“Put Mary Esther into her crib,” she whispered. She clicked off the desk lamp.
As they made love, Saul thought of the bees, of procreation, and citizenship. Already, he thought, those insects—Apis mellifera—were proving to be a kind of solution.
Spring moved into summer, and in the distance the outlet mall was completed, with a new cineplex going up nearby, and the microwave tower constructed. Saul bought a new computer. Just before school ended, he told his students about the bees and the hives. Pride escaped from his face, radiating it; he could feel it bathing his students with its unwholesome glow. When he explained how honey was extracted from the frames, he glanced at Gordy Himmelman and saw a look of what he took to be dumb animal malice directed back at him. What was the big deal? Saul wondered before he turned away. The kid hated Saul anyway. A bit more hatred would be salt on top of salt.
One night in early June, Patsy was headed upstairs, looking for the Snugli, which she thought she had forgotten in Mary Esther’s room, when she heard Saul’s voice coming from behind the door. She stopped on the landing, her hand on the banister. At first she thought he might be singing to the baby, but, no, Saul was not singing. He was sitting in there—well, he was probably sitting, Saul didn’t like to stand when he spoke—talking to his daughter, and Patsy heard him finishing a sentence: “. . . was never very happy.”
Patsy moved closer to the door.
“Who explains?” Saul was saying, apparently to his daughter. “No one does.”
Saul went on talking to Mary Esther, filling her in on his mother and several other mysterious phenomena. What did he think he was doing, discussing this ephemera with an infant? “I should sing you a song,” he announced, interrupting his train of thought. “That’s what parents do. It’s in all the books. Maybe I’ll do Zorastro’s aria. Or ‘Pigeons on the Grass, Alas.’ You might like that.”
To get away from Saul’s sitcom vocalizing, Patsy retreated to the window for a breath of air. Looking out, she saw someone standing on the front lawn, bathed in moonlight, staring in the direction of the house. He was thin and ugly and scruffy, and he looked a bit like a shadowy clod, but a dangerous shadowy clod, and the hairs on the back of her neck stood up.
“Saul,” she said. Then, more loudly, “Saul, there’s someone out on the lawn.”
He joined her at the window. “I can’t see him,” he said. “Oh, yeah, there.” He shouted, “Hello? Can I help you?”
The boy turned around. He got on a bike and raced away down the driveway and onto Whitefeather Road.
Saul did not move, his hands planted on the windowsill. “Well, I’ll be damned. It’s Gordy Himmelman,” he groaned. “That little bastard has come onto our property. I’m getting on the phone.”
“Saul, why’d he come here? What’d you do to him?” She held her arms against her chest. “What does he have against us?”
“I was his teacher. And we’re Jewish,” Saul said. “And to top it all off, we’re parents. He never had any. I showed those kids the baby pictures and he had a psychotic break. Big mistake. He’s not used to being psychotic. Somebody must have found Gordy in a barrel of brine. He was not of woman born.” He tried to smile. “I’m kidding, sort of.”
“Do you think he’ll be back?” she asked.
“Oh, yes.” Saul wiped his forehead. “They always come back, those kind. And I’ll be ready when he does.”
It had been a spring and summer of violent weather, and Saul had been reading the Old Testament again, looking for clues. On Thursday, around four in the afternoon, he had finished mowing the front lawn and was sitting on the porch, drinking the last, the final, bottle of Mad Dog’s no-brand beer when he looked to the west and felt a sudden cooling of the air, a shunting of atmosphere from higher to lower. Just above the horizon a mass of clouds began boiling. Clouds that looked like breasts and hand tools—he couldn’t help thinking the way he thought— advanced over him, with other clouds hanging down, pendulous. The wind picked up.
“Patsy,” he called. “Hey, Patsy.”
Something calamitous was happening in the atmosphere. In a moment a voice could easily emerge from the whirlwind. The pressure was dropping so fast that Saul could feel it in his elbows and knees.
“Patsy!” he shouted.
From upstairs he heard her calling back: “What, Saul?”
“Go to the basement,” he said. “Close the upstairs window and take Mary Esther down there. Take a flashlight. Something’s coming. We’re going to get a huge storm.”
