by Kij Johnson
A report would say traffic is light, but that is an overstatement. In the past twenty minutes, she has seen exactly two vehicles going her way on the interstate. Ten minutes ago she passed a semi with the word covenant on the side. And just a moment ago, a rangy Montana State Patrol SUV swept past with its lights flashing at a hundred miles an hour to her eighty-five. As the siren Dopplered past, Sam heaved upright and barked once. Linna glances into her mirror: he’s asleep again, loose-boned across the back seat.
Linna comes over a small hill to see emergency lights far ahead: red, blue, a lilac-white bright as lightning. The patrol SUV blocks the freeway. There are six cars stopped in the lanes behind it, patient as cows lined up at the door of the barn. The sun is too low behind her to light the dip in the highway ahead of the cars. The air collected there seems dark.
Sam wakes up and whines when the car slows. Linna stops next to a night-blue Ford, an Explorer. The other drivers and the state trooper are out of their cars, so she turns off the Subaru’s engine. It has run, with occasional stops for gas and food and dog walks and a half-night of sleep snatched at a Day’s Inn outside of Missoula, for two days. The silence is deafening. The wind that parched Linna’s skin and hair is gone. The air is still and warm as dust, and spicy with asphalt and sage.
Linna lifts Sam from the back seat, places him on the scrub grass of the median. He would have been too heavy to carry last year, but his muscles atrophy as his spine fuses, and he’s lost weight. Sam stretches painfully, a little urine dribbling. He can’t help this; the nerves are being pinched. Linna has covered the back seat of the Subaru with a waterproof tarp and a washable blanket. She’s careful when she takes corners, not wanting him to slide.
Whatever else he is (in pain; old; dying), Sam is still a dog. He hobbles to a shrub with tiny flowers pale as ghosts against the leaves, and sniffs it carefully before marking. He can no longer lift his leg so he squats.
The only sunlight that Linna can still see fades on the storm clouds to the east, honey to rust. The rest of the world is already dim with twilight: ragged outlines of naked rock, grass, and brush stained imperfect grays. A pickup pulls up behind her car and, a moment later, the Covenant truck beside it. Another patrol vehicle blocks the westbound lanes, but its light bar seems much too faint, perhaps a reflection of the sky’s dying light. If time is the measure for distance, then dusk can be a strange place.
Linna clips Sam onto his leash and loops it over her wrist. She rubs at her sore hand as she walks to the patrol SUV. The people standing there stare at the road to the east, but there’s nothing to see.
Linna knows suddenly that this is not twilight or shadows. The air over the road truly is flowing darkness, like ink dropped in moving water. “What is that?” she asks the patrolman, who is tall with very white skin and black hair. Sam pulls to the end of his leash, ears and nose aimed at the darkness.
“The Bee River is currently flooding east- and westbound lanes of Ninety-four, ma’am,” the patrolman says. Linna nods. All the rivers here seem to have strange names: Tongue River, Automatic Creek. “We’ll keep the road closed until it’s safe to pass again, which—”
“The freeway’s closed?” A man holds a cell phone. “You can’t do that! They never close.”
“They do for floods and blizzards and ice storms,” the patrolman says. “And the Bee River.”
“But I have to get to Bismarck tonight!” The man’s voice shakes; he’s younger than he looks.
“That’s not going to be possible,” the trooper says. “Your options would be Twelve and Twenty, and they’re blocked, too. Ninety’s okay, but you’ll have to backtrack. It’s going to be a day or two before anyone can head east here. Town of Terry’s just a couple of miles back and you might be able to find lodging there. Otherwise, Miles City is about half an hour back.”
Linna watches the seething darkness, finally hears what her engine-numbed ears had not noticed before: the hum, reminding her of summers growing up in Iowa, hives hot in the sun. “Wait,” she says: “It’s all bees. That is a river of bees.”
A woman in a green farm coat laughs. “Of course it is. Where you from?”
“Seattle,” Linna says. “How can there be a river of bees?” Someone new arrives and the patrolman turns to him, so the woman in the green coat answers.
“Same way there’s a river of anything else, I suppose. It happens sometimes in June, July. Late May sometimes, like now. The river wells up, floods some roads, runs through some ranch yards.”
