[Dinoysus]

CHAPTER III

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

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

I turned the scope upcanyon to where the creek spilled over the wall in a twenty foot falls. The top of the hole completely boxed off by this cliff. And two sides soaring. Pretty neat spot. A length of dead pine was propped against the rock beside the waterfall, limbs stubbed in a crude ladder. Okay. If they went that way in flight they didnt pull up and hide the ladder, maybe only because it was too heavy or they didnt have time.

I was lying at the very rim, scrunched between two rocks looking straight down. Here my cliff was about a hundred feet high, maybe less. I was wedged tight and had to slide the holstered Glock around to my back so it wouldnt scrape.

Think like Bangley. Thats what you need to do. Bangleys voice, I can hear it:

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

Yeah but what if theres more of them? Or if hes got more than the shotgun?

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

Huh.

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

Yeah, two.

Hig?

Yeah?

What are you doing here?

Silence.

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

Silence.

You cant form a plan unless you got a mission. You cant have a mission if you dont know what the fuck you want. First rule. Have a clear mission, have an exit strategy.

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

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

The canyon darkened and I shivered. A cloud, a swollen cumulus tugged its shadow across the cut. Bearing away the last chill of a long winter. The shadow smelled like ponderosas. It passed over and the sun on the arms of my jacket smoothed out the goosebumps. It was comfortable snugged like this in the rocks. I could hear the buzz of a deerfly but it didnt bother me. In the moment I realized I could lay my head on my suntoasted arms and go to sleep no problem. My nose was inches from the ground. I watched an ant climb the stem of a small purple aster. Smelled good here. Like flinty dirt and new grass, mesquite.

Hig!

Uh, yeah. What?

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

Huh.

Fuck. Hadnt thought of that. I blew out, nearly whistled. What is up with you? Are you completely out of it? Have you so totally lost your edge?

Did you ever have an edge?

Hig!

Uh what?

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

Why?

Because you dont know what the fuck to do! I dont mean you wouldnt know what to do if you had a purpose. Ive seen you, Hig. When you have a purpose like getting away from nine marauding motherfuckers and dusting their ass youre pretty goddamn good Hig on wheels. But you dont have a clue what youre doing here. Youre acting like a goddamn lost puppy. One look at a tall girl who maybe doesnt have the sickness and youre goddamn gaga.

Thats not it.

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

Bad enough to risk it all for Something Known is what youre saying.

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

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

Toast.

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

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

Blinked. Stone dust in my eyes. Right side of my face now stinging too. Hand to temple. No blood this time. Fucking Gramps. Thats twice. Old bastard had my head bracketed. If I wasnt more goddamn careful the next shot would be dead center.

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

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

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

Why was I so giddy? Somehow the pickle I was in made me very glad. I mean, it wasnt a pickle. I could walk away. But. I had an image of a white rag tied at the end of a stick stuck over the edge of that cliff. Waving it like some Hollywood cliché. No one ever tried that with us back at the airport because A) it was always night, and B) we, mostly Bangley, shot them dead before they knew what was happening. If someone had tried that back there, then what? Never negotiate. Bangley would have gained maximum tactical advantage, called to them, Okay come out in peace and then he wouldve blown their heads off. Good old Bangley.

Yup, that was going to take some depth of faith and trust and even then it was a flip of a coin, and plus I didnt have anything white.

I scrambled back a bit, stood up, stretched. Refreshed almost like Id had a nap. Then I trotted back to the Beast. I kept a stack of Xerox paper in the back seat pocket and a couple of crayons. Also a few palm sized stones and rubber bands. This so if I needed to drop a note mostly to the families I could. But a couple of times I dropped notes on wanderers camped out on the roads too close to the airport who didnt seem to understand my catchy NorthSouthEastWest song: Turn back north or die etc. Nor a stick of dynamite. These messages, the ones wrapped around the stones and dropped from the Beast, were very succinct and graphic and they always worked. Power of the pen. I was always very proud of myself when I crafted four lines that got a refractory band of pirates to pack up and scurry back up a road. I picked up half a dozen sheets and a black crayon and gathered up Jaspers quilt and trotted back across the park.

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

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

Well. Lets see how this goes over before I waste any more sheets.

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

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

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

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

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

Then silence. Quizzical. Thats what it felt like.

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

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

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

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

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

Why didnt I just shout down there? Well, conversations can get so crosswise so quick. What Ive found. First time I met Melissa was in a coffee shop and I was too shy to speak so I wooed her with a note. Works. One wrong tone of voice and thats it. Nah, this was better. Plus the creek was pouring, plus wind, plus there was no way on earth I was going to stick my mouth over that edge.

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

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

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

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

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

They werent going anywhere, neither was I.

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

I had nothing against golf.

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

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

Okay. I had an idea.

I walked back to the Beast got another stack of paper. Had all the time in the world: none of us seemed to be going anywhere. Unless they bolted for the tree ladder which they wouldnt as I could pot them as easy as the German officers in that awful Hemingway vignette that I loved. It was absolutely topping. They tried to get over it, and we potted them from forty yards. They rushed it, and officers came out alone and worked on it. It was an absolutely perfect obstacle. I mean if thats what I had been here to do.

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

I-COULD-BLOW-YOU-TO-SMITHER-EENS-BUT-I-WONTPEACE

Lucky I had half a ream of paper.

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

I threw it well upstream into what in my minds eye I saw as the top of the meadowwell away from the cows and the cobwebbed sonofabitch and his girl.

The explosion was deeply satisfying. Thank you Bangley. I had the other pages ready and while they were still rattled and pinching their limbs to see if they werent dead I pushed them out:

SEE?-NEXT-ONE-MIGHT-HURT

Long pause.

DONT-MAKE-ME-RUN-OUT-OF-PAPER
Pause.

STAND-UP

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

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

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

Breathe Hig. Say 10-4. Ten four.

