The Dog Stars

by Peter Heller

  I’d never heard the word.

  Met them on the way in, he said. They have the blood sickness. Yelled across the yard. Shot two that came too close. Wish I had incendiary now.

  I glanced at him. The shock of it. Never heard that story but of course how could they know he ended up with me, my partner.

  A few of the ragged kids ran out of a turkey shed and waved, jumped up and down. Bangley turned his hunched shoulders in the cramped seat to look at me.

  They know you?

  Yup. I help them. They’re not Druids, they’re Mennonites.

  I felt his eyes on the side of my face then not. He said nothing the rest of the trip, not even when we flew up close along the mountains and saw the fresh snow blowing off the rock ridges.

  III

  So I wonder what it is this need to tell.

  To animate somehow the deathly stillness of the profoundest beauty. Breathe life in the telling.

  Counter I guess to Bangley’s modus which is to kill just about everything that moves.

  On the night of the one sided firefight in which I didn’t pull the trigger I walked straight past the west hangars and kept going. Jasper has a good nose and I knew that if he looked up and got worried he would just follow. Didn’t want to whistle him away from his party, and I knew Bangley well enough that he’d had enough killing in one night not to fuck with my dog. I had no goggles no gun. Bangley always wears a belted sidearm, I’m sure he wears it to sleep. I have never seen him asleep but I wonder how many nights he has watched us at the base of the berm snoozing. There is much about the man that creeps me out but this is the worst, the unrelenting sense of being surveilled. I’ve learned to live with it the way the Cree in Canada must live with swarms of mosquitoes. Did live. But there is the nagging fear: if he decided the attacks had tapered off enough to defend this place himself or if my visiting the families was too much of a risk he might kill us both, me and Jasper, unimpeded with an easy two shots fifty steps from his front porch. So in this sense I am crazy to sleep in the open, but then if Bangley wanted to kill me he would have limitless opportunities in any one day, so I decided from the beginning to make my daily choices without including Mr. Death in the calculus.

  And so, in this way, I thought as I walked past the last hangars west and away from our one burning bulb on the one porch into the not total darkness of the starlit plains, I thought that in this way the visitation by the five men paid a kind of surety against my survival at least for a while. For a while Jasper and I were indispensable, though Bangley had dispatched the group, the killing part, with literally one eye on the ball.

  I walked around the old gas tank which was green in daylight, now black, bulked in the tall sage brush, and my feet found without thinking the worn trail to the mountains. My trail. The one Jasper and I had worn over nine years, and Bangley out to his tower. Erie airport had no control tower, it was an uncontrolled field, meaning that the pilots just talked to each other and worked things out according to long used protocol, but Bangley and I had built our own tower four miles out onto the plain, halfway to the mountain front, and this tower was for killing. It had taken us two months to build, salvaging the lumber out of a painstaking teardown of an ugly, blocky, modern, wooden thing on Piper Lane that reminded me of a grade school from the Seventies. We hauled the lumber out to the site in his pickup when it still ran, and in his dry van trailer, the one he had showed up with that was full of guns, weapons of every murderous phylum, and mines and canned food and ammo. We hauled out a generator too from one of the electricity free hangars on the north side, and we ran it on avgas to power the saws and drills. Bangley was not a born carpenter and it was the first and only time I saw him do a manual job with any kind of éclat, the work fired I know now by a vision of the clean, long shots he’d get with his .408. He couldn’t wait to get to the top platform and install the bench rest and locking swivel he had spent hours at his desk designing. A separate permanent mount for his spotting scope and another for his laser range finder. None of which—the gun nor the scope nor the range finder—he ever left on the tower. But he left a windspeed/direction indicator out there on its own pole where it wouldn’t be queered by wind deflecting and eddying off the roof, and he left his ballistics tables in a neat dove jointed drawer which I crafted for him.

