“They stung the dozer man.  They didn’t sting you.   Have you ever been stung by a honey bee?  I don’t mean wasps or yellow jackets, I mean bees.”

            “Not that I can recall.”

            “You have a gift for bees and don’t even know it.  Knowing that’s worth a whole case of beer.”

            He sat in the shade and drank a beer with her.  He discovered that she lived alone in a little town over toward the Georgia line and that she made her living from bee keeping. 

            “You mind helping me with the bees,” she asked.  “I’ve got to cut out a pretty big piece of trunk to get that hive out of there.”

            She explained that she needed help loading the trunk onto the ATV. 

            “What do bees think about chain saws?” he asked.

            “Like I told you, this is a real nice hive,” she said.

            She went on to explain to him that hives had personalities.

            “Some might as well be those African bees,” she said.

            “They won’t sting me?” he asked.

            “You got the gift.  You’re safe.”

            He imagined life with this woman.  He had never been through the little town she named, and she had given him no details about the house she lived in aside from the fact that she lived alone.  But he wondered what it would be like to trade in blasting for beekeeping.

            It turned out that she was right about the bees.  He helped her cut out the hive.  Though bees swarmed about them, he was not stung a single time.  From time to time in the process of cutting the trunk and loading it on the ATV, he brushed against her. 

As they sat together on a log, he let a fantasy take shape in his mind of them lying together on a sandbar, but that evaporated as he considered that there was no shade on the river.  They would have to wait for the evening, and he suspected there was no chance at all she was going to be around that long.

            “What’s that big pistol for?” he asked.

            “My Daddy’s pistol,” she said.  “He passed last year.”

            “I’m sorry.”

            He felt shy and awkward around this woman.  He considered asked her about her broken nose.  Something personal like that could lead him in a fruitful direction.   A bee landed on his bare leg.  He resisted the impulse to brush it off.  It walked around for a moment.  He watched its abdomen pulsing, the place where the stinger was hidden.  Then it took flight.

            “Look—” he began.

            He resisted the impulse to reach out and put his hand on her leg.   Maybe after they drank another beer.

            “I’m looking,” she said.

            Then he told her how he worked as a blaster and about his service in Afghanistan. 

            “My brother is in Afghanistan,” she said.

Now there was absolutely no chance of him moving in with this woman. These were one-night lies. That brother would be coming home.  And then he found himself imagining the brother dead. But he was no blaster. She would find out about that. And all this was because he had let himself get nervous over her strangeness. Maybe that big pistol was to blame.