The Dog Stars

I

There was no hurry really. Plenty of water in the big rivers if we got stranded in Junction. We’d wait a couple of weeks, fatten up, let the season round out into full summer, ride it while we could. Let the creek drop. I decided to enjoy it. I treated it like a vacation, first one I’d had since.

Since I’d made the unexpected contingency plan, things around the homestead had lightened up a little. Surprised me, frankly, that it had surprised him, the notion of picking him up later. He was so sharp, such a tactician. Like Bangley that way, always thinking three moves ahead in a crisis, and cool.

Then it struck me that the option must have occurred to him immediately. And then I respected him even more. He knew.

It was obvious to him that we could take off without him and pick him up later, but he would keep his mouth shut. Two reasons I figured. One, he was the kind of dude who subscribed to Never take what isn’t offered freely. And Two, he was conflicted about leaving. Part of him, maybe the bigger part, wanted to stay, to watch the creek dwindle, to help the livestock into the next world, to die with his ranch and molder there into the flinty ground.

For a man his age with his values that option was in many ways preferable to the other. The journey to a strange land—because it was a Strange Land now in every sense. Also, it was the plains, not the mountains—the making of a new life, the having to adapt to new threats, new rules not his own. It was a sucky prospect. And if he had told her that this was his preference he would have hurt her badly, she would never have let him, she would go hysterical to the extent that a woman who had been through what she had been through could go hysterical. She would not forgive him.

So the fragile little Pilot Operating Handbook with the table of takeoff distances, the curve incontrovertible beyond which there was no new life anywhere, only a faltering aircraft struggling to rise over the small trees and snagging its landing gear, then wings, the big cartwheel … it was his ticket out. Out of the plan. Maybe why he didn’t look more shocked. Why he had worked the weight and balance in front of her.

Thinking about it like that I almost felt sorry I had broached the option. If he wanted to die in place he was a big boy. But.

I swung in the hammock. I recited every poem I had ever half remembered. I went fishing upstream and down. I ate. Took the spade up top and filled in the ruts in our airstrip, knocked down the brush. Helped Cima harvest the garden, the early greens.

It was a good garden. The dirt was rich, a lot richer than ours back at the airport. It was full of worms and black from year after year of spreading manure. The families gave me chicken manure, but it wasn’t enough, it wasn’t like this. In the early morning, in the shadow of the bigger trees, the dirt was cold and wet, the new plants covered in dew. That smell. The shadow edged back and I liked to strip to my boxers so that my knees were in the damp dirt and the full sun was hot on my back. The dirt encrusted basket beside us, between rows.

Why’d you go back east? I said.

I got a scholarship to Dartmouth.

My uncle went there. Were you an only child?

She shook her head.

Twin brother. He died when we were fifteen. Motorcycle.

Man.

I had good grades. Good test scores. I was going to be a vet, go to Colorado State, come back home and set up a large animal practice. All my life that was what I was going to do. We had a college counselor, Mr. Sykes. He had a very good placement record, but he controlled who went where so tightly all the kids called him Sucks. One day in English class my junior year there was a tap on the glass of the door and he came in and handed me a folded note. It said My office 12:45. During the lunch hour. I remember we were talking about The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Do you know it?

I loved that poem until they taught it to me in high school. Did you know there is a Hidden Meaning?

Really?

Yup. Sex, art and scholarship are all class weapons.

Hunh. Funny thing to teach aspiring scholars.

We weren’t aspiring scholars. We were supposed to go to work for StorageTek or UPS. Or Coors.

The note. Sykes, I said.

Oh. My heart galloped. Every year Dartmouth gave one scholarship to a kid from Delta High. It was endowed by the man who built the fiberboard plant, an alum. I guess he felt bad for all the formaldehyde smoke which reeked in the winter when there was an inversion. Every fall one kid got a note from Sykes to see him at lunch hour. He controlled it, chose the kid. I don’t think that was even legal but that’s the way it was. His little fiefdom. Kept all the families, the whole town, kissing his ass all year. For the rest of the class nobody could concentrate, they were all watching me. And my head was rushing with the possibilities, images of a future I had no pictures for. They tumbled together: ivy covered bricks, handsome upperclassmen in argyle sweaters, taking them off to row crew. You know I didn’t have a clue. My days consisted of throwing hay before daylight and running cross country after school, and then back home for more chores, mostly giving oats and medicine to horses, and mucking stalls, and homework.

I was beet red, I could tell. The more I tried to concentrate on the poem the more I felt the eyes on me and when I glanced up and snuck a look, they were. I could already feel the envy. Like a wind. By the end of the day I wasn’t sure if any of this was a curse or a blessing. Anyway, I went to see Sykes. I couldn’t eat anything in the cafeteria so I just went to the Girls’ Room and sat on the toilet and tried to breathe. He said, Cima I think you have a good chance for the Ritter Scholarship. He was completely bald. I thought his head was the shape of an egg. I remember seeing tiny beads of sweat on the mottled pink dome of it as if it were he on the hot seat. He was from Illinois, outside of Chicago, I remember. He said, You will write the personal essay in your application about ranch life and losing Bo.

I was shocked. Almost as if I had hallucinated that last request. Well, it wasn’t a request. Come again, I said. His hands were resting on the desk and he actually made a careful triangle out of his thumbs and forefingers and pursed his lips and looked into it as if it were some Masonic window into my destiny. He said, You will write about being a ranch girl and losing your brother who was your soulmate.

I stared at him. I had heard that he controlled the whole application process. But nobody had ever said anything like that to me before. I mean put their big fat foot, clomp clomp, into my most interior landscape. Bo to me was like a secret garden. A place only I could go. A source of both grief and great strength. He was smiling at me. He had the smallest mouth and only one side came up. I remember. The turmoil. Life had just opened up really wide and bright then suddenly the horror: that to go there I would be asked to forfeit my soul. Something like that. Terrifying. I know I was flushing to the roots and I couldn’t seem to articulate anything. He kept smiling at me. He said, You don’t have to thank anyone now, it’s certainly momentous. Deus ex machina. That’s what he said! As if he were God! My word. He thought I was overcome with gratitude and I was actually so furious. I felt violated. I was so mad I could’ve taken his egg head and crushed it. I just mumbled and ducked out.

Did you write about Bo?

Yes. I wrote about how my college counselor had demanded that I write about my dead twin. I wrote a long essay, twice as long as asked for, about a certain kind of tact that was part of ranch culture and why I thought it had developed and why it was important and how the fact that a ranch girl writing about her missing twin might appeal to the admissions people at the highest caliber Eastern college was another example of the disconnect between us. Eastern establishment and Western land based people. We didn’t want anybody’s sympathy. I was so angry. Never been so mad I don’t think. I sent the application off without letting Sykes review it, which was strictly against protocol. Nobody had ever done it. He tried to scuttle the application, he was such a vengeful little fuck, but it was too late. I guess they were so impressed with my ranch girl grit or something. I got in, of course. Early decision, full ride. The college pressured the high school and forced Sykes to retire. You know the part that still troubles me about all that is that I knew I would. Get accepted. I mean I flipped the emotional payoff they were looking for, didn’t I? I mean I was truly furious, but I also knew somewhere inside that it would make my candidacy even stronger. I have prayed about it often. I mean apologizing to Bo for using him to get into college.

I shook the dirt off some Swiss chard and lay it in the basket.

You didn’t use Bo. You wrote exactly what you were feeling.

Yeah, but I’ve often thought that the move with the most integrity would’ve been to blow off Dartmouth for having that kind of expectation, those values, and go to Northern State. I mean it’s an ag school. Was.

You were what? Seventeen? You wanted to flex your muscles. You were an ass kicker like your dad. Nobody on earth is more righteous than a seventeen year old. And it wasn’t the college, it was Mr. Sucks.

You know what I mean. He was right, after all. About the subject that would snare them. I don’t know. I think of him sometimes, a middle aged, single man, humiliated out of the one job he was great at. What he did with the rest of his life, how it was for him when the flu hit. Lonely, alone, terrified. Funny the things that keep you up at night after all that has happened.

Amen, I said.

Silence. I pulled out some new meadow grass. Hands black with crumbled dirt like bear paws. She was way too tactful to ask me. Still the ranch girl.

You want to know what keeps me up at night?

She sat back on her haunches in the sun, straightened, blew the hair out of her face. She had a strong straight nose, wideset eyes. A long slender neck, now bruised.

I couldn’t say: I put a pillow over my wife’s face at the end. That I felt her struggle in the last seconds trying to push away the death she’d asked for. A reflex right? That I held tight and leaned in and kept the promise I’d just made. That was the right decision. Wasn’t it?

Could I say that we murdered a young boy in the middle of the night? That we didn’t make him into dog food. That we murdered a young girl in broad daylight who was running after me with a kitchen knife probably wanting my help. Or that the memories of fishing alone for trout in a mountain creek with Jasper lying on the bank were maybe my sweetest memories. That so much of that is a dream or might as well be. That I don’t know the difference anymore between dream and memory. I wake from dream into dream and am not sure why I keep going. That I suspect only curiosity keeps me alive. That I’m not sure any longer if that is enough.

I smothered my wife with a pillow. At the end when she asked. Like putting down a dog. Other things. Worse.

Her hand was still holding a clump of loose chard. It tightened on the leaves. She nodded. Her eyes were warm and steady.

And I wish I could have been there to do that for Tomas. I wish I could have done it. Why didn’t I stay to be with my husband? My mother had hers, she didn’t need me as much he did. Well, he hadn’t contracted it yet. He was coughing a bit but we weren’t sure. No fever. A lot of people were coughing, only a few were confirmed. But I should have known. In my position with the first reports coming in I should have known.

She sat up straight on her haunches and she cried silently. I put my chard in the basket and went to weeding. I shook the dirt from the roots and put the worms back in the ground.

The deepest spot was just beneath the falls. Even at low water it was four or five feet deep and cold. Hard to imagine it drying up, but it would without enough snowpack, enough summer rain. Once the days turned really hot I bathed there every day. I went late in the afternoon when the sunlight still reached the bottom of the canyon. I liked the contrast, hot and cold. It was shielded by willows. I hung my shirt up on one of the branches like a ragged flag so they would know I was there and pushed into the little pool on a beaten path. The spray from the cascade reached the smooth stones on the bank, must’ve been ten degrees cooler in there. Grateful, as grateful as I was all day, I unbuttoned my pants and untied my boots, stripped. Sometimes just sat in the mist, the outer stones the warmest, and dangled my feet and calves in the water: cool billow on my chest, sun on my back, the contrasts. And watched the patch of rainbow shift around in the spray.

I wanted to ask her: What did you all know about the flu, about the coming pandemic. Did you? Did it really take everyone so by surprise? Why was it so fast? What was the blood disease that came right after and why did so many who survived contract it? Wanted to ask her all that since she first told me she was a doctor, that kind of doctor. But then she preempted with the story of her husband dying without her in the ward and I didn’t want to reopen old wounds etc but now I was resolved. She had brought it up. But then she was crying. I would’ve cried too probably but to tell the truth I was cried out. Wrung out like a human rag.

Sitting bare assed on the stones dangling my feet in the water, feeling the push of moist air off the falls, hearing nothing but the roar of plunging water, hot sun burning the backs of my ears. Thinking of nothing. Grateful for that. My favorite time of day. I could say now: I am at peace. Here on the bank of the dying creek.

The afternoon of the morning we had picked chard, I walked up to the falls and pulled my sweaty dirt smeared shirt over my head and thought I’d better wash it. Which was just rinsing it and slapping it on the rocks and wringing it out. I thought, Another thing to be grateful for, Hig: no pile of work clothes to wash and hang on the line and fold and stuff into the cubbies in the closet which were too small. Melissa and I never had enough room for our stuff. You’d think a carpenter would take care of his own little remodels, but no. Just your shirt, your pants, your socks. One fleece undershirt. A favorite wool sweater darned and darned again. You thought you were leaving Erie for a few days.

