When We Were Wolves (35 page)

The warm Chinook winds come out of the southwest to the mountains above Hams Fork. Snowmelt causes the Hams Fork River to run high and fast, carrying with it flotsam—beaver dams, pine trees, fence posts—through town, over the Jackmans’ vegetable garden, and nearly to their front door. The kids run trotlines from their bedroom windows and catch fish between pages of homework.

The river pushes to the porch of the old Southern Hotel. Three sheriff’s Blazers are parked in the mud surrounding the historic brothel. Radios squawk and bootsteps rap up and down the rotting wooden porch. The half-inch plywood has been pried off the front doorframe. Inside, the deputies are dusting for fingerprints, but the fingerprints they find on the twenty or so statues are of the hundreds of small children who’d worn bronze elbows and noses to a shine in city parks throughout the West. The deputies walk through the hotel slowly, pointing and taking pictures, as if touring a museum. From a dank corner of what had been the parlor, arms crossed and jaw set, like a statue, Beth studies the diorama. Joe is at work making art with steel pipe, oblivious to the accusations flying out of his wife’s mouth. He is making a crude buffalo sculpture as a Christmas present for his friend. A surprise.

Tall and expensive, with giant hands, Abraham Lincoln watches steely-eyed over a deer, an antelope, a wild-eyed mule. A clean-cut cavalry trooper that may or may not have been Colonel George Armstrong Custer fearlessly strokes a little grizzly bear. A mangy gray wolf herds a quarter horse. Several stoic hard-rock miners push an ore car containing a stony mermaid. Jesus Christ, hand held high, waves at a familiar Indian. A shiny green pig noses a miniature tyrannosaurus no bigger than a pony. A puffy Jim Bridger hoists a stringer of trout toward Lewis and Clark, who look lost and worried. Having tumbled into a dogpile are a camel, a black bear, Brigham Young, and Thomas Jefferson waxing confused, and the famous Hams Fork bull elk.

The Louvin Brothers on the AM singing “The Christian Life,” my little Subaru whines through the uranium-rich hills of central Wyoming, halfway to western South Dakota, the easternmost edge of the West. Yessir, there are buffalo there, fat with bronze, and
they stampede through the parking lot of the biggest resort/casino this side of Las Vegas. Deadwood will be a walk in the park.

I’ll send Joe a postcard from Gillette and tell him I’ve been thinking we should someday soon go to Mexico, drive and not stop until the beers cost a nickel and the
carne asada
is free, fish for marlin on the fly. Hope Beth doesn’t get the mail.

n Oregon boot was a heavy iron cuff with an iron brace that ran down your ankle and under your arch. The idea of course was to discourage migration. It was invented by some crackpot warden at Salem with too much free time on his hands. We had Oregon boots in Wyoming in 1949 and walking in them was like walking across the exercise yard in ice skates. We did that, too.

We learned to act and think as a gang, a team (“There is no ‘I’ in ‘team’!”), apostles. And this is what we saw quickly: Christianity in prison carried privileges. We got what is called “good time,” time off our sentences, for attending services. We got free subscriptions to
National Geographic.
We got Sunday oysters in our gravy. We got all the bad coffee we could drink. Instead of making gravel, bucking grain, peeling potatoes, or pressing license plates, we dusted pews and crafted Nativity scenes out of plywood and wind chimes out of tin fruit-cocktail cans and baling twine.

As Wolves—we were the Wolves—we were well on our way to
really
good time. We wanted to play hockey, and if we had to attend Pastor Liverance’s Wednesday-night Bible Study to do it, what the hell, so be it. Like the apostle Paul, we were former Commandment breakers on the road to Damascus. And Cheyenne.

The Hole is where you went for fighting. It didn’t matter who started it. We naturally didn’t much care for one another, but we learned to suppress our darker instincts for the greater good of the whole. It was teamwork, sportsmanship, brotherly love out of necessity.

