The Honey Bus Read online

  I slid under first on my back, as it was more Matthew’s nature to see if something was safe before trying it. He watched my legs disappear and waited for my report. A tangle of weeds blocked my view of the undercarriage, so I used a snow angel technique to knock them down. I pressed here and there on the bus floor with my foot to test for weak spots. The metal was rusty, but solid. I kicked at the exhaust pipe, and it rattled some, showering me in fine dirt. I scooted toward the front of the bus, and bumped into a discarded tire. Other than that, the only thing I found under the bus was a graveyard of corroded five-gallon Wesson Oil cans.

  I gave up searching and rested for a moment on my back, trying to think. There had to be a solution that I was overlooking. Matthew called out to me, and when I turned to look over my shoulder, I saw him on his hands and knees peering under the bus. Then two legs appeared and framed my brother.

  “What’s so interesting under there?” I heard Grandpa ask my brother.

  “Mare-miss,” my brother said, pointing. His tongue still hadn’t mastered my three-syllable name.

  Grandpa got down on his belly next to Matthew, and now both of them were staring. I held still because I felt like I had just been caught doing something, not anything bad, just something slightly embarrassing.

  “Whatcha doing under there?”

  “Trying to get in.”

  “Don’t you know the door’s up here?”

  “It’s locked.”

  “To keep little kids out.”

  Grandpa reached under the bus and crooked his finger, signaling me to come to him. I scrabbled out, and as he helped me to my feet, he brushed the dirt from my back and plucked off the burrs. Whatever was in the bus would have to wait. Until I got bigger, whenever that was. The only people admitted entry were Grandpa’s friends, so I imagined I would have to wait until I was an adult, which might as well be never.

  “I thought you wanted to see the bees,” Grandpa said.

  His counteroffer was exquisitely played, and I perked up immediately. As my part of the deal, I had to come inside for breakfast first.

  Belly properly filled with pancakes, I followed Grandpa to the back fence, where he kept a row of six beehives. The sun was shining on the slit entrances at the base of the hives, illuminating the landing boards where the bees were flitting in and out. A small cloud of bees hovered before each hive, all the foragers waiting for a clear shot to get back inside. I noticed that the bees were buzzing in a different way than the one we caught in the house; their sound didn’t have the urgency of a shout, it was more contented and calm like a person humming a song. I stood in front of the right-most hive, about a foot away from the entrance so I could watch them. I felt Grandpa’s hand on my shoulder.

  “Don’t stand there,” he said. “See what’s happening behind you?”

  I turned and saw a traffic jam of bees jiggling in the air, unwilling to go around me to get into the hive. The backup was growing by the second.

  “You’re in their flight path,” he said, guiding me to the side of the hive. As soon as I stepped out of the way, the clot of waiting bees whooshed in a comet back to their hive. I knelt down next to the hive so I was eye level with the bees. One by one they marched to the entrance, cleaned their antennae, then crouched and launched like a jet fighter.

  “What do you see?”

  “Lots of bees coming and going,” I said.

  “Look closer.”

  I did, and saw the same thing. Bees flying in. Bees flying out. So many it was hard to keep my eye on one bee at a time. Grandpa took a comb out of his back pocket and whisked it through his hair in three practiced swipes, top and sides, waiting for me to see whatever it was I was supposed to see. Then he pointed at the landing board. “Yellow!” he announced.

  All I saw were bees.

  “There’s orange! Gray! Yellow again!”

  And then I saw it. Some of the returning bees had something stuck to their back legs. Every fifth or sixth honeybee that returned waddled in carrying small balls like the pills that collect on a favorite sweater, some loads no bigger than the head of a pin, others the size of a lentil, so large the bee strained under the weight.

  “What is it?”

  “Pollen. From flowers. The color tells you which flower they came from. Tan is from the almond tree. Gray is the blackberries. Orange is poppy. Yellow is mustard, most likely.”

  “What’s it for?”

  “Bee bread.”

