The Music of Bees Read online

  “Sometimes it takes a while to decide, bro,” he called.

  Was he sneering? What if he was? Harry felt like such a nerd. Why did he care what that guy thought, anyway, some stranger?

  Harry shaved his skinny jawline and chin but left the stubble on his upper lip. He’d grow a mustache. Out on the river, he’d seen some kayakers with mustaches lately. Guys his age. It could be cool.

  He pulled his beanie over his damp hair and grabbed his backpack, which contained his notebook, a pen, a bottle of water, and a slightly dented orange. Harry walked down the gravel drive past the collection of tattered “No Trespassing” signs to the highway and turned south, warming up as he went and looking up at the great dark trees.

  “Where you off to, little Harry Stokes?”

  He could almost hear his mother’s voice. She always asked that when she saw him readying to leave the house when he was a boy.

  Harry, short for Harold. Harold Stokes. Middle name of Courtland. The whole thing was ridiculous, really. Harold Courtland Stokes III. It sounded like some country club member you’d read about in the Times. His parents’ families were poor, but ostentatious names were common in the South. Of Harold Courtland Stokes II, Harry had a fuzzy memory of a tall man laughing as he dabbed whiskey on Harry’s tongue with his pinky, cigarette smoke curling around his big hand.

  One afternoon when he was in high school, he’d screwed up the courage to ask his mother about his father as he helped her unload a truck full of compost. How did they meet? Why did she leave? Did his father ever ask about him?

  “Your father is a jackass,” she said, mashing out her cigarette with the heel of her boot and pulling on her gloves. He didn’t ask again.

  When she took Harry north to New York, Lydia had wanted to become an actress. Instead she ended up waitressing at a Long Island golf club, where she had met and married a nice guy named Sal Romano. Sal ran a landscaping business and had been the only father Harry had ever known. Good old Sal.

  Harry heard an approaching car and turned, sticking out his thumb. It was a Subaru wagon with a young family inside. The father never took his eyes off the road. The mother flicked her gaze at him and away. Guilt. Fear. Two car seats in back. Harry couldn’t blame them. He kept walking.

  Sal and Lydia had announced in January that they were selling the Long Island house and moving to Florida for good. Sarasota, where they’d been wintering, had won them over. Sal was sick of the landscaping business, especially after Hurricane Sandy. Lydia was tired of the snow. In Sarasota, she’d taken up pickleball, and Sal wanted to sit by the pool and read the tomes of military history he favored. Harry struggled to hide his disappointment.

  “That’s great!” he’d managed. “Here’s to you guys!” He raised his beer to clink with their wineglasses. His enthusiasm was feeble, and he knew it showed. It wasn’t lost on him that their announcement coincided with his parole officer signing off on him two weeks earlier, leaving him free and clear to leave the state if he liked. Living in their basement was always meant to be temporary, but it weighed on him, the thought of moving on by himself. His mother set down her wineglass and reached a hand across the table, her eyes misty.

  “You’re gonna be just fine, Harry. Fresh start, honey. And if you ever need a place to stay, you can always—”

  “Bup-bup-bup!” Sal held up his big hand like a stop sign. “Don’t get carried away, Lydia hon.”

  He raised his glass again.

  “To Harry’s future,” he said. “May it be as bright as his mother’s eyes.”

  Lydia sniffled and raised her glass. Harry had forced a smile and swigged his beer.

  The wind picked up, and a chill spiked down his neck. He buttoned up his uncle’s wool shirt. The sun went behind a cloud, and the pavement in front of him freckled with raindrops. Harry pulled his cap lower and hunched his shoulders.

  He heard the whine of an approaching engine and stuck out his thumb. A Ford Econoline van lumbered past and pulled over. Harry jogged up to the window and saw a young woman behind the wheel. Bright blue eyes under a red trucker cap over brown braids and a plaid flannel shirt. She smiled and rolled down the window.

  “Hi! Um, I’m, like, totally lost! Do you know the pullout for the upper Klickitat run? I’m delivering lunch for a Wet Planet rafting trip.”

  Harry knew the pullout was just down the road. He often saw the bright yellow rafts clear the rapids behind Uncle H’s place and eddy out at the sandy beach. He pointed south and explained where to turn off.

