Peter Heller - The Dog Stars

Crossed my arms over the handle of the spade and looked at the mountains. Gentle wind. A harrier, white rumped, beat the sage across the creek, fluttering and gliding just over the brush trying to scare up a rabbit. Two hawks, not the redtails, smaller, maybe Cooper’s, gyred. A lot of songbirds vanished even before, but in this world the raptors seem to be doing fine. A hawk’s world.

How long? Did you work the farm with him? Hating him?

We stood there. The water in the furrows conversed one to another in overlapping rills. No words and I knew with certainty that Bangley had killed his old man.

When you get back, he said finally. We’ll make improvements. If you want. We could make it water a lot easier. But then I always thought Hig enjoyed working out here in the sun moving the dirt around.

That was considerate.

He scratched the blade of his cheekbone under his right eye. It was weird. I looked at him the way you might look if you’d just discovered your spouse was in the witness protection program. Had been a hit man or something. Or a senator.

Fuckin A.

Fuckin A.

I don’t know whether to be mad or go hysterical busting a gut.

He smiled at me. Not the grim straight grin but the real half smile that was at once embarrassed at itself.

Personal choice, he said.

What?

Personal choice. Those are the toughest. When you have to think about shit like that.

You are fucking crazy. A crazy fucking farmer.

He was leaning on his crossed arms too and his grin went straight across again unsmiling and I knew the conversation was over and that I probably shouldn’t call him that anymore.

Now I was topping off the wing tanks. I moved the aluminum ladder around the nose, scraped it over the pavement to the left wing and climbed it with the heavy hose and nozzle over my shoulder. Click click click, the numbers unrolled, the fuel gurgled and hissed as it reached the sleeve of the cap. Seventeen point three gallons. Even now with all that it meant I still got a mild kick out of free gas. Free until. The sun was two fingers off the swells to the east, two fingers at arm’s length meaning about half an hour meaning it was nearly six. Thirteen hundred Zulu. Greenwich Mean Time. Greenwich. Somewhere in England. Home of the Clock. Center of the Timed Universe. Used to be. Nobody much keeping track anymore was my guess.

When Uncle Pete died of what was probably cirrhosis hastened by cancer and he knew he had only a few months left he did something I thought was way out of character: he spent his days in his cabin organizing his slides. His vast collection of colored positives. He had grown up with film and had taken exclusively slides which he said were sharper. He put the yellow paper boxes, the white and blue plastic ones, each one a roll, in a foot high stack that mostly covered his kitchen table. In often intense pain, by the light of a small window by day and a standing lamp in the evenings, he unboxed them one roll at a time, slipping each mounted picture into a sleeve in a transparent binder sheet. He labeled them with a Sharpie: on the actual slide he put binder number/slide number, on the page he put the same plus date taken and an up to three word description: Bone Fishing Keys. Beside the three ring binders, which held one to five years’ worth depending on how prolific he had been with his camera, he kept another binder of lined paper with a keyed journal. This held longer descriptions, notes of particular pictures which sparked his memory. I visited him once during this time. While he catalogued, I cut and split the firewood for a long winter both of us knew he would not see. Three cords of maple beech ash yellow birch, cut from his wood-lot on the side of a gentle hill, split and stacked along half of the front porch and around the side, the whole of which—me working while he sat inside—embarrassed him. At first I thought he was crazy. I mean he could have been sitting on his little porch watching the Vermont spring turn into a riotously green and sultry summer for the last time, watched the wrens and larks and owls in the lyrical commerce of breeding and nesting, leaf and air. Got bitten by black flies, gnats, then mosquitoes, on the last exquisite evenings. Why wasn’t he out there on his Dartmouth rocker? Maybe picking on his beat up guitar?

But lying one night in my old bunk under a wide open window listening to a screech owl trying to terrify me with a woman’s screams and only making me happy—the bittersweet cry of undigestible beauty and great impending loss—then it came to me: the obvious epiphany that he was reliving his life. Doh. Slide by slide, picture by picture. He was aggregating memory like a wall against extinction and the little boxes of slides were his bricks.

Up on the ladder in the soft morning, listening to the last pull of fuel gurgle into the wing tank and gauging the time by the sun. Something about that made me think of Pete and his albums leaning into the table in the dim close cabin that smelled of resin and woodsmoke and coffee. Like a man leaning into an incessant wind. Keeping track of things that have no use anymore except as a bulwark against oblivion. Against the darkness of total loss.

Well. I wasn’t going to count the hours. I had a plane full of fuel and good weather and I was going to take off and fly west and see how far I got. I was tightening down the gas cap when I heard a scuff and saw Bangley walking across the ramp. He had a basket on his arm.

I grinned. It was like the old railroad song. Pete sang it. Johnny’s mother came to him with a basket on her arm / She said my darling son / Be careful how you run / Many a man has lost his life just trying to make lost time …

It’s not a pie, he said.

I grinned. Clicked down the cap cover and climbed down.

He handed me the basket, turned to the stepladder and chopped up on the locking struts so it half folded and carried it back to the pump. Inside the basket were six grenades.

Don’t know why I never thought of it before, he said. Working on the launcher got me to thinking.

They lay inside like so many eggs inside a nest. The Egg of Death. Something in a fairy tale I once read and couldn’t remember.

How many mags do you have for the AR?

Four. The big ones.

He nodded.

You got the hand pump?

He meant the pump with long hose I could use to get gas out of an underground tank or any tank. Aside from the extra fuel the thirty feet of hose was my heaviest item. I nodded.

What are you going to do when you run out of gas?

Land.

He nodded. He looked at the Beast, at the mountains. His hands were in his pockets. He was looking west into the light breeze, he said

You been a good partner Hig. A little goofy sometimes.

Oh fuck. My chest constricted thought I was going to—Well.

Like family he said.

I stood there rooted to the tarmac.

I’m not a easy man to get along with. Only ones ever got halfway there were my wife and son. And you. Big Hig.

I think my mouth actually hung open. I blinked at him.

Long story, he said. He smiled the half smile.

Keep your eyes rolling in your head Hig. Situational awareness. Don’t get goofy thinking about the past and let some SOB blindside you. Try and come back.

I stared at him.

I’ll keep the weeds down.

He walked away. I stared after him. Fuckin A.

Fuckin A.

I hand cranked the heavy hose back on its roller and climbed into the Beast, latched the door. Hit the master switch, turned the key in the mags and pushed the starter.

Few sounds in the world as exciting as the exploding catch of a Continental engine firing to life. The first refractory turns of the prop. The roar smoothing out as the prop disappears in the speed of its rotation.