Deadout

by Jon McGoran

  There was a pause in the conversation, and I was looking at her and she was looking at me and I was thinking, what am I doing here?

  Then the door opened and Moose walked in, and I could see he was thinking the exact same thing.

  “Doyle!” he said, looking at her and making my name sound like an accusation.

  Annalisa and I shared a little smile before I turned in my seat to face him. “Hey, Moose. How’s it going?”

  “Okay.” He looked back and forth between Annalisa and me about six times. “I was wondering if you could lend me a hand with something.”

  “Uh, sure. With what?”

  “With the bee lining. We’re shorthanded.”

  “Bee lining?” I said. “I’m not really crazy about bees.” Annalisa raised an eyebrow. “Um, okay. Sure. Right now?”

  He nodded and snuck another look at Annalisa. She smiled at him.

  “All right,” I said, grabbing my coffee and my newspaper. “Well, it was very nice running into you.”

  “You, too,” she replied with a smile. “Be careful with the bees. But don’t worry, they’re harmless.”

  7

  “So what was that about?” Moose said as soon as we got outside.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Her. Why were you talking to her?”

  “What?” I laughed. “Nola was gone when I woke up, so I went in for a cup of coffee. I recognized Annalisa from this morning. Wait a second, where is Nola? I thought she was with you.”

  “She was,” he said, looking down at his car keys.

  “Where is she now?”

  “She’s at one of the farms, learning some of the newer techniques.”

  Newer techniques, I thought, as we got into his car, consciously fighting the urge to stiffen my entire body. “Teddy what’s-his-name?”

  “Teddy Renfrew,” he said nonchalantly. “Yeah, why?”

  “No reason.” It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Nola, I just really didn’t like Teddy what’s-his-name.

  “So, I’m not really crazy about bees,” I told him.

  He gave me a half smile, deciding whether or not to mess with me about it. My less than half smile convinced him not to.

  “They’re okay,” he said. “You just need to stay cool, and they’ll stay cool, right? You don’t swat at them, don’t make loud noises, don’t mess with their hive, and they’ll be cool.” He let out a sad laugh. “Besides, the way things are going, we might not even see any.”

  I looked out the window as we drove. “So where are we going?”

  “I need to check the bee-lining stations so we can analyze the data.”

  “What are the bee-lining stations?”

  “You know what a ‘beeline’ is?”

  “A straight line.”

  “Exactly. When bees are out getting nectar from flowers, they zigzag all over the place. But once they’re full, once they can’t take any more, they fly straight back to their hive. Wherever they are, they know exactly where the hive is. They make a ‘beeline’ for the hive. That’s where the phrase comes from. When you’re bee lining, you set up bait stations filled with sugar water. The bees find it, they fill up and fly straight back to the hive. You set up three bait stations and plot the beelines on a map, the point where they intersect is where the hive is.”

  “Huh. That’s actually pretty cool.”

  “It can be pretty tedious. Up until last year, you’d have to lie there for hours, watching and then trying to track the directions the bees were flying in.”

  “So what happened last year?”

  He looked at me with a smug smile as we slowly turned down a bumpy driveway. “Benjy got a grant,” he said, raising his voice over the sound of his tires grinding the dirt and gravel. “And BeeWatch went hi-tech.”

  Forty yards down the driveway, a generator was quietly humming. We pulled up next to it, and Moose pressed a switch on the generator, sending it quiet. A cord ran from the generator to a small cluster of hi-tech equipment another twenty yards away. There was a cluster of metal cases, a couple of feet on each side. At the center was a pair of short tripods, each topped by a sleek black box about six inches high, a foot and a half wide, and three feet long. A red plastic bucket was hanging under one of them.

  “That’s the feeding station at the bottom,” Moose said as we walked up. I looked around for bees, but didn’t see any. “The things on the tripods are LIDAR units, like radar, only using lasers. A motion detector kicks them on if anything bee-sized comes into the area. The lasers sweep the area, take a few three-dimensional images, and then calculate the trajectory of the bee through space. Add some super-sensitive GPS. Bingo: instant beeline.