So I took the shirt with me and pushed through the willows and she was standing naked in the fogged water, facing me, watching something up high on the wall. She was willowy thin. I could just see her ribs. Long legged, the curve of her hips sweet, her mound prominent, the touch of dark hair not fully hiding her. Her breasts smallish, but not small. Tight as apples. What do I mean? Firm, full. Collarbones, nice shoulders. Strong arms, slender but strong. A bruise on her upper right thigh. I must have stopped breathing. She was, I don’t know. Perfect. My one dumb thought was: How on earth did you frigging hide all that? In a man’s too large shirt? My eye must be out of practice! That’s what I thought. All in a split second. Because reflexively I turned to look up at the wall and saw the peregrine land in the nest carrying a bird, a pretty damned big bird.

How do you think she’ll divide it up? she said over the water.

What? None of this seemed real. I looked back at her and she was half turned away, the small of her back where it dimpled, her sweet butt making another perfect curve. I. The curve that kills me. Dead Man’s Curve. I blinked. I thought, She is nothing, not a frigging thing like one of Bangley’s posters. She is like a million times more lovely. I didn’t say, Sorry to surprise you, or anything. I said, She’ll tear it to pieces. I mean I yelled it over the falls and then I turned around and fled.

Big Hig. Pretty cool in a plane, pretty cool with visitors, reduced to babble.

A while later she found me in the shade. Your turn, she said smiling.

She was passing the hammock, leaning her head, wringing out her hair. Where I was lying in a kind of endocrine shock—trying at once to recall and push away every detail I had just seen. Startled again by the sight of her and sure she could read my mind. I grinned back, sheepish as a sixteen year old.

When are you gonna show me yours? she said.

I must’ve started, flushed. Her smile was broad now and guileless and I saw for an instant the high school runner, the ranch girl who liked to win a barrel race.

Checked on the Beast, topped off the oil, pumped up the tires with a bicycle pump I kept in back. Took naps. The dreams of the old house stopped. Now I dreamt of big cats, tigers and mountain lions flowing down through the rocks to the river at twilight, the unblinking eyes seeing everything. In the dream there was a sense of supreme grace and power and also intelligence. In these dreams I came face to face with the beasts very close and looked into their eyes and something was transmitted but nothing I could ever name. When I woke, though, I felt infused with something strong and frightening and maybe beautiful. I felt lucky.

I had one dream, lying out in the hammock on an almost windless afternoon, that Melissa and I were bow hunting. She never did that, but I did. If I had the time between jobs to go out earlier and take a longer season, I’d buy a bow tag. In the dream we weren’t hunting the cats we were hunting one of those rare ibex deals that went dark way before before, somewhere up in the foothills of the Himalayas, and when she had her bow drawn on a big buck, very close, I cried NO! and the animal leapt and ran and she turned to me and her face was bright with fury and betrayal. When I woke up I was gripping the rope side of the hammock and it took me a minute to realize where I was, that it was a dream, and then the near vertigo, thinking, This is a dream, and a little relieved I was in this one and not that one.

Cima’s bruises lightened and vanished and new ones appeared. We seemed to talk nonstop. But I felt very comfortable in the silences that were never silent but filled with birds, wren and lark. With the flashing wingbars of nighthawks at dusk. Later there were bat squeaks, the bustle of leaves, the sough of the lowering stream. All kind of pastoral, a little strange given everything. I felt comfortable working beside her in the garden, cleaning vegetables in the shade of the board table. I’ll tell you this: Once everything ends you are no more free. The more lovely this respite, the more some cagey animal inside of me refused to surrender. The more I dreamt of Jasper, of Melissa. The sadder I got. Weird, huh? Once shelling peas our hands touched over the pot and she let her fingers stay over mine. Just a second. I looked up and her eyes were steady, frank, more like the way a glass pond is tannin black, windless, serene, contained, waiting. Lovely. Waiting to reflect a cloud, to be swept by rain. I couldn’t breathe.

The openness, the simple being-ness of those eyes struck me as brave and terrifying. I must have recoiled. She smiled inward and went back to shucking peas. I suppose as an internist you see all kinds of raw symptoms, nothing much surprises you.

We had enough venison, no reason to eat mutton or beef so we didn’t. Pops thought some of the animals might survive here on their own if it rained later on, if the winter was as mild as last. When things get better we can come back, he said. Nobody else said a word. Pops was not in the habit of bullshitting himself but there it was, every man has his imaginary refuge.

Another week, two. Some inner wires began to loosen. Never know how tight we are until then. Pops was off cutting wood. I started a dinner fire for her in the outside pit and we sat on stumps and just watched it build. It swayed and whispered with the rhythm of the breeze. This time of day the wind came upstream as it did in all this country but something about the shape of the canyon made it eddy and blow around so there was never a safe spot by the fire away from smoke. We had already moved our seats twice. I was crying with smoke.

Smoke makes you cry and then you grieve, I said. Like cutting onions. Always made me sad.

She smiled.

I never been to New York. Did you like it?

I loved it. Just loved it. You know how some people say they wish they had two lives so they could be a cowboy in one and an actor in another? Or whatever? I wanted two lives so I could live in the Heights—Brooklyn Heights—in one and in the East Village say in another. I couldn’t get enough of it. I wanted to go to Yankees games—Yanks not Mets—and to Off Off Broadway and poetry slams and get lost at the Met. Again. I went to every artist’s retrospective there was. I could eat Sabrett’s until I was sick.

Sabrett’s?

Hot dogs. With kraut, grilled onions, mustard, no relish. Some evenings I walked Court Street down to Carroll Gardens and back. I got to know all the hawkers at all the folding tables selling scarves and children’s books and phony watches. I thought, When we have kids we’ll get their first books here. For two dollars! Probably stolen off trucks by the mob, huh?

Probably.

A world with a mob. That seemed quaint. The good old days. I said, What about the end? Did you see any of it?

She shook her head. She leaned down and pushed the butt of a stick into the fire and when she did her loose shirt swung away from her collarbones and I saw her breasts again fuller than they should have been, deep tanned and freckled on the top and milky below. I couldn’t get away from them today. I guess that part of me just woke up. Probably been there all the time, Hig, and you were in the Fog.

The Fog of Being, I said.

What?

Sorry. I talk to myself sometimes.

I noticed.

Really?

She nodded. Do I?

Not that I’ve heard.

Silence.

I didn’t see the collapse, the mass death. But I felt it coming. Like a pressure drop. The kind that is worse than bad weather. We had it a few times growing up at the ranch. A pressure shift you could feel in your pulse, your lungs. A darkening of the sky, a weird green tinged blackness. The cattle restless and upset beyond the usual omens of thunderstorm. That’s the way it felt. Why I think I should have known.

Should have. This to myself. So many of those. I could build houses out of them, burn them for fuel, fertilize the garden.

Do you know how it began? New Delhi?

She shook her head.

That’s what the press reported. Mutation of a superbug, one of the ones they’d been watching for two decades. In the water supply etc. Combined with a bird flu. We called it the Africanized bird flu, after the killer bees. First cases in London and blamed on New Delhi. But that’s probably not where it originated. We heard rumors that it originated at Livermore.

The national weapons lab?

She nodded. The rumor was that it was a simple trans-shipment. A courier on a military flight with a sample taking it to our friends in England. Supposedly the plane crashed in Brampton. Nobody will ever know—she looked around the box canyon and let the absurdity of those words trail off in the wind with the smoke.

I was wide awake now. She inhaled deeply and I could see—Hig! Her nipples against the thin fabric of her shirt. My god. Hig. You haven’t heard any news, real news in almost a decade. It’s making you horny!

Genetically modifying flu is an old business.

Right, I said.

Look me in the eyes when you say hello to me.

I shook myself. She was grinning at me through smoke.

Calmate, soldier, she said.

Never learned Spanish, I murmured.

We ate dinner I don’t know what time, but sometime in the late evening when the sky was that luminescent blue that might hold a single star and the nighthawks flitted in the meadow and over the creek feasting on the latest hatch. They wintered in Mexico or somewhere and seemed to be doing alright. Shear winged and acrobatic as swallows. White wingbars blinking on a sudden shift in direction. Small peeps. A joy in watching the birds in their single hour of feeding.

I guess they ate then because the bugs were out. It was not cold as it would be later when truly dark and the ropy stars skeined together and you could feel the heat of the day radiating off the rock wall.

I took the few dishes to the creek and washed them with sand. They cooked outside most of the time in a firepit lined with river stones. On those nights father and daughter sat on two stumps and watched the wind rashed embers like TV. I set the wet dishes on the table and lay in the hammock and tried to see how long I could go without thinking about anything. I think my record was six Mississippi.

One night I fell asleep naked before I could crawl into my bag and I woke in the dark with the weight of the cover settling over me.

Not alarmed, it seemed right. I made to sit up and a hand pushed me back. Shhh, she said. I came out to pee and thought you’d get cold that way.

I lay back.

Thanks.

She leaned over me I felt her hair brush my face, a touch of her breath, then she was lifting the quilt, stretching her length alongside, and she wriggled in her hips, her ribs in the margin of hammock tight against me and she said into my neck

There.

That’s all. Then she fell asleep.

She was wearing the man’s shirt. Nothing else. I could feel her mound against my leg. Mons pubis, right? The cradle of her pelvic bones. I lay there, heart hammering. I traced her body in my mind from her toes where they touched mine, kind of bony and cold, up her calves, thighs, to the inside of her knees, the kneecap where it burrowed into the crook of my own leg—you get the idea. My brain all on its own took the trip, followed the map, lingered at every place of interest, every scenic view. It was the novelty. My heart pounded and my dick uncurled and straightened and lengthened, and then it was almost pain. It throbbed, and my mind continued to travel. Up and down her length, every point of contact. At some point I must have exhausted myself, run out of gas, I slept.

The next morning I realized that it was the weight of another cramping your space in sleep, that it was hearing another’s breathing. That simple. Jasper did that. Past that don’t even go there. That was all she wanted or she would’ve asked.

The next day at breakfast which is cold meat and potatoes, in the garden, at the supper table, tending the fire, she is the same. The same calm eyes absorbing everything, the way a dark pond absorbs sunlight. The marvel of it. Women are like that. Pops is not, I’m not. He’s no fool, probably expecting some similar development since Day One. Whatever development it is, maybe nothing. After all we are some of the few people left on earth just about. It’s like one of those desert island jokes. The one about the hat. Be weirder if it didn’t happen, right, Hig?

Not really. Doesn’t feel like that. Feels frigging weird. Not weird, tumultuous. Momentous. Well, it’s probably nothing. Probably doesn’t mean a thing, I mean just an experiment to see how it felt after all those years. A sleep experiment.

His eyes rest on me a fraction of a second longer. That’s all. Subtle but loud. I can’t meet them. I look away. I get that Pops is a hard man where he needs to be hard, but beyond that he pretty much minds his own business and expects the same.

Does she want to be my girlfriend? What a stupid idiotic thought. Are you in goddamn high school? You are on the Beach man. Last man and woman left in what? Three counties probably. It’s your patriotic duty to follow that through.

It is?

No.

What then?

Shrug.

Do what you want.

What do I want?

I want to be two people at once. One runs away.

The next night she came very late. I realized I’d been waiting most of the night without sleeping. Just waiting. Wondering what I would do, what she would. She lifted the quilt which I’d left unzipped and squeezed in and snuggled her mouth into my ear and murmured, Miss me. And fell asleep. It was an order and a question.

