Sting

On his way to the blind date, Hector calculates the hours until he’s back home with his hawk. Likely four, five hours at most. Hector does not want, or need, to go on any kind of date. He wants to instead be preparing for his red-tailed hawk’s next hunt. On their trips back from hunting and abating, Hector keeps Oso’s eyes tied with a falconry hood. Hector’s sisters call it a helmet, which Hector resents. At night, Hector removes the hood and keeps the volume of the television low, to help keep the raptor in a state of calm. Though Oso’s outdoor mews is within view of the living room, Hector, who lives alone, gives Oso copious perches throughout his home, a small guesthouse near the back of his parents’ lot on the outskirts of the Southern California chaparral. Oso also has a perch on the passenger seat of Hector’s car.

Hector’s favorite thing about Oso is that he is a bird of prey, not a bird of song. Birdsong reminds Hector of his father who had kept dozens of cages of oscines all throughout Hector’s childhood; rose finches, canaries, cockatiels, all of whom received his father’s affection. A limited family resource. Hector’s tio also had parrots who, while not songbirds, whistled and spoke with abandon. The worst of them was an African Grey named Chico with many biases, reflecting his uncle’s biases rather than existing as innate avian prejudices. Chico whistled whenever the girl cousins entered the room, and shrieked madly when deliveries were made by anyone dark-skinned, like Hector’s mom. The parrot would ceaselessly mimic the sound of the telephone when he was bored. Naturally, from all corners of the house came the commotion: his uncle, demanding someone pick up the phone; others, yelling back that it wasn’t the landline but the pinche pajaro. Then lots of screaming resumed, joining the bird raised in chaos.

Hector’s sisters and cousins didn’t quite remember it as being that chaotic. However, his sisters themselves demonstrated similar capacities and instincts toward the unrestrained which had both inured and hardened Hector into the kind of person who recognized instantly people who screamed, people who were easily agitated, and who liked to agitate others, keeping his distance from them despite regularly attracting them.

That’s why, when Hector’s best friend, Randy had asked Hector if he would do him a favor, a huge solid, by going on a double date, Hector’s first question was: is she loud?

I don’t know, Randy had said. It’s Monica’s old friend. She’s not stepping out without her. Please, man.

I don’t know, Hector had said.

Man, you already owe me one.

I have to work early the next morning.

Randy’s eyes said checkmate.

That’s perfect, Randy said. Because Monica’s friend needs a ride home early. You can dip whenever you want, get her out of my hair.

Hector regrets it all, especially when, after having arrived on time, it’s clear that Monica and her friend will be painfully, ridiculously late. Hector worries that perhaps he was wrong about how long before he’s back home to feed Oso.

Hector avoids eye contact with Randy when he announces he’s leaving.

No way, man, Randy protests. They’re just parking now.

To Hector’s surprise, Randy is not lying, and Hector discovers that he’d had expectations because he found them unmet. Hector’s date, Selene, stands off to the side in canvas sneakers and a rayon blouse, pronouncing her name like his grandmother would, articulating the last ‘e.’ He determines Selene is about their age, mid-twenties.

Hector says to Selene, How’s your day going?

Every morning before the horizon brightens, Selene checks her beehives’ progress before her shift at a local discount retailer. She can be found traipsing in the backyard except in the winter when she knows better than to open the hive frames, when the bees rely on huddling close to each other’s warmth to survive the temperature dip.

It has been years since Selene thought of her bees as bees. At first, in the delusions of grief, Selene would speculate, what if her younger sister had been reincarnated as a bee, specifically one of her bees. Checking for swarm cells and inspecting for colony disease, Selene would ruminate: if one were to believe in reincarnation, statistically-speaking, there is a chance that everyone becomes a bee at one point or another. Most bees live a fleeting, pollen-filled couple of months. Well, since her hives flourished in the years since her sister died, then perhaps she has taken care of her sister over and over again. Her sister. Once so fiercely committed to family and community, to the sacrifice of herself.

