The Dog Stars

by Peter Heller

He didn’t laugh.

  He said, I try to stay on the Right Side of the Bible. Left side was written by Jews. Some things to pay attention to, I guess, but if I were you I’d start with John.

  We should have all paid more attention to the Left Side I am thinking now. The Wrong Side, the Side Where Shit Goes Really Really Wrong.

  Drop down and follow the Fraser past Tabernash. Most of the valley burned except the firehouse and the discount liquor store which now stands alone at the edge of a field full of bighorn sheep. They rouse, swing and trot in a panic toward the blackened forest as I pass and I see four wolves standing out of the grass and they turn them back like sheepdogs. Fly on.

  I know this country all of it. Doc Ammons, I can see his barn still standing in a hundred open acres this side of Granby. The house is gone but. His son Swift was my best friend in college and they were my second family. Three of us fished the Fraser often. Can see the log corrals, the ring where Becky trained her horses and riding students. Could probably find a stack of my old books in the log outbuilding where I used to sleep. Today I don’t want the memories. I fly over.

  Right through the gunsight slot of Gore Canyon wingtips up against rock both sides. Seems like. Fished here, too, the river dropping so fast, the rapids so loud, reverberating off the cliff—you had to be careful as you walked down the railroad tracks to look back often. More than one fisherman never heard or saw the train coming. Air over the water cold and heavy throwing up mist, the Beast loving it.

  Do I? I used to love to fly like this. Twisting through a canyon fifty feet off the water.

  Now I don’t feel anything. I feel the way my unwadered legs felt after ten minutes in the snowmelt. Numb and glad to be. Glad to be numb.

  The difference maybe between the living and the dead: the living often want to be numb the dead never do, if they never want anything.

  Sunlight. Out the other end. The river quieting to black water, the rock folding back to hills, woods unburned. I can see duck smattering the pools. Herons out of the reeds, angular, spreading those huge wings at the sound of the plane. Color of smoke.

  What do you want? Hig. What?

  I want to be the color of smoke.

  Then what?

  Then. Then.

  Pull back hard on the yoke and climb steeply out of the hole at State Bridge. Dry sheep hills, herds of antelope and deer scattered. In the flats along the Colorado River I can see the once swank Eagle Airport. Key the mike and call the tower. Ask for clearance to pass through their airspace. A hope and a habit. Triple Three Alpha three to the east at niner thousand request transition your airspace en route—

  Where am I en route to? Junction maybe. With a jog south to the Uncompahgre Plateau, the places I used to hunt. For no reason.

  en route—

  I want to say En route to Something Completely Fucking Different. I fly over.

  II

  Sudden lurch and buck. Again. Thrown to the left, left wing dipping. Hold tight to the yoke, correct and watch the altimeter. I love this. The yoke in my hands is neutral, the plane level and the altimeter needle is circling clockwise upwards. Updraft. The trees get smaller, pressure in the seat cushion like a great lifting hand. Late morning thermal, the still dark woods soaking the sun and throwing up this plume of warm air. The unasked lift is fast, heady, a little alarming.

  Gain fifteen hundred feet with no work at all. Cross high over the Roaring Fork right over Carbondale, unburned, surrounded by rivers and green ranches. I blink. Looks like cattle there. Cattle of old. Black and red. Must be—nothing else that color. Damn. Cattle gone wild, sticking to home, miraculously out of the mouths of wolves. I’d drop to look but don’t want to lose this height nor spend the gas to climb again for the next pass.

  A ranch. Cattle. The spring river flowing by. A ranch house in the shade of leafing cottonwoods and globe willows. A cracked and broken road winding by. Squint and I can imagine someone in the yard. Someone leaning to bolt a spreader to the tractor. Someone thinking Damn back, still stiff. Smelling coffee from an open kitchen door. Someone else hanging laundry in a bright patch. Each with a litany of troubles and having no clue how blessed. Squint and remake the world. To normalcy. But.

  More normal the absences.

  Huntsman’s Ridge. Can see the long rockslide we used to ski, called it Endless. Seemed so then. Be perfect now: spring corn-snow compacted and stable. Zero avalanche danger.

