The Honey Bus Read online

  It didn’t occur to me to ask Grandpa for help; I couldn’t imagine him with a needle and thread in his burly paws. Even if I had come to him with my problem, it would have gotten back to Granny, who had already told me to stop bothering her about a costume.

  When I awoke on October 31, there still was no plan. Grandpa had already left for a plumbing job in Big Sur, and I found Granny in the kitchen rushing to empty the contents of Grandpa’s wooden shoeshine box onto the counter.

  “Sit here on the stool,” Granny said.

  I obeyed. She twisted the lid off a round tin of brown shoe polish, dabbed her finger in and smeared it on my forehead.

  “Now hold still,” she said, tipping my chin toward her.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Making your costume,” she said, adding black around my eyes. She quickly covered my whole face and part of my neck. Next she grabbed one of Rita’s brown flea collars from the broom closet, and buckled it around my neck.

  “Wait here,” she said.

  I heard her opening drawers in her bedroom. She returned with a balled-up pair of beige pantyhose. She flicked her wrist and they unfurled, then she stretched the elastic waist over my head, and put all my hair inside. The legs flopped down to touch my shoulders. Last, she clipped one of Rita’s thin leashes to the flea collar, then handed me the other end.

  “Okay, that oughta do it,” she said, stepping back to check her work.

  Granny followed me to the bathroom to go have a look. I stood before the mirror and gasped. It looked like I had been horribly burned, just the whites of my eyes peering out from a chocolate brown face with black lines drawn across my forehead, and dark circles around my eyes. There was a black triangle on the tip of my nose, and whiskers drawn on my cheeks. I looked like someone with leathered skin from spending too much time outdoors, wandering around with pantyhose on their head. My mouth fell open, and I touched the greasy paint to see if I was still underneath.

  “You’re a basset hound!”

  “A basket what?” My voice came out in a whisper.

  “A dog, a hound dog.”

  She’d read a magazine article about how to make Halloween costumes with ordinary household items.

  “I look dumb,” I protested.

  “I’ll tell you what’s dumb,” she said. “There are children in other countries who are starving, and you’re worried about a Halloween costume.”

  It was done. There was no more discussing it. I slumped on my daily walk to school, carrying my own leash. The shoe polish had a strong petroleum odor and was making me slightly woozy. On the playground, I parted a sea of perplexed princesses and superheroes as they struggled to figure out what I was.

  Hallie was dressed as a ballerina with a red tutu over her gymnastics leotard, and pink ballet slippers with ribbons that crossed up her calves. She covered the sun from her eyes and squinted to get a better look at me.

  “Why do you have underwear on your head?”

  “Those are ears.”

  Hallie’s forehead wrinkled in confusion.

  “I’m a hound dog.”

  I kept my eyes on my shoes. “Granny did it. It’s not any good.”

  Hallie took the leash from my hand.

  “You can be my dog,” she said. “If anyone says anything, you attack them on my command.”

  The beautiful part of the plan was that as her dog, I could remain mute and not have to answer any questions about my costume. Hallie spoke for me, explaining that every ballerina has a guard dog, end of story. When our teacher took a classroom picture in the sandbox, Hallie held my leash, and I knelt down at her feet, her loyal pet. Our plan worked, and I kept my dog face on until I could no longer stand the fumes. I scrubbed the shoe polish off in the bathroom using industrial pink powder soap and scratchy brown paper towels. Lastly, I yanked the pantyhose from my head and dropped them in the trash can.

  No matter how much trouble I was having fitting in, I still liked school itself. I embraced the routine of it, the bells that set the parameters around art projects and recess and story time, putting a purpose to my days. Every day I came home with a story for Grandpa about what I’d learned, and he gave me encouragement to keep trying to make friends, reminding me that it takes time to find the right people who you feel comfortable with. When I told him what had happened on Halloween, he gave me two pieces of advice: keep Hallie as a friend for life, and next year put on his bee veil and go to school as a beekeeper. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it.

