At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories

by Kij Johnson

  “Are you off soon?”

  Rasali and Kit had made love on the levee against the cold grass. They had crossed the bridge together under the sinking moons, walked back to The Deer’s Hart and bought more beer, the crowds thinner now, people gone home with their families or friends or lovers—the strangers from out of town bedding down in spare rooms, tents, anywhere they could. But Kit was too restless to sleep and he and Rasali ended up back by the mist, down on the dock. Morning was only a few hours away and the smaller moon had set. It was darker now and the mist had dimmed.

  “In a few days,” Kit said, thinking of the trunks and bags packed tight and gathered in his room at The Fish: the portfolio, fatter now and stained with water, mist, dirt and sweat. Maybe it was time for a new one. “Back to the capital.”

  There were lights on the opposite bank, fishers preparing for their work despite the fair, the bridge. Some things don’t change.

  “Ah,” she said. They both had known this. It was no surprise. “What will you do there?”

  Kit rubbed his face and felt stubble under his fingers. “Sleep for a hundred years. Then there’s another bridge they want, down at the mouth of the river, a place called Ulei. The mist’s nearly a mile wide. I’ll go down and look at the site and start working on a budget.”

  “A mile,” Rasali said. “Can you do it?”

  “I think so. I bridged this, didn’t I?” His gesture took in the bridge and the woman beside him. “Ulei is on an alluvial plain. There are some low islands. That’s the only reason it’s possible. So maybe a series of flat stone arches, one to the next. You? You’ll keep building boats?”

  “No.” She leaned her head back and he felt her face against his ear. She smelled sweet and salty. “I don’t need to. I have a lot of money. The rest of the family can build boats but for me that was just what I did while I waited to cross the mist again.”

  “You’ll miss it,” Kit said. It was not a question.

  Her strong hand laid over his. “Mmm,” she said, a sound without implication.

  “But it was the crossing that mattered to you,” Kit said, realizing it. “Just as with me, but in a different way.”

  “Yes,” she said and after a pause: “So now I’m wondering. How big do the Big Ones get in the Mist Ocean? And what’s on the other side?”

  “Nothing’s on the other side,” Kit said. “There’s no crossing something without an end.”

  “Everything can be crossed. Of course it has an end. There’s a river of water deep under the Mist River, yes? And that water runs somewhere. And all the other rivers, all the lakes—they all drain somewhere. There’s a water ocean under the Mist Ocean and I wonder whether the mist ends somewhere out there, if it spreads out and vanishes and you find you are floating on water.”

  “It’s a different element,” Kit said, turning the problem over. “So you would need a boat that works through mist, light enough with that broad belly and fishskin sheathing; but it would have to be deep-keeled enough for water.”

  She nodded. “I want to take a coast-skimmer and refit it, find out what’s out there. Islands, Kit. Big Ones. Huge Ones. Another whole world maybe. I think I would like to be Rasali Ocean.”

  “You will come to Ulei with me?” he said but he knew already. She would come, for a month or a season or a year or even longer, perhaps. They would sleep tumbled together in an inn very like The Fish or The Bitch, and when her boat was finished, she would sail across Ocean, and he would move on to the next bridge or road. Or he might return to the capital and a position at University. Or he might rest at last.

  “I will come,” she said. “For a bit.”

  Suddenly he felt a deep and powerful emotion in his chest: overwhelmed by everything that had happened or would happen in their lives, the changes to Nearside and Farside, the ferry’s ending, Valo’s death, the fact that she would leave him eventually or that he would leave her. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “I’m not,” she said and leaned across to kiss him, her mouth warm with sunlight and life. “It is worth it, all of it.”

  All those losses, but this one at least he could prevent.

  “When the time comes,” he said: “When you sail. I will come with you.”

  A fo ben, bid bont. To be a leader, be a bridge.

