When We Were Wolves (25 page)

Twilight turned to dark and the headlights began taking purchase on the signs and reflector posts of the asphalt ribbon that bisected a moonscape of spuds and sugar beets. The Blackfoot AM played consoling country songs from the halcyon days of Buck Owens and Merle Haggard. A yellow diamond with a black cow silhouette whiffled with bullet holes signaled more open range.

“Sweetheart,” I said. I would say this and if she was awake, fine. “I need to tell you something about our savings. There really aren’t any.” No response from Bonnie.

I was chewing two chunks of Double Bubble and drumming to “Kansas City Song” on the vinyl steering wheel at seventy-five miles per hour when realization sent a double of adrenaline through my system.

“Son of a bitch.”

I comprehended the very real yellow eyes of the black cow silhouetted against black U.S. 20. The late brakes took maybe thirty miles per hour off our velocity. I’d already resigned to hit the animal in the adrenalined fraction of a second before the sound of the car breaking.

Bonnie and I—no lap belts—hit the dashboard. Spiderwebbing glass and the crunch of metal as the wheels left asphalt and launched from a shallow ditch, and the two of us getting thumped around before the Matador came to rest in an irrigation canal fifty feet into a beet field. The radio still played …
Take good care of you
… The radiator hissed. I tasted blood, which I assumed was my own, but in the yellow light of the dashboard I could see it was dripping from the cow, broken like a watermelon, and suspended between the firewall and front seat.

Bonnie was silent, a line of blood running from her scalp, across the bridge of her nose, to her lips and chin. “Sweetheart, are you okay? Sugar, please say you’re all right.” But what scared me most was that I realized, through my pleading for Bonnie to be okay, that
I was really pleading for
me
to be okay—how much of this steady smear of blood that I prayed came from the heifer was mine?

I touched my face and looked at my hands.

“I’m okay I guess,” she said. And part of me was relieved, though part of me remembered that the unhappiness brought on by Jarbidge could have, in a cowy stroke of fate, been laid to rest in this field of sugar beets with the smell of raw hamburger, radiator coolant, and stagnant mosquito water.

Bonnie’s door was jammed shut with earth. My door opened. I kicked it down on the hinges and it swung hard. I stepped into the shallow water and deep mud. Bonnie slid underneath the bloody cow to my side, her hair slick with wet, wedding dress tainted red. As she pulled herself out the door frame, the animal wheezed. “The cow’s still alive,” Bonnie cried. “It’s suffering. You havta do something quick. Put it out of its misery. Kill it.”

“How the hell am I gonna do that?”

“I don’t know, do something. This is your fault. Use your knife.”

I always carried a pocketknife my grandfather had given me when I was eleven. Blade extended, the thing wasn’t over four inches long and I carried it for luck more than practicality. I walked to the cow and told her I was sorry, knowing this would be charged to my karma debt. “It was an accident,” I said. I poked a little at the hide under her chin.

God, what a story. I forced the blade into the throat hide. It went in hard—like through a boot sole—and, even sawing, I could hardly move the blade. A new, thin stream of blood painted my shoes. I was thinking of adjectives to describe the scene. I kept sawing and the cow kept not dying.

The sounds that seemed to escape from the cut were horrible.
How could you do this?
she said in anguished bovine language. I
was only ranging.

“Is it dying?” asked Bonnie. She’d pried open the trunk and found a sweatshirt to pull on over her dress.

“Hell, yes, she’s dying, but it might take two fucking days. We’re on open range. That means we just bought this cow.” My fear for myself had surfaced and now went before Bonnie and drama, and she smelled it.

“What are we gonna do?” she asked.

“Wait for someone with a gun and a camera, I guess.”

Things were quiet for a moment, except for the cow. I kept sawing and Bonnie began rummaging in the trunk again. She looked westward.

“Don’t worry about the wedding—I don’t think it was very official,” she said.

I collapsed in the dirt and faced the sky. “Oh, this takes the cake. I’m giving up. I’m finished.”

Bonnie’s shoes clicked as she walked away down the highway, but I pretended not to notice. I was getting good at pretending not to notice.

How much time passed? A class period, maybe two. “It’s cold.” My arms, neck, and knee had begun to stiffen. “It’s cold, I said. Aren’t you cold? Answer me, Bonnie.” Silence.

“So you’re selling out that easy. I see how it is now.” But my words were absorbed by the black soil of beet field and she couldn’t have heard me. “Okay, I see how it is now.” A car stopped—old Plymouth with round taillights like rat’s eyes. No Bonnie. No flashlight.

I limped south, southwest through the volcanic soil, hoping before long to run into U.S. 26, where I could hitch a ride to Idaho Falls. By now Bonnie was in a warm car, talking to her Boise mother on the cell phone. Few things beat the warmth of a car heater, the inane buzz of the AM radio, but you have to be cold first to appreciate it.

I walked all night, fueled by fear and the cold. Millions upon millions of goddamn sugar beets. Enough sugar here to fill every sugar packet in every cafe from hell to breakfast.

Selling out had long ago become bullshit. Drinking coffee, stories, twelve-year-olds high on sugar and Yellow Number 5—that life didn’t sound so bad now. Weekends driving into the mountains in my Explorer. Seeing friends at the bar.

I tried navigating by the stars. There were no stars over Boise. I felt as if I was walking in circles and gave up, trusting my instincts.

Sometime well after midnight it became apparent that a person could die atop all that sugar. Collapse from exhaustion and dehydration. Maybe just lie down and freeze to death on an especially cold August night.

The thin line of dawn began appearing. I adjusted my direction to walk due west. I could see the lights of a town that might have been two miles away, might have been twenty. Must be Rexburg, I figured. They’ll have eggs in Rexburg. I limped to the beet elevator.