  Our teachers were hippies and nonconformists who freely embellished on the curriculum. One teacher taught us how to shape and fire clay pots. Another tested our extrasensory perception, drawing a symbol on a piece of paper and challenging us to harness our ESP power to duplicate what he’d drawn on our own papers. For some reason this exercise had to be done on the soccer field, where we stood in a circle around the teacher, sketch pads in hand, and tried to read his mind. I learned from a science experiment that cola will rot my bones. A teacher put three Dixie cups of cola in the window, and inside one she dropped a chicken bone, another a nail and the third a penny. We monitored the daily deterioration of each item in a logbook. When the chicken bone disappeared first, within a month, I promised almighty God that I would never drink soda again.

  I couldn’t wait to get to school and find out what the day’s discovery would be. I responded to my teachers’ attention with a gratitude I didn’t comprehend beyond the feeling that I wanted to please them, to memorize everything they told me, and show them how good I could be.

  One day, the surprise was a new music teacher. The first time I walked into his classroom, Mr. Noakes was sitting with his knees apart on a metal stool, strumming a guitar, like he was waiting for a bus instead of a roomful of kindergarteners. He was bamboo-thin and looked too young to be a teacher, in jeans and tan suede Wallabee boots with flat rubber soles, periodically flipping his long brown bangs out of his eyes so he could locate the right frets. He rumbled up to school in his VW van on Wednesdays only, for the last hour of school, and his class became the highlight of my week. On music days he’d prop open his door, lower the needle on the vinyl and let the lyrics draw us in. “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” would filter down the breezeway, we’d cock our ears, drop our pencils and join the Pied Piper parade to the music room. Mr. Noakes didn’t play that “Puff the Magic Dragon” happy music designed to calm us down—he let us listen to real songs from the radio.

  When Mr. Noakes let us choose musical instruments, most of the girls gravitated toward the twinkly-sounding flutes or xylophones while I jostled the boys for the drums. He let us make noise, and he never blew whistles at us like some of the other teachers, nor did he keep a running tally of demerits for bad behavior on the chalkboard. He saw it as his personal mission to instill excellent musical taste in our malleable brains, and played records for us from his personal collection. One day he flipped through his milk crate, pulled out an album cover and held it up for us to see.

  “Does anyone know who these guys are?”

  I recognized the four Beatles in a crosswalk and instantly froze. That was Dad’s music. Suddenly, my skin felt clammy and the floor beneath me tilted. Mr. Noakes was still clutching the Abbey Road record, his eyebrows arched, waiting to see whether anyone could identify it. I raised my hand, along with one other boy.

  “Only two of you?”

  Mr. Noakes scanned the room, savoring the moment before blowing our innocent minds. He looked giddy as he approached the record player and worshipfully slid the black disc out of the sleeve, being careful to keep his fingertips to the outer edge of the vinyl, and lowered it on the turntable.

  This could not be happening. The Beatles were private between Dad and me, not something everyone could just have for free. Playing it in front of the whole class would be like prying into my life, and Mr. Noakes had no right to do this to me
. I helplessly watched him put the needle on the record, knowing that a terrible secret was going to flood out of me, something that I was not allowed to talk about at home, something that I was ashamed of, something that would separate me further than I already was from my classmates. I looked to the door and wondered if I could make a run for it.

  The first notes of “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” swelled from the speakers, took hold of my body and shook it. I felt heat ripple up from my stomach, rise up my throat and collect behind my eyes. I didn’t hear Paul McCartney; I heard Dad’s voice telling me to go to sleep, to finish all my peas, promising he would always be my dad. It was as if he had materialized in the room, but when I tried to look into his face, it kept slipping out of focus, like he had stepped behind an opaque screen. I panicked, trying to remember what he looked like. All I had left of him was my memory, and I was starting to lose that, too. I looked around and saw that the students were engrossed in the strange, perky song about three murders, laughing and pretending to clobber one another with a hammer. I would never have pure joy like they did. I hated them for being so effortlessly happy.

