Honey in the Carcase

by Josip Novakovich

  He brought the bees several pounds of honey, apologizing for having taken it in the summer. He admired the heaven on earth, the earth in heaven.

  His son Daniel visited and told him that Estera, although anemic, had nearly fully recovered. When asked to join her in Osijek, Ivan said, “Somebody has to stay here and protect the church and the bees.”

  The shack where his son had developed photographs had served as a chapel ever since Ivan excommunicated himself from the Baptist church. Likeminded Baptists and Pentecostals, for whom their churches had not been pious enough, used to worship in the shack with Ivan and his family, until they discovered that they were not like-minded. Nobody came now, but still, it used to be—and would continue to be—God’s space.

  Ivan played the violin in his chapel and studied scripture. He was disappointed that scripture mentioned bees only a few times and lions many times. It consoled him that in one verse bees got the better of the lion: There was a swarm of bees and honey in the carcase of the lion.

  Another passage intrigued Ivan. And it shall come to pass in that day, that the Lord shall hiss for the fly that is in the uttermost part of the river of Egypt, and for the bee that is on the land of Assyria.

  He whistled and hissed to call out his bees, but none came out. Then he made a flute from a wet willow branch, with a low note, and found a hiss that indeed excited the bees so that they came out and crisscrossed the sky into a mighty net. When they came back, they tossed out their drones, and they kept tossing them for days. A peculiar fratricide—that aspect of bee theologically troubled Ivan. Some element of God’s wrath built in the natural order of things? In front of the beehives, fat drones with stunted wings curled atop each other and shrank; the ditch filled up with drones. On a sunny day, so many crows flew over Ivan’s head, to feast on the drones, that the sky grew dark.

  After a prolonged bombardment, a band of Chetniks came to Ivan’s street. He was the only person living on his block. When he saw them coming, he unplugged the beehive entrances and hissed on his flute. At the same time, a bomb flew, with a low whistle, and fell in the street. It did not go off. Bees grew agitated and flew out into the street, where the sweaty Chetniks, having loaded his neighbor’s furniture on a truck, turned their eyes to Ivan’s house.

  Thousands of bees covered each brigand, giving him the appearance of an armored medieval knight. The brigands ran helter-skelter, dropping their weapons. One staggered in circles and fell dead in front of Ivan’s house. He kept swelling even after the rigor mortis gripped him.

  TUMBLEWEED

  SLEEPY FROM SPENDING A NIGHT at a truck stop near Rapid City—in dull debates with a couple of hairy potheads about whether there could be another Prohibition in the States and another Revolution in the Soviet Union—I stood on the shoulder of Interstate 90 with my thumb up. My arm began to hurt, and after an hour or so I sat on the side of the road, propping my arm on my backpack. Two hours later I lay on the shoulder and lifted my right leg, barefoot, sticking up my large toe.

  I was standing up again when a pickup braked; its tires squealed and smoked, painting gray asphalt black. I climbed into the truck and faced a drooping blond moustache and weathered skin under a leather hat with a snake brim. A black gun on the seat made me hesitate; I didn’t shut the door behind me.

  “What you waiting for? You aren’t Iranian, are you?”

  “No.” My feet crunched through a bunch of empty cans and fumbled over a hunting rifle.

  “At first sight, I thought you were. I’m not gonna stop for some Iranian shithead. But then I thought, so what if he’s an Iranian, I could blow his brains out—do a service to the world. But you aren’t Iranian?”

  “No, I’m glad to say.”

  “Have a beer, then. Where you going?”

  “New York.”

  “That’s a sick town. If I was you, I wouldn’t go there. I could take you to Iowa, to I-80, how would that be?”

  “Tremendous,” I said.

  “I’m driving to Missouri to visit my ol’ man. It’s lonely down there, so I’m taking him a toy.” He pointed at a gray snowmobile in the back of the pickup.

  “It’s summer,” I said.

  “So what? Soon it’ll be winter. For old folks, time passes fast. But for us fuckers on this freaking road, it’s different. Man, I hope you’re fun.”

  I glanced at the gun.