Pretty cramped. She lay in the crook of my arm which fell asleep, went numb. I felt her length, her thigh over mine, her breast against my side, the expansion of her breath. She smelled like smoke and something sweet, tangy the way sage is tangy. I got another bursting hard on. I lay there. You again? Becoming a regular are you? You are welcome, probably, pending good behavior. I lay there trying to make out constellations through the leaves, smelling her hair, listening to the relaxed concourse of her breath. In the middle of the night she found me, it. Slipped her hand down my belly and stroked. Lightly. Not a murmur, not a kiss, as if we were both asleep. We weren’t. My body felt like an air base in one of those movies when the incoming siren goes off. Everybody scrambling toward the fighters from everywhere. Every cell awake pouring its attention toward my surprised dick. Felt really really good. Wonderful. Her hand slowed, paused, twitched twice, she was asleep. I was still hanging on a terrible edge. I lay there in a kind of suspended, excruciating wonder.

Pops and I took the spade, the machete up to the meadow, worked on the runway. Worked in silence, moving stones, leveling, tamping dirt, cutting brush. If there was any awkwardness it was mine. We were rooting out a mesquite bush in the middle of the track. He was prying with the spade, I was pulling on a rope we’d tied to the slender stump. I swung around the arc like on a tether to yank from a better direction, and pulled, and a stout root freed itself and kicked dirt into his face. He stopped, stood straight, blinded. Slowly cleared the dirt, spat. He held the shovel with both hands like a pike.

Hig, you’re acting squirrely. More squirrely than usual.

He didn’t say Higs. He blinked out more dirt, wiped his eyes with a knuckle.

Do you need my blessing or something? Like a corny movie?

Shocked me worse than if he’d slugged me. I held the end of the rope as if I weren’t sure why, as if it were the tail of some beast I wasn’t sure I wanted to be so intimate with.

At this stage in the game I got bigger fish to fry. I was never that kind of dad anyway. I never once said, Have her home by ten.

I looked down at my hand holding the rope, at the dirt all over his face and started to laugh. Christ. I laughed. The more I laughed the more funny it was. Shit, I don’t know, maybe it was the pent up tension from the night before. Deadly sperm backup we used to call it. Maybe it was just the desert island cartoon thing, the protective father thing, the way that no one was acting like they were supposed to act. Was that it? Probably not. Probably simple relief that Pops hadn’t killed me yet. Or that he was standing there with dirt all over his face and not mad. Or just that I hadn’t laughed, really laughed, in way too long.

Must have been after mid-June. I lost count of the days. Probably not a good thing to do. I mean with no newspaper, no apparatus to tell you the date. Once you lose count, well it’s gone forever.

We finished the venison, all but the jerky which we were saving for the trip, and we slaughtered a sheep and had been eating mutton for two days. Mutton and last summer’s potatoes and new greens, lettuce, chard, peas. The days were hot and the creek a slow runnel and the nights warm. She came just a little while after dark, after I’d settled in with the flannel bag beneath me on the hammock sleeping only in my shirt. She was wearing a long man’s shirt and her hand came to my face and passed over my cheek and she grabbed a tuft of my beard and pulled which made me laugh. There was a quarter moon like a ruddy lightship floating over the canyon and I could see her clearly. She was holding a blanket. She spread it on the dirt beside the hammock and lay down on her back, one arm propped under her head. She watched the moon, I watched her. I stuck my bare foot over the edge of the hammock and touched it to the wool of the blanket and pushed off and swung myself.

Playing hard to get? she murmured.

No.

I rocked. She unbuttoned the shirt. It parted. She pushed the far side of it off her breast with her free hand and still gazing at the sky she tucked her fingers under a button and pulled the rest of it to the side. It fell open. The rise and fall of her breath. The length of her. In the dark she radiated a soft light of her own like waves breaking at night. The smooth pale plain of her stomach. The—all of her.

Jesus Christ, Hig, don’t turn away, don’t close your eyes. Breathe, man! You are supposed to look, dumbass! It’s not impolite. If you don’t look you will insult her. Who the fuck do you think this is for, this is for you! She wasn’t, like, just in the neighborhood.

All of that in my clamorous head. Telling myself to be respectful, act like a grownup. Soak up every detail. She has vouchsafed you some portion of pure luck. Be grateful.

The rusty moon painted her without shadow. My toes dug into the wool and I stopped swinging. I held still and watched her. A kind of suspended awe. The way I had watched a royal elk step out of aspen: what you are seeing, Hig, cannot be real, it is just too magnificent. Don’t twitch a muscle or it will vanish.

She didn’t vanish. She turned her head to me. I cleared my throat.

You were in the neighborhood, I said lamely. My voice came out kind of high like an adolescent who can’t control the timbre.

She raised one eyebrow: maybe. She raised up on her elbows and shrugged the shirt down her arms. Then she rolled over and lay on her stomach, her head on her crossed hands. Offering another vista. The world can end but you are not immune oh no.

If you want, you can just look at me, she said. It’s probably been a long time. I’m in no hurry.

She raised her sweet butt into the air.

Um, is it okay if we rush through that part.

Unh huh.

I got my ass out of the hammock, shucked my shirt and lay down beside her. I don’t know why, but I thought of flying. How there is a checklist you tick down before starting the engine, before taxiing, before takeoff. How if you are flying every day all the motions are smooth, sequential, you barely look at the list, but if it’s been a while you are halting, thinking through everything, taking each item one at a time, making sure. So you don’t have a wreck.

I forget where to start, I said. I feel like a—

A fifteen year old wouldn’t say that.

Yeah. I was thinking more like a pilot. A rusty pilot with a bunch of checklists. So we won’t crash.

Touch my back, she said.

I did. I ran my fingers over her lightly. Her skin tightened and smoothed out under them. I thought of wind moving over a field of wheat. She whimpered.

Does it hurt?

No. God, no. She said it into her folded arms. It has to be light but it feels great.

My hand swept over the rise of her ass moved over her thighs the backs the insides.

Mmmm, she murmured. Maybe it’s better when you forget.

She rocked up onto her side and her fingers found my hair, my beard, tangled into them, pulled my face into her. When her mouth found mine I disassembled. Not exploded like a bomb or anything, but came apart. A few pieces at a time. They floated away, went into a kind of orbit. A splintering galaxy. An extravagant slow motion annihilation. The only center was her mouth, her hair. It was her. A reconstitution around the core of her. Without thought. I rolled on top of her and she gasped in pain.

Wait—

Oh. Shit. Scrambling off.

It’s okay, okay. Here. I’m not so fragile. She pushed me onto my back. She kissed me. Kissed and kissed her hair covering me. She kissed my eyes nose lips. With her mouth, then she lowered her breasts onto my face and kissed me, brushed with her nipples, eyes, nose, tongue. And then. Surprise. The shock of it. She lowered herself onto me. The first touch. Wet. Like her mouth. Resistance. That heat. Ever so slowly, and slip, surrender.

Oh god, don’t move. All those pieces. She moved. Her moving over me called them called them. The way a thousand fish rock together with the swell. Back and forth. The way the stars in the leaves. I reached. In her, in the very center, somewhere the single only stillness where everything cohered. Nothing but reach.

And then I let go. From reaching the strain to what? Nothing. Relinquish. Fall. If I cried and I’m not saying I did. The bliss, the sheer loss of falling.

She keened and I exploded. Whatever constellation, whatever was achieved was riven by light and scattered to the dark and fuck, that’s where it should have been all along. She lay on me shuddering her weight and all those bits of us rained down as soft and unapologetic as ash.

Whew, she whispered, her lips moving in my ear.

Yeah, whew.

We crashed, huh?

Yup. In a good way.

How you refill. Lying there. Something like happiness, just like water, pure and clear pouring in. So good you don’t even welcome it, it runs through you in a bright stream, as if it has been there all along.

We lay as still as we could, heart pounding against heart, a sympathetic rhythm that ricocheted and bounced and went counter and synced again, both of us I think fascinated by the music of it and the sensation. After a while she rose up and pulled the flannel quilt over us and snuggled down beside me and we slept. Not like the other nights of confusion. A deep and relieved slumber. Real comfort, simple exhaustion.

Before dawn, to spare him embarrassment, I guess, she rose, buttoned her shirt and went back into the meadow to sleep in the blankets on the thick bed of ponderosa needles she used on warm nights. Out under the stars, she said, where she could see everything. But I think it was the comfort of the cattle breathing, the rhythmic tearing of grass, always two or three who grazed at night beside, around her. And he snored, she said. He came to the creek at first light as he always did, over the burble I could hear the splashing, the brushing teeth with the defunct flattened bristles, a few hawks and spits, a cough.

And she—I could hear her wishing him good morning, opened my eyes, saw her in the shirt but with pants now she must keep by her bed. The wonderful satisfaction of seeing her like that now, out in the world, as conscribed as it is. In knowing her now as I did. Closed my eyes to doze again. She always refused to let me start the morning fire. It’s mine, she insisted. My ritual. Don’t mess with my habits. They are how we get along around here. Relax. Sleep in. I did. When I got up she always had the mug of bitter tea ready. Welcome as much for the ritual of it I guess as for the puckering taste.

That morning I rose slowly, stretched, took an inventory: Hig, you have your arms? Check. Your legs? Check. You have not really been blown to pieces? Nope. You have your heart? Not a question you’ve asked before. Not after. Yes I do. A little joggled, a little fuller. Lighter and heavier, too, go figure.

They were at the fire. I smelled roasting meat. I splashed my face, chest, dunked my head, dried myself with the shirt, walked to the fire.

Morning.

Pops nodded. She was squatting, adding a chunk of split wood to the flames and the sunup breeze swirled the smoke around, wreathed her. She winced, grimaced, craned her face to the side, added the wood.

Morning, I said.

She was either too smoked out to hear me or couldn’t answer. The grimace. She stood, stepped out of the smoke, put her knuckles to her teary eyes.

Morning, I said.

She wiped the tears, blinked at me out of irritated eyes. Saw her heave a breath. Didn’t say a word. She lifted the steaming kettle off a stump, poured it, handed me my mug without looking at me.

Meat’s gonna burn, she said. To her dad or to me or no one. Edge of frustration.

I’ll get it, I said. I reached for the long fork but she pushed my hand away with her forearm, grabbed the fork, turned the chops on the wire grill.

Relax, she said.

My insides froze. Glanced at Pops who politely turned to the side on his seat, his expression blank. He studied the top of the far canyon wall, sipped his drink.

Again:

Just relax. I’ll have chops in a minute.

I heaved a long breath, turned aside, too, studied the far wall with Pops. You have your arms? Hig? Hig? Yes, I do. Your legs? Yes. Stop there. Be grateful for that.

I could’ve cried. Stood in the billowing smoke and used it for cover. So this is how it is.

After a silent breakfast, silent chewing, I took the dishes to the creek as I always did: three plates, three mugs, three folding knives, three forks, the long fork. Let the wire grill burn off. I spread the fine sand around on the enamel plates with my fingers, scraped at the grease. Focus on the task at hand, concentrate, Hig. The water. It seemed warm. Warmer. That was frigging sad. Sad. Dug the fork tines down into the gravel bottom, wiped them in my fingers. Fuck. I breathed. When I was done I lay them out to dry on the board table. Pops passed me. He was carrying the rifle, shoulder slung, and the spade.

I’m going to scout the highway, he said. I don’t want to walk out there on the big day and find a beat up useless piece of road.

That made sense. We didn’t have enough fuel to circle while he filled and packed some potholes.

He took a step, then glanced back at me.

Everybody’s been through a lot, he said.

I loved him then.

For the first time I felt him as some kind of family. As much as you could construct from blowdown and debris.

Yeah.

He nodded, walked on downcanyon toward the brush fence.

She was sweeping the packed dirt around the fire with a twig broom. She did it every morning to beat back the crumbs and keep ants and mice away from the kitchen.

As I approached, she swept. No pause. Focused on the dirt ahead of the broom.

Want me to pick some greens for lunch, I said.

My guts were gripped. She kept sweeping.

If you want, she murmured. Swept.

Cima?

Sweep. The harsh twiggy scrape.

I caught her arm. She went rigid.

Ow!

I dropped it like a hot grill. She stared at me.

That’s gonna bruise, she said. No modulation.

Cima. Jesus. I’m sorry.

