Bee-Loud Glade (10 page)

“It's nice to have someone to talk to,” she said, looking up with eyes as blue as they'd been on the screen.

She rolled onto her side across my thigh, looking away toward the water far off in the distance, and her hair smelled like coconut and laundry dried in the sun, and I imagined my rash was on fire and frozen all at the same time because that seemed like the most unpleasant sensation I could possibly feel and therefore the most distracting. I tried not to look at the camera, in hopes it hadn't spotted my spotting of it, in hopes I could pass off as natural my professional, trustworthy behavior.

“This is my favorite part of the garden,” she said. “The view from right here. It would be nice if the ocean was closer, but it's fine as it is. Quiet. Even if do I miss living on the beach. You could probably see my old house from here, if my husband hadn't torn it down. Had his men do it, I mean. He doesn't do much himself.” She shifted her weight more heavily onto my thigh and said, “He doesn't need to.”

She rolled onto her back in my lap, her stomach arched and smooth and her breasts... God help me, it was all I could do just holding my tongue.

“Is that what you like?” she asked. “The quiet? Is that why you're here?” She paused, still leaving space in our conversation for me to answer. “I thought it was so strange, to hire a hermit. But I think I understand. I understand why you'd do it, I mean. I don't get what's in it for him, but there must be something. There always is.”

She sat up, and I breathed a silent sigh of relief.

“I think I could be a hermit. He didn't ask me, but I think I could do it.” She laughed. “Maybe I'll live in your cave with you. We'd have some fun.”

My heart and stomach swapped spots when I heard that, and in case she'd noticed I smiled at an angle I hoped she would be able to see but would stay out of sight of the lens in the bush.

“Let's get more berries,” she said, and stood up. “My pail's almost full.”

I gave Mrs. Crane a second to turn her back and start walking before lifting myself from the ground, then followed with the bucket held in front of me for the sake of discretion.

12

O
ne morning soon after my berry-picking excursion with Mrs. Crane, a whistle carved from light wood appeared with my breakfast. I blew through its open ends until my cheeks and head hurt without making any sound more melodic than my own spit and sputter. Then I realized it was a flute, not a whistle, and tried blowing across a hole in its top. It hurt my head less that way, but the result was no closer to music. Still, I couldn't imagine I was meant to master an instrument on my first try, so I decided to make it part of my morning routine. I carried the flute to the top of the cave with my tea, and after watching the sunrise spent an hour or so puffing away, huffing and hacking and—I thought—showing the promise of progress. When I was wobbling and wheezing and thought I might fall from the cave, and dark worms wiggled at the edges of my eyes, I set the flute aside and climbed down to get on with the day.

The next morning the flute was gone. I searched the cave, but there weren't many places a flute might be hiding, in my wall nooks and niches or wrapped in my blankets, and it wasn't in any of those. It was just gone. I'd only had it a day but was already looking forward to learning the flute, though perhaps I hadn't shown enough promise in my first attempt to meet Mr. Crane's expectations.

As the days and weeks passed my breakfast tray brought with it all sorts of objects and tasks and requests. I went apple and berry picking when I was told to by either one of the Cranes, and I sat in trees all day every day for a couple of weeks. Some of Mr. Crane's requests I enjoyed and others I didn't, but it was hard to get too excited about any of his passing interests when I knew they weren't likely to last. And, in the case of the hot spring he'd mentioned, when those ideas never materialized. Most of his requests were as fleeting as the websites I used to surf through at work to pass time, or the spam I responded to in the long hours of night (though responding to spam had turned out all right at least once, and once was enough to have altered my life).

When the beehives first appeared downhill from the blackberry brambles, a row of five bright white boxes, I didn't know what they were. It was early and the swarms were asleep, but as the sun warmed them those boxes buzzed and I swear they shook side to side as the thousands upon thousands upon millions of bees shook out wings numb with sleep the way my leg is some mornings, cocked funny beneath my own weight.

I don't suppose Mr. Crane could have known that I was allergic to bees. Or that I just plain never liked them. And I had no way to tell him, not without losing my job one way or the other: break my contracted silence, or refuse to do what he asked.

Overnight the hives had been installed by unseen delivery forces, and a note the next morning asked me to gather honey. No further instructions, no diagrams for assistance or gloves and mask, no fire hose or bazooka. Only five hives of bees growling like tiny pit bulls as they awaited my unprotected approach, and as able as dogs to smell fear. Maybe smell allergies, too—who knows what lurks in the cruel apian heart?

