Peter Heller - The Dog Stars

In October, November walking around the lake on our evening pre-prandial we’d point them out to each other. I thought she was always wrong. She’d get half mad. She was so smart, but she didn’t know the geese like I did. I never thought of myself as really really smart but I always knew things in my bones.

When we got the puppy Jasper I was confirmed: he would chase the wild ones who were skittish but not the mean residents. My theory anyway.

We had no children. She couldn’t have. We saw a doctor. Tried to sell us treatments we declined. We were okay with just each other. Then she did, like a miracle. Get pregnant. We’d gotten used to the other and I wasn’t sure I could ever love someone more. I watched her sleeping and I thought: I love you more than anything.

Sometimes back then, fishing with Jasper up the Sulphur, I hit my limit. I mean it felt my heart might just burst. Bursting is different than breaking. Like there is no way to contain how beautiful. Not it either, not just beauty. Something about how I fit. This little bend of smooth stones, the leaning cliffs. The smell of spruce. The small cutthroat making quiet rings in the black water of a pool. And no need to thank even. Just be. Just fish. Just walk up the creek, get dark, get cold, it is all a piece. Of me somehow.

Melissa part of the same circle. But different because we are entrusted with certain souls. Like I could hold her carefully in my cupped hands, like to bear her carefully carefully, the country I cannot, but her I can, and maybe all along it was she holding me.

The hospital St. Vincent’s was right across the lake. The orange helicopters landed there. At the end we talked about flying west but it was too late and there was the hospital, we went to the hospital. To one of the buildings they took over. Filling with the dead.

Bangley just shows up. I’m changing oil. He could rap on the steel siding of the bay but he doesn’t he likes to give me a heart attack. Shows up beside me like a ghost.

What are we monkeying with now?

Jesus, if I have a coronary who will fly your patrols?

We’d find someone wouldn’t we? Put an ad in the paper.

His grin straight across his eyes never smiling.

Anyway I bet I could fly this sucker.

He says it every now and then. It’s like a warning. For what? If he wanted this windy place to himself he would have. A long time ago.

Now Jasper is awake on his dusty blanket and growling. Jasper can’t stomach Bangley unless it’s like an emergency visitor situation in which case he keeps his trap shut, he’s a team player. Once just after Bangley showed up Jasper snapped at his arm and Bangley unholstered a sidearm big as like a skillet and aimed and I yelled. The only time. I said You shoot the dog we all die.

Bangley blinked he had that grin. What do you mean we all die?

I mean I fly patrols from the air, the only way we know we can secure the perimeter.

That word. It was the only one that hit its target. I almost saw it go in his ear and through the tubes into his brain. Perimeter. Only way to secure. He blinked. He worked his jaw side to side. He stank. Like old blood like when you butcher a deer.

Only reason I am still alive. How do you think I live here by myself?

So that’s how the bargain was struck. Without even a negotiation.

No words but that. I flew. He killed. Jasper growled. We let each other be.

I was saying: I’m changing the oil in the Beast and he shows up beside me like a ghost.

Why do you visit the Druids? he says.

They’re not Druids they’re Mennonites.

He grunts.

I put down the filter wrench. Lay it on a rolling box. Pick up the safety wire pliers.

Bangley is standing there. I smell before I see him. I feed the wire through the hole in the flange at the filter’s base, twist it with the pliers. It’s safety wire. Holds the filter on in case. All to spec. FAA regs. Wouldn’t want the oil filter to vibrate loose, fall off, spill all the oil midair and the engine tears apart. Has happened. They used to say all FAA rules resulted from a real accident. So the .032 mil wire is maybe a kind of memorial to some pilot. Maybe his family too.

Bangley is picking his teeth with a splinter of wood, watching me. On top of the tool box is a shop rag a square of old t-shirt. The graphic is faded but I can see rows of smudged pink cartoon women: big breasted little breasted all shapes and underneath “melons” “peaches” “jugs” “plums” “raisins” a big “Cabo” bannered across the top. I read all the fruit before I reach in and wipe everything down one more time. Stab of pain. Just that. Fold it. A cartoon. That we are so hard wired that way. That two little arcs or circles of a cartoon boob could stir up memory, a temperature, change, a tightening of guts, a crawling in the groin. I think it’s curious. I half gulp, stand still for a second, breathe.

Melissa was cantaloupes.

Cabo is out at the end of a nine hundred mile peninsula. Plenty of fish probably. Is there some survivor like me out at the old municipal airport changing the oil in an antique Maule, flying recon every day, using a Ski Colorado t-shirt as a shop rag? Fishing of an evening off some dilapidated pier that still stinks of creosote? Wondering what it’s like to ski.

Why didn’t Colorado shirts ever have tits on them? I ask Bangley.

Not much of a sense of humor in old B.

Walk to the north wall of the hangar slide a case of 50 straight weight Arrowshell off the stack. Set it down on a wooden stool. The sunlight is retreating back across the concrete slab to the open doorway. Bangley is wearing his honking sidearm. Night and day. Once he went to the pond in the creek bottom to hook a catfish and a bearded stranger built like a bear rose out of the Russian olive and attacked him. He says. Bangley shot him through his shaggy head. Brought an entire leg back still wearing three sets of ripped pants and a bandaged boot. The left. Threw it down in front of the hangar.

For the dog he said. Angry. Because I didn’t do my job. To him. I didn’t guarantee the perimeter.

Why do you visit the Mormons? he says again. He is fucking with me. He is ramrod straight and inclines forward real subtle when he is pissed.

I pull at one flap of the cardboard box of motor oil. The glue is heavy, I tear it open tear the other side, four rows of three black quarts. The pale waxy line down the side of each tall rectangular bottle is translucent for reading the level, they remind me of tuxedo pants. One stripe of piping. Twelve little groomsmen.

How do you know that I do?

Bangley gets mad in gradations of increasing internal pressure like a volcano. The veins in his nose turn purple. Madder I mean. He is like one of those volcanoes in Ecuador that is always threatening to blow even when the top looks wisped with clouds like any other mountain.

We agreed, he says. Seismologists at the USGS or wherever seeing portentous tremors on the graph. A certain vein in his forehead just under the bill of his Ducks Unlimited camo cap beginning to throb.

No, you agreed. With yourself.

Off limits. It’s off limits.

What are you? The Base Commander?

I should never talk to Bangley this way. I know it as I say it. I just get sick of the attitude sick to death of it. He’s working his jaw back and forth.

I put the funnel, just an old oil bottle cut off halfway, back down on top of the other quarts. I face him.

Look Bangley relax. Want a Coke?

Once every two months I land on a cleared boulevard in Commerce City and restock ten cases of the oil. On the way over one day I found the Coke truck. I always bring back four cases, two for him two for me. A case of Sprite for the families which I don’t tell him about. Most of the cans have frozen too many times and burst but the plastic bottles survive. Bangley always goes through his Coke a lot faster.