“This belongs in a movie,” I whisper.
Dad squeezes my shoulder. “I’m glad you’re still young enough to gawk at the stars with your old man.”
“I’m not that young.” I lean against his truck, lost in the sea of stars. “Dad? What are those bumps on Serge’s face?”
“Believe it or not,” he says, “they’re bee stings, from years ago. They never fully healed.”
“Wow.” I wasn’t expecting that. “No wonder he’s obsessed with bees.”
“Like I said, grief can do funny things.” He pats my back.
“Dad?” One more question. “What happened between you and Serge?”
He looks down at me, and I watch something harden behind his eyes, like a puddle drying into crackled dirt. “You don’t need to know that,” he says, and grabs a rifle from the truck bed.
It’s dark, so he doesn’t see my scowl.
He hands me a flashlight. “Don’t go on top of the ridge,” he warns. “Stay in sight of the truck. Just shine that around the edge of the pasture, and if you see the sheep, holler.”
Dad vanishes, and I’m left with the stars, the moon, and a flashlight.
Something howls. A coyote, I think. That’s probably why Dad took his rifle.
I don’t have a rifle.
I walk into the night, picturing ghosts of dead bees and long-gone grandmothers swirling around me. Invisible eyes follow me from every crack in the ridge.
The ridge is a buildup of multicolored sand, stuck together in a giant wall about a mile from the back porch. When moonlight hits the ridge, it glitters like a Christmas ornament. The bottom is inky purple, from a million years ago when the universe banged itself together. Star dust. Above the purple, the sand turns rusty red, the color of caveman blood. Then a stripe of orange, and a bright yellow stripe at the top. It’s a prehistoric Popsicle. The Painted Desert, they call New Mexico. Like some god reached down from the clouds and dragged his palette along the mesas.
Beyond the ridge, the land dips into a basin. The grass becomes rose-colored, ragged, and the scrub recedes like a balding hairline. There’s just desert on and on until you hit Mexico. It’s easy to get lost in the vastness of the night and the land, even in your head.
At home, the city has a vastness to it, too — a vastness of cars, of people, of pavement, of never-ending lights. Little patches of perfectly manicured grass — fake Mother Nature — are inserted into the metropolis.
But I’ve never seen anything as beautiful as the ridge.
The ridge isn’t safe to play on, as pretty as it is. On the drive up, Dad gave me the rundown of its many dangers. Coyotes prowl there, and scorpions, and fire ants make their hills on the ridge’s peaks. There are rattlers, always, hidden among the stones, so camouflaged you don’t see them until it’s too late.
I need snake-stomping boots.
An owl hoots. I spot it, a silhouette against the dime-round moon; it soars past me and lands on a lone cactus, ruffled-feather breast, unblinking eyes.
I scan the flashlight around me. No sheep.
Something tickles my neck. A trio of bees hovers around my head like it’s their hive.
“Go away!” I cry, running in a wide circle to lose them, my blanket fanning out behind me like a cape. “Quit following me!”
But when I stop, the bees swarm back around me, too close.
“Rain’s been gone for a hundred years,” I whisper. “You don’t belong here anymore.”
Bzzz, they drone. Bzzz, around and around me, until I’m dizzy.
“You stop teasing my grandpa,” I say, and flick my hands until the bees go.
Then it’s me, and the sky, alone in the great, loud silence of desert.
Living in Albuquerque means I’m used to sharing close quarters. There’s always been at least thirty kids in my class. At home there’s limited closet space and not enough room in the yard to set up a trampoline. Some nights, I open my bedroom window just to breathe new air.
But there’s such a thing as too open. Too wide. Here in the dark, I’m nothing. I’m less than a smudge on the pages of the world’s history, tiny on the number line of forever. The lost sheep, Alta, Serge’s dementia, even junior high — everything seems laughably small. What’s one missing sheep to eternity?
Chilly night air creeps into my blanket. I think I’ll wait for Dad in the truck, with the heat on.
In the truck, maybe I’ll feel less small.