Selene sometimes still trips over these kinds of grief distortions when she lets her mind wander as she administers mite treatments, customizes her cedar frames, and looks for the queen to make sure she doesn’t scoop her up before soaking the drones in alcohol or powdered sugar to dislodge the mites. Selene counts the mites, treats the hive with the preferred chemical in her region, and waits to do the whole thing again in a few months. In the meantime, she attends the local beekeeping club meetings to disseminate timely info, discuss best practices, and gratefully accept advice from the longstanding members and their aspiring friends. When her hives become a certain size, her brother Raul helps her lift the boxes and encourages the bees to expand into her fresh cedar frames. During seasonal dearth she supplies the bees with sugar feeders, carefully placing them in spots she knows will discourage resource theft by other bees in nearby colonies. So much of beekeeping involves thinking about theft. After all, it is there in the name, keeping of bees, not bee fostering, not bee maintenance. Not bee-ing.

On the day of her double date, the morning air is smogless and damp, the landscape velveted with darkness as she trudges her way to her makeshift apiary, but she finds her backyard empty. Her hives, gone.

All of them.

She sees tracks in the dirt and markings where the boxes had stood for months. Selene feels that all-encompassing dread that occurs when the pull of reality fights with the desire to go back to previous feelings, previous states of mind. It feels as though she were in a weird reverie, almost like the beginning of a panic attack. She looks around and hates that this isn’t the first time she’s had to deal with vandalism. In those instances, she’d been able to rescue the queen and most of the drones, still in their boxes, the splinters of the felled boxes like menacing teeth, bared at her. Still, she’d been lucky; she’d heard of beekeepers finding cans of bug spray littered throughout their apiary, concrete poured into the boxes, borax boxes emptied into innocent hives. It was hard not to cry then as it is hard not to cry now. It wasn’t just that the tracker hadn’t worked until that moment. It was that she hadn’t put trackers on all the hives because, due to the last vandalization, she only had one working tracker trusted by fellow beekeepers, an expensive trinket known to not disrupt bee activity. Her father had offered to help with buying more and she had agreed to let him, but she was still waiting for the money.  

Now, Selene wants to scream at the neighborhood. She hates how loud everything is at all hours of the day—the car alarms, the police sirens, the clunkers warming up loudly in their driveways at 5:00 a.m.—and she especially hates the cops patrolling at all times except for when they were precisely needed; like, for instance, right now. Why couldn’t the police have noticed this particular thing, when they notice so many other convenient misfortunes?

She just wants this one thing in this fucking world. Why is that too much?

Selene, in her seat across from Hector, doesn’t know where to rest her gaze, so she stares at her lap.

My day? Well, my bees got stolen, Selene says, and this becomes more interesting than Monica and Randy loudly kissing next to Hector.

What do you mean?

I have a few beehives, she says. But anyways, yeah, sometime last night, they were taken.

By who? Hector says.

Well, if I knew that, she says, I wouldn’t be here.

I’m sorry, he decides to say.

Yeah, she says.

You should put a tracking device on your hives, he says. I track my bird when we go hunt. I always worry whenever I call him to the glove that someday maybe he won’t come.

Selene nods. The two remain silent for a while after that as Monica recounts a time she went shopping and almost got into a fistfight with a cashier. Finally, Selene leans over to Hector and asks more about his bird.

We work at some resorts over in San Diego, he says. They pay us to keep the pigeons away from the guests at the pool. We’re a hit over there. They’re asking us to do meet-and-greet type of classes now.

They ask your bird, too? Selene says.

Hector pauses, then forces a laugh. Yeah, he’s my partner. He charges a lot.

That’s funny, she says.

I can’t believe people fuck around with bees like that, he says.

My bees and I get paid too.

For what?

Like, for things like pollinating almond trees during the season. And I actually do have a tracker on my hive. I guess they broke it or something. It’s not clocking.

