They spent their lives in search of sweetness, these bees: blue morning glories climbing the trellis outside the bakery window, a half-empty packet of sugar, the shallow bowls of lemonade that Joseph set on each table.
Joseph dipped his finger in a bowl and held it out, a perch in a birdcage. The bee drifted through the bakery on the summer air, drifted past the table of toddlers and their mothers, drifted past the skinny child Enzo in her brown velvet chair in the corner, drifted past Zap, who was bent over the cash register behind the counter. Joseph willed the bee toward himself: Come, hungry bee, here is sugar for you.
It was the end of June and the air of Minneapolis lay heavy and slow on Joseph’s skin. Even if he rose at dawn to push his way around the lake, the breeze was languid, saturated.
Joseph held his syrupy finger straight and still. He stilled his breathing and waited for the bee, which seemed to have neither buzz nor any visible means of keeping itself aloft, that heavy body, threadlike legs hanging limp and useless.
“Is that the hero guy?” the little boy in the Batman shirt said, and pointed at Joseph. “Is that him?”
His Batman shirt was frayed at the bottom where he rolled it with his thumb and forefinger. Dark dribbles on the chest. His friend, the one who always wore a yellow windbreaker, stared at Joseph.
“You don’t always have to say everything twice,” Batman’s mother said. “And boys, don’t stare at people. It’s rude. Be quiet and eat your blueberry muffins.”
She glanced at Joseph herself and at once glanced away. She and the mother of the windbreaker boy nodded at each other. Joseph held his finger so still as to appear stone; the bee alighted on Joseph’s finger and huddled itself, focused and greedy, onto Joseph’s first knuckle.
“But is he the hero that the beer guy was talking about? Is he?”
“You can tell for yourself, can’t you, Batman?” Zap said. “Look at him.”
Batman and his friend, Windbreaker Boy, gazed silently in the direction of Joseph. Zap kept working, extracting crumpled bills from the cash register and smoothing them into piles. Joseph’s finger held steady. Another bee circled, and another.
“Watch him closely now,” Zap said. “Note his every action.”
Batman’s mother frowned at Zap. What was he doing, encouraging these children to stare at people when she had just told them it was rude? Zap looked at her and held his finger to his lips: Shhh. All is well. Let me do my job.
“What’s he doing, Zap? What’s he doing?”
“See for yourself, Batman,” Zap said. “Observe the boy. And observe the bee.”
The word bee, and Enzo, who loathed bees, looked up from her table and hunched back in her chair, her mechanical pencil held in front of her like a shield. Zap took a black felt marker from the pen mug and wrote WE ARE IN SORE NEED OF FIVES on a napkin. He taped the napkin to the penny cup and faced it outward.
The lone bee on Joseph’s finger lifted itself into the air and zagged away toward the open doors.
“See?” Zap said. “The boy finds himself surrounded by bees. But do the bees sting the boy?”
Joseph wiped his finger on his jeans. The bee bowl at this table was filled to the brim; lemonade overflowed when Joseph opened the napkin dispenser to refill it.
“They do not,” Zap said. “The boy remains unstung.”
Refilling napkin dispensers was tricky. Fill one too full and the napkins were impossible to remove. Without the click of the latch after refilling, the napkins would fall out. Now Joseph took a damp sponge in one hand, lifted the small bowl of lemonade with the other, and wiped clean the puddle. Bees hovered over the sweet vanished spill.
“Does that mean he’s a superhero, Zap?” Batman said. “Does it?”
“Indeed it does, Batman,” Zap said. “A superhero is in our midst, and his name is Joseph. Joseph the beekeeper.”
Batman nodded. He stuck his index and middle fingers in his mouth. Windbreaker Boy shook his head.
“No,” Windbreaker Boy announced. “That guy can’t be a superhero. He’s in a wheelchair.”
The two mothers turned as one, fingers already to lips.
“Boys, shhh. Never talk about people in front of them like that.”
“But he’s in a wheelchair.”
Joseph rolled to the next table, where someone had emptied the napkin dispenser of its entire stack. This someone had used the stack of napkins as a makeshift notebook and had covered the napkins with penciled numbers. What did the numbers mean? Was someone out there just now realizing that he had left his numbered napkins at the bakery and was this someone filled with anger and frustration?
“Wheelchair, wheelchair, wheelchair,” Windbreaker Boy chanted. He gazed at the mothers, brimming with the power of the forbidden word, and the mothers glared and hissed.
Batman looked from his friend to Zap and back again. He took his fingers out of his mouth.
