When We Were Wolves

by Jon Billman

  She would hide. And she would lie. I know this, because I watched her once. We were building water bars on a logging road about a half mile from where Ash was taking silt samples. At break time I grabbed two Cokes from my cooler and set out to take her one. When I got close enough to see her. I stopped and sat down on a stump and just watched her. She knelt as if she was praying in the silt along the little spring creek she was sampling. I watched her for maybe ten minutes. Finally she looked up to the pine crowns and rinsed her hands and washed her face. It was a moment, a time where I didn’t belong.

  Without giving her the Coke—I drank hers, too—I returned to my crew. Half an hour later we got a call for an acre-large fire on Commissary Ridge. Cappy called Ash on the radio, asked for her location. She gave him an impossible legal: Township 28 north, Range 117 west. Alice Lake. “Taking tea samples above Alice Lake,” she said. “I’m a good hour’s hike away from my truck. Sorry, Cap. can’t make this one,” she said.

  “Roger that,” said Cappy. “Sorry you’ll miss it.”

  From where she was praying, it would have taken her two, maybe three, hours to get into Alice Lake. You had to walk.

  We returned from that fire sometime well after midnight. Ash was sitting in an old Naugahyde recliner in the crew quarters, wearing her cool-night T-shirt over nothing, drinking a beer, reading Insects of Western North America. “I suppose you guys want pancakes,” she said.

  The Thursday after Raphael and I finally locked horns, Cappy left the Gazette on the kitchen table. He had circled the article in the Police Blotter with a red map pen: FS MAN IN DRUNKEN RUCKUS. The reporter used my full name, which seemed foreign to me, the neon details of the fight belonging to someone else. I had already settled with the bar owner, and neither Raphael nor I was about to press charges.

  I began watching her wake up again—my left eye half-closed with swelling. And I soaked her pancakes with syrup to soften them up, make them easier to chew.

  I worked. I slept. I drank. At night heat lightning ringed the sky around Hams Fork. Several mornings it rained. No fires.

  I wrote a couple of long letters, telling Jennifer I missed her and dreamed of seeing her in October. I carved a six-foot-tall pine-log grizzly bear with a chain saw one long weekend and had Harley help me drag it into the crew quarters, where I set it up between my bunk and his. I was glad when Ash said it gave her the willies, like it was staring at her all night.

  The better part of August came and went. We had no fires to extinguish so they put us to work stacking slash piles and painting trees for timber sales. We prayed for fire.

  One afternoon I ran over Cinder while backing my engine into the shop. I don’t know why he didn’t get out of the way, but he didn’t. The dual tires rolled over him, squashing him flat. We had to use a snow shovel like a spatula to scrape him off the concrete. Cappy said we didn’t need a goddamn cat around anyway. Ash didn’t say anything.

  In late August, Raphael abandoned her; he had to get back to Bible school in Nebraska. The way she limped around when he left—in his ambulance, like a portent, kicking up gravel dust in the crew-quarters parking lot—we knew it was over for good. He’d strung her along like any of us would have done, or did.

  Ash stopped making pancakes. “Eat some oatmeal for Chrissakes,” she told us the morning after he drove away. She stopped going for long walks in the desert alone. She stopped going to church— Hams Fork New Psalmody Free—on Sunday mornings.

  I took to walking in the desert northeast of town by myself. I carried a rucksack and spent a good deal of time thinking thoughts I was later ashamed of.

  After work the day before Labor Day, I mixed brake fluid and antifreeze in a Styrofoam cup and set it in the desert near the dump, so we could blame the fire on garbage.

  We were hunched around the kitchen table trying to coffee away our hangovers, when Cappy walked in and told us we didn’t look like firefighters, we looked pitiful. “Goddammit,” he said, “every Mormon kid in the county is gonna be downtown and our public-relations point man smells like a distillery.” He meant, in particular, that I looked and smelled pitiful, especially considering I was slated to be Smokey again, for the second time that summer, my third straight Labor Day parade.

  But we’d gotten a call half an hour before—the Eternal Flame— and Harley and Chuck had gone out to see about it.

  I was experiencing acute déjà vu: after coffee, Ash would be off to her grasshopper study in the north, sharing her tent with a new pilot.

