The Dog Stars (28 page)

I get that.

Yeah. He fell in love right there. He went batso. It was almost the same for me except that he was a natural, I wasn’t.

Were you ever a natural? At anything?

I thought, At loss. At losing shit. Seems to be my mission in life. Course I didn’t say it, who am I to talk?

Fishing, I guess. Trout used to throw themselves at me. You?

She shook her head.

I spent some time at the Beast. Climbed the tree ladder, walked back up the creek and out of the canyon. Summer caught me off guard. I walked shade to shade in the sun, it was no longer pleasant. Hot by midmorning. The water lower perceptibly by the day. Creek bottom showing its ribs. Logs and debris propped on the rocks, the rocks more prominent. Scared me. The stream was
dropping early and fast. It would dry up. Even the fish tolerant of warmer water, even they would die. Carp and catfish. Crawfish. Frogs.

The dry pine needles crackled and crunched beneath my boots. Reflected the sun in the shadeless places so there was no relief for the eyes in looking down. Two weeks now, something like it, and the flowers were mostly gone. The fastest spring ever.

In the old cycles the drought would break, the monsoon would come, the snows would sweep in, and the life would come back. How was a mystery. To me. The trout, the cutthroat that had been here longer than us, the leopard frogs and salamanders, somehow they would return the next year. From where? Maybe in the gullets of birds I don’t know. Not now. Probably.

I climbed the switchbacking trail up through the archipelago, the islands of shadow made by the ponderosas. Smelled the toasting bark, the still moist ground drying out. Harried by the summer buzz of a deerfly. At the top the cedars were dense. Thick and gnarled in the trunks, twisting into the sunlight, cradling boulders like ugly consoling arms, ever slowgrowing these had never been cut. Some probably seedlings when Cortes was looking at his men with a wild surmise. I walked across the open meadow, patted the Beast on the nose.

Missed you.

Looked down the little park. Short. The piñon and juniper at the end weren’t tall, twenty feet at the tallest, but pines set back were forty feet high maybe. We could cut those.

If it was the middle of winter. The heat would make a big difference. Cold air more dense, hot air cutting performance by a
shocking amount. We’d leave in the dark, just after, safe enough to see but close to the coolest time.

Here’s what I mean. I stuck my head inside, she smelled the same always. Smelled Jasper, smelled what was probably still the 1950s and pulled out the POH from the vinyl pocket behind my seat. It’s the Pilot Operating Handbook, the original from 1956. Thin little sucker probably less than an eighth of an inch, eighty eight pages with an illustration on the cover of the plane. In the back are the performance tables. These are wonderful things—literal and invaluable. What these are is some test pilot got into this very model and took off again and again. From this altitude and this one. At this air temp and that one. Technicians in white coats and those thick framed black glasses recorded the data and plotted the beautiful, simple, unhurried curves. They went home to wives in beehives and drank Seagram’s Seven on ice in faceted tumblers. The test pilots, what did they do? They were veteran fighter pilots from the war, World War II, who had firebombed Japan and strafed aerodromes in Austria and settled into the new suburbs like the characters James Dickey wrote about, and back in the little cockpit at the Cessna test center in Wichita, with the plane shuddering in the old familiar way of any prop plane, then the former wing commander was like any lifetime equestrian who swings onto any horse anywhere with that complex and simple feeling of being home and freed from the constraints of the mundane.

In the back of my slim owner’s manual were pages of these tables and graphs. Takeoff and rollout distances. I flipped—carefully—I always handled the POH like an ancient and priceless artifact—to the page titled Take-Off Data. Ran my finger across the airfield elevations to seventy five hundred feet and down the columns of air temps in Fahrenheit. Takeoff distance at empty weight to clear a fifty foot obstacle at thirty two degrees with no headwind was nine hundred and fifty feet. See? Don’t ask me. Air is less dense
as it heats up. Then I did something I never do, hadn’t done since my private pilot’s license test: I took out the certified weight and balance sheet I kept folded in a pocket in the bulkhead by my knee. Every plane has one specific to the very aircraft. Weights and moments. I pulled a sheet of clean Xerox paper and worked out the problem. I put Pops in front at a hundred eighty pounds and Cima in the rear at one twenty with a bag of provisions weighing twenty. Five gallons of water at forty. No lambs. The full gas cans were gone as I’d put the fuel in the tanks. I figured in the fuel, the guns, two rifles, the shotgun, the handguns, four grenades. Period. Two quarts of oil.

I scratched a nub of pencil over the paper and worked the numbers. Then I left the paperwork on my seat, left the door open, there was no wind, and paced the track through the meadow.

