The Dog Stars

I

I don’t. Don’t do anything all day. Don’t start the fire. Don’t cook the fish. Leave them on the stringer hanging from a bough. Attractant to bear and cougar. Don’t care. Get up to pee, drink a little water from the creek running colder from the icy night. Lower in its bed, the fallen tree propped on rocks upstream higher off the water. So. Retreat. Heart like the stream contracted too.

Go back to the sleeping bag and lie down next to him. Doze. Shove my leg over so I can feel his weight. Different now, wooden, but it is him. Drink in the afternoon. The day cool. The sun full on the creek, on the two of us, maybe three four hours then gone. Can smell the fish now. So.

Keep the tarp rolled back and wait for night. What was that song? If I die before I wake, feed Jake, he’s been a good dog … Maybe better. But then he would have had to be the one to die of heartbreak. Better like this. Like the darkness pouring back into the canyon covering the stream covering us in a black shroud. Still. No resolution ever. None. Nothing decided, nothing finished. The Dipper wheels back into place. Just one turn. One turn of the wheel and we are different, never the same. Not ever. Not even those stars. Even they, they decay, collapse, coalesce, break apart. Close my eyes. It’s what’s inside. What’s inside moving, swimming in the pain like a blind fish forever swimming. Is what lives what remains. Renews, renews the love and the pain. The love is the creek bed and the pain fills it. Fills it every day with tears.

Sometime in the night, sometime when the Twins are over the canyon, I think about the sled and the rifle inside it. What to do with it. I feel the weight of Jasper on my knee where I have wedged it beneath him and I think: He would not approve, no. He would say: what? He wouldn’t say a thing. He never left his post ever, he would give me strength that way. We never leave our posts do we? This is just who we are.

Sometime under Gemini I fall asleep.

It is the third day. At daybreak I shift, feel him in the quilt and have a moment. A moment where I have forgotten and then a moment where I remember and still expect him to stir. Fully expect him to resurrect. Because he could. We have defied everything haven’t we? Why not this?

And then I sob. Sob and sob. And rouse myself and carry him in the quilt curled, carry him just under the trees and begin to dig. With a stick, with a flat rock, with my fingers.

Most of the morning until it is deep enough to discourage a bear. Fitting. This was one of our favorite camps in the world. Year after year. If his spirit could look out. To the changing creek, season to season. I lay him in wrapped in the quilt and I say

Goodbye, bud. You are Jasper. My heart. We are never apart, not here, not there.

Then I scrape back in the dirt.

I spend the rest of the day gathering stones. Cobbles, eggs, heavy rocks. Smoothed and rounded by the stream. I build a mound as high as my chest. In the top I don’t know what to put. I take off my old wool sweater. As much his smell as mine. I lay it over the top and pile on more rocks. To dissolve there like a prayer flag his smell and mine washing in the seasons. As if I could cover him.

Then I load up the sled and walk upstream.

Twenty times today I stopped and turned as if to call. Hey keep up. Twenty times I rolled my shoulders back into the hill. Put my head down, feet to the track.

Stopped once, turned my face full into the sun, eyes closed, let the light sear my tears. Tipped my head back further, a coyote in full throat.

The creek on my right crashing over a ledge. The sun overwhelming eyelids, pouring down like heavy water.

If there is nothing else there is this: to be inundated, consumed.

It is not that there is nothing left. There is everything left that was before, minus a dog. Minus a wife. Minus the noise, the clamor of.

We think by talking and talking we can hold something off. Well. I couldn’t, could I? You couldn’t. You went along because you thought that was your job. Was I a fool? Were we both? To love is to take one side of the argument and hold it fast unto death. To land on one side with both feet. Or all four, huh, bud?

We fools going up the trail, two fools, now one.

There is a pain you can’t think your way out of. You can’t talk it away. If there were someone to talk to. You can walk. One foot the other foot. Breathe in breathe out. Drink from the stream. Piss. Eat the venison strips. Leave his venison in the trail for the coyotes the jays. And. You can’t metabolize the loss. It is in the cells of your face, your chest, behind the eyes, in the twists of your gut. Muscle sinew bone. It is all of you.

When you walk you propel it forward. When you let go the sled and sit on a fallen log and. You imagine him curling beside you in the one patch of sun maybe lying over your feet. Not feeling so well. Then it sits with you, the Pain puts its arm over your shoulders. It is your closest friend. Steadfast. And at night you can’t bear to hear your own breath unaccompanied by another and underneath the big stillness like a score is the roaring of the cataract of everything being and being torn away. Then. The Pain is lying beside your side, close. Does not bother you with the sound even of breathing.

That is some heavy shit, huh, Jasper? Getting all poetic on its ass when what it is is I miss you. I really fucking miss you.

I walked for three days. Barely ate or slept. The lying down in the bag was a pro forma kind of thing. I didn’t feel like making a fire or sitting by it, I didn’t feel like sleeping or not sleeping, I didn’t know what else to do. Occasionally knelt on the stones and sipped from the creek. Walked west and then north. Straight into the Indian Peaks. When I am really hunting I leave the sled and pack at a base camp or landmark and continue quietly. I bring a smaller pack for the day with the down sweater, a liter bottle so I can take to the ridges or sit the day on some slope away from water. Matches, a game saw, a parka. Now I didn’t. I hauled the sled scraping and bumping and made a racket and saw no game, only chipmunks, nuthatch, crows, alarmed squirrels raising chatter from the trees, letting the whole country know: Here comes Hig. Hig with his gun. But he’s not serious, he’s banging around with that contraption, he doesn’t look so good, Where’s his mutt? The squirrel on a limb, alarmed, tail curved forward over his back, alive and twitching, the chatter as piercing as an alpenhorn. Might as well just blow a whistle. Olly Olly Incomefree. Ready or not here I come. Even the crows alight, twist their heads, fix us, me, with a shiny eye, open beak, stretch throat and dredge a signal angry cry from croaky mutterings. I inspire them. To heights of outrage. That the hunter is careless. That he is slamming up the trail. That he is heedless, loud, unaware, bungling. That he is upsetting the Order. The chain of. The hunters and hunted. A lack of respect. Something is wrong with him. CAWWREAACHH.

Grief is an element. It has its own cycle like the carbon cycle, the nitrogen. It never diminishes not ever. It passes in and out of everything.

The third evening it began to snow. A late spring snow but not heavy, not wet. The temperature dropped as suddenly as the passing of a cloud, cold, cold like midwinter and the wind dropped too. We were on the edge of a small basin above treeline and in the bottom were patches of old snow and a small lake recently cleared of ice. We. I. It is possible to continue together. Say what you like it felt that way to me. Walking behind, ranging to the side, the same but not apparent. Not as. A lake like a gem set in a bezel of tufted tundra and rough scree, the water green with the luminous unapologetic green of a semiprecious stone but textured with the wind. Then it wasn’t. The surface stilled and glassed off, polishing itself in an instant, the water reflecting the dark clouds that massed and poured against the ridges like something molten and it was suddenly very cold and the snowflakes began to touch the surface. Ringless, silent, vanishing. I let go the sled’s bridle. I was fifty yards from the water. The snow heavier. A white scrim that darkened the air, that hastened the dusk the way a fire deepens the night. I stood transfixed. Too cold for bare hands but my hands were bare. The flakes stuck in my eyelashes. They fell on my sleeves. Huge. Flowers and stars. They fell onto each other, held their shapes, became small piles of perfect asterisks and blooms tumbled together in their discrete geometries like children’s blocks.

Something like laughter. That a flower could be this small, this fleeting, that a snowflake could be so large, so persistent. The improbable simplicity. I groaned. Why don’t we have a word for the utterance between laughing and crying?

And I was suddenly very hungry. Took my eyes off of my left sleeve and looked around the col. The rock ridge and peak above me obscured. What the fuck are you doing here? Hig, what the fuck were you thinking? Why are you this high, this late in the day?

Shouldn’t be. Benighted above treeline. Storms that move fast this time of year migrating like everything else. The cold. Exposed.

An old panic rose in my chest. The panic of nightfall, of storm, of being alone on open ground. Surprised the shit out of me.

Had to get down, get lower.

I mean the panic was familiar the way a dread nausea or hangover is familiar but so long absent I thought it banished. Like stuck between living and dying there is no use for panic. It wasn’t. Banished I mean. Not a stranger at all. Panic close and familiar with its own smell, its own way of compressing the edges. I picked up the pull rope on the sled. Looked back at my own tracks over a field of crusted leftover snow. At the dark that thickened with the flakes. Too late to move. Fuck.

One thing is that Jasper always calmed me down. He didn’t get too excited by much except maybe a wolf track, so I didn’t either.

But it was calm. Without wind there was no danger. I could make a lean-to of the tarp against a boulder and snuggle into the bag and sleep. Tomorrow morning if the snow was not too deep I could head down and gain the shelter of the trees without trouble, I could fish the creek easy within half a day. A few hours down.

I had eaten all the jerked venison. A hunger deep, ravenous, alive. Had I not thrown out the other meat, Jasper’s, I would have eaten it now. Who to judge? What matters if it is he or I, we are the same. But I had emptied the bags on the trail days ago.

Alright. There was water. There was a boulder pile on the other side, the slope side of the lake. I tugged on the sled and took a step and stopped.

There was a shadow on the ridge. All of this was very close: lake, slope, tumbled scree, sharp ridgeline behind it climbing out of the snowstorm and straight into the low lid of cloud. Just there on the razorback of the spur, just where it disappeared into cloud, a large dark shape. I rubbed the ice out of my eyelashes with the back of my arm and when I focused on the ridge again it was gone.

Made a slant roof of the blue tarp against a rock, tossed out the smaller stones to make a smooth place to curl up, and covered myself and slept. Slept without dreams, without whelming grief, slept to wake in near absolute darkness to hear the ticking of the snow on the plastic sheeting to sleep again. Woke thinking the shape was large enough to be an elk. Thinking that I had seen no sign and wondering whether it was a good thing or a bad thing to wish for things that aren’t there.

Tenth day out when I beeped Bangley on the walkie talkie. Early morning. I wasn’t worried much about being covered for the few miles in the open, of being shot or followed out of the trees, but it was our ritual. Also it gave him a little time to readjust to me landing back in his world, maybe a couple of hours to remember how to be human. Maybe. Also if he was scoping the perimeter from the tower in the mansion which he would do every hour, it might save my butt from being fodder for friendly fire. How I go one way or the other never much concerned me but somehow that was one way I refused. I mean the thought of it: Bangley’s mistake. Or maybe not. Maybe a half mistake, unacknowledged like poor old Francis Macomber. That was it. Didn’t want to be him in the Short Happy Life. So I turned on the unit for the first time and squeezed the mike button twice.

Had two deer in the sled. They were smallish does, but there were two of them, enough maybe to justify the time gone, probably not. Didn’t give a shit. He could say what he liked. Wasn’t his rodeo anymore, wasn’t mine really either, when I thought about it I knew less every day. Didn’t know a goddamn thing.

One minute, less, then static, and

Well well. Prodigal Hig. Thought you’d croaked on me. I really did.

Hi Bruce.

Considered pause, kind of long. Stops him in his tracks every time. Reflex like pushing a button. Maybe his mom the only one who ever used the name. When she was mad.

Have some trouble?

No irony now. Which surprised me. Bangley almost sounded concerned. Hard to tell, though, over the walkie talkies.

A little.

Okay. Glad you’re back in one piece.

Pause.

Are you? In one piece?

I held the hand radio out and looked at it. Bangley sounded like a frigging human being. Must be the reception, the static, something in the bending of the radio waves, some kind of solar flare kinda thing, distorting. What he meant was: Do you need help getting across?

Yup one piece. Legs arms, everything.

Okay give me ninety minutes.

10-4.

Hig?

Yuh?

You take a fucking vacation?

Ah, the old Bangley.

I keyed the mike. Ninety minutes. Out.

It was already light. I was squatting in my spot below a slope of ponderosas—a thicket of willows and poplars at the base of the first hills where the creek swung to the south and our trail continued straight east. Across open ground. If I’d had my ducks in a row I would have been set up hours before dawn and not make Bangley walk across to the tower in daylight. He carried the CheyTac .408 which was a light sniper rifle as light as something with that much power can be. His pride and joy, made for walking if you have to walk and still be able to shoot someone in the lungs a mile away.

I waited ninety minutes with the sun full in my face, which to tell the truth was not the best stratagem, to walk into it half blind, and I was glad to know he was up there in his tower, sun at his back with a clear view to the first trees in perfect light. Had had trouble three times. The one was the girl with the knife which was no trouble at all. I was thinking how trouble was really the last thing I expected, how warm at dawn, fresh with the smell of new grass and early flowers, when I started to walk. I walked for more than an hour the load heavy on the level, both does quartered and piled in the sled, and I was more than halfway to the tower, laboring against the harness, pulling hard, when the radio strapped to my chest came alive.

Hig you got company. Urgency. A rare alarm.

Okay. Company.

I dropped the bridle and spun around. Back along the trail nothing. Tall sage, rabbit brush, gamma grass already knee high. Yellow and white asters blooming, fat bees already feeding, the trail smooth and empty behind me. Heart hammering.

Hig, they are stalking you. Quarter mile back. Read that? Quarter mile, a little more.

Okay. Okay. Got it.

Say 10-4. Repeat back the info. You’re a pilot for chrissakes.

Jesus Bangley.

Trying to get you to calm down. Focus on the details. One at a time.

Mother of christ. Who spawned this guy?

Pause.

10 fucking 4. Quarter mile. I am focused.

Good. Okay, turn back around. Now. Turn back! Look at me. Grab a water bottle. Stretch. Make like you are taking a break. NOW!

Okay, okay, got it.

There is no way they can hear us, Hig. The wind is them to you. They are upwind. Look natural. Stretch. Drink. Key the mike like you are scratching your chest. You are all alone out here. As far as they are concerned, Hig, you are solo. Single prey.

Fucking great.

Where’s your buddy?

My buddy? Oh, Jasper. Long story.

Short pause. Could almost hear the clicking, the slight recalibration of strategy.

Niner. Got that? Niner is the number. You got niner pursuers.

Niner? Holy shit.

Hig they know you are armed. They want your meat they want your weapon. They are not armed. Not with guns. Saw no guns. If they had guns you would be dead by now. Copy?

Yes, I fucking copy. Nine?

Hig listen. They have machetes. Looks like machetes or swords.

Swords? Fucking swords?

Hig, calm down. They are willing to take some losses. The way I see it. They really want your weapon.

Fucking Bangley. He was divining all this from two miles away. Standing in the tower leaning into the eyepiece of his spotting scope.

Great.

Willing to take some losses. Each one figuring it’ll be the other guy. They want to eat venison and they want the rifle. Read me?

Yes.

Say it Hig. Stay focused.

My heart was hammering. I almost laughed out loud. Right there with the sun at my back looking down the trail through the high brush with a frigging, practically a frigging division of visitors four hundred yards back.

Say it.

10-4.

Good. Settle your breathing.

Bangley, tell me what the fuck you want me to do? What should I do?

Breathe, I want you to breathe. They are stalking you Hig. They have all day. The way they see it. No rush. You are moving slow, they will close the distance. Little by little. Then they will charge you. They have done it before. They move like they have done this before. Copy?

Yes I fucking copy. 10-4.

Okay. You have the advantage. Advantage Hig. Right now you have the edge.

I do?

Fucking A, yes Hig. Listen to me.

I thought right then he sounded a little worried which didn’t reassure me. Nine was a lot of fucking visitors who wanted to kill you. Me.

Listen to me. Up ahead, east, maybe eighty yards, the trail drops into kind of a draw. Shallow, but deep enough. You stretch and pick up the rope like you are real fatigued and walk on ahead and down into that gully.

Bangley I am fucking fatigued.