  Welsh proverb

  The Evolution of Trickster Stories Among the Dogs of North Park After the Change

  North Park is a backwater tucked into a loop of the Kaw River: pale dirt and baked grass, aging playground equipment, silver-leafed cottonwoods, underbrush, mosquitoes and gnats that blacken the air at dusk. To the south is a busy street. Engine noise and the hissing of tires on pavement mean the park is no retreat. By late afternoon the air smells of hot tar and summertime river bottoms. There are two entrances to North Park: the formal one, of silvered railroad ties framing an arch of sorts, and an accidental little gap in the fence back where Second Street dead-ends into the park’s west side, just by the river.

  A few stray dogs have always lived here, too clever or shy or easily hidden to be caught and taken to the shelter. On nice days (and this is a nice day, a smell like boiling sweet corn easing in on the south wind to blunt the sharper scents), Linna sits at one of the faded picnic tables with a reading assignment from her summer class and a paper bag full of fast food. She waits to see who visits her.

  The squirrels come first and she ignores them. At last she sees the little dust-colored dog, the one she calls Gold.

  “What’d you bring?” he says. His voice, like all dogs’ voices, is hoarse and rasping. He has trouble making certain sounds. Linna understands him the way one understands a bad lisp, or someone speaking with a harelip.

  (It’s a universal fantasy, isn’t it?—that the animals learn to speak and at last we learn what they’re thinking, our cats and dogs and horses: a new era in cross-species understanding. But nothing ever works out quite as we imagine. When the Change happened, it affected all the mammals we have shaped to meet our own needs. They all could talk a little, and they all could frame their thoughts well enough to talk. Cattle, horses, goats, llamas. Pigs. Minks. And dogs and cats. And we found that, really, we prefer our slaves mute.

  (The cats mostly leave, even ones who love their owners. Their pragmatic sociopathy makes us uncomfortable and we bore them, and they leave. They slip out between our legs and lope into summer dusks. We hear them at night, fighting as they sort out ranges, mates, boundaries. The savage sounds frighten us, a fear that does not ease when our cat Klio returns home for a single night asking to be fed and to sleep on the bed. A lot of cats die in fights or under car wheels but they seem to prefer that to living under our roofs, and as I said, we fear them.

  (Some dogs run away. Others are cast out by the owners who loved them. Some were always free.)

  “Chicken and French fries,” Linna tells the dog, Gold. Linna has a summer cold that ruins her appetite and in any case it’s too hot to eat. She brought her lunch leftovers, hours old but still lukewarm: half a Chik-fil-A sandwich and some fries. He never takes anything from her hand, so she tosses the food onto the ground just beyond kicking range. Gold likes French fries so he eats them first.

  Linna tips her head toward the two dogs she sees peeking from the bushes. She knows better than to lift her hand suddenly, even to point or wave. “Who are these two?”

  “Hope and Maggie.”

  “Hi, Hope,” Linna says. “Hi, Maggie.” The dogs dip their heads nervously as though bowing. They don’t meet her eyes. She recognizes their expressions, the hurt wariness: she’s seen it a few times on the recent strays of North Park, the ones whose owners threw them out after the Change. There are five North Park dogs she’s seen so far. These two are new.

  “Story,” says the collie, Hope.

  2. One Dog Loses Her Collar.

  This is the same dog. She lives in a little room with her master. She has a collar that itches, so she claws at it. When her master comes home, he puts a leash on the coll
ar and takes her outside to the sidewalk. There’s a busy street outside. The dog wants to play on the street with the cars, which smell strong and move very fast. When her master tries to take her back inside, she sits down and won’t move. He pulls on the leash and her collar slips over her ears and falls to the ground. When she sees this, she runs into the street. She gets hit by a car and dies.

  This is not the first story Linna has heard the dogs tell. The first one was about a dog who’s been inside all day and rushes outside with his master to urinate against a tree. When he’s done, his master hits him because his master was standing too close and his shoe is covered with urine. One Dog Pisses on a Person. The dog in the story has no name, but the dogs all call him—or her: she changes sex with each telling—One Dog. Each story starts, “This is the same dog.”

