When We Were Wolves (24 page)

“This is Mr. Petefish,” I’d said. “I’m sick. I’m sick of a lot of things. In fact, I think I’ll be sick until the end of the year.” I’d already called in two weeks in a row and they had to pay me for my sick days, which had added up over the years. The principal phoned a couple of times in the late morning but I never picked up. Instead,
I’d suffer his nasally voice on the machine, thinking I wasn’t missing much.

Burned out, we were selling in. Bonnie resigned from her secretarial job at Boise-Cascade with a traditional two-week notice on the first day I called in sick.

I considered myself a spirit teacher. My principal considered me lazy. I love teaching, but I needed to be able to sleep until ten, go in at noon twice a week, and tell stories until Happy Hour. Kids remember stories, not comma splices. I couldn’t face the rat maze, the Pavlovian hell of bells and report cards. I taught through stories. While other teachers filled pails, I lit little fires. And fires are hard to capture without parables.

After I’d quit, I sold my Explorer—a vanity I’ll admit I’d caved in to—for eight thousand dollars cash and disciplined myself to two cigarettes a day.

Bonnie quit smoking cold turkey along with her job. She drove a white four-hundred-dollar AMC Matador, like the one I drove in high school. I love that car. Bonnie’s dream was to someday open a bed-and-breakfast in some quaint western town at the edge of reality. She’d told me this the first time we’d met, in a bar, her dressed in a leather mini, me wearing my teacher pants, at Happy Hour at five-thirty on a Monday night. After we quit, we decided I would take a seasonal job doing something romantic, like planting trees or putting out fires. We even had a little ceremony where we ate macaroni and cheese with jug wine, because we were saving money, and cut up our credit cards with scissors. It was fun, I thought. Bonnie paused as I whooped with joy when the scissors snapped a piece of my Visa across the room. She seemed a little quiet afterward, but I pretended not to notice. The plan was already in action.

Sell everything, flee Boise, get married, and find true happiness in living like coyotes. Hunter-gatherers.

We started out by driving to Reno, where I gave her the queen of
diamonds—the card, that is—and asked her to be my wife. I celebrated our engagement by losing ten thousand dollars at the roulette wheel. The next morning we had breakfast and I never got around to telling her. I figured it was something we could discuss after the honeymoon when we needed the money.

From Reno, we headed to Elko for the thirty-five-dollar marriage license before making our way north to the most remote town in the lower forty-eight. I thought it would be romantic and I needed something grandiose for when we discussed our budget.

The drive was spectacular. After twenty miles of two-lane highway, we followed the signs onto a dirt road that wound for fifty miles over cattle guards, through thick forests and green fields, up and around mountains, heavenward, until we finally began a steep descent that took us right into the village of Jarbidge.

“It’s lovely” was all Bonnie could manage on the drive. The rest of the time we were so busy looking at the scenery, we forgot about each other.

The “bad and evil place” thing really shook Bonnie up. I had to buy her another beer with her own money to try and calm her nerves. I consoled my new wife by saying that Jarbidge was probably really the last name of the first single-jack miner in camp, but the Forest Service man nipped that idea in the bud by verifying the barmaid’s story from behind his own Angel Creek Ale.

“My wife swore the place is cursed. She lived here for almost a year. Left without a word. I’ve been here for thirteen.”

“It’s an omen, Frank,” sobbed Bonnie. “Our marriage is cursed.”

“It’s just a name,” I said. I was ready to call for a paper bag if Bonnie started to hyperventilate. “And even if the town is bad, it doesn’t mean our union is cursed.”

“Yes it does!” she cried. “I had a dream last night that proves it all!”

We all looked at Bonnie, waiting for her dream, me knowing this couldn’t be a good thing.

“I dreamt that we were walking around town and I kept seeing all of these people in old-fashioned clothes. I would say, ‘Look at that pretty dress, Frank,’ or something like that, but Frank”—Bonnie looked me in the eye—“you couldn’t see their faces. Now I know what it means. They were ghosts. I dreamt about evil ghosts the night before my wedding. That’s a serious omen.”

After that Bonnie cried into another beer. I loaded her into the old Matador and wrote
Just Married
with my finger in the dust on the trunk. “We can renew our vows somewhere else,” I said. “Make a great anniversary.”

“Where?” Bonnie yelled. “Las Vegas? The Elvis Chapel?”

The night before we had slept in the Matador and got up early to bathe upstream from town in the Jarbidge River. The cold August water shriveled my manhood, and I poured each of us a shot from a pint bottle of Ten High whiskey. Bonnie put on her new white halter dress, me in olive pants, white shirt, my grandfather’s old tie. “I must really love you to do this,” Bonnie had said, shivering while she poured herself another drink into one of the shot glasses I’d brought for this occasion. “Frank’s Bar” was etched into the glass.

“It’s a test,” I said. “I’ll not marry any girl who wouldn’t bathe in a cold mountain stream on her wedding morning.”

We drove to town with the windows down, the Matador’s lifters knocking a little louder than I remembered.

Nevada covered our shoes, clothes, and hair like a layer of history by the time we got to the town hall, where Reverend Ron said he’d meet us and marry us for the small gratuity of a hundred dollars. If not for the whiskey, I knew Bonnie’d be worrying about the dust coating her new dress.

Reverend Ron greeted us from the porch of the saloon, clutching a Bible against his heart. The barmaid and the Forest Service
man—witnesses—followed him down the street to the town hall. It was already in the mid-eighties. The Reverend Ron was some sort of outlier himself. The scene came straight from a hundred-fifty-year-old tintype: the reverend wore a deerskin jacket, faded jeans, a flared Civil War goatee, and leather sandals—Boise sandals! Boise seventh-grader sandals. They were all the rage.

I took a breath and grabbed Bonnie’s hands. Bonnie shook. Reverend Ron’s ceremony was full of cowboy-and-Indian hippie sophistry. Tears tracked down Bonnie’s cheeks.

“All people of the world recognize marriage, and there are many common themes in all wedding ceremonies. With tremendous insight, however, and perhaps most significant to our western way of life, is a simply worded yet profound Indian ceremonial which describes the union of a man and a woman in this light: ‘Now you will feel no rain, cold, or loneliness, for each of you will be shelter, warmth, and companion for the other.’”

Bonnie’s crying became softly audible.

“At this moment you come before us as two persons, but there is only one life before you.

“Go therefore to your dwelling, to enter into the days of your life together.

“May those days be good, and long upon this earth.”

Bonnie wept uncontrollably now, a cry of something I can’t describe that was nowhere near deep joy. “We don’t even have a dwelling!” she interjected.

“Aw, Sugar.” I squeezed her hand and made her look at me until she smiled a weak smile.

Reverend Ron’d lost his place in the ceremony. “The ring?” he asked, clearing his throat.

Her ring: a simple, thin band that I prayed contained real gold. I had found it in a Nampa pawnshop.

“This band of gold that you now offer to Bonnie represents a circle.
The symbol of the universe. The symbol of peace and perfection. Likewise, this ring is the symbol of unity in which your lives are now joined in one unbroken circle of love and commitment that is never-ending.

“As Frank and Bonnie have before us pledged their love and commitment, each to the other, I declare, through the authority vested in me by the State of Nevada, they are husband and wife. You may seal this union with a kiss.”

We did and walked out into the sunlight, holding hands, toward the saloon. No one remembered photographs.

Hot Springs, Nevada/Idaho was on our map. We both had a sad buzz on, made stronger by the winding forty dirt miles north of Jarbidge. We pictured a resort town at the mouth of the valley with a hot bath and a hotel room. I sped through town—a single wide trailer and shotgun shack with
HOT SPRINGS
painted on the side. The air smelled of sulfur.

Two shirtless and filthy Indian kids rode a swayback mare. “Indians,” I said, thinking all the while that my students would love this story, ghosts and Indians. I could probably even make it into an Indian ghost story.

“Drive on,” Bonnie said, pointing down the road. “I don’t like it here.”

“But Indians,” I told her. “These are probably Shoshone or Blackfeet—would they be here if the place was evil?” We drove on and I settled for washing my face with a wet-nap.

Bonnie slumped against my shoulder and slept the fitful sleep of the depressed who don’t have their medication quite dialed in. A rainbow air freshener that hadn’t bothered me before hung from
the rearview mirror. I ripped it down, looking over at sleeping Bonnie, and threw it out the window.

Night would soon settle on the southern Idaho desert, northbound, and I began to need the ceremony of eggs and a bottomless cup of coffee. It’s the surest thing about the road, breakfast at any hour, and something to chew on when driving all night: loss and breakfast. Bonnie still didn’t know about the ten-thousand-dollar donation I’d made in Reno.

Driving north and east in Idaho felt like driving in a circle.

We had wanted to get married in Nevada. I had, at least. It wasn’t until after we’d arrived that I realized I’d sabotaged every childhood dream and wedding fantasy Bonnie’d ever held; this is something they never outgrow. There is nothing real in Nevada. Not the people. Not the neon. All faceless ghosting of hope. Where did those Indian kids go to school?

Women spend the rest of their lives chasing the fairy tales, only adjusting their expectations somewhat accordingly. The license was real. The marriage was real. Quitting our jobs was real. Nevada is the false-front moral equivalent of the façade we’d left in the city.

The Matador’s lifters beat like a marching drum.

The gas gauge read E when I slipped into the Amoco in Sugar City. The neon of the Amoco was warmer than the casino glow of Reno. I smiled at the girl behind the counter as I pumped the Matador full of 85-octane. As the pump clicked off the gallons, I retraced
Just Married
in the dust of the trunk. Bonnie stayed asleep, not knowing we were in Sugar City Not caring.

The streets were quiet and peaceful and represented a life that was still miles away for us. The pump clicked off and I waved at the girl behind the counter and got back in. The Matador probably needed a quart of oil, but I didn’t want to push it. Surely she saw the
Just Married
in the dust of the trunk. Surely she wouldn’t call in the drive-off on a newly wed couple with a whole life ahead of them.