I stood rooted to the dirt. Sheer panic. Couldn’t even see straight. Against all will my chest began to heave and then I felt tears running off my chin. Completely paralyzed. She stared at me. A mask. Like a death mask but the eyes alive or gathering life. Her dark eyes still as coins, then somehow gathering light as eyes do and registering, softening. She stood there trembling and studying my face and then I saw the tears well in her eyes and they were hers again, the dark pools. We stood like two trees. Swaying. What was left of the fire’s smoke puffed and wisped.

Last night she said. After we fell asleep. I dreamt of Tomas. Dreamt and dreamt of him.

Her lips shivered and her mask crumbled.

He was calling me. He was dying on his cot and calling me, bleating just like an animal that knows it’s going to slaughter. Just like an animal, Hig! And I stood against the wall unwilling to help him. My husband. My best friend.

She was sobbing with a hypoxic violence.

My love was frozen. Like a winter pond. I must have dreamt that for hours. In the end I couldn’t take it and I picked up my skinning knife and walked over and slit his throat. Oh god!

She collapsed. I stepped forward and caught her. I thought of two trees nearly unrooted and leaning against each other.

I don’t know if I can do this, she said. I thought I could.

Pops reported that the highway was good and straight for at least a thousand feet. Good enough, no big holes. He had left a bandana tied to a mile marker for a wind sock. Cima was warm enough, but more withdrawn. She came out to the hammock but not every night nor every other night. We didn’t make love again for days. Five. Can’t pretend I didn’t count. And when we did, when we were about to—I mean we lay on the blanket naked, holding each other, not kissing, not talking, but just our noses exploring ears and necks, and hands reconnoitering a territory made brand new by these new reckonings of loss—when it seemed to be time to consummate or at least somehow celebrate this new vulnerability, I pulled her on top of me and she was not wet and I had trouble entering and I could feel that it hurt her, and for some reason I thought of Tomas—the dream Tomas, bleeding—and a wave of panic overcame me and I lost my erection.

Damn the dream world. His ghost was wading through it and ruining what only a few days ago had been as euphoric as any love affair I’d known.

She gave my wanger a consolatory double squeeze which made me feel worse. Sighed heavily—I read Disappointment—and rolled off to the side. Her arms came around me gently. Lying on the blanket, arm in arm, in an unconsummated paralysis. I felt lonelier then than I had felt before the canyon. The hearts thudded and ricocheted against each other, but the spirit did not. I could not stroke her more than absently, or kiss her, or even talk with authenticity. As if failing in consummating love had robbed me of all legitimacy as a lover. Had stripped my license to love or even express affection. It was awful.

It occurred to me as I lay next to her on my side and tried to catalogue this new dread—the dread of separateness when love was so near—it occurred to me that what may have been transmitted at the critical moment the moment of truth, of penetration, was her own memory of the dream. I mean we communicate without speech of course. I thought that in all likelihood that blood curdling image of the dead had passed through her at the same instant or just before. Which meant that none of us was ready. Okay, Hig, I thought. Reason it any way you want. Make yourself feel better any way you can, but you can’t rewrite it. It sucks. Can’t make it better. I can’t, I can’t move. Can hardly breathe.

Hig.

She whispered the word, a wind eddying in my ear.

Huh?

Will you give me oral pleasure?

She said it in a French accent and I knew she was referencing that old classic, Pulp Fiction.

I chuffed, a soundless laugh without mirth.

Really? You don’t want that.

She nodded, her head against my chest.

Okay. Big exhale. Duty calls.

I did. I kissed down between her breasts, her little innie belly button, the shallow horns of her pelvis, the lower plain of her concave belly, the patch of tight curls, the little lips, the smooth kernel, inhaled her, and then I went to work. Like a job. What works? What works best?

For a little while it was like that. And then she was lifting her hips and rolling herself under my lips and tongue and whimpering. And then she moaned, and then I was encouraging, then cheerleading with teeth, lips, tongue. Then tugging and releasing. I was flying her like a kite, that’s what it felt like, and then I forgot all my bullshit self and the kite was very very high and tugging harder and the blood reasserted and she was coming. She was arched and coming and I was inside her and she was clutching and clawing my back. I realized I must be hurting her with my weight. I hastily rolled off and spewed in the air and we lay and breathed without thought and we were almost happy again. Almost without reserve.

Go figure.

And then it was three more nights because she was so bruised up. But the mood around camp was better. And I could feel a gathering of momentum toward departure.

II

Pops left before full light. Without ceremony or sentiment. Took one look around the canyon, the last pairs of cows and calves, the sheep and lambs, hefted a light pack, his rifle, and without a word walked downstream and out the brush fence.

Left the only life he had ever given himself to. The life of his own lineage, his father and mother, his father’s father. It was in his blood truly and he latched the gate and walked out of the canyon.

I weighed everything again. Made a balance scale with a liter bottle, a five gallon pail, a stick and a rope. Hung it from a low limb by the stream. Five gallons is forty pounds half of it twenty, the liter bottle about two. I weighed the AR-15 rifle, Cima’s pack, mine, the hose and hand pump.

How much does a lamb weigh?

The little mixed herd moved in the tall grass heads down. Three lambs shook their heads, their ears, went back to feeding. One butted his mother in the ribs to nurse. Their lives were about to change. If any survived the winter it would be a miracle.

I dunno, maybe twenty?

Let’s see. You have a girl and a boy?

She smiled. A ram and a ewe? Yes.

Like the Ark. Here we go.

We wrapped one of the little guys in a sling made of a shirt and weighed him against the bucket. He swung under the branch his ears flopping, his legs splayed extended his tiny perfect shining black hooves, a look of sheer bewilderment on his little face. I emptied the pail until they balanced. About seventeen pounds.

Okay, we can take them. Without your dad on takeoff we should be okay.

Should be?

It’s a crap shoot anyway. We smoothed the runway, cut the tall trees at the end. The book says we need a hundred more feet. But they never met the Beast.

Short nod. Cima looked across the meadow, the canyon. If I were a painter—she was that beautiful. Maybe not her alone, but the moment. The green reflected darkly in her violet eyes, and I thought, If we crash and burn tomorrow morning, well.

Made a last fire in the dark, watched the flames lean and light the rock wall for the last time. Ate venison and potatoes, greens, drank the tea. Doused the fire with a hiss, a billow of steam. Heard the low of a cow, the rustle of the leaves.

Had loaded everything yesterday afternoon but the lambs. Cima slept in the fields with her animals, listening to them graze around her. Now we led the two lambs on strings of twine upstream, carried them up the tree ladder beside the trickle of waterfall. They squirmed, bleated. Two moms answered, followed the cries to the top of the field, confused. The sadness of our world, it underlies everything like a water. Set the lambs down foursquare on their feet and they stood tall and stiff, reassessing life from this height. And trundled after us.

Walking a lamb on a string is not at all like walking a dog on a leash. It was a constant conversation, an argument. Full of debate, concessions, sudden capitulations, obstinacy in the face of reason. They balked we tugged. They gamboled ahead, no shit, we ran after. There is no way not to laugh. It was the perfect distraction from the emotions of leaving such a place and all that it meant. Finally I picked up my lamb and carried him.

At the Beast Cima expertly hogtied the little guys and we set them on our packs behind the seats. We climbed in, pulled the seat belt harnesses over our shoulders and clipped the steel buckles at our waists. I handed her the clipboard with the checklists.

You be the copilot. Haven’t had one in a while.

I primed the motor, pulled the stiff knob from the dash, listened for the spray of gas filling the carburetor and shoved it in. Repeat. Flipped on the master switch. The revving whir of the gyroscope. Turned the key in the mags, inched the throttle forward a half inch, set my boots against the brakes and pushed the starter.

Two coughs, two half spins of the prop and I shoved the throttle forward and she caught and roared and shuddered. We all did, me, Cima, the lambs. A small plane coming to life is emotional. It’s like a whole auditorium standing for an ovation. It’s grand and a little frightening. I pulled the throttle back to an even idle which was quieter, less momentous, less shake and more tremble. Let the engine warm a little, watched the dial of the oil pressure gauge ease down into the green.

Okay, I yelled. Go down the Before Takeoff list.

Had to yell. Didn’t carry an extra headset with me anymore. What would have been the point? Jasper didn’t need it.

Trim wheel to neutral!

Check!

Align heading indicator.

Check!

Run up to 1700.

Check!

Mags.

Carb heat.

Primer set and locked.

Check!

All of it gathering its own momentum as the motor warmed, the digital columns for each cylinder on the engine analyzer climbed, the oil pressure fell—all while the motor roared, the plane shivered, all heading for the critical moment of takeoff. I loved this. It was this—the anticipation of being finally airborne as much as the flying itself that had kept me coming back again and again whenever I could.

Outside thermometer read fifty two degrees. Good. Nice and cool. Heavier air. Eased off the brakes and she began to roll. Jostled her through the sage into the newly cleaned track using the brakes to steer, turned her down to the east end and spun her in the circle we had cleared. She pointed west. Sun behind us made long shadows of the brush. High desert daybreak pungent and cool. Straight ahead across the meadow the cedar woods that were our limit, our raised bar.

She gave me a thumbs up. I checked the trim wheel one last time, shoved the throttle forward to the panel, glanced at the oil pressure, the Beast roared, shook I yelled, God is great! Released the brakes.

I don’t know why I yelled that. It might have been the last thing I said in this life. I wasn’t thinking Jihad I was thinking Hig, those Cessna guys in the white coats never tested this. They maybe never imagined a world eighty years hence when their plane would be a Noah’s Ark for sheep. She rolled, broke inertia, almost balking at first, way too slow, and the thought flashed No way!

And then she bounded, gathered the runway, reeled it in, the trees at the end came, grew dark, larger, maybe halfway to them I felt her break ground, the airborne moment and I pushed the nose down hard, pressure, she wanted to lift off, climb, but I held her down, held her three feet off the track hard in the ground effect where she could gain the most speed. We hurtled like that barely off the dirt and then I heard Cima scream, the first trees billboarding right in our face, and I jerked up the Johnson bar and pulled the yoke, not pulled it but released to my chest and the Beast flared, the nose leapt, the plane reared, it seemed straight into sky, the single prayer Don’t fucking stall, the stall horn blaring, airspeed dial, the needle hovering at sixty, the horn, the lambs chiming in, the weird thoughts you have when it all teeters: the lambs are the same fucking key. The same key as the stall horn. Sounds like their mom.

Not Cima. She just screamed. Once. I shoved the yoke forward again, swung down the nose to near level, prayed for speed for speed, soon enough the Beast took it, accelerated like a swallow that swoops after veering upwards for a bug and we flew level at sixty five, I looked down at the trees, thought, If we cleared them by two feet.

Not a regulation takeoff. Not in the book even for a short soft field. This is what our vector from the meadow probably looked like:

Well I must’ve been glad to be alive. I loosed a yell. The junipers rushed beneath us. The Beast rolled over the next ridge fifty feet over the trees, it seemed on her own volition, like a magic carpet. Coastered down the other side. One way to enter the next dream. She was beaming the way a small kid beams after surviving the magic mountain log flume at Six Flags. She reached over and pinched my arm.

We’re alive see? Nice work.

We’re awake.

You say the strangest things.

Even the lambs had caught the mood. They no longer cried, they lifted their heads off the packs and followed the conversation, floppy eared and guileless attendants. As far as they knew, all this represented the next stage in the normal life cycle of a sheep.

We crossed the big river and Pops was sitting on his pack like any hitchhiker on a shadeless stretch of desert highway. Something in his attitude at once resolute and refractory, pinned to his long shadow, the rifle standing between his knees like the staff of an acolyte. Which he was: bent to the mission, devoted now to a new life. If we could get there. The bandana fluttered on the mile post, barely registering the breeze of a calm summer morning. I banked left and landed and tapped the brakes to a full stop right across from where he sat.