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

Hi!

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

Hi!

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

How should we do this? Yelling.

Silence.

Gramps! Relax! If I wanted to kill and rape and plunder youd be dead by now!

Pause while he took that in.

I forgive you! I yelled.

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

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

Sorry for scaring your cows!

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

Okay you can keep your guns. Im coming down.

Okay?

Okay?

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

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

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

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

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

[Dinoysus]

CHAPTER IV

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

That one, Higs actual first dateI was so nervous it was a
disaster. We went to see Avatar in 3D. I kept having to duck away
and pee. Every time I brought back more popcorn or candy. She
must have thought I was some sort of diabetic or bulimic or
something. I didnt kiss her at the end nor try and she was
clearly flushed and upset, and Ill never know if it was because
she thought I was a geek and couldnt wait to get rid of me orthis
only occurred to me months latermaybe she was as nervous as I and
kinda liked me but didnt know how to ask and felt rejected when I
left so abruptly. My first realization that someone else might be
anxious for my approval, that they could be scared of me. Before
the end of the world that was a profound insight. Now I pretty
much took it for granted: everybody was scared of me.

Which is a weird way to head out on a date. Poor Hig, poor
Frankenstein.
Not her. She smiled. She smiled.

Id charmed em hadnt I? Charmed em right out of Kill Mode. Right
out of their knickers. Hadnt I?

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

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

Like that.

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

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

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

Bangley:
I-told-you-Hig:-never-everfuck-you-know-damn-well-what.-R.I.P.

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

Did not want to die. Not now.

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

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

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

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

Huh.

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

Perfect hiding place. Them. I mean a perfect spot to ride out the
end. From here, upstream, youd never have a clue that the stream
would open up into such a wide deep hole, such a meadow. No
reason ever to come down here, to follow the water. It wasnt the easiest going and the old track above, the road Id landed on,
would take you more quickly north and east. To places where the
road crossed the little river without effort. From ground level
at the top you couldnt see the hole, the canyon, at all til you
were right on it, right on the edge. And I bet that the way up
from downstream was beset by waterfalls and cliffs. It was
perfect. A hideout. Outlaws of old would covet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Up.

Huh?

Up. Back out. Touch that rifle youre a dead man.

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

Hands on ground. Back out. Crawl.

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

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

Roll over.

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

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

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

Over again. Roll over.

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

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

Shut up.

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

Didnt say that, didnt say anything.

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

You shoulda kept on. Nobody bothers us here.

I did, I can tell.
Shut up.

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

Now stand.

Didnt even give me a chance. One jerk hard on the rope yanked me
to my feet, about ripped out my shoulders.

Walk.

I walked. And.

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

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

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

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

Shes very good. I taught her. You screw up just a little, you
die.

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

Climb down.

One handed? Im afraid of heights.

Which was true. Flying is different.

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

Use two hands.

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



My name is Hig.

I was born in the Year of the Rat.

I have no serial number but my pilots license number is 135-271.

I am an Aquarius.

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

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

Jasper was my dog.

No kids. My wife was pregnant.

My favorite books are: Shane. Infinite Jest.

I can cook. Pretty well for a guy.

Profession: contractor. I dont like it. I hated it. I should have
been a high school English teacher or something. A pet groomer. I
am free of disease, as far as I know I am healthy. I visit
families with the blood sickness about twice a month.

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

Maybe it wasnt my favorite poem before before but it is now.

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

May I have some water?



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

My right jacket pocket.

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

Three points.

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

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

Sunll be out of your eyes in twenty minutes.

She stood stock still in front, still backlit. She was tall. I
couldnt make out her face. Could feel the bore of her stare
though.

Does she talk?

Whoops. Minus three. Back to zero. Thats where you like to be.
Thats what Im getting.

I like to travel light.

He nodded barely.

Thats good. The dip. Been a while. I dont give a shit how you
like to travel. You could be carrying around a dining room set
for all I care. Looked around. We could use one.

If I say anything youre gonna dock me points right? I mean
unprompted. Right?

He nodded. Minus one.

And then I lose my frequent flyer opportunities Im guessing.

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

Suddenly I wasnt having any fun. I heard the thudding of the
waterfall, rhythmic like a tribal drum, heard one of the sheep
bleat and thats exactly how I felt. Plaintive and kind of
traumatized.

I looked at him.

You know what?

I said that.

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

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

I lost my dog a week ago. Jasper. I dont need you or your shit. I
got nothing. Go ahead, subtract twenty fucking points, shoot me
dead. Ill be fucking glad. Go ahead.

I could taste the salt of my tears.

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

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


•

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

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

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

I really didnt give a shit what this old bastard did to me.
Nothing to lose is so empty, so light, that the sand you crumble
to at last blows away in a gust, so insubstantial its carried
upwards to shirr into the sandstorm of the stars. Thats where we
all get to. The rest is just wearing thin waiting for wind.

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

Walked back.

Im leaving. Back up that fucking tree. Pretty clear you prefer
your own company.

I looked at her.

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

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

I spit.

Shoot me in the back on the way up and like I said Im not sure
you wouldnt be doing me a favor.

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

Ill need my Glock, my rifle. You keep the grenades. Housewarming.

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

Thanks. Thanks for kicking me in the ass.

I hauled off and slugged him.

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

You didnt have to kick me in the ass. Or play executioner. I wouldve gone anywhere you told me.

Who was I to talk?

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



You, You, Hey.

What?

Higs, right? Thats what you said.

Hig.

Hig. You want some lunch?

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

Lunch? Do people still eat lunch.

We do.

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

He really your dad?

Yes. On my fathers side.

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

He may not want to have lunch with me.

I didnt invite him.

