The Dog Stars (39 page)

I thought she was thinking medical thoughts, but then I felt her twitch against me. Not the nightmare twitches Jasper sometimes had but the twitch of falling, of letting go.

On or about. The best I can say now. Bangley had checked off the calendar in my hangar until the attack which I thought especially thoughtful. But. So we knew that happened on June 19th. But he never could say afterward how many days he had been lying behind Red Square. At least a week he thought.

On or about the 4th of July I was working in the garden. Killing potato bugs one at a time. Cima was with the families. I had dropped her off in the morning and she said to pick her up for dinner, she wanted to be there all day. She was dispensing a vitamin
D infusion, but I knew it was for the children. She couldn’t stay away from them.

I was working in the garden. She was away. Bangley was playing chess with Pops. That’s what they did. They sat on the porch of my house in the creaking chairs and played chess like it was a country store in some apocalyptic parody of Norman Rockwell. Bangley’s cane against the rail. He was better at chess, but his mind wandered and then Pops could beat him.

I was squashing potato bugs between my fingers and I heard a sound that I had heard so often I didn’t look up. But. It had been a long time. I craned my head, wincing eyes past the sun and there: two vapor trails. Parallel but one behind. And the distant dopplered rush of receding engines.

Not dreaming, no.

I hadn’t run so fast. In years. Got to the Beast and hit the master switch and flipped on the radio. I had a Narco scanner which ran the digits, the frequencies up through the silence and nothing. Static. Around and around went the numbers. Stopped like a roulette wheel. A break, a fraying of the grayness. A voice, words. Before I pushed the mike button I made myself listen and I couldn’t understand. It was Arabic. Had to be. A conversation, laughter. Heading west at thirty thousand feet. Heading probably to California. From up there, we, our airport, would be indistinguishable from the rest of the landscape, the decaying infrastructure. I called and called.
The two jets, 747s, Erie, two 747s Erie. Boeing 747s who just overflew Denver, this is Erie
. I called and called. Until my voice was hoarse and the streamers of steam were a white memory, a mirage. I stared after them kind of stunned. Good or bad?

A week later, exactly, two more. About the same time. And the next week. The fourth week nothing. The four of us gathered on the porch at the afternoon hour like waiting for some fireworks or a dignitary. And nothing.

They could have immunity, she said. A race could have immunity. Or clusters of immunity. The Arab countries are tribal. An entire tribe could be immune.

In September, two more flew over. Never answered my calls.

We sleep outside into October. Maybe we will all winter. The way Jasper and I used to do. Piling on the quilts. Sleep some frosty nights with wool hats on, with just our noses sticking out. Head to head or butt to butt. We name the winter constellations and when we run out of the ones we know—Orion, Taurus, Pleiades, the Chariot—we make them up. Mine are almost always animals, hers almost always food—the Sourdough Pancake with Syrup, the Soft Shell Crab au Gratin. I name one for a scrappy, fish loving dog.

I still dream Jasper is alive. Before that my heart will not go.

My favorite poem, the one by Li Shang-Yin:

When Will I Be Home?

When will I be home? I don’t know
.

In the mountains, in the rainy night
,

The Autumn lake is flooded
.

Someday we will be back together again
.

We will sit in the candlelight by the West window
.

And I will tell you how I remembered you

Tonight on the stormy mountain
.

Acknowledgments

Many friends and family have contributed insight and energy to the making of this book. To my first readers, Kim Yan, Lisa Jones, Jay Heinrichs, Rebecca Rowe, Helen Thorpe, John Heller, Pete Beveridge, and Caro Heller I am deeply indebted. I cannot thank you enough. Lisa, as always, was a fearless and invaluable reader and guide. Helen’s words came at the perfect time. John and Caro, my parents, have been the bravest, most creative role models.

For their close reading and expert knowledge, huge thanks to Jason Hicks; Jeff Streeter; Donna Gershten; Mike Gugeler; Kirk Johnson; and Jason Elliott, Navy SEAL. Thanks to Janis Hallowell, Nathan Fischer, Mark Lough, Ted Steinway, and David Grinspoon for more help.

Carlton Cuse was a source of great inspiration. Bobby Reedy put me on a special creek with a fly rod years ago. And thanks to Bobby and Jason Elliott for initiating me into the fearsome power of a sniper rifle.

Thanks to Brad Wieners for the first flying story and all the others.

David Halpern has been a friend and champion for many years. Without him, this book would not have been realized. I am profoundly grateful. Thanks to Kathy Robbins for everything. To
Louise Quayle for such fine work. And to Charlotte Mendelson for her discernment and enthusiasm.

To my brilliant editor Jenny Jackson, I raise a glass.

And to Dave Hoerner, one of the greatest bush pilots who ever flew, thanks for teaching me to fly.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Peter Heller holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in both fiction and poetry. An award-winning adventure writer and longtime contributor to NPR, Heller is a contributing editor at
Outside
magazine,
Men’s Journal
, and
National Geographic Adventure
, and a regular contributor to
Bloomberg Businessweek
. He is also the author of several nonfiction books, including
Kook, The Whale Warriors
, and
Hell or High Water: Surviving Tibet’s Tsangpo River
. He lives in Denver, Colorado.

ALSO BY PETER HELLER

Kook: What Surfing Taught Me About Love
,
Life, and Catching the Perfect Wave

The Whale Warriors: The Battle at the Bottom of
the World to Save the Planet’s Largest Mammals

Hell or High Water: Surviving Tibet’s Tsangpo River

Set Free in China: Sojourns on the Edge

The Dog Stars

by Peter Heller

Reading Group Guide

About the Guide

The introduction, discussion questions, and suggested further reading that follow are designed to enliven your group’s discussion Peter Heller’s novel about a pilot and his dog trying to survive in a world filled with loss,
The Dog Stars
.

About the Book

A novel of extraordinary depth and power,
The Dog Stars
is narrated by Hig, a pilot who has taken refuge in an abandoned airport in Erie, Colorado, with his beloved dog Jasper and a gun-nut neighbor appropriately named Bangley. Nine years ago a devastating pandemic ravaged the globe, killing off everyone Hig loves, and taking much of the plant and animal life as well.

Hig misses the world that’s gone, his wife, Melissa, and all the trout wiped out by the rising temperatures in mountain streams. Bangley, on the other hand, seems born for just this kind of life. He enjoys nothing more than picking off marauders from the sniper tower he and Hig built. He’s a shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later kind of guy. “Never, ever negotiate,” he tells Hig repeatedly, advice which Hig frequently ignores, to his own peril.

They exist in an uneasy alliance. Bangley needs Hig to secure the perimeter, grow vegetables, and hunt deer. Hig needs Bangley to cover his ass and bring out the firepower—machine guns, grenades, mortars—when things get especially dicey. They don’t entirely trust or like each other but they make it work, like a difficult marriage. But Hig wants more than a life devoted to mere survival and fending off murderous intruders.

He visits a village of diseased Mennonites, dropping off supplies and helping them in whatever way he can. He takes frequent trips, with his copilot Jasper, to the high country to fish and bask in the brisk, clean air. He longs for human connection, so much so that he risks flying beyond the point of no return—the point beyond which he won’t have enough fuel to get back—looking for something or someone.

From there, the story takes some surprising turns, some of them tender and some of them treacherous. Indeed, the tension between compassion, lovingness, and the desire for human connection on the one hand, and self-protection and a merciless kill-or-be-killed instinct on the other, is one of the novel’s major themes.

As well as being a thrilling page-turner and a vivid imagining of life after global catastrophe,
The Dog Stars
offers a thought-provoking exploration, alternately hopeful and terrifying, of the essential features of human nature—what humans are, or what we may become after the protective veneer of civilization has been stripped away.