The Bean Trees - Barbara Kingsolver [53]
“But oh, Taylor, if you could have seen him. How handsome he was.” She had her eyes closed and her face turned up toward the sun. “The first time I laid eyes on him he was draped on this fence like the Marlboro man, with his arms out to the sides and one boot up on the bottom rung. Just chewing on a match and hanging out till it was time to turn out the next bull. And do you know what else?” She sat up and opened her eyes.
“What?” I said.
“Right at that exact moment there was this guy in the ring setting some kind of a new world’s record for staying on a bull, and everybody was screaming and throwing stuff and of course me and my girlfriend Rachel had never seen a rodeo before so we thought this was the wildest thing since Elvis joined the army. But Angel didn’t even look up. He just squinted off at the distance toward the hay field behind the snack bar. Rachel said, ‘Look at that tough guy over by that fence, what an asshole, not even paying attention.’ And you know what I thought to myself? I thought, I bet I could get him to pay attention to me.”
A child in a Michael Jackson tank shirt rumbled down the gravel path on a low-slung trike with big plastic wheels, making twice as much noise as his size would seem to allow for. “This is a O-R-V,” he told us. Now I knew.
“I know you.” He pointed at Lou Ann. “You’re the one gives out money at Halloween.”
Lou Ann rolled her eyes. “I’m never going to live that down. This year they’ll be coming in from Phoenix and Flagstaff to beat down our door.”
“Watch out when the bums come,” he told us. “Go straight home.” He tore off again, pedaling like someone possessed.
The gravel path cut through the middle of the park from a penis-type monument, up at the street near Mattie’s, down to the other end where we liked to sit in a place Lou Ann called the arbor. It was the nicest thing about the park. The benches sat in a half-circle underneath an old wooden trellis that threw a shade like a cross-stitched tablecloth. The trellis had thick, muscly vines twisting up its support poles and fanning out overhead. Where they first came out of the ground, they reminded me of the arms of this guy who’d delivered Mattie’s new refrigerator by himself. All winter Lou Ann had been telling me they were wisteria vines. They looked dead to me, like everything else in the park, but she always said, “Just you wait.”
And she was right. Toward the end of March they had sprouted a fine, shivery coat of pale leaves and now they were getting ready to bloom. Here and there a purplish lip of petal stuck out like a pout from a fat green bud. Every so often a bee would hang humming in the air for a few seconds, checking on how the flowers were coming along. You just couldn’t imagine where all this life was coming from. It reminded me of that Bible story where somebody or other struck a rock and the water poured out. Only this was better, flowers out of bare dirt. The Miracle of Dog Doo Park.
Lou Ann went on endlessly about Mama. “I can just see your mama…. What’s her name, anyway?”
“Alice,” I said. “Alice Jean Stamper Greer. The last thing she needs is an Elleston on top of all that.”
“…I can just see Alice and Harland running for the sugar shack. If she’s anything like you, she goes after what she wants. I guess now she’ll be getting all the paint and body jobs she needs.”
“He’s only half owner, with Ernest Jakes,” I said. “It’s not like the whole shop belongs to him.”
“Alice and Harland sittin’ in a tree,” she sang, “K-I-S-S-I-N-G!”
I plugged my ears and sang, “I’m going back someday! Come what may! To Blue Bayou!” Turtle whacked the dirt and sang a recipe for succotash.
I spotted Mrs. Parsons and Edna Poppy coming down the gravel path with their arms linked. From a great distance you could have taken them for some wacked-out geriatric couple marching down the aisle in someone’s sick idea of a garden wedding. We waved our arms at them, and Turtle looked up and waved at us.
“No, we’re waving at them,” I said, and pointed.