A cipher of mine at Second Nature had once written to a beekeepers' journal, proposing that plastic plants could be dusted with synthetic and hybrid pollens to attract a decorative hive. These pollens were also a mild tranquilizer, able to keep the bees under control in ways wild plants and unpredictable pollens made impossible. I'd learned about bees for that letter, to make it convincing, and I remembered that bees communicate using dance: a scout returns to the hive, the other bees gather, and he (she?) pivots and wiggles and pirouettes toward the site of some succulent flower. Or, I imagined, toward an exposed and stingable patch of available flesh.

Where were those pacifying pollens when I needed them? The louder the buzzing in the boxes became, the surer I was I could see their sides shake, rattling racks of honeycomb as more and more bees danced for the pure, violent joy of stinging poor me as soon as I came close enough.

Dramatic, I know, to assume those bees knew I was near and that they cared. But so much of fear is inflation, an assumption our own terrors matter to others. To think that of all a neighborhood's houses, the escaped psychotic killer will choose our own, or the bear find our tent; that our own plane will be the one in a million to crash.

But in this case I was right; for once it was all about me. As I sat on the hillside beneath the brambles, overlooking the hives with the sunrise behind them, it almost could have been beautiful if I hadn't been wondering how I might get at the honey. And all of a sudden the warmth in those boxes reached some critical point and so did the furious joy of the bees, because they erupted in five long, dark ribbons up into the air and—I swear it—turned in midstream at sharp angles and all 799 trillion of them rocketed in my direction.

So I ran away. What else could I do?

But I was running uphill and in a panic, and I tripped after one or two steps. Bees, it turns out, are much faster than anything else in the world and are especially faster than me. I was still wearing my tunic in those early days, but even that didn't offer much cover: the bees stung my arms and my legs and my back, they were in my hair and stinging my scalp, and one industrious bee managed to plant his stinger between the two smallest toes of my left foot. Try to imagine a less pleasant spot to be stung. Then rest assured I was stung twice there, too.

I'm pretty sure I saw Smithee watching from up on the hill, in the shadow of some broad bushes, but I could be wrong about that. I was paying more attention to the bees on my trail than to anything else. If he was there, he didn't step in to help me, but I couldn't blame him for that. I wouldn't wade into a river of bees to help someone I hardly knew, either. He probably thought I was a goner. I know I did.

I have no doubt they would have stung me to death, only some of the bees alerted their cruel colleagues to the flowers on the blackberry brambles. How Mr. Crane's gardeners managed their berry bushes to always be both in bloom and in fruit I don't know, and somehow they did it without being seen. But I'm glad they did, because as fast as they had been upon me the bees were off to the bushes, swarming the branches and blossoms the way they'd swarmed me.

And that's when I fainted, right there in the grass. I woke up facedown and sneezing and wheezing and swollen and sore all over my body, jerked back to the world by the
whump whump
of a helicopter descending onto the pad by the house, and by the rush of skittering, twittering birds escaping the sound of the craft. It was a long black helicopter with no markings on it and with a slender, bent tail that looked like the biggest of the billions of tiny stingers I spent the rest of the day scraping out of my skin.

I tried, while I scraped and scratched, to imagine my bloggers all telling the story: who would be sympathetic, who would be cruel, who would have stepped in to help had they spotted a frantic man swarmed by those billions of bees. I tried, but I didn't get anywhere. In the past, I had imagined the interface I used for writing blog entries, picturing the words as I would have typed them, then those same words posted onto each site, and I imagined reading the words on a screen. But that day, while ridding myself of the dead bodies of bees that had stung me and stuck, still hanging out of my skin, on that day I couldn't concentrate on my bloggers. I couldn't make them speak, or type, any longer, and when I tried to flip back through their archives, scrolling my mind through all their back pages, I couldn't recall those words either. I had lost all those voices at last, drowned out by the droning of bees.

The silver lining of my near-death encounter was that rather than such a massive, sudden concentration of venom killing me, it somehow cured my allergies instead—not just to bees but to everything. All the sneezing and wheezing and coughing I'd done, all the pollens and seed puffs and dust that had driven me crazy in those early weeks, didn't bother me at all after that. And I have only those damn bees to thank. I even took to harvesting honey, as I'd been instructed to do, once I developed my technique of waiting for a day with strong breezes on which I build a fire downwind from the hives, a technique I'm still using with only minor refinements. Once the smoke calms them I slide out the combs and take just enough honey to fill my pot made from a hollowed-out stone (I didn't hollow the stone, I found it that way in the trees by my cave, but it works perfectly). I never take more than I'll add to my tea over a couple months' time, and I try not to bother the bees any more than I must, and they haven't stung me again. Maybe they all got their fill of my flesh the first time, or maybe they're making their plans. I don't trust that many animals working together.

