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

Harry smiled, bit into his sandwich, and stole a glance at her long, tanned legs in cutoff jean shorts. She drove the van with her knees and lit a joint, threw her head back, and sang along with the Dead.

“What a loooooong strange trip it’s been!”

She inhaled, coughed, smiled at Harry, and passed him the joint. For the first time in a long time, Harry felt like things were looking up.

4 Callow Bee

Let all your motions about your hives be gentle and slow. Accustom your bees to your presence: never crush or injure them, or breathe upon them in any operation.

—L. L. LANGSTROTH

The year had finally turned a shoulder on Oregon’s bleak winter and was hinting at the promise of summer. Nights like this, after sunset, the sky darkened and then turned that improbable green-yellow against the black hillside. Jake had always loved the bruised light that clung like an anti-shadow to the ridgeline. He gazed at it now, remembering the first time he’d been old enough to be outside this late in the evening. On the school playground, a parent-teacher night. He spun in circles on the tire swing, watching the sky darken as he waited for his mother, feeling like such a big kid.

He could hear the spring runoff coursing through the irrigation ditch that ran alongside Reed Road at his shoulder. By late March, the snowmelt off Mount Hood flooded the drainages of the valley and filled the night air with a clean green scent, that distinct smell of young spring. It was one reason he had always loved being out in the orchards at twilight even before the accident.

He shifted onto his back and tuned into the raucous song of chorus frogs in the ditch. He recalled his eternal debate with Noah about where the thumb-size creatures went in winter. Did they hibernate or die off? How did they know when it was time to reemerge and start singing so hopefully into the cold air? Why was he lying next to the ditch? Time had slowed, and the tiny frogs bleated like a metronome for this in-between place. Metronome. Keeping time, like Cheney’s enormous, drumming tail.

Noah’s sister Angela had found Cheney running around after school one day the fall of the boys’ junior year. His skinny brindled rump and lack of a collar marked him as a stray. A pair of hilarious helicoptering ears couldn’t decide whether to stay up or down. His tail banged out the beat of his happiness as he romped around on huge paws, with white stockings on three legs. His nose was a thick, short snout, and his wide mouth was split in an eternal grin. One eye was blue and the other brown. Noah was the one who said the dog looked like former vice president Dick Cheney if the man had ever smiled. The name stuck.

That day Angela brought him home, Cheney jumped on Jake and then Noah, his big paws raking down their arms and legs.

“Ow! Oh my God! Down, dog. Down! Off! Beast!” Jake yelled.

The dog tore off, running in tight, happy circles around the living room.

Noah and Angela’s hope of keeping the big mutt evaporated the second their mother walked in the door.

“Absolutely not,” Mrs. Katz said. “Take it to the county shelter. Immediately.”

Nobody argued with Mrs. Katz. Jake wished his mother got angry once in a while or at least talked back to his father. Maybe it was out of spite for Ed that he decided to take the dog home.

“I think he’s cool. You little punk rocker!” he said, tugging on the dog’s big ears. “I’ll get him a spiked collar. Want to come home with me, boy?”

The dog boxed Jake’s shoulders.

Mrs. Katz stopped chopping onions and pointed her knife at Jake. “Jacob Stevenson. Do not tell your poor mother I encouraged you to take this dog home.”

“He was never here, Mrs. K,” Jake said, holding up two fingers. “Scout’s honor. I found him at school.”

Mrs. Katz laughed and shook her head. “Good luck, Jacob.”

Once Cheney was in his life, Jake couldn’t imagine life without him. Cheney lying on his back to have his belly scratched in the morning. Cheney’s thrilled face peering through the bedroom window when Jake skated home after school. His joyous bounding at the end of the leash. That time he found a turtle, surely someone’s escaped pet, and nosed it with such a hilarious combination of worry and surprise. Cheney wading farther and farther into the river until he discovered he could swim. Once he flushed a dozen wild turkeys up in the east hills as Jake and Noah scouted a deer hunt with Noah’s dad. He bounded after the awkward birds, which seemed more annoyed than afraid, occasionally tearing back to Jake and barking as if to say, “OH MY GOD! Isn’t this AWESOME? TURKEYS!”

Jake had never minded being an only child, but after Cheney came, he felt like there had been an empty space in his life, a small closet of sadness that was now filled by this eternally joyful creature. The dog was a cheerful presence in the Stevenson family home, which had grown quieter and sadder with each passing year. When Jake’s father wasn’t around, Jake thought that he, his mother, and the dog almost felt like a family again. It made him happy to see his mom laugh at Cheney’s antics, the way he would try to climb in her lap, all eighty pounds of him. For Jake, Cheney was simply and completely his first true love.

Ed had been on a job in Salem when Jake brought Cheney home. His mom was already smitten too, but Jake was pretty certain his argument for having a guard dog was what won Ed over. He didn’t like his neighbors and was constantly complaining about their use of the driveway or where they put their garbage cans