Good Hig. That’ll keep you calm. No espresso for Hig, not at the moment. Steady hand. We want your hands good and steady. Now walk. There is a large dense sage bush or something on the north side of the trail right in the bottom. Couple of bushes. Perfect. You drag the sled behind that brush and conceal it. Cut branches if you have to. You got two animals in there far as I can make out. Correct?

You’re good Bruce. You’re incredible.

Pause while he took that in. Not sure if I was being sarcastic or not, didn’t even matter.

Glad that is dawning on you, Hig, I really am. The sled, the meat will be your cover. Case I am wrong about the guns. Case they have a weapon. A crossbow or something I can’t see. They don’t, but we want you covered. All exigencies.

He loved to say that. All exigencies. Well, it was the reason he was still frigging alive. I had to, I was handing it to him. Bangley.

You hide the sled and set up behind it. Got that?

Affirmative. Pause. Bangley?

Go ahead Hig.

My magazine holds five shots. One in the chamber. Six.

Pause. I could hear the breeze rattling the rabbit brush. Suddenly seemed really really quiet.

How am I gonna take out nine if they charge me? With six shots?

Radio crackle. Don’t know when I was ever so glad to hear that. The sound of intervention, of calm in a firefight, the sound of tactical mastery. Bangley.

Okay listen, Hig. Breathe and listen. Stretch again. You got no clue, not a single inkling those fuckers are behind you. Wouldn’t hurt to sing.

Sing?

Yeah, sing. Or whistle. Nothing more goddamn lulling than a whistle. Now listen, listen to me, Hig. When they come over the edge of that draw you wait. Plan your shots. You are going to be moving right to left. That’s easier for you. Got that?

Yes.

Say it.

Right to left. 10-4.

Okay. Even if you aren’t having your best goddamn morning you will drop two probably three. At least. You will also be firing from concealment. Those first shots will be a total fucking surprise, believe me. Total shock. They thought they had you. They thought you were some poor exhausted deer hunting bastard on his clueless stroll home. Did not know they were walking into our fucking perimeter.

He was giving me a pep talk. It was working. Goddamn Bangley.

Hig?

Yuh?

You with me?

Okay. What the hell are they doing now?

Don’t worry about them. They got all day, remember? Long as you’re stopped, taking a break, they don’t move. Okay, Hig, you drop two or three first go. Maybe four if it’s your goddamn birthday. Now the rest are diving for cover and trying to locate you. They haven’t had time to locate you. Now you have your ammo handy. Not all in your hand, you might drop the bullets. Line em out onetwothreefour five. Line out ten. Twelve is better if you’re feeling generous. Right there on the sled. Ten.

Ten.

Good. You have a side load magazine. Never understood that fucking lever action hunk of nostalgia .308 of yours. What is that? Savage 99?

He knew exactly what it was.

Savage fucking 99. Goddamn Hig. Well I’m glad. Now I’m glad.

You are?

Fucking A. Side load magazine. That’ll be a lot quicker than turning it over. Just thumb em in. One at a time, no hurry. If you have time lever it slow and quiet and feed in the sixth. Quiet cuz you don’t want em to locate you if they haven’t. And they haven’t. Got it?

I took a deep breath. I was exhausted. I was suddenly really really happy to have Bangley as backup. Never been happier.

Got it. 10 motherfucking 4.

That’s my Hig. Now there will be anywhere from seven to five left. You are in cover, concealed, and if they think it’s worth their own worthless hide to keep coming, after you just dropped their buddies, they are more serious than I think they are. They probably won’t. But they might be pissed, too. The pissed factor. Gotta give that some weight. The totally-apeshit you-just-killed-my-retarded-twin-brother factor. Which case you really got the edge.

I started laughing. Right there with the sun on my face, and the breeze coming off the mountains, carrying, probably, the scent eau de marauder, and my dog dead, I started laughing.

You laughing or crying?

He sounded seriously concerned.

Laughing, I’m laughing. Jasper died. In his sleep.

Sorry, Hig. I am. Now pull yourself together. Hig!

Okay okay. The totally-apeshit-retarded-brother factor. I’m with you, Bangley.

On task Hig. Stay on task. You got four to seven left. If they do charge you in anger just pot a couple more, we’re all done here. Rest will back off, guaranteed. If they are smarter than they look, they will spread out first. They will try to flank you. That’d be serious but I have a good angle. Remember when you wanted to build the tower twenty feet high? Stop at twenty? And I said thirty and made you cranky for two weeks? Remember? And the porch? My double joisted reinforced porch? This is why. I can see em. Every one. They are gone to ground now, but when they move, even in a crouch, I got em. So stay put. If they spread out, just reload and I’ll call em. You face the needle rock, due west, that’s twelve o’clock and I’ll call em from there. Direction and distance. Be like sporting clays.

Hig? You got that?

Sporting clays. Needle rock is twelve o’clock.

Good boy. You actually sound composed, Hig. Just thought of something. You packing your backup? Your Glock?

Yes.

In like Flynn. We do everything like I just said. All else fails, one gets too close, just draw that sucker and plug him. Make sure it’s racked. Wait til you get down out of sight and make sure it’s racked. Got it?

Got—10-4.

Now pack up your water bottle, start whistling, pick up the rope and move.

That’s what I did. I whistled. I put the harness over my forehead like a tump line, which was a way to relieve my shoulders, and I began to walk again. Real slow. I was suddenly tired to the bone, more tired than I could remember being. There was part of me that just wanted to lie down and sleep in the warm early sun, let them take the meat, the gun, my life. Get it all over with. But then another part wanted to work with Bangley. I mean I could tell he was excited by this challenge and I could tell the fucker actually believed in me. That I could pull this off. Weird, but I wanted to do it partly for him. Why I guess a team is usually stronger than the sum of individuals. I bent forward and dug in and tugged like a mule in harness and got the sled moving on the smooth trail which, once it was, it was easy to keep going. I got to the lip of the shallow draw and gathered the bridle in one hand, and backed up and picked up the sawed off kayak by the bow handle, and eased it over the edge. I controlled it by hand on the way down the little slope. At the bottom, while it was still sledding, I tugged as hard as I could and ran across. Sandy there, open in the bottom. Went as fast as I could. Once I had dropped out of sight they would be making up ground behind me, running themselves. I hustled the sled into the thick sage on the far side and levered it sideways to the trail. Almost the same movement I reached for the big Buck knife and started cutting thick branches. In less than a minute I had the sled well covered. Had been a green kayak, forest green, and I was suddenly very frigging glad I had had the foresight to pick something almost camo rather than something like bright fuchsia.

Fifty yards Hig. Fifty yards to the draw.

I worked the rifle out of its binding on the sled, the one box of shells, and lay down, lay the rifle over the flat hard hide of a hind quarter. Always quartered the animals hide-on, skinned them later which was more difficult but preserved the meat much better in transport. Glad I did now. The short fur made a good solid rest for the barrel of the .308.

Thirty yards. Thirty Hig.

Whispering now, close to it.

Slowing down. Single file on the easy trail. They don’t have a clue, Hig. Got that? Advantage Hig. Just stay calm, wait for the bulk of em to come down into the bottom, and take em right to left, front to back. Reload. Do it again. You’ll be fine. Gonna shut up now. Have fun.

He was out. Bangley. Such a weird thing to say: Have fun. But the fucker meant it, that was the thing. It did something to my head. I was amped. Balanced the rifle on the deer hide, took the Glock out of the paddle holster on my belt and racked it, lay it on the fur to the right. Two feet over. Shook the red plastic bullet holders out of the box and worked each bullet out and lay it on the fur to the right of the rifle point forward, so I could thumb them in without changing their direction. My hands were shaking a little. Just a little. Have fun. Kind of changed everything. You got exactly nothing to lose Hig. That’s what I told myself. So have fun. Heart thumping, but it was the almost happy anxious thump I remembered from playing soccer in high school. I was a goalie, the last stop, the last resort, the ultimate repository of the team’s trust, and that’s what it felt like now. Fuck up, you might as well crawl under a rock. But once it started it was all action, no thought, and the joy pushed up through the fear. That’s almost how it felt now. Nothing to lose is very close to the Samurai You are already dead. That’s what I told myself.

Lay thirteen brass shells out in a row. Lucky 13. I worked the lever and jacked a bullet into the chamber and thumbed the first into the magazine. Twelve left, a row of bright brass soldiers. Two full reloads. One deep breath and settled. Relaxed weight against the deer’s thigh bone under the muscle and hide. Pressed into my chest. Right hand around the receiver finger on the trigger and sighted both eyes open on the patch of dirt that was the trail where it dropped over the edge of the draw, the dirt almost polished with the passage of the sled, the passage of our years. Maybe a hundred and fifty feet. And

The first came over half crouched, neither fast nor slow, came over scanning and slowed, looking puzzled. But came. A very thin man in a full gray beard, bare arms covered in jailhouse tattoos, stars and crosses, carrying a sword. A frigging cavalry sword. Not seeing his prey, expecting to now, uncrouching reflexively to standing and walking down into the bottom and studying the slide of the sled in the sand. The one behind almost toppled him coming over fast, eager for a charge, a huge man, red bearded, also carrying a sword. All the thinking before stopped. Killers. They were killers. I wanted them. Good goddamn, Hig, way to go boy. Could hear Bangley’s words like some kind of telepathic transmission. I don’t know maybe my mouth actually watered. Pity the prey that fell before these men. Third was a long hair, wiry dirty hair to the waist, cleanshaven, in a black leather biker’s vest—had a baseball bat bristled with screws. Long, maybe quarter inch screws with the heads sawed off and the shafts sharpened. Red and Screws barreled past the leader and trotted down the open bank in what could only be bloodlust, and they were just over a hundred feet before they stopped and began to scan. I had these three. Three others were coming over, a blur to me of animated mass. I had these. Front to back, Scrawny leader to Red to Screws was left to right, Oh well, I put the cross hairs on the leader, pulled. Familiar jump, the gun coming off the fur, lifting it just a little, levering and swinging right, I’d done this before scores of times to take two or three deer, swinging right to center mass, barrel now a fist’s width off the rest, no problem, center Red and fire. BANG! Lever. No decision just fire. Barely conscious of the first two falling, the last, Screws, just beginning to crouch for a dive and BANG, the hit shoulder or side, him spinning and thrown and moving on the ground, then up, the mass at the lip uncoalescing, about to fragment, just aim for biggest object, two men together and pull, one arm back, thrown and falls. Lever. Four. Four! A surge of something, not joy not triumph but close. I was, we were, were a team, we nailed four—

Hig, move back! Run!

The radio loud now, urgent, almost insanely urgent

Run to me buddy! Now! The Glock! Pocket the Glock. Grab the bullets one hand the rifle run! RUN! To me!

Jesus. I did it. Something about the orders, the order, the sequence real clear, god bless him, I grabbed the Glock, shoved it in right pocket, scooped up handful of bullets, the gun, ran. Looked back. Just as I did the five came over the lip in a full tilt run, spread out. They were fast. Lean and fast, unencumbered but for the weapons in each hand. This image: five big men spread and charging. Sand would slow them, they’d be on me in thirty seconds. Just one, just one would kill me. Ran. Gun, bullets in hands, ran. Fast as I could. One more glance back, they were in the bottom now, in the open and closing—

WHROAAWMP

Concussion thrown rain of dirt dirt in mouth eyes

WROOOOAMP

Arms covering head jesus mother of god

WHRAWWWWWWWOMK

Shiver ground shake clawing dirt the dirt moving clods shower of clumps sand in a raining pebbles stalks wood thud a clod and

Silence. Ringing ears, ringing. Wet. Nose bleeding.

Hear out of it the ringing silence, the radio, Hig? Hig? Hig! You alive? Hig!

All the pieces. Hands claw back over ground. What? To head. Intact head intact. Ears ringing. Roll onto side, sleeve to nose, bleeding, not bad. Spit. Eyes. Clear eyes, blunt fingers, breathe. Intact

Hig! Godammit you’re alive! Take a break, take a break. Nothing broken? All in one piece? Try standing. Slow. Hig!

Okay to knees. Stay there a while maybe a week. Hands and knees. Blood from nose dripping to dirt can see it, that’s good, a good sign. Hands and knees breathe. Breathe. Okay I’m okay.

Hig, they’re gone, scattered. See one, well parts of one, back a hundred feet. Maybe more casualties. Rest are off the radar. Gone, Hig. Hear me? When you can get it together, locate your weapon your rifle.

Hig? You’re alright. Probably a little concussed is all. You still got the Glock? Hig? Check your pocket. Tell me you still have the Glock. Til we are absolutely sure the area is cleared. Tell me.

Hands and knees. Roll back to sitting. Blink in the sun. Talking to me. Bangley is talking to me. The radio. Reach hand to chest, hand stiff slow like slow motion, key the mike squeeze no strength

I. I

Hig you’re okay. Thatta boy

I. I got the Glock

Oh man. That’s good. Good man, Hig. Just stay put for a minute. Breathe.

Pause.

Bangley

Yes, Hig?

You’re always telling me to breathe.

Laughter through the unit. Genuine relieved laughter. A draught of cold water.

Better than if you fucking don’t, huh, Hig?

More laughter.

You did good, Hig. You did fucking great. You potted four at the start. Four! Way way past the line out of Vegas, man. We all had you at two tops, the sorta shaky way you sounded.

Laughter.

Thanks.

Pause.

What the fuck just happened? Bangley. What did you do?

Mortar. 81 mil British. Had to use the fuckers sometime. The porch on the tower I made you build? That’s what it’s for Hig. Save your ass. Wanted it to be a surprise sometime, kinda like a birthday present.

Crackle.

Surprised you, right Hig? It really did. Still have a bunch left. For when the shit really hits the fan.

Sat in the dirt in the sun while the blood in my nose dried to a crust and tried to digest the mortar thing. Fucking Bangley. Had a mortar tube hidden out by the tower all the frigging time. Good lord.

Crackle.

When I first saw the nine coming on you slow I went down and fetched the fucker out of the brush where I had it stashed. Looked like you might really need some high powered help this time Hig.

Pause.

But you did really good. Might have made it without the mortars. Way you were shooting. Damn.

I saw my rifle knocked under a salt bush fifteen feet away. Tilted my head back like before: eyes closed, sun flooding, the ringing subsiding slowly like a vagrant wind. Laughed. Cried too. Laughed and cried at the same time, I don’t know how long, just like a crazy man.

I flew that afternoon. Not in any shape to do it, but I did. To look for the other four, to see if they had designs on the families or on us and not a sign. Headed for the hills is what they did. The best thing. To fly. First time in years without Jasper. Still put his pheasant hunting quilt on the seat for luck, I guess, still took the turns more gingerly, the dives less sudden so as not to throw him—how I had trained myself to fly now. Flew the big circle and at the wave of the first hills west I looped back in and swooped low to look at the carnage, the three craters raw wounds in the brush, the bodies where we left them when Bangley walked out to help me bring in the sled. I could barely pull it. Not that I didn’t have the strength in my legs. My temples throbbed, an ache in the forehead, just couldn’t seem to concentrate long enough to take five steps in a row with a sustained pull. Felt a little nauseous too. Bangley was patient and after sharing the harness he said

Hig take a break. I got this for a while. You’ve had a long day.

Are you going to tell me to breathe?

He took a sip from the plastic tube of his water pack and looked at me with fresh appraisal. He had a fleck of tobacco on his cheek that looked like a mole. The same exact place as Marilyn Monroe.

Hig?

Yuh.

Breathe only if you want to. You know, when you say that I am relieved. You are concussed Hig no doubt about it. Which I am truly sorry about. But. Better than being dead by a long shot. It’s not as bad as it could be. Your eyes are facing the same direction and Hig hasn’t lost his sense of humor.

He put the tump over his forehead leaned into it and walked.

