The Dog Stars

by Peter Heller

  Shells and rain.

  And the company of another, just one.

  Starvation. Slowly burning through time like a fire in wet wood. Attenuating to bone, to walking bones, then one dies, then the other. Or attacked by passing islanders maybe better.

  Missing what most the whole time? The babbling faceless agora, the fame, the parties, the pop of flash bulbs? The lovers, the gaiety, the champagne? The solitude carved out of celebrity, poring over charts by a single lamp on a wide desk in a venerable hotel? Room service, coffee before dawn? The company of one friend, two? The choice: All of it or not? Some or none? Now, not now, maybe later?

  I have none of that now. Those choices. And yet. I do not want to run out of fuel and go down in the high desert grass of the western Gunnison valley and die trying to walk with Jasper three hundred miles home. Home. Meager as it is. Nothing to lose as I have. Nothing is something somehow.

  Jasper growled. I had slept in my reverie.

  Low, mean, serious.

  I held my breath, listened. Sat up slow. He is mostly deaf, yes, but his nose is good.

  Could be coyotes. Or wolves. The mountain wolves in the last two years: drifting down from the mountains in ragged packs. Growing pressure of the growing repopulation. Because they used to be there in numbers enough and are again.

  Jasper growled now in the night and I sat up in the blankets heart thumping. I whispered Stay and crawled to the top of the berm.

  Jasper knows. He knows when the shit’s serious.

  He sat back on his hindquarters and cut the noise mid-growl and looked at me with real concern and also with the taut poise of a hunter who is enjoying himself. He was amped. So was I. This hadn’t happened in a long time, maybe half a year, and I felt a little sluggish, a little out of practice. A couple of years ago and I would have been at the top of the berm by now and scanning with the goggles with my left hand on the receiver of the AR. As it was I had to dig the rifle out from between the cold damp tarp and the back of the duffle. Next to it the goggles inside an old wool sock. At least I still thought to bring them out with me when we slept. I set the goggles against my brow and stretched the strap over the back of my head and slowly, quietly, tugged against and pulled the charging handle that racked the gun. Climbed the berm slowly, more cautiously.

  Jasper stayed still. Straining against the urge to chase down the smell in the dark. Or maybe some sound, some sound in some frequency that penetrated his near deafness. I climbed the steep back of the berm slowly. Prayed it was coyotes, even wolves. Not in the mood for killing, not one bit. Not myself, not to spot for Bangley.

  At the top I slid the rifle flat over the smooth top and lowered myself to cold dirt and wriggled upwards until my eyes cleared the lip.

  In the light of the porch bulb I saw them. One two threefourfive … break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat … Five men all fullgrown except maybe one smaller maybe younger.

  Shit.

  With great effort that first summer we had levered and toppled the dumpster back south maybe a hundred feet further from the house. It was on its side, the open top gaping black. The creek bank was sheer and deep. The stream ran around it so that the airport sat in an oxbowed bite. Perfect moat. The only good ford was a trail that led out of the bottom to this house, the only one we lit. So they naturally clustered against the dumpster, south of it in the shadow of the bulb, shielded from the house where they—anyone not a professional soldier—would imagine the threat and the prize.

  Fish in a barrel. Whatever other hapless metaphor for the hapless soon to be dead.

  I kill deer. I have no problem killing deer. Dressing, butchering, eating.

  Heart now thumping like a blind thing trying to bang its way out of the ribcage. I felt down to my belt and squeezed the sides of the radio, keying the mike button with my thumb three times. Then three then three. Then I counted. Before I got to two hundred Bangley would be sauntering up behind me carrying two guns: M4 assault rifle and a light sniper, probably an AR-10 .308. Counted to myself and shifted the rifle up and over one of the sandbags at the top and snugged the stock into my right shoulder and sighted. Ninety feet. We had measured it to the inch.