“The beer guy said the beekeeper guy was a hero. But I don’t like the beer guy.”
“The beer guy is the beekeeper’s father,” Zap said. “And you don’t have to like him for him to be right. This one time anyway.”
“A hero can’t be in a wheelchair,” Windbreaker Boy insisted.
“Oh, but that is where you are sadly mistaken, my small windbreaker friend.”
Batman and Windbreaker Boy stared at Joseph in his wheelchair, and Enzo too stared at Joseph from her table in the corner. Her mechanical pencil, which she called a clickster, bounced up and down, secured between her second and third fingers. As long as other children were nearby, Enzo would not venture forth. She would remain in her corner and bide her time.
“How can the bee guy be a hero?” Windbreaker Boy said. “Heroes fly. Heroes wear capes. Heroes wear tights.”
Zap ripped open a bag of ice cubes. The bakery’s ice maker was broken, and until it was fixed they were buying bags of ice from Rainbow Foods and keeping them in the freezer. Each summer day required several bags of ice, under the lemonade and orange juice, in the watercooler, nested around the cream and milk carafes.
“The beekeeper is a hero because he risked life and limb to rescue his mother from a fate worse than death,” Zap said.
“She was stranded on a precipice, and with no thought to his own safety, the beekeeper crept out onto thin air.”
“He must have had a cape, then,” Windbreaker Boy said.
“What’s a precipice?” Batman said.
“A precipice is a cliff.”
Batman and Windbreaker Boy studied Joseph with this new knowledge. Enzo watched and absorbed from her table, clickster motionless between thumb and index finger.
“A cliff on a mountain overlooking the sea,” Zap elaborated. It was his habit to tell superhero stories to the children in the bakery. “The sea surrounding their island.”
“Is the beekeeper from an island?”
Zap nodded. “All hail the beekeeper,” he said. “All hail Joseph, the beekeeper from the island of bees.”
Batman and Windbreaker Boy studied Joseph. Now they were kneeling on the seats of their wooden chairs. The mothers had relaxed and turned away into their own soft conversation. They were free to release their reign; Zap had led their children into questions and contemplation. Blueberry muffins sat half-eaten on the table.
Overhead, the big bakery fans whirred, slicing the air with long wooden blades. Their thin dangling chains clanked faintly in the manufactured breeze. Joseph could reach the wall switch that controlled the fans, but the chains hung far above his head. Even tall Zap had a hard time reaching them.
“Keep watching, my small friends,” Zap said. “And perhaps, if you are lucky, you too will someday unlock the secret of the bees.”
“But why’s he in that wheelchair?” Windbreaker Boy said. He was a boy who would not be dissuaded. His gaze was truculent and unconvinced. “What’s wrong with him?”
The mothers turned back, both swarming on Batman and Windbreaker Boy. Don’t point. Keep your voice down. We don’t ask questions like that. We don’t stare at handicapped people. That’s rude. Rude! Finish your muffin now; it’s time to go.
Part Two
“The Mighty Thor has been watching and listening,” Enzo said to Joseph, “and now she knows three things about you.”
Batman and Windbreaker Boy were gone in a shuffle of trash gathering and feet dragging and shoe tying. The bakery was empty except for Enzo and Joseph and Zap, who was stacking paper cups and their lids by the coffee carafes: small, medium, large. Enzo pointed her clickster at Joseph’s head.
“Number one, you have very long hair for a boy.”
Joseph saw Zap turn his head in their direction. Zap was bat-eared. The sound of Enzo’s voice echoed off him and he could locate its precise origin no matter where she was in the large bakery room, no matter when she had slipped in, no matter how many other customers were there.
“So do I,” Zap said. “What’s your point?”
Enzo ignored him and lowered her voice.
“Number two, the bee thing.”
She nodded significantly, as if she had divined a secret unknown to anyone else.
“Number three, you refuse to talk about your past. These are the things that the Mighty Thor has noticed.”
She leveled the clickster at Joseph’s heart. Click.
“Stop calling yourself the Mighty Thor,” Zap said. “I’m sick of it.”
“Shut up,” Enzo said. “This is a private conversation between the beekeeper and me.”
She refused to speak directly to Zap, her sworn enemy. Enzo wiggled her clickster. She was only nine but she knew how to level a stern gaze, and she did so often. An untouched raisin scone sat on Enzo’s table. Joseph had taken the raisin scone from its basket in the muffin-and-scone bakery case earlier and placed it before her on a doily, but she had ignored its presence.
