When We Were Wolves

by Jon Billman

  “Why, Two Bulls, you’re drunk. You ain’t even won this rodeo and you’re talkin’ my uranium. You’re drunk. You’re piss drunk.”

  “True enough. Everyone here will put up a stash. You can collect wagers on the side. The purse. My truck. The deed to my house in Montana. And I’ll ride her first, wear her down for ya.”

  “You’d better make the finals here, first, Indian,” Mose said. “Everything in time, everything in time.”

  The air was smoky from the forest fires burning west of Alkali— Yellowstone, the Bridgers, the Wind Rivers, and the Tetons—and the neon from Atomic Bar shone against the east like an artificial sun as Sandy Two Bulls straddled a stallion named Dog Rose. Two Bulls nodded and leaned back hard. He spurred Dog Rose out of the chute, then dug into the bronc’s shoulders with his sharp spurs in a graceful and violent rhythm. The horse blew and bucked hard for eight seconds, ten seconds, twenty seconds, until he became exhausted and sore and Sandy Two Bulls rode him to a bleeding standstill.

  Buck Lewis drew Atomic Bomb and three long seconds out of the chute was thrown to the side, where his head got caught in the rigging. Atomic Bomb’s horsepower ripped the young man’s ear off the side of his head. A dozen cowboys walked the arena, searching for the ear. They tied his own dirty shirt around his head and drove him into Riverton in the back of a pickup, where he recovered enough to keep on living, getting to feel things, no longer a boy, though he never rode bareback broncs again.

  Mose’s speaking-in-tongues adrenaline still pumped through his veins and he wanted to put an exclamation point on his speech, but by now I could tell he was no longer sure of himself. Two Bulls had won the jackpot, but the cowboys still waited around for what had turned into the real event. The drunk crowd couldn’t give a damn about uranium: they wanted to see animals break the bones of cowboys, and vice versa. This was their religion. I thought about what Mose’d said about being a cowboy, and I could see this as Sandy Two Bulls tried to position himself and pound the rigging on Atomic Bomb’s back. But Mose didn’t always practice what he preached. With his whiskey-thick breath, he was getting ready, strapping on his tarnished spurs.

  Atomic Bomb bucked as much as the gates would let her, making Sandy Two Bulls have to hold on even in the chute. Then the mare let out a big breath and settled, saving her energy.

  With a snort and several honks, she exploded out of the opened gate. She sucked her back, swapped ends, and drilled Sandy Two Bulls into the hard arena soil, then circled around to run over him, exact vengeance on him like a mad bull buffalo. Two Bulls made it up onto the fence and Atomic Bomb cut away and circled the arena twice before being waved back into the alleyway. Two Bulls limped over to me near the chute and blew to catch his wind with his hands on his knees. He spit in the dirt and smiled up at me. I ran and got him a dipper of water, and I knew I would tell him about my uranium horse.

  Mose rested his boot on the first rail of the bronc chute. “Davey, my boy,” he said, surveying his world by moving his eyes sideways, back and forth, like a lizard, “you gotta pay the fiddler if you wanna dance.”

  Mose mounted Atomic Bomb while keeping his left hand firm on the top rail of the chute. Gingerly, he forced his gloved right hand into the rigging, drew it tight as the mare snorted hard. He pounded the leather into his palm. Mose looked old, yes, but through his eyes shone a deep pool of youth. He wore the smile of a man about to enter through the ivory gates to glory. Mose’s gates were solid uraninite.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I urge you to invest in Poison Spider Uranium! Let er go!” he yelled, nodding. The gate swung open and the spectators whooped and hollered, but the mare just stood there and a moment that seemed like an eternity went by as the horse took everything into consideration before commencing with what she did best. She was a high roller. She sucked her back again, accordioned, then swapped ends, her trademark. She runaway bucked and sunfished straight across the arena, and Mose looked like he would stay on her back out of some unearthly gravitational law that only applied to medicine men and evangelists.

  Mose bucked away, then connected with horsehide, shot away again, daylight between, out and back, but clinging to the bronc, like an electron. The crowd was silent, watching with mouths open, listening to the thunder of hooves, the cracking of cowboy against bronc.

