His hair soaked with rain, he glanced at Patsy, who, with some difficulty, was keeping her mouth shut. What she loved intermittently about Saul was the vagary of feeling that focused itself into the tiniest actions of human attention, like the tying of this pink shoe. Better to keep her emotions a secret than to talk about them all the time, she thought. It would generate more energy that way. It was a variety of discouraged love that she felt, not the plain unvarnished kind. He finished the knot and kissed them both. Dirt and honey were on his lips, and they came off on Patsy’s.
At a distance of a hundred yards, the boy, Gordy, watched all this, and from her vantage point Patsy saw the boy’s empty expression, those mortuary eyes. She felt certain that he would stick around. They would have to give him something, some form of tribute, because, like it or not, he was following them back, their faithful zombie, made, or mad, in America. She heard his shoes shuffling on the driveway.
Well, maybe we are missionaries, Patsy thought, as she stumbled and Saul held her up. We’re the missionaries they left behind when they took all the religion away. But missionaries for what? On the front porch of the house she could see the empty bottle of Saul’s no-brand beer still standing on the lip of the ledge, and she could see the porch swing slowly rock back and forth, as if someone were still sitting there, waiting for them.
Six
Later that night, several hours after Gordy had left, Saul returned to the toppled wreckage of his beehives. In the damp and still unappeaseable darkness, he carried the frames two at a time into the shed at the back of the yard. His hand-crank extractor was stored in the corner, and he dropped the frames into the barrel one by one, each making a hollow clank. A few of the bees still clung to them, and Saul did his best to shoo them out, but they were angry with him — he could hear it, a distinctly irritated insect murmur — and after being stung several times, he let them stay. He would deal with them later. He didn’t know what to do with the honey on the frames. It would just remain there for now. He felt selfish and proprietary. He didn’t want it himself, but he didn’t want anyone else to get it, either. Milk and honey, the various rewards, all out of his hands. In the corner, a mouse scurried behind a pine board, its paws making fingernail-skittering sounds, and outside, very distantly, came the hooting of an owl. He let the stillness of the evening absorb him, travel through him, like the onset of sleep.
When he was finished, he sat down in the doorway of the shed, caught his breath, and smelled the air off the fields, the generously muddy odor following summer rain on dry soil. Overhead, the familiar stars slipped further and further away.
Several days later, dressed in his jeans and his T-shirt, Saul was standing at the kitchen counter drinking a glass of grapefruit juice and checking Patsy’s dusty African violets on the sill. When he glanced out the kitchen window, he saw Gordy Himmelman planted on the lawn, staring up into the sky impatiently, as if waiting for a hot-air balloon to snatch him up and rescue him. His hands were knitted together. The boy always seemed to be gazing skyward or earthward. He rarely could look out at his own level, at the human scene; Saul had never seen his gaze pointed in that direction, where his prospects seemed to be as dim as he was.
In any case, he was back.
The previous week, the night of the storm, Saul had instructed Gordy to go home and never to return, though he had said it without the necessary anger to make the correct frightening impression. Gordy had seldom listened to him, anyway, in class or out. He had given Saul one of his several blank expressions, like that of someone waiting for a translation. On Gordy, blankness had a certain eloquence. The boy was profoundly blank. Nevertheless, after following Saul around for a few minutes, doglike, he had mounted his rusting bicycle, nodded once, and disappeared down the road as twilight came on and the setting sun bathed him in a misleading post-rainstorm rosy glow. Watching him pedal away, Saul had felt a distinct relief. He was tired of the ragtag unfortunate and the disengaged and the special-needs types who had clustered around him in classrooms and elsewhere, and he was glad to see Gordy bicycling out of his life. He had come to think of himself as an opportunist of misfortune, his own and others’. Somehow, without knowing how the process had been effected, he had taken advantage of the disadvantaged. Now that he had a child of his own, his compassion for other people’s children felt all used up. He was finished with the unlucky and the disabled. No more charity in the service of narcissism. With the bees gone, redemption seemed — what? Unworkable. He was tired of the romance of failure, anyway.
But someone had failed to tell Gordy Himmelman that Saul was through with him, because here he was, loitering on the morning lawn, a sentry dressed in his uniform: soiled jeans and torn shirt. Saul put down his juice glass carefully in a cereal bowl near the kitchen sink and strolled outside to where Gordy was standing. Already the air was unsettled and feverish, though it had rained again in the middle of the night, another brief tantrum of a downpour, and the grass had a warm, damp prickliness, as if Saul were stepping on a horsehair doormat. It was a disagreeable sensation. In the trees the blue jays and crows flapped and screamed. The weather was getting so moody and violent these days: it was the warfare of heaven against earth, the opening of the seven seals.
“So,” Saul said. “Hey, Gordy.” Close up, his former student smelled of roasted pumpkin seeds and brine. He hadn’t shaved, and his boy’s scraggly indecisive peachfuzz facial hair mingled with his acne. He was wearing some sort of metal-and-leather apparatus around his neck, probably a dog collar, with a small broken soundless bell attached. He was chewing something — gum, Saul hoped.
“Hey, Mr. Bernstein.” Gordy nodded at Saul, then looked away quickly, as if he were busy, occupied with many tasks.
“Can I help you with something?”
“Nope,” Gordy said. “Not right now. Maybe later.” Gordy waved. “See ya.”
“Gordy, what’re you doing here?”
There was a long silence, during which Gordy Himmelman studied Saul’s feet. Finally he said, “I came here on my bike.”
“I know that. I mean, what are you doing here?”
“Is this, like, a quiz?” Gordy shrugged and started to laugh, then stopped himself. “Hey, I don’t mean to make no trouble. Ha ha ha ha ha. Not today anyways.”
“No. Right. I’m just asking you why you came.”
“It’s a nice day. Can’t I stand here?” Gordy smiled his odd square smile. He was now surveying the sky again. Once more the birds began their ritual screaming. Saul had the feeling that they were trying to tell him something important, in fact to convey an urgent message, in bird language. In addition, Saul could hear, behind him, Mary Esther’s crying and Patsy’s quiet, soothing, morning endearments.
“Yes, it is a nice day. I guess you can stand there, maybe for a minute. But did you come here to talk to me? Or apologize?” Hearing that word, whose meaning he could not possibly have known, the boy seemed to startle. “Gordy, why did you knock down my beehives?”
For his trouble, Saul got one of Gordy’s sudden deadpan expressions. For a half-second it occurred to Saul that the boy might be lovestruck. Then Gordy said, “A hawk just went by, looked like. That thing you said, I couldn’t help it. It was like an idea I had. Me and Bob. Only Bob wasn’t there.”