“But it’s not water,” Linna says. Sam pushes against her knees. His aching spine stiffens up quickly; he wants to move around.
“Nope. Nice dog.” The woman waggles her fingers at Sam, who pushes his head beneath them. “What’s wrong with him? Spinal fusion?”
“Yeah,” Linna says. “Arthritis, other stuff.”
“That’s not good. Not much they can do, is there? We used to raise shepherds. Lot of medical problems.”
“He’s old.” Linna stoops to wrap an arm around his ribcage, to feel his warmth and the steady thumping of his heart.
The woman pats him again. “Well, he’s a sweetie. Me and Jeff are going to turn back to Miles City, try and get a room and call Shelly—that’s our daughter—from there. You?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Don’t wait too long to decide, hon. The rooms fill fast.”
Linna thanks her and watches her return to their pickup. Headlights plunge as it feels its cautious way across the median to the other lanes. Other cars are doing the same, and a straggling row of tail lights heads west.
Some vehicles stay. “Might as well,” says the man with the Covenant truck. He is homely, heavyset; but his eyes are nice as he smiles at Linna and Sam. “Can’t turn the rig around anyhow, and I want to see what a river of bees looks like with the light on it. Something to tell the wife.” Linna smiles back. “Nice pup,” he adds, and scratches Sam’s head. Leaning heavily against Linna’s leg, Sam stands patiently through it, like a tired but polite child.
She walks Sam back to the Subaru and feeds him on the grass, pouring fresh water into a plastic bowl and offering food and a Rimadyl for the pain. He drinks the water thirstily while she plays with his ears. When he’s done, she lifts him carefully onto the back seat, lays her face against his head. He’s dozing when she rolls his window down and returns to the river of bees.
A patrol car has rolled up the outside shoulder to park beside the SUV, and a second officer has joined the first. Lit by their headlights, the young man with the cell phone still pleads. “I don’t have a choice, officers.”
“I’m sorry, sir.” The patrolman shakes his head.
The man turns to the other officer, a small woman with dark hair in an unruly braid stretching halfway down her back. “I have a Ford Explorer. This—river—is only twenty, thirty feet wide, right? Please.”
The patrolwoman shrugs, says, “Your call, Luke.”
The patrolman sighs. “Fine. Sir, if you insist on trying this—”
“Thank you,” the man says.
“—I have a winch on the patrol vehicle. We’ll attach it to your rear axle, so I can pull you out of trouble if you stall partway. Otherwise unhook it on the other side and I’ll drag it back. Keep all vents and windows closed, parking lights only. Tap your brakes if you need a pull. As slow as the truck will go. And I am serious, sir: the river is dangerous.”
“Yes, of course,” the man says. “I’m really grateful, Officer Tabor.”
“All right then,” the patrolman, Tabor, says, and sighs again. He talks into the radio on his shoulder. “Tim, I’ve got someone who’s going to try and crawl through. I’ve warned him of the dangers, but his wife’s in the hospital in Bismarck, he really wants to try. If he gets through, can you make sure he’s okay?” Indecipherable squawks. “Right, then.”
Linna and the Covenant driver (his name is John, he tells her as they wait, John Backus, from Iowa City originally, now near Nashville, trucki
ng for twelve years, his wife Jo usually comes along but she’s neck-deep in preparations for the oldest’s wedding, on and on) watch the huge Ford roll forward, trailing cable like a dog on an inertia-reel leash. Barely lit by its parking lights, the truck inches onto, into, the dark patch of highway. Blackness curls like smoke, drifts over the truck. It revs its engine for a moment and then dies. Brake lights tap on, and Tabor sighs a third time, sets the winch in motion, and pulls the truck back.
The air is cold, the sky moonless but bright with stars. To warm herself, Linna walks along the line of cars and trucks. People sleep across their front seats, or read or talk or play cards under dome lights. Engines purr, running heaters. The air is sweet with exhaust, an oddly comforting smell. An older couple sit in lawn chairs by their parked RV; the woman offers Linna a Styrofoam cup of coffee and the chance to use their bathroom. Linna accepts both gratefully, but refuses their offer to sleep on the couch.