Now from the plane I could see it all: the slide out of the sandy trail and the pile of brush where I had hidden the sled, a bit of red plastic in the dirt the little shell holder that came with the box, the spot I had probably gotten to when the first bomb hit not eighty feet away. The four where I had dropped them, three in the sandy bottom one above, the birds, vulture crow raven magpie, lifting off in a scatter as I flew over. The one mangled by the mortar that could just as easily have been me. One arm, half a head gone. My head still ached and when I flew by low and saw him I leaned over and threw up out the window. Barely anything to throw up just the canned bean and venison salad Bangley made me in the hangar but still it spewed along the fuselage and I had to scrub it off next day. What it was, that might have been me. The mortar is not a precision weapon. Bangley said he had worked out the range the angle for five spots along the trail and was pretty sure about it but. What it was, it was a big gamble he saw me getting overwhelmed and.

I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and flew south and east and scouted the approach roads to the families, and nothing. And when I came back around from the east I saw a dozen in the yard and the red union suit hanging limp off the pole and I landed. Bounced up the drive and shut her down. Climbed out stiff.

Aaron is a tall man, craggy, with a hooked beard, a beard like a scoop of carved wood. He was wasted by the blood disease as most of them were and moved slowly with deliberation like a man much older than he was. He waved his hand, huge on the end of the narrow wrist that stuck out of a patched flannel shirt.

I waved and walked and they all, mothers fathers kids, moved toward me in a ragged bunch and stopped and we faced off across the beaten mud of the yard. Fifteen feet. The unspoken irrevocable distance like an old Western movie where the mountain man meets the braves in some meadow. Or the homesteader confronts the landgrabbing rancher and his hired guns, the horses always pulling up to stand in a nearly taut line as if at a precipice. Always that bit of mutually respected demilitarized zone across which words can be flung followed maybe by bullets and arrows and death. That’s what we called it, the DMZ. Awkward at first but not now. In this case we had decided without discussion or even any medical evidence that there was no way the sickness could infect from that far off. Probably not even from five feet, probably not even in a casual touch, but everybody, mostly me, felt better about this gap. If we needed to, we placed objects in the middle of it to be retrieved and that was okay too.

Aaron said Aren’t you going to bring Jasper down?

I blinked at him, half turned back to the plane, then just stood. Couldn’t breathe for a sec.

They were all watching me, I could feel it like a pressure. I hung my head down, watched a drop of salt water hit the dirt. Wiped it away.

Hig are you okay?

Aaron was bent forward, his thin back, his turkey neck, the beard. Land of the lost. Talk about being already dead. I straightened up.

He died Aaron. On the mountain. In his sleep. He was old.

I could almost see the wave of shock sway the little group. The last death here had been a child, Ben, a boy of eight or nine who got so excited, more than anyone when I landed the plane and carried Jasper to the ground. Many times he forgot the rules and bounded across the zone shrieking with glee and reached his arms out to the dog who stood up off his haunches and wagged and like the figures on the Grecian Urn he never got there, never attained his goal—always some long armed parent or aunt scooped him up with a mild scold.

I’m sorry Hig. We’re all sorry.

The sincerity of it, the dignity. After what they had all lost and. It didn’t matter. It was mine, my family. The second tear that spilled I wiped away and I told myself there wouldn’t be another. Not in front of them.

Thanks.

A little girl stepped forward. Her name was Matilda. She had a handful of wild asters. She crossed to the middle of the Zone and lay it on the ground and smiled at me.

I picked them before, she said. For you.

Just as a present?

She nodded, looking up at me. She smiled, pretty, her skin waxy, dark rings around her eyes.

Thank you, I said. Thank you. And I broke down. Just stood there in front of them all and wept, wept uncontrollably, shuddering, and smiled at the girl through the tears. Her own smile faded and she looked scared and stepped back into the skirts of her mother and I felt bad but couldn’t help myself. It was Jasper, not just. It was all of it. Was this hell? To love like this, to grieve from fifteen feet, an uncrossable distance?

I picked up the flowers but didn’t step back. They were all little more than an arm’s length away, two.

Thank you, I said to them all. Jasper loved coming here.

Which was true. I think the scent of children made him happy.

The flowers are beautiful. I sniffed them. Mmmmm. Wow.

Grinned. The girl smiled again from where she hung on the woman’s skirts.

You put up the flag?

Aaron nodded. The last time was a week after the last Sprite. The solar water pump they used to draw from the creek to irrigate had died, just a bad fuse but they didn’t have one and I did so the next morning I brought one. Now a tall woman stepped through from the back. She was stunning, half her face. The disease had not yet claimed her vigor. Half her face had been burned horribly, some kind of gas explosion. When she talked she turned the burned half away and looked at you from the side and seemed to speak to air. Her name was Reba like the country singer of before and she could sing too, I had heard her. She held out a cracked plastic pickle bucket and I took it, hand to hand, the first time ever, and inside it brimmed with early baby lettuce.

We are having a bumper crop, Aaron said. I remember you saying you didn’t grow it for some reason. We thought. He trailed off.

I smiled. I squatted down and reached out my hand to the little girl who had given me the flowers.

Go ahead her mother said.

She held out her little hand grubby with dirt and I took it and squeezed it lightly and smiled. I met her hazel eyes, a little bloodshot with the immune system war raging inside her, and held to her tiny fingers for a long moment, held to them like they were a rope and I was a man drowning.

The beans were already sprouting, showing the little curl just out of the turned dirt. The water was running in the furrows. I told Bangley I was heading out again.

We were in his shop which was the old sunken living room of a Mcmansion to the north of my hangar. It looked out of big double paned plate windows to the west, away from the runway to the mountains. It was a gunsmith shop plain and simple. Bangley made no excuses about knowing nothing about engines, wood, carpentry of any kind, agriculture, especially agriculture, gardening, cooking, especially cooking, languages, history, math beyond arithmetic, fashion, leatherwork, gin rummy, sewing, or especially rhetoric—the decorum, the customs of a respectful rhetorical debate.

Spit it out Hig is what he liked to say in the last instance. Spit it out and don’t pull any goddamn punches. It’s just you and me here ha ha! No one else to impress.

But he knew guns, knew how to modify them, improve them, and he could build one from the ground up, from pipe and old flatware. In the box trailer he pulled behind his pickup on the afternoon he showed up at the airport he brought with him a heavy drill press, a welder, a generator, grinders, a band saw. When I pointed out that these skills—the welding, the soldering, the tempering—that they were applicable to all kinds of metalwork, he chuffed his gravel laugh.

Got no use for that is all he’d say.

He had also brought with him about fifty posters, all girls in bikinis or less holding various weapons and bannered with the great names in small armaments from Colt through Sig to Winchester. They were tacked up all over the walnut paneled walls where framed paintings used to hang, taped even to the edges of the windows. They were shooting submachine guns holding pistols in the low ready position like a fig leaf and sometimes not bothering to cover their total nakedness at all and the pain they caused me, I mean the sight of unclad women, actually constricted my throat so I kept my visits to the bare minimum so to speak. Ha. When I did go I hailed him from the yard and waited for a yell back, an invite maybe, trying to train him to do the same and stop giving me a heart attack at my hangar which I knew to be fruitless.

We got plenty of venison, Hig, he said straightening from a large pipe in a vise.

After our dustup the other day he announced that he was going to build a grenade launcher. He actually had one, an M203, but the range was inadequate to save my ass, he said, so he was going to rebuild it. More accurate he said.

Can’t have the Hig getting concussed anymore, makes him too goddamn goofy.

Now he straightened and squinted at me while I tried not to look at the homicidal naked girls. Weird: on a low table, by the leather couch he had decided to keep, was a framed picture of the family that had lived here: some ski vacation, three blonde kids in helmets, parkas, their parents standing behind holding skis and smiling broadly, teeth as white as the snowy mountains in the range behind them. Top of one of the mountains at Vail or somewhere. I never asked about it. I intuited that it was not as simple as being reminded of the filial warmth that once pervaded, but more likely some Bangley score keeping, like: Look you Yuppie motherfuckers, you had all that but who is here in your sunken living room today, healthy as a horse and crafting better weaponry so he can keep ahold of it like you couldn’t.

Just a guess.

You thinking you need another fishing vacation? Last one wasn’t exciting enough?

Shook my head. I’m flying.

Flying?

Grand Junction. Got a transmission from there a little while ago. From the tower.

His hands, which I thought of as paws they were so big and blunt looking, they let go the pipe, set down the file. He looked at me under the hanging gun rack he’d had me build for him in the beginning—he never did anything without a platoon’s worth of firepower within reach.

Little while ago?

Three years.

His grin was straight across. He rubbed the stubble on his cheek and I could hear it rasping from across the room.

Three years.

He turned halfway back to look out the window west in the direction of Junction as if trying to gauge in spacetime the relationship between the distances and the passage of seasons. For just a second, for the first time, I saw him as a man getting old. He turned back.

Goddamn Hig. You weren’t very good about returning phone calls were you?

I smiled at him.

Hig?

Yeah?

You having a midlife crisis?

Just behind him to the left on a wall panel beside the big window was a famous Czech model holding a short, wicked looking machine gun, something like an Uzi. She was weighting her left leg, her right hip cocked outward, and all the geometries led the eye from her green gaze to her mound which coyly peaked out of a very spare triangle of dark hair which could not hide the short line, the path to the promised land. It killed me. Breathing immediately constricted. It occurred to me that Bangley was a tactician to the bone. He read the layout of any situation instantly, and found the spring that wound the clock, the vulnerable entry. Was I having a midlife crisis?

Don’t really believe in em, I said. Our whole frigging life is a crisis.

You think so?

No.

First the elk, now the control tower. Three hundred miles away. What’s your Point of No Return?

He meant fuel. The point at which I wouldn’t have enough to get back.

Two sixty.

Maybe you’re chasing shadows Hig. You wanna kill us both?

I stood in the middle of the family’s living room. There had been a big flatscreen, a surround sound stereo system, a player console on a side table with over ten thousand songs, a lot of country pop. Bangley had ripped it all out, hung up pegboard and the posters. There had been a game controller on the middle table. We had turned it on: World at War VII. I thought Bangley would like it. He turned away when I turned it on, and he visibly relaxed when I shut it off.

I know, I said.

He looked at me. His mineral eyes, his grin rigid.

I know it’s a risk. Whoever was there who sent the transmission he had power. He was in a control tower so he had powerful radios. Maybe he knows something.

Knows something?

Some news.

News.

Like about the Arabs or something.

Bangley didn’t move. Then he picked up the file and grasped the pipe with his paw and lowered his head.

Hig is a shark, he said. Gotta keep moving or die. Gotta do what he’s gotta do.

I thought about that all night as I lay out at the base of the berm alone, Jasper’s weight on my leg an aching absence. And watched the last of the winter constellations go under earth in the west. That was his way of giving me permission. Which I didn’t need. Still.

Clear calm morning, early May, the wind sock by the gas pump hanging still, the sky over the mountains a ringing bowl of water-clear blue. Our resident redtail floats, riding the first thermal over the barely warming tarmac. Easy circles. His mate’s nest is in a cottonwood at the edge of our fish pond and yesterday I heard the squalling cheeps of the chicks. Three I think. She stood, pumped her broad wings once and looked at me with a murderous acuity. Don’t fuck with mama. Wouldn’t dream of it I said aloud.

I turn on the pump and fill two six gallon gas jugs and load them behind my seat. Under seventy five pounds. Full tanks fifty five gallons usable. The extra gas will give me just under one more hour, not enough if I do any scouting along the way, not enough to get back, but I will take no more gas as I want to be able to land and take off short if I need to. Survival pack thirty pounds including ten days of jerky, dried tomatoes, corn, two jars olive oil. Five gallons water which I probably don’t need as Grand Junction is so named for straddling the confluence of two big rivers. But it’s a desert town and I don’t know what will happen, how hard it will be to get to the river. Always carry water.

I keep Jasper’s bird hunting quilt on the passenger seat. Lock the AR and the machine pistol into the vertical rack at the front of his seat.

What is the plan, Hig? Fly there.

Then what? Contact the natives.

Then what? Swap news.

You have no news.

I have what I have.

Then what? Fly home?

Good question.

Refuel.

Good luck.

Me and Me talking. Bangley is nowhere in sight. Climb the ladder, top off the Beast. Enough direct sun to run the pump, enjoy the old analog clicking of the numbers rolling in the pump’s window. The light warm breeze on my left cheek, the single skeining scream of the hawk. Roughed at the edges like his wings. The old excitement of a trip, a real trip, meaning new country. Surge of optimism don’t know why. Bangley is right. The odds of any useful news are low, the odds of the man in the tower being a skeleton high. And what news is useful? I’ve asked myself that every day in the week since. What is news? We eat we sleep we secure the perimeter we defend ourselves I go up into the mountains sometimes to get the news of the creeks and the trees. From the Beast the news of wind. What else is there?

Had to show Bangley how to water the garden for the first time, how to direct the flow from the header into the different marks, how to clean the furrows, show him what is and what is not a weed. He was ornery. He confessed that he’d sworn that he would never on this earth be a farmer, that the only dirt he’d ever dig in his life would be the dirt of a grave.

The hair stood up on the back of my neck when he said that. To know him this long and still be surprised.

My father was a farmer he said.

In Oklahoma?

He stared at me, the double ought spade in his hand looking nothing if not at home.

Okay so you’ve done this before.

He stared at me. He pursed his lips, looked at the blade of the shovel smeared with clay and half covered in the smoothly flowing current of a mark.

This is your show, he said finally. Were me I would’ve used the gated pipe stacked in the yard of that place to the north.

Now it was my turn to stare.

You’re a farmer, I said.

Nothing. He winced down his eyes and looked off west into the sun. Vagrant breeze moved the hair sticking out under the back of his cap. The flow of irrigation water captured from the creek made a cold ripple and burble. It pushed against clods fallen from the edges, flowed over them in smooth humps that fell into tiny riffles behind them. Eddied along the edges. If I stared long enough I could magnify the furrow in my head, build a perfect trout stream from any straight line of water. I always irrigated barefoot and my feet were numb. I loved the sensation as I sat on Jasper’s mound, the one he used to supervise from, and let the feeling come back tingling in the sun. Let them dry with heels propped on a piece of rag. Shook the dirt out of boots and socks before I put them back on.

I stared at him.

That’s what it is, I said. In some previous Life of Bangley. That shovel. Looks like a goddamn part of you. Like you were born with it.

Turned his head and looked at me and the hair stood up again. Cold, icy as the water flowing over my right foot.

It’s a spade, he said.

I nodded.

I know.

We looked at each other. What the hell, I was leaving in the morning.

You didn’t like your father much, huh?

Hesitated, shook his head slow.

You hated the fucker.

Bangley’s jaw working side to side.

You did everything. Jesus. A farmer. That’s where you learned it. You could weld, blacksmith, shoe a horse, build a corral, a barn. Probably a better frigging carpenter than me. Holy fuck.

Crossed my arms over the handle of the spade and looked at the mountains. Gentle wind. A harrier, white rumped, beat the sage across the creek, fluttering and gliding just over the brush trying to scare up a rabbit. Two hawks, not the redtails, smaller, maybe Cooper’s, gyred. A lot of songbirds vanished even before, but in this world the raptors seem to be doing fine. A hawk’s world.

How long? Did you work the farm with him? Hating him?

We stood there. The water in the furrows conversed one to another in overlapping rills. No words and I knew with certainty that Bangley had killed his old man.

When you get back, he said finally. We’ll make improvements. If you want. We could make it water a lot easier. But then I always thought Hig enjoyed working out here in the sun moving the dirt around.

That was considerate.

He scratched the blade of his cheekbone under his right eye. It was weird. I looked at him the way you might look if you’d just discovered your spouse was in the witness protection program. Had been a hit man or something. Or a senator.

Fuckin A.

Fuckin A.

I don’t know whether to be mad or go hysterical busting a gut.

He smiled at me. Not the grim straight grin but the real half smile that was at once embarrassed at itself.

Personal choice, he said.

What?

Personal choice. Those are the toughest. When you have to think about shit like that.

You are fucking crazy. A crazy fucking farmer.

