The Bean Trees (28 page)

As we were leaving I asked her about the TV. “That’s the one thing that’s still the same. What’s with it anyway? Doesn’t anybody ever turn the sound up?”

“The stupid thing is broke. You get the sound on one station and the picture on the other. See?” She flipped to the next channel, which showed blue static but played the sound perfectly. It was a commercial for diet Coke. “My gramma likes to leave it on 9, she’s just about blind anyway, but the rest of us like it on 8.”

“Do you ever get the Oral Roberts shows?”

She shrugged. “I guess. I like Magnum P.I.”

Somehow I had been thinking that once we got back in the car and on the road again, everything would make sense and I would know what to do. I didn’t. This time I didn’t even know which way to head the car. If only Lou Ann were here, I thought. Lou Ann with her passion for playing Mrs. Neighborhood Detective. I knew she would say I was giving up too easily. But what was I supposed to do? Stake out the bar for a week or two and see if the woman ever showed up again? Would I recognize her if she did? Would she be willing to go to Oklahoma City with me to sign papers?

There had never been the remotest possibility of finding any relative of Turtle’s. I had driven across the country on a snipe hunt. A snipe hunt is a joke on somebody, most likely some city cousin. You send him out in the woods with a paper bag and see how long it takes for him to figure out what a fool he is.

But it also occurred to me to wonder why I had come this far. Generally speaking, I am not a fool. I must have wanted something, and wanted it badly, to believe that hard in snipes.

“I can’t give up,” I said as I turned the car around. I smacked my palms on the steering wheel again and again. “I just can’t. I want to go to Lake o’ the Cherokees. Don’t even ask me why.”

They didn’t ask.

“So do you want to come with me, or should we take you to your church now? Really, I can go either way.”

They wanted to come with me. I can see, looking back on it, that we were getting attached.

“We’ll have a picnic by the lake, and stay in a cabin, and maybe find a boat somewhere and go out on the water. We’ll have a vacation,” I told them. “When’s the last time you two had a vacation?”

Estevan thought for a while. “Never.”

“Me too,” I said.

FIFTEEN

Lake o’ the Cherokees

E
speranza and Estevan were transformed in an unexplainable way over the next two hours. They showed a new side, like the Holy Cards we used to win for attendance in summer Bible school: mainly there was a picture of Jesus on the cross, a blurred, shimmering picture with flecks of pink and blue scattered through it, but tip it just so and you could see a dove flying up out of His chest. That was the Holy Ghost.

We must have been getting closer to the heart of the Cherokee Nation, whatever or wherever it was, because as we drove east we saw fewer and fewer white people. Everybody and his mother-in-law was an Indian. All the children were Indian children, and the dogs looked like Indian dogs. At one point a police car came up behind us and we all got quiet and kept an eye out, as we had grown accustomed to doing, but when he passed us we just had to laugh. The cop was an Indian.

It must have been a very long time since Esperanza and Estevan had been in a place where they looked just like everybody else, including cops. The relief showed in their bodies. I believe they actually grew taller. And Turtle fit right in too; this was her original home. I was the odd woman out.

Although, of course, I supposedly had enough Cherokee in me that it counted. I knew I would never really claim my head rights, and probably couldn’t even if I wanted to—they surely had a statute of limitations or some such thing. But it was a relief to know the Cherokee Nation wasn’t a complete bust. I read a story once, I might have this confused but I think the way it went was that this lady had a diamond necklace put away in a safe-deposit box all her life, thinking that if she ever got desperate she could sell it, only to find out on her deathbed that it was rhinestones. That was more or less the way I felt on that first terrible trip through Oklahoma.

It was nice to find out, after all, that Mama’s and my ace in the hole for all those years really did have a few diamonds in it: Lake Oologah, Lake o’ the Cherokees.

“The Cherokee Nation has its own Congress and its own President,” I reported to Esperanza and Estevan. “Did you know that?” I wasn’t sure if I actually knew this or was just elaborating on what the girl in the restaurant had told me.

