The Secret Life of Bees (21 page)

Zach and I both turned and looked through the back window. Three teenaged colored boys stood on the sidewalk, drinking R.C. Colas out of the bottle and glaring over at the men.

‘Let’s come back another time,’ I said.

‘It’ll be okay,’ Zach said.

‘You wait here.’

No, it won’t be okay, I thought. As he slid out of the honey wagon, I heard the boys call Zach’s name. They crossed the street and came over to the honey wagon. Glancing through the window at me, they gave Zach a few playful shoves. One of them waved his hand in front of his face like he’d bitten into a Mexican pepper.

‘Who you got in there?’ he said. I looked at them, tried to smile, but my mind was on the men, who I could see were watching us. The boys saw it, too, and one of them—who I would later find out was named Jackson—said real loud, ‘You gotta be dumb as dirt to believe Jack Palance is coming to Tiburon,’ and all of them laughed. Even Zach. The man holding the shovel handle walked right up to the truck bumper and stared at the boys with that same half smile, half sneer I had seen on T. Ray’s face a thousand times, the sort of look conjured from power without benefit of love, and he yelled, ‘What did you say, boy?’

The murmuring noise on the street fell away. The beagle dropped his ears and slunk off under a parked car. I saw Jackson bite down, causing a tiny ripple across his jaw. I saw him raise his R.C. Cola bottle over his head. And throw it. I closed my eyes as it flew out of his hand. When I opened them again, there was glass sprayed across the sidewalk. The man with the shovel handle had dropped it and had his hand over his nose. Blood seeped through his fingers. He turned back to the other men.

‘That nigger busted open my nose,’ he said, sounding more surprised than anything. He looked around, confused for a moment, then headed into a nearby store, dripping blood all the way. Zach and the boys stood by the truck door in a little knot, stuck to the pavement, while the rest of the men walked over and formed a half circle around them, hemming them in against the truck.

‘Which one of you threw that bottle?’ one man said. The boys didn’t open their mouths.

‘Bunch of cowards,’ another man said. This one had picked up the shovel handle from the sidewalk and was jabbing it in the air in the boys’ direction every time they moved.

‘Just tell us which one of you it was, and you other three can go,’ he said. Nothing. People had started coming out of the stores, gathering in clumps. I stared at the back of Zach’s head. I felt like my heart had a little ledge on it and I was standing there leaning as far out as I could, waiting to see what Zach would do. I knew that being a snitch was considered the lowest sort of person, but I wanted him to point his finger and say, The one over there. He did it. That way he could climb back into the honey truck and we would be on our way. Come on, Zach. He turned his head and looked at me from the corner of his eye. Then he shrugged his shoulder slightly, and I knew it was over and done. He would never open his mouth. He was trying to say to me, I’m sorry, but these are my friends. He chose to stand there and be one of them. I watched the policeman put Zach and the other three boys in his car. Driving away, he turned on his siren and red light, which seemed unnecessary, but I guess he didn’t want to disappoint the audience on the sidewalk. I sat in the truck like I had frozen and the world had frozen around me. The crowd faded away, and all the cars downtown went home one by one. People closed up their stores. I stared through the windshield as if I was watching the test pattern that came on television at midnight. After the shock wore off some, I tried to think what to do, how to get home. Zach had taken the keys, or I might’ve tried driving myself, even though I didn’t know gears from brakes. There wasn’t a store open now to ask to use a phone, and when I spotted a pay phone down the street, I realized I didn’t have a dime. I got out of the truck and walked. When I got to the pink house a half hour later, I saw August, June, Rosaleen, Neil, and Clayton Forrest gathered in the long shadows near the hydrangeas. The murmur of their voices floated up into the dying light. I heard Zach’s name. I heard Mr. Forrest say the word ‘jail.’

I guessed that Zach had called him with his one phone call, and here he was, breaking the news.

Neil stood next to June, which told me they hadn’t really meant all that don’t you come back and you selfish bitch that they’d hurled at each other. I walked toward them, unnoticed. Someone down the road was burning grass clippings. The whole sky smelled sour green, and stray pieces of ash flicked over my head. Coming up behind them, I said, ‘August?’

She pulled me to her.

‘Thank goodness. Here you are. I was about to come looking for you.’