He was leaning on his crossed arms too and his grin went straight across again unsmiling and I knew the conversation was over and that I probably shouldn’t call him that anymore.

Now I was topping off the wing tanks. I moved the aluminum ladder around the nose, scraped it over the pavement to the left wing and climbed it with the heavy hose and nozzle over my shoulder. Click click click, the numbers unrolled, the fuel gurgled and hissed as it reached the sleeve of the cap. Seventeen point three gallons. Even now with all that it meant I still got a mild kick out of free gas. Free until. The sun was two fingers off the swells to the east, two fingers at arm’s length meaning about half an hour meaning it was nearly six. Thirteen hundred Zulu. Greenwich Mean Time. Greenwich. Somewhere in England. Home of the Clock. Center of the Timed Universe. Used to be. Nobody much keeping track anymore was my guess.

When Uncle Pete died of what was probably cirrhosis hastened by cancer and he knew he had only a few months left he did something I thought was way out of character: he spent his days in his cabin organizing his slides. His vast collection of colored positives. He had grown up with film and had taken exclusively slides which he said were sharper. He put the yellow paper boxes, the white and blue plastic ones, each one a roll, in a foot high stack that mostly covered his kitchen table. In often intense pain, by the light of a small window by day and a standing lamp in the evenings, he unboxed them one roll at a time, slipping each mounted picture into a sleeve in a transparent binder sheet. He labeled them with a Sharpie: on the actual slide he put binder number/slide number, on the page he put the same plus date taken and an up to three word description: Bone Fishing Keys. Beside the three ring binders, which held one to five years’ worth depending on how prolific he had been with his camera, he kept another binder of lined paper with a keyed journal. This held longer descriptions, notes of particular pictures which sparked his memory. I visited him once during this time. While he catalogued, I cut and split the firewood for a long winter both of us knew he would not see. Three cords of maple beech ash yellow birch, cut from his wood-lot on the side of a gentle hill, split and stacked along half of the front porch and around the side, the whole of which—me working while he sat inside—embarrassed him. At first I thought he was crazy. I mean he could have been sitting on his little porch watching the Vermont spring turn into a riotously green and sultry summer for the last time, watched the wrens and larks and owls in the lyrical commerce of breeding and nesting, leaf and air. Got bitten by black flies, gnats, then mosquitoes, on the last exquisite evenings. Why wasn’t he out there on his Dartmouth rocker? Maybe picking on his beat up guitar?

But lying one night in my old bunk under a wide open window listening to a screech owl trying to terrify me with a woman’s screams and only making me happy—the bittersweet cry of undigestible beauty and great impending loss—then it came to me: the obvious epiphany that he was reliving his life. Doh. Slide by slide, picture by picture. He was aggregating memory like a wall against extinction and the little boxes of slides were his bricks.

Up on the ladder in the soft morning, listening to the last pull of fuel gurgle into the wing tank and gauging the time by the sun. Something about that made me think of Pete and his albums leaning into the table in the dim close cabin that smelled of resin and woodsmoke and coffee. Like a man leaning into an incessant wind. Keeping track of things that have no use anymore except as a bulwark against oblivion. Against the darkness of total loss.

Well. I wasn’t going to count the hours. I had a plane full of fuel and good weather and I was going to take off and fly west and see how far I got. I was tightening down the gas cap when I heard a scuff and saw Bangley walking across the ramp. He had a basket on his arm.

I grinned. It was like the old railroad song. Pete sang it. Johnny’s mother came to him with a basket on her arm / She said my darling son / Be careful how you run / Many a man has lost his life just trying to make lost time …

It’s not a pie, he said.

I grinned. Clicked down the cap cover and climbed down.

He handed me the basket, turned to the stepladder and chopped up on the locking struts so it half folded and carried it back to the pump. Inside the basket were six grenades.

Don’t know why I never thought of it before, he said. Working on the launcher got me to thinking.

They lay inside like so many eggs inside a nest. The Egg of Death. Something in a fairy tale I once read and couldn’t remember.

How many mags do you have for the AR?

Four. The big ones.

He nodded.

You got the hand pump?

He meant the pump with long hose I could use to get gas out of an underground tank or any tank. Aside from the extra fuel the thirty feet of hose was my heaviest item. I nodded.

What are you going to do when you run out of gas?

Land.

He nodded. He looked at the Beast, at the mountains. His hands were in his pockets. He was looking west into the light breeze, he said

You been a good partner Hig. A little goofy sometimes.

Oh fuck. My chest constricted thought I was going to—Well.

Like family he said.

I stood there rooted to the tarmac.

I’m not a easy man to get along with. Only ones ever got halfway there were my wife and son. And you. Big Hig.

I think my mouth actually hung open. I blinked at him.

Long story, he said. He smiled the half smile.

Keep your eyes rolling in your head Hig. Situational awareness. Don’t get goofy thinking about the past and let some SOB blindside you. Try and come back.

I stared at him.

I’ll keep the weeds down.

He walked away. I stared after him. Fuckin A.

Fuckin A.

I hand cranked the heavy hose back on its roller and climbed into the Beast, latched the door. Hit the master switch, turned the key in the mags and pushed the starter.

Few sounds in the world as exciting as the exploding catch of a Continental engine firing to life. The first refractory turns of the prop. The roar smoothing out as the prop disappears in the speed of its rotation.

Go fast enough we disappear.

Bounced across the ramp through the lines of wrecked and disintegrating airplanes, turned straightacross the taxiway onto the strip and took off from midfield. Saw Bangley pushing into the door of the house that was his workshop, he didn’t look up.

The Beast is hungry. Pulling at air like an excited horse. I look over: the empty right seat, just Bangley’s egg basket and the quilt with the hunter aiming at the rising pheasant, over and over. Crumpled against the door. Even half deaf and stiff Jasper was a better copilot than most men. All men. That it has come to this: life distilled in a ratty blanket. The shot will never hit, the bird never fall but neither will that hunter ever miss. Or lose anything. His dog will never die.

The biggest hole torn by a mutt.

…thinking about the past let some SOB blindside you…

I fly over. Straight over the Divide. Boulder burned below, the triangular slabs of the Flatirons thrust against the greater mass of the mountains like blank headstones. Prettiest town on earth couldn’t sustain. Mark it. The ski area El Dora scarred with old trails and slopes, the lines of the lifts just below us, can see the empty chairs swinging in the wind. A few bumps, the Beast more than compliant. Sail over the snow saddle. Close enough to see the tracks of a single large animal stringing the ridge. Not possible but. Too high. All of us caught out too high.

Winter Park and the Fraser Valley revealing itself on the other side as we go over. Scores of ski trails tender green against the rust of the dead forests. We used to ski there. The last time Melissa and I split up for a run and I rode next to a big man who said he was here for winter break with a church group from Nebraska. Nondenominational.

We just follow the Bible word for word he said. Word for word you can’t go wrong. Shook his head nice smile. I’d be crazy to disbelieve him.

I thought of stones in a river, rock hopping. One rock to the next, nothing to think about. Word for word. Just follow them, man. Breadcrumbs right to God. Sitting the chair next to him, our skis dangling over sixty feet of air, I thought Maybe there is a different translation for meek. Maybe it’s not the meek who inherit, maybe it is the simple. Not will inherit the earth, they already own it.

I told him I always got stuck at the Begats. I said I had just read Lamentations though and it seemed like Mad Max. I mean women eating their babies, everybody dying.

He didn’t laugh.

He said, I try to stay on the Right Side of the Bible. Left side was written by Jews. Some things to pay attention to, I guess, but if I were you I’d start with John.

We should have all paid more attention to the Left Side I am thinking now. The Wrong Side, the Side Where Shit Goes Really Really Wrong.

Drop down and follow the Fraser past Tabernash. Most of the valley burned except the firehouse and the discount liquor store which now stands alone at the edge of a field full of bighorn sheep. They rouse, swing and trot in a panic toward the blackened forest as I pass and I see four wolves standing out of the grass and they turn them back like sheepdogs. Fly on.

I know this country all of it. Doc Ammons, I can see his barn still standing in a hundred open acres this side of Granby. The house is gone but. His son Swift was my best friend in college and they were my second family. Three of us fished the Fraser often. Can see the log corrals, the ring where Becky trained her horses and riding students. Could probably find a stack of my old books in the log outbuilding where I used to sleep. Today I don’t want the memories. I fly over.

Right through the gunsight slot of Gore Canyon wingtips up against rock both sides. Seems like. Fished here, too, the river dropping so fast, the rapids so loud, reverberating off the cliff—you had to be careful as you walked down the railroad tracks to look back often. More than one fisherman never heard or saw the train coming. Air over the water cold and heavy throwing up mist, the Beast loving it.

Do I? I used to love to fly like this. Twisting through a canyon fifty feet off the water.

Now I don’t feel anything. I feel the way my unwadered legs felt after ten minutes in the snowmelt. Numb and glad to be. Glad to be numb.

The difference maybe between the living and the dead: the living often want to be numb the dead never do, if they never want anything.

Sunlight. Out the other end. The river quieting to black water, the rock folding back to hills, woods unburned. I can see duck smattering the pools. Herons out of the reeds, angular, spreading those huge wings at the sound of the plane. Color of smoke.

What do you want? Hig. What?

I want to be the color of smoke.

Then what?

Then. Then.

Pull back hard on the yoke and climb steeply out of the hole at State Bridge. Dry sheep hills, herds of antelope and deer scattered. In the flats along the Colorado River I can see the once swank Eagle Airport. Key the mike and call the tower. Ask for clearance to pass through their airspace. A hope and a habit. Triple Three Alpha three to the east at niner thousand request transition your airspace en route—

Where am I en route to? Junction maybe. With a jog south to the Uncompahgre Plateau, the places I used to hunt. For no reason.

en route—

I want to say En route to Something Completely Fucking Different. I fly over.

II

Sudden lurch and buck. Again. Thrown to the left, left wing dipping. Hold tight to the yoke, correct and watch the altimeter. I love this. The yoke in my hands is neutral, the plane level and the altimeter needle is circling clockwise upwards. Updraft. The trees get smaller, pressure in the seat cushion like a great lifting hand. Late morning thermal, the still dark woods soaking the sun and throwing up this plume of warm air. The unasked lift is fast, heady, a little alarming.

Gain fifteen hundred feet with no work at all. Cross high over the Roaring Fork right over Carbondale, unburned, surrounded by rivers and green ranches. I blink. Looks like cattle there. Cattle of old. Black and red. Must be—nothing else that color. Damn. Cattle gone wild, sticking to home, miraculously out of the mouths of wolves. I’d drop to look but don’t want to lose this height nor spend the gas to climb again for the next pass.

A ranch. Cattle. The spring river flowing by. A ranch house in the shade of leafing cottonwoods and globe willows. A cracked and broken road winding by. Squint and I can imagine someone in the yard. Someone leaning to bolt a spreader to the tractor. Someone thinking Damn back, still stiff. Smelling coffee from an open kitchen door. Someone else hanging laundry in a bright patch. Each with a litany of troubles and having no clue how blessed. Squint and remake the world. To normalcy. But.

More normal the absences.

Huntsman’s Ridge. Can see the long rockslide we used to ski, called it Endless. Seemed so then. Be perfect now: spring corn-snow compacted and stable. Zero avalanche danger.

Half the aspen forest still in leaf, still living. On our left the rugged wall of the Raggeds. I nod, fly over.

Now the country gets soft. It will be aspen forests for miles. I tap the fuel gauge.

Twenty nine point three gallons. Not enough gas to get home. As simple as that.

As simple as that we go over the edge.

I was wondering: Is this what it’s like to die? To be this alone? To hold to a store of love and pass over?

We almost moved here. Paonia. Some misspelling of Peony. Melissa was tired of teaching, tired of the principal and the District, was itching to try something else. Organic farming maybe. Building was a lot slower over on this side of the state but I could’ve probably pieced it together with remodels, cabinets, the odd house. First time I saw it I thought it looked like a train set. Looks like a train set still. I let the Beast fall.

Cut power and glide down the south slope of Grand Mesa, the tops of the soft aspens a few feet under our belly. Still green, the pale trunks still startling, the ferns beneath them still a thick carpet no doubt harboring deer. Whoosh off a band of cliff. And the valley opens: a green river bottom backed by a high double mountain with a swooping saddle between. Orchards, the neat rows of tufted trees on either side of the river. Vineyards too. Tall cottonwoods marking the westward twisting course of the stream. In the west, where the river flows out of the valley into a dry desert scrubland, I can see the railroad tracks, the flat topped mesas and the massing uplift of the Plateau, purple in the morning haze. And the town, more a hamlet, clustered between the river and the hill with the white stone P.

Bought groceries here often, ammo, dog food. Used to wait seven minutes at the crossing while the coal train clattered by. Timed it once, resenting the loss of daylight. Look over at Jasper’s seat.

You loved it here, huh, bud. Walk down to the river below the town park and throw the stick in the current. You weren’t too good at stick. Or swimming. Loved it anyway. We should all be like that huh?

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.

Before I augured in the three stakes and tied her down facing into her takeoff, before I put two of Bangley’s Eggs of Death in the pockets of my jacket, and slung the AR over my shoulder and walked away from the Beast, I did the first not dumb thing all morning. I took out the jugs and using the strut climbed over the wings and poured one each, the last fuel in each wing tank. Fuel up now. Better to fuel up before you get your undies in a bundle. And I took the key. Put it in my right jeans pocket and said Hig. The key is in the right jeans pocket.

Never know how much of a hurry you might be in later.

III

Well she was not nude waiting for me by the creek, not even dressed out in the grass in front of the house singing, she was nowhere. Need not have tied myself to any mast. The smoke that had leaked from the chimney and billowed downcanyon was gone.

Place looked suddenly dead. Bucket kicked over in the yard, a dirty cooking spoon beside it. The cattle, a few sheep, were there heads down in the meadow all facing downstream. Ribbed thin, sharp hips, nearly starving. One big bird high up on the high wall gyring along the rock face. A peregrine. The ledge marked with a white ribbon of guano must be her nest. Circle out, circle back. Pity the ducks that angled down into this hole. No chickens. That occurred to me. Because of the falcon? No, the old coot had a shotgun. Because they would need a rooster then, or two, to maintain the flock—probably too loud every morning if you want to stay hidden, like letting the whole damn country know you’re here. Smart.

I turned the scope upcanyon to where the creek spilled over the wall in a twenty foot falls. The top of the hole completely boxed off by this cliff. And two sides soaring. Pretty neat spot. A length of dead pine was propped against the rock beside the waterfall, limbs stubbed in a crude ladder. Okay. If they went that way in flight they didn’t pull up and hide the ladder, maybe only because it was too heavy or they didn’t have time.

I was lying at the very rim, scrunched between two rocks looking straight down. Here my cliff was about a hundred feet high, maybe less. I was wedged tight and had to slide the holstered Glock around to my back so it wouldn’t scrape.

Think like Bangley. That’s what you need to do. Bangley’s voice, I can hear it:

Goddamn, Hig. Old man and a scrawny girl got you all in a bundle. So far you got more firepower on your right hip than he’s got by a factor of ten.

Yeah but what if there’s more of them? Or if he’s got more than the shotgun?

You see any sign of more? Stools in the yard, clothes hanging, bedding, old shoes?

Huh.

Good you’re thinking like that, Hig, can’t take that away. Ticking off the exigencies. Hig is an old dog but he learns shit little by little. But you gotta look at the intel staring you in the face. I’m not saying there aren’t three more guys with weapons hidden in the trees. Good to plan for that, too. But you gotta act on what you believe. Plus you also got the rifle, you got the grenades. You got the grenades, right?

Yeah, two.

Hig?

Yeah?

What are you doing here?

Silence.

I mean what do you want? What the fuck do you want?

Silence.

You can’t form a plan unless you got a mission. You can’t have a mission if you don’t know what the fuck you want. First rule. Have a clear mission, have an exit strategy.

