The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver

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 Idecided 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 at the dirt, probably looking for bugs to step on. Just beyond the park I could see a stack of tires. “Will you look at that,” I said. “I’m one lucky duck. We should have gone to Las Vegas.”
    The stacked-up tires made a kind of wall on both sides of a big paved corner lot. Inside the walls a woman was using an air hose to chase bugs off the pavement, herding them along with little blasts of air. She was wearing blue jeans and cowboy boots and a red bandana on her head. A long gray braid hung down the middle of her back.
    “How do,” I said. I noticed that the name of the place was Jesus Is Lord Used Tires. I remembered wanting to call 1-800-THE LORD, just to see who you’d get. Maybe this was it.
    “Hi, darlin,” she said. “These bugs aggravate the dickens out of me after it rains, but I can’t see my way clear to squashing them. A bug’s just got one life to live, after all. Like us.”
    “I know what you mean,” I said.
    “Oh, bless your heart. Looks like you’ve got a couple of flats.”
    I did. I hadn’t seen the rear on the right side.
    “Drive it up onto the big jack,” she ordered. “We’ll get them off and have a look. We’ll fix your little wagon right up.”
    I asked if Turtle could ride up on the jack, but she said it wasn’t safe, so I took her out of the car and looked for a place to put her down. All those tires around made me nervous. Just out of instinct, more or less, I looked up to see if there was anything tall overhead to get thrown up onto. There was nothing but clear