When We Were Wolves (23 page)

“See the jet airplanes fly from California to New York and right over our heads. Why not fill our pockets with the idea that those planes will soon be powered with Wy-o-ming a-tomic fuel? The Lord has Iain for us a wealth of treasures. We live in the greatest, most powerful country in the world. Why shouldn’t you live in the greatest, most prosperous state in the union? Dear friends, this is no miracle of judgment—it is simply God’s brown earth. And worth its weight in gold, though my uranium is better than gold, yea, fine gold. Allow me, fellow citizens, to mediate your covenant of wealth, for in the house of the righteous is much treasure. For your children, the children of Wyoming, I strongly urge you to invest in the fruit of thy ground. Invest in Poison Spider Uranium.”

Mose, spittle in the corner of his mouth, his shirt soaked with sweat, wheezed into the microphone and bowed his head, less out of respect and relief than admiration for his new boots. He dropped the microphone onto the wooden deck of the announcer’s stand and a shrill of feedback pierced everyone’s ears and made the corralled horses buck and knock together.

Mose climbed down from the stand, went to the jeep, grabbed the Geiger counter, and walked through the middle of the arena to where Asshole’s bones dried in the wind. He switched the machine
on and waved the vacuum tube over the bones. “This hinny’s been workin’ Poison Spider claims and now he’s giving off enough radiation to light a town.”

The crowd around the mule parted to let a cowboy through. “I’ll ride that mare against ya for it,” said Sandy Two Bulls, pointing to the corral where Atomic Bomb paced in circles.

“What’s that you say, Hebrew?” Mose said.

“For everything that went into that mule,” Sandy Two Bulls said, his hand following his words across the desert. “All your gold mines. The bar. That jeep. This town. The boy.” His finger stopped at me. The eyes of the crowd moved with Sandy’s finger, finally shifting from me to Mose. Everyone was silent, anticipating a duel.

“Why, Two Bulls, you’re drunk. You ain’t even won this rodeo and you’re talkin’ my uranium. You’re drunk. You’re piss drunk.”

“True enough. Everyone here will put up a stash. You can collect wagers on the side. The purse. My truck. The deed to my house in Montana. And I’ll ride her first, wear her down for ya.”

“You’d better make the finals here, first, Indian,” Mose said. “Everything in time, everything in time.”

The air was smoky from the forest fires burning west of Alkali— Yellowstone, the Bridgers, the Wind Rivers, and the Tetons—and the neon from Atomic Bar shone against the east like an artificial sun as Sandy Two Bulls straddled a stallion named Dog Rose. Two Bulls nodded and leaned back hard. He spurred Dog Rose out of the chute, then dug into the bronc’s shoulders with his sharp spurs in a graceful and violent rhythm. The horse blew and bucked hard for eight seconds, ten seconds, twenty seconds, until he became exhausted and sore and Sandy Two Bulls rode him to a bleeding standstill.

Buck Lewis drew Atomic Bomb and three long seconds out of
the chute was thrown to the side, where his head got caught in the rigging. Atomic Bomb’s horsepower ripped the young man’s ear off the side of his head. A dozen cowboys walked the arena, searching for the ear. They tied his own dirty shirt around his head and drove him into Riverton in the back of a pickup, where he recovered enough to keep on living, getting to feel things, no longer a boy, though he never rode bareback broncs again.

Mose’s speaking-in-tongues adrenaline still pumped through his veins and he wanted to put an exclamation point on his speech, but by now I could tell he was no longer sure of himself. Two Bulls had won the jackpot, but the cowboys still waited around for what had turned into the real event. The drunk crowd couldn’t give a damn about uranium: they wanted to see animals break the bones of cowboys, and vice versa. This was their religion. I thought about what Mose’d said about being a cowboy, and I could see this as Sandy Two Bulls tried to position himself and pound the rigging on Atomic Bomb’s back. But Mose didn’t always practice what he preached. With his whiskey-thick breath, he was getting ready, strapping on his tarnished spurs.

