The Honey Bus Page 7

  “Don’t you want your kids?” she wailed.

  Matthew looked at me with wide eyes, searching my face for reassurance. I took a step closer to him, and he wrapped his arm around my leg.

  I heard Dad’s voice rise to meet Mom’s, and they became two dogs, barking and growling at each other. A familiar dread pressed down on my rib cage, and I understood that if I didn’t get through that door, I might never see my father again. This was my one chance to try to change his mind. Maybe, if he saw me, if I pleaded with him, he’d stay. I couldn’t let Dad come this close and then slip away without trying. I lunged for the door, unlocking it just in time to see Dad walking down the driveway and toward the road. The neighborhood reverberated with Mom’s voice as she hollered to his back.

  “Mark my words, YOU WILL REGRET THIS!”

  I opened my mouth to scream, but cobwebs caught my voice. I tried to run, but my legs were somehow wrapped in iron chains. Mom picked up Matthew and jogged after Dad, chastising him for leaving his family.

  My brain and my body had somehow disconnected, and I could no longer discern what was real and what was only in my imagination. Dad continued walking with his eyes fixed forward. When he was nearly to the road, the blood rushed back into my legs and I raced to the top of the driveway, where Mom was standing with Matthew on her hip, watching Dad go. She had quieted now and stood mute, as if she, too, couldn’t grasp what she was witnessing.

  My mind spun frantically, searching for an explanation. Then it suddenly rested on a simple solution, and a butterfly of hope flittered down and landed on my shoulder. This was all a bad dream. Since moving to California, I’d started having nightmares, so I tried to convince myself that I was going to wake up from this.

  Dad was getting smaller with each step. I started walking after him, and Mom reached down and held me back. Her fingertips pressed on my chest, and I could feel the message inside them: there’s nothing you can do. My pulse quickened as I realized I had run out of time. This was real, and Dad was leaving for good.

  Hot tears welled in my eyes, and Dad became a blurry smudge. I wept in a way I never knew possible, the sobs chuffing out of me in painful bursts. My tears fell to the pavement, leaving little dark circles, and Matthew swiveled around in Mom’s arms to see what was the matter with me. He probably wouldn’t remember this day, and that made me cry even harder.

  Dad heard me. He turned around and began walking back. I stopped breathing, waiting. When he reached us, he fell on one knee and hugged me so hard that I coughed for air. I detected the sweet, raisin-aroma of his perspiration and he was trembling, like his whole body was crying. I scanned him as if I’d never seen him before, rememorizing the dark hair covering his forearms, the stretchy gold band of his watch. There was a tan line where his wedding ring used to be.

  “I will always be your dad,” he whispered into my ear. I let myself melt onto his chest so I couldn’t feel my edges anymore. I wanted to tell him to stay, but there was no room for words in between my sobs. I couldn’t control anything anymore, not even language.

  “I love you,” he said, squeezing me once more and releasing me. He stood and took one last look at Matthew and Mom, and began walking down Via Contenta again. Mom tugged on my arm.

  “Let’s go.”

  I yanked my hand out of hers and started walking after Dad. I made it as far as the neighbor’s house when I realized I was powerless to stop him from shrinking into the distance.

  Mom left me then, and fled back to the house with my brother bouncing in her arms.

  I stayed on the road and watched Dad reach the corner, turn left and blink out of sight. My vision narrowed, and I forced all my energy on the spot where Dad had been just seconds ago, as if wishing could bring him back. I wished so hard that I felt light-headed, like I was going to faint.

  The completeness of my fate pressed down on me, and I stumbled back home, my body so numb I couldn’t feel the ground beneath me. I needed Mom. I was desperate to curl inside the curve of her and have her tell me it was only a bad dream. I wanted her to tell me Dad was going to the store, and everything was going to be all right. There had to be more time, a second chance. I ran through the house, looking for her, and finally stopped before the closed bedroom door.

  I knocked.

  “Mom?”

  She didn’t make a sound, so I slowly turned the doorknob and wedged the door a crack. A curl of cigarette smoke wafted out.

  “Mom?”

  I heard, but could not see, her shift in the sheets.

