When We Were Wolves

by Jon Billman

  He pointed toward the Buick. “Here, son, help me with this.” He wheezed several notes, like an accordion, and started back for the car. I followed him, studying the mule and the wild-eyed horse in the trailer. A spirited mare, coat slick brown, not bay, but dark— almost greenish in the sunlight, like crude oil. She was blocky, with fox ears and a bowed Roman nose, big feet, and long, shaggy hair on her fetlocks. Her matted croup and thigh had been firebranded and cross-branded several times into an illegible maze of scars. She bucked hard in the trailer. “Here,” said Mose. A wooden crate took up most of the back seat. Stenciled on the crate in black letters: NEON, FRAGILE, THIS SIDE UP.

  We left the animals in the trailer while we hung Alkali Bar’s new neon sign atop the corrugated-tin roof in the afternoon sun. “Beasts’ll be fine,” Mose said. “They can wait.” Once in a while the mare would snort and kick against the tailgate. I worked without a break until just about dusk, when we finished jack-wiring the livewire into the hotbox in the mop closet, my room. Mose climbed down the rotting ladder, stuck his head through the east window, and said, “Okay, hit the switch.”

  Full dark sat on the desert and we had gone through a box of fuses by the time we got it wired right. Out of fuses, I replaced an element on the last fuse with a shiny new 1950 copper penny and flicked the switch again. The hotbox made a faint hum in the evening quiet. I ran outside toward the pump and looked up. In bright orange letters surrounded by a cartoonish outline of the bomb we dropped on Japan, it read: ATOMIC BAR. Mose stood erect in the glow, chin high, and struggled to contain his pride. His eyes reflected the neon like two new dimes at the carnival midway.

  Early the next morning, with difficulty we untrailered the mare and turned her into the corral. “You can just starve today if that’s your attitude, you glue-bound fleabiskit!” Mose yelled. The mare ran tight circles along the rail, catching up again to the dust clouds behind her.

  He turned the mule and me into the hills to stake our fortunes. I knew nothing about uranium or prospecting, though Mose told me that didn’t matter—he would teach me all I needed to know. He gave us a pick, a shovel, a rock hammer, a couple of cold fried-egg sandwiches, a case of beans, an aluminum surplus mess kit, two tin canteens, three full canvas water sacks, a bedroll, an old United States Geological Survey topographical map, boundary stakes, a shiny chrome Precision Radiation Geiger counter Mose’d ordered from a catalogue, a surplus compass, a battered Mexican straw hat, and a weathered copy of the General Mining Law of 1872.

  “Don’t I get to ride the mare?” I asked.

  “Oh no,” laughed Mose. “That gal is bronc stock. There’d be something seldom about you after I turned you out in the desert on that devil. She’s gonna subsidize our uranium riches until those checks clear.”

  “Well, what’s her name?”

  He watched her gait around the corral, kicking dirt, snorting, and butting her breast and throat latch against the top rail in anger. Mose studied her tantrum with pride, like he’d made her himself. “Atomic Bomb, starting today.”

  Mose stayed at the bar because, he said, he only had one lung left and the walking would do him in. Besides, I was man enough for the job, he told me, and he had a rodeo to run. “That hinny gives you any trouble,” Mose said, “go ahead and beat him within a miner’s inch of his life.”

  The mule was probably near the same age as me and was almost as rank as Atomic Bomb. A hinny is a cross between a stallion and a jenny. This one had white patches around his eyes, like a clown, and, like Atomic Bomb, had been cross-branded so many times that his ass-end read like history. The first time I pulled the latigo he jerked around, honked, and bit me on the arm. I fell to the ground, holding the wound with my glove hand, fingers inking red at the edges.

  One-handed, with my bloody hand still holding my throwing arm, I hitched down my gear and threw a moldy canvas manty over the bulging panniers. Still not trusting him, the mule, I took the lead rope in my right hand and jerked him forward. He followed, slowly. We cleared the first rise and I might as well have been on the moon, alone with the wind and this goddamned beast. I figured since it was just him and me, I had the right to give him a name. I named him Asshole.

  Mose had instructed us to do this: walk for three and a half days east, into the riverless Paradox Basin, the wilderness. He pointed to the morning sun and said, “There lies the Promised Land. The land of milk and honey. Do you see that?”