  Onethirtyone onethirtytwo

  They were crouched and talking among themselves, whispering, I couldn’t hear them. The wind was light, cool against the back of my neck, westerly from me to them. Carrying sound. Very slowly I thumbed the safety to fire, heard the click, wince, seemed loud, eased the small lever forward to full auto.

  Oneseventynine oneeighty

  They were not even not pros. They were crouched together as one target at this distance one alone filled the scope, way more than filled it. They were farmers insurance men mechanics. Probably. Haplessly clustered. But. I shifted the scope, just the slightest pressure from the inside of my shoulder, and swept them and they had guns, each one. As I swept, the sight picture tremored with the hammering of my heart. At this stage they were killers. I mean this stage in our mutually culpable history. Who to say how many or how cruelly. At this stage they were gathered in the posture of armed assault. On who knew what remnant of family had managed to survive in that house. And.

  The cruelty of it struck me: they in relation to the house, the fictional family, me to them, that any of us should be in this position. Don’t fucking think, Hig. You will get us all killed Bangley liked to bark.

  TwoOfive twoOsix. No Bangley. What the fuck. Never happened not once he wasn’t here by two hundred, usually earlier.

  I eased my eye off the eyepiece and twisted my head around to the left. No shadow. No figure, no Bangley approaching. Fuck. Eye back on the scope. Hand on the trigger guard trembling. Starting to tremble.

  They were talking among themselves. I flipped the lever that unlocked the scope with my trembling left hand and released it from its rail. Lay it to the side out of line of the iron peep sight. It opened up my field of view.

  Even as a boy, the killing part was my least favorite. I loved to hunt with my Uncle Pete. He was an unreconstructed man of letters and of action in the mode of Ernest Hemingway and Jack London, except that he taught ballroom dancing. On cruise ships. He and Aunt Louise did that for like twenty years and she died, and my normally exuberant and talkative uncle got quiet, more serious. Still fun. He wasn’t very good at either one, either the action or the letters, but I idolized him for a long time, longer than was necessary and went on my first elk hunt with him when I was twelve.

  I was good. I mean I quickly understood terrain and habitat almost as if I had grown up with People of the Deer, and I was quiet and careful about the direction of the wind and the sound of twigs whizzing along the cordura of my pack, and the covering sounds of water, and I was an adept stalker and helpful in camp and nearly leapt out of my bag into the icy five a.m. chill of what was still a mountain mid-November night. I adored it all, and it seemed I didn’t have any problem putting the cow elk in my sights, but the way she stumbled over the rockfall when I shot, tripping forward and somersaulting over her own neck, and the way her eye shone up at me and she scrabbled her useless legs sideways over the rocks before I shot again right into the head in a panic, and the life went out of her eye and her legs, and then the way when I dressed her the blood spilled onto the frozen ground and mixed pink with warm milk from her still feeding teats—

  Didn’t like it. Did it every year for years afterward and loved it all including having elk in the freezer, but not that. Don’t even like to kill a bug.

  Twotwentythree twotwentyfour

  No Bangley. I had tried negotiating once. Closest I ever came to dying.

  Old rules are done Hig. Went the way of the woodpecker. Gone with the glaciers and the government. New world now. New world new rules. Never ever negotiate.

  He loved to say that before he set up to plug someone.

  Five was a big bunch, biggest we’d had in a couple of years. They were crouched, the biggest closest to the dumpster had a rifle with scope, was twisted back doing t
he talking, signing with his right hand, touching the watch cap cocked on his head, the one just beside him had some sort of assault rifle probably an AK, the three others: two shotguns and a ranch rifle all clear at ninety feet with the goggled eye. The third from the left with a shotgun wore a cowboy hat a short man in a big hat. They were bunched and nodding and they were about to move. My hand shook. They would never be this tight a target.

  I planned to sweep right to left. Full auto. Set the peep in the middle of the last one’s bulk and planned to cut across through the midline of the bunch.

