The Dog Stars (3 page)

For the dog he said. Angry. Because I didn’t do my job. To him. I didn’t guarantee the perimeter.

Why do you visit the Mormons? he says again. He is fucking with me. He is ramrod straight and inclines forward real subtle when he is pissed.

I pull at one flap of the cardboard box of motor oil. The glue is heavy, I tear it open tear the other side, four rows of three black quarts. The pale waxy line down the side of each tall rectangular bottle is translucent for reading the level, they remind me of tuxedo pants. One stripe of piping. Twelve little groomsmen.

How do you know that I do?

Bangley gets mad in gradations of increasing internal pressure like a volcano. The veins in his nose turn purple. Madder I mean. He is like one of those volcanoes in Ecuador that is always threatening to blow even when the top looks wisped with clouds like any other mountain.

We agreed, he says. Seismologists at the USGS or wherever seeing portentous tremors on the graph. A certain vein in his forehead just under the bill of his Ducks Unlimited camo cap beginning to throb.

No, you agreed. With yourself.

Off limits. It’s off limits.

What are you? The Base Commander?

I should never talk to Bangley this way. I know it as I say it. I just get sick of the attitude sick to death of it. He’s working his jaw back and forth.

I put the funnel, just an old oil bottle cut off halfway, back down on top of the other quarts. I face him.

Look Bangley relax. Want a Coke?

Once every two months I land on a cleared boulevard in Commerce City and restock ten cases of the oil. On the way over one day I found the Coke truck. I always bring back four cases, two for him two for me. A case of Sprite for the families which I don’t tell him about. Most of the cans have frozen too many times and burst but the plastic bottles survive. Bangley always goes through his Coke a lot faster.

You’ll kill us both. We agreed.

I get him a Coke. Here relax. It’s not good for your heart.

He had arteriosclerosis. Has. Once he said: I’m a time bomb. Which he didn’t have to tell me.

I open it so he has no choice. At the crack of the top and the sound of the fizz he winces like one more Coke down, one less in the world.

Here.

Hig you will kill us. He drinks, he can’t help himself. I can see it work in his throat and down into his barrel chest.

He makes himself stop before he drains the whole bottle. You know just one cough, he says. That’s what they said at the end. Not just through blood.

Sharing bodily fluids. I’m not fucking a Mennonite.

A cough is a bodily fluid. Land in your eye. Open your mouth to speak.

I don’t think that was ever proven.

What the fuck does it matter if it’s proven. You want to get this far and die of the blood?

This far. I’m thinking not saying it. This far. Bangley and Jasper and a low fat diet. Well.

You can’t choose for me Hig.

I breathe.

Everything we do is risky. Once in a while they need my help.

For what? For fucking what? They have what? Two, three, five years tops? The luckiest? Every few months one dies. I can tell
by how you mope around. For what? Boils and rash and bloody coughs and burning?

They are people. They are trying to stay alive day by day. Maybe some can survive it. There were rumors of survivors.

He is still inclined forward, still throbbing the vein with a dribble of fresh Coke on the stubble of his chin.

They are no threat to us Bruce.

The sound of his given name widens his eyes. He never told it to me, it was always just I’m Bangley, which like I said I rarely use.

The families know to stay fifteen feet back. I’ve trained them. Not once not ever have they showed any aggression, nothing but gratitude, kind of embarrassing gratitude when I fix a pump or show them how to make a fish trap for the creek. Truth is I do it as much for me as them: it kinda loosens something inside me. That nearly froze up.

Bangley works the jaw stares at me. That last thing—it’s like I just spoke perfect Japanese, a whole paragraph ending with a slight bow. Like A, he can’t believe I fucking said it, and B, he doesn’t understand a single syllable. Psycho spiritual language it leaves him, well, less than cold.

Once I asked him if he thought there was something more. We were sharing two rare Cokes on the front porch of my house I never go in, under the bulb I leave on at night that used to work like a bug zapper for attackers. It was evening and the October sun was making for the mountains. Like some old couple taking their ease. Two wicker chairs losing their paint and cricking when we shifted our weight. His chair had a rhythm like he remembered
what it was to sit in a rocker. Only time I can think of he told me anything about his life before. He grew up in Oklahoma. That’s what he told me.

It’s not like you think, he added. Long story.

That was it. A little cryptic. I hadn’t really thought anything. He never elaborated. Still, seemed like we were making leaps and bounds intimacy-wise.

I told him I used to build houses.

What kind of houses?

Timber frame. Adobe. Odd custom stuff. Wrote a book too.

A book on building houses.

No. A little book. Poetry. Nobody read it.

Shit? He took a measured sip of Coke watching me as he tipped back the bottle, watching me as he set it back down on his thigh, kind of appraising me with a new appreciation, not readable good or bad. Adjusting the context.

Wrote for magazines now and then. Mostly about fishing, outdoor stuff.

The relief it swept his face like pushing off a cloud shadow. I almost laughed. You could see the gears: Phew, outdoor stuff, Hig is not a homo.

Growing up I wanted to be a writer. A great writer. Summers I worked construction, framing. Like that. Tough to make a living
as a writer. Anyway I probably wasn’t so good. Got married bought a house. Led to another thing then the other thing.

Long story, I said.

