At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories (18 page)

“Yes, of course,” the man says. “I’m really grateful, Officer Tabor.”

“All right then,” the patrolman, Tabor, says, and sighs again. He talks into the radio on his shoulder. “Tim, I’ve got someone who’s going to try and crawl through. I’ve warned him of the dangers, but his wife’s in the hospital in Bismarck, he really wants to try. If he gets through, can you make sure he’s okay?” Indecipherable squawks. “Right, then.”

Linna and the Covenant driver (his name is John, he tells her as they wait, John Backus, from Iowa City originally, now near Nashville, trucking for twelve years, his wife Jo usually comes along but she’s neck-deep in preparations for the oldest’s wedding, on and on) watch the huge Ford roll forward, trailing cable like a dog on an inertia-reel leash. Barely lit by its parking lights, the truck inches onto, into, the dark patch of highway. Blackness curls like smoke, drifts over the truck. It revs its engine for a moment and then dies. Brake lights tap on, and Tabor sighs a third time, sets the winch in motion, and pulls the truck back.

The air is cold, the sky moonless but bright with stars. To warm herself, Linna walks along the line of cars and trucks. People sleep across their front seats, or read or talk or play cards under dome lights. Engines purr, running heaters. The air is sweet with exhaust, an oddly comforting smell. An older couple sit in lawn chairs by their parked RV; the woman offers Linna a Styrofoam cup of coffee and the chance to use their bathroom. Linna accepts both gratefully, but refuses their offer to sleep on the couch.

She does not think she’ll be able to sleep. Stars pace across the sky, their dim light somehow deeper than blackness and yet too bright to sleep through. A coyote or perhaps a dog barks once, a long way away. Back at the car, Linna watches Sam chase something in his sleep, paws twitching in the rhythm of running.
Live forever
, she thinks, and wills his twisted spine and legs straight and well.

It is very cold and the sky through the windshield is the color of freshwater pearls when Linna wakes, blinks, and remembers. There is half a cup of coffee on the floor of the passenger seat. It’s cold and acidic, but the familiar bitterness anchors her. Sam is still sleeping. He never liked morning, and they moved to Mountain Time as they drove yesterday, so whatever local time it is (4:53, the dashboard clock tells her when she looks), it is actually an hour earlier for them. Once out of the car, she stretches. Her eyes are sticky and her back aches, but the time before dawn is a strange land to her, and she finds herself surprisingly happy.

She walks to the patrol SUV. Tabor sits with the door open, drinking directly from a thermos. “Coffee,” he says. “Still hot. Want some? I lost the cup, though.”

She takes the steel cylinder. The smaller patrol car and its driver are gone, as are the big Ford and the distraught young man. “What happened to the guy who had to get to his wife?”

“We scraped all the bees off the air intakes and got the truck running again. He drove back to Ninety. It’s adding three, four hundred miles, but he’s going to try and go around.”

Linna nods and drinks. The coffee
is
hot, and it warms her to her toes. “Oh,” she says with delight: “That’s good.” She returns the thermos.

“You get stung last night?” Tabor has seen the white spot on her hand.

She rubs it and laughs a little, oddly embarrassed. “No, right before I left Seattle. And now here’s a river of them. Small world,” she says and looks toward the fog collected in the dip.

“Hmm.” Tabor drinks off some of the coffee. Then: “Listen for it,” he says.

Linna listens. The SUV’s idling engine throbs. A car door clicks open, far back in the line. There’s no wind, no whispering grass or rubbing leaves—but there is a humming, barely audible. “That’s
them
.” She whispers, as though her voice might disturb them.

“Yeah. The fog is clearing. Look.”

She walks a little toward where the river should be, will be. “No closer,” Tabor behind her warns and she stops. A tiny breeze brushes her cheek. Mist recoils, and patches of darkness show through: asphalt black with sleeping bees. The sky lightens, turns from pearl to lavender to blue. The clouds are gone and the eastern horizon glows. The fog retreats. There is the river.

The river is a dark changeable mist like the shifting of a flock of flying starlings, like a pillar of gnats over a highway in hot August dusk, like a million herring turning. South to north, the river runs like cooling lava, like warm molasses. It might be six feet deep, though in places it is much less, in others much more. It alters as she watches.

The river of bees streams as far as she can see. It flows from the south, down a butte beside the freeway and across the road and into the river bed of the Yellowstone, then pours up over the side of a gully to the northwest. As she watches, more sleeping bees wake and lift to join the deepening river. The buzz grows louder.

Tabor stands beside her now but she cannot look away. “Where does it begin?” she says at last. “Where does it end?”

He is slow answering and she knows he is as trapped in its weird beauty as she. “No one knows,” he says: “Or no one says. My dad used to tell me tales, but I don’t know that he knew, either. Maybe there’s a spring of bees somewhere, and it sinks underground somewhere else. Maybe the bees gather, do this thing, and then go home. There’s no ocean of bees, anyway.”

Others join them, talking in loud and then hushed voices; there are snapshots, videos—“not that the pictures ever come out,” a voice grumbles. This is peripheral. Linna watches the bees. The sun rises, a cherry ovoid blur that shrinks and resolves as it pulls away from the horizon. Pink-gold light fills the hollow. The river quickens and grows. People watch for a time and then walk back to their cars. Their voices grow louder as they move away, conversations full of longing for coffee and breakfast and hot showers and flush toilets. They reassure themselves with the ordinary.

Linna does not move until she hears Sam bark once, the want-to-go-out-
now
bark. Even then, she walks backward.

“This is going to sound strange,” Linna says to Tabor.

She walked Sam until his joints loosened and he no longer dragged his hind legs. She exchanged pleasantries with the man from the Covenant truck, though now she remembers nothing but his expression, oddly distant and sad as he watched her rub her hand. She drank orange spice tea and ate a fried-egg sandwich when the woman at the RV offered them, and used the little stainless steel bathroom again. The woman’s husband was cooking. He flipped an egg to the ground between Sam’s feet. Sam ate it tidily and then smiled up at the cook. Linna spoke at random, listening for the bees’ hum. “Excuse me,” she remembers saying to the couple, interrupting something. “I have to go now.” She has led Sam back to the patrol SUV, and says:

“This is going to sound strange.”

“Not as strange as you probably think,” Tabor says. He’s typing something into the computer in his vehicle. “Let me guess. You’re going to follow the river.”

“Can I?” she says, her heart leaping. She knows he shouldn’t know this, shouldn’t have guessed; knows she won’t be allowed, but she asks anyway.

“Can’t stop you. There’s the River, and then I saw the sting and I knew. My dad—he was a trooper, back twenty and more years ago. He told me it happens like this sometimes. There’s always a bee sting, he said. Let me see your car.”

She leads Tabor back to the Subaru, lifts Sam into the back seat. The trooper makes her open the back hatch, sees the four gallon jugs of water there. “Good, but could be better. What about food?” She shows him what she has, forty pounds of dog food (she bought it two weeks ago, as though it were a charm to make Sam live long enough to eat it all) and two boxes of granola bars. “Gas?” She has half a tank: just under two hundred miles’ worth maybe. “Get some, next time you’re near a road,” Tabor says. “Subaru, that’s good,” he adds, “but you don’t have much clearance in a Forester. Be careful when you’re off-road.”

“I won’t go off-road,” Linna says. “There’s just too much that can go wrong.”

“Yes, you will,” Tabor says. “You’ll follow the river to its mouth, whatever and wherever that is. I can’t stop you, but at least I can make sure you don’t get into trouble on the way.”

Tabor brings her a heavy canvas bag from his SUV. “This is sort of an emergency kit,” he says. “My dad put it together before he retired. We’ve been keeping it at the base ever since. Got the report and hauled it down with me, figuring someone might show up needing it. Heavy gloves, snakebite kit, wire, some other stuff.”

“Do people get back?” Linna says.

Tabor unzips the bag a few inches, drops a business card in. “Don’t know. But when you get wherever it is, you’re going to send all this gear back to me. Or leave it. Or—” he pauses, looks again at the river.

She laughs, suddenly ashamed. “How can you be so calm about this? I know this is all insane and I’m
still
doing it, but you—”

“This is Montana, ma’am,” Tabor says. “Good luck.”

The aqua clock says 6:08 and the sun is two hands above the horizon when Linna puts the Subaru into gear and eases across the median.

Linna is lucky at first. The exit to Terry and its bridge across the Yellowstone are only a couple of miles back, and she learns her first lesson about following the river: she doesn’t have to
see
the river of bees because she can taste its current in the air. Terry is a couple of gas stations and fast-food places, a handful of trailers and farmhouses, everything shaded by cottonwoods, their leaves a harsh silver-green when the wind moves through them.

Her second lesson: the river tells her where to go. There is only one road out of Terry, but there is no chance she might make a mistake and take another. She stops long enough to buy gas and road food and breakfast, and eats in the car on her way out of town. Sam is interested, of course, so she feeds him a hash-brown cake by holding it over her shoulder. Soft lips lift the cake from her hand. The vet would not be pleased, but she’s not here and Linna and Sam are.

The road is two empty lanes of worn pavement following a dry streambed through soft-edged badlands. She knows the bees are a mile or two to the east. Gravel roads branch off to the north from time to time. She longs to take one, to see the bees again, but she knows the roads will taper off, end in a farmyard, or turn abruptly in the wrong direction. It will be many miles before she reaches the river’s mouth. These roads will not take her there.

The road changes from worn to worse, and then decays to gravel. Linna slows and slows again. The sun that pours in the passenger windows loses its rosy glow as it climbs, turns flat and hot. The only traffic she sees is a single ancient tractor that might once have been orange, heading into town. The old man driving it wears a red hat. He salutes her with a thermos. She salutes with her own cup of fast-food coffee. The dust he’s raised pours into the car until she rolls the windows closed.

Once, when she crosses the mouth of a little valley, Linna can see the bees at a distance. She stops there to walk and water Sam and to drink stale water from one of the jugs. The cooling engine ticks a few times, then leaves her in the tiny hissing of the wind in the grasses. The river of bees cannot be heard from here, but she feels the humming in her bones, like true love or cancer.

She opens the bag that Tabor gave her. There are all the things he mentioned, and others besides: wire-cutters and instructions for mending barbed wire; a Boy Scout manual from the ’50s; flares; a spade; a roll of toilet paper that smells of powder; tweezers and a magnifying glass and rubbing alcohol; stained, folded geological survey maps of eastern Montana; a spare pair of socks; bars of chocolate and water purification tablets; a plastic star map of the northern hemisphere in summer—and a note.
Do not damage anything permanently. Close any gates you open—mend any fences you cut—Cattle, tractors and local vehicles receive right of way—Residents mostly know about the river. They’ll allow you to pass through their property so long as you don’t break the fences.
It was signed:
Richard Tabor.
Officer Luke Tabor’s father, then.

In another small town—the sign says Brockway—the road tees into another dusty two-lane, this one going east-west. She finds a gravel road heading northwest, but it turns unexpectedly and eventually leaves her in a ranch yard in an eddy of barking dogs, Sam yelling back. The next road she tries turns east, then north, then east again. The gravel that once covered it is long gone. The Subaru humps its way through gullies and potholes. She drives over a rise, and the river streams in front of her, blocking off the road.

She’s close enough to see individual bees but only for an instant before they drop back into the texture of the river. Brownian motion: she can see the bee but she cannot see the river; or she sees the current but not the bees.

What am I doing?
she asks herself. She is fifty miles off the freeway, following hypothetical roads through an empty land in pursuit of something beautiful but impossible and so very dangerous. This is when she learns the third lesson: she cannot help doing this. She backtracks to find a better road, but she keeps slewing around to look behind her as though she has left something behind, and she cries as she drives.