The Dog Stars (2 page)

In the beginning there was Fear. Not so much the flu by then, by then I walked, I talked. Not so much talked, but of sound body—and of mind, you be the judge. Two straight weeks of fever, three days 104 to 105, I know it cooked my brains. Encephalitis or something else. Hot. Thoughts that once belonged, that felt at home with each other, were now discomfited, unsure, depressed, like those shaggy Norwegian ponies that Russian professor moved to the Siberian Arctic I read about before. He was trying to recreate the Ice Age, a lot of grass and fauna and few people. Had he known what was coming he would have pursued another hobby. Half the ponies died, I think of heartbreak for their Scandinavian forests, half hung out at the research station and were fed grain and still died. That’s how my thoughts are sometimes. When I’m stressed. When something’s bothering me and won’t let go. They’re pretty good, I mean they function, but a lot of times they feel out of place, kinda sad, sometimes wondering if maybe they
are supposed to be ten thousand miles from here in a place with a million square miles of cold Norwegian spruce. Sometimes I don’t trust my thoughts not to bolt for the brush. Probably not my brain, probably normal for where we’re at.

I don’t want to be confused: we are nine years out. The flu killed almost everybody, then the blood disease killed more. The ones who are left are mostly Not Nice, why we live here on the plain, why I patrol every day.

I started sleeping on the ground because of the attacks. Survivors, it seemed like they picked it out on the map. On a big creek, check. So water, check. Must have fuel, check. Since it was an airport, check. Anyone who read anything knew, too, that it was a model for sustainable power, check. Every house with panels and the FBO run mostly on wind. Check. FBO means Fixed Base Operator. Could’ve just said the Folks Who Run the Airport. If they knew what was coming they wouldn’t have complicated everything so much.

Mostly the intruders came at night. They came singly or in groups, they came with weapons, with hunting rifles, with knives, they came to the porch light I left on like moths to a flame.

I have four sixty watt panels on the house I don’t sleep in, so one LED light all night is no problem.

I was not in the house. I was asleep under blankets on the open ground behind the berm a hundred yards away. It is an old airport, it is all open ground. Jasper’s low growl. He’s a blue heeler mix with a great nose. I wake up. I beep Bangley on the handset. For him I think it was like sport. Kind of cleaned out his carbon, the way for me going up to the mountains.

It was a high berm, just a big mound of dirt, we made it higher. Tall enough to walk behind. Bangley, he saunters up and snuggles down beside me at the top where I am already watching with the goggles, and I smell his rasping breath. He has them too, the goggles, in fact he has like four, he gave me one. He said at the rate we use them the diodes will last ten years maybe twenty. What happens then? I celebrated my fortieth birthday last year. Jasper got a liver (doe), I ate a can of peaches. I invited Melissa and she came the way she does, a whisper and a shiver.

In ten years the additive will no longer keep the fuel fresh enough. In ten years I’ll be done with all this. Maybe.

Half the time, if the moon is up or if there is starlight and snow, Bangley doesn’t need the goggles, he has the red dot, he just centers the red dot on the moving figures, on the ones standing still, crouching, whispering, centers it on the shadow by the old dumpster, puts the red dot on a torso.
Bang
. He takes his time, plans out the sequence,
bang bang bang
. Breath gets heavier, raspier just before. Like he’s about to fuck someone which I guess he is.

The biggest group we had was seven. I heard Bangley lying beside me counting under his breath. Shit on a shingle, he murmured and chuckled like he does when he is not happy. I mean a lot more not happy than usual.

Hig, he whispered, you are going to have to participate.

I have the AR-15 semi-auto, I am good with it, he fitted me with the night scope. I just.

I did.

It was three of them that survived the first volley and after that we had our first bona fide firefight. But they didn’t have night goggles and they didn’t know the terrain and so it didn’t take long.

That’s how it started, the sleeping outside. I was never going to get trapped in the house. Like the dragon sleeps on the pile of treasure, but not me. I stay back a ways.

After the second summer they tapered off, like turning off a faucet, drip drip. One visitor a season maybe, then none. Not for almost a year, then a band of four desperados that almost cleaned our clock. That’s when I started flying regular like a job.

Now I don’t have to sleep on the ground. We have our system, we are confident. The Fear is like a memory of nausea. You can’t remember how bad it was or that you just about asked to die instead. But I do. Sleep on the ground. Under a pile of blankets in winter that must weigh twenty pounds. I like it. Not boxed in. I still sleep behind the berm, I still leave the porch light on, Jasper still curls against my legs, still dreams in whimpers, still trembles under his own blanket, but I think he is mostly deaf now and useless as an alarm which we will never let on to Bangley. Bangley, you just don’t know with him. He harbors. Might resent the meat I share who knows. The way he sees it everything has a use.

I once had a book on the stars but now I don’t. My memory serves but not stellar ha. So I made up constellations. I made a Bear and a Goat but maybe not where they are supposed to be, I made some for the animals that once were, the ones I know about. I made one for Melissa, her whole self standing there kind of smiling and tall looking down on me in the winter nights. Looking down while
frost crinkles in my eyelashes and feathers in my beard. I made one for the little Angel.

Melissa and I lived on a lake in Denver. Only seven minutes from downtown, the big bookstore, the restaurants, movies, we liked that. We could see grass, water, mountains out the big window of the little house. The geese. We had a resident flock and a flock of Canadas that came in fall and spring in great chevrons, mixed with the locals, maybe mated, then moved on. Took off again in raucous waves. I could tell the transients from the wild ones. I thought I could.

