The Music of Bees by Eileen Garvin (free ereaders txt) 📗

strange. Last week he had looked up during a hand of cribbage and scowled at Harry.

“Who let you in here?” he growled.

“You did, Uncle H,” Harry said nervously.

The old man’s frown relaxed, and he laughed.

If Uncle H had mentioned his great-nephew, the county people might not have believed the kooky old man. Harry planned to hitchhike down to the hospital and check on him. But he hadn’t gone that first day or yesterday. Today was day three. He could have at least called from the pay phone in BZ Corner. He didn’t want to think about why he hadn’t. He was ashamed of himself, which made his hunger disappear briefly. He put the thought away and cast his gaze down the overgrown driveway.

“Security,” Harry wrote in his now-full left column. However, those assets were growing decidedly less attractive in the face of other facts: he was dirty, hungry, a little worried about food poisoning with the cooler situation, and slightly miserable waking up alone in the dark woods. He didn’t feel close to his uncle, exactly, but Uncle H had been someone to talk to or at least listen to. However, the weeks Harry had spent at his uncle’s hadn’t put him any closer to solving his own problems, which were considerable. He flipped back to that list, which was growing.

Under the header “Spring 2014 Status Report,” he had written the following: “Problems: Homeless (not counting trailer), Jobless, Checking account: $318.57, Owe Mom and Sal $1,468.25.”

He sighed. Harry needed money. He knew his mother would send him some if he asked. She always did, saying it was just to help him get on his feet. But this wasn’t a crisis. He’d simply run out of money like he always did when he hit a dead end because he had no plan. No, he couldn’t call his mother. Besides, she’d ask about Uncle H. He felt a lead weight in his stomach thinking of the old man alone at the hospital.

Harry turned the page and wrote a new list.

“April 2014 Tasks: Update résumé, Apply for jobs, Go see H, Call Mom.” He drew an arrow and moved “Go see H” to the top of the list, which made him feel better.

The idea of looking for work made his stomach clench. Work was not the problem. Harry was a hard worker. The problem was interviewing, talking to people, closing the deal.

“You don’t follow through, kid!” Sal would yell. “That last place offered you a job and you never called back! What the heck is wrong with you?”

Exasperating.

Harry had no reasonable explanation. How could he describe the paralyzing set of questions a new situation would present? What was the best route to drive to work in the morning? What was he supposed to wear? Did people bring a lunch, or did they go out? What if he had to use the bathroom, like, really use the bathroom? He couldn’t ask anyone those questions, so it was easier to come up with white lies: the pay was bad, the hours were lousy, the manager seemed like a jerk.

Harry tapped his pen against his upper lip. Getting a job would be harder than usual this time, not just because he was living in the woods without a car. There was also the nagging detail that Harry was a criminal. Or had been. Past tense. But he had served his time for that. It was behind him, he told himself. First things first. He had to find his uncle.

He grabbed a towel, soap, and a change of clothes and walked into the woods toward the river. For all the vagueness of the term “pastoral beauty,” Harry had truly become enamored of the great dark woods around Uncle H’s place. The days he rambled through the trees above the river he found himself shocked by the beauty of the simplest things: the electric-green moss growing on a tree trunk; an unexpected sunbreak lighting up the ghost of a tree snag. Once, as he tramped along, a handful of small birds, squabbling among themselves, had flown out of the trees and directly across his path. They’d been so engrossed in their spat that they hadn’t even noticed him. “A quarrel of sparrows.” That was what the bird book called them. Another night, just before bed, Harry stood outside in the darkness and looked up at the stars, which were so bright there far from any city, brighter than any he’d ever seen. Then he heard the deep, pulsating call of an owl throbbing through the woods around him. Harry could not have said which tree the great bird sat in, as the call seemed to be everywhere at once. The hoot came again, and Harry felt it settle into his chest and fill his heart. A child of the suburbs, he had never been so close to such wildness and had not known it would stir such feeling in him. He would have called it happiness if someone had asked him. But there was nobody to do so.

Harry walked the trail to a small sandbar on the river where the wild current circled back on itself and created a calm eddy. He stripped to pale gooseflesh, took a deep breath, and jumped into the icy water, which shocked the breath out of him. He toed the sandy bottom before scrambling out to soap his hair and body in the fragile sunlight. Then he jumped in again, scrubbing himself clean.

Back on the bank, he dried off and pulled on the cleanest of his two pair of pants and one of his uncle’s shirts, a tartan wool with the tags still attached. His body tingled as he walked back to the trailer. He shaved in the small mirror his uncle had hung on a tree. Bald at twenty-four, or balding, anyway, he sighed. He had considered shaving it all off but remembered how a high school dare had revealed his bumpy Neanderthal skull.

Yet he wanted to do something to mark