Bee Wars

by Stephen Wunderli

Evan’s tan face could not cover up his odd bone structure. His forehead was narrow, and his eyes seemed larger than normal behind thick glasses. He was revenge rich. The child that never got picked, and the boy who never got the girl, until now. The cloverleaf of traffic had turned into a hive abuzz with bumping vehicles without course. A milk tanker had come onto I-80 too fast just east of Chicago and rolled up the guardrail before overturning across three lanes, forcing flow onto a side road jammed with commuters who didn’t notice the nineteenth-century farms with neatly clipped pastures, white-painted rail fences, towering barns, seas of wheatfields, and gravel drives level as landing strips. “No use crying over spilled milk,” Evan quipped. His thick glasses moved up his nose when he smiled. Angelica was not amused.

“I have to pee.”

“No Stop-N-Go in sight. You know this route used to be...”

“Stop,” she said. “Please.”

Angelica pulled her bare feet up onto the passenger dash. She was small enough to do so, weighing only a hundred and twenty pounds. Long dark hair fell forward and veiled her face, which leaned forward onto her knees in frustration. “And I need caffeine, or I’m not going to make it.”

“We could pull over here and let the traffic pass. Watch the sunset from the tall grass and…”

“And what? Is that all you think about? Pee. Caffeine. Get me out of here. I’m starting to stink. Where’s my deodorant?”

Evan turned back to the road. His attempt at loosening the bands of tension in his too-beautiful bride had failed. He didn’t marry her for her brains. She was angular. He had rounded edges. They were headed to French Lick Springs for their honeymoon because Evan liked the sound of the place; it held the sexual promise he needed to make it through the ceremony and the four-month, don’t-touch engagement. And because it was cheap and appealed to his accounting mind. He eased off the brake to roll the Tesla forward, remembering how the early versions of the car required a tap on the accelerator to progress and how drivers hated it, being used to idling forward in traffic. He was pleased with the innovation. He started to explain this to Angelica, but she stopped him by holding up her hand. “You drone on and on and on, and I’m so ready to be in a chaise by the pool.”

That’s how their trip was going. A sideroad off the main highway of expectations.

The traffic had slowed to a stop. The long line of vehicles stood humming in the heat. Car doors angled open like wings of grounded insects. What Evan hadn’t noticed was that, with the detour, the Tesla was running out of power. The heat, the lack of motion, the air conditioner, it all drained the battery. There was a farmers’ market up ahead, so Evan decided to make a break for it on the shoulder.

“What are you doing?”

“Pushing through the crowd to the front of the line. To the victor go the spoils!”

They bumped along at a slant, tilting into the irrigation ditch, angry car horns and dust trailing them, and finally slewing to a stop in deep gravel. Angelica sat in the car as the Tesla lifted one of its wings, Evan emerging. He approached a stand stocked with honey and apples. “Is there a restroom close by, and maybe someplace to get an espresso or a coke, maybe an energy drink?” He was talking to an Amish woman in a gingham dress and matching bonnet surrounded by gingham girls in descending sizes like Russian nesting dolls set out on display. “We have honey. Good for energy,” the woman said.

“It’s my honeymoon,” Evan replied. “I need all the energy I can get.”

The Amish woman herded the little dresses out of the stand to wait where they couldn’t hear. She returned with two golden mason jars. “Eleven dollars.”

Evan handed her a twenty. She didn’t offer any change.

Angelica sat with her legs dangling out of the car and her head in her hands. “It’s hot. The air conditioner just quit, and I have dust in my hair.”

“I have honey,” Evan said, holding up a jar.

“Is that some kind of sick joke?”

It was Angelica’s idea to have a late summer wedding when the chance of rain ruining the outdoor setting was passed. Flowers were strung and draped from hundred-year-old oak trees in the perfect Instagram story. Eleven box trucks of white lilies and roses hung like the robes of Aphrodite. Then, the bees arrived, wafting in, crowding corsages, and swarming the towering cake with its edible honeysuckle and pastel pansies. Angelica knocked the jars from Evan’s hands and the glass cracked open, the golden syrup looking more like motor oil than honey.

“Bees. Yes, sorry. You’ve had enough bees.”

Angelica stood and stretched, her lithe, ballet body and bare mid-section causing the Amish woman to drop the blind on half of the stand and whisper something in German to the little gingham girls. Angelica didn’t notice. The skirt she wore lifted on the breeze, her top the same gauzy fabric that captured air and light.

Evan returned to the driver’s side and checked the gauges, thinking to himself that maybe tonight would be spent just sitting, listening to the hum of life fanning their frustrations away, a preparatory night for a whole day spent in their room, uninhibited, unleashed. He pulled out his phone to order flowers to the suite but stopped. Bees. Not a good idea. The Amish woman glared at him half-hidden behind the blind.

“Let’s go,” he called to Angelica, but when he pressed the start button the car only winked a pulse on the screen before flatlining. The life had transferred out of the car-length battery and, according to Einstein, it could not be reclaimed only transformed. Angelica didn’t respond. She kept walking, tossing her Kate Spades over her shoulder and tip-toeing barefoot on the hot gravel. Evan stood up and considered the woman with the perfect abs and the car with its torque and whiplash speed. They both seemed like such an accomplishment a week ago. What would she post on Instagram now?

