The Dog Stars

  I guess they ate then because the bugs were out. It was not cold as it would be later when truly dark and the ropy stars skeined together and you could feel the heat of the day radiating off the rock wall.

  I took the few dishes to the creek and washed them with sand. They cooked outside most of the time in a firepit lined with river stones. On those nights father and daughter sat on two stumps and watched the wind rashed embers like TV. I set the wet dishes on the table and lay in the hammock and tried to see how long I could go without thinking about anything. I think my record was six Mississippi.

  One night I fell asleep naked before I could crawl into my bag and I woke in the dark with the weight of the cover settling over me.

  Not alarmed, it seemed right. I made to sit up and a hand pushed me back. Shhh, she said. I came out to pee and thought you’d get cold that way.

  I lay back.

  Thanks.

  She leaned over me I felt her hair brush my face, a touch of her breath, then she was lifting the quilt, stretching her length alongside, and she wriggled in her hips, her ribs in the margin of hammock tight against me and she said into my neck

  There.

  That’s all. Then she fell asleep.

  She was wearing the man’s shirt. Nothing else. I could feel her mound against my leg. Mons pubis, right? The cradle of her pelvic bones. I lay there, heart hammering. I traced her body in my mind from her toes where they touched mine, kind of bony and cold, up her calves, thighs, to the inside of her knees, the kneecap where it burrowed into the crook of my own leg—you get the idea. My brain all on its own took the trip, followed the map, lingered at every place of interest, every scenic view. It was the novelty. My heart pounded and my dick uncurled and straightened and lengthened, and then it was almost pain. It throbbed, and my mind continued to travel. Up and down her length, every point of contact. At some point I must have exhausted myself, run out of gas, I slept.

  The next morning I realized that it was the weight of another cramping your space in sleep, that it was hearing another’s breathing. That simple. Jasper did that. Past that don’t even go there. That was all she wanted or she would’ve asked.

  The next day at breakfast which is cold meat and potatoes, in the garden, at the supper table, tending the fire, she is the same. The same calm eyes absorbing everything, the way a dark pond absorbs sunlight. The marvel of it. Women are like that. Pops is not, I’m not. He’s no fool, probably expecting some similar development since Day One. Whatever development it is, maybe nothing. After all we are some of the few people left on earth just about. It’s like one of those desert island jokes. The one about the hat. Be weirder if it didn’t happen, right, Hig?

  Not really. Doesn’t feel like that. Feels frigging weird. Not weird, tumultuous. Momentous. Well, it’s probably nothing. Probably doesn’t mean a thing, I mean just an experiment to see how it felt after all those years. A sleep experiment.

  His eyes rest on me a fraction of a second longer. That’s all. Subtle but loud. I can’t meet them. I look away. I get that Pops is a hard man where he needs to be hard, but beyond that he pretty much minds his own business and expects the same.

  Does she want to be my girlfriend? What a stupid idiotic thought. Are you in goddamn high school? You are on the Beach man. Last man and woman left in what? Three counties probably. It’s your patriotic duty to follow that through.

  It is?

  No.

  What then?

  Shrug.

  Do what you want.

  What do I want?

  I want to be two people at once. One runs away.

  The next night she came very late. I realized I’d been waiting most of the night without sleeping. Just waiting. Wondering what I would do, what she would. She lifted the quilt which I’d left unzipped and squeezed in and snuggled her mouth into my ear and murmured, Miss me. And fell asleep. It was an order and a question.

  Pretty cramped. She lay in the crook of my arm which fell asleep, went numb. I felt her length, her thigh over mine, her breast against my side, the expansion of her breath. She smelled like smoke and something sweet, tangy the way sage is tangy. I got another bursting hard on. I lay there. You again? Becoming a regular are you? You are welcome, probably, pending good behavior. I lay there trying to make out constellations through the leaves, smelling her hair, listening to the relaxed concourse of her breath. In the middle of the night she found me, it. Slipped her hand down my belly and stroked. Lightly. Not a murmur, not a kiss, as if we were both asleep. We weren’t. My body felt like an air base in one of those movies when the incoming siren goes off. Everybody scrambling toward the fighters from everywhere. Every cell awake pouring its attention toward my surprised dick. Felt really really good. Wonderful. Her hand slowed, paused, twitched twice, she was asleep. I was still hanging on a terrible edge. I lay there in a kind of suspended, excruciating wonder.

