The Bean Trees Read Online Free PDF Page A

a while I began to wonder if perhaps it was dead. Maybe the woman had a dead child, murdered or some such thing, and had put it in my car, and I was riding down the road beside it, talking to it. I had read a story in Senior English about a woman who slept with her dead husband for forty years. It was basically the same idea as the guy and his mother in Psycho , except that Norman Bates in Psycho was a taxidermist and knew how to preserve his mother so she wouldn’t totally rot out. Indians sometimes knew how to preserve the dead. I had read about Indian mummies out West. People found them in caves. I told myself to calm down. I remembered that the baby’s eyes had been open when she put it down on the seat. But then again, so what if its eyes were open? Had it blinked? What was the penalty for carrying a dead Indian child across state lines?
    After a while I smelled wet wool. “Merciful heavens,” I said. “I guess you’re still hanging in there.”
    My plan had been to sleep in the car, but naturally my plans had not taken into account a wet, cold kid. “We’re really in trouble now, you know it?” I said. “The next phone booth we come to, I’m going to have to call 1-800-THE LORD.”
    The next phone booth we did come to, as a matter of fact, was outside the Mustang Motel. I drove by slowly and checked the place out, but the guy in the office didn’t look too promising.
    There were four or five motels pretty much in a row, their little glass-fronted offices shining out overthe highway like TV screens. Some of the offices were empty. In the Broken Arrow Motor Lodge there was a gray-haired woman. Bingo.
    I parked under the neon sign of a pink arrow breaking and unbreaking, over and over, and went into the office.
    “Hi,” I said to the lady. “Nice evening. Kind of chilly, though.”
    She was older than she had looked from outside. Her hands shook when she lifted them off the counter and her head shook all the time, just slightly, like she was trying to signal “No” to somebody behind my back, on the sly.
    But she wasn’t, it was just age. She smiled. “Winter’s on its way,” she said.
    “Yes, ma’am, it is.”
    “You been on the road long?”
    “Way too long,” I said. “This place is real nice. It’s a sight for sore eyes. Do you own this place?”
    “My son owns it,” she said, her head shaking. “I’m over here nights.”
    “So it’s kind of a family thing?”
    “Kind of like. My daughter-in-law and me, we do most of the cleaning up and all, and my son does the business end of it. He works in the meat-packing plant over at Ponca City. This here’s kind of a sideline thing.”
    “You reckon it’s going to fill up tonight?”
    She laughed. “Law, honey, I don’t think this place been filled up since President Truman.” She slowly turned the pages of the big check-in book.
    “President Truman stayed here?”
    She looked up at me, her eyes swimming through her thick glasses like enormous tadpoles. “Why no, honey, I don’t think so. I’d remember a thing like that.”
    “You seem like a very kind person,” I said, “so I’m not going to beat around the bush. I’ve got a big problem. I can’t really afford to pay for a room, and I wouldn’t even bother you except I’ve got a child out in that car that’s wet and cold and looking to catch pneumonia if I don’t get it to bed someplace warm.”
    She looked out toward the car and shook her head, but of course I couldn’t tell what that meant. She said, “Well, honey, I don’t know.”
    “I’ll take anything you’ve got, and I’ll clean up after myself, and tomorrow morning I’ll change every bed in this place. Or anything else you want me to do. It’s just for one night.”
    “Well,” she said, “I don’t know.”
    “Let me go get the baby,” I said. “You won’t mind if I just bring the poor kid in here to warm up while you decide.”
     
    The most amazing thing was the way that child held on. From the