by Jon Billman
I asked how far to Jackson Hole too, when I came here from the tired Midwest, because on the atlas it’s only an inch, maybe an inch and a quarter, away, but this place is far from anywhere. TV tourism spots for Wyoming do not show Hams Fork. They show natty fly fishermen and chesty cowgirls grilling steaks and dinosaur eggs, Devils Tower, snowy peaks, never the desert. Never a local throwing chunks of sucker meat on a treble hook at a rainbow trout choking in runoff, never a strip mine or a PTA meeting. On TV this place looks like starting over.
Robin’s hair is the color of new motor oil and she smells like apples when she walks by at a crowded district meeting. She is also on the List because of what Wayne did, because of what Wayne does. In their forties, no kids. The wind doesn’t quit blowing in Hams Fork and you can hear the Kerr place all over town.
The administration was not impressed with my lesson about Benjamin Franklin, an artist, and I was called on the rug. Again. My lecture in question included his rendezvous with concubines, illegitimate children, painting, voyeuristic tendencies. The history books fail to mention those elements that make a man real. The Mormons pretend they never existed.
“What will you tell them in your next Ben Franklin lecture?” they wanted to know.
I answered, “He was a man with poor vision who is engraved forever in the history books but did not get his face put on a rock in South Dakota?”
“Yes,” said the Mormons.
I asked Wayne once how come he doesn’t just fly this place and move to Jackson or Park City and open a real gallery. “Because the tourists there tend to have more taste,” said Wayne Kerr the realist. “Because our tourists are bait fishermen’s wives from Ohio. Besides, I haven’t finished a real painting in twenty years.”
Do the Mormons want truth? “Hell no,” says Wayne.
Through the window I have seen Wayne fly off the handle and just start throwing and kicking maybe three hundred dollars’ worth of landscapes around the studio until he’s so winded and shaky and coughy he can hardly stand, which doesn’t take long. He’s careful, though, careful not to hit the figures, the beautiful almost-finished oil figures he’s kept hanging in gold no-glass frames next to the oil figure studies on cheap gessoed paint-board scraps that form a collage in the studio as a reminder: a reminder of what he used to do, what he has done, will do again. I could feel for Robin.
I wait an hour and call Wayne but he isn’t home yet. It is dinnertime for most people here. Robin checks and says, Yes, their satellite dish is fine and sure enough their French porn channel— Galaxy 4, Channel 17—is coming in clear as sunshine, but I know she doesn’t watch it and Wayne doesn’t need it, so wouldn’t you know, they’re getting it loud and clear now. She adds that there’s a new crack in the foundation along the side of the garage where the studio is, and wasn’t that quake something. She’ll send Wayne over when he gets in. That is, if he gets in, because Wayne is probably seeing Copper over whiskey sours at the Number 9. This is the most we have ever talked and I don’t say this to Robin, don’t wish to make her sad. But Robin knows Copper will leave and take with her Wayne’s new passion, and passion, she knows, Wayne needs like oxygen, vitamin D, and fat in winter; she tells herself she married an artist and can’t bear a passionless Wayne. We talk about California weather and school. Since the quake I pick up garbled AM radio over the telephone. It’s not real clear but the Jazz game is on and for a minute I listen to the fantasy of professional basketball and Robin’s voice.
He is painting real paintings again. “Pictures,” Copper calls them in her nasal red-haired Montana accent. “Beautiful pictures,” she says in a way that allows for the fact that she’s in them. He’s even growing his beard back, though this time it is streaked with gray. Copper is from Billings, an explosives engineer fresh out of School of Mines where, Wayne tells me, she switched from electrical engineering when she found she had a penchant for blowing things up. She’s with the Wyoming branch of some outfit out of Houston that puts out derrick fires with dynamite. Word of mouth had it that Wayne Kerr used to do figures, nudes, and she approached him at a junior high faculty party where she was a date of one of the assistant football coaches who spent the better part of the party overshaking everyone’s hand and drawing plays on damp cocktail napkins. “I hear you’re into oils.” she said to Wayne, making a little “o” with her lips on “oils” and sucking the rest of the word in like good cigar smoke. They talked for an hour and a half while Robin ate celery. Copper rides a vintage motorcycle and Wayne says she’s good and wild and narcissistic and that that ain’t easy to please. I see here in the Casper Star-Tribune that geologists still can’t pinpoint the fault.
