The Dog Stars (37 page)

Now we descended over the foothills, and I pointed the Beast toward Erie by rote. I aimed for the dirt escarpment that stood out like a billboard on the other side of the interstate, still fifteen miles off my aiming point from the west that would put me right over midfield. Seeing it, I flashed on the summer I was eighteen:
returning home to Mom’s little house in Hotchkiss. Surprising her. On walking up the switchback mesa road at dusk. The excitement of returning home, the fear of having it be nothing like I expected. My heart drummed. Could feel it in there trying to compete with the throb of the engine, the lower roar and vibration as I pulled back the throttle to descend.

To our eight miles of prairie. Over the last trees, the very last living pines wandering out onto the plain like disoriented sentinels, our perimeter, our margin of safety, and then I could see the tower, the one we’d built together. Bangley’s sniper deck, the porch where he fired his stash of mortars—and then I was over the place and didn’t look down too closely to see the bones, the bodies left unburied and scattered by now by wolves and coyotes, and whatever else. Could have seen, if I looked closely, the white bleat of a rib’s arch or skull. And I felt a surge of—what? Of something for Bangley who I realized in that moment had become my family. Because it was to him, like to my mother twenty two years ago, I was returning home. Not my wife, my child, my mother, not anything but Bangley with his gravel voice. For whom it was a matter of pride to be a stubborn dickhead all the time. And I felt a twinge of fear, of recoil. What if he was straight up mad at me?

The warring emotions. And then I felt the fear full bore. When I dropped to six thousand feet and flew over the glinting river which was low, but running, and came in straight for the south end of the runway and saw the charred husks of the houses, saw foundations, saw one half of my hangar ripped open as if by a tornado and burned.

III

Bangley’s house, a hundred yards north, the one with his gunsmith shop in the sunken living room and the photo of the blonde family skiing—it was standing, but the windows were shot out and there were scorch marks around the second floor dormer which was splintered, and next to it was a gaping hole in the roof. Oh fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.

Pops was straight up and alert on his pack, I glanced back, he knew it was all wrong, and Cima squeezed my thigh and couldn’t keep herself away from the window, from pressing her face to it like a kid at the shark tank.

Before I landed I came in low and took a pass over the garden. It was still there, undisturbed. The water was still running across the head of the marks at the top of the plot, and there was water running in half the furrows.

But. Even from two hundred feet I could see the weeds. They filled the unwatered marks and climbed and crowned the ridges of banked earth.

I jammed the throttle and pulled up and came around again higher. Banked left and aimed for midfield and landed long and taxied straight to Bangley’s house. Mixture, mags, master switch.
Off. Shut down. The Beast had barely stopped rolling when I shoved open the sticky door and jumped out and ran to the house.

The front door was open, swinging slightly in the light wind.

Bangley! Bangley! Hey! You in here! BANGLEY!

I was surprised by the force of my shout. Sounded like a stranger.

Bounded down into the workshop. Oddly the big plate window looking to the mountains was intact but there was a string of bullet holes running diagonally up the wall over the hearth. The picture of the skiing family sat unmolested on the side table. Bangley’s tools lay where he left them, the barrel and receiver of a Sig Sauer .308, one of his favorite guns, suspended over the worktable in two vises.

Jesus.

Pops behind me.

Your buddy, he said. I knew from our first interview that he would be a badass, else how could a guy like you—

Stopped himself.

Never imagined this.

Bangley!

Desperate. For the first time I felt it claw over me, the desperation like a bad odor. Weird. Never know how you feel about someone until their house is torn open.

Flinched. Pops’s hand on my shoulder.

They caught him in here. He was working. It was during the day. Never expected a daytime assault like that. They came in from the front and he survived the first burst and he fought them off. He fought them to a retreat, then went upstairs where he could get a better view, better angle, and fought them from there. Probably only a couple of them had guns.

I bounded up the stairs. Heart gripped. What would I see? Had never been up there, never. The hallway lined with photos of the blonde family. Skiing, sailing, in a bamboo bungalow, palm trees, a yellow lab in a flowerfilled field. Saw all that at speed, taking the hall in running bounds on thick carpet, stopping once to orient myself toward the front of the house where the dormer would be. This room here. Shove open the partially closed door.

A child’s room, the boy’s. Poster of Linu Linu in a bikini over the bed, the bed covered in a quilt patterned with cowboys on bucking broncos. Butterflies pinned in frames on the wall and an electric guitar in the corner. Also slalom skis. Surfboard, a shortboard mounted on the angled ceiling, bright green graphic of the serpent in the apple tree and a naked Eve standing half turned away, her breast barely covered by the curls of her hair: SIN SURFBOARDS. A signed NASCAR poster. Car number 13.

Two hunting arrows, real ones, were stuck in the poster and the wall above it was torn with bullet holes.

Two tubs of Copenhagen and a Folgers coffee can spittoon on the floor by the bed. Night vision binocs and two Glocks hanging in their holsters from a hat stand. Jesus. It was the son’s room and it was Bangley’s. This is where he lived. Fucking A. Preserved like a room in one of those historic museums. I flashed on Bangley’s
father, the one he had hated—and I thought, He never had a room like this I bet. He was healing himself or following some instinct of compensation or maybe something more weird, who knew, living in this museum, this play set of a room. And there was sunlight coming through the roof. A hole two feet across. No sign of an explosion, how did it get there? Oh. Almost stepped through an equal sized hole in the floor. The questions racing through my head and colliding in a NASCAR pileup. And the window burned. And sandbags stacked to the sill and up the sides. And no sign of Bangley which was at this point a good thing.

