Beehive Read online

  “Want a drink? Have a drink!”

  “No, no thanks.” He poured one anyway. I never drank at all in those days, took a sharp will around football players. “So tell me about the job.”

  “You know why they gave me this job?”

  “Twenty years on the line seems good enough to me.”

  “That’s because you don’t know the line. They’ll keep you there long as you can do the job.”

  “So why’d they move you?”

  “Because I blacked out.”

  “That can happen to anyone, happens at least once a week at practice.”

  “I didn’t faint or nothing. I mean I blacked out. Standing there doing my job and I don’t know where I am or what I’m doing. It’d been happening for years, but I just figured it comes with knowing the job so well. The boss didn’t see it that way.”

  I eyed him close, because I’d learned that he got thirstier when he hid some gravel in his gullet, and often as not you could see him studying how to spit the gravel out. “Did someone get hurt, Dad?”

  He shook his head hard. “Not bad, anyway. They tell me I shot a few staples across the room, but no one got hit. I can’t say, I can’t say.”

  “So they gave you an office off the line.”

  He nodded. “The doc said I have to stop drinking. The boss says if I don’t do what the doc says they’ll have to can me. Son, I can’t do it, I just can’t.”

  I had never seen my father cry before, and I didn’t want to see him cry now. I went out to find some friends. When I came home, my mother sat working on her flowers at the kitchen table and my father slept half-dressed on their bed. I noticed the living room couch neatly made up, too, and it took no brains to realize Ma had been sleeping in my room since I’d gone away.

  9.

  So perhaps with different parents I would have responded to Elizabeth’s phone message with a message of my own. My mother didn’t like the life her husband made for her, and my father didn’t ask for alcoholism. Don’t think I didn’t know how rare a chance Ohio State made for me, but I couldn’t have made one for myself any more than they could have. Perhaps I was that one bee who could find the relocated hive, could see football and college as an opportunity a little diligence could earn me. But I didn’t choose to grow big, and I only chose to get strong when my survival depended on it. Bees become what they eat. People too, but people eat the lives their families lead.

  Of course, a bee can’t survive without the hive but people can. Once we leave home we can make something new of ourselves. Take Jim. He grew up in Dee-troit, as he calls it, city-boy to the bone, but now he’s working with some Virginia truck farmers, friends of some third cousins who live in DC. They’ve got nearly a thousand acres in cultivation all over Rockland County, and Jim handles all the organically grown produce, about three hundred acres he bought close in to the city. He eats conscientiously and meditates: a strapping black man from Murder Central, part of the sprouts-for-lunch bunch. A real self-made man, the way I look at it.

  We met in a game my sophomore year at Ohio State, his freshman at Michigan. Opening kickoff, he received, the new college phenom. Ten steps later, I planted him like a corpse. It felt like a rock when we both landed square on the ball. The refs gave it to Jim’s Wolverines, though neither of us had a cell of skin on it. He twitched a bit as he got up and yelled at me, “G-g-g-g-g-good hit, f-f-f-fucker!” Then he jogged awkwardly off the field.

  The rest of the game I’m worrying about him. Damn, did I hit him too hard? He looked so spastic, so shaky. And that stutter! Maybe he won’t tell his coach how he feels. Maybe they play their guys hurt. Maybe his brain’s bleeding, for God’s sake! Damn. The rest of the game I’m watching him like a mother. He totes up the yards, but he’s running all jangly. He screws up, then he screws us. I’m the one missing tackles, missing signals, because I worry I damaged this guy.

  So after the game I run across the field. So does everyone else, that sportsman-handshake rag, but I want to find Jim, see he’s all right. I can’t find him. A hundred guys in uniform, how am I supposed to?

  I stop a teammate of his, a guy mumbling, “Good game, good game,” to anyone wearing my colors.

  “Yeah, you too. Have you seen Jim Polder?”

