When We Were Wolves (20 page)

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 Desert, 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.