Stein Stung Read online

  Who knew they had to be moved to a winter location? Who knew they had to be fed pollen patties and a mixture of nectar and sugar? Who knew about disease and pesticides and mite control and how to replace a queen? Who knew about all the time it took out of your life? He lost half of Spider’s bees in the first year. Those that survived were ragged and unproductive. His healthy eight-frame boxes had depleted down to two, maybe three decent frames of bees.

  It was about that time that Renn Moody paid a visit. When he saw what things had come to he volunteered to take the bees. Hollister had been so embarrassed of his negligence that he made a bold proclamation: If Renn would teach him, he would work as hard as any man ever could to learn. True to his word, Hollister became a dedicated pupil. Sometimes his dedication exceeded his abilities, but he was resilient and learned by his mistakes. By the end of the following summer he had brought his twenty-four colonies back to good health.

  “One night a month ago, they were gone,” Ruth Ann abruptly concluded, as if the whole long tale had been a set up for her to jump the ending.

  “How?” Stein asked them.

  “How is the easy part,” Hollister shrugged. “All you need is a flatbed and a forklift.”

  “And the will to do evil,” Ruth Ann amended.

  Stein spoke from lofty experience that it was never that easy.

  “Come on. We’ll show you.” Ruth Ann bolted up out of her chair.

  “What do you mean, you’ll show me?”

  “Let’s go commit a felony.”

  ***

  Moments later Stein found himself trailing Hollister out the door. “Boy, did I have a wrong first impression of your wife,” Stein wheezed.

  “Tell me about it,” said Hollister, who himself was trying to keep up with Ruth Ann.

  Stein followed them back over Route 53 in his rented Kia. The landscape looked spooky at night with bare witchy branches groping at him from the sides of the road. He followed the truck into a nearly blind driveway just past the Paulsen Reservoir siding.

  “This is us,” said Hollister, who had hopped out of the truck. He pointed to a place for Stein to park in their gravel driveway under an overhanging scraggly oak and alongside a spiffy red Camaro convertible with Massachusetts plates.

  “Out of state visitors?” Stein asked.

  “Mine,” said Ruth Ann. “Imagine how happy my parents were that after I graduated Harvard Business School and came west for a Venture Capitalist job, I married a hillbilly named Billy Bob.”

  “That’s not exactly how it happened,” Hollister explained to Stein.

  “Yeah. Somehow I had a feeling.”

  Hollister lowered the Bronco’s tailgate and wheeled his forklift out from the garage and onto the flatbed.

  “Let’s skedaddle,” Ruth Ann whooped.

  The three of them wedged into the cab.

  “See why I love it here?” Ruth Ann grinned. “You never get to say skedaddle at a business meeting.”

  They did not go very far. The place she stopped to pull over seemed arbitrary. There was no barbed wire or fencing of any sort. Rows of trees twenty feet tall stood like silent regiments in the harsh underlighting of the headlights and the soft blush of the quarter moon. The trees were not the point of interest, but rather the stack of white wooden boxes whose purpose Stein now had been educated to recognize. With her elbow out the window, the sleeve of her flannel shirt rolled up over her bony arm, Ruth Ann backed the truck to the lip of the row and cut the engine. While Stein watched in wonderment, Ruth Ann and Hollister lowered the tailgate and wheeled the forklift up to the neatly stacked boxes.

  “In five minutes I could lift this pallet onto my truck and those bees’d be mine.”

  “If he had the will to do evil,” Ruth Ann amended.

  “That’s how mine got boosted. Just that easy.”

  A small detail had caught Stein’s attention. Everything else faded to white noise.

  “Who do these boxes belong to?” Stein asked. There was an authority and directness in his voice that had not been there before.

  “Don’t worry, we weren’t going to take them.” Ruth Ann laughed. “You just went all sheriff on me.”