  Moved right index finger onto the cold trigger, took a deep breath, a deep living breath to let out slow the way taught and

  Cracked open. The night. Not me. Erupted pulse of flame peripheral from down to my right, the hulk carcass of a truck, the concatenate blast of rapid fire, the group in my sight coming apart entropic, the red dot flying across like a lethal bug throwing their shadows upwards and out to land, to be swallowed by the green ground.

  Not me.

  I hadn’t pulled the trigger.

  A shriek and scream, one moaning another writhing, and whimpers, I saw Bangley step out from behind the truck, unholster his .45 walk calmly across the open ground and three shots, the ones crying suddenly silent.

  Light wind, cold. Blood rushing in my ears, rinsing the cries. Quiet.

  He picked up the scattered guns, slung all five. Walked around the berm, unslung the guns, heard them chink together on the ground, talked low to Jasper, climbed up to me where I was still prone, I would say still frozen on the trigger but more like just stilled with disbelief.

  What the fuck.

  Good he said. Good job. Not sure you still had it in you.

  He meant that I would. That my finger was moving on the trigger.

  Before he took over.

  What the fuck Bangley. Not sure I still had what in me?

  Silent. Knew I knew what.

  I’ve never had it fucking in me. But I do it. What the fuck were you thinking? What if I’d seen you and thought you were one of them?

  Never happen: You see me. Unh unh. Not that way.

  I opened my mouth, closed it. I said, Unfuckingbelievable. What if they had broke apart. I mean just launched. Sooner.

  Silence. Knew I knew now that he had them covered from the get go.

  Well how the hell did you know I was about to pull the trigger and why didn’t you? Let me?

  Silence. Knew that I knew now that he was scoping me more closely than he was scoping them. Scoping my frigging finger while he kept half an eye on the men that could have frigging killed us. Had them sighted all along. Let loose only when he saw me take the big breath maybe. I see him in my mind’s eye pulling the trigger on the first man not even looking, watching me first in the good night scope on its own legs, watching me jerk back in alarm in surprise, then casual but efficient tuck down to his weapon and sweep the rest of the group. Not sweep. Bangley doesn’t believe in full auto. Two shots probably to each panicked leaping shadow. T-TAP. Each one that fast. Maybe he was laughing at my confusion all the while he harvested this bunch of souls.

  C’mere Hig. Show you something.

  Goes over the top and down the berm. Jasper still down there, this side, trembling. Not with fear. I can see him in the starlight. Sitting on his haunches following my movements with concern, restraining himself from action, somebody doing their job just their job the way they are supposed to.

  C’mon. I whistle soft. He jumps, not like the old days but still fast enough up to the top of the berm and over. Bangley is down there among the black figures sprawled. Jasper already moving one to the other, not stopping, nosing, the low growl.

  Look at this Hig. They never should have done it.

  He doesn’t sound unhappy.

  Bangley has reached up and switched on the LED headlamp banded to his cap. His cap is on backward. He shines it on the short man, the one in the cowboy hat, the hat now tumbled into a drainage furrow a few feet off. It’s a boy. Maybe nine. About the age. Melissa seven months pregnant when. Nine years ago. This boy is thin, hair matted and tangled. A hawk feather tied into it.

  Face hollow, a shadow smirched with dirt and exposure. Would have been born into this. Nine years of this. Piecing the jigsaw puzzle of this world into some dire picture in his head to end cast as an extra in Bangley’s practical joke.

  He grunts. Arms in the hands of babes. Should have left him behind.

  Where?

  Bangley shrugs, swings his head up, the light up into my eyes, blinding.

  I wince down against the harsh white blare but don’t turn.

  Then when he wandered out of the creek starving tomorrow you would have shot him just like the others, but in full daylight and at three hundred yards not thirty.

  I can’t see anything but the light, but I know Bangley’s grin is straight across and grim.

  Hig you haven’t learned a goddamn thing in all this time. You’re living in the past. Makes me wonder if you appreciate any of this. Goddamn.

  He walks off. He means do I deserve it. To live.

