The Dog Stars

  Took a big pinch. The nicotine hit as soon as I’d taken the first swallow and I felt dizzy for a second.

  Damn. I forgot.

  I spit.

  Shoot me in the back on the way up and like I said I’m not sure you wouldn’t be doing me a favor.

  They stared at me. She had a dark stain on her throat like a bruise.

  I’ll need my Glock, my rifle. You keep the grenades. Housewarming.

  He hesitated, picked the handgun off the table, handed it to me butt first. I holstered it. He lifted the rifle to muster, across his chest, passed it to me.

  Thanks. Thanks for kicking me in the ass.

  I hauled off and slugged him.

  The one I’d been saving, a solid short right that connected to his left cheek. It knocked him off his feet clean and hard and he hit the dirt ass first. Knocked his hat off. Total surprise. He pushed up on his hands and blinked at me and only when I let my eyes travel over the whole picture did I see one hand filled with a handgun. Like magic. A heavy .45, officer issue.

  You didn’t have to kick me in the ass. Or play executioner. I would’ve gone anywhere you told me.

  Who was I to talk?

  I turned around and walked across the open ground upstream, my back as naked and ready for a bullet as for the fall and click of the next moment.

  You, You, Hey.

  What?

  Higs, right? That’s what you said.

  Hig.

  Hig. You want some lunch?

  Stopped. She was probably half an inch taller than me. A sunburned scar parted her dark hair, her right eyebrow. Thin and sharp. The bruise at her throat.

  Lunch? Do people still eat lunch.

  We do.

  Glanced back at the house. The old bastard was shoving the gun into the back of his waistband, adjusting his hat, watching us.

  He really your dad?

  Yes. On my father’s side.

  No apology for him. No small betrayal. I appreciated that. On my father’s side. What a funny thing to say. She was smiling.

  He may not want to have lunch with me.

  I didn’t invite him.

  She hooked her thumbs in the pockets of her shorts and straightened her arms in a stretch. I did notice. How it lifted her breasts, how it exposed her waist above the waistband.

  But I will, if you all promise not to punch or shoot each other.

  You all. A country girl. Before. I stared at her. Honestly I didn’t know if I wanted to have lunch with them or not. I had gotten kind of used to the idea of living on air, of blowing away. Some comfort in that.

  Hig? Yes? Bangley’s voice again, disembodied. I could imagine his rough laugh if he knew he was kinda my superego. Which I couldn’t get rid of, just like a bad pop song. The girl is inviting you to lunch. She feels bad you almost pissed your pants. Ha! Be polite.

  Okay.

  Okay I said.

  Cimarron. She held out her hand.

  Everybody calls me—

  She stopped, looked around the canyon, smiled.

  Cima.

  Shepherd’s pie with butter. Well salted. Ground beef. I thought I was going to die. Pops was right, the sun traveled over the rim of the canyon and we ate at the plank table in the shade. Close enough to the creek: a pleasant sift. It mixed with the breeze which also sounded like rushing water when it shirred the tops of the cottonwoods. Butter. Melting in glops over the mashed potato, puddling. Who would’ve thought something so unresistant and pale could mesmerize a man? She kept bringing it, I kept eating it. A steel pitcher of milk chilled in the creek which I emptied twice. Holy shit. Hig had you climbed that stupid tree and flown away or even been shot in the back you would’ve missed the meal of your life. I was so enchanted with the food I didn’t even notice if Pops was giving me the Wolf Eye or Stink Eye or Shark Eye or whatever kind of eye you give to somebody who has just raised a welt on your face and was now eating your provisions nonstop.

  To be offered cold milk. To have your blue enameled plate filled again. By a woman. To have her walk from an outside fire bearing your dish. To sit in the shade of a big old tree, not a metal hangar, and eat. To hear the bleat of a sheep come through the loud rustle of the leaves. To have an older man sitting across from you in silence, eating also, enemy or friend not sure, it doesn’t matter. To be a guest. To break bread.

  The pleasure almost split me like a baking stuffed tomato. Like my heart swelled and my skin got thinner and thinner in the heat of it. Of company.