Hector for a second imagines someone stealing Oso. It is in the lifelong falconer’s best interest to reintroduce the best hunters back into the mating pool, but, as Hector’s master falconry mentor used to say, sometimes your bird sticks around. Hector doesn’t like imagining someone else handling Oso, who had quickly proven to be the kind of hawk that could make someone like Hector question the breadth of bird intelligence, the limits of which had long been assumed by Hector due to having handled dozens of them before. It was in the way Oso had partialities and seemed to prefer the tempo Hector preferred, a careful legato of coming and going and a keen eye for precision. Hector’s mentor, before he passed, himself acknowledged this about Oso. That he was a gentlemanly kind of bird.

When the date is over, Hector and Selene say goodbye to Randy and Monica. The image of Monica fighting with a retail worker is enough to sully any rumblings of desire within Hector, and he understands now why Randy is with her. Hector is only barely offended when Monica says to them both: Bye, random animal weirdos.

 Back in Hector’s car, Hector places Oso’s perch in the backseat, then Selene sits politely with her phone on her lap as Hector inputs her address. They drive toward the foothills, passing the neat rows of hunter-green shrubs that dot the sidewalks of new developments cut and pasted throughout the inland valley. Hector thinks about small talk and almost decides on a topic when Selene lets out a noise that puts Hector on edge.

What is it? he asks, glancing at her, noticing she is agape and staring at her phone.

My bee tracker, she says. It just came on.

I thought you said they broke it.

I was just guessing. I don’t know what happened. But it looks like it’s somewhere now. Selene squints as she expands the map on her GPS tracking app. She says, Near Palmdale.

Hector raises his eyebrows. That’s over the mountain.

Yeah, she says and then falls silent.

Hector looks at the time on the dashboard and is glad that Selene’s home is only a brief hop from his place, where Oso has a few ounces of mealworms and some raw venison for feasting. After Oso’s dinner, Hector would likely listen to rock en español on his headphones, visit Only Fans, and be asleep before 11:00 p.m. so that he could hit the freeway at exactly 5:40 a.m. for the Four Seasons in Carlsbad.

That’s crazy, Hector says.

Yeah, she says.

Hector soon detects a shimmer of urgency on her part to get home, a heckle of impatience beneath her calm demeanor. During dinner, Selene had mentioned that some of her hives were taken but then kept referring to only one afterward, and Hector thinks that it would make adequate small talk to ask about the discrepancy.

Selene answers, Yeah, the ones at the community garden, those are fine. There are tons of cameras there. But they took all the ones at my place. I actually only had one tracker on my hives at home. That’s why I keep mentioning one hive. The one with the tracker.

Who, Hector wants to know, would destroy something like that?

I don’t know, Selene says, squirming again. Competition. Maybe. There’s a saying that a beekeeper’s biggest enemy is another beekeeper.

After a while, Selene settles back into the passenger seat and looks out of the car window, a southward panorama, as they make their way toward San Bernardino.

What are you going to do? Hector says, and he doesn’t realize he has stopped paying attention to the speed limit after she says, I’m going to go get them.

Selene hates Monica the most in this moment. Monica, having witnessed the wild zeniths and nadirs of her grief, has been desperate for Selene to return to who she used to be, her gracious, fawning friend. But that person—

Dead, too, Selene thinks.

Now, Selene wishes that she had been eating ice cream with her grandmother on their couch, where she would have been near her car instead of sitting in this strange car that smells like oily down. If not for Monica, Selene would have already been on her way to Palmdale.

It doesn’t sound too safe, Hector tells her after a while.

Those hives are the only thing I care about, Selene says. She thinks about explaining why but instead adds, My great-grandmother used to bee-keep in the Maya tradition. I thought it would make me feel better to start learning about bees, or something.

Feel better about what?

As she thinks about how to respond, her brother Raul texts her, asking for a screenshot of the hives’ location, and she is distracted again. The only sound for the rest of the car ride is Selene’s fingers tapping hastily on her phone. Soon, Hector pulls up at her home. Selene notices that he is chivalrous enough to watch her enter before speeding off. 

