Peter Heller - The Dog Stars

I smiled at him, maybe the first time.

That’s why we need fourteen gallons, I said. One of the reasons.

He looked puzzled, winced, pushed his tongue up under his lip where I knew he kept his chew.

We need fourteen because we’ve gotta land and take off again. We’ll pick you up out on the highway. Won’t be a problem. There’s a decent straight stretch right at the bridge turnoff. All the runway we want. It’ll be no sweat.

He didn’t let his face soften, nothing like that. Just that in his stare, in the winter of it, I thought I saw a slight thaw, a reassessing.

You can walk out a day early and we’ll pick you up at daybreak.

Okay, he said again and that was it.

There was no hurry really. Plenty of water in the big rivers if we got stranded in Junction. We’d wait a couple of weeks, fatten up, let the season round out into full summer, ride it while we could. Let the creek drop. I decided to enjoy it. I treated it like a vacation, first one I’d had since.

Since I’d made the unexpected contingency plan, things around the homestead had lightened up a little. Surprised me, frankly, that it had surprised him, the notion of picking him up later. He was so sharp, such a tactician. Like Bangley that way, always thinking three moves ahead in a crisis, and cool.

Then it struck me that the option must have occurred to him immediately. And then I respected him even more. He knew.

It was obvious to him that we could take off without him and pick him up later, but he would keep his mouth shut. Two reasons I figured. One, he was the kind of dude who subscribed to Never take what isn’t offered freely . And Two, he was conflicted about leaving. Part of him, maybe the bigger part, wanted to stay, to watch the creek dwindle, to help the livestock into the next world, to die with his ranch and molder there into the flinty ground.

For a man his age with his values that option was in many ways preferable to the other. The journey to a strange land—because it was a Strange Land now in every sense. Also, it was the plains, not the mountains—the making of a new life, the having to adapt to new threats, new rules not his own. It was a sucky prospect. And if he had told her that this was his preference he would have hurt her badly, she would never have let him, she would go hysterical to the extent that a woman who had been through what she had been through could go hysterical. She would not forgive him.

So the fragile little Pilot Operating Handbook with the table of takeoff distances, the curve incontrovertible beyond which there was no new life anywhere, only a faltering aircraft struggling to rise over the small trees and snagging its landing gear, then wings, the big cartwheel … it was his ticket out. Out of the plan. Maybe why he didn’t look more shocked. Why he had worked the weight and balance in front of her.

Thinking about it like that I almost felt sorry I had broached the option. If he wanted to die in place he was a big boy. But.

I swung in the hammock. I recited every poem I had ever half remembered. I went fishing upstream and down. I ate. Took the spade up top and filled in the ruts in our airstrip, knocked down the brush. Helped Cima harvest the garden, the early greens.

It was a good garden. The dirt was rich, a lot richer than ours back at the airport. It was full of worms and black from year after year of spreading manure. The families gave me chicken manure, but it wasn’t enough, it wasn’t like this. In the early morning, in the shadow of the bigger trees, the dirt was cold and wet, the new plants covered in dew. That smell. The shadow edged back and I liked to strip to my boxers so that my knees were in the damp dirt and the full sun was hot on my back. The dirt encrusted basket beside us, between rows.

Why’d you go back east? I said.

I got a scholarship to Dartmouth.

My uncle went there. Were you an only child?

She shook her head.

Twin brother. He died when we were fifteen. Motorcycle.

Man.

I had good grades. Good test scores. I was going to be a vet, go to Colorado State, come back home and set up a large animal practice. All my life that was what I was going to do. We had a college counselor, Mr. Sykes. He had a very good placement record, but he controlled who went where so tightly all the kids called him Sucks. One day in English class my junior year there was a tap on the glass of the door and he came in and handed me a folded note. It said My office 12:45. During the lunch hour. I remember we were talking about The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock . Do you know it?

I loved that poem until they taught it to me in high school. Did you know there is a Hidden Meaning?

Really?

Yup. Sex, art and scholarship are all class weapons.

Hunh. Funny thing to teach aspiring scholars.

We weren’t aspiring scholars. We were supposed to go to work for StorageTek or UPS. Or Coors.

The note. Sykes, I said.

Oh. My heart galloped. Every year Dartmouth gave one scholarship to a kid from Delta High. It was endowed by the man who built the fiberboard plant, an alum. I guess he felt bad for all the formaldehyde smoke which reeked in the winter when there was an inversion. Every fall one kid got a note from Sykes to see him at lunch hour. He controlled it, chose the kid. I don’t think that was even legal but that’s the way it was. His little fiefdom. Kept all the families, the whole town, kissing his ass all year. For the rest of the class nobody could concentrate, they were all watching me. And my head was rushing with the possibilities, images of a future I had no pictures for. They tumbled together: ivy covered bricks, handsome upperclassmen in argyle sweaters, taking them off to row crew. You know I didn’t have a clue. My days consisted of throwing hay before daylight and running cross country after school, and then back home for more chores, mostly giving oats and medicine to horses, and mucking stalls, and homework.

I was beet red, I could tell. The more I tried to concentrate on the poem the more I felt the eyes on me and when I glanced up and snuck a look, they were. I could already feel the envy. Like a wind. By the end of the day I wasn’t sure if any of this was a curse or a blessing. Anyway, I went to see Sykes. I couldn’t eat anything in the cafeteria so I just went to the Girls’ Room and sat on the toilet and tried to breathe. He said, Cima I think you have a good chance for the Ritter Scholarship. He was completely bald. I thought his head was the shape of an egg. I remember seeing tiny beads of sweat on the mottled pink dome of it as if it were he on the hot seat. He was from Illinois, outside of Chicago, I remember. He said, You will write the personal essay in your application about ranch life and losing Bo.

I was shocked. Almost as if I had hallucinated that last request. Well, it wasn’t a request. Come again, I said. His hands were resting on the desk and he actually made a careful triangle out of his thumbs and forefingers and pursed his lips and looked into it as if it were some Masonic window into my destiny. He said, You will write about being a ranch girl and losing your brother who was your soulmate.

I stared at him. I had heard that he controlled the whole application process. But nobody had ever said anything like that to me before. I mean put their big fat foot, clomp clomp, into my most interior landscape. Bo to me was like a secret garden. A place only I could go. A source of both grief and great strength. He was smiling at me. He had the smallest mouth and only one side came up. I remember. The turmoil. Life had just opened up really wide and bright then suddenly the horror: that to go there I would be asked to forfeit my soul. Something like that. Terrifying. I know I was flushing to the roots and I couldn’t seem to articulate anything. He kept smiling at me. He said, You don’t have to thank anyone now, it’s certainly momentous. Deus ex machina . That’s what he said! As if he were God! My word. He thought I was overcome with gratitude and I was actually so furious. I felt violated. I was so mad I could’ve taken his egg head and crushed it. I just mumbled and ducked out.