The Dog Stars (5 page)

Often Bangley wanders over and joins me. He can’t cook I can. Can’t train the man to knock ever, or at least not whisper in like some ghost, which creeps me out a little cause I never know how long he’s been watching.

Dinner early tonight.

Fuck Bangley, I nearly scalded myself.

You cook like you enjoy it.

Huh?

The way you move around with the skillet, the knife, like it’s a kitchen. Like it’s one of those cooking shows.

Bangley’s nostrils flare with a gill-like rhythm when he’s particularly enjoying himself.

I stare at him for just a moment.

You hungry?

Like one of those cooking shows where they tie on an apron. Like cooking a frigging dinner is some kind of dance. Tra la la.

I put a pan full of fresh new potatoes down on the stove. In the beginning I tried using venison fat for lard but it went rancid so fast.

Well I’m not wearing an apron, as you can see, and I’m not dancing.

Almost no oil in the pantries of houses at the end the last few months they must have been drinking it for the calories. Then in the basement of the big Bauhaus across on Piper Lane I found two five gallon barrels of olive oil. Hidden behind a stack of new bricks.

You were singing though. He flashes that straight across grin. Just makes him look meaner.

The stove is hot with Canadian fir two by fours, the best frying wood for flash heat. The oil is spitting and I prod at the cut potatoes until most of them are in contact with the bottom of the pan. With the steel spatula I reach down and joggle the chrome lever
that closes the side vent to the stove to slow it down. I think: If I were made of different stuff, if I thought I could defend this place myself I would shoot Bangley where he stands and get it over with. Would I? Maybe. And then I would miss this sparring every day. Probably feel it like a big void. We really have become like a married couple.

I don’t think I was singing, I say finally.

You were Hig, you were. Wasn’t Johnny Cash either. He grins.

Like that was the only approved sing to yourself music in the Book of Bangley.

Well what the fuck was it?

He shrugs. Hell if I know. Some pop girl stuff. From the radio I distantly recall.

Distantly recall
. Standing there with a smile of triumph and his scruffy week old beard. I swear. I start to laugh. That’s what he does to me: aggravate me all the way to the point of laughter. To the point of ridiculous and then a fuse pops, flicks a switch, and I laugh. Lucky for both of us I guess.

Sit down Bangley. Pull up a stool. We’re having catfish, dandelion salad with basil, new potatoes
au
something not
gratin
.

See? he says. Just like one of those shows. If you aren’t just a little light in the loafers I’m a jew.

I look at him. I laugh harder.

*

I play music sometimes. I have mp3s, cds, vinyl, everything. I wired my hangar to the main battery bank at the FBO the one that pulls from the wind turbine so power isn’t a problem. The mood has to be just right. I have to be careful or it sends me back to that place I don’t want to ever be again. Can’t be anything we used to listen to: we were a sucker for the decades old singer-songwriter, climb out of the bottle, country road stuff, Whiskeytown to Topley to Sinead. We loved the Dixie Chicks, who wouldn’t. Amazing Rhythm Aces. Open Road, Sweet Sunny South, Reel Time Travelers, the scrappy fine bluegrass and old timey groups just before before. We thought it was heartbreaking then. Try playing it on a fine early spring morning with the hangar door open and a single redtail gyring over the warming tarmac:
And I remember your honeysuckle scent I still adore
I can’t believe that you don’t want me anymore …

Or the sweet wrecked mountain tenor of Brad Lee Folk singing
Hard Times
.
Head hung down and homeless, lost out in the rain …

I never thought I’d be an old man at forty.

What I can play is blues. She was never that into blues. I can salve with Lightning and Cotton, BB and Clapton and Stevie Ray. I can blast Son Seals singing Dear Son until the coyotes in the creek raise up a sympathetic sky ripping interpretation of the harmonica solo. Piercing howls and yelps. Sounds like it’s killing them and also like they love it. Which when you get right down to it is the blues.