I thought the first rule was Never Negotiate. Negotiate, Hig, and you are negotiating your own life …

That’s the first principle. Anyway what the fuck does it matter? You got a bigger problem to solve first. Which is: What the fuck, Hig, do you hope to accomplish?

The canyon darkened and I shivered. A cloud, a swollen cumulus tugged its shadow across the cut. Bearing away the last chill of a long winter. The shadow smelled like ponderosas. It passed over and the sun on the arms of my jacket smoothed out the goosebumps. It was comfortable snugged like this in the rocks. I could hear the buzz of a deerfly but it didn’t bother me. In the moment I realized I could lay my head on my suntoasted arms and go to sleep no problem. My nose was inches from the ground. I watched an ant climb the stem of a small purple aster. Smelled good here. Like flinty dirt and new grass, mesquite.

Hig!

Uh, yeah. What?

Focus, goddammit. Get your dick outta your hand. Every minute you are lying out here not knowing what the fuck you are up to, you are vulnerable. So is the plane. Whoever was down there may be working their way to the rim to scout your sorry ass. Planning right now how to neutralize the threat that is Hig. What we would be doing and fast. Stead of just lying down there vulnerable, exposed, the way you are doing right now.

Huh.

Fuck. Hadn’t thought of that. I blew out, nearly whistled. What is up with you? Are you completely out of it? Have you so totally lost your edge?

Did you ever have an edge?

Hig!

Uh what?

Know why you are sleepy? Why suddenly you could just stretch out and snooze til sundown?

Why?

Because you don’t know what the fuck to do! I don’t mean you wouldn’t know what to do if you had a purpose. I’ve seen you, Hig. When you have a purpose like getting away from nine marauding motherfuckers and dusting their ass you’re pretty goddamn good. Hig on wheels. But you don’t have a clue what you’re doing here. You’re acting like a goddamn lost puppy. One look at a tall girl who maybe doesn’t have the sickness and you’re goddamn gaga.

That’s not it.

Why’d you risk the plane then? I saw that little maneuver. Pretty fucking dicey. Risk everything for a closer look at a crack. What if she hates men? Ever think of that?

Bad enough to risk it all for Something Known is what you’re saying.

Then I thought: We’re more likely to risk it all for something unknown. For some perverse reason.

I told you, Hig: Get all philosophical in a tactical situation and you’re toast.

Toast.

That sounded good. Two pieces of lightly browned toast with butter and jam. Hadn’t had butter in nine years hadn’t had milk. I bet those cows gave sweet warm milk every day. One or two. I shifted the scope down into the meadow to scan for a swollen udder and I saw them. Pure dumb luck. He must have had at least two guns, which made sense to have a hunting rifle as well as a shotgun, because this was the flashing glint off his scope. A bare instant. Enough to let me place him in a thicket of cattails, at the edge of the creek, on the meadow side, away from the house. A large sandstone block about the size of a car had tumbled there and he was hard against it. Right where I would’ve sat. Same basic strategy as we used at the airport: the house would be the draw. He sat where he, or they, could sight the open ground between the creek and the little stone house. All of that within shotgun range. Could take care of most passing threats with the two shots from the double barrel. And he, they, had the rifle too for long shots, or for after. They. Once I placed him I could just see the barrel of his rifle, darker, straighter than the reeds, and I could see her shift a mass of dark hair. She had the other gun. Shotgun. And he was not looking across the yard he was sighting straight up at me. Fuck.

The blast blew chips of sandstone from my snug rock all over the right side of my face. I jerked back. The second twanged in air just over my head. Fuck.

Blinked. Stone dust in my eyes. Right side of my face now stinging too. Hand to temple. No blood this time. Fucking Gramps. That’s twice. Old bastard had my head bracketed. If I wasn’t more goddamn careful the next shot would be dead center.

I could hear Bangley laughing. As if he were three feet away. Laughing out of the ether, like a not totally benign ghost.

Pickle, huh Hig? A quandary. All you want to do is make friends and now you might have to shoot somebody. Laughter loud and long.

Had a point, old Bangley, my tactical superego. The old bastard down below was a wicked good shot. Like professional good, like Bangley. He had nearly taken me out with a shotgun, like the Beast and I were just one big blue winged teal. Pretty good.

Why was I so giddy? Somehow the pickle I was in made me very glad. I mean, it wasn’t a pickle. I could walk away. But. I had an image of a white rag tied at the end of a stick stuck over the edge of that cliff. Waving it like some Hollywood cliché. No one ever tried that with us back at the airport because A) it was always night, and B) we, mostly Bangley, shot them dead before they knew what was happening. If someone had tried that back there, then what? Never negotiate. Bangley would have gained maximum tactical advantage, called to them, Okay come out in peace and then he would’ve blown their heads off. Good old Bangley.

Yup, that was going to take some depth of faith and trust and even then it was a flip of a coin, and plus I didn’t have anything white.

I scrambled back a bit, stood up, stretched. Refreshed almost like I’d had a nap. Then I trotted back to the Beast. I kept a stack of Xerox paper in the back seat pocket and a couple of crayons. Also a few palm sized stones and rubber bands. This so if I needed to drop a note mostly to the families I could. But a couple of times I dropped notes on wanderers camped out on the roads too close to the airport who didn’t seem to understand my catchy NorthSouthEastWest song: Turn back north or die etc. Nor a stick of dynamite. These messages, the ones wrapped around the stones and dropped from the Beast, were very succinct and graphic and they always worked. Power of the pen. I was always very proud of myself when I crafted four lines that got a refractory band of pirates to pack up and scurry back up a road. I picked up half a dozen sheets and a black crayon and gathered up Jasper’s quilt and trotted back across the park.

I was grinning. I could feel it stretching my smarting cheeks. I hunkered back down by the edge of the canyon and wrote on one sheet vertically as big as it would go: I

The satisfaction of composing. Remembered that Dylan Thomas sometimes would set down one word of a new poem then walk down to the pub and get shitfaced in celebration. For breaking the void of silence.

Well. Let’s see how this goes over before I waste any more sheets.

Crept, wriggled to the edge of the clifftop which for my purposes was auspiciously formed in a real lip, sharp and dropping to a vertical, if not overhanging, face of sandstone. Keeping my precious splintered head well back, I reached out pushed and shook the quilt off the edge, unfurling it like a flag. Made sure the hunter and the flushing pheasant and the dog were right side up from the bottom’s point of view and made sure my fingers did not go past the lip.

Most fun I’d had in years except maybe fishing and I think it’s because it was a lot like fishing, except there were people at the other end of this line. Catch and release.

Soon as the quilt reached air another shot. Creased air right over my hands, head.

You hear bullets make the sound they always do in Westerns and war stories and guess what? They do. They make a phhhht like someone opening a poisonous can of soda. The Soda of Death. Like a vacuum following itself at the speed of a diving duck. Followed almost simultaneously by a little hum, a musical exclamation point.

Okay shoot at my quilt if you want. I have needle and thread.

Then silence. Quizzical. That’s what it felt like.

Often fishing you can feel right away the spirit of the fish on the other end of the line. That connection. I mean you know right away: is it fierce, scared, experienced, young and dumb, wily, panicked, resigned, confident, mischievous. Any of it in a rapid tugging and zing of line. I often thought of the silence between people in the same way.

I unfurled the quilt and the shot blasted at nearly the same instant and then silence. A puzzled silence. I grinned. I knew Gramps was scoping the blanket, studying the repeating pattern, thinking, What the fuck? I knew from that distance with his scope he would be able to make out the scene. I scrabbled the ground for two heavy stones and weighted the top of the quilt and let it hang.

I let him puzzle it out, maybe discuss it. Then I took the paper, stuck it on the point of a four foot broken limb and pushed it over the edge: I. BANG! Swish. Complete miss. Ha! Not going for the paper going for my head, where it would be if I was just a little tiny bit closer.

Silence. I hung the paper on the stick vertically so he could read it. He could. They were really fucking close. I mean if I wanted to be really mean I could maybe just shove a boulder over the edge. Or spit.

I pulled the stick back. If I was chuckling it was the first time in maybe nine years. Chuckling—that word. It’s not a word for the End of Times. I unpeeled the paper off the crayon with my teeth and wrote on the second paper again vertically, AM.

Why didn’t I just shout down there? Well, conversations can get so crosswise so quick. What I’ve found. First time I met Melissa was in a coffee shop and I was too shy to speak so I wooed her with a note. Works. One wrong tone of voice and that’s it. Nah, this was better. Plus the creek was pouring, plus wind, plus there was no way on earth I was going to stick my mouth over that edge.

Stuck AM on the stick hung it over. Now no shot. Silence. Sonofabitch was getting the hang of it. I AM. Existential enough. Shit, I could stop right there, just let them chew on that a while. Picked up the crayon, wrote NOT. Pulled in my stick, stuck it on. Let that flap in the wind.

The philosophical implications of going from the penultimate assertion to the last were profound. I mean Hamlet had nothing on this. The unfolding dialectic. Dang.

Then A. I wrote A covering one whole page stuck it out. A. A. Flap, rustle.

Then I sharpened the crayon on the rock turned the page sideways and wrote as big as I could fit: PHEASANT.

Hung it out there. Weighted the stick down with another rock and lay back face to the sun, arms crossed under my poor abused head, and let the warmth cover me and the sun work on the cuts.

They weren’t going anywhere, neither was I.

If this were a Western I would now put my hat on a stick. I was wearing a hat. A sweatstained fraybrimmed baseball cap that said Cherry Hills Golf Club. I took it off a visitor one night and I liked it maybe because it carried a message of consolation: the End of Everything meant the End maybe for all time, maybe in all the universe, of Golf.

I had nothing against golf.

Anyway there were probably Scotsmen in Scotland who somehow survived the pandemic and after and were now strolling over the heath playing the old game—no irrigation but mist and rain, no lawnmowers but herds of wild sheep. Thwacking their drives into the fog. That was a nice idea.

Maybe Gramps hated golf. Doubt if he could read lettering that small but if he had say a ten power scope, well, he might. I put it on the stick anyway, for fun, shoved it out there to the edge. Nothing. The old crust wasn’t buying it. He was gonna wait til he saw an eye, an ear. Hmph. Now what? I could just stand up, walk to the edge and shout. Hey! I come in peace! In friendship! And. If they subscribed to the First Principles of Bruce Bangley I was a dead man. Curiously, for the first time it seemed in a while I wasn’t ready to die. Not just this minute. I mean I had more than a casual interest in staying alive. For some reason.

Okay. I had an idea.

I walked back to the Beast got another stack of paper. Had all the time in the world: none of us seemed to be going anywhere. Unless they bolted for the tree ladder which they wouldn’t as I could pot them as easy as the German officers in that awful Hemingway vignette that I loved. It was absolutely topping. They tried to get over it, and we potted them from forty yards. They rushed it, and officers came out alone and worked on it. It was an absolutely perfect obstacle. I mean if that’s what I had been here to do.

I hunkered down by my rock in the sun, well behind it, and wrote out more words. Put them on the stick one after the other and held them over the lip as before. Deep silence while the fish on the other end thought about it.

I-COULD-BLOW-YOU-TO-SMITHER-EENS-BUT-I-WON’T—PEACE

Lucky I had half a ream of paper.

Then I took an Egg of Death out of my pocket pulled the pin which was pretty stiff and tossed it over the edge.

I threw it well upstream into what in my mind’s eye I saw as the top of the meadow—well away from the cows and the cobwebbed sonofabitch and his girl.

The explosion was deeply satisfying. Thank you Bangley. I had the other pages ready and while they were still rattled and pinching their limbs to see if they weren’t dead I pushed them out:

SEE?-NEXT-ONE-MIGHT-HURT

Long pause.

DON’T-MAKE-ME-RUN-OUT-OF-PAPER

Pause.

STAND-UP

I can admit I was really enjoying myself. For the first time in what seemed years my head seemed clear. Not like the thoughts were standing out in a meadow like those shaggy Norwegian horses and wondering what they were doing here. Not like one might wander off into the trees.

Just for good measure I crept the cap out to the edge again. Nothing. Maybe we were coming to an understanding. I crawled to the edge and peered over. They were both standing up in the cattails holding their guns out to the side. He was tall, fit, not that old, maybe early sixties, in a ratty fawn cowboy hat. She was taller than he and I’d have to say handsome. Skinny but strong jawed, high cheeked, dark eyebrows, long dark hair twisted into a braid. Can’t say why but she looked smart from three hundred feet. I reached back for the AR and put the scope on them. If a man can spark he was sparking: mouth compressed in rage and his eyes which were gray were throwing off glints of fury. His face had the deep lines of a man who had earned them out in the elements. Her eyes were wideset and what? Violet? Something between blue and black. Her cheeks were inflamed scarlet and she looked scared but also something else: mildly amused. Was that it? She looked to be about thirty five.

Can you fall in love through a rifle scope? Damn. I pulled my head away and looked down with naked eye. Well proportioned, wide hipped, tall. Maybe too skinny. I brought my eye to the gun again and nudged the barrel and let the scope travel down. I admit. Her legs were scratched and inflamed and maybe too thin but they were long and tapered.

Breathe Hig. Say 10-4. Ten four.

Came up to one knee, still aiming, both eyes open. I yelled.

Hi!

He blinked. I nudged the scope over to her face and they both looked like they might be crazy or maybe in a bad dream.

Hi!

Kept the scope on her. She smiled. Actually smiled. It was subtle, small, but at ten power I could see the damn thing.

How should we do this? Yelling.

Silence.

Gramps! Relax! If I wanted to kill and rape and plunder you’d be dead by now!

Pause while he took that in.

I forgive you! I yelled.

I mean for trying to kill me more than twice! Nearly wrecking my plane. Nothing personal. I know. Would’ve done the same thing myself.

My shouts trailed off on the breeze. But I could see that they could hear me. I mean something was registering. I could also see when I lifted my head back and looked downcanyon that all the cows and a few sheep were huddling terrified against a tall woven brush fence across the bottom of the box.

Sorry for scaring your cows!

They stood there, arms out. I played the scope over both of them. He was chewing his cheek trying to make out what the hell was going on. And her. I wasn’t sure. I could see gears turning and I thought something not unpleasant was dawning on her. That was my fantasy. I knew, I knew that I was addled somehow, but also that I was as clear as I had been in my adult life.

Okay you can keep your guns. I’m coming down.

Okay?

Okay?

He nodded. Finally. Pulled the gun back in to his body and stood again like a man in command of his world. I’ll say this: there was something about the codger that was dignified and proud. He was a fucking good shot, I knew that. I got the feeling that everything the prickly bastard did he did with that amount of confidence. Just an impression from the bleachers.

If you decide to kill me you’ll feel really bad later! I promise you’ll deprive yourself of the best part of your day!

She smiled. Oh man. I was gone. I thought Maybe, maybe he is her dad. What a fool.

In purgatory there is really nothing else to be. I lowered the gun, stepped back fast and walked back to the Beast.

Just for luck and respect I put another grenade in my jacket pocket to make two and grabbed some venison jerky for a peace offering, then I slung the AR over my shoulder and trotted across the sage meadow. I worked myself upcanyon through the piñons until the cleft shallowed out and I found a game trail down to the creek.

IV

My heart was booming like a bongo but not from the effort. The ground was rough, yes, the way into the creek steep and strewn with boulders. I placed a hand on their warm shoulders as I hopped and pivoted around them, slid on loose dirt following the path of deer. Their droppings lay among the long brown needles of ponderosas and the sun mixed the scents which were strangely close to the musky scent of a living deer close by in pines. So that the hunter in me was roused. But that wasn’t it either. My heart was hammering because I felt like I was heading to my first date.

That one, Hig’s actual first date—I was so nervous it was a disaster. We went to see Avatar in 3D. I kept having to duck away and pee. Every time I brought back more popcorn or candy. She must have thought I was some sort of diabetic or bulimic or something. I didn’t kiss her at the end nor try and she was clearly flushed and upset, and I’ll never know if it was because she thought I was a geek and couldn’t wait to get rid of me or—this only occurred to me months later—maybe she was as nervous as I and kinda liked me but didn’t know how to ask and felt rejected when I left so abruptly. My first realization that someone else might be anxious for my approval, that they could be scared of me. Before the end of the world that was a profound insight. Now I pretty much took it for granted: everybody was scared of me.