“Behold, happy is the man whom God correcteth: therefore despise not thou the chastening of the Almighty: For he maketh sore, and bindeth up: he woundeth, and his hands make whole,” our chaplain told a small congregation of us early one sunny Sunday morning. “Gentlemen, faith and the execution of goodness is your fast ticket out of here.”

The Oil Cup was what the best hockey team in the Rocky Mountain Oil League got to keep. The
Purgatory Camera
ran a photo of our governor, Brandall Owens, hoisting the gold Oil Cup at a backroom press conference in Cheyenne. Pastor Liverance, an ex-Canadian and ex-hockey player, wanted that cup on his altar in Purgatory like it was the Holy Grail itself. The chaplain sat in on parole hearings and his opinion mattered.

“Gentlemen, I want that cup,” he said every afternoon before practice. The pastor said it like a man possessed, a pirate, or Captain Ahab, staring past us at the sagebrush sea of opportunity that cup would bring for his advancement. We saw it as our opportunity, too. His advancement was our freedom. The Wolves wanted out.

It reads somewhere in Genesis that “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall not cease,” and the Wolves didn’t either in our efforts to
master hockey. Most of the time the yard was dry and dusty and the dirt and sand caked our faces and stuck to our hair oil. When it rained we laced up our skates and practiced in the mud, running up and down the greasy yard in these powerful high-kneeing battle stomps, chasing the makeshift puck we carved out of an old snow tire, then slapping it in the general direction of the chicken-wire goals. In late October it got cold enough for the wall guards’ spit to freeze when it hit the ground, so Warden Gordon had them hose down a quarter-acre section of hardpan that stayed slick and frozen until April (not counting a brief January or February thaw), wherein we skated in the brown slush.

We lifted barbells and dumbbells. We performed sit-ups and jumping jacks. We ran laps in our Oregon boots. We got to where we could skate in a straight-enough line without falling down. Our ankles grew strong and knotted. Some days the chaplain would watch the team from the watchtower and yell encouraging words from above. “That’s it boys, that’s it!” Warden Gordon chose the team color, atomic orange, and our colleagues made our canvas game uniforms in the garment shop.

We got new blue dungarees and striped hickory shirts to wear on the bus. The guys in License Plate honed our blades to razor sharpness. Pastor Liverance passed out brand-new Gideons. We didn’t necessarily like each other, weren’t buddy-buddy. But we kept our eyes on the pastor and stomped and skated together for a greater good—the good time we would get if Liverance got his Oil Cup.

At night in our dim cells we read stories about Cain and David and Max McNab and Gordie Howe and John the Baptist.

In those days geologists here from Texas and Oklahoma had just discovered oil four miles under the earth in the Cambrian Layer,
and though it was harder to get at than the shallow seas of crude in the South, oil began spouting up all over our high desert. Rookie crude barons with new mad money thought it might be fun to own restaurants and roadhouses and big new Chryslers and Lincolns and hockey teams, and thought it might be even more fun to sell a lot of tickets and pit their hockey teams against a band of hooligans from the Wyoming State Pen.

Governor Owens was a pale, gaunt fellow who saw Wyoming as a colossal gold mine. Brandall Owens thought a prison team sounded like a good idea; therefore Warden Gordon thought it sounded like a great idea. The Wolves took right away to thinking of the whole shitaree as divine.

Pastor Liverance must have thought he was scoring in some big spiritual face-off because he had volunteered out here, was here because he
wanted
to be—the Pope of Wyoming himself. A short man. He teetered around the pulpit on stiff new dogger-heel cowboy boots as he spoke, keeping his arms out for balance as he clunked around the wooden platform, like the tall man on stilts at the rodeo circus or a dude from out east. Or like he was wearing hockey skates in church. He never did get used to those boots and the extra two inches of height with which they endowed him.

“What’s your take out here, Pastor?” the Wolves asked at that first Christian rendezvous. No one
wants
to be here. Permanence isn’t Western in nature. You take what you can get, or get what you have to take, and move on, get the hell out.
Vamoose.
Looking down and shifting his narrow eyes, he told us: “It says in Luke to sell all that ye have, and give alms. Provide yourselves with purses that do not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”