In October, November walking around the lake on our evening pre-prandial we’d point them out to each other. I thought she was always wrong. She’d get half mad. She was so smart, but she didn’t know the geese like I did. I never thought of myself as really really smart but I always knew things in my bones.

When we got the puppy Jasper I was confirmed: he would chase the wild ones who were skittish but not the mean residents. My theory anyway.

We had no children. She couldn’t have. We saw a doctor. Tried to sell us treatments we declined. We were okay with just each other. Then she did, like a miracle. Get pregnant. We’d gotten used to the other and I wasn’t sure I could ever love someone more. I watched her sleeping and I thought: I love you more than anything.

Sometimes back then, fishing with Jasper up the Sulphur, I hit my limit. I mean it felt my heart might just burst. Bursting is different than breaking. Like there is no way to contain how beautiful. Not it either, not just beauty. Something about how I fit. This little
bend of smooth stones, the leaning cliffs. The smell of spruce. The small cutthroat making quiet rings in the black water of a pool. And no need to thank even. Just be. Just fish. Just walk up the creek, get dark, get cold, it is all a piece. Of me somehow.

Melissa part of the same circle. But different because we are entrusted with certain souls. Like I could hold her carefully in my cupped hands, like to bear her carefully carefully, the country I cannot, but her I can, and maybe all along it was she holding me.

The hospital St. Vincent’s was right across the lake. The orange helicopters landed there. At the end we talked about flying west but it was too late and there was the hospital, we went to the hospital. To one of the buildings they took over. Filling with the dead.

Bangley just shows up. I’m changing oil. He could rap on the steel siding of the bay but he doesn’t he likes to give me a heart attack. Shows up beside me like a ghost.

What are we monkeying with now?

Jesus, if I have a coronary who will fly your patrols?

We’d find someone wouldn’t we? Put an ad in the paper.

His grin straight across his eyes never smiling.

Anyway I bet I could fly this sucker.

He says it every now and then. It’s like a warning. For what? If he wanted this windy place to himself he would have. A long time ago.

Now Jasper is awake on his dusty blanket and growling. Jasper can’t stomach Bangley unless it’s like an emergency visitor situation in which case he keeps his trap shut, he’s a team player. Once just after Bangley showed up Jasper snapped at his arm and Bangley unholstered a sidearm big as like a skillet and aimed and I yelled. The only time. I said You shoot the dog we all die.

Bangley blinked he had that grin. What do you mean we all die?

I mean I fly patrols from the air, the only way we know we can secure the perimeter.

That word. It was the only one that hit its target. I almost saw it go in his ear and through the tubes into his brain. Perimeter. Only way to secure. He blinked. He worked his jaw side to side. He stank. Like old blood like when you butcher a deer.

Only reason I am still alive. How do you think I live here by myself?

So that’s how the bargain was struck. Without even a negotiation.

No words but that. I flew. He killed. Jasper growled. We let each other be.

I was saying: I’m changing the oil in the Beast and he shows up beside me like a ghost.

Why do you visit the Druids? he says.

They’re not Druids they’re Mennonites.

He grunts.

I put down the filter wrench. Lay it on a rolling box. Pick up the safety wire pliers.

Bangley is standing there. I smell before I see him. I feed the wire through the hole in the flange at the filter’s base, twist it with the pliers. It’s safety wire. Holds the filter on in case. All to spec. FAA regs. Wouldn’t want the oil filter to vibrate loose, fall off, spill all the oil midair and the engine tears apart. Has happened. They used to say all FAA rules resulted from a real accident. So the .032 mil wire is maybe a kind of memorial to some pilot. Maybe his family too.

Bangley is picking his teeth with a splinter of wood, watching me. On top of the tool box is a shop rag a square of old t-shirt. The graphic is faded but I can see rows of smudged pink cartoon women: big breasted little breasted all shapes and underneath “melons” “peaches” “jugs” “plums” “raisins” a big “Cabo” bannered across the top. I read all the fruit before I reach in and wipe everything down one more time. Stab of pain. Just that. Fold it. A cartoon. That we are so hard wired that way. That two little arcs or circles of a cartoon boob could stir up memory, a temperature, change, a tightening of guts, a crawling in the groin. I think it’s curious. I half gulp, stand still for a second, breathe.

Melissa was cantaloupes.

Cabo is out at the end of a nine hundred mile peninsula. Plenty of fish probably. Is there some survivor like me out at the old municipal airport changing the oil in an antique Maule, flying recon every day, using a Ski Colorado t-shirt as a shop rag? Fishing of an evening off some dilapidated pier that still stinks of creosote? Wondering what it’s like to ski.

Why didn’t Colorado shirts ever have tits on them? I ask Bangley.

Not much of a sense of humor in old B.

Walk to the north wall of the hangar slide a case of 50 straight weight Arrowshell off the stack. Set it down on a wooden stool. The sunlight is retreating back across the concrete slab to the open doorway. Bangley is wearing his honking sidearm. Night and day. Once he went to the pond in the creek bottom to hook a catfish and a bearded stranger built like a bear rose out of the Russian olive and attacked him. He says. Bangley shot him through his shaggy head. Brought an entire leg back still wearing three sets of ripped pants and a bandaged boot. The left. Threw it down in front of the hangar.