Which is a weird way to head out on a date. Poor Hig, poor Frankenstein.

Not her. She smiled. She smiled.

I’d charmed em hadn’t I? Charmed em right out of Kill Mode. Right out of their knickers. Hadn’t I?

I stopped dead. Squinted down to the creek, took one more careful step into the shade of a pine. Maybe not.

The cute thing with the quilt. Codger had no patience. He placed a high value on his time his attention. While I was lying back in the sun enjoying myself, letting them think about things, he was forced to hunker down in the wet cattails, his blood boiling, fearing too—for life, for his gal—thinking, I’m gonna kill that smug sonofabitch. First chance. Thinks he’s so goddamn cute, how cute will it be when I make him watch his own balls roasting on the fire.

Like that.

I went on. Nevertheless. With the hair kinda standing up on my neck.

When I got to the stream I turned down it and followed an easy trail along the bank. Tall grass here, tiny white asters like daisies, Indian paintbrush. Wild strawberry, penstemon. Huge ponderosas, the smell of cold wet stone and vanilla. White moths circling each other over a gravel bar. Mating. The first date thing: that was history. My heart was still racing but not for that. I saw the moths flitting, three then two, in and out of sunlight, and thought: Hig, mating is probably not in the cards not this round. Not ever probably.

When you get to the short cliff at the top of the meadow, the one with the waterfall, when you swing down onto that tree ladder and put your back to Gramps, he is gonna shoot you dead with a delicious grunt. So there. Think this is a game, punk? You-are-not-a-pheasant-Correct:-you-are-a-dead-man. Write that on your little sheets. Bang. You just wouldn’t leave us alone. Bang. Stop twitching will ya? Bang.

Bangley: I-told-you-Hig:-never-ever—fuck-you-know-damn-well-what.-R.I.P.

Hmph. Whatever quandary I was in before I was just as much in now. That’s what I saw as I moved fast down the stream. Another thing: he, they, could’ve climbed up the tree ladder into the upper creek in two minutes flat and could now be waiting for me in the willows behind any tree and ambush me at leisure. I froze.

Did not want to die. Not now.

I could be in his sights as we speak. Goosebumps again this time not from the chill.

Scanned down the creek. A box elder at water’s edge, leaves the color of limes. A few cottonwoods below. When the wind pulsed, their leaves turned back, brightening like the palm of a hand held up in sunlight. Stop. They could be crouched behind those thick shaggy trunks.

Stop, Hig, Stop. Reconsider the folly of mere human connection. Listen to a tree.

When you fished, that’s what you were seeking huh? Connection. Think of the cost to the fish. The fish did not want your connection and if a trout could have killed you with one gulp he would have. Gramps is that fish. He can swallow you.

Huh.

I backed up, got my body flat behind a tree. The creek was about thirty feet below me, the current already running clear and shallow enough to wade across. Low water for this early in the season, maybe thigh deep at the deepest. Scanned up the opposite bank. It was a slope, steep, of new grass and flowering weeds running up under an open glade of ponderosas. Toward the top of the ridge, crumbling rimrock broke through like moldering ruins, walls and parapets.

Perfect hiding place. Them. I mean a perfect spot to ride out the end. From here, upstream, you’d never have a clue that the stream would open up into such a wide deep hole, such a meadow. No reason ever to come down here, to follow the water. It wasn’t the easiest going and the old track above, the road I’d landed on, would take you more quickly north and east. To places where the road crossed the little river without effort. From ground level at the top you couldn’t see the hole, the canyon, at all til you were right on it, right on the edge. And I bet that the way up from downstream was beset by waterfalls and cliffs. It was perfect. A hideout. Outlaws of old would covet.

How did they get the cows in there? Only way in was the ladder. That occurred to me.

Why when I was in the most critical spots did my mind wander to curiosities? Bangley would not approve. Bangley would say Get down. That ambush idea that’s a good one. Hunker down and think about things.

I did. Backed up the slope ten paces into the cover of a thick juniper that grew to the ground like a shaggy bush. Snuggled in behind it, pushed in to where I could sit and see through branches down the slope. Stiff twigs brushed my scabbing face stung. The scent was heady. It was like being inside one of those sachets. Why did she do that? Dusty blue juniper berries rained to the ground. Think this is what they made gin out of. Really?

Now what? I was safe. So what have you gained?

Crouched in a mass of prickly twigs. I was a troll who lived at the base of a tree. Looked at the world through a scratchy scrim of needles and branches. Lived on rain, on bits of song and memory.

I lay the rifle on the ground, hugged my knees, leaned into the thicker branches.

Exhausted. To the bone. The untethering that took such an effort. The flight over already seemed like another life. And the airport seemed like a dream. If the airport was a dream, then Jasper was a dream behind a dream, and before before was a dream behind that. Within and within. Dreaming. How we gentle our losses into paler ghosts.

Wait til nightfall that’s what. In the dark I can walk downstream. Watch them. Climb down the ladder in safety. One benefit of so many nights fishing, fishing obsessively into the dark: I know how to trust feet to find the way.

A trout could see the smallest fly on the surface in the darkest night. The sky always luminous, luminous to a trout and the bug silhouetted against it. I loved catching fish in the dark. Often just the sound in a quiet pool, the blip, the tiny hyphenated splash then the tug. I loved it.

Darkness. Nothing. Sharp smell of warming needles. Sleep. Okay a few minutes. Sleep.

Up.

Huh?

Up. Back out. Touch that rifle you’re a dead man.

Hard and sharp hard sharp thing against back of neck. Stick. Yup a stick. A long pole. At the other end a man with a gun. Fuck. Fuck. Good one Hig.

Hands on ground. Back out. Crawl.

Crawl. Slow. Now flat, lie flat. Hands behind head. Now!

Knee in back hard. Hand roughly pushing under jacket relieving me of the belted Glock. Hand running down my back, up again, down legs, expert, swift.

Roll over.

Same with the front, fast frisk, relieving me of the grenades. Into the pockets of his own barn coat.

Younger than. Or not. Leaner. White haired. Hard like shoe leather. Creases. Creased lines deep from cheeks down. Grimace lines. Spray of creases from corners of the eyes, outside corners. Gray eyes sparking. Used to sparking back at the naked sun. No bullshit at all. Every movement sure and swift.

Not sure why: up close I felt less afraid. Didn’t feel panicked at all. Which was probably dumb right now. Gramps was not the least afraid of me, not a shred. Somehow I reciprocated.

Over again. Roll over.

Knee hard in back, sharp needles stinging right side of my face. Watched him from the corner of my eye. Shrugged a circle of coiled rope off his left shoulder, shook it out one handed, bound my hands tight. One handed.

Must be a rancher, I said. Can tell by your hat.

Shut up.

Ten-four. Kinda nice not to make idle conversation.

Didn’t say that, didn’t say anything.

Knee hard down on the knobs of my spine, hurt as he yanked up, tightened the knot.

You shoulda kept on. Nobody bothers us here.

I did, I can tell.

Shut up.

Knee grinding ribs. He stepped back, five steps sideways, uncoiling rope, reached down, picked the AR out of the tree and slung it.

Now stand.

Didn’t even give me a chance. One jerk hard on the rope yanked me to my feet, about ripped out my shoulders.

Walk.

I walked. And.

A relief to do what someone said. Someone who knew exactly what he was doing. Just follow orders. It occurred to me as I stumbled down the hill that if he had wanted me dead I’d be dead. Just like me before when I was on the rim and they were cowering below. Reciprocating. He was reciprocating now. A perfectly reciprocal relationship. Damn.

I’d been closer than I thought. Maybe two hundred yards to where the creek went over the lip, poured over the twenty foot falls. I could see the top of their tree ladder sticking up to the left of the current. I could hear the cascade hitting the pool at the bottom. It sent up spray and the spray in the sunlight shimmered with a shifting shred of rainbow.

From this angle through the mist the little box canyon looked like Eden. Green and bounded, waterfed, remote from death. How was I going to get down that? Was he going to lower me by my bound arms—up behind me and tear out both shoulders? Or just shove me over the edge, hope the pool is a few feet deep? Break an ankle or legs, cripple me, all the better.

The whistle pierced, I jumped. Jerked around. Could’ve been the peregrine but right in my goddamn ear. She came out of the stone hut. She carried the scoped rifle. Bolt action. Also a small blanket. She sat at a wood slab table, rolled the blanket, propped the barrel on it like a sandbag, sighted upwards, thought better of it, lifted the gun and pulled down a bipod, two legs at the front of the barrel, sighted again. Better angle. On me. She’d done this before, that was clear.

She’s very good. I taught her. You screw up just a little, you die.

He stepped forward and with one tug freed the knot on one wrist, left one tied to the end of his rope.

Climb down.

One handed? I’m afraid of heights.

Which was true. Flying is different.

He kicked me in the ass. No shit. A swift boot. Toe in the buttocks which lurched me forward, almost sent me over the edge. That hurt. Like a bastard. Kinda hurt my feelings. What if I had stumbled over? First time since he woke me up I really wanted to hit him.

Use two hands.

I crouched, clutched the tree with both hands swung down.

My name is Hig.

I was born in the Year of the Rat.

I have no serial number but my pilot’s license number is 135-271.

I am an Aquarius.

My mother loved me. She really really loved me. My father. Absent but. Well. I had an uncle that taught me to fish.

I wrote thirty poems after college, twenty three of which were for my wife.

Jasper was my dog.

No kids. My wife was pregnant.

My favorite books are: Shane. Infinite Jest.

I can cook. Pretty well for a guy.

Profession: contractor. I don’t like it. I hated it. I should have been a high school English teacher or something. A pet groomer. I am free of disease, as far as I know I am healthy. I visit families with the blood sickness about twice a month.

My favorite poem was written by Li Shang-Yin in the ninth century.

Maybe it wasn’t my favorite poem before before but it is now.

I have always been particularly attuned to loss. I guess. Got a bumper crop now.

May I have some water?

He tied me to a post in the yard. Facing the sun. Sat me on one of the stools, hands behind me. Tight. They stood and studied me. I squinted, tried to make them out. Thought of something.

My right jacket pocket.

He stepped forward reached in, dug around, pulled out two fresh cans of Copenhagen. Nine or ten years old, expired, but still. I’d brought them as gifts, so. He stepped to my side so I could see him bent, his head down, looking at me sideways, close. Then he opened one of the cans with that expert tear of the thumbnail, creasing the paper around the tin lid, the quarter twist and pry. He stuck his nose in, breathed. I could smell it. Salt and dirt. The tobacco was dust dry, I knew from Bangley, but he pinched two fingers, stuck a small load in his upper lip. He was an upper lip man. Spat.

Three points.

That all? Two tins. I think six is fair.

He handed her the tins and I was surprised to see her take a dip. He pulled the second stool around to the side of me, sat.

Sun’ll be out of your eyes in twenty minutes.

She stood stock still in front, still backlit. She was tall. I couldn’t make out her face. Could feel the bore of her stare though.

Does she talk?

Whoops. Minus three. Back to zero. That’s where you like to be. That’s what I’m getting.

I like to travel light.

He nodded barely.

That’s good. The dip. Been a while. I don’t give a shit how you like to travel. You could be carrying around a dining room set for all I care. Looked around. We could use one.

If I say anything you’re gonna dock me points right? I mean unprompted. Right?

He nodded. Minus one.

And then I lose my frequent flyer opportunities I’m guessing.

Minus two. Get to minus ten I shoot you dead. No appeal. On the spot. Mention her again I dock you five. Cause now you know better. Tell an untruth, that’s ten points, you’re dead. Shit your pants you’re dead. Piss yourself that’s up to you.

Suddenly I wasn’t having any fun. I heard the thudding of the waterfall, rhythmic like a tribal drum, heard one of the sheep bleat and that’s exactly how I felt. Plaintive and kind of traumatized.

I looked at him.

You know what?

I said that.

Know what? Fuck you. Fuck you and your points. I came here in peace and you tried to kill me twice. I came here looking for something, I don’t know what. I don’t know what, you got that? Not death, though. We had enough of that back at the airport. Enough death.

I sat tightly bound on the stool and I looked at him and I could feel tears streaming down my face, stinging the cuts on the left side.

I lost my dog a week ago. Jasper. I don’t need you or your shit. I got nothing. Go ahead, subtract twenty fucking points, shoot me dead. I’ll be fucking glad. Go ahead.

I could taste the salt of my tears.

Let him up Dad, she said. Enough. Let him up.

Her voice was husky. I blinked up at her straight into the sun. Felt his capable hands loose the rope.

I walked away from them to a cottonwood by the edge of the creek and pissed. I didn’t care. I wasn’t shy. The pour and burble of the stream covered my sobs. Cool in the deep shade. Sobbed so hard I gagged. Maybe they were watching, no, they were definitely watching, fuck them. I just let it finish, then breathed. Knelt and splashed my face, the cuts that were already rashing into a spray of scabs. Drank. Why the fuck was I crying all the time? I didn’t give a shit, not really. I wasn’t cracking up, it’s just what I felt like doing. Nine years barely a drop, then Jasper, now this.

The world opens suddenly, opens into a narrow box canyon with four sheep, and we grieve. Two shepherds, maybe not in their right mind, and we grieve. The relief of company not Bangley, not the blood disease, we grieve. We grieve. That this was once the middle of nowhere and now it’s not even that. And I am not even that. Before I could locate myself: I am a widower. I am fighting for survival. I am the keeper of something, not sure what, not the flame, maybe just Jasper. Now I couldn’t. I didn’t know what I was. So grieve.

I stood in the shade of the tree in the cool breath of the moving water and let the sound, the light breeze blow through me. I was a shell. Empty. Put me to your ear and you would hear the distant rush of a ghost ocean. Just nothing. The slightest pressure of current or tide could push and roll me. I would wash up. Here on this bank, dry out and bleach and the wind would scour and roughen me, strip away the thinnest layers until I was brittle and the thickness of paper. Until I crumbled into sand. That’s how I felt. I’d say it was a relief to have at last nothing, nothing, but I was too hollow to register relief, too empty to carry it.

I really didn’t give a shit what this old bastard did to me. Nothing to lose is so empty, so light, that the sand you crumble to at last blows away in a gust, so insubstantial it’s carried upwards to shirr into the sandstorm of the stars. That’s where we all get to. The rest is just wearing thin waiting for wind.

Certainly not a place to negotiate from. There is nothing to trade. I didn’t even think, I spared his life and his daughter’s he owes me at least one. What? One thing. Twenty frigging points.

Walked back.

I’m leaving. Back up that fucking tree. Pretty clear you prefer your own company.

I looked at her.

Could I please have a dip? Was never a habit, but right now it smells good. Thanks.

Took a big pinch. The nicotine hit as soon as I’d taken the first swallow and I felt dizzy for a second.

Damn. I forgot.

I spit.

Shoot me in the back on the way up and like I said I’m not sure you wouldn’t be doing me a favor.

They stared at me. She had a dark stain on her throat like a bruise.

I’ll need my Glock, my rifle. You keep the grenades. Housewarming.

He hesitated, picked the handgun off the table, handed it to me butt first. I holstered it. He lifted the rifle to muster, across his chest, passed it to me.

Thanks. Thanks for kicking me in the ass.

I hauled off and slugged him.

The one I’d been saving, a solid short right that connected to his left cheek. It knocked him off his feet clean and hard and he hit the dirt ass first. Knocked his hat off. Total surprise. He pushed up on his hands and blinked at me and only when I let my eyes travel over the whole picture did I see one hand filled with a handgun. Like magic. A heavy .45, officer issue.

You didn’t have to kick me in the ass. Or play executioner. I would’ve gone anywhere you told me.