  This guy gets a devilish light in his eye. “J-j-j-j-jim? The star of the g-g-g-game? He’s talking to T-T-T-TV!” He cracks up and runs toward the locker room. I put my fanny down on their bench and feel like an utter dope.

  10.

  We stayed friends afterwards. He went into pro ball, because he could. I finished college, took the civil service exam and applied for jobs away from Ohio. Jim came to the Redskins the year I got promoted out of data entry at the Bureau. He started keeping bees over at his place, outside of town, and when he went away asked me to look in on them, make sure there was water in the nearby birdbath and so on. “I don’t want nothing untoward to happen,” he told me.

  I go out for a look, a cloudy squally kind of day, waltz over to the entrance and bend over to peek in. A dozen of them came after me at once. One stung my nose and another got my forehead. Half a squeal later, I was inside and what looked to me like the rest of the hive battered themselves against the screen door coming after me.

  I watched them for a while from there, and then picked through Jim’s library for books on bees and beekeeping. “Never approach the entrance to a beehive. That is sufficient provocation for most guard bees.” Aha! “Inclement weather makes bees temperamental.” Aha again! I spent the whole day there reading, took a handful of books with me and stopped at the library on my way home for even more. The creatures hooked me then and there. While I read, I nursed the throbbing bumps on my face, easing the swelling with ice wrapped in paper towel. Three hundred bee stings will kill the average man, but two will teach him a lesson good enough to last his whole life.

  11.

  We have ten hives in a copse at the middle of Jim’s contiguous farms and another couple in the middle of each of the orchards; the apple blossom and cherry blossom honeys sell very well. But the stand of trees is where we go on these evening visits, especially when the weather is fine, as it has been all spring. Winters, Jim builds around his place. He put up a swinging bench, two Adirondack chairs and a tire at the northern edge of the copse. The bees buzz around on their way to the bean and pea fields up that way. We came out without the netting, a spring survey of coming work. Once the farms kick into production, Jim doesn’t have time for the bees anymore. They’re mine anyway; we keep them out here because Jim needs their help growing food.

  “So how’s Queen Elizabeth?” Jim’s stutter has faded as he’s grown older. He’s also gotten thinner since he gave up meat, weight-lifting and beer with the boys. The jangle in his walk is now a dancer’s stride. All that bulk made him awkward in his own skin.

  “Fine. Off to Newport for some meeting.”

  “When did she t-t-tell you?” When the words still catch, Jim bangs the tips of his long left-hand fingers against his thigh. Most of his work pants have a worn patch at the bottom of that front pocket. The light tap “gets my record spinning,” says Jim.

  “Found a message when I got home.”

  “Any other woman, I’d swear she was stepping out on you.”

  “Elizabeth?”

  “D-d-don’t lay on me it hasn’t run cross your mind.”

  “Sure. Not much I can do about it though, is there?”

  “Not with that attitude.”

  “What attitude?”

  “You know. You t-t-told me sitting here a year ago, and you told me again this fall. ‘She’s out of my league. I’m lucky she lets me stay in the game.’”

  “True words. I’d say them again.”

  “If you were playing football, I’d say you’re right: one game with the big boys and you get a desk job for life.” Jim always teases me about my work. “People in l
ove don’t have leagues that way.”

  “Wisdom from the expert!” Jim had such high romantic ideals he could never have a romance. He’d survived on temporary liaisons with organically-minded college kids who came to work the farm with him most summers. I teased him about love the way he got on me about work. “Big words from the big lover!”

  Jim laughs his hacking chuckle. “Don’t fool yourself Those girls put themselves to sleep thinking about how big.”

  I say, “Elizabeth loves her work. At least she calls when she won’t be coming home.”

  “You don’t have nothing to worry about with her and other lovers, not for a while. That woman is married to her work.” Jim had met Elizabeth half a dozen times, mostly at parties I’d dragged her to. But I had learned to trust Jim’s intuition about people, and he’d learned more about her when she’d come out for dinner that first winter than I had in the two months we’d known each other. Jim somehow coaxed Elizabeth out. All I had seen of her had been either work-mode or sex. Not that we never talked, just that she related to me woman to man instead of person to person. I don’t say I minded.

