“Follow me,” he said. For some dumb reason I followed him.
We walked without talking for about five minutes then crested a hill that looked down into a shallow valley. A creek wandered through it and three large oak trees canopied dozens of white boxes.
“I keep bees,” he said.
I stopped.
“Keep walking,” he said. “If you’re brave enough to go to bed with Sheila, you’re brave enough to take an up close look at some bees. Maybe even help out. Know anything about bees?”
“No,” I said. I followed him a bit slowly. “Don’t we need some protection? A white jumpsuit? That funny little hat with the face net?”
“No. Not these bees. They’re nice. Italians. And it’s a cool day. They’re nice on cool days. I’m just doing a spot check.”
“I’d prefer to talk to you about those bonds of your daughter's.”
He ignored me. He used the hive tool to lift the lid off a hive. The buzz of thousands of bees quickly became a minor roar. A cloud of them flew up from the box and past Nichols. He didn’t seem to notice. I hung back. He did a bit of prying with the hive tool and seemed to loosen something. He pulled out a wooden frame holding what looked to be honeycomb, but a white film that had the look of solidified bacon grease covered it.
“This is capped honey,” he said. “Under the thin layer of white wax is the honey. You skim the wax off, put this frame through a centrifuge and you got wonderful, raw honey.”
“Is this how you pay the bills?”
“I ain’t got much in the way of bills,” he said. “Just keep the trailer heated when it gets cold. And some grub.”
“And your daughters?”
“Sheila took everything I’ve got.”
“She doesn’t have enough to send Lindsay to college on,” I said. I heard him snicker.
He put the frame back into the box then lifted the entire box up. It exposed another taller box that it was resting on.
“That top box is the honey super,” he said. “That is where the bees keep all the honey. This second, lower box is where the queen lives with most of the rest of the bees.
“You know anything about bees?” he asked again. I shook my head no again and kept as far a distance from the bees as I could without tempting Austin Nichols into a clucking j’accuse. I didn’t want to look like a chicken.
He used his hive tool again to loosen the wooden frame and pulled out a mass of bees. He was examining the surface.
“Bingo!” he said.
“Bingo?”
“Bingo!”
“Okay,” I said.
He didn’t speak for a moment then looked up with a grin and said, “There she is.”
“Who’s there?”
“The queen.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I almost never see her.”
“Okay.”
“So you really know nothing about bees, eh?”
I didn’t bother answering this time.
“The bees live in a hive,” he said in a tone that made me feel like I was back sitting in a college lecture hall. “The hive is a superorganism. You know what I mean?”
“Yeah,” I said then said, “No, I don’t.”
“No single bee—that solitary, lone organism—can live on its own. Each must be part of a hive—the superorganism. There are no loners in the bee world. Together they form one single organism.”
He kept talking. A bee landed on the front of my shirt and got my attention. He noticed it.
“She’ll fly away soon enough,” he said then went back to his lecture.
“If we think of the hive as a superorganism—a single organism—then what I’ve done here by taking this hive apart is akin to cutting into a single animal. I’ve opened up the beast and I’ll have to put it back together again. It’s not as damaging as, say, cutting into a cow, but the superorganism is still damaged.”
The bee flew away and I breathed again.
“Now inside this superorganism are three players. The queen, the workers and the drones.”
I made the feigned interest sound. A cross between a grunt and a sigh.
“Now when a queen dies, the workers feed a few already laid female eggs a special compound called royal jelly. These eggs getting the jelly will develop into queens. The thousands of female eggs that don’t get the jelly become workers. Now once a queen makes it out of her cell you know what the first thing she does is?”
I made the feigned interest sound again but gave it a hurry-it-up lilt. He didn’t notice.
“She kills the other queen cells. Her sisters! She sticks her stinger in their little egg cells and stirs ‘em up like a late term abortion. Kills ‘em all one-by-one. Her first act as queen is murder. And her second act is copulation. Once her wings dry she goes on her mating flight. That’s where the drones come in. Drones are the only males in the hive. They chase after the queen and as many as she’ll allow have a go at her.”
