When We Were Wolves (21 page)

The courthouse smelled of floor wax, old books, and perfume. Our presence caused a buzz with the courthouse office girls and government men in newer suits, white shirts, and gold tie tacks. The uranium boom was still centered in the Four Corners area of
the Southwest and hadn’t hit Wyoming yet, though many geologists thought it was possible and only a matter of time. We had to smell something awful. Mose shuffled through a deck of business cards and reached one to everyone we saw like he was dealing them into our private game of Texas hold em, Omaha, or stud. He paid the filing fee at a dollar per claim with a brand-new hundred-dollar bill. “Yessir, even Ben Franklin is tight with Poison Spider Uranium.” We walked out of the courthouse slowly, enjoying every step. Mose tipped his old hat to women and stopped to look at oil paintings of Indians and politicians.

We bought Cokes and gasoline at a service station where guys in white hats circled your car and checked everything, smiling. “Better get used to the good life, my boy,” Mose said.

That day we drove south, all the way to Saratoga, where I noticed that
Mark of the Gorilla
, and
Stagecoach Kid
, starring Tim Holt, were playing at the Rialto. We turned left, east, then traveled for about fifteen miles until we came to the headframe of an old copper mine. Mose talked to a man at the gate and handed him a greasy envelope. The man nodded his head and waved us through. We pulled alongside a pile of old rock, copper tailings, and Mose shut the ignition off. The engine dieseled and the car bucked and died. He got out with the Geiger counter and flicked it on. The machine made a screech and the needle buried itself at the right of the dial.

“Uranium?” I asked.

“No, my boy,” he said. “Euxenite. Pretty worthless. But not to us.” I spent the next hour or so shoveling copper tailings into the horse trailer.

“This will make a man outta ya, Davey,” Mose said between wheezy bars of a whistled tune. He was leaning against the trunk, eating a peach. “Your days with that idiot spoon are numbered. You’ll soon trade your shovel for a suit and a new silverbelly fedora.
Mark my word.” He studied the loaded trailer, then had me shovel the Buick’s trunk full of the copper tailings too.

He started the engine, furrowed his brow, then turned the car off. “Fill the goddamn back seat up too,” he said. “I’m gettin’ me a new car soon anyway.” The tires rubbed against the rear fenders as the old Buick belched green smoke and lurched toward the highway.

Atomic Bomb spent her time damaging the arena. I repaired gates and rails until Mose got tired of it and tethered her to a picket post out in the desert. “All right, you can just eat sagebrush and weeds if you’re gonna make my life difficult!” Mose yelled at her. I knew that after this year’s jackpot, he would unload her on the highest bidder and be done with her. Mose was determined to inflate that bid.

Mose tried to make her meaner, a better bucker, by throwing apples at her, a Wyoming version of Dizzy Dean. He saved soft and wormy pie apples and bounced them off her tough hide. She would start and whinny, the rope taut, then turn and stare Mose down, head lowered, rage in her eyes. After she thought no one watched her any longer, she took the rotten apples in her teeth and squashed them once before swallowing.

The next morning, Monday, after hen eggs, beans, and coffee, I saddled Asshole. This time Mose loaded him with two potato sacks of mine tailings in addition to our normal cache, throwing a double-diamond hitch to secure the heavy load. “A mule wearin’ diamonds, if that don’t beat all, eh, Davey?” The mule shook a little with each step, straining. Mose hollered after us, “Ain’t gonna become a uranium tycoon polishin’ your britches on a bar stool, son!”

Asshole and I cleared the first rise and a herd of three hundred or so antelope studied us carefully before exploding toward the west.

I hobbled Asshole and we camped that night along a chimney rock, the base blackened by hundreds of fires of Indians and hunters. I ran my hands over the thin fossils of little fish and ferny plants and tiny oysters that covered the layered sedimentary rock like ancient wallpaper. I sang songs the nuns taught us at St. Josephs. I sang songs I heard on the Philco back in Alkali. I caught the miniature desert horned toads, talked to them, and let them go. “Go on, get outta here. See ya.” I saw rattlesnakes and made gentlemen’s agreements with them that they stay in the rocks and far enough away from camp not to bother Asshole or me. In return, I wouldn’t shoot them. I did not tell them I didn’t have a gun. I fell asleep to the soft jingle of Asshole’s bell.

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.