Peter Heller - The Dog Stars

I land on the straight dirt drive that Ts from the old county road to the west. I can see the sign swiveling in the wind. At the head of the drive they wired a metal sign to two posts it has a red skull and crossbones says DANGER WE HAVE THE BLOOD. The drive floods, gets sliced with ruts. They come out with shovels and fill the holes. They aren’t good at maintenance, they’re most of the time too weak, but the landing strip is one thing they keep clean. Almost always a strong crosswind from say 330. I slip the Beast so she comes down cocked, almost sideways to the drive, left wing low, nose ruddered over hard to the south, then kick her straight at the last second, the kids in the yard jump up and down, I can see they are laughing from two hundred feet, it’s the only time I ever see them laugh.

Jasper used to be able to jump up into the cockpit now he can’t. In the fourth year we had an argument. I took out the front passenger seat for weight and cargo and put down a flannel sleeping bag with a pattern of a man shooting a pheasant over and over, his dog on three legs, pointing, out in front. Not sure why I didn’t do that before. The dog doesn’t look like Jasper, still. I carried him. Lay him on the pattern of the man and the dog.

You and me in another life I tell him.

He likes to fly. Anyway I wouldn’t leave him alone with Bangley.

When I took out the seat he got depressed. He couldn’t sit up and look out. He knows to stay back of the rudder pedals. Once in a shear he skidded into them and nearly killed us. After that I fashioned like a four inch wood fence but scrapped it after he inspected it and jumped out of the plane and like refused to fly, no shit. It insulted him. The whole thing. I used to worry about the engine roar and prop blast, I wear the headset even though there is no one to talk to on the radio because it dampens the noise, but I worried about Jasper, even tried to make him his own hearing protector, this helmet kind of thing, it wouldn’t stay on. Probably why he’s mostly deaf now.

When I picked up oil etc I moved the quilt to the top of the stack so he could look out.

See? I said. At least it’s good half the time. Better than most of us can expect.

He still thought it was lame I could tell. Not half as excited. So now when I’m not picking up, just flying, which is most of the time, I bolt the seat back in, it just takes a few minutes. Not like we don’t have time. First time he sat up straight again and glanced at me like What took you so long? then looked forward real serious, brow furrowed like a copilot. His mood it lifted palpable as weather.

He’s getting old. I don’t count the years. I don’t multiply by seven.

They bred dogs for everything else, even diving for fish, why didn’t they breed them to live longer, to live as long as a man?

One weird thing: the GPS still works. The satellites, the military or whoever put them up there to spin around us and tell us where we are, they still send their signals, triangulate my position, the little Garmin mounted on the yoke still flashes a terrain warning if it thinks I am getting too close to high ground.

I am always too close to high ground. That’s the other thing about the end of everything: I stopped worrying about my engine failing.

There’s a Nearest button on the Garmin. Somebody was thinking. It tells you fast which way is the nearest airport and how far. It pops up a list of the closest airports, their identifiers, distance, bearing, tower frequency. When I used to worry about stuff the Nearest button was my pilot’s best friend. Any kind of weather or trouble or just getting low on fuel and I tapped it and there was the list and if I scrolled down and highlighted I could just press Go To and pop it gave my vector. Steer the arrow back to the center of the arc. Slickest thing.

Still useful but after nine years so many of the runways are unusable or you have to know where the two foot pothole is exactly and rudder around it. Surprising how fast. How fast it turns back to grass and ground. Back before, there was a TV show: Life After People . I watched every one. I recorded it. I was gripped. By this idea: New York City in a thousand years would look like: an estuary. A marsh. A river. Woods. Hills. I liked it. I can’t say why. It thrilled me.

That fast. Because it is amazing how fast girder steel corrodes when exposed to water and air, how fast roots break shit apart. It all falls down. Oh, so the runways: nine years doesn’t sound like a long time but it is for the tarmac unmaintained and it is for a brain-cooked human trying to live it. I could make a list. Nine years is pretty fucking long:

To live with Bangley’s bullshit.

To remember the ad hoc flu ward and.

To miss my wife after.

To think about fishing and not go.

Other stuff.

But. I lost a cylinder one evening south of Bennet. I was flying the city which I do now and then not too low just to see and. Tap tap tap vibration like a mother. Best to get down and troubleshoot, might be just a fouled plug. I didn’t need the Garmin to tell me Buckley the air force base was just to the west maybe twelve miles. I banked around and came down with the gold sun straight in my eyes, banging louder, now kind of alarming like it would suck to throw a bearing and practically blind with the sun, using the left pavement edge as a guide, and a hundred feet after I touched down still tearing ass, maybe seventy indicated, WHOMP , and had it been the nose gear and not the left main the Beast, and me too, we would be toast. Jasper too. I walked back and checked. The hole was waist deep practically, neatly rectanguloid, it looked like it had been dug out by prairie dogs with little backhoes. Fuck. My back. The jolt. I sat down with my legs dangling in the hole, Jasper sat too and leaned against me like he does, and glanced up at me real quick and polite, and real concerned. Sitting that way reminded me of a Japanese restaurant Melissa took me to once that had instead of chairs, instead of mats and pillows, like a well for your feet, like cheat floor seating for stiff Westerners. The sun threw our shadows about half a mile long down the runway. As it was, the impact cracked the strut, which is when I learned to weld and also it’s possible to weld with solar power.

I sat with my feet in the hole and shook myself by the shoulders and said, What’s wrong with you? Is this a game to you?

That took a while to answer.

Do you want to live today?

Yes.

Do you grant that you may want to live tomorrow? And maybe the next day?

Yes.

Then get methodical. You got nothing but time.

So I made a survey. I took the chart we call a sectional and flew every airstrip within a hundred miles. I flew Centennial, I flew Colorado Springs, the Air Force Academy, I flew Kirby, formerly Nebraska, I flew Cheyenne. I flew them all at probably thirty feet in good light and made notes. Surprising how many would have killed me. At Cranton we almost did when I came in for the fly-by real low and parallel to the runway and some xenophobe put a high powered hole through the fuselage. I knew because it exited right through my side window up and out. That’s how I knew we had neighbors in Cranton.

So the Nearest button still works but about half I can’t use anymore at all. Better to land in an old field. Used to mean Nearest Haven now means Nearest Maybe Death Trap. All good information.

I still monitor the radio. Old habits die hard. Every airport has a frequency so traffic can talk to each other if there’s no tower. Important to know where everybody is when you’re taking off or entering the pattern. Used to be. Collisions used to happen every year. Between airports there’s no designated way to communicate but there’s an emergency frequency 121.5. What I do when I’m approaching an airport is flip to the old channel. When I’m within five miles I make a call. Call a few times.