The letters on the elevator:
SUGAR CITY, IDAHO.

I ran across the highway, not bothering to look even one way

The Amoco was warm. There was a small convenience store with a bar and a few stools where customers could eat a cold sandwich and drink coffee from Styrofoam cups. I hadn’t noticed the bar part before, when I was borrowing the gasoline. “I’ll have a half dozen eggs over easy, sausage, bacon, hashbrowns, toast, white. Keep the coffee coming.”

“Might be a ham salad sandwich left,” the clerk, a kid not long out of high school, said without pausing her sweeping.

I found two sandwiches and unwrapped the cellophane and ate one in three bites without much chewing.

“Will that do it?”

“I’m full as a tick. Do you know that I can’t pay for these?” I said, talking with my mouth full. “Guess I’m dining and dashing.” “It’s on me. Actually, it’s on the manager.” “I demand that you call the police.” “Sheriff.”

“Then I demand that you call the sheriff.”

“Nope.”

“But I’m a fugitive! I’m a fugitive from Boise. I drove off with a tank of your gasoline. I’ve killed some guy’s cow. I’ve stolen your sandwich.”

“So if you drove off with our gasoline, where’s your car?” “I told you. I hit a cow on the highway.”

The girl kept sweeping. “Sounds like bull. Look, I’m off shift in ten minutes and the sandwiches are free. The gas is free—I don’t care. Now get out or not, but I’m going home in ten minutes, no hassles, okay.”

Arrest would mean a hot meal and a blanket for a few days. I could sort out my thoughts, my future. Now I had to face all of Idaho with nothing but a windbreaker and a pocket comb.

She was finished with her shift—the best part of the day. The kind of accomplished tired that feels so good because you’ve put something hellish behind you. I imagine that the reason people run marathons is so they can feel the kind of tired that follows, where nothing in the world, not even Idaho, is bigger than a cold, hard-earned beer—no news.

My hunger delayed for an hour or two, I walked into the cold morning sun onto the shoulder of the highway. I felt light with nothing but hands in my pockets, no keys, no money, no responsibility. No wife. Nowhere to go but down the road. I could choose anonymity and poverty. I possessed the glorious luxury of choice that made me one of the richest men in the world. Only the beautiful, atavistic need to survive! Here I was at the crossroads of rock bottom and I could choose not to go up. I might choose to go to Mexico and live vicariously through a song. I could choose to go back to another classroom and tell stories while a real world spun around me.

I walked northbound, toward Blackfoot—the opposite direction
from Boise. I concentrated on my feet, and the walking took my mind off things. A school bus passed without slowing. Maybe twenty minutes down the road, a huge early-seventies Lincoln slowed and wheeled to the shoulder fifty yards ahead of me. The Lincoln was green, patched with rust, enormous snow tires on the rear—reservation car.

As I neared I could read a bumper sticker:
CUSTER WAS A PUNK.

Heads of long black hair shifted inside. The rear passenger door opened and a signal of smoke caught a breeze and blew toward me. They’d never been to Jarbidge, Nevada. What did I teach? Kids—I taught kids. A farmer in coveralls stood looking into his irrigation ditch as we passed, at his expensive heifer atop Bonnie’s Matador. Friends and brothers, five Indians told stories of an Idaho Falls drunk, the Merit smoke sweet and white as saccharine.

unday, June 25, was a battle. The last of the smoke cleared in the afternoon, the dust settled in the barley field, and the Sioux, Arapahoe, Cheyenne, Crow, and Seventh Cavalry called the horses, picked up the arrows, dusted themselves off, and headed downtown together for cold beers at the Mint. Most of the chiefs and officers had planes to catch in Billings, but the group got on without them. They’d pick up the Indian Wars again at next year’s Reenactment of Custer’s Last Stand.

On Monday morning, June 26, the day after the big battle, Owen Doggett came home from the Mint to find he was now trespassing on the dirt half acre he used to almost own. Everything the actor now owned formed a crude breastwork ten yards from the chipped cinder-block front step that led to the single-wide he also
used to almost own. A buckskin shirt. A few T-shirts. Some socks. A faded union suit. A broken AM radio with a coat-hanger antenna. His Sage fly rod. An empty duffel bag. A brick of pistol rounds, and the title to the 76 Ford Maverick.

Charley Reynolds, the basset hound, was off chasing rabbits in the cheatgrass; he belonged solely to Owen Doggett now. Owen Doggett banged on the window of the locked trailer house with his gloved fists and yelled, “Sweetheart, I’ll make you eggs!”

His wife had already begun her day’s work, tying flies for an outfitter in Sheridan. Her fly patterns were intricate, exacting, and held the subtle variances of nature usually reserved for spider-webs, mud-dauber nests, and snowflakes. Through the cloudy window of her workroom, Sue Doggett looked up from her vise and out at her husband in his riding boots and dirty wool tunic. She mouthed, “Read my lips: I am not acting.”

Mr. and Mrs. Owen Doggett were married three years ago on a moonlit Monday midnight in Reno, Nevada, after meeting at a Halloween party and dating for exactly sixteen days. The engagement lasted an afternoon and a dinner. They took the red-eye out of Billings and stayed drunk for the entire two-day trip. They were married in the same clothes they met in—his custom Custer buckskin, her star-spangled Wonder Woman bustier. The wedding cost exactly twenty-seven dollars, bourbon and snapshots included.

Sue is a full-blooded Crow. Owen Doggett calls her The Sioux. And sue is what she is doing; she’s suing the trooper for all he’s worth. No negotiations. Sue gave him an old government Colt revolver as a wedding present. She wanted the valuable relic back. “Indian-giver!” he called her. He cannot afford a lawyer.