  Now he was just messing with me. Bees can’t bake bread. All they make is honey. Everybody knew that.

  “Grandpa!”

  “What? You don’t believe me?”

  “No.”

  “Suit yourself. Bees mix the pollen with a little spit and nectar and feed it to their babies. Bee bread.”

  It made some sense, but it was just too weird. I waited for him to giggle at his own joke, but he kept a straight face. Grandpa had told the truth when he said it was safe to let a bee crawl on me, so I guessed he knew what pollen was for. For the moment, I played along.

  “They’re making bread in there?”

  “They push the pollen off their legs, chew it with nectar and store it in the honeycomb.”

  “Can I see?”

  “Not today. I don’t want to disturb them right now. They are building new wax.”

  Just then the fattest bee I’d ever seen lumbered out of the hive. It was wider and stockier than all the others, and its head was comprised almost entirely of two massive eyes. I watched it approach several of the regular-size bees and tap its antennae against theirs. Every bee it touched backed up and walked around it, as if irritated by being bumped.

  “Is that the queen bee?”

  Grandpa picked it up and put it in his palm. “Nope. A drone...a boy bee. He’s begging for food.”

  I asked Grandpa why he didn’t just get his own food.

  “Boy bees don’t do any work. All those bees you see with pollen? All girls. Boys don’t collect nectar or pollen for the hive, they don’t feed the babies and they don’t make wax or honey. They don’t even have stingers, so they can’t protect the hive.”

  Grandpa returned the drone to the hive entrance where it resumed the search for handouts. Finally, one of the returning girl bees paused and linked tongues with him. Feeding him nectar, Grandpa said.

  “He only has one job, but I’ll explain it to you when you’re a little older.”

  Grandpa had set up two stumps near his apiary, and we took seats and watched the bees flying as one would watch a fire, or the sea, lulled by all the individual movements that combined together into a single flow. I liked interpreting the patterns of their routine, to know that the bees weren’t just flying willy-nilly; there was an order to what they were doing. They were out grocery shopping for bread and nectar. A beehive could seem chaotic if you didn’t understand that bees had a plan for everything.

  I could have never guessed that a beehive is a female place, a castle with a queen but no king. All the worker bees inside are female; around sixty thousand daughters that look after their mother by feeding her, bringing her water droplets and keeping her warm at night. The colony would wither and die without a queen laying eggs. Yet without her daughters taking care of her, the queen would either starve or freeze to death.

  Their need for one another was what kept them strong.

  4

  Homecoming

  1975—Summer

  Our grandparents had the incredible good fortune to live only steps away from the Carmel Valley Airfield, where two-seater planes landed and took off a handful of times a month. It was nothing more than a dirt landing strip, with just one runway and a taxiway, and no lights, fences or security of any kind. There were no markings or signs to direct pilots and the tattered wind sock was rendered useless. Pilots had to radio in to a neighbor with a view of the runway and ask w
hich way the wind was blowing.

  Uprooted as we were without access to our playthings or our former playmates, Matthew and I had to get creative in our diversions and make use of whatever was readily available. We tried to build pyramids with Granny’s poker cards, we put out birdseed and waited for birds, but an airport with real live planes was an entertainment jackpot.

  All it took was the rumble of an incoming propeller, and Matthew would drop whatever was in his hand and go streaking out of the house to look for a plane. He was mad for those planes, falling into a near trance as he watched them come in for a landing. He’d run for Grandpa and yank him by the hand, urging him to take us across the street so we could stand by the runway and feel the wind wash over us as the plane whooshed down from the skies.

  One afternoon we heard the telltale engine noise, but Grandpa was working in Big Sur and we didn’t have an escort. But now that we were spending so much time alone together, a budding solidarity was forming between Matthew and me, and sometimes our companionship crossed over into mischief. We hesitated ever so slightly, looked back to the quiet house, then grinned at one another and bolted across the road, huffing it up the small incline to reach the airstrip just as the plane was circling overhead.

