The Beans of Egypt, Maine Read online

Outside, Pete Bean’s loaded logging truck idles. Pete is closest to the radiator, opening an Italian sandwich with triple black olives. The oil runs off the paper. He picks the black olives out first, one at a time, and eats them. Without teeth.

  Merry Merry flops down into the folding metal chair next to Pete. Her hands in her lap do something that looks like two furious white gamecocks.

  Pete is fat but the family tends to call it stout . . . And they wouldn’t call what he’s got a beard . . . it’s just a poor shave. He murmurs, “Black olives make you passionate, you know.”

  Marty Gallant is the school bus driver, has a cold pair of gray eyes, enormous gray hands. He looks through the loam-color light at the Budweiser clock. “Don’t eat ’em, then.”

  Merry Merry watches Beal wipe a can of tuna fish on his pant leg. The can’s not really dusty but some of the canned goods do give one the feel of an archeological find.

  Pete Bean’s union suit has no buttons, is done up tautly across his belly and breasts with safety pins. He says, “I hear Granville Pollard’s up your place, Beal.”

  Beal looks among the faces. “Yip,” he says.

  Pete chuckles. “He ’n’ your gramp always been thick.”

  All the men smile.

  Merry Merry rocks her body to and fro . . . but there’s no rocking chair. The bus driver narrows his pale eyes on her.

  “Pip ’n’ him’s been plowin’ an’ stuff,” says Beal. “Pip pays him ta help.”

  The men look at each other. The radiator clangs.

  “Now there’s quite a ticket, that Granville feller,” Pete says. He picks a cigar off the mopboard and takes three loud, juicy draws. “Down Four Corners we always call him Rip . . . you know . . . Van Winkle . . . Well, you call him Rip and see what he does, Beal.” Pete looks like he’s chewing a good piece off his cigar. He sets it back on the mopboard.

  “Woi!!!” shouts Merry Merry, pointing at Pete’s plaid wool pants.

  “Don’t get excited . . . It’s just an olive, woman!” Pete picks the olive from his pant leg, eats it.

  At the counter, Beal picks out a handful of Dubble Bubbles.

  Howe Letourneau looks outdoors. He has one empty sleeve, pinned up to the shoulder, and a face of silver scars. He says, “When’s your Lab going ta drop dem pups, Beal?”

  “Pups?” says Beal.

  Stout Pete leans over the radiator and looks, too. “Ayup,” he says. Pete’s suspenders are also safety-pinned here and there. The union suit is orange under the arms . . . and the elbows look like they’ve been dynamited away.

  “Ain’t been no males around,” Beal says. He pays for the gum and tuna. The Bean behind the counter squints to count out change. There’s not much light.

  Merry Merry sees Beal turn around with the gum. “Reeeeium!” she rejoices, starting to get up.

  “Stay put,” murmurs the bus driver. He looks at Beal. “Hurry with them gums, Beal.”

  Pete uncrosses his legs and runs a finger around in the Italian sandwich. “Don’t always need the male,” says Pete. Pete winks at Howe Letourneau. Howe winks back. Pete says, “After all, babies is always comin’ ta single women, ain’t they, Howe?”

  Howe says, “Aye.”

  Pete looks Beal in the eye. “Why, look at the Virgin Mary. You know what virgin means, dontcha?”

  Pete’s still looking Beal in the eye.

  “Yes,” says Beal.

  Pete digs out a quivering slice of cheese, lowers it into his mouth. He slurps happily on the cheese a minute and says, almost in a whisper, “God made the Virgin Mary pregnant . . . and God, as everybody knows, is faster than the speed of light.”

  Marty Gallant cackles.

  Howe Letourneau reddens.

  Beal looks out through the speckled glass. Jet is hunkered down on the piazza, scratching. Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump.

  Beal creaks back over the slanted floor and Merry Merry opens her mouth wide. He fishes around inside Merry Merry’s mouth with his fingers. Pete and the other men watch. Out comes Merry Merry’s soft, warm old gum. Beal sticks the gum in the ashtray. Then he unwraps the new Dubble Bubbles and Merry Merry claps her hands. “Gummm! Beeee! Gummm!”

  Pete says, “I expect she’ll drop them pups any day.”

  Merry Merry’s heavy braids swing, one knocking against Pete Bean’s elbow.

  “Whaddya got for jokes in dat Dubble Bubble, Beal?” Howe Letourneau asks hoarsely.