He climbed in behind his daughter. Noah’s Ark, he said glancing at the lambs. That was all. Cima pulled the door shut, latched it and we took off to the west toward Grand Junction.

Something was not right. I won’t say wrong because how it registered wasn’t anything so definitive. Ten miles to the east I had made the first call. We had cleared the far cliffs of Grand Mesa, the great flattopped butte that looked like it must have been a peninsula in some shallow, plesiosaur haunted sea. A sixty mile long outcrop risen against the sky. It was banded with purple cliffs and covered with aspen forests. In summer they were waist deep with ferns and strung with dark lakes and beaver ponds. Melissa and I had shared some of our best camping trips up there, once tenting for a week on the edge of a lake with no road for miles and the trout just about jumping into our frying pan.

We had flown past it, beneath the rim, staying low to save fuel, the warm wind pouring through the empty frame where Pops had shot out my window, and there was Grand Junction, straddling the two rivers and sprawling over the desert hills. A vast gritty town that stretched all the way to the Book Cliffs to the north.

There were the highways, the streets, the developments, the cul de sacs, the flat blank roofs of the box stores, the vast parking lots. There was the industrial section along the Colorado River, the train tracks, the phalanx of warehouses. The city was threaded with cottonwoods. Many of the old trees that lined the streets and depended on watering were skeletal and dead but many were rooted deep enough and punctuated the thoroughfares with dashes and clumps of violent green like some Morse code.

The canopies of cottonwoods still shaded the river parks, some of the oldest and biggest fighting the drought just half dead, still clothed with leaves on one side. And fire. Not a corner of the city untouched. As if it had been fire not flu that had swept death through the town. The cars, every one it seemed, scorched. Where they were parked in the side streets in their rows, in mall parking lots, out on the highways, where they lay in such a chaos, such absence of pattern some giant might have thrown them like pick up sticks. Whole neighborhoods were burned to the ground. Others looked as if torched just to melting and left to cool the way a pastry chef glazes a brûlée. The sweet black smell of embered wood cloyed in my nostrils and I’m not sure if we could really smell the town a thousand feet up or if the sight produced it. And if there were skeletal trees there were human bones. I saw them. Not true skeletons as the connective tissue was gone, but the bones of the dead were everywhere gathered into heaps by some predator and scattered by scavengers. Heaps so big we could see them from here.

Cima vomited. Just the sight of the ruined town. Hurriedly she pushed open the side window and stuck her mouth in the gap and sprayed the glass behind her. This was the city where they did their big shopping, Costco and auto parts, farm equipment. This is where they came for a weekend movie when the one in Delta didn’t interest them. The two towns being almost equidistant from the ranch. She had not seen it end. She and Pops left just as it was getting really bad. When there was still TV news, when the newscasters appeared more exhausted by the day, then scared and exhausted, then terrified as their colleagues dropped away to the hospitals and makeshift flu wards, or were just not heard from, assumed ill or dead, and the last TV anchors stood in, and the field correspondents taped themselves using tripods, the reports more frantic. And were finally cut short by mayhem. I remembered that. Because they had nothing else to do at the end: broadcast, courageous, the way the band played on the deck of the sinking ship, either that or go home and die.

Sometime in there Pops and Cima decided to leave the ranch and they loaded up the gooseneck cattle trailer and towed a little trailer for the four wheeler behind that, and they drove out to the highway in the middle of the night. With a dozen cattle, as many sheep, two saddled horses, two Australian shepherds, and provisions. And Pops had to fight his way through three barricaded ambushes in just the fifteen miles to the creek road, and shoot three crazy fuckers further on in the cedar hills, all of which he was pretty much expecting and didn’t have much problem executing with his guns. But they shot one of the horses and two of the sheep inside the trailer, which made it less easy to pretend the next day that they were driving cows up onto their summer lease as they would on any normal morning in early May. He rode horseback and she drove the ATV, which pulled a small trailer of gear and supplies, the twelve miles into the canyon. She would have preferred to ride, she was never comfortable on four wheelers, but he was skilled at hazing and herding the livestock on horseback and the dogs were, too, and they were used to taking orders from him in the saddle.

The next morning they walked back downstream and he blew the one ford that crossed the creek with dynamite, and made the track impassable except on foot or horseback, and then only at low water.

They swept their tracks as best they could and obliterated them thoroughly for two miles before they left the rough road for the creek trail and the canyon. It took them all day. And then, thank god, two days later it poured rain.

All this she had told me over the last three weeks. So I understood the shock of seeing Grand Junction. It was one thing to lose the whole world as you knew it, another to see, to maybe smell your old neighborhood as charnel house and killing field.

She had made it out the window, streaked the rearward glass, but the plane still reeked. I handed her the water bottle I always kept between the seats and stole a look back at Pops to see if he would be triggered by the smell or the sights below him. It happens that way on boats and planes, the passengers already queasy and one throws up and it’s a chain reaction. But he sat like a Buddha with a lamb in his lap, one strong claw on her shoulder, his face impassive and hard, leaning to the window taking it all in.

This is what you left, I thought. The vindication of the choice you made to leave that night. Vindication and horror. Sometimes being right isn’t all it’s cracked up to be: how many times in the last few years I thought about bitter fruit, how when what you are right about is—well you can’t even look at it.

But it wasn’t the burned and devastated city, the pockets of virid trees, that were somehow wrong or simply not quite right. I was now six miles out. I was nine hundred feet off the ground and aiming for the airport, for the tower, where three years ago I had gotten the signal, the beginning of a message. I dialed the frequency—it was still there in my GPS—and made the second call.

Grand Junction Tower, Cessna Six Three Three Three Alpha six southeast at five thousand eight hundred inbound for landing.

Said it again. Then miracle: static. A loud burst of aural snow. I twisted up the squelch excited and called again.

Cessna Six Triple Three Alpha—

It wasn’t crystal clear but it was. It was! A woman’s voice. Maybe older, a little raspy. Slightly humored, kind.

Cessna Six Triple Three Alpha, wind two four zero at five, make a straight in approach, cleared to land runway two niner.

All formal, all perfect, by the book, just like before before. Said with a straight face. Like a normal business day at the old airport. Can’t fully describe what that harkening back to normalcy did to my spirit. As if in pretending that this were airport operations as usual I could also pretend that my wife lived and my dog, that she was in her seventh month and they were back on the Front Range and I was about to touch down after a three hour flight away from them, not one that had taken nine years and on which there was no true return.

What wasn’t right was not even that. It was the beacon. Almost every paved airport, has, had, a rotating beacon green and white. And I had seen it flash from ten miles out, and thought nothing of it. And then at six miles I saw it flashing again, pulsing like the heartbeat of a living enterprise and the dissonance—the burned out city at the end of the known world, and the living, pulsing light, the voice of the controller transmitting everyday commands—finally caught my attention and the hair on the back of my neck stood up. Can’t tell you why except to say that it was odd to say the least: that they had power. Or: why shouldn’t they? We had it at Erie. More and more airports had been supplementing with solar and wind. Or that the beacon shouldn’t be on in daylight in clear, VFR conditions. Don’t know why, except to say that something put me on edge.

I lined up. I banked twenty degrees left and straightened out for final and there was the long east-west strip built for jets stretching out in front of us like a vision. Smooth too. Looked it from here. Didn’t have the buckled, cracked, potholed look of every strip on the east side of the mountains. Somebody had maintained it. Least it seemed that way from a mile out and descending. Backed off the throttle, set twenty degrees of flaps and let her float down at five hundred feet per, the Beast seeming to breathe relief at this reversion to past protocol. I swear she has an animus or a mind or something.

And as we came down slowly and the strip grew wider and longer and rose to meet us, we could see the rows of hangars, some caved in, some roofs blown half off by wind. We could see the control tower on our left, the cantilevered, green tinted, bulletproof windows. We could see wrecks of planes, a few on either side of the runway, a big jet at the end. As there were at every airport—the tied down craft battered by weather, eventually pulling loose and tumbling, but. That’s when it hit me. Like a frigging bullet.

I was maybe thirty feet off the ground. I had cut power, topped the prop, done all the things you do in the final moments, and was getting ready to pull back the yoke and flare for a soft touchdown and. And it hit me.

The beacon, the tower: the wrecks on the field were scorched like the cars. Can’t say I thought anything, nothing reasoned, articulated, there wasn’t time. It was just the shock of the image: the burned and crumpled planes. Different from Erie. Different from Denver, from Centennial, the old planes ripped from their moorings and cartwheeled over the airfield by wind. These were crashes. Live-engine wrecks. I did pull back the yoke, but not for a flare. I jerked it back and slammed the throttle to the panel and the engine caught and screamed and my palm slammed the carb heat knob back in and we lurched, reared skyward. We jumped off the field maybe steeper even than our takeoff half an hour before from the meadow. And the lambs wailed.

I looked out the low side window, the bowl of plexiglas, and in the same instant the cable came up. Sprung taut, probably missed my wheels by ten feet. Sprung like a trap. Which is what it was.

Holy fuck.

Hig, you are a cool bastard. That was Bangley talking. Giving me the rare Bangley thumbs up. And in that moment too I glanced at the fuel flow gauge and saw we had two gallons left. Ten minutes at most. Fuck.

I banked left to come around for a look and tensed for gunfire from the ground.

Goddamn. It was Pops. A taut line. He had moved the lamb and he had his gun up and he was scanning the hangars, the wreckage.

The cable stretched across the runway about a third of the way down and ten feet off the pavement, held taut by two sprung arms welded from T-bar steel. The arms were articulated downward like the bills of evil herons. The cable was painted black like the tarmac but I could clearly see its shadow and then the evil thread of it. No gunfire. I craned around.

Pops?

That was it, he yelled. Their one big trick.

Want to? I called back.

Get em? Fuck yeah.

Cima?

She looked confused, still sick, unable to appreciate the implications of what had just happened. She nodded.

We don’t have much choice, I yelled. We’re about out of gas.

I tightened the bank and swooped for another final, this time without checklists, without any thought at all except That motherfucker that motherfucker. I’m coming to get you. And the gut-punch feeling of betrayal. All those years, thinking about that radio call. The hope it had engendered. It drove me wild.

Everything was on automatic. I banked tight and swooped and touched down a hundred feet past the cable. Pops leaned forward and said:

Taxi past. There. Park behind that building, the second west of the tower.

I kept her rolling fast. The radio crackled on. Nice landing said the voice and it didn’t sound like Aunt Bee now. It sounded frayed and hard. Then laughter. Laughter like hanging metal scraping over pavement, loud and sustained. Congratulations. You’re the first.

I didn’t call back. I turned left onto a broad taxiway and found cover where Pops said and shut her down. We were in the cool shadow of Big River Flight School and Authorized Cessna Service Center and we were close enough to the wall that we couldn’t see the top of the tower and they couldn’t get a bead on us, whoever they were. Climbed out moved the seat forward for Pops so he could squeeze out. A cricket chirped loudly from the base of the wall. Cima sat. Hadn’t unbuckled. I didn’t know what to say, I had never seen her like this. She seemed in shock. She was in shock. I walked around to her door opened it. Her long hand pressed against the panel over the oil pressure gauge and a new bruise spread along her forearm. She turned. Her eyes were bleary.

It’s not just the meanness of it. The trap. That too. It’s the city.

I nodded. She and Pops had retired early from the world before it had fired into full conflagration. They had seen enough, enough to flee but not the full demise. Not what I had seen every day from the air. What Bangley and I had known in the middle of our nights. The charred town and all that it implied.

You want to stay here?

Nodded.

Okay.

I walked back around, reached across my seat and unclipped the Uzi from its rack and held it out to her.

If someone shows up that doesn’t look like me or your dad, plug em. It’s charged.

She hesitated, nodded, took the gun.

