Peter Heller - The Dog Stars

Spat.

Well, might have been the best break you got all day. Because maybe it wasn’t the smartest fucking move, but you are lucky Hig. That’s one goddamn thing I’ll say. Because then they gave you intel. Totally out of the blue. Un fucking prompted. Not even under duress. Not from Hig. We get the beta about the A-rabs.

Now he cursed for real. Under his breath. Now he didn’t turn, he spat on the floor of the hangar.

We get the beta about A-rabs and what do you do? You plug the fucker. NOW you plug him. Finally realize he’s not a Boy Scout like you, and you off him in cold blood. Before they could tell you what the fuck they meant. First intel about a possible real visitor, I mean a visitor with some fucking muscle, a possible goddamn invasion , and you terminate the conversation. Because you discover, oh surprise surprise, that the man is a rapist and a killer like every other survivor walking around this goddamn country. Holy shit. What a goddamn shock. God damn .

He was officially steamed. His neck, face were red. That one vein throbbing in his forehead. I felt the heat in my own face. He’s right. That’s what I thought. If I get caught short and killed one day it’s because I’m too soft. Right? Is it worth living the other way? Bangley’s way? Well, I’m an apprentice. Still. An acolyte in the School of Bangley. Just by living here. And not too great at it. Still.

Good job, he said. Happy hunting.

Stood up, unkinked his back, walked off.

Well, that didn’t work out so well. I stopped at the truck to bring Bangley back a treat. Was thinking of him. Hunh. He didn’t even take a Coke not a single one. He wouldn’t take one while we were gone either. I knew the man. He might watch us in our sleep through a night scope but he would never touch a thing inside the hangar. Part of his Code. Anyway the Coke is tainted now. Tainted with incompetence. Here at what cost. Because even though I survived the encounter there is a cost. Statistical if nothing else. For Bangley, we only get so many fuckups before the jaws close, so the fight at the truck puts one more in my column which for better or worse is now his column. That’s what steams him the most. He doesn’t want to lose because he suffered some fool.

I blew the air out of my cheeks. Thought: The mountains will be good. Good to get up there. Breathe some fresh air. Thought: Strange. One other person but the families in a hundred square miles and I still need fresh air.

Now we walk fast in the dark. Me and Jasper, the sled scraping behind. Cold. Good and cold. High stars nettle the black, no moon, crossing under the Milky Way like crossing a deep river. Never will get to the other side. We never do.

The argument with Bangley still rankles. Now just our breaths. Winter fat. Can feel it in my legs. Good to move, move fast.

I pull the sled on a lead with my right hand then switch. Pack is in the sled, rifle too. This time, Thanks Bangley, wearing a subcompact handgun, a plastic Glock weighs almost nothing. A sense of more survivors around, increasing traffic, don’t know why.

Pass the tower on our right. Pass the Spot without a shudder. Thoughts come with the rhythm of the fast steps. Can get used to killing the way you can get used to a goat on the doorstep. Uncle Pete. With his bottle and cigarillos and stories. His living on a yacht with Louise. Their living in a trawler in Alaska. As if somehow being afloat could make a life more compelling. Never liked whiskey, he told me. But I drink it because it has a storied history.

The dead goats multiply. You can pull a goat off into the field, but a memory you can only haul into the sun and hope it desiccates. Dries to something crumbled and odorless.

We walk. We are half an hour from the first slopes, the first trees. The night is without weight: the dark weightless now in its immanent passing like a deer about to bolt. The morning light a thought that is just occurring. Still and quiet, high stars, no wind.

I think about the Plains tribes, the ones that lived here, that moved through. The Utes the Arapaho the Cheyenne. The Comanches came this far, the Sioux moving and hunting and raiding, the Kiowa, the occasional Apache. When I was a boy I read about the wars and raids between them and wondered why anyone would fight in a country this big. Why the landscape ever became a territory that needed division. Well. Bangley and I are two and sometimes our resource base seems cramped. Not because we don’t have enough food, enough raw materials, enough quilts. It is ideological. Ideology that tears apart nations. Tore, past tense. What nations now? Whoever is left still fighting, scrapping over the leftovers. Maybe banding together like me and Bangley.

Still we are divided, there are cracks in the union. Over principle. His: Guilty until—until nothing. Shoot first ask later. Guilty, then dead. Versus what? Mine: Let a visitor live a minute longer until they prove themselves to be human? Because they always do. What Bangley said in the beginning: Never ever negotiate. You are negotiating your own death.

Me versus him. Follow Bangley’s belief to its end and you get a ringing solitude. Everybody out for themselves, even to dealing death, and you come to a complete aloneness. You and the universe. The cold stars. Like these that are fading, silent as we walk. Believe in the possibility of connectedness and you get something else. A tattered union suit flying on a flagpole. Help asked and given. A smile across a dirt yard, a wave. Now the dawn not so lonely.

We are philosophers, huh, Jasper?

He’s just happy to be moving. Together. He knows where we’re going.

Follow the creek trail upwards. A trail long before we trod it, before the Arapaho, the aforementioned Cheyenne. Deer and elk, bighorn before. The coyotes who hunted them. Cougars. The wolves. The wolves again. Maybe mountain buffalo. Grizzlies occasionally, but mostly they are shy of trails, even game trails.

We move in and out of cottonwoods which make a deeper darkness. Thickets of willows. Up the grassy slopes going pale, into a short rock canyon echoing the spilling water. Then a ponderosa forest, smelled before seen, the scent carried downstream: redolent of vanilla, like a sweetshop. These still living. The sled scrapes over the trammeled roots, exposed rock. Clusters of deer scat long desiccated. I stop, let go the bridle, and hug a big tree, standing in a frieze of sweet sage that is also paler than the night, patches beneath the trees, fragrant also and tangy. Hug the thick rough bark, nose stuck in a resined crack, inhale vanilla strong as any small brown bottle, the tree pungent and sweet as butterscotch. A time when we entered shops that smelled like this. Staffed with high school kids in aprons struggling to scoop the hard ice cream. Seemed cruelly hard back then. Why keep it so cold? Thin girls blowing hair back and approaching each cone like a grudge match. Rum raisin my favorite. Melissa’s pistachio. Or anything with chunks of toffee. But adored a butterscotch sundae. The saliva running in my mouth at the base of the tree. Would kill for it now maybe, not even a figure of speech.

Jasper is patient. He sits, then lies down. In other years he would have ranged ahead and swung out on our flanks, wide, crossing and recrossing the trail, following his nose, picking up game, irrepressible, but now he is happy to rest. Me too. We are in no hurry. There is plenty of stored food at the airport and Bangley can get along without me for a few days, though I hope not too well. Always the fear when we take to the mountains that he will learn to like it like this better. Alone. Though he is smart enough, a good enough tactician to know that long term his odds go down. Plus, he is not a farmer. Jasper has been through this before too many times and is polite enough not to be visibly embarrassed. The hugging a tree, the mutterings. Tonight—it is still night, though barely—I don’t say a word, because tonight I am watching myself a little and I have always despised the sentimental, maybe because it is a familiar weakness. But the tree smells almost sweeter than anything in our world now and it smells like the past.