of the earth, and
then he turned out to be a reticent breeder, which is a fancy way of saying homosexual.

He came out as a young man for his asthma and he never could get used to
the dry.

Mattie’s place seemed homey enough, but living in the hustle-bustle of downtown
Tucson was like moving to a foreign country I’d never heard of.

She pried the cup out of Turtle’s hand and refilled it.

It was covered with vines, and the crazy-quilt
garden kept right on going on the other side, except without the car parts.

I wondered
if Mattie lived on the premises, maybe upstairs.

The road took us through a place
called Texas Canyon that looked nothing like Texas, heaven be praised for that, but
looked like nothing else I had ever seen either.

He was kind
of fanatical, you might say.

I left the interstate at an off ramp and pulled over next to what looked
like the Flying Nun’s hat made out of bumpy concrete, held up by orange poles.

Downtown Tucson was lively, with secretaries clicking down the sidewalks in
high-heeled sandals, and banker and lawyer types puffy-necked in their ties, and in the
evenings, prostitutes in get-ups you wouldn’t believe.

There were a lot more bugs crawling up on the cement slab.

I never could figure out why men thought they could impress a
woman by making the world out to be such a big dangerous deal.

We’ll
fix your little wagon right up.”

“My
absolute dream is to have a horse of my own, and braid flowers in its mane and prance
around in a ring and win ribbons and stuff.”

There was a desk covered with papers, and all around against the walls there
were waist-high stacks of old National Geographics and Popular Mechanics and something
called The Beacon, which showed Jesus in long, swirling robes floating above a lighthouse.

I left the interstate at an off ramp and pulled over next to what looked
like the Flying Nun’s hat made out of bumpy concrete, held up by orange poles.

“Oh, it’s fantastic,” she said.

In Tucson, it was clear that there was nobody overlooking us all.

Whereabouts?”

“No!” she said, scouring the steam table like a fiend.

A whole swarm of black
ants came out of a crack and milled around the cigarette butt trying, for reasons I could
not imagine, to take it apart.

Mattie’s place seemed homey enough, but living in the hustle-bustle of downtown
Tucson was like moving to a foreign country I’d never heard of.

A guy came out of the little
boarded-up building and leaned against one of the orange poles near us.

He had on camouflage
army pants and a black baseball cap with cloth flaps hanging down in the back, such as
Gregory Peck or whoever it was always wore in those old Foreign Legion movies.

I always went there around
ten-thirty, which is a weird time of day to eat a hot dog, but I was trying to get Turtle and
me onto two meals a day.

Rocks stacked on top of one another like piles of copulating potato
bugs.

She was really nice to Roger, even though he was bald and red-faced and kind of bossy.

Mrs. Hoge’s ulterior motive, I believe, was the child, which she looked after a
great deal of the time.

“No, like Seattle Slew, the racehorse.

“What’d you pay for that bucket of bolts?”

The top
snapped right off.

Mattie rubbed Ivory soap on the treads and
then dunked them in like big doughnuts.

And that’s a rare breed,
let me tell you.

“Comic Relief,” I said to Turtle.

The only thing is you have to go and
check in every two hours, to prove you’re still shopping, so I just dash over there on my
breaks.

I called
her Turtle, on account of her grip.

Inside
the walls a woman was using an air hose to chase bugs off the pavement, herding them
along with little blasts of air.

She had this idea that everyone in Kentucky
owned at least one Thoroughbred, and it took me some time to convince her that I had
never even been close enough to a horse to get kicked.

Usually people would either get embarrassed or give me a lecture.

An entire rusted-out Thunderbird,
minus the wheels, had nasturtiums blooming out the windows like Mama’s hen-andchicks
pot on the front porch at home.

Sure enough, they were one hundred percent purple: stems, leaves, flowers and pods.

Possibly
it had once been a gas station, although there were no pumps and the building at the back
of the paved lot looked abandoned.

I wished to God I wasn’t going to have to make
such a spectacle of myself later on, starting the car.

Little threads of bubbles streamed up like
strings of glass beads.

“That’s a peculiar resume.”

“I could give you a pair of good retreads, five thousand
miles guaranteed, put on and balanced for sixty-five.”

This car got me here from Kentucky, and I reckon she’s got a few

thousand left in her.”

I could hear
someone thumping around overhead in stocking feet.

She
had a gold wedding band settled into the flesh of her finger, the way older women’s rings
do when they never take them off.

She still wasn’t talking but she knew her name about as
far as a cat ever does, which means that when you said it she would look up if she was in
the right mood.

The spider raised its two front legs toward the flame like a scared lady in an old
movie.