  “See what?” I said. “I just see sand and skunkbrush.”

  “Look up there on the horizon.”

  I squinted between two distant mountains, like a rifle sight, at the sun coming up over Wyoming. That time of day you can actually watch the sun rise, like if you stare hard enough at the minute hand of your watch. All I could see was sagebrush, the tops torching in the brightness like they were on fire, burning. I blinked away the spots left in my eyelids and looked at my boss.

  “There’s money on the ground in those hills,” he said. “Go find it.” He slapped the mule in the ass and we lit out into the radiating heat.

  I kept the Geiger counter switched on, strapped to Asshole’s withers, the vacuum tube swinging along his shoulders with every slow step. Nothing but the irregular clicks of normal background radiation that is part of everything.

  Asshole was a bloater. He’d swell up with air when I cinched the pack saddle down and adjusted the breeching each morning. Careful not to get bit, I’d try jamming my knee between his ribs. He would wheeze, but still manage to keep enough air in his belly. As we walked he would deflate and the latigo would slacken and the pack would slide. Again and again I’d have to wrestle with the heavy pack and cuss a son-of-a-bitch mule. It got so I could tell he liked the cursing. His ears would twitch and he would fill up with fresh air and let out a gleeful honk. Sometimes the pack would slide clear underneath him and I’d have to untie the manty and unpack and rehitch everything.

  On the morning of the fourth day of walking, in the lonesome middle of Paradox Basin known on my U.S.G.S. map as the Gas Hills—known to Mose as Bumfuck, Egypt—I hobbled Asshole, turned him out to graze on Russian thistle, sandbur, and the sparse rough grasses, and started looking for anticlines, rock outcrops, and colored formations in order to begin staking dishonest mineral claims.

  I walked-off a dozen 600-by-1,500-foot rectangles. At the corners of the claims I built foot-high rock-duck markers. I staked the perimeters. I filled out location notices on a pad of paper Mose had handed me before I left, described in detail the land the claims were on, tucked the papers in tin bean cans with Moses’ business card, and left them on the claims. It didn’t matter that the rocks were cold and worthless, just rocks; now Poison Spider Uranium Co., Inc., had property.

  The last thing I did, before finding Asshole and packing him back up and beginning the long return walk to Alkali, was hike the claims with the Geiger counter. The needle didn’t budge, other than the normal twitch from background radiation. Lack of uranium ore was not going to stop the company. Mose explained to me that fortunes were made inside your head and that presence of the mineral— geological whim—was just something to believe in if your world was small. We, he said, were going to raise a million dollars, split it like an atom, and sell the company. “Hell, we can move to California or Kathmandu if we want to!” said Mose. “I’m gonna buy a boat the size of a battleship and sail the oceans of the world. Like a pirate.”

  We were going to salt several of the bogus claims with euxenite, atomic fool’s gold, bring investors out by the Greyhound load, hand them cold beers, and show them our future. They would see a claim or two for themselves, then our long, notarized list of claims filed. Then they would get out their checkbooks and Mose would reach them his ivory pen. Mose wanted the claims three-days remote on purpose. He wanted to discourage government men from taking too close a look. And he wanted to make the claims seem all that much more valuable, like El Dorado, for their remoteness.

  The wild horses ranged from here south to the Red Dese
rt, into northwestern Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and deep into Mexico, and north to the Pryor Mountains of Montana. They came out and into the open as the evenings cooled into night. I would sit on a rock and watch the horseplay. The mustangs were wary of me, wary of people. Sometimes two stallions would fight over a mare for their harems. Ranchers shot the stallions whenever they could get within rifle range, because a horse eats what a cow eats, and from a ranchers angle, there wasn’t enough grass for both. And because the stallions would strut in and steal purebred ranch mares. Horse thieves.

  My arm healed quickly. Asshole’s dull teeth left a flat scar the shape of a goldfish. I took a short-sleeved pride in the scar because it marked me as a real cowboy, a mountain man, no matter that it was a damn hinny and not a grizzly bear that had bitten me. By flexing and relaxing my arm I could make the scarfish tail-dance.

  Though I might just as well have been talking to rocks on the journey back to Alkali, I began talking to the mule. Asshole and I had involved conversations about the weather. About Wyoming. About girls and the Brooklyn Dodgers. I asked him, figuring that food was about as much as a mule had to look forward to in the future and his immediate diet consisted of greasewood leaves and snakeweed, if he could have anything at all to eat right then, what would it be?

  I told him I was soon going to be rich. I told him that if he didn’t pull another stunt like biting me, that maybe I could scare up an apple or two, maybe some sugar cubes or a carrot, when we got back to Alkali. And in the afternoons, when my brains were at the verge of simmering, my canteens warm as radiators, and I couldn’t stomach the thought of eating another bean, I could swear that mule talked back to me.

  Other than overpriced gasoline, pinto beans, and beer, Mose’s spot in the road was known for one thing: the infamous jackpot rodeo. The Alkali Jackpot was an informal event that drew cowboys and Indians from miles in all directions. A few of the wilder cowboys scratching out their livings on the bigger summer circuits would even drop in on their way to the more prestigious and respectable events in Casper, Riverton, Lander, Sheridan, Cody, and Powell, because the Alkali pot could get near handsome, and because the event was held on a Monday, the second Monday every July. The men associated with the Alkali Jackpot didn’t have real jobs to begin with, or they were cowboys who could work an extra Sunday to make up for their weekday absence. The Alkali Jackpot was a spectacle, like a car wreck, and the way most cowboys are wired, they couldn’t stand not to look, even if a look was 150 miles out of their way.

  The Indians from the reservation in Riverton didn’t adhere to the Roman week. They would begin arriving late Sunday morning by the jalopy load. In their trunks were the cases of Old Stagg bourbon and wet gunnysacks full of bottled Old Style beer. The main event, drinking, began well before the second-most-popular event, bareback riding. Gambling followed the bronc riding for a close third.

  The purse consisted of entry fees, the ante—no added money— but many wagers on the side. And sometimes there were fistfights due to differences of opinion. The rules were simple. No judges: Seldom clocked the ride with a pocket watch. If you rode your bronc the full eight seconds, you’d advance to the next go-round. The last man to stay mounted won the purse.

  Small ranches would save their rankest horses for Alkali broncs. Many of the horses were the wild mustangs from the Paradox Basin that had been rounded up for rodeo stock. Left in the desert, their element, they were a miraculous and intelligent arrangement of chemistry. Roped, corralled, and often beaten, the horses became volatile, angry equine bombs. The cowboys possessed a lemonade-from-lemons pride in bad horses, and the prestige in rearing a rank horse and trailering it to Alkali was almost as high as sitting on the back of one for eight seconds. As many wagers were made on horses as on cowboys.

  The Alkali Jackpot was the biggest bucking-horse sale south of Miles City. And though it was seedier, an underground Monday rodeo, the audience always included several large-hat stock contractors—the Barnums and Baileys of the Rocky Mountain rodeo circuits. Like Major League scouts, they were here to find and buy the rankest stock for the bigger events in brighter towns. An especially surly bronc could bring the owner several hundred, even a couple thousand, dollars.

  “How’s our fortune doing, Davey, my boy?” Mose said as Asshole and I walked out of the desert and through the parking lot. I limped from blisters but held my head up high.

  “Okay,” I said, noticing that Mose had been busy while I was gone. He’d built an announcer’s stand for that July’s festivities, hand-painted a sign advertising Poison Spider Uranium, and, beside the front door of the bar, nailed a poster with the familiar Wyoming license plate silhouette of a bronc rider underneath ATOMIC BAR JACKPOT RODEO ! Slowly, things around Alkali were beginning to look a little straighter, a little brighter.

  “Well, today we’re gonna take a little trip. Hitch up the horse trailer and we’ll be on our way. We’ll have investors out here in a New York minute.”

  We stopped to file the claims at the Fremont County Clerk’s Office in Lander. I liked Lander because it was civilization. If you were on the payroll you could order a hamburger or a malted and see a picture. You could watch pretty girls there for free. Summer dresses, white upper arms, freckles or no. I wanted to show a pretty girl the scar on my bicep. I wanted to tell her I was vice-president of a multimillion-dollar uranium company. Pretty girls did not stop in Alkali.