  His preferred range was fourteen hundred yards. Close enough with his skills to pretty much guarantee a kill but far enough to flatter his pride. Which meant that there was one spot on the trail that was a place where many people over the years had seen their last living look of the sad world. It was a place literally soaked in blood. The ground here, the dirt between a tall sage on the south side of the trail and tall bushy rabbit brush on the north, was black with the coppery minerals of spilled blood, stained the way the place in a yard or dirt drive where a man changes the oil in his car is stained. That night I covered the four miles plus four hundred yards in much less than an hour. I didn’t notice the distance and I didn’t notice the time. By my calendar it was the night of April 21st which to my knowledge is not some solstice or equinox, but seems significant anyway to me like all 21sts of the month. It was also Melissa’s birthday. She didn’t like parties so we never had one. We had quiet dinners, usually sushi, which she regarded as a ridiculously decadent form of nutrition but adored nevertheless like twice a year. Her favorites were gone by the end, the tuna and yellowtail and wild salmon, and the prices were so high for most of the rest we just stopped going.

  I always gave her a book. An old hardback from the same section in the used bookstore where you’d find Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, and musty scrawled-in Hobbits, the painted paper covers often ripped or gone. But some motif from the cover illustration was stamped on the cloth of the hard cover itself, a rearing horse or an ancient elm, so that you could close your eyes and run your hands over the grainy surface and feel the fleet curves of the bucking bronco, the brachial patterns of the spreading tree.

  My favorite was a sort of illustrated guidebook of pond creatures on which a very young child had written in pencil on each page under the picture of an otter

  I love otter

  Under a muskrat:

  I love muskrat

  Beaver:

  I love beaver

  I walked past the tower in the dark. The path through the brush absorbed and gave back the light from the Milky Way and was clear in its windings. I walked over the target spot, over a black staining that was not the shadow of the sage. I did not shudder or feel much of anything. I felt the wind. It was west down from the mountains and it should have been cold-snow cold, but it was warm and smelled of earth, and of the cedar on the lower slopes and the spruce higher up. Like rock emerging from ice. Lichen and moss. I thought it did. It smelled like spring.

  Too early in mid-April for a real thaw, but anymore the old seasonal benchmarks were mostly nostalgia. We had snow in the mountains this winter but there were two years running where the peaks were dry holding almost nothing. This scared me more than attacks or disease.

  Losing the trout was bad. Losing the creek is another thing altogether.

  I still fished in the mountains. The trout were gone because the streams got too warm, but I fished suckers and carp, nymphing the bottom like before, and overcoming the revulsion when I got a sucker, the sluggish resistance that couldn’t be called a fight, and the distended lips and the scales. I made myself get used to the taste and the bones. Now that the trout were gone the carp had learned to occupy the niche and feed more and more on the surface, so I even sometimes fished dry flies. Never brought them back for Bangley because he wouldn’t have understood. The hours spent. The danger in being so absorbed along a stream which was the thoroughfare for both animals and wanderers.

  But I did. He would have called it Recreating, which he called with scorn anything that didn’t directly involve our direct survival, or killing, or planning to kill which amounted to the same thing. Christ Hig we’re not Recreating here are we? Good goddamn. Deer hun
ting was one thing. The amount of quality protein in one successful trip divided by the risk. The fact that I wanted to go, that I needed it—to get up there, to get away, to breathe that air—he overlooked. Had I hated it, he would have liked that better. Same with flying. He knew that flying for me was life somehow and yet he couldn’t count on two hands the times we were arguably saved by the intelligence from some patrol.

  He wasn’t my boss and I did what I did, but he made sure his disapproval grated hard, and after a while it was easier to not put this stuff in his face. A matter of keeping the needle in the green day to day.

  I fished. I’d set down my pack against a still green tree. The kayak sled. My rifle. I passed up the beetle kill, the standing dead trees that broke and fell in a hard wind, and walked further into the green. I always fished a stretch of woods that had not died, or that was coming back. I set down the pack and breathed the smell of running water, of cold stone, of fir and spruce, like the sachets my mother used to keep in a sock drawer. I breathed and thanked something that was not exactly God, something that was still here. I could almost imagine that it was still before when we were young and many things still lived.