Selene immediately changes into her boots and kisses her grandmother hello and goodbye. Her grandmother pulls on her arm—ay mija where are you going at this hour—and Selene wants to shake her off hard but instead, she crouches, eye-level.

Stay here with me, her grandmother repeats.

Selene’s brother texts: Wait 4 me. Almost there.

Selene is grateful that her brother doesn’t try to dissuade her, and she hopes he is amenable to lending her his truck. Selene sits with her grandmother to convince her to not wait up for her, and she is almost successful when the doorbell rings.

Who is that? her grandmother says.

It’s Raul, Selene says, rising to open the door.

When Selene opens the door, she finds Hector standing there.

Hey, sorry, he says. I was just gonna drop these off, but then I saw you were still here. I thought it would be better to give them to you in person.

He unrolls his fist to reveal tiny plastic pucks, the size of watch batteries.

What? she says.

I said you can have these, Hector says. I should’ve offered. They’re trackers. My old mentor, he was, uh, when he was getting sick, he kept ordering all of these for me. They’re the wrong kind for raptors.

Selene reaches slowly, awkwardly, and her grandmother says, Who is that, Selene?

Remembering herself, Selene steps aside and invites Hector inside politely, embarrassed.

I was wrong, Grandma, it’s not Raul. This is Hector.

Half bowing and nodding at the same time, Hector himself looks like a bird, the hairs on his head pressed down pat-straight from the pressure of his baseball cap, which he now holds in his hands.

This is my grandmother, Selene says.

Where is Raul? her grandmother says.

He’s almost here.

I’m glad you decided not to go, Hector says. It’s a long drive, and it’s dark out.

Selene stares at him hard, and is about to say something when Raul lets himself into the house, rapping loudly on the door as he moves past it.

Selene says, Let’s go.

Oh, so you are going? Hector says.

Raul steps aside to kiss his grandmother, observing his sister carefully, curious about Selene’s love interest, having never before seen any evidence of anybody being interested.

Selene says, Of course I’m going.

Raul says to Hector, Feel free to come along. Unless you’re too scared.

Hector says, Of course I’m going, and Selene and Raul laugh at the punchline Hector wasn’t trying to hit.

On their way out, Selene says, Don’t worry, Grandma. Go have a deep sleep. In the morning we’ll go to church.

Hector thinks to himself how and why. He has that thing in the morning, and also, he could have maneuvered his way out of this, instead of grabbing his hunting bag and hopping into Raul’s pickup. 

Behind the wheel, Raul says, We are gonna find the tracker on the side of some road, you know.

From the backseat, Hector says, Are you going to call the cops?

Selene begins to say something but stops short.

Hector says, So what is the plan?

The siblings remain silent, and Hector considers that their plan may be a loose web of ideas floating in the air.

Selene says, Well, we could find the hives intact. In which case, I want them back.

Everyone is silent at the meaning of this. Hector lets the moonlight wash over his face. He can feel every car bump and every rotation over potholes deep in his bones. They drive along the foothills, rising above sea level gradually between the mountain ranges that belong separately to the coast and inland, until finally they are on the other side that flirts with the impressive terrain that is the lip of the Mojave Valley, an area Hector passes through often with Oso. It is too dark in certain stretches to tell how flat the landscape is, but they smell the difference in climes, the air, the soil.   

At around 10:00 p.m., Selene tells Raul to pull off the highway, and after labyrinthine turns, they find themselves on a small barely-paved road, on which yards of chain-link hug the property lines of several one-stories adorned with rundown cars in barren yards and metal bars on the windows.

Reminds me of home, Raul says, and Hector absentmindedly agrees; Selene looks over her shoulder at Hector.

What does your tracker say? Raul asks Selene.

It says it’s somewhere over there, Selene says, pointing toward the houses.

It isn’t moving, she adds. But it’s giving a general area.

Raul says, Let’s go, Hector.