She does not think she’ll be able to sleep. Stars pace across the sky, their dim light somehow deeper than blackness and yet too bright to sleep through. A coyote or perhaps a dog barks once, a long way away. Back at the car, Linna watches Sam chase something in his sleep, paws twitching in the rhythm of running. Live forever, she thinks, and wills his twisted spine and legs straight and well.
It is very cold and the sky through the windshield is the color of freshwater pearls when Linna wakes, blinks, and remembers. There is half a cup of coffee on the floor of the passenger seat. It’s cold and acidic, but the familiar bitterness anchors her. Sam is still sleeping. He never liked morning, and they moved to Mountain Time as they drove yesterday, so whatever local time it is (4:53, the dashboard clock tells her when she looks), it is actually an hour earlier for them. Once out of the car, she stretches. Her eyes are sticky and her back aches, but the time before dawn is a strange land to her, and she finds herself surprisingly happy.
She walks to the patrol SUV. Tabor sits with the door open, drinking directly from a thermos. “Coffee,” he says. “Still hot. Want some? I lost the cup, though.”
She takes the steel cylinder. The smaller patrol car and its driver are gone, as are the big Ford and the distraught young man. “What happened to the guy who had to get to his wife?”
“We scraped all the bees off the air intakes and got the truck running again. He drove back to Ninety. It’s adding three, four hundred miles, but he’s going to try and go around.”
Linna nods and drinks. The coffee is hot, and it warms her to her toes. “Oh,” she says with delight: “That’s good.” She returns the thermos.
“You get stung last night?” Tabor has seen the white spot on her hand.
She rubs it and laughs a little, oddly embarrassed. “No, right before I left Seattle. And now here’s a river of them. Small world,” she says and looks toward the fog collected in the dip.
“Hmm.” Tabor drinks off some of the coffee. Then: “Listen for it,” he says.
Linna listens. The SUV’s idling engine throbs. A car door clicks open, far back in the line. There’s no wind, no whispering grass or rubbing leaves—but there is a humming, barely audible. “That’s them.” She whispers, as though her voice might disturb them.
“Yeah. The fog is clearing. Look.”
She walks a little toward where the river should be, will be. “No closer,” Tabor behind her warns and she stops. A tiny breeze brushes her cheek. Mist recoils, and patches of darkness show through: asphalt black with sleeping bees. The sky lightens, turns from pearl to lavender to blue. The clouds are gone and the eastern horizon glows. The fog retreats. There is the river.
The river is a dark changeable mist like the shifting of a flock of flying starlings, like a pillar of gnats over a highway in hot August dusk, like a million herring turning. South to north, the river runs like cooling lava, like warm molasses. It might be six feet deep, though in places it is much less, in others much more. It alters as she watches.
The river of bees streams as far as she can see. It flows from the south, down a butte beside the freeway and across the road and into the river bed of the Yellowstone, then pours up over the side of a gully to the northwest. As she watches, more sleeping bees wake and lift to join the deepening river. The buzz grows louder.
Tabor stands beside her now but she cannot look away. “Where does it begin?” she says at last. “Where does it end?”
He is slow answering and she knows he is as trapped in its weird beauty as she. “No one knows,” he says: “Or no one says. My dad used to tell me tales, but I don’t know that he knew, either. Maybe there’s a spring of bees somewhere, and it sinks underground somewhere else. Maybe the bees gather, do this thing, and then go home. There’s no ocean of bees, anyway.”
Others join them, talking in loud and then hushed voices; there are snapshots, videos—“not that the pictures ever come out,” a voice grumbles. This is peripheral. Linna watches the bees. The sun rises, a cherry ovoid blur that shrinks and resolves as it pulls away from the horizon. Pink-gold light fills the hollow. The river quickens and grows. People watch for a time and then walk back to their cars. Their voices grow louder as they move away, conversations full of longing for coffee and breakfast and hot showers and flush toilets. They reassure themselves with the ordinary.
Linna does not move until she hears Sam bark once, the want-to-go-out-now bark. Even then, she walks backward.
“This is going to sound strange,” Linna says to Tabor.