  “Oh, this thing? Don’t worry about it. It’s for rattlesnakes. Hypnotizes them. Just keep it circling in front of their eyes, their heads follow. Once the sucker’s got the rhythm, you pull the trigger. Head busts like a tomato. Thirsty?” He offered me another can.

  I slid my thumbnail beneath the opener, and the smell of yeast popped out. For a while we didn’t speak. On one side of the road, a field of wavy alfalfa seemed to spin clockwise; in another, a herd of Angus cows rotated counterclockwise. Not all the cows faced the wind.

  Brown clouds of dust made the horizon hazy. Little dry, wiry bushes, like skeletons of globes, bounced over the road and collected on the fences alongside.

  “What are these weeds?”

  “Russian thistle. You’ve got an accent. Where did you say you were from? You aren’t from Iran?”

  “I didn’t say I was from anywhere. Yugoslavia.”

  “How do you like it here? Much better than Czechoslovakia, isn’t it?”

  “I imagine it is.”

  “I’ve never been to Czechoslovakia…”

  “Neither have I.”

  “Man, don’t you joke like that with me, you just told me you’re a Czecho.”

  “Yugoslav.”

  “Well, how’d you get out?”

  “Simple,” I said. “Cut the electrical wires with a pair of scissors, swam across a river into Austria, took hot gunfire the whole way.” I considered pulling up the sleeve of my T-shirt to pass off my smallpox vaccination scars as bullet wounds, but I didn’t have the energy to sustain such bullshit.

  “At least in this country we have democracy,” he said.

  I leaned over the speedometer, staring at the hand that trembled around ninety.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I don’t believe in cops. Dig me a beer out of the cooler. Grab one for yourself.”

  We drank more than a case of beer, and then, for refreshments, stopped at a pitch-dark country bar and had a couple shots of Jack Daniel’s. He kept laughing that he was on the road with a commie “from Yugoslavakia.”

  “It’s pretty cold in Yugoslavakia, isn’t it?”

  “No, Yugoslavia’s on the Mediterranean,” I said. Or used to be, I might have added.

  “Shit. The Russians have got so far.” He took off his hat, wiped his white forehead with a red handkerchief. About half a dozen Minnesotans at the bar insisted I have a double shot of vodka, so I wouldn’t feel too far from home.

  Back in the pickup, the sunlight was unbearably bright. Hawks floated on the updrafts over grassy pastures nursing placid ponds. A hawk dove into the grass, and then slowly and heavily rose from it, its talons empty.

  He swallowed a white pill and gave me one too. “Amphetamines. A good invention, helps you drink more.” A black corvette passed us. He sped up to 110, and, passing the Corvette, made the international “fuck you” sign to the driver. “Nobody passes me, I mean, nobody. Not even a cop gets away with that shit.”

  “Have you ever gotten a ticket?” I asked. Instead of answering, he opened his right palm; I popped a can and placed it in his hand.

  “So how come you don’t got no wheels?” he asked me sympathetically, perhaps imaging that I was stripped of my license for heroic driving.

  “Too much time at school,” I said. “Hoped I’d save some money this summer, working the oil fields, except I couldn’t find enough work. I’d heard you could make tons down here.”

  “You should’ve run into me before. I run rigs up in Montana. What work can you do?”

  “Just a worm.”

  “That’s okay. You could make a derrickman pretty fa
st if you aren’t scared of heights. A little overtime, you’d be cracking fifty grand a year. I make about eighty grand, more than a fucking dentist in LA.”

  “It must be a great feeling. All the bucks.”

  “Better than getting laid.”

  “I couldn’t compare. I haven’t gotten laid since Ford was president, and I haven’t ever made real money.”

  “Shit, as a drummer in Chicago, I got puss every night with a different woman—sometimes two, three at a time. We’d go into a hotel room, smoke weed, and bang! I screwed more in a year than a hundred average men in their lives. You’ll never lay as many women as I did, I don’t care how much education you got.”

  A green and white IOWA sign loomed huge above us. A small black-and-white sign stood on the side of the road: SPEED LIMIT 55. MOBILE HOMES 50.

  “So you study in New York?”

  “Yeah, Columbia.”

  “Don’t crap me. That’s a school for rich kids—all you got is your useless dick.”

