The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver Read Free Book Online Page B

daughter-in-law.
    I was in hog heaven to be on the road again. In Arizona. My eyes had started to hurt in Oklahoma from all that flat land. I swear this is true. It felt like you were always having to look too far to see the horizon.
    By the time we were in sight of Tucson it became clear what those goofy pink clouds had been full of: hail. Within five minutes the car was covered with ice inside and out, and there was no driving on that stuff. The traffic was moving about the speed of a government check. I left the interstate at an off ramp and pulled over next to what looked like the Flying Nun’s hat made out of bumpy concrete, held up by orange poles. Possibly it had once been a gas station, although there were no pumps and the building at the back of the paved lot looked abandoned. All over the walls and boarded-up windows someone had painted what looked like sperms with little smiles in red spray paint, and sayings like “Fools Believe.”
    I rubbed my hands on my knees to keep them from freezing. There was thunder, though I did not see lightning. I thought of all the mud turtles in Arizona letting go. Did Arizona even have mud turtles? An old man my mama used to clean for would say if it thunders in January it will snow in July. Clearly he had never been to Arizona. Or perhaps he had.
    We got out of the open car and stood under the concrete wings to stay dry. Turtle was looking interested in the scenery, which was a first. Up to then the only thing that appeared to interest her was my special way of starting the car.
    “This is a foreign country,” I told her. “Arizona. You know as much about it as I do. We’re even steven.”
    The hail turned to rain and kept up for half an hour. A guy came out of the little boarded-up building and leaned against one of the orange poles near us. I wondered if he lived there, or what. (If he did live there, did he paint the sperms?) He had on camouflage army pants and a black baseball cap with cloth flaps hanging down in the back, such as Gregory Peck or whoever it was always wore in those old Foreign Legion movies. His T-shirt said VISITOR FROM ANOTHER PLANET . That’s me, I thought. I should be wearing that shirt.
    “You from out of town?” he asked after a while, eying my car.
    “No,” I said. “I go to Kentucky every year to get my license plate.” I didn’t like his looks.
    He lit a cigarette. “What’d you pay for that bucket of bolts?”
    “A buck two-eighty.”
    “Sassy one, aren’t you?”
    “You got that one right, buster,” I said. I wished to God I wasn’t going to have to make such a spectacle of myself later on, starting the car.
    The sun came out even before the hail stopped.There was a rainbow over the mountains behind the city, and over that another rainbow with the colors upside down. Between the two rainbows the sky was brighter than everywhere else, like a white sheet lit from the back. In a few minutes it was hot. I had on a big red pullover sweater and was starting to sweat. Arizona didn’t do anything halfway. If Arizona was a movie you wouldn’t believe it. You’d say it was too corny for words.
    I knew I had better stay put for a few more minutes to give the engine a chance to dry out. The guy was still hanging around, smoking and making me nervous.
    “Watch out,” he said. There was this hairy spider about the size of a small farm animal making its way across the pavement. Its legs jerked up and down like the rubber spiders on a string that you get from a gumball machine.
    “I’ve seen worse,” I said, although to tell you the truth I hadn’t. It looked like something that might have crawled out of the Midnight Creature Feature.
    “That’s a tarantula,” he said. “You got to watch out for them suckers. They can jump four feet. If they get you, you go crazy. It’s a special kind of poison.”
    This I didn’t believe. I never could figure out why men thought they could impress a woman by making the world out to be such a big