  “Are bees the only things that set it off?”

  “Anything close to a honeybee will set it off, but we know the wing-beat signature of a honeybee as opposed to a beetle or a mosquito. So we filter for that. The mapping software even plots the locations for us.”

  He walked up to the station and disconnected a small gray box and replaced it with the one under his arm, which seemed to be identical. “Pretty simple, right?”

  “So … what do you need me for?”

  “These units are pretty heavy, and sometimes we have to move them. It’s a lot easier with two people.” He shrugged, and his face colored a bit. “Plus, I figured we could hang out.”

  It seemed like he had something else on his mind, and once we got back in the car, he said, “So, how are things going with you and Nola? You guys doing okay?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Just a vibe. Is something up?”

  I sighed. “Relationships are tricky. Living together is tricky. Apparently living with a cop is tricky.”

  “Nola told me about that Jarrett guy. She was a little freaked out by it.”

  “I was a little freaked out myself. It’s not like that kind of thing happens all the time, but it happens. I know she doesn’t like it, but that’s the way it is. It’s like, she’s not a vegetarian, but she doesn’t like to think of where meat comes from. And I get that, I’m the same way. Sometimes law and order isn’t pretty. She’s been seeing a little more of that side of things since moving in with me. With Simeon Jarrett, she got to look at it right up close.”

  “How about you? How are you doing?”

  I turned to look at him, and he looked back, holding my gaze. Moose and I had been through some stuff in the short time we’d known each other, but it was still a short time.

  “I’m getting there,” I told him. “Sometimes it’s easier than others.”

  “Still having nightmares?”

  “I’m not ‘having nightmares.’ Did Nola tell you that? I had a couple of nightmares. What, you haven’t?”

  He looked away. “A few. But I think you saw a few more things than I did.”

  I wanted to remind him that I was kind of a badass and he was kind of not, but he had a point.

  * * *

  At the next stop, we had to move the whole station, which was a bit of a production. Moose asked if I could move it myself, because if I could then he could monitor the GPS and that way we could do it more precisely.

  I said sure, because that’s what you say when your little friend asks if you are strong enough to do something. But I didn’t realize until too late that meant moving the whole tripod, with the LIDAR unit on the top, all the cables, et cetera, and the feeding station hanging from the bottom.

  I wrapped my arms around the whole thing and lifted, inching forward and to the right according to Moose’s directions. We were about ten seconds into it and the unit was starting to get heavy when two bees emerged from the top of the feeding station. I guess they weren’t finished, because they did not fly straight back to their hive. Instead, they flew straight up at me, one landing on my shirt and the other one getting close enough to my ear that it sounded like a goddamned buzz saw.

  I did not freak out, or at least not totally, but I wanted to, having bees on me and not being able to d
o anything about it. I planted the whole unit right where it was, and I backed the hell away from it.

  “Nope, not yet,” Moose said, oblivious as I brushed at my shirt and my hair. The bee near my head must have flown away, but the one on my shirt tumbled onto the ground in a little ball.

  “Actually, that’s close enough,” Moose said, then he looked up at me. “Are you okay?”

  I nodded. “Cramp.”

  He nodded back. “Okay, well, why don’t you relax while I reattach the power supply.”

  I nodded, watching as the bee on the ground got its legs under it, then took a few steps and flew off. My stomach felt squirrelly from the little surge of adrenaline and I leaned against the truck. It was a kind of unreasoned, little-kid fear that I hadn’t felt since I was eight years old. It reminded me of then, of being so afraid of bees that I used to wish I was allergic so I’d have an excuse for the terror bees provoked in me.

  That summer, I had decided I wasn’t going to be scared of bees anymore. I went out of my way to confront them, stomping on them and swatting them, proving I wasn’t afraid. By the time school started, I tried killing a few with my bare hands. I got stung a couple of times, and it hurt, but it wasn’t the end of the world. As the nights got cooler, I realized the bees would soon be gone, but I felt like I hadn’t quite made my point.

