The Beekeeper's Frequency

I have a problem and the problem is the 8:14 express, or more accurately it's me, because I know exactly when that train comes through the old station past the range and I stay anyway. It's been that way for most of this year, every Saturday morning, me at the Green Swing Driving Range with a bucket of balls that never shrinks as fast as it should because I keep stopping to talk to people instead of actually practicing.

Paige says I don't have a golf problem, I have a leaving problem. She's thirty-eight, married to a patient man named Pablo for ten years now, and she's been coming to the range with me since we both realized that our forties were coming for us and we needed something to do with our hands that wasn't a phone. She's better at golf than me. She's also much better at leaving.

"You missed it again," she said last Saturday, nodding toward the tracks as the express went through, that long low horn rolling over the eucalyptus scrub behind the fence. "The 8:14. Gone. You just let it go, Mia."

"I know," I said, and I lined up another ball like that was an answer.

"You know. Forty-two years old, Chief Operating Officer of an actual company, and you cannot catch a train on time because you keep buying one more bucket of balls from a sixty-seven-year-old man who flirts with everybody."

"I do not buy one more bucket."

"You bought one more bucket. Gino told me. He said, quote, tell the pretty COO the sun's free but the balls aren't."

Gino runs the place, retired from the postal service years back, and he says things like that to everyone, which is why nobody takes it seriously, which is probably why he still says it. The Green Swing is nothing much, a sun-bleached gravel lot with a tin roof over the hitting bays and a club rack that leans slightly to the left and a drink fridge that only works if you slam it first. But it's mine, sort of, my Saturday mornings, and I guard them the way I don't guard anything else.

So there I was at a quarter past eight, one more bucket open in front of me, watching the last of the train disappear and thinking about how I'd have to drive into town later instead of taking the morning express like a person with her life together. And that's when he wandered over.

I'd noticed him before, of course. Everyone notices him eventually. He's forty-six, broad through the shoulders in the way of a man who lifts heavy white boxes for a living, and he keeps a dozen beehives out in the scrub past the range, and on Saturday mornings he parks his ute by the fence with the tailgate down and fiddles with a radio in the truck bed. Not a car radio. One of the old ones, a proper ham rig with dials and a long antenna wired up to something on the fence post, and it crackles and beeps and sometimes a voice comes out of it from somewhere very far away.

"Mate, can I borrow your seven iron?" he said, strolling into my bay like we'd already been introduced. "Left mine in the truck and I can't be bothered walking back."

"Help yourself," I said, and handed it over, and he took it and looked at my hands instead of swinging it.

"Oh, you're joking," he said. "Who taught you that grip?"

"Excuse me?"

"That grip. You're strangling it. You're holding that club like it owes you money." He turned the iron over in his own hands, genuinely distressed, like I'd personally offended him. "You're all business, aren't you. Everything's a negotiation. You'd try to close a deal with a golf ball."

"I am a COO, actually," I said, and immediately hated how that sounded, and he grinned like he'd been waiting for it.

"Course you are. That explains the grip. Here." He handed the club back and stepped behind me, not touching, just standing there with his hands up like a man showing he's unarmed. "May I? I'll fix your left hand. Just the left hand. I'm not a monster."

"You're very dramatic for a beekeeper," I said, but I put my hands back on the club and he reached around and turned my left hand until my knuckles pointed at the sky, and his fingers were rough and there was a smear of propolis on his wrist that smelled like tree resin and honey, warm and sweet. "That's it. Now don't think about it. Thinking is your whole problem."

I hit the next ball fat and dribbled it about forty metres.

"Better," he said.

"That was worse."

"It was honest, though. That was the old you lying to yourself. This one was the truth. Truth goes forty metres." He strolled back toward his truck with my seven iron like payment for the lesson, calling over his shoulder, "I'm Benny, by the way. You keep missing trains. I've noticed."

And he was gone before I could work out what to say to that, which I suspect was the point, and I stood there holding a club properly for the first time in my life and feeling like a stranger in a beige work shirt had just read me.

Paige appeared at my elbow with two cans from the fridge, slamming the door shut behind her, and handed me one. "So," she said. "Benny's here."

"Benny's always here. He keeps bees."

"Mia. Benny is here on the Saturdays you are here. He was not here the two Saturdays you were in Sydney for the board thing, I checked, I come anyway, I checked for you, and he wasn't here. And now you're here and the bees man is here." She took a long drink and looked very pleased with herself. "That's all I'm saying."

"That's a lot of saying for all you're not saying."

"I'm just saying the radio man likes your Saturdays." She wiggled her eyebrows at me, which at thirty-eight and married looks ridiculous and she knows it. "He's got forearms, Mia."

"He's got a truck full of radio equipment and bees in his pockets probably. He called my grip a negotiation."

"Sounds like flirting."

"It sounds as though he needed a seven iron."

I said all of that very firmly and then, because I am a hypocrite with a bucket of balls to finish, I looked over at his ute, and the radio was going. You could hear it from the bays, that soft crackle, and then a voice, thin and far away, a man's voice reading numbers in some clipped accent, and Benny sitting on the tailgate in the shade with a mug of something, writing on a pad on his knee, utterly peaceful. He'd propped the antenna wire up on the fence post with a clothes peg and a piece of fencing wire and it swayed a little in the wind off the scrub.