  Harley sounded concerned on the high-band.

  “Bit of a problem here, Cappy. Better give the boys at the BM a ring. Their desert is burning and ours is catching. Over.”

  “You wanna give me a size-up? Over.” “Roger that. Break.” We waited, staring at the radio.

  “Yeah, Cappy looks like twenty-five or so acres are lit up, and there’s a stiff wind out of the west, northwest. I’m a little concerned—this pitchy sagebrush is some serious fuel. You might consider sending every gandy dancer we got. And a BM dozer.”

  Ash’s face fell and she got up to grab her rucksack and head for the airport. Cappy looked up from the radio and glanced at the wall map. “Get your Nomex, Ash, you’re swatting flames today. There’s nothing between that fire and town but five thousand acres of dry sage.”

  “No bear duty” I said. “There is a God.”

  Ash threw her fire pack on my engine and jumped in the cab. “This is beautiful,” she said. “I’ve got nothing better to do today than put out a trash fire.” We passed a BLM lowboy shuttling a D-9 dozer up the dump road. The fire was sending up a thick column of smoke the color of young thunderheads, and thin tendrils of flame were visible from five miles away.

  The wind picked up even more and the dry sage torched and ran in the direction of Hams Fork. Another BLM Cat started cutting line along the edge of town, soon aided by two more colossal dozers from the open-pit coal mine that supported the community. The plan was to flank the fire at the city limits with a Cat line and back-burn and push the head to the northeast, away from improvements and toward the river.

  Ash and I ran the burn-out operations along the Cat line on the southern flank. Bandannas over our faces like road agents, we worked as a team. The idea was to burn the fuel from the Cat line back toward the actual fire’s momentum. I would drop a line of burning diesel fuel with the drip torch well inside the Cat line and Ash would walk behind me, filling in, cursing this carcinogenic duty. I couldn’t see her through the smoke, and it was easy to get disoriented. With burning-out in heavy smoke, it was possible to walk toward the fire coming at you. Or you could burn yourself into a corner. “Are ya with me?” I’d call, sometimes coughing out the words.

  “I’m with ya. Are you with me?” she’d answer, her voice hoarse from use and smoke. The intensity of the fire had driven us to relying on each other, needing each other. She looked to me for direction here in my element. I’d show her the way through, hold her hand until the smoke cleared.

  “Roger that,” I’d say.

  Several hours had gone by when a Llama helicopter beat the wind overhead, filling drop-buckets in the Hams Fork River, then dumping its load at the head of the fire.

  Ash and I found ourselves in a bad place. We’d burned ourselves into a warm corner and gotten turned around in the smoke. “Want me to call in the helicopter?” she asked, coughing.

  “Not just yet,” I said, breathing hard. Calling in the helicopter meant a beating for your pride. It meant you’d made bad decisions and weren’t as good at your job as you could be, or as good as someone else was.

  The main fire bore down on us from the northwest, and our escape route in the burn-out torched twelve-foot flames. It occurred to me then that if the main fire ran over us it would keep going, jump the Cat line, and burn right through downtown Hams Fork; my nearsighted pride would be responsible for the devastation of the entire town.

  “We’re about to get roasted, you bastard! Suck it up and call in.”
/>
  “Okay, yes, goddammit, now!” I yelled. Ash was already on her hand-held. I realized that this time my stubbornness could kill another, not just me. For the first time all season I was concerned with something, someone, others, rather than just myself. I could see my world from the outside and it was small and rotten.

  “Echo Charley Hotel, Elkind on net. We need water in a bad way.”

  She gave Charley Hotel our approximate location—where we were supposed to have been—and we could hear the rotors beating their way toward us.

  “Roger-wilco, I’ve got you, Elkind,” said the pilot. “Hit the dirt.” Sage branches snapped and chunks of wet sand flew as three hundred gallons of river water cut us a new safety route.

  “Thanks, Charley Hotel,” Ash said when she caught her breath. “You’re a godsend.”

