by Jon Billman
The salting was like sowing grain seeds. I stomped over the claims, dragging Asshole behind, throwing handfuls of the hot broken rocks, egging the earth on, daring the sandstone to turn into uranium. Alchemy. I could touch my future, feel it in my hands, and see it under my fingernails. A little Atomic Age Midas, where so many things I’d touched in my life before had turned to worthless dust. I could reach into those potato sacks and grab a handful of my tomorrow. The salting ore, this atomic pyrite, might well have been gold. I would have given such a bag of gold for a cold tin cup of water.
Before I left, Mose sat at the bar and reloaded a brick of 12-gauge shells. He opened a box of new high-brass Peters, unfolded the star-crimped paper ends, and let the lead buckshot spill into an old Hills Brothers can with a brown man in a yellow caftan drinking from a bowl. The Hills Brothers man, dressed for the desert, seemed at ease with himself; he had his coffee. Mose replaced the buckshot with euxenite pellets he’d ground with a machine hammer. Whatever we would shoot this hot buckshot into would set a Geiger counter crackling like a plague of locusts. “Enterprising folks have been shooting silver and gold into the walls of mines for over a century,” he said. “We’re pioneers, Davey, we’re the first to shoot a salt charge into the Atomic Age.” He explained that we were fixing to doctor up a special claim, a hidden one a little closer to home, to show investors who might not be up for a trip deep into the wilderness.
I began riding Asshole one evening, barefoot, wearing only my shorts, enjoying the last of the day’s sunshine on my back and my dirty neck. He let me mount him, I think, only because of the great relief he felt not having to shoulder the sacks of salting ore. I was light as a skeleton. I kept the empty packsaddle on him; he was used to it. Having nothing but time, we’d work into riding bareback gradually. I whispered encouragement into his ear, things I thought at the time were true. “I’m not gonna hurt ya, boy Just gonna ride around real slow like. Davey won’t let nothin’ happen to ya. Promise.”
He stepped slowly. I didn’t push him, for it would have violated our trust. We patrolled our claims, though there wasn’t anything to defend them against, just the coyotes Mose called prairie lawyers.
The Geiger counter buzzed and rattled when we rode over the centers of the salty claims where the euxenite was scattered. The claims looked the same, but the earth was now more alive there. We made it so. Now the rocks could talk and I could listen to them on a D-cell-powered mail-order machine.
I dismounted Asshole because I didn’t know where else to ride him and it felt good to walk around a little myself. I walked one of our claims, studying the contacts where the sandstones change colors from pinkish-purple to buff or gray. That’s when I found the horse. A black fossilized scar in a dry wash now owned by Poison Spider Uranium, that up close looked to be the skeleton of a dog, a small collie maybe. But it was equine, horse-like, a model in a museum diorama. I touched the horse carefully, running my fingers along its dark lines—a map of life, then. The little beast bore millions of years worth of sedimentary pressure and had yet to evolve into the modern idea of horse.
Asshole walked up behind me, his bell tinkling softly. I started at a rattlesnake that turned out to be the Geiger counter still switched on. I jumped back. But we hadn’t salted the claim this wash ran through. The black of the bones and the rich green-brown mineral inside the skull and between the ribs and vertebrae was pitchblende, uraninite. I untied the Geiger counter from the packsaddle and waved the vacuum tube over the skeleton. The needle buried at the right of the dial as I traced the bones. The horse was embedded in a hot vein of pay uranium. Maybe the horse could make Poison Spider legitimate.
I rolled a small boulder in front of the entombed horse, then brushed our footprints clear with a sage branch. Whether or not it made Poison Spider an honest company, I had conviction that the little horse would get me a raise. The feeling that the horse meant something more than money gnawed at me, but I had started to think like Mose, a businessman. I thought of how I would demand a raise, how I would or wouldn’t tell him about the radioactive horse. At this point in my career as a uranium man, I envied my friends still playing ball back at St. Joseph’s.
Hungry, sore, tired, canteens empty, we walked out of the wilderness to the sound and dust of Mose, in the parking lot, cutting doughnuts in a newly painted atomic-orange surplus jeep. He waved his hat as he sped past me, kicking a cloud of soil in our faces. “We’ve gone mechanized, Davey!” he yelled between laughs and whoops. Asshole jerked back and I had to calm him as the gears of the jeep whined and the engine groaned. POISON SPIDER URANIUM in black stenciled letters on the side of the hood. I knew that this meant Mose was going into the desert with me. The trips that belonged to Asshole and me were going public, no longer our own. I didn’t tell Mose about the horse.