Hector looks at the dashboard clock and something akin to acquiescent determination—to get this over with as swiftly as possible—takes over him. He grabs his sack and hops out of the truck. Selene slips out of the passenger seat. Selene moves past them both and reaches to unlatch the nearest gate, an entry to a front yard. From down the street, a pair of rottweilers catch sight of them and their barking prompts Hector to reach out quickly and grab Selene’s hand before she releases the latch, surprising even himself. He keeps hold of her small, smooth hand as he puts a finger to his lips and beckons with his head to follow him.

He cuts across an empty lot nimbly, toward a line of bushes, still holding her hand.

Let’s just see if we can get a good view of the backyards from afar, Hector says. I have some binoculars.

Does it have night-vision? asks Raul, and Hector says that there is only one way to find out. They crouch, out of sight behind low shrubs.

Hector huddles next to Selene. He feels her warmth. He uncaps the lenses and hands them over to her.

Just check it out, he says.

Raul murmurs, interrupting, Maybe we should call the cops.

Selene glances at him sideways, They won’t care.

Raul says, They will if we tell them it’s grand larceny.

Hector almost chokes on his spit.

Raul adds, They’re actually not that much, compared to real orchards.

At this, Selene whips her head toward her brother so he can see her eyes and says, It’s not about money.

She stands and heads back toward the houses. Selene is a swarm of emotions, searching for the cause of them, so that she may unburden herself. Her legs stride forward with intensity because the only thing to do now is to go up to the houses, all of them, and ask for her fucking bees back, now, immediately. 

Raul follows closely behind. The dogs start back up again.

Raul says, Selene, Are you sure about this?

Selene stops in the middle of the street for a moment. She scans the houses in front of her and asks herself which of the three look most guilty. Eventually, the dogs are called inside by a woman who makes a point of eyeing the three of them before closing her door.

Selene says, If each of us go up to one door at the same time, and say we know the bees are on their property, the odds of one of us being right goes up.

This display of logic has Hector responding that he is, in fact, going to call the cops. He pulls out his phone.

Selene reaches for him this time. She grabs his arm lightly. She asks, If someone stole your hawk, wouldn’t you go get him?

Hector understands the question, but he still says, Well, I’d call him to me.

And if he’s in a cage?

When Hector doesn’t reply, Selene checks her phone tracker app. It is still on and nearby. She points to it and says, Hector, I have to try.

Hector murmurs, Wish it had one of those loud buzzers.

Selene falls silent, and, even in the dark, Hector can tell she is blushing.

Hector says, No, really? 

I wasn’t even thinking, Selene mutters, scrolling through the tracker app. Finding the buzzer feature, she says, Okay, I found it. One of you keep watch by the car.

She approaches the first house.

Hector waits for her like a secret service agent at the end of the footpath that meets the dying grass.

Selene rings the doorbell and waits. These houses really do remind her of the house she grew up in, with its crumbling fake stucco and cobwebbed bushes everywhere. Desert spiders are the worst kind, she thinks.

An older couple comes to the door together, arms linked. Can we help you? the wife says. Her gray eyebrows knit together in apprehension, and Selene hesitates.

Um, Selene says. Do you have my bees?

The couple look at each other. Bees? the man says. No.

Selene shows them the app on her phone.

My bees were taken. And it’s showing as them being here, or around here.

The wife says, No, no bees here. I’m sorry.

Selene says, It’s really important to me. I’ve had my bees for years. Um, there’s no one else living here who would have taken any bees?

The man looks at his wife as if really considering who around him would take thousands of bees, and they both look incredibly regretful to say that no, nobody lives here but them.

Thank you anyways, Selene says.

Selene brushes past Hector to say she’s going to the next house. She walks past Raul, leaning against his truck, and she is unlatching the next gate to enter the walkway, when Hector stops her and says, Hey. Let’s take turns?

Hector is glad that she wordlessly, immediately, agrees with a shrug.

He rings the doorbell. Selene stands off to the side, obscured by the extended garage to the right of the entryway.

Hector senses a person peering through the eyehole, taking time to open the front door. Eventually, a man with a thick mustache and giant silver belt buckle appears.

What is this? he says in a threatening way.

