Free The Dog Stars by Peter Heller Page B

party for him but would leave Erie wide open for at least half an hour.
    Jasper is sitting up in his seat and I taxi past the rows of private aircraft still tied down. All have flat and rotted tires, many cracked windshields from hail. Some, the ropes frayed and wore and broke in big winds, and the planes upended or rolled into others across the ramp, or further. Last spring we had a gale and a Super Cubbroke loose and ended up in the second story plate window of a fancy house across the runway, on Piper Lane, which was fitting. The green street sign like a pre-printed headstone.
    Why don’t I fly one of the Super Cubs or Huskies? Some narrow tandem (one seat in front, one in back), something more agile, that can swoop down and land short, can basically land and take off on a tennis court? Why do I fly my eighty year old Cessna four seater?
    Because the seats are side by side. So Jasper can be my copilot. The real reason. The whole time I fly I talk to him, and it amuses me no end that the whole time he pretends not to listen.
    We taxi between the rows. There are some beautiful old planes. The colored stripes, the blues and golds and reds are fading. The numbers. One I used to fly, a little home-built plane with a pull down bubble cockpit, stands nose down to the tarmac like a forlorn bird, the U.S. Air Force stars painted on the fuselage burned to washed splashes. It was built by a longtime friend of mine, Mike Gagler. An Alaska bush pilot who ended up flying jets for the airlines and built planes as a hobby. Never did anything like anyone else almost as a matter of principle. He died early with his family in a yellow house I can see from the open door of the hangar. He refused to go to the hospital, said they were just a way for the government to get the dead in one place. He was the last in his family to die, by force of will, so his wife and two daughters would have someone to hold them. I buried the four of them with the airport’s backhoe when it still ran.
    In the early days I took it out, Mike’s RV-8, and wasted gas. Left Jasper sitting anxious and alone by the gas pumps and climbed straight into the sun and kept pulling the stick until the sky rolled down beneath me and the horizon came down over my head likethe visor of a helmet. Big, slow, sickening backward loops and fast barrel rolls. I did it because I didn’t know what else to do.
    Then I’d buzz the runway at ten feet and see Jasper rooted on his haunches following me with his eyes, and even at that speed I knew he was worried, and grieving that I might leave him like everything else had done, so I stopped.
    The wind sock midfield swings northward, puffing without urgency, so we turn south onto the taxiway, and I jam the throttle and we take off. One thing about everybody dying is that you don’t have to use the designated runway.
    Nothing is designated anymore. If it weren’t for Bangley I’d forget my name.

    I figure we’ll fly the big circle then stop for a Coke. Scout the meadows below Nederland, below the peaks of the Divide, fly the spiral inward, check the roads and the two trails while there’s good light, make sure Bangley is clear of visitors at least a day in the three directions, then land at the soda fountain and bring back a couple cases. Only eight minutes out to the northeast toward Greeley. A peace offering. Of bloated cans and plastic bottles. There’s a stack of Dr. Pepper I can see with the headlamp in back of the semi, maybe now’s the time to spring it on him like Christmas. Bangley seems like a Dr. Pepper man. One of Sprite for the families, land there one time, it’s been a few weeks. As we bank left, north, the lowering sun spills through the glass like something molten.
    Look straight down, the tract development north of the airport patterns itself in the head to toe lollipops of feeder and cul de sac,and if I squint, to blur the ones burned, I can imagine a normal late spring evening.
    Continue the climbing bank west