Authors: Howard McEwen
This guy doesn’t want to be found, I thought. I followed the road around a bend then came to one of those old campers that looked wrapped in sheet metal. It was small. There couldn’t have been much room in there for anything excepting a bed and two-person table. It had a place for two wheels, but where rubber should have been two cinder blocks held it up. The camper’s trailer hitch pointed to an old truck parked perpendicular to it.
“Hello,” I shouted. Nothing.
“Hello,” I shouted again. Nothing again.
I walked up to the trailer and knocked hard. Still nothing.
I turned and squealed like a bitty of a girl.
“Who are you?” a man asked. He was about six one with grey hair that needed cut. His face was ruddy and thin and he looked strong under his shirt, even with a paunch that his belt cut into. He was wearing gloves and his right hand was holding some kind of silver blade. My eyes fixed on it. Some kind of dark residue was around the edge.
“You snuck up on me,” I said.
“It’s my property to sneak on if I want. Who are you?” I kept my eyes on the blade.
“My name is Jacob Gibb. You Austin Nichols?”
“Yep. You the tax man? I’m paid up.”
“No, I’m an investment advisor. I’ve come to talk to you about your daughter.”
Mr. Nichols loosened up a bit. He walked past me and put the blade in a tool box.
“Sheila sent you, eh?”
“She and your daughter,” I said. “Lindsay’s first college payment is due this week. They say you have some bonds to help her pay it.”
“Lindsay’s not going to college,” he said.
“She’s been accepted.”
“I didn’t say she wasn’t accepted. I just said she’s not going.”
“I don’t understand.”
“That’s because it’s none of your business.”
“Your ex-wife and daughter asked me to make it my business.”
“Mr. Gibb, those bonds are safe. My mother made me custodian and when they’re twenty-one I’ll give them to each of my daughters.”
“The time is now,” I said.
“That would mean something if I cared what
they
thought,” he said. “Or
you
thought. I’m the father. I have to do right by my girls.”
“By keeping them from college? By not being around? By hiding out here?”
That froze him. He stood a bit straighter and appeared broader and more fierce.
“How old are you?”
“Thirty-three,” I said.
“Kids?”
“No.”
“Married?”
“No.”
“Then you can’t understand. At heart, you’re still a teenager.”
“Mr. Nichols, I’m not going back to Sheila without some kind of explanation.”
He fixed me with those grey eyes again then without breaking his gaze picked up that blade. He wiped it on his pants. It was the way I said Sheila. When I spoke her name I put a top spin of sexual English on it.
He brushed the blade absent-mindedly under his chin like he was scratching the itch of a thought.
“You been inside my wife, Mr. Gibb?”
“How about you put down the blade, Mr. Nichols. I’m only here to help. To help your daughter.”
“Blade?” He laughed. “No, this isn’t a blade. Don’t worry. I’m not the jealous kind. At least any more. I married a whore, Mr. Gibb. If I was mad at every man who found himself inside Sheila, I’d have a long list of anger. She cuckolded me so many times I don’t feel anything.”
I didn’t like him talking like that about Sheila, but I did like the fact that he relaxed his grip on the blade.
“What is it?” I asked focusing back on the blade.
“A hive tool.”
“A hive tool?”
“A hive tool.”
We looked at each other for a long moment with me looking stupid and him looking at someone who looked stupid.
“Follow me,” he said. For some dumb reason I followed him.
We walked without talking for about five minutes then crested a hill that looked down into a shallow valley. A creek wandered through it and three large oak trees canopied dozens of white boxes.
“I keep bees,” he said.
I stopped.
“Keep walking,” he said. “If you’re brave enough to go to bed with Sheila, you’re brave enough to take an up close look at some bees. Maybe even help out. Know anything about bees?”
“No,” I said. I followed him a bit slowly. “Don’t we need some protection? A white jumpsuit? That funny little hat with the face net?”
“No. Not these bees. They’re nice. Italians. And it’s a cool day. They’re nice on cool days. I’m just doing a spot check.”
“I’d prefer to talk to you about those bonds of your daughter's.”
He ignored me. He used the hive tool to lift the lid off a hive. The buzz of thousands of bees quickly became a minor roar. A cloud of them flew up from the box and past Nichols. He didn’t seem to notice. I hung back. He did a bit of prying with the hive tool and seemed to loosen something. He pulled out a wooden frame holding what looked to be honeycomb, but a white film that had the look of solidified bacon grease covered it.
“This is capped honey,” he said. “Under the thin layer of white wax is the honey. You skim the wax off, put this frame through a centrifuge and you got wonderful, raw honey.”
“Is this how you pay the bills?”
“I ain’t got much in the way of bills,” he said. “Just keep the trailer heated when it gets cold. And some grub.”
“And your daughters?”
“Sheila took everything I’ve got.”
“She doesn’t have enough to send Lindsay to college on,” I said. I heard him snicker.
He put the frame back into the box then lifted the entire box up. It exposed another taller box that it was resting on.
“That top box is the honey super,” he said. “That is where the bees keep all the honey. This second, lower box is where the queen lives with most of the rest of the bees.
“You know anything about bees?” he asked again. I shook my head no again and kept as far a distance from the bees as I could without tempting Austin Nichols into a clucking
j’accuse
. I didn’t want to look like a chicken.
He used his hive tool again to loosen the wooden frame and pulled out a mass of bees. He was examining the surface.
“Bingo!” he said.
“Bingo?”
“Bingo!”
“Okay,” I said.
He didn’t speak for a moment then looked up with a grin and said, “There she is.”
“Who’s there?”
“The queen.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I almost never see her.”
“Okay.”
“So you really know nothing about bees, eh?”
I didn’t bother answering this time.