  “Ain’t no jokes in this kind,” says Beal.

  “Bazooka Joe,” says the bus driver solemnly.

  Beal puts the new bright gums into Merry Merry’s mouth one at a time. Gently, her lips close up around his fingers.

  7

  MERRY MERRY works the latch of Whitey’s cage with her fingers, and the thumbs straight as fingers. The brilliance of sun and snow charges through the wire window onto her back in a pattern of lines. The cage door comes open. She lifts out a very old white doe with a pouch, a doe large as a lamb. She finds Granville Pollard’s pallet of blankets, collapses onto them, laughing. She doesn’t always have a good hold on this rabbit. More often than not, Whitey turns up hopping around over at Pomerleaus’ or down on the tar road.

  Pip lets the stranger off at the top of the right-of-way. Granville Pollard comes sweeping down in his long unbuttoned coat.

  Meanwhile, Auntie K.’s eyes are glued to The Guiding Light. Auntie Hoover sleeps off third shift.

  Granville Pollard enters the barn.

  Merry Merry looks up. She laughs. “Ba-heeeee!” She drives her face into the white doe.

  Granville puts out his hand. “You ain’t supposed to be out here,” he says. “Or is it I’m supposed to be somewhere?”

  Merry Merry laughs violently, redly.

  He kneels, crosses his arms on his knee. His beard parts over his thigh and almost touches the floor.

  Now she’s rocking the top half of her body . . . laughing. On her jacket collar is fixed a tin Heart Fund heart. The aunties always take the time to fix her up with pretty “jewels” or bows.

  He draws his pointing finger between the ears of the white doe. The doe’s eyes show endless pink circles.

  Granville focuses on Merry Merry’s braids swinging in frenzied circles. He catches one braid in his hand.

  “Gettin’ gray,” he says.

  She smiles a slow eerie smile.

  He says, “Me, too . . . goddam it. Ain’t it a pissah!”

  She scrambles her fingers more deeply into the doe’s shoulders.

  Granville rolls the braid between his hands.

  Merry Merry kisses the doe.

  Granville stands. He gives a coil of rope a hard kick. “Well . . . they ain’t got ta worry. No shit. There’s too much watah over the dam . . . I don’t even like you no more.”

  He turns and squints at the braids that are raking through the dusty-looking sun.

  “They’re makin’ a hoo-ha over nuthin’, for cryin’ out loud.”

  8

  ROSIE CRIES OUT, “Auntie K.! Auntie K.! The dog is under Beal’s cot!”

  Beal can tell Rubie’s just come home from another drunk. The whole back room smells like Rubie’s wide-open mouth.

  Auntie K. pushes the door panel aside, and the light from the hallway fire door explodes around her. Now Beal can plainly see Rubie’s arm, the hand with the long and short fingers . . . the green workshirt ripped from a fight.

  Jet’s tail thumps.

  Auntie K. snarls, “I smell a dog.”

  Beal sits up, tries to flatten his hair down. He rubs his eyes. “Ain’t Jet that smells.” He looks at Rubie.

  Rosie says, “Beal’s in trouble, ain’t he, Auntie?”

  The tail thumps.

  Beal has been sleeping in his clothes . . . even his boots. His cot is covered in sand.

  Lizzie and Annie and Rosie stand around Auntie K. in pajamas and gowns. Rosie simpers, “You sneaked her in the fire door, didn’t you, Pimplehead?”

  Auntie K. stoops to grab at Je
t, but Beal blocks the way with his foot. He says, “Auntie . . . she’s gonna have pups. Can’t she stay indoor to have pups?”

  Auntie K. puts her hands on her hips. “Ayuh . . . and get goo and crud all over my floors.”

  Rubie makes about six bull-like snorts in his sleep.

  Lizzie chirps, “How’d he get in here? I just seen him out sleepin’ by the steps.”

  Annie says, “Where was you, stupid? Pip and Ernest just lugged him through.”

  Beal’s chin dimples. “Ah-aaaaah-ah-ah-auntie . . . please! It’s freezin’ out!”

  Auntie K. gets a grip on the nape of Jet’s neck and pulls hard.

  Rosie says, “Beal’s cryin’.”

  Beal pretends he’s going to spit at them.

  “Auntie!” Rosie screams.

  Beal watches Auntie K. shove Jet out through the fire door.