I stood in the middle of the room gulping air, catching my breath. Went to the windowless window and looked down at our encampment, our airport, and couldn’t help burping up a bubble of stricken laughter.

He could see just about everything: over the low berm across the runway where I slept with Jasper, right to the dumpster we had dragged away from my house, my house that was a decoy. He could see the porch and front door of that house, down along the line of rusted plane hulks, two sides of the FBO building, the doorway to my hangar. Not much he could not cover from here, which is of course why he had chosen it. Had never occurred to me, don’t know why. Or that when I beeped him in the night with an intruder alarm that he could scope the whole scene from here. He would have known how many were stacked behind the dumpster, what they were carrying, how many more were maybe hanging back, knew it all before he sauntered up to our berm in the dark, had probably already planned who he would shoot first and how. Why he never seemed surprised, always seemed way too relaxed to me. Fuck. And the sandbags. He could have probably made the shots with one of his sniper rifles right from here. Fucking Bangley. How far was it? Three hundred yards, maybe. Easy. For him. And I felt standing there rising up in me the revulsion
and admiration and I have to say—what? Love, maybe, that I had grown to feel for that certain fucked up individual.

He was good at one thing, really good at it, and the rest he muddled through with unyielding orneriness. One strategy, I guess. And he backed me up. Unfailingly, unhesitant. And, what? Generously. I mean above and beyond, right? Never even let me know just how in hand he had the whole operation. And so when I left, he knew exactly the increase in threat, in danger. Could probably calibrate it to an exact and lethal degree, the way he would calibrate windage and elevation for one of his long shots from the tower, knew with chilling precision just how in danger he would be living here alone without me and Jasper, then just me, as a warning system. I mean the symbiosis, the extent to which I hadn’t even been aware. And that somehow made the surly and ultimately brief resistance to me leaving even more touching. The basket of grenades. Telling me I was family. Telling me in my own way to have a good one, to be safe, not for him, but for me.

And those other trips. The fishing and hunting which he knew were recreational more than anything, or psychological, understood R&R, and which put him at deadly risk. His never once objecting.

This was his room. Kinda touching. Kinda peculiar.

I turned. Pops in the doorway his gray eyes moving over the child’s objects, the guns.

That’s Bangley in a nutshell, I said.

Well.

Pops’s eyes traveling to the sandbagged window.

He didn’t die here.

Pops stepped across to the singed hole that used to be the dormer window. Scanned downward, across.

He was wounded here. Pops touched a shredded curtain.

Knew he couldn’t stay here, they would burn him out. Knew he had to move, hurt as he was. Had to move and attack. He was a good soldier.

Was?

Pops shrugged.

We both stood there. I couldn’t move. I felt frozen.

And then we heard the double shot and the scream.

And then we were running down the hall, down the stairs, through the selectively trashed ground floor, out into the painful sunlight.

The Beast was yards away on the ramp that served as taxiway for these houses on the north. Cima was crouched beside it under the wing trying to make herself as small as the wheel.

Pops stopped short and I bumped into him, almost knocked him to the ground.

Wait.

He shielded his eyes and scanned. She by the plane was crouched and pointing. Toward my hangar which was closed. I mean the
part that was still intact. She was okay, had been the sound of the shots that flattened her.

And then Pops was moving.

It’s him, he said.

I overtook and passed him in three steps. Never know how you feel about someone until they die and come back. I shoved the hangar door, the one a person uses to walk through, the one cut into the main door which lifts, I hit it so hard I fell into my old digs. Stumbled across the big floor which I had covered in all manner of fine Persians from the other houses, stumbled so hard and headlong I wrenched my back, fuck, and hyperextended a knee, ow, pulled myself erect and stopped and stood like a tree and squinted getting used to the dimness.

There were two corrugated pale translucent panels in the roof that served as lowrent skylights and sort of lit the place with natural daylight when the doors were closed. And saw our couch, the
Valdez
, Jasper’s easy chair, the workbench, the stool, the counter in the back where I cooked, and the red linoleum table where we often had our gourmet meals. Nothing else. But heard. Slight scraping like a mouse in the wall. Metallic.

I had a tool chest, rolling drawers, massive red steel, six feet wide. It was beautiful. Took me and Bangley most of a morning to roll it over from the service center hangar, to get it past the frost heaves and potholes, bridging the bad places with planking. It had a place of honor middle of the north wall. Bangley called it Red Square. I need a ratcheting flat wrench, quarter inch, he’d say. Can you get off your butt and go to Red Square and find me one? Please. The scraping came from the chest and the chest was gapped away from the wall. Bangley’s steel toed work boot stuck out from behind
it. Next to it, against the wall, his grenade launcher, the one he had been working on.

He was covered in dried blood. Looked like someone had dumped a bucket of it down the lower half of him. His eyes were swollen near shut, a white crust of dried mucus or vomit on the side of his face that lay on his arm. His left leg was bent at a weird angle. He lay on his favorite assault rifle, the M4, and his bloody left hand lay over the trigger guard.

A croak guttered from his cracked lips. The words came in the faintest grit of a whisper.

Fuckin Hig.

That’s all. And his hand came up stiff as a claw and touched my beard.