I flew that afternoon. Not in any shape to do it, but I did. To look for the other four, to see if they had designs on the families or on us and not a sign. Headed for the hills is what they did. The best thing. To fly. First time in years without Jasper. Still put his pheasant hunting quilt on the seat for luck, I guess, still took the turns more gingerly, the dives less sudden so as not to throw him—how I had trained myself to fly now. Flew the big circle and at the wave of the first hills west I looped back in and swooped low to look at the carnage, the three craters raw wounds in the brush, the bodies where we left them when Bangley walked out to help me bring in the sled. I could barely pull it. Not that I didn’t have the strength in my legs. My temples throbbed, an ache in the forehead, just couldn’t seem to concentrate long enough to take five steps in a row with a sustained pull. Felt a little nauseous too. Bangley was patient and after sharing the harness he said
Hig take a break. I got this for a while. You’ve had a long day.
Are you going to tell me to breathe?
He took a sip from the plastic tube of his water pack and looked at me with fresh appraisal. He had a fleck of tobacco on his cheek that looked like a mole. The same exact place as Marilyn Monroe.
Hig?
Yuh.
Breathe only if you want to. You know, when you say that I am relieved. You are concussed Hig no doubt about it. Which I am truly sorry about. But. Better than being dead by a long shot. It’s not as bad as it could be. Your eyes are facing the same direction and Hig hasn’t lost his sense of humor.
He put the tump over his forehead leaned into it and walked.
Now from the plane I could see it all: the slide out of the sandy trail and the pile of brush where I had hidden the sled, a bit of red plastic in the dirt the little shell holder that came with the box, the spot I had probably gotten to when the first bomb hit not eighty feet away. The four where I had dropped them, three in the sandy bottom one above, the birds, vulture crow raven magpie, lifting off in a scatter as I flew over. The one mangled by the mortar that could just as easily have been me. One arm, half a head gone. My head still ached and when I flew by low and saw him I leaned over and threw up out the window. Barely anything to throw up just the canned bean and venison salad Bangley made me in the hangar but still it spewed along the fuselage and I had to scrub it off next day. What it was, that might have been me. The mortar is not a precision weapon. Bangley said he had worked out the range the angle for five spots along the trail and was pretty sure about it but. What it was, it was a big gamble he saw me getting overwhelmed and.
I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and flew south and east and scouted the approach roads to the families, and nothing. And when I came back around from the east I saw a dozen in the yard and the red union suit hanging limp off the pole and I landed. Bounced up the drive and shut her down. Climbed out stiff.
Aaron is a tall man, craggy, with a hooked beard, a beard like a scoop of carved wood. He was wasted by the blood disease as most of them were and moved slowly with deliberation like a man much older than he was. He waved his hand, huge on the end of the narrow wrist that stuck out of a patched flannel shirt.
I waved and walked and they all, mothers fathers kids, moved toward me in a ragged bunch and stopped and we faced off across the beaten mud of the yard. Fifteen feet. The unspoken irrevocable distance like an old Western movie where the mountain man meets the braves in some meadow. Or the homesteader confronts the landgrabbing rancher and his hired guns, the horses always pulling up to stand in a nearly taut line as if at a precipice. Always that bit of mutually respected demilitarized zone across which words can be flung followed maybe by bullets and arrows and death. That’s what we called it, the DMZ. Awkward at first but not now. In this case we had decided without discussion or even any medical evidence that there was no way the sickness could infect from that far off. Probably not even from five feet, probably not even in a casual touch, but everybody, mostly me, felt better about this gap. If we needed to, we placed objects in the middle of it to be retrieved and that was okay too.
Aaron said Aren’t you going to bring Jasper down?
I blinked at him, half turned back to the plane, then just stood. Couldn’t breathe for a sec.
They were all watching me, I could feel it like a pressure. I hung my head down, watched a drop of salt water hit the dirt. Wiped it away.
Hig are you okay?
Aaron was bent forward, his thin back, his turkey neck, the beard. Land of the lost. Talk about being already dead. I straightened up.
He died Aaron. On the mountain. In his sleep. He was old.
I could almost see the wave of shock sway the little group. The last death here had been a child, Ben, a boy of eight or nine who got so excited, more than anyone when I landed the plane and carried Jasper to the ground. Many times he forgot the rules and bounded across the zone shrieking with glee and reached his arms out to the dog who stood up off his haunches and wagged and like the figures on the Grecian Urn he never got there, never attained his goal—always some long armed parent or aunt scooped him up with a mild scold.
I’m sorry Hig. We’re all sorry.
The sincerity of it, the dignity. After what they had all lost and. It didn’t matter. It was mine, my family. The second tear that spilled I wiped away and I told myself there wouldn’t be another. Not in front of them.
Thanks.
A little girl stepped forward. Her name was Matilda. She had a handful of wild asters. She crossed to the middle of the Zone and lay it on the ground and smiled at me.
I picked them before, she said. For you.
Just as a present?
She nodded, looking up at me. She smiled, pretty, her skin waxy, dark rings around her eyes.
Thank you, I said. Thank you. And I broke down. Just stood there in front of them all and wept, wept uncontrollably, shuddering, and smiled at the girl through the tears. Her own smile faded and she looked scared and stepped back into the skirts of her mother and I felt bad but couldn’t help myself. It was Jasper, not just. It was all of it. Was this hell? To love like this, to grieve from fifteen feet, an uncrossable distance?
I picked up the flowers but didn’t step back. They were all little more than an arm’s length away, two.
Thank you, I said to them all. Jasper loved coming here.
Which was true. I think the scent of children made him happy.
The flowers are beautiful. I sniffed them. Mmmmm. Wow.
Grinned. The girl smiled again from where she hung on the woman’s skirts.
You put up the flag?
Aaron nodded. The last time was a week after the last Sprite. The solar water pump they used to draw from the creek to irrigate had died, just a bad fuse but they didn’t have one and I did so the next morning I brought one. Now a tall woman stepped through from the back. She was stunning, half her face. The disease had not yet claimed her vigor. Half her face had been burned horribly, some kind of gas explosion. When she talked she turned the burned half away and looked at you from the side and seemed to speak to air. Her name was Reba like the country singer of before and she could sing too, I had heard her. She held out a cracked plastic pickle bucket and I took it, hand to hand, the first time ever, and inside it brimmed with early baby lettuce.
We are having a bumper crop, Aaron said. I remember you saying you didn’t grow it for some reason. We thought. He trailed off.
I smiled. I squatted down and reached out my hand to the little girl who had given me the flowers.
Go ahead her mother said.
She held out her little hand grubby with dirt and I took it and squeezed it lightly and smiled. I met her hazel eyes, a little bloodshot with the immune system war raging inside her, and held to her tiny fingers for a long moment, held to them like they were a rope and I was a man drowning.
The beans were already sprouting, showing the little curl just out of the turned dirt. The water was running in the furrows. I told Bangley I was heading out again.
We were in his shop which was the old sunken living room of a Mcmansion to the north of my hangar. It looked out of big double paned plate windows to the west, away from the runway to the mountains. It was a gunsmith shop plain and simple. Bangley made no excuses about knowing nothing about engines, wood, carpentry of any kind, agriculture, especially agriculture, gardening, cooking, especially cooking, languages, history, math
