The Dog Stars

  She talked to me like that. I mostly listening. He worked. Passed me without a word. I never offered to help. Something about his look prohibitive. I hiked up to the Beast and got my sleeping bag. The nights were clear and cool, full of stars, the stream of stars framed by the rim of the canyon like the banks of a dark river, dark but swimming with light. Through the leaves of the big cottonwoods. I slept in the hammock with the leaves above me a rustling roof. They moved the stars around and gave them voice. The first night the hammock hurt my back but after that it didn’t. The third day I climbed the tree ladder with my rifle and brought home a large buck. Dragged it down the creek and lowered it on a rope off the rim of the waterfall and we ate the heart and liver that night.

  I did it again the next day and he and I didn’t bother to hang the quarters but butchered them together on the board table and cut most into jerky strips. Working fast and easy with no words. They had salt. A twenty gallon barrel they brought with them. We soaked the meat in salt brine in buckets. He didn’t miss a trick, which is a thing I made sure not to tell him.

  Funny how you can live a whole life waiting and not know it.

  She spoke as she lifted a pile of greens from a bowl of pea pods. We sat at the table, in the shade of the big trees.

  Waiting for your real life to begin. Maybe the most real thing the end. To realize that when it’s too late. I know now that I loved him more than anything on earth or off of it. More than God, the one in my Episcopal liturgy.

  She snapped the early peas, her hair hanging in her face, the backs of her hands blotched purple with blood. Her fingertips worked gingerly as if sore. They rolled a particularly tough pod back up to the knuckles of thumb and forefinger.

  He died calling for me, looking desperately around the ward calling my name. Confused. Very early on, before all the networks went down and my friend Joel the doctor who ran the wing called me. Before we knew what this was. My mother was dying and it was too late to fly back home to New York, too late and I made the decision to stay with her and Dad. Joel said he would cremate Tomas and hold the ashes. I was beyond grateful. It was apparent that my mother would not survive. I would fly home in a week or two and drive upstate and spread his ashes in John’s Brook up in the mountains outside Keene Valley where we spent every weekend we could. I worked for the city in public health so I had weekends, you know, rare for an internist. I was never on call except in a public health emergency and that wasn’t often. We stayed in a white clapboard cottage in the village with a view of Noonmark from the sleeping porch. That’s a little Adirondack mountain that looks like a parody of a mountain, very peaky like the Matterhorn but tiny. The little mountain that could. We climbed it often on Saturdays after sleeping in. Trotted happily up the ledgy trail to a rocky top just out of the stunted firs. And in the long evening we’d take the two single gear bikes up the paved road to a stone pothole with a little sluicing waterfall, the water always freezing, and we’d strip and jump in. This was our ritual while we waited for our lives to truly begin and I think now that maybe true sweetness can only happen in limbo. I don’t know why. Is it because we are so unsure, so tentative and waiting? Like it needs that much room, that much space to expand. The not knowing anything really, the hoping, the aching transience: This is not real, not really, and so we let it alone, let it unfold lightly. Those times that can fly. That’s the way it seems now looking back. Like those pleasantly exhausted bike rides up the side of a country highway on a warm evening. To a bridge. To a little rootsnaked trail through heavy maples. Where we padded barefoot upstream to a swimming hole. Even getting poison ivy so badly one weekend I missed two days of work. Seems from here that that was the sweetest time ever vouchsafed to two people. Ever. On earth. While we waited for him to finish his degree, for me to have a child, to do the real work of living.

  She looked up. We are fools, you know.

  Oh fuck. One fucking thing I do know.

  It hurts you? To snap the peas?

  She shook her head her hair swinging over the bowl not looking up from under.

  It does, doesn’t it?

  What is hurt? I get a little sore. More like if your hands get dry and you crack a fingertip.

  I watched her hands closely after that. Moving the pods deftly up and down the fingers sometimes switching to the third or fourth finger spreading the pain. Working swiftly without complaint.