“The bees live in a hive,” he said in a tone that made me feel like I was back sitting in a college lecture hall. “The hive is a superorganism. You know what I mean?”
“Yeah,” I said then said, “No, I don’t.”
“No single bee—that solitary, lone organism—can live on its own. Each must be part of a hive—the superorganism. There are no loners in the bee world. Together they form one single organism.”
He kept talking. A bee landed on the front of my shirt and got my attention. He noticed it.
“She’ll fly away soon enough,” he said then went back to his lecture.
“If we think of the hive as a superorganism—a single organism—then what I’ve done here by taking this hive apart is akin to cutting into a single animal. I’ve opened up the beast and I’ll have to put it back together again. It’s not as damaging as, say, cutting into a cow, but the superorganism is still damaged.”
The bee flew away and I breathed again.
“Now inside this superorganism are three players. The queen, the workers and the drones.”
I made the feigned interest sound. A cross between a grunt and a sigh.
“Now when a queen dies, the workers feed a few already laid female eggs a special compound called royal jelly. These eggs getting the jelly will develop into queens. The thousands of female eggs that don’t get the jelly become workers. Now once a queen makes it out of her cell you know what the first thing she does is?”
I made the feigned interest sound again but gave it a hurry-it-up lilt. He didn’t notice.
“She kills the other queen cells. Her sisters! She sticks her stinger in their little egg cells and stirs ‘em up like a late term abortion. Kills ‘em all one-by-one. Her first act as queen is murder. And her second act is copulation. Once her wings dry she goes on her mating flight. That’s where the drones come in. Drones are the only males in the hive. They chase after the queen and as many as she’ll allow have a go at her.”
He looked up into the air. “Up there,” he said pointing, “every queen is a member of the one-hundred-foot club. With multiple partners. Once she’s had enough of the drones, she flies back to her hive and starts laying eggs and never mates again.”
I stifled a yawn. I saw where this was going.
“The majority of the bees are the workers. They’re unfertilized females. Their job is to serve the queen. They feed the queen by hand and quite literally pick up her crap. They go out and collect honey and pollen and store it and work it. They raise and feed the young. The workers haul out dead bees and guard the entrances against predators.”
“What do the drones do?” he asked rhetorically. “They hang out around the hive. If the queen gets killed or dies they’ll be there to have another go at the new queen. Otherwise, they just hang out. At the end of the summer, when all the eggs have been laid and there’s no need for drones, the queen gives the command and all the workers kick them out. The drones try to get back in, but the workers won’t let them. They all die within a day of being kicked out.”
“Can we talk about your daughter and Sheila?” I asked.
“We have been, Mr. Gibb.”
I rolled my eyes. The metaphor was wearing on my nerves. “Sheila is definitely a queen bee,” he said. “She mates until she gets what she wants. She expects her little workers—my daughters—to serve her every need. As for us men? When she’s done with us, she tosses us out in the cold.”
“Spoken like an ex-husband,” I said.
“True. But you’re not the first man I’ve met who Sheila has used up. There was my business partner. My best friend. My head waiter. Her divorce attorney. I hear a city commissioner. Look, she drove me from the hive long ago. It was made clear that none of them had any use for me. I was thrown from the hive and not allowed back in. The same with the rest of the men. After they were no longer useful, they were banished.”
“The bottom line,” I said, “is you’re punishing your daughter and her future because of a grudge against your wife.”
“Mr. Gibb, you’ve no idea what you’re dealing with. If I turn those bonds over, the money goes straight to Sheila. She’s not going to let Lindsay use it for college. Sheila is the queen bee. That family is like this hive. Its existence is to serve the queen. That’s how Sheila works. I’m hoping Lindsay is able to break away from her mother. Start her own hive before she turns twenty-one and before Sheila gets her hands on that money. If I turn it over now, when my daughter’s twenty-one she’ll have no education and no money.”
I thought I’d make another run at the bonds, but he was a stone wall. Even if he did wear this calm, bee-centric philosopher’s face, there was still too much bitterness in him. It had been five years since the divorce and he was still a mess—cut off from everyone and everything selling his honey and tending his bees. I started to wonder about my two and half grand and how to politely get the cash back.
The fresh air kick started my hunger. I said goodbye and worked my way back through the trees, to the road and programmed my GPS unit to get the heck back home.
I’d run my day by Mr. Carmichael tomorrow. I was sure he would have an idea. He always seemed to have a solution.
My hunger was really getting to me and I pulled into a white clapboard restaurant with a gravel parking lot in a town called Butler. Inside it was bright, clean, freshly painted and unencumbered by anything close to ambiance. I had an open face roast beef sandwich and caught up on the day’s news via my phone. The sandwich was serviceable but designed for a guy beefier than me who lifted things heavier than a Mont Blanc and didn’t plant their backsides in an Aeron for eight hours each day.
The waitress came up and laid the check down on the laminate table and I replied by laying down my plastic.
“Cash only,” she said and aimed her Bic toward a sign behind the register that said CASH ONLY.
I smiled and I put my plastic back in my wallet and laid down a twenty and told her to keep it on the nine buck bill. What can I say, she was cute in a country-fried way and I was eager to get the heck back to the asphalt of my neighborhood. My car gave me a little grief when I tried to turn it over in the parking lot, but then she got herself going. After a few miles, the fuel needle started flirting with the E so I pulled into a gas station to separate the two.
The station was small. A single room was surrounded by windows on three sides. I just knew the bathrooms were around back and disgusting and to get into them you had to ask the cashier for the key which was attached to a cinder block. It was from a time when gas stations were filling stations and only sold oil and coolant and wiper blades and three kinds of candy bars and if you wanted a drink the Coke machine was across the parking lot. But at least the pumps had card readers. I pushed my debit card through the slot, yanked it out and waited for approval.