Who was I to talk?

I turned around and walked across the open ground upstream, my back as naked and ready for a bullet as for the fall and click of the next moment.

You, You, Hey.

What?

Higs, right? That’s what you said.

Hig.

Hig. You want some lunch?

Stopped. She was probably half an inch taller than me. A sunburned scar parted her dark hair, her right eyebrow. Thin and sharp. The bruise at her throat.

Lunch? Do people still eat lunch.

We do.

Glanced back at the house. The old bastard was shoving the gun into the back of his waistband, adjusting his hat, watching us.

He really your dad?

Yes. On my father’s side.

No apology for him. No small betrayal. I appreciated that. On my father’s side. What a funny thing to say. She was smiling.

He may not want to have lunch with me.

I didn’t invite him.

She hooked her thumbs in the pockets of her shorts and straightened her arms in a stretch. I did notice. How it lifted her breasts, how it exposed her waist above the waistband.

But I will, if you all promise not to punch or shoot each other.

You all. A country girl. Before. I stared at her. Honestly I didn’t know if I wanted to have lunch with them or not. I had gotten kind of used to the idea of living on air, of blowing away. Some comfort in that.

Hig? Yes? Bangley’s voice again, disembodied. I could imagine his rough laugh if he knew he was kinda my superego. Which I couldn’t get rid of, just like a bad pop song. The girl is inviting you to lunch. She feels bad you almost pissed your pants. Ha! Be polite.

Okay.

Okay I said.

Cimarron. She held out her hand.

Everybody calls me—

She stopped, looked around the canyon, smiled.

Cima.

Shepherd’s pie with butter. Well salted. Ground beef. I thought I was going to die. Pops was right, the sun traveled over the rim of the canyon and we ate at the plank table in the shade. Close enough to the creek: a pleasant sift. It mixed with the breeze which also sounded like rushing water when it shirred the tops of the cottonwoods. Butter. Melting in glops over the mashed potato, puddling. Who would’ve thought something so unresistant and pale could mesmerize a man? She kept bringing it, I kept eating it. A steel pitcher of milk chilled in the creek which I emptied twice. Holy shit. Hig had you climbed that stupid tree and flown away or even been shot in the back you would’ve missed the meal of your life. I was so enchanted with the food I didn’t even notice if Pops was giving me the Wolf Eye or Stink Eye or Shark Eye or whatever kind of eye you give to somebody who has just raised a welt on your face and was now eating your provisions nonstop.

To be offered cold milk. To have your blue enameled plate filled again. By a woman. To have her walk from an outside fire bearing your dish. To sit in the shade of a big old tree, not a metal hangar, and eat. To hear the bleat of a sheep come through the loud rustle of the leaves. To have an older man sitting across from you in silence, eating also, enemy or friend not sure, it doesn’t matter. To be a guest. To break bread.

The pleasure almost split me like a baking stuffed tomato. Like my heart swelled and my skin got thinner and thinner in the heat of it. Of company.

Bangley and I ate together often, but it was different can’t say how: it was like feeding time in a zoo of our own making. This was different. I was free to leave. They were free to disinvite me. The sense of privilege.

Nobody said much. I moaned, grunted. Hunched over the plate. Only realized it when I looked up and she was smiling. Her face was drawn too thin. Her huge eyes reminded me of a radar dish absorbing everything, unable not to. Like the squelch was set too low and much of what she absorbed was pain. Another bruise on her forearm, the one that handed me the plate. Glanced up once and she was rubbing the back of her neck with a wince. Clearly getting pleasure also from my famished devouring.

Don’t get out much Pops said. You.

I stopped chewing.

No not really. Where I live most of the restaurants are too expensive.

Where do you live?

Denver. North of there.

They were both staring at me now. Hungry like me. In a different way.

I set my fork on the boards, took a long swallow of cold milk, wiped my mouth on the sleeve of my jacket.

It was bad, I said. Ninety nine point whatever. Mortality. Just about killed everyone.

Your family? she said.

I nodded.

Everyone. Infrastructure frayed then fell apart. Before the end it was. It was bad.

Reached for the cup of milk and drank as if it could cool.

It was a frenzy. Everyone clinging to some shred: that they might be the one who was immune. Because we had heard of that, too, the mysterious resistance that ran in families. Genetic.

They were staring at me. He opened a pocket knife, picked his teeth.

When my wife died I made my way to the country airport where I keep my plane. I hid out.

You defended it, he said, scanning my face.

I nodded.

With help.

He was reading my own capacity for hell, for death, for wreaking it.

We defended it. Me and Bangley. Who showed up one day with a trailer full of weapons.

Bangley? He grunted. He knew what he was about old Bangley. Didn’t he?

He put an elbow on the table, stretched out his long legs, picked his teeth.

He brought you along. Kinda trained you up. Set a perimeter didn’t he? He had no problem killing anything that crossed it. Young, old, men, women. But you did.

But you got over it.

Dad.

Ninety nine point whatever. What’s left? Point whatever. One out of two hundred? Three hundred? We’ve seen what that is. It’s not usually pretty is it? Is it Higs?

Hig.

Big Hig.

I stared at him.

Not pretty what’s left, is it?

I stared at him. His eyes were alight with equal parts cold knowledge and warm mischief.

He spat a fleck of food off his tongue. You’re a hunter. Deer, elk. Before.

Nodded. How—?

He waved it away.

The way you hold your rifle. Way you move down the creek. Looking at sign. Can’t help yourself.

My mouth opened. I saw myself stepping in the suncrackled needles studying the piles of scat. He was watching. He could have had me any time he wanted.

Never in the service though.

I stared at him.

Fact you don’t like killing anybody. Not even a bull elk I’d bet. If there was one to kill. Not even a trout. If there was one. Too bad. You love to fish too.

Who the fuck was this guy? How—?

I saw you studying the creek. You stood right where I would’ve stood so as not to spook the fish in the pool.

I stared.

But killing is something you can get used to. Isn’t it, Hig?

No.

So you say.

He leaned forward and his eyes bore into mine. He aimed his gray eyes into mine and they sparked like he had lit the fuses.

I suggest you shrug out of your pissant self-righteousness. Like a rattler out of old skin. You’d move easier, smoother. Turned and spat. Nobody at this table is an innocent. That shit with the pheasant? Had you been close enough I would’ve slit your throat. Not thinking. Glad you weren’t. That would’ve been a real dumbshit move.

The whole thing, the speech, the image, it shivered my insides like a cold and sudden night wind. Who the fuck was this guy? He could’ve slit my throat in the juniper. While I slept.

He stood up, stretched. He was in his sixties, I guessed, but he was long and lean and looked to be strung together with catgut. He moved easily in his skin. A life bent to work which he loved, was my guess if I were guessing. A rancher clearly, some sort of soldier along the way. I was tempted to play What’s My Line with him, too, but it felt gauche. I mean I didn’t need to get into a one-up deal with this dude, into any kind of pissing match. He’d just given me maybe the best meal of my life. Or she had.

He said, Thanks for lunch. Touched her shoulder. How’s the throat?

She smiled. Been better.

He nodded once, picked a bow saw from a peg on the outside wall of the hut and walked downstream. Opened a gate in the brush fence and went through. I poured another cup of milk from the pitcher. Must have been my fourth or fifth.

You’re not used to it. You’re going to make yourself sick. You’ll have wicked diarrhea at the least.

You a doctor as well as a chef?

Uh huh.

The cup stopped at my lips. I put it down.

What kind of doctor?

Internist. Public health.

Her mouth stretched into the form of a smile but her eyes weren’t smiling. Not even ironic.

Epidemiology to tell the truth.

Everybody around here seemed to be very into telling the truth, the whole truth.

Where?

New York City.

Oh.

Fuck.

What happened to your throat?

He was mean but he didn’t seem mean like that. But. He was the only other person around. Unless they had attack sheep.

It’s not what happened to. I mean it’s the result of damage to my blood vessels. I hemorrhage quite easily. My muscles get very sore as well. A type of fibromyalgia. You see I contracted the flu. I barely survived. One result of the prolonged fever was the systemic inflammation that resulted in these conditions. But I had some resistance which we understand to be inherited from my father.

Biological resistance or sheer orneriness.

That too. I’m sorry we scared you. You scared us.

Again she didn’t defend him, didn’t feel the need. She was squarely in his corner as it should be. Right?

We talked about it. Dad doesn’t pull punches as you see.

She poured herself her own cup of milk, leaned into the table. The breeze played with wisps of curly hair that strayed to her temple, her eyebrow.

You kinda triggered our Plan. He thought we should talk about what we would do when one day we were overrun. When, not if. Or when we were outwitted or outgunned. When you showed up with grenades we thought it might be that time.

Damn.

I thought, Maybe that wasn’t a smile I saw on her lips. Through the scope. Maybe that was the face you make when everything is over. Over over.

One of the cows lowed long and deep with a rising inflection the way cows do. Like a question. The cottonwood leaves overhead flitted and ticked.

You have a pact huh?

She nodded.

He shoots you.

The cow mooed again, this time one short note as if answering her own query. Simple country life. Question and answer.

How close were you?

Close. He had the .45 out. After you threw the grenade. But then he said, Let’s play this out another step. He said it will be a risk: he—you—can shoot me as soon as we step out. But he said he had a hunch.

A hunch?

He said you were weak. He said, Let’s play this out.

That stung. I felt myself flush. Or maybe it was all the lactose hitting my system.

You all aren’t diplomatic in the least.

Seems like a world that’s way past diplomacy.

Maybe. Bangley feels the same way. My partner.

Anyway he gave me the .45 just in case. In case you did plug him from the rim and try to take me.

Jesus.

That’s the world. That was the world we left. I nodded.

He said, You can handle him. If he kills me, you kill him when he gets close. But if there are more. Then.

She touched her throat unconsciously. I nodded. She probably would have handled me if it got to that. Don’t take it hard, Hig. It’s kind of a compliment. They read you from a hundred yards.

Why didn’t he kill me then? In the creek? Instead you all serve me lunch.

I widened my eyes.

You all aren’t trying to fatten me up? I mean you’ve got that taste for human flesh like a rogue shark?

Now she really smiled. She laughed. Leaned her head back, showing me the large bruise, and laughed high and husky.

Ow. Cupped her palm over the ribbed architecture of her trachea. Hurts a little not much. A rogue shark. No. Whew.

She poured herself another mug of milk, drank slowly. No. Finishing her last swallow. No, we need you.

Oh.

Suddenly I did feel nauseous. Funny, but the first image was some sort of forced breeding experiment. Why that would make me feel sick I’m not sure as she was very good looking, I’d say almost beautiful. Though scarred and very fragile. But the image was me screwing her on a stone bed like an altar while her father stood over us with a gun to my head.

I didn’t ask. The way these people shared things, I knew I’d be told soon whether I liked it or not. Exhaustion again. It swept over me. Like some sort of mustard gas. What was wrong with me? It was like nine years of vigilance had suddenly caught up. I felt like crossing my arms on the rough wood of the table and laying my head down atop them and falling asleep. Right now.

You don’t mind if I take a nap do you? I don’t know if I can stay awake.

It’s the milk probably. She stood and pointed farther under the trees by the water. There’s a sort of hammock under there. Be my guest.

Be my guest. Guest. For better or worse. I thanked her for the meal and lay down by the stream in a suspended blanket and hugged my coat around me and slept.

I dreamt a house in a field that should have been my own, I mean I was returning to a place I had built, the expectation of haven, of a home that was to shelter everything I loved, and as I approached across a field without a road I saw an addition built on the side, the right side as I faced it, an annex bigger than the house itself, and it had angles that were strange to me, to my sense of things—disturbing dormers too high on the roof, juttings where there shouldn’t be, and I realized with a sinking heart and growing sense of doom that someone that I would hate lived inside my house and had some sort of squatter’s rights, some rights vague to me now and bargained away in an awful negotiation I could barely recall and that I could stop and stay there but only in a capacity of confirmation: confirming this thing that felt exactly like a nightmare: or I could pass on and relinquish somehow everything I had loved, loved up to this excruciating point, and I was standing in the field unable to make the decision to go in or walk on and I woke up sobbing.

Never occurred to me to break in and take my house back.

All the choices we can’t see. Every moment.

Lay in the hammock and oddly there were no sobs in this unreal world, no collar wet with tears, just the cottonwood leaves shifting and spinning above me, the creek slipping past. You could wake from one nightmare to the next to the next and never eat or piss and die of thirst.

When I opened my eyes she was working in the garden. I could see her there through the trees along the creek crouching, probably getting ahead of the weeds. He came through the brush gate carrying two poles of fir, must have been long seasoned because he carried them lightly. Light tufts of feathers blew out of the trees, the parachutes of cottonwood seeds. Didn’t float very well. Closed my eyes heard the rhythmic sough of the saw like a raspy animal breathing hard. Later heard the tunk, the crack of splitting wood. A cottonwood seed landed on my eyelid.

After a while I roused, splashed my face in the creek, walked out to where she was weeding, now shaded by the cliff. I squatted down in the next row beside her and began to dig with fingers and pull. She glanced over, smiled.

We have one too, I said. A garden.

She nodded.

Silence. We worked. In silence. The comfort of that.

Next day after breakfast we weeded again. The sun climbed, pushed the shade against the wall.

Do you have kids? I said.

She sat back on her calves, pushed her hair with the back of her wrist.

We were waiting to have children. Until he was faculty full time. He is a musician.

I nodded. Go on.

He finished his dissertation, had passed his orals just as the first cases hit Newark. We lived in a walkup on Cranberry Street that’s Brooklyn Heights just across the river from the Seaport the Financial District. We could see the world from our windows. That view you see in all the movies—skyline, bridge. We were always stressed out. I make myself remember that, but now it seems like the happiest life anyone could wish for. The egg and bacon bagel I got every morning and felt guilty about—you had to walk down three steps into this narrow train car practically of a deli on Montague Street, always a line, always others on the way to work, impatient, getting coffee in those blue and white Greek cups, sugar and milk in first. Just that. He called my cell as I waited on the platform. Could just get one bar of reception: What do you want me to bring home? Indian? Pasta? Ha. A life made up of small meals. To remember that. Two people waiting for their real future which I guess was the coming of children like two people waiting for a train. The happiest expectation. Maybe not so happy at the time but seems so now. He taught at Hunter, an adjunct, made squat, loved his students hated the department. Waiting to get the degree. Waiting. Time in its pod. Blown open and scattered.

She talked to me like that. I mostly listening. He worked. Passed me without a word. I never offered to help. Something about his look prohibitive. I hiked up to the Beast and got my sleeping bag. The nights were clear and cool, full of stars, the stream of stars framed by the rim of the canyon like the banks of a dark river, dark but swimming with light. Through the leaves of the big cottonwoods. I slept in the hammock with the leaves above me a rustling roof. They moved the stars around and gave them voice. The first night the hammock hurt my back but after that it didn’t. The third day I climbed the tree ladder with my rifle and brought home a large buck. Dragged it down the creek and lowered it on a rope off the rim of the waterfall and we ate the heart and liver that night.

I did it again the next day and he and I didn’t bother to hang the quarters but butchered them together on the board table and cut most into jerky strips. Working fast and easy with no words. They had salt. A twenty gallon barrel they brought with them. We soaked the meat in salt brine in buckets. He didn’t miss a trick, which is a thing I made sure not to tell him.

Funny how you can live a whole life waiting and not know it.

She spoke as she lifted a pile of greens from a bowl of pea pods. We sat at the table, in the shade of the big trees.

Waiting for your real life to begin. Maybe the most real thing the end. To realize that when it’s too late. I know now that I loved him more than anything on earth or off of it. More than God, the one in my Episcopal liturgy.

She snapped the early peas, her hair hanging in her face, the backs of her hands blotched purple with blood. Her fingertips worked gingerly as if sore. They rolled a particularly tough pod back up to the knuckles of thumb and forefinger.

