At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories

by Kij Johnson

  Once, when she crosses the mouth of a little valley, Linna can see the bees at a distance. She stops there to walk and water Sam and to drink stale water from one of the jugs. The cooling engine ticks a few times, then leaves her in the tiny hissing of the wind in the grasses. The river of bees cannot be heard from here, but she feels the humming in her bones, like true love or cancer.

  She opens the bag that Tabor gave her. There are all the things he mentioned, and others besides: wire-cutters and instructions for mending barbed wire; a Boy Scout manual from the ’50s; flares; a spade; a roll of toilet paper that smells of powder; tweezers and a magnifying glass and rubbing alcohol; stained, folded geological survey maps of eastern Montana; a spare pair of socks; bars of chocolate and water purification tablets; a plastic star map of the northern hemisphere in summer—and a note. Do not damage anything permanently. Close any gates you open—mend any fences you cut—Cattle, tractors and local vehicles receive right of way—Residents mostly know about the river. They’ll allow you to pass through their property so long as you don’t break the fences. It was signed: Richard Tabor. Officer Luke Tabor’s father, then.

  In another small town—the sign says Brockway—the road tees into another dusty two-lane, this one going east-west. She finds a gravel road heading northwest, but it turns unexpectedly and eventually leaves her in a ranch yard in an eddy of barking dogs, Sam yelling back. The next road she tries turns east, then north, then east again. The gravel that once covered it is long gone. The Subaru humps its way through gullies and potholes. She drives over a rise, and the river streams in front of her, blocking off the road.

  She’s close enough to see individual bees but only for an instant before they drop back into the texture of the river. Brownian motion: she can see the bee but she cannot see the river; or she sees the current but not the bees.

  What am I doing? she asks herself. She is fifty miles off the freeway, following hypothetical roads through an empty land in pursuit of something beautiful but impossible and so very dangerous. This is when she learns the third lesson: she cannot help doing this. She backtracks to find a better road, but she keeps slewing around to look behind her as though she has left something behind, and she cries as she drives.

  So she threads her way across eastern Montana, gravel to dirt to cracked tar to dirt, always north, always west. Sometimes she’s in sight of the river. More often it’s only a nagging in her mind: this way. She drives past ranches and ruined lonely barns, past a church of silver wood with daylight shining through its walls. She drives across an earthen dam, a narrow paved ridge between afternoon sunlight on water and a small town straggling under cottonwoods, far below what would be water level if it weren’t for the dam. She crosses streams and dry runs with strange names: Powder Creek, Milk River. When she slows on the narrow bridges to look down, she does not see powder or milk, just water or nothing. Only the river of bees is what it claims to be.

  When she crosses U.S. Highway 2, Linna stops for a while in Nashua. Sam is asleep, adrift in Rimadyl. She parks in the shade and leaves her windows open, and sits under the glare of fluorescent lights in a McDonald’s, stirring crushed ice in a waxed cup. Conversations wash over her. The words are as strange as a foreign language after the hours alone: the river of bees (which blocks Highway 2 less than a mile east of town), but also feline asthma, rubber flip-flops for the twins, and Jake’s summer job canning salmon in Alaska.

  The bees pour north. The roads Linna follows grow sketchier. The Subaru is all-wheel drive and set fairly high, but it lurches through potholes and washouts, and scrapes its undercarriage. Sam pants in her ear until Linna slows to a crawl. He relaxes a little, lies back down. The sun crawls northwest, scalding Linna’s arm and neck and cheek. She thinks sometimes of using the air conditioner but finds she cannot. The dust, the heat, the sun: they are all part of driving to the river’s mouth. Sam seems not to mind the heat, though he drinks almost a gallon of water.

  Linna is able to stay close enough to the river that individual bees sometimes stray into an open window. Black against sun-gold and dust-white, they inscribe intricate calligraphy in the air. Linna cannot read their messages.

