Free The Dog Stars by Peter Heller Page A

the posters on the walls of teenage boys. The cover girl of cover girls, the paragonof sexiness. She is on vacation on a big cruise ship that hits a reef in the Caribbean and sinks. She washes up on a desert island with my buddy Jed. The only survivors. They wash up onto the beach, the waves christen them with foam, they are in tatters, mostly naked, and they look into each other’s eyes with the dawning apprehension of their unique solitude, and love hits them like a falling coconut. They fall hopelessly. Luckily, the island is replete with low hanging fruit and sweet fresh water, and oysters and fish that jump into their woven baskets, so that sustaining themselves is a breeze and they have a lot of leisure time just to gaze into each other’s eyes and make the kind of fierce love I imagine an apocalypse affords. About a week into it Jed says, Tripp?
    Ahh. Hmmm. Yes, my fragrant studliness.
    I have a favor to ask you.
    Of course, my sandbrushed power drill. Anything. For you.
    Can you wear my cowboy hat for a few days?
    Oh sure, why not!
    Next day he says, Trippa?
    Yes, Pooty?
    I have a favor to ask you.
    Anything my little mango.
    Can you use a bit of this charcoal and draw on a moustache?
    Hmm. Well for you, you big Cumquat, anything.
    Next day they’ve just made love nonstop for an entire tide cycle. They are sitting on a tortoiseshell bench watching a thunderstorm sweep over the azure water, Trippa in her hat and moustache, and Jed says, Hun?
    Yes Poots.
    Um, can I call you Joe?
    Well, ah sure, you plunging hammerhead shark you.
    Jed grabs her and shakes her shoulders.
    Joe! he cries. Joe! Joe! I’m fucking Trippa Sands!
    Still makes me laugh. Can’t help but think of me and Bangley which isn’t so funny. That he wants me to be Joe so he can show someone how well he is surviving. I’m fucking the shit out of this survival stuff aren’t I, Hig? He never told me another thing about his upbringing except that it wasn’t what you think, but I imagine that his mother, if he had one, was pretty hard to impress.
    Well. I guess. I say it to Jasper who has shifted so his head is hanging down off of Valdez but is still snoring. I put my hand on his ribs in the short fur and rub.
    Let’s go flying.

    It’s late afternoon, my favorite time after dawn. I fuel up. The pump runs off its own solar panel. Used to use a battery and inverter but the battery died so I wired it directly to the inverterand now can only fuel up if the sun is shining which it is. I have a hand pump if I need it, but it’s a pain. I fill the tanks from a stepladder, through capped intakes at the top of each wing, and it’s a real pain to be on the ground and pump and keep track of the fuel level which is checked by climbing up and looking straight down into the bladder through the fill hole. I can estimate and get it close, but it’s way easier just to stand up there and pull the trigger on the pump hose and hear the reassuring electric hum and the clicking of the numbers rolling on the meter like filling up a car used to be.
    Used to. Plenty of gas still out in the world but problem is the auto gas went stale and bad a year or two after. 100 low lead, which I burn, is stable something like ten years. So I expect to lose it one of these days. I can add PRI and nurse it along for ten more years probably. Then I’ll have to look for jet fuel which is kerosene and lasts for basically ever. I know where it is, the closest. I know that right now I’m the only one alive who knows, or at least knows how to get it out. But every time I land at Rocky Mountain Airport I feel vulnerable in a way I never do at my other stops. It’s too big. A big old jetport with scores of buildings, hangars, sheds and the pumps and the steel fill plates out in the open.
    When I have to, me and Bangley will pow wow. Maybe we’ll have to break camp. Can’t imagine. Or maybe I’ll just have to take him with me to cover my back every time I fill up which would be a kind of