beyond arithmetic, fashion, leatherwork, gin rummy, sewing, or especially rhetoric—the decorum, the customs of a respectful rhetorical debate.
Spit it out Hig is what he liked to say in the last instance. Spit it out and don’t pull any goddamn punches. It’s just you and me here ha ha! No one else to impress.
But he knew guns, knew how to modify them, improve them, and he could build one from the ground up, from pipe and old flatware. In the box trailer he pulled behind his pickup on the afternoon he showed up at the airport he brought with him a heavy drill press, a welder, a generator, grinders, a band saw. When I pointed out that these skills—the welding, the soldering, the tempering—that they were applicable to all kinds of metalwork, he chuffed his gravel laugh.
Got no use for that is all he’d say.
He had also brought with him about fifty posters, all girls in bikinis or less holding various weapons and bannered with the great names in small armaments from Colt through Sig to Winchester. They were tacked up all over the walnut paneled walls where framed paintings used to hang, taped even to the edges of the windows. They were shooting submachine guns holding pistols in the low ready position like a fig leaf and sometimes not bothering to cover their total nakedness at all and the pain they caused me, I mean the sight of unclad women, actually constricted my throat so I kept my visits to the bare minimum so to speak. Ha. When I did go I hailed him from the yard and waited for a yell back, an invite maybe, trying to train him to do the same and stop giving me a heart attack at my hangar which I knew to be fruitless.
We got plenty of venison, Hig, he said straightening from a large pipe in a vise.
After our dustup the other day he announced that he was going to build a grenade launcher. He actually had one, an M203, but the range was inadequate to save my ass, he said, so he was going to rebuild it. More accurate he said.
Can’t have the Hig getting concussed anymore, makes him too goddamn goofy.
Now he straightened and squinted at me while I tried not to look at the homicidal naked girls. Weird: on a low table, by the leather couch he had decided to keep, was a framed picture of the family that had lived here: some ski vacation, three blonde kids in helmets, parkas, their parents standing behind holding skis and smiling broadly, teeth as white as the snowy mountains in the range behind them. Top of one of the mountains at Vail or somewhere. I never asked about it. I intuited that it was not as simple as being reminded of the filial warmth that once pervaded, but more likely some Bangley score keeping, like: Look you Yuppie motherfuckers, you had all that but who is here in your sunken living room today, healthy as a horse and crafting better weaponry so he can keep ahold of it like you couldn’t.
Just a guess.
You thinking you need another fishing vacation? Last one wasn’t exciting enough?
Shook my head. I’m flying.
Flying?
Grand Junction. Got a transmission from there a little while ago. From the tower.
His hands, which I thought of as paws they were so big and blunt looking, they let go the pipe, set down the file. He looked at me under the hanging gun rack he’d had me build for him in the beginning—he never did anything without a platoon’s worth of firepower within reach.
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:
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