The Amish woman and the small dresses looked at him from the heat vapors. Something waxy inside him was being unwound and drawn from his abdomen.

“Are you okay?” The woman asked.

“I think I have a hemorrhoid.”

“I have an ointment for that, too.”

“Not this kind of pain.”

“Our honey is the best,” she said, standing stout with an unforgiving face.

“I’m sure it is.”

“I know it is. Ansel sends the children into the fields to keep Jurgen’s bees avay. We vant only our bees in the hive, no interbreeding. Pure Ansel honey.”

“Okay.”

“More than okay. If ve can’t keep the honey pure it is not vorth selling. Our bees. His bees. Separate.”

Evan nodded.

The Russian nesting doll girls snuck out of the stand and walked across the gravel sea in their lace-up boots to reach out and touch the fabric of Angelica’s dress.

“Yes, thank you,” Angelica said. “Keep the hem from dragging. Thank you.”

The little, blonde girls giggled. Angelica strode forward with the buzzing attendants.

“The car is broke?” The Amish woman asked.

“Yes. Broke,” Evan said.

“I vill fetch Ansel. He vill know what to do.”

The busty Amish woman floated down the gravel drive, parted the stream of traffic, and moved down a longer drive toward a perfectly kept farmhouse. Evan sat under the shade of the open gullwing door, while Angelica paraded around the gravel pitstop trailing children gripping the edge of her dress. They giggled. Each small girl had a distinct laugh that somehow became a chorus. Angelica took the lead, prancing dramatically in circles, while the girls tried to hang on in a train behind her. She began to laugh, that release of a laugh that unties the knots of claustrophobia. The trim of her gown came off, and she laughed even harder. She tore it in lengths and fashioned waist bows for the girls.

“Beautiful, aren’t they?” she asked Evan.

“Yes,” he answered. “All of you.”

Angelica turned to the gaggle of gingham behind her. “I have an idea.”

“What are you up to?” Evan asked.

“You’ll see.”

Angelica slipped out of the bottom half of her dress and stood strikingly on her lissome legs, the white panties only a thin brace for her upper body. She tore the top half down the middle and slipped it off like a shirt. A few car horns honked as she stood there in the bikini of her underwear. She waved them off and rested her attention on the girls. They were silent and wide-eyed. Angelica crouched down beside the tallest one, holding up the white linen to the girl’s shoulders.

“Perfect.”

The girl smiled.

Angelica used her straight white teeth to tear the fabric in lengths and tie it around each set of small shoulders. She looked closely at the blue eyes and the scuffed cheeks, the sunburned noses, and the off-kilter smiles. “Do as I do.”

Angelica moved gracefully into dance poses, arms wide, gracefully moving into The Swan. Torso shifting, arms angling, chin out, and one leg nestled behind the left kneecap, The Flamingo. The girls followed in their clumsy, childlike imitations, the smallest one more occupied with fluttering, loosely belonging to the group, winging in and out of order.

“A waltz, please maestro,” Angelica commanded.

“Of course,” Evan conceded. He began to voice the violins of Blue Danube, “Daaa dada da dummmm.”

“Tempo.”

Evan picked up the pace and dropped into an operatic voice. “Da dada da dum…da da…da da da da dummmm dummmmmm dumm.”

Car horns honked.

Girls swirled until their bonnets hung loosely on their backs, their golden hair alive in the failing sun. Angelica rose up on the ball of one foot, bent gracefully at the waist, gathered air with her arms, and let them slowly hang, her hands like birds trembling, then drawing her forward, leaping!

“Da da da da dummmm da da da da dummmm dumm dummmmm da da dummda dummm da dum da da dumm.”

The bass line of car honks bleated in rhythm to one final crescendo. “Da dum da dum!” Honk honk honk! “Daaaa dummmmmmm!” Honk honk!

Angelica swooped into a bow. The girls imitated the grand gesture, then rose and rushed to gather around this naked stranger, to touch the skin of her slender arms and the shaven legs smooth as soap, comb the scented hair with their fingers, kiss the moist lips, and gaze at the hazel eyes. Angelica sat on the gravel and engulfed them all in her arms, the giggling, squirming bunch, anxious to be held, wrapping hands and legs around themselves, while the rumbling of Ansel’s ancient tractor approached, trailering a generator to convert gasoline to energy and charging the Tesla with unseen horsepower.

“Maybe you shouldn’t have done all of that,” Evan said as they drove away in the dark after four hours of charging in silence, the girls gone and only Ansel alone with his straw hat, standing by the generator making too much noise to have a conversation. “He seemed quite unhappy.”

“He was only mad about the spilled honey,” Angelica answered, giggling and touching Evan on the thigh.

The Tesla buzzed through the night, shaking bits of light onto the road and trees, pollinating the neat farmhouses and honey stands with sparks of electricity, homing a haphazard path of promise and sweetness.

BIO: Stephen Wunderli is a freelance writer for The Foundation for a Better Life and The Denver Gazette. He is the recipient of the United Nations Time for Peace award, and the Bridport Prize in literature.