The Dog Stars

shoot somebody. Laughter loud and long.

Had a point, old Bangley, my tactical superego. The old bastard down below was a wicked good shot. Like professional good, like Bangley. He had nearly taken me out with a shotgun, like the Beast and I were just one big blue winged teal. Pretty good.

Why was I so giddy? Somehow the pickle I was in made me very glad. I mean, it wasn’t a pickle. I could walk away. But. I had an image of a white rag tied at the end of a stick stuck over the edge of that cliff. Waving it like some Hollywood cliche. No one ever tried that with us back at the airport because A) it was always night, and B) we, mostly Bangley, shot them dead before they knew what was happening. If someone had tried that back there, then what? Never negotiate. Bangley would have gained maximum tactical advantage, called to them, Okay come out in peace and then he would’ve blown their heads off. Good old Bangley.

Yup, that was going to take some depth of faith and trust and even then it was a flip of a coin, and plus I didn’t have anything white.

I scrambled back a bit, stood up, stretched. Refreshed almost like I’d had a nap. Then I trotted back to the Beast. I kept a stack of Xerox paper in the back seat pocket and a couple of crayons. Also a few palm sized stones and rubber bands. This so if I needed to drop a note mostly to the families I could. But a couple of times I dropped notes on wanderers camped out on the roads too close to the airport who didn’t seem to understand my catchy NorthSouthEastWest song: Turn back north or die etc. Nor a stick of dynamite. These messages, the ones wrapped around the stones and dropped from the Beast, were very succinct and graphic and they always worked. Power of the pen. I was always very proud of myself when I crafted four lines that got a refractory band of pirates to pack up and scurry back up a road. I picked up half a dozen sheets and a black crayon and gathered up Jasper’s quilt and trotted back across the park.

I was grinning. I could feel it stretching my smarting cheeks. I hunkered back down by the edge of the canyon and wrote on one sheet vertically as big as it would go: I

The satisfaction of composing. Remembered that Dylan Thomas sometimes would set down one word of a new poem then walk down to the pub and get shitfaced in celebration. For breaking the void of silence.

Well. Let’s see how this goes over before I waste any more sheets.

Crept, wriggled to the edge of the clifftop which for my purposes was auspiciously formed in a real lip, sharp and dropping to a vertical, if not overhanging, face of sandstone. Keeping my precious splintered head well back, I reached out pushed and shook the quilt off the edge, unfurling it like a flag. Made sure the hunter and the flushing pheasant and the dog were right side up from the bottom’s point of view and made sure my fingers did not go past the lip.

Most fun I’d had in years except maybe fishing and I think it’s because it was a lot like fishing, except there were people at the other end of this line. Catch and release.

Soon as the quilt reached air another shot. Creased air right over my hands, head.

You hear bullets make the sound they always do in Westerns and war stories and guess what? They do. They make a phhhht like someone opening a poisonous can of soda. The Soda of Death. Like a vacuum following itself at the speed of a diving duck. Followed almost simultaneously by a little hum, a musical exclamation point.

Okay shoot at my quilt if you want. I have needle and thread.

Then silence. Quizzical. That’s what it felt like.

Often fishing you can feel right away the spirit of the fish on the other end of the line. That connection. I mean you know right away: is it fierce, scared, experienced, young and dumb, wily, panicked, resigned, confident, mischievous. Any of it in a rapid tugging and zing of line. I often thought of the silence between people in the same way.

I unfurled the quilt and the shot blasted at nearly the same instant and then silence. A puzzled silence. I grinned. I knew Gramps was scoping the blanket, studying the repeating pattern, thinking, What the fuck? I knew from that distance with his scope he would be able to make out the scene. I scrabbled the ground for two heavy stones and weighted the top of the quilt and let it hang.

I let him puzzle it out, maybe discuss it. Then I took the paper, stuck it on the point of a four foot broken limb and pushed it over the edge: I. BANG! Swish. Complete miss. Ha! Not going for the paper going for my head, where it would be if I was just a little tiny bit closer.

Silence. I hung the paper on the stick vertically so he could read it. He could. They were really fucking close. I mean if I wanted to be really mean I could maybe just shove a boulder over the edge. Or spit.

I pulled the stick back. If I was chuckling it was the first time in maybe nine years. Chuckling—that word. It’s not a word for the End of Times. I unpeeled the paper off the crayon with my teeth and wrote on the second paper again vertically, AM.

Why didn’t I just shout down there? Well, conversations can get so crosswise so quick. What I’ve found. First time I met Melissa was in a coffee shop and I was too shy to speak so I wooed her with a note. Works. One wrong tone of voice and that’s it. Nah, this was better. Plus the creek was pouring, plus wind, plus there was no way on earth I was going to stick my mouth over that edge.

Stuck AM on the stick hung it over. Now no shot. Silence. Sonofabitch was getting the hang of it. I AM. Existential enough. Shit, I could stop right there, just let them chew on that a while. Picked up the crayon, wrote NOT. Pulled in my stick, stuck it on. Let that flap in the wind.

The philosophical implications of going from the penultimate assertion to the last were profound. I mean Hamlet had nothing on this. The unfolding dialectic. Dang.

Then A. I wrote A covering one whole page stuck it out. A. A. Flap, rustle.

Then I sharpened the crayon on the rock turned the page sideways and wrote as big as I could fit: PHEASANT.

Hung it out there. Weighted the stick down with another rock and lay back face to the sun, arms crossed under my poor abused head, and let the warmth cover me and the sun work on the cuts.

They weren’t going anywhere, neither was I.

If this were a Western I would now put my hat on a stick. I was wearing a hat. A sweatstained fraybrimmed baseball cap that said Cherry Hills Golf Club. I took it off a visitor one night and I liked it maybe because it carried a message of consolation: the End of Everything meant the End maybe for all time, maybe in all the universe, of Golf.

I had nothing against golf.

Anyway there were probably Scotsmen in Scotland who somehow survived the pandemic and after and were now strolling over the heath playing the old game—no irrigation but mist and rain, no lawnmowers but herds of wild sheep. Thwacking their drives into the fog. That was a nice idea.

Maybe Gramps hated golf. Doubt if he could read lettering that small but if he had say a ten power scope, well, he might. I put it on the stick anyway, for fun, shoved it out there to the edge. Nothing. The old crust wasn’t buying it. He was gonna wait til he saw an eye, an ear. Hmph. Now what? I could just stand up, walk to the edge and shout. Hey! I come in peace! In friendship! And. If they subscribed to the First Principles of Bruce Bangley I was a dead man. Curiously, for the first time it seemed in a while I wasn’t ready to die. Not just this minute. I mean I had more than a casual interest in staying alive. For some reason.

Okay. I had an idea.

I walked back to the Beast got another stack of paper. Had all the time in the world: none of us seemed to be going anywhere. Unless they bolted for the tree ladder which they wouldn’t as I could pot them as easy as the German officers in that awful Hemingway vignette that I loved. It was absolutely topping. They tried to get over it, and we potted them from forty yards. They rushed it, and officers came out alone and worked on it. It was an absolutely perfect obstacle. I mean if that’s what I had been here to do.

I hunkered down by my rock in the sun, well behind it, and wrote out more words. Put them on the stick one after the other and held them over the lip as before. Deep silence while the fish on the other end thought about