Peter Heller - The Dog Stars

Must have been after mid-June. I lost count of the days. Probably not a good thing to do. I mean with no newspaper, no apparatus to tell you the date. Once you lose count, well it’s gone forever.

We finished the venison, all but the jerky which we were saving for the trip, and we slaughtered a sheep and had been eating mutton for two days. Mutton and last summer’s potatoes and new greens, lettuce, chard, peas. The days were hot and the creek a slow runnel and the nights warm. She came just a little while after dark, after I’d settled in with the flannel bag beneath me on the hammock sleeping only in my shirt. She was wearing a long man’s shirt and her hand came to my face and passed over my cheek and she grabbed a tuft of my beard and pulled which made me laugh. There was a quarter moon like a ruddy lightship floating over the canyon and I could see her clearly. She was holding a blanket. She spread it on the dirt beside the hammock and lay down on her back, one arm propped under her head. She watched the moon, I watched her. I stuck my bare foot over the edge of the hammock and touched it to the wool of the blanket and pushed off and swung myself.

Playing hard to get? she murmured.

No.

I rocked. She unbuttoned the shirt. It parted. She pushed the far side of it off her breast with her free hand and still gazing at the sky she tucked her fingers under a button and pulled the rest of it to the side. It fell open. The rise and fall of her breath. The length of her. In the dark she radiated a soft light of her own like waves breaking at night. The smooth pale plain of her stomach. The—all of her.

Jesus Christ, Hig, don’t turn away, don’t close your eyes. Breathe, man! You are supposed to look, dumbass! It’s not impolite. If you don’t look you will insult her. Who the fuck do you think this is for, this is for you! She wasn’t, like, just in the neighborhood.

All of that in my clamorous head. Telling myself to be respectful, act like a grownup. Soak up every detail. She has vouchsafed you some portion of pure luck. Be grateful.

The rusty moon painted her without shadow. My toes dug into the wool and I stopped swinging. I held still and watched her. A kind of suspended awe. The way I had watched a royal elk step out of aspen: what you are seeing, Hig, cannot be real, it is just too magnificent. Don’t twitch a muscle or it will vanish.

She didn’t vanish. She turned her head to me. I cleared my throat.

You were in the neighborhood, I said lamely. My voice came out kind of high like an adolescent who can’t control the timbre.

She raised one eyebrow: maybe. She raised up on her elbows and shrugged the shirt down her arms. Then she rolled over and lay on her stomach, her head on her crossed hands. Offering another vista. The world can end but you are not immune oh no.

If you want, you can just look at me, she said. It’s probably been a long time. I’m in no hurry.

She raised her sweet butt into the air.

Um, is it okay if we rush through that part.

Unh huh.

I got my ass out of the hammock, shucked my shirt and lay down beside her. I don’t know why, but I thought of flying. How there is a checklist you tick down before starting the engine, before taxiing, before takeoff. How if you are flying every day all the motions are smooth, sequential, you barely look at the list, but if it’s been a while you are halting, thinking through everything, taking each item one at a time, making sure. So you don’t have a wreck.

I forget where to start, I said. I feel like a—

A fifteen year old wouldn’t say that.

Yeah. I was thinking more like a pilot. A rusty pilot with a bunch of checklists. So we won’t crash.

Touch my back, she said.

I did. I ran my fingers over her lightly. Her skin tightened and smoothed out under them. I thought of wind moving over a field of wheat. She whimpered.

Does it hurt?

No. God, no. She said it into her folded arms. It has to be light but it feels great.

My hand swept over the rise of her ass moved over her thighs the backs the insides.

Mmmm, she murmured. Maybe it’s better when you forget.

She rocked up onto her side and her fingers found my hair, my beard, tangled into them, pulled my face into her. When her mouth found mine I disassembled. Not exploded like a bomb or anything, but came apart. A few pieces at a time. They floated away, went into a kind of orbit. A splintering galaxy. An extravagant slow motion annihilation. The only center was her mouth, her hair. It was her. A reconstitution around the core of her. Without thought. I rolled on top of her and she gasped in pain.

Wait—

Oh. Shit. Scrambling off.

It’s okay, okay. Here. I’m not so fragile. She pushed me onto my back. She kissed me. Kissed and kissed her hair covering me. She kissed my eyes nose lips. With her mouth, then she lowered her breasts onto my face and kissed me, brushed with her nipples, eyes, nose, tongue. And then. Surprise. The shock of it. She lowered herself onto me. The first touch. Wet. Like her mouth. Resistance. That heat. Ever so slowly, and slip, surrender.

Oh god, don’t move. All those pieces. She moved. Her moving over me called them called them. The way a thousand fish rock together with the swell. Back and forth. The way the stars in the leaves. I reached. In her, in the very center, somewhere the single only stillness where everything cohered. Nothing but reach.

And then I let go. From reaching the strain to what? Nothing. Relinquish. Fall. If I cried and I’m not saying I did. The bliss, the sheer loss of falling.

She keened and I exploded. Whatever constellation, whatever was achieved was riven by light and scattered to the dark and fuck, that’s where it should have been all along. She lay on me shuddering her weight and all those bits of us rained down as soft and unapologetic as ash.

Whew, she whispered, her lips moving in my ear.

Yeah, whew.

We crashed, huh?

Yup. In a good way.

How you refill. Lying there. Something like happiness, just like water, pure and clear pouring in. So good you don’t even welcome it, it runs through you in a bright stream, as if it has been there all along.

We lay as still as we could, heart pounding against heart, a sympathetic rhythm that ricocheted and bounced and went counter and synced again, both of us I think fascinated by the music of it and the sensation. After a while she rose up and pulled the flannel quilt over us and snuggled down beside me and we slept. Not like the other nights of confusion. A deep and relieved slumber. Real comfort, simple exhaustion.

Before dawn, to spare him embarrassment, I guess, she rose, buttoned her shirt and went back into the meadow to sleep in the blankets on the thick bed of ponderosa needles she used on warm nights. Out under the stars, she said, where she could see everything. But I think it was the comfort of the cattle breathing, the rhythmic tearing of grass, always two or three who grazed at night beside, around her. And he snored, she said. He came to the creek at first light as he always did, over the burble I could hear the splashing, the brushing teeth with the defunct flattened bristles, a few hawks and spits, a cough.

And she—I could hear her wishing him good morning, opened my eyes, saw her in the shirt but with pants now she must keep by her bed. The wonderful satisfaction of seeing her like that now, out in the world, as conscribed as it is. In knowing her now as I did. Closed my eyes to doze again. She always refused to let me start the morning fire. It’s mine, she insisted. My ritual. Don’t mess with my habits. They are how we get along around here. Relax. Sleep in. I did. When I got up she always had the mug of bitter tea ready. Welcome as much for the ritual of it I guess as for the puckering taste.