Water Rites (8 page)

He was afraid. Afraid. What did he mean, anyway? Nita crossed her arms against the first hint of evening chill, pressing her forearms against the new, tender swell of her breasts. Her body felt strange, as if it wasn’t really hers anymore. The Bee Man’s scared feeling had to do with that. It had a prickly edge that made Nita think of Alberto, when he and Theresa Santorres went for their evening walks with their arms around each other.

Nita wriggled into the sleeping bag. She didn’t want any food. The honey-water had filled her stomach and softened the worst of the pain. The Bee Man moved around in the tent, talking to himself, a few low words she couldn’t quite make out. It was getting cold, like it always did at night. She pulled the thick fabric of the bag up over her shoulders. It smelled like the Bee Man, like honey and sweat and dust.

It smelled strange. She sniffed the dry, night air, missing the familiar smell of the crowded unit, in spite of the hurting anger that filled it. They had lived there almost as long as she could remember. Since Papa died.

I’ll kill the bastard, next time he touches her
, Alberto had snarled.

And they’ll hang you. You’re gonna get us all fired, and what will we do then?
Mama had said that, arguing with Alberto, hissing and angry, after they thought she was asleep. It had been Mama who had made Alberto ask the Bee Man to take her. A hard lump closed her throat, and Nita made a small, choked sound that tried to turn into a sob.

“You hurting?”

She had forgotten his presence, and the Bee Man’s touch made Nita jump.

“Easy, now. Gently. Bad dreams, maybe?” He stroked her tangled hair hesitantly. “Things can look pretty dark, your first night away from your folks,” he said, and he felt like he was remembering. “We’ll get along fine,” he said as he got to his feet. “If you have any more bad dreams, you call me, hear?”

Nita nodded. He didn’t feel so scared now. He felt peaceful, like the bees. She fell asleep, comforted by his quiet song.

*

The Bee Man woke her before dawn. They left the narrow streambed and climbed up into the dry hills, their shadows stretching ahead of them, thin and spindly on the dusty ground.

“We’ll gather firewood later.” The Bee Man broke a limb from a fir with a dry, brittle snap. “I don’t know how much longer the forest’s going to last. It’s too dry for seedlings to make it, and the old trees give in to beetle damage and die. At least the land’s still alive up here. Flowers still bloom. Stuff grows along the bottoms of the old streambeds and in the low places here a little water seeps up. We’re killing the land, down in the valley,” he said. “If the rains came back tomorrow, it would still be a desert down there.”

Nita looked at the dying trees. The Bee Man’s words blew through her, dry and dusty as the wind, full of gray shadows. She hadn’t ever thought of the land as something that could be alive or dead. Land was just . . . land. Dust or rock or bushes. Nita stopped. Two bees crawled over a small spike of fuzzy purple flowerlets that grew from a crack in the rock. Out here, all by themselves, the bees’ song was faint and hard to hear, but it comforted her. Nita scooped them gently from the flower. They buzzed in her closed hand, confused, not angry yet, searching for the vanished sunlight.

“I thought you’d be scared, after yesterday.” The Bee Man looked over her shoulder.

He was pleased with her again. His pleasure warmed Nita, drove away the gray chill of his talk about the dying land. Nita opened her hands and the bees zoomed away.

“There’s a wild nest at the top of this slope,” the Bee Man said. “I figure we might as well take it, now that the honey-bloom’s over.” He pulled two of the flimsy scarves from his pack, handed her one. “You always wear this veil, hear?” He draped it over her head, tucked it carefully into the neck of her shift. “Stings on your arms hurt. But you get one too close to your eye and you can go blind.”

The cloth made it hard to see, but Nita could hear the bees’ song as they got close. They darted in and out of a broken stump, singing contentment. She sang with them as the Bee Man built a small fire where the smoke would drift over the nest. The bees swirled up, confused by the smoke, angry as the Bee man chopped into their dead treetrunk home. Nita hummed the harsh note, changing it, soothing the hive’s distress until the comfort-hum wrapped her, thick as the warm honey-smell rising from the folded layers of golden comb inside the trunk. Fascinated, she leaned over the opened nest. Pulpy white larva filled some of the cells and others had been closed with waxy brown caps. She could see pale, half-formed bees beneath some of the caps.