  Half the aspen forest still in leaf, still living. On our left the rugged wall of the Raggeds. I nod, fly over.

  Now the country gets soft. It will be aspen forests for miles. I tap the fuel gauge.

  Twenty nine point three gallons. Not enough gas to get home. As simple as that.

  As simple as that we go over the edge.

  I was wondering: Is this what it’s like to die? To be this alone? To hold to a store of love and pass over?

  We almost moved here. Paonia. Some misspelling of Peony. Melissa was tired of teaching, tired of the principal and the District, was itching to try something else. Organic farming maybe. Building was a lot slower over on this side of the state but I could’ve probably pieced it together with remodels, cabinets, the odd house. First time I saw it I thought it looked like a train set. Looks like a train set still. I let the Beast fall.

  Cut power and glide down the south slope of Grand Mesa, the tops of the soft aspens a few feet under our belly. Still green, the pale trunks still startling, the ferns beneath them still a thick carpet no doubt harboring deer. Whoosh off a band of cliff. And the valley opens: a green river bottom backed by a high double mountain with a swooping saddle between. Orchards, the neat rows of tufted trees on either side of the river. Vineyards too. Tall cottonwoods marking the westward twisting course of the stream. In the west, where the river flows out of the valley into a dry desert scrubland, I can see the railroad tracks, the flat topped mesas and the massing uplift of the Plateau, purple in the morning haze. And the town, more a hamlet, clustered between the river and the hill with the white stone P.

  Bought groceries here often, ammo, dog food. Used to wait seven minutes at the crossing while the coal train clattered by. Timed it once, resenting the loss of daylight. Look over at Jasper’s seat.

  You loved it here, huh, bud. Walk down to the river below the town park and throw the stick in the current. You weren’t too good at stick. Or swimming. Loved it anyway. We should all be like that huh?

  Bank downriver and aim for the high dry plateau. Guts in a knot.

  I cannot live like this. Cannot live at all not really. What was I doing? Nine years of pretending.

  The road we took crossed a green bridge. The canyon was called Dominguez. I am eight hundred feet above the ground. See the bridge. See the orchard pressed against the canyon walls, the dirt track. Follow it.

  Sparse forest, piñons, junipers almost black and still living. Desert trees that don’t grow up but grow gnarled and thick. Stunted and stubborn. Remind me of Bangley. They just refuse to die at any price. Some of these have been here since the so-named Spanish priest traveled through here with his god.

  Never flown this. We always came here in a truck. The road is grown in. Overgrown track swings away from the smaller river to climb a ridge. Bank right to follow it into another drainage and the country I used to hunt. But. Off to the left in the path of the creek a flash of red rock, the upper wall of a canyon just revealed. Always amazed that such a small stream can leave such a landmark, that so much big country stays hidden in these clefts. I bank back to take a look.

  As I near, the rim reveals the ruddy face of a high wall, deep red and waterstained in strips of black and ochre. Cut by ledges. Pale printed outline where a huge block came unglued. The cliff two hundred feet high if a foot.

  It’s a box canyon. I’ll be damned. The exploding lime green tops of cottonwoods, a few bristled ponderosas. And. I circle tight. How could I have never seen it? Because I was following the road, if you call it that.

  The split and rive
n little canyon widens into this boisterous green hole. Creek winds through. A meadow on the left bank. And. So shocked and curious I am descending in my gyre and I almost spiral into the high wall.

  A stone hut against the cliff. Smoke wafting from. A stone bridge over the creek to the field. Cattle scattered on the watered grass. Half a dozen.

  Cattle.

  And.

  A garden plot larger than ours. Fed by a ditch cut from an oxbow of the creek. And.

  A figure in the garden bent.

  And.

  It’s a woman.

  Long dark hair tied back. Unbending to stand. Hand to forehead, shading to watch the plane.

  A woman in shorts, man’s shirt tied at the waist. Barefoot? Barefoot. Tall and lanky. Standing straight, tall, shielding her face and watching me. Mouth in a wide circle. Yelling? Yes.

  A figure now out of the house if that’s a house, a man with a gun. Old man. Old man with a gun raising it skyward and sighting. Jesus.

