When We Were Wolves (3 page)

“How’s the arm tonight?” I yelled to Job.

“Which one?” Job said.

There was at the time a white barnstorming team from a religious settlement up in Michigan called the House of David. They let their hair and beards grow long and God-like and kept Bibles with them in the dugout. We had met the Whiskers on the road before, at chautauquas and county fairs, and respected them because, yes, they preached humbly to the fans before the games, but after the first pitch their spirits were real. Their fervor for God turned into a fervor for baseball and winning. They cursed like Philistines in their blue-and-gray uniforms and threw at batters’ heads. A Whisker—pitcher named Benson—eventually made it to the Bigs. The games were as intense as firefights. It was like facing Jesus at every position.

This game would be our first-ever night game. Crude portable lights were trucked in along with generators. The steel stanchions
were short and the lights yellow and not very bright, creating shadows behind everything. It made possible an incandescent noon at midnight. To folks in those parts, and even to us, a night baseball game was a miracle.

Farmers and the CCC crews were all off from work and gathered in town at dinnertime to eat and talk about baseball and the possibility of weather. Horses and mules pulled wagonloads of children. A Methodist church had set up an old army tent and a choir practiced and sipped iced tea. Faith had the feel of the chautauqua.

Drunk on a dram of humidity that some of the old-timers sensed, the crowd watched us take infield practice. Hope and desperation played on their faces—babies crying, mothers crying, fathers cursing and praying in the same breaths. They cheered our mistakes while grasshoppers danced in the dusky light that filtered through the dust. Ministers and deacons in dark suits and straw hats passed walnut collection plates.

From the tin lean-to visitors’ dugout, we watched the Whiskers take infield. “I have felt weather in my arm all day,” Job said while fishing the June bugs from the water bucket with the drinking gourd. “Tonight there will be weather.” The air was heavy with humidity. Heat lightning flashed to the west. “We will be rewarded with God’s prosperity.”

In the hazy twilight both teams racked up errors involving lack of sight. As it got darker we played blind to the balls that were hit over the lights, which were many. Line drives hid in the lights and the outfielders had to react to directions from their infielders. We communicated with whistles, growls, and shrieks only the Indians understood. Even Job’s breaking balls were hard to pick up in the shadows, and I had to track them by sound through the batter’s grunts of frustration.

The Indians hit the ball hard and put runners on base all evening. Except for Job, who seemed to have lost a step in beating the throw to first. But we did score runs, even driving two long balls into the wheat, one with two aboard.

The umpiring had been stacked against the Indians from the very beginning. The umps were Faith Rotarians who didn’t see any benefit in another Indian coup. Job couldn’t get a called strike, and most of his pitches lacked snap and heat and the Whiskers spent the evening whacking breadbasket strikes into the outfield and sometimes beyond. I knew Job was convinced that throwing the game would be an offering of something more important than the purse money we would never see, a tithe of weather that would bring the Indians something more. Losing would mean rain, a final truce. Job believed he could control the hellish dry spell and its curse on all the land. He was now willing to lose on purpose, a personal sacrifice that he believed with all his soul would bring a saving rain. The other eight of us weren’t convinced and wanted to beat the Whiskers like a drum.

Job kept shaking off the pitches I called, hurling instead easy fastballs, sliders that didn’t slide, and change-ups that weren’t much of a change. In the fourth I started to the mound to talk some sense into him, but how do you avoid a sermon at a time like that? Our eyes met. He pointed at the storm cell that was building over the Black Hills to the west. I realized I had nothing to say to him that would matter and walked back to my crouch behind the plate. More slow fastballs.

But the Indians battled hard at the plate as well. A pitching duel this wasn’t. Both teams batted around two innings in a row.

Indians were up one at the bottom of the ninth, 13 to 12, Whiskers on first and second, two out. From his one-armed stretch Job
checked the runners. Then again. He shook off my signs until we agreed on a fastball. His eyes were yellow and sorry, like the chiefs on old tobacco cans. He hadn’t licked his fingers or gone to the rosin bag or the seam of his pants for a phonograph needle all game.

Then Job put a dull fastball into the wheelhouse of Joe Garner, the Whiskers’ cleanup man. Garner stepped into the bucket, swung through, and massacred the easy mushball. A rainmaker. Otis Downwind in left ran underneath it just to say goodbye. The stitched horsehide that Job had always said possessed the spirit of the horse was still traveling skyward into the humidity when the wind came fast and quiet, ambushing the ball, pulling it down into the surprised glove of Otis Downwind, and ending the game.

From my knees in the dirt—the knees I can feel the big storms with now—I could hear the wall of wind coming toward the diamond like a night train.

Loud claps of thunder boomed just west of center field. Lightning struck the prairie with a dozen electric arrow’s, “Smell the rain!” the crowd yelled. “The miracle! Do you smell the rain! At last, thank God, the rain!”

The crowd stood, noses skyward, mouths open, like baby birds. For a moment, the Indians, too, were transfixed by the rush of wheat under the black umbrella of clouds. Then, silently, eight of us ran off the field to the car, Otis desperately throwing himself into the crank, trying to turn the engine over.

“Job, come on!” I yelled over the wind, but he didn’t move, didn’t even turn to look at us. By now, everyone but Otis and me were piled in the car.

The crowd reached to touch the weather, and Job, still on the mound, face to the sky, waved his gloved hand and stump in the air in exaltation. Thunder cracked as the engine fired up and the crowd yelled louder. The car sputtered slowly away from the field,
picking up speed toward the dirt highway, as Otis and I ran beside it, still calling for Job.

The storm rolled eastward across the prairie, onto Faith, with the sound of a thousand horses racing to the river, and the wheat was beaten with hailstones the size of baseballs.

e’re on top of my aluminum trailer in Hams Fork, adjusting my satellite dish because the earthquake jounced it cockeyed and instead of the French porn channel Wayne showed me I could get, I now have snow. “I got a dad in Preston, Idaho,” says Wayne, pointing to the northwest with a socket wrench, says it like he’s got another in Denver and maybe one in the garage, says it like he’s holding on to this dad because he might come in handy someday and you just never know. “He just bought a new compressor, a real portable job. I’m gonna hook it onto this big brush I got ordered and we’ll be in business.” Wayne’s already in business so I know this new business is recreation, sport, diversion, and maybe he’ll count me in. I am glad his talk is of art. It is late afternoon and the high desert snow is starting to turn purple, like a bruise.

“What sort of business?” I ask.

“You’ll see,” he says. And I know he’s right.

This is the Renaissance man, the Wayne Kerr I used to know, who, when I first came to Hams Fork two years ago, reached out his hand and was the only one to offer me a beer; my friend Wayne Kerr who is passed around here in conversation like so many Bible stories of miscreants and ne’er-do-wells. Wayne believes every creature on land has a counterpart at sea. He’s becoming an artist again since he met Copper, his new model and his new girlfriend.

It’s colder than billyhell up here, but I’ve got a vista. My trailer sits on the windy east scarp over Hams Fork, so that standing on the roof I am even with the water tower across town behind the school where I teach history. I can sight along U.S. 30 just this side of one of the Mormon ward houses and the port of entry where over-the-road drivers idle their rigs and secure trip permits before driving through Wyoming. Westbound, the cable of asphalt leaves the valley and turns into Utah.

I can look out over the shiny tops of trailer after trailer set in awkward rows on gritty Old Testament gray, sage and sooty snow lapping at rusty snow machines and four-wheel-drives as if someday the land, with a swarm of locusts and a hurricane wind, might muster up enough force to take back this godforsaken desert. No one wants to live up here. You are exposed and can see too much; I can look right down into the sewage-treatment plant. I see the smokestacks from the coal-burning power plant that lights half of Salt Lake City. There are mine shafts all underneath my trailer and they are on fire from an explosion fifty years ago. You can smell the smoke. It’s March, the temperature doesn’t get above thirty in the daytime, the regional suicide rates rise, and I still have flies.

If you are not Mormon in Hams Fork, you have a past. I was married. It pushes a man against the wall to come home from work and find everything he owns in the front yard in the rain. I have lived in a car that didn’t run. Slept in libraries.

My wife was pretty, but now she lives in Illinois. Right now I am content to stand up here and watch.