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

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

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

Hig? Yes? Bangleys voice again, disembodied. I could imagine his
rough laugh if he knew he was kinda my superego. Which I couldnt
get rid of, just like a bad pop song. The girl is inviting you to lunch. She feels bad you almost pissed your pants. Ha! Be polite.

Okay.

Okay I said.

Cimarron. She held out her hand.

Everybody calls me

She stopped, looked around the canyon, smiled.

Cima.



Shepherds pie with butter. Well salted. Ground beef. I thought I
was going to die. Pops was right, the sun traveled over the rim
of the canyon and we ate at the plank table in the shade. Close
enough to the creek: a pleasant sift. It mixed with the breeze
which also sounded like rushing water when it shirred the tops of
the cottonwoods. Butter. Melting in glops over the mashed potato,
puddling. Who wouldve thought something so unresistant and pale
could mesmerize a man? She kept bringing it, I kept eating it. A
steel pitcher of milk chilled in the creek which I emptied twice.
Holy shit. Hig had you climbed that stupid tree and flown away or
even been shot in the back you wouldve missed the meal of your
life. I was so enchanted with the food I didnt even notice if Pops was giving me the Wolf Eye or Stink Eye or Shark Eye or
whatever kind of eye you give to somebody who has just raised a
welt on your face and was now eating your provisions nonstop.

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

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

Bangley and I ate together often, but it was different cant say
how: it was like feeding time in a zoo of our own making. This
was different. I was free to leave. They were free to disinvite
me. The sense of privilege.

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

Dont get out much Pops said. You.

I stopped chewing.

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

Where do you live?

Denver. North of there.

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

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

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

Your family? she said.

I nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

You defended it, he said, scanning my face.

I nodded.

With help.

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

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

Bangley? He grunted. He knew what he was about old Bangley. Didnt
he?

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

He brought you along. Kinda trained you up. Set a perimeter didnt
he? He had no problem killing anything that crossed it. Young,
old, men, women. But you did.

But you got over it.

Dad.

Ninety nine point whatever. Whats left? Point whatever. One out
of two hundred? Three hundred? Weve seen what that is. Its not
usually pretty is it? Is it Higs?

Hig.

Big Hig.

I stared at him.

Not pretty whats left, is it?

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

He spat a fleck of food off his tongue. Youre a hunter. Deer,
elk. Before.

Nodded. How?

He waved it away.

The way you hold your rifle. Way you move down the creek. Looking
at sign. Cant help yourself.

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

Never in the service though.

I stared at him.

Fact you dont like killing anybody. Not even a bull elk Id bet.
If there was one to kill. Not even a trout. If there was one. Too
bad. You love to fish too.

Who the fuck was this guy? How?

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

I stared.

But killing is something you can get used to. Isnt it, Hig?

No.

So you say.

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

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

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

He stood up, stretched. He was in his sixties, I guessed, but he
was long and lean and looked to be strung together with catgut.
He moved easily in his skin. A life bent to work which he loved,
was my guess if I were guessing. A rancher clearly, some sort of
soldier along the way. I was tempted to play hats My Line with
him, too, but it felt gauche. I mean I didnt need to get into a
one-up deal with this dude, into any kind of pissing match. Hed
just given me maybe the best meal of my life. Or she had.

He said, Thanks for lunch. Touched her shoulder. Hows the throat?

She smiled. Been better.

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

Youre not used to it. Youre going to make yourself sick. Youll
have wicked diarrhea at the least.

You a doctor as well as a chef?

Uh huh.

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

What kind of doctor?

Internist. Public health.

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

Epidemiology to tell the truth.

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

Where?

New York City.

Oh.

Fuck.

What happened to your throat?

He was mean but he didnt seem mean like that. But. He was the
only other person around. Unless they had attack sheep.

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

Biological resistance or sheer orneriness.

That too. Im sorry we scared you. You scared us.

Again she didnt defend him, didnt feel the need. She was squarely in his corner as it should be. Right?

We talked about it. Dad doesnt pull punches as you see.

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

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

Damn.

I thought, Maybe that wasnt a smile I saw on her lips. Through
the scope. Maybe that was the face you make when everything is
over. Over over.

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

You have a pact huh?

She nodded.

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

How close were you?

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

A hunch?

He said you were weak. He said, Lets play this out.

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

You all arent diplomatic in the least.

Seems like a world thats way past diplomacy.

Maybe. Bangley feels the same way. My partner.

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

Jesus.

Thats the world. That was the world we left. I nodded.

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

She touched her throat unconsciously. I nodded. She probably
would have handled me if it got to that. Dont take it hard, Hig.
Its kind of a compliment. They read you from a hundred yards.

Why didnt he kill me then? In the creek? Instead you all serve me
lunch.

I widened my eyes.

You all arent trying to fatten me up? I mean youve got that taste
for human flesh like a rogue shark?

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

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

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

Oh.

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



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

You dont mind if I take a nap do you? I dont know if I can stay
awake.

Its the milk probably. She stood and pointed farther under the
trees by the water. Theres a sort of hammock under there. Be my
guest.

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

I dreamt a house in a field that should have been my own, I mean
I was returning to a place I had built, the expectation of haven,
of a home that was to shelter everything I loved, and as I
approached across a field without a road I saw an addition built
on the side, the right side as I faced it, an annex bigger than
the house itself, and it had angles that were strange to me, to
my sense of thingsdisturbing dormers too high on the roof,
juttings where there shouldnt be, and I realized with a sinking
heart and growing sense of doom that someone that I would hate
lived inside my house and had some sort of squatters rights, some
rights vague to me now and bargained away in an awful negotiation
I could barely recall and that I could stop and stay there but
only in a capacity of confirmation: confirming this thing that
felt exactly like a nightmare: or I could pass on and relinquish
somehow everything I had loved, loved up to this excruciating
point, and I was standing in the field unable to make the
decision to go in or walk on and I woke up sobbing.

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

All the choices we cant see. Every moment.