  Bangley and I ate together often, but it was different can’t say how: it was like feeding time in a zoo of our own making. This was different. I was free to leave. They were free to disinvite me. The sense of privilege.

  Nobody said much. I moaned, grunted. Hunched over the plate. Only realized it when I looked up and she was smiling. Her face was drawn too thin. Her huge eyes reminded me of a radar dish absorbing everything, unable not to. Like the squelch was set too low and much of what she absorbed was pain. Another bruise on her forearm, the one that handed me the plate. Glanced up once and she was rubbing the back of her neck with a wince. Clearly getting pleasure also from my famished devouring.

  Don’t get out much Pops said. You.

  I stopped chewing.

  No not really. Where I live most of the restaurants are too expensive.

  Where do you live?

  Denver. North of there.

  They were both staring at me now. Hungry like me. In a different way.

  I set my fork on the boards, took a long swallow of cold milk, wiped my mouth on the sleeve of my jacket.

  It was bad, I said. Ninety nine point whatever. Mortality. Just about killed everyone.

  Your family? she said.

  I nodded.

  Everyone. Infrastructure frayed then fell apart. Before the end it was. It was bad.

  Reached for the cup of milk and drank as if it could cool.

  It was a frenzy. Everyone clinging to some shred: that they might be the one who was immune. Because we had heard of that, too, the mysterious resistance that ran in families. Genetic.

  They were staring at me. He opened a pocket knife, picked his teeth.

  When my wife died I made my way to the country airport where I keep my plane. I hid out.

  You defended it, he said, scanning my face.

  I nodded.

  With help.

  He was reading my own capacity for hell, for death, for wreaking it.

  We defended it. Me and Bangley. Who showed up one day with a trailer full of weapons.

  Bangley? He grunted. He knew what he was about old Bangley. Didn’t he?

  He put an elbow on the table, stretched out his long legs, picked his teeth.

  He brought you along. Kinda trained you up. Set a perimeter didn’t he? He had no problem killing anything that crossed it. Young, old, men, women. But you did.

  But you got over it.

  Dad.

  Ninety nine point whatever. What’s left? Point whatever. One out of two hundred? Three hundred? We’ve seen what that is. It’s not usually pretty is it? Is it Higs?

  Hig.

  Big Hig.

  I stared at him.

  Not pretty what’s left, is it?

  I stared at him. His eyes were alight with equal parts cold knowledge and warm mischief.

  He spat a fleck of food off his tongue. You’re a hunter. Deer, elk. Before.

  Nodded. How—?

  He waved it away.

  The way you hold your rifle. Way you move down the creek. Looking at sign. Can’t help yourself.

  My mouth opened. I saw myself stepping in the suncrackled needles studying the piles of scat. He was watching. He could have had me any time he wanted.

  Never in the service though.

  I stared at him.

  Fact you don’t like killing anybody. Not even a bull elk I’d bet. If there was one to kill. Not even a trout. If there was one. Too bad. You love to fish too.

  Who the fuck was this guy? Ho
w—?

  I saw you studying the creek. You stood right where I would’ve stood so as not to spook the fish in the pool.

  I stared.

  But killing is something you can get used to. Isn’t it, Hig?

  No.

  So you say.

  He leaned forward and his eyes bore into mine. He aimed his gray eyes into mine and they sparked like he had lit the fuses.

  I suggest you shrug out of your pissant self-righteousness. Like a rattler out of old skin. You’d move easier, smoother. Turned and spat. Nobody at this table is an innocent. That shit with the pheasant? Had you been close enough I would’ve slit your throat. Not thinking. Glad you weren’t. That would’ve been a real dumbshit move.

  The whole thing, the speech, the image, it shivered my insides like a cold and sudden night wind. Who the fuck was this guy? He could’ve slit my throat in the juniper. While I slept.

  He stood up, stretched. He was in his sixties, I guessed, but he was long and lean and looked to be strung together with catgut. He moved easily in his skin. A life bent to work which he loved, was my guess if I were guessing. A rancher clearly, some sort of soldier along the way. I was tempted to play What’s My Line with him, too, but it felt gauche. I mean I didn’t need to get into a one-up deal with this dude, into any kind of pissing match. He’d just given me maybe the best meal of my life. Or she had.