And the thing is, I watched him for longer than I'd admit to anyone, because there was something about a man sitting quietly in the sun talking to the far side of the world, not performing for anybody, that did something to my Saturday in a way that forty metres of honest golf could not fix.

"Stop staring," Paige said.

"I'm assessing my competition for the seven iron."

"You're staring." She crushed her can and dropped it in the bin. "I'm off, I promised Pablo I'd be home by ten. You coming?"

"I've still got half a bucket."

"Of course you do." She kissed my cheek and collected her bag. "Say hi to the radio man for me. Tell him your grip is improving under professional supervision."

She drove off and I hit the rest of the bucket, badly and then less badly, and the sun climbed and the morning went warm and the express was long gone and I wasn't going to make anything on time anywhere. When I finally put the club back on the rack, Benny was still at the tailgate, and he looked up over the radio and said, "Train's gone, love. You'll have to drive in now. Terrible shame."

"You knew that would happen," I said.

"Knew what would happen?"

"Don't." I pointed at him with a ball tee. "You're doing a bit. You've been doing a bit all morning."

"Well," he said, and turned a dial, and the crackle dipped and swelled. "Come sit anyway. Unless you've got somewhere to be."

And the annoying thing, the genuinely annoying thing, was that I didn't.

I sat on the tailgate, because of course I sat on the tailgate, and the metal was warm through my skirt and the whole truck swayed a little when I shifted my weight. Benny didn't make a fuss about it, which I appreciated, he just kept writing his numbers and let me sit there like sitting on a stranger's truck was a thing I did every Saturday.

"Norway?" I asked, nodding at the pad.

"Slovenia, this morning. Norway's mostly evenings, their night is our morning, it gets confusing." He tore the page off and started a fresh one. "The fellow in Ljubljana and I have been at it four years and I still can't say his surname."

"You've never met him."

"Never. Never seen his face, never heard his actual voice, that's his radio voice, everybody's radio voice is different from their real voice." He said it like that was a perfectly normal way to have a friend, and maybe it is, and I sat with that for a second. "He knows I keep bees and I know his daughter's studying in Graz and that's most of it, really. We argue about weather."

"That's most of it."

"That's most of anything, if you're doing it right." He capped his pen and looked at me properly for the first time since I'd sat down, and up close he had sun creases at the corners of his eyes and a small white scar through one eyebrow. "Anyway. You've been holding that tailgate like it owes you money. Come out to the hives, if you want. They're just through the trees, ten minutes, I'll drive you back for your car."

I should say here that I thought about it, because I did think about it, I ran the little COO calculus I run on everything, unknown location, unknown man, phone has full bars, Paige knows roughly where I am. And then the calculus came back and said, Mia, he keeps bees and talks to Slovenia, what do you think is going to happen, and I got in the passenger seat of his ute.

The hives were past a fire trail and a fallen branch, twelve white boxes standing in a row in the scrub with the eucalyptus leaning over them, and the sound before I saw them was the thing that got me, this low steady hum like the ground itself had an idle running. Benny got a smoker out of the tray, pumped it a few times, and puffed smoke at the front of the first box.

"You can stand there," he said, pointing at a patch of ground upwind. "They'll come look at you and decide you're boring and go back to work. Don't swat, don't run, and don't wear anything floral, which you haven't, good."

"I'm in golf gear."

"You're in golf gear," he agreed, and pried the lid off the hive barehanded, no gloves, no veil, nothing, and lifted a frame out dripping with bees, hundreds of them, crawling over his fingers and his wrist and the smear of propolis, and he held it up to the light like a photograph. "See, they've capped this section, that's honey coming along. And here's Her Majesty." He pointed at one longer bee in the crowd, moving through the others like a woman crossing a room she owned. "She runs the whole box and she's never once been asked to do anything impressive. She just lays and everything arranges itself around her."

I don't know how long I stood there watching his hands work, but it was a while, and the bees landed on his arms and he let them, and at one point one sat on the back of his hand and he brought it up close to his face and looked at it, and I had to look away because it felt like reading someone's mail.

"How did you start?" I asked.

"My grandfather. And then I stopped for twenty years, and then I was thirty-nine and a bit unmoored and I remembered that when I did this I never thought about anything else, so I started again." He slid the frame back and eased the lid on. "The radio's the same story, really. It's all the same story. Things that connect you to people you'll never meet and don't owe you anything."

"You talk to them about bees?"

"I talk to them about whatever. Mostly weather, some politics, one fellow in Ontario and I just do numbers for an hour sometimes, no words at all, we just send numbers back and forth and it's the most relaxing hour of my week." He closed the box and pulled his shirt cuff down over a sting I hadn't even seen him get. "You'll want to check your ankles in the car, there's usually one or two riding along."

We drove back and I did have a bee in the car and he evicted it with a piece of envelope and no fuss at all, and that was when I looked at the clock on the dash and saw that it was eleven forty and I had, without deciding to, missed