  I could feel tears gathering and willed them to go away. I couldn’t afford to add a meltdown to my growing list of social transgressions. I squeezed my eyes closed and hummed, trying to block out the song. When that didn’t work, I put my forehead on my knees so my jeans would absorb my tears. A few sobs slipped out, and I tried to make them sound like hiccups. My chest heaved, and snot ran down my upper lip. By the time the song ended, the only sound in the room was my weeping.

  Mr. Noakes hastily dismissed the class, and I stayed curled in a tight ball. When the room was empty, he knelt next to me.

  “What’s wrong?”

  The sound of a man’s voice only made me shudder harder.

  “My dad...” was all I could get out.

  “Oh man,” Mr. Noakes said under his breath. “Don’t move. I’ll get the nurse.”

  She appeared in the room, huffing from a run. I let her lift me off the floor and wrap me in her thick arms, and I melted into her big bosom. Hugging her was like burying myself under the bedcovers, and I stayed there until I’d stopped snuffing. She held my hand and walked me to her office, where I sat on her cot and tried to tell her why I was upset. It was very hard to explain.

  “My dad,” I repeated.

  She handed me a tissue. “Where is he?”

  “Rhode Island.”

  She blew out her cheeks and paused a second before pulling out a metal file drawer. She rifled through manila folders and lifted one out. She held it open in one hand, and asked me her next question without looking up.

  “Do you live with your mom?”

  “Yes. No... I live at Granny’s.”

  She tilted her head, like she was trying to figure out what I was not telling her.

  “Who should I call to pick you up?”

  I told her that nobody picks me up.

  “I walk home,” I said, pointing east.

  She pulled a pen out of a cup on her desk and scribbled a phone number on a notepad, tore it off and handed it to me.

  “Give this to your grandmother when you get home, and tell her to call me,” she said. I nodded.

  “Do you need to rest awhile before you’re ready to go?”

  I declined. I’d had enough of this day and was ready for it to end. When I gave the note to Granny, I was too scared to tell her the truth, so I told her I didn’t know why the nurse wanted her to call. Granny didn’t press further, and I was happy to not talk about it.

  The following Wednesday, when it was time to go to the music room, my teacher told me to stay behind in class. When the students were gone, she placed before me a new set of watercolors and a pad of paper. She poured some water in a cup and handed me a brush. I stared at the blank page for a moment, then painted the first thing that came to mind. Six legs, four wings, three body sections, five eyes, two antennae. A stinger.

  Over the next several weeks, I continued to paint while my classmates went to music class. I missed playing the drums, and even though my teacher said I could return whenever I felt ready, I never felt ready. Now the kids tiptoed around me as if I were fragile, which was at least a step up from being ignored. My painting progressed. I made pictures of pretty houses with curtains in the windows, and stick trees topped by big green balls of foliage. I painted cats and bees and flowers. I brought them all home to Grandpa, who carefully admired each one and taped them to the walls of his “office”—an unfinished room off the carport where he kept an old Western desk and boxes of plumbing supplies.

  One afternoon I found him in the carport, stomping on aluminum cans and then finishing the job with a sledgehammer, pounding them into flat discs. He gripped the handle with both hands, raised the sledgehammer upside down and smashed the cans with the top of the head. He was tossing squished cans into a cardboard box in the back of his truck when he saw me.

  “You get good money for these at the scrap place,” he said. “Five cents.”

  By the looks of his pile, I guessed he would make a small fortune. There were hundreds of cans littering the ground. His white T-shirt was worn so thin there were holes in it, and the bottoms of his pant legs were wet from remnants that had squirted out of the cans. He was wearing leather boots, the toe of the left one encircled in duct tape to mend a hole. Bits of food were stuck in his mustache.

