the trigger but more like just stilled with disbelief.
What the fuck.
Good he said. Good job. Not sure you still had it in you.
He meant that I would. That my finger was moving on the trigger.
Before he took over.
What the fuck Bangley. Not sure I still had what in me?
Silent. Knew I knew what.
I’ve never had it fucking in me. But I do it. What the fuck were you thinking? What if I’d seen you and thought you were one of them?
Never happen: You see me. Unh unh. Not that way.
I opened my mouth, closed it. I said, Unfuckingbelievable. What if they had broke apart. I mean just launched. Sooner.
Silence. Knew I knew now that he had them covered from the get go.
Well how the hell did you know I was about to pull the trigger and why didn’t you? Let me?
Silence. Knew that I knew now that he was scoping me more closely than he was scoping them. Scoping my frigging finger while he kept half an eye on the men that could have frigging killed us. Had them sighted all along. Let loose only when he saw me take the big breath maybe. I see him in my mind’s eye pulling the trigger on the first man not even looking, watching me first in the good night scope on its own legs, watching me jerk back in alarm in surprise, then casual but efficient tuck down to his weapon and sweep the rest of the group. Not sweep. Bangley doesn’t believe in full auto. Two shots probably to each panicked leaping shadow.
C’mere Hig. Show you something.
Goes over the top and down the berm. Jasper still down there, this side, trembling. Not with fear. I can see him in the starlight. Sitting on his haunches following my movements with concern, restraining himself from action, somebody doing their job just their job the way they are supposed to.
C’mon. I whistle soft. He jumps, not like the old days but still fast enough up to the top of the berm and over. Bangley is down there among the black figures sprawled. Jasper already moving one to the other, not stopping, nosing, the low growl.
Look at this Hig. They never should have done it.
He doesn’t sound unhappy.
Bangley has reached up and switched on the LED headlamp banded to his cap. His cap is on backward. He shines it on the short man, the one in the cowboy hat, the hat now tumbled into a drainage furrow a few feet off. It’s a boy. Maybe nine. About the age. Melissa seven months pregnant when. Nine years ago. This boy is thin, hair matted and tangled. A hawk feather tied into it.
Face hollow, a shadow smirched with dirt and exposure. Would have been born into this. Nine years of this. Piecing the jigsaw puzzle of this world into some dire picture in his head to end cast as an extra in Bangley’s practical joke.
He grunts. Arms in the hands of babes. Should have left him behind.
Where?
Bangley shrugs, swings his head up, the light up into my eyes, blinding.
I wince down against the harsh white blare but don’t turn.
Then when he wandered out of the creek starving tomorrow you would have shot him just like the others, but in full daylight and at three hundred yards not thirty.
I can’t see anything but the light, but I know Bangley’s grin is straight across and grim.
Hig you haven’t learned a goddamn thing in all this time. You’re living in the past. Makes me wonder if you appreciate any of this. Goddamn.
He walks off. He means do I deserve it. To live.
I walk away leave Jasper to his business. We will bury them tomorrow.
This is what I do, have done: I strip off haunches arms breast buttocks calves. Slice it thin soak in salt brine and dry to jerky for Jasper for the days between. You remember the story of the rugby team in the Andes. The corpses were corpses already dead. They did it to survive. I am no different. I do it for him. I eat venison, bottom fish, rabbit, shiners. I keep his jerky in airtight buckets. He likes it best of all his food I’m sure because of the salt. Tomorrow I will do it again but not the boy, I’ll bury him not with any tenderness or regret just in one piece with his hawk feather.
That we have come to this: remaking our own taboos forgetting the original reasons but still awash in the warnings. I walk back around the berm. I am supposed to lie back down in our blankets and sleep with the berm at my head like a wide headstone. So I am fresh for tomorrow to fly. I will not sleep all night. I lay the gun down, just the gun, snug it back under the duffel and keep walking.
II
Back then I took up flying with the sense of coming to something I had been meant to do all my life. Many people who fly feel this way and I think it has more to do with some kind of treetop or clifftop gene than with any sense of unbounded freedom or metaphors of the soaring spirit. The way the earth below resolves. The way the landscape falls into place around the drainages, the capillaries and arteries of falling water: mountain slopes bunched and wrinkled, wringing themselves into the furrows of couloir and creek, draw and chasm, the low places defining the spurs and ridges and foothills the way creases define the planes of a face, lower down the canyon cuts, and then the swales and valleys of the lowest slopes, the sinuous rivers and the dry beds where water used to run seeming to hold the hills and the waves of the high planes all together and not the other way around. The way the settlements sprawl and then congregate at these rivers and mass at every confluence. I thought: It’s a view that should surprise us but it doesn’t. We have seen it before and interpret the terrain below with the same ease we walk the banks of a creek and know where to place our feet.
But what I loved most from the first training flight was the neatness, the sense of everything in its place. The farms in their squared sections, the quartering county roads oriented to the cardinal compass points, windbreaks casting long shadows westward in the morning, the round bales and scattered cattle and horses as perfect in their patterns as sprays of stars and holding the same ruddy sun on their flanks, the pickups in the yards, the trailer parks in diagonal rows, the tract homes repeating the side-lit angles of roofs, baseball diamond and kart track ovals, even the junkyards just so, ragged lines of rusted cars and heaps of scrap metal as inevitable and lovely as the cottonwoods limning the rivers, casting their own long shadows. The white plume from the stack of a power plant tended eastward on the morning wind as pure as washed cotton. This was then. From up here there was no misery, no suffering, no strife, just pattern and perfection. The immortal stillness of a landscape painting.
And for a time while flying, seeing all this as a hawk would see it, I am myself somehow freed from the sticky details: I am not grief sick nor stiffer in the joints nor ever lonely, nor someone who lives with the nausea of having killed and seems destined to kill again. I am the one who is flying over all of it looking down. Nothing can touch me.
There is no one to tell this to and yet it seems very important to get this right. The reality and what it is like to escape it. That even now it is sometimes too beautiful to bear.
Also I wonder how Bangley is built inside and everyone like him. He is as at home with his solitude as the note reverberating inside a bell. Prefers it. Will protect it to the death. Lives for protecting it the way a peregrine lives for killing other birds midflight. Does not want to communicate what the death and the beauty do to each other inside him.
I took him flying in the first week of his arrival. He wanted to recon our perimeter, our weakest approaches. Squeezed him into the passenger seat and gave him a headset so he could talk to me. I made widening circles outward and climbed like a climbing hawk. It was a clear morning with the gullies still shadowed and a flock of