  Stein beckoned for Hollister to hand him his flashlight and began tiptoeing closer. “Are there bees in those boxes?” Before he got the answer, which he knew would be yes, he edged closer. Just an arm’s length away now, he shone the light across the top plane of the two boxes. Someone had made a crude attempt to hack it away, but the owner’s brand was etched too deeply into the wood frame to be obliterated: three circles inside a triangle, each with a triangle inside of it.

  “These hives are stolen property,” he said. “I need to know who they belong to.”

  Ruth Ann went berserk. “What is this, Stein, a sting?” She turned her rant on Hollister. “Damn it, Billy Bob, I knew the minute I looked at him he was the law!”

  “The law? You’ve got to be kidding.” Stein still expected people to see him as the subversive warrior with his shoulder-length mane tied up in a bandana made of a ripped U.S. flag. Not the “before” picture in an ad for exercise equipment. “I’m here to bring these back to their rightful owner.”

  “Their rightful owner is Renn Moody and he’s giving these boxes to my husband. He’s coming over in the morning to split some of his hives. You can ask him yourself.”

  Stein glanced down at his watch. The drive back to LA would have to wait.

  Chapter Six

  While Hollister and Ruth Ann Greenway were setting up the roll-out cot for Stein to bunk in overnight, it was Lila’s night to host her book club, which meant that Mercedes had been up to her maracas all day making hors d’oeuvres and salads and those little fancy pastries the girls loved.

  Stein called them the Trust Fund Girls. The eight women had an average net worth of seven million. Like Lila, they were in their late forties, Beverly Hills High School gals, sevens and eights on the male Universal ratings system for faces and bodies. Most went to college for the proverbial MRS. Money they made on their own was in real estate and stocks. One of them, with her husband, owned a gigantically successful chain of burger shacks. One was married to a heart surgeon. Connie, the one who had never been married, had the best genetically engineered body of them all, and was the major nutcase.

  Although their pampered lives represented everything Stein believed wrong with the world, he was never unkind to them. Except once, to Connie, who had plunked herself down in front of him while he was trying to watch a Lakers game and initiated a conversation about why he thought the dermatologist she’d been going to for six years had never asked her out. She had been wearing a daringly low cut blouse, exposing a good bit of enhanced pulchritude. Frustrated at his lack of response she had accused him of staring at her breasts, to which he had laconically replied that he was more interested in the wonders of nature than the wonders of science.

  During much of the afternoon, Angie had noticed Lila peering out the kitchen window with increasing levels of anxiety. After Matthew had gone for an obligatory evening with his mother, Angie knocked on Lila’s bedroom door. She found her reading the book that was up for discussion that night, The House of Sand and Fog, which had put her to sleep by page thirteen the previous four times she had tried. Who Moved My Cheese? and The Millionaire Mind had been suggested but the consensus was they should read fiction. After that discussion, the Trust Fund Girls had decided to found a second book club, dedicated to finance and current events. Lila hadn’t read that book, either, and they’d meet tomorrow.

  Angie held onto both sides of the doorframe and let her body twist inside so her face was almost buried in her arm. She wanted Lila to know she appreciated all she did to make her feel welcome. She liked Lila and her father together. She had encouraged her dad to see past Lila’s middle-of-the-road politics and the other incongruities of their lives. And when Stein had tiptoed around the subject of possibly moving in with Lila, Angie had been thoughtful and mature and considerate an
d enthusiastic.

  Angie returned to the patio with the unequivocal intention of fulfilling her promise to cover the pool with the blue plastic tarp Lila had bought for that purpose and to move all the accumulated bones to the pool house. Except. As Zimmerman’s Law states with such unerring accuracy: Whatever you think is going to happen next, it will almost always be something else.

  That event in question had already happened. The pits had yielded up a new treasure. It was sizable and manifest, and sat partially above the surface of the muck. It looked to Angie at first like an elephant’s ear, but she knew elephant ears did not have a solid bone structure and that the false ID was just her brain doing what it does—identifying the unknown as the closest thing it has on file. Exactly the way God came to exist, she had long believed.