He looked up into the air. “Up there,” he said pointing, “every queen is a member of the one-hundred-foot club. With multiple partners. Once she’s had enough of the drones, she flies back to her hive and starts laying eggs and never mates again.”
I stifled a yawn. I saw where this was going.
“The majority of the bees are the workers. They’re unfertilized females. Their job is to serve the queen. They feed the queen by hand and quite literally pick up her crap. They go out and collect honey and pollen and store it and work it. They raise and feed the young. The workers haul out dead bees and guard the entrances against predators.”
“What do the drones do?” he asked rhetorically. “They hang out around the hive. If the queen gets killed or dies they’ll be there to have another go at the new queen. Otherwise, they just hang out. At the end of the summer, when all the eggs have been laid and there’s no need for drones, the queen gives the command and all the workers kick them out. The drones try to get back in, but the workers won’t let them. They all die within a day of being kicked out.”
“Can we talk about your daughter and Sheila?” I asked.
“We have been, Mr. Gibb.”
I rolled my eyes. The metaphor was wearing on my nerves. “Sheila is definitely a queen bee,” he said. “She mates until she gets what she wants. She expects her little workers—my daughters—to serve her every need. As for us men? When she’s done with us, she tosses us out in the cold.”
“Spoken like an ex-husband,” I said.
“True. But you’re not the first man I’ve met who Sheila has used up. There was my business partner. My best friend. My head waiter. Her divorce attorney. I hear a city commissioner. Look, she drove me from the hive long ago. It was made clear that none of them had any use for me. I was thrown from the hive and not allowed back in. The same with the rest of the men. After they were no longer useful, they were banished.”
“The bottom line,” I said, “is you’re punishing your daughter and her future because of a grudge against your wife.”
“Mr. Gibb, you’ve no idea what you’re dealing with. If I turn those bonds over, the money goes straight to Sheila. She’s not going to let Lindsay use it for college. Sheila is the queen bee. That family is like this hive. Its existence is to serve the queen. That’s how Sheila works. I’m hoping Lindsay is able to break away from her mother. Start her own hive before she turns twenty-one and before Sheila gets her hands on that money. If I turn it over now, when my daughter’s twenty-one she’ll have no education and no money.”
I thought I’d make another run at the bonds, but he was a stone wall. Even if he did wear this calm, bee-centric philosopher’s face, there was still too much bitterness in him. It had been five years since the divorce and he was still a mess—cut off from everyone and everything selling his honey and tending his bees. I started to wonder about my two and half grand and how to politely get the cash back.
The fresh air kick started my hunger. I said goodbye and worked my way back through the trees, to
the road and programmed my GPS unit to get the heck back home.
I’d run my day by Mr. Carmichael tomorrow. I was sure he would have an idea. He always seemed to have a solution.
My hunger was really getting to me and I pulled into a white clapboard restaurant with a gravel parking lot in a town called Butler. Inside it was bright, clean, freshly painted and unencumbered by anything close to ambiance. I had an open face roast beef sandwich and caught up on the day’s news via my phone. The sandwich was serviceable but designed for a guy beefier than me who lifted things heavier than a Mont Blanc and didn’t plant their backsides in an Aeron for eight hours each day.
The waitress came up and laid the check down on the laminate table and I replied by laying down my plastic.
“Cash only,” she said and aimed her Bic toward a sign behind the register that said CASH ONLY.
I smiled and I put my plastic back in my wallet and laid down a twenty and told her to keep it on the nine buck bill. What can I say, she was cute in a country-fried way and I was eager to get the heck back to the asphalt of my neighborhood. My car gave me a little grief when I tried to turn it over in the parking lot, but then she got herself going. After a few miles, the fuel needle started flirting with the E so I pulled into a gas station to separate the two.