  I listened to the creek, and to the wind and watched it move the heavy dark boughs. In a pool below me the dark surface was dusted with green pollen. The roots of a tree exposed in the bank snaked over the water and in their spaces old spiderweb swayed in the wind and glimmered along the threads with its rhythm.

  I took out the four pieces of the rod wrapped in flannel and snugged them together, sighting along the guides and twisting the shining metal loops so they lined up true. It was a Sage pack rod, a little number four I’d had since high school. My father gave it to me for my sixteenth birthday just after I came to live with him. He died of pancreatic cancer the next year before he could ever show me how to use it, but I ended up teaching myself and learning from Uncle Pete.

  I pulled out the Orvis reel he had given me with the rod, which I’d kept cleaned and oiled when no other part of my life was working smoothly if at all. I slid the tang of the reel foot into the aluminum slot in the top of the cork handle and tightened down the nut. The nut went around the whole rod and rod seat and was stamped with a deep diamond pattern that made it easy for the thumb and forefinger to grab. It turned easily and locked down tight.

  All of this, these motions, the sequence, the quiet, the rill and gulp, the riffle of the stream and the wind soughing the needles of the tall trees. As I strung the rod. I had known it all hundreds, probably now thousands of times. It was ritual that required no thought. Like putting on socks. Except this ritual put me in touch with something that felt very pure. Meaning that in fishing I had always all my life brought the best of myself. My attention and carefulness, my willingness to risk, and my love. Patience. Whatever else was going on. I began fishing just after Pop died and I tried to fish the way I thought he would. Which is a little weird thinking about it now: trying to emulate a man I had never seen wield a rod, and with the fierceness of a son this man had never had much of a chance to father.

  When I lost my high school girlfriend, I fished. When in a fit of frustration and despair I quit writing anything, I fished. I fished when I met Melissa and barely dared to hope that I had found someone I could love in a way that surpassed anything I had known. I fished and fished and fished. When the trout got hit with disease, I fished. And when the flu finally took her in an Elks Hall converted to a hospital and crammed with the cots of the dying not five hundred yards from our house, I fished.

  I was not allowed to bury her. She was incinerated with the rest. I fished. In the increasing chaos of dwindling supplies and longer gas lines and riots, I fished. By then I was nymph fishing for carp just to get away and follow a stretch of creek, the curves and moods of which I knew as well as I had known the body of my dead wife.

  In all the years at the airport I kept bringing my rod into the mountains. I’d set down the pack and put together the rod and breathe and Jasper would take his cue and lie down on the bank where he could get a good view of the action. I put on the light wading shoes which were like hi-tops with sticky rubber on the soles, and stepped down to the smooth stones that were dusty and gray in air and stepped into the water. As soon as these riverbed rocks were wet and covered they came alive with color, greens and russets and blues. I did too. Felt like that. Soon as the cold shocked my feet and pressed my shins.

  Never used waders anymore. I just liked the feel of cold running water against my legs.

  I was thinking, remembering this as I followed the path toward the mountains and I thought how I hadn’t fished in over a year, not at all last summer, and wondered why, and wished now that I had the rod and Jasper, just a pack for a day and no gun and fuck Bangley I wasn’t even going to pretend I was going hunting. But I didn’t. Have any of it. I’d been walking for as much time as it took Orion to decline over the mountains, probably an hour and a half, and I stopped. I breathed and looked around me for the first time and realized I was very close to the first trees of the mountain front. And I was alone. I came out of reverie and almost called out for Jasper and realized that for the first time I could remember he wasn’t with me. An icy fear contracted my guts and I turned and trotted all the way back to the airport.

