When We Were Wolves

by Jon Billman

  ust a boy of seventeen and Four Roses drunk, Romer Meeks had pancaked his father’s Aeronca Chief onto Becky Weed’s front yard, downtown Tea, South Dakota. He’d knocked out his two front teeth against his kneecap and spit a pulpy string of blood on the long grass next to the little airplane, which rested maimed over its buckled landing gear. He’d wanted to impress her. Now he’d have to tell his dad he’d broke his glasses.

  Romer limped, casual as a scarecrow, to the porch where Becky and her family stood. Don’t appear messy, he thought, the idea forming like foam in his consciousness. Don’t appear hurt neither. Mostly, though, don’t appear stupid, but it’s maybe a little late for that. “What are you up to?” Romer said as he reached visiting distance, hiding the gap in his mouth with his tongue like an upside-down wolf whistle.

  “My God, Romer, are you okay?” Becky asked, standing at the edge of the porch. Romer felt a throbbing in his chest.

  “Just turn around and keep on walkin’,” Becky’s father said, staring at the toylike airplane for signs of smoke and fire. “Limp on home.”

  “But, Dad, what if he’s hurt?” “He ain’t hurt that bad.”

  Romer did limp home, to be rejected by the Air Force and the Navy and the Coast Guard and Jackrabbit Air Freight, for reasons that ranged from arrhythmia to corrective lenses thick as the bottoms of canning jars. After another wrecked airplane he had to have custom-made shoes with the left sole cobbled two inches higher than the right, normal one, just so he could walk in a straight line. Fifteen years later, he wore black lizard-skin cowboy boots, little red airplane hand-stitched into the elkhide shafts, cloud of thread on leather weather, skywritten initials just below: RM.

  Chasing bugs and nightshade up and down the long and short rows of eastern South Dakota, Romer laid malathion and Dibrom 14 fog over small town after small town for an outfit out of Sisseton called Sky Tractor; the poison settled into wells and backwaters, marrow, eddies, aquifers, and fat stores. Romer found himself gypsy-flying over Big Stone City, where, he remembered reading from the Weddings section of the County Broad-Axe, Becky Weed had moved (following a honeymoon in Hawaii) with her husband, the quarterback-turned-banker.

  Jim Beam his drinking buddy the night before, poison and coffee sloshing in his stomach now, the checkerboard cropland surrounding the airport read like the cloudy irrigated topographical map of his memory. He’d come such a long way, scud-running the 250-horsepower ‘66 Piper Pawnee with a narrow Spartan cockpit like a fighter plane, a long way from the boyhood Chief that would fly backward at full throttle in a stiff headwind.

  But now, in real time, he flew. A film of green engine oil and yellow motes of poison that dripped from leaky O-rings painted the windscreen of the Pawnee or his glasses—wasn’t sure—causing the sunlight to prism his view, sweet vibrations and smell of malathion, alfalfa seed, and old tractor filling the cockpit as he taxi-bounded across the grass, synaptic bulbs firing, his liver feeling fine and clean as ever. Styrofoam Grande Cafe Java between his legs. Traffic control a smile and a wave.

  Pawnee Whiskey Zulu. He took off heavy to the north, using every inch of runway in the thin summer air, pulled up and banked hard and buzzed town fast and low. That morning over breakfast— cigarettes, a jelly-filled—he’d sleuthed Becky Weed’s (now Becky Catchpole’s) address. Old fashioned pre-GPS telephone-book map in his lap lined with a carpenter’s pencil, he nosed the airplane down and rolled left into a twisted horseshoe. Romer surveyed her half acre of yard and house in reconnaissance fashion, the end of the canopy rainbow resting at her patio, where the quarterback barbecued in a pink golf shirt. Becky Weed nowhere in sight.

  Romer had held a fantasy, that of flying shotgun for the Animal Damage Control boys over to West River, shooting coyotes from a Husky with a Benelli 10-gauge, but the ADC was military in nature and he knew he wouldn’t pass muster, many physical equivalents of flat feet. He’d have to stay satisfied with his summertime blitzkrieg on the delicate chemical balance in the nervous systems of arthropods. Catchpole the quarterback flashed a banker’s wave at the pilot in the sky, Thanks for spraying, yes, the world needs fewer insects and more fliers like you, you’d qualify for low interest, damn sure would—Go Coyotes!—see me on Monday in my designer tie.

  Romer waved back, tipped his wings as if to say, Remember me, Becky Weed? Romer Meeks, the only one who’s crashed for you.

  This one’s on the county, city of Big Stone, Romer Meeks, Sky Tractor (by God!). He ruddered left, stall speed rising, circled and came in low, yawing above the ranch-style, out of trim, then leveled his booms over a 12-gallon veil of malathion, enough organo-phosphates to drop a murder of crows.

  Becky Weed will not have to swat mosquitoes as long as Romer flies her evening air.

  wo Bulls and I while away our days mining petrified herring for tourists. What we’re really fishing for are the six-feet-long gar that the museums will pay good money for. But, like the Eocene horses, the gar are very rare.

  There isn’t much traffic in Alkali, but we manage to sell enough gasoline and cigarettes along with the three-inch Knightia fossils to eke out an existence in this ghost town, population three. Two Bulls’ wife, Miriam, is a good cook and we eat like pharaohs, though her hand shakes more each year as she holds the cast-iron skillet out to us—she won’t let us buy her a microwave oven. Some days Two Bulls can hardly stoop to tie his boots from the pain in his joints. He sees his arthritis as a good reason to lace his coffee with cheap whiskey. I see his arthritis as a good reason to join him and doctor up my cup as well.

  In the past fifty of my seventy-some years, I have yet to find an other perfect Eocene horse in the stone. But the one we have, the one I found when I was young, we keep in the back room of the store, where we can see it and touch it, and no government agency will come take it away and send it to a fancy museum in the East. In an odd way the horse keeps us company. A fish we could set loose, no problem.

  There are still a few mustangs here in Wyoming. Sometimes, just before dark, I see one, a Roman-nosed Andalusian stallion I call Atom Boy. He comes to drink from a muddy spring in the foothills. The hair on his fetlocks is long and shaggy and his ribs show under his matted hide. He sucks the spring dry, then stands, watching, while it slowly fills up so he can suck it dry again. He does this until he gets his fill. Atom Boy stays out of the open—behind a herd of antelope, an oil pump jack, or a sandstone outcrop. He knows there are people who would shoot him for dog food.

  Booms and rodeos come and go; the only thing consistent are the bottle flies. There is always talk of the mines starting up again, and Western Nuclear keeps a skeleton crew out there, pumping the shafts dry, letting them fill, then pumping them dry again; this, I suppose, can be written off in taxes. We could dig for fossils in the old mines, save for the water and radon. To the companies, Alkali is a dunghill. Whatever uraninite the country needs now comes cheap from the deserts of North Africa, where the Moorish Barb mustangs came here from. Western Nuclear doesn’t understand that the smell of wet sage has a way of evening out your losses.

  I still keep batteries in the old chrome Geiger counter. I get a boost from knowing our world is still radioactive, and no matter what the professors do with it, that energy comes from God’s brown earth. The glazed dishes we eat from will set the Geiger counter to rattling. Thorium gas-lantern mantles are hot too. Sometimes our petrified fish kick up a few alpha particles when I hold the vacuum tube close. In this way I listen to the fish. The fish tell me what was. Every afternoon, over coffee, whiskey, or both, Two Bulls tells me what used to be, though I know because I was there too—Two Bulls just likes to put his Indian bent on things. The horse, Atom Boy, reminds us both of a story. It’s an old testament.

  Truman was President on that Sunday in early June when Mose drove up the tree-lined lane to the headmasters office in his rusty 1939 Buick. I was shagging flies on the ball field when one of the boys brought word that Father Irons wanted to see me. As I entered his office, Father Irons fo
rced a smile and introduced us. “David, I’d like you to meet Mr. Moses Dogbane. Mr. Dogbane, this is David Hadsell, one of our finest boys. Mr. Dogbane is in mineral futures.”

  A fossil of a man, wild-bearded, with stringy gray hair under a battered Stetson Open Road, he wore an old gray double-breasted suit, suspenders, and dusty cowboy boots. He nodded and shook my glove hand with his dirty right hand, while the stubby fingers of his left hand held a gold watch on a chain with a yellow elk tooth attached to the end. He wheezed when he breathed and made a nervous clicking sound, like a Geiger counter, with his tongue against the backs of his soft brown teeth. His breath smelled of whiskey and horseradish.

