The Bean Trees

by Barbara Kingsolver

  "We had a lot of rain lately," the guy said. "When the ground gets full of water, the critters drown out of their holes. They got to come up and dry off." He reached out with his foot and squashed a large, shiny black bug with horns. Its wings split apart and white stuff oozed out between. It was the type that you wouldn't have guessed had wings, although I knew from experience that just about every bug has wings of one kind or another. Not including spiders.

  He lit another cigarette and threw the match at the tarantula, missing it by a couple of inches. The spider raised its two front legs toward the flame like a scared lady in an old movie.

  "I got things to do," I said. "So long." I put Turtle in the car, then went around to the other side and put it in neutral and started to push.

  He laughed. "What is that, a car or a skateboard?"

  "Look, buster, you can help give me a push, or you can stand and watch, but either way I'm out of here. This car got me here from Kentucky, and I reckon she's got a few thousand left in her."

  "Not on them tires, she don't," he said. I looked back to see the rear tire flapping empty on the wheel. "Shit," I said, just as the engine caught and the car zoomed forward. In the rear-view mirror I could see broken glass glistening on the off ramp, dropping away behind me like a twinkly green lake.

  I had no intention of asking the dumb guy for help. The tire looked like it was done-for anyway so I drove on it for a few blocks. There were a bank, some houses, and a park with palm trees and some sick-looking grass. Some men with rolled-up blankets tied around their waists were kicking at the dirt, probably looking for bugs to step on. Just beyond the park I could see a stack of tires. "Will you look at that," I said. "I'm one lucky duck. We should have gone to Las Vegas."

  The stacked-up tires made a kind of wall on both sides of a big paved corner lot. 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 was wearing blue jeans and cowboy boots and a red bandana on her head. A long gray braid hung down the middle of her back.

  "How do," I said. I noticed that the name of the place was Jesus Is Lord Used Tires. I remembered wanting to call 1-800-THE LORD, just to see who you'd get. Maybe this was it.

  "Hi, darlin," she said. "These bugs aggravate the dickens out of me after it rains, but I can't see my way clear to squashing them. A bug's just got one life to live, after all. Like us."

  "I know what you mean," I said.

  "Oh, bless your heart. Looks like you've got a couple of flats."

  I did. I hadn't seen the rear on the right side.

  "Drive it up onto the big jack," she ordered. "We'll get them off and have a look. We'll fix your little wagon right up."

  I asked if Turtle could ride up on the jack, but she said it wasn't safe, so I took her out of the car and looked for a place to put her down. All those tires around made me nervous. Just out of instinct, more or less, I looked up to see if there was anything tall overhead to get thrown up onto. There was nothing but clear blue sky.

  Off to one side there were some old wheel rims and flat tires. An empty tire couldn't possibly explode, I reasoned, so I sat Turtle down in one of those.

  "What's your little girl's name?" the woman wanted to know, and when I told her she didn't bat an eye. Usually people would either get embarrassed or give me a lecture. She told me her name was Mattie.

  "She's a cute little thing," Mattie said.

  "How do you know she's a girl?" I wasn't lipping off, for once. Just curious. It's not as if I had her dressed in pink.

  "Something about the face."

  We rolled the tires over to a tub of water. Mattie rubbed Ivory soap on the treads and then dunked them in like big doughnuts. Little threads of bubbles streamed up like strings of glass beads. Lots of them. It looked like a whole jewelry store in there.

  "I'm sorry to tell you, hon, these are bad. I can tell you right now these aren't going to hold a patch. They're shot through." She looked concerned. "See these places here along the rim? They're sliced." She ran her hand along the side of the tire under the water. 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.

  "I'm sorry," she said again, and I could tell she really was. "There's a Goodyear place down the road about six blocks. If you want to roll them down there for a second opinion."

  "That's okay," I said. "I'll take your word for it." Turtle was slapping at the side of her flat whitewall with one hand. The other had caught hold of the doohickey where the air goes in. I tried to think what in the world we were going to do now. "How much for new ones?" I asked.

  Mattie considered for a minute. "I could give you a pair of good retreads, five thousand miles guaranteed, put on and balanced for sixty-five."

  "I'll have to think on that one," I said. She was so nice I didn't want to tell her flat out that I couldn't afford new tires.

  "It's too early in the morning for bad news," Mattie said. "I was just brewing up a pot of coffee. You want a cup of coffee? Come sit."

  "Okay," I said. I collected Turtle out of the tire and carried her to the back of the shop. It was a big old two-story place, and there at the back of the garage was an area with a sink and some shelves, some folding chairs painted blue, a metal table, and a Mr. Coffee. I scooted another flat over next to the chairs and set Turtle down in it. I was glad to be away from that wall of tires, all of them bulging to burst. Hanging around here would be like living in a house made of bombs. The sound of the air hose alone gave me the willies.

  "These come in pretty handy," I said, trying to be cheerful. "I know what I can use those two flat tires for."