  Pops and I took the spade, the machete up to the meadow, worked on the runway. Worked in silence, moving stones, leveling, tamping dirt, cutting brush. If there was any awkwardness it was mine. We were rooting out a mesquite bush in the middle of the track. He was prying with the spade, I was pulling on a rope we’d tied to the slender stump. I swung around the arc like on a tether to yank from a better direction, and pulled, and a stout root freed itself and kicked dirt into his face. He stopped, stood straight, blinded. Slowly cleared the dirt, spat. He held the shovel with both hands like a pike.

  Hig, you’re acting squirrely. More squirrely than usual.

  He didn’t say Higs. He blinked out more dirt, wiped his eyes with a knuckle.

  Do you need my blessing or something? Like a corny movie?

  Shocked me worse than if he’d slugged me. I held the end of the rope as if I weren’t sure why, as if it were the tail of some beast I wasn’t sure I wanted to be so intimate with.

  At this stage in the game I got bigger fish to fry. I was never that kind of dad anyway. I never once said, Have her home by ten.

  I looked down at my hand holding the rope, at the dirt all over his face and started to laugh. Christ. I laughed. The more I laughed the more funny it was. Shit, I don’t know, maybe it was the pent up tension from the night before. Deadly sperm backup we used to call it. Maybe it was just the desert island cartoon thing, the protective father thing, the way that no one was acting like they were supposed to act. Was that it? Probably not. Probably simple relief that Pops hadn’t killed me yet. Or that he was standing there with dirt all over his face and not mad. Or just that I hadn’t laughed, really laughed, in way too long.

  Must have been after mid-June. I lost count of the days. Probably not a good thing to do. I mean with no newspaper, no apparatus to tell you the date. Once you lose count, well it’s gone forever.

  We finished the venison, all but the jerky which we were saving for the trip, and we slaughtered a sheep and had been eating mutton for two days. Mutton and last summer’s potatoes and new greens, lettuce, chard, peas. The days were hot and the creek a slow runnel and the nights warm. She came just a little while after dark, after I’d settled in with the flannel bag beneath me on the hammock sleeping only in my shirt. She was wearing a long man’s shirt and her hand came to my face and passed over my cheek and she grabbed a tuft of my beard and pulled which made me laugh. There was a quarter moon like a ruddy lightship floating over the canyon and I could see her clearly. She was holding a blanket. She spread it on the dirt beside the hammock and lay down on her back, one arm propped under her head. She watched the moon, I watched her. I stuck my bare foot over the edge of the hammock and touched it to the wool of the blanket and pushed off and swung myself.

  Playing hard to get? she murmured.

  No.

  I rocked. She unbuttoned the shirt. It parted. She pushed the far side of it off her breast with her free hand and still gazing at the sky she tucked her fingers under a button and pulled the rest of it to the side. It fell open. The rise and fall of her breath. The length of her. In the dark she
radiated a soft light of her own like waves breaking at night. The smooth pale plain of her stomach. The—all of her.

  Jesus Christ, Hig, don’t turn away, don’t close your eyes. Breathe, man! You are supposed to look, dumbass! It’s not impolite. If you don’t look you will insult her. Who the fuck do you think this is for, this is for you! She wasn’t, like, just in the neighborhood.

  All of that in my clamorous head. Telling myself to be respectful, act like a grownup. Soak up every detail. She has vouchsafed you some portion of pure luck. Be grateful.

  The rusty moon painted her without shadow. My toes dug into the wool and I stopped swinging. I held still and watched her. A kind of suspended awe. The way I had watched a royal elk step out of aspen: what you are seeing, Hig, cannot be real, it is just too magnificent. Don’t twitch a muscle or it will vanish.