Once my allergies faded, there was only the itch of a tunic that may as well have been a hair shirt, and the rash it left on my body. I still spent a long part of each morning scratching, and the itch still woke me sometimes at night. I'd taken to tumbling and rolling on the dewy lawn when I woke, while I waited for my tea water to boil. That was my shower, though without any soap or shampoo, and sometimes it soothed me more than anything could and other times, other days, it didn't soothe me at all. Plant after plant, leaf after leaf, I crushed every green, purple, and even red stem, stalk, and shoot to smear juices and pulps on my erupteous skin (Did I make that word up? I haven't seen a dictionary in a long time, and my imaginary scribe shrugged his imaginary shoulders when I asked him if he knew. “Erupteous,” then.) but none of them did me much good.

I'd never had trouble with itching and rashes before I came to the cave. And I was too embarrassed to tell anyone, because how would I tell without speech? I might have lifted my tunic and waggled my wang until somebody noticed, and hoped they'd deliver me cream instead of a slap or a kick, but who's to say? And who would I show? Since moving into his cave, I hadn't seen more of Mr. Crane than his notes, and so far as I knew he was halfway around the world and passing his notes via Smithee or some other employee I hadn't met. Though his helicopter landing suggested that he had come home at least once, if it had been him on board.

I'd seen Mrs. Crane a few times since our first encounter, enlisting me for more berry picking, and sometimes she came and sat beside me on the cave top and talked. One afternoon she'd asked me to spread sunscreen across her back and the backs of her legs as she laid in the sun, and had I been in my right mind I might have thought to smear some of that lotion onto myself, but who could think straight while trying to keep himself calm in the face of all that: the face, and the rest of her, too? With his hands on a woman like that? And my problem wasn't sunburn but rash, after all; maybe her sunscreen had aloe mixed in, but I didn't look away from her body to read the bottle.

But a day or two after I was attacked by the bees, a welcome rain rolled through the garden, breaking a thick haze of heat that had hung on our hillside for days. I stripped off my tunic and had a tumble, wiggling and writhing on grassy green ground until I was wet if not clean and smelled a bit better to my own calloused nose. I did my front first, and wasn't it nice to feel slippery wet grass on my rash-scabby body (I don't know grass species, but this kind had soft blades; I made sure first, because who needs grass cuts in any old place, let alone his tenderest places?) instead of rough fabric. Then I flopped over and with my eyes shut dug both shoulders into the mud and stuck my balls in the air and into the sun, arching my back like a leprous yogi. The mud was cool and the sunlight was hot and between both of those, oh, wasn't that what I'd been needing?

Then somebody coughed and I flopped onto my belly like a fish in a pail, my whole body red as the bird who comes to share my breakfast some mornings, the one with the feathery white peak on his head.

Mr. Crane stood a few feet away in a white-striped gray suit, hands in his trouser pockets and dark glasses hiding his eyes. “Finch,” he said as if he hadn't just seen me humping the air or whatever he thought I was doing, as though we'd happened to meet on the street.

I grabbed for my tunic but it was out of reach on the grass where I'd left it before wriggling away in my reverie, so I had to scrabble and crab on my hands and my knees before I could pull it back onto my body. Which probably ended up being less dignified than staying nude would have been. Then I stood at attention or something like it and waited for what he would say.

Mr. Crane stepped past me and kept going, moving away from the house and from me, before he said without looking back, “Walk with me, Finch. I have something to tell you.”

Well, I thought, that was that. I'd had a good run in his yard, not as long as I would've liked, but here I was baby-bird naked and wiggling around, and I would fire myself if I came upon that. He'd hired me to be his garden hermit, not a garden-variety pervert. But I hurried after him all the same, and caught up to walk two or three steps behind him through the bushes and trees.

He led me away from my glade and my cave, down the slope of the hill toward the blackberry brambles, and I thought maybe I had gone too far with his wife, smearing her creams, holding her pails, listening to what she told me instead of ignoring her as she passed by my cave. That he was taking me back to the scene of my crime.