The station was small. A single room was surrounded by windows on three sides. I just knew the bathrooms were around back and disgusting and to get into them you had to ask the cashier for the key which was attached to a cinder block. It was from a time when gas stations were filling stations and only sold oil and coolant and wiper blades and three kinds of candy bars and if you wanted a drink the Coke machine was across the parking lot. But at least the pumps had card readers. I pushed my debit card through the slot, yanked it out and waited for approval.
‘AUTHORIZING’ flashed once, ‘AUTHORIZING’ flashed again then the third ‘AUTHORIZING’ was interrupted by a ‘DECLINED.’ I was irritated. I pulled out my credit card. I put it in the slot and got ‘AUTHORIZING… AUTHORIZING… AUTHORIZING… DECLINED.’
I was getting pissy and ready to throw a fit over my slight inconvenience. I popped inside.
“Your card reader is fouled up,” I said. “Can you run my card in here?”
A middle-aged guy with pumpkin teeth took them both and played the AUTHORIZING-DECLINED game with both my cards.
“We take cash,” he said a bit sarcastically.
I looked at my wallet. It looked back empty. That twenty I gave the waitress was all the cash I had on me. “I’m tapped,” I told the guy and went out to my car.
I called my bank first. My balance was pennies. Their screw up, I knew, but I was panicking. Some perfunctory bank service rep couldn’t have cared less. She let me know a check went through that morning for almost exactly what I had on balance. I swore. She matter-of-factly offered to do an inquiry. No dice on getting me some cash now though. I called my credit card company. I’d been maxed out.
I got a bit pathetic. What’s going on, I whined to myself. I was stuck and what rhymed with stucked. I turned the car over and started to drive. If I didn’t make it I’d call… I didn’t know who I’d call. All my college buddies disappeared in the haze of scandal when my father’s business collapsed. I’d been fired from most jobs and never stayed in touch with the guys I met at them. I hadn’t talked to my sister in two years. Dad was in the ground and mom was worse off living in Florida. I suddenly felt lonely.
So I drove.
I came up five miles short. My Motown beast shuttered then sputtered. I jerked the wheel side to side trying to splash gas into the fuel pick up. I must have scored because she went another one hundred feet into a gas station parking lot then petered to a stop.
I sat there angry. My phone rang. It was Miss Matter-of-fact from the bank.
“This morning we cleared a check,” she said and gave me the amount. It wiped out my balance. She said she had a scan of the check. It wasn’t for twenty-five hundred but for almost exactly what I had in there.
“No it wasn’t,” I yelled.
“Sir, I’m looking at an image of it right now.”
“I’m telling you it’s not right,” I said.
“Then possibly the check has been altered. We can look into that if you wish.”
“Oh, I wish. I wish,” I said. “Look into it now. I’m stuck in a gas station in Cold Spring, Kentucky with nothing but pocket lint.”
I hung up the phone, took a breath and it rang almost immediately.
“Yeah,” I said. It was my credit card company.
I’d been maxed out with several telephone and online purchases.
I know I’m a dunce, but it took that long for it to hit me. Sheila. I’d given her that check and handed her my plastic to pay for drinks at Japp’s. That’s all she needed. I dialed her up.
Electronic sounds then an automated voice told me the number had been disconnected. I dialed again. The same. I went into my phone’s text folder to check the number from when we’d had a sexy back and forth. I had the right number. A dead number.
I dialed again. More electronic spam and then the same message.
I yelled an expletive and although my windows were rolled up tight, a middle-aged woman shot a glare of indignation my way.
I gave myself five minutes to tamp down my pride.
Then I called Mr. Carmichael.
On the phone he seemed more confused than annoyed, but forty-five minutes later, when I saw his Audi nose into the lot and him step out, he looked to be what I’d call mad. But I wouldn’t know. I’d never seen him mad. He was always calm. I had no reference.
I got out and walked to him sheepishly.