  Angie knew she was here to clean up and that what she was now irresistibly compelled to do would delay that chore. But the winner in any battle between obedience and curiosity in Angie’s psyche was a foregone conclusion. The object was situated near enough to the shallow end that Angie was sure she could reach it from the second step.

  She was wearing her Nikes and her good jeans on the possibility that Matt might come by following his command performance avec mama. To be on the safe side, she slipped her shoes off and stepped out of her jeans. The muck level seemed to have receded slightly. Her bare legs extended into a long V. Her body bowed into a graceful arc. Her arm extended while at her anchor point her toes grasped for stability and balance. She reached the object. It was solid and palpable. She girded herself and tugged. The unanchored object came up with such surprising ease it nearly staggered her. She wavered for a moment but never lost her center of gravity. She took a step backward up onto solid ground and sat on the new grass to examine her find.

  It was about a foot and a half wide, shaped like two ears, not one, and it tapered down to a narrower width at the bottom. As she gave it a superficial cleaning, the covering ooze plopped back into the pool and one of her hands encountered a circular opening that her closed fist could pass through. Her other hand found a symmetrical opening on the other side. She held it up in front of her, her hands through the openings. Chills surged down her body. She knew what she had found. If this hip joint belonged to an elephant, it was the Jane Fonda of pachyderms.

  A loud blast like a rifle shot startled her. She whirled around to face the pool. A methane eruption had opened a small crater from whose caldera now arose a round, smooth protuberance, which was thrust higher by a second expulsion of gas. It had two symmetrical marble-sized sockets a few inches apart, another opening below and centered between them, and beneath that, a wider, jack-o-lantern opening. Without taking her eyes from the hypnotic apparition, she speed dialed a number on her phone. She could barely form words.

  “Matthew,” she breathed. “You have to come over here now. Make some excuse to your mother. This is no wooly mammoth we found. This dude is a dude!”

  ***

  Stein awoke to the aroma of frying bacon. No bouquet quite fills a house like the scent of punished pig. He rolled carefully out of the guest bed, testing the effects on his back from a night away from Lila’s Sacropedic mattress. It came as a pleasant surprise when he propped himself into sitting position and felt relatively pain free.

  Ruth Ann, framed in the kitchen doorway, noted ironically that he was up early. Through the sliding panel glass door that led to the backyard, Stein saw two figures encased in white bee suits, bent to industrial labor. Boxes were being pried open, frames removed, studied at close range, and their living seething contents scraped off into new homes.

  “I wish somebody would have gotten me up earlier,” Stein grunted as he threw himself into his pants, shirt, and shoes. He had slept in his underwear.

  “The staff is deeply apologetic. The night concierge did not communicate all your special instructions.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  The kitchen was large and open. The style of the house was hard to categorize. Early sixties suburban ranch crossed with real ranch. Stein looked longingly at the pile of eggs and bacon and toast sitting on a sideboard. “I should really get out there and help them, I suppose,” he said, fervently hoping for dissuasion.

  “Aren’t you the brave little worker bee.”

  He couldn’t tell if she was mocking or praising him, which had been his historical problem with women.

  “Billy Bob put this out for you.”

  Stein hoped she meant the food, but she was gesturing toward a white HAZMAT body suit that lay draped over the back of a kitchen chair. “Okay,” he said, and intoned the mantra of the gladiators. “We who are about to die salute you.”

  “Oh, stop being a little baby. They’re just supering new hives.” Ruth Ann slapped him gently with a sleeve of the bee suit.

  It was made of thick canvas, stiff and unwieldy, difficult to put on. Ruth Ann instructed and assisted him. Legs first. She grasped his left calf, guided his leg down into the opening while holding the right side taut. When he got stuck, she reached her arm way down into the suit down to bend his ankle. Then once it was secure, she tugged it up tight around the thigh. The proximity was hard to ignore. She helped fit his arms inside and then knelt before him and zippered up the front, crotch to throat. She made sure the Velcro stays were secure at his wrists and ankles. “Don’t want those suckers crawling in there, do we?”

