The Bean Trees (19 page)

“Four-H?”

“It’s a club for farm kids where you raise lambs or make an apron or wire a den lamp out of a bowling pin, things like that. I never was in it. You had to pay.”

“I see.”

“Do you want to sit in the living room?” I asked him. He followed me into the other room and I scooted Snowboots off the sofa. When Estevan sat down next to me my heart was bumping so hard I wondered if I was going to have a heart attack. Just what Estevan needed would be another woman falling apart on him.

“So nobody could understand about Scotty,” I said. “But the way I see it is, he just didn’t have anybody. In our school there were different groups you would run with, depending on your station in life. There were the town kids, whose daddies owned the hardware store or what have you—they were your cheerleaders and your football players. Then there were hoodlums, the motorcycle types that cut down trees on Halloween. And then there were the rest of us, the poor kids and the farm kids. Greasers, we were called, or Nutters. The main rule was that there was absolutely no mixing. Do you understand what I mean?”

“Yes,” he said. “In India they have something called the caste system. Members of different castes cannot marry or even eat together. The lowest caste is called the Untouchables.”

“But the Untouchables can touch each other?”

“Yes.”

“Then that’s it, exactly. The Nutters were the bottom of the pile, but we had each other. We all got invited to the prom and everything, from inside our own group. But poor Scotty with his electricity and his trigonometry, he just didn’t belong to any group. It was like we were all the animals on Noah’s ark that came in pairs, except of his kind there was only the one.”

It struck me how foolishly I was chattering about something that was neither here nor there. Mama would call this “rattling your teeth.” I drank about half my beer without saying another word.

Then I said, “I could kind of see it with Scotty, but Esperanza had somebody. Has somebody. How could she want to leave you? It’s not fair.” I realized I was furious with Esperanza. I wondered if he was too, but didn’t dare ask. We sat there in the shadowy living room thinking our thoughts. You could hear us swallowing beer.

Then out of the clear blue sky he said, “In Guatemala City the police use electricity for interrogation. They have something called the ‘telephone,’ which is an actual telephone of the type they use in the field. It has its own generator, operated by a handle.” He held up one hand and turned the other one in a circle in front of the palm.

“A crank? Like the old-fashioned telephones?”

“Operated with a crank,” he said. “The telephones are made in the United States.”

“What do you mean, they use them for interrogation? Do you mean they question you over the telephone?”

Estevan seemed annoyed with me. “They disconnect the receiver wire and tape the two ends to your body. To sensitive parts.” He just stared at me until it hit me like a truck. I felt it in my stomach muscles, just the way I did when I realized that for nearly an hour I had been in the presence of Newt Hardbine’s corpse. There is this horrible thing staring you in the face and you’re blabbering about bowling-pin lamps and 4-H.

“I’ll get us another beer,” I said. I went to the kitchen and brought back the rest of the six pack, carrying it by the plastic rings like a purse. I popped two of them open and plumped back down on the sofa, no longer caring what I looked like. The schoolgirl nerves that had possessed me half an hour ago seemed ridiculous now; this was like having a crush on some guy only to find out he’s been dating your mother or your math teacher. This man was way beyond me.

“I don’t know exactly how to say this,” I said. “I thought I’d had a pretty hard life. But I keep finding out that life can be hard in ways I never knew about.”

“I can see that it would be easier not to know,” he said.

“That’s not fair, you don’t see at all. You think you’re the foreigner here, and I’m the American, and I just look the other way while the President or somebody sends down this and that, shiploads of telephones to torture people with. But nobody asked my permission, okay? Sometimes I feel like I’m a foreigner too. I come from a place that’s so different from here you would think you’d stepped right off the map into some other country where they use dirt for decoration and the national pastime is having babies. People don’t look the same, talk the same, nothing. Half the time I have no idea what’s going on around me here.”

A little shadow moved in the doorway and we both jumped. It was Turtle.

“You’re a rascal,” I said. “You hop back to bed this minute.”

She took one hop backwards, and both Estevan and I tried not to smile. “This minute,” I said, in the meanest voice I could muster. She hopped backwards through the door, clapping her hands one time with each hop. We could hear her hopping and clapping all the way back through the kitchen and into bed. Snowboots jumped onto the back of the sofa and sat behind my neck, waiting for something. He made me nervous.

