The Dog Stars

by Peter Heller

  The first came over half crouched, neither fast nor slow, came over scanning and slowed, looking puzzled. But came. A very thin man in a full gray beard, bare arms covered in jailhouse tattoos, stars and crosses, carrying a sword. A frigging cavalry sword. Not seeing his prey, expecting to now, uncrouching reflexively to standing and walking down into the bottom and studying the slide of the sled in the sand. The one behind almost toppled him coming over fast, eager for a charge, a huge man, red bearded, also carrying a sword. All the thinking before stopped. Killers. They were killers. I wanted them. Good goddamn, Hig, way to go boy. Could hear Bangley’s words like some kind of telepathic transmission. I don’t know maybe my mouth actually watered. Pity the prey that fell before these men. Third was a long hair, wiry dirty hair to the waist, cleanshaven, in a black leather biker’s vest—had a baseball bat bristled with screws. Long, maybe quarter inch screws with the heads sawed off and the shafts sharpened. Red and Screws barreled past the leader and trotted down the open bank in what could only be bloodlust, and they were just over a hundred feet before they stopped and began to scan. I had these three. Three others were coming over, a blur to me of animated mass. I had these. Front to back, Scrawny leader to Red to Screws was left to right, Oh well, I put the cross hairs on the leader, pulled. Familiar jump, the gun coming off the fur, lifting it just a little, levering and swinging right, I’d done this before scores of times to take two or three deer, swinging right to center mass, barrel now a fist’s width off the rest, no problem, center Red and fire. BANG! Lever. No decision just fire. Barely conscious of the first two falling, the last, Screws, just beginning to crouch for a dive and BANG, the hit shoulder or side, him spinning and thrown and moving on the ground, then up, the mass at the lip uncoalescing, about to fragment, just aim for biggest object, two men together and pull, one arm back, thrown and falls. Lever. Four. Four! A surge of something, not joy not triumph but close. I was, we were, were a team, we nailed four—

  Hig, move back! Run!

  The radio loud now, urgent, almost insanely urgent

  Run to me buddy! Now! The Glock! Pocket the Glock. Grab the bullets one hand the rifle run! RUN! To me!

  Jesus. I did it. Something about the orders, the order, the sequence real clear, god bless him, I grabbed the Glock, shoved it in right pocket, scooped up handful of bullets, the gun, ran. Looked back. Just as I did the five came over the lip in a full tilt run, spread out. They were fast. Lean and fast, unencumbered but for the weapons in each hand. This image: five big men spread and charging. Sand would slow them, they’d be on me in thirty seconds. Just one, just one would kill me. Ran. Gun, bullets in hands, ran. Fast as I could. One more glance back, they were in the bottom now, in the open and closing—

  WHROAAWMP

  Concussion thrown rain of dirt dirt in mouth eyes

  WROOOOAMP

  Arms covering head jesus mother of god

  WHRAWWWWWWWOMK

  Shiver ground shake clawing dirt the dirt moving clods shower of clumps sand in a raining pebbles stalks wood thud a clod and

  Silence. Ringing ears, ringing. Wet. Nose bleeding.

  Hear out of it the ringing silence, the radio, Hig? Hig? Hig! You alive? Hig!

  All the pieces. Hands claw back over ground. What? To head. Intact head intact. Ears ringing. Roll onto side, sleeve to nose, bleeding, not bad. Spit. Eyes. Clear eyes, blunt fingers, breathe. Intact

  Hig! Godammit you’re alive! Take a break, take a break. Nothing broken? All in one piece? Try standing. Slow. Hig!

  Okay to knees. Stay there a while maybe a week. Hands and knees. Blood from nose dripping to dirt can see it, that’s good, a good sign. Hands and knees breathe. Breathe. Okay I’m okay.

  Hig, they’re gone, scattered. See one, well parts of one, back a hundred feet. Maybe more casualties. Rest are off the radar. Gone, Hig. Hear me? When you can get it together, locate your weapon your rifle.

  Hig? You’re alright. Probably a little concussed is all. You still got the Glock? Hig? Check your pocket. Tell me you still have the Glock. Til we are absolutely sure the area is cleared. Tell me.