I told them what had happened as we walked back to the house. August’s arm was around my waist like she was afraid I’d keel over again in a blind faint, but really, I had never been more present. The blue in the shadows, the shape of them against the house, how they looked like certain unkind animals—a crocodile, a grizzly bear—the smell of Alka-Seltzer circulating over Clay- ton Forrest’s head, the white part in his hair, the weight of our iring strapped around our ankles. We could hardly walk for it. We sat in the ladder-back chairs around the kitchen table, ex- cept for Rosaleen, who poured glasses of tea and set a plate of pimiento-cheese sandwiches on the table, as if anybody could eat. Rosaleen’s hair was done up in perfect cornrow plaits, which I guessed May had done for her after supper.

‘Now, what about bail?’ August said. Clayton cleared his throat.

‘Judge Monroe is out of town on vacation, so nobody is getting out before next Wednesday, it looks.’

Neil stood up and walked over to the window. His hair was cut in a neat square at the back. I tried to concentrate on it to keep from breaking down. Next Wednesday was five days from now. Five days.

‘Well, is he all right?’ asked June.

‘He wasn’t hurt, was he?’

‘They only let me see him for a minute,’ said Clayton.

‘But he seemed all right.’

Outside, the night sky was moving over us. I was aware of it, aware of the way Clayton had said he seemed all right, as if we all understood he wasn’t but would pretend otherwise. August closed her eyes, used her fingers to smooth out the skin on her forehead. I saw a shiny film across her eyes the beginning of tears. Looking at her eyes, I could see a fire inside them. It was a hearth fire you could depend on, you could draw up to and get warm by if you were cold, or cook something on that would feed the emptiness in you. I felt like we were all adrift in the world, and all we had was the wet fire in August’s eyes. But it was enough. Rosaleen looked at me, and I could read her thoughts. Just because you broke me out of jail, don’t get any bright ideas about Zach. I understood how people became career criminals. The first crime was the hardest. After that you’re thinking, What’s one more? A few more years in the slammer. Big deal.

‘What are you gonna do about this?’ said Rosaleen, standing beside Clayton, looking down at him. Her breasts sat on her stomach, and her fists were planted in her hips. She looked like she wanted us all to fill our lips with snuff and go directly to the Tiburon jail and spit on people’s shoes. It was plain Rosaleen had fire in her, too. Not hearth fire, like August, but fire that burns the house down, if necessary, to clean up the mess inside it. Rosaleen reminded me of the statue of Our Lady in the parlor, and I thought, If August is the red heart on Mary’s chest, Rosaleen is the fist.

‘I’ll do my best to get him out,’ said Clayton, ‘but I’m afraid he’s got to stay in there a little while.’

I reached into my pocket and felt the black Mary picture, remembering the things I’d planned to say to August about my mother. But how could I do that now, with this terrible thing happening to Zach? Everything I wanted to say would have to wait, and I’d go back to the same suspended animation I’d been in before.

‘I don’t see why May needs to know about this,’ June said.

‘It will do her in. You know how she loves that boy.’

Every one of us turned to look at August.

‘You’re right,’ she said.

‘It would be too much for May.’

‘Where is she?’ I asked.

‘In her bed, asleep,’ Rosaleen said.

‘She was worn out.’

I remembered I had seen her in the afternoon, out by the wall, pulling a load of stones in the wagon. Building onto her wall. As if she sensed a new addition was called for. The jail in Tiburon did not have curtains like the one in Sylvan. It was concrete-block gray, with metal windows and poor lighting. I told myself it was an act of stupidity to go inside. I was a fugitive from justice, and here I was breezing into a jail where there were probably policemen trained to recognize me. But August had asked if I wanted to come with her to visit Zach. How was I going to say anything but yes to that? The policeman inside had a crew cut and was very tall, taller than Neil, and Neil was Wilt Chamberlain size. He didn’t seem especially glad to see us.

‘Are you his mother?’ he asked August. I looked at his name tag. Eddie Hazelwurst.

‘I’m his godmother,’ August said, standing very erect, like she was having her height measured.

‘And this is a friend of the family.’

His eyes passed over me. The only thing he seemed suspicious about was how a girl as white as me could be a friend of the family. He picked up a brown clipboard from a desk and popped the fastener up and down while he tried to decide what to do with us.

