Peter Heller - The Dog Stars

How do you think she’ll divide it up? she said over the water.

What? None of this seemed real. I looked back at her and she was half turned away, the small of her back where it dimpled, her sweet butt making another perfect curve. I. The curve that kills me. Dead Man’s Curve. I blinked. I thought, She is nothing, not a frigging thing like one of Bangley’s posters. She is like a million times more lovely. I didn’t say, Sorry to surprise you, or anything. I said, She’ll tear it to pieces. I mean I yelled it over the falls and then I turned around and fled.

Big Hig. Pretty cool in a plane, pretty cool with visitors, reduced to babble.

A while later she found me in the shade. Your turn, she said smiling.

She was passing the hammock, leaning her head, wringing out her hair. Where I was lying in a kind of endocrine shock—trying at once to recall and push away every detail I had just seen. Startled again by the sight of her and sure she could read my mind. I grinned back, sheepish as a sixteen year old.

When are you gonna show me yours? she said.

I must’ve started, flushed. Her smile was broad now and guileless and I saw for an instant the high school runner, the ranch girl who liked to win a barrel race.

Checked on the Beast, topped off the oil, pumped up the tires with a bicycle pump I kept in back. Took naps. The dreams of the old house stopped. Now I dreamt of big cats, tigers and mountain lions flowing down through the rocks to the river at twilight, the unblinking eyes seeing everything. In the dream there was a sense of supreme grace and power and also intelligence. In these dreams I came face to face with the beasts very close and looked into their eyes and something was transmitted but nothing I could ever name. When I woke, though, I felt infused with something strong and frightening and maybe beautiful. I felt lucky.

I had one dream, lying out in the hammock on an almost windless afternoon, that Melissa and I were bow hunting. She never did that, but I did. If I had the time between jobs to go out earlier and take a longer season, I’d buy a bow tag. In the dream we weren’t hunting the cats we were hunting one of those rare ibex deals that went dark way before before, somewhere up in the foothills of the Himalayas, and when she had her bow drawn on a big buck, very close, I cried NO! and the animal leapt and ran and she turned to me and her face was bright with fury and betrayal. When I woke up I was gripping the rope side of the hammock and it took me a minute to realize where I was, that it was a dream, and then the near vertigo, thinking, This is a dream, and a little relieved I was in this one and not that one.

Cima’s bruises lightened and vanished and new ones appeared. We seemed to talk nonstop. But I felt very comfortable in the silences that were never silent but filled with birds, wren and lark. With the flashing wingbars of nighthawks at dusk. Later there were bat squeaks, the bustle of leaves, the sough of the lowering stream. All kind of pastoral, a little strange given everything. I felt comfortable working beside her in the garden, cleaning vegetables in the shade of the board table. I’ll tell you this: Once everything ends you are no more free. The more lovely this respite, the more some cagey animal inside of me refused to surrender. The more I dreamt of Jasper, of Melissa. The sadder I got. Weird, huh? Once shelling peas our hands touched over the pot and she let her fingers stay over mine. Just a second. I looked up and her eyes were steady, frank, more like the way a glass pond is tannin black, windless, serene, contained, waiting. Lovely. Waiting to reflect a cloud, to be swept by rain. I couldn’t breathe.

The openness, the simple being-ness of those eyes struck me as brave and terrifying. I must have recoiled. She smiled inward and went back to shucking peas. I suppose as an internist you see all kinds of raw symptoms, nothing much surprises you.

We had enough venison, no reason to eat mutton or beef so we didn’t. Pops thought some of the animals might survive here on their own if it rained later on, if the winter was as mild as last. When things get better we can come back, he said. Nobody else said a word. Pops was not in the habit of bullshitting himself but there it was, every man has his imaginary refuge.

Another week, two. Some inner wires began to loosen. Never know how tight we are until then. Pops was off cutting wood. I started a dinner fire for her in the outside pit and we sat on stumps and just watched it build. It swayed and whispered with the rhythm of the breeze. This time of day the wind came upstream as it did in all this country but something about the shape of the canyon made it eddy and blow around so there was never a safe spot by the fire away from smoke. We had already moved our seats twice. I was crying with smoke.

Smoke makes you cry and then you grieve, I said. Like cutting onions. Always made me sad.

She smiled.

I never been to New York. Did you like it?

I loved it. Just loved it. You know how some people say they wish they had two lives so they could be a cowboy in one and an actor in another? Or whatever? I wanted two lives so I could live in the Heights—Brooklyn Heights—in one and in the East Village say in another. I couldn’t get enough of it. I wanted to go to Yankees games—Yanks not Mets—and to Off Off Broadway and poetry slams and get lost at the Met. Again. I went to every artist’s retrospective there was. I could eat Sabrett’s until I was sick.

Sabrett’s?

Hot dogs. With kraut, grilled onions, mustard, no relish. Some evenings I walked Court Street down to Carroll Gardens and back. I got to know all the hawkers at all the folding tables selling scarves and children’s books and phony watches. I thought, When we have kids we’ll get their first books here. For two dollars! Probably stolen off trucks by the mob, huh?

Probably.

A world with a mob. That seemed quaint. The good old days. I said, What about the end? Did you see any of it?

She shook her head. She leaned down and pushed the butt of a stick into the fire and when she did her loose shirt swung away from her collarbones and I saw her breasts again fuller than they should have been, deep tanned and freckled on the top and milky below. I couldn’t get away from them today. I guess that part of me just woke up. Probably been there all the time, Hig, and you were in the Fog.

The Fog of Being, I said.

What?

Sorry. I talk to myself sometimes.

I noticed.

Really?

She nodded. Do I?

Not that I’ve heard.

Silence.

I didn’t see the collapse, the mass death. But I felt it coming. Like a pressure drop. The kind that is worse than bad weather. We had it a few times growing up at the ranch. A pressure shift you could feel in your pulse, your lungs. A darkening of the sky, a weird green tinged blackness. The cattle restless and upset beyond the usual omens of thunderstorm. That’s the way it felt. Why I think I should have known.

Should have. This to myself. So many of those. I could build houses out of them, burn them for fuel, fertilize the garden.

Do you know how it began? New Delhi?

She shook her head.

That’s what the press reported. Mutation of a superbug, one of the ones they’d been watching for two decades. In the water supply etc. Combined with a bird flu. We called it the Africanized bird flu, after the killer bees. First cases in London and blamed on New Delhi. But that’s probably not where it originated. We heard rumors that it originated at Livermore.

The national weapons lab?

She nodded. The rumor was that it was a simple trans-shipment. A courier on a military flight with a sample taking it to our friends in England. Supposedly the plane crashed in Brampton. Nobody will ever know—she looked around the box canyon and let the absurdity of those words trail off in the wind with the smoke.