by Peter Heller
Little while ago?
Three years.
His grin was straight across. He rubbed the stubble on his cheek and I could hear it rasping from across the room.
Three years.
He turned halfway back to look out the window west in the direction of Junction as if trying to gauge in spacetime the relationship between the distances and the passage of seasons. For just a second, for the first time, I saw him as a man getting old. He turned back.
Goddamn Hig. You weren’t very good about returning phone calls were you?
I smiled at him.
Hig?
Yeah?
You having a midlife crisis?
Just behind him to the left on a wall panel beside the big window was a famous Czech model holding a short, wicked looking machine gun, something like an Uzi. She was weighting her left leg, her right hip cocked outward, and all the geometries led the eye from her green gaze to her mound which coyly peaked out of a very spare triangle of dark hair which could not hide the short line, the path to the promised land. It killed me. Breathing immediately constricted. It occurred to me that Bangley was a tactician to the bone. He read the layout of any situation instantly, and found the spring that wound the clock, the vulnerable entry. Was I having a midlife crisis?
Don’t really believe in em, I said. Our whole frigging life is a crisis.
You think so?
No.
First the elk, now the control tower. Three hundred miles away. What’s your Point of No Return?
He meant fuel. The point at which I wouldn’t have enough to get back.
Two sixty.
Maybe you’re chasing shadows Hig. You wanna kill us both?
I stood in the middle of the family’s living room. There had been a big flatscreen, a surround sound stereo system, a player console on a side table with over ten thousand songs, a lot of country pop. Bangley had ripped it all out, hung up pegboard and the posters. There had been a game controller on the middle table. We had turned it on: World at War VII. I thought Bangley would like it. He turned away when I turned it on, and he visibly relaxed when I shut it off.
I know, I said.
He looked at me. His mineral eyes, his grin rigid.
I know it’s a risk. Whoever was there who sent the transmission he had power. He was in a control tower so he had powerful radios. Maybe he knows something.
Knows something?
Some news.
News.
Like about the Arabs or something.
Bangley didn’t move. Then he picked up the file and grasped the pipe with his paw and lowered his head.
Hig is a shark, he said. Gotta keep moving or die. Gotta do what he’s gotta do.
I thought about that all night as I lay out at the base of the berm alone, Jasper’s weight on my leg an aching absence. And watched the last of the winter constellations go under earth in the west. That was his way of giving me permission. Which I didn’t need. Still.
Clear calm morning, early May, the wind sock by the gas pump hanging still, the sky over the mountains a ringing bowl of water-clear blue. Our resident redtail floats, riding the first thermal over the barely warming tarmac. Easy circles. His mate’s nest is in a cottonwood at the edge of our fish pond and yesterday I heard the squalling cheeps of the chicks. Three I think. She stood, pumped her broad wings once and looked at me with a murderous acuity. Don’t fuck with mama. Wouldn’t dream of it I said aloud.
I turn on the pump and fill two six gallon gas jugs and load them behind my seat. Under seventy five pounds. Full tanks fifty five gallons usable. The extra gas will give me just under one more hour, not enough if I do any scouting along the way, not enough to get back, but I will take no more gas as I want to be able to land and take off short if I need to. Survival pack thirty pounds including ten days of jerky, dried tomatoes, corn, two jars olive oil. Five gallons water which I probably don’t need as Grand Junction is so named for straddling the confluence of two big rivers. But it’s a desert town and I don’t know what will happen, how hard it will be to get to the river. Always carry water.
I keep Jasper’s bird hunting quilt on the passenger seat. Lock the AR and the machine pistol into the vertical rack at the front of his seat.
What is the plan, Hig? Fly there.
Then what? Contact the natives.
Then what? Swap news.
You have no news.
I have what I have.
Then what? Fly home?
Good question.
Refuel.
Good luck.
Me and Me talking. Bangley is nowhere in sight. Climb the ladder, top off the Beast. Enough direct sun to run the pump, enjoy the old analog clicking of the numbers rolling in the pump’s window. The light warm breeze on my left cheek, the single skeining scream of the hawk. Roughed at the edges like his wings. The old excitement of a trip, a real trip, meaning new country. Surge of optimism don’t know why. Bangley is right. The odds of any useful news are low, the odds of the man in the tower being a skeleton high. And what news is useful? I’ve asked myself that every day in the week since. What is news? We eat we sleep we secure the perimeter we defend ourselves I go up into the mountains sometimes to get the news of the creeks and the trees. From the Beast the news of wind. What else is there?
Had to show Bangley how to water the garden for the first time, how to direct the flow from the header into the different marks, how to clean the furrows, show him what is and what is not a weed. He was ornery. He confessed that he’d sworn that he would never on this earth be a farmer, that the only dirt he’d ever dig in his life would be the dirt of a grave.
The hair stood up on the back of my neck when he said that. To know him this long and still be surprised.
My father was a farmer he said.
In Oklahoma?
He stared at me, the double ought spade in his hand looking nothing if not at home.
Okay so you’ve done this before.
He stared at me. He pursed his lips, looked at the blade of the shovel smeared with clay and half covered in the smoothly flowing current of a mark.