Enzo pointed her clickster at Joseph’s forehead.
“Did you really rescue your mother from a fate worse than death on a cliff overlooking the sea?”
“No.”
“Did you really creep out onto thin air?”
“No.”
“Did you really fly?”
“No.”
“Answer me,” Enzo said.
“I am answering you.”
“No, really answer me.”
Joseph saw that she would not be happy until the answer to her questions was yes. Yes was the answer she sought. Yes, Joseph had crept out onto thin air and yes he had flown and yes he had rescued his mother from a fate worse than death. She was a child who longed for yes.
Enzo pointed the clickster at Joseph’s heart. Click.
Zap had folded his arms across his chest and was watching Enzo, the bee child buzzing around the silent Joseph. Zap was only seventeen, one year older than Joseph, but he was capable of appearing older. Joseph reached for the saltshaker on Enzo’s table and unscrewed the lid. He poured in a thin stream of white from the large canister in his lap. His movements were slow and deliberate, the better to calm the angry child. Enzo darted a glance at the raisin scone, plump and still on its doily.
Joseph rolled to the next table and unscrewed the top of its small glass saltshaker. Enzo followed.
“Answer me,” Enzo chanted. “Answer me.”
“No,” Joseph said again. “No, no, and no.”
Enzo squinched up her face and put her hands over her ears and sang “Lalalalalala.” From the counter where he now stood sifting through the bowl of Auntie Apple’s caramels, Zap frowned at her. A bee drifted over and hovered above Enzo, seeming not even to move as it hung in the air above her chanting head. Enzo and Zap were like bees themselves, angry and bumbling in each other’s presence, enemies forced to coexist in a single hive. Enzo brandished her clickster, slashing it back and forth in the air. She took aim at Zap.
“Pow,” she muttered.
Part Three
It took very little to set Enzo off. When she was angry, she muttered or spoke in a controlled yell. Zap narrowed his eyes at Enzo, who ignored him the way no other child did. Zap was a Pied Piper, tall and strong. Small children looked at him as a magical adult, an adult who was on their side. They called him Zap because he told them stories about superheroes. Zap saved broken cookies for them in tiny paper cups, which he passed out on the sly.
But Enzo?
Enzo too was a child, but Enzo alone ignored the sound of Zap’s flute. Enzo alone was left outside the mountain after the door had closed, the other children inside with the magic Zap, and when he was with Enzo, Zap too was without laughter, without music.
Zap turned away and began bagging unsold day-old bread for the food-shelf man, who arrived daily at four o’clock. It was the food-shelf man’s habit to stride without stopping to the day-old shelf for the bagged loaves. If the food-shelf man didn’t see them waiting, he turned and strode out again. It was a point of pride with Zap always to be prepared for the food-shelf man.
“Bee,” Enzo whispered. She pointed at a hovering wasp and followed its wavering progress with her clickster.
The child lived in fear of bees, and she did not distinguish among them. Wasps, hornets, honeybees, bumblebees, all were the same to her, and in her presence, Joseph had also come to regard all bees as one bee. But bees were everywhere, hoisting themselves into the air from underground, swarming around their papery hives. This one drank its fill and then dragged itself back into the air, drifting first toward the coffee station with its two urns — French roast and decaf French roast — and then suddenly darting toward the open door.
Enzo unshrank herself and returned to her familiar shape, nine-year-old girl sitting straight up on a lumpy velvet chair. She clicked her clickster.
“Stop clicking that thing,” Zap said. “It’s driving me crazy.”
“My clickster is essential to this investigation,” Enzo said in the voice of a calm professional trained to deal with recalcitrant witnesses.
An enormously tall man wearing a kilt stood outside the far window, looking in at Enzo in her brown velvet chair. He often came to the bakery in the late afternoon, seeking Zap, who gave him hard-boiled eggs. Hard-boiled eggs were the only thing that the man in the kilt would eat.
Enzo made shooing motions at him.
“Go away,” she said. “No eggs for you today.”
“Leave Kilt Man alone,” Zap said.
Kilt Man gazed at Enzo as if he sensed her presence but could not quite see her. Enzo pushed her hands at the air as if she could propel the tall man away by force of air and will.
“Hey, Kilt Man,” she cried. “Kilt Man, fly away home. Your house is on fire and your children are alone.”
“Cut it out,” Zap said. “The poor guy’s a loony tune.”
“Shut up.”