After feeding and watering Asshole and Atomic Bomb that afternoon while Seldom rocked on the porch and Mose took a nap, I sat in the old jeep, just sitting and thinking and breathing-in the machine’s old oil smell. The seats were torn and the sharp end of a spring poked at my back. Oil and water leaked from underneath, turning the parking lot a muddy prism of colors in the sunlight. A thin shroud of cirrus clouds drifted overhead, fair-weather reminders of the rains that track north into the Bighorns and Montana, missing the Paradox Basin, again and again. I clutched the steering wheel, slick with bearing grease from Mose’s hands, and thought of how I’d tell my boss about the radioactive horse and the mineral deposits I was sure were pitchblende. We could forget the medicine show and become a real company. Maybe Mose would make me vice-president in charge of exploration. We could buy a Piper Colt to fly our prospects in and have an office in Riverton with a secretary and a shiny hardwood conference table the size of a mineral claim.
Just before dark, Seldom stirred beans and I swatted flies and sipped coffee at the bar. An evangelist from Denver told us that “He raiseth up the poor out of the dust, and lifteth the needy out of the dunghill. He will abundantly bless your provision. He will satisfy His poor with bread.” A shotgun reported twice and Asshole honked in a pitch much higher than normal. Pennzoil brushed my leg and shot under the porch as I ran outside. Asshole lay on his side at the edge of the parking lot, near the corral, still kicking and trying to breathe with two hot red holes the size of TV trays in his side, as Mose bent over him stiffly, dousing the mule with gasoline from a galvanized-tin bucket.
“Shit fire and save matches! We’re mechanized, Davey, my boy! Don’t need no mule no more!” he yelled while striking the flint on his Zippo and holding the orange flame to the wet, flammable mulehide. Asshole combusted with a flash I could hear across the parking lot. Mose picked up the shotgun again, reloaded, and shot twice more into the flaming mule. “We’re modern, my boy! Do ya hear me? We’re modern—no more mule to feed!”
I wanted to yell something, but was not sure what. Instead, I just stared as the mule’s flesh ashed and melted in the heat, and the wind fanned the flames that picked him clean to the skeleton. The uranium horse would be our secret, Asshole and me.
Mose, his Stetson pulled down tight against the wind, pointed and waved with his shotgun as if it were a staff. I drove the jeep, a new sensitive scintillometer mounted on the hood in case we passed over legitimate paydirt. For the first time all summer I became aware of my sunburns, my blisters torching holes through my soles. My knuckles were red from gripping the steering wheel. I kept picturing Asshole burning in the parking lot. I sped up and the jeep bucked through the sagebrush, a stiff and heartless beast. The gears ground and whined over the misfiring of the cylinders and the sloshing of gasoline in the tank under the seats.
“Don’t let it get in your head to be a cowboy,” Mose said, holding on where he could. “Because there ain’t nothin’ but disappointment in that.” He spit a wet plug of tobacco into the wind. “Cowboy is an attitude’ll plague you all your days. We’re businessmen, young David. You don’t get rich but by using your brain. Cowboy is just a sure way to empty pockets a
nd a broken back. Embrace the future, son. We’re purveyors of the bright-orange sage.
“Let’s get this job over and done so I can get out of this goddamn desert, Davey” Mose yelled over the whine of the gears. “I’m sweatin’ like a two-dollar whore on miners’ payday.”
The temperature gauge ran warm for most of the trip, and when we pulled up to the claim the radiator hissed and steamed. Mose pointed to the drill steel and nine-pound hammer in the back and began hobbling over to check his claim. “Here.” He pointed to a long and narrow sandstone table. “Jack here.”
The hammer was heavy, very heavy but awkwardly I hefted it over my head and down on the head of the steel bar. The metallic ring of steel on steel wasn’t steady and rhythmic, but foreign and irregular. Mose might have held the drill steel while I swung, but instead he slowly walked the perimeter of his claim, reverently studying it as if it were an altar of stone, while I struggled to rotate the drill after each swing of the hammer.