  “I do study there. What can I say? The rich kids are the undergrads.”

  “So you think you’re smart? Can’t get laid, can’t do better than work as a worm.” He laughed. “A pinko at Columbia, you tell that to my gran’ma, not me!”

  For a while, we didn’t talk. Then he said, “Well, I’m gonna crash somewheres around here. I don’t know about you, but I’m wasted. Why don’t you get out here?” He braked suddenly, swerved on the shoulder and nearly into the cornfield.

  “I thought you’d get me to I-80,” I said.

  “Out!”

  I barely had enough time to get my backpack out of the bed. My notebook fell out and slid under the snowmobile. The pickup started quickly, the tires shooting gravel and soil in low trajectories twenty yards down the shoulder. The red sun was sinking into the cornfield. I realized my notebook was gone, and with it my novel of two hundred pages, a romance of sorts, which I was sure would be published by Second Chance at Love, Inc., and fetch me fifteen grand, maybe twenty.

  Unsteady, I stuck my thumb up and looked around. A green LEMARS sign with a couple of rusty holes from bullets.

  A truck siren hooted at me like a lonely freight train—as if I hadn’t calculated there was enough time for me to cross the road to the gas station, where I asked about a bus that would get me to I-80. The attendant ignored me while pumping into a large Chevy filled with the wide, ruddy faces of an extended family. “Is there a bust…eh, bus stop around here?” No answer, so I shouted, “Are there any Christians around here?”

  The husky gas attendant looked at me. “Christians? Listen, man. If you don’t leave the premises pronto, I’m gonna call the cops. They’ll tell you about Christians.”

  “But you must know Christ’s teachings. He may even be your Lord, your personal Savior?”

  “Get lost, ya hear!” shouted the man, while a Chevy load of sunflower faces watched us.

  I staggered into the motel and asked about the bus terminal—three miles down the road, a little too far for me—and about a single room for the night—twenty ninety-five, a little too much.

  Stepping out, I was blinded by bright lights. I missed the last step and sank, jolting the slipped disk in my back—potentially a capital injury, if I’d promptly sought workmen’s comp from the construction company. There were two police cars waiting, three or four cops with beer paunches protruding authoritatively into the darkness outside the scope of the beams of light. Not happy with the limelight, I sidled sideways.

  “Sir, stay where you are. There’s been complaints about you.”

  “About me? How do you know it was about me?”

  “Driver’s license, please.”

  “But I’m not driving.”

  “I need it to identify you.”

  “I’ve got a green card.”

  “No driver’s license.” The cop’s tone made it sound like grounds for execution. “We’ve got to test you. Drunk as a skunk, seems to me.”

  “I don’t want to be tested. I am drunk, isn’t that good enough? Isn’t the freedom to get drunk at the root of democracy? Pursuit of personal happiness is guaranteed by the Constitution.”

  “Come now, it’ll be better for you. Close your eyes. Bring the tip of your index finger to your nose.”

  “I don’t want to. I am drunk, and so what? I’ll bet you lift one or two yourself now and then, when you get home after a dull day of work, with your wife in pajamas.”

  “Bring that finger to your nose!” The cop was shouting now. The other one clanked a pair of handcuffs melodiously. So I followed orders, and it seemed to me I did a pretty good job, damn near hitting my nose, and only once my right eye. My eyeball hurt, but not badly.

  “All right, now walk the straight line—put one foot right in front of the other.” I did that too, and didn’t fall. My assessment of the results must have differed from theirs: the melody-maker put the cuffs on my hands, and two cops shoved me into a car. They turned on the siren and drove me around the town several times to brag about having caught a menace to law and order. I felt honored. It was attention, certainly more of it than you get standing on the shoulder of the road, passed by all sorts of people.

  They led me into a police station, doing a pretty good imitation of TV cops escorting a murderer. In a room, a thin investigator sitting behind the desk asked me to empty my pockets. He examined all the things on the table one by one, as if he hadn’t seen the likes. He found my registered alien card especially fascinating, though I didn’t think much of my photo; I had a large pimple on the tip of my nose from the unbearable heat in Miami, where I had immigrated.

