Peter Heller - The Dog Stars

I jumped. In the corner—there was no corner it was all corners, octagonal—on the east side was an old woman with her hair, no shit, in a bun. It was Aunt Bee. She stood next to a spotting scope on a tripod and wore, no shit again, a calico dress printed in blue cornflowers. She wore wire rimmed round glasses. Could have been your school librarian, your doting grandma, the face on the pancake syrup label. She was at once backed up straight against a nav screen and paralyzed mid lunge toward the shooter who must have been her husband, her hands clawing the air in front of her chest, and her mouth open in a scream. Pops shot her. Middle of the forehead. Twenty cats did hot laps around the tower, then froze in various poses of arched terror. Dropped the decibel level in the reverberant room by half. Now just cats and the old man.

Pops stepped to him, crouched.

Finish Gramps choked. His eyes swum up. They were filmed like poached eggs. Shoot . He begged.

Pops said How’d you spring the cable.

Wha — ? He gurgled up a gobbet of blood.

The cable. How’d you spring it?

Bucko

Backhoe?

Gramps vomited affirmative.

Fuel? Where’s the fuel? You have hundred low lead?

Shoot plea—

Where is it?

Ea tak

East tank?

Yu

Pops tugged on a bunch of keys clipped to the man’s belt.

This the key?

Oauuuua

Is this the key?

Yu

Go to hell.

Pops shot him. I gagged.

Looked out the window once before fleeing the cats, the stench. Roof of the Jet Center covered in solar panels. Like Erie. How they pumped their water, fuel, powered the radios and beacon. East gas pumps right below not a hundred yards. Easy shot from here, how they protected it. The survivors? From any of the wrecks? Could have picked them off at distance, or Aunt Bee could have gone to her blocked spot like an actor, waved like a concerned grandma, gestured them urgently over. Easy enough. Damn.

Before we left the tower Pops invited me to the third floor apartment. I said I didn’t want to see. He said, You are going to want to see. Cats were already venturing down the stairs. I followed him.

Ever been in a retiree’s RV? The one they sold their house for? How spotless and neat, the bed made with a patch quilt, maybe a pattern of sunflowers smoothed taut, a plush bear on the pillow? Silk rose in a velcroed cutglass vase on the veneer booth table? It was like that. Single small bedroom, no window, immaculate plush wall to wall carpet, no cats. Except. In the room that would have been the living room where the TV might have been, one wall was pegged and on a hundred pegs were caps, mostly baseball caps with the logos of FBOs, aircraft service centers, aviation specialists of all types—cylinders, props, skins—from every corner of the country. The rest of the walls were covered with shelves. On the shelves, alternating, were pairs of spectacles—sunglasses, reading glasses, bifocals, everything—and crudely stuffed birds of every type. They were lumpy, dullcolored birds stuffed with some filler without benefit of armatures, eyes sewed shut without skill—owls, bluebirds, magpies, sparrows, ducks. And bird guides: antique Petersen, Golden, National Geo, Sibley’s. Seemed every one that had ever been published in the last century.

Hobbies still going strong, Pops said. That’s a relief.

Fuckin A.

We gassed up almost like before, just flipped the lever and heard the electric pump and watched the numbers roll out the gallons. I checked the color, and for water and particulates with a clear plastic tube I carried. We found six more five gallon gas cans and filled them too. Fired the engine. She ran smooth so the gas was good. We took off. Pops said On the ground! Two o’clock. I banked over. Three bison grazed at the end of the strip, hides still patched and ragged from winter.

The buffalo are moving down to their old range, the wolves, the bighorn too. The trout are gone, the elk, but. I’ve seen osprey up on Jasper’s creek, and bald eagles. Plenty of mice in the world, plenty of hawks. Plenty of crows. In winter the trees are full of them. Who needs Christmas tree decorations? Miles and miles of dead forest but the spruce are coming back, the fir and the aspen.

We flew over. The wind buffeted and rushed where my window had been. At Kremmling, in the hills beneath the Gore Range, was a vast fire. New since. Some lightning strike. Trees on the edge caught and exploded. We saw deer running downhill.

Look! she said.

Behind the deer was a grizzly bear. She loped, coming down hard on her short front legs, putting on the brakes, wheeling trying to herd two terrified cubs. Herd them down and down.

In the river, in the flat stretch above the canyon, deer were swimming.

I thought of a painting I had seen at the natural history museum in Denver. A bunch of mixed dinosaurs, I remember triceratops, fleeing across a sparse plain pursued by fire, and volcanoes erupting in the background. I wonder if they could run as fast as a mama grizzly or a deer.

The chairs swung on the chairlifts at Winter Park. New trees came almost to the seats. We had just enough fuel to make it to Erie, but just enough. I wanted to land and put in at least one extra can. In case. Of what? Just in case. We circled back to a clear stretch of highway on the west side of the ski town. Landed, jostled to a stop close to the buildings at the town limit. Stretched, poured in the cans of fuel. Stood on the strut, Pops handed them up. Edge of town seventy yards away, a rec center, a Sinclair station, a gaudy darkwood chalet: Helga’s German Food and Spirits. Miraculously untorched, the town.

Cima stood in the road, hands in the pockets of her jeans, staring. Still seemed in some kind of shock. The world beyond their canyon. The empty burning world. The intact buildings the scariest. For me. Because they looked almost normal, because they echoed. They do whatever it is a struck bell does long after the sound fades.

I want to go in, she said. Pointing like a tourist at the German restaurant.

There?

Yes.

Quicker we load up and take off, safer we’ll be. Empty, but. You never know.

I want to go in.

I shrugged. Pops was in his own reverie watching the Gore Range, the burning Never Summers from that distance, kind of transfixed. You can get used to a lot but maybe not this. All of a sudden. I whistled to him that we’d be back in a few minutes grabbed the AR and we walked up the frost heaved highway. Tufts of grass and sage, little poplars grew up out of the cracks. Small lizards skittered. We walked straight into the sun which hung over the snows of the Divide. Still snow up there, anyway.

Did you like German food?

I felt like we were on a date, which was weird. The canyon had been insulated from more than this whistling vacancy.

Hated it, pretty much.

Hunh.

She reached across, grabbed my hand. I’m not going anywhere, Hig, she said. Where would I go?