I carry the water in and spread towels on the floor. He washes so slow the water don’t hardly splash. His fox-color eye is on my face. I smoke and watch him pass the rag over his messy legs.
I guess he didn’t like the look on my face ’cause when he left for work the next day, that was it.
10
TEN CUCKOOS. Dale sleeps a grave, deep sleep these days, ain’t no baby no more. And Bonny Loo, she don’t sleep at all, just smokes them long cigarettes.
Gunfire. Two thunderous shots.
I light the lamp. I sit on the edge of the bed and fix my ears on the silence. Two more shots. My face goes cold with recognition. I find my socks but can’t seem to find my shoes. A blind haze fills my eyes, and Gram comes to all sides of my head with her dark throaty whisper: FOR YOU WILL PUT THEM TO FLIGHT; YOU WILL AIM AT THEIR FACES WITH YOUR BOWS. BE EXALTED, O LORD, IN THY STRENGTH! WE WILL SING AND PRAISE THY POWER. I try to put on my shirt, but my hair tangles in the buttons.
Another shot. Another. Another. I wrestle with my shirt, my dungarees. Crack! Crack! I find my sweater, but it goes on inside out.
“Ma!” Bonny Loo calls from the hall. “What is it?” She slams out onto the piazza.
“No, Bonny! Don’t run!”
“You’re runnin’, Ma!”
“All right . . . I won’t.” But I run.
Dale cries in his room.
Bonny Loo’s face is close to mine. “Get down!” I say.
We go down together, on all fours. Her cigarette-smellin’ mouth says, “Ma! What is it?”
Dale hollers, “Da!” He shakes the crib bars in his room. “Da! Da!”
Another shot . . . and glass tinkling on the other side of the road.
“My God!”
Bonny Loo crawls behind me now, sobbing.
Dale screams.
Another shot. Glass . . . like little bells.
Bonny Loo puts her arms around my waist, breathes deep into my hair. We roll together in a sobbing ball. “It’s HIM, ain’t it, Ma! Ain’t it, Ma!”
We go out on all fours into the wind, down the steps, over the hard-packed yard to the well. The wind makes the tarpaper flap, the plastic on the windows billows. It seems our whole house is gettin’ ready to flap and flutter away.
Another shot. Another. Another. Another . . . Big windows break apart, skid across big hardwood floors.
“BEAL!” I call. The wind takes the word and rips it away.
Silence.
“BEEEEEEEEEEAL!”
He don’t answer. The wind comes again, a deep dragonlike sigh.
11
SUDDENLY there is more light than my eyes can stand. Motors. Radios. The rude snaps of rifles being loaded . . . mumbles . . . more lights . . . lights wipin’ the trees. Bonny Loo and I lie here in what seems like broad daylight. We see what they are lookin’ for in the crazy whirring light: Rubie Bean’s purplish-red truck heaped with mossy wood, Beal balancing on the load. The beard flicks like an angry tail. He is sightin’ with his good eye on what’s left of them broad new windows across the road. Another shot. Glass buckles. But cops work fast to remove the problem. They fill this painful light with a million crisp shots.
I stand right up in the light, screaming with a voice that feels like it rips my throat apart.
Bonny Loo clings.
Beal’s body pulls to one side . . . heaves to the other . . . flutters. He is beautifully lightweight. The hand and the rifle remain unseparated, not ever letting go.
A young cop looks faint, blinking wildly. Others just close their eyes.
Beal is spotted . . . pinto . . . drippin’ black on white . . . down . . .
The hump of his back shows in the grass.
In this broad, daylight-blue, noisy night Bonny Loo’s face is twisting out a word. “M-M-MA!”
Home Fire
AS SOON AS we get comfortable in our pew, Dale takes off his shoes with the E.T. laces and yawns. Bonny Loo rolls her program up in her long fingers, and she don’t take off her coat. Her hair is wet from the storm. How powerful she’s become, full and square like all Bean women. Her dark hair is cut gypsy-style. She smells like cigarettes.
Daddy sets with us on our pew. Sometimes as Dale nods off, he eases his large dark head into Daddy’s lap. Daddy and I don’t never talk . . . just set together. This is the only place I see him—nowadays I never miss a Sunday. It’s good to see him.