  Linna stops when the violet twilight starts to hide things from her. She parks on a ridge beside a single ragged tree that makes the air sharp with juniper. Thinking of snakes, she walks Sam carefully, but it is growing dark and cold and only the hot-blooded creatures remain awake. A bat or perhaps a swift or a small owl veers overhead with the almost inaudible whirring of wings. A coyote barks. Sam pricks his ears but does not respond, except to urinate on a shrub he has been smelling.

  She does not sleep well that night. At one point, great snorting animals surround the Subaru for what seem hours, occasionally bumping into it as they pass. Sam is as awake as she. At first she thinks they’re bears, that she has stumbled somehow upon a river of bears, but starlight shows they are steers. For some reason they are not asleep but travel under the spinning sky, toward water or away from something or out of simple restlessness. Still, she cannot sleep until they are long gone, no more than a memory of shuffling and grunts.

  It is past dawn when Linna brings herself to admit she won’t be sleeping anymore. After the steers passed she couldn’t stop shivering, so she crawled awkwardly over the front seats to curl up with Sam, and pulled his soft blanket over them both. Now his spine presses against her thigh. Each bone is sharp as a juniper knurl. He smells of stale urine and sickness, but behind that is the sweetness that has always been his. She presses her face to his shoulder and inhales deeply. His muskiness works its way into her lungs, her blood and bones.

  People have smells like this, smells that she has collected to herself and stored in the memory of her body; but Sam has been part of her life for longer than anyone but parents and siblings. For the first time, she thinks that perhaps she should have stayed on the road, closer to where veterinarians and their bright clean buildings live; but she has enough Rimadyl to kill Sam if he needs it, and she thinks that death is the only gift she or anyone can give him now.

  At last she climbs from the car, stretches in the surprising simultaneous sensations of cold air and sun’s warmth. “Come on, pup,” she says aloud. Her voice startles her. It’s the first she’s heard since Nashua—yesterday, was it? It seems longer. Sam staggers upright and she lifts him to the ground. He creeps a few steps and then urinates, creeps a few more and pauses to smell a tuft of something yellow-green. She doesn’t bother with the leash.

  Perhaps a hundred yards away, the river hums along, broader and slower now. Linna can see individual straying bees as she squats to urinate, grateful again for the toilet paper in the kit the officer, Tabor, gave her. Something wild and sweet-smelling grows all around her. It might be lavender, though she thinks of lavender as something polite and domesticated, all about freshly ironed sheets and bath salts and tussie-mussies. Bath salts: she sniffs her armpits as she squats and then recoils. Well, dogs like stink.

  The wandering bees explore the flowers around her, spiraling and arrowing like electrons in a cloud chamber. One lands on her stung hand as it rests on her knee. The slight touch of its legs might be no more than an imagined tickle if she did not also see its stocky, velvety bulk. It’s the Classic bee: yellow-and-black striped, small-bodied, dark transparent wings folded tidily. It strokes the air with tiny feelers, then leans its head over and touches its mouth to the white spot on her hand, as though tasting her. For a dizzying moment she wonders if it’s going to snap her up the way Sam snapped up the bee that gave her the sting back in Seattle.

  Behind her, Sam gives a yelp, all surprise and pain. Linna whirls around and feels a drop of her urine splash against her knee as she stands. There is a hot sharp shock to her hand. A bee sting.

  “Sam?” she shouts and stumbles forward, dragging her pants up, feverish with panic or the sting. She knows he’s going to die, but not yet, her mind tells her. Too soon.

  Sam limps to her, a comical look of distress
on his face. She’s reassured, as she’s seen this expression before and it doesn’t mesh with her fears. She folds to her knees beside him (lightheaded or concerned) and looks at the paw he’s lifting. A tiny barb against a pale patch of skin on his pad. She finds herself laughing hysterically as she removes the stingers, first from his paw and then from her hand. Officer Tabor’s father knew what he was doing.

  Linna has not driven more than five miles an hour since awakening, though these terms—mile, hour—seem irrelevant. It might be better or more accurate to say she has driven down forty little canyons and up thirty-nine of them, and crossed twelve ridges and two surprising meadows, softly sloped as any Iowa corn field and spangled with flowers that are small and very blue: time measured as distance. She thinks perhaps she’s crossed into Canada but there’s been nothing to indicate this. She’s running low on water and is tired of granola bars, but she hasn’t seen anything that looked like a town since Nashua.