  I don’t hear the concussion but. Twang of bird shot, the tear of aluminum and a new hiss of air. Jesus. Then a pop, burn and sting, my face burning whole left side. Both hands grip the yoke. Pull straight back into a hard climb and roll right wing straight back over the rim almost brush the tops of the low junipers on the edge as I go over and lose sight of them. Bits of shattered glass roll into my collar. Hey. Hey. My window is gone. Left side window, what’s left a mosaic of shattered tempered glass clinging to the frame.

  Blood soaking my shirt. Air.

  In that instant I knew what I had come for.

  Not what you think: you are thinking Woman but that wasn’t it. It was to be glad again to be alive.

  The moment you realize nothing vital is broken inside you, nor in the Beast, that you are climbing, leveling out, that the engine is purring, the controls tight. That your trembling fingers come up to the side of your bloody face and touch, and touch gingerly, feel the four splinters of glass and that’s it. A few shards. Fuck. And the roof of the cockpit is peppered with holes, just the liner, nothing all the way through metal. That close. The fucker almost took me out. If I hadn’t been rolling away over the edge of the canyon all that bird shot would now be in my head. Damn. And in that moment I began to laugh.

  My first glad instinct was to climb down there with the AR-15 and turn the old bastard into hash at close range. That felt good. It was feeling something, not morose. Hig, the SOB did you a favor. Woke your sorry ass up. Just was doing what you would have done to defend his hearth and home and woman.

  Woman.

  Was that his woman? The old badger. Who knew what arrangements were made in this world. First instinct was to climb down there and murder the fucker and take his woman. And. Why not?

  Well, anyway Hig, whether you are a good man or a bad man, or just a pretty good man in a fucked up world, you are going to have to land the Beast first. Put her down in a rolling rocky country with one road that is no longer a road.

  I banked around, went over the ridge away from the canyon and aimed the nose down into a sage meadow with the rutted track going straight south across it.

  Double U-O-M-A-N. First sight of one viable, one tall, one without the blood sickness probably, and not frozen on a poster in Bangley’s shop or spilled on the ground behind you, too young, with a kitchen knife in her hand—first sight and you are willing to forget everything. Like checking the landing.

  Fuck Hig, get your shit together.

  I pulled up. Circled low. The road was deeply rutted. Like it would bury the right main gear up to the strut. Nice one, Hig. Be a long walk back to anywhere.

  That’s not it. Just. I mean pussy whipped at a thousand feet. I realized, laughing, that it could’ve been men, or a hag. It was this new relationship to a person of any gender: that I was under no obligation to kill them. Or let Bangley kill them. I mean this was their house, not mine. I was the visitor.

  Amazing how not having to kill someone frees up a relationship generally. Despite the fact that Gramps tried to kill me. Well. Bygones. I could walk down in there and shoot him or not, which was liberating. Or them. Could’ve been a whole platoon in the house or somewhere hidden just waiting for me. I circled low twice and mapped the rutted road carefully, where the ditch started, where ended, marked it with bushes and gaps. Could they hear me a mile away in the canyon? Probably. Probably right now they were lining up twelve gauge shells on the rock windowsill, probably she was shaking loose her hair, unbuttoning her shirt, and waiting to bait me in range like a Siren.

  Hig!

  Focus Hig, breathe. Say 10-4.

  10-4.

  Focus on the little things. Stay alive.

  10 fucking 4.

  I would’ve skipped the rutted track and put down right in the sage meadow but I did not have tundra tires and a rock hidden in the brush could snap a wheel off. Better the known danger etc. Made sure I could see a few feet either side of the ruts because I was going to have to put one wheel on the center hump and the other thwacking through the edge of the bushes. Then I decided to not be stingy. The landing was gonna have to be precise within inches. Better to know exactly how the wind was blowing.

  I pulled up, gained three hundred feet, and dabbed the side of my face with a corner of Jasper’s quilt. Then reached down between the seat to a little wood box I kept there and pulled the tab of a smoke bomb with my teeth and dropped it out the window. The thick orange plume boiled out of it and trailed after.