“All I am saying is, don’t be so sure until you have all the facts,” Estevan said. “You cannot know what Esperanza has had to live through.”

I was confused. He was picking up the middle of a conversation I didn’t even know we’d started.

“No,” I said. “I don’t. Or you either.”

He looked away from me and touched the corners of his eyes, and I knew he was crying in the secret way men feel they have to do. He said something I couldn’t hear very well, and a name, “Ismene.”

I shoved Snowboots gently away from the back of my neck. “What?” I asked.

“Do you remember the day we walked in the desert? And you asked why Esperanza was staring at Turtle, and I told you she looked very much like a child we knew in Guatemala.” I nodded. “The child was Ismene.”

I was afraid to understand this. I asked him if he meant that Ismene was their daughter, and Estevan said yes, that she was. She was taken in a raid on their neighborhood in which Esperanza’s brother and two friends were killed. They were members of Estevan’s teachers’ union. He told me in what condition they had found the bodies. He wasn’t crying as he told me this, and I wasn’t either. It’s hard to explain, but a certain kind of horror is beyond tears. Tears would be like worrying about watermarks on the furniture when the house is burning down.

Ismene wasn’t killed; she was taken.

Try as I would, I couldn’t understand this. I was no longer so stupid as to ask why they didn’t call the police, but still I couldn’t see why they hadn’t at least tried to get her back if they knew the police had taken her, and where. “Don’t be upset with me,” I said. “I know I’m ignorant, I’m sorry. Just explain it to me.”

But he wasn’t upset. He seemed to get steadier and more patient when he explained things, as if he were teaching a class. “Esperanza and I knew the names of twenty other union members,” he said. “The teachers’ union did not have open meetings. We worked in cells, and communicated by message. Most people knew only four other members by name. This is what I am saying: In Guatemala, you are careful. If you want to change something you can find yourself dead. This was not the—what do you call? The P.T.A.”

“I understand.”

“Three members had just been killed, including Esperanza’s brother, but seventeen were still alive.She and I knew every one of those seventeen, by name. Can you understand that this made us more useful alive than dead? For us to go after Ismene is what they wanted.”

“So they didn’t kill her, they just held her? Like…I don’t know what. A worm on a goddamn hook?”

“A goddamn hook.” He was looking away from me again. “Sometimes, after a while, usually…these children are adopted. By military or government couples who cannot have children.”

I felt numb, as if I had taken some drug. “And you picked the lives of those seventeen people over getting your daughter back?” I said. “Or at least a chance at getting her back?”

“What would you do, Taylor?”

“I don’t know. I hate to say it, but I really don’t know. I can’t even begin to think about a world where people have to make choices like that.”

“You live in that world,” he said quietly, and I knew this, but I didn’t want to. I started to cry then, just tears streaming out all over and no stopping them. Estevan put his arm around me and I sobbed against his shoulder. The dam had really broken.

I was embarrassed. “I’m going to get snot on your clean shirt,” I said.

“I don’t know what it is, snot.”

“Good,” I said.

There was no way on earth I could explain what I felt, that my whole life had been running along on dumb luck and I hadn’t even noticed.

“For me, even bad luck brings good things,” I told him finally. “I threw out a rocker arm on my car and I got Turtle. I drove over broken glass on an off ramp and found Mattie.” I crossed my arms tightly over my stomach, trying to stop myself from gulping air. “Do you know, I spent the first half of my life avoiding motherhood and tires, and now I’m counting them as blessings?”

Turtle showed up in the doorway again. I don’t know how long she had been there, but she was looking at me with eyes I hadn’t seen on her since that night on the Oklahoma plain.

“Come here, pumpkin,” I said. “I’m okay, just sprung a leak, don’t you worry. Do you want a drink of water?” She shook her head. “Just want to cuddle a few minutes?” She nodded, and I took her on my lap. Snowboots jumped onto the sofa again. I could feel the weight of him moving slowly across the back and down the other arm, and from there he curled into Estevan’s lap. In less than a minute Turtle was asleep in my arms.