I turn around, and a scream bursts out of me before I process what I’m seeing: the missing sheep, lying mangled in an unnatural position — legs bent back, spine arched, wool tangled. The head is missing, and a cloud of flies pick at the corpse. Ribs, real ribs, jut from the body. They look fake. I never knew real bones were so clean, so yellow-white.
Where’s the head? I’m too nauseated to search with the light. Blood makes me sick, makes my stomach churn and my head spin.
“Carol!” Dad runs to me, rifle in hands. I point, trying not to breathe in any of the flies. When I finally take a desperate gulp of air, I inhale the stink of rotting flesh and dry heave.
“Coyotes,” Dad diagnoses.
“They, uh, didn’t take much.” I speak with my hand over my nose to filter the death stench.
“Drought makes the sheep spindly.” Dad waves his flashlight around the perimeter, and we spot it at the same time: the head of the chewed-up sheep, dragged about two feet from its body. The sheep’s lifeless eyes are round black mirrors, reflecting the flashlight’s gleam.
I’m still shaky with nausea, but Dad doesn’t seem bothered.
“How are you not grossed out by this?” I ask, my hand still firmly covering my nose.
“Coyotes used to get into the chicken coop all the time,” Dad says, waxing nostalgic. “We used to wake up to feathers and blood all over the pasture.”
“I get the picture,” I say, trying not to imagine this carnage of poultry.
Dad gets a shovel and a tarp from the truck bed and scoops up the remains, wrapping them up like leftover dinner. “So the meat doesn’t attract buzzards,” he explains, “and so the coyotes don’t take it as an open invitation to help themselves.” The sheep corpse goes into the bed of the pickup.
I hear a buzz.
No, not a buzz. A different sound.
A rattle.
“Carol,” Dad says, his quietness a warning. “Stay still.”
My whole self seizes up. “Snake?”
Dad angles his light on the ridge. “Oh, wow,” he says. I follow the light, and now I really feel sick.
A knot of rattlesnakes has made a nest in a crevice on the ridge. I count a dozen heads, but can’t tell which snaky head belongs to which body. The tangle of snakes makes a collective hiss, a few tails rattling.
Dad whistles. “That looks like a nightmare come true.”
“What do we do?” I ask.
He shrugs. “It’s their desert, too. Nothing we can do except watch where we step.”
I scramble into the truck, my bare feet tingling with phantom snakebites. Dad gets in and starts the engine. “Don’t tell Mom about the snakes, or she won’t sleep the rest of the summer.” He yawns, leans over, and kisses my forehead. “Let’s get some shut-eye.”
“Okay, good. I’m beat.” That’s a lie. I couldn’t be more awake.
“Too beat to drive the truck back?” Dad offers.
I grin. He doesn’t have to say another word — I know the drill. We switch spots, and I scoot the seat up as far as it will go, though I still have to stretch out my toes to press the gas pedal. But once it’s in gear, my handling of the truck along the bumpy desert drive is as smooth as Dad’s.
After Alta almost failed drivers’ ed last year (and boy, it took all my strength not to gloat), Dad decided it wouldn’t hurt to give me a jump on things, and taught me how to drive on empty roads outside the city.
I really love to drive. The concentration required to handle the truck means everything else — dead sheep, rattlesnake n
ests, senile old grandfathers — blurs. Driving makes me feel in control when everything else in my life feels out of control.
Death lurks around every corner of this ranch. It’s under the porch, slithering around Lu. It’s dragging sheep out of their pasture to eat them alive. It’s sleeping in scaly piles on the ridge. It’s dusted all over the abandoned bedroom, where you can practically see the indent from where Grandma Rosa laid her head on the pillow.
Most of all, death hangs on Serge like a wet towel, tangled in his salty-white hair, dripping down his shoulders… .
Next to me, Dad yawns and rubs his eyes, but there’s no way I’ll be able to go back to sleep tonight; it’d be a parade of bad dreams — of snakes and dead sheep and those darn bees, always, the bees.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Dad says as I pull into the driveway.
“About the bees?” I blurt.
“Uh, no,” he says, looking at me strangely. “I meant about the dead sheep.”
Great, bees are buzzing aimlessly in my mind, just like Serge. “Sheep, I meant sheep. No, I’m okay. Circle of life and all that.”