  Don’t, she said. Don’t watch.

  Once in passing she told me that she didn’t expect to live past fifty or fifty five. From what she knew of the damage to organs caused by the fever. She also confessed that in an odd way she was happier here than she’d ever been. Even with all the loss. Happier being whatever that was. Than waiting.

  I lost count. Of the days. Maybe it was five, maybe nine. Time expanding like an accordion making wheezy earnest music.

  The weather dry and warming. Day after day. The creek a little lower, a little less push, less strength in its roar, the falls diminished, its white lash narrowing as it spilled over the stone lip. The creek like a mood. Less exuberant. I woke sometime in the middle of the night and lay in the hammock, wriggled my foot out of the sleeping bag into the chill and found the rough ground with my bare foot and rocked myself back and forth. And watched the stars swim against their mesh of leaves. Like fish nosing a net.

  That is what we are, what we do: nose a net, push push, a net that never exists. The knots in the mesh as strong as our own believing. Our own fears.

  Ha. Admit it: you don’t have the slightest idea what you are doing, you never ever did. With all the nets in the world, real or unreal. You swam around in a flashing confused school following the tail of the fish in front. Pretty much. Nibbling at whatever passed, in whatever current you swam into.

  Even the love of your life felt like luck, like she might vanish in the finning crowd at any moment. Which she did.

  What are you doing?

  I don’t know.

  Rock rock. Back and forth. Lull. Push. Release. Swing back. The stars, the leaves, even the sound of the creek throbbing back and forth. Of a boat. Of a hammock. Of a child’s swing. Of a womb. Back and forth. Rock rock. Smell of cold current, of stone, manure, blossom. Sleep.

  He put it to me in simple terms. Came at first light to the hammock with a steaming enamel cup. They’d long since run through coffees and teas, now concocted a brew of roasted pine nuts and Mormon tea which was bitter and smoky, not bad. He sat on the sawed stump I used as a side table. Half nod toward it for permission, moved the Glock, lay it on my pack and sat. Handed me the cup. I sat up, straddled the hanging blanket. Turned up the squelch on my brain, on the running current of images. I’d been dreaming of my house again, this time not in a field but my, our, actual house on its street on the west side of town, two blocks from the lake. But it did not look like our house, it was a low brick bunker with chimneys that I knew was a crematorium, and I was standing outside it confused again wondering where I was supposed to sleep, to feed Jasper.

  I suppose I’d heard his footsteps over the creek. I woke from the dream confusion into the compounding loss, into the gentle light, but in a world that is all loss that’s like waking into air from air.

  What can a fish know of water? Plenty I guess.

  I shut the dream down, took the cup. He didn’t look like he ever slept. I mean none of his features ever blurred. They got sharper in anger but they were always sharp.

  In a few weeks if it doesn’t rain, which it won’t, it’ll be time to go.

  I sat up straighter.

  I told you I would leave anytime. Just say the word.

  He shook his head.

  You’ve been more than hospitable, I said seriously. I think I’m getting fat.

  He didn’t smile.

  I don’t mean you, I mean us. The three of us. You are going to fly us out of here.

  I blinked. Lowered the cup to my lap.

  Do you have any frigging idea what it’s like out there? Do you? Why would you leave
here? This little Eden? Where you and what’s left of your family can live in peace?

  That’s what I was thinking. I said, Why?

  Drought.

  I glanced at the burbling stream, the green meadow.

  Last summer the creek almost dried up. We had to dig in the streambed to pool enough water just to drink. Half our cattle died. Pretty much been getting worse every year. Getting warmer. Just like they said it would.

  He drank from his own cup.

  We knew we’d have to bail. Probably this spring. We weren’t sure where to go. And there is the fear of traveling without water. If it’s drying up here, what is happening off the mesa?

  He unsnapped the breast pocket of his shirt and dug out the Copenhagen. Took a small plug handed me the tin.