  “I’m confident Mr. Dogbane will lead you to a bright future, son,” Father Irons said as we stepped back into the sunlight.

  “I’ll put hair on your chest, young man,” Mose said, tucking the watch back into his vest pocket, “you can count on that much. Hair on your chest, yessir.”

  St. Joseph’s records said I was either sixteen or seventeen. This was correct enough, for I could hit a fastball farther than any fifteen-year-old, but I wasn’t yet wise enough to think like an eighteen-year-old. Schoolwise anyway. Outside of school there wasn’t much paperwork involved.

  I packed my duffel and we made the long hot drive to Alkali, stopping only briefly in Casper for gas, oil, and a week-old Tribune. I noticed a matinee I hadn’t seen, Gun Smugglers, advertised on the marquee at the Acme downtown. “What’s Gun Smugglers all about?” asked Mose. “That a good one?”

  “Haven’t seen it,” I said.

  Mose was a prospector and a deal man. He started me out as a swamper for room and board and a pair of six-dollar field boots that gave me blisters on my heels the size of silver dollars. My room was a dim and dirty mop closet behind the bar. Board was beans and fried-egg sandwiches with mustard on bread you sometimes had to tear the green patches from, and once in a while a rangy chicken we killed ourselves.

  Mose gave testament to my future. “Set your aspirations high,” he told me. I thought maybe I’d like to play professional baseball, though as I grew a little older I realized that was only a kid’s pipe dream. What I knew for sure was that I didn’t want to be a priest. Mose wheezed when he told me what he thought I shouldn’t become. “A cowboy couldn’t pour piss from a boot if the instructions were printed on the heel. Thou shalt not be a dumbfucking cowboy, Davey, my boy. Best get uranium on your cranium. We’re gonna leave the horseshit to the punchers and deal our way to the top.”

  Alkali sat like a sun blister along dirt-and-gravel spur highway 77— what the locals called Poison Spider Road—in the Paradox Basin. A small wooden sign a hundred yards up the highway announced it: EAT AND DRINK AT ALKALI.

  Somewhere in that big bowl of land was the geographic center, the nucleus, of the state of Wyoming. Standing in the middle of the pitted dirt parking lot of the Alkali Bar, the world was wind, sage, snakeweed, and sandstone. At the edge of the parking lot, where the Alkali Bar and a half dozen withered Russian olive trees met the desert, a pump jack sat frozen with rust, a dinosaur from the real oil-boom days of the forties. On the clearest mornings you could see Mount Sinai to the west. The tattered screen door of the bar would slap against the blue asbestos siding in the wind. Nailed above the door hung a rusty caulked horseshoe, for luck. KWRL out of Riverton played Hank Williams and Bing Crosby all day long; the tinny Philco radio buzzed with static from the army-surplus diesel generator that rumbled behind the bar, powering the town. At night Seldom, Moses big wife, listened to AM sermons from Casper and Denver, hellfire and redemption at dusk. “Today, Mr. David,” she would say, “today was so hot, I saw a coyote chasin’ a jackrabbit and they was both walkin’.” Alkali wasn’t on most road maps.

  Mose did magic tricks. He’d sit at the bar and drop a hen’s egg into a milk bottle without it breaking. He could find the one-eyed jack on the first cut in his old dog-eared deck of cards. He could change a dime into a silver dollar, then back into a dime again. Sometimes he would change one of my dimes into a nickel.

  A matted cur we called Pennzoil lived in a hole under the boards of the front porch. The dog had tapeworm and he stayed in the damp shade during the heat of the day, and in the evening came out and dragged his hind end across the parking lot. “Where’s the wandering Jew today?” Mose said often. There would be days when not a single customer pulled in to so much as buy a Coke and walk around the oiled hardwood floor and study the framed black-and-white rodeo photographs of champion cowboys like Toots Mansfield, Harry Tompkins, Buster Ivory, Homer Pettigrew, Dee Burk, Ike Rude, Jess Goodspeed, Shoat Webster, and Casey Tibbs. On these lonely days, Mose would look at his boots and figure the price of diesel fuel to the price of customers’ absence until the shadows crept across the floor and the preachers lit up the airwaves: “And the Lord shall make thee the head, and not the tail, and thou shalt be above only and not beneath.” Like an evangelist, Mose recited familiar passages right along with them while Seldom rocked and nodded her head.

  Mose had recently married into Alkali. One afternoon while I fought back the desert at the edge of the parking lot with a sickle, Mose strolled out to see how the battle was coming along. “Man don’t know what he’s doin’, the desert’ll get the best of him,” he said. I asked Mose if Seldom was her real name. “Nope,” he said. “Real name’s Abigail.” I asked him why he called her Seldom. “Because there’s something seldom about that woman,” he said. Wheezing from the heat, he shook his finger at the sky. “She ain’t much to look at, but I have learned that it’s better to dwell in the wilderness than with a contentious and angry woman.” Seldom ate a raw clove of garlic each morning and tended to the town from a rocking chair on the porch while Mose made figures on the backs of old penny stock certificates that weren’t worth a hill of beans. Seldom smiled often, though didn’t much care for dusting. Dust covered everything in Alkali.

  Mose was an antique, a product of the old days. He was part businessman, part saddle tramp, part hardrock mucker. In his day you had to be a jack-of-all-trades. Would-be mining brokers might raise a little capital and birth a mining company on the marble stock exchange floor, then go out into the hills and dirty their hands. Mose had humped a battered alligator-hide briefcase all over the West, not getting rich, more often not breaking even, for a good lot of his many years. He did it all, not having evolved into a specialist, and survived a heart attack, a near-hanging in New Mexico over an asbestos mine gone bad, and a bout with lung cancer to boot.

  “Like straw for bricks, uranium is the nucleus of tomorrow,” he said to me and every one of the few customers who came into the Alkali Bar. “Like straw for bricks.” It was something he’d read in the Bible or the Tribune. He was going to get rich from ground-level atomic power. “There are folks down in Utah getting dirty rich,” he wheezed between sips of the boiled coffee he called coffin varnish, “and these hills don’t look no different than Utah hills.” Mose had no intentions of breaking rock himself. He was going to booster his way to wealth. I had a feeling the rock-breaking was where I might come in.

  Alkali Bar’s daily special consisted of pinto beans in a jalapeño-and-chili-powder sauce Seldom made, every day, and it was the only thing customers could get from the kitchen—breakfast, lunch, or dinner. She never washed the giant cast-iron Dutch oven the beans simmered in, and a black char caked the inside of the big pot. Between bites, chewing and shooing bluebottle flies, customers would reply to Mose, “You don’t say,” or “That’s what I hear.” But most just paid for their gas and bottle of beer and hurried down the road on their way to God knows where.

  Sometimes oil men, men who knew geology, would come in and Mose would talk uranium with them. Under the saltgrass and greasewood, there were ancient seas of oil in the Paradox Basin, but uranium was foreign to the oil men, just something they remembered hearing about in chemistry class in high school. Their checks were signed by the oil companies. They were lost in oil the way a person can get lost in time in Wyo
ming, and before you know it, an entire life passes by.

  Mose and the geologists talked rocks. They talked vein deposits and mineralization. They talked radioactivity and economic feasibility. They talked about the nuclear-age equivalents of “fool’s gold,” radioactive elements that weren’t worth that hill of beans to the Atomic Energy Commission but could excite a money-blind prospector. The men would finish their coffee and beans. Mose would lick a stubby carpenter’s pencil, mumble, and scratch names and figures on the yellowed stock certificates. “For the Lord is my shepherd, but also my rock,” Mose said.

  A week after I arrived in Alkali and learned to pump gas from the pump that was set to give three quarts of watered-down Fire Chief for every gallon that rolled over on the register, Mose’s Buick, towing a rusty open-top two-horse trailer, came rattling through the parking lot on its way back from Riverton. He sprang out of the driver’s side, slammed the heavy door, and stomped over to the porch, where I was pretending to sweep. “Take a look-see at my new business card.” He poked a small gray business card at me and Seldom, who was rocking in the shade of the porch and whistling through her teeth.

  POISON SPIDER URANIUM CO., INC.

  EXPLORATION AND DEVELOPMENT

  J. MOSES DOGBANE, JR., PRESIDENT

  RURAL ROUTE BOX I-A

  ATOMIC BAR, WYO.

  “Our uranium is the nucleus of tomorrow.”

  Alkali didn’t have a phone.

  “You’re living in Atomic Bar. Wyoming, now. I’ve already notified the postman. I don’t want to hear any word about Alkali except in the history books. And there’s no sense thumbing through the history books unless backward’s where you want to go.”