When We Were Wolves (30 page)

Once there, we might walk out into the dump with eight-gallon piss-pumps on our backs and squirt some water on the little flame. Most often we just looked around at what was new in the dump and made comments about what could have been saved—a couch, a refrigerator, a TV, a mattress.

I lost a Third of July game of cards fair and square and had to be Smokey the goddamn Bear in the Hams Fork Independence Day Parade.

On a supermarket atlas, the southwest corner of Wyoming goes from Bureau of Land Management white to Forest Service green as you run your finger northward. The reason we needed range-land biologists was because of Lapland. The BLM sagebrush desert lapped into our Forest Service sagebrush desert, which slowly turned into thin scrub copse and eventually, as you got higher, thick crops of pine. Nothing is green in Lapland, save for the sage crowns and the few grasses in early spring.

The crew quarters was a good hour’s drive away, over this moonscape, from the nearest forest fire—the deep-pine fires that smelled like smoked Christmas—because Lapland sat between
Hams Fork to the south and the real woods of the north. Many cows. Many sheep.

The BLM men were government cowboys who thought like ranchers and had little patience for small and insignificant things like jackrabbits and coyotes. They wore cowboy boots and Stetsons and loved nothing better than running wild mustangs or control-burning thousands of acres of high desert. We couldn’t blame them for that, though we did not always get along and often referred to them as the BM.

Our Forest Service people were government lumberjacks who had little patience for anything that did not grow tall and burn hard. We wore cork-sole logging boots and farmer caps, and we could put an edge to a chain saw in two and a half minutes with a pocket file, overhaul it in twenty with a Swiss Army knife. We worked like loggers. And most of us thought like pyromaniacs. “Let it burn to the road, burn her to the road!”

Ranchers leased BLM and Forest Service land for next to nothing and overgrazed their herds until a grasshopper would starve to death; mining and logging paid the bills. The cowboys called us the Forest Circus. The Hams Fork
Gazette
editorial page called the BLM and us “outmoded government tumors.”

The reason we needed Smokey the Bear and his “Only You!” campaign was less apparent than why we needed Ash. For over fifty years Smokey had had an impact on kids and campers. He kept fire to a minimum. We, Smokey and us firefighters, did our jobs so well that the forest had evolved into an unhealthy monoculture of stunted ponderosa pine. In the draws too steep to log were the ironwood trees, pulpy cottonwoods, choked pine starts, and weeds. This treescape was what we called dense fuel, which burned like billyhell when it did catch fire.

Our fires were mostly caused by lightning. After a fire and the spring snowmelt, serviceberries, raspberries, fireweed, and bunch-grass would return. And wildlife—deer, moose, elk, bears, game birds, rabbits—would feed in the new meadows. Fires were a good thing, but millions of tax dollars went each year to try to prevent them and put them out.

Cappy said a forest fire was an educated devil who had made it to the top.

Raphael said fire was a symbol of Gods presence; trying to prevent forest fires was like trying to prevent earthquakes.

Some of the townspeople said they suspected the Forest Service and the BLM were professional arsonists who set “job fires” intentionally so they could collect hazard pay for the long hours it took to put them out. I was invested enough in the firefighting game to know that this could be true. When I first started the job I would have been skeptical, but later I found myself thinking in ways that made arson justifiable.

Ash said, “For a woman to dream about grasshoppers portends she will bestow her affections upon ungenerous people.”

Ash dreamed about grasshoppers. I awoke one night to hear her talking in her sleep.

“They’re everywhere,” she said. Her blanket was on the floor, and I could see her pale nakedness in the thin electric security-light filtering through the uncurtained windows. She scratched at her face and then, with a shudder, jolted upright, breathing hard.

“It’s okay, Ash,” I whispered. “Only a dream.”

A couple of the other guys turned over, and Harley mumbled something about the Minnesota Twins. Out of nighttime weakness I whispered, “Do you want to come over here, bunk with me for a
while?” The bunks were narrow, and I guessed Ash would take up more than half of mine. I wanted the temporal weight of her near me. We all did at that hour, though most would have denied it.

“No,” she said.

The next morning over pancakes I told her I had had a dream about bears. “What does that mean?”

She stared at the poster of Harry’s trash fire, chewing. Still staring, she swallowed and said, “Bear signifies overwhelming competition in pursuits of every kind. Killing a bear means extrication from entanglements.”

“Custer killed bear in Wyoming,” said Harley.

One evening in July I drove out to the airport to see Raphael about Ash. Ash was on a solo hike in the desert, something she often did after work. I wanted to get this thing settled. Maybe he would win out, but I wasn’t prepared to spend the rest of the fire season sharing her. But I also knew this: No one won Ash. She wasn’t anyone’s prize, like the office girls in Rock Springs or Logan could be. Her attentions were a good thing during a lonely summer, but they were unpredictable and carnal and not something you wanted to have to suffer through a whole cycle of seasons. Her attentions were humbling when you found yourself counting on them.

The sun was dropping quickly behind Utah and the crickets were chirping. I walked by the old phone booth that waiting passengers used more for a windbreak than for communications—I’d tried to use it before and it never worked—and through the gate in the Cyclone fence, across the dirt runway to the rusty green hangar. The shiny white Cessna glowed in the open bay door. My bootsteps echoed off the steel ceiling. Raphael looked up from his reading.

I knew that he knew why I had come. “I don’t think I’m here to break your nose,” I said.

He bit his lip and looked down at the toe of his tennis shoe.

“Want a beer?” Turning to an old Norge, he pulled the chrome handle and a sheet of cool covered the little room. He took out two beers, and motioned for me to sit on the parts crate, the only furniture he had besides his own rotten-webbed lawn chair.

“We need to get something straight,” I said, already feeling disarmed. There were little pieces of ice in the beer.

“Would it help if I broke
your
nose?” he asked.

“Might,” I said. “It seems to be coming down to something like that.”

“Got any pistols?” he asked. “We could have a duel.”

“Nope.”

“Swords?”

I looked at my hands and tried to make fists. “No swords. I guess it’s looking like an old-fashioned fistfight.” I took a hard swallow of beer, stood up and walked back into the bay. Raphael followed, and we stood in the big doorway looking at the dull orange horizon of Utah on fire.

“I get the feeling God’s on your side and that bothers me,” I told him. “Anyway, you can’t hit me back—you’re in minister school.”

“I think you’d feel better about coming all the way out here if I clocked you a few times. Be glad to, actually. I could clean your whole plow, if that would make you all the happier.”

“I thought so earlier, but I just don’t have it in me anymore,” I said. “I’ll take that beating another day.”

On the short walk back to my pickup the pay phone rang, once, twice, three times. I looked around, stepped inside, and picked up the receiver. “What would you do if you did have her all to yourself?” he asked.

My manhood and what was left of my pride were riding on the next several words to come out of my mouth. What I’d say would secure my place in the natural order of things for the rest of that summer. What I said was guttural and instinctive. I said what I felt, what was true. I said, “I don’t know.”

In that short arc between my ear and the receiver hook, it sounded as if Raphael said, “God bless you.”