  The young woman giggled and rolled her eyes. “I’m terrible with directions. Can you just show me?”

  That was how Harry found himself in the warm, dry van, munching on an enormous pastrami sandwich from River Daze Cafe in Hood River with the beautiful Moira. After she dropped off the lunches, she climbed back behind the wheel and asked Harry where he was headed.

  “I’m going down to Hood River if you want a ride,” she said.

  He hesitated. He didn’t want to explain about his uncle, so he just told her he was looking for work.

  “I don’t know what you’re looking for, but there’s more jobs in Hood River than BZ,” she said.

  Harry nodded, deciding he would go see Uncle H on the way home from Hood River.

  Moira turned up the music. Harry smiled, bit into his sandwich, and stole a glance at her long, tanned legs in cutoff jean shorts. She drove the van with her knees and lit a joint, threw her head back, and sang along with the Dead.

  “What a loooooong strange trip it’s been!”

  She inhaled, coughed, smiled at Harry, and passed him the joint. For the first time in a long time, Harry felt like things were looking up.

  4

  Callow Bee

  Let all your motions about your hives be gentle and slow. Accustom your bees to your presence: never crush or injure them, or breathe upon them in any operation.

  —L. L. LANGSTROTH

  The year had finally turned a shoulder on Oregon’s bleak winter and was hinting at the promise of summer. Nights like this, after sunset, the sky darkened and then turned that improbable green-yellow against the black hillside. Jake had always loved the bruised light that clung like an anti-shadow to the ridgeline. He gazed at it now, remembering the first time he’d been old enough to be outside this late in the evening. On the school playground, a parent-teacher night. He spun in circles on the tire swing, watching the sky darken as he waited for his mother, feeling like such a big kid.

  He could hear the spring runoff coursing through the irrigation ditch that ran alongside Reed Road at his shoulder. By late March, the snowmelt off Mount Hood flooded the drainages of the valley and filled the night air with a clean green scent, that distinct smell of young spring. It was one reason he had always loved being out in the orchards at twilight even before the accident.

  He shifted onto his back and tuned into the raucous song of chorus frogs in the ditch. He recalled his eternal debate with Noah about where the thumb-size creatures went in winter. Did they hibernate or die off? How did they know when it was time to reemerge and start singing so hopefully into the cold air? Why was he lying next to the ditch? Time had slowed, and the tiny frogs bleated like a metronome for this in-between place. Metronome. Keeping time, like Cheney’s enormous, drumming tail.

  Noah’s sister Angela had found Cheney running around after school one day the fall of the boys’ junior year. His skinny brindled rump and lack of a collar marked him as a stray. A pair of hilarious helicoptering ears couldn’t decide whether to stay up or down. His tail banged out the beat of his happiness as he romped around on huge paws, with white stockings on three legs. His nose was a thick, short snout, and his wide mouth was split in an eternal grin. One eye was blue and the other brown. Noah was the one who said the dog looked like former vice president Dick Cheney if the man had ever smiled. The name stuck.

 
That day Angela brought him home, Cheney jumped on Jake and then Noah, his big paws raking down their arms and legs.

  “Ow! Oh my God! Down, dog. Down! Off! Beast!” Jake yelled.

  The dog tore off, running in tight, happy circles around the living room.

  Noah and Angela’s hope of keeping the big mutt evaporated the second their mother walked in the door.

  “Absolutely not,” Mrs. Katz said. “Take it to the county shelter. Immediately.”

  Nobody argued with Mrs. Katz. Jake wished his mother got angry once in a while or at least talked back to his father. Maybe it was out of spite for Ed that he decided to take the dog home.

  “I think he’s cool. You little punk rocker!” he said, tugging on the dog’s big ears. “I’ll get him a spiked collar. Want to come home with me, boy?”

  The dog boxed Jake’s shoulders.

  Mrs. Katz stopped chopping onions and pointed her knife at Jake. “Jacob Stevenson. Do not tell your poor mother I encouraged you to take this dog home.”

  “He was never here, Mrs. K,” Jake said, holding up two fingers. “Scout’s honor. I found him at school.”