I unsnapped the AR. Also took the handheld radio. Turned it on and dialed in 118.1, the tower. Sometimes it’s a good idea to talk to your enemy. Not usually. Bangley had taught me that—the value of reticence. Also the value of overwhelming firepower. I reached back under one of the lambs and pried out the stuff sack that held the grenades, nodded at Pops, and we moved around the south corner of the building. I followed him. He hugged the wall so that we were still out of sight of the tower. Before we cleared the next corner and crossed the open ramp where small planes had once tied down, and came into full view of whoever was up there, we pulled up. It was about fifty yards to the next building, a single story brick, the offices of the FBO, a hangar adjacent and behind. We could see the back of it: a row of dark windows still mostly intact, and a metal door toward the rear.

Hig that old lady up there sounded just like my grandma.

And?

We’re gonna clean her clock and whoever else. No questions asked. He looked at me.

I nodded.

Those cocksuckers invited you out here under false pretenses. Did you see all those goddamn wrecks? How many planes you think they did like that?

A lot. Scores. It’s the biggest runway on the way to L.A. between Denver and Phoenix.

He leaned against the bricks.

Why? he said.

Why do they do it?

I mean not for the fuel. Half those wrecks burned. Not for the damn meat. Unless you like charcoal.

There’d be survivors. Some maybe not badly injured. And sometimes they didn’t burn. Not all the way, sometimes not at all. There’d be supplies, food, weapons. Lambs. Bahhh.

Okay so what did they do with the pissed off survivors?

Silence. He stepped around the corner and the shot cracked. Blew brick dust into my face. I thought he was cooked. He fell back. I grabbed at him blindly, hugged him to me.

Fuck. Losing my edge, Hig. Thanks.

He was fine. He was breathing hard. I wiped my eyes.

That’s what they do, Hig. Pick em off one by one. Come out of the wreck injured, dazed not even sure what hit em and bang. Or use em for whatever they use em for. Okay now I’m really pissed.

He unbuttoned his patched flannel shirt, scanned the ground behind us and picked up a two foot piece of rusty rebar. Hung the shirt on it.

Stick this out past the edge when I say. Up here like this. We get into that next building we’re made. Do NOT move from here until I tell you. He slid the bolt back, checked for a chambered bullet, crouched. Three two one, go!

I shoved out the shirt, the shot cracked, zinged, he was gone. He was sprinting toward that back door running like a halfback, feinting and zagging and two more shots exploded up pavement behind and ahead of him. He made it to the sight shadow of the building, to the spot where he could no longer be seen from above, and walked the rest of the way to the door. Turned, gave me a thumbs up before he tugged it open and disappeared inside. Fucking Pops. Hope I can run like that when I’m—what?—my age. I could never run like that. Damn. I pulled back the shirt. There was a neat hole halfway down, repeated in three folds. Gut shot. Ouch. I waited. One minute, two, began to count like I did for Bangley. At two hundred I wondered what was going on. At two twenty three: one shot. It rang over the airport like a bell. A single toll. Echoed and died. It was Pops’s .308. I knew the sound. Half a minute later the door in the back of the FBO scraped open and Pops waved me over. I ran. He held up his hand patted the air like Take your time, relax.

What the fuck? What happened?

A fool, that’s what. Those windows up in the tower are thick bulletproof. Been like that since 9/11. But they have to shoot out somewhere. They have gunports. Like an old fort. I knew once I was inside, I’d have all the time I needed to set up the shot.

I stared at him.

You nailed the shooter through a gunport? Like through his scope?

Shook his head. Nah. Turns out they have two ports—a higher one, maybe chest level, for the long shot, one for the angle directly down to cover the base of the tower. He was looking out the upper one and I shot through the lower. You wanna blow the door, go up and pay a visit?

Damn, Pops.

He had shot whoever it was right up their skirts. Through like a four inch hole.

Oh yeah. We walked across. The door at the base of the tower was heavy metal painted green. He unzipped a greasy belt pack took out two sticks of dynamite taped them together with duct tape.

Been saving these. Seems like a good time.

He taped them to the heavy metal door on the hinge side, close to the ground, lit them and jogged back. We ducked inside the Jet Center for good measure. It blew. Small bits of pavement rained against the windows. Reminded me of passing a truck on a gravel road. We jogged back. The door hung cattywampus off the top hinge, swung a sad metronome in drifting smoke. Pops stood in the doorway like a hesitant messenger.

Give me your gun, he said. You mind?

I handed it to him, he gave me his.

This’ll be a little better for what we’re doing.

Reflex: he tugged back the charging handle, checked that a shell was chambered, and went into commando mode. Not as if he hadn’t before. Couldn’t wait for him to meet Bangley. That’s what I was thinking, even amused imagining the introductions as Pops covered the first flight of stairs and went up gun to his shoulder sighting up the stairwell both eyes open. The treads were concrete laid over steel and they beat a dull tong tong as we ran up. There were five levels. At each one he told me to stay in the well and cover it and he went through the door. He cleared each floor swiftly and we moved up. Leaned into my ear breathing in rasps.

You’re gonna love the decorations in this place.

I could imagine. The top door, the door to the control room was locked. Of course. He shot the lock out, pushed through. The smell. A barrier. I gagged and spit. Cats everywhere. Freaked by the shooting, running over the radar keyboards, the comm panels, arched bristled and hissing against the dead black flatscreens. Calicoes and blacks, blue eyed Siamese.

The air reeked of cat piss and swam with light from the tinted windows, infused with green like an aquarium. On the west side, the side we had come from, where I knew the shooter would be slumped on his side beneath the cantilevered windows, was a man choking and crying. He was holding his guts which were spilled onto the floor. Blood seeped from his back, pooled in reservoir and ran across the floor in a sinuous ribbon like a creek.

He was an old man, older than Pops. His beard was white, his grizzled hair uncut, matted now and soaked in blood from the painted steel floor. The one who had first called, the one I had heard years before, must’ve been. He wore suspenders. His cap had been thrown into the middle of the open room. It was printed with yellow lettering, Peoria Jet Center “Service in the Heartland.” Over the nausea, a wave of goosebumps. Fucker. The heartland had come west looking for a safe haven from the flu and hit this bastard’s cable. Probably. His rifle lay a few feet from the cap. An AR-10 with a long barrel. Cats drawled in the loud panicked mews of a vet’s waiting room. The old man gagged, gurgled, sobbed. One of the bolder cats was already lapping at the crimson creek.

Samuel! Cold shriek. Sammy my Sammy my Sammy!

I jumped. In the corner—there was no corner it was all corners, octagonal—on the east side was an old woman with her hair, no shit, in a bun. It was Aunt Bee. She stood next to a spotting scope on a tripod and wore, no shit again, a calico dress printed in blue cornflowers. She wore wire rimmed round glasses. Could have been your school librarian, your doting grandma, the face on the pancake syrup label. She was at once backed up straight against a nav screen and paralyzed mid lunge toward the shooter who must have been her husband, her hands clawing the air in front of her chest, and her mouth open in a scream. Pops shot her. Middle of the forehead. Twenty cats did hot laps around the tower, then froze in various poses of arched terror. Dropped the decibel level in the reverberant room by half. Now just cats and the old man.

Pops stepped to him, crouched.

Finish Gramps choked. His eyes swum up. They were filmed like poached eggs. Shoot. He begged.

Pops said How’d you spring the cable.

Wha—? He gurgled up a gobbet of blood.

The cable. How’d you spring it?

Bucko

Backhoe?

Gramps vomited affirmative.

Fuel? Where’s the fuel? You have hundred low lead?

Shoot plea—

Where is it?

Ea tak

East tank?

Yu

Pops tugged on a bunch of keys clipped to the man’s belt.

This the key?

Oauuuua

Is this the key?

Yu

Go to hell.

Pops shot him. I gagged.

Looked out the window once before fleeing the cats, the stench. Roof of the Jet Center covered in solar panels. Like Erie. How they pumped their water, fuel, powered the radios and beacon. East gas pumps right below not a hundred yards. Easy shot from here, how they protected it. The survivors? From any of the wrecks? Could have picked them off at distance, or Aunt Bee could have gone to her blocked spot like an actor, waved like a concerned grandma, gestured them urgently over. Easy enough. Damn.

Before we left the tower Pops invited me to the third floor apartment. I said I didn’t want to see. He said, You are going to want to see. Cats were already venturing down the stairs. I followed him.

Ever been in a retiree’s RV? The one they sold their house for? How spotless and neat, the bed made with a patch quilt, maybe a pattern of sunflowers smoothed taut, a plush bear on the pillow? Silk rose in a velcroed cutglass vase on the veneer booth table? It was like that. Single small bedroom, no window, immaculate plush wall to wall carpet, no cats. Except. In the room that would have been the living room where the TV might have been, one wall was pegged and on a hundred pegs were caps, mostly baseball caps with the logos of FBOs, aircraft service centers, aviation specialists of all types—cylinders, props, skins—from every corner of the country. The rest of the walls were covered with shelves. On the shelves, alternating, were pairs of spectacles—sunglasses, reading glasses, bifocals, everything—and crudely stuffed birds of every type. They were lumpy, dullcolored birds stuffed with some filler without benefit of armatures, eyes sewed shut without skill—owls, bluebirds, magpies, sparrows, ducks. And bird guides: antique Petersen, Golden, National Geo, Sibley’s. Seemed every one that had ever been published in the last century.

Hobbies still going strong, Pops said. That’s a relief.

Fuckin A.

We gassed up almost like before, just flipped the lever and heard the electric pump and watched the numbers roll out the gallons. I checked the color, and for water and particulates with a clear plastic tube I carried. We found six more five gallon gas cans and filled them too. Fired the engine. She ran smooth so the gas was good. We took off. Pops said On the ground! Two o’clock. I banked over. Three bison grazed at the end of the strip, hides still patched and ragged from winter.

The buffalo are moving down to their old range, the wolves, the bighorn too. The trout are gone, the elk, but. I’ve seen osprey up on Jasper’s creek, and bald eagles. Plenty of mice in the world, plenty of hawks. Plenty of crows. In winter the trees are full of them. Who needs Christmas tree decorations? Miles and miles of dead forest but the spruce are coming back, the fir and the aspen.

We flew over. The wind buffeted and rushed where my window had been. At Kremmling, in the hills beneath the Gore Range, was a vast fire. New since. Some lightning strike. Trees on the edge caught and exploded. We saw deer running downhill.

Look! she said.

Behind the deer was a grizzly bear. She loped, coming down hard on her short front legs, putting on the brakes, wheeling trying to herd two terrified cubs. Herd them down and down.

In the river, in the flat stretch above the canyon, deer were swimming.

I thought of a painting I had seen at the natural history museum in Denver. A bunch of mixed dinosaurs, I remember triceratops, fleeing across a sparse plain pursued by fire, and volcanoes erupting in the background. I wonder if they could run as fast as a mama grizzly or a deer.

The chairs swung on the chairlifts at Winter Park. New trees came almost to the seats. We had just enough fuel to make it to Erie, but just enough. I wanted to land and put in at least one extra can. In case. Of what? Just in case. We circled back to a clear stretch of highway on the west side of the ski town. Landed, jostled to a stop close to the buildings at the town limit. Stretched, poured in the cans of fuel. Stood on the strut, Pops handed them up. Edge of town seventy yards away, a rec center, a Sinclair station, a gaudy darkwood chalet: Helga’s German Food and Spirits. Miraculously untorched, the town.

Cima stood in the road, hands in the pockets of her jeans, staring. Still seemed in some kind of shock. The world beyond their canyon. The empty burning world. The intact buildings the scariest. For me. Because they looked almost normal, because they echoed. They do whatever it is a struck bell does long after the sound fades.

I want to go in, she said. Pointing like a tourist at the German restaurant.

There?

Yes.

Quicker we load up and take off, safer we’ll be. Empty, but. You never know.

I want to go in.

I shrugged. Pops was in his own reverie watching the Gore Range, the burning Never Summers from that distance, kind of transfixed. You can get used to a lot but maybe not this. All of a sudden. I whistled to him that we’d be back in a few minutes grabbed the AR and we walked up the frost heaved highway. Tufts of grass and sage, little poplars grew up out of the cracks. Small lizards skittered. We walked straight into the sun which hung over the snows of the Divide. Still snow up there, anyway.

