watching a thunderstorm sweep over the azure water, Trippa in her hat and moustache, and Jed says, Hun?
Yes Poots.
Um, can I call you Joe?
Well, ah sure, you plunging hammerhead shark you.
Jed grabs her and shakes her shoulders.
Joe! he cries. Joe! Joe! I’m fucking Trippa Sands!
Still makes me laugh. Can’t help but think of me and Bangley which isn’t so funny. That he wants me to be Joe so he can show someone how well he is surviving.
Well. I guess. I say it to Jasper who has shifted so his head is hanging down off of
Let’s go flying.
It’s late afternoon, my favorite time after dawn. I fuel up. The pump runs off its own solar panel. Used to use a battery and inverter but the battery died so I wired it directly to the inverter and now can only fuel up if the sun is shining which it is. I have a hand pump if I need it, but it’s a pain. I fill the tanks from a stepladder, through capped intakes at the top of each wing, and it’s a real pain to be on the ground and pump and keep track of the fuel level which is checked by climbing up and looking straight down into the bladder through the fill hole. I can estimate and get it close, but it’s way easier just to stand up there and pull the trigger on the pump hose and hear the reassuring electric hum and the clicking of the numbers rolling on the meter like filling up a car used to be.
Used to. Plenty of gas still out in the world but problem is the auto gas went stale and bad a year or two after. 100 low lead, which I burn, is stable something like ten years. So I expect to lose it one of these days. I can add PRI and nurse it along for ten more years probably. Then I’ll have to look for jet fuel which is kerosene and lasts for basically ever. I know where it is, the closest. I know that right now I’m the only one alive who knows, or at least knows how to get it out. But every time I land at Rocky Mountain Airport I feel vulnerable in a way I never do at my other stops. It’s too big. A big old jetport with scores of buildings, hangars, sheds and the pumps and the steel fill plates out in the open.
When I have to, me and Bangley will pow wow. Maybe we’ll have to break camp. Can’t imagine. Or maybe I’ll just have to take him with me to cover my back every time I fill up which would be a kind of party for him but would leave Erie wide open for at least half an hour.
Jasper is sitting up in his seat and I taxi past the rows of private aircraft still tied down. All have flat and rotted tires, many cracked windshields from hail. Some, the ropes frayed and wore and broke in big winds, and the planes upended or rolled into others across the ramp, or further. Last spring we had a gale and a Super Cub broke loose and ended up in the second story plate window of a fancy house across the runway, on Piper Lane, which was fitting. The green street sign like a pre-printed headstone.
Why don’t I fly one of the Super Cubs or Huskies? Some narrow tandem (one seat in front, one in back), something more agile, that can swoop down and land short, can basically land and take off on a tennis court? Why do I fly my eighty year old Cessna four seater?
Because the seats are side by side. So Jasper can be my copilot. The real reason. The whole time I fly I talk to him, and it amuses me no end that the whole time he pretends not to listen.
We taxi between the rows. There are some beautiful old planes. The colored stripes, the blues and golds and reds are fading. The numbers. One I used to fly, a little home-built plane with a pull down bubble cockpit, stands nose down to the tarmac like a forlorn bird, the U.S. Air Force stars painted on the fuselage burned to washed splashes. It was built by a longtime friend of mine, Mike Gagler. An Alaska bush pilot who ended up flying jets for the airlines and built planes as a hobby. Never did anything like anyone else almost as a matter of principle. He died early with his family in a yellow house I can see from the open door of the hangar. He refused to go to the hospital, said they were just a way for the government to get the dead in one place. He was the last in his family to die, by force of will, so his wife and two daughters would have someone to hold them. I buried the four of them with the airport’s backhoe when it still ran.
In the early days I took it out, Mike’s RV-8, and wasted gas. Left Jasper sitting anxious and alone by the gas pumps and climbed straight into the sun and kept pulling the stick until the sky rolled down beneath me and the horizon came down over my head like the visor of a helmet. Big, slow, sickening backward loops and fast barrel rolls. I did it because I didn’t know what else to do.
Then I’d buzz the runway at ten feet and see Jasper rooted on his haunches following me with his eyes, and even at that speed I knew he was worried, and grieving that I might leave him like everything else had done, so I stopped.
The wind sock midfield swings northward, puffing without urgency, so we turn south onto the taxiway, and I jam the throttle and we take off. One thing about everybody dying is that you don’t have to use the designated runway.
Nothing is designated anymore. If it weren’t for Bangley I’d forget my name.
I figure we’ll fly the big circle then stop for a Coke. Scout the meadows below Nederland, below the peaks of the Divide, fly the spiral inward, check the roads and the two trails while there’s good light, make sure Bangley is clear of visitors at least a day in the three directions, then land at the soda fountain and bring back a couple cases. Only eight minutes out to the northeast toward Greeley. A peace offering. Of bloated cans and plastic bottles. There’s a stack of Dr. Pepper I can see with the headlamp in back of the semi, maybe now’s the time to spring it on him like Christmas. Bangley seems like a Dr. Pepper man. One of Sprite for the families, land there one time, it’s been a few weeks. As we bank left, north, the lowering sun spills through the glass like something molten.
Look straight down, the tract development north of the airport patterns itself in the head to toe lollipops of feeder and cul de sac, and if I squint, to blur the ones burned, I can imagine a normal late spring evening.
Continue the climbing bank west and level out at eight hundred feet and begin my scan.
Nothing. Nothing the whole way. Roads empty. Blessedly. Usually are. Had there been wanderers it would have fucked up everything, delayed our hunt. Then I would have swooped, cut the engine, played the tape. I have four songs on the CD rigged to the amp and the speakers: they are titled
Turn Back North or Die
Turn Back South or Die
Turn Back East or Die
Turn Back West or Die
The words are easy to remember: just the title over and over. Followed by the exhortative: We know you are here. You will become dog food like many before you.
Bangley made me add that.
Fuck no, I said. That’s unnecessary and disgusting.
Bangley just stared at me, his grin half formed.
It’s true ain’t it? Ain’t it Hig?
Hit me like a punch.
Add it, he said. This isn’t some debutante ball.
Mostly it works. Enough unknowns, enough survived that visitors can’t be sure there isn’t some phalanx of Mongols at the airport waiting to tear them apart. Which I guess we are. A phalanx of two. No, three. And they must think: These guys have an air force, a loudspeaker, a recording, what else have they got? We have Bangley, I think. You have no idea what that means. You better fucking turn back.
If they need more convincing I’ve gotten pretty good at shooting Bangley’s Uzi machine pistol out my window on a left bank. I try not to hit anybody but sometimes I do.
I have been shot at fourteen times. Three went through the fuselage. Most people don’t know how to shoot at airplanes. They never lead us enough.
Nobody now. Highway 7 is clear, 287, the interstate. Our trail west. Sun is pouring down Boulder Canyon