  The fire coursed a definite track to the river, sparing Hams Fork. The sky tasted of ash. We took some lukewarm water and a melted candy bar, the sunset behind Utah a salmon-colored haze, and climbed onto a parked truck for a better view. The desert was cindered, lifeless. In the distance we could see the orange glow of the dump. The fire had taken the little shack and the wooden fence-posts around it, leaving snarled barbed wire surrounding four acres of hot embers that sparked in the wind. All of the surface trash was gone—the sofas, the televisions, the mattresses. What survived, and would last for centuries, was the refuse buried deep in the ground, like coal or fossils.

  The main fire was setting spot fires that stretched along the desert horizon. We were strapping our headlamps onto our hard hats for night duty, when Ash pointed back toward the main fire.

  Well in front of the fire’s head, a herd of two hundred pronghorn antelope fled toward the river, pushing eastward. Behind them, just in front of the real heat, a wall of grasshoppers—an entire plague of them—pushed eastward, the roar of their wings louder than the roar of sage combusting.

  “Warrior grasshoppers,” Ash said.

  The river was wide and murky and could have been oil for all the smoke. Hundreds of the hoppers didn’t make the jump and landed in the water; the surface boiling with feeding whitefish, rainbow, and brook trout.

  As we watched the fish fattening on the insects, the fire spotted across the river, igniting the far bank. The grasshopper wall ran out in front. My fire could burn to the Atlantic Ocean for all we cared. We both knew October was coming. The natural cycle of things would take back the desert.

  oe Jackman is privy to a mysterious world of Freemason-like codes and handshakes and genealogical records. My history with his world began 175 years ago in Illinois when one of my cousins was present at the shooting of Joseph Smith, founder of Joe’s church. My cousin was part of the mob that stormed the jail holding the prophet. I’m not sure if the cousin did any actual shooting or not, but my family’s relationship with the church has been tainted ever since.

  Field mice the size of barn cats gnaw into the burlap sacks of wheat Joe stores in the pantry for the Apocalypse. But Joe sees the rodents’ place in the order of things. He sets a livetrap for them and transplants the fat devils out in the snow, though they always manage to get back in, bringing friends. He considers himself fair, Christian. He hunts big game the old way, the noble way, in the higher country, on skis, with a black powder rifle. He lives off the lean of the land, trout and venison. He tithes religiously.

  Joe has just one wife. Beth, and many kids. They barter for vegetables and cereal and fabric to make clothes. They dig wild garlic and gather raspberries from clearings in the Bridger National Forest north of Hams Fork. They do not subscribe to a newspaper. No TV. Joe works sixty-hour weeks as a pipe fitter. For birthdays and Christmas he makes his family durable things—barbecues, ice-fishing stoves, meat smokers.

  The kids hunt the roadsides for valuable aluminum beer cans and stash their coins in piggy banks Joe creates from lengths of pipe with the ends capped, carriage bolt legs, scrap-steel ears, a curly nine-gauge wire tail, and a nickel slit cut in the top with a torch.

  On hair-cutting day it’s Who’s Who in the Bible as Beth calls names and clips heads to a uniform slightly round shortness, moving down the line of towheads.

  When Joe gets mad, which isn’t often, he says “fetchin’, friggin’, fudgin’, flootin’,” etc., etc. No coffee—hot Tang for breakfast.

  Joe works at the gasification plant, a castellated snarl of pipes, stacks, and boilers making an elaborate skyline on the desertscape, which turns bituminous Carmel County coal into gasoline. On his lunch breaks, after he’s downed his venison summer sausage sandwich, he’ll make his kids scrap-steel animals, like a clown makes balloon wiener dogs. The steel creatures are sprung from the nature Joe spends so much time observing, and the beaver, antelope, elk, fish, moose, and bears are more alive and real than any rag doll or sock monkey. More alive than any bronze effigy in a city park.

  I did time at the State Pen in Purgatory. I was soon given trustee status and work detail for good behavior, working the State Pen’s cattle ranch, cutting on horseback, branding, riding fences, night herding. I was in the cattle business in Purgatory long enough to realize that there isn’t any real money in rustling cows anymore, that the West is driven by other aspects of the dollar, most visibly, metals. I got out of prison a little early for good behavior, gave up horses for a knobby-tired bicycle and a fourth-hand Subaru wagon with a ski rack on the roof. Bumper sticker: EARTH FIRST!Well mine the other planets later. When I moved back to Hams Fork, rumor had it I took to cross-branding statues. When the one-and-a-half-scale bronze bull elk disappeared from its cement perch in the town triangle the winter after I got out of prison, folks began to point fingers, but Joe defended me. I didn’t much care for the word “thief.”