Me and the kids, we always ride home with the McKenzies. We always lose Dale’s shoes under the seat. Comin’ out of the parkin’ lot this mornin’, Mal McKenzie’s freckled fingers muckled the wheel, and he moaned, “It’ll be with God’s good grace that we get home alive!”
I looked out at the storm and thought, Oh, no! I must make it home, if just to drop dead inside the door.
I imagine lying across my bed in my cold bedroom with a cigarette in my teeth, watching the draft stir the cobwebs around. I have these days started to enjoy my aloneness.
2
THE MCKENZIES’ CAR toots as it buzzes away into the slanted storm. I carry Dale and his new brown shoes. Bonny Loo smashes at the snow, trying to get room to open the piazza door.
“What’s these footprints?!” she cries out. Her frozen breath is a chain like paper dolls dancing out of her mouth. She presses her bare palms together as if in prayer. “COMPANY!”
I murmur, “That’s our footprints when we came out.”
“No-SUH!” she screams. “These are NEW!”
We stomp our boots inside the piazza.
Through the door glass, I can see somebody at our supper table! He handles part of a gun, his fingers long and short. One fingernail is just a claw. He looks up at us through the glass, lookin’ in at him. His mouth is shut up on a wooden match. Seethin’ over the mouth is an untrimmed mustache of black. Some gray cuts through.
It’s the ghost of my dead husband, Beal Bean.
3
PINKIE BUTTS at the man’s new yellow work boots, butts hard with his head.
The right boot shoves him away.
At first, I guess I just stand there with my mouth open, but now I’m moving through the kitchen that smells of WD-40, of toast he has made in the oven, of hot peanut butter. He has lit the lamp to make a coarse light over the guns on the table. He watches me go into the hall, carrying Dale.
Bonny Loo says, “Hi!”
When I come back, I says, “Bonny Loo, shut the door, for cryin’ out loud!” I take off my coat, hang it, start a pot of tea. My hands aren’t shakin’. I’m proud of how steady my hands do these things.
Pinkie is back at the boots, rubbin’ and purrin’. The boot draws up and kicks, knocks Pinkie into a skid.
His voice, hoarser than Beal’s, is tellin’ Bonny Loo that if these weapons ain’t oiled, they’ll pit up . . . and you can’t knock the friggin’ sights . . . an’ who’s been fuckin’ around with his guns while he was gone? Around these words his mustache is frisky and accommodating.
I fit myself on the stool in the corner, my back to the wall, clumps of snow droppin’ from my pant legs. I light up a Kent.
I say, “You’re Rubie, ain’t you?”
Bonny Loo’s eyes widen.
“That ain’t the question,” he says hoarsely, workin’ his fox-color eyes over the bolt and spring in his hands. “The real question is, who are you?” The tops of his hands, softly haired, crisscrossed with roused arteries, are the hands of Beal. No difference. No difference. In my throat, something growing to the size of an egg crowds my windpipe . . . an explosion of tears is getting ready.
“Beal’s wife,” I say.
He grunts.
I clutch my knees. “You can call me Earlene.”
“Where’s my wife?” he says.
“You mean Madeline or Marie?”
He puts down the spring and bolt.
I say, “I’m sorry . . . You of course mean Madeline.”
His eyes follow me as I pull up one of the lids in the cookstove. “You build a nice fire,”
I say softly. I try to swallow, but not much gets by the lump in my throat.
“Where is she?” he rasps. “When I left . . . well”—he chuckles—“when I was . . . appree-hended, I had a woman and two babies here. Now, poof!”
I balance my cigarette on the edge of the counter. “She married somebody . . . She met what’s his name. She’s been gone quite a while.”
“Almost four years,” adds Bonny Loo.
His eyes carry the light of the lamp. His mustache scrambles as he chews his bottom lip. He’s wearin’ a new denim workshirt. I can tell even though he’s sittin’ that he’s shorter than Beal. The distance of the shoulders I can measure, too—by eye. They are the shoulders of Beal. Back-to, he is Beal. Anyone would swear. I swallow three times. The lump in my throat plumps out bigger.
“So Madeline decided to scout around, huh?” he says slowly.
Bonny Loo moves away from him, drops her coat over the woodbox, looks into my face to see what I’m going to do. I don’t know what I’m going to do.
