Peter Heller - The Dog Stars

Little while ago?

Three years.

His grin was straight across. He rubbed the stubble on his cheek and I could hear it rasping from across the room.

Three years.

He turned halfway back to look out the window west in the direction of Junction as if trying to gauge in spacetime the relationship between the distances and the passage of seasons. For just a second, for the first time, I saw him as a man getting old. He turned back.

Goddamn Hig. You weren’t very good about returning phone calls were you?

I smiled at him.

Hig?

Yeah?

You having a midlife crisis?

Just behind him to the left on a wall panel beside the big window was a famous Czech model holding a short, wicked looking machine gun, something like an Uzi. She was weighting her left leg, her right hip cocked outward, and all the geometries led the eye from her green gaze to her mound which coyly peaked out of a very spare triangle of dark hair which could not hide the short line, the path to the promised land. It killed me. Breathing immediately constricted. It occurred to me that Bangley was a tactician to the bone. He read the layout of any situation instantly, and found the spring that wound the clock, the vulnerable entry. Was I having a midlife crisis?

Don’t really believe in em, I said. Our whole frigging life is a crisis.

You think so?

No.

First the elk, now the control tower. Three hundred miles away. What’s your Point of No Return?

He meant fuel. The point at which I wouldn’t have enough to get back.

Two sixty.

Maybe you’re chasing shadows Hig. You wanna kill us both?

I stood in the middle of the family’s living room. There had been a big flatscreen, a surround sound stereo system, a player console on a side table with over ten thousand songs, a lot of country pop. Bangley had ripped it all out, hung up pegboard and the posters. There had been a game controller on the middle table. We had turned it on: World at War VII . I thought Bangley would like it. He turned away when I turned it on, and he visibly relaxed when I shut it off.

I know, I said.

He looked at me. His mineral eyes, his grin rigid.

I know it’s a risk. Whoever was there who sent the transmission he had power. He was in a control tower so he had powerful radios. Maybe he knows something.

Knows something?

Some news.

News.

Like about the Arabs or something.

Bangley didn’t move. Then he picked up the file and grasped the pipe with his paw and lowered his head.

Hig is a shark, he said. Gotta keep moving or die. Gotta do what he’s gotta do.

I thought about that all night as I lay out at the base of the berm alone, Jasper’s weight on my leg an aching absence. And watched the last of the winter constellations go under earth in the west. That was his way of giving me permission. Which I didn’t need. Still.

Clear calm morning, early May, the wind sock by the gas pump hanging still, the sky over the mountains a ringing bowl of water-clear blue. Our resident redtail floats, riding the first thermal over the barely warming tarmac. Easy circles. His mate’s nest is in a cottonwood at the edge of our fish pond and yesterday I heard the squalling cheeps of the chicks. Three I think. She stood, pumped her broad wings once and looked at me with a murderous acuity. Don’t fuck with mama. Wouldn’t dream of it I said aloud.

I turn on the pump and fill two six gallon gas jugs and load them behind my seat. Under seventy five pounds. Full tanks fifty five gallons usable. The extra gas will give me just under one more hour, not enough if I do any scouting along the way, not enough to get back, but I will take no more gas as I want to be able to land and take off short if I need to. Survival pack thirty pounds including ten days of jerky, dried tomatoes, corn, two jars olive oil. Five gallons water which I probably don’t need as Grand Junction is so named for straddling the confluence of two big rivers. But it’s a desert town and I don’t know what will happen, how hard it will be to get to the river. Always carry water.

I keep Jasper’s bird hunting quilt on the passenger seat. Lock the AR and the machine pistol into the vertical rack at the front of his seat.

What is the plan, Hig? Fly there.

Then what? Contact the natives.

Then what? Swap news.

You have no news.

I have what I have.

Then what? Fly home?

Good question.

Refuel.

Good luck.

Me and Me talking. Bangley is nowhere in sight. Climb the ladder, top off the Beast. Enough direct sun to run the pump, enjoy the old analog clicking of the numbers rolling in the pump’s window. The light warm breeze on my left cheek, the single skeining scream of the hawk. Roughed at the edges like his wings. The old excitement of a trip, a real trip, meaning new country. Surge of optimism don’t know why. Bangley is right. The odds of any useful news are low, the odds of the man in the tower being a skeleton high. And what news is useful? I’ve asked myself that every day in the week since. What is news? We eat we sleep we secure the perimeter we defend ourselves I go up into the mountains sometimes to get the news of the creeks and the trees. From the Beast the news of wind. What else is there?

Had to show Bangley how to water the garden for the first time, how to direct the flow from the header into the different marks, how to clean the furrows, show him what is and what is not a weed. He was ornery. He confessed that he’d sworn that he would never on this earth be a farmer, that the only dirt he’d ever dig in his life would be the dirt of a grave.

The hair stood up on the back of my neck when he said that. To know him this long and still be surprised.

My father was a farmer he said.

In Oklahoma?

He stared at me, the double ought spade in his hand looking nothing if not at home.

Okay so you’ve done this before.

He stared at me. He pursed his lips, looked at the blade of the shovel smeared with clay and half covered in the smoothly flowing current of a mark.

This is your show, he said finally. Were me I would’ve used the gated pipe stacked in the yard of that place to the north.

Now it was my turn to stare.

You’re a farmer, I said.

Nothing. He winced down his eyes and looked off west into the sun. Vagrant breeze moved the hair sticking out under the back of his cap. The flow of irrigation water captured from the creek made a cold ripple and burble. It pushed against clods fallen from the edges, flowed over them in smooth humps that fell into tiny riffles behind them. Eddied along the edges. If I stared long enough I could magnify the furrow in my head, build a perfect trout stream from any straight line of water. I always irrigated barefoot and my feet were numb. I loved the sensation as I sat on Jasper’s mound, the one he used to supervise from, and let the feeling come back tingling in the sun. Let them dry with heels propped on a piece of rag. Shook the dirt out of boots and socks before I put them back on.

I stared at him.

That’s what it is, I said. In some previous Life of Bangley. That shovel. Looks like a goddamn part of you. Like you were born with it.

Turned his head and looked at me and the hair stood up again. Cold, icy as the water flowing over my right foot.

It’s a spade, he said.

I nodded.

I know.

We looked at each other. What the hell, I was leaving in the morning.

You didn’t like your father much, huh?

Hesitated, shook his head slow.

You hated the fucker.

Bangley’s jaw working side to side.

You did everything. Jesus. A farmer. That’s where you learned it. You could weld, blacksmith, shoe a horse, build a corral, a barn. Probably a better frigging carpenter than me. Holy fuck.