  The little dust-colored dog, Gold, is the storyteller. As the sky dims and the mosquitoes swarm, the strays of North Park ease from the underbrush and sit or lie belly-down in the dirt to listen to Gold. Linna listens, as well.

  (Perhaps the dogs always told these stories and we could not understand them. Now they tell their stories here in North Park, as do the dogs in Cruz Park a little to the south, and so across the world. The tales are not all the same though there are similarities. There is no possibility of gathering them all. The dogs do not welcome eager anthropologists with their tape recorders and their agendas.

  (The cats after the Change tell stories as well but no one will ever know what they are.)

  When the story is done and the last of the French fries eaten, Linna asks Hope, “Why are you here?” The collie turns her face away. It is Maggie, the little Jack Russell, who answers. “Our mother made us leave. She has a baby.” Maggie’s tone is matter-of-fact. It is Hope who mourns for the woman and child she loved, who compulsively licks her paw as though she were dirty and cannot be cleaned.

  Linna knows this story. She’s heard it from the other new strays of North Park: all but Gold, who has been feral all his life.

  (Sometimes we think we want to know what our dogs think. We don’t, not really. Someone who watches us with unclouded eyes and sees who we really are is more frightening than a man with a gun. We can fight or flee or avoid the man, but the truth sticks like pine sap. After the Change, some dog owners feel a cold place in the pit of their stomachs when they meet their pets’ eyes. Sooner or later they ask their dogs to find new homes, or they forget to latch the gate, or they force the dogs out with curses and the ends of brooms. Or the dogs leave, unable to bear the look in their masters’ eyes.

  (The dogs gather in parks and gardens, anywhere close to food and water where they can stay out of people’s way. Ten blocks away, Cruz Park is big, fifteen acres in the middle of town. Thirty or more dogs already have gathered there. They raid trash or beg from their former masters or strangers. They sleep under the bushes and the bandstand and the inexpensive civic sculptures. No one goes to Cruz Park on their lunch breaks anymore.

  (In contrast North Park is a little dead end. No one ever did go there and so no one worries much about the dogs, yet.)

  3. One Dog Tries to Mate.

  This is the same dog. There is a female he very much wants to mate with. All the other dogs want to mate with her too, but her master keeps her in a yard surrounded by a chain-link fence. She whines and rubs against the fence. All the dogs try to dig under the fence, but its base is buried too deep. They try to jump over, but it is too tall for even the biggest or most agile dogs.

  One Dog has an idea. He finds a cigarette butt on the street and puts it in his mouth. He finds a shirt in a Dumpster and pulls it on. He walks right up to the master’s front door and presses the bell button. When the master answers the door, One Dog says, “I’m from the men with white trucks. I have to check your electrical statico-pressure. Can you let me into your yard?”

  The man nods and lets him go in back. One Dog takes off his shirt and drops the cigarette and mates with the female. It feels very nice, but when he is done and they are still linked together, he starts to whine.

  The man hears and comes out. He’s very angry. He shoots One Dog and kills him. The female tells One Dog, “You would have been better off if you had found another female.”

  The next day after classes—hot again, and heavy with the smell of cut grass—Linna finds a dog. She hears crying and crouches to peek under a hydrangea, its blue-gray flowers as fragile as paper. It’s a Maltese with filthy fur matted with twigs and burrs. There are stains under her eyes and she is moaning with the terrible sound of an injured animal.

  The Maltese comes nervous to Linna’s outstretched fingers and the murmur of her voice. “I won’t hurt you,” Linna says. “It’s okay.”

  Linna picks the dog up carefully, feeling the dog flinch under her hand as she checks for injuries. She knows already that the pain is not physical. She knows the dog’s story before she hears it.

  The house nearby is massive, a graceful collection of Edwardian gingerbread work and oriel windows and green roof tiles. The garden is large, with a low fence just tall enough to keep a Maltese in. Or out. A woman answers the doorbell. Linna can feel the Maltese vibrate in her arms at the sight of the woman: excitement, not fear.