“Thanks for coming,” I said.
He only nodded.
“I’ll push my car to the pump,” I said.
He nodded again and walked a few steps to the pump island in his three thousand dollar suit, waiting to buy my beater a tank of gas.
I’d never felt more like a teenager since I was a teenager. He bought me a full tank and asked me to meet him at the office. I drove into the city hating life. I parked my car in my garage then quick stepped it the seven blocks to the office. I tried Sheila a few more times. I got zilch.
“How much did she get?” he asked.
“Between my checking account and my credit card about thirty-five thousand.”
He didn’t react.
“You reach her by phone?”
“Disconnected.”
“Go to her home?”
“I don’t know where she lives.”
He raised his graying eyebrows.
“It’s easy enough to find out,” I said.
The eyebrows lowered but in a way that didn’t make me feel good.
“I’ll get on the phone with the banks and try to figure it out. See what I can get back.”
“They’ll need you to press criminal charges. They need it to become a criminal matter so they can go after her and make you whole. That’s their process. If you don’t press charges, they won’t help you.”
“I have no problem pressing charges.”
“I do.”
“Excuse me?”
“This business of ours is a trust business,” he said. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I thought. I’ve heard this before. He went on: “We handle people’s investments, but it’s more than just money and a number on their quarterly statement. It’s their dreams for the future. It’s their security in old age. It’s their legacy after they’re gone. If it gets out that my right-hand man can’t even keep from being defrauded by a sexual acquaintance, we’re going to lose that trust that I’ve built up over my career and potentially lose them as clients.”
“But if I’m to get my money back.”
“Yes,” he interrupted.
“If I’m to get my money back, I’ll have to press charges.”
“You do what you think is best, but if you do then I’ll have to terminate your employment. I can’t have this larceny and carelessness ass
ociated with my office. It may cause some distrust.”
“That’s not acceptable,” I said.
“That’s the alternatives you have,” he said. “You took the risk of taking into your bed a woman you knew so little about—that you don’t even know where she lives. You wrote a check and handed over your credit card on no other basis than she made you feel good. Even if you knew where she lived, I’d suggest you didn’t....”
He was still talking sense when I got up and left. I’m sure he was angered by the rudeness. Those two lays were great but not worth thirty-five grand.
I walked home with my head hung. I went to my apartment and grabbed five twenties out of a stack of fifty twenties I keep locked in my desk at home then headed down to Japp’s.
Molly spotted me, smiled and understood that I wasn’t up for gabbing.
“Anything but a Sazerac,” I told her and straddled a bar stool.
She pulled out a bottle I didn’t know.
“What’s that?” I asked.
Honey syrup.
I sighed.
She put ice into her Boston shaker, tossed in one ounce of the honey syrup then two ounces of gin then squeezed half a lemon into it. She slapped on the shaker’s mate, lifted both above her head and gave it the what-for. She strained it into a Champagne saucer.
“It’s called a Bee’s Knees,” she said.
I took a sip. The gin’s earthy juniper was still there but sweetened with the honey and brightened by the lemon. Perfectly balanced. I tried to give Molly a smile but failed, and she’s smart enough to know when to skip the chit-chat and move on to helping the next guy down the bar.
I sipped my Bee’s Knees and thought of Sheila.
She was a Sazerac.
She was strong and exotic. She seduced me with her flavor and fed my yearning for more. She made me feel good and made me feel strong. That’s when a Sazerac takes a man by surprise. He drinks too much and it lays him out cold. It stomps him and leaves him. He recovers but it takes time.
Lovers in a Dangerous Time — Part III
She touched my arm then pointed to the right. I pulled the Kawasaki to the side of the street and let it idle. We were in a residential area high above the city. All the homes stood empty. The women and children were sent away after the incident of May 1. The men left when rebels were spotted near the city. The finely trimmed lawns and heavily structured landscaping had already become shaggy and overgrown. The jungle looked ready to reclaim it.
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