  Matthew wanted to get closer to the plane this time, so we crept to the median between the two runways and sat down in the grass to wait for the plane to fly over us. I snapped off a mustard blossom and ate it, like I’d seen Grandpa do. I offered a yellow bloom to Matthew, but he wrinkled his nose. We could hear the propeller approaching, beating the air like thunder. Matthew reached for my hand, and we stretched out on our backs and looked skyward.

  When the plane’s underbelly crossed not twenty feet overhead, we felt the growling engine in our chests and screamed with the same mix of joy and terror that roller coasters were designed for. I can’t imagine what the pilot must have thought when he saw two small children pop into view at the last minute. We waved, innocently hoping he’d see us; he probably had heart palpitations.

  We sat up and watched the plane make a few short screeching hops and then touch down. It rolled toward the end of the landing strip where a collection of similar planes was parked, their wings chained to the ground.

  Just then the plane, its blades still whirring, made a U-turn and started slowly approaching us. It was halfway down the runway when the plane stopped and the pilot got out and shouted something at us. We couldn’t hear the words, but picked out the unmistakable tone of an adult who “would like a word” with us. We sprang to our feet and took off, and before I could count to ten, we were back behind our little red house, bent over, sucking in oxygen. I hoped the pilot hadn’t seen which house we ran to, and secretly promised myself never to do that again.

  When we caught our breath, we walked as innocently as possible into the kitchen, where Granny was scorching something in the electric skillet. She’d given up on the oven long ago, insisting the temperature dial had a manufacturer’s defect that burned her food. The oven became a tabletop for a square electric frying pan no bigger than a pizza box, and although her cursing had subsided considerably, every breakfast, lunch and dinner still came out blackened and overdone.

  “Where have you two been?” she asked, keeping her back to us and furiously scraping at something with the spatula. I put my finger to my lips to remind Matthew we couldn’t tell. He nodded.

  “Nowhere. Just outside,” I said.

  “Well, stay close. Dinner’s almost ready.”

  “We saw a plane!” Matthew piped. The kid just couldn’t help himself. Before the conversation could progress, I quickly grabbed his hand and led him to the living room, distracting him with a suggestion that we build a fort.

  Granny had one of those couches that felt as long as a Cadillac, made with two rectangular bottom cushions that when removed made excellent walls. We dismantled the stuffed yellow chair for the roof pieces and assembled a hut in front of the television, leaving a peephole so we could sit inside and watch TV. It was almost like being in the dark of a real movie theater. We settled in to watch Matthew’s favorite show, Emergency!, about two Los Angeles paramedics who carry a hospital phone in a box and rescue accident victims, mostly by jolting them back to life with electrical paddles.

  “TV’s too loud!” Granny called from the kitchen.

  Just then a car exploded on-screen at full volume.

  I was cozy. I didn’t feel like removing a wall and crawling all the way to the TV to reach the volume knob.

  “Turn the TV down,” I said to Matthew.

  He ignored me. Lately, Matthew’s adoration of me seemed to be waning. This was disturbing on two counts. One, he was no longer following my orders. The other day he’d even refused to let me put every necklace and bangle in Mom’s jewelry box on him, something we did all the time. But worse, he was all I had left of my family, and I couldn’t tolerate the thought of him leaving me, too. I tried not to take his emerging independence personally, it was part of his growing up after all, but I was afraid it signaled something deeper, that he one day wouldn’t need me. The thought of Matthew leaving me was so terrifying that I became meaner to try to keep him in line, to show him that there were severe consequences for disobeying me. So if he wasn’t going to turn the TV down, then he wasn’t going to get to stay in the hut, either. I knocked the sofa cushion nearest me, and our house toppled on us. Matthew howled in outrage as he kicked his way free of the ruins.

  Granny appeared in the living room, wiping her hands on a dish towel. She shot us a look that said we were riding her last nerve. Then she cranked down the volume, and that’s when we heard someone knocking on the front door.