  He said, Thanks for lunch. Touched her shoulder. How’s the throat?

  She smiled. Been better.

  He nodded once, picked a bow saw from a peg on the outside wall of the hut and walked downstream. Opened a gate in the brush fence and went through. I poured another cup of milk from the pitcher. Must have been my fourth or fifth.

  You’re not used to it. You’re going to make yourself sick. You’ll have wicked diarrhea at the least.

  You a doctor as well as a chef?

  Uh huh.

  The cup stopped at my lips. I put it down.

  What kind of doctor?

  Internist. Public health.

  Her mouth stretched into the form of a smile but her eyes weren’t smiling. Not even ironic.

  Epidemiology to tell the truth.

  Everybody around here seemed to be very into telling the truth, the whole truth.

  Where?

  New York City.

  Oh.

  Fuck.

  What happened to your throat?

  He was mean but he didn’t seem mean like that. But. He was the only other person around. Unless they had attack sheep.

  It’s not what happened to. I mean it’s the result of damage to my blood vessels. I hemorrhage quite easily. My muscles get very sore as well. A type of fibromyalgia. You see I contracted the flu. I barely survived. One result of the prolonged fever was the systemic inflammation that resulted in these conditions. But I had some resistance which we understand to be inherited from my father.

  Biological resistance or sheer orneriness.

  That too. I’m sorry we scared you. You scared us.

  Again she didn’t defend him, didn’t feel the need. She was squarely in his corner as it should be. Right?

  We talked about it. Dad doesn’t pull punches as you see.

  She poured herself her own cup of milk, leaned into the table. The breeze played with wisps of curly hair that strayed to her temple, her eyebrow.

  You kinda triggered our Plan. He thought we should talk about what we would do when one day we were overrun. When, not if. Or when we were outwitted or outgunned. When you showed up with grenades we thought it might be that time.

  Damn.

  I thought, Maybe that wasn’t a smile I saw on her lips. Through the scope. Maybe that was the face you make when everything is over. Over over.

  One of the cows lowed long and deep with a rising inflection the way cows do. Like a question. The cottonwood leaves overhead flitted and ticked.

  You have a pact huh?

  She nodded.

  He shoots you.

  The cow mooed again, this time one short note as if answering her own query. Simple country life. Question and answer.

  How close were you?

  Close. He had the .45 out. After you threw the grenade. But then he said, Let’s play this out another step. He said it will be a risk: he—you—can shoot me as soon as we step out. But he said he had a hunch.

  A hunch?

  He said you were weak. He said, Let’s play this out.

  That stung. I felt myself flush. Or maybe it was all the lactose hitting my system.

  You all aren’t diplomatic in the least.

  Seems like a world that’s way past diplomacy.

  Maybe. Bangley feels the same way. My partner.

  Anyway he gave me the .45 just in case. In case you did plug him from the rim and try to take me.

  Jesus.

  That’s the world. That was the world we left. I nodded.

  He said, You can handle him. If he kills me, you kill him when he gets close. But if there are more. Then.

  She touched her throat unconsciously. I nodded. She probably would have handled me if it got to that. Don’t take it hard, Hig. It’s kind of a compliment. They read you from a hundred yards.

  Why didn’t he kill me then? In the creek? Instead you all serve me lunch.

  I widened my eyes.

  You all aren’t trying to fatten me up? I mean you’ve got that taste for human flesh like a rogue shark?

  Now she really smiled. She laughed. Leaned her head back, showing me the large bruise, and laughed high and husky.

  Ow. Cupped her palm over the ribbed architecture of her trachea. Hurts a little not much. A rogue shark. No. Whew.

  She poured herself another mug of milk, drank slowly. No. Finishing her last swallow. No, we need you.

  Oh.

