When We Were Wolves (22 page)

After feeding and watering Asshole and Atomic Bomb that afternoon while Seldom rocked on the porch and Mose took a nap, I sat in the old jeep, just sitting and thinking and breathing-in the machine’s old oil smell. The seats were torn and the sharp end of a spring poked at my back. Oil and water leaked from underneath, turning the parking lot a muddy prism of colors in the sunlight. A thin shroud of cirrus clouds drifted overhead, fair-weather reminders of the rains that track north into the Bighorns and Montana, missing the Paradox Basin, again and again. I clutched the steering wheel, slick with bearing grease from Mose’s hands, and thought of how I’d tell my boss about the radioactive horse and the mineral deposits I was sure were pitchblende. We could forget the medicine show and become a real company. Maybe Mose would make me vice-president in charge of exploration. We could buy a Piper Colt to fly our prospects in and have an office in Riverton with a secretary and a shiny hardwood conference table the size of a mineral claim.

Just before dark, Seldom stirred beans and I swatted flies and sipped coffee at the bar. An evangelist from Denver told us that “He raiseth up the poor out of the dust, and lifteth the needy out of the dunghill. He will abundantly bless your provision. He will satisfy His poor with bread.” A shotgun reported twice and Asshole honked in a pitch much higher than normal. Pennzoil brushed my
leg and shot under the porch as I ran outside. Asshole lay on his side at the edge of the parking lot, near the corral, still kicking and trying to breathe with two hot red holes the size of TV trays in his side, as Mose bent over him stiffly, dousing the mule with gasoline from a galvanized-tin bucket.

“Shit fire and save matches! We’re mechanized, Davey, my boy! Don’t need no mule no more!” he yelled while striking the flint on his Zippo and holding the orange flame to the wet, flammable mulehide. Asshole combusted with a flash I could hear across the parking lot. Mose picked up the shotgun again, reloaded, and shot twice more into the flaming mule. “We’re modern, my boy! Do ya hear me? We’re modern—no more mule to feed!”

I wanted to yell something, but was not sure what. Instead, I just stared as the mule’s flesh ashed and melted in the heat, and the wind fanned the flames that picked him clean to the skeleton. The uranium horse would be our secret, Asshole and me.

Mose, his Stetson pulled down tight against the wind, pointed and waved with his shotgun as if it were a staff. I drove the jeep, a new sensitive scintillometer mounted on the hood in case we passed over legitimate paydirt. For the first time all summer I became aware of my sunburns, my blisters torching holes through my soles. My knuckles were red from gripping the steering wheel. I kept picturing Asshole burning in the parking lot. I sped up and the jeep bucked through the sagebrush, a stiff and heartless beast. The gears ground and whined over the misfiring of the cylinders and the sloshing of gasoline in the tank under the seats.

“Don’t let it get in your head to be a cowboy,” Mose said, holding on where he could. “Because there ain’t nothin’ but disappointment in that.” He spit a wet plug of tobacco into the wind. “Cowboy is an attitude’ll plague you all your days. We’re businessmen,
young David. You don’t get rich but by using your brain. Cowboy is just a sure way to empty pockets and a broken back. Embrace the future, son. We’re purveyors of the bright-orange sage.

“Let’s get this job over and done so I can get out of this goddamn desert, Davey” Mose yelled over the whine of the gears. “I’m sweatin’ like a two-dollar whore on miners’ payday.”

The temperature gauge ran warm for most of the trip, and when we pulled up to the claim the radiator hissed and steamed. Mose pointed to the drill steel and nine-pound hammer in the back and began hobbling over to check his claim. “Here.” He pointed to a long and narrow sandstone table. “Jack here.”

The hammer was heavy, very heavy but awkwardly I hefted it over my head and down on the head of the steel bar. The metallic ring of steel on steel wasn’t steady and rhythmic, but foreign and irregular. Mose might have held the drill steel while I swung, but instead he slowly walked the perimeter of his claim, reverently studying it as if it were an altar of stone, while I struggled to rotate the drill after each swing of the hammer.

When I had a shallow drill hole, maybe a foot and a half deep, Mose stuck the barrel of the shotgun in and tripped the trigger. A thin column of rock, sand, and smoke trailed up out of the hole. “Get the counter.” I ran to the jeep and brought back the chrome counter. Mose yanked it out of my hands, flicked it on, and the needle danced, and the counter rattled and Mose showed his brown teeth. “See this hole,” he said, breathing hard. “I want fifteen more here just like it. Only deeper. I’m leaving the gun and the euxenite shells, I’ll be back out tomorrow sometime.”

I wanted to pump a radioactive shell into Mose’s back, pump him and the jeep full of euxenite holes. Instead I sat on a rock and watched the cloud of desert follow the jeep into Alkali.

It was lonely without that Asshole but Mose’s jobs kept me busy
and after a while I didn’t hate him as much. Soon it was time for the rodeo.

Sandy Two Bulls, a Northern Cheyenne Indian and a helluva cowboy, drove up in the Ford pickup he’d bought with a season’s winnings several years before. There were pictures in the bar of Sandy. He always wore a white Montana-creased Stetson, pants tucked into knee-high boots, and short, sharp, drop-shank, star-roweled spurs strapped to them with leather thong ankle wraps that ran under his heels and up his ankles, like biblical sandals with cowboy boots underneath. His chaps were buffalo hide and, from a distance, the same color as the skin on his face.

