Peter Heller - The Dog Stars

I was wide awake now. She inhaled deeply and I could see—Hig! Her nipples against the thin fabric of her shirt. My god. Hig. You haven’t heard any news, real news in almost a decade. It’s making you horny!

Genetically modifying flu is an old business.

Right, I said.

Look me in the eyes when you say hello to me.

I shook myself. She was grinning at me through smoke.

Calmate , soldier, she said.

Never learned Spanish, I murmured.

We ate dinner I don’t know what time, but sometime in the late evening when the sky was that luminescent blue that might hold a single star and the nighthawks flitted in the meadow and over the creek feasting on the latest hatch. They wintered in Mexico or somewhere and seemed to be doing alright. Shear winged and acrobatic as swallows. White wingbars blinking on a sudden shift in direction. Small peeps. A joy in watching the birds in their single hour of feeding.

I guess they ate then because the bugs were out. It was not cold as it would be later when truly dark and the ropy stars skeined together and you could feel the heat of the day radiating off the rock wall.

I took the few dishes to the creek and washed them with sand. They cooked outside most of the time in a firepit lined with river stones. On those nights father and daughter sat on two stumps and watched the wind rashed embers like TV. I set the wet dishes on the table and lay in the hammock and tried to see how long I could go without thinking about anything. I think my record was six Mississippi.

One night I fell asleep naked before I could crawl into my bag and I woke in the dark with the weight of the cover settling over me.

Not alarmed, it seemed right. I made to sit up and a hand pushed me back. Shhh, she said. I came out to pee and thought you’d get cold that way.

I lay back.

Thanks.

She leaned over me I felt her hair brush my face, a touch of her breath, then she was lifting the quilt, stretching her length alongside, and she wriggled in her hips, her ribs in the margin of hammock tight against me and she said into my neck

There.

That’s all. Then she fell asleep.

She was wearing the man’s shirt. Nothing else. I could feel her mound against my leg. Mons pubis, right? The cradle of her pelvic bones. I lay there, heart hammering. I traced her body in my mind from her toes where they touched mine, kind of bony and cold, up her calves, thighs, to the inside of her knees, the kneecap where it burrowed into the crook of my own leg—you get the idea. My brain all on its own took the trip, followed the map, lingered at every place of interest, every scenic view. It was the novelty. My heart pounded and my dick uncurled and straightened and lengthened, and then it was almost pain. It throbbed, and my mind continued to travel. Up and down her length, every point of contact. At some point I must have exhausted myself, run out of gas, I slept.

The next morning I realized that it was the weight of another cramping your space in sleep, that it was hearing another’s breathing. That simple. Jasper did that. Past that don’t even go there. That was all she wanted or she would’ve asked.

The next day at breakfast which is cold meat and potatoes, in the garden, at the supper table, tending the fire, she is the same. The same calm eyes absorbing everything, the way a dark pond absorbs sunlight. The marvel of it. Women are like that. Pops is not, I’m not. He’s no fool, probably expecting some similar development since Day One. Whatever development it is, maybe nothing. After all we are some of the few people left on earth just about. It’s like one of those desert island jokes. The one about the hat. Be weirder if it didn’t happen, right, Hig?

Not really. Doesn’t feel like that. Feels frigging weird. Not weird, tumultuous. Momentous. Well, it’s probably nothing. Probably doesn’t mean a thing, I mean just an experiment to see how it felt after all those years. A sleep experiment.

His eyes rest on me a fraction of a second longer. That’s all. Subtle but loud. I can’t meet them. I look away. I get that Pops is a hard man where he needs to be hard, but beyond that he pretty much minds his own business and expects the same.

Does she want to be my girlfriend? What a stupid idiotic thought. Are you in goddamn high school? You are on the Beach man. Last man and woman left in what? Three counties probably. It’s your patriotic duty to follow that through.

It is?

No.

What then?

Shrug.

Do what you want.

What do I want?

I want to be two people at once. One runs away.

The next night she came very late. I realized I’d been waiting most of the night without sleeping. Just waiting. Wondering what I would do, what she would. She lifted the quilt which I’d left unzipped and squeezed in and snuggled her mouth into my ear and murmured, Miss me. And fell asleep. It was an order and a question.

Pretty cramped. She lay in the crook of my arm which fell asleep, went numb. I felt her length, her thigh over mine, her breast against my side, the expansion of her breath. She smelled like smoke and something sweet, tangy the way sage is tangy. I got another bursting hard on. I lay there. You again? Becoming a regular are you? You are welcome, probably, pending good behavior. I lay there trying to make out constellations through the leaves, smelling her hair, listening to the relaxed concourse of her breath. In the middle of the night she found me, it. Slipped her hand down my belly and stroked. Lightly. Not a murmur, not a kiss, as if we were both asleep. We weren’t. My body felt like an air base in one of those movies when the incoming siren goes off. Everybody scrambling toward the fighters from everywhere. Every cell awake pouring its attention toward my surprised dick. Felt really really good. Wonderful. Her hand slowed, paused, twitched twice, she was asleep. I was still hanging on a terrible edge. I lay there in a kind of suspended, excruciating wonder.

Pops and I took the spade, the machete up to the meadow, worked on the runway. Worked in silence, moving stones, leveling, tamping dirt, cutting brush. If there was any awkwardness it was mine. We were rooting out a mesquite bush in the middle of the track. He was prying with the spade, I was pulling on a rope we’d tied to the slender stump. I swung around the arc like on a tether to yank from a better direction, and pulled, and a stout root freed itself and kicked dirt into his face. He stopped, stood straight, blinded. Slowly cleared the dirt, spat. He held the shovel with both hands like a pike.

Hig, you’re acting squirrely. More squirrely than usual.

He didn’t say Higs. He blinked out more dirt, wiped his eyes with a knuckle.

Do you need my blessing or something? Like a corny movie?

Shocked me worse than if he’d slugged me. I held the end of the rope as if I weren’t sure why, as if it were the tail of some beast I wasn’t sure I wanted to be so intimate with.

At this stage in the game I got bigger fish to fry. I was never that kind of dad anyway. I never once said, Have her home by ten.

I looked down at my hand holding the rope, at the dirt all over his face and started to laugh. Christ. I laughed. The more I laughed the more funny it was. Shit, I don’t know, maybe it was the pent up tension from the night before. Deadly sperm backup we used to call it. Maybe it was just the desert island cartoon thing, the protective father thing, the way that no one was acting like they were supposed to act. Was that it? Probably not. Probably simple relief that Pops hadn’t killed me yet. Or that he was standing there with dirt all over his face and not mad. Or just that I hadn’t laughed, really laughed, in way too long.