  She didn’t vanish. She turned her head to me. I cleared my throat.

  You were in the neighborhood, I said lamely. My voice came out kind of high like an adolescent who can’t control the timbre.

  She raised one eyebrow: maybe. She raised up on her elbows and shrugged the shirt down her arms. Then she rolled over and lay on her stomach, her head on her crossed hands. Offering another vista. The world can end but you are not immune oh no.

  If you want, you can just look at me, she said. It’s probably been a long time. I’m in no hurry.

  She raised her sweet butt into the air.

  Um, is it okay if we rush through that part.

  Unh huh.

  I got my ass out of the hammock, shucked my shirt and lay down beside her. I don’t know why, but I thought of flying. How there is a checklist you tick down before starting the engine, before taxiing, before takeoff. How if you are flying every day all the motions are smooth, sequential, you barely look at the list, but if it’s been a while you are halting, thinking through everything, taking each item one at a time, making sure. So you don’t have a wreck.

  I forget where to start, I said. I feel like a—

  A fifteen year old wouldn’t say that.

  Yeah. I was thinking more like a pilot. A rusty pilot with a bunch of checklists. So we won’t crash.

  Touch my back, she said.

  I did. I ran my fingers over her lightly. Her skin tightened and smoothed out under them. I thought of wind moving over a field of wheat. She whimpered.

  Does it hurt?

  No. God, no. She said it into her folded arms. It has to be light but it feels great.

  My hand swept over the rise of her ass moved over her thighs the backs the insides.

  Mmmm, she murmured. Maybe it’s better when you forget.

  She rocked up onto her side and her fingers found my hair, my beard, tangled into them, pulled my face into her. When her mouth found mine I disassembled. Not exploded like a bomb or anything, but came apart. A few pieces at a time. They floated away, went into a kind of orbit. A splintering galaxy. An extravagant slow motion annihilation. The only center was her mouth, her hair. It was her. A reconstitution around the core of her. Without thought. I rolled on top of her and she gasped in pain.

  Wait—

  Oh. Shit. Scrambling off.

  It’s okay, okay. Here. I’m not so fragile. She pushed me onto my back. She kissed me. Kissed and kissed her hair covering me. She kissed my eyes nose lips. With her mouth, then she lowered her breasts onto my face and kissed me, brushed with her nipples, eyes, nose, tongue. And then. Surprise. The shock of it. She lowered herself onto me. The first touch. Wet. Like her mouth. Resistance. That heat. Ever so slowly, and slip, surrender.

  Oh god, don’t move. All those pieces. She moved. Her moving over me called them called them. The way a thousand fish rock together with the swell. Back and forth. The way the stars in the leaves. I reached. In her, in the very center, somewhere the single only stillness where everything cohered. Nothing but reach.

  And then I let go. From reaching the strain to what? Nothing. Relinquish. Fall. If I cried and I’m not saying I did. The bliss, the sheer loss of falling.

  She keened and I exploded. Whatever constellation, whatever was achieved was riven by light and scattered to the dark and fuck, that’s where it should have been all along. She lay on me shuddering her weight and all those bits of us rained down as soft and unapologetic as ash.

  Whew, she whispered, her lips moving in my ear.

  Yeah, whew.

  We crashed, huh?

  Yup. In a good way.

  How you refill. Lying there. Something like happiness, just like water, pure and clear pouring in. So good you don’t even welcome it, it runs through you in a bright stream, as if it has been there all along.

  We lay as still as we could, heart pounding against heart, a sympathetic rhythm that ricocheted and bounced and went counter and synced again, both of us I think fascinated by the music of it and the sensation. After a while she rose up and pulled the flannel quilt over us and snuggled down beside me and we slept. Not like the other nights of confusion. A deep and relieved slumber. Real comfort, simple exhaustion.

  Before dawn, to spare him embarrassment, I guess, she rose, buttoned her shirt and went back into the meadow to sleep in the blankets on the thick bed of ponderosa needles she used on warm nights. Out under the stars, she said, where she could see everything. But I think it was the comfort of the cattle breathing, the rhythmic tearing of grass, always two or three who grazed at night beside, around her. And he snored, she said. He came to the creek at first light as he always did, over the burble I could hear the splashing, the brushing teeth with the defunct flattened bristles, a few hawks and spits, a cough.