  "I've got some peanut-butter crackers," Mattie said, leaning over Turtle. "Will she eat peanut butter?"

  "She eats anything. Just don't let her get hold of anything you don't want to part with. Like your hair," I said. Mattie's braid was swinging into the danger zone.

  She poured coffee into a mug that said "BILL with a capital B," and handed it to me. She poured a cup for herself in a white mug with cartoon rabbits all over it. They were piled all over each other like the rocks in Texas Canyon. After a minute I realized that the rabbits were having sex in about a trillion different positions. I couldn't figure this woman out. This was definitely not 1-800-THE LORD.

  "You must have come a ways," she said. "I saw your plates were Kentucky. Or plate, rather. You don't have to have them both front and back in Kentucky?"

  "No. Just the back."

  "Here you've got to have one on the front too. I guess so the cops can get you coming and going." She handed Turtle a peanut-butter cracker, which she grabbed with both hands. It broke to smithereens, and she got such big sad eyes I thought she was going to cry.

  "It's all right, honey," Mattie said. "You put that one in your mouth and I'll give you another one." Turtle did. I was amazed. She had never been this kind to Mrs. Hoge. Mattie was clearly accustomed to dealing with kids.

  "Are you on the road?" she asked me.

  "Have been up to now. From Kentucky, with a stopover in Oklahoma. We're out to see what we can see. Now I guess we'll see how we like Tucson."

  "Oh, you will. I ought to know, I've lived my whole life here. And that's a rare breed, let me tell you. I don't think there's hardly a soul in Tucson anymore that was born here. Most of them come, you know, from out of state. My husband, Samuel, was from Tennessee. He came out as a young man for his asthma and he never could get used to the dry. I love it, though. I guess it's all in what you're used to."

  "I guess," I said. I was dying to know about the name of the place, but couldn't think of a polite way to bring it up. "Is this tire place part of a national chain, or something like that?" I finally asked. That sounded polite, but dumb.

  She laughed. "No, me and my husband started it up. His dad was a mechanic, so Sam was a grease monkey born and raised. He was the one that named the place. He was kind of fanatical, you might say. Bless his soul." She ha
nded Turtle another cracker. The kid was eating like a house on fire. "He got some Mexican kids to do the painting out front. I never did change it, it's something different. Lots of people stop in for curiosity. Does that baby want some juice? She needs something to wash that peanut butter down with."

  "Don't put yourself out. I can get her some water out of the tap."

  "I'll run get some apple juice. I won't be a minute." I had thought she meant she was actually going to a store, but she went through a door at the back of the shop. Apparently there was more to this building, including a refrigerator with apple juice in it. I wondered if Mattie lived on the premises, maybe upstairs.

  While she was gone two men stopped by, almost at exactly the same time, although they were not together. One of them asked for Matilda. He wanted an alignment and to pick up a tire for his ORV. He said it as though everybody ought to know what an ORV was, and maybe have one or two at home. The other man had on a black shirt with a white priest's collar, and blue jeans, of all things. I wondered if maybe he was some kind of junior-varsity priest. I really had no idea. They didn't have Catholics in Pittman.

  "She'll be back in about two seconds," I told them. "She just went to get something."

  The ORV fellow waited, but the priest said he would come back later. He seemed a little jumpy. As he drove away I noticed there was a whole family packed into the back of his station wagon. They looked like Indians.

  "Well, how in the world are you, Roger?" Mattie said when she came back. "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. I wondered if it was hard to fill it through that little spout. Once Turtle got her hands on this cup she wasn't going to want to give it up.

  Roger drove his car onto a platform that was attached to a red machine with knobs and dials on it. Mattie started up the machine, which made the front tires of Roger's Toyota spin around, and after a minute she lay down on one shoulder and adjusted something under the front. She didn't get that dirty, either. I had never seen a woman with this kind of know-how. It made me feel proud, somehow. In Pittman if a woman had tried to have her own tire store she would have been run out of business. That, or the talk would have made your ears curl up like those dried apricot things. "If Jesus is indeed Lord," I said to myself, "He surely will not let this good, smart woman get blown sky-high by an overfilled tire. Or me either, while He's at it."

  The two of them went out to the wall of tires and pulled down a couple of smallish fat ones. They hit the ground with a smack, causing both Turtle and me to jump. Roger picked one of them up and dribbled it like a basketball. He and Mattie were talking, and Roger was making various vibrating sounds with his lips. I supposed he was trying to describe something that was wrong with his ORV. Mattie listened in an interested way. She was really nice to Roger, even though he was bald and red-faced and kind of bossy. She didn't give him any lip.

  When she came back Turtle had drunk all her juice and was banging the cup against the tire, demanding more in her speechless way. I was starting to get embarrassed.

  "You want more juice, don't you?" Mattie said to Turtle in a grownup-to-baby voice. "It's a good thing I brought the whole bottle down in the first place."