  Hands and knees. Roll back to sitting. Blink in the sun. Talking to me. Bangley is talking to me. The radio. Reach hand to chest, hand stiff slow like slow motion, key the mike squeeze no strength

  I. I

  Hig you’re okay. Thatta boy

  I. I got the Glock

  Oh man. That’s good. Good man, Hig. Just stay put for a minute. Breathe.

  Pause.

  Bangley

  Yes, Hig?

  You’re always telling me to breathe.

  Laughter through the unit. Genuine relieved laughter. A draught of cold water.

  Better than if you fucking don’t, huh, Hig?

  More laughter.

  You did good, Hig. You did fucking great. You potted four at the start. Four! Way way past the line out of Vegas, man. We all had you at two tops, the sorta shaky way you sounded.

  Laughter.

  Thanks.

  Pause.

  What the fuck just happened? Bangley. What did you do?

  Mortar. 81 mil British. Had to use the fuckers sometime. The porch on the tower I made you build? That’s what it’s for Hig. Save your ass. Wanted it to be a surprise sometime, kinda like a birthday present.

  Crackle.

  Surprised you, right Hig? It really did. Still have a bunch left. For when the shit really hits the fan.

  Sat in the dirt in the sun while the blood in my nose dried to a crust and tried to digest the mortar thing. Fucking Bangley. Had a mortar tube hidden out by the tower all the frigging time. Good lord.

  Crackle.

  When I first saw the nine coming on you slow I went down and fetched the fucker out of the brush where I had it stashed. Looked like you might really need some high powered help this time Hig.

  Pause.

  But you did really good. Might have made it without the mortars. Way you were shooting. Damn.

  I saw my rifle knocked under a salt bush fifteen feet away. Tilted my head back like before: eyes closed, sun flooding, the ringing subsiding slowly like a vagrant wind. Laughed. Cried too. Laughed and cried at the same time, I don’t know how long, just like a crazy man.

  I flew that afternoon. Not in any shape to do it, but I did. To look for the other four, to see if they had designs on the families or on us and not a sign. Headed for the hills is what they did. The best thing. To fly. First time in years without Jasper. Still put his pheasant hunting quilt on the seat for luck, I guess, still took the turns more gingerly, the dives less sudden so as not to throw him—how I had trained myself to fly now. Flew the big circle and at the wave of the first hills west I looped back in and swooped low to look at the carnage, the three craters raw wounds in the brush, the bodies where we left them when Bangley walked out to help me bring in the sled. I could barely pull it. Not that I didn’t have the strength in my legs. My temples throbbed, an ache in the forehead, just couldn’t seem to concentrate long enough to take five steps in a row with a sustained pull. Felt a little nauseous too. Bangley was patient and after sharing the harness he said

  Hig take a break. I got this for a while. You’ve had a long day.

  Are you going to tell me to breathe?

  He took a sip from the plastic tube of his water pack and looked at me with fresh appraisal. He had a fleck of tobacco on his cheek that looked like a mole. The same exact place as Marilyn Monroe.

  Hig?

  Yuh.

  Breathe only if you want to. You know, when you say that I am relieved. You are concussed Hig no doubt about it. Which I am truly sorry about. But. Better than being dead by a long shot. It’s not as bad as it could be. Your eyes are facing the same direction and Hig hasn’t lost his sense of humor.

  He put the tump over his forehead leaned into it and walked.

  Now from the plane I could see it all: the slide out of the sandy trail and the pile of brush where I had hidden the sled, a bit of red plastic in the dirt
the little shell holder that came with the box, the spot I had probably gotten to when the first bomb hit not eighty feet away. The four where I had dropped them, three in the sandy bottom one above, the birds, vulture crow raven magpie, lifting off in a scatter as I flew over. The one mangled by the mortar that could just as easily have been me. One arm, half a head gone. My head still ached and when I flew by low and saw him I leaned over and threw up out the window. Barely anything to throw up just the canned bean and venison salad Bangley made me in the hangar but still it spewed along the fuselage and I had to scrub it off next day. What it was, that might have been me. The mortar is not a precision weapon. Bangley said he had worked out the range the angle for five spots along the trail and was pretty sure about it but. What it was, it was a big gamble he saw me getting overwhelmed and.