  But with Jim she relaxed. We drank two bottles of wine, the three of us, and talked about bees. The only bit of conversation I remember, we told her about supercedure. When a hive senses that the queen has run low on sperm — some queens get enough on their one nuptial flight to last six or seven years, but one or two years is more typical — the worker bees plot to overthrow her. Some say she loses a certain smell, others that the workers notice an increase in drone, or unfertilized, larvae. In any case, they build big queen cells into the honeycomb, several of them up near the top where the queen rests, and over the course of a couple of weeks they raise a crop of princesses. The first one out often tries to kill the others, but the workers guard their cache of royalty. If the princess survives to a successful nuptial flight, the two queens fight. If the old queen wins, the workers release another princess; if she loses, as she usually does, the workers help the new queen kill the other princesses, the potential threats in their cells.

  “Of course,” Jim told Elizabeth, “sometimes the hive just turns on the queen. Too much r-r-rough handling, or heat, or water and the hive blames the queen. Before you know it, the workers flock around her. The have little hooks on their feet they latch together, thousands of them. And then they squeeze. And squeeze. And squeeze.”

  I said, “We call it ‘balling the queen.’”

  Elizabeth looked at me the way she does, like the room’s too light and there are too many people, and said, “I thought that’s what the drones did.”

  Later we went out in the cold dark of the country and walked around the hives. They were mostly single or double-levels then, and quiet as a pantry. After we stood in the cold watching the pale and silent boxes, she said, “They make better stories than they do company, don’t they?” Alone, I never feel that people are smarter than bees. Elizabeth always makes me feel that some of us are.

  “She’s a working girl, down to her bones,” Jim was saying. “She’s married to her employment. That’s why she never treats you like a mate. She already has one. That’s why she won’t have someone else. You’re already her p-p-piece on the side. C’mon and see the Control Tower.”

  We named one hive the Control Tower because we had stacked eight supers and the hive seemed overjoyed to just keep growing. Healthy hives go about sixty or eighty thousand, and we figure this one up about one-fifty, maybe more. It all started that night with Elizabeth. I noticed what looked like the start of swarm cells down below, very strange for winter.

  This hive had an especially fertile queen for a year, and we’d put on two more frames for them in the summer. But now that wasn’t enough room and they had thoughts of dividing. Then a freak storm terrified another hive into assassination, not a good queen to start with, and a very discontented hive. So Jim and I stacked that hive onto the Control Tower and separated them with some newspaper covered with sugar water. The bees ate through the paper, and the strong hive below started a program of eugenics, killing off the bees who met the standards of the old queen but wouldn’t make it in their new home. By now, the queen was two-and-half and going strong laying worker brood.

  “Oh, man, look at this mess!” Every time the bees showed a hint of swarming, like the last time I was out, we quieted them down with another super of empty frames. Of course, we’d destroy their swarm cells too, the queen cells they build at the bottom of the hive, to raise a new queen who will lead half the hive to a new home. More room calmed the Control Tower, but every time we stacked another frame, the bees would seal the joints with propolis. Normally, with any other hive, we’d crowbar free any combs or frames or supers linked with this sticky cement, because you couldn’t get the honey any other way. But with the Control Tower we’d given up the idea of honey. We were shooting for the stars. We’re climbing up super by super. I said, “You think Elizabeth is married to her work, take a look at these guys.”

  “They got to have some phenomenal birth and survival rate. I think maybe they got a second queen in there.”

  “So what am I supposed to do about Elizabeth?”

  “I dunno. What are you supposed to do about these b-b-bees?”

  I made him a face he knew. I don’t joke with anybody they way I joke with Jim, but sometimes he knows I don’t want to joke even with him.

