Stein Stung Page 3

  “No, you haven’t,” Karma laughed.

  “No,” Stein confessed. “I haven’t.” He tucked the folder away. In its place was his own bemused curiosity. “How the heck do bees get rustled? You don’t lasso them, right? And part two of the question, if you found them, how would you know they were yours? They all look alike, don’t they? Or was that some horribly racist remark?”

  Karma squinted a long penetrating gaze into Stein’s face. When he realized the question was sincere and not meant to show him up, he answered in the polite nonjudgmental way you’d talk to an undergifted child. “No offense meant, but why would they send a man up here who knew absolutely nothing about the subject?”

  “It probably has to do with the high regard in which both of us are held by the Establishment.”

  On that note they bonded and Karma educated Stein on the basics of beekeeping and bee pilfering. Thieves did not steal individual bees. Usually the thieves were beekeepers themselves. They took entire colonies. Those white boxes on the side of the road were commercial hives, each holding forty thousand bees.

  “Did you say forty thousand?”

  Karma nodded.

  “That’s a fuck of a lot of bees!”

  The waitress returned with their mulled lemonades. Her apron strap brushed against the back of Stein’s neck as she set his glass down, setting off a whole sequence of unrealistic fantasies. He managed to return his attention to Karma after she departed. All right, so he kind of vaguely understood how. He was still miles away from why.

  “Do you know where almonds come from?” Karma asked.

  “From those cute little blue cans.”

  “And before that.”

  “I’m guessing trees?”

  “Excellent. You’re a wise and intuitive man. But did you know—and no offense, I’m guessing you did not—that ninety percent of the world’s supply of almonds are grown a couple hundred miles from here in the San Joaquin Valley?”

  “I’ll definitely try to remember that next time I’m on Jeopardy!”

  “It’s a multibillion-dollar industry.”

  “Did you say billion?”

  “Every single blossom has to be cross-pollinated to produce a nut. This is such a vast and complex job, only bees can do it. It is the largest pollination event on the planet. And it has to be done in the two weeks that the trees are in blossom.”

  “I’m understanding that I want to stay as far away from this place as possible. But I still don’t see where the money comes in.”

  “There aren’t near enough bees up there do the job, so beekeepers all over the country ship their colonies in on flatbeds. Six trillion bees’ll be working those orchards.”

  “Did you say trillion?” The thought made Stein’s skin shrivel. He took a healthy swig of his lemonade, which Karma mentioned in passing wouldn’t exist without bees to pollinate the lemons and sweeten it with honey.

  “A healthy colony can rent out for a hundred and fifty dollars a month.”

  “Oh,” Stein deflated. “I thought you were going to say ten thousand a month. No offense, but a hundred and fifty is chump change.”

  “For one, yes. Even for my dozen. But a commercial operation may run one or two thousand colonies. Suppose they were stolen and rented out for a hundred and fifty each. Do the math.”

  That’s exactly what he was doing.

  “Now suppose you educate me. Why do they send you?”

  “They want me to help get your property back.”

  “No, they don’t.” Moonblossom’s tone was a lot more derogatory this time.

  “No.” Stein admitted. “They don’t.”

  “They want to know if I’m telling the truth about losing them.”

  “Yes,” said Stein. “That’s exactly what they want to know. And are you?”

  ***

  Karma said that he was telling the truth and Stein believed him. So that was that. Job well done. As he retraced his route through winding roads back up toward the summit and over Lake Casitas, one thought kept grating at him. Karma was claiming a big thousand dollars for his loss. Why would Lassiter and Frank pay Stein five grand to verify a claim one-fifth the size? It just didn’t add up.

  He pulled over to the side of the road and sifted once again through the details of the accident that had killed Frank Monahan. This time when he read that the overturned trailer had been carrying four hundred colonies, he had a greater understanding of the scope of the incident. Two million bees had been turned loose. He remembered the time that one bee that had flown into his ear. It had buzzed against his eardrum for three hours, like a sawmill had been set up in his brain, so he thought he’d be driven crazy and die. Or that it would crawl into his brain and sting him and he would die. Or that the bee would become exhausted and die and the noxious fumes of its decaying body would poison him and he would die.