  I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and flew south and east and scouted the approach roads to the families, and nothing. And when I came back around from the east I saw a dozen in the yard and the red union suit hanging limp off the pole and I landed. Bounced up the drive and shut her down. Climbed out stiff.

  Aaron is a tall man, craggy, with a hooked beard, a beard like a scoop of carved wood. He was wasted by the blood disease as most of them were and moved slowly with deliberation like a man much older than he was. He waved his hand, huge on the end of the narrow wrist that stuck out of a patched flannel shirt.

  I waved and walked and they all, mothers fathers kids, moved toward me in a ragged bunch and stopped and we faced off across the beaten mud of the yard. Fifteen feet. The unspoken irrevocable distance like an old Western movie where the mountain man meets the braves in some meadow. Or the homesteader confronts the landgrabbing rancher and his hired guns, the horses always pulling up to stand in a nearly taut line as if at a precipice. Always that bit of mutually respected demilitarized zone across which words can be flung followed maybe by bullets and arrows and death. That’s what we called it, the DMZ. Awkward at first but not now. In this case we had decided without discussion or even any medical evidence that there was no way the sickness could infect from that far off. Probably not even from five feet, probably not even in a casual touch, but everybody, mostly me, felt better about this gap. If we needed to, we placed objects in the middle of it to be retrieved and that was okay too.

  Aaron said Aren’t you going to bring Jasper down?

  I blinked at him, half turned back to the plane, then just stood. Couldn’t breathe for a sec.

  They were all watching me, I could feel it like a pressure. I hung my head down, watched a drop of salt water hit the dirt. Wiped it away.

  Hig are you okay?

  Aaron was bent forward, his thin back, his turkey neck, the beard. Land of the lost. Talk about being already dead. I straightened up.

  He died Aaron. On the mountain. In his sleep. He was old.

  I could almost see the wave of shock sway the little group. The last death here had been a child, Ben, a boy of eight or nine who got so excited, more than anyone when I landed the plane and carried Jasper to the ground. Many times he forgot the rules and bounded across the zone shrieking with glee and reached his arms out to the dog who stood up off his haunches and wagged and like the figures on the Grecian Urn he never got there, never attained his goal—always some long armed parent or aunt scooped him up with a mild scold.

  I’m sorry Hig. We’re all sorry.

  The sincerity of it, the dignity. After what they had all lost and. It didn’t matter. It was mine, my family. The second tear that spilled I wiped away and I told myself there wouldn’t be another. Not in front of them.

  Thanks.

  A little girl stepped forward. Her name was Matilda. She had a handful of wild asters. She crossed to the middle of the Zone and lay it on the ground and smiled at me.

  I picked them before, she said. For you.

  Just as a present?

  She nodded, looking up at me. She smiled, pretty, her skin waxy, dark rings around her eyes.

  Thank you, I said. Thank you. And I broke down. Just stood there in front of them all and wept, wept uncontrollably, shuddering, and smiled at the girl through the tears. Her own smile faded and she looked scared and stepped back into the skirts of her mother and I felt bad but couldn’t help myself. It was Jasper, not just. It was all of it. Was this hell? To love like this, to grieve from fifteen feet, an uncrossable distance?

  I picked up the flowers but didn’t step back. They were all little more than an arm’s length away, two.

  Thank you, I said to them all. Jasper loved coming here.

  Which was true. I think the scent of children made him happy.

  The flowers are beautiful. I sniffed them. Mmmmm. Wow.

  Grinned. The girl smiled again from where she hung on the woman’s skirts.

  You put up the flag?

  Aaron nodded. The last time was a week after the last Sprite. The solar water pump they used to draw from the creek to irrigate had died, just a bad fuse but they didn’t have one and I did so the next morning I brought one. Now a tall woman stepped through from the back. She was stunning, half her face. The disease had not yet claimed her vigor. Half her face had been burned horribly, some kind of gas explosion. When she talked she turned the burned half away and looked at you from the side and seemed to speak to air. Her name was Reba like the country singer of before and she could sing too, I had heard her. She held out a cracked plastic pickle bucket and I took it, hand to hand, the first time ever, and inside it brimmed with early baby lettuce.