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



When I opened my eyes she was working in the garden. I could see
her there through the trees along the creek crouching, probably
getting ahead of the weeds. He came through the brush gate
carrying two poles of fir, must have been long seasoned because
he carried them lightly. Light tufts of feathers blew out of the
trees, the parachutes of cottonwood seeds. Didnt float very well.
Closed my eyes heard the rhythmic sough of the saw like a raspy
animal breathing hard. Later heard the tunk, the crack of
splitting wood. A cottonwood seed landed on my eyelid.



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

We have one too, I said. A garden.

She nodded.

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


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

Do you have kids? I said.

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

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

I nodded. Go on.

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



She talked to me like that. I mostly listening. He worked. Passed
me without a word. I never offered to help. Something about his
look prohibitive. I hiked up to the Beast and got my sleeping
bag. The nights were clear and cool, full of stars, the stream of
stars framed by the rim of the canyon like the banks of a dark
river, dark but swimming with light. Through the leaves of the
big cottonwoods. I slept in the hammock with the leaves above me
a rustling roof. They moved the stars around and gave them voice.
The first night the hammock hurt my back but after that it didnt.
The third day I climbed the tree ladder with my rifle and brought
home a large buck. Dragged it down the creek and lowered it on a
rope off the rim of the waterfall and we ate the heart and liver
that night.

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



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

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

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

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

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

She looked up. We are fools, you know.

Oh fuck. One fucking thing I do know.



It hurts you? To snap the peas?

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

It does, doesnt it?

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

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

Dont, she said. Dont watch.



Once in passing she told me that she didnt expect to live past
fifty or fifty five. From what she knew of the damage to organs
caused by the fever. She also confessed that in an odd way she was happier here than shed ever been. Even with all the loss.
Happier being whatever that was. Than waiting.



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

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

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

Ha. Admit it: you dont have the slightest idea what you are
doing, you never ever did. With all the nets in the world, real
or unreal. You swam around in a flashing confused school
following the tail of the fish in front. Pretty much. Nibbling at
whatever passed, in whatever current you swam into.

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

What are you doing?

I dont know.

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



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

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

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

I shut the dream down, took the cup. He didnt look like he ever
slept. I mean none of his features ever blurred. They got sharper
in anger but they were always sharp.

In a few weeks if it doesnt rain, which it wont, itll be time to
go.

I sat up straighter.

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

He shook his head.

Youve been more than hospitable, I said seriously. I think Im
getting fat.

He didnt smile.

I dont mean you, I mean us. The three of us. You are going to fly us out of here.

I blinked. Lowered the cup to my lap.

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

Thats what I was thinking. I said, Why?

Drought.

I glanced at the burbling stream, the green meadow.

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

He drank from his own cup.

We knew wed have to bail. Probably this spring. We werent sure
where to go. And there is the fear of traveling without water. If
its drying up here, what is happening off the mesa?

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

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

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

You want to come with me?

Not a matter of want, Higs.

Rhymes with Big, I said. The old bastard.

He winced at me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whynt you dig a well?

He grimaced. Dont think I didnt try. Underneath this whole canyon
is ledge rock. Four feet down. Cant even dig a decent grave.



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

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

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

I dont have enough fuel to get back, I said.

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

Dont bullshit me, Higs.

Hig. Rhymes with Big if you forget.

It occurred to me too just then that maybe I better be a bit more
tactful. If I couldnt fly them out of here he might just shoot
me. Damn. I was starting to feel used. Loved just for my air
power. Like the United States before. First Bangley then this.
What if I had no plane? What if I were just Big Hig, just making
my way through the broken world offering what I could, some
kindness, some compassion, some technical knowhow but no plane.
Who are you kidding? Bang.

Ask the guys at the Coke truck.

What?

Sorry. Been so much alone I dont know sometimes when Im talking
to myself.

I turned toward the running stream and spat.

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

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

Higs, you are gonna fly us out of here. You fly us to a town, a
fortified compound, I dont give a shit, and Ill take care of
getting fuel.

I shivered. I bet he would.

Auto gas wont work anymore.

What?

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

He chewed the inside of his cheek. Hadnt spit once, I guess he
swallowed it.

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

It was hard to look at him. I didnt feel like a stone wall
anymore. I felt like a rabbit. Caught out in the open.

Whyd you come here? he said simply.

Didnt answer. Not defensive, not reticent, I just didnt know. Not
really.

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

My dog died, I said.

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

I didnt have another idea, I said.



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



Well go to Junction. Well check out what you wanted to check out.
The tower, the airport. Then well get some avgas. Then well fly
back to Bangley. And if he doesnt like that well convince him.

I dont know if I can take off with both of you. From that meadow.

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

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



No point in slaughtering the livestock and making more jerky. We
had what must have been twenty pounds from the venison Id shot
and we couldnt take any more weight. Probably couldnt take that.
Cima said the livestock, they would fend for themselves and God
willing there would be enough rain this season to make it
through.

She wanted to take two lambs, male and female.

They cant weigh more than twenty pounds apiece.

I tried to explain that a small plane was more like a kite than a
truck. I told her about learning from Dave Harner in Montana,
what he yelled at me the first few days as I tried to land the
172 at airports around the shores of Flathead Lake. As I came in
on final and the plane swerved and veered like a sick duck hed
yell Jeesus Hig! You drive a motorcycle? Yes! You drive a pickup?
Yes! Thought so! Well this aint either one! This is a bird!
Slight adjustments slight adjustments! Christ! That was
atrocious!

She laughed.

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

Remember him? Paul Bunyan?

Of course.

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

I get that.

Yeah. He fell in love right there. He went batso. It was almost
the same for me except that he was a natural, I wasnt.

Were you ever a natural? At anything?

I thought, At loss. At losing shit. Seems to be my mission in
life. Course I didnt say it, who am I to talk?