  Atomic Bomb bucked him up, then off to her left side. A bloater like Asshole, she let out a powerful snort and whinny, deflating her lungs. Mose’s gloved hand hung in the rigging as it slid around and underneath the mare. Like so much copper tailing, Mose’s own weight pulled him into the maelstrom of powerful hooves, leaving his hat and handkerchief in the dirt, the elk-tooth watch behind to glint in the half-light like fool’s gold, and his hand still in the rigging. Mose hung upside down in the hammer mill of hooves as Atomic Bomb rimmed the arena, her Roman nose held high.

  Mose rode her barrel like a trick rider. Atomic Bomb passed so close to the fence we could feel her hot breath. Two Bulls and I stepped back from a cloud of Mose’s whiskey and horseradish dust. Forever the salesman, Mose gave the crowd his best, most confident bloody-nose grin. In his eyes he was still a champion cowboy and a champion mineral baron, his fortune within reach of his thick fingers. His teeth had been knocked out and left in the dirt. But you can’t sell stock in old teeth. Mose hung on.

  When Atomic Bomb finished her parade, she jumped to clear the corral and something not horse made a hollow thud against wood, knocking the top rail and several spectators to the ground. The mare kicked up a cloud of desert and raced toward the east— a dark dot on the horizon the size of an atom—into the future.

  onnie and I had just gotten married in the town hall in the tiny village of Jarbidge, Nevada, and were throwing back Angel Creek Ales at two dollars a pop in the Red Dog Saloon when Bonnie asked the barmaid how the most remote gold town in the lower forty-eight got its name. The barmaid let out a lungful of smoke and said, “Jarbidge’s Shoshoni for ‘a bad or evil place.’” This started Bonnie to crying big makeup-ruining tears. Names and their meanings meant a lot to Bonnie—she didn’t take mine: Petefish.

  “This is Mr. Petefish,” I’d said. “I’m sick. I’m sick of a lot of things. In fact, I think I’ll be sick until the end of the year.” I’d already called in two weeks in a row and they had to pay me for my sick days, which had added up over the years. The principal phoned a couple of times in the late morning but I never picked up. Instead, I’d suffer his nasally voice on the machine, thinking I wasn’t missing much.

  Burned out, we were selling in. Bonnie resigned from her secretarial job at Boise-Cascade with a traditional two-week notice on the first day I called in sick.

  I considered myself a spirit teacher. My principal considered me lazy. I love teaching, but I needed to be able to sleep until ten, go in at noon twice a week, and tell stories until Happy Hour. Kids remember stories, not comma splices. I couldn’t face the rat maze, the Pavlovian hell of bells and report cards. I taught through stories. While other teachers filled pails, I lit little fires. And fires are hard to capture without parables.

  After I’d quit, I sold my Explorer—a vanity I’ll admit I’d caved in to—for eight thousand dollars cash and disciplined myself to two cigarettes a day.

  Bonnie quit smoking cold turkey along with her job. She drove a white four-hundred-dollar AMC Matador, like the one I drove in high school. I love that car. Bonnie’s dream was to someday open a bed-and-breakfast in some quaint western town at the edge of reality. She’d told me this the first time we’d met, in a bar, her dressed in a leather mini, me wearing my teacher pants, at Happy Hour at five-thirty on a Monday night. After we quit, we decided I would take a seasonal job doing something romantic, like planting trees or putting out fires. We even had a little ceremony where we ate macaroni and cheese with jug wine, because we were saving money, and cut up our credit cards with scissors. It was fun, I thought. Bonnie paused as I whooped with joy when the scissors snapped a piece of my Visa across the room. She seemed a littl
e quiet afterward, but I pretended not to notice. The plan was already in action.

  Sell everything, flee Boise, get married, and find true happiness in living like coyotes. Hunter-gatherers.

  We started out by driving to Reno, where I gave her the queen of diamonds—the card, that is—and asked her to be my wife. I celebrated our engagement by losing ten thousand dollars at the roulette wheel. The next morning we had breakfast and I never got around to telling her. I figured it was something we could discuss after the honeymoon when we needed the money.

  From Reno, we headed to Elko for the thirty-five-dollar marriage license before making our way north to the most remote town in the lower forty-eight. I thought it would be romantic and I needed something grandiose for when we discussed our budget.