  Outside, Renn Moody was instructing Hollister, pointing out a necessary detail of how the work needed to be done. Hollister listened carefully, lifted a frame of bees out of the box and checked with his mentor that he was doing it properly. Ruth Ann read Stein’s thoughts. “Renn and Jarlene’s only son died in the war. Hollister’s dad croaked early. What can you say? Nature’s eternal law of compensation.”

  She topped Stein’s head with a safari hat. “They can sting through canvas. I’d hate to see you get any more of a swelled head. Now go. Before the job is all finished and I don’t get to watch you in action.” She turned him toward the door and gave him a goodly shove.

  Stein walked robotically to the door, slid it open, and went EVA, as the astronauts say. The air all around the men was a chaotic solar system of flying bees. Their wildly erratic mass was not as thick as a swarm, not as dense as a cloud, more like windblown ash from a swirling forest fire. He had once gone down in a diving suit and hated the encasement. This was all that plus the incessant buzz. Yet he could not help marvel that with all those thousands of bees, darting around each other in chaotic proximity, there were no mid-air collisions. How did they do that? If they were all planes there’d be carnage.

  Renn made a broad gesture of welcome when he saw Stein come out. So easy and familiar was the beekeeping coroner with his work that he had set his veil and headgear aside and was scraping off a frame containing ten thousand bees as if they were breadcrumbs. “Know what we’re doing here?” he called cheerily to Stein.

  Stein’s throat felt too dry to have a speaking voice. “Supering some new colonies?”

  “Very good.” Renn elbowed Hollister. “Hear that? The man’s a learner.”

  Among the boxes into which Renn was scraping his own healthy bees, one was branded with Karma Moonblossom’s insignia. “Hollister tells me of your interest in this particular piece of equipment right here.”

  “Sorry if it’s a little awkward.”

  “Awkward’s relative. I once had to embalm a baby girl who’d been impaled by a hunting arrow. Hollister will finish up. Why don’t we go inside?”

  Back in the house, Stein stripped out of his gear. The house sounded empty. Ruth Ann had probably left for work. Stein hoped some of the food had been left out but she was a tidy housekeeper.

  “So you like bees,” Stein said.

  “Being around death all day, it’s good to be surrounded by life.”

  “How do you manage the balance with work?”

  “We have a deal. Nobody dies during pollination season.”

  “I guess the news didn�
�t get to Frank Monahan.”

  “There’s always someone who doesn’t go along with the game plan. Then look what happens. Hollister says you think maybe these boxes were stolen?”

  “I didn’t say I think maybe. I said they are. They were. I’d be grateful to know where you got the boxes from.”

  “If you’re sure you want to dig this deep into the hive, Hollister needs an extractor. I’m going to be taking him up to Butch and Burleigh Branston when we’re done here. Those are the boys I got these boxes from. I feel like I’m feeding the poor boy to the wolves. But if you want to watch a feeding frenzy, you’re welcome to come along.”

  “Thanks, that’ll be helpful.”

  “You haven’t met the Branston boys. I’d lower my expectations a notch.”

  ***

  They went together in Doc Moody’s luxury truck, a well-appointed vehicle of Japanese ancestry. He had parked it at the L of the driveway, alongside a stand of maguey plants that divided Hollister and Ruth Ann Greenway’s property from their neighbor’s. The long-spiked shoots that burst up out of the center were almost wide enough to be rolled into narrow canoes. Each had a sharp-tipped talon at the end an inch or two long. He could never see one of these magueys without getting sick to his stomach, remembering the point of one sticking clear through Angie’s big toe. She had stepped on the plant growing on their hillside property the day he and Hillary told her they were getting divorced.

  Whatever Renn Moody’s chronological age was, behind the wheel he was sixteen. Traffic signals and lane demarcations were merely suggestions of possible behavior. He was good though, skillful enough so that Stein never felt endangered. Also, now that he was aware of what he was looking at, Stein fathomed the immensity of the orchards. Last night in the dark he could only see the first rows of trees the headlights penetrated. There were a fuck of a lot of trees. “They all almonds?” Stein asked.