  “Whatsa matta you?” he said, noting my long face.

  I told him we were going to have a special day at school. That the dads were going to come and each say a little something to the class about their jobs. That I wasn’t going to go because I didn’t have a dad to bring.

  “I see,” said Grandpa, taking a long pull on his beer. He burped with gusto. “Pardon me.”

  He dropped his beer can on the ground and flattened it. Then he set the sledgehammer before me. “Want to do one?”

  I grasped the handle and strained, able to lift it only a few inches. I stepped my feet a little wider and let the full weight of the sledgehammer come down, and the can yielded with a satisfying crunch. I felt powerful and suddenly found a hidden reservoir of energy. I hit the can again, and again and again, losing myself as the beer foamed out of it, feeling a little better with each blow. When I finally looked up, Grandpa was staring at me. He asked if I was working on any new art projects, and I mentioned we were learning papier-mâché.

  Grandpa lifted an eyebrow. “What’re you making?”

  “A bee.”

  “Yeah? I’d like to see that.”

  Grandpa suggested that perhaps he should come see it along with all the other dads. And so it was settled. Grandpa would be my fill-in for Take Your Dad To School Night. But I wasn’t so sure this was a good idea. When I pictured the other dads, I saw men in business suits with briefcases and office jobs. Then I saw Grandpa standing next to them, with his hair all messed up and black dirt under his fingernails and no business cards. I hoped he’d at least remember to comb the food out of his mustache.

  When the day finally came, I had convinced myself bringing Grandpa was a terrible idea. He would be so much older than the other dads that he’d call even more attention to the fact that I was without a real dad. All I wanted to do was blend in, and since starting school, I’d somehow done everything possible to make myself stick out. Now I was going to show up to Dad Night with an impostor, drawing even more puzzled looks. I wished that I’d just stayed home after all, and tried to think of ways to cancel our outing at the last minute as I waited in the living room for Grandpa to get ready.

  Finally, he came out of the bedroom, adjusting his favorite bolo tie around his neck, the one with a nugget of turquoise mounted on a shiny silver square. He wore it only to square dances, funerals and weddings. I noticed that his jeans were creased down the front—he must have taken an unworn Christmas pair out of the cedar chest. His mustard-colored
Western shirt had ivory snaps and thin gold metallic stripes. His hair was combed down, his stubble was gone and he smelled of aftershave. I checked his fingernails: clean.

  We walked down the street to my elementary school. In one hand he held mine, and in the other he held a jar of honey for my teacher.

  Inside the classroom, I guided Grandpa to the table of art projects and pointed out my bee. It was about the size of a loaf of bread, and I’d put effort into shaping it correctly, with six legs and four wings. I had unfolded two paper clips and poked them into the hardened newspaper for antennae. Grandpa picked the bee up and turned it to look at it from all sides, whistling appreciatively. Just then my teacher walked over and introduced herself, and he gently placed it back down.

  “Quite a bee,” she said.

  Grandpa said he was happy to meet her, and held out the honey jar. She placed a hand over her heart as she reached for the gift.

  “This is from your bees?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Grandpa said.

  “Incredible,” she whispered.

  I’d never heard Grandpa say ma’am before, and I giggled. He threw me a look that said not to blow his cover. He was on his best behavior, and so far, so good. No one had asked him who he was or why he was with me. We were a pair, and that’s all that mattered. We stood close together while the other fathers talked to the class about their careers, and as I listened to stories about working in banks and courtrooms and on golf courses, I wondered what Grandpa was going to say. He didn’t have a real job—one with a workplace and a boss and a paycheck. He just fixed things and kept bees. I worried he wouldn’t have much to offer, or he might get flustered having to speak before a group. He once told me the great thing about being a beekeeper is that you can do it all alone, without having to speak to anyone. Grandpa was the kind of person who preferred to keep to himself, and he always used the minimal amount of words to convey a thought. I wasn’t sure he was up to this.