  And she—I could hear her wishing him good morning, opened my eyes, saw her in the shirt but with pants now she must keep by her bed. The wonderful satisfaction of seeing her like that now, out in the world, as conscribed as it is. In knowing her now as I did. Closed my eyes to doze again. She always refused to let me start the morning fire. It’s mine, she insisted. My ritual. Don’t mess with my habits. They are how we get along around here. Relax. Sleep in. I did. When I got up she always had the mug of bitter tea ready. Welcome as much for the ritual of it I guess as for the puckering taste.

  That morning I rose slowly, stretched, took an inventory: Hig, you have your arms? Check. Your legs? Check. You have not really been blown to pieces? Nope. You have your heart? Not a question you’ve asked before. Not after. Yes I do. A little joggled, a little fuller. Lighter and heavier, too, go figure.

  They were at the fire. I smelled roasting meat. I splashed my face, chest, dunked my head, dried myself with the shirt, walked to the fire.

  Morning.

  Pops nodded. She was squatting, adding a chunk of split wood to the flames and the sunup breeze swirled the smoke around, wreathed her. She winced, grimaced, craned her face to the side, added the wood.

  Morning, I said.

  She was either too smoked out to hear me or couldn’t answer. The grimace. She stood, stepped out of the smoke, put her knuckles to her teary eyes.

  Morning, I said.

  She wiped the tears, blinked at me out of irritated eyes. Saw her heave a breath. Didn’t say a word. She lifted the steaming kettle off a stump, poured it, handed me my mug without looking at me.

  Meat’s gonna burn, she said. To her dad or to me or no one. Edge of frustration.

  I’ll get it, I said. I reached for the long fork but she pushed my hand away with her forearm, grabbed the fork, turned the chops on the wire grill.

  Relax, she said.

  My insides froze. Glanced at Pops who politely turned to the side on his seat, his expression blank. He studied the top of the far canyon wall, sipped his drink.

  Again:

  Just relax. I’ll have chops in a minute.

  I heaved a long breath, turned aside, too, studied the far wall with Pops. You have your arms? Hig? Hig? Yes, I do. Your legs? Yes. Stop there. Be grateful for that.

  I could’ve cried. Stood in the billowing smoke and used it for cover. So this is
how it is.

  After a silent breakfast, silent chewing, I took the dishes to the creek as I always did: three plates, three mugs, three folding knives, three forks, the long fork. Let the wire grill burn off. I spread the fine sand around on the enamel plates with my fingers, scraped at the grease. Focus on the task at hand, concentrate, Hig. The water. It seemed warm. Warmer. That was frigging sad. Sad. Dug the fork tines down into the gravel bottom, wiped them in my fingers. Fuck. I breathed. When I was done I lay them out to dry on the board table. Pops passed me. He was carrying the rifle, shoulder slung, and the spade.

  I’m going to scout the highway, he said. I don’t want to walk out there on the big day and find a beat up useless piece of road.

  That made sense. We didn’t have enough fuel to circle while he filled and packed some potholes.

  He took a step, then glanced back at me.

  Everybody’s been through a lot, he said.

  I loved him then.

  For the first time I felt him as some kind of family. As much as you could construct from blowdown and debris.

  Yeah.

  He nodded, walked on downcanyon toward the brush fence.

  She was sweeping the packed dirt around the fire with a twig broom. She did it every morning to beat back the crumbs and keep ants and mice away from the kitchen.

  As I approached, she swept. No pause. Focused on the dirt ahead of the broom.

  Want me to pick some greens for lunch, I said.

  My guts were gripped. She kept sweeping.

  If you want, she murmured. Swept.

  Cima?

  Sweep. The harsh twiggy scrape.

  I caught her arm. She went rigid.

  Ow!

  I dropped it like a hot grill. She stared at me.

  That’s gonna bruise, she said. No modulation.