“I hate to strip the nests like this, leave them to starve.” The Bee Man sighed as he brushed bees from a sticky slab of comb and sealed it into one of the plastic pails they’d brought with them.

So this nest would die? Nita stared at the shattered trunk. Brown bits of broken comb and golden honey stuck to the splintered wood and the bees settled on their ruined nest in a dark layer. Their song would end, because she and the Bee Man had smashed through the wood and taken the comb? When the Bee Man touched her shoulder, Nita jerked away from him.

“Nita?” The Bee Man followed her into the shade of a dying pine. “What’s wrong?”

Nita shook her head, wanting to tell him that it was wrong, that the bees’ song shouldn’t die. The words wouldn’t come. They stuck in her throat, hard and hurting. A bee landed on her hand, sipping at the sticky honey coating her skin. Nita closed her hand over it, crushed it. Slowly, she opened her hand, dropped the dead bee into the dust at the Bee Man’s feet.

The Bee Man sighed. “That nest would have starved out before the next rainy season. It wasn’t big enough to make it through the dry months. I take their honey so that we can eat. I take out the killer bee nests that compete with these.” He stared down the slope of the hillside. “Down in the valley, we grind up those test-tube shrubs, digest them into sugars and grow wheat cells or soybean cells or even orange juice-sacs in tanks. So we eat and we survive, but nothing else can grow down there. Just bushes. We can never go back to the way it was. We’re killing the land to stay alive.” He shook his head bitterly. “You keep running, and all you can do is stay one step ahead of the Dry.”

It had hurt him to take the wild nest, too. He loved the bees. Nita reached out suddenly and touched his hand.

He started a little, as if she’d pinched him, but then he smiled at her. “Let’s take what we’ve got and call it a day,” he said.

*

They went out every day to harvest a careful share of comb from the Bee Man’s hives and to strip the small, wild nests they’d found. The sparse flowers had dried up in the hot sun that seemed to get hotter every day, and no more honey would flow until next spring, he told her.

“I’ve never seen anyone handle bees like you,” the Bee Man said more than once. “I wish I had your talent with ’em.”

He was pleased with her.

When they took shares from the Bee Man’s hives, she sang them comfort and they buzzed gold and black and brown around their heads as they cut the slabs of storage comb free, leaving the larvae-filled cells behind. When they took the wild nests, Nita sang them a gentle song that was full of the Bee Man’s sadness at taking their honey, and the bees settled onto their comb in a dark, quiet layer.

The Bee Man talked to her. He told her how the bees lived, how a worker danced to show the other bees where flowers grew, and how the hive knew when to grow a new queen. He taught her how to live with the bees, how to melt comb into liquid honey and cakes of valuable wax, how to let the bees show her the tiny water seeps, what to eat and not to eat, how to survive in the dry hills.

He told her the names of the flowers; yellow bells and shooting stars down in the crevices, where water seeped up from the winter rains; lupine and desert parsley up high, where it was drier; fescue and wheat grass in tough, dusty clumps up on the ridges, where trees still cast a little shade. He didn’t feel scared any more, and that pleased Nita. He felt warm inside, peaceful as bee song.

His song and the bee song blended, seeping through the years of silence that filled her up, like water soaking into a field. When she was little, before Papa died, she had talked. Nita listened to the Bee Man’s words and wanted to tell him how the bees sounded. He loved the bees, but he didn’t hear them. She was sure of it, and his not-hearing surprised her.

But the words still wouldn’t come.

*

One afternoon, they walked clear down to the edge of the fields to check on the tree-trunk hive where they’d stopped on Nita’s first day with the Bee Man. The hive was gone, replaced by plowed brown dirt and the dusty green tufts of newly planted bushes. Soaker hoses gleamed in the furrows like basking snakes.

“They just ran the machines right over it.” The Bee Man shaded his eyes, squinting against the harsh light. “I should of moved it, never mind whether there were enough flowers up there for another big hive. Too late now.”

He didn’t talk much as they walked back up to the camp. His shoulders drooped and his toes dragged as he walked, raising salty dust that hung behind them in the still air. That evening, they melted the week’s small take of comb. Nita strained out dead bees and larvae, watching foam and liquid wax swirl on the surface of the simmering honey. The Bee Man was still sad, and she sat down beside him, close enough to feel the warmth from his arm against hers. He looked at her as she touched his hand, and smiled, blinking a little, as if he’d been thinking about something else and had forgotten that she was there.