Zap moved from behind the counter to Enzo’s table and bent over, knelt so that he was on her level. She turned her head away. The man in the kilt stood still and straight, his pallid face calm.
“I’m asking you please to leave him alone,” Zap said. “Please, Enzo.”
“Mighty Thor.”
Enzo kept her head turned and rigid. Zap sighed and backed away, toward the counter where the day-old bread was waiting. The man in the kilt angled his own head down, a slow and stunted movement. Now he was looking directly at Enzo. Now he could both sense her and see her. His world had opened a crack and allowed her presence entry.
“He should take medicine,” Enzo said.
“If he took medicine,” Joseph said, “he might feel like he was disappearing.”
“He should disappear.”
Enzo was clenched, anger shimmering out. It happened so easily. It took nothing to set her off; the sight of Kilt Man outside the window, gazing into her world from his, was enough. She hunched forward in her Kilt Man stance, neck held rigid and eyes unblinking and lips moving. Zap stood behind the counter, breaking giant day-old cookies into small pieces, his small-child stack of Dixie cups teetering beside him.
“Maybe he likes being crazy,” Zap said to Enzo. “Ever think of that?”
“How could anyone like being crazy?”
Zap was looking at Joseph; Joseph could feel it — but he did not look back at Zap. Did anyone like being crazy? Did anyone choose?
“Make him go away. He’s scary. I’m scared of him.”
Enzo’s voice was high and thin, a whine, a plea. Make him go away. Make the man in the kilt leave the window, the sidewalk outside, the bakery, world of sweetness, where bread and pastry and cakes rose high and light in the burning heat of the dawn ovens, ovens hidden away in the back room. Disappear the man in the kilt, so that no small child would have to see him.
Joseph’s hands clenched on the tires of his chair. If he shoved backward, he would crash, crash into the table behind him, the table where a father and his son sat, the father reading the paper, the son squeaking his straw in and out of the hole in the cover of his plastic cup. Squeak. Squeak. Now the father looked up from his paper. The son kept squeaking, but the father folded his paper with a snap and frowned at the man outside the window, the man in the kilt who craved eggs. No eggs for you today, Kilt Man. Take your brain with its flying misfirings and go away. You make no sense. Leave us alone.
Joseph inched backward in his chair. He stared at the father, who was staring out the window, and willed him to look away from Kilt Man. The father drummed his fingers on the table and frowned. Joseph rolled silently backward another inch. The boy squeaked his straw up and down in a swift and complicated rhythm.
Kilt Man looked through the window at Joseph, silent in his inching chair. Enzo sat next to him in her own chair, index fingers held up and together in the sign that was supposed to ward off evil. She was saying something, but Joseph couldn’t hear her. His gaze held the gaze of the man in the kilt. Now the father was saying something to his son. Stop that squeaking; it’s time to go. Now the boy was protesting. Make him go away. Beyond the bakery was the world outside, where the kilted man with the sad eyes stood. Anger and fear buzzed within the world of the bakery, ricocheting from wall to wall.
There was no escape. You could not leave one world without being trapped in the next. Joseph’s neck was hurting; he had rolled himself against the straw-squeaking boy’s table and his hands were still pushing at the tires, shoving the chair against the hard wooden table edge.
Breathe.
John Schaefer from rehab used to say that. “Breathe, my child,” he would say when he saw Joseph tensing. “Breathe.”
Joseph lifted his hands from the tires and set them in his lap, fingers twined around one another like the slender twining trunks of birch trees.
Breathe, my child.
The father and son disappeared down the sidewalk, the boy still protesting, his bent straw clutched in one hand.
Breathe.
Zap stared at Joseph from behind the counter, worry in his eyes, while his hands kept busy with their broken-cookie task. In Joseph’s peripheral vision, the tall shadow of Kilt Man moved backward down the sidewalk and faded away.
“I’m scared of him,” Enzo said again.
“The beekeeper isn’t scared of him, though,” Zap said.
“That’s what makes him the hero.”
“I told you I wasn’t a hero,” Joseph said.
His own voice sounded strange to Joseph, rusty from disuse. He needed to clear his throat. He needed to clear his brain.
Enzo briskly clicked her clickster and made her eyes large and unblinking.
“Back to my investigation,” she said. “Did the beer guy chase your mother to the edge of the cliff, and is that why you had to rescue your mother? Is that what really happened?”
“No.”
“Well, what was she doing on the cliff, then? Was she trying to escape the bees?”
Joseph said nothing.
“Was . . . she . . . trying . . . to escape . . . the bees?” Enzo said in the overly enunciated tones of an angry parent.
