Peter Heller - The Dog Stars

This is what you left, I thought. The vindication of the choice you made to leave that night. Vindication and horror. Sometimes being right isn’t all it’s cracked up to be: how many times in the last few years I thought about bitter fruit, how when what you are right about is—well you can’t even look at it.

But it wasn’t the burned and devastated city, the pockets of virid trees, that were somehow wrong or simply not quite right. I was now six miles out. I was nine hundred feet off the ground and aiming for the airport, for the tower, where three years ago I had gotten the signal, the beginning of a message. I dialed the frequency—it was still there in my GPS—and made the second call.

Grand Junction Tower, Cessna Six Three Three Three Alpha six southeast at five thousand eight hundred inbound for landing .

Said it again. Then miracle: static. A loud burst of aural snow. I twisted up the squelch excited and called again.

Cessna Six Triple Three Alpha—

It wasn’t crystal clear but it was. It was! A woman’s voice. Maybe older, a little raspy. Slightly humored, kind.

Cessna Six Triple Three Alpha, wind two four zero at five, make a straight in approach, cleared to land runway two niner .

All formal, all perfect, by the book, just like before before. Said with a straight face. Like a normal business day at the old airport. Can’t fully describe what that harkening back to normalcy did to my spirit. As if in pretending that this were airport operations as usual I could also pretend that my wife lived and my dog, that she was in her seventh month and they were back on the Front Range and I was about to touch down after a three hour flight away from them, not one that had taken nine years and on which there was no true return.

What wasn’t right was not even that. It was the beacon. Almost every paved airport, has, had, a rotating beacon green and white. And I had seen it flash from ten miles out, and thought nothing of it. And then at six miles I saw it flashing again, pulsing like the heartbeat of a living enterprise and the dissonance—the burned out city at the end of the known world, and the living, pulsing light, the voice of the controller transmitting everyday commands—finally caught my attention and the hair on the back of my neck stood up. Can’t tell you why except to say that it was odd to say the least: that they had power. Or: why shouldn’t they? We had it at Erie. More and more airports had been supplementing with solar and wind. Or that the beacon shouldn’t be on in daylight in clear, VFR conditions. Don’t know why, except to say that something put me on edge.

I lined up. I banked twenty degrees left and straightened out for final and there was the long east-west strip built for jets stretching out in front of us like a vision. Smooth too. Looked it from here. Didn’t have the buckled, cracked, potholed look of every strip on the east side of the mountains. Somebody had maintained it. Least it seemed that way from a mile out and descending. Backed off the throttle, set twenty degrees of flaps and let her float down at five hundred feet per, the Beast seeming to breathe relief at this reversion to past protocol. I swear she has an animus or a mind or something.

And as we came down slowly and the strip grew wider and longer and rose to meet us, we could see the rows of hangars, some caved in, some roofs blown half off by wind. We could see the control tower on our left, the cantilevered, green tinted, bulletproof windows. We could see wrecks of planes, a few on either side of the runway, a big jet at the end. As there were at every airport—the tied down craft battered by weather, eventually pulling loose and tumbling, but. That’s when it hit me. Like a frigging bullet.

I was maybe thirty feet off the ground. I had cut power, topped the prop, done all the things you do in the final moments, and was getting ready to pull back the yoke and flare for a soft touchdown and. And it hit me.

The beacon, the tower: the wrecks on the field were scorched like the cars. Can’t say I thought anything, nothing reasoned, articulated, there wasn’t time. It was just the shock of the image: the burned and crumpled planes. Different from Erie. Different from Denver, from Centennial, the old planes ripped from their moorings and cartwheeled over the airfield by wind. These were crashes. Live-engine wrecks. I did pull back the yoke, but not for a flare. I jerked it back and slammed the throttle to the panel and the engine caught and screamed and my palm slammed the carb heat knob back in and we lurched, reared skyward. We jumped off the field maybe steeper even than our takeoff half an hour before from the meadow. And the lambs wailed.

I looked out the low side window, the bowl of plexiglas, and in the same instant the cable came up. Sprung taut, probably missed my wheels by ten feet. Sprung like a trap. Which is what it was.

Holy fuck.

Hig, you are a cool bastard. That was Bangley talking. Giving me the rare Bangley thumbs up. And in that moment too I glanced at the fuel flow gauge and saw we had two gallons left. Ten minutes at most. Fuck.

I banked left to come around for a look and tensed for gunfire from the ground.

Goddamn . It was Pops. A taut line . He had moved the lamb and he had his gun up and he was scanning the hangars, the wreckage.

The cable stretched across the runway about a third of the way down and ten feet off the pavement, held taut by two sprung arms welded from T-bar steel. The arms were articulated downward like the bills of evil herons. The cable was painted black like the tarmac but I could clearly see its shadow and then the evil thread of it. No gunfire. I craned around.

Pops?

That was it, he yelled. Their one big trick.

Want to? I called back.

Get em? Fuck yeah.

Cima?

She looked confused, still sick, unable to appreciate the implications of what had just happened. She nodded.

We don’t have much choice, I yelled. We’re about out of gas.

I tightened the bank and swooped for another final, this time without checklists, without any thought at all except That motherfucker that motherfucker. I’m coming to get you. And the gut-punch feeling of betrayal. All those years, thinking about that radio call. The hope it had engendered. It drove me wild.

Everything was on automatic. I banked tight and swooped and touched down a hundred feet past the cable. Pops leaned forward and said:

Taxi past. There. Park behind that building, the second west of the tower.

I kept her rolling fast. The radio crackled on. Nice landing said the voice and it didn’t sound like Aunt Bee now. It sounded frayed and hard. Then laughter. Laughter like hanging metal scraping over pavement, loud and sustained. Congratulations. You’re the first .

I didn’t call back. I turned left onto a broad taxiway and found cover where Pops said and shut her down. We were in the cool shadow of Big River Flight School and Authorized Cessna Service Center and we were close enough to the wall that we couldn’t see the top of the tower and they couldn’t get a bead on us, whoever they were. Climbed out moved the seat forward for Pops so he could squeeze out. A cricket chirped loudly from the base of the wall. Cima sat. Hadn’t unbuckled. I didn’t know what to say, I had never seen her like this. She seemed in shock. She was in shock. I walked around to her door opened it. Her long hand pressed against the panel over the oil pressure gauge and a new bruise spread along her forearm. She turned. Her eyes were bleary.

It’s not just the meanness of it. The trap. That too. It’s the city.

I nodded. She and Pops had retired early from the world before it had fired into full conflagration. They had seen enough, enough to flee but not the full demise. Not what I had seen every day from the air. What Bangley and I had known in the middle of our nights. The charred town and all that it implied.