Rushing through the house, Saul closed windows and switched off lights, and when he returned to the front door to close it, he saw the tall and emaciated apparition of his student Gordy Himmelman out in the yard, standing fixedly like an emanation from the dirt and stone of the fields. He had returned. Toward Saul he aimed his vacant stare. Flies buzzed around his head. Saul, who could not stop thinking even in moments of critical emergency, was struck into stillness by Gordy’s presence, his authoritative malevolence—or whatever it was—standing there in the just-mown grass. For the first time the thought entered Saul’s mind that he was responsible for Gordy somehow, that he had had a small but important part in his creation, that he had been the minor lab-coated assistant in Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory, attaching the wires behind the Tesla coils. But they’d all collaborated: the volatile ambitious sky and the forlorn backwardness of the fields had together given rise to this human disaster, who, even as Saul watched, yelled toward the house, “Hey, Mr. Bernstein. It’s a storm.” Or maybe he said, “I’m a storm.” Saul didn’t quite hear. Then the boy said, “Go take a look at your bees, shitbird.” In slow motion, he smiled.
Feeling like a commando, Saul, in whom necessity had created the illusion of speed, caught up to Gordy, who was pumping away on his broken and rusted bicycle, and pulled him off. He threw and kicked the junk Schwinn into the ditch. In the rain that had just started, Saul grabbed Gordy by the shoulders and shook him back and forth. He pressed his thumbs hard enough to bruise. Gordy, violently stinking, smelled of neglect and seepage, and Saul nearly gagged. But he could not stop shaking him; it was like the release of a terrible pressure, a shaking cure. Violence was a sort of joy after all. But he himself was shaking, too. With violent, rapid, horizontal jerking motions, the boy’s head was whipped. His face was level with Saul’s. They were the same height.
Saul wanted to see his eyes. But the eyes were as empty as mirrors.
“Hey, stop it,” Gordy said. “It hurts. You’re hurting. You’re hurting him.”
“Hurting who?” Saul asked. Thunder rolled toward him. He saw himself reflected in Gordy Himmelman’s eyes, a tiny figure backed by lightning. Who, me?
“Stop it, don’t hurt him.” Patsy’s voice, repeating Gordy’s words, snaked into his ear, and he felt her hand on his arm, restraining him. She was there, out in the rain, less frightened of the rain than she was of Saul. The boy had started to sag, seeing the two of them there, his scarecrow arms raised to protect himself, having assumed, probably, that he was about to be killed. There he squatted, the child of attention deficit, at Saul’s feet.
“Stay there,” Saul mumbled. “Stay right there.” Through the rain he began walking, then running, toward his bees. The storm, empty of content, tucked itself toward the east and was being replaced—one patch of firmament after another—by one of those insincere midwestern blue skies.
Mary Esther began to cry and wail as Patsy jogged toward Saul. Gordy Himmelman followed along behind her.
When she was within a hundred feet of Saul’s beehives, Patsy saw that the frames had been knocked over, scattered. Saul lay, face down, where they once stood. He was touching his tongue to the earth momentarily, for a taste.
When he rose, he saw Patsy. “All the bees swarmed,” he said. “They’ve left. They’re gone.”
She held Mary Esther tightly and examined Saul’s face. “How come they didn’t attack him? Didn’t they sting him?”
“Who knows?
” Saul spread his arms. “They just didn’t.”
Gordy Himmelman watched them from a hundred yards away, and with his empty gaze he made Patsy think of the albino deer, the one with the arrow in it—half blind, wandering these fields day after day without direction.
“Look,” Saul said, pointed at Mary Esther, who had stopped crying when she saw her father. “Her shoe is untied.” He wiped his face with his sleeve and shook off the dirt from his jeans. Approaching Patsy, he gave off a smell of soil and honey and sweat. Distracted, he tied Mary Esther’s shoe.
His hair soaked with rain, he glanced at Patsy, who, with some difficulty, was keeping her mouth shut. What she loved intermittently about Saul was the vagary of feeling that focused itself into the tiniest actions of human attention, like the tying of this pink shoe. Better to keep her emotions a secret than to talk about them all the time, she thought. It would generate more energy that way. It was a variety of discouraged love that she felt, not the plain unvarnished kind. He finished the knot and kissed them both. Dirt and honey were on his lips, and they came off on Patsy’s.