“Maybe she was trying to escape a bratty kid who wouldn’t stop asking her questions,” Zap said. “Ever think of that?”
Enzo ignored him. “Do you have a brother?”
“No,” Joseph said.
“A sister?”
“No.”
“No, really,” Enzo said. “Do you have a sister?”
She was doing it again, lost in her world of yes longing.
“No,” Zap said. “You heard him the first time.”
Enzo pointed the clickster at Joseph and clicked once, as if he were withholding information that she would wrest from him sooner or later.
“So it’s just you, then,” she said. “You and the beer guy and your mother.”
“No,” Zap said. “It’s just him and Big. No mother.”
“Yes mother,” Joseph said.
Zap stared from the bread rack.
“Yes mother,” Joseph said again.
Enzo’s clickster did a small victory dance in the air. Her questions had provoked a reaction, a confrontation, however small; the investigator was on the right track. Joseph looked away from her eyes, which were bright with triumph.
“But she’s not here,” Zap said. He was looking right at Joseph, but Joseph would not look at him.
“She’s in the hospital,” Joseph said.
“Right,” Zap said. “That’s all I meant. I didn’t mean that you don’t have a mother. I only meant that your mother isn’t here, in this particular upper-midwestern part of the world.”
“Your mother is in the hospital?” Enzo said. “Tell us about her.”
Joseph watched his fingers twine on themselves again. Now his fingers were playing a game his mother used to play with him when he was little. He looked at the dull mass of fingers and chose one. Lift, he commanded the finger; raise yourself into the air. He watched as the wrong finger detached itself from the mass and rose. No. Not you. He refocused on the finger he wanted. Lift. Again the wrong finger rose. Synapses were firing, but they were misfiring. Commands were not reaching the desired target.
“Come on,” Enzo wheedled. “Talk.”
No. Joseph would not talk. He would hold in everything swarming inside him about his mother. No one in this new world would know anything about her, how every day they played Scrabble together, how she wore three tiny earrings in the shape of lipsticks on one ear and three tiny earrings in the shape of mouths on the other, how her dark winter coat had been a gift from Big one Christmas and she loved it because the sleeves were long enough and the fake fur around the collar and cuffs kept her warm, how the coat had come with two large brown buttons in a tiny plastic bag hidden in the pocket and his mother had held up the buttons and said, “Two, not one, that’s class.”
Now Joseph’s shoulders were curved around his chest. He would clench himself tight. He would hold his mother within and he would not think about her, alone now in the hospital, near no one who had seen her fingering the two extra buttons of her dark coat, no one who knew her, no one who held her heart within his own.
Enzo retrained the clickster on Joseph and made her bright eyes .at and hard, as if she were a detective schooled to give away nothing.
“New subject. How did your legs get hurt?”
“His legs don’t hurt,” Zap said.
“He’s in a wheelchair. Of course they do.”
“Of course they don’t. It’s called paralysis. Ever heard of it?”
The door behind the counter opened and a short, wide man appeared in the doorway and beckoned to Zap. Zap rolled his eyes and pushed himself away from the table. Frank the Figurehead occasionally emerged from the back to confer with his son. In the three weeks he had been working there, it seemed to Joseph that Zap ran the bakery, but the Figurehead was Zap’s father and the owner, and when he beckoned, Zap answered the call.
Enzo turned her back on him and pointed her clickster at Joseph’s legs. Now she had the subject all to herself.
“I repeat my question. How did your legs get hurt?”
“My legs don’t hurt.”
Joseph prodded himself in the thighs with both index fingers and invited her with a gesture to do the same. Enzo shook her head. No. She would not touch Joseph’s legs. That was not the job of the investigator. Joseph rolled to the last table, where the last saltshaker needed filling.
“How long will your mother be in the hospital?” Enzo said suddenly.
Her eyes bored into Joseph’s. She moved her head back and forth in a metronomic sway, as if she were trying to hypnotize him. She stood up and moved behind Joseph’s wheelchair and placed her hands on the back grips.
“A long time.”
Enzo gave his chair a little push.
“You must not be a very good superhero if your mother’s in the hospital.”
“I already told you that I’m not a hero at all. That’s Zap’s story, not mine.”
She pushed his chair again.
“A real superhero would fix his legs,” she said. “Then he’d go rescue his mother. That’s what a real superhero would do.”