Fishing, I guess. Trout used to throw themselves at me. You?

She shook her head.



I spent some time at the Beast. Climbed the tree ladder, walked
back up the creek and out of the canyon. Summer caught me off
guard. I walked shade to shade in the sun, it was no longer
pleasant. Hot by midmorning. The water lower perceptibly by the
day. Creek bottom showing its ribs. Logs and debris propped on
the rocks, the rocks more prominent. Scared me. The stream was
dropping early and fast. It would dry up. Even the fish tolerant
of warmer water, even they would die. Carp and catfish. Crawfish.
Frogs.
The dry pine needles crackled and crunched beneath my boots.
Reflected the sun in the shadeless places so there was no relief
for the eyes in looking down. Two weeks now, something like it,
and the flowers were mostly gone. The fastest spring ever.

In the old cycles the drought would break, the monsoon would
come, the snows would sweep in, and the life would come back. How
was a mystery. To me. The trout, the cutthroat that had been here
longer than us, the leopard frogs and salamanders, somehow they
would return the next year. From where? Maybe in the gullets of
birds I dont know. Not now. Probably.

I climbed the switchbacking trail up through the archipelago, the
islands of shadow made by the ponderosas. Smelled the toasting
bark, the still moist ground drying out. Harried by the summer
buzz of a deerfly. At the top the cedars were dense. Thick and
gnarled in the trunks, twisting into the sunlight, cradling
boulders like ugly consoling arms, ever slowgrowing these had
never been cut. Some probably seedlings when Cortes was looking
at his men with a wild surmise. I walked across the open meadow,
patted the Beast on the nose.

Missed you.

Looked down the little park. Short. The piñon and juniper at the
end werent tall, twenty feet at the tallest, but pines set back
were forty feet high maybe. We could cut those.

If it was the middle of winter. The heat would make a big
difference. Cold air more dense, hot air cutting performance by a
shocking amount. Wed leave in the dark, just after, safe enough
to see but close to the coolest time.

Heres what I mean. I stuck my head inside, she smelled the same
always. Smelled Jasper, smelled what was probably still the 1950s
and pulled out the POH from the vinyl pocket behind my seat. Its
the Pilot Operating Handbook, the original from 1956. Thin little
sucker probably less than an eighth of an inch, eighty eight
pages with an illustration on the cover of the plane. In the back
are the performance tables. These are wonderful thingsliteral and
invaluable. What these are is some test pilot got into this very
model and took off again and again. From this altitude and this
one. At this air temp and that one. Technicians in white coats
and those thick framed black glasses recorded the data and
plotted the beautiful, simple, unhurried curves. They went home
to wives in beehives and drank Seagrams Seven on ice in faceted
tumblers. The test pilots, what did they do? They were veteran
fighter pilots from the war, World War II, who had firebombed
Japan and strafed aerodromes in Austria and settled into the new
suburbs like the characters James Dickey wrote about, and back in
the little cockpit at the Cessna test center in Wichita, with the
plane shuddering in the old familiar way of any prop plane, then
the former wing commander was like any lifetime equestrian who
swings onto any horse anywhere with that complex and simple
feeling of being home and freed from the constraints of the
mundane.

In the back of my slim owners manual were pages of these tables
and graphs. Takeoff and rollout distances. I flippedcarefullyI
always handled the POH like an ancient and priceless artifactto
the page titled Take-Off Data. Ran my finger across the airfield
elevations to seventy five hundred feet and down the columns of
air temps in Fahrenheit. Takeoff distance at empty weight to
clear a fifty foot obstacle at thirty two degrees with no
headwind was nine hundred and fifty feet. See? Dont ask me. Air
is less dense as it heats up. Then I did something I never do,
hadnt done since my private pilots license test: I took out the
certified weight and balance sheet I kept folded in a pocket in
the bulkhead by my knee. Every plane has one specific to the very
aircraft. Weights and moments. I pulled a sheet of clean Xerox
paper and worked out the problem. I put Pops in front at a
hundred eighty pounds and Cima in the rear at one twenty with a
bag of provisions weighing twenty. Five gallons of water at
forty. No lambs. The full gas cans were gone as Id put the fuel
in the tanks. I figured in the fuel, the guns, two rifles, the
shotgun, the handguns, four grenades. Period. Two quarts of oil.

I scratched a nub of pencil over the paper and worked the
numbers. Then I left the paperwork on my seat, left the door
open, there was no wind, and paced the track through the meadow.



One eighty one eighty one one eighty two. Counted my steps. Reminded me of counting the seconds waiting for Bangley in a
firefight. Skirted the ruts. Plowed grass with my shins. Eyed the
turkey vulture gyring to the north. And when I got to two hundred
and saw how much clearing there was ahead f me I knew. It wasnt
long enough. Six hundred forty feet at most. There was no way.

Lastly. I already knew but I double checked. I took a stout
wooden paint stir stick out of the same seat pocket. It was
ticked with a Sharpie at intervals along its length and marked 5
10 15 all the way up to 30. Gallons. I climbed up on the strut,
untwisted the fuel cap at the top of the wing on the wing tank
and lowered in the stick. Drew it out turned it away from full
sunlight and noted the fast vanishing and pungent wetness. Did it
to the other side.



The guys in the white coats. The fighter pilot in his flight
suit. With the wife in the beehive. Humming, tapping his fingers
on the yoke of the Cessna to Rock Around the Clock. In 1955. All
of it about to break open: the manic music, Hula Hoop, surf
girls, Elvis, all now from this distance like some crazed
compensationfor what? The Great Fear. Lurking. First time in
human history maybe since the Ark that they contemplated the Very
End. That some gross misunderstanding could buzz across the red
phones, some shaking finger come down on the red button and it
would all be over. All of it. That fast. In a ballooning of
mushrooming dust and fire, the most horrible deaths. What that must have done to the psyche. The vibrations suddenly set in
motion deeper than any tones before. Like a wind strong enough
for the first time to move the heaviest chimes, the plates of
rusted bronze hanging in the mountain passes. Listen: the deep
terrifying slow tones. Moving into the entrails, the spaces
between neurons, groaning of absolute death. What would you do?
Move your hips, invent rock n roll.