  The trail she follows is a winding cow or deer path. She keeps one set of tires on the track and hopes for the best, which works well so long as she goes slowly enough. She keeps inspecting where the bee stung her earlier. There is an angry swelling across her hand, centered on a weeping white spot, half an inch from the first. What is half an inch, if measured in time? Linna doesn’t know but she worries over the question, as though there might be an answer.

  Since the sting the light has seemed very bright, and she is by turns hot and cold. She wonders whether she should turn around and try to find a hospital (where? how can she know when she measures distance by event?). But the calligraphy of the bees hovers; she is just on the edge of making sense of it; she is reluctant to give this up.

  The Subaru grinds to a stop in a gully that is too deep to cross. Linna feels the river: close, it says, so close; so she lifts Sam out and they walk on. He is very slow. There are bees everywhere, like spray thrown from a mountain stream. They rest on her hands and tickle her face with their feather-tip feet, but she is not stung again. Sam watches them, puffs air at one that clings to the silver-furred leaves of a plant. They cross a little ridge and then a second one. There is the mouth of the river of bees.

  The bees pool in a grassy basin. As she watches, the river empties a thousand—a million—more into the basin, but the level never changes and she never sees bees leave. It is as though they sink into the ground, into some secret ocean.

  She knows she is hallucinating, because at the bank of the lake of bees is an unwalled tent hung with tassels and fringe. Six posts hold a white silk roof. The sunlight through it is intimate, friendly. And because this is a hallucination Linna approaches without fear, Sam beside her, his ears pricked forward.

  Linna cannot later say whether the creature under the tent was a woman or a bee, though she is sure this is the queen of the bees, as sure as she is of death and sunlight. She knows that—if the creature was a woman—she had honey-colored eyes and black hair, with silver streaks glinting in both. And if the creature was a bee, her faceted eyes were deep as Victorian jet, and her voice held a thousand tones at once.

  But it’s easier to think of the queen of the bees as a woman. The woman’s gold skin glows against her white gown. Her hands are very long and slender, with almond-shaped nails. They pour tea and arrange cakes on plates ornamented with pink roses. For a disconcerting moment, Linna sees slim black legs arrange the cakes and blinks the image back to hands. Yes, better to think of her as a woman. “Please,” the queen of the bees says. “Join me.”

  In the shade of the awning are folding teakwood chairs draped with white fringed shawls. Linna sinks into one, takes a cup that is as thin as eggshell, and sips. Its contents are warm and clearly tea, but they are also cooling and sweet and fill her with a sudden happiness. She watches the queen of the bees place a saucer filled with tea on the ground beside Sam (a thousand dark facets reflect his face. No. Simple gold eyes, caught in a mesh of laugh-lines fine as thread that smile down at him). He drinks it thirstily, grins up at the woman.

  “What is his name?” she says. “And yours?”

  “Sam,” says Linna. “I’m Linna.”

  The woman gives no name for herself but gestures to her skirts as they swirl around her ankles. A small cat with long gray-and-white fur and startling blue eyes sits against one foot. “This is Belle.”

  “You have a cat,” Linna says. Of all the things she has seen today, this seems the strangest somehow.

  The woman reaches down a hand. Belle walks over to sniff her fingers. Her fur is thick but it doesn’t conceal how thin she is. Linna can see the bumps of her spine in sharp outline. “She’s very old now.”

  “I understand,” Linna says softly. She meets the woman’s eyes, sees herself reflected in their gold, their black depths.

  Silence between them stretches, defined by the eternal unchanging humming of the river of bees, the scent of sage and grass in the sun. Linna drinks her tea and eats a cake. Across from her the bee’s body glows brilliantly in the silk-muted sun.

  Linna holds out the injured hand. “Did you do this?”