Joseph watched his fingers, holding the saltshaker at a slant. The white salt streamed into the opened top. If he listened carefully enough, he might hear the sound it made, tiny cubes of white tumbling one over the other into the darkness of the interior of the saltshaker. Hush. Listen. Anything in this world might be making a sound at any given moment, and anyone listening might find import in that sound. If you only listened, meaning that had been lost might be found. That was what Joseph had always believed. But he was in an unfamiliar world now, and he no longer knew if those words were words he could still live by.
Again Enzo nudged his chair. She smelled like her hair, child’s hair of shampoo and sun, and of cinnamon.
“Don’t you miss her?”
Push.
Enzo leaned in close, and closer. Her T-shirt was damp with sweat.
“Don’t you?”
Push.
The saltshaker fell to the floor with a flat splat: broken. White grains spilled out, whiter than the white tiles. Joseph felt his legs gathering themselves to tense, to spring, to rise from the chair and fling him out the double doors, down the block, west to Lake Calhoun, to run down the stairs to the lake three at a time. He would leap over the bikers and Rollerbladers, jump to the lowest branch of the huge old oak by the 32nd Street playground, and turn himself east, away from the plains, back to the hushed old mountains from whence he had come. He would aim the arrow of his body at the redbrick buildings of Utica, at the redbrick building of the hospital. The doors of the hospital would open as he approached and he would wing his way to his mother’s room, and alight beside her bed, or by her chair, or find her in the hallway, crouched behind a ficus tree, those trees condemned to live indoors in office buildings and hospitals.
I am here now were the words he would beam silently to her, and she would hear him, and her hand would emerge from the old dark coat with two, not one, extra buttons that long ago had been wrapped in red-and-green Santa Claus paper and reach toward him.
“Because I would,” Enzo said. “I would miss my mother every day of my life.”
Joseph hunched forward in his chair. The little bowl of lemonade on the table before him crawled and shuddered with bees, their wings lifting and settling.
Part Four
“What the hell happened here?” Zap said to Enzo. “What did you do, idiot child?”
Zap was back and the Figurehead was gone. The clickster was balanced between Enzo’s index and middle fingers.
“I was just asking him about his mother,” Enzo said.
“Well, don’t.”
“It’s a free country,” Enzo said. “I can ask him about anything I want. Anyway, you’re the one who started it. You’re the one who said he was trying to save his mother.”
Joseph stared at his feet trapped in their white cotton socks, tied into the running shoes that he had brought with him from the land of mountains, where he no longer lived. He was still in his chair. He had not flown.
“You made him disappear again,” Zap said. “Idiot child.”
“My name is not Idiot Child. My name is the Mighty Thor. And guess what? You were wrong. His legs do so hurt. He was pounding them. So there.”
Joseph heard in her voice that she was close to tears. It was early evening in the bakery and the long rays of the summer sun slanted across the bakery cases.
“You can’t be the Mighty Thor,” Zap said.
“Yes I can.”
“No you can’t. The Mighty Thor was a comic book superhero from the seventies.”
Enzo’s hand clenched around her clickster.
“You could be the Unmighty Thor, though,” Zap said. “That would be a good name for you.”
Back and forth their words darted, spears of anger and frustration flung from one to the other. The enemy bees spoke to each other by means of harsh buzzes. They spoke with furiously beating wings. If Enzo could, she would zoom up into the air and scrape herself along the pressed-tin ceiling of the bakery. She would hurt herself and be glad of the hurt.
Joseph sat in his chair and looked at his hands. Once they gripped the tires this tightly, it was hard to let them go. Hard to ungrip. He willed the index fingers first to relax, to soften, to feel the rubber of the tire. Then the thumbs. Then the rest of them. Let go, Joseph soothed, let go. One by one, his fingers loosened.
Now Joseph’s hands hung by the sides of the tires. Now he could turn to the child. He was the beekeeper and he could work his calming beekeeper magic.
“Enzo,” Joseph said.
Zap and Enzo both turned to Joseph. The child’s eyes were too bright. They threatened to overflow, but Enzo held the tears back, and Joseph could feel in his own eyes how mighty was her effort. The raisin scone he had brought her still sat on her table.
“Welcome back from the island, beekeeper,” Zap said.
“Enzo,” Joseph said again.
Zap gave up. He turned and went back to the counter and opened up the cash register.
“Not Enzo,” Enzo said. “Mighty Thor.”