Dad yawns and can barely reopen his eyes.
“It’s past midnight,” I say.
“Okay, okay.”
I snicker. First Dad acting like the parent with Serge, now me acting like the parent with Dad — this ranch makes everything all topsy-turvy.
“Will you kill the headlights?” Dad says as we get closer to the ranch house. “We don’t want to wake anyone up.”
I switch the truck’s lights off and pull into the gravel driveway as slowly and quietly as I can.
We climb out of the truck and walk up the porch stairs. I lean over the railing to get one more peek at that sky, at that cosmic mess and glow. A speck of light whizzes across the horizon. “A shooting star,” I whisper, but Dad’s already slumped into the house. I pass the star’s wish on to him; seems like he could use it even more than me.
“Rosa?” Serge scares a gasp out of me. I forgot he was out here.
“No, it’s me,” I say. “It’s Carol.”
“Yes, I know it’s you, Caro-leeen-a,” he says. “You just look so much like her. You shine like she used to shine.”
“Me?” I say.
“You belong with the stars, like she did.”
I shake my head and walk over to him. “I don’t think so. Dad says she was full of fire.”
Serge’s cat eyes gleam in the darkness. “But so are you, Caro-leeen-a. A hidden fire. A volcano.”
“That sounds more like Alta. Not me.” The truth of this statement burns, right above my stomach. Alta’s the fiery one. Not me.
“No,” Serge insists. “Sounds like you, Caro-leeen-a.”
His ancient hands carve into a piece of sandy-white wood with a knife. They work fast for old hands. He barely has to look down at them; he’s probably done this a thousand times, a thousand nights.
“What’s it going to be?” I lean closer to look.
“Who knows,” he says. “My mind wants to sleep, but my hands want to work.”
I sigh. “I can’t sleep, either.”
Some unidentifiable critter makes a noise in the pasture, and I jump. “This place gives me the heebie-jeebies.”
Serge nods. “Bees. Snakes. A whole sky full of magical things.” He coughs, a raspy hyena bark. “Caro-leeen-a, I need water.”
I fill a glass in the kitchen and take it out to him. He guzzles it and asks for another, and his cough finally stops. “Drought dries everything, inside and out,” he says. “Did you know there used to be a lake here? Right there.” He points beyond the ridge.
“It dried up in the drought, too?”
“No,” he says. “One hundred years ago, the bees flew away with our lake, and there’s been no water since. Not even rain.”
More word salad. Even when he seems just fine, the dementia simmers underneath, waiting to burst out. The patchy starlight gives every one of his bee-sting scars its own shadow, so his face mirrors the desert landscape: bursts of scrub and rocks, miles of flat.
“How could bees take a lake?” I say, a heavy dose of skepticism in my voice. I’ll fight dementia with logic.
Serge leans close to me, like it’s a secret. “One drop of water at a time.” He smells of campfire, of old wood burning. “If one bee can carry a single drop of water, a thousand bees can steal a puddle. To take our lake, our green-glass lake, the bees came by the millions. They took the lake, and it’s been drought ever since.”
Part of me knows I should wake Dad, let him know Serge is lost in time and space, but I’m frozen to the porch floor, with an image in my head: an army of sickle-winged bees, each with a drop of clear green water held in its spiky black legs.
“We never thought the bees would come back … but you’ve seen them, haven’t you, Caro-leeen-a? They’re coming home at last.”
“This is just a story, right?” I whisper.
“It is my best story,” he says. “You’re twelve this year, chiquita.” I’m surprised he knows this — surprised he remembers. But he’s probably kept count of every day since Grandma Rosa died. “Twelve is the border between childhood and old. Are you too old for my stories, Caro-leeen-a?”
Caro-leeen-a. He pronounces my name like it’s the secret ingredient in one of Mom’s Mexican dinners. “No.” I cross my legs and settle near his snake-stomping boots. “I’m not too old.”
Serge smiles, his watery-blue eyes crinkling. “The story begins, like all good stories, with ‘Once upon a time …’ ”
Once upon a time, there was a tree, bigger around than three men could hug. Its leaves were emerald green, the bark black. The tree’s branches dipped and curved like a lazy river, and its roots kissed the shore of a green-glass lake.