This is your show, he said finally. Were me I would’ve used the gated pipe stacked in the yard of that place to the north.
Now it was my turn to stare.
You’re a farmer, I said.
Nothing. He winced down his eyes and looked off west into the sun. Vagrant breeze moved the hair sticking out under the back of his cap. The flow of irrigation water captured from the creek made a cold ripple and burble. It pushed against clods fallen from the edges, flowed over them in smooth humps that fell into tiny riffles behind them. Eddied along the edges. If I stared long enough I could magnify the furrow in my head, build a perfect trout stream from any straight line of water. I always irrigated barefoot and my feet were numb. I loved the sensation as I sat on Jasper’s mound, the one he used to supervise from, and let the feeling come back tingling in the sun. Let them dry with heels propped on a piece of rag. Shook the dirt out of boots and socks before I put them back on.
I stared at him.
That’s what it is, I said. In some previous Life of Bangley. That shovel. Looks like a goddamn part of you. Like you were born with it.
Turned his head and looked at me and the hair stood up again. Cold, icy as the water flowing over my right foot.
It’s a spade, he said.
I nodded.
I know.
We looked at each other. What the hell, I was leaving in the morning.
You didn’t like your father much, huh?
Hesitated, shook his head slow.
You hated the fucker.
Bangley’s jaw working side to side.
You did everything. Jesus. A farmer. That’s where you learned it. You could weld, blacksmith, shoe a horse, build a corral, a barn. Probably a better frigging carpenter than me. Holy fuck.
Crossed my arms over the handle of the spade and looked at the mountains. Gentle wind. A harrier, white rumped, beat
the sage across the creek, fluttering and gliding just over the brush trying to scare up a rabbit. Two hawks, not the redtails, smaller, maybe Cooper’s, gyred. A lot of songbirds vanished even before, but in this world the raptors seem to be doing fine. A hawk’s world.
How long? Did you work the farm with him? Hating him?
We stood there. The water in the furrows conversed one to another in overlapping rills. No words and I knew with certainty that Bangley had killed his old man.
When you get back, he said finally. We’ll make improvements. If you want. We could make it water a lot easier. But then I always thought Hig enjoyed working out here in the sun moving the dirt around.
That was considerate.
He scratched the blade of his cheekbone under his right eye. It was weird. I looked at him the way you might look if you’d just discovered your spouse was in the witness protection program. Had been a hit man or something. Or a senator.
Fuckin A.
Fuckin A.
I don’t know whether to be mad or go hysterical busting a gut.
He smiled at me. Not the grim straight grin but the real half smile that was at once embarrassed at itself.
Personal choice, he said.
What?
Personal choice. Those are the toughest. When you have to think about shit like that.
You are fucking crazy. A crazy fucking farmer.
He was leaning on his crossed arms too and his grin went straight across again unsmiling and I knew the conversation was over and that I probably shouldn’t call him that anymore.
Now I was topping off the wing tanks. I moved the aluminum ladder around the nose, scraped it over the pavement to the left wing and climbed it with the heavy hose and nozzle over my shoulder. Click click click, the numbers unrolled, the fuel gurgled and hissed as it reached the sleeve of the cap. Seventeen point three gallons. Even now with all that it meant I still got a mild kick out of free gas. Free until. The sun was two fingers off the swells to the east, two fingers at arm’s length meaning about half an hour meaning it was nearly six. Thirteen hundred Zulu. Greenwich Mean Time. Greenwich. Somewhere in England. Home of the Clock. Center of the Timed Universe. Used to be. Nobody much keeping track anymore was my guess.
When Uncle Pete died of what was probably cirrhosis hastened by cancer and he knew he had only a few months left he did something I thought was way out of character: he spent his days in his cabin organizing his slides. His vast collection of colored positives. He had grown up with film and had taken exclusively slides which he said were sharper. He put the yellow paper boxes, the white and blue plastic ones, each one a roll, in a foot high stack that mostly covered his kitchen table. In often intense pain, by the light of a small window by day and a standing lamp in the evenings, he unboxed them one roll at a time, slipping each mounted picture into a sleeve in a transparent binder sheet. He labeled them with a Sharpie: on the actual slide he put binder number/slide number, on the page he put the same plus date taken and an up to three word description: Bone Fishing Keys. Beside the three ring binders, which held one to five years’ worth depending on how prolific he had been with his camera, he kept another binder of lined paper with a keyed journal. This held longer descriptions, notes of particular pictures which sparked his memory. I visited him once during this time. While he catalogued, I cut and split the firewood for a long winter both of us knew he would not see. Three cords of maple beech ash yellow birch, cut from his wood-lot on the side of a gentle hill, split and stacked along half of the front porch and around the side, the whole of which—me working while he sat inside—embarrassed him. At first I thought he was crazy. I mean he could have been sitting on his little porch watching the Vermont spring turn into a riotously green and sultry summer for the last time, watched the wrens and larks and owls in the lyrical commerce of breeding and nesting, leaf and air. Got bitten by black flies, gnats, then mosquitoes, on the last exquisite evenings. Why wasn’t he out there on his Dartmouth rocker? Maybe picking on his beat up guitar?
