Peter Heller - The Dog Stars

Did you write about Bo?

Yes. I wrote about how my college counselor had demanded that I write about my dead twin. I wrote a long essay, twice as long as asked for, about a certain kind of tact that was part of ranch culture and why I thought it had developed and why it was important and how the fact that a ranch girl writing about her missing twin might appeal to the admissions people at the highest caliber Eastern college was another example of the disconnect between us. Eastern establishment and Western land based people. We didn’t want anybody’s sympathy. I was so angry. Never been so mad I don’t think. I sent the application off without letting Sykes review it, which was strictly against protocol. Nobody had ever done it. He tried to scuttle the application, he was such a vengeful little fuck, but it was too late. I guess they were so impressed with my ranch girl grit or something. I got in, of course. Early decision, full ride. The college pressured the high school and forced Sykes to retire. You know the part that still troubles me about all that is that I knew I would. Get accepted. I mean I flipped the emotional payoff they were looking for, didn’t I? I mean I was truly furious, but I also knew somewhere inside that it would make my candidacy even stronger. I have prayed about it often. I mean apologizing to Bo for using him to get into college.

I shook the dirt off some Swiss chard and lay it in the basket.

You didn’t use Bo. You wrote exactly what you were feeling.

Yeah, but I’ve often thought that the move with the most integrity would’ve been to blow off Dartmouth for having that kind of expectation, those values, and go to Northern State. I mean it’s an ag school. Was.

You were what? Seventeen? You wanted to flex your muscles. You were an ass kicker like your dad. Nobody on earth is more righteous than a seventeen year old. And it wasn’t the college, it was Mr. Sucks.

You know what I mean. He was right, after all. About the subject that would snare them. I don’t know. I think of him sometimes, a middle aged, single man, humiliated out of the one job he was great at. What he did with the rest of his life, how it was for him when the flu hit. Lonely, alone, terrified. Funny the things that keep you up at night after all that has happened.

Amen, I said.

Silence. I pulled out some new meadow grass. Hands black with crumbled dirt like bear paws. She was way too tactful to ask me. Still the ranch girl.

You want to know what keeps me up at night?

She sat back on her haunches in the sun, straightened, blew the hair out of her face. She had a strong straight nose, wideset eyes. A long slender neck, now bruised.

I couldn’t say: I put a pillow over my wife’s face at the end. That I felt her struggle in the last seconds trying to push away the death she’d asked for. A reflex right? That I held tight and leaned in and kept the promise I’d just made. That was the right decision. Wasn’t it?

Could I say that we murdered a young boy in the middle of the night? That we didn’t make him into dog food. That we murdered a young girl in broad daylight who was running after me with a kitchen knife probably wanting my help. Or that the memories of fishing alone for trout in a mountain creek with Jasper lying on the bank were maybe my sweetest memories. That so much of that is a dream or might as well be. That I don’t know the difference anymore between dream and memory. I wake from dream into dream and am not sure why I keep going. That I suspect only curiosity keeps me alive. That I’m not sure any longer if that is enough.

I smothered my wife with a pillow. At the end when she asked. Like putting down a dog. Other things. Worse.

Her hand was still holding a clump of loose chard. It tightened on the leaves. She nodded. Her eyes were warm and steady.

And I wish I could have been there to do that for Tomas. I wish I could have done it. Why didn’t I stay to be with my husband? My mother had hers, she didn’t need me as much he did. Well, he hadn’t contracted it yet. He was coughing a bit but we weren’t sure. No fever. A lot of people were coughing, only a few were confirmed. But I should have known. In my position with the first reports coming in I should have known.

She sat up straight on her haunches and she cried silently. I put my chard in the basket and went to weeding. I shook the dirt from the roots and put the worms back in the ground.

The deepest spot was just beneath the falls. Even at low water it was four or five feet deep and cold. Hard to imagine it drying up, but it would without enough snowpack, enough summer rain. Once the days turned really hot I bathed there every day. I went late in the afternoon when the sunlight still reached the bottom of the canyon. I liked the contrast, hot and cold. It was shielded by willows. I hung my shirt up on one of the branches like a ragged flag so they would know I was there and pushed into the little pool on a beaten path. The spray from the cascade reached the smooth stones on the bank, must’ve been ten degrees cooler in there. Grateful, as grateful as I was all day, I unbuttoned my pants and untied my boots, stripped. Sometimes just sat in the mist, the outer stones the warmest, and dangled my feet and calves in the water: cool billow on my chest, sun on my back, the contrasts. And watched the patch of rainbow shift around in the spray.

I wanted to ask her: What did you all know about the flu, about the coming pandemic. Did you? Did it really take everyone so by surprise? Why was it so fast? What was the blood disease that came right after and why did so many who survived contract it? Wanted to ask her all that since she first told me she was a doctor, that kind of doctor. But then she preempted with the story of her husband dying without her in the ward and I didn’t want to reopen old wounds etc but now I was resolved. She had brought it up. But then she was crying. I would’ve cried too probably but to tell the truth I was cried out. Wrung out like a human rag.

Sitting bare assed on the stones dangling my feet in the water, feeling the push of moist air off the falls, hearing nothing but the roar of plunging water, hot sun burning the backs of my ears. Thinking of nothing. Grateful for that. My favorite time of day. I could say now: I am at peace. Here on the bank of the dying creek.

The afternoon of the morning we had picked chard, I walked up to the falls and pulled my sweaty dirt smeared shirt over my head and thought I’d better wash it. Which was just rinsing it and slapping it on the rocks and wringing it out. I thought, Another thing to be grateful for, Hig: no pile of work clothes to wash and hang on the line and fold and stuff into the cubbies in the closet which were too small. Melissa and I never had enough room for our stuff. You’d think a carpenter would take care of his own little remodels, but no. Just your shirt, your pants, your socks. One fleece undershirt. A favorite wool sweater darned and darned again. You thought you were leaving Erie for a few days.

So I took the shirt with me and pushed through the willows and she was standing naked in the fogged water, facing me, watching something up high on the wall. She was willowy thin. I could just see her ribs. Long legged, the curve of her hips sweet, her mound prominent, the touch of dark hair not fully hiding her. Her breasts smallish, but not small. Tight as apples. What do I mean? Firm, full. Collarbones, nice shoulders. Strong arms, slender but strong. A bruise on her upper right thigh. I must have stopped breathing. She was, I don’t know. Perfect. My one dumb thought was: How on earth did you frigging hide all that? In a man’s too large shirt? My eye must be out of practice! That’s what I thought. All in a split second. Because reflexively I turned to look up at the wall and saw the peregrine land in the nest carrying a bird, a pretty damned big bird.