  Mrs. Katz laughed and shook her head. “Good luck, Jacob.”

  Once Cheney was in his life, Jake couldn’t imagine life without him. Cheney lying on his back to have his belly scratched in the morning. Cheney’s thrilled face peering through the bedroom window when Jake skated home after school. His joyous bounding at the end of the leash. That time he found a turtle, surely someone’s escaped pet, and nosed it with such a hilarious combination of worry and surprise. Cheney wading farther and farther into the river until he discovered he could swim. Once he flushed a dozen wild turkeys up in the east hills as Jake and Noah scouted a deer hunt with Noah’s dad. He bounded after the awkward birds, which seemed more annoyed than afraid, occasionally tearing back to Jake and barking as if to say, “OH MY GOD! Isn’t this AWESOME? TURKEYS!”

  Jake had never minded being an only child, but after Cheney came, he felt like there had been an empty space in his life, a small closet of sadness that was now filled by this eternally joyful creature. The dog was a cheerful presence in the Stevenson family home, which had grown quieter and sadder with each passing year. When Jake’s father wasn’t around, Jake thought that he, his mother, and the dog almost felt like a family again. It made him happy to see his mom laugh at Cheney’s antics, the way he would try to climb in her lap, all eighty pounds of him. For Jake, Cheney was simply and completely his first true love.

  Ed had been on a job in Salem when Jake brought Cheney home. His mom was already smitten too, but Jake was pretty certain his argument for having a guard dog was what won Ed over. He didn’t like his neighbors and was constantly complaining about their use of the driveway or where they put their garbage cans or the noise from backyard parties. Something always pissed Ed off. He warmed to the idea that Cheney might scare people.

  “I don’t want to see it or hear it or smell it,” Ed said, jabbing his cigarette and glaring down at the dog. “Take care of the animal or it goes.”

  “The animal”—of course that was how his father would put it. He wouldn’t see what a friend the dog was or how hard Cheney tried. When he failed, Cheney was so sorry—like when he stole a block of cheese off the counter. Or when he broke the screen door during his wild greetings. He wanted to be good, you could tell. After he’d clobbered Jake’s mom a couple of times, he understood he needed to be calm around her. He would sit at her feet, trembling, as she scratched his ears and the white star on his chest.

  His father was sure he wouldn’t be able to take care of the dog and was waiting for Jake to make a mistake. But Jake did it all: walked him, fed him, brushed him. He filled his water bowl and kept him tied up when they were outside in the yard together. Jake got him neutered, and poor Cheney banged around the house in that great plastic cone. His mom helped pay for the surgery and dog license, but they didn’t tell Ed that. Anyway, he promised to pay her back.

  What had Noah’s mom said that day?

  “Good luck, Jacob.”

  Dean had said the same thing. “Good luck, kid.”

  Dean was his big, buff physical therapist at Providence Rehab.

  “You’re gonna do great.”

  Wait. That was later. That was after. Cheney came before the accident.

  His memories were all jumbled together. Where was he? The ditch.

  He opened his eyes again and saw the darkening sky above him. He could make out the Oak Grove Schoolhouse rising against the east hills. He’d been out on Reed Road listening to Spring Heeled Jack. So how had he fallen out of his chair next to the irrigation ditch?

  And Cheney, where was Cheney, his fireplug of a dog, his constant companion?

  The day of Pomeroy’s party, Jake had shut Cheney in his room. He’d only be gone for an hour. Then the dog could hang out in the yard with him while he raked. Cheney looked mournful as he watched the boy lace up his Doc Martens. Jake tossed him a peanut butter–filled KONG from the freezer. The last he saw of his dog was Cheney bounding around like a giant brindled bunny with the red KONG in his jaws.

  Jake put a hand to his face. He tried to sit up and everything whirled. He lay back on the cold ground and remembered the day he came home from rehab. His big dog’s absence was the first thing he noticed. He pushed his way into the house and saw the hook by the door empty of the leash. He listened in vain for the staccato click of nails on linoleum. There was no happy bark from his room. That one tiny spark that held the crushing depression at bay went out.

  He would never know exactly what happened to Cheney. His father glanced up from the TV. Ed, who had come to visit Jake in the hospital only once and had stared down at his son, his face clenched like a fist, now wore the same look. He turned back to the TV and sipped his beer.