  He noticed a detail in the photographs that had not registered before. The overturned truck had North Dakota license plates. Alarm sirens began to go off in his brain as Karma’s story unraveled. If his bees indeed had been stolen, what the hell would they be doing on a truck coming into California from North Dakota? Fuck. He pounded the steering wheel. The man just lied to his face. He must have heard about the accident, figured why not make a claim? A thousand bucks was a small enough amount to pass under the radar. The company probably spent more every month on air freshener. Stein had a mini-ethical crisis of his own to face. If the little man was striking a tiny gnat’s blow against the beast, more power to him. Why should only kings plunder? And yet. Stein’s Achilles’ heel had always been that he could not let one hand wash the other. They both always came out dirty.

  By the time he got back to Scooter’s Incarnation, Karma was long gone. His local honey stand was well known, and people were fine about giving Stein the vague directions to his place. He followed the bends in the paved section of the back road, careful to avoid overhanging branches and mud puddles. He had done enough damage to Lila’s expensive toys.

  There were a goodly number of rutty dirt paths that could equally have fit the directions he’d been given. He tried several. Each of them ultimately dead-ended so that he had to back his way up to the main rut. His neck was killing him from all the looking back over his shoulder, and he was ready to bag the entire venture when he noticed a turnoff to the left that looked more promising than the others. He locked the car and set out on foot. The air felt sweet and fresh, the late-day exhalation of rosemary and sage.

  After a short distance, the path doglegged to the left and then to the right, where it opened up into a semi-paved asphalt road. He briefly considered going back for the car, but less than a hundred yards ahead he saw a house. A rustic A-frame. The woman who answered the door told him Karma was out in the orchard supering his stock. Stein wondered what that meant and speculated on what the woman’s relationship to Karma might be. She looked to be in her forties, a little bit dykey in the shoulders, so probably not his girlfriend. Too young to be his mother. She hadn’t referred to him as Mister, so probably not his housekeeper. Not that Karma would be likely to have one.

  With his mind thus preoccupied, Stein did not take notice of a more significant factor until he was in the midst of it. Karma was kneeling beside a stack of white wooden boxes while thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of bees flew about him in chaotic profusion. When Stein saw where he was, he froze as though he had been dipped into liquid nitrogen.

  “Well, howdy there. What a nice surprise,” Karma’s voice sang out. He gave a couple of puffs with his smoker tool, sending wafts of white cloud across the colony, then pried open the top of a wooden box with a small, sharp tool, and withdrew one of eight wooden frames that hung like file folders. It was covered completely by blankets of active bees crawling over a loom of perfect, symmetrical six-sided cells.

  “Brood,” Karma explained. “Honeybee nursery.”

  He worked without fear or haste, extracting a second then a third densely populated frame while ex
plaining to the stock-still statue of Stein that he was attempting to regenerate his lost stock by starting new colonies, placing these frames into new, empty boxes. Each of them was branded with the design that Stein now vaguely remembered Millicent Pope-Lassiter had described: circles inside triangles inside circles. Karma’s face was right up close to the frame as he gently pushed his index finger through their mass. “There she is. Do you see her?” He proffered the frame toward Stein. “That’s the queen we’re going to move to the new hive. See how much bigger she is?”

  “I’ll take your word for it.” Stein drew back and made his voice sound pleasantly innocuous. “Can we go somewhere else to talk?”

  “No need to worry. As long as you come with a pure heart and no malice intent they won’t bother you.”

  Stein had a feeling he was being fucked with, but wasn’t ready to put it to the test.

  “Would you like to go inside?” Karma asked.

  “I would like that very much.”

  Inside meant a high-roofed ramshackle barn out behind the A-frame. It housed tubs and barrels and basins and machines so unlike anything Stein had ever seen that he gave up trying to fathom their purpose. There were a couple of folding chairs that had seen better days and a sofa that had seen better centuries.