“The fields keep catching up to me,” he told her. “Stick the plants in the ground and kill the ground with salt water. I don’t know.” He stared into the red glow of the coals beneath the iron pot. “It scares me, what we’re doing. I keep moving on, but it’s always right behind me. The Dry. The salty fields. It doesn’t pay to look back.” He rubbed his face.

“My father was a hard man,” he said. “There was only his way to do things, so I took off when I was about your age. I was lucky. I ran into an old beekeeper, who taught me about bees. After awhile, my father didn’t seem so impossible anymore, so I want back.” He laughed, a short, bitter note that made Nita wince. “They were gone. Dad, Mom, the whole town. The Dry had moved in, eaten up the fields, filled the streets with dust. I don’t know what happened to my folks. Someone told me that they went back east to find a cousin, and someone else told me that they went to Portland. I never found them. Maybe they’re dead.” He shook his head slowly. “It doesn’t pay to care too much. One day you turn around, and everything’s gone. Like that hive.”

Nita took his hand in hers, wanting to tell him that the bushes and the Dry were just
things
— just salt and plants and dry land — not killers that could chase you. He started to pull his hand away, then closed his fingers around hers, tight enough to hurt.

“You’re a good listener.” He got stiffly to his feet and lifted the honey pot from the fire. “I thought I was doing Alberto a big favor by taking you on, ruining my reputation in the bargain. I guess my reputation’s still shot,” he said, and laughed.

Nita didn’t understand, but she smiled, too, because he was warm inside again, like the bee song.

*

Nita woke in darkness that night, struggling up from nightmare to the dry rumble of thunder higher in the mountains. Lightning flickered across the horizon and Nita clutched the sleeping bag around her. Thunder made her remember the gunshots. She had been playing in the yard when they drove up. They had carried guns in their hands, had called her father by name.

Thunder boomed again and Nita sat up with a gasp. Cold wind gusted through the camp, shaking the tent, and the thunder cracked again. Hard drops stung Nita’s arms and face. Rain? She stumbled to her feet, but already the shower had moved on, riding the cold wind down the stream-bed. Lightning glared, searing Nita’s eyes with the stark image of the tent, woodpile, and the pot of cooling honey. Then the darkness rushed in again, thick as dirt on a grave, pressing down on her, smothering her. Shivering, Nita slipped into the tent.

The air smelled like plastic, honey, and the Bee Man; thick and comforting. He lay on his side, wrapped in a tangled quilt. The soft rasp of his breathing filled the tent, and he stirred, murmuring in his sleep as Nita curled up beside him. The thunder rumbled again, but it didn’t scare her this time. Maybe it was raining, somewhere. Nita closed her eyes and fell asleep to the soft murmur of the Bee Man’s dreams.

*

In the morning, Nita woke with the Bee Man’s arms around her. His breath tickled her neck, and the warmth of his body against her back made her breasts feel tight and tender. She wriggled closer against him, felt him wake up.

He murmured something, still half asleep, and his arms tightened around her. Nita felt the stir of of his desire — like Alberto and Theresa — felt an echo in her own flesh. It took her by surprise, made her skin go cold and then hot. She pressed back against his warmth full of a strange ache that came from everywhere and nowhere, centering between her legs like a second heartbeat.

The Bee Man’s eyes opened and he sat up, pushing roughly away from her. “What are you doing here?” he asked in a harsh, funny voice.

Scared. He hadn’t felt scared like that in a long time. Nita scrambled to her feet. He was staring at her, frowning, all muddy and mixed up inside, like a pan of wash water after the whole family has used it.

“It’s all right.” He forced a laugh. “You just . . . surprised me. That’s all.” He stared at her for the space of several heartbeats, then began to talk again, too fast. “This is market day, remember? We’re almost out of beans, so we’d better get started if we want to get there before the best stuff is gone.” He stopped, looked at her again. “It’s all right,” he said.

Nita ducked quickly outside.

It wasn’t all right. The Bee Man’s fear clogged the air as he strung full honey jugs together and loaded cakes of wax into the pack. He didn’t look at her, didn’t talk much. Nita kept her eyes on the ground as they made their way down the riverbed to town, hurt by his feelings, unable to shut them out. She didn’t know what she had done to scare him.