  How long the visitor had been trying to get our attention, we couldn’t say. Most likely it was one of Grandpa’s honey customers, dropping by unannounced with an empty glass jar in hand. Grandpa wasn’t home, so whoever it was would have to leave their jar on the doorstep with a check or cash in it, and Grandpa would swap the money with honey, then put it back outside so they could fetch it later.

  Granny opened the door, and I saw her back stiffen.

  Then she shouted my mother’s name over her shoulder. “Sal-leeeee!”

  I heard the creak of the bedroom door, and Mom padded into the living room in rumpled sweatpants and T-shirt, an outfit that doubled as her nightgown.

  “You don’t have to yell, Mom,” she said, blinking in the afternoon light. Mom came up behind Granny and put one arm on the door frame and leaned in. Then she took a step back.

  “David,” she said.

  I heard a low male voice, and the hair on the back of my neck prickled up.

  Dad!

  The vault inside me where I stored all my secret thoughts about Dad flung open, and fireworks exploded out of every pore. Six months of wishing in the lonely quiet of night had worked its magic, and now everything was going to snap back to the way it was before, just like I knew it always would.

  I clicked off the TV, and Dad’s silky words swirled into the living room, wrapping me in a tight fabric and pulling me toward him. I knew he would come back. Now we could finally go home, Mom would be happy again, and Matthew and I would get our own rooms back. I looked at my little brother, and he was bouncing up and down, his eyes fixed on the door.

  “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!” he sang.

  I leaped in the direction of Dad’s voice, but Mom and Granny wouldn’t step aside or open the door wider than a couple of inches, so all I could see were bits of him—the side of his leather Top-Sider shoe, a patch of ink-black hair. I peered through the crack in the door and spotted our green Volvo parked in the driveway by the eucalyptus tree. He must really want us back if he drove all the way here, I thought.

  “Did you bring my portable dishwasher?” Mom demanded. “The kids’ toys?”

  I tugged on Granny’s sleeve, but she didn’t respond. I tapped on Mom’s back. Nothing.
/>   My father had just driven across country in Mom’s Volvo to return it to her, and no one had explained this beforehand to Matthew and me. He’d stayed the night at his mother’s house in Pacific Grove, and he’d asked her to follow him to our house the next day and park a few streets away so he could catch a ride back to the airport. He’d anticipated a possible confrontation at our house and wanted to spare his mother from seeing it, so they made a plan for him to walk to the village where there was a one-block strip with a grocery, barbershop, bank and restaurant, and meet her in the parking lot.

  I knew none of this. When Dad suddenly appeared on our doorstep, I’d assumed that he was there to fetch us. I looked on, stunned, as Granny blocked him from coming through the door.

  Something wasn’t right. Dad must know we were in the house, so why wasn’t he coming inside? What was taking so long? Why weren’t they letting him in? Granny was speaking in clipped sentences, with the same undertone of disgust she saved for bad politicians she read about in the newspapers. I heard Dad mumbling, like he was apologizing, and the air became thick with malice. Their voices were getting louder, darker, sharper, and my muscles clenched with the memory of our last night in Rhode Island. Then Mom’s voiced cracked into thunder.

  “How can you do this to me?” Mom shrieked. “Don’t you care about your own children?”

  Dad’s fingers flashed into the house and dropped the car keys into Granny’s open palm. She tossed the key ring a few feet onto her writing desk as if it was a stinky shoe that she didn’t want to touch. Mom stepped outside to talk to Dad and Granny closed the door, thumping her butt into it to make sure the latch caught. She pushed the button in the doorknob to lock it, and swiped her palms together in a gesture of finishing something, of wiping flour off her hands. She walked back to the kitchen without glancing our way, as if nothing had happened.

  Things were moving too fast. I could hear Mom outside roaring at Dad. I didn’t know what divorce meant, but I caught the finality in her voice as she spat the word at him, and that told me all I needed to know—that whatever was wrong with my parents was unfixable.