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

and then the sheriff was yelling over the crowd through a megaphone. Harry turned away and looked at the big orange truck, which sat idling in the road.

In the months after his arrest in New York, nobody ever asked Harry why he had agreed to help his friends with the failed heist—why, specifically, he had decided to climb behind the wheel of the truck full of electronics that his friends had decided to steal. His mother had asked him, “What were you thinking?” But that wasn’t the same thing as asking him what his motivation was.

Though he’d never been asked, Harry knew exactly why he had done it. That day at the bar with Marty and Sam, he’d actually started to walk away. He drained his PBR and set the empty can on the counter. Then Marty turned to him and said, “It’s not like you have a better idea, do you, Stokes? You haven’t had an original thought in your entire life. So don’t pretend you’re better than the rest of us.”

Harry didn’t say anything, but he was thinking that Marty was right. He was nothing special. What kind of life was he going to have with his associate’s degree and living out in the burbs with his parents? The economy was in the toilet, and there was nothing about Harry that would set him apart from the thousands of other unemployed guys his age. So why not do it?

It was a decision, he understood, after thinking about it all those months in jail, made out of self-loathing. It was careless and hurtful, to his parents certainly, but also to himself. You couldn’t just stop trying. You had to believe in something. And if you didn’t like yourself, how could you expect anyone else to?

Now Harry looked back at the chaos on Fir Mountain Road. He knew Jake would understand if he could explain it to him. Alice would get it too. Maybe he would be able to tell them sometime. In the meantime, he knew what needed to happen next, and this time his motivation was clear as day. It was love.

The truck driver, standing with his back to the road and shouting into his cell phone, didn’t notice Harry swing himself up into the cab. He didn’t hear Harry throw the truck into gear. By the time the driver turned around, Harry had gained speed and was heading back up the long hill into town.

Harry knew this act was a violation of his parole. He understood he would likely end up back in jail, this time for a minimum of two years. Alice and Jake would find out that he was both a liar and a felon. He would break his mother’s heart all over again. But he did it anyway. Harry, who was uncertain about most things in life, who questioned every decision he made and thought of himself as a grade-A dumbass, knew unequivocally that this was the right thing to do just then. Even if it only delayed spraying by a day or two, it would make a statement. Alice and Jake would understand that he had done this thing for them, for the bees, because he could.

And when he crossed the Hood River Bridge and paid the toll, the attendant didn’t even glance up from her screen as Harold Courtland Stokes III crossed the river and headed up into the great dark woods of the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in a stolen semitruck full of pesticides.

Far up Highway 141, Harry pulled the big truck into the clearing where his uncle’s trailer once sat. He cut the rumbling engine and rolled down the window. He felt the breeze blow across his face, and his body relaxed. The sweet little hollow was now devoid of trash and broken glass. Gone were the tattered “No Trespassing” signs and bits of pink insulation. No sound of loose siding banging around in the wind. He heard the rush of the whitewater highway running behind the clearing. He heard the keen of an osprey fishing over the river eddy. He leaned his head against the door and looked up at the tall dark trees. He thought of the secret lives of creatures this forest held within its heart. He thought how nice it would be to get down from the truck and disappear into those woods forever.

How much time passed? He couldn’t say. It felt like a lifetime and it felt like minutes before Harry heard the sound of an approaching vehicle. He looked in the mirror and saw what he’d been waiting for—the sheriff’s Jeep with its flashing blue-and-red lights. He sighed and climbed down out of the truck. His heart felt heavy. His heart felt light. He walked toward his future with his hands held up in surrender.

•   •   •

The Hood River County Courthouse was a large, imposing building with neoclassical columns, an ornate façade, and a large mural depicting the harrowing journey of the Oregon Trail—white settlers battling prairie fires, flooded rivers, and snowy mountain passes to reach the verdant, supposedly empty farmlands of Oregon. When first painted in the 1950s, the mural had depicted settlers fighting hostile Native Americans. It had been edited in the 1980s to show members of the Wasco and Wishram tribes welcoming their new white neighbors. That wasn’t the whole truth either, but it leaned in the right direction. Local tribes had been curious and helpful when the first whites came. In return they had been misunderstood, abused, and eventually robbed of their lands.

The courthouse builders had clearly anticipated a wilder West and had constructed ample jail space in the courthouse basement. The only other time it had been as full was a day in 1942 when the county had jailed local Japanese-American residents before sending them on trains to internment camps around the country. That chapter of local history was not presented in the mural either.

Jake waited in the courthouse basement with the other men from the incident on Fir Mountain