The Dog Stars by Peter Heller Read Free Book Online Page B

and a flock of seagulls shocked white between us and the ground. At ten miles and a thousand feet he said Druids. Go lower circle.
    I’d never heard the word.
    Met them on the way in, he said. They have the blood sickness. Yelled across the yard. Shot two that came too close. Wish I had incendiary now.
    I glanced at him. The shock of it. Never heard that story but of course how could they know he ended up with me, my partner.
    A few of the ragged kids ran out of a turkey shed and waved, jumped up and down. Bangley turned his hunched shoulders in the cramped seat to look at me.
    They know you?
    Yup. I help them. They’re not Druids, they’re Mennonites.
    I felt his eyes on the side of my face then not. He said nothing the rest of the trip, not even when we flew up close along the mountains and saw the fresh snow blowing off the rock ridges.

III
    So I wonder what it is this need to tell.
    To animate somehow the deathly stillness of the profoundest beauty. Breathe life in the telling.
    Counter I guess to Bangley’s modus which is to kill just about everything that moves.

    On the night of the one sided firefight in which I didn’t pull the trigger I walked straight past the west hangars and kept going. Jasper has a good nose and I knew that if he looked up and got worried he would just follow. Didn’t want to whistle him away from his party, and I knew Bangley well enough that he’d had enough killing in one night not to fuck with my dog. I had no goggles no gun. Bangley always wears a belted sidearm, I’m sure he wears it to sleep. I have never seen him asleep but I wonder how many nights he has watched us at the base of the berm snoozing. There is much about the man that creeps me out but this is the worst, the unrelenting sense of being surveilled. I’ve learned to live with it the way the Cree in Canada must live with swarms of mosquitoes. Did live. But there is the nagging fear: if he decided the attacks had tapered off enough to defend this place himself or if my visiting the families was too much of a risk he mightkill us both, me and Jasper, unimpeded with an easy two shots fifty steps from his front porch. So in this sense I am crazy to sleep in the open, but then if Bangley wanted to kill me he would have limitless opportunities in any one day, so I decided from the beginning to make my daily choices without including Mr. Death in the calculus.
    And so, in this way, I thought as I walked past the last hangars west and away from our one burning bulb on the one porch into the not total darkness of the starlit plains, I thought that in this way the visitation by the five men paid a kind of surety against my survival at least for a while. For a while Jasper and I were indispensable, though Bangley had dispatched the group, the killing part, with literally one eye on the ball.
    I walked around the old gas tank which was green in daylight, now black, bulked in the tall sage brush, and my feet found without thinking the worn trail to the mountains. My trail. The one Jasper and I had worn over nine years, and Bangley out to his tower. Erie airport had no control tower, it was an uncontrolled field, meaning that the pilots just talked to each other and worked things out according to long used protocol, but Bangley and I had built our own tower four miles out onto the plain, halfway to the mountain front, and this tower was for killing. It had taken us two months to build, salvaging the lumber out of a painstaking teardown of an ugly, blocky, modern, wooden thing on Piper Lane that reminded me of a grade school from the Seventies. We hauled the lumber out to the site in his pickup when it still ran, and in his dry van trailer, the one he had showed up with that was full of guns, weapons of every murderous phylum, and mines and canned food and ammo. We hauled out a generator too from one of the electricity free hangars on the north side, and we ran it on avgas to power the saws and drills. Bangley was not a born