  “Is this your dog?” Linna asks with a smile. “I found her outside, scared.”

  The woman’s eyes flicker to the dog and away, back to Linna’s face. “We don’t have a dog,” she says.

  (We like our slaves mute. We like to imagine they love us and they do. But they are also with us because freedom and security war in each of us, and sometimes security wins out. They love us. But.)

  In those words Linna has already seen how this conversation will go, the denials and the tangled fear and anguish and self-loathing of the woman. Linna turns away in the middle of the woman’s words and walks down the stairs, the brick walkway, through the gate and north toward North Park.

  The dog’s name is Sophie. The other dogs are kind to her.

  (The story is, that when George Washington died, his will promised freedom for his slaves, but only after his wife had also passed on. A terrified Martha freed them within hours of his death. Though the dogs love us, thoughtful owners can’t help but wonder what they think when they sit on the floor beside our beds as we sleep, teeth slightly bared as they pant in the heat. Do the dogs realize that their freedom hangs by the thread of our lives? The curse of speech, the things they could say and yet choose not to say, makes that thread seem very thin.

  (Some people keep their dogs even after the Change. Some people have the strength to love, no matter what. But many of us only learn the limits of our love when they have been breached. Some people keep their dogs. Many do not.

  (The dogs who stay seem to tell no stories.)

  4. One Dog Catches Possums.

  This is the same dog. She is very hungry because her master forgot to feed her, and there’s no good trash because the possums have eaten it all. “If I catch the possums,” she says, “I can eat them now and then the trash later, because the they won’t be getting it all.”

  She knows that possums are very hard to catch, so she lies down next to a trash bin and starts moaning. Sure enough, when the possums come to eat trash, they hear her and waddle over.

  “Oh, oh, oh,” moans the dog. “I told the rats a great secret and now they won’t let me rest.”

  The possums look around but they don’t see any rats. “Where are they?” the oldest possum asks.

  One Dog says, “Everything I eat ends up in a place inside me like a giant garbage heap. I told the rats and they snuck in, and they’ve been there ever since.” And she let out a great howl. “Their cold feet are horrible!”

  The possums think for a time and then the oldest says, “This garbage heap, is it large?”

  “Huge,” One Dog says.

  “Are the rats fierce?” says the youngest.

  “Not at all,” One Dog tells the possums. “If they weren’t inside me, they wouldn’t be any trouble even for
a possum. Oh! I can feel one dragging bits of bacon around.”

  After whispering among themselves for a time, the possums say, “We can go in and chase out the rats, but you must promise not to hunt us ever again.”

  “If you catch any rats, I’ll never eat another possum,” she promises.

  One by one the possums crawl into her mouth. She eats all but the oldest, who is too tough and stringy to be worth it.

  “This is much better than dog food or trash,” she says.

  (Dogs love us. We have bred them to do this for ten thousand, a hundred thousand, a million years. It’s hard to make a dog hate people though we have at times tried, with our junkyard guards and our attack dogs.

  (It’s hard to make dogs hate people but it is possible.)

  Another day, just at dusk, the sky an indescribable violet. Linna has a hard time telling how many dogs there are now, ten or twelve perhaps. The dogs around her snuffle, yip, bark. One moans, the sound of a husky trying to howl. Words float up: dry, bite, food, piss.

  The husky continues its moaning howl, and one by one the others join in with drawn-out barks and moans. They are trying to howl as a pack but none of them know how to do this, nor what it is supposed to sound like. It is a wolf-secret and they do not know any of those.

  Sitting on a picnic table, Linna closes her eyes to listen. The dogs out-yell the trees’ restless whispers, the river’s wet sliding, even the hissing roaring street. Ten dogs, or fifteen. Or more. Linna can’t tell because they are all around her now, in the brush, down by the Kaw’s muddy bank, behind the cottonwoods, beside the tall fence that separates the park from the street.