  The woman touches Linna’s hand where the two stings burn. The pain is there, under fingers that flicker soft as antennae, and then it is not. Linna inspects her hand. The white spots are gone. Linna’s mind is as clear as the dry air, so she knows this is an illusion. She must still be having some sort of reaction, or everything—the tent, the woman, the lake of bees—would be gone. “Can you heal your cat like this?”

  “No.” The woman bends to pick up Belle, who curls up in her thin black insect’s legs. Belle’s blue eyes blink up at the face of the queen of the bees. “I cannot stop death, only postpone it for a time.”

  Linna’s mouth is dry. “Can you do that for Sam? Make him run again?” She leans over to touch Sam’s ruff. The blood rushing to her head turns everything red for a moment.

  “I cannot say. I hope that you and I will talk a while. It’s been many years since I had someone to talk to, since the man who brought me Belle. She couldn’t eat. Her jaw—” the cat purrs against the bee’s thorax “—it was ruined, a cancer. He walked the last day after his car gave up, carrying her. We talked for a time, and then he gave her to me and left. So long ago now.”

  “What was his name?” Linna thinks of a canvas bag back in the Subaru, filled with all the right things.

  “Tabor,” she says. “Richard Tabor.”

  And so they talk, eating cakes and drinking tea under the silk awning of the queen of the bees. Linna recalls certain things, but cannot later say whether they are hallucinations; or stories she was told or told herself; or things she did not speak of but knew. She remembers the taste of sage pollen, bright and smoky on what might be her tongue or might be her imagination. They talk of (or visit, or dream of) countless infants, creamy smooth and packed safe in their close cribs; small towns in the middle of nowhere; great cities; towers and highways seething with urgent activity. They talk of (or visit, or dream of) great tragedies—disaster, whole races destroyed by disease or cruelty or misfortune—and small ones, drizzly days and mislaid directions and dirt and vermin. Later, Linna cannot recall which stories or visions or dreams were about people and which were about bees.

  The sun eases into the west. Its light crawls onto the table. It touches the black forefoot of the queen of the bees. She stands and stretches, then gathers Belle into her arms. “I must go.”

  Linna stands as well and notices for the first time that the river is gone, leaving only the lake of bees, and even this is smaller than it was. “Can you heal Sam?” she says suddenly.

  “He cannot stay with you and stay alive.” The woman pauses, as though choosing her words. “If you and Sam chose, he could stay with me.”

  “Sam?” Linna puts down her cup carefully, trying to conceal her shaking hands. “I can’t give him to anyone. He’s old, he’s too sick. He needs pills.” She slips from her seat to the dry grass beside Sam. He struggles to his feet and presses his face against her chest, as he
has since he was a puppy.

  The queen of the bees looks down at them both, stroking Belle absently. The cat purrs and presses against her black-velvet thorax. Faceted eyes reflect a thousand images back to Linna, her arms around a thousand Sams.

  “He’s mine. I love him, and he’s mine.” Linna’s chest hurts.

  “He’s Death’s now,” the woman says. “Unless he stays with me.”

  Linna bends her face to his ruff, smells the warm living scent of him. “Let me stay with him then. With you.” She looks up at the queen of the bees. “You miss company. You said so.”

  The black heart-shaped head tips back. “No. To be with me is to have no one.”

  “There’d be Sam. And the bees.”

  “Would they be enough for you? A million million subjects? Ten thousand lovers, all as interchangeable and mindless as gloves? No friends, no family, no one to pull the sting from your hand?”

  Linna’s eyes drop. She cannot bear to look into that fierce face, proud and searingly alone.

  “I will love Sam with all my heart,” the queen of the bees continues in a voice soft as a hum. “Because I will have no one else.”

  Sam has rolled to his side, waiting patiently for Linna to remember to scratch him. Live forever, she thinks, and wills his twisted spine and legs straight and well.

  “All right then,” she whispers.

  The queen of the bees exhales sweet air. Belle makes a tired cranky noise, a sort of question. “Yes, Belle,” she says, and touches her with what might be a long white hand. Belle sighs once and is still.