  “Not now, Meredith.”

  Her pale fingers reached out of the dark and tapped her cigarette into the ashtray on the headboard. I knew I had been dismissed, but my legs stayed rooted to the threshold. She exhaled, then swept the sheets off with one arm and swung herself into a sitting position. She came toward me, a moving shadow in the smoky haze. I lifted my arms expectantly.

  She shut the door.

  I felt my knees buckle and stumbled, catching myself against the wall.

  “Meredith! I hope that’s not you I hear bothering your mother!” Granny called out over the sizzling skillet.

  The reptilian part of my brain sent one instruction: flee. I wanted to disappear, to get away from everybody and everything—to crawl into a dark hole and scream. I pushed myself off the wall, streaked out the kitchen door and bolted outside.

  I heard the slender leaves of the eucalyptus tree shushing in the breeze. The massive tree stood taller than our house, and its summer bloom had appeared seemingly overnight. Grandpa’s honeybees were losing their minds inside its butter-scented blossoms, scrabbling and rolling in the yellow pollen. Tens of thousands of bees buzzed in such a chorus that it sounded like all the overhead power lines were sizzling.

  I felt an uncontrollable urge to get closer to the bees.

  My legs, without consulting the rest of me, began walking toward the tree. I placed my hand on the curling outer skin of the trunk and felt a faint pulse, like sound waves coming from a stereo speaker. Then, as if someone else had taken control of my muscles, I watched my right sneaker wedge itself into the deep groove of the double trunk, and I hoisted myself up limb by limb, climbing higher and higher into the hum until I was completely concealed in a cloud of honeybees.

  I reclined into a crook of an uppermost branch and watched the bees dart before me like sideways rain, so intent on their free buffet that they hardly noticed a girl in their midst. This close, I could see the blossoms were shaped like miniature hula skirts with a hard shell on top and a ring of delicate fronds. The bees swam in the center of them, wriggling their legs in a frenzied crawl stroke to coat themselves with yellow dust.

  Bees circled me, their song stronger now. I stayed very still, letting the bees become accustomed to my presence. When one landed on my leg, I simply watched it, holding my breath until it flew away. When it happened a second and third time, I began to trust that the bee was only resting and wouldn’t harm me.

  I studied the bees as they pushed pollen grains onto their back pair of legs, packing the granules down into tight, round saddlebags. I noticed they used their forelegs to brush pollen dust off their eyes and antennae, working from front to back, first cleaning their triangular head, then pushing the dust down their bodies toward their abdomens, then finally shoving the grains onto their back set of legs, packing the yellow grains down into two concave pockets designed to hold pollen. The bees took their time, and when their pollen cargo felt just right, they zoomed back to the hive to store it in their honeycomb pantry.

  I inhaled the menthol of the eucalyptus and felt my outlines melting away. I was safe inside a buzzing force field where no one could see me and no one had to feel sorry for me. Above ground, I was no longer that girl without a father at home. I wasn’t the girl whose mother never got out of bed. The bees made me invisible. I closed my eyes and let myself be lulled by their hymn.

>   The sun went down, the bees went home for the night, but still I stayed in the tree. I didn’t want to come back down to the ground. Down there was chaos. Up here, the bees turned chaos into order. Up here, there was an entire species living its own life, oblivious to the fog of depression that engulfed our house. The bees reminded me that the world was so much larger than my family’s insular problems. I liked being this close to creatures that were relentless about their work, natural survivors that avoided self-pity and never gave up.

  I felt a compulsion to be near bees that I couldn’t explain. On a deep level, the bees were teaching me the importance of taking care of myself. I could see, with my very own eyes, that defeat was not a natural way to be, even for insects. The bees showed me that I had a choice how to live. I could collapse under the sadness of losing my parents, or I could keep going.

  5

  Big Sur Queen

  1975—Summer

  I started spending so much time in the eucalyptus tree that I began packing a lunch to take with me. If anyone noticed that I’d withdrawn from the family, nobody complained. I’m pretty sure my whereabouts went unnoticed. Except by one person.

