Peter Heller: The Dog Stars

You’ll kill us both. We agreed.

I get him a Coke. Here relax. It’s not good for your heart.

He had arteriosclerosis. Has. Once he said: I’m a time bomb. Which he didn’t have to tell me.

I open it so he has no choice. At the crack of the top and the sound of the fizz he winces like one more Coke down, one less in the world.

Here.

Hig you will kill us. He drinks, he can’t help himself. I can see it work in his throat and down into his barrel chest.

He makes himself stop before he drains the whole bottle. You know just one cough, he says. That’s what they said at the end. Not just through blood.

Sharing bodily fluids. I’m not fucking a Mennonite.

A cough is a bodily fluid. Land in your eye. Open your mouth to speak.

I don’t think that was ever proven.

What the fuck does it matter if it’s proven. You want to get this far and die of the blood?

This far. I’m thinking not saying it. This far. Bangley and Jasper and a low fat diet. Well.

You can’t choose for me Hig.

I breathe.

Everything we do is risky. Once in a while they need my help.

For what? For fucking what? They have what? Two, three, five years tops? The luckiest? Every few months one dies. I can tell by how you mope around. For what? Boils and rash and bloody coughs and burning?

They are people. They are trying to stay alive day by day. Maybe some can survive it. There were rumors of survivors.

He is still inclined forward, still throbbing the vein with a dribble of fresh Coke on the stubble of his chin.

They are no threat to us Bruce.

The sound of his given name widens his eyes. He never told it to me, it was always just I’m Bangley, which like I said I rarely use.

The families know to stay fifteen feet back. I’ve trained them. Not once not ever have they showed any aggression, nothing but gratitude, kind of embarrassing gratitude when I fix a pump or show them how to make a fish trap for the creek. Truth is I do it as much for me as them: it kinda loosens something inside me. That nearly froze up.

Bangley works the jaw stares at me. That last thing—it’s like I just spoke perfect Japanese, a whole paragraph ending with a slight bow. Like A, he can’t believe I fucking said it, and B, he doesn’t understand a single syllable. Psycho spiritual language it leaves him, well, less than cold.

Once I asked him if he thought there was something more. We were sharing two rare Cokes on the front porch of my house I never go in, under the bulb I leave on at night that used to work like a bug zapper for attackers. It was evening and the October sun was making for the mountains. Like some old couple taking their ease. Two wicker chairs losing their paint and cricking when we shifted our weight. His chair had a rhythm like he remembered what it was to sit in a rocker. Only time I can think of he told me anything about his life before. He grew up in Oklahoma. That’s what he told me.

It’s not like you think, he added. Long story.

That was it. A little cryptic. I hadn’t really thought anything. He never elaborated. Still, seemed like we were making leaps and bounds intimacy-wise.

I told him I used to build houses.

What kind of houses?

Timber frame. Adobe. Odd custom stuff. Wrote a book too.

A book on building houses.

No. A little book. Poetry. Nobody read it.

Shit? He took a measured sip of Coke watching me as he tipped back the bottle, watching me as he set it back down on his thigh, kind of appraising me with a new appreciation, not readable good or bad. Adjusting the context.

Wrote for magazines now and then. Mostly about fishing, outdoor stuff.

The relief it swept his face like pushing off a cloud shadow. I almost laughed. You could see the gears: Phew, outdoor stuff, Hig is not a homo.

Growing up I wanted to be a writer. A great writer. Summers I worked construction, framing. Like that. Tough to make a living as a writer. Anyway I probably wasn’t so good. Got married bought a house. Led to another thing then the other thing.

Long story, I said.

Bangley held his Coke in both hands in his lap. He kind of hunched over himself maybe remembering. Suddenly remote like his spirit retreated to a safer distance. To watch. From a distance. Still rocking the chair that didn’t rock.

We didn’t speak for a long time. The sun touched one of the higher peaks, broke slowly like a bloody yolk. Wind stirred, rattled the dried rabbit brush at the exact moment. Cold.

I asked him if he ever thought there was anything more than this, than just surviving day to day. Recon, fixing the plane, growing the five vegetables, trapping a rabbit. Like what are we waiting for?

His chair, crick crick , stopped. He got very still like a hunter that smelled an animal on the wind. Close. Like he woke up.

Say again.

More than this. Day to day.

He worked his jaw, his mineral eyes graying in the fading light. Like maybe I’d tipped over the edge.

Gotta go he said. Stood up. Hooked a finger in the breast pocket of his flannel shirt, fished out the bottle cap, screwed it on. Carried his Coke off the porch, boot cracking the broken step.

That was maybe the second year. So now in the hangar I know the stuff about thawing out inside will not exactly exact sympathy. Half the time with Bangley I’m thinking about all the stuff I should never say.

I crack a quart of oil and tip it into the funnel made from a cut off bottle and snug it down into its twin. Leave it to drain. Face him.

Who knows maybe one day we will need them . We can’t know.

Ha. A cough of contempt dismissive. Never happen Hig. For funeral detail maybe.

He had consigned them, wished it. All of them dead.

You want to be the only one left? You’d be just as happy. The only goddamn human being left on earth.

If it shakes out like that. Better than the alternative. Anyway I got you. He tipped back the Coke watched me past the bottle.

He meant the alternative if everyone’s going to die. I think. I didn’t say it: One day I’m gonna climb in the Beast and fly west and keep going.

No you won’t he said.

What?

What you were thinking. There is no other safe place. Maybe on the planet. We got the perimeter, water, power, food, firepower. We got mountains close enough if the game gets scarce. We got no internal strife no politics cause it’s just you and me. We got no internal to tear apart. Like the Mormons like everybody else out there who ain’t alive anymore. We keep it simple we survive.

He grins.

Country boys will survive.

His favorite phrase.

I stare at my only friend on earth. I guess he’s my friend.

Don’t go killing us, he says and leaves.

Still I go when they ask. The patrol goes west to the mountain front then south. I follow the line of trees that mark the river. At the stacks of the power plant and the reservoir I swing back northwest. The Mennonites are on the creek. In an old turkey farm. Eight metal sheds in two rows of four set at angles like diagonally parked cars. Tall century old trees strung along a windbreak and clustered into a grove in the middle of which cants the asphalt roof of a big brick farmhouse. Two ponds fed by the creek. In one I can see floats, an empty canoe. An array of solar panels to the south of the sheds and two windmills, one mechanical for drawing water. Why they came here in the first place.

In the yard, in the clearing, a thirty foot flagpole, flag long since gone, maybe stripped for a baby blanket. When they need help they hoist a ripped red union suit. Signal and wind sock. In a strong wind it splays legs and arms out stiff like a headless man.