Did you like German food?

I felt like we were on a date, which was weird. The canyon had been insulated from more than this whistling vacancy.

Hated it, pretty much.

Hunh.

She reached across, grabbed my hand. I’m not going anywhere, Hig, she said. Where would I go?

Lots of places, I thought but I didn’t say anything. To the other side for one. Or way way inside. A lot of places someone else can never follow.

I kept my mouth shut. The door was open, there was no door. Maybe they’d burned it in the hearth along with the furniture. The windows were boarded up. Someone had been planning for the end of a bad patch, planning to protect the business, their life savings. Those signs of hope that were so quaint now, even perverse. We stepped inside.

They hadn’t burned the furniture: all the tables, the heavy wood chairs, bulked in the dimness, attendant and stolid. There was a hearth in the center, a round fireplace, stone bordered, the requisite centerpiece of every dimwitted après ski designer. Probably fondue pots in the kitchen. Near the front, where rain and snow had blown in, the wood was stained and warped, but further back there was only dry dust and the tracks and shit of mice. Heavy oak bar in the back, tall wood stools, a smoky mirror unbroken. Reflected the light from the doorway like a molten pool on a creek near nightfall. She hesitated, then advanced and stood in front of the bar, looking into the big mirror. Back a few feet, stock still, arms out from her sides, and I thought of a child at a dance recital who has forgotten the next steps. Gone blank. Or a ranch girl at a new bar, a girl from the hills, overwhelmed, who didn’t know what to order, how to ask. She looked at herself and she burst into tears.

Who was that ragged, burly, bearded man who held her? Is that you, Hig? You look all patched and tufted and threadbare like those winterworn bison. You’re missing a tooth. You look like a homeless hockey player.

Didn’t know. A little nervous about coming over the final hump. Over the Rocks, they used to say at the airpark like it was a big deal. Not for me, never was. I mean it was high, it was the Continental Divide, there was almost always snow, a shitty place to lose an engine under any circumstances, a long way down to the first clearings in the lodgepole, the long dead pines. On either side, Winter Park or Nederland. I always left two thousand feet of clearance, flying so high I got a little spaced out once in a while, and it was always okay. But. Now it was a big deal. How would it be? I aimed for the low spot in the pass where the old Jeep road went over the rocks and patchy snow, watched the low country rise up behind the ridge, the way it does when you are making it over, watched it lift and unfurl like one of those bannered flags they used to have at the Olympics, and saw there beyond the final buttress of foothills: old Erie, the airstrip itself soon visible south of the radio tower that no longer blinks, the ribbon of tarmac rolled out like a welcome mat just for me. Nervous about seeing Bangley again, that’s what. It had been, by my best reckoning, just over six weeks.

Now we descended over the foothills, and I pointed the Beast toward Erie by rote. I aimed for the dirt escarpment that stood out like a billboard on the other side of the interstate, still fifteen miles off my aiming point from the west that would put me right over midfield. Seeing it, I flashed on the summer I was eighteen: returning home to Mom’s little house in Hotchkiss. Surprising her. On walking up the switchback mesa road at dusk. The excitement of returning home, the fear of having it be nothing like I expected. My heart drummed. Could feel it in there trying to compete with the throb of the engine, the lower roar and vibration as I pulled back the throttle to descend.

To our eight miles of prairie. Over the last trees, the very last living pines wandering out onto the plain like disoriented sentinels, our perimeter, our margin of safety, and then I could see the tower, the one we’d built together. Bangley’s sniper deck, the porch where he fired his stash of mortars—and then I was over the place and didn’t look down too closely to see the bones, the bodies left unburied and scattered by now by wolves and coyotes, and whatever else. Could have seen, if I looked closely, the white bleat of a rib’s arch or skull. And I felt a surge of—what? Of something for Bangley who I realized in that moment had become my family. Because it was to him, like to my mother twenty two years ago, I was returning home. Not my wife, my child, my mother, not anything but Bangley with his gravel voice. For whom it was a matter of pride to be a stubborn dickhead all the time. And I felt a twinge of fear, of recoil. What if he was straight up mad at me?

The warring emotions. And then I felt the fear full bore. When I dropped to six thousand feet and flew over the glinting river which was low, but running, and came in straight for the south end of the runway and saw the charred husks of the houses, saw foundations, saw one half of my hangar ripped open as if by a tornado and burned.

III

Bangley’s house, a hundred yards north, the one with his gunsmith shop in the sunken living room and the photo of the blonde family skiing—it was standing, but the windows were shot out and there were scorch marks around the second floor dormer which was splintered, and next to it was a gaping hole in the roof. Oh fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.

Pops was straight up and alert on his pack, I glanced back, he knew it was all wrong, and Cima squeezed my thigh and couldn’t keep herself away from the window, from pressing her face to it like a kid at the shark tank.

Before I landed I came in low and took a pass over the garden. It was still there, undisturbed. The water was still running across the head of the marks at the top of the plot, and there was water running in half the furrows.

But. Even from two hundred feet I could see the weeds. They filled the unwatered marks and climbed and crowned the ridges of banked earth.

I jammed the throttle and pulled up and came around again higher. Banked left and aimed for midfield and landed long and taxied straight to Bangley’s house. Mixture, mags, master switch. Off. Shut down. The Beast had barely stopped rolling when I shoved open the sticky door and jumped out and ran to the house.

The front door was open, swinging slightly in the light wind.

Bangley! Bangley! Hey! You in here! BANGLEY!

I was surprised by the force of my shout. Sounded like a stranger.

Bounded down into the workshop. Oddly the big plate window looking to the mountains was intact but there was a string of bullet holes running diagonally up the wall over the hearth. The picture of the skiing family sat unmolested on the side table. Bangley’s tools lay where he left them, the barrel and receiver of a Sig Sauer .308, one of his favorite guns, suspended over the worktable in two vises.

Jesus.

Pops behind me.

Your buddy, he said. I knew from our first interview that he would be a badass, else how could a guy like you—

Stopped himself.

Never imagined this.

Bangley!

Desperate. For the first time I felt it claw over me, the desperation like a bad odor. Weird. Never know how you feel about someone until their house is torn open.

Flinched. Pops’s hand on my shoulder.

They caught him in here. He was working. It was during the day. Never expected a daytime assault like that. They came in from the front and he survived the first burst and he fought them off. He fought them to a retreat, then went upstairs where he could get a better view, better angle, and fought them from there. Probably only a couple of them had guns.

I bounded up the stairs. Heart gripped. What would I see? Had never been up there, never. The hallway lined with photos of the blonde family. Skiing, sailing, in a bamboo bungalow, palm trees, a yellow lab in a flowerfilled field. Saw all that at speed, taking the hall in running bounds on thick carpet, stopping once to orient myself toward the front of the house where the dormer would be. This room here. Shove open the partially closed door.

A child’s room, the boy’s. Poster of Linu Linu in a bikini over the bed, the bed covered in a quilt patterned with cowboys on bucking broncos. Butterflies pinned in frames on the wall and an electric guitar in the corner. Also slalom skis. Surfboard, a shortboard mounted on the angled ceiling, bright green graphic of the serpent in the apple tree and a naked Eve standing half turned away, her breast barely covered by the curls of her hair: SIN SURFBOARDS. A signed NASCAR poster. Car number 13.

Two hunting arrows, real ones, were stuck in the poster and the wall above it was torn with bullet holes.

Two tubs of Copenhagen and a Folgers coffee can spittoon on the floor by the bed. Night vision binocs and two Glocks hanging in their holsters from a hat stand. Jesus. It was the son’s room and it was Bangley’s. This is where he lived. Fucking A. Preserved like a room in one of those historic museums. I flashed on Bangley’s father, the one he had hated—and I thought, He never had a room like this I bet. He was healing himself or following some instinct of compensation or maybe something more weird, who knew, living in this museum, this play set of a room. And there was sunlight coming through the roof. A hole two feet across. No sign of an explosion, how did it get there? Oh. Almost stepped through an equal sized hole in the floor. The questions racing through my head and colliding in a NASCAR pileup. And the window burned. And sandbags stacked to the sill and up the sides. And no sign of Bangley which was at this point a good thing.

I stood in the middle of the room gulping air, catching my breath. Went to the windowless window and looked down at our encampment, our airport, and couldn’t help burping up a bubble of stricken laughter.

He could see just about everything: over the low berm across the runway where I slept with Jasper, right to the dumpster we had dragged away from my house, my house that was a decoy. He could see the porch and front door of that house, down along the line of rusted plane hulks, two sides of the FBO building, the doorway to my hangar. Not much he could not cover from here, which is of course why he had chosen it. Had never occurred to me, don’t know why. Or that when I beeped him in the night with an intruder alarm that he could scope the whole scene from here. He would have known how many were stacked behind the dumpster, what they were carrying, how many more were maybe hanging back, knew it all before he sauntered up to our berm in the dark, had probably already planned who he would shoot first and how. Why he never seemed surprised, always seemed way too relaxed to me. Fuck. And the sandbags. He could have probably made the shots with one of his sniper rifles right from here. Fucking Bangley. How far was it? Three hundred yards, maybe. Easy. For him. And I felt standing there rising up in me the revulsion and admiration and I have to say—what? Love, maybe, that I had grown to feel for that certain fucked up individual.

He was good at one thing, really good at it, and the rest he muddled through with unyielding orneriness. One strategy, I guess. And he backed me up. Unfailingly, unhesitant. And, what? Generously. I mean above and beyond, right? Never even let me know just how in hand he had the whole operation. And so when I left, he knew exactly the increase in threat, in danger. Could probably calibrate it to an exact and lethal degree, the way he would calibrate windage and elevation for one of his long shots from the tower, knew with chilling precision just how in danger he would be living here alone without me and Jasper, then just me, as a warning system. I mean the symbiosis, the extent to which I hadn’t even been aware. And that somehow made the surly and ultimately brief resistance to me leaving even more touching. The basket of grenades. Telling me I was family. Telling me in my own way to have a good one, to be safe, not for him, but for me.

And those other trips. The fishing and hunting which he knew were recreational more than anything, or psychological, understood R&R, and which put him at deadly risk. His never once objecting.

This was his room. Kinda touching. Kinda peculiar.

I turned. Pops in the doorway his gray eyes moving over the child’s objects, the guns.

That’s Bangley in a nutshell, I said.

Well.

Pops’s eyes traveling to the sandbagged window.

He didn’t die here.

Pops stepped across to the singed hole that used to be the dormer window. Scanned downward, across.

He was wounded here. Pops touched a shredded curtain.

Knew he couldn’t stay here, they would burn him out. Knew he had to move, hurt as he was. Had to move and attack. He was a good soldier.

Was?

Pops shrugged.

We both stood there. I couldn’t move. I felt frozen.

And then we heard the double shot and the scream.

And then we were running down the hall, down the stairs, through the selectively trashed ground floor, out into the painful sunlight.

The Beast was yards away on the ramp that served as taxiway for these houses on the north. Cima was crouched beside it under the wing trying to make herself as small as the wheel.

Pops stopped short and I bumped into him, almost knocked him to the ground.

Wait.

He shielded his eyes and scanned. She by the plane was crouched and pointing. Toward my hangar which was closed. I mean the part that was still intact. She was okay, had been the sound of the shots that flattened her.

And then Pops was moving.

It’s him, he said.

I overtook and passed him in three steps. Never know how you feel about someone until they die and come back. I shoved the hangar door, the one a person uses to walk through, the one cut into the main door which lifts, I hit it so hard I fell into my old digs. Stumbled across the big floor which I had covered in all manner of fine Persians from the other houses, stumbled so hard and headlong I wrenched my back, fuck, and hyperextended a knee, ow, pulled myself erect and stopped and stood like a tree and squinted getting used to the dimness.