The men at the Cessna test center compiling those numbers, those
distances. Erecting them against the smallest accidents while the
gut fear of the Big One gripped their dreams. Is that how it was?
I dont know. I overdramatize. But given what has happened how can
you? Cant really overdo anything. There is no hyperbole anymore
just stark extinction mounting up. Nobody would believe it.

The test pilots were working in perfect conditions on smooth
tarmac. A soft field knocked off a percentage of performance, and
the rough track in this sage field was another story. We could
fill in the ruts, smooth it out as best we could, but.

I uncoiled the hose and siphoned the twelve extra gallons back
into the cans. We wouldnt need them to get to Junction and it
would save us seventy two pounds. Then I thought, Dont cut it too
close, and I climbed back on the strut and poured back what I
judged to be about two gallons. I left one full can in the sage
and emptied the other one out in the dirt and then nestled it,
the empty can, back into the Beast. Then I went fishing. I took
my rod case out of its bracket behind my seat and the light nylon daypack with flybox and tippet and walked back down into the
canyon.



My calculations showed that the best way to have any chance at
all of taking off, of clearing the trees, was to leave the old
man.

I could imagine how well that was gonna wash. I could imagine the
conversation. I could just about hear the snick of his big knife
clearing the plastic sheath, my own peep as the point of the
blade came to my throat. Dont bullshit me Higs! I told you not to
fucking bullshit me.

I caught five carp. Rolled a pheasant tail along the bottom and
yanked them out one after another. The peregrine glided along the
wall above and let herself fall, flaring just over the trees
above the creek. I think she was watching me, curious. Do
peregrines eat fish? The carp were skinny fish, long and thin and
I realized with a whomp of sadness that they were starving. The
shift in water temperatures was affecting them, too, or their
food. I unhooked them with special care, the care I had always
reserved for trout, and held them gently while they finned in my
cupped hand against the current, until their gills filled and the
undulations of their tail strengthened and they wriggled away. I
gave up, didnt feel like fishing anymore.

The trout are gone the elk the tigers the elephants the suckers.
If I wake up crying in the middle of the night and Im not saying
I do its because even the carp are gone.

I pictured the conversation. I can take your daughter, twenty
pounds of jerky but not you.

But. The light bulb went off. Hig, you had what they used to call
an epiphany. When discovering something, some intellectual
connection, had a value like gold. Eureka.

Id bring the weight and balance sheet, the pencil and worksheet,
the fragile POH with its disattached cover and its
incontrovertible tables and go through the numbers as if for the
first time and let everyone draw their own conclusions.

She had lunch on the table in the shade. Pitcher of cold milk,
salted meat, a salad of lambs quarter and new lettuce, green
onions. I sat down. Pops watched me. He followed me with his
eyes, watched me while he chewed. She ate. She moved easier
today, lighter. The bruises seemed to be fading, her mood
brighter. She ate slowly, breathed deep as if smelling the creek,
each new blossom.

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

No.

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

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

Yup.

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

I slid it over. I ate.



He was sharp. Whatever he did before on the ranch, in the
service, he didnt waste time. He took the pencil and went to
work. Didnt ask, Is this right? Is this how you do it? Been a
while nothing like that. A man without the habit of justifying
himself, making excuses. Didnt ever say, Higs check my math, will
you? Nope, the SOB looked once at the problem, began to multiply,
fill in the blanks work the equation. I saw him make a list down
the right side of the page of provisions, each with its weight
estimated. He worked it three different ways and each time I saw
him scratch two or three items off the list. Saw him reduce the water to three gallons. Scratch off the steel gas can.

Unh uh.

He looked up.

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

He nodded, restored it to the list.

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

No.

I interrupted him again. Pencil stopped, eyebrow raised.

Fuel stays.

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

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

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

You did it already didnt you?

I nodded.

I stay, she goes.

Nodded.

You already knew that.

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

Okay, he said.

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

I smiled at him, maybe the first time.

Thats why we need fourteen gallons, I said. One of the reasons.

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

We need fourteen because weve gotta land and take off again. Well
pick you up out on the highway. Wont be a problem. Theres a
decent straight stretch right at the bridge turnoff. All the
runway we want. Itll be no sweat.

He didnt let his face soften, nothing like that. Just that in his
stare in the winter of it, I thought I saw a slight thaw, a
reassessing.

You can walk out a day early and well pick you up at daybreak.

Okay, he said again and that was it.

[Dinoysus]

BOOK THREE

CHAPTER I

There was no hurry really. Plenty of water in the big rivers if we got stranded in Junction. Wed 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 Id had since.

Since Id 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 isnt 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 landbecause it
was a Strange Land now in every sense. Also, it was the plains,
not the mountainsthe 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 didnt 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 wasnt enough, it wasnt 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.

Whyd 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 werent 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 dont think that
was even legal but thats 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 didnt 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 wasnt sure if any of this was a
curse or a blessing. Anyway, I went to see Sykes. I couldnt 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 wasnt 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 couldnt seem
to articulate anything. He kept smiling at me. He said, You dont
have to thank anyone now, its certainly momentous. Deus ex
machina. Thats 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 couldve 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
calibr Eastern college was another example of the disconnect
between us. Eastern establishment and Western land based people.
We didnt want anybodys sympathy. I was so angry. Never been so
mad I dont 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,
didnt 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 didnt use Bo. You wrote exactly what you were feeling.