At a distance of a hundred yards, the boy, Gordy, watched all this, and from her vantage point Patsy saw the boy’s empty expression, those mortuary eyes. She felt certain that he would stick around. They would have to give him something, some form of tribute, because, like it or not, he was following them back, their faithful zombie, made, or mad, in America. She heard his shoes shuffling on the driveway.
Well, maybe we are missionaries, Patsy thought, as she stumbled and Saul held her up. We’re the missionaries they left behind when they took all the religion away. But missionaries for what? On the front porch of the house she could see the empty bottle of Saul’s no-brand beer still standing on the lip of the ledge, and she could see the porch swing slowly rock back and forth, as if someone were still sitting there, waiting for them.
Six
Later that night, several hours after Gordy had left, Saul returned to the toppled wreckage of his beehives. In the damp and still unappeaseable darkness, he carried the frames two at a time into the shed at the back of the yard. His hand-crank extractor was stored in the corner, and he dropped the frames into the barrel one by one, each making a hollow clank. A few of the bees still clung to them, and Saul did his best to shoo them out, but they were angry with him—he could hear it, a distinctly irritated insect murmur—and after being stung several times, he let them stay. He would deal with them later. He didn’t know what to do with the honey on the frames. It would just remain there for now. He felt selfish and proprietary. He didn’t want it himself, but he didn’t want anyone else to get it, either. Milk and honey, the various rewards, all out of his hands. In the corner, a mouse scurried behind a pine board, its paws making fingernail-skittering sounds, and outside, very distantly, came the hooting of an owl. He let the stillness of the evening absorb him, travel through him, like the onset of sleep.
When he was finished, he sat down in the doorway of the shed, caught his breath, and smelled the air off the fields, the generously muddy odor following summer rain on dry soil. Overhead, the familiar stars slipped further and further away.
Several days later, dressed in his jeans and his T-shirt, Saul was standing at the kitchen counter drinking a glass of grapefruit juice and checking Patsy’s dusty African violets on the sill. When he glanced out the kitchen window, he saw Gordy Himmelman planted on the lawn, staring up into the sky impatiently, as if waiting for a hot-air balloon to snatch him up and rescue him. His hands were knitted together. The boy always seemed to be gazing skyward or earthward. He rarely could look out at his own level, at the human scene; Saul had never seen his gaze pointed in that direction, where his prospects seemed to be as dim as he was.
In any case, he was back.
The previous week, the night of the storm, Saul had instructed Gordy to go home and never to return, though he had said it without the necessary anger to make the correct frightening impression. Gordy had seldom listened to him, anyway, in class or out. He had given Saul one of his several blank expressions, like that of someone waiting for a translation. On Gordy, blankness had a certain eloquence. The boy was profoundly blank. Nevertheless, after following Saul around for a few minutes, doglike, he had mounted his rusting bicycle, nodded once, and disappeared down the road as twilight came on and the setting sun bathed him in a misleading post-rainstorm rosy glow. Watching him pedal away, Saul had felt a distinct relief. He was tired of the ragtag unfortunate and the disengaged and the special-needs types who had clustered around him in classrooms and elsewhere, and he was glad to see Gordy bicycling out of his life. He had come to think of himself as an opportunist of misfortune, his own and others’. Somehow, without knowing how the process had been effected, he had taken advantage of the disadvantaged. Now that he had a child of his own, his compassion for other people’s children felt all used up. He was finished with the unlucky and the disabled. No more charity in the service of narcissism. With the bees gone, redemption seemed—what? Unworkable. He was tired of the romance of failure, anyway.
But someone had failed to tell Gordy Himmelman that Saul was through with him, because here he was, loitering on the morning lawn, a sentry dressed in his uniform: soiled jeans and torn shirt. Saul put down his juice glass carefully in a cereal bowl near the kitchen sink and strolled outside to where Gordy was standing. Already the air was unsettled and feverish, though it had rained again in the middle of the night, another brief tantrum of a downpour, and the grass had a warm, damp prickliness, as if Saul were stepping on a horsehair doormat. It was a disagreeable sensation. In the trees the blue jays and crows flapped and screamed. The weather was getting so moody and violent these days: it was the warfare of heaven against earth, the opening of the seven seals.
