When We Were Wolves (18 page)

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 forced 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.