Okay.
So the superintendent and principal are on me. I am a good teacher and that is a problem for them. They make unannounced visits and just sit in my classroom, taking notes and trying to get to me, write me up on trifles they find in dusty policy books, then put the pink slips in my permanent file. It doesn’t matter that I can lecture the hell out of Thomas Jefferson, the Gettysburg Address, or women’s suffrage (Wyoming was the first). They are frustrated because they cannot write Is a friend of Wayne Kerr in my file. I buy beer. I like blue movies. They know because they watch. They see. Things are harder for Robin; she has tenure and they must ride her harder, search a little deeper, raise their voices a little more. They just won’t hand me a new contract in May, they’ll have a fat file of why’s, and I’ll be starting up again in another middle of nowhere somewhere else. Though those places are becoming fewer. It isn’t easy but there is a point you have to hit where you quit sweating. With each move I travel a little lighter. I’m just not quite sure which side of that point I’m on.
It is March and not nearly spring, not nearly warm, not nearly the May or June recess we get from winter. But Copper is out there in the night, a whiskey shadow on her old piston-knocking Indian Chief motorcycle, though it still snows hard and the north winds from Canada and Montana still blow and howl like hell and find every bad rivet and seam on this trailer; out there in her leather jacket and faded jeans with holes and grease and tears all up and down her legs and nothing underneath, long red mane flying behind her. Up and down Main Street. Antelope Street. U.S. 30 and 189; all over Carmel County, miles of black snowdrift backdrop. She leaves a trail in the cold from the bike’s hot exhaust and the breath that comes from deep inside her. I hear the Indian—the Indian!—as I climb onto the roof, and watch her streak through the warm fog of streetlights.
People get a little anxious this time of year. Mormons have turned to coffee. I’ve seen Copper open a beer bottle with her eye socket. The fire of that Indian is rhythmic and steady, something heartening. I hope Wayne will be by soon.
Mormons populate more than half of this town—almost three quarters. They’re on the school board and the town council, and they own the grocery store and all of the gas stations. The Mormon priesthood have visions and see things against their eyelids. What I am going to tell you next is in my file. They know-I helped Wayne one night when he airbrushed Revelation 22:18 and left his mark on thirty-two cars of a Union Pacific coal train that took half an hour to lumber through the switchyard at the center of town that next morning: “I warn every one who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if any one adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book.” On the last car, the one right after “book,” Wayne sprayed this cartoon Joseph Smith hammering away on a laptop computer and the Book of Mormon spitting out of a laser printer. Cartoon Joe had a little name tag above his pocket, just like the guys at the Chevron station: Joe. I just carried the big carbon dioxide tanks and paint—Wayne’s got a bad back— but they knew. Copper kept watch, though it was okay because the train was parked out in the middle of Pratt Canyon, real nowhere. It started getting light and Wayne didn’t get the “Book of Mormon” quite finished, so that it read “Book of Mor,” but everyone got the idea. This made the paper in Cheyenne when the Revelation rolled through on its way to Omaha and
power plants farther east. It was the first time I had felt alive and useful since the idea of being married stopped sounding like a good one. I don’t feel that alive now. Wayne’s an atheist, but he knows his Bible.
The Hams Fork Gazette front page called it “Juvenile Graffiti,” but Wayne just called it something for the boys at the bar. “In this place you’ve got to make your own fun,” he says. This is true and I’m glad to see it, and with Copper, Wayne makes much more of his own fun more often. Every once in a while now you’ll see one of Wayne’s words roll through town: plagues, words, if, one, book, God. His new paintings are impressive.
It’s all right to go to the bar more often now that I’m new history, a lame duck soon to be extinct like so many dinosaur birds buried in the high-desert sand. I go with Wayne because he has never bought in to living with someone else’s standards and his attitude gives me a lift. He writes editorials to the Gazette (the Gazoo, he calls it) under the pen name Stephen Hero, Star Route, Hams Fork, Wyoming. He harangues the mayor, the town council, the school board, the Carmel County sheriff, the bishops, the superintendent, the chief of police. All for fun, he says, all for fun. I don’t really give a shit about any of that, Wayne claims after really throwing the dictionary—sometimes the Bible—at them. All for fun. The thing is, though, he is always dead-on and the written replies in next week’s paper never touch him. But they are keeping score for sure, bet everything they are, a running count. Wayne’s new word, I think he coined it, is “Custerian.”
I don’t sleep well anymore. The alcohol helps. I get recurring nightmares. It’s evening in the dream, summer and green. I’m at the drive-in with friends and peers and most times they have dates. We laugh and drink and make fun of the movies. Between features all the other cars leave but ours. Then the big gray speaker in the window quits working and we only can see the movie, not hear it, but we don’t mind and sometimes don’t even notice. Then the picture gets fuzzy and I guess I must fall asleep. When I wake up in the dream I am alone. It’s cold and the windows are iced over from the inside. I try to start the car from the back seat and the starter just grinds. I get out of the back seat in just my underwear and run around in the snow. No one is here at this boarded-up theater in the middle of nowhere. The marquee out front reads CLOSED FOR SEASON. I look back toward the car and my footprints are blown over. I didn’t bring a shovel. I have jumper cables but I’m alone in the world. Every dream it’s a different drive-in.
A while back we worked out a deal. I’m learning to sketch, a first step. Wayne lets me sit in the studio for twenty minutes or half an hour now and then and I sketch from what he has already done, his work with Copper and the unfinished figures and parts on the walls: arms, legs, breasts, hips, faces, sex, and shadows. In exchange for lessons and studio time, I change his oil and wash, sometimes vacuum, his truck. I’m going to run the idea by him of maybe sketching Robin sometime, maybe paint her. If I make it that far. For some Polaroids of Copper I gave Wayne two racks of Heineken.
“Persistence of the New West” he will call his next exhibit, and when he says this he looks a little younger, a little thinner, a little taller. He’s even making his own paints with lead and cadmium, toxins from deep in the ground that Wayne says are truer in color and tell a more accurate story. Copper has been posing in cowboy boots and nothing else, Stetsons, lariats; she has posed with little mini-cigars, a fringed leather jacket over naked skin, a buffalo hide, skis, branding irons, whiskey bottles, Susan B. Anthony dollars, a rawhide whip, nothing, fly-fishing vest, chaps.
I have seen them work when Robin says they’re in the studio and I walk out, not wanting to disturb them, and look through the curtain crack in the little foundation window. There is an energy that fills the air and ground of the studio; art and sex, yes, but also, somehow, magic. The mad, naked nude painter, Wayne Kerr. Copper, like art-history-book prints of Titian’s Mary Magdalene looking to the sky in ecstasy, wraps her long hair around naked shoulders, breasts, sex. He puts his Rockies cap on backwards and a thick black-handled brush crossways in his teeth and bites down on it as color rushes and swirls for minutes at a time until the session is over, until he’s slick with sweat, the pain is gone, the egg is out, the painting is begun; until the mouth brush is splintered, wet with tobacco spit, used. I’ve seen it more than once. Then he’ll take her, most always from behind like a dog, and they’ll scratch and howl and bite and curse, Copper’s white breasts turning red with heat, Wayne’s hairy waist and gut heaving with in-rut, mythical lust, really driving his back into it. He plays a lot of Mozart now. It’s been a long time since Wayne has had one of his landscape-kicking fits.
The UPS driver is a Mormon. Wayne and I are convinced our packages ride around town for a few extra days but what can you do? I’m opening a package of new paints, safe paints, wash-with-water acrylics, and glance out my front window and see Robin walking. I often see her walking, hiking out her frustrations at having her name uttered in the same sentences as mine when the microphones are turned off at school board meetings and in the lounge before the 8:15 bell rings, where a clique of teachers are taking last hits on their Monday-morning herb tea. She is frustrated from being looked at by housewives when she’s searching— maybe humming a hymn or a folk song—through the cereal aisle, looking for Honeycombs for Wayne.