Her voice was dull. Not-Enzo gazed at Joseph from a land she had willed into being, a land where the name Mighty Thor belonged to her alone and not a seventies comic book superhero. Joseph knew by the way she whispered it that Enzo loved the name she had chosen. She wanted to be known not as Enzo, idiot child, but as Thor, child of might. Joseph sat in his chair and kept his eyes on hers. Come back, Mighty Thor. Come back to the bakery, where a raisin scone waits for you at your table in the corner, your table and your brown velvet chair.
“I am not a superhero,” Joseph said.
She shook her head, her eyes filling. She wanted to hear yes, but Joseph was telling her no. He had to keep telling her no.
“But why not? Why can’t you be?”
“I failed in my mission, that’s why.”
“But the beer guy said. He said.”
The child was staring at him with her too-bright eyes. The child was hungry. The child was tired. The child was standing on a cliff, trying to keep her balance.
“Mighty Thor,” Joseph said.
He sent the magic words — Mighty Thor — out to Enzo, the child who was trying not to cry. Zap, behind the counter, was silent, his eyes moving between Enzo and Joseph.
“Mighty Thor,” Joseph said again. “What if you yourself were a superhero? Imagine that.”
The child gazed back at him.
“What would your superpower be, do you think?”
The tight lines of her shoulders began to droop. She kept her eyes on him and shook her head. This was the way to call her home. Joseph held his hand out to her and beckoned — Come, little child, come and tell me your secret — but no.
Enzo would not budge. She, too, would say no.
“I could tell you,” she said in the thin voice of someone who had memorized a line from a movie, “but then I’d have to kill you.”
“We’re closing,” Zap called from the counter. “Calling all brats. Time to fly away to your brat caves.”
Where did Enzo go when the bakery closed? She was there every day, moving in and out of the open double doors at will, flitting from table to bakery case to sidewalk, never alighting for long. The clickster was limp in her hand.
“Closing time,” Zap called again. “Now.”
He banged shut the cash register drawer. Time to let the register rest, and the muffins and cookies on their display doilies and plates, and the loaves of bread in their baskets. Time to let darkness soften the edges of the tables and smooth the worn treads of the black-and-white tiles of the floor. Time for the bees to return from their wanderings and huddle together in darkness. Time for Joseph to glide to Enzo’s table in the corner and pluck the raisin scone from its plate, glide back to where the child stood still fighting tears, and hold it out to her, that she might take it from his hand and carry it with her as she went out from the bakery and away, into the still summer night.
Part Five
Joseph punched the handicap button with the stick he kept tucked next to him for that purpose, and the double doors of the gym opened with their squeak and groan. The m dangled off the end of the word gym. Jim’s Gy … m. The m had been dangling ever since Joseph had left his home and moved to Minneapolis. Maybe the m had been dangling ever since the gym was built.
Joseph wheeled down the hall, past the man who didn’t bother checking his membership card, the man who each night yawned and waved simultaneously.
Yawn.
Wave.
Joseph’s black backpack swung and slapped gently at the back of his chair. He was already wearing his swimsuit. He left the house in it every day.
Joseph could swim at the Y on Hennepin Avenue, bright and windowed, but he didn’t. The old guys at Jim’s Gy . . . m lifted weights in a windowless room. No piped-in music, no televisions mounted overhead. The old guys grunted. The old guys had gray hair or no hair and heavy, wrinkled faces.
The pool was a squat rectangle filled with chalky blue water. No windows here, either. The weight room smelled of sweat and the pool room of chlorine, and old concrete, and damp wood from the single set of bleachers on the other side of the pool, the old-guy, non-Joseph side.
He rolled into the single handicapped stall, the stall with the crookedly hung door. Shoved his black backpack with his deodorant and extra T-shirt and catheter into the bottom of the locker. In his chair, he was not high enough to reach the single hook. He wrapped his towel around his shoulders. All of Big’s towels were thin and dingy. At home in Utica, Joseph and his mother’s towels had been blue and green, and he had washed them and folded them in thirds and kept them in the second drawer on the left in the bathroom.
Down the tiled hallway, into the windowless room of fake blue and acrid chlorine. An old guy was there. He sat on the edge of the pool, fumbling with a yellow bathing cap, the kind that old ladies wore, plain yellow and flowerless, even though he had no hair that Joseph could see. The old guy bent forward, dipped his hands into the water, and splashed tiny handfuls onto the skinny white legs. He tilted his head up at Joseph across the pool and appraised him.
“Kid! What the hell happened to you?”