  I was more than halfway through a peanut butter and jelly sandwich when I could’ve sworn I heard an owl. I twisted on my perch, looking this way and that, but it was hard to see through the curtain of slender eucalyptus leaves rattling in the breeze.

  “Hoo! Hoo!” Louder now. I shoved the last bite into my mouth and climbed down to a lower branch with a better view to scan the yard.

  Grandpa. I spotted him hiding behind the wooden shed where he stored his bee equipment. He had his hands cupped in front of his mouth, directing his birdcall toward me. He was wearing his bee veil, and hooting through the mesh.

  “I know that’s you, Grandpa,” I called down to him.

  “Hoooow doooo yoooou know it’s not an ooooowl?”

  “I can see you.”

  He stepped into full view and looked up to the treetop. We eyeballed one another, waiting for the next chess move. Grandpa cleared his throat.

  “Whatcha doin’ up there?”

  “Watching bees.”

  “Coming down anytime soon?”

  “No.”

  Grandpa took his veil off and slowly folded it back down into a flat square. “That’s a shame,” he said.

  I didn’t answer, waiting to see where he was going with this.

  “I needed someone to help me find the queen.”

  This was it! The invitation I’d been waiting for—to open up a beehive. It was the one thing, Grandpa knew, that could lure me out of the tree.

  “Wait up!” I said. I scrabbled down the trunk so fast that the bark peeled underneath me in long, pink strips.

  Grandpa kept more than one hundred hives sprinkled along the Big Sur coast. His largest bee yard was in a remote area at the foot of Garrapata Ridge accessible only by four-wheel drive, and even then sometimes he had to use a chain saw to cut through the occasional tree that fell across the road. Grandpa and a beekeeper friend owned a 160-acre piece of undeveloped Big Sur wilderness that he said was perfect for bees. Named for the Spanish word for tick, the Garrapata Canyon caught full sun, was protected on either side by steep chaparral ridges and isolated from people. All the bees had to do was fly out of the hive and feast on California sagebrush all the way to the mountain peak, then float back down as their bodies grew heavy with nectar. The land was an all-you-can-eat buffet for bees, offering them a year-round menu of sage, eucalyptus and horsemint, while Garrapata Creek provided a clean source of water.

  Each year his hives produced more than five hundred gallons of honey that he delivered to Big Sur customers, plus a couple local restaurants and a grocery store. He never advertised, because demand always outweighed supply. By fall, he ran out of honey and had to put anxious customers on a list for the following spring honey flow. I’d heard Grandpa tell stories about Big Sur at the dinner table, and it sounded like something out of one of my fairy tales, untamed and magical. I wasn’t going to sit in a tree and miss my chance to finally go there.

  Minutes later, I was bouncing on the passenger side of his work truck with my feet resting on a set of clanking metal toolboxes. It was a Chevy half-ton that farted like an old man and once upon a time used to be a glossy yellow, but now was weathered to the dull texture of chalk and pockmarked with rust. The odometer had flipped over to zero at least twice that he could remember before eventually it stopped spinning, and he attributed his truck’s good health to a regimen of regular oil changes. The windshield was crusted with dead bugs and mustard-yellow dots of bee poop, which Grandpa couldn’t remove with the wipers because they also had stopped working years ago. When rips appeared in the red vinyl bench seat, he covered them in duct tape; when he ran into something, he banged out the dings with a mallet. His truck was a handyman’s flea market on wheels; everything he might need for beekeeping or plumbing jobs was tied to the contractor’s rack, crammed in the back bed or jammed somewhere in the cab. The dashboard was packed several inches high with a nest of pipe fittings, grease-pencil stubs and rubber bands, opened mail and seed packets, and balled-up bits of beeswax. He used the hooks of the empty gun rack to hang his tattered work shirts, splattered with pipe dope.

  I was wedged into a small space he cleared for me on the bench seat, separated from Grandpa by a barrier made of beekeeping magazines, his dented workman’s lunch box and a green metal thermos. His dog, Rita, was in her usual spot, curled on an old pillowcase beneath his seat, safe from falling objects. The three of us literally clattered down the road, creating a jangling chorus every time we hit a bump and jostled Grandpa’s collection of things that might come in handy someday.