She takes long, strong strides and stares straight ahead, inhaling, exhaling hard, sweating, her breath trailing behind her, misting her long brown hair until it vaporizes and another puff of breath takes its place. She walks down a stretch of fenced-in yard where a young elkhound is thrilled to be running beside her until the end of his fence, where Robin looks at him like she could be party to every dog wish if only that were in the design of things, and for twenty yards or so it is. She walks past the stockyards and rodeo grounds, up the BLM road that leads to the radio towers and relay station on top of Sarpy Ridge. The snow is deep and less sooty up there, well above me. Through my monocular I’ll see her trudging through thigh-deep drifts, kicking, slapping at the white with her fists, throwing it, daring the earth to move. The snow dampens her screams of anger—anger because she is under fire for what her husband did and anger because she is not an Indian-riding redhead with big tits and shit for morals—until she gradually disappears into the blackening winter sky. By daylight the wind has wiped clean her tracks, footprints that from down here are only sixteenths of an inch, millimeters apart. Wayne says her mind deals in the concrete and they are concretely married and he still comes home most nights and still puts his dishes in the dishwasher.
Up there maybe there’s less chance her prayers get trapped in the inversion of wood and coal smoke that sometimes hangs over the valley. But maybe those prayers blow to Utah. She copes. Robin is from California, where they have real earthquakes.
I’m grading some horrid red-pen term papers and watching aerobics, which I can still get on ESPN, and drinking a beer. It’s ten o’clock or so now, but I’ll skip the news. Women. The knock at the door is Wayne in overalls. Before I answer he mounts the ladder with the new fifteen-millimeter nut he promised me this afternoon and I’m in my living room with the remote control and the window open. I set the control box to Galaxy 4, Channel 17. Fuzz, snow, snow, okay! “That’s it!” Three French women have cuffed a no-clothes policeman to the radiator and are smearing him with ice cream and licking it off to some kind of psychedelic Wagnerian fugue, dow daw dowww, whokaneeow, whokaneeow. Wayne tightens up the nut on the antennae, pounds across the metal roof and back down the ladder. I go outside to meet him, to thank him. He’s breathing hard and looking through the window at the TV. “You know,” he says, “what does this tell you about the state of our nation?”
“This is France,” I say.
“That’s right. Use your phone?”
Wayne checks in with Robin. I can feel the weight of her disappointment on the other end, Wayne’s excitement on this end.
“You still with me here, man?” asks Wayne.
“I thought y
ou were going to get some new equipment. From your dad?” I’m stalling for myself, but I know I’m in. Wayne doesn’t even hear me. The dogs are running tonight.
This is a problem I seem to always have had: How do I know how much I have? And how do I know when I am losing it? I get up and pull my coveralls on, go out to the truck, and we’re off. “Hey,” says Wayne. “You can hear those UFO freaks from that Albuquerque station on your phone.”
We park in the sage on the other side of U.S. 30. The only traffic is an occasional semi, so there is no real effort involved in keeping unseen. It’s clear and the moon makes it possible to pick up outlines well without being seen from a distance.
“Look at that honey moon,” says Wayne. “Magical.” It creates a shadow over everything we do. A bolt cutter makes short work of the lock on the cyclone and barbed-wire gate. I muscle the ladder off the truck and drag it to the base of the tower. Wayne fixes a bandanna over his face like a nineteenth-century highwayman, turns his cap around, throws a climbing rope over his shoulder, and nods at many quarts of paint, the pressure regulator and tanks—twenty pounds of gas in heavy steel cylinders, three of them—in the rusty truck bed, nothing lightweight from the Idaho dad. I just get the ladder telescoped and steady and, like a kid on a beer buzz hell-bent to spray his girlfriends name on the tank, bad-back Wayne scoots a quarter of the way up, to where the caged ladder starts, before I get to the bottom with the clumsy tanks. Over my breathing I can hear soft pings like hail on aluminum as Wayne takes to the top like a house spider. I look up and can barely make out the WELCOME I’ve seen a hundred times. It’s Wayne’s canvas tonight. He drops me the rope.