  The drive was spectacular. After twenty miles of two-lane highway, we followed the signs onto a dirt road that wound for fifty miles over cattle guards, through thick forests and green fields, up and around mountains, heavenward, until we finally began a steep descent that took us right into the village of Jarbidge.

  “It’s lovely” was all Bonnie could manage on the drive. The rest of the time we were so busy looking at the scenery, we forgot about each other.

  The “bad and evil place” thing really shook Bonnie up. I had to buy her another beer with her own money to try and calm her nerves. I consoled my new wife by saying that Jarbidge was probably really the last name of the first single-jack miner in camp, but the Forest Service man nipped that idea in the bud by verifying the barmaid’s story from behind his own Angel Creek Ale.

  “My wife swore the place is cursed. She lived here for almost a year. Left without a word. I’ve been here for thirteen.”

  “It’s an omen, Frank,” sobbed Bonnie. “Our marriage is cursed.”

  “It’s just a name,” I said. I was ready to call for a paper bag if Bonnie started to hyperventilate. “And even if the town is bad, it doesn’t mean our union is cursed.”

  “Yes it does!” she cried. “I had a dream last night that proves it all!”

  We all looked at Bonnie, waiting for her dream, me knowing this couldn’t be a good thing.

  “I dreamt that we were walking around town and I kept seeing all of these people in old-fashioned clothes. I would say, ‘Look at that pretty dress, Frank,’ or something like that, but Frank”—Bonnie looked me in the eye—“you couldn’t see their faces. Now I know what it means. They were ghosts. I dreamt about evil ghosts the night before my wedding. That’s a serious omen.”

  After that Bonnie cried into another beer. I loaded her into the old Matador and wrote Just Married with my finger in the dust on the trunk. “We can renew our vows somewhere else,” I said. “Make a great anniversary.”

  “Where?” Bonnie yelled. “Las Vegas? The Elvis Chapel?”

  The night before we had slept in the Matador and got up early to bathe upstream from town in the Jarbidge River. The cold August water shriveled my manhood, and I poured each of us a shot from a pint bottle of Ten High whiskey. Bonnie put on her new white halter dress, me in olive pants, white shirt, my grandfather’s old tie. “I must really love you to do this,” Bonnie had said, shivering while she poured herself another drink into one of the shot glasses I’d brought for this occasion. “Frank’s Bar” was etched into the glass.

  “It’s a test,” I said. “I’ll not marry any girl who wouldn’t bathe in a cold mountain stream on her wedding morning.”

  We drove to town with the windows down, the Matador’s lifters knocking a little louder than I remembered.

  Nevada covered our shoes, clothes, and hair like a layer of history by the time we got to the town hall, where Reverend Ron said he’d meet us and marry us for the small gratuity of a hundred dollars. If not for the whiskey, I knew Bonnie’d be worrying about the dust coating her new dress.

  Reverend Ron greeted us from the porch of the saloon, clutching a Bible against his heart. The barmaid and the Forest Service man—witnesses—followed him down the street to the town hall. It was already in the mid-eighties. The Reverend Ron was some sort of outlier himself. The scene came straight from a hundred-fifty-year-old tintype: the reverend wore a deerskin jacket, faded jeans, a flared Civil War goatee, and leather sandals—Boise sandals! Boise seventh-grader sandals. They were all the rage.

  I took a breath and grabbed Bonnie’s hands. Bonnie shook. Reverend Ron’s ceremony was full of cowboy-and-Indian hippie sophistry. Tears tracked down Bonnie’s cheeks.

  “All people of the world recognize marriage, and there are many common themes in all wedding ceremonies. With tremendous insight, however, and perhaps most significant to our western way of life, is a simply worded yet profound Indian ceremonial which describes the union of a man and a woman in this light: ‘Now you will feel no rain, cold, or loneliness, for each of you will be shelter, warmth, and companion for the other.’”

  Bonnie’s crying became softly audible.

  “At this moment you come before us as two persons, but there is only one life before you.

  “Go therefore to your dwelling, to enter into the days of your life together.

  “May those days be good, and long upon this earth.”

  Bonnie wept uncontrollably now, a cry of something I can’t describe that was nowhere near deep joy. “We don’t even have a dwelling!” she interjected.

