The Dog Stars

by Peter Heller

  Still useful but after nine years so many of the runways are unusable or you have to know where the two foot pothole is exactly and rudder around it. Surprising how fast. How fast it turns back to grass and ground. Back before, there was a TV show: Life After People. I watched every one. I recorded it. I was gripped. By this idea: New York City in a thousand years would look like: an estuary. A marsh. A river. Woods. Hills. I liked it. I can’t say why. It thrilled me.

  That fast. Because it is amazing how fast girder steel corrodes when exposed to water and air, how fast roots break shit apart. It all falls down. Oh, so the runways: nine years doesn’t sound like a long time but it is for the tarmac unmaintained and it is for a brain-cooked human trying to live it. I could make a list. Nine years is pretty fucking long:

  To live with Bangley’s bullshit.

  To remember the ad hoc flu ward and.

  To miss my wife after.

  To think about fishing and not go.

  Other stuff.

  But. I lost a cylinder one evening south of Bennet. I was flying the city which I do now and then not too low just to see and. Tap tap tap vibration like a mother. Best to get down and troubleshoot, might be just a fouled plug. I didn’t need the Garmin to tell me Buckley the air force base was just to the west maybe twelve miles. I banked around and came down with the gold sun straight in my eyes, banging louder, now kind of alarming like it would suck to throw a bearing and practically blind with the sun, using the left pavement edge as a guide, and a hundred feet after I touched down still tearing ass, maybe seventy indicated, WHOMP, and had it been the nose gear and not the left main the Beast, and me too, we would be toast. Jasper too. I walked back and checked. The hole was waist deep practically, neatly rectanguloid, it looked like it had been dug out by prairie dogs with little backhoes. Fuck. My back. The jolt. I sat down with my legs dangling in the hole, Jasper sat too and leaned against me like he does, and glanced up at me real quick and polite, and real concerned. Sitting that way reminded me of a Japanese restaurant Melissa took me to once that had instead of chairs, instead of mats and pillows, like a well for your feet, like cheat floor seating for stiff Westerners. The sun threw our shadows about half a mile long down the runway. As it was, the impact cracked the strut, which is when I learned to weld and also it’s possible to weld with solar power.

  I sat with my feet in the hole and shook myself by the shoulders and said, What’s wrong with you? Is this a game to you?

  That took a while to answer.

  Do you want to live today?

  Yes.

  Do you grant that you may want to live tomorrow? And maybe the next day?

  Yes.

  Then get methodical. You got nothing but time.

  So I made a survey. I took the chart we call a sectional and flew every airstrip within a hundred miles. I flew Centennial, I flew Colorado Springs, the Air Force Academy, I flew Kirby, formerly Nebraska, I flew Cheyenne. I flew them all at probably thirty feet in good light and made notes. Surprising how many would have killed me. At Cranton we almost did when I came in for the fly-by real low and parallel to the runway and some xenophobe put a high powered hole through the fuselage. I knew because it exited right through my side window up and out. That’s how I knew we had neighbors in Cranton.

  So the Nearest button still works but about half I can’t use anymore at all. Better to land in an old field. Used to mean Nearest Haven now means Nearest Maybe Death Trap. All good information.

  I still monitor the radio. Old habits die hard. Every airport has a frequency so traffic can talk to each other if there’s no tower. Important to know where everybody is when you’re taking off or entering the pattern. Used to be. Collisions used to happen every year. Between airports there’s no designated way to communicate but there’s an emergency frequency 121.5. What I do when I’m approaching an airport is flip to the old channel. When I’m within five miles I make a call. Call a few times.

  Loveland traffic Cessna Six Three Three Three Alpha five to the south at six thousand en route Greeley. Repeat. Anybody? I’m the only goddamn plane up here and likely to be til the end of time. Maybe on another planet in another universe they will again invent the Cessna. Ha!

  I laugh. I hoot. It’s kinda morbid. Jasper glances sideways with mild canine embarrassment.

  I have a book of poems by William Stafford. It’s the only thing I went back for: my poetry collections. Landing at night on no power, no lights, in the old King Sooper’s parking lot, one row a thousand easy feet between low cars, the wings went over and no light poles. Just over a mile from there to the house. Fires burning west and south, some punctuating gunshots. Waiting in the plane with the AR-15 between my legs waiting to see if anyone was left to bother the Beast for the half hour I’d be gone.