  IV

  It warmed fast. Spring gave way without resistance. Two weeks earlier than last by the calendar I had scrawled onto a board in the hangar. I judged the threat of night frost over and furrowed and strung the rows of the garden, and drilled and planted under a benign sun which warmed the back of my neck and turned the fur of Jasper’s back pleasantly hot under my hands.

  I planted the same crop I planted every year: string beans, potatoes, corn. Also had spinach which I grew in a cold frame along with the little tomato plants I’d started.

  In the final days when I decided I would have to bail out of the city fast, those are what I took out of my own cold shed in the backyard. A dirt crusted basket of seed packets and a bucket of seed potatoes. The same five, this now our tenth planting. I’d need to trade seeds with the families soon to keep the plants strong, why I hadn’t done it already I’m not sure. A couple of years I used the warm conservatory room of one of the mansions to start seedlings but they died in a hard frost each time when the cold overcame the stored heat in the brick floor. I couldn’t be bothered to put in a woodstove and keep them warm. Then I made the cold frame for the spinach so we could have it all year and for tomato starts in the spring. It worked usually. I planted the potatoes later than normal so that we would get a late harvest and have them all winter. With what we had, and with just me and Bangley, I canned more than we could use and stored the jars and a heap of potatoes in a cold room in the basement of my house, the one with the bulb. I never told Bangley but I dropped off fresh vegetables in the summer, and jars too later in the year, to the families who also had a garden but were hapless in their efforts due to the disease.

  On this afternoon in late April I worked slowly, enjoying the warmth of the day and letting the sun soak into my winter bones. I talked to Jasper the whole time.

  We need a hill, I called, picking up the spade. We need two rows built up nice for the potatoes.

  Jasper furrowed his brow and agreed, happy just to lie on a pile of sunwarmed dirt and supervise.

  Hey where are the old stakes for the beans? Where did we put em?

  Jasper’s ears came up and his mouth opened in his version of a smile. He didn’t know. He didn’t give a fuck.

  Were life that simple, I thought, as I had many times before. Simple as a dog’s life.

  I spaded up the hills for the potatoes and buried the pieces, each with its eye. I found the split lumber we’d used as bean poles and dug them in and guyed them out with string and strung three lines laddered for the climbing vines over six feet high. There was almost nothing on earth as satisfying as a wall of beans, leaves fluttering taller than you are.

  I was in no hurry. What we didn’t plant today we’d p
lant tomorrow. Probably warm enough even to plant the corn. Our shadows puddled to the south at midday and lengthened over the furrows as the spring sun made its transit into the northwest. I hummed almost tunelessly. Melissa always ribbed me for the unconscious near melody I repeated day after day when I worked. Always the same non-song. The comfort. I made a little trough for the beans, sprinkled them along it, covered them firmly. Dirt from shoveling furred the hairs on my arm and smudged my face when I rubbed my nose with the back of a fist. From the dammed-up pond in the creek, I siphoned into the shallow ditch at the head of the garden and broke it in four places with the tip of the spade to run water into the furrows. The silver runnels in the turned earth went ruddy and molten with the low sun. Staining the dirt to either side. By the middle of the night the whole planting would be wet.

  I was tired. Tomorrow I’d plant the rest, the tomatoes and corn. The next day if the weather was good Jasper and I would take the sled, and this time the fly rod, and go up to the mountains for a spring buck.

  The deer wandered the plains but they knew somehow to stay away from the airport and I hadn’t had much luck stalking them on the open prairie. I was a mountain hunter and anyway I wanted to go up there before the creeks got too high.

  Bangley sometimes set up on the second floor of his house with a sandbag in an open window and made sport long-shooting what he could. He killed two gray wolves at great distance but then they too steered clear. He sewed the fur of a ruff onto the hood of his winter fatigue coat and wore it like a trophy.

  I stood back of the new garden watching the sun touch the mountains and ruddle the turned dirt and the threads of water and I can say there was something moving inside that resembled a kind of happiness.