“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.
I thought of Esperanza, her braids on her shoulders. Esperanza staring at the ceiling. She would be lying on a cot somewhere, sweating the poison out of her system. Probably they had given her syrup of ipecac, which makes you keep throwing up until you can feel the sides of your stomach banging together. All of Esperanza’s hurts flamed up in my mind, a huge pile of burning things that the world just kept throwing more onto. Somewhere in that pile was a child that looked just like Turtle. I lifted Estevan’s hand from my ribcage and kissed his palm. It felt warm. Then I slid off the sofa and went to my own bed.
Moonlight was pouring in through the bedroom window like a watery version of my mother’s potato soup. Moon soup, I thought, hugging myself under the covers. Somewhere in the neighborhood a cat yowled like a baby, and somewhere else, closer by, a rooster crowed, even though it was nowhere near daybreak.
TEN
The Bean TreesEven a spotted pig looks black at night. This is another thing Mama used to tell me quite often. It means that things always look different, and usually better, in the morning.
And they did. Mattie called first thing to say that Esperanza was going to be all right. They hadn’t pumped her stomach after all because she hadn’t taken enough to do much harm. I made Estevan a big breakfast, eggs scrambled with tomatoes and peppers and green chile sauce, and sent him home before I could start falling in love with him again over the breakfast dishes. Turtle woke up in one of those sweet, eye-rubbing moods that kids must know by instinct as a means of saving the human species from extinction. Lou Ann came home from the Ruiz family reunion singing “La Bamba.”
It’s surprising, considering Roosevelt Park, but we always heard birds in the morning. There must be transients in the bird world too, rumple-feathered outcasts that naturally seek out each other’s company in inferior and dying trees. In any case, there were lots of them. There was a type of woodpecker that said, “Ha, ha, ha, to hell with you!” I swear it did. And another one, a little pigeony-looking bird, said, “Hip hip hurroo.” Lou Ann insisted that it was saying “Who Cooks for Who?” She said she had read it in a magazine. I had a hard time imagining what kind of magazine would go into something like that, but I wasn’t about to argue. It was the first time I could remember her hanging on to her own opinion about something-Lou Ann not normally being inclined in that direction. One time in a restaurant, she’d once told me, a waiter mistakenly brought her somebody else’s dinner and she just ate it, rather than make trouble. It was beef shingles on toast.
Gradually Lou Ann and I were changing the house around, filling in the empty spaces left behind by Angel with ABC books and high chairs and diaper totes and all manner of toys, all larger than a golf ball. I had bought Turtle a real bed, junior size, from New To You. We turned the screen porch in the back into a playroom for the kids, not that Dwayne Ray did any serious playing yet, but he liked to sit out there strapped in his car seat watching Turtle plant her cars in flowerpots. The fire engine she called “domato,” whereas the orange car was “carrot.” Or sometimes she called it “Two-Two,” which is what I had named my Volkswagen, after the man who profited from my rocker arm disaster.
I had considered putting Turtle’s bed out there on the porch too, but Lou Ann said it wouldn’t be safe, that someone might come along and slash the screen and kidnap her before you could say Jack Robinson. I never would have thought of that.
But it didn’t matter. The house was old and roomy; there was plenty of space for Turtle’s bed in my room. It was the type of house they called a “rambling bungalow” (the term reminded me somehow of Elvis Presley movies), with wainscoting and steam radiators and about fifty coats of paint on the door frames, so that you could use your thumbnail to scrape out a history of all the