  We are having a bumper crop, Aaron said. I remember you saying you didn’t grow it for some reason. We thought. He trailed off.

  I smiled. I squatted down and reached out my hand to the little girl who had given me the flowers.

  Go ahead her mother said.

  She held out her little hand grubby with dirt and I took it and squeezed it lightly and smiled. I met her hazel eyes, a little bloodshot with the immune system war raging inside her, and held to her tiny fingers for a long moment, held to them like they were a rope and I was a man drowning.

  The beans were already sprouting, showing the little curl just out of the turned dirt. The water was running in the furrows. I told Bangley I was heading out again.

  We were in his shop which was the old sunken living room of a Mcmansion to the north of my hangar. It looked out of big double paned plate windows to the west, away from the runway to the mountains. It was a gunsmith shop plain and simple. Bangley made no excuses about knowing nothing about engines, wood, carpentry of any kind, agriculture, especially agriculture, gardening, cooking, especially cooking, languages, history, math beyond arithmetic, fashion, leatherwork, gin rummy, sewing, or especially rhetoric—the decorum, the customs of a respectful rhetorical debate.

  Spit it out Hig is what he liked to say in the last instance. Spit it out and don’t pull any goddamn punches. It’s just you and me here ha ha! No one else to impress.

  But he knew guns, knew how to modify them, improve them, and he could build one from the ground up, from pipe and old flatware. In the box trailer he pulled behind his pickup on the afternoon he showed up at the airport he brought with him a heavy drill press, a welder, a generator, grinders, a band saw. When I pointed out that these skills—the welding, the soldering, the tempering—that they were applicable to all kinds of metalwork, he chuffed his gravel laugh.

  Got no use for that is all he’d say.

  He had also brought with him about fifty posters, all girls in bikinis or less holding various weapons and bannered with the great names in small armaments from Colt through Sig to Winchester. They were tacked up all over the walnut paneled walls where framed paintings used to hang, taped even to the edges of the windows. They were shooting submachine guns holding pistols in the low ready position like a fig leaf and sometimes not bothering to cover their total nakedness at all and the pain they caused me, I mean the sight of unclad women, actually constricted my throat so I kept my visits to the bare minimum so to speak. H
a. When I did go I hailed him from the yard and waited for a yell back, an invite maybe, trying to train him to do the same and stop giving me a heart attack at my hangar which I knew to be fruitless.

  We got plenty of venison, Hig, he said straightening from a large pipe in a vise.

  After our dustup the other day he announced that he was going to build a grenade launcher. He actually had one, an M203, but the range was inadequate to save my ass, he said, so he was going to rebuild it. More accurate he said.

  Can’t have the Hig getting concussed anymore, makes him too goddamn goofy.

  Now he straightened and squinted at me while I tried not to look at the homicidal naked girls. Weird: on a low table, by the leather couch he had decided to keep, was a framed picture of the family that had lived here: some ski vacation, three blonde kids in helmets, parkas, their parents standing behind holding skis and smiling broadly, teeth as white as the snowy mountains in the range behind them. Top of one of the mountains at Vail or somewhere. I never asked about it. I intuited that it was not as simple as being reminded of the filial warmth that once pervaded, but more likely some Bangley score keeping, like: Look you Yuppie motherfuckers, you had all that but who is here in your sunken living room today, healthy as a horse and crafting better weaponry so he can keep ahold of it like you couldn’t.

  Just a guess.

  You thinking you need another fishing vacation? Last one wasn’t exciting enough?

  Shook my head. I’m flying.

  Flying?

  Grand Junction. Got a transmission from there a little while ago. From the tower.

  His hands, which I thought of as paws they were so big and blunt looking, they let go the pipe, set down the file. He looked at me under the hanging gun rack he’d had me build for him in the beginning—he never did anything without a platoon’s worth of firepower within reach.