‘All right, you can have five minutes,’ he said. He opened a door into a corridor that led to a single row of four jail cells, each of them holding a black boy. The smell of sweating bodies and sour urinals almost overpowered me. I wanted to bring my fingers up to pinch my nose, but I knew that would be the worst insult. They couldn’t help that they smelled. They sat on benchlike cots hooked along the wall, staring at us as we passed. One boy was throwing a button against the wall, playing some kind of game. He stopped when we came by. Mr. Hazelwurst led us to the last cell.

‘Zach Taylor, you got visitors,’ he said, then glanced at his watch. When Zach stepped toward us, I wondered if he’d been hand- cuffed, fingerprinted, photographed, pushed around. I wanted so much to reach through the bars and touch him, to press my fingers against his skin, because it seemed only by touch that I could be sure all this was actually happening. When it was apparent Mr. Hazelwurst wasn’t leaving, August began to speak. She spoke about one of the hives she kept over on the Haney farm, how it had up and swarmed.

‘You know the one,’ she said.

‘The one that had trouble with mites.’

She went into minute detail about the way she’d searched high and low, into the dusk hours, combing the woods out past the watermelon fields, finally finding the bees in a magnolia sapling, the whole swarm hanging there like a black balloon caught in the branches.

‘I used the funnel to drop them in a swarm box,’ she said, ‘then I hived them again.’

I think she was trying to put it in Zach’s mind that she would never rest till he was back home with us. Zach listened with his eyes watery brown. He seemed relieved to keep the conversation on the level of bee swarms. I’d worked on lines I wanted to say to him, too, but in the mo ment I couldn’t remember them. I stood by while August asked him questions—how was he doing, what did he need? I watched him, filled with tenderness and ache, wondering what it was that connected us. Was it the wounded places down inside people that sought each other out, that bred a kind of love between them? When Mr. Hazelwurst said, ‘Time’s up, let’s go,’ Zach cast his eyes in my direction. A vein stuck out right above his temple. I watched it quiver, the blood pulsing through it. I wanted to say something helpful, to tell him we were more alike than he knew, but it seemed ridiculous to say that. I wanted to reach through the bars and touch the vein with the blood rushing through it. But I didn’t do that either.

‘Are you writing in your notebook?’ he asked, his face and voice suddenly, oddly, desperate. I looked at him and nodded. In the next cell, the boy—Jack- son—made a noise, a kind of catcall, that caused the moment to seem silly and cheap. Zach shot him an angry look.

‘Come on, you’ve had your five minutes,’ the policeman said.

August placed her hand on my back, nudging me to leave. Zach seemed as if he wanted to ask me something. He opened his mouth, then closed it.

‘I’ll write this all down for you,’ I said.

‘I’ll put it in a story.’

I don’t know if that’s what he wanted to ask me, but it’s something everybody wants—for someone to see the hurt done to them and set it down like it matters. We went around not bothering to smile, even in front of May. When she was in the room, we didn’t talk about Zach, but we didn’t act like the world was fine and rosy either. June resorted to her cello, the way she always did when sorrow came along. And walking to the honey house one morning, August stopped and stared at the tire ruts in the driveway left by Zach’s car. The way she stood there, I thought she might start to cry. Everything I did felt heavy and difficult—drying the dishes, kneeling for evening prayers, even pulling down the sheets to get into bed. On the second day of the month of August, after the supper dishes were washed up, and the Hail Marys had been done, August said, No more moping tonight, we’re going to watch Ed Sullivan. And that’s what we were doing when the phone rang. To this day August and June wonder how our lives would have been different if one of them had answered the phone instead of May. I remember that August made a move to answer it, but May was closest to the door.

‘I’ll get it,’ she said. No one thought a thing about it. We fixed our eyes on the television, on Mr. Sullivan, who introduced a circus act involving monkeys that rode tiny scooters across a high wire. When May stepped back into the room a few minutes later, her eyes zigzagged from face to face.

‘That was Zach’s mother,’ she said.

‘Why didn’t you tell me about him getting put in jail?’

She looked so normal standing there. For a moment none of us moved. We watched her like we were waiting for the roof to cave in. But May just stood there, calm as she could be. I started thinking maybe some sort of miracle had taken place and she’d somehow gotten cured.