White blossoms burst from the branches. Summer, winter, and the days in between, the tree was always in bloom. The flowers breathed out their sweet scent, spicing the dry desert air with their honey-vanilla fragrance. Bees made colonies in the branches, and like good tenants, they kept the blossoms tidy, kept them pollinated, kept them healthy.
The bees kept the whole tree alive.
On a day hot enough to boil eagle eggs in their shells, a boy and a girl climbed to the tree’s highest branch. From here, they could see all the way to the ridge, which was striped in the fuzzy violets and peaches of sunset.
“Your turn,” the boy said.
“No.” The girl dangled from one twiggy arm, lopsided above the lake.
Inés, the rascally black puppy, barked and chased a butterfly.
“Rosa,” the boy said, only he stretched the name out into long, dramatic syllables: Rrrose-uhhh. “Tell me.”
“Why?” she said.
“I won’t laugh,” the boy promised. He shifted on the branch, legs shaking. Heights terrified him. The lake terrified him. The girl, also, terrified him, but in an entirely different way. He was rounder than the other boys in the village, and moon-faced, wearing an embarrassingly too-tight pair of linen trousers. “I told you what my wish would be. Now you.”
Rosa closed her eyes. The boy watched her soar miles away from earth, just with her imagination, her rose-petal lips pursed in thought. “My wish would be to leave the village,” she finally said. She let go of the branch and fell thirty feet — splash — into the cold water.
For a minute, the only sound was the buzz of the bees.
When Rosa’s head bobbed out of the water, the boy’s jaw was still dropped. “But no one ever leaves!” he called.
“I know.” Rosa’s crow-black hair spread behind her in the water like a fan.
“No one has ever left before,” the boy said.
“Sergio, I know.” She waded onto shore. “That’s why it’s just a silly wish.”
Every step she took, bees followed her in a halo around her head. They trailed behind wherever she went. No one else in the village had the bees follow when they walked; only Rosa. No one knew why, but no one really asked why — the vill
age had plenty of mysteries. Bigger mysteries.
Father Alejandro, the priest of the village’s mission, told his parishioners that these mysteries would never be explained by man, because some mysteries were gifts from God. The tree was a gift. The land was a gift. The bees, too, were a gift.
If you asked Sergio, he would say that Rosa herself was a gift, and they were all blessed to know her. Father Alejandro insisted that she was the same as everyone else: born of an old village family, raised to tend the communal crops and attend church on Sundays. But Sergio knew different. Rosa was teeming with life. She was so full of life, it overflowed, like the village wells after a rain, and that’s why the bees always danced around her like honey-making angels. Where there was Rosa, there was life.
And where there was Rosa, there was also Sergio.
Rosa ran her fingers along the tree trunk, patting the lucky knothole. “Father Alejandro says with God, all things are possible. Mysteries. Miracles.”
“Rosa!” Sergio cried. “You’re bleeding!”
She kept walking, circling the tree.
Sergio dropped from his branch faster than an autumn leaf. “I said you’re bleeding!” He grabbed her shoulders and made her stop.
“Am I?” Rosa looked down at all her limbs. There it was, jagged down her shin, a stream of blood. Every time she put weight on that leg, blood oozed from the deep cut. “I must have scraped it on the rocks,” she said.
“Shh.” Sergio knelt next to her leg, waiting, watching.
Then it happened — the cut sewed itself whole, the flaps of broken skin pulling together as if with invisible thread. He touched the healed flesh in wonder, as he always did. Father Alejandro once told him that in the world outside the village, pain and sickness weren’t healed like this. Cuts had to be stitched together with actual thread; injuries hurt; pain scorched like a fire in the flesh. Some wounds killed.
Sergio couldn’t even imagine … Outside the village, would a cut like this keep bleeding forever? Would such a wound have killed Rosa?
He splashed lake water over her leg to clean it, and when the blood washed away, the skin was smooth, not a trace of the wound left. Then he sat against the tree trunk, panting until his pulse leveled.
Hour of the Bees Page 5