  Rubie’s eyes jump under the lids. His shoulders quiver. One leg jerks.

  Annie gives Rubie a sideways look. “What a dub. Even in his dreams he’s makin’ a nu-since of hisself.”

  9

  BEAL AND JET are in the tree house, waiting for night. Beal’s left hand is spread on the tight convex belly that now and then shudders from the pups. Beal’s face is a mess from crying. You can cry all you want when you’re alone in the snowy woods. His pant legs are wet. He wears a Lone Ranger bedspread over his shoulders. He has brought six blankets, but these are heaped under and around the dog.

  Another hour. Total dark.

  The wind picks up and the tree house sways crazily, and through this wind, Beal’s crying is a high ghostlike scream.

  10

  THE SUNRISE makes red bars through the bony trees. Beal hears the scuffing of snowshoe tails. He puts one eye to a tree-house crack.

  Rubie Bean.

  “Get down!” commands Rubie from below.

  The memory of Lizzie, Annie, and Rosie with hammers over his fingers flashes into mind.

  Jet stands up and paws at the tree-house door.

  “It’s Rubie,” Beal whispers huskily. “Pretend we ain’t here, Jet.”

  “Make it snappy!” Rubie calls up in his raspy, grunty voice. The voice hammers through the bony trees.

  Jet gives the door another scratch.

  Rubie spits hard, and the spit drives into the snow deep as a hot bullet.

  “Beal! Get the hell down here!”

  Beal holds his breath.

  Rubie bends and unlaces the snowshoes with his long and short fingers. “I ain’t fuckin’ around, Mistah Man!” the raspy voice says.

  Beal hollers through the crack, “I’ll be home in a while. I ain’t runnin’ away . . . just campin’ out.”

  Rubie moves up the ladder fast.

  Beal’s chin dimples; his face scrinches in a loud sob.

  Jet whines. Her tail slowly sways. Rubie punches the little tree-house door and it jerks open, strewing the red morning light. Rubie comes in on his hands and knees. One hand of long and short fingers muckles onto Beal’s right foot.

  Beal shrieks with terror.

  Rubie rises up on his knees, his wild dark hair touching the ceiling of the tree house. He narrows his eyes close to Beal’s face. “You make me sick, pussy face!” he snarls. “At least my boys try ta fight back.”

  Beal collapses, sobbing. And Rubie looks frantically from wall to wall . . . confused. “Okay! Okay! Shit . . . would you just TELL them women next time you skip out? Between you and me, I don’t think you’re half as slow as they claim . . . you’re just fruity and fucked up.”

  11

  WHEN HE ENTERS THE BARN, Beal hears a hose running. It’s the stranger in a box stall with his head in a tub of water. The clothes are piled over a plank of the stall, the old coat, the dark shirt, empty pant legs dangling. The stranger jerks his head up and stands, the water pressing down the front of his body. The water flies from him in a noise, spreads on the floor.

  “Sorry,” says Beal. “Didn’t know you was here.”

  The stranger stops bathing. The water drips. High up on the right arm is a tattoo of a leaping deer. A twelve-pointer.

  “I come to get Pip a spare . . . right over h-hah-here,” Beal stammers.

  Twelve points. How can Beal count the points in a split second? He paws through the pile of tires. And the deer was done in blue, the trees and hills in red.

  “Well . . . I know it’s right in here . . . I seen it here . . . last week,” Beal murmurs.

  The stranger tries to focus. The water drips slower now. The hose deep in the tub makes a sudden gurgle. The man pushes into the tub again as if to dive from a height. The water bucks out of the tub. The floor blackens.

  The water divides, makes bright falling sheets down hard on Granville Pollard, like the hissing icy falls come down in Egypt Village on a gray night, gray light, gray water rocking, bucking, trembling over rocks and stumps . . . It also divides this way around the gray penis, in and out, around and down.

  Beal’s fingers cleave to the worn tread. He rolls the tire into the light, keeping his head down.

  The man drives his head into the tub another time, and when he rears back, the water explodes from him . . . and terror rises thickly in Beal’s throat . . . terror that Granville Pollard with indescribable morals could be in one glimpse a kind of Santa Claus . . . that Beal in one glimpse would love him . . .

  “This ain’t no sixteen-inch. What the hell’s Pip talkin’ about?” Beal drops the tire. He raises his head. The stranger is squinting, in his half-sightedness, looking with one green, milky eye at Beal.