Atomic Bomb bucked as much as the gates would let her, making Sandy Two Bulls have to hold on even in the chute. Then the mare let out a big breath and settled, saving her energy.

With a snort and several honks, she exploded out of the opened gate. She sucked her back, swapped ends, and drilled Sandy Two Bulls into the hard arena soil, then circled around to run over him, exact vengeance on him like a mad bull buffalo. Two Bulls made it up onto the fence and Atomic Bomb cut away and circled the arena twice before being waved back into the alleyway. Two Bulls limped over to me near the chute and blew to catch his wind with his hands on his knees. He spit in the dirt and smiled up at me. I
ran and got him a dipper of water, and I knew I would tell him about my uranium horse.

Mose rested his boot on the first rail of the bronc chute. “Davey, my boy,” he said, surveying his world by moving his eyes sideways, back and forth, like a lizard, “you gotta pay the fiddler if you wanna dance.”

Mose mounted Atomic Bomb while keeping his left hand firm on the top rail of the chute. Gingerly, he forced his gloved right hand into the rigging, drew it tight as the mare snorted hard. He pounded the leather into his palm. Mose looked old, yes, but through his eyes shone a deep pool of youth. He wore the smile of a man about to enter through the ivory gates to glory. Mose’s gates were solid uraninite.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I urge you to invest in Poison Spider Uranium! Let er go!” he yelled, nodding. The gate swung open and the spectators whooped and hollered, but the mare just stood there and a moment that seemed like an eternity went by as the horse took everything into consideration before commencing with what she did best. She was a high roller. She sucked her back again, accordioned, then swapped ends, her trademark. She runaway bucked and sunfished straight across the arena, and Mose looked like he would stay on her back out of some unearthly gravitational law that only applied to medicine men and evangelists.

Mose bucked away, then connected with horsehide, shot away again, daylight between, out and back, but clinging to the bronc, like an electron. The crowd was silent, watching with mouths open, listening to the thunder of hooves, the cracking of cowboy against bronc.

Atomic Bomb bucked him up, then off to her left side. A bloater like Asshole, she let out a powerful snort and whinny, deflating her
lungs. Mose’s gloved hand hung in the rigging as it slid around and underneath the mare. Like so much copper tailing, Mose’s own weight pulled him into the maelstrom of powerful hooves, leaving his hat and handkerchief in the dirt, the elk-tooth watch behind to glint in the half-light like fool’s gold, and his hand still in the rigging. Mose hung upside down in the hammer mill of hooves as Atomic Bomb rimmed the arena, her Roman nose held high.

Mose rode her barrel like a trick rider. Atomic Bomb passed so close to the fence we could feel her hot breath. Two Bulls and I stepped back from a cloud of Mose’s whiskey and horseradish dust. Forever the salesman, Mose gave the crowd his best, most confident bloody-nose grin. In his eyes he was still a champion cowboy and a champion mineral baron, his fortune within reach of his thick fingers. His teeth had been knocked out and left in the dirt. But you can’t sell stock in old teeth. Mose hung on.

When Atomic Bomb finished her parade, she jumped to clear the corral and something not horse made a hollow thud against wood, knocking the top rail and several spectators to the ground. The mare kicked up a cloud of desert and raced toward the east— a dark dot on the horizon the size of an atom—into the future.

onnie and I had just gotten married in the town hall in the tiny village of Jarbidge, Nevada, and were throwing back Angel Creek Ales at two dollars a pop in the Red Dog Saloon when Bonnie asked the barmaid how the most remote gold town in the lower forty-eight got its name. The barmaid let out a lungful of smoke and said, “Jarbidge’s Shoshoni for ‘a bad or evil place.’” This started Bonnie to crying big makeup-ruining tears. Names and their meanings meant a lot to Bonnie—she didn’t take mine: Petefish.