Yeah, but Ive often thought that the move with the most integrity
wouldve been to blow off Dartmouth for having that kind of
expectation, those values, and go to Northern State. I mean its
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 wasnt the college, it
was Mr. Sucks.

You know what I mean. He was right, after all. About the subject
that would snare them. I dont 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 couldnt say: I put a pillow over my wifes face at the end. That
I felt her struggle in the last seconds trying to push away the
death shed asked for. A reflex right? That I held tight and
leaned in and kept the promise Id just made. That was the right
decision. Wasnt it?

Could I say that we murdered a young boy in the middle of the
night? That we didnt 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 dont 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 Im 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 didnt I stay to be with my husband? My
mother had hers, she didnt need me as much he did. Well, he hadnt
contracted it yet. He was coughing a bit but we werent 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, mustve 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 didnt
want to reopen old wounds etc but now I was resolved. She had
brought it up. But then she was crying. I wouldve 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 Id 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. Youd 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 dont know. Perfect. My one dumb thought
was: How on earth did you frigging hide all that? In a mans too
large shirt? My eye must be out of practice! Thats 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 shell 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 Mans Curve. I blinked. I thought, She is nothing, not a
frigging thing like one of Bangleys posters. She is like a
million times more lovely. I didnt say, Sorry to surprise you, or
anything. I said, Shell tear it to pieces. I mean I yelled it
over the falls and then I turned around and fled.

Big Hig. Pretty cool in 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 shocktrying 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 mustve 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, Id buy a bow tag. In the dream we
werent 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.

Cimas 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. Ill 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
couldnt 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 didnt. 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 HeightsBrooklyn Heightsin one and in the East Village say in
another. I couldnt get enough of it. I wanted to go to Yankees gamesYanks not Metsand to Off Off Broadway and poetry slams and
get lost at the Met. Again. I went to every artists retrospective
there was. I could eat Sabretts until I was sick.

Sabretts?

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 childrens books and phony watches. I thought, When we
have kids well 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 couldnt 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 Ive heard.

Silence.

I didnt 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. Thats 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.

Thats what the press reported. Mutation of a superbug, one of the
ones theyd 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 thats 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 knowshe 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 seeHig! Her
nipples against the thin fabric of her shirt. My god. Hig. You
havent heard any news, real news in almost a decade. Its 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 dont 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. Wite 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 youd 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.

Thats all. Then she fell asleep.

She was wearing the mans 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 legyou 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 anothers
breathing. That simple. Jasper did that. Past that dont even go
there. That was all she wanted or she wouldve 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, Im not. Hes 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. Its like one of those desert island jokes. The one
about the hat. Be weirder if it didnt happen, right, Hig?

Not really. Doesnt feel like that. Feels frigging weird. Not weird, tumultuous. Momentous. Well, its probably nothing.
Probably doesnt 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. Thats all.
Subtle but loud. I cant 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. Its 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 Id been waiting
most of the night without sleeping. Just waiting. Wondering what
I would do, what she would. She lifted the quilt which Id 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 werent. 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 wed
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, youre acting squirrely. More squirrely than usual.

He didnt 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 hed slugged me. I held the end of the
rope as if I werent sure why, as if it were the tail of some
beast I wasnt 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 dont 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 hadnt killed me yet. Or that he
was standing there with dirt all over his face and not mad. Or
just that I hadnt 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 its 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 summers 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 Id settled in with the flannel bag beneath me
on the hammock sleeping only in my shirt. She was wearing a long
mans 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. Theall of her.

Jesus Christ, Hig, dont turn away, dont close your eyes. Breathe,
man! You are supposed to look, dumbass! Its not impolite. If you
dont look you will insult her. Who the fuck do you think this is
for, this is for you! She wasnt, 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. Dont twitch a muscle or it will vanish.

She didnt 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 cant 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. Its probably been
a long time. Im 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 dont 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 its been a while you are halting, thinking through everything, taking each item one at a time, making sure. So you dont have a
wreck.

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

A fifteen year old wouldnt say that.

Yeah. I was thinking more like a pilot. A rusty pilot with a
bunch of checklists. So we wont 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 its 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.

Its okay, okay. Here. Im 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, dont 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 Im 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,
thats 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 dont 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 sheI 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. Its mine, she insisted. My ritual. Dont 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
youve 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 couldnt 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. Didnt say a word. She lifted the steaming kettle
off a stump, poured it, handed me my mug without looking at me.

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

Ill 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. Ill 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 couldve 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.

Im going to scout the highway, he said. I dont want to walk out
there on the big day and find a beat up useless piece of road.

That made sense. We didnt have enough fuel to circle while he
filled and packed some potholes.

He took a step, then glanced back at me.

Everybodys 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.

Thats gonna bruise, she said. No modulation.

Cima. Jesus. Im sorry.

I stood rooted to the dirt. Sheer panic. Couldnt 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 fires 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 its 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 couldnt 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 dont 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 didnt make love again for days. Five.
Cant pretend I didnt count. And when we did, when we were about
toI 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 losswhen 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 Tomasthe dream Tomas, bleedingand 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
Id known.

She gave my wanger a consolatory double squeeze which made me
feel worse. Sighed heavilyI read Disappointmentand 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 dreadthe dread of separateness when love was
so nearit 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 cant rewrite it. It sucks. Cant make it
better. I cant, I cant 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 dont 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, thats 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.

[Dinoysus]

CHAPTER 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 fathers 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,
Cimas pack, mine, the hose and hand pump.

How much does a lamb weigh?

The littl 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?

Lets 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?

Its 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
paintershe 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. Havent 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. Its
like a whole auditorium standing for an ovation. Its 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 Take off list.

Had to yell. Didnt carry an extra headset with me anymore. What
would have been the point? Jasper didnt 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 fellall while the motor roared, the plane
shivered, all heading for the critical moment of takeoff. I loved this. It was thisthe 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 dont know why I yelled that. It might have been the last thing
I said in this life. I wasnt 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 Noahs 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 Dont 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 mustve 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.