At night I lie with Jasper against the back of the berm. It’s early spring, some late or very early hour with Orion toppling backward
onto the serrated edge of the mountains and not crying out but silent, silent as he tries to shoot the bull before it tramples him. Sometimes he is very peaceful not tonight. Tonight he is fighting for his life.

Jasper is unleashed, sleeping on my left thigh but my thoughts are leashed tight. I allow them to circle tight. To brush the green house, the hangar, the possibility of a spring hunting trip for spring bear when the bear are careless with hunger.

He is snoring softly like he does, a little snort on the inhale and maybe a whimper on the way out. Then against all plan I begin to remember the call from Grand Junction. Coming in like a train out of a snowstorm, whomping the bandwidth then receding back into the static blizzard with a long mournful tail of dopplered distance. Lost.
Triple Three Alpha … Grand Junk … Grand Junction …
The voice older, kind, concerned, like a grandparent calling up a steep flight of stairs.

How many years ago? Two or three. It was summer I remember. I remember the smoke from the summer fires, circling the Beast up into the smoke, and the sunset that night like a massacre. How I circled and climbed and made the circles broader and keyed and keyed the mike. Frantically worked the squelch. Some skip in the atmosphere maybe, how could it travel that far with none of the repeaters working anymore years since. The competence in the voice. An older man. I remember that. It came through the noise. Another pilot, I was sure it was another pilot.

I can fly to Gunnison and back on my tanks maybe Delta the other way. Maybe—if the wind is right in both directions. Which rarely happens. I have thought about it. Again and again. Junction less than half an hour beyond. And then. What? Another pilot at another airport probably much less secure. But.

They had power somehow. They—he—had survived seven years. Maybe still so.

Jasper shifts, straightens his legs in a dreaming stretch and pushes back against me, wakes himself up. Sniffs. Lowers his head again.

I lift my head from the pillow

I see the frost the moon
.

Lowering my head I think of home
.

Li Po’s most famous poem.

Even then: long before before the end, the bottomless yearning.

Almost never home, any of us.

I lie back against the duffel bag stuffed with foam I use as a pillow. Doesn’t get dirty as fast, doesn’t remind me of my old bed. Rub the band of the wool hat back down on my forehead. The sky is bell clear, the forest fires don’t start til mid-June, and the Milky Way is a flowing river of stars profoundly depthless. I mean deeper than can be reckoned. Jasper sighs. Almost no wind. What there is is cooling my right ear, a lazy breeze from the north.

Would I be more at home if I met a pilot from Grand Junction? If Denver to the south was a bustling living city? If Melissa were sleeping on the other side of Jasper as she used to do? Who would I be more at home with? Myself?

Still I think of the pilot’s voice. The competence and the yearning. To connect. I think I should have gone there. Pushed the fuel, backed off the throttle, flown slow, maybe eighteen square, picked my morning and gone. To see. What, I don’t know. Still I didn’t come close. To going. Admit it: I was scared. Of finding the interrupted dead as I had and had and had again. Nothing but. And
running out of fuel before I was even back to Seven Victor Two which is Paonia, the airstrip up high on the narrow flat butte like an aircraft carrier. Running out of fuel in the ’dobe flats east of Delta. Going down in the shadow of Grand Mesa.

Before, I read that they found Amelia Earhart. Conclusive I guess. On the island that had been checked off in 1940 as Searched. Opened clam shells, a jackknife shattered apart for its blade, for maybe a fishing spear. A fire pit. Ancient crumbling makeup. A plexiglas airplane window. A woman’s shoe. Bones. Chips of bones. The DNA verified against a living female Earhart cousin. Of course it was her island, she and the navigator castaways for how long until they succumbed to what? The coral atoll from the air: elliptical oasis with a central lagoon. Flat outer reef at low tide like a parking lot. The Lockheed Electra with a landing configuration stall speed of fifty five mph, she’d need seven hundred feet, no more. Wading the meager provisions to shore maybe injured. Maybe not low tide, maybe the gear torn off by water. Maybe blood in the water. Running out of fuel over the Pacific taking gratefully what comes. That they made that tiny island at all. Living off of shells and rain.

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.