  Suddenly I did feel nauseous. Funny, but the first image was some sort of forced breeding experiment. Why that would make me feel sick I’m not sure as she was very good looking, I’d say almost beautiful. Though scarred and very fragile. But the image was me screwing her on a stone bed like an altar while her father stood over us with a gun to my head.

  I didn’t ask. The way these people shared things, I knew I’d be told soon whether I liked it or not. Exhaustion again. It swept over me. Like some sort of mustard gas. What was wrong with me? It was like nine years of vigilance had suddenly caught up. I felt like crossing my arms on the rough wood of the table and laying my head down atop them and falling asleep. Right now.

  You don’t mind if I take a nap do you? I don’t know if I can stay awake.

  It’s the milk probably. She stood and pointed farther under the trees by the water. There’s a sort of hammock under there. Be my guest.

  Be my guest. Guest. For better or worse. I thanked her for the meal and lay down by the stream in a suspended blanket and hugged my coat around me and slept.

  I dreamt a house in a field that should have been my own, I mean I was returning to a place I had built, the expectation of haven, of a home that was to shelter everything I loved, and as I approached across a field without a road I saw an addition built on the side, the right side as I faced it, an annex bigger than the house itself, and it had angles that were strange to me, to my sense of things—disturbing dormers too high on the roof, juttings where there shouldn’t be, and I realized with a sinking heart and growing sense of doom that someone that I would hate lived inside my house and had some sort of squatter’s rights, some rights vague to me now and bargained away in an awful negotiation I could barely recall and that I could stop and stay there but only in a capacity of confirmation: confirming this thing that felt exactly like a nightmare: or I could pass on and relinquish somehow everything I had loved, loved up to this excruciating point, and I was standing in the field unable to make the decision to go in or walk on and I woke up sobbing.

  Never occurred to me to break in and take my house back.

  All the choices we can’t see. Every moment.

  Lay in the hammock and oddly t
here were no sobs in this unreal world, no collar wet with tears, just the cottonwood leaves shifting and spinning above me, the creek slipping past. You could wake from one nightmare to the next to the next and never eat or piss and die of thirst.

  When I opened my eyes she was working in the garden. I could see her there through the trees along the creek crouching, probably getting ahead of the weeds. He came through the brush gate carrying two poles of fir, must have been long seasoned because he carried them lightly. Light tufts of feathers blew out of the trees, the parachutes of cottonwood seeds. Didn’t float very well. Closed my eyes heard the rhythmic sough of the saw like a raspy animal breathing hard. Later heard the tunk, the crack of splitting wood. A cottonwood seed landed on my eyelid.

  After a while I roused, splashed my face in the creek, walked out to where she was weeding, now shaded by the cliff. I squatted down in the next row beside her and began to dig with fingers and pull. She glanced over, smiled.

  We have one too, I said. A garden.

  She nodded.

  Silence. We worked. In silence. The comfort of that.

  Next day after breakfast we weeded again. The sun climbed, pushed the shade against the wall.

  Do you have kids? I said.

  She sat back on her calves, pushed her hair with the back of her wrist.

  We were waiting to have children. Until he was faculty full time. He is a musician.

  I nodded. Go on.

  He finished his dissertation, had passed his orals just as the first cases hit Newark. We lived in a walkup on Cranberry Street that’s Brooklyn Heights just across the river from the Seaport the Financial District. We could see the world from our windows. That view you see in all the movies—skyline, bridge. We were always stressed out. I make myself remember that, but now it seems like the happiest life anyone could wish for. The egg and bacon bagel I got every morning and felt guilty about—you had to walk down three steps into this narrow train car practically of a deli on Montague Street, always a line, always others on the way to work, impatient, getting coffee in those blue and white Greek cups, sugar and milk in first. Just that. He called my cell as I waited on the platform. Could just get one bar of reception: What do you want me to bring home? Indian? Pasta? Ha. A life made up of small meals. To remember that. Two people waiting for their real future which I guess was the coming of children like two people waiting for a train. The happiest expectation. Maybe not so happy at the time but seems so now. He taught at Hunter, an adjunct, made squat, loved his students hated the department. Waiting to get the degree. Waiting. Time in its pod. Blown open and scattered.