The scenery grew more interesting by the mile. At first it was still basically flat but it kind of rolled along, like a great green, rumpled bedsheet. Then there were definite hills. We passed through little towns with Indian names that reminded me in some ways of Kentucky. Here and there we saw trees.

Once, all of a sudden, Turtle shouted, “Mama!” She was pointing out the window.

My heart lost its beat for a second. To my knowledge she had never referred to anyone as Mama. We looked, but couldn’t see anybody at all along the road. There was only a gas station and a cemetery.

Turtle and Esperanza were becoming inseparable. Turtle sat on her lap, played with her, and whined at the rest stops when Esperanza wanted to go to the bathroom by herself. I suppose I should have been grateful for the babysitting. I couldn’t quite imagine how I would have kept Turtle entertained by myself, while I was driving. We’d managed a long trip before, of course, but that was in Turtle’s catatonic period. At that stage of her life, I don’t think she would have minded much if you’d put her in a box and shipped her to Arizona. Now everything was different.

Lake o’ the Cherokees was a place where you could imagine God might live. There were enough trees.

I still would have to say it’s stretching the issue to call the Ozarks mountains, but they served. I felt secure again, with my hopes for something better tucked just out of sight behind the next hill.

We found a cottage right off the bat. It was perfect: there were two bedrooms, a fireplace with a long-tailed bird (stuffed) on the mantel, and a bathroom with an old claw-foot tub (one leg poked down through the floor, but the remaining three looked steadfast). It was one of a meandering row of mossy, green-roofed cottages lined up along a stream bank in a place called Saw Paw Grove.

They didn’t want to take it for the night, but I insisted. We had the money from Mattie, and besides, it wasn’t that expensive. No more than we would have spent the night before if I hadn’t had connections at the Broken Arrow. It took some doing, but I convinced Estevan and Esperanza that we weren’t doing anything wrong. We deserved to have a good time, just for this one day.

I told them to think of it as a gift. “As an ambassador of my country I’m presenting you with an expenses paid one-day vacation for four at Lake o’ the Cherokees. If you don’t accept, it will be an international incident.”

They accepted. We sat on the cottage’s little back porch, watching out for Turtle and the holes where the floorboards were rotted out, and stared at the white stream as it went shooting by. No water in Arizona was ever in that much of a hurry. The moss and the ferns looked so good I just drank up all that green. Even the rotten floor planks looked wonderful. In Arizona things didn’t rot, not even apples. They just mummified. I realized that I had come to my own terms with the desert, but my soul was thirsty.

Growing all along the creek there were starry red-and-yellow flowers that bobbed on the ends of long, slender stems. Turtle informed us they were “combines,” and we accepted her authority. Estevan climbed down the slick bank to pick them. I thought to myself, Where in the universe will I find another man who would risk his neck for a flower? He fell partway into the creek, soaking one leg up to the knee—mainly, I think, for our benefit. Even Esperanza laughed.

Something was going on inside of Esperanza. Something was thawing. Once I saw a TV program about how spring comes to Alaska. They made a big deal about the rivers starting to run again, showing huge chunks of ice rumbling and shivering and bashing against each other and breaking up. This is how it was with Esperanza. Behind her eyes, or deeper, in the arteries around her heart, something was starting to move. When she held Turtle on her lap she seemed honestly happy. Her eyes were clear and she spoke to Estevan and me directly, looking at our eyes.

Estevan survived his efforts and handed a flower to each of us. He kissed Esperanza and said something in Spanish that included “mi amor,” and fixed the flower in her buttonhole so that it sprang out from her chest like one of those snake-in-the-can tricks. I could imagine them as a young couple, shy with each other, doing joky things like that. I braided the stem of my flower into my hair. Turtle waved hers up and down like a drum major’s baton, shouting, “Combine, combine, combine!” None of us, apparently, was able to think of any appropriate way of following this command.

I was supposed to be calling them Steven and Hope now so they could begin getting used to it. I couldn’t. I had changed my own name like a dirty shirt, but I couldn’t help them change theirs.

“I love your names,” I said. “They’re about the only thing you came here with that you’ve still got left. I think you should only be Steven and Hope when you need to pull the wool over somebody’s eyes, but keep your own names with your friends.”