His hands with the long and short fingers snap the gun back together. He’s familiar with guns to the point of grace. He stands. Lays the gun down. He is older than Beal, maybe old as Daddy. There is gray at his temples, gray like galvanized nails and pails. He crosses the kitchen, drops into my red rocker. He rocks with his knees.
Pinkie has joined Atlas under the woodstove, but keeps his eyes on Rubie Bean.
Bonny Loo watches Rubie hard. She stares like a little kid does.
I say, “Rubie, do you drink tea?”
“Nah.” He chuckles.
I pour myself tea. He’s rockin’ slowly, heavily behind me.
“Did you hear Beal’s dead?” I ask.
His voice, a rasp: “Yeh.”
“But nobody told you Madeline and the kids moved out?”
His rockin’ slows. He is a dark snake about to throw itself across the kitchen onto my back.
Bonny Loo drags a match over the woodbox, lights a cigarette. She wants to torment me . . . especially now.
“Well, I can’t kill the bastard, Mr. What’s His Name. I’m reformed,” he whispers. He makes slow, deep rocks, stretchin’ his legs. I turn, see the long legs stretchin’ out, the belly rounded under the new shirt, the eyes closed.
Bonny Loo stares at him and then at me, as though this was The Greatest Show on Earth and I’m about to sink my head into the mouth of the lion.
Bonny Loo says, “Are you outta jail forEVER?”
The snow toils around the dooryard, bangin’ the glass windows, flappin’ the plastic ones. In a way, it’s a silent moment.
He opens his eyes. Smiles. He, unlike Beal, has twisted teeth. He opens these teeth to let out a crampy little “Ha ha.”
Bonny Loo smokes hard and fast. She’s sitting on her coat on top of the woodbox. She seems to have more pimples than the last time I looked.
Rubie hammers his chest with his fist. “While I was in Thomaston, I had a heart attack of the worst kind . . . died and come back on the shower room floor.” He chuckles. “Mellowed me out. What you are lookin’ at, ladies . . . what you are enjoyin’ the company of . . . is a pussycat.”
I set my tea on the kitchen table between the stock of one of his guns and a sweet-smelling rag. I grope for a chair, feelin’ dizzy.
“I didn’t know ’bout no heart attack,” I whisper.
Rubie yanks out a grayish handkerchief and digs at his nose. “I got a lift in the meat wagon to the hospital where I got the treatment of a fuckin’ king.”
Bonny Loo blinks.
“They used me good,” he says, stuffing his handkerchief back.
I look to the center of his workshirt.
He rocks, smiling. “Ayuh . . . Believe me . . . I am . . . no longer a prick. I am ree-formed. I will not kill Madeline’s new man. I won’t even bruise him. See! I’m takin’ this with a grain of salt.”
Bonny Loo puts her cigarette out on the woodstove.
Rubie rocks deeply, pushin’ from the knees. His dungarees are old, loose, soft-lookin’. I close my eyes. “You want dinnah?” I ask.
“Ayuh . . .” He sets up, rubs his hands together. “My first home-cooked meal in fifteen years.”
4
BRANCHES SQUEAL against the house. The snow leaps. I carry the cast-iron pan to the table with both hands.
Dale rubs his eyes.
Bonny Loo is quiet.
Before we get to say grace, Rubie heaps a conical slimy pile on his plate, forks American chop suey into his mouth, makes the most piglike ghastly noises ever, elbows of macaroni twirlin’ at the tails of his mustache, droppin’ back in his plate. He stabs into the butter with his hunting knife. He sucks milk from his drinkin’ jar. He gags, snorts like he’s about to huck one across the table, but manages to swallow it, his eyes waterin’.
He wipes his knife on his leg and belches.
Dale’s soft fox-color eyes narrow with disgust. “You better wipe your whiskahs,” he says.
5
I UNDRESS in the corner. The plastic swan-print curtain that covers my bedroom door rises and falls from the drafts.
I have made up a bed for him in Dale’s room, dug out old quilts and deerskins from a musty trunk. Dale will sleep on the floor at the foot of Bonny Loo’s metal bed. Bonny Loo loves to tell Dale about all the horror movies she’s seen on Jamie’s cable TV: The Amityville Horror, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Exorcist Two. Whenever we have overnight company using Dale’s bedroom, Bonny Loo says fiendishly, “Ah-ha! Dale . . . COME into my parlor.” And she rubs her hands together. He goes in and balls up in the blankets of his pallet on the floor, his round face a drained color.