  "Please don't go out of your way," I said. "We've put you out enough already. I have to tell you the truth, I can't even afford to buy one tire right now, much less two. Not for a while, anyway, until I find work and a place for us to live." I picked up Turtle but she went on banging the cup against my shoulder.

  "Why, honey, don't feel bad. I wasn't trying to make a sale. I just thought you two needed some cheering up." She pried the cup out of Turtle's hand and refilled it. The top snapped right off. I hadn't thought of that.

  "You must have grandbabies around," I said.

  "Mmm-hmmm. Something like that." She handed the cup back to Turtle and she sucked on it hard, making a noise like a pond frog. I wondered what, exactly, could be "something like" grandbabies.

  "It's so dry out here kids will dehydrate real fast," Mattie told me. "They'll just dry right up on you. You have to watch out for that."

  "Oh, right," I said. I wondered how many other things were lurking around waiting to take a child's life when you weren't paying attention. I was useless. I was crazy to think I was doing this child a favor by whisking her away from the Cherokee Nation. Now she would probably end up mummified in Arizona.

  "What kind of work you looking for?" Mattie rinsed the coffee cups and set them upside down on a shelf. A calendar above the shelf showed a bare-chested man in a feather headdress and heavy gold arm bracelets carrying a woman who looked dead or passed out.

  "Anything, really. I have experience in house-cleaning, x-rays, urine tests, and red blood counts. And picking bugs off bean vines."

  Mattie laughed. "That's a peculiar resume."

  "I guess I've had a peculiar life," I said. It was hot, Turtle was spilling or spitting juice down my shoulder blade, and I was getting more depressed by the minute. "I guess you don't have bean vines around here," I said. "That kind of limits my career options."

  "Well, heck yes, girl, we've got bean vines!" Mattie said. "Even purple ones. Did you ever see purple beans?"

  "Not that were alive," I said.

  "Come on back here and let me show you something."

  We went through the door at the back, which led through a little room jam-packed with 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. Behind the desk there was a staircase and another door that led out the back. I could hear someone thumping around overhead in stocking feet.

  Outside was a bright, wild wonderland of flowers and vegetables and auto parts. Heads of cabbage and lettuce sprouted out of old tires. An entire rusted-out Thunderbird, minus the wheels, had nasturtiums blooming out the windows like Mama's hen-and-chicks pot on the front porch at home. A kind of teepee frame made of CB antennas was all overgrown with cherry-tomato vines.

  "Can you believe tomatoes on the second of January?" Mattie asked. I told her no, that I couldn't. Frankly that was only the beginning of what I couldn't believe. Mattie's backyard looked like the place where old cars die and go to heaven.

  "Usually we'll get a killing frost by Thanksgiving, but this year it's stayed warm. The beans and tomatoes just won't quit. Here, doll, bite down, don't swallow it whole." She handed me a little tomato.

  "Okay," I said, before I realized she had popped one into Turtle's mouth, and was talking to her. "It hailed this morning," I reminded Mattie. "We just about froze to death for a few minutes there."

  "Oh, did it? Whereabouts?"

  "On the freeway. About five blocks from here."

  "It didn't get here; we just had rain. Hail might have got the tomatoes. Sometimes it will. Here's the beans I was telling you about."

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

  "Gosh," I said.

  "The Chinese lady next door gave them to me." She waved toward a corrugated tin fence that I hadn't even noticed before. It was covered with vines, and the crazy-quilt garden kept right on going on the other side, except without the car parts. The purple beans appeared to go trooping on down the block, climbing over anything in their path.

  "They're originally from seeds she brought over with her in nineteen-ought-seven," Mattie told me. "Can you picture that? Keeping the same beans going all these years?"

  I said I could. I could picture these beans marching right over the Pacific Ocean, starting from somebody's garden in China and ending up right here.

  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. Or a foreign decade. When I'd crossed into Rocky
Mountain Time, I had set my watch back two hours and got thrown into the future.

  It's hard to explain how this felt. I went to high school in the seventies, but you have to understand that in Pittman County it may as well have been the fifties. Pittman was twenty years behind the nation in practically every way you can think of, except the rate of teenage pregnancies. For instance, we were the last place in the country to get the dial system. Up until 1973 you just picked up the receiver and said, Marge, get me my Uncle Roscoe, or whoever. The telephone office was on the third floor of the Courthouse, and the operators could see everything around Main Street square including the bank, the drugstore, and Dr. Finchler's office. She would tell you if his car was there or not.

  In Tucson, it was clear that there was nobody overlooking us all. We would just have to find our own way.

  Turtle and I took up residence in the Hotel Republic, which rented by the week and was within walking distance of Jesus Is Lord's. Mattie said it would be all right to leave my car there for the time being. 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.

  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. 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 was one who hung out near the Republic who wore a miniskirt that looked like Reynolds Wrap and almost every day a new type of stockings: fishnets in all different colors, and one pair with actual little bows running down the backs. Her name was Cheryl.

  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. These people slept in their clothes. I know that living in the Republic only put me a few flights of stairs above such people, but at least I did sleep in pajamas.