He died calling for me, looking desperately around the ward calling my name. Confused. Very early on, before all the networks went down and my friend Joel the doctor who ran the wing called me. Before we knew what this was. My mother was dying and it was too late to fly back home to New York, too late and I made the decision to stay with her and Dad. Joel said he would cremate Tomas and hold the ashes. I was beyond grateful. It was apparent that my mother would not survive. I would fly home in a week or two and drive upstate and spread his ashes in John’s Brook up in the mountains outside Keene Valley where we spent every weekend we could. I worked for the city in public health so I had weekends, you know, rare for an internist. I was never on call except in a public health emergency and that wasn’t often. We stayed in a white clapboard cottage in the village with a view of Noonmark from the sleeping porch. That’s a little Adirondack mountain that looks like a parody of a mountain, very peaky like the Matterhorn but tiny. The little mountain that could. We climbed it often on Saturdays after sleeping in. Trotted happily up the ledgy trail to a rocky top just out of the stunted firs. And in the long evening we’d take the two single gear bikes up the paved road to a stone pothole with a little sluicing waterfall, the water always freezing, and we’d strip and jump in. This was our ritual while we waited for our lives to truly begin and I think now that maybe true sweetness can only happen in limbo. I don’t know why. Is it because we are so unsure, so tentative and waiting? Like it needs that much room, that much space to expand. The not knowing anything really, the hoping, the aching transience: This is not real, not really, and so we let it alone, let it unfold lightly. Those times that can fly. That’s the way it seems now looking back. Like those pleasantly exhausted bike rides up the side of a country highway on a warm evening. To a bridge. To a little rootsnaked trail through heavy maples. Where we padded barefoot upstream to a swimming hole. Even getting poison ivy so badly one weekend I missed two days of work. Seems from here that that was the sweetest time ever vouchsafed to two people. Ever. On earth. While we waited for him to finish his degree, for me to have a child, to do the real work of living.

She looked up. We are fools, you know.

Oh fuck. One fucking thing I do know.

It hurts you? To snap the peas?

She shook her head her hair swinging over the bowl not looking up from under.

It does, doesn’t it?

What is hurt? I get a little sore. More like if your hands get dry and you crack a fingertip.

I watched her hands closely after that. Moving the pods deftly up and down the fingers sometimes switching to the third or fourth finger spreading the pain. Working swiftly without complaint.

Don’t, she said. Don’t watch.

Once in passing she told me that she didn’t expect to live past fifty or fifty five. From what she knew of the damage to organs caused by the fever. She also confessed that in an odd way she was happier here than she’d ever been. Even with all the loss. Happier being whatever that was. Than waiting.

I lost count. Of the days. Maybe it was five, maybe nine. Time expanding like an accordion making wheezy earnest music.

The weather dry and warming. Day after day. The creek a little lower, a little less push, less strength in its roar, the falls diminished, its white lash narrowing as it spilled over the stone lip. The creek like a mood. Less exuberant. I woke sometime in the middle of the night and lay in the hammock, wriggled my foot out of the sleeping bag into the chill and found the rough ground with my bare foot and rocked myself back and forth. And watched the stars swim against their mesh of leaves. Like fish nosing a net.

That is what we are, what we do: nose a net, push push, a net that never exists. The knots in the mesh as strong as our own believing. Our own fears.

Ha. Admit it: you don’t have the slightest idea what you are doing, you never ever did. With all the nets in the world, real or unreal. You swam around in a flashing confused school following the tail of the fish in front. Pretty much. Nibbling at whatever passed, in whatever current you swam into.

Even the love of your life felt like luck, like she might vanish in the finning crowd at any moment. Which she did.

What are you doing?

I don’t know.

Rock rock. Back and forth. Lull. Push. Release. Swing back. The stars, the leaves, even the sound of the creek throbbing back and forth. Of a boat. Of a hammock. Of a child’s swing. Of a womb. Back and forth. Rock rock. Smell of cold current, of stone, manure, blossom. Sleep.

He put it to me in simple terms. Came at first light to the hammock with a steaming enamel cup. They’d long since run through coffees and teas, now concocted a brew of roasted pine nuts and Mormon tea which was bitter and smoky, not bad. He sat on the sawed stump I used as a side table. Half nod toward it for permission, moved the Glock, lay it on my pack and sat. Handed me the cup. I sat up, straddled the hanging blanket. Turned up the squelch on my brain, on the running current of images. I’d been dreaming of my house again, this time not in a field but my, our, actual house on its street on the west side of town, two blocks from the lake. But it did not look like our house, it was a low brick bunker with chimneys that I knew was a crematorium, and I was standing outside it confused again wondering where I was supposed to sleep, to feed Jasper.

I suppose I’d heard his footsteps over the creek. I woke from the dream confusion into the compounding loss, into the gentle light, but in a world that is all loss that’s like waking into air from air.

What can a fish know of water? Plenty I guess.

I shut the dream down, took the cup. He didn’t look like he ever slept. I mean none of his features ever blurred. They got sharper in anger but they were always sharp.

In a few weeks if it doesn’t rain, which it won’t, it’ll be time to go.

I sat up straighter.

I told you I would leave anytime. Just say the word.

He shook his head.

You’ve been more than hospitable, I said seriously. I think I’m getting fat.

He didn’t smile.

I don’t mean you, I mean us. The three of us. You are going to fly us out of here.

I blinked. Lowered the cup to my lap.

Do you have any frigging idea what it’s like out there? Do you? Why would you leave here? This little Eden? Where you and what’s left of your family can live in peace?

That’s what I was thinking. I said, Why?

Drought.

I glanced at the burbling stream, the green meadow.

Last summer the creek almost dried up. We had to dig in the streambed to pool enough water just to drink. Half our cattle died. Pretty much been getting worse every year. Getting warmer. Just like they said it would.

He drank from his own cup.

We knew we’d have to bail. Probably this spring. We weren’t sure where to go. And there is the fear of traveling without water. If it’s drying up here, what is happening off the mesa?

He unsnapped the breast pocket of his shirt and dug out the Copenhagen. Took a small plug handed me the tin.

Then you showed up in the plane. To think I almost killed you.

Yup this definitely calls for a chew. I pinched one, handed it back. The familiar pleasure of gripping it under top lip, the mild rush.

You want to come with me?

Not a matter of want, Higs.

Rhymes with Big, I said. The old bastard.

He winced at me.

You two want to fly back with me to Erie, to the airport? And live with us? With me and Bangley? Out on the Plains?

He leaned forward on the stump, spat. I want to stay here. To live out my years in peace with my daughter. Call it a draw. The whole damn episode.

Shook his head as if to clear it. This life that I knew when I came back. Came out of the service, when I came back to the ranch. I knew it would be so much different than it is. Call it a draw.

He puffed out his cheeks. His hand was shaking when he put the cup to his lips. He put the back of his wrist into the corner of his eye.

It was my grandfather’s ranch. He ran cattle up here in the summer before there was even a goddamn BLM to lease it from.

It occurred to me that the death of his grazing land hurt him more, incomparably more than the death of the human race. I liked him a lot better in that moment.

Why’n’t you dig a well?

He grimaced. Don’t think I didn’t try. Underneath this whole canyon is ledge rock. Four feet down. Can’t even dig a decent grave.

In the minutes we sat, the rough sanded gray of dawn suffused with a smoother, brighter light, like clear water running over wet gravel. The country may have been dying. I knew the snowpack was less every year on the Divide, the runoff earlier, the creeks lower, more bony in the fall. But right now I heard a canyon wren, the six seven eight paced notes whistling down a scale never used by man. Answered by another. I heard a meadowlark across the field and saw the dipping flight of the kingfisher I’d seen almost every morning. Moving fast up the stream. The bigger rivers like the Gunnison weren’t drying up. Not yet.

His face was tight, he looked past me. Whoever he was, whatever he’d done, he loved his land, his daughter, with a fierceness as natural and unprompted as weather.

The immediate problem that presented itself was: could I take off from the short sage meadow with the extra weight. Not at all a given. Maybe not with both of them, maybe not with one.

I don’t have enough fuel to get back, I said.

He twitched. His eyes shifted back to my face and hardened.

Don’t bullshit me, Higs.

Hig. Rhymes with Big if you forget.

It occurred to me too just then that maybe I better be a bit more tactful. If I couldn’t fly them out of here he might just shoot me. Damn. I was starting to feel used. Loved just for my air power. Like the United States before. First Bangley then this. What if I had no plane? What if I were just Big Hig, just making my way through the broken world offering what I could, some kindness, some compassion, some technical knowhow but no plane. Who are you kidding? Bang.

Ask the guys at the Coke truck.

What?

Sorry. Been so much alone I don’t know sometimes when I’m talking to myself.

I turned toward the running stream and spat.

I’m not fucking with you. I flew past my point of no return. That was right around Colbran.

He scanned my face again. The emotion was hard to read but his eyes moved over my features like a mason taking the measure of a very old wall. There was a frank reassessment in his eyes that unnerved me.

Higs, you are gonna fly us out of here. You fly us to a town, a fortified compound, I don’t give a shit, and I’ll take care of getting fuel.

I shivered. I bet he would.

Auto gas won’t work anymore.

What?

After three years none of it would. Even adding lead. Went stale. Not stable enough. Hundred low lead is far more stable. Still good but pushing its life nine years out. Anyone out here, their gas is long dead.

He chewed the inside of his cheek. Hadn’t spit once, I guess he swallowed it.

At Erie I wasn’t worried. I had a line on a warehouse in Commerce City full of PRI which “restores gas to refinery condition” according to the literature in each case. Like magic. Enough to last another decade at least. But. Out here who knows. Even avgas might not work. Depends on the condition of the tanks, mostly.

It was hard to look at him. I didn’t feel like a stone wall anymore. I felt like a rabbit. Caught out in the open.

Why’d you come here? he said simply.

Didn’t answer. Not defensive, not reticent, I just didn’t know. Not really.

You got in your plane and flew past your point of no return. In a world maybe without any more good fuel. You left a safe haven, a partnership that worked. For a country that is not at all safe, where anyone you meet is most likely going to try to kill you. If not from outright predation then from disease. What the fuck were you thinking? Hig.

My dog died, I said.

I told him about the radio transmission I’d picked up three years ago. I told him about hunting and fishing and Jasper dying and killing the boy and others, and being at the end of all loss.

I didn’t have another idea, I said.

He knew it all. He knew that a Cessna 182 of the Beast’s vintage usually carried fifty five usable gallons. He knew the burn rate per hour would be about thirteen. He knew the approximate distances. He had figured it all. He had figured I was right at the PONR, no return. Figured I had carried a couple extra cans. What he had figured and figured wrong was that I knew what the hell I was doing.

We’ll go to Junction. We’ll check out what you wanted to check out. The tower, the airport. Then we’ll get some avgas. Then we’ll fly back to Bangley. And if he doesn’t like that we’ll convince him.

I don’t know if I can take off with both of you. From that meadow.

Oh you will. If we have to cut your legs off and prop you up. I can work the rudder pedals.

He smiled grim but I saw a shadow of worry cross the winter of his eyes.

No point in slaughtering the livestock and making more jerky. We had what must have been twenty pounds from the venison I’d shot and we couldn’t take any more weight. Probably couldn’t take that. Cima said the livestock, they would fend for themselves and God willing there would be enough rain this season to make it through.

She wanted to take two lambs, male and female.

They can’t weigh more than twenty pounds apiece.

I tried to explain that a small plane was more like a kite than a truck. I told her about learning from Dave Harner in Montana, what he yelled at me the first few days as I tried to land the 172 at airports around the shores of Flathead Lake. As I came in on final and the plane swerved and veered like a sick duck he’d yell Jeesus Hig! You drive a motorcycle? Yes! You drive a pickup? Yes! Thought so! Well this ain’t either one! This is a bird! Slight adjustments slight adjustments! Christ! That was atrocious!

She laughed.

Harner, my instructor, had been a logger. A big timber logger when there were still big trees in the Northwest. He’d run up and down the steep mountains carrying a forty pound chainsaw with a fifty inch bar and cut more wood than anyone else in all that country. Kind of a living Paul Bunyan.

Remember him? Paul Bunyan?

Of course.

Just checking. For his birthday, his thirtieth, his friends gave Dave a demo lesson at the local airport. It was Kalispell. They said they wanted him to see for himself all the country he had clear-cut. Kind of touching when you think about it. So he climbed in with a kid named Billy, a still wet bush pilot, and took the controls for the taxi and got the feel of the rudders right away, little touches—not like me, I almost ran into a box store on my first taxi—and it was his airplane for the takeoff and they climbed out of Kalispell. He did just what Billy told him, every little thing, and he was remarkably, freakishly relaxed. After all, he told me, how freaky could it be after running up and down forty degree slopes with a vicious cutting blade screaming and a thousand tons of timber falling all around you? It was calm, he said. Just uncannily, almost divinely, calm. Not his exact words. He said, Hig it was like flying inside a photograph, one of those real beautiful ones of country you love, all quiet and still the way you want the world to be. What he was talking about was the disembodied detachment you get flying. Like the world is as perfect as a train set and nothing bad can touch you.

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.

Can you? he said at last. He put down his cup, wiped his mouth on his sleeve waited.

No.

She put down her fork. The pack was at my feet. I pulled up the slider, loosened the drawstring, drew out the manual, the sheets, took the stub of pencil out of the band of my cap.

Weight and balance, he said. I nodded. Takeoff distance, he said.

Yup.

He was no fool. I had scrawled only the formula, left the weights blank. At the top of the page in the right corner I had jotted down some weights: One gal. avgas=6 lbs. One gal. water=8 lbs. Presently in tanks: 14 gals.

I slid it over. I ate.

He was sharp. Whatever he did before on the ranch, in the service, he didn’t waste time. He took the pencil and went to work. Didn’t ask, Is this right? Is this how you do it? Been a while … nothing like that. A man without the habit of justifying himself, making excuses. Didn’t ever say, Higs check my math, will you? Nope, the SOB looked once at the problem, began to multiply, fill in the blanks work the equation. I saw him make a list down the right side of the page of provisions, each with its weight estimated. He worked it three different ways and each time I saw him scratch two or three items off the list. Saw him reduce the water to three gallons. Scratch off the steel gas can.

Unh uh.

He looked up.

The gas can. The siphon hose. Ten pounds. Need them absolutely. What if we have to walk to get fuel?

He nodded, restored it to the list.

Then he siphoned out avgas, reduced the tanks to 10 from 14.

No.

I interrupted him again. Pencil stopped, eyebrow raised.

Fuel stays.

Thirty five miles to Grand Junction, tops. One twenty mph with a headwind. Point three hours thirteen gallons an hour. Ten is plenty.

Forget it. If we have to circle, check all the runways, taxiways, if we get fired on, if we have to find a road.

He nodded. Went at it again. Finally he put down the pencil, straightened his arms against the side of the table, sat back. Stared at me. Thought I saw hatred. Hard to tell with Pops.

You did it already didn’t you?

I nodded.

I stay, she goes.

Nodded.

You already knew that.

Nodded. He stared. A mobile light moved over his features. Gave them a look of animation though I don’t think anything moved. I’d say, Could’ve heard a pin drop, but. Not with the creek right there. He stared at me, nodded slowly.

Okay, he said.

Just like that. It was done. Now I really liked the old coot, have to admit. He took his medicine, no whining.

I smiled at him, maybe the first time.

That’s why we need fourteen gallons, I said. One of the reasons.

He looked puzzled, winced, pushed his tongue up under his lip where I knew he kept his chew.

We need fourteen because we’ve gotta land and take off again. We’ll pick you up out on the highway. Won’t be a problem. There’s a decent straight stretch right at the bridge turnoff. All the runway we want. It’ll be no sweat.

He didn’t let his face soften, nothing like that. Just that in his stare, in the winter of it, I thought I saw a slight thaw, a reassessing.

You can walk out a day early and we’ll pick you up at daybreak.

Okay, he said again and that was it.