When I was a child I had a set of paper dolls. They were called the Family of Dolls, and each one had a name written on the cardboard base under the feet. Their names were Mom, Dad, Sis, and Junior. I played with those dolls in a desperate, loving way until their paper arms and heads disintegrated. I loved them in spite of the fact that their tight-knit little circle was as far beyond my reach as the football players’ and cheerleaders’ circle would be in later years.

But that night I looked at the four of us there on the sofa and my heart hurt and I thought: in a different world we could have been the Family of Dolls.

Turtle wiggled. “No,” she said, before she was even awake.

“Yes,” I said. “Time for bed.” I carried her in and tucked her under the sheet, prying her hand off my T-shirt and attaching it to her yellow stuffed bear, which had a pink velvet heart sewed onto its chest.

“Sleep tight, don’t let the potato bugs bite.”

“Tato bite,” she said.

When I came back Snowboots had moved from Estevan’s lap and curled into the little depression where I had been. I sat in the space between them with my feet tucked under me. I no longer felt self-conscious, though I could feel almost a pull, like a flow of warm water, at the point where our knees touched.

“It seems like, if you get to know them well enough, everybody has had something awful happen to them. All this time I’ve been moping around because of having the responsibility of Turtle forced on me, and now I feel guilty.”

“That responsibility is terrible if you don’t want it.”

“Oh, big deal. The exact same thing happened to about sixty percent of the girls in my high school, if not the whole world.”

“If you look at it that way,” he said. He was falling asleep.

“I guess that’s just the way the world has got to go around. If people really gave it full consideration, I mean, like if you could return a baby after thirty days’ examination like one of those Time-Life books, then I figure the entire human species would go extinct in a month’s time.”

“Some people wouldn’t send them back,” he said. “I would have kept Ismene.” His eyes were closed.

“Did you get up in the middle of the night to do the feeding and diapering?”

“No,” he said, smiling a little.

“I can’t believe I’m even asking you that. Does it hurt you a lot to talk about Ismene?”

“At first, but not so much now. What helps me the most is to know her life is going on somewhere, with someone. To know she is growing up.”

“Sure,” I said, but I knew there was another side to this, too. Where she was growing up, what they would raise her to be. I thought of Turtle being raised by Virgie Mae Parsons, learning to look down her nose and wear little hats, and then I got it mixed up with police uniforms. A little later I realized I had been asleep. We both rolled in and out of sleep in a friendly way. You can’t be nervous if you’re sleeping on the same sofa with somebody, I thought. Letting your mouth fall open any old way.

Snowboots jumped off the sofa. I heard his claws scratch the carpet as he covered up his sins.

“Why did they call you Nutters?” I remember Estevan asking at some point. I thought and thought about it, trying to fight my way out of some dream where Turtle and I were trying to get to the other side of a long, flat field. We had to follow the telephone wires to get to civilization.

“Nutters,” I said finally. “Oh, because of walnuts. In the fall, the kids that lived in the country would pick walnuts to earn money for school clothes.”

“Did you have to climb the trees?” Estevan amazed me. That he would be interested in details like that.

“No. Basically you waited till they fell, and then picked them up off the ground. The worst part was that to get the hulls off you’d have to put them in the road for cars to run over, and then you’d pick the nuts out of the mess. It stained your hands black, and then you were marked. That was the worst part, to go to school with black hands and black fingernails. That was proof positive you were a Nutter.”

“But otherwise you would have no new clothes.”

“Right. So you were damned if you didn’t and damned if you did. I guess the ideal thing,” I conjectured, half dreaming, “would have been to get clothes with good, deep pockets.” I meant so that you could hide your hands, but I had a picture in my mind of skirts and trousers with pockets full of pounds and pounds of walnuts. Ten cents a pound is what we got for them. A hundred and fifty pounds equaled one pair of Levi’s.

Later I woke up again, feeling the pressure of Snowboots’s feet walking down my leg, then hearing them thump on the floor. Estevan and I were curled like spoons on the sofa, his knees against the backs of my knees and his left hand on my ribs, just under my breast. When I put my hand on top of his I could feel my heart beating under his fingers.