  On a warm Saturday afternoon that October, I caught a bee in a jar and put it in the freezer, just long enough to knock it out. I tied a piece of thread around its middle and the other end around a stick. I guess I thought I was taming it or something. Then the bee woke up and started flying in circles. I sat there, mesmerized, watching it go round and round. At first I thought I was really something. I had tamed this thing, dominated it, made it more scared of me than I was of it. And each time it came toward me, a blur of black and yellow, I felt like it was looking at me, afraid and wondering why I had done this, why I had been killing bees all summer long. Like it knew who I was and what I’d been doing.

  I ran inside to get the scissors, but by the time I got back the bee was faltering, flying a few feet and then landing, and resting. I waited until it landed and snipped the thread as close to the bee as I dared.

  I could remember how hot my face felt as I started to cry, watching it flying away, trailing the thread, bobbing and swaying, under the weight of it, exhausted. It disappeared over some bushes, but I knew it never got home.

  “You okay?” Moose asked when he came back to the truck.

  I nodded. He looked concerned. “How about you?”

  “Have you seen any bees?” he asked.

  I looked right at him. “A couple.”

  “Good,” he said. “I haven’t seen any since Pete’s place this morning.”

  * * *

  “So how serious is it?” I asked as we drove off. “The whole bee situation.”

  “We’ll know more once we get this data analyzed. People are noticing though. They sent a news crew out to interview Benjy today.” Moose smiled when he said it, like, as troubled as he was by the big picture, it was still kind of cool to get on TV. “It’s great that people are starting to pay attention, but scary that the problem has gotten bad enough that they would, you know?”

  By the time we were done, there was plenty of shade and the tops of the trees were a fiery orange. I knew the island wasn’t small, almost ten miles wide and more than twenty miles long, but I was still surprised by how much of it there seemed to be.

  We drove past Edgartown on the way back, the uniform white houses and black shutters a contrast to the colorful jumble of Oak Bluffs. A thin ribbon of road took us north, the ocean on our right and salt ponds sparkling in the late-afternoon sun to our left. The air still had a chill, but the warmth of the sun held a reminder that summer was coming.

  Moose got a text while we were driving back. “Dinner tonight,” he said, his eyes shifting back and forth between his screen and the road. “A bunch of folks are meeting up at Offshore Alehouse. You up for it? You’ll love the Alehouse.”

  “Sounds good to me,” I said as we swung into Oak Bluffs. “I’ll check with Nola.”

  It seemed strange that I’d barely spoken to her since we arrived, but when Moose pulled in across from the hotel, she was standing on the big front porch, smiling and waving. With the sunlight behind her she seemed to be glowing, and I pictured her back on her farm, in Dunston, in the late-summer sun, looking beautiful and smiling at me. I felt a warm rush at the sight of her, and a tiny, inexplicable pang of sadness.

  Moose parked next to the harbor, and as we crossed the road, Nola came down the steps. When she stepped up next to me and slid her arm around my waist, I realized how much I’d been missing her.

  “You boys been out playing with bees?” she asked, stepping up to give me a kiss.

  “Yeah, Doyle helped me with the monitoring stations while you were out there playing in the dirt. How was it anyway?”

  “It’s an amazing place. Teddy’s got quite an operation.”

  I fought the urge to stiffen. “You were at Teddy’s the whole time?”

  “Yes, I had no idea the place was so big. It’s impressive.”

  “Totally is,” Moose conceded.

  I kept my cool and was glad I did as Nola slid her hand up to the back of my neck and worked her fingers up into my hair.

  “So did you guys talk about tonight?” she asked. “Are we on?”

  “Yeah, Benjy sent me a text,” Moose replied. “Sounds good.”

  “Great,” she replied, sliding in front of me and wrapping my arms around her so her back was pressing against me. “Teddy said it was a good place, with room for the whole crowd.”