  Landed twenty feet from the road and blew low and stiff east-northeast.

  Damn, that was a bright idea. Good strong late morning crosswind could’ve messed with my plan. What else was I forgetting?

  The reason Bangley was still alive was that he never forgot anything. Maybe he remembered a few too many things, a lot of redundancy, he didn’t care. What else did he have to do with his day? It was just occurring to me that maybe the reason I was still alive was that Bangley never forgot anything. Bangley. Husband and father. Farmer. Damn.

  Oh, I know. Hig, you forgot that trying to land on a deeply rutted basically a trail in rocky sage country you mostly can’t see through—you forgot that it could clean your clock. Or clean the clock of the Beast which might be the same thing.

  Okay, breathe. I came around a last time for final and pulled the bar up for half flaps and pushed down the nose, ruddered hard over for a full slip, and floated sideways into the field.

  A bush landing has a way of waking you up. If you weren’t already. Powered off, engine growl to idle, and kicked the Beast straight just before touch down, left wing down low into the wind and the left gear thwacked into the brush loud. I struggled with the gusts. To keep the nose over the left edge of the ditch and not in it. Then the right main gear, the back right wheel hit the mounding dirt between the old wheel tracks and we jerked left. I struggled to keep that tire out of the rut. Must have, because I didn’t feel anything break, just heard the loud rips and tumps and squeals as the thicker sage beat at the plane and held the nose off as long as I could and when it came down there was a merciful clear bald run of low rocks and chewed down grass, thanks bighorn, or whoever, and the Beast bumped and shook and I shuddered to a stop just before the piñons.

  Whew. Breathe. First thought: My paint job. The beautiful Beast scoured with stick lines. Second was: That was way too close. That was fucking dumb. All of it was dumb. If I hadn’t thrown the smoke bomb I would’ve wrecked. I looked at the digital fuel gauge before shutting her down. Just over twelve gallons left. Less than an hour. And less than an hour in the two jugs. Not even close to enough to get back. Dumb. But. I could get to Junction if I could take off with the same luck I had just landed.

  Before I augured in the three stakes and tied her down facing into her takeoff, before I put two of Bangley’s Eggs of Death in the pockets of my jacket, and slung the AR over my shoulder and walked away from the Beast, I did the first not dumb thing all morning. I took out the jugs and using the strut climbed over the wings and poured one each, the
last fuel in each wing tank. Fuel up now. Better to fuel up before you get your undies in a bundle. And I took the key. Put it in my right jeans pocket and said Hig. The key is in the right jeans pocket.

  Never know how much of a hurry you might be in later.

  III

  Well she was not nude waiting for me by the creek, not even dressed out in the grass in front of the house singing, she was nowhere. Need not have tied myself to any mast. The smoke that had leaked from the chimney and billowed downcanyon was gone.

  Place looked suddenly dead. Bucket kicked over in the yard, a dirty cooking spoon beside it. The cattle, a few sheep, were there heads down in the meadow all facing downstream. Ribbed thin, sharp hips, nearly starving. One big bird high up on the high wall gyring along the rock face. A peregrine. The ledge marked with a white ribbon of guano must be her nest. Circle out, circle back. Pity the ducks that angled down into this hole. No chickens. That occurred to me. Because of the falcon? No, the old coot had a shotgun. Because they would need a rooster then, or two, to maintain the flock—probably too loud every morning if you want to stay hidden, like letting the whole damn country know you’re here. Smart.

  I turned the scope upcanyon to where the creek spilled over the wall in a twenty foot falls. The top of the hole completely boxed off by this cliff. And two sides soaring. Pretty neat spot. A length of dead pine was propped against the rock beside the waterfall, limbs stubbed in a crude ladder. Okay. If they went that way in flight they didn’t pull up and hide the ladder, maybe only because it was too heavy or they didn’t have time.

  I was lying at the very rim, scrunched between two rocks looking straight down. Here my cliff was about a hundred feet high, maybe less. I was wedged tight and had to slide the holstered Glock around to my back so it wouldn’t scrape.

  Think like Bangley. That’s what you need to do. Bangley’s voice, I can hear it: