The Dog Stars (9 page)

It was a split double recliner for husband and wife presumably, but now for me and Jasper, with a lever on each side and covered in the finest calfskin. It was very soft. I put an heirloom quilt on his side, patched with prints in blues and yellows, and with a
repeating pattern of a log cabin made from squares and triangles in printed cloth, every piece different but with the same twist of smoke coming out of each chimney, paisley or polka dot or ribbed with color, so it gave an impression of a fanciful village evenly spread over a country of geometric fields and flowering crops, and at a retiring hour when everyone was indoors enjoying the warmth of a fire. As we were. It was comforting to look at and comfortable sitting in the deep chair in the waves of heat from the stove, levered halfway back and drinking tea.

I could almost imagine that it was before, that Jasper and I were off somewhere on an extended sojourn and would come back one day soon, that all would come back to me, that we were not living in the wake of disaster. Had not lost everything but our lives. Same as yesterday standing in the garden. It caught me sometimes: that this was okay. Just this. That simple beauty was still bearable barely, and that if I lived moment to moment, garden to stove to the simple act of flying, I could have peace.

It was like I was living in a doubleness, and the doubleness was the virulent insistence of life in its blues and greens laid over the scaling grays of death, and I could toggle one to the other, step into and out of as easily as I might step into and out of the cold shadow of the hangar just outside. Or that I didn’t step, but the shadow passed over like the shadow of a cloud that covered my arms with goosebumps, and passed.

Life and death lived inside each other. That’s what occurred to me. Death was inside all of us, waiting for warmer nights, a compromised system, a beetle, as in the now dying black timber on the mountains. And life was inside death, virulent and insistent as a strain of flu. How it should be.

It was memory that threw me. I tried hard not to remember and I remembered all the time.

Spencer was his name. Going to be. Sophie if a girl. Very English. In the second trimester we decided we wanted to know. Melissa’s family was Scottish. Came over from Melrose when she was seven, enrolled in a West Denver primary school and was made to stand in front of the class and repeat words like
arithmetic
while all the kids giggled and the teachers died of cuteness assault. She said she lost the accent completely in two months. Adaptable as only a seven year old can be.

Her father’s name.

Not sick, not once, the whole time. Never nauseous. Never craved avocados and ice cream.

She didn’t like to hunt at all but she loved to fish. She fished with me when she could. In some ways she was better than me. She didn’t have the distance and accuracy in her cast but she could think more like a trout than probably anyone alive. She would stand on the bank of a creek and just breathe and watch the bugs flying in and out of the sunlight.

The guides, the freaks, did stuff like pump out the stomach of their first fish with a rubber bulb to see what they were eating right now. As if being caught, netted, held in the scalding air wasn’t traumatic enough. They put the fish back, but did they live after that operation? They claimed they did, I doubted it. She didn’t do anything like that. She snugged the halves of her rod together, strung it, pulled the line straight down from the top guide with a whizz of the reel and let her slender fingers slide down the length of the leader, the tippet, and pushed back the brim of her Yankees cap, and then she asked me.

Hig what should I put on?

I studied the hatch flitting in the sunlight or swarming the surface, turned over a few rocks to look at the larvae.

Eighteen Copper John on the bottom, a Rio Grand King, pretty big, on top.

She’d move her lips around looking at me like I was putting her on. Then she’d tie on a bead head prince and an elk hair caddis. Big and small just the reverse. Or she’d go with a purple wooly booger, the one with the brass conehead, which is like a swimming minnow mimic and an entirely different strategy.

Why do you ask me? I said. I think you ask and then do just the opposite.

Her smile, bright and sudden, was one of my favorite things on the planet.

I’m not disrespecting you Hig. I’m doing a survey. Kind of calibrating what I’m thinking against the finest fisherman I know.

Flattery now. Jeez. Fish on.

She usually outcaught me. Except on the big rivers, the Gunnison, the Green, the Snake, where a long cast was helpful. The last time we went fishing we had a terrible fight.

I drank the tea. It occurred to me that Jasper owned more special quilts than any dog in history. He had his
Valdez
recliner log cabin quilt, his flying hunting dog quilt, his outside sleeping quilt covered in Whos from Whoville. He was lying flat on his side with
his butt against me and his legs sticking off the cushion and he was snoring.

Is it possible to love so desperately that life is unbearable? I don’t mean unrequited, I mean being
in
the love. In the midst of it and desperate. Because knowing it will end, because everything does. End.

I drank in the beginning. Every kind of food, even the horses, were all consumed in the first year, but the booze was still tucked in cabinets and closets, in basements. Bangley and I used it for treating cuts. Bangley never drank because it was part of his Code. I’m not sure if he thought of himself as a soldier or even a warrior, but he was a Survivor with a capital S. All the other, what he had been in the rigors of his youth, I think he thought of as training for something more elemental and more pure. He had been waiting for the End all his life. If he drank before he didn’t drink now. He didn’t do anything that wasn’t aimed at surviving. I think if he somehow died of something that he didn’t deem a legitimate Natural Cause, and if he had a moment of reflection before the dark, he would be less disappointed with his life being over than with losing the game. With not taking care of the details. With being outsmarted by death, or worse, some other holocaust hardened mendicant.

Sometimes I think the only reason he kept me around was so he had someone to witness his prowess in the winning of each day. I wonder if the stunt the other night was just to let me know that it was him. That he vouchsafed our survival every day. Remember that, Hig.

I heard a joke once about a shipwreck. I heard it way back when a model named Trippa Sands was the woman in the posters on the walls of teenage boys. The cover girl of cover girls, the paragon
of sexiness. She is on vacation on a big cruise ship that hits a reef in the Caribbean and sinks. She washes up on a desert island with my buddy Jed. The only survivors. They wash up onto the beach, the waves christen them with foam, they are in tatters, mostly naked, and they look into each other’s eyes with the dawning apprehension of their unique solitude, and love hits them like a falling coconut. They fall hopelessly. Luckily, the island is replete with low hanging fruit and sweet fresh water, and oysters and fish that jump into their woven baskets, so that sustaining themselves is a breeze and they have a lot of leisure time just to gaze into each other’s eyes and make the kind of fierce love I imagine an apocalypse affords. About a week into it Jed says, Tripp?

Ahh. Hmmm. Yes, my fragrant studliness.

I have a favor to ask you.

Of course, my sandbrushed power drill. Anything. For you.

Can you wear my cowboy hat for a few days?

Oh sure, why not!

Next day he says, Trippa?

Yes, Pooty?

I have a favor to ask you.

Anything my little mango.

Can you use a bit of this charcoal and draw on a moustache?

Hmm. Well for you, you big Cumquat, anything.

Next day they’ve just made love nonstop for an entire tide cycle. They are sitting on a tortoiseshell bench watching a thunderstorm sweep over the azure water, Trippa in her hat and moustache, and Jed says, Hun?

Yes Poots.

Um, can I call you Joe?

Well, ah sure, you plunging hammerhead shark you.

Jed grabs her and shakes her shoulders.

Joe! he cries. Joe! Joe! I’m fucking Trippa Sands!

Still makes me laugh. Can’t help but think of me and Bangley which isn’t so funny. That he wants me to be Joe so he can show someone how well he is surviving.
I’m fucking the shit out of this survival stuff aren’t I, Hig?
He never told me another thing about his upbringing except that it wasn’t what you think, but I imagine that his mother, if he had one, was pretty hard to impress.

Well. I guess. I say it to Jasper who has shifted so his head is hanging down off of
Valdez
but is still snoring. I put my hand on his ribs in the short fur and rub.

Let’s go flying.

It’s late afternoon, my favorite time after dawn. I fuel up. The pump runs off its own solar panel. Used to use a battery and inverter but the battery died so I wired it directly to the inverter
and now can only fuel up if the sun is shining which it is. I have a hand pump if I need it, but it’s a pain. I fill the tanks from a stepladder, through capped intakes at the top of each wing, and it’s a real pain to be on the ground and pump and keep track of the fuel level which is checked by climbing up and looking straight down into the bladder through the fill hole. I can estimate and get it close, but it’s way easier just to stand up there and pull the trigger on the pump hose and hear the reassuring electric hum and the clicking of the numbers rolling on the meter like filling up a car used to be.

Used to. Plenty of gas still out in the world but problem is the auto gas went stale and bad a year or two after. 100 low lead, which I burn, is stable something like ten years. So I expect to lose it one of these days. I can add PRI and nurse it along for ten more years probably. Then I’ll have to look for jet fuel which is kerosene and lasts for basically ever. I know where it is, the closest. I know that right now I’m the only one alive who knows, or at least knows how to get it out. But every time I land at Rocky Mountain Airport I feel vulnerable in a way I never do at my other stops. It’s too big. A big old jetport with scores of buildings, hangars, sheds and the pumps and the steel fill plates out in the open.

When I have to, me and Bangley will pow wow. Maybe we’ll have to break camp. Can’t imagine. Or maybe I’ll just have to take him with me to cover my back every time I fill up which would be a kind of party for him but would leave Erie wide open for at least half an hour.

Jasper is sitting up in his seat and I taxi past the rows of private aircraft still tied down. All have flat and rotted tires, many cracked windshields from hail. Some, the ropes frayed and wore and broke in big winds, and the planes upended or rolled into others across the ramp, or further. Last spring we had a gale and a Super Cub
broke loose and ended up in the second story plate window of a fancy house across the runway, on Piper Lane, which was fitting. The green street sign like a pre-printed headstone.

Why don’t I fly one of the Super Cubs or Huskies? Some narrow tandem (one seat in front, one in back), something more agile, that can swoop down and land short, can basically land and take off on a tennis court? Why do I fly my eighty year old Cessna four seater?

Because the seats are side by side. So Jasper can be my copilot. The real reason. The whole time I fly I talk to him, and it amuses me no end that the whole time he pretends not to listen.

We taxi between the rows. There are some beautiful old planes. The colored stripes, the blues and golds and reds are fading. The numbers. One I used to fly, a little home-built plane with a pull down bubble cockpit, stands nose down to the tarmac like a forlorn bird, the U.S. Air Force stars painted on the fuselage burned to washed splashes. It was built by a longtime friend of mine, Mike Gagler. An Alaska bush pilot who ended up flying jets for the airlines and built planes as a hobby. Never did anything like anyone else almost as a matter of principle. He died early with his family in a yellow house I can see from the open door of the hangar. He refused to go to the hospital, said they were just a way for the government to get the dead in one place. He was the last in his family to die, by force of will, so his wife and two daughters would have someone to hold them. I buried the four of them with the airport’s backhoe when it still ran.

In the early days I took it out, Mike’s RV-8, and wasted gas. Left Jasper sitting anxious and alone by the gas pumps and climbed straight into the sun and kept pulling the stick until the sky rolled down beneath me and the horizon came down over my head like
the visor of a helmet. Big, slow, sickening backward loops and fast barrel rolls. I did it because I didn’t know what else to do.

Then I’d buzz the runway at ten feet and see Jasper rooted on his haunches following me with his eyes, and even at that speed I knew he was worried, and grieving that I might leave him like everything else had done, so I stopped.

The wind sock midfield swings northward, puffing without urgency, so we turn south onto the taxiway, and I jam the throttle and we take off. One thing about everybody dying is that you don’t have to use the designated runway.