The Dog Stars (20 page)

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 riven 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.