The Dog Stars (4 page)

He’s getting old. I don’t count the years. I don’t multiply by seven.

They bred dogs for everything else, even diving for fish, why didn’t they breed them to live longer, to live as long as a man?

One weird thing: the GPS still works. The satellites, the military or whoever put them up there to spin around us and tell us where we are, they still send their signals, triangulate my position, the little Garmin mounted on the yoke still flashes a terrain warning if it thinks I am getting too close to high ground.

I am always too close to high ground. That’s the other thing about the end of everything: I stopped worrying about my engine failing.

There’s a Nearest button on the Garmin. Somebody was thinking. It tells you fast which way is the nearest airport and how far. It pops up a list of the closest airports, their identifiers, distance, bearing, tower frequency. When I used to worry about stuff the Nearest button was my pilot’s best friend. Any kind of weather or trouble or just getting low on fuel and I tapped it and there was the list and if I scrolled down and highlighted I could just press Go To and
pop
it gave my vector. Steer the arrow back to the center of the arc. Slickest thing.

Still useful but after nine years so many of the runways are unusable or you have to know where the two foot pothole is exactly and rudder around it. Surprising how fast. How fast it turns back to grass and ground. Back before, there was a TV show:
Life After People
. I watched every one. I recorded it. I was gripped. By this idea: New York City in a thousand years would look like: an estuary. A marsh. A river. Woods. Hills. I liked it. I can’t say why. It thrilled me.

That fast. Because it is amazing how fast girder steel corrodes when exposed to water and air, how fast roots break shit apart. It all falls down. Oh, so the runways: nine years doesn’t sound like a long time but it is for the tarmac unmaintained and it is for a brain-cooked human trying to live it. I could make a list. Nine years is pretty fucking long:
To live with Bangley’s bullshit.
To remember the ad hoc flu ward and.
To miss my wife after.
To think about fishing and not go.
Other stuff.

But. I lost a cylinder one evening south of Bennet. I was flying the city which I do now and then not too low just to see and.
Tap tap tap
vibration like a mother. Best to get down and troubleshoot,
might be just a fouled plug. I didn’t need the Garmin to tell me Buckley the air force base was just to the west maybe twelve miles. I banked around and came down with the gold sun straight in my eyes, banging louder, now kind of alarming like it would suck to throw a bearing and practically blind with the sun, using the left pavement edge as a guide, and a hundred feet after I touched down still tearing ass, maybe seventy indicated,
WHOMP
, and had it been the nose gear and not the left main the Beast, and me too, we would be toast. Jasper too. I walked back and checked. The hole was waist deep practically, neatly rectanguloid, it looked like it had been dug out by prairie dogs with little backhoes. Fuck. My back. The jolt. I sat down with my legs dangling in the hole, Jasper sat too and leaned against me like he does, and glanced up at me real quick and polite, and real concerned. Sitting that way reminded me of a Japanese restaurant Melissa took me to once that had instead of chairs, instead of mats and pillows, like a well for your feet, like cheat floor seating for stiff Westerners. The sun threw our shadows about half a mile long down the runway. As it was, the impact cracked the strut, which is when I learned to weld and also it’s possible to weld with solar power.

I sat with my feet in the hole and shook myself by the shoulders and said, What’s wrong with you? Is this a game to you?

That took a while to answer.

Do you want to live today?

Yes.

Do you grant that you may want to live tomorrow? And maybe the next day?

Yes.

Then get methodical. You got nothing but time.

So I made a survey. I took the chart we call a sectional and flew every airstrip within a hundred miles. I flew Centennial, I flew Colorado Springs, the Air Force Academy, I flew Kirby, formerly Nebraska, I flew Cheyenne. I flew them all at probably thirty feet in good light and made notes. Surprising how many would have killed me. At Cranton we almost did when I came in for the fly-by real low and parallel to the runway and some xenophobe put a high powered hole through the fuselage. I knew because it exited right through my side window up and out. That’s how I knew we had neighbors in Cranton.

So the Nearest button still works but about half I can’t use anymore at all. Better to land in an old field. Used to mean Nearest Haven now means Nearest Maybe Death Trap. All good information.

I still monitor the radio. Old habits die hard. Every airport has a frequency so traffic can talk to each other if there’s no tower. Important to know where everybody is when you’re taking off or entering the pattern. Used to be. Collisions used to happen every year. Between airports there’s no designated way to communicate but there’s an emergency frequency 121.5. What I do when I’m approaching an airport is flip to the old channel. When I’m within five miles I make a call. Call a few times.

Loveland traffic Cessna Six Three Three Three Alpha five to the south at six thousand en route Greeley
. Repeat. Anybody? I’m the only goddamn plane up here and likely to be til the end of time. Maybe on another planet in another universe they will again invent the Cessna. Ha!

I laugh. I hoot. It’s kinda morbid. Jasper glances sideways with mild canine embarrassment.

I have a book of poems by William Stafford. It’s the only thing I went back for: my poetry collections. Landing at night on no power, no lights, in the old King Sooper’s parking lot, one row a thousand easy feet between low cars, the wings went over and no light poles. Just over a mile from there to the house. Fires burning west and south, some punctuating gunshots. Waiting in the plane with the AR-15 between my legs waiting to see if anyone was left to bother the Beast for the half hour I’d be gone.

I took the rifle and jogged around the lake like so many times before, morning and evening. Used to jog. I ignored the pictures on the mantel, along the stairs, didn’t look, packed an old backpack and a duffel full of books, just poems. Fingered
We Die Alone
which is the first book Melissa gave me which was creepily prognosticant in the title only: the protagonist is a true real Norwegian commando back in the last good war. He out-skis two entire divisions of German troops and survives to pose handsomely in distinguished middle age in a rollneck fisherman’s sweater for the back of his memoir. I had always envied that guy, a war hero in hearty Norway who must have had a cabin up in the fjordland and a thousand friends and too much mulled cider or aquavit or whatever they drink at parties, and enjoyed skiing now just for fun. If that man could have imagined hell on earth probably. He’d seen its shadow. I fingered the book, didn’t read the inscription and slid it back on the shelf. Done. I’d decided I was done with crying about anything.

When I got back to the parking lot I circled in from the outside rows and there were two figures leaning into the open doors of the plane, one about to climb in. I cursed myself and checked
the safety, heart hammering, and stood and yelled to get the fuck away, and when they grabbed hunting rifle and shotgun I shot them at twenty yards the first ones. For poems. I gave their guns to Bangley, refused to answer when he asked.

The Stafford book is called
Stories That Could Be True
. One poem is called “The Farm on the Great Plains” and it begins:

A telephone line goes cold;

birds tread it wherever it goes
.

A farm back of a great plain

tugs an end of the line
.

I call that farm every year
,

ringing it, listening, still

He calls his father. He calls his mother. They are gone for years only a hum now on the line but he still calls.

When no one responds from the airport I’m about to fly over I flip back to the emergency frequency and make a pro forma call

Mayday mayday Cessna Six Triple Three Alpha feeling awful lonely
.

In year seven someone answered. I took my hands off the yoke and pressed the headset into my ears. The hair stood up along my arms like it does in an electric storm.

It came out of the static with a doppler fade.

Triple Three Alpha …
tailing off into aural snow.

Triple Three Alpha …
Gust of static … 
Grand junk
. Whomp like hit with magnetic wind.

Grand Junction …

I waited. I shook my head. Actually knocked my temple in the headset. Keyed the mike with the thumb button on the yoke.

Grand Junction? Grand Junction? Triple Three Alpha over Longmont
.

I’m over Longmont holy shit! Didn’t copy. Repeat: didn’t copy!

I circled. I circled higher. Climbed to fifteen thousand feet and circled til I was dizzy with hypoxia. Descended to thirteen and circled for two hours til the fuel flow gauge told me I had fifteen minutes left, then I banked east.

Whoever it was was a pilot or a controller.

The one and only time.

I cook my meals in the hangar. About a month after Bangley showed up I got him to help me dolly over a Vigilant woodstove from the kitchen of a fancy Mcmansion on the east side of the runway. Maybe the provisional nature of eating in what’s essentially a mechanic’s garage makes me feel like none of this is permanent. Part of why I don’t live in a house. Like living in a hangar, sleeping outside, I can pretend there’s a house somewhere else, with someone in it, someone to go back to. But who’s kidding whom? Melissa is not coming back, the trout aren’t, and neither is the elephant nor the pelican. Nature might invent a speckled proud coldwater fighting fish again but she will never again give the improbable elephant another go.

Still last summer I saw a nighthawk. First one in years. Flitting for bugs in a warm dusk, wingbars blinking in the twilight. That soft electric peep.

So the hangar is where I cook and eat. I tried eating in my house at the kitchen table like Bangley does, tried it for a few days but it didn’t sit.

All the firewood we could use in our lifetimes is stacked up in the walls of the houses around the airfield. A sledgehammer and a crowbar gives me all I can use for a week in a few hours. Not to mention fine furniture.

Took a few winces to get used to battering apart finish carpentry, cherry and walnut, and maple flooring for firewood. But. Value relative to need. Still I’m taking apart the crummy houses first. Not sure if I’ll ever get to the four or five really beautifully built mini-mansions the ones with exotic hardwoods, if I do by then they will hold no cachet probably. Probably just look to me like some refreshingly different scents in the burning. By another unspoken agreement we began harvesting wood in the cheaper houses on the west side of the runway, him working north and me south. That leaves me a not-so-long wheelbarrow roll back to the hangar.