But lying one night in my old bunk under a wide open window listening to a screech owl trying to terrify me with a woman’s screams and only making me happy—the bittersweet cry of undigestible beauty and great impending loss—then it came to me: the obvious epiphany that he was reliving his life. Doh. Slide by slide, picture by picture. He was aggregating memory like a wall against extinction and the little boxes of slides were his bricks.
Up on the ladder in the soft morning, listening to the last pull of fuel gurgle into the wing tank and gauging the time by the sun. Something about that made me think of Pete and his albums leaning into the table in the dim close cabin that smelled of resin and woodsmoke and coffee. Like a man leaning into an incessant wind. Keeping track of things that have no use anymore except as a bulwark against oblivion. Against the darkness of total loss.
Well. I wasn’t going to count the hours. I had a plane full of fuel and good weather and I was going to take off and fly west and see how far I got. I was tightening down the gas cap when I heard a scuff and saw Bangley walking across the ramp. He had a basket on his arm.
I grinned. It was like the old railroad song. Pete sang it. Johnny’s mother came to him with a basket on her arm / She said my darling son / Be careful how you run / Many a man has lost his life just trying to make lost time …
It’s not a pie, he said.
I grinned. Clicked down the cap cover and climbed down.
He handed me the basket, turned to the stepladder and chopped up on the locking struts so it half folded and carried it back to the pump. Inside the basket were six grenades.
Don’t know why I never thought of it before, he said. Working on the launcher got me to thinking.
They lay inside like so many eggs inside a nest. The Egg of Death. Something in a fairy tale I once read and couldn’t remember.
How many mags do you have for the AR?
Four. The big ones.
He nodded.
You got the hand pump?
He meant the pump with long hose I could use to get gas out of an underground tank or any tank. Aside from the extra fuel the thirty feet of hose was my heaviest item. I nodded.
What are you going to do when you run out of gas?
Land.
He nodded. He looked at the Beast, at the mountains. His hands were in his pockets. He was looking west into the light breeze, he said
You been a good partner Hig. A little goofy sometimes.
Oh fuck. My chest constricted thought I was going to—Well.
Like family he said.
I stood there rooted to the tarmac.
I’m not a easy man to get along with. Only ones ever got halfway there were my wife and son. And you. Big Hig.
I think my mouth actually hung open. I blinked at him.
Long story, he said. He smiled the half smile.
Keep your eyes rolling in your head Hig. Situational awareness. Don’t get goofy thinking about the past and let some SOB blindside you. Try and come back.
I stared at him.
I’ll keep the weeds down.
He walked away. I stared after him. Fuckin A.
Fuckin A.
I hand cranked the heavy hose back on its roller and climbed into the Beast, latched the door. Hit the master switch, turned the key in the mags and pushed the starter.
Few sounds in the world as exciting as the exploding catch of a Continental engine firing to life. The first refractory turns of the prop. The roar smoothing out as the prop disappears in the speed of its rotation.
Go fast enough we disappear.
Bounced across the ramp through the lines of wrecked and disintegrating airplanes, turned straightacross the taxiway onto the strip and took off from midfield. Saw Bangley pushing into the door of the house that was his workshop, he didn’t look up.
The Beast is hungry. Pulling at air like an excited horse. I look over: the empty right seat, just Bangley’s egg basket and the quilt with the hunter aiming at the rising phe
asant, over and over. Crumpled against the door. Even half deaf and stiff Jasper was a better copilot than most men. All men. That it has come to this: life distilled in a ratty blanket. The shot will never hit, the bird never fall but neither will that hunter ever miss. Or lose anything. His dog will never die.
The biggest hole torn by a mutt.
… thinking about the past let some SOB blindside you …
I fly over. Straight over the Divide. Boulder burned below, the triangular slabs of the Flatirons thrust against the greater mass of the mountains like blank headstones. Prettiest town on earth couldn’t sustain. Mark it. The ski area El Dora scarred with old trails and slopes, the lines of the lifts just below us, can see the empty chairs swinging in the wind. A few bumps, the Beast more than compliant. Sail over the snow saddle. Close enough to see the tracks of a single large animal stringing the ridge. Not possible but. Too high. All of us caught out too high.
Winter Park and the Fraser Valley revealing itself on the other side as we go over. Scores of ski trails tender green against the rust of the dead forests. We used to ski there. The last time Melissa and I split up for a run and I rode next to a big man who said he was here for winter break with a church group from Nebraska. Nondenominational.
We just follow the Bible word for word he said. Word for word you can’t go wrong. Shook his head nice smile. I’d be crazy to disbelieve him.
I thought of stones in a river, rock hopping. One rock to the next, nothing to think about. Word for word. Just follow them, man. Breadcrumbs right to God. Sitting the chair next to him, our skis dangling over sixty feet of air, I thought Maybe there is a different translation for meek. Maybe it’s not the meek who inherit, maybe it is the simple. Not will inherit the earth, they already own it.
I told him I always got stuck at the Begats. I said I had just read Lamentations though and it seemed like Mad Max. I mean women eating their babies, everybody dying.
