When We Were Wolves (36 page)

“Say, is there a Pope of Wyoming?” I asked one evening during a Bible Study smoke break. “‘Cause if there ain’t this guy’s trying awful goddamn hard for nothing.”

“Yes, there is,” said Belecki. “Like there’s a King of Canada.” Rich Belecki was our forward, our ringer, our finisher, though the Wolves rarely started much in the way of offense that he might finish. Belecki was a white-collar, silver-spoon pretty boy previously from British Columbia, who wound up in prison by embezzling money from some oil company slush fund. He’d grown up with the game, and his family sent him valuable things like a radium-dial watch and spanking-new hockey skates. He was forever rubbing down the rich black leather with mink oil. The rest of us had never skated in our lives, and some of the figure skates the Salvation Army gave us were
white.
We supposed Liverance would have to settle for martyrdom or governor. Or they could make him warden. He told us we must protect Belecki on the ice at all costs.

On the chaplain’s desk in his dank little office behind the chapel was a photograph of Maurice “the Rocket” Richard in his Canadiens uniform, his hair oiled down slick and his arm around Liverance in his white chaplain collar and black wool getup, the pastor’s hair slick and greasy too. Pastor Liverance smiled away like Christmas in the photo—teeth a yellowed gray from the Chesterfields and big fifteen-cent Webster Golden Weddings he was forever smoking—like he was thinking, “This shot will soon look great on my desk.” I didn’t know who the Rocket was until Pastor Liverance showed me his Canadiens scrapbook. Richard was the Canadiens’ goal-scoring prima donna and was subjected to many opponents’ illegalities on the ice: bad checks.

On the side of the bus we stenciled
WYOMING STATE PENITENTIARY CHRISTIAN WOLVES
. I told the team I read in
National Geographic
that packs of wolves brought down camels on this very desert just a few million years ago, and it was those camel bones making the oil men rich today.

Rob LeBlanc, who sounded French Canadian but who was really a semi-commercial catfisherman and car thief from Cameron Parish, Louisiana, said, “We have oil in the swamps. We have wolves there too and they eat chickens, ducks, and rats, and sometimes big things like children.”

Big Jimmy McGhan, an ex-marine, ex—horse thief, and the Wolves’ physical leader, said, “Remember, gentlemen, a lion from the forest shall slay them and a wolf from the desert shall destroy them.”

“Yeah,” said Fowