The Bean Trees Read Free Page B

on the basis of what I do not know. Its abundance of potato bugs and gossip, perhaps. I knew how people could toot their own horn without any earthly cause.
    And so what I promised myself is that I would drive west until my car stopped running, and there I would stay. But there were some things I hadn’t considered. Mama taught me well about tires, and many other things besides, but I knew nothing of rocker arms. And I did not know about the Great Plain.
    The sight of it filled me with despair. I turned south from Wichita, Kansas, thinking I might find a way around it, but I didn’t. There was central Oklahoma. I had never imagined that any part of a round earth could be so flat. In Kentucky you could never see too far, since there were always mountains blocking the other side of your view, and it left you the chance to think something good might be just over the next hill. But out there on the plain it was all laid out right in front of you, and no matter how far you looked it didn’t get any better. Oklahoma made me feel there was nothing left to hope for.
    My car gave out somewhere in the middle of a great emptiness that according to the road signs was owned by the Cherokee tribe. Suddenly the steering wheel bore no relation to where the car was going. By the grace of some miracle I surely did not yet deserve, I managed to wobble off the highway all in one piece and find a service station.
    The man who straightened out my rocker arm was named Bob Two Two. I am not saying he didn’t ask a fair price—I should have been able to fix it myself—but he went home that night with his pocket full of something near half the money I had. I sat in the parking lot looking out over that godless stretch of nothing and came the closest I have ever come to cashing in and plowing under. But there was no sense in that. My car was fixed.
    I had to laugh, really. All my life, Mama had talked about the Cherokee Nation as our ace in the hole. She’d had an old grandpa that was full-blooded Cherokee, one of the few that got left behind in Tennessee because he was too old or too ornery to get marched over to Oklahoma. Mama would say, “If we run out of luck we can always go live on the Cherokee Nation.” She and I both had enough blood to qualify. According to Mama, if you’re one-eighth or more they let you in. She called this our “head rights.”
    Of course, if she had ever been there she would have known it was not a place you’d ever go to live without some kind of lethal weapon aimed at your hind end. It was clear to me that the whole intention of bringing the Cherokees here was to get them to lie down and die without a fight. The Cherokees believed God was in trees. Mama told me this. When I was a kid I would climb as high as I could in a tree and not come down until dinner. “That’s your Indian blood,” she would say. “You’re trying to see God.”
    From what I could see, there was not one tree in the entire state of Oklahoma.
    The sun was headed fast for the flat horizon, and then there would be nothing but twelve hours of headlights in front of me. I was in a hurry to get out of there. My engine was still running from Bob Two Two’s jumper cables, and I hated to let a good start go to waste, but I was tired and didn’t want to begin a night of driving without a cup of coffee and something to eat. I drove across the big patch of dirt that lay between the garage and another small brick-shaped building that had a neon Budweiser light in the window.
    When I drove around to the front, a swarm of little boys came down on my car like bees on a bear.
    “Wash your windows, lady,” they said. “Dollar for the whole car.”
    “I got no windows,” I told them. I reached back and put my hand through the side window hole to show them. “See, just the windshield. Lucky me, because I got no dollar either.”
    The boys went around the car putting their hands through all the window holes again and again. I thought twice about