  Then you showed up in the plane. To think I almost killed you.

  Yup this definitely calls for a chew. I pinched one, handed it back. The familiar pleasure of gripping it under top lip, the mild rush.

  You want to come with me?

  Not a matter of want, Higs.

  Rhymes with Big, I said. The old bastard.

  He winced at me.

  You two want to fly back with me to Erie, to the airport? And live with us? With me and Bangley? Out on the Plains?

  He leaned forward on the stump, spat. I want to stay here. To live out my years in peace with my daughter. Call it a draw. The whole damn episode.

  Shook his head as if to clear it. This life that I knew when I came back. Came out of the service, when I came back to the ranch. I knew it would be so much different than it is. Call it a draw.

  He puffed out his cheeks. His hand was shaking when he put the cup to his lips. He put the back of his wrist into the corner of his eye.

  It was my grandfather’s ranch. He ran cattle up here in the summer before there was even a goddamn BLM to lease it from.

  It occurred to me that the death of his grazing land hurt him more, incomparably more than the death of the human race. I liked him a lot better in that moment.

  Why’n’t you dig a well?

  He grimaced. Don’t think I didn’t try. Underneath this whole canyon is ledge rock. Four feet down. Can’t even dig a decent grave.

  In the minutes we sat, the rough sanded gray of dawn suffused with a smoother, brighter light, like clear water running over wet gravel. The country may have been dying. I knew the snowpack was less every year on the Divide, the runoff earlier, the creeks lower, more bony in the fall. But right now I heard a canyon wren, the six seven eight paced notes whistling down a scale never used by man. Answered by another. I heard a meadowlark across the field and saw the dipping flight of the kingfisher I’d seen almost every morning. Moving fast up the stream. The bigger rivers like the Gunnison weren’t drying up. Not yet.

  His face was tight, he looked past me. Whoever he was, whatever he’d done, he loved his land, his daughter, with a fierceness as natural and unprompted as weather.

  The immediate problem that presented itself was: could I take off from the short sage meadow with the extra weight. Not at all a given. Maybe not with both of them, maybe not with one.

  I don’t have enough fuel to get back, I said.

  He twitched. His eyes shifted back to my face and hardened.

  Don’t bullshit me, Higs.

  Hig. Rhymes with Big if you forget.

  It occurred to me too just then that maybe I better be a bit more tactful. If I couldn’t fly them out of here he might just shoot me. Damn. I was starting to feel used. Loved just for my air power. Like the United States before. First Bangley then this. What if I had no plane? What if I were just Big Hig, just making my way through the broken world offering what I could, some kindness, some compassion, some technical knowhow but no plane. Who are you kidding? Bang.

  Ask the guys at the Coke truck.

  What?

  Sorry. Been so much alone I don’t know sometimes when I’m talking to myself.

  I turned toward the running stream and spat.

  I’m not fucking with you. I flew past my point of no return. That was right around Colbran.

  He scanned my face again. The emotion was hard to read but his eyes moved over my features like a mason taking the measure of a very old wall. There was a frank reassessment in his eyes that unnerved me.

  Higs, you are gonna fly us out of here. You fly us to a town, a fortified compound, I don’t give a shit, and I’ll take care of getting fuel.

  I shivered. I bet he would.

  Auto gas won’t work anymore.

  What?

  After three years none of it would. Even adding lead. Went stale. Not stable enough. Hundred low lead is far more stable. Still good but pushing its life nine years out. Anyone out here, their gas is long dead.

  He chewed the inside of his cheek. Hadn’t spit once, I guess he swallowed it.

  At Erie I wasn’t worried. I had a line on a warehouse in Commerce City full of PRI which “restores gas to refinery condition” according to the literature in each case. Like magic. Enough to last another decade at least. But. Out here who knows. Even avgas might not work. Depends on the condition of the tanks, mostly.

  It was hard to look at him. I didn’t feel like a stone wall anymore. I felt like a rabbit. Caught out in the open.