Joseph put his towel on the bench. He rolled to the very edge of the pool, put on the brake, and lowered himself out and down. Not easy. Pay attention. Do not fall. “Falling isn’t so bad once you’ve done it,” John Schaefer had said back in Utica. “Make yourself fall,” John Schaefer had said. “It’s not the end of the world.”
But Joseph did not want to fall.
“Kid! You deaf? What the hell happened to you?”
The water rippled up and over the filter.
“Not Vietnam. Too young. Right?”
Splash.
“Too young to have heard of Vietnam, probably. Ever hear of it? Vietnam.”
Splash.
“Born that way? A cripple?”
Splash.
“No. I’m guessing not. Jesus Christ, then, I’m stumped. Stumped! Get it? No, wait. You still got legs, so you can’t be stumped. Your legs just don’t work. Am I right?”
Joseph lowered himself into the water.
“Oh Christ, kid, I got it. Muscular dystrophy. That’s it, isn’t it?”
Joseph twisted onto his back and stared up at the ceiling. Up and up and up, to where the fluorescent tubes of light hung blurry and white. Arms out. And in. And out. And in. He swam three laps and rested, his arms draped over the edge of the pool.
“Kid! Can you pee on your own, or do you use a bag?”
Joseph closed his eyes. He came to the pool for the blue silence of it, the cold wash of water at night. The pool was an island surrounded on all sides by the summer sounds of this city, this city of lakes, of Mississippi River, of summer storms that whirled themselves upward into sudden tornadoes. Here was the place where Joseph ended his days, the place from which he emerged wet and aching into the dark night air.
Big was sleeping now, in his small bedroom with the window shade duct-taped to the sill. He did not know that his son was swimming, pulling one arm over the other. Big would rise in a few hours, rise in the darkness and make his way to the darkened bakery, where he would enter the propped-open alley door and light the ovens.
The drive from Utica to Minneapolis had taken three days. It was late May and Joseph had been in rehab since February. John Schaefer had sat in the wide doorway of the lobby, nodding and drumming his fingers on his tires. The chair that Big had brought with him was folded up behind them in the cab of Big’s pickup. Big drove with two hands on the wheel, as if he had studied a driver’s manual diagram and noted the exact placement of each hand. Big didn’t used to drive that way. He had been a hang one hand out the window type, a drive with your knees type if he needed to pull on a pair of gloves or light a cigarette, a habit he seemed to have given up in the year since he had left Joseph and his mother.
“You have to go?” his father had said into the silence, an hour into the drive.
John Schaefer must have told Big at the hospital that it was important to pay attention to toileting. He’s in good shape for a para, John Schaefer might have told him. He’s one of the lucky ones because he can take care of it himself, but you’ve got to stay on top of the toileting. Infection. UTIs are nasty things if you don’t get on them right away.
“No.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
Now Joseph pushed off with his arms and began to swim again.
Arms out. And in.
“Kid!”
The old guy’s voice was magnified and blurred by the water sloshing in and out of Joseph’s ears. He stopped swimming and draped his arms over the pool’s edge. The old guy stood on the other side, his yellow bathing cap askew. He tilted his head and surveyed Joseph.
“Got a girlfriend?”
Joseph shook his head.
“Why the hell not? You’ve got the looks.”
The old guy hobbled along the edge of the pool, legs bracing on each step so as not to slip on the wet concrete.
“Got one for me, then? The wife passed on and I don’t like being alone.”
The old guy shuffled his way to the locker room door and waved. Back to the bat cave. Joseph pushed off with his arms and began again to do the backstroke. Arms out. Arms in.
“I’m John Schaefer, nice to meet you. You can still have sex.”
That was the first thing John Schaefer ever said to Joseph. He had whizzed by on Joseph’s first day in the hallway, his chair so close that Joseph had flinched. That had been Joseph’s first real day in the chair, feeling the rubber tires under his hands. His fingers had blistered. He had stared down the hall at the back of John’s head and watched as John wheeled about and rolled to a perfect stop in front of Joseph.
“You can. Swear to God. You might need to be a little creative, but that’s a good thing.”
That smile. The easy way he stroked the rubber of his tires, as if he were petting a cat.
“How do I know? Personal experience, my friend.”
Then he had nodded at Joseph’s fingers.
“Also, you might want to get yourself some gloves.”
John Schaefer was probably whizzing away right now, back in the rehab unit. He had seemed never to sleep. Maybe another sixteen-year-old boy was there, a new para, venturing out in his chair for the first time. Maybe John Schaefer was telling him, right at this moment, that he could still have sex, that he just needed to be a little creative. But what if you had never had sex?