One eighty one eighty one one eighty two. Counted my steps. Reminded me of counting the seconds waiting for Bangley in a firefight. Skirted the ruts. Plowed grass with my shins. Eyed the turkey vulture gyring to the north. And when I got to two hundred and saw how much clearing there was ahead of me I knew. It wasn’t long enough. Six hundred forty feet at most. There was no way.

Lastly. I already knew but I double checked. I took a stout wooden paint stir stick out of the same seat pocket. It was ticked with a Sharpie at intervals along its length and marked 5 10 15 all the way up to 30. Gallons. I climbed up on the strut, untwisted the fuel cap at the top of the wing on the wing tank and lowered in the stick. Drew it out turned it away from full sunlight and noted the fast vanishing and pungent wetness. Did it to the other side.

The guys in the white coats. The fighter pilot in his flight suit. With the wife in the beehive. Humming, tapping his fingers on the yoke of the Cessna to Rock Around the Clock. In 1955. All of it about to break open: the manic music, Hula Hoop, surf girls, Elvis, all now from this distance like some crazed compensation—for what? The Great Fear. Lurking. First time in human history maybe since the Ark that they contemplated the Very End. That some gross misunderstanding could buzz across the red phones, some shaking finger come down on the red button and it would all be over. All of it. That fast. In a ballooning of mushrooming dust and fire, the most horrible deaths. What that must have done to the psyche. The vibrations suddenly set in motion deeper than any tones before. Like a wind strong enough for the first time to move the heaviest chimes, the plates of rusted bronze hanging in the mountain passes. Listen: the deep terrifying slow tones. Moving into the entrails, the spaces between neurons, groaning of absolute death. What would you do? Move your hips, invent rock n roll.

The men at the Cessna test center compiling those numbers, those distances. Erecting them against the smallest accidents while the gut fear of the Big One gripped their dreams. Is that how it was? I don’t know. I overdramatize. But given what has happened how can you? Can’t really overdo anything. There is no hyperbole anymore just stark extinction mounting up. Nobody would believe it.

The test pilots were working in perfect conditions on smooth tarmac. A soft field knocked off a percentage of performance, and the rough track in this sage field was another story. We could fill in the ruts, smooth it out as best we could, but.

I uncoiled the hose and siphoned the twelve extra gallons back into the cans. We wouldn’t need them to get to Junction and it would save us seventy two pounds. Then I thought, Don’t cut it too close, and I climbed back on the strut and poured back what I judged to be about two gallons. I left one full can in the sage and emptied the other one out in the dirt and then nestled it, the empty can, back into the Beast. Then I went fishing. I took my rod case out of its bracket behind my seat and the light nylon daypack with flybox and tippet and walked back down into the canyon.

My calculations showed that the best way to have any chance at all of taking off, of clearing the trees, was to leave the old man.

I could imagine how well that was gonna wash. I could imagine the conversation. I could just about hear the snick of his big knife clearing the plastic sheath, my own peep as the point of the blade came to my throat.
Don’t bullshit me Higs! I told you not to fucking bullshit me
.

I caught five carp. Rolled a pheasant tail along the bottom and yanked them out one after another. The peregrine glided along the wall above and let herself fall, flaring just over the trees above the creek. I think she was watching me, curious. Do peregrines eat fish? The carp were skinny fish, long and thin and I realized with a whomp of sadness that they were starving. The shift in water temperatures was affecting them, too, or their food. I unhooked them with special care, the care I had always reserved for trout, and held them gently while they finned in my cupped hand against the current, until their gills filled and the undulations of their tail strengthened and they wriggled away. I gave up, didn’t feel like fishing anymore.

The trout are gone the elk the tigers the elephants the suckers. If I wake up crying in the middle of the night and I’m not saying I do it’s because even the carp are gone.

I pictured the conversation. I can take your daughter, twenty pounds of jerky but not you.

But. The light bulb went off. Hig, you had what they used to call an epiphany. When discovering something, some intellectual connection, had a value like gold. Eureka.

I’d bring the weight and balance sheet, the pencil and worksheet, the fragile POH with its disattached cover and its incontrovertible tables and go through the numbers as if for the first time and let everyone draw their own conclusions.

She had lunch on the table in the shade. Pitcher of cold milk, salted meat, a salad of lamb’s quarter and new lettuce, green onions. I sat down. Pops watched me. He followed me with his eyes, watched me while he chewed. She ate. She moved easier today, lighter. The bruises seemed to be fading, her mood brighter. She ate slowly, breathed deep as if smelling the creek, each new blossom.