When I had a shallow drill hole, maybe a foot and a half deep, Mose stuck the barrel of the shotgun in and tripped the trigger. A thin column of rock, sand, and smoke trailed up out of the hole. “Get the counter.” I ran to the jeep and brought back the chrome counter. Mose yanked it out of my hands, flicked it on, and the needle danced, and the counter rattled and Mose showed his brown teeth. “See this hole,” he said, breathing hard. “I want fifteen more here just like it. Only deeper. I’m leaving the gun and the euxenite shells, I’ll be back out tomorrow sometime.”
I wanted to pump a radioactive shell into Mose’s back, pump him and the jeep full of euxenite holes. Instead I sat on a rock and watched the cloud of desert follow the jeep into Alkali.
It was lonely without that Asshole but Mose’s jobs kept me busy and after a while I didn’t hate him as much. Soon it was time for the rodeo.
Sandy Two Bulls, a Northern Cheyenne Indian and a helluva cowboy, drove up in the Ford pickup he’d bought with a season’s winnings several years before. There were pictures in the bar of Sandy. He always wore a white Montana-creased Stetson, pants tucked into knee-high boots, and short, sharp, drop-shank, star-roweled spurs strapped to them with leather thong ankle wraps that ran under his heels and up his ankles, like biblical sandals with cowboy boots underneath. His chaps were buffalo hide and, from a distance, the same color as the skin on his face.
I was standing on the porch, trying not to look too worked up about the arrival of the cowboys, but I couldn’t hold my excitement. Sandy Two Bulls was here. He walked from his truck at the edge of the parking lot to Asshole’s bones.
“Horse catch fire?”
It took me a second to realize he was talking to me. “Mule. Named him Asshole. Mose had him cremated.” “How’s that?” Sandy asked.
“Mose says Asshole ate too much. We’re modern now.”
Sandy took off his hat to wipe his forehead and poked at the bones with the toe of his boot.
That evening, along with other Indian cowboys, Sandy practiced on the reservation stock trailered-in earlier that day. The Indians nosed their cars against the corral and turned their headlights on to light the arena. Under the yellow light of headlights and the neon Atomic Bar atom bomb, they would take turns riding and reriding the horses, bareback, until the stock were too tired to buck and the Indians were too drunk to pull themselves up and get back on, and rodeo whoops answered the faraway howls of coyotes until the batteries in the jalopies ran dead from lighting the arena.
The next morning, Jackpot Monday, more rusty pickups and stock trucks with cracked windshields and odd-colored doors, hoods, and fenders ground into the parking lot. The bar was packed full of cowboys, who ate Seldom’s pinto beans and washed down the fire with boiled coffee. Bottles were passed around and the coffee got doctored up. The Atomic Bar Jackpot began just after noon.
Mose did his best to solicit more stock contractors that year, and representatives from Fuller and Howard out of Riverton, Roberts Rodeo Company from down in Kansas, Tommy Steiner out of Cheyenne, Bob Barnes Rodeo Company, Butler Brothers, and even Autry and Colburn attended the event, wearing cleaner shirts, expensive stockman’s Panama straws, and custom Olathe and Paul Bond boots. They were here on strict business and tried to steer clear of the revelry. Mose thought he could interest them in uranium as well as his firebranded mascot, Atomic Bomb.
The men talked about her as “the devil horse.” She ran nervous circles around her picket post before Mose had tied her to the jeep and pulled her into a small corral of her own to wait for her turn to buck. She kicked at him with her hind hooves, missed, and split a rail on the gate.
I drove. The orange jeep rimmed the arena like Atomic Bomb on her first day in Alkali. I stopped in front of the announcer’s stand. In a white gentleman’s Stetson, bright orange shirt, and green wool pants tucked into the stovepipe shafts of his boots, like a ringmaster, Mose strutted to the ladder, slowly climbed up, and took the microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, his voice big and full of echo and static, “welcome to Atomic Bar, Wyoming, and the worlds greatest Monday jackpot rodeo!” A few hands clapped, a few men hollered, but mostly the sounds included antsy horses and stiff dry wind. “Folks, please rise and remove that hat for our great country’s National Anthem.” A needle scratched against the rim of an old record; then Bing Crosby sang “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the speed just a little slow, while everyone listened patiently with their Stetsons over their hearts. “Let ‘er buck!”