Hector clears his throat. I am so sorry to disturb you, he says, pulling on his most formal affect, and he holds his body upright, legs strong.

It’s late, the man adds.

Hector says, My friend lost something very valuable, and we tracked it down to this neighborhood. That’s why we are here so late. Again, I apologize.

Okay, the man says, looking more annoyed than menacing this time.

Hector says, But we were wondering if we could spread word about a money reward for any info that would help us get these items back immediately. Time is kind of important here. We need them back ASAP.

Well, what did your friend lose?

Hector says, Beehives.

The man shuts the door.

Hector says to Selene, I think he has them. You should have seen the look on his face.

Selene nods. Ok, she says. It’s time to call the police. 

She is pulling out her phone, when the door opens again. It is the mustached man with a younger man in front him whom he pushes toward Hector. Selene, who is able to see the entryway clearly this time, says in disbelief, Matthew?

The younger man averts his eyes while greeting her and mispronounces her name for the millionth time, as if it were a French word.

Sorry, Matthew says.

About what? Taking my bees? she says.

No, I didn’t, he says.

Selene shows him the app, and points to where the signal hovers over the neighborhood, a circle flashing within a bigger circle. Matthew looks on in horrified curiosity, and Selene glares at him, this acquaintance of a local beekeeper whom she knew well from the beekeeping club they both attended at the community apiary. The avid beekeeper had brought Matthew along to meetings, and Selene distinctly remembers conversing with him and remarking on how young he looked.

 Hector steps forward and says, Listen. We just want to go home with the bees. We can do this the easy way. Or, we can call the cops.

The man who had initially opened the door says, Oh, Christ. Not again.

The tone in his voice prompts everyone to look at him, who is now gripping Matthew by the shoulder.

Before either can speak, Raul has joined them. Raul says, Oh, and, you have to help us put them onto the truck bed because those motherfuckers are heavy.

Hector helps load the hive boxes, which are multiple stacked cedar frames upon cedar frames. Raul and Selene hoist the beehives under tarps to ratchet strap them in place. Hector watches Selene work quickly alongside Matthew, who is as cautious with the bees as she is, but mainly Hector notices Selene’s collarbone collecting beads of sweat as she jumps on and off the truck bed and kneels to inspect the straps and pulls her gloves on and off with her delicate mouth.

The weight of thousands of bees is rigorous on Hector’s knees. He is grateful that Raul is careful and makes them rest in order to avoid disturbing the hives; a disturbance would encourage them to leave even in the winter months.

And yet, a few bees do make it past the burlap tarps. Hector watches one sting his arm.

Hector has never been stung before. His instinct is to drop what he is holding and attend to the site of injury; however, something deep within him forces him to continue moving cautiously, holding pounds of honeycomb and broods within cells, entire generations depending on him to do the right thing. It takes everything within him to not scream or drop what he is holding, even though the already-flexed muscles of his arm make the pain that much more pronounced. He calmly calls for a break, and steels himself as the bee, sacrificing her infinite body, finally falls away from his arm.

He looks up to see Selene watching him.

Now the three of them and the bees are all in the truck again, and Selene is sitting in the back of the cab with Hector.

Selene holds Hector’s arm with one hand while leaning in to grab hold of the stinger, leaning in so close Hector can feel the warmth of her knee on his thigh.

Winter hives are heaviest, she whispers, breath shallow with concentration, bringing her face right up to his forearm, so she can deftly pull out, in one quick motion, the hollow serrated point that had been holding in the bee’s abdomen.

She says, They get really fat so they can live for six months, instead of six weeks. They are so different physically, that they are considered a totally different type of bee. Their stings are something else.

When it is over, Selene says, But you’re going to be fine.

She slips her hand into Hector’s hand, and she rests her head on his shoulder, on the arm he uses when Oso comes back to him.

Hector, his adrenaline dissipating, thinks about work tomorrow. He will place a hooded Oso on his car perch to drive him hundreds of miles westward for the opportunity to introduce him to strangers poolside. He will teach those strangers how to receive the weight of him on their arm.