  “OK, OK,” he conceded. But then he asked, “If you were her fancy man, what would you do?”

  “Depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On whether I wanted more from her. On if she made me jealous. On if I thought I could have some other kind of relationship with her.”

  “What do you want now?”

  “Nothing. I like it how it is.”

  “Dude?”

  “I get to be around her. We sleep together every night — “

  “Uh-huh.”

  “ — almost every night. She tells me I help her work. I don’t know how; I don’t understand ninety-five percent of what she does. But she says I help her, and that’s enough for me right now.”

  “And when you want to hitch?” Jim gets down on his hands and knees to check the bottom of the hive for swarm cells. “Nothing down there but some cleaning bees, old ones. Amazing.” Usually young bees cleaned and old bees died, but in the Control Tower the young bees cleaned the cells and the old bees, whose ragged wings kept them from foraging now, worked at sweeping away the tremendous accumulation at the bottom of so large a hive.

  I get down on the other side to look. “Sure is.” I sat back on my heels listening to the din of this huge city. “I’m only thirty-two. Am I in a hurry to marry?”

  “Would you marry Queen Elizabeth?”

  “Maybe for the money.” We laughed, but then I said, “I could never keep her, so why try?”

  “So why stay?”

  I stand and cross over to inspect the other hives: The Embassy, Department of the Treasury, Langley. We named most of them for their similarity in character to DC landmarks. “I’m never going to get it this good again.”

  “Or this b-b-bad,” Jim corrects me.

  “Or this bad,” I admitted.

  12.

  Elizabeth came home late the next night, Thursday. Fall and spring I play softball Thursday nights and so over the months we assigned no plans to that night. We don’t call each other — which is to say I don’t call her — during the day to set dinner. We never count on that night together. So we didn’t talk, even though my spring league hadn’t begun yet. I scrounged a meal from the restaurant take-out containers in the fridge and began reading Census Monthly, Population Reports and the other trade journals. Diligence doesn’t end at the Bureau doors.

  I heard her key before I heard her. “Ron?” she called. She walked past my study door, where I sat with my feet up and a reading light on. She had a shopping bag in her hand
and her suit on. She’ll shed that suit first chance she gets, so I knew for sure she’d been working late.

  “Here!” I didn’t get up.

  “Ron?” This time she turned into the study. I could see from her walk how tired she was; she shuffled like an exhausted child when she needed sleep. In one motion, she knelt and laid her head on my chest, mumbling there, “Hi, honey.”

  Her hair glistened red and brown, like a chestnut polished for a Christmas display. I kissed it. “Hi. Rough day?”

  She wriggled up and nibbled my shoulder, my cheek, my moustache, my lips. She sat back on her heels. “Two rough days.” She shrugged off her coat. “Yesterday started out of control, when that report I’d worked on last week, the Greece-Turkey one, came out of the computer printed like a chart.” She twisted sideways and unzipped her skirt, breathed deep as she loosed the top button. She slid her shoes off her heels behind her, then brought her legs up and rested her chin on her knees.

  “Have I told you how sexy you are?” she said, smiling. “That was when the General called. ‘Got a special project hatching, Elizabeth. I think we could use your help with.’ He always talks to me like a high school guidance counselor, I don’t know why.” She lifted her hips and pulled the hem of her skirt and slip. She kicked them off with one foot and then giggled at me. That’s how she gave away she knew this was a show and I was the audience. I’d never call on her to cut it out. She liked undressing in front of me, and I loved it. I always watched, and I always knew she’d be hurt if I didn’t. I threw her a kiss.

  She leaned over, head to knees, stretching. Her toes pointed, her hair waves of color on the deep-blue Persian. By the time she sat back up, she’d unbuttoned her blouse, which fell open around the lace-flowered cups of her bra. She leaned back on her hands, swaying side to side as she talked, almost cheap, airing herself like that, but still a rich indulgence for me.