Were alive see? Nice work.

Were 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. Noahs Ark, he said lancing 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 wont say wrong because how it
registered wasnt 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 Im 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
didnt 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 didnt 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 its 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 isnt all its cracked up to be: how many times in the
last few years I thought about bitter fruit, how when what you
are right about iswell you cant even look at it.

But it wasnt 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
frequencyit was still there in my GPSand 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 wasnt crystal clear but it was. It was! A womans 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. Cant 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 wasnt 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 milesout, 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 dissonancethe burned
out city at the end of the known world, and the living, pulsing
light, the voice of the controller transmitting everyday
commandsfinally caught my attention and the hair on the back of
my neck stood up. Cant tell you why except to say that it was odd
to say the least: that they had power. Or: why shouldnt they? We
had it at Erie. More and more airports had been supplementing
with solar and wind. Or that the beacon shouldnt be on in
daylight in clear, VFR conditions. Dont 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. Didnt 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
airportthe tied down craft battered by weather, eventually
pulling loose and tumbling, but. Thats 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. Cant say I thought anything, nothing reasoned,
articulated, there wasnt 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 dont have much choice, I yelled. Were 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. Im 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 didnt sound like Aunt Bee now. It sounded frayed
and hard. Then laughter. Laughter like hanging metal scraping
over pavement, loud and sustained. Congratulations. Youre the
first.

I didnt 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 couldnt see
the top of the tower and they couldnt 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. Hadnt unbuckled. I didnt 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.

Its 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 doesnt look like me or your dad, plug
em. Its 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 its a good idea to talk
to your enemy. Not usually. Bangley had taught me thatthe 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?

Were 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. Its 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.

Thered be survivors. Some maybe not badly injured. And sometimes
they didnt burn. Not all the way, sometimes not at all. Thered 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 hm blindly, hugged him to me.

Fuck. Losing my edge, Hig. Thanks.

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

Thats 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 Im 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 were 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 Imwhat?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 Popss .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, thats 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, Id 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 portsa 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.

Thisll be a little better for what were doing.

Reflex: he tugged back the charging handle, checked that a shell
was chambered, and went into commando mode. Not as if he hadnt
before. Couldnt wait for him to meet Bangley. Thats 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.

Youre 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, mustve 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
bastards 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 vets 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 cornerthere was no corner it was all corners,
octagonalon 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 Howd you spring the cable.

Wha? He gurgled up a gobbet of blood.

The cable. Howd you spring it?

Bucko

Backhoe?

Gramps vomited affirmative.

Fuel? Wheres 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 mans 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 didnt 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 retirees 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 roomwhere 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 typescylinders, props, skinsfrom every corner of the country. The rest of the walls were covered with shelves.
On the shelves, alternating, were pairs of spectaclessunglasses,
reading glasses, bifocals, everythingand crudely stuffed birds of
every type. They were lumpy, dullcolored birds stuffed with some
filler without benefit of armatures, eyes sewed shut without
skillowls, bluebirds, magpies, sparrows, ducks. And bird guides:
antique Petersen, Golden, National Geo, Sibleys. Seemed every one
that had ever been published in the last century.

Hobbies still going strong, Pops said. Thats 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 oclock. 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. Ive seen osprey up on Jaspers 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: Helgas 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 well 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 wed 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. Im not going anywhere, Hig,
she said. Where would I go?

Lots of places, I thought but I didnt 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
theyd 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 hadnt 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 didnt 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. Youre missing a tooth. You look like a
homeless hockey player.



Didnt 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, thats 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 Moms 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 plainlike disoriented
sentinels, our perimeter, our margin of safety, and then I could
see the tower, the one wed built together. Bangleys sniper deck,
the porch where he fired his stash of mortarsand then I was over
the place and didnt 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 ribs arch or skull. And I felt a surge ofwhat?
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.

[Dinoysus]

CHAPTER III


Bangleys house, a hundred yards north, the one with his gunsmith
shop in the sunken living room and the photo of the blonde family
skiingit 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 couldnt
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 Bangleys 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.
Bangleys 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. Popss 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 childs room, the boys. 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 sons room and
it was Bangleys. This is where he lived. Fucking A. Preserved
like a room in one of those historic museums. I flashed on
Bangleys father, the one he had hatedand 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 couldnt 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, dont 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 saywhat? 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 hadnt 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 faily. 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
childs objects, the guns.

Thats Bangley in a nutshell, I said.

Well.

Popss eyes traveling to the sandbagged window.

He didnt 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 couldnt 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 couldnt 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.

Its 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, Jaspers 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, hed
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. Bangleys 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.

Thats 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 didnt. Tough old bastard. We knew
that. Cima didnt 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. Ill 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 dont 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 beforeNew York, certainly, the mountains and mesas of her
upbringingas if it were an arrival she had been preparing for.
For a long time without knowing it. Maybe. I dont 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 hadnt 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 wouldnt 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 methe 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 ech 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 cheekmove it gently overher 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 cant come close to
reckoning.

Pops took a house next to Bangleys, 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 Bangleys 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. Bangleys 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. Didnt 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
youre 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
theyd 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.

Its okay. Im a doctor.

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

Hi, Im 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
werent 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.

CimaI 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. Whats 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 Bangleys 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 bodys 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. Hadnt gotten
that far yet. All so new.

That vitamin D could slow the process?

Yes.

Maybe well 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
twtch 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
couldnt stay away from them.

I was working in the garden. She was away. Bangley was playing
chess with Pops. Thats 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.
Bangleys 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 didnt 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 hadnt 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
couldnt 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 knowOrion, Taurus, Pleiades, the
Chariotwe make them up. Mine are almost always animals, hers
almost always foodthe 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 dont 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.