  Why’d you come here? he said simply.

  Didn’t answer. Not defensive, not reticent, I just didn’t know. Not really.

  You got in your plane and flew past your point of no return. In a world maybe without any more good fuel. You left a safe haven, a partnership that worked. For a country that is not at all safe, where anyone you meet is most likely going to try to kill you. If not from outright predation then from disease. What the fuck were you thinking? Hig.

  My dog died, I said.

  I told him about the radio transmission I’d picked up three years ago. I told him about hunting and fishing and Jasper dying and killing the boy and others, and being at the end of all loss.

  I didn’t have another idea, I said.

  He knew it all. He knew that a Cessna 182 of the Beast’s vintage usually carried fifty five usable gallons. He knew the burn rate per hour would be about thirteen. He knew the approximate distances. He had figured it all. He had figured I was right at the PONR, no return. Figured I had carried a couple extra cans. What he had figured and figured wrong was that I knew what the hell I was doing.

  We’ll go to Junction. We’ll check out what you wanted to check out. The tower, the airport. Then we’ll get some avgas. Then we’ll fly back to Bangley. And if he doesn’t like that we’ll convince him.

  I don’t know if I can take off with both of you. From that meadow.

  Oh you will. If we have to cut your legs off and prop you up. I can work the rudder pedals.

  He smiled grim but I saw a shadow of worry cross the winter of his eyes.

  No point in slaughtering the livestock and making more jerky. We had what must have been twenty pounds from the venison I’d shot and we couldn’t take any more weight. Probably couldn’t take that. Cima said the livestock, they would fend for themselves and God willing there would be enough rain this season to make it through.

  She wanted to take two lambs, male and female.

  They can’t weigh more than twenty pounds apiece.

  I tried to explain that a small plane was more like a kite than a truck. I told her about learning from Dave Harner in Montana, what he yelled at me the first few days as I tried to land the 172 at airports around the shores of Flathead Lake. As I came in on final and the plane swerved and veered like a sick duck he’d yell Jeesus Hig! You drive a motorcycle? Yes! You drive a pickup? Yes! Thought so! Well this ain’t either one! This is a bird! Slight adjustments slight adjustments! Christ! That was atrocious!

  She laughed.

  Harner, my instructor, had been a logger. A big timber logger when there were still big trees in the Northwest. He’d run up and down the steep mountains carrying a forty pound chainsaw with a fifty inch bar and cut more w
ood than anyone else in all that country. Kind of a living Paul Bunyan.

  Remember him? Paul Bunyan?

  Of course.

  Just checking. For his birthday, his thirtieth, his friends gave Dave a demo lesson at the local airport. It was Kalispell. They said they wanted him to see for himself all the country he had clear-cut. Kind of touching when you think about it. So he climbed in with a kid named Billy, a still wet bush pilot, and took the controls for the taxi and got the feel of the rudders right away, little touches—not like me, I almost ran into a box store on my first taxi—and it was his airplane for the takeoff and they climbed out of Kalispell. He did just what Billy told him, every little thing, and he was remarkably, freakishly relaxed. After all, he told me, how freaky could it be after running up and down forty degree slopes with a vicious cutting blade screaming and a thousand tons of timber falling all around you? It was calm, he said. Just uncannily, almost divinely, calm. Not his exact words. He said, Hig it was like flying inside a photograph, one of those real beautiful ones of country you love, all quiet and still the way you want the world to be. What he was talking about was the disembodied detachment you get flying. Like the world is as perfect as a train set and nothing bad can touch you.

  I get that.

  Yeah. He fell in love right there. He went batso. It was almost the same for me except that he was a natural, I wasn’t.

  Were you ever a natural? At anything?

  I thought, At loss. At losing shit. Seems to be my mission in life. Course I didn’t say it, who am I to talk?

  Fishing, I guess. Trout used to throw themselves at me. You?