  Karma ambled toward a fifty-gallon drum filled nearly to the top with a rich, amber, viscous liquid. He dipped a beveled tool with a spiral groove into the contents of the barrel then let a few golden drops dribble onto his visitor’s tongue. Stein’s jaw hung as if he had tasted divine revelation.

  “I raise my bees organically. No pesticides. No antibiotics. This is how they express their appreciation.” He reached up to a shelf above him and handed Stein a couple of jars, labeled with his MOONBLOSSOM logo. “Take some home to your family. I assume that’s why you came back.”

  He sensed that Karma knew that wasn’t the reason. “This is my boss’s idea, not mine. But I’ll be honest, once she brought it up it made me wonder about it too. How would your bees wind up on a truck coming into California from North Dakota?”

  “You’re thinking I’m trying to cheat the insurance company?” A few stray bees strafed around Stein’s periphery, making him very uneasy.

  Karma chided him. “Do you know what happens when a bee stings a human? The barb stays rooted inside the flesh so when they fly away it tears open their abdomen and they die. Quite frankly, their life here is too good to throw away on you.”

  Stein leaned forward with his elbows on the wooden barrel that served as a table. “I want to believe you. Convince me that your bees could be coming in from North Dakota.”

  “You said the truck was from North Dakota. Do you know how long it had been in state?”

  Stein had to admit he did not.

  “North Dakota raises very healthy bees. Nobody uses pesticides. They winter them in empty potato silos. It’s a perfect environment. Truck could have brought down a load from ND and still had some room for mine. Maybe others.”

  Even if the guy was completely full of shit, Stein dug his style and was ready to go to bat for him. “Here’s the thing though, man,” Stein said. “I know Lassiter and Frank. Before they’ll part with a cent they’ll want to see proof that your equipment was on that truck.” Stein had remembered seeing the word “equipment” on the report and waited to be praised for using it correctly.

  Instead, what Karma said was that he had never filed a claim with Lassiter and Frank.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Yeah, that’s the odd part. I’m not insured with Lassiter and Frank. I never heard of Millicent Pope-Lassiter until she contacted me.”

  “She contacted you? Why would she contact you?”

  “If I had to guess, I’d say she’s insuring someone a whole lot bigger than me and wants to stay under the radar.”

  It made such perfect sense it embarrassed Stein not to have seen it. “We should switch jobs,” he said. Then a couple of bees flew low-level recon over his forehead and he thought, maybe not.

  Chapter Three

  Lila was standing on the balustrade outside her second-story bedroom window wearing one of her wacky getups—an oversized straw beach bonnet, black culottes, sunglasses, and a polka-dot blouse—when Stein drove in. She waved down to get his attention and mouthed, They’re here! Stein had grasped that the contractors were there when he saw three trucks blocking the driveway. He followed the sound of a compressor and the trail of an insulated electrical extension cable and a thick pipe down the full length of the driveway and into the backyard.

  Four bare-chested Filipino bantamweights were cursing in Tagalog and wrestling mightily with the clogged hose. The compressor sputtered, roared to life, then died. The hose went into death throes like a python choking on the warthog it had swallowed whole. A few gulps of putrid muck and tar dribbled out, then receded back into the open pit that had so recently been a swimming pool.

  The foreman, who was wearing a Florida Marlins baseball cap, made a series of contorted physical gestures that could either have meant they would need to return yet again with still heavier machinery or that he had a terrible case of hemorrhoids. In either case, the operation was kaput for the day.

  “When?” Stein gestured urgently at his watch.

  He couldn’t tell if the foreman’s answer meant today or in two days or next Tuesday. And each version of the translation that Stein proposed for confirmation was answered with an enthusiastic “yes.”

  In the wake of their departure, Stein lingered at the wrought-iron fence. Bubbles of methane popped sporadically to the surface. The scope of the damage he had inflicted made the five grand he just earned seem paltry. He heard Lila in the kitchen directing Mercedes in the preparation of a tuna salad sandwich for Stein, and he ambled inside.