She walked Sam until his joints loosened and he no longer dragged his hind legs. She exchanged pleasantries with the man from the Covenant truck, though now she remembers nothing but his expression, oddly distant and sad as he watched her rub her hand. She drank orange spice tea and ate a fried-egg sandwich when the woman at the RV offered them, and used the little stainless steel bathroom again. The woman’s husband was cooking. He flipped an egg to the ground between Sam’s feet. Sam ate it tidily and then smiled up at the cook. Linna spoke at random, listening for the bees’ hum. “Excuse me,” she remembers saying to the couple, interrupting something. “I have to go now.” She has led Sam back to the patrol SUV, and says:
“This is going to sound strange.”
“Not as strange as you probably think,” Tabor says. He’s typing something into the computer in his vehicle. “Let me guess. You’re going to follow the river.”
“Can I?” she says, her heart leaping. She knows he shouldn’t know this, shouldn’t have guessed; knows she won’t be allowed, but she asks anyway.
“Can’t stop you. There’s the River, and then I saw the sting and I knew. My dad—he was a trooper, back twenty and more years ago. He told me it happens like this sometimes. There’s always a bee sting, he said. Let me see your car.”
She leads Tabor back to the Subaru, lifts Sam into the back seat. The trooper makes her open the back hatch, sees the four gallon jugs of water there. “Good, but could be better. What about food?” She shows him what she has, forty pounds of dog food (she bought it two weeks ago, as though it were a charm to make Sam live long enough to eat it all) and two boxes of granola bars. “Gas?” She has half a tank: just under two hundred miles’ worth maybe. “Get some, next time you’re near a road,” Tabor says. “Subaru, that’s good,” he adds, “but you don’t have much clearance in a Forester. Be careful when you’re off-road.”
“I won’t go off-road,” Linna says. “There’s just too much that can go wrong.”
“Yes, you will,” Tabor says. “You’ll follow the river to its mouth, whatever and wherever that is. I can’t stop you, but at least I can make sure you don’t get into trouble on the way.”
Tabor brings her a heavy canvas bag from his SUV. “This is sort of an emergency kit,” he says. “My dad put it together before he retired. We’ve been keeping it at the base ever since. Got the report and hauled it down with me, figuring someone might show up needing it. Heavy gloves, snakebite kit, wire, some other stuff.”
“Do people get back?” Linna says.
She laughs, suddenly ashamed. “How can you be so calm about this? I know this is all insane and I’m still doing it, but you—”
“This is Montana, ma’am,” Tabor says. “Good luck.”
The aqua clock says 6:08 and the sun is two hands above the horizon when Linna puts the Subaru into gear and eases across the median.
Linna is lucky at first. The exit to Terry and its bridge across the Yellowstone are only a couple of miles back, and she learns her first lesson about following the river: she doesn’t have to see the river of bees because she can taste its current in the air. Terry is a couple of gas stations and fast-food places, a handful of trailers and farmhouses, everything shaded by cottonwoods, their leaves a harsh silver-green when the wind moves through them.
Her second lesson: the river tells her where to go. There is only one road out of Terry, but there is no chance she might make a mistake and take another. She stops long enough to buy gas and road food and breakfast, and eats in the car on her way out of town. Sam is interested, of course, so she feeds him a hash-brown cake by holding it over her shoulder. Soft lips lift the cake from her hand. The vet would not be pleased, but she’s not here and Linna and Sam are.
The road is two empty lanes of worn pavement following a dry streambed through soft-edged badlands. She knows the bees are a mile or two to the east. Gravel roads branch off to the north from time to time. She longs to take one, to see the bees again, but she knows the roads will taper off, end in a farmyard, or turn abruptly in the wrong direction. It will be many miles before she reaches the river’s mouth. These roads will not take her there.
The road changes from worn to worse, and then decays to gravel. Linna slows and slows again. The sun that pours in the passenger windows loses its rosy glow as it climbs, turns flat and hot. The only traffic she sees is a single ancient tractor that might once have been orange, heading into town. The old man driving it wears a red hat. He salutes her with a thermos. She salutes with her own cup of fast-food coffee. The dust he’s raised pours into the car until she rolls the windows closed.