  When we turned off Carmel Valley Road south onto Highway 1 and entered Big Sur, nature woke up and suddenly started doing the can-can. Everywhere I looked, the jagged mountains were tumbling into the sea, like rockslides frozen in free fall—still yet dramatic at the same time. We navigated a thin, winding ribbon of road hundreds of feet above the exploding surf. I rolled the window down, and heard sea lions barking and waves booming into sea caves below. The spicy aroma of sage mixed with sea salt wafted into the truck. We dipped down into forests where the air dropped ten degrees and the massive redwood trees clustered together in tribal circles, then we burst back into the sun again. I twisted my head in every direction, trying not to miss a thing.

  “There’s one!” Grandpa said, pointing toward the ocean.

  “One what?”

  “Whales. Look for their spouts.”

  I squinted harder at the blueness.

  “There it goes again!”

  Grandpa was now driving with his head turned all the way to the right. I grabbed the armrest as he went around a tight left turn, but he stayed perfectly centered in his lane while he stared at the ocean. He’d driven this stretch of Highway 1 so many times he didn’t need sight to navigate it.

  “Where?” I scanned the horizon, but it looked just as blank as it had a second ago.

  “It should come up again, right about there,” he said, pointing farther south. “Sometimes you see two spouts, a little one next to a big one, then you know it’s a mama whale with a calf.”

  As if on command, a white spray shot into the air from beneath the surface, and a beat later, a smaller one, just off to the right of the first.

  “I saw it!” I yelped.

  A turkey vulture circled effortlessly overhead on six-foot wings, its black feathers spread out at the wing tips like individual fingers. It was so huge it cast a shadow over the road as it passed above. I rolled the window down more, and the wind ruffled my hair as I looked up at the red of its head. We watched it glide above a cove with water the color of jade and kelp fronds waving on the surface.

  “There’s where you catch abalone,” Grandpa said, pointing to the inlet.

  “How?”
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  “You dive down with an abalone iron. You gotta get it under the shell quick, otherwise the abalone feel you doing something and clamp down on the rock.”

  “Does it taste good?”

  “Yeah, if you hammer it first.”

  Sounded a little gross to me. I returned to whale spotting, but the ocean was a blank slate once again.

  “See those two rocks?” he said, pointing to two triangular peaks jutting two stories high, less than twenty yards offshore. “I almost crashed right into them.”

  Grandpa unscrewed the cup on his thermos and held it out to me—my signal to fill it with scalding chicory coffee. Then he settled into one of his Cannery Row fishing stories. Grandpa used to fish alone in his own skiff for sardines and sell them to the canneries, but it was hard to compete with the large Italian family-run fishing crews, and he had to catch lots of fish to make any money. One day his friend Speedy Babcock told him there was more money for less effort in salmon.

  “I had never fished salmon before, and Speedy said he’d teach me,” he said.

  They left Monterey for Santa Cruz in Speedy’s twenty-eight-foot cabin cruiser, and caught thirty king salmon, about six hundred pounds of fish—a fortune. But on the way back, they got lost in the midnight fog.

  “We couldn’t see so we had to navigate by sound. The water sounds different in different spots along the coast, and he kept steering west, thinking we were turning into the Monterey harbor, but I could tell we were only at Point Lobos. He wouldn’t listen to me. We argued until those rocks suddenly appeared and I wrestled the rudder from him. We almost lost everything by that much,” he said, holding his thumb and finger an inch apart.

  I asked Grandpa what happened after that.

  “Never went fishing with that guy again,” he said.

  Grandpa slowed, put on his blinker and we turned left into the cool shade of Palo Colorado Road, lined with eucalyptus trees. On the corner was one of Big Sur’s earliest homesteads, a three-story log cabin built in the late 1800s out of redwood slabs caulked together with lime, sand and horsehair. A sheep pasture encircled it, the lambs hopping straight in the air like grasshoppers. The ranch extended across Highway 1 to a stunning sea cliff pasture, where a herd of white-and-red Hereford cattle could stand close enough to the sea to feel the saltwater spray.