The Bean Trees - Barbara Kingsolver [18]
“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 dangerous deal. I mean, we’ve got to live in the exact same world every damn day of the week, don’t we?
“What’s it coming around here for?” I said. “Is it your pet, or your girlfriend?”
“Nah,” he said, squashing out his cigarette, and I decided he was dumber than he was mean.
There were a lot more bugs crawling up on the cement slab. A whole swarm of black ants came out of a crack and milled around the cigarette butt trying, for reasons I could not imagine, to take it apart. Some truck had carried that tobacco all the way from Kentucky maybe, from some Hardbine’s or Richey’s or Biddle’s farm, and now a bunch of ants were going to break it into little pieces to take back to their queen. You just never knew where something was going to end up.
“We had a lot of rain lately,” the guy said. “When the ground gets full of water, the critters drown out of their holes. They got to come up and dry off.” He reached out with his foot and squashed a large, shiny black bug with horns. Its wings split apart and white stuff oozed out between. It was the type that you wouldn’t have guessed had wings, although I knew from experience that just about every bug has wings of one kind or another. Not including spiders.
He lit another cigarette and threw the match at the tarantula, missing it by a couple of inches. The spider raised its two front legs toward the flame like a scared lady in an old movie.
“I got things to do,” I said. “So long.” I put Turtle in the car, then went around to the other side and put it in neutral and started to push.
He laughed. “What is that, a car or a skateboard?”
“Look, buster, you can help give me a push, or you can stand and watch, but either way I’m out of here. This car got me here from Kentucky, and I reckon she’s got a few thousand left in her.”
“Not on them tires, she don’t,” he said. I looked back to see the rear tire flapping empty on the wheel. “Shit,” I said, just as the engine caught and the car zoomed forward. In the rear-view mirror I could see broken glass glistening on the off ramp, dropping away behind me like a twinkly green lake.
I had no intention of asking the dumb guy for help. The tire looked like it was done-for anyway so I drove on it for a few blocks. There were a bank, some houses, and a park with palm trees and some sick-looking grass. Some men with rolled-up blankets tied around their waists were kicking