Peter Heller - The Dog Stars

Lots of places, I thought but I didn’t say anything. To the other side for one. Or way way inside. A lot of places someone else can never follow.

I kept my mouth shut. The door was open, there was no door. Maybe they’d burned it in the hearth along with the furniture. The windows were boarded up. Someone had been planning for the end of a bad patch, planning to protect the business, their life savings. Those signs of hope that were so quaint now, even perverse. We stepped inside.

They hadn’t burned the furniture: all the tables, the heavy wood chairs, bulked in the dimness, attendant and stolid. There was a hearth in the center, a round fireplace, stone bordered, the requisite centerpiece of every dimwitted après ski designer. Probably fondue pots in the kitchen. Near the front, where rain and snow had blown in, the wood was stained and warped, but further back there was only dry dust and the tracks and shit of mice. Heavy oak bar in the back, tall wood stools, a smoky mirror unbroken. Reflected the light from the doorway like a molten pool on a creek near nightfall. She hesitated, then advanced and stood in front of the bar, looking into the big mirror. Back a few feet, stock still, arms out from her sides, and I thought of a child at a dance recital who has forgotten the next steps. Gone blank. Or a ranch girl at a new bar, a girl from the hills, overwhelmed, who didn’t know what to order, how to ask. She looked at herself and she burst into tears.

Who was that ragged, burly, bearded man who held her? Is that you, Hig? You look all patched and tufted and threadbare like those winterworn bison. You’re missing a tooth. You look like a homeless hockey player.

Didn’t know. A little nervous about coming over the final hump. Over the Rocks, they used to say at the airpark like it was a big deal. Not for me, never was. I mean it was high, it was the Continental Divide, there was almost always snow, a shitty place to lose an engine under any circumstances, a long way down to the first clearings in the lodgepole, the long dead pines. On either side, Winter Park or Nederland. I always left two thousand feet of clearance, flying so high I got a little spaced out once in a while, and it was always okay. But. Now it was a big deal. How would it be? I aimed for the low spot in the pass where the old Jeep road went over the rocks and patchy snow, watched the low country rise up behind the ridge, the way it does when you are making it over, watched it lift and unfurl like one of those bannered flags they used to have at the Olympics, and saw there beyond the final buttress of foothills: old Erie, the airstrip itself soon visible south of the radio tower that no longer blinks, the ribbon of tarmac rolled out like a welcome mat just for me. Nervous about seeing Bangley again, that’s what. It had been, by my best reckoning, just over six weeks.

Now we descended over the foothills, and I pointed the Beast toward Erie by rote. I aimed for the dirt escarpment that stood out like a billboard on the other side of the interstate, still fifteen miles off my aiming point from the west that would put me right over midfield. Seeing it, I flashed on the summer I was eighteen: returning home to Mom’s little house in Hotchkiss. Surprising her. On walking up the switchback mesa road at dusk. The excitement of returning home, the fear of having it be nothing like I expected. My heart drummed. Could feel it in there trying to compete with the throb of the engine, the lower roar and vibration as I pulled back the throttle to descend.

To our eight miles of prairie. Over the last trees, the very last living pines wandering out onto the plain like disoriented sentinels, our perimeter, our margin of safety, and then I could see the tower, the one we’d built together. Bangley’s sniper deck, the porch where he fired his stash of mortars—and then I was over the place and didn’t look down too closely to see the bones, the bodies left unburied and scattered by now by wolves and coyotes, and whatever else. Could have seen, if I looked closely, the white bleat of a rib’s arch or skull. And I felt a surge of—what? Of something for Bangley who I realized in that moment had become my family. Because it was to him, like to my mother twenty two years ago, I was returning home. Not my wife, my child, my mother, not anything but Bangley with his gravel voice. For whom it was a matter of pride to be a stubborn dickhead all the time. And I felt a twinge of fear, of recoil. What if he was straight up mad at me?

The warring emotions. And then I felt the fear full bore. When I dropped to six thousand feet and flew over the glinting river which was low, but running, and came in straight for the south end of the runway and saw the charred husks of the houses, saw foundations, saw one half of my hangar ripped open as if by a tornado and burned.

Bangley’s house, a hundred yards north, the one with his gunsmith shop in the sunken living room and the photo of the blonde family skiing—it was standing, but the windows were shot out and there were scorch marks around the second floor dormer which was splintered, and next to it was a gaping hole in the roof. Oh fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.

Pops was straight up and alert on his pack, I glanced back, he knew it was all wrong, and Cima squeezed my thigh and couldn’t keep herself away from the window, from pressing her face to it like a kid at the shark tank.

Before I landed I came in low and took a pass over the garden. It was still there, undisturbed. The water was still running across the head of the marks at the top of the plot, and there was water running in half the furrows.

But. Even from two hundred feet I could see the weeds. They filled the unwatered marks and climbed and crowned the ridges of banked earth.

I jammed the throttle and pulled up and came around again higher. Banked left and aimed for midfield and landed long and taxied straight to Bangley’s house. Mixture, mags, master switch. Off. Shut down. The Beast had barely stopped rolling when I shoved open the sticky door and jumped out and ran to the house.

The front door was open, swinging slightly in the light wind.

Bangley! Bangley! Hey! You in here! BANGLEY!

I was surprised by the force of my shout. Sounded like a stranger.

Bounded down into the workshop. Oddly the big plate window looking to the mountains was intact but there was a string of bullet holes running diagonally up the wall over the hearth. The picture of the skiing family sat unmolested on the side table. Bangley’s tools lay where he left them, the barrel and receiver of a Sig Sauer .308, one of his favorite guns, suspended over the worktable in two vises.

Jesus.

Pops behind me.

Your buddy, he said. I knew from our first interview that he would be a badass, else how could a guy like you—

Stopped himself.

Never imagined this.

Bangley!

Desperate. For the first time I felt it claw over me, the desperation like a bad odor. Weird. Never know how you feel about someone until their house is torn open.

Flinched. Pops’s hand on my shoulder.

They caught him in here. He was working. It was during the day. Never expected a daytime assault like that. They came in from the front and he survived the first burst and he fought them off. He fought them to a retreat, then went upstairs where he could get a better view, better angle, and fought them from there. Probably only a couple of them had guns.