“So,” Saul said. “Hey, Gordy.” Close up, his former student smelled of roasted pumpkin seeds and brine. He hadn’t shaved, and his boy’s scraggly indecisive peachfuzz facial hair mingled with his acne. He was wearing some sort of metal-and-leather apparatus around his neck, probably a dog collar, with a small broken soundless bell attached. He was chewing something—gum, Saul hoped.
“Hey, Mr. Bernstein.” Gordy nodded at Saul, then looked away quickly, as if he were busy, occupied with many tasks.
“Can I help you with something?”
“Nope,” Gordy said. “Not right now. Maybe later.” Gordy waved. “See ya.”
“Gordy, what’re you doing here?”
There was a long silence, during which Gordy Himmelman studied Saul’s feet. Finally he said, “I came here on my bike.”
“I know that. I mean, what are you doing here?”
“Is this, like, a quiz?” Gordy shrugged and started to laugh, then stopped himself. “Hey, I don’t mean to make no trouble. Ha ha ha ha ha. Not today anyways.”
“No. Right. I’m just asking you why you came.”
“It’s a nice day. Can’t I stand here?” Gordy smiled his odd square smile. He was now surveying the sky again. Once more the birds began their ritual screaming. Saul had the feeling that they were trying to tell him something important, in fact to convey an urgent message, in bird language. In addition, Saul could hear, behind him, Mary Esther’s crying and Patsy’s quiet, soothing, morning endearments.
“Yes, it is a nice day. I guess you can stand there, maybe for a minute. But did you come here to talk to me? Or apologize?” Hearing that word, whose meaning he could not possibly have known, the boy seemed to startle. “Gordy, why did you knock down my beehives?”
For his trouble, Saul got one of Gordy’s sudden deadpan expressions. For a half-second it occurred to Saul that the boy might be lovestruck. Then Gordy said, “A hawk just went by, looked like. That thing you said, I couldn’t help it. It was like an idea I had. Me and Bob. Only Bob wasn’t there.”
“Well, you . . . you hate me, right? And didn’t you kill that deer?”
“Well, I dunno. Naw. It’s not like that.” He looked away. He looked at the sky. Noth
ing up there but sky. Wherever Gordy went, he created a cognitive fog, even in broad daylight.
“You don’t know? Okay. Then what are you doing here?”
“You mean right now?” He gave Saul a goofy how-dumb-do-you-think-I-am expression. “I’m talkin’ to you.”
“Yes. Of course. Certainly. But what I’m asking you is, why did you get on your bicycle and come over here? I really don’t get it. I’m missing something. You . . . I thought you hated me. Don’t you? You and Bob Pawlak? I thought you couldn’t stand the sight of me. You called me a shitbird. That’s what you said. A shitbird. I don’t even know what a shitbird is. And then there were the hives. You ruined them. You owe me for them,” Saul said irritably.
“That was only in school. And the rest was just talk. Anyway I never said nothing about hating, not in that way. ’Cause it’s you who hate me. I can tell. Is that your car over there?” With his thumb, Gordy gestured toward Saul’s Chevy. He had been avoiding eye contact. The body shop had made the car look like new after Saul had rolled it all those many months ago.
“Yes.” Saul sighed. “Yes, it is.” He pointed a finger at the boy. “Gordy, if you can’t explain to me what you’re doing here, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
“Okay.” The boy nodded. “Okay.” How hard it was to argue with someone when that person didn’t listen to you! Or did listen, but didn’t act on it. It was like being married.
“Gordy, please go home. You’re trespassing. You have to get off my property right now.”
“Okay.” He did not move. “What year is it?” He motioned again at the car with his thumb.
“The car?” Saul felt flustered. “It’s two years old.”
“Still shiny, though. You wash it in soapsuds?”
“That’s not the point.”
Gordy grinned at Saul, the grin of the torturer. Some sort of discoloration had applied itself down through the years to the boy’s teeth. They were rotting in a premature manner. “You must of just washed it, for it to look that clean. You must be proud of it.”
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