Neither of them said anything, but they didn’t urge me again to call them by false names.

Later we found a place that rented boats by the half hour and Estevan and I took one out onto the lake. Esperanza didn’t want to go. She didn’t know how to swim, and I wasn’t sure about Turtle, so the two of them stayed on the shore feeding ducks.

Estevan and I took turns rowing and waving at the shore until Turtle was a tiny bouncing dot. By then we were in the very middle of the lake, and we let ourselves drift. The sun bounced off the water, making bright spangles and upside-down shadows on our faces. I rolled my jeans up to my knees and dangled my bare feet over the side. There was a fishy-smelling assortment of things in the bottom of the boat, including a red-and-white line floater and a collection of pop-top rings from beer cans.

Estevan took off his shirt and lay back against the front of the boat, his hands clasped behind his head, exposing his smooth Mayan chest to the sun. And to me. How could he possibly have done this, if he had any idea how I felt? I knew that Estevan had walked a long, hard road beyond innocence, but still he sometimes did the most simple, innocent, heartbreaking things. As much as I have wanted anything, ever, I wanted to know how that chest would feel against my face. I looked toward the shore so he wouldn’t see the water in my eyes.

I pulled the wilted flower out of my braid and twisted the stem in my fingers. “I’m going to miss you a lot,” I said. “All of you. Both, I mean.”

Estevan didn’t say he was going to miss all of me. We knew this was a conversation we couldn’t afford to get into. In more ways than one, since we were renting by the half-hour.

After a while he said, “Throw a penny and make a wish.”

“That’s wasteful,” I said, kicking my toes in the water. “My mother always said a person that throws away money deserves to be poor. I’d rather be one of the undeserving poor.”

“Undeservedly,” he corrected me, smiling.

“One of the undeservedly poor.” Even my English was going to fall apart without him.

“Then we can wish on these.” He picked up one of the pop-top rings. “These are appropriate for American wishes.”

I made two American wishes on pop tops in Lake o’ the Cherokees. Only one of them had the remotest possibility of coming true.

At dusk we found picnic tables in a little pine forest near the water’s edge. Both Mattie and Irene had packed us fruit and sandwiches for the road, most of which were still in the Igloo cooler in the trunk. We threw an old canvas poncho over the table and spread out the pickle jars and bananas and apples and goose-liver sandwiches and everything else. Other picnickers here and there were working on modest little balanced meals of things that all went together, keeping the four food groups in mind, but we weren’t proud. Our party was in the mood for a banquet.

The sun was setting behind us but it lit up the clouds in the east, making one of those wraparound sunsets. Reflections of pink clouds floated across the surface of the lake. It looked like a corny painting. If I didn’t let my mind run too far ahead, I felt completely happy.

Turtle still had a good deal of energy, and was less interested in eating than in bouncing and jumping and running in circles around the trees. Every so often she found a pine cone, which she would bring back and give to me or to Esperanza. I tried very hard not to keep count of whose pile of pine cones was bigger. Turtle looked like a whirling dervish in overalls and a green-striped T-shirt. We hadn’t realized how cooped up she must have felt in the car, because she was so good. It’s funny how people don’t give that much thought to what kids want, as long as they’re being quiet.

It’s also interesting how it’s hard to be depressed around a three-year-old, if you’re paying attention. After a while, whatever you’re mooning about begins to seem like some elaborate adult invention.

Estevan asked us which we liked better, sunrise or sunset. We were all speaking in English now, because Esperanza had to get into practice. I couldn’t object to this—it was a matter of survival.

“Sun set, because sun rise comes too early,” Esperanza said, and giggled. She was very self-conscious in English, and seemed to have a whole different personality.

I told them that I liked sunrise better. “Sunset always makes me feel a little sad.”

“Why?”

I peeled a banana and considered this. “I think because of the way I was raised. There was always so damn much work to do. At sunrise it always seems like you’ve got a good crack at getting everything done, but at sunset you know that you didn’t.”

Esperanza directed our attention to Turtle, who was hard at work burying Shirley Poppy in the soft dirt at the base of a pine tree. I had to laugh.