  “Coffee, Señor Estine?”

  “Thanks, Mercedes.” He asked Lila where Angie was.

  “They’re probably still at the mall.”

  “They?” Stein’s sentries came to attention at the sound of the plural pronoun. “Is her mother here?”

  “Matthew came down for a visit from Berkeley.”

  Stein couldn’t immediately place the name.

  “Matt,” Lila clarified. “My stepson. He likes to be called Matthew now.”

  Stein’s paternal anti-boycraft guns raised out of their silos. “You drove them to the mall and left them there?”

  She laughed at his anxiety. “Stein, he has his own car. He’s eighteen.”

  “Wasn’t he just fourteen?”

  “Weren’t we all?” She offered him her cordless phone. “Her cell is on speed dial. Number three. If you have the overpowering urge to chaperone.”

  “Sorry. I get protective.”

  “Maybe just a little.”

  Lila dispatched Mercedes to the living room, where she said the plants looked dry and ought to be watered, and slid alongside Stein on the banquette. She was dying to know what happened on his trip.

  “I wish I could tell you,” he said, in an offhand manner that she took completely the wrong way. She slid away from him as if she’d been shoved. He caught hold of her receding shoulder. “I don’t mean that I can’t tell you.” He explained his mystification about why Millicent Pope-Lassiter had wanted him to go up there. He couldn’t discern any useful purpose to the trip. The intimacy mollified Lila. She wanted to be part of a team. A repository of disclosure. Stein exhumed the wad of hundreds he had been paid and pushed them into Lila’s hand to put it toward the damage and repair.

  She felt embarrassed, as if he had interpreted her upset as dunning for upkeep and pushed the money back at him.

  “We should talk about our financial arrangement,” Stein said. “I’m feeling a little bit like a squatter.”

  “Or,” Lila countered, “Mercedes put fresh sheets on the bed. We could try them out.”

  “Hold that thought till I come out of the shower.” He kissed her in the center of her furrowed brow and headed up the red tile circular staircase. Li
la rinsed out the coffee cup and then trailed him up the stairs. Mercedes glanced up from her watering to give Lila an arch look. She had been with her ten years and had become the source of church lady advice. The shower was running full force when Lila slid into the bathroom, dropped her clothes and opened the glass door. The torrent sounded like an ovation.

  ***

  Stein knew it was irrational but it upset him when he didn’t know where Angie was. On the alternate weeks when Hillary had custody, he rarely fretted for her safety. But the closer she was, the closer he needed her to be. Following the shower and its amorous aftermath, Stein knocked on Angie’s bedroom door. When there was no reply he asked Lila for her phone and pressed numeral three on the speed dial. The ten-digit melody of Angie’s phone number sang in his ear. A telephone somewhere downstairs began to ring in perfect synchronicity with the sound of the outgoing tone in Stein’s ear.

  He handed the phone back to Lila, saying she gave him the wrong speed dial number.

  “Maybe you pressed the wrong number,” she suggested.

  “Maybe I didn’t.” He hung up. The ringing stopped. He redialed. It started. “Okay?”

  “It’s Angie’s number,” Lila insisted.

  Holding the handset in front of him like a dowser rod, Stein followed the sound of the ringing down the stairs, through the dining room and into the kitchen, where its source lay on the counter, nestled in a sweater. It was not Lila’s other line but Angie’s orange-colored flip-top, the kind all the kids at school had. He hit the kill button and again the ringing stopped. “Angie?” he called her name like she was lost in the wilderness.

  “Dad! Come out here. You’ve got to see this!”

  She was ankle deep in the primordial soup that filled Lila’s pool. Her jeans were rolled up to her knees. Afternoon sun haloed around her newly styled burnt Sienna coif. It almost overwhelmed him how beautiful she was. She was holding, as if an offering to a god who liked bizarre offerings, an object covered in the birth placenta of the tarry muck from which it had emerged. Its gently curved shape and solid heft gave a clue to its identity.