  Moose smiled at our embrace; then he looked at his watch. “Okay, well, it’s just a few blocks from here, but how about I come by at seven and we can walk over together? That way you two can get some quiet time first.”

  “Sounds good,” Nola said, leaning back a little more.

  8

  Quiet time was great, although not particularly quiet, especially when I kicked over the bedside lamp. We made fast work of each other’s clothes and fell onto the bed, trying not to laugh as we almost bounced off it and onto the floor.

  It had been a week, and a lot longer since we had done it in the daytime. I felt sneaky and young, and we fought off a conspiratorial laugh, until I was inside her. Nothing funny about that. We were both worked up, and it was frantic at first, but then we slowed down, taking our time, kissing and running our fingers through each other’s hair. Looking into each other’s eyes and smiling. Then smiling time was over for a while.

  We finished just before the sun did, dropping onto our backs, sweaty and heaving, as a final sliver of bronze light slid up the wall and narrowed to nothing. I felt the tiniest flicker of regret at having missed what looked to have been a spectacular sunset. Then I looked down at Nola and smiled, because it couldn’t have been as spectacular as she was. She looked up at me and smiled, and I held out my arm, curling it around her as she scooted up close.

  We lay like that for a while, holding on to each other, holding on to the moment, watching the room slowly go dark.

  When Nola’s phone lit up the room, the gentle acoustic guitar ringtone sent us scrambling like a blaring trumpet. I landed on my feet in a combat stance, still half asleep. By the time I was fully awake, Nola had turned on the bedside lamp, squinting at me as she held her phone to her ear.

  “Hi, Moose,” she said, looking at her watch. “No, of course not … Ten minutes, that’s fine.”

  One of the many things I liked about Nola was that she could get ready in a hurry, and I especially liked the way she got ready in a hurry and still looked great. We shared a purely utilitarian shower that was over before the water had fully heated up, and Moose texted us that he was outside on the porch a leisurely fifteen minutes later. The stiff breeze coming off the harbor was bracing, especially with my hair still wet from the shower.

  It was a five-minute walk to the Alehouse, an
d after the first minute, conversation was replaced with hunched shoulders and hurrying. By the time we got there I was grateful to be enveloped in the boozy swell of warmth and loud conversation that greeted us. The place had a vaulted wood ceiling, and walls decked with oars and boats and flags and stuffed fish. At the far end was a massive fireplace made of the ubiquitous fieldstone.

  Moose waved toward the back, where Teddy was standing in a little nook by the bar, giving him a semi-friendly smile and cool-guy tilt of his head. I told myself that maybe I had misjudged the guy, but then his eyes moved from Moose to Nola and his smile moved from fifty percent friendly to one hundred percent wolfish.

  As we filed between the tightly packed tables, our feet crunching peanut shells on the floor, an older couple made their way past us toward the door. Their strained smiles faltered as one of the larger tables erupted in laughter. They’d probably had the place to themselves when they got there for the early bird special, and stayed just a little too long.

  The crowd was an odd mix: a big table of rowdy college kids, a couple of booths of older working men with lined faces, and a few middle-aged couples. I recognized a face at one of the other large tables, a thin guy in an oversized hoodie sitting with two oversized friends wearing regular-sized clothes.

  In the back corner, two beefy guys sitting at a booth were taking turns drinking their beers without smiling or talking. The younger one had a buzz cut and the older one had hair just long enough that you could see he’d lost most of it. They were wearing cheap suits—not that I’m judging—and looked like they maybe weren’t as solid as they used to be. They were still on top of it enough that they each gave me exactly two seconds of eye-work before looking away and never once looking back. If I wasn’t a cop, I might have thought they were cops. But I am, and they weren’t. Maybe at one point, but not for a while.

  I couldn’t help wondering if the ex-cops and the oversized friends were there to keep an eye on each other. But what did I care? I was on vacation.

  As we reached the end of the bar, I saw Benjy and Pete sitting on stools, tucked away behind Teddy. We all shook hands and Teddy gave that phony smile, but between each handshake his eyes flickered back toward Nola.