There were two corrugated pale translucent panels in the roof that served as lowrent skylights and sort of lit the place with natural daylight when the doors were closed. And saw our couch, the Valdez, Jasper’s easy chair, the workbench, the stool, the counter in the back where I cooked, and the red linoleum table where we often had our gourmet meals. Nothing else. But heard. Slight scraping like a mouse in the wall. Metallic.

I had a tool chest, rolling drawers, massive red steel, six feet wide. It was beautiful. Took me and Bangley most of a morning to roll it over from the service center hangar, to get it past the frost heaves and potholes, bridging the bad places with planking. It had a place of honor middle of the north wall. Bangley called it Red Square. I need a ratcheting flat wrench, quarter inch, he’d say. Can you get off your butt and go to Red Square and find me one? Please. The scraping came from the chest and the chest was gapped away from the wall. Bangley’s steel toed work boot stuck out from behind it. Next to it, against the wall, his grenade launcher, the one he had been working on.

He was covered in dried blood. Looked like someone had dumped a bucket of it down the lower half of him. His eyes were swollen near shut, a white crust of dried mucus or vomit on the side of his face that lay on his arm. His left leg was bent at a weird angle. He lay on his favorite assault rifle, the M4, and his bloody left hand lay over the trigger guard.

A croak guttered from his cracked lips. The words came in the faintest grit of a whisper.

Fuckin Hig.

That’s all. And his hand came up stiff as a claw and touched my beard.

Touch and go. For two weeks. More. If he died it would be from dehydration, blood loss. He didn’t. Tough old bastard. We knew that. Cima didn’t want to move him. Set him up on the couch. She set and splinted his leg which was shattered from a bullet in the thigh. She cleaned and sewed shut the hole in his left side which had broken a rib and missed his stomach. The hangar was hot in the afternoon but not too bad with the door up and the hole in the west wall. Took him four days to register my face again. For a few seconds. Lapsed into kind of a coma in between. She got water and Sprite into him with a turkey baster. On the sixth day he opened his eyes while she fed him and stared.

Mrs. Hig, he said.

She said she burst out laughing. Something about his expression, even that: the facial expression of a man half dead. She said it was like a challenge, daring her to deny it, and not devoid of self awareness, something like humor.

Doctor Hig to you, she said. She told me he held her eyes for a significant moment, nodded barely, and went back to sleep.

Pops got less tense by the day. I took him up with me in the Beast and flew the circuit. Pointed out the landmarks like a tour guide. Found him a headset and explained as we went. The tower, the river, the distances, which he could see. The high cutbank which formed our moat, the only decent ford across it, the berm. The thirty mile radius to clear the roads, the families.

When we flew over they ran from the garden, the houses, the sheds, a tattered and ragamuffin welcome, waving. The kids jumped up and down. I counted the children: seven. One less, not sure who. Circled, waved held out a finger. I’ll be back.

Cima said Bangley was essentially ICU, needed someone monitoring him 24/7. We took turns. Something about her. Something over the week had grown and flowered, something hibernating in the canyon had come out into the sunlight and liked what it saw. Hard to explain.

In the role of doctor, no doubt there was expertise, an easy competence that needed no thought, a return to a hard won usefulness that made her to me seem bigger. I don’t know, taller, broader, a planet with more gravity than it had before. That was part of it. Watch anyone enter their arena of real mastery and you see it, the growing bigger than themselves. Love that. But it was something more too. As if the arrival at this half ravaged airfield on the plains, as alien as it was from anyplace she had lived before—New York, certainly, the mountains and mesas of her upbringing—as if it were an arrival she had been preparing for. For a long time without knowing it. Maybe. I don’t know. Seemed that way to me. As if part of her relaxed, as if there were a shucking of some old skin. A husk of herself that had been a barrier I hadn’t even been aware of. And in the sloughing off, she opened and flowered. Corny, huh? Not really. Magical. I mean to watch a person let go of something and flower.

I wouldn’t know what it is she let go of.

I loved to watch her sitting on the stool which I cut down to couch height, watch her lean over Bangley and talk to him softly, not like doctor to patient, or saintly minister, but with respect, with humor, like two friends. I loved to watch her check the splint, rewrap bandages, her movements more assured even than when she tended the garden with me—the difference between a half grudging second nature and the assurance of pride, of skill hard won and tempered. I loved to watch her push the dark curls out of her face, tie them back with a string or stretch her long arms and wander out into the blaze of summer sun and walk across the ramp to where the lambs were tethered inside a fence Pops had built in the shade of a globe willow. I loved to watch her undress and dive into the pond by the river and stand as she stood in the spray that first evening and beckon me in. She was simply the most beautiful being Big Hig had ever seen.

We slept in the open on the ground where I had always slept. With Jasper. But we made a willow screen, and we opened two of the flannel sleeping bags and spread them on a double mattress we hauled out of my house, the one with the porch, and I slept as I never had, not since. We slept often holding each other in a tangle of arms and legs which I had never been able to do, not with anyone. I woke in the middle of the night as I used to do and propped my head on my arms and watched the stars and counted constellations and made up others, but now I did it with the pressure of her elbow in my cheek—move it gently over—her hair in my mouth, her thigh over mine and with a sense of having been spared and having been blessed.

Still, some nights I grieved. I grieved as much at what I knew must be the fleeting nature of my present happiness as any loss, any past. We lived on some edge, if we ever lived on a rolling plain. Who knew what attack, what illness. That doubleness again. Like flying: the stillness and speed, serenity and danger. The way we could gobble up space in the Beast and seem to barely move, that sense of being in a painting.

We made love as if the whole thing were new somehow. Maybe because we had to do it so gently, so slowly. Sometimes she moved onto me and took me ever so gently inside and straddled me and we lay still so still the stars moved behind her and we moved infinitesimally and it was somehow like a conversation and it filled me with a happiness, a welling joy I can’t come close to reckoning.

Pops took a house next to Bangley’s, took an upstairs room with a view down the airfield, ever the tactician, the two like peas in a pod in some way. And sandbagged the one window and introduced himself to Bangley one morning and asked deferentially if he could borrow one of Bangley’s rifles, the Sig Sauer. Bangley was well enough by then, it was the tenth or eleventh day, well enough to sit up on the couch and look Pops over, to speak through his sewed up lip.

The other old guy, Bangley croaked. That was the first thing he said.

Pops cracked a half grin and it went straight across, and I thought Fuckin A, they almost smile the same. Bangley’s hands were bandaged and Pops reached over and touched his forearm. The gesture was touching and respectful.

That was a fight you put up.

Bangley looked at him steadily out of those eyes that could fragment, go kaleidoscopic. Didn’t say anything.

Ten or twelve huh? Maybe three armed.

Fourteen, Bangley rasped. Fourteen and four.

Pops nodded.

What went through the roof?

Rock. Or some damn thing. Had a goddamn light cannon.

They picked up their dead.

Bangley made his best simulacrum of a shrug.

I guess, he croaked. After a silence he said, They bunched once.

His throat caught and he cleared it.

Thought I was dead. In the house. I hit them with the grenade launcher. Took two more on the way here. That was enough. For them.

Bangley studied what he must have been surmising was his new friend.

Who were you with? he said finally.

Navy SEALs, Pops said. Afghanistan. Other places.

Bangley nodded, barely.

Dressed like goddamn Mongols. Six of them female. Had bows. Knew how …

He trailed off, his eyes turning, coalescing around some memory. The slightest tremor running through his body.

Pops waited. If anyone knew.

I wondered, he said finally. I took the house just to the northeast. Wondered if I could borrow that Sig for a while. While you’re in the hospital.

Bangley took a while to refocus. When he did he half nodded. That your daughter? Was his answer.

I took her to see the families. She wanted to go as soon as I landed with Pops. She took her medic bag. We landed on the drive and they came from everywhere, some running, some barely able to walk, mustered like some ragtag company along their quarantine line in the yard. We got out and I watched their expressions change as Cima approached. The dark ringed eyes widened in surprise, the lantern jaws fell open, the little ones like curious and half frightened deer, the heads coming forward. If they’d had swiveling ears they would have swiveled, the looks back to their mothers, the excitement.

Cima stepped right across the DMZ, and as one they fell back half a step, almost cringing, and opened a cove of space before her. She held up a long, strong, bruised hand.

It’s okay. I’m a doctor.

As if that explained anything. She smiled. Realized how absurd and archaic.

Hi, I’m Cima.

It may have been her bruises, a subtle sense of frailty, of having survived a terrible sickness. I watched their faces. A few waved, nodded to me, smiled, but. They were studying her with a fascination, a curiosity that almost overcame fear, some kindred welcoming. Of a being maybe that was somehow like them, they weren’t sure how. And different, too, different enough to kindle a fierce wonder. Well. They were Mennonites. A visitation was in their ken. And I thought I was the descending angel. I stood there in the yard for the first time ever not knowing what to do with my big hands, feeling like chopped liver and laughing in surprised and uncomfortable guffs.

And. She was a doctor. But.

Cima—I called.

She half turned.

They—

They. Of course she knew they were contagious. We had talked about it minutes before.

She held up a hand, a gesture of All Okay, and also a little of dismissal, and I had to laugh again. How times change. They had closed the cove around her into a circle and I knew that she had already seduced them or won them, that they loved her as I had loved her, I knew from the first moments.

The children reached out, clung to her skirt, one little girl, I think her name was Lily, Lily held her leg like a bear cub hugs a tree.

Hi! I heard Cima say. Hi. You are pretty. What’s your name? And you? And this handsome little guy.

The wonder of being touched by a stranger. No longer untouchable.

I was worried but. Almost worth whatever would come just to see that scene.

She set up in a room in the old farmhouse what would have then been quaintly called the parlor, and she examined them all. She put on latex gloves. I could see them on her hands as she opened the door to the kitchen and called in the next. Gently. Must have had a stash in her bag. She sewed up bad cuts, dressed wounds, called for buckets of warm water. She counseled a young woman six or seven months pregnant. Consoled, I knew, an older man whose weeping could be heard from outside the screen kitchen door. She told me it was okay for me to come across, to mingle, it was a misperception. Like Hep C, she said. Like HIV used to be. Fluid transfer, blood. Otherwise—

The misperception that had saved their lives. The big signs along the fences at the edge of their fields THE BLOOD. The terror that evoked. The truth of it for anyone with a pair of binoculars to see: the wasted figures bent as if into a stiff wind, the exhausted movements, the hollow eyes. Kept them away, all attackers, preserved their lives as it killed them.

We flew back in silence despite the good headsets.

That night we lay out by the berm, lay close together. Both on our backs, both studying reefs of luminous clouds that tore off from banks over the mountains. They were rinsed by a half moon, and shuddered from within with heat lightning. I watched them fly over and hoped a big rain would send us running into the hangar to be Bangley’s roommates. The country could use some rain. She said There were studies at the end. A few convincing reports.

On the blood?

Mm hm.

I waited.

They suggested that the onset of the autoimmune disease was speeded by a breakdown in the body’s ability to make its own vitamin D. Really a curious mechanism. Like AIDS with T cells. I mean if there is any known analog.

She paused, watched the clouds.

I love it when you talk like that.

She elbowed my ear.

There was no evidence that the converse is true. Hadn’t gotten that far yet. All so new.

That vitamin D could slow the process?

Yes.

Maybe we’ll have to make a run to Walmart.

She was quiet. We watched the clouds. They tore off but never thickened. Not over us. The rain, if there was rain, stayed on the peaks.

Hey, I murmured, wanna hear my favorite poem? It was written in the ninth century, in China.

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

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

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

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

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

Not dreaming, no.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Will I Be Home?

When will I be home? I don’t know.

In the mountains, in the rainy night,

The Autumn lake is flooded.

Someday we will be back together again.

We will sit in the candlelight by the West window.

And I will tell you how I remembered you

Tonight on the stormy mountain.