  “Aw, Sugar.” I squeezed her hand and made her look at me until she smiled a weak smile.

  Reverend Ron’d lost his place in the ceremony. “The ring?” he asked, clearing his throat.

  Her ring: a simple, thin band that I prayed contained real gold. I had found it in a Nampa pawnshop.

  “This band of gold that you now offer to Bonnie represents a circle. The symbol of the universe. The symbol of peace and perfection. Likewise, this ring is the symbol of unity in which your lives are now joined in one unbroken circle of love and commitment that is never-ending.

  “As Frank and Bonnie have before us pledged their love and commitment, each to the other, I declare, through the authority vested in me by the State of Nevada, they are husband and wife. You may seal this union with a kiss.”

  We did and walked out into the sunlight, holding hands, toward the saloon. No one remembered photographs.

  Hot Springs, Nevada/Idaho was on our map. We both had a sad buzz on, made stronger by the winding forty dirt miles north of Jarbidge. We pictured a resort town at the mouth of the valley with a hot bath and a hotel room. I sped through town—a single wide trailer and shotgun shack with HOT SPRINGS painted on the side. The air smelled of sulfur.

  Two shirtless and filthy Indian kids rode a swayback mare. “Indians,” I said, thinking all the while that my students would love this story, ghosts and Indians. I could probably even make it into an Indian ghost story.

  “Drive on,” Bonnie said, pointing down the road. “I don’t like it here.”

  “But Indians,” I told her. “These are probably Shoshone or Blackfeet—would they be here if the place was evil?” We drove on and I settled for washing my face with a wet-nap.

  Bonnie slumped against my shoulder and slept the fitful sleep of the depressed who don’t have their medication quite dialed in. A rainbow air freshener that hadn’t bothered me before hung from the rearview mirror. I ripped it down, looking over at sleeping Bonnie, and threw it out the window.

  Night would soon settle on the southern Idaho desert, northbound, and I began to need the ceremony of eggs and a bottomless cup of coffee. It’s the surest thing about the road, breakfast at any hour, and something to chew on when driving all night: loss and breakfast. Bonnie still didn’t know about the ten-thousand-dollar donation I’d made in Reno.

  Driving north and east in Idaho felt like driving in a circle.

  We had wanted to get married in Nevada. I had, at least. It wasn’t until after we’d arrived that I realized I’d sabotaged every childhood dream and wedding fantasy Bonnie’d ever held; this is something they never outgrow. There is nothing real in
Nevada. Not the people. Not the neon. All faceless ghosting of hope. Where did those Indian kids go to school?

  Women spend the rest of their lives chasing the fairy tales, only adjusting their expectations somewhat accordingly. The license was real. The marriage was real. Quitting our jobs was real. Nevada is the false-front moral equivalent of the façade we’d left in the city.

  The Matador’s lifters beat like a marching drum.

  The gas gauge read E when I slipped into the Amoco in Sugar City. The neon of the Amoco was warmer than the casino glow of Reno. I smiled at the girl behind the counter as I pumped the Matador full of 85-octane. As the pump clicked off the gallons, I retraced Just Married in the dust of the trunk. Bonnie stayed asleep, not knowing we were in Sugar City Not caring.

  The streets were quiet and peaceful and represented a life that was still miles away for us. The pump clicked off and I waved at the girl behind the counter and got back in. The Matador probably needed a quart of oil, but I didn’t want to push it. Surely she saw the Just Married in the dust of the trunk. Surely she wouldn’t call in the drive-off on a newly wed couple with a whole life ahead of them.

  Twilight turned to dark and the headlights began taking purchase on the signs and reflector posts of the asphalt ribbon that bisected a moonscape of spuds and sugar beets. The Blackfoot AM played consoling country songs from the halcyon days of Buck Owens and Merle Haggard. A yellow diamond with a black cow silhouette whiffled with bullet holes signaled more open range.

  “Sweetheart,” I said. I would say this and if she was awake, fine. “I need to tell you something about our savings. There really aren’t any.” No response from Bonnie.

  I was chewing two chunks of Double Bubble and drumming to “Kansas City Song” on the vinyl steering wheel at seventy-five miles per hour when realization sent a double of adrenaline through my system.