  The courthouse smelled of floor wax, old books, and perfume. Our presence caused a buzz with the courthouse office girls and government men in newer suits, white shirts, and gold tie tacks. The uranium boom was still centered in the Four Corners area of the Southwest and hadn’t hit Wyoming yet, though many geologists thought it was possible and only a matter of time. We had to smell something awful. Mose shuffled through a deck of business cards and reached one to everyone we saw like he was dealing them into our private game of Texas hold em, Omaha, or stud. He paid the filing fee at a dollar per claim with a brand-new hundred-dollar bill. “Yessir, even Ben Franklin is tight with Poison Spider Uranium.” We walked out of the courthouse slowly, enjoying every step. Mose tipped his old hat to women and stopped to look at oil paintings of Indians and politicians.

  We bought Cokes and gasoline at a service station where guys in white hats circled your car and checked everything, smiling. “Better get used to the good life, my boy,” Mose said.

  That day we drove south, all the way to Saratoga, where I noticed that Mark of the Gorilla, and Stagecoach Kid, starring Tim Holt, were playing at the Rialto. We turned left, east, then traveled for about fifteen miles until we came to the headframe of an old copper mine. Mose talked to a man at the gate and handed him a greasy envelope. The man nodded his head and waved us through. We pulled alongside a pile of old rock, copper tailings, and Mose shut the ignition off. The engine dieseled and the car bucked and died. He got out with the Geiger counter and flicked it on. The machine made a screech and the needle buried itself at the right of the dial.

  “Uranium?” I asked.

  “No, my boy,” he said. “Euxenite. Pretty worthless. But not to us.” I spent the next hour or so shoveling copper tailings into the horse trailer.

  “This will make a man outta ya, Davey,” Mose said between wheezy bars of a whistled tune. He was leaning against the trunk, eating a peach. “Your days with that idiot spoon are numbered. You’ll soon trade your shovel for a suit and a new silverbelly fedora. Mark my word.” He studied the loaded trailer, then had me shovel the Buick’s trunk full of the copper tailings too.

  He started the engine, furrowed his brow, then turned the car off. “Fill the goddamn back seat up too,” he said. “I’m gettin’ me a new car soon anyway.” The tires rubbed against the rear fenders as the old Buick belched green smoke and lurched toward the highway.

  Atomic Bomb spent her time damaging the arena. I repaired gates and rails until Mose got tired of it and tethered her to a picket post out in the desert. “All right, you can just eat sagebrush and weeds i
f you’re gonna make my life difficult!” Mose yelled at her. I knew that after this year’s jackpot, he would unload her on the highest bidder and be done with her. Mose was determined to inflate that bid.

  Mose tried to make her meaner, a better bucker, by throwing apples at her, a Wyoming version of Dizzy Dean. He saved soft and wormy pie apples and bounced them off her tough hide. She would start and whinny, the rope taut, then turn and stare Mose down, head lowered, rage in her eyes. After she thought no one watched her any longer, she took the rotten apples in her teeth and squashed them once before swallowing.

  The next morning, Monday, after hen eggs, beans, and coffee, I saddled Asshole. This time Mose loaded him with two potato sacks of mine tailings in addition to our normal cache, throwing a double-diamond hitch to secure the heavy load. “A mule wearin’ diamonds, if that don’t beat all, eh, Davey?” The mule shook a little with each step, straining. Mose hollered after us, “Ain’t gonna become a uranium tycoon polishin’ your britches on a bar stool, son!”

  Asshole and I cleared the first rise and a herd of three hundred or so antelope studied us carefully before exploding toward the west.

  I hobbled Asshole and we camped that night along a chimney rock, the base blackened by hundreds of fires of Indians and hunters. I ran my hands over the thin fossils of little fish and ferny plants and tiny oysters that covered the layered sedimentary rock like ancient wallpaper. I sang songs the nuns taught us at St. Josephs. I sang songs I heard on the Philco back in Alkali. I caught the miniature desert horned toads, talked to them, and let them go. “Go on, get outta here. See ya.” I saw rattlesnakes and made gentlemen’s agreements with them that they stay in the rocks and far enough away from camp not to bother Asshole or me. In return, I wouldn’t shoot them. I did not tell them I didn’t have a gun. I fell asleep to the soft jingle of Asshole’s bell.