The storm shakes the house, the roof creaks, the trees sing.
Rubie paces the kitchen. Certain boards moan under his boots. He opens the refrigerator, and something . . . a jar of jam . . . or a jar of bread ’n’ butters . . . thumps . . . rolls over the floor. “Shit!” he snarls.
I lay on my side with the light of the swan curtain glimmering on my back. I will never sleep again as long as this “killer” roams my house . . . even if it is his house.
I could go to my father’s house, unload my two children and say, “Daddy! I’m home!” I could help him paint sea gulls . . . fix his meals . . . intrude on his noiseless, high-ceilinged lonesomeness.
I hear the sound of the red rocker receiving Rubie Bean’s weight . . . then the slow, painful rock.
I turn my pillow over a time or two. I lay very very still, listenin’. I picture one of his fingers . . . the one that has the claw, a cakey yellow claw . . . how he uses it to hook onto his sweet-smelling gun rag . . . twirls the rag a time or two. I hear him stand up. He paces some more. It would be nuthin’ for him to push through this plastic swan curtain, spreadin’ his fingers through the dark to find my bed.
I turn my pillow over again.
After three or four hours, the storm whispers, drags itself slowly out of the trees, out of these hills. The rocking chair don’t make no more noise. I pick the swan curtain away just enough to look out into the poor light of the kitchen lamp.
He’s asleep in the red rocker, his arms folded over his chest, his legs strewed out in front of him, head hanging. The graying mustache sags . . . like a bat.
I go back to bed, bury into the pillows. I sleep.
6
WHAT WAKES ME just after dawn is Rubie Bean up on the roof pushin’ off snow. After I have a smoke, I go into his room. The bed ain’t been touched. I look out and see them, the man and the boy, both bareheaded. Dale pitches a snowball into the garden, just misses the scarecrow with the tattered workshirt. Rubie shovels a path to the outhouse, and one to the barn. He works fast, snow spewing in all directions.
Dale pitches snowballs at the eaves of the house, and the icicles tinkle away like glass.
Pip Bean clacks into the yard with his plow down.
When Pip is done plowing he steps outta the truck, a grim scrap of a man in red suspenders, his white ha
ir in a dozen cowlicks. With a green-gloved hand he slaps Rubie’s back. They lean against the pickup and talk. Dale comes toward them. Pip and Rubie talk, using their hands, Rubie leaning at times on his shovel. Rubie bends to ruffle Dale’s hair. It seems Dale’s head yearns up into the palm of Rubie’s hand . . . a kind of triumph.
Then Pip leaves.
Rubie’s eyes come to rest on his old logging truck, the mossy load under snow. He walks under the rusted hydraulic jaws. Slowly, dragging his shovel. Dale talks at him. Madeline has sold parts off the truck, nearly stripped it. Rubie feels the empty seal-beam sockets with his gloved fingers.
He begins shoveling the truck out. I can tell by the pumping of his shoulders in his black-and-red plaid coat that he is tiring.
7
SHE RUNS OUT without her coat. I go to the piazza and eye the tractor that’s come into the dooryard. Its bucket is raised. Bonny Loo climbs up. Her body is big and full as all Bean women’s. Her Cheerios T-shirt is tight across her back. I spin my wedding ring frantically. I can’t believe my eyes, this Jamie Lombard. She has said he is beautiful. But I always wonder what a beautiful boy would see in Bonny Loo.
He reaches behind him, pulls out a brown bag. His grin is with high cheeks, skin like a glass cup, shaking yellow hair across his forehead. He has green eyes.
Rubie is squatted down in the motor of his big truck. Dale’s on the fender . . . Been spendin’ time with Rubie.
Jamie looks me in the eye as he shuts off the tractor. Drops to the ground. His body is flat and narrow, heavily dressed. He puts his arm around Bonny Loo. Bonny Loo don’t look at me at all.
Dale swings his legs over the red, stove-up truck fender, gettin’ ready to jump. I see Rubie focusin’ on Jamie. I see Rubie’s frozen breath quicken. I picture his heart . . . trod trod trod . . . like the steps of a horse twitchin’ out its last big load of the day. He’s been home twenty-four hours. If Rubie Bean’s heart stops again . . . I will somehow be to blame.
The Beans of Egypt, Maine Page 18