  He asked me what I was doing in Iowa, and I told him I was part of the labor force in retreat. We were defeated near Laramie, Wyoming, because of the oil glut, no doubt an Iranian swindle. My anti-Iranian comment didn’t seem to placate him. He asked, “Don’t you know it’s illegal to be intoxicated in public?” I said I didn’t. “Don’t you know it’s illegal to hitchhike in Iowa?”

  “But how else are you going to get around if you can’t afford a car? That’s discrimination against the poor.”

  “We’re not the welfare department. For your own good, to protect you and others, we’ll put you in jail for the night until you sober up.”

  He said this in a friendly voice, like a doctor sending a patient to a hot springs in the Alps to cure rheumatism. That made me feel pretty good, thinking I’d have a free night.

  “And in the morning, you’ll have to go to court and pay a fine.”

  “A fine? I have hardly any cash. I just have this check from working on coalmine silos in Wyoming…”

  “Maybe you can get someone to wire you money,” he said, turning my student ID over and cleaning his nails with it. Now I felt humiliated. So far it had all seemed sort of fun, so much bustle and bright activity, but now, on account of thirty bucks, tears welled up in my nose so that I sniffed and sniffed, clearly under severe emotional strain.

  Another cop came by and said, “Give me your belt and shoelaces.”

  “Shoelaces?”

  “So you don’t kill yourself.”

  “I am not depressed,” I said. “Besides, my shoelaces are rotten.” To demonstrate, I tugged at one, which instantly snapped. “See, you couldn’t even hang a cat with these.” But there was no arguing; I had to surrender my shoelaces.

  Holding my biceps, a cop led me into an empty cell. Neon light emanated from the ceiling. The faucet water was hot; it didn’t alleviate my dehydration and headache. Although even the stool was hot, I sat on it and remained in that philosophical attitude for hours, as if posing for a post-modern replica of Rodin’s gloomy sculpture. Then I lay on a hard wooden bench in the middle of the room—I guess it was supposed to be a spartan bed—and tried to sleep. I was nauseated. My bones, eyes, and unidentified organs hurt.

  When it seemed it must be at least noontime of the following day, I began to bang against the metal door, staring through the barred window. Soon some other admirable c
itizens joined me, and we hollered, screamed, and kicked the doors of our respective cells. I hurt my toe kicking the door and wondered whether I could sue the U.S. government for compensation.

  After a quarter-hour jam session, a guard appeared and asked us what we wanted. We all wanted to drink and to eat. The guard brought us some frosty donuts with orange juice. The donuts were sticky and the orange juice tasted of flour.

  A guard led me into the courthouse, a large room with some kind of wood paneling. A well-fed woman showed up in a black gown, took a small polished wooden hammer, and banged with it on the table. She asked me to raise my hand and swear. I swore all the judge wanted, and even thought of contributions. I had to keep my right arm raised; my left was employed in keeping my trousers from sliding down. The cops had forgotten to give back my belt; judging by the appearance of most of the cops and the judge, belts were not a necessity in Iowa. The judge asked me whether I was guilty of public intoxication.

  “I am not guilty. It’s pretty natural to be drunk.”

  “Answer my questions straight, to avoid further inconvenience.”

  She repeated her question. She seemed persistent, so I agreed to plead guilty, to get out of the tiresome place. I had to pay thirty bucks to a cashier—a cheerful woman behind the glass partition who slid me half a dozen papers to sign, with the joy and generosity of a person distributing prizes after a golf tournament. I varied my signatures to break the monotony.

  I got back my belt and my shoelaces. I tried to pass the tip of the shoelaces through the appropriate holes in my sneakers. My hand trembled from the hangover; I was like an old man who cannot pass a thread through the eye of a needle. A policeman observed my struggles, and I looked at him angrily to mind his own holes. With my saliva, I pointed the tops of my shoelaces between my forefinger and thumb—the faithful thumb that had gotten me so many places—and coaxed the laces through the holes.

  It was cloudy, humid, and awfully bright outside, so that the streets glared as if coated with ice. I got to the Greyhound bus terminal, bought a gallon of spring water, and sat, gulping the water loudly while I waited for a bus to Sioux City. An old man sat next to me.