No clowns, no barrel racing, no country-and-western singers. Not even bleachers. Just bronc riding and spirits. Cowboys and ranchers leaned against the fencerail as riders drew their broncs out of a hat and climbed into the chute to straddle angry horses with names like Inferno, Bearclaw, Cherry Bomb, Tabasco Tea, Bazooka, Hudson Hornet, Whisky, Tiger Boy, Gunsmoke, Jack Hammer, Old Mr. Boston, Tax Man, Custer’s Mother, B-17. They were thrown by Party Girl, Soda Jerk, Lucky Strike, Enola Gay, Texas Ranger, Iron Moccasin, Free Beer, Aunt Ulcer, Howitzer, Spilled Milk, Don’t Call Me Dude, Wrecking Ball, Truman’s Mule. Cowboys were stepped on by Rocking R, Banshee, Dark Meat, Sergeant, Red Devil, Two A.M., and Fastball. Bones were broken by Daisy May, Hermosa Bar, Medicine Show.
A bucking strap was cinched tight around the horse’s flanks. At most rodeos, the bucking straps were smooth leather. At Alkaki, the straps were thick lengths of rough hemp rope with a knot or two tied in the middle. When the cinch knot was pulled tight, the horse would bleat and honk and kick in the chutes. When the knot was pulled tight and spurs were raked across its ribs, the horse wanted to hurt a cowboy.
Atomic Bomb had been isolated at her picket post all day without feed. Mose wanted her mad and hungry for the finals, which looked like they would include Sandy Two Bulls and a kid from Powell no older than me with the name Buck Lewis.
Mose’s wheeze filled the dead air between the semis and the finals. He looked at the sky, then let the word take him. “Now, ladies and gentlemen, allow me to be frank for a moment. You, ladies and gentlemen, and I, ladies and gentlemen, are atoms. Blessed atoms. We are particles, matter, patterns of molecules—protons, neutrons, electrons—arranged in the image of God. We good people of the West, have long been plagued by the East, and I’m not talking the Reds of Russia. We here in Wyoming have been plagued by Wall Street locusts and Connecticut corporations alike, raping our resources and exporting the money that way by trainload after Union Pacific trainload. Why must we vow poverty? Good people, riches and honor are with me, yea, durable riches and righteousness. Like straw for bricks, let us see this great country into the nuclear age with the best raw materials from right here under the Big Wonderful.” Sweat dripped from Mose’s temples, tracked down the crags of his face, and disappeared into his brushy mustache.
“See the jet airplanes fly from California to New York and right over our heads. Why not fill our pockets with the idea that those planes will soon be powered with Wy-o-ming a-tomic fuel? The Lord has Iain for us a wealth of treasures. We live in the greatest, mo
st powerful country in the world. Why shouldn’t you live in the greatest, most prosperous state in the union? Dear friends, this is no miracle of judgment—it is simply God’s brown earth. And worth its weight in gold, though my uranium is better than gold, yea, fine gold. Allow me, fellow citizens, to mediate your covenant of wealth, for in the house of the righteous is much treasure. For your children, the children of Wyoming, I strongly urge you to invest in the fruit of thy ground. Invest in Poison Spider Uranium.”
Mose, spittle in the corner of his mouth, his shirt soaked with sweat, wheezed into the microphone and bowed his head, less out of respect and relief than admiration for his new boots. He dropped the microphone onto the wooden deck of the announcer’s stand and a shrill of feedback pierced everyone’s ears and made the corralled horses buck and knock together.
Mose climbed down from the stand, went to the jeep, grabbed the Geiger counter, and walked through the middle of the arena to where Asshole’s bones dried in the wind. He switched the machine on and waved the vacuum tube over the bones. “This hinny’s been workin’ Poison Spider claims and now he’s giving off enough radiation to light a town.”
The crowd around the mule parted to let a cowboy through. “I’ll ride that mare against ya for it,” said Sandy Two Bulls, pointing to the corral where Atomic Bomb paced in circles.
“What’s that you say, Hebrew?” Mose said.
“For everything that went into that mule,” Sandy Two Bulls said, his hand following his words across the desert. “All your gold mines. The bar. That jeep. This town. The boy.” His finger stopped at me. The eyes of the crowd moved with Sandy’s finger, finally shifting from me to Mose. Everyone was silent, anticipating a duel.