Bangley held his Coke in both hands in his lap. He kind of hunched over himself maybe remembering. Suddenly remote like his spirit retreated to a safer distance. To watch. From a distance. Still rocking the chair that didn’t rock.

We didn’t speak for a long time. The sun touched one of the higher peaks, broke slowly like a bloody yolk. Wind stirred, rattled the dried rabbit brush at the exact moment. Cold.

I asked him if he ever thought there was anything more than this, than just surviving day to day. Recon, fixing the plane, growing the five vegetables, trapping a rabbit. Like what are we waiting for?

His chair,
crick crick
, stopped. He got very still like a hunter that smelled an animal on the wind. Close. Like he woke up.

Say again.

More than this. Day to day.

He worked his jaw, his mineral eyes graying in the fading light. Like maybe I’d tipped over the edge.

Gotta go he said. Stood up. Hooked a finger in the breast pocket of his flannel shirt, fished out the bottle cap, screwed it on. Carried his Coke off the porch, boot cracking the broken step.

That was maybe the second year. So now in the hangar I know the stuff about thawing out inside will not exactly exact sympathy.
Half the time with Bangley I’m thinking about all the stuff I should never say.

I crack a quart of oil and tip it into the funnel made from a cut off bottle and snug it down into its twin. Leave it to drain. Face him.

Who knows maybe one day
we
will need
them
. We can’t know.

Ha. A cough of contempt dismissive. Never happen Hig. For funeral detail maybe.

He had consigned them, wished it. All of them dead.

You want to be the only one left? You’d be just as happy. The only goddamn human being left on earth.

If it shakes out like that. Better than the alternative. Anyway I got you. He tipped back the Coke watched me past the bottle.

He meant the alternative if everyone’s going to die. I think. I didn’t say it: One day I’m gonna climb in the Beast and fly west and keep going.

No you won’t he said.

What?

What you were thinking. There is no other safe place. Maybe on the planet. We got the perimeter, water, power, food, firepower. We got mountains close enough if the game gets scarce. We got no internal strife no politics cause it’s just you and me. We got no internal to tear apart. Like the Mormons like everybody else out there who ain’t alive anymore. We keep it simple we survive.

He grins.

Country boys will survive.

His favorite phrase.

I stare at my only friend on earth. I guess he’s my friend.

Don’t go killing us, he says and leaves.

Still I go when they ask. The patrol goes west to the mountain front then south. I follow the line of trees that mark the river. At the stacks of the power plant and the reservoir I swing back northwest. The Mennonites are on the creek. In an old turkey farm. Eight metal sheds in two rows of four set at angles like diagonally parked cars. Tall century old trees strung along a windbreak and clustered into a grove in the middle of which cants the asphalt roof of a big brick farmhouse. Two ponds fed by the creek. In one I can see floats, an empty canoe. An array of solar panels to the south of the sheds and two windmills, one mechanical for drawing water. Why they came here in the first place.

In the yard, in the clearing, a thirty foot flagpole, flag long since gone, maybe stripped for a baby blanket. When they need help they hoist a ripped red union suit. Signal and wind sock. In a strong wind it splays legs and arms out stiff like a headless man.

I land on the straight dirt drive that Ts from the old county road to the west. I can see the sign swiveling in the wind. At the head of the drive they wired a metal sign to two posts it has a red skull and crossbones says DANGER WE HAVE THE BLOOD. The drive
floods, gets sliced with ruts. They come out with shovels and fill the holes. They aren’t good at maintenance, they’re most of the time too weak, but the landing strip is one thing they keep clean. Almost always a strong crosswind from say 330. I slip the Beast so she comes down cocked, almost sideways to the drive, left wing low, nose ruddered over hard to the south, then kick her straight at the last second, the kids in the yard jump up and down, I can see they are laughing from two hundred feet, it’s the only time I ever see them laugh.

Jasper used to be able to jump up into the cockpit now he can’t. In the fourth year we had an argument. I took out the front passenger seat for weight and cargo and put down a flannel sleeping bag with a pattern of a man shooting a pheasant over and over, his dog on three legs, pointing, out in front. Not sure why I didn’t do that before. The dog doesn’t look like Jasper, still. I carried him. Lay him on the pattern of the man and the dog.

You and me in another life I tell him.

He likes to fly. Anyway I wouldn’t leave him alone with Bangley.

When I took out the seat he got depressed. He couldn’t sit up and look out. He knows to stay back of the rudder pedals. Once in a shear he skidded into them and nearly killed us. After that I fashioned like a four inch wood fence but scrapped it after he inspected it and jumped out of the plane and like refused to fly, no shit. It insulted him. The whole thing. I used to worry about the engine roar and prop blast, I wear the headset even though there is no one to talk to on the radio because it dampens the noise, but I worried about Jasper, even tried to make him his own hearing
protector, this helmet kind of thing, it wouldn’t stay on. Probably why he’s mostly deaf now.

When I picked up oil etc I moved the quilt to the top of the stack so he could look out.

See? I said. At least it’s good half the time. Better than most of us can expect.

He still thought it was lame I could tell. Not half as excited. So now when I’m not picking up, just flying, which is most of the time, I bolt the seat back in, it just takes a few minutes. Not like we don’t have time. First time he sat up straight again and glanced at me like What took you so long? then looked forward real serious, brow furrowed like a copilot. His mood it lifted palpable as weather.