  Hams Fork had been infamous for the Southern Hotel, a Tudor brothel down by the railroad tracks along the river. Now empty, the hotel once drew clientele from four states, many government offices, and myriad religious denominations, until the early 1980s, when an insufferable task force of angry housewives saw the doors and windows boarded by a posse of long-faced sheriff’s deputies. Now the Southern Hotel stands full only of rats and memories, leaking and broken.

  Without the cathouse, Hams Fork figured they needed that bronze elk. A twenty-five-cent postcard showed the beast under Greetings from Hams Fork, Wyoming. The Chamber of Commerce, Jaycees, Lion’s Club, and Rodeo Boosters held a meeting with Sheriff Bagwell. They wanted restitution.

  There is an old Indian saying that if you stand by the river long enough, sooner or later all your enemies will float by. Joe stays out of the loop of town politics. In the beginning, he had not been aware that an ex-con was back in town. He had not even been aware of who the ex-con was. We met when I rode one of my newer mountain bikes through what I didn’t know was the Jackmans’ vegetable garden.

  “See here!” yelled Beth, throwing her sinewy arm in the air. “You’re riding through our fetchin’ vegetable garden!”

  I stopped. “Thought it was a weed patch.”

  Joe stared at the bicycle and me on it, dressed like a rodeo clown. “Yeah, well we’ve been busy with other things. Nice day for a bike ride, anyway. How many speeds that thing got?”

  “Twenty-four.”

  “Holy Moses. Where you live?”

  “In an army tent down to Oakley. I’m camped on the BLM.”

  “Well whatdoyaknow,” said Joe, still studying the derailleurs.

  Beth was weeding in the vegetable garden the next day when I floated by on the Hams Fork in a dented aluminum canoe. “Good day for a garden,” I called. She looked up from her work, her thin face frowning as I passed by.

  I traded Joe that canoe for a half of venison.

  A few days later, while Beth stayed busy inside, I moved into the aluminum snailback trailer that sat on blocks behind Joe’s lopsided double-wide. From the bathroom, Beth’s view of the river was blocked by the trailer. This put her more on edge. “You two are becoming quite a pair to draw from,” I overheard her tell her husb
and that evening after a meal of venison liver and rice.

  Beth was satisfied, though, when I convinced Joe he needed a new house and we could build him one easy as pie. First we tore the old one down, piece by piece, while the family lived in tents by the river. Then I helped Joe frame a new cabin, a modest three-room bungalow tucked back against a wash across the railroad tracks on the scantily industrial, more feckless side of town.

  The new home was built from almost-brand-new Highway Department pine snowfence I got a sizable deal on. Joe and I went at the cattle-truck-load of lumber with a skill saw and a claw hammer and had it framed in less than a week. Running water and electricity in less than two. The plumbing is done in copper, the old way, with brazed joints, no plastic PVC pipes.

  The roof is aluminum, Lincoln Log green, and coated with a Teflon-type finish so snow won’t accumulate. A Roman archway crowns the kitchen and small dining area. The fireplace we masoned from stones gathered along the Hams Fork River that runs through the back yard just after the river oxbows at the Hams Fork Sewage Treatment Facility. A cedar sauna. A mudroom.

  In a corner of the living room stands a half-scale bronze Benjamin Franklin, a housewarming gift from me. Franklin has long hair down the back of his neck, round spectacles, an inquisitive expression on his face, and a belly hanging over his trouser buttons. Franklin wears a soiled Stetson Open Road and cradles fly rods in his oxidized-green left arm. Beth thinks the statue hideous and often keeps an old cotton sleeping bag draped over it.

  The elders admired Joe’s dedication in showing an outlaw the road to reform, to salvation. The whole gesture was so Christian. The truth is that Joe didn’t know me from Adam. He only knew that he liked something about me.