I was standing on the porch, trying not to look too worked up about the arrival of the cowboys, but I couldn’t hold my excitement. Sandy Two Bulls was here. He walked from his truck at the edge of the parking lot to Asshole’s bones.

“Horse catch fire?”

It took me a second to realize he was talking to me. “Mule. Named him Asshole. Mose had him cremated.” “How’s that?” Sandy asked.

“Mose says Asshole ate too much. We’re modern now.”

Sandy took off his hat to wipe his forehead and poked at the bones with the toe of his boot.

That evening, along with other Indian cowboys, Sandy practiced on the reservation stock trailered-in earlier that day. The Indians nosed their cars against the corral and turned their headlights on to light the arena. Under the yellow light of headlights and the neon Atomic Bar atom bomb, they would take turns riding and reriding the horses, bareback, until the stock were too tired to buck and the Indians were too drunk to pull themselves up and get back on, and rodeo whoops answered the faraway howls of coyotes until the batteries in the jalopies ran dead from lighting the arena.

The next morning, Jackpot Monday, more rusty pickups and stock trucks with cracked windshields and odd-colored doors, hoods, and fenders ground into the parking lot. The bar was packed full of cowboys, who ate Seldom’s pinto beans and washed down the fire with boiled coffee. Bottles were passed around and the coffee got doctored up. The Atomic Bar Jackpot began just after noon.

Mose did his best to solicit more stock contractors that year, and representatives from Fuller and Howard out of Riverton, Roberts Rodeo Company from down in Kansas, Tommy Steiner out of Cheyenne, Bob Barnes Rodeo Company, Butler Brothers, and even Autry and Colburn attended the event, wearing cleaner shirts, expensive stockman’s Panama straws, and custom Olathe and Paul Bond boots. They were here on strict business and tried to steer clear of the revelry. Mose thought he could interest them in uranium as well as his firebranded mascot, Atomic Bomb.

The men talked about her as “the devil horse.” She ran nervous circles around her picket post before Mose had tied her to the jeep and pulled her into a small corral of her own to wait for her turn to buck. She kicked at him with her hind hooves, missed, and split a rail on the gate.

I drove. The orange jeep rimmed the arena like Atomic Bomb on her first day in Alkali. I stopped in front of the announcer’s stand. In a white gentleman’s Stetson, bright orange shirt, and green wool pants tucked into the stovepipe shafts of his boots, like a ringmaster, Mose strutted to the ladder, slowly climbed up, and took the microphone. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, his voice big and full of echo and static, “welcome to Atomic Bar, Wyoming, and the worlds greatest Monday jackpot rodeo!” A few hands clapped, a few men hollered, but mostly the sounds included antsy horses and stiff dry wind. “Folks, please rise and remove that hat for our great country’s National Anthem.” A needle scratched against the rim of an old record; then Bing Crosby sang “The Star-Spangled
Banner,” the speed just a little slow, while everyone listened patiently with their Stetsons over their hearts. “Let ‘er buck!”

No clowns, no barrel racing, no country-and-western singers. Not even bleachers. Just bronc riding and spirits. Cowboys and ranchers leaned against the fencerail as riders drew their broncs out of a hat and climbed into the chute to straddle angry horses with names like Inferno, Bearclaw, Cherry Bomb, Tabasco Tea, Bazooka, Hudson Hornet, Whisky, Tiger Boy, Gunsmoke, Jack Hammer, Old Mr. Boston, Tax Man, Custer’s Mother, B-17. They were thrown by Party Girl, Soda Jerk, Lucky Strike, Enola Gay, Texas Ranger, Iron Moccasin, Free Beer, Aunt Ulcer, Howitzer, Spilled Milk, Don’t Call Me Dude, Wrecking Ball, Truman’s Mule. Cowboys were stepped on by Rocking R, Banshee, Dark Meat, Sergeant, Red Devil, Two A.M., and Fastball. Bones were broken by Daisy May, Hermosa Bar, Medicine Show.

A bucking strap was cinched tight around the horse’s flanks. At most rodeos, the bucking straps were smooth leather. At Alkaki, the straps were thick lengths of rough hemp rope with a knot or two tied in the middle. When the cinch knot was pulled tight, the horse would bleat and honk and kick in the chutes. When the knot was pulled tight and spurs were raked across its ribs, the horse wanted to hurt a cowboy.

Atomic Bomb had been isolated at her picket post all day without feed. Mose wanted her mad and hungry for the finals, which looked like they would include Sandy Two Bulls and a kid from Powell no older than me with the name Buck Lewis.

Mose’s wheeze filled the dead air between the semis and the finals. He looked at the sky, then let the word take him. “Now, ladies and gentlemen, allow me to be frank for a moment. You, ladies and gentlemen, and I, ladies and gentlemen, are atoms. Blessed atoms. We are particles, matter, patterns of molecules—protons, neutrons,
electrons—arranged in the image of God. We good people of the West, have long been plagued by the East, and I’m not talking the Reds of Russia. We here in Wyoming have been plagued by Wall Street locusts and Connecticut corporations alike, raping our resources and exporting the money
that
way by trainload after Union Pacific trainload. Why must we vow poverty? Good people, riches and honor are with me, yea, durable riches and righteousness. Like straw for bricks, let us see this great country into the nuclear age with the best raw materials from right here under the Big Wonderful.” Sweat dripped from Mose’s temples, tracked down the crags of his face, and disappeared into his brushy mustache.