  I took the rifle and jogged around the lake like so many times before, morning and evening. Used to jog. I ignored the pictures on the mantel, along the stairs, didn’t look, packed an old backpack and a duffel full of books, just poems. Fingered We Die Alone which is the first book Melissa gave me which was creepily prognosticant in the title only: the protagonist is a true real Norwegian commando back in the last good war. He out-skis two entire divisions of German troops and survives to pose handsomely in distinguished middle age in a rollneck fisherman’s sweater for the back of his memoir. I had always envied that guy, a war hero in hearty Norway who must have had a cabin up in the fjordland and a thousand friends and too much mulled cider or aquavit or whatever they drink at parties, and enjoyed skiing now just for fun. If that man could have imagined hell on earth probably. He’d seen its shadow. I fingered the book, didn’t read the inscription and slid it back on the shelf. Done. I’d decided I was done with crying about anything.

  When I got back to the parking lot I circled in from the outside rows and there were two figures leaning into the open doors of the plane, one about to climb in. I cursed myself and checked the safety, heart hammering, and stood and yelled to get the fuck away, and when they grabbed hunting rifle and shotgun I shot them at twenty yards the first ones. For poems. I gave their guns to Bangley, refused to answer when he asked.

  The Stafford book is called Stories That Could Be True. One poem is called “The Farm on the Great Plains” and it begins:

  A telephone line goes cold;

  birds tread it wherever it goes.

  A farm back of a great plain

  tugs an end of the line.

  I call that farm every year,

  ringing it, listening, still

  He calls his father. He calls his mother. They are gone for years only a hum now on the line but he still calls.

  When no one responds from the airport I’m about to fly over I flip back to the emergency frequency and make a pro forma call

  Mayday mayday Cessna Six Triple Three Alpha feeling awful lonely.

  In year seven someone answered. I took my hands off the yoke and pressed the headset into my ears. The hair stood up along my arms like it does in an electric storm.

  It came out of the static with a doppler fade.

  Triple Three Alpha … tailing off into aural snow.

  Triple Three Alpha … Gust of static … Grand junk. Whomp like hit with magnetic wind.

  Grand Junction …

  I waited. I shook my head. Actually knocked my temple in the headset. Keyed the mike with the thumb button on the yoke.

  Grand Junction? Grand Junction? Triple Three Alpha over Longmont.

  I’m over Longmont holy shit! Didn’t copy. Repeat: didn’t copy!

  I circled. I circled higher. Climbed to fifteen thousand feet and circled til I was dizzy with hypoxia. Descended to thirteen and circled for two hours til the fuel flow gauge told me I had fifteen minutes left, then I banked east.

  Whoever it was was a pilot or a controller.

  The one and only time.

  I cook my meals in the hangar. About a month after Bangley showed up I got him to help me dolly over a Vigilant woodstove from the kitchen of a fan
cy Mcmansion on the east side of the runway. Maybe the provisional nature of eating in what’s essentially a mechanic’s garage makes me feel like none of this is permanent. Part of why I don’t live in a house. Like living in a hangar, sleeping outside, I can pretend there’s a house somewhere else, with someone in it, someone to go back to. But who’s kidding whom? Melissa is not coming back, the trout aren’t, and neither is the elephant nor the pelican. Nature might invent a speckled proud coldwater fighting fish again but she will never again give the improbable elephant another go.

  Still last summer I saw a nighthawk. First one in years. Flitting for bugs in a warm dusk, wingbars blinking in the twilight. That soft electric peep.

  So the hangar is where I cook and eat. I tried eating in my house at the kitchen table like Bangley does, tried it for a few days but it didn’t sit.

  All the firewood we could use in our lifetimes is stacked up in the walls of the houses around the airfield. A sledgehammer and a crowbar gives me all I can use for a week in a few hours. Not to mention fine furniture.

  Took a few winces to get used to battering apart finish carpentry, cherry and walnut, and maple flooring for firewood. But. Value relative to need. Still I’m taking apart the crummy houses first. Not sure if I’ll ever get to the four or five really beautifully built mini-mansions the ones with exotic hardwoods, if I do by then they will hold no cachet probably. Probably just look to me like some refreshingly different scents in the burning. By another unspoken agreement we began harvesting wood in the cheaper houses on the west side of the runway, him working north and me south. That leaves me a not-so-long wheelbarrow roll back to the hangar.

  Often Bangley wanders over and joins me. He can’t cook I can. Can’t train the man to knock ever, or at least not whisper in like some ghost, which creeps me out a little cause I never know how long he’s been watching.

  Dinner early tonight.

  Fuck Bangley, I nearly scalded myself.

  You cook like you enjoy it.

  Huh?

  The way you move around with the skillet, the knife, like it’s a kitchen. Like it’s one of those cooking shows.

  Bangley’s nostrils flare with a gill-like rhythm when he’s particularly enjoying himself.

  I stare at him for just a moment.

  You hungry?

  Like one of those cooking shows where they tie on an apron. Like cooking a frigging dinner is some kind of dance. Tra la la.

  I put a pan full of fresh new potatoes down on the stove. In the beginning I tried using venison fat for lard but it went rancid so fast.

  Well I’m not wearing an apron, as you can see, and I’m not dancing.

  Almost no oil in the pantries of houses at the end the last few months they must have been drinking it for the calories. Then in the basement of the big Bauhaus across on Piper Lane I found two five gallon barrels of olive oil. Hidden behind a stack of new bricks.

  You were singing though. He flashes that straight across grin. Just makes him look meaner.

  The stove is hot with Canadian fir two by fours, the best frying wood for flash heat. The oil is spitting and I prod at the cut potatoes until most of them are in contact with the bottom of the pan. With the steel spatula I reach down and joggle the chrome lever that closes the side vent to the stove to slow it down. I think: If I were made of different stuff, if I thought I could defend this place myself I would shoot Bangley where he stands and get it over with. Would I? Maybe. And then I would miss this sparring every day. Probably feel it like a big void. We really have become like a married couple.

  I don’t think I was singing, I say finally.

  You were Hig, you were. Wasn’t Johnny Cash either. He grins.

  Like that was the only approved sing to yourself music in the Book of Bangley.

  Well what the fuck was it?

  He shrugs. Hell if I know. Some pop girl stuff. From the radio I distantly recall.

  Distantly recall. Standing there with a smile of triumph and his scruffy week old beard. I swear. I start to laugh. That’s what he does to me: aggravate me all the way to the point of laughter. To the point of ridiculous and then a fuse pops, flicks a switch, and I laugh. Lucky for both of us I guess.

  Sit down Bangley. Pull up a stool. We’re having catfish, dandelion salad with basil, new potatoes au something not gratin.

  See? he says. Just like one of those shows. If you aren’t just a little light in the loafers I’m a jew.

  I look at him. I laugh harder.

  *

  I play music sometimes. I have mp3s, cds, vinyl, everything. I wired my hangar to the main battery bank at the FBO the one that pulls from the wind turbine so power isn’t a problem. The mood has to be just right. I have to be careful or it sends me back to that place I don’t want to ever be again. Can’t be anything we used to listen to: we were a sucker for the decades old singer-songwriter, climb out of the bottle, country road stuff, Whiskeytown to Topley to Sinead. We loved the Dixie Chicks, who wouldn’t. Amazing Rhythm Aces. Open Road, Sweet Sunny South, Reel Time Travelers, the scrappy fine bluegrass and old timey groups just before before. We thought it was heartbreaking then. Try playing it on a fine early spring morning with the hangar door open and a single redtail gyring over the warming tarmac:

  And I remember your honeysuckle scent I still adore

  I can’t believe that you don’t want me anymore …

  Or the sweet wrecked mountain tenor of Brad Lee Folk singing Hard Times.

  Head hung down and homeless, lost out in the rain …

  I never thought I’d be an old man at forty.

  What I can play is blues. She was never that into blues. I can salve with Lightning and Cotton, BB and Clapton and Stevie Ray. I can blast Son Seals singing Dear Son until the coyotes in the creek raise up a sympathetic sky ripping interpretation of the harmonica solo. Piercing howls and yelps. Sounds like it’s killing them and also like they love it. Which when you get right down to it is the blues.

  At night I lie with Jasper against the back of the berm. It’s early spring, some late or very early hour with Orion toppling backward onto the serrated edge of the mountains and not crying out but silent, silent as he tries to shoot the bull before it tramples him. Sometimes he is very peaceful not tonight. Tonight he is fighting for his life.

  Jasper is unleashed, sleeping on my left thigh but my thoughts are leashed tight. I allow them to circle tight. To brush the green house, the hangar, the possibility of a spring hunting trip for spring bear when the bear are careless with hunger.

  He is snoring softly like he does, a little snort on the inhale and maybe a whimper on the way out. Then against all plan I begin to remember the call from Grand Junction. Coming in like a train out of a snowstorm, whomping the bandwidth then receding back into the static blizzard with a long mournful tail of dopplered distance. Lost. Triple Three Alpha … Grand Junk … Grand Junction … The voice older, kind, concerned, like a grandparent calling up a steep flight of stairs.

  How many years ago? Two or three. It was summer I remember. I remember the smoke from the summer fires, circling the Beast up into the smoke, and the sunset that night like a massacre. How I circled and climbed and made the circles broader and keyed and keyed the mike. Frantically worked the squelch. Some skip in the atmosphere maybe, how could it travel that far with none of the repeaters working anymore years since. The competence in the voice. An older man. I remember that. It came through the noise. Another pilot, I was sure it was another pilot.

  I can fly to Gunnison and back on my tanks maybe Delta the other way. Maybe—if the wind is right in both directions. Which rarely happens. I have thought about it. Again and again. Junction less than half an hour beyond. And then. What? Another pilot at another airport probably much less secure. But.

  They had power somehow. They—he—had survived seven years. Maybe still so.

  Jasper shifts, straightens his legs in a dreaming stretch and pushes back against me, wakes himself up. Sniffs. Lowers his head aga
in.

  I lift my head from the pillow

  I see the frost the moon.

  Lowering my head I think of home.

  Li Po’s most famous poem.

  Even then: long before before the end, the bottomless yearning.

  Almost never home, any of us.

  I lie back against the duffel bag stuffed with foam I use as a pillow. Doesn’t get dirty as fast, doesn’t remind me of my old bed. Rub the band of the wool hat back down on my forehead. The sky is bell clear, the forest fires don’t start til mid-June, and the Milky Way is a flowing river of stars profoundly depthless. I mean deeper than can be reckoned. Jasper sighs. Almost no wind. What there is is cooling my right ear, a lazy breeze from the north.

  Would I be more at home if I met a pilot from Grand Junction? If Denver to the south was a bustling living city? If Melissa were sleeping on the other side of Jasper as she used to do? Who would I be more at home with? Myself?

  Still I think of the pilot’s voice. The competence and the yearning. To connect. I think I should have gone there. Pushed the fuel, backed off the throttle, flown slow, maybe eighteen square, picked my morning and gone. To see. What, I don’t know. Still I didn’t come close. To going. Admit it: I was scared. Of finding the interrupted dead as I had and had and had again. Nothing but. And running out of fuel before I was even back to Seven Victor Two which is Paonia, the airstrip up high on the narrow flat butte like an aircraft carrier. Running out of fuel in the ’dobe flats east of Delta. Going down in the shadow of Grand Mesa.

  Before, I read that they found Amelia Earhart. Conclusive I guess. On the island that had been checked off in 1940 as Searched. Opened clam shells, a jackknife shattered apart for its blade, for maybe a fishing spear. A fire pit. Ancient crumbling makeup. A plexiglas airplane window. A woman’s shoe. Bones. Chips of bones. The DNA verified against a living female Earhart cousin. Of course it was her island, she and the navigator castaways for how long until they succumbed to what? The coral atoll from the air: elliptical oasis with a central lagoon. Flat outer reef at low tide like a parking lot. The Lockheed Electra with a landing configuration stall speed of fifty five mph, she’d need seven hundred feet, no more. Wading the meager provisions to shore maybe injured. Maybe not low tide, maybe the gear torn off by water. Maybe blood in the water. Running out of fuel over the Pacific taking gratefully what comes. That they made that tiny island at all. Living off of shells and rain.