  12

  BEAL WALKS along the newly plowed road, his mind on only one thing. Jet. Jet who has disappeared. Lost? Or taken and dropped off somewhere by Reuben. Wouldn’t Reuben do a thing like that? A kind of grim test?

  Beal pictures Death to be a place of no pain, no shame. He pictures his and Jet’s deaths together, warm, indiscernible, he and she mixed, wed. His pant legs are frozen and they scuff together like heavy canvas. Beal considers the dying part of suicide, those moments between life and death when the body lets go of those shreds of soul. His body perhaps will also be shreds.

  His pant legs hit together . . . thwank, thwank, thwank.

  Roberta Bean opens the door of her wee blue house, and Beal is swathed in heat and the smell of baking potatoes.

  He sleeps on the floor next to her mattress, is wakened in the morning by Roberta’s warm old baby, fruity-smelling baby, jumping on him, making wet echoey half-words in his ear.

  He’s glad he isn’t dead.

  Earlene

  The Sons of God

  DADDY COMES in wearin’ his khaki carpenter’s clothes and goes straight to the couch and sets on it with his arms folded.

  I says, “You ain’t mad, are you?”

  He says, “I’m sorry, Earlene, but this is goin’ ta be a sad Christmas.”

  I sit next to him on the couch and put my hand between his shoulder blades. I feel the bumps of his spine through his shirt with my thumb. I says, “What do you mean, Daddy?”

  He says he’s been laid off, and there won’t be any presents. He jiggles his leg and blows his cheeks in and out.

  I pull up his shirt to scratch his back. I scratch shapes of flowers between his shoulder blades. He always likes this. His leg stops jigglin’.

  Daddy is the littlest man anywheres. As he sets there on the couch, his shoulders wing out and his proud body is straight. He always has a hard time finding his khaki carpenter’s clothes in his size. His belt is always cut off at the end to get rid of the extra. Lately, I’ve been growin’ right and left. “A growth spurt,” Gram calls it. I’m almost as big as Daddy. When I’m next to Daddy, I draw myself down to be smaller.

  I look out the picture window. I don’t say nuthin’. He don’t say nuthin’. We watch Pip Bean come out on the steps of his mobile home overway. Daddy’s backbone stiffens under my fingers. Daddy has said a million times that the Beans breed like flies. I must admit I can’t count ’em. The Beans
are the only neighbors here on the right-of-way. And there’s Beans all up an’ down the road, and all along the highway to East Egypt. Daddy says even the Letourneaus and Barringtons got a gallon of Bean blood in each of ’em.

  Out there on his step, Pip Bean’s got a box and a brown bag. The wind slices sideways through Pip Bean’s stand-up gray hair. The wind gives the brown bag in Pip Bean’s hand the look of a flutterin’ hen.

  Daddy’s eyes are on Pip Bean. His backbone can almost cut my hand, it’s so sharp and stiff.

  Pip Bean takes Christmas lights and a brand-new extension cord from the bag. Then he lets go of the bag and the wind takes it. The bag skips, leaps, runs . . . through the tires, radiators, and parts to old bicycles . . . around a skidder motor covered with a rug . . . over the right-of-way . . . into our yard, where it catches on Daddy’s wee gardenia bush.

  Daddy narrows his eyes.

  We can see a lot through our picture window. We can see every move the Beans make when they’re outdoor. What they do inside Daddy says is a “mystery.” Daddy says what the Beans do inside their mobile home “would make a grown man cry.” In the summertime you see them Beans’ plastic curtains risin’ and fallin’ in their windows . . . and now and then a loud grunt or a screech . . . but mostly just the tinny little crackle of their TV.

  Daddy’s leg is jigglin’ again. I say, “Want me to make you coffee, Daddy?”

  Daddy says, “If there’s any left.”

  I get up and run water into the kettle.

  Not only did Daddy build this house and most the furniture in it, but he also whittles. He whittles little fishermen, horses, deer, and gulls for Gram to take to the church fairs. He makes these things right on the rug in the living room, his legs crossed Indian-style. He hardly ever sleeps.

  I see Pip Bean out through the kitchen door, stringin’ up the little lights to the exact shape of his mobile home. He scoots along the top of the mobile home on his all fours, tightening all the little blue bulbs.

  Daddy hisses, “They are the tackiest people on earth.”