  “Like I said. Take care of the animal or it goes.”

  “I’m so sorry, honey,” his mom whispered behind him. “I didn’t know.”

  Jake wheeled himself to his bedroom. The doorway had been widened to accommodate the chair. His old twin bed with the Star Wars sheets was gone, and there was an accessible bed in its place. There was an overbed lifting pole attached to the wall. His posters and games were still there, and his desk and computer. All clean and tidy, too tidy. He closed the door behind him on the sound of his mother’s low voice and Ed’s rising to drown hers out.

  He was exhausted but couldn’t sleep. He lay awake watching the moon move across the sky until all was dark again. He wanted to be anywhere else but there. Yet where could he go? Finally, he slept. He dreamed of a golden river. It flooded its banks, swept him out of his wheelchair, and away he swam, light and happy. He awoke in the morning to the crushing weight of his future.

  After that Jake slipped into a dark place. Winter 2013 set a record for rain—124 inches in three months. He thought he might go crazy. He woke up in the dark listening to his parents leave for work and watched the darkness fall by 3:00 p.m.

  Each day he faced the empty hours. Another day of waiting. Another day of PT exercises that seemed to have plateaued. Instagram posts from friends who had moved on to other things. Email messages he couldn’t bring himself to open. He slept as late as he could to kill the time. He was eighteen years old and killing time. His life was like jail. He would have cried, but he had already done that for months and it hadn’t helped.

  He thought briefly about killing himself then. He sat in front of Ed’s rifle case one afternoon, considering how he would manage it. One thing that stopped him was the thought of his mother and what would happen to her if he botched it and ended up even worse off than he was then. And anyway, he was still himself, wasn’t he?

  He listened to music—the Clash, the Ramones, the Dead Kennedys, and all the U.S. ska bands, the louder the better. But he couldn’t touch his trumpet. That music was too close to his heart. Just the thought of playi
ng made him feel absolutely shredded. The trumpet case sat in the corner of his too-tidy room until one day he couldn’t stand it anymore and shoved it in the back of his closet.

  He faced his physical limitations head-on then. Yes, he was supremely grateful that he could shower, use the bathroom on his own, and transfer in and out of his chair by himself. Learning to use a catheter to empty his bladder several times a day. Tracking his bowel movements to avoid the kind of situation that had given the term “shit storm” new meaning. That had been a steep learning curve, but he’d done it all, thank God. The humiliation of the nurses and his mother helping him remained fresh in his mind.

  However, the list of things he could no longer do was overwhelming. He couldn’t drive—not without some kind of modified vehicle, which felt like an insurmountable goal—or even hop into Katz’s truck without a thought. No more skateboarding, which also meant no more skate park. What was he going to do—have his mom drop him off by the half-pipe? Just moving freely in public was a thing of the past. Like the one time he went to the pharmacy with his mom after a doctor’s appointment. The memory made him feel sick. The bright overhead lights in his eyes, the stupid Halloween displays blocking the aisles. He just wanted some damn Chex Mix and had gotten his fucking wheel caught under a cardboard cutout of a grinning jack-o’-lantern jutting out into the aisle. Some little old lady tried to help him, which made it so much worse. “Humiliating” didn’t even begin to describe it. He didn’t have the words. He was only eighteen and shouldn’t have to have the words.

  He stayed home after that. He played Tomb Raider, ignored his email, and didn’t return texts. They were only from Noah by then anyway. Katz still texted every couple of days and even called him occasionally, leaving funny messages, pretending to be someone else, most recently a Scottish whisky salesman named Headachy McDrinkerstein. They hadn’t spoken in person since before Christmas Eve. Noah had stopped by with Celia Martinez, and Jake couldn’t come out of his room. He could hear their voices rise and fall talking to his mom, the sound of the door closing, Noah’s truck driving away. It was easier to be alone. Being with his old friend was too painful, especially with his new girlfriend. He liked Celia, but she was a reminder that their lives were changing and his wasn’t. Now what? That was the eternal question. The last thing he thought of at night and the first thing in the morning was, What the fuck am I supposed to do now?