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
