When We Were Wolves (29 page)

They said about Hams Fork, Wyoming, our station, there’s a pretty girl behind every tree. The nearest tree—small scrub pine—was thirty miles to the north of town. We would match up on the first days of every season, a romantic version of picking teams in high school gym class. I finally had a little seniority in the pecking order, but the other guys didn’t want Ash for other reasons. There was a saying: “The summer’s too short to dance with a fat girl.” Maybe they didn’t know or couldn’t remember how long a slow, wet fire season could be. Ash was wide at the base like a spruce tree, sturdy and strong. I brought her Milky Ways and coffee with lots of cream and sugar. I couldn’t say to the other guys she wasn’t big, because she was. The beautiful girls in Hams Fork were mostly Mormons who lived in Utah and did not work for the Forest Service. Anyway, we didn’t go into town very often, because there wasn’t much to go there for.

On our dates Ash showed me where horned toads lived in the roots of sagebrush and the little mountain scorpions no bigger than Lincoln’s head on a penny. “I never dream of fires,” she said one afternoon while we were walking in the blue dusk. “I tend to dream of fish. Fish are a good thing. What do you dream of?”

The dreams that stood out in my memory were of railroad tracks,
spiders, sex, and tornadoes. “Sharks?” I said, not meaning it as a question.

The freckled skin around her mouth tightened and her eyes became cautious slits. She studied me. She knew it was a line, and not a very good one. I became convinced she could recognize a lie and know what kind it was the way I could smell smoke and identify the fuel. “To dream of catching fish is good,” she said, finally, as if to take me seriously. “If you fail to catch any in your dreams, it will be bad for you.”

“Does that include sharks?” I said. “What about sharks?”

She fumbled through her dream dictionary. “Sharks are not good,” she said, frowning. She smelled like horsemint. It was almost Flag Day before she let me hold her hand.

I had my useless degree in English lit, which took me six and a half years to get. I majored in English because I liked reading. Or at least I didn’t mind it. I wanted to fight forest fires during the season and do nothing in the wintertime. Maybe some skiing. Maybe read some books. It was that time of my life—my mid-twenties— when I hadn’t yet realized that fortune wasn’t going to fall from the sky, knock me down, and stick to me like slurry.

Many evenings Ash and I would hike up a deer trail to the top of Sarpy Ridge and watch Utah’s lightning, which was better than our own. We’d take Cokes and a blanket, and it was like the Fourth of July. Some nights we would smoke the marijuana Ash had brought with her from Arizona. Most nights it would just be distant heat lightning. We would kiss or make animal sounds in the boredom— birds, coyotes, moose. Sometimes the lightning struck hard and green and beautiful, and it was like a celebration.

Ash was running a study up near the Montana border. She spent a couple days a week up there, counting warrior grasshoppers and Mormon crickets. When she returned, she spent most workdays behind a computer in the map room, long hair pulled back, gold-framed glasses on her big, wind-tanned cheeks, red and serious.

Her expertise was in riparian management, but she taught me that worms do not have eyes, but can sense light through their skin. She taught me that mosquitoes are attracted to the color blue. She told me about the Australian fire beetle. The females are colored exactly like the males, but are a good deal larger. “Size is everything in their mating habits,” she said. “The males are attracted to the largest, strongest females.” Road-train drivers would toss Emu beer bottles onto the roadside. Male fire beetles would come by the hundreds to mate with the bottles, which looked like big female fire beetles.

She taught me how to tell the temperature by counting snowy-tree-cricket chirps. “Count the chirps over thirteen seconds,” she said as we stood in the desert and I held my Indiglo watch to my eyes, listening, counting. “Then add forty.” We compared the Fahrenheit crickets to the thermometer she carried on her belt. The crickets were nearly right-on each time, give or take a degree either way.

I taught her that a smart arsonist can make a time-delayed incendiary device by mixing brake fluid and antifreeze in a Styrofoam coffee cup. Plant the little bomb in some tinder at night and stroll away. Once the temperature reached sixty the next morning, whoomph, fire.

It was a warm summer.

The camp’s cat was named Cinder. He was black as a witch’s cat, and during the day he insisted on sleeping on my bunk. He was a mouser
and his ears twitched when he dreamed. Ash bought him half-and-half to put on his dry food. Some of the guys didn’t like cats and weren’t above kicking him when he got in their way.

Raphael, the pilot, bunked out at the dirt-strip airport. He was under Forest Service contract, and we used him for everything from shuttling biologists around the desert to tracking livestock movements to searching for smokes after a lightning storm to dropping boxes of fried chicken to us on the fireline. He was always reading in the little hangar closet he bunked in, feet propped up on a parts crate, sipping a Coke. He read pilot magazines and A. B. Guthrie novels. Very often the Bible. I tried to not like him, but it was not easy. He and Ash slept in a dome tent under the wing of his Cessna when he flew her up to the border for the grasshopper count. She told me when I asked about hotel accommodations on her trips.

His name was Raphael, but they called him Ralph. He kept to himself and wasn’t passionate about fires like the rest of us. The whole of him didn’t quite fit in.

He was a foreigner, from the East, olive-skinned and not tall, with short dark hair. The little extra weight he carried made him appear almost but not quite puffy. Not hard and lean like those of us who swung chain saws and Pulaskis. Ralph was studying to be a minister at one of those little Bible colleges in the Midwest and he drove a 1972 Cadillac ambulance with a bike rack and a CD player. “Don’t you want to fly B-17s, Canadairs, Orions,” I asked him once, “instead of that little Cessna?”

“No,” he said. “I am content with this.” What I thought he meant was that he was content with Ash.

Without thinking of the consequences, I asked him, “Does she haul your ashes?”

“You don’t need to know that,” Raphael said. I expected he was more than just sleeping in that tent with Ash. I expected he would hit me and
was a
little disappointed when he didn’t.

“Your survival in the wilderness might depend on it,” she said, breaking the green-and-brown hoppers legs at the joints like expensive crab. She popped the insect into her mouth whole. The exoskeleton cracked in her teeth and her neck worked a little as she swallowed.

“Just let me die,” I said.

“I can’t help but to feel for him,” Ash told me after her third or fourth plane ride to the border. “Raphael is an angel.”

“What in hell does that mean?” I knew damn well what it meant to me, but I wanted her take on the matter.

Ash’s eyes told me she would not answer, but not because it wasn’t any of my business. In Wyoming, in the Forest Service, silence is an acceptable response, often encouraged.

That afternoon the mosquitoes were thick. I smeared my arms with government-surplus Desert Storm bug juice. The mint-green paint on my truck door had begun peeling where the sweat from my left arm smeared against it.

Though it looked like I was going to come up the loser in a toss of the I-Ching, I became determined not to let her go before October. She was something to hold on to for a summer in Hams Fork, something many, even most, people there did not have. That summer she was the only thing.

The Eternal Flame was the dump fire that would not go out. It had been burning for years, from deep in the ground where newspapers and plastic diapers and snow tires and condoms and motor oil and couches, beer bottles, and flashlight batteries smoldered and some
times torched enough to shoot up a little flame, bigger than a pilot light, smaller than a campfire. Mostly it wasn’t an eternal flame, it was just smoke. They covered it up, but it burned and coughed, burned and coughed. We would get called because from town it sometimes looked like Utah or the western heel of the Bridger-Teton National Forest was on fire. The Smokey propaganda poster over our kitchen stove showed a burned-over Oldsmobile in a black-and-white apocalypse. It said:
HARRY’S TRASH FIRE GOT AWAY, DON’T LET YOURS
. We knew it was just the dump, but we had to go.