  I walk away leave Jasper to his business. We will bury them tomorrow.

  This is what I do, have done: I strip off haunches arms breast buttocks calves. Slice it thin soak in salt brine and dry to jerky for Jasper for the days between. You remember the story of the rugby team in the Andes. The corpses were corpses already dead. They did it to survive. I am no different. I do it for him. I eat venison, bottom fish, rabbit, shiners. I keep his jerky in airtight buckets. He likes it best of all his food I’m sure because of the salt. Tomorrow I will do it again but not the boy, I’ll bury him not with any tenderness or regret just in one piece with his hawk feather.

  That we have come to this: remaking our own taboos forgetting the original reasons but still awash in the warnings. I walk back around the berm. I am supposed to lie back down in our blankets and sleep with the berm at my head like a wide headstone. So I am fresh for tomorrow to fly. I will not sleep all night. I lay the gun down, just the gun, snug it back under the duffel and keep walking.

  II

  Back then I took up flying with the sense of coming to something I had been meant to do all my life. Many people who fly feel this way and I think it has more to do with some kind of treetop or clifftop gene than with any sense of unbounded freedom or metaphors of the soaring spirit. The way the earth below resolves. The way the landscape falls into place around the drainages, the capillaries and arteries of falling water: mountain slopes bunched and wrinkled, wringing themselves into the furrows of couloir and creek, draw and chasm, the low places defining the spurs and ridges and foothills the way creases define the planes of a face, lower down the canyon cuts, and then the swales and valleys of the lowest slopes, the sinuous rivers and the dry beds where water used to run seeming to hold the hills and the waves of the high planes all together and not the other way around. The way the settlements sprawl and then congregate at these rivers and mass at every confluence. I thought: It’s a view that should surprise us but it doesn’t. We have seen it before and interpret the terrain below with the same ease we walk the banks of a creek and know where to place our feet.

  But what I loved most from the first training flight was the neatness, the sense of everything in its place. The farms in their squared sections, the quartering county roads oriented to the cardinal compass points, windbreaks casting long shadows westward in the morning, the round bales and scattered cattle and horses as perfect in their patterns as sprays of stars and holding the same ruddy sun on their flanks, the pickups in the yards, the trailer parks in diagonal rows, the tract homes repeating the side-lit angles of roofs, baseball diamond and kart track ovals, even the junkyards just so, ragged lines of rusted cars and heaps of scrap metal as inevitable and lovely as the cottonwoods limning the rivers, casting their own long shadows. The white plume from the stack of a power plant tended eastward on the morning wind as pure as washed cotton. This was then. From up here there was
no misery, no suffering, no strife, just pattern and perfection. The immortal stillness of a landscape painting. Nor ever can those trees be bare … Even the flashing lights of an emergency vehicle progressing along the track of a highway pulsed with the reassuring rhythm of a cricket.

  And for a time while flying, seeing all this as a hawk would see it, I am myself somehow freed from the sticky details: I am not grief sick nor stiffer in the joints nor ever lonely, nor someone who lives with the nausea of having killed and seems destined to kill again. I am the one who is flying over all of it looking down. Nothing can touch me.

  There is no one to tell this to and yet it seems very important to get this right. The reality and what it is like to escape it. That even now it is sometimes too beautiful to bear.

  Also I wonder how Bangley is built inside and everyone like him. He is as at home with his solitude as the note reverberating inside a bell. Prefers it. Will protect it to the death. Lives for protecting it the way a peregrine lives for killing other birds midflight. Does not want to communicate what the death and the beauty do to each other inside him.

  I took him flying in the first week of his arrival. He wanted to recon our perimeter, our weakest approaches. Squeezed him into the passenger seat and gave him a headset so he could talk to me. I made widening circles outward and climbed like a climbing hawk. It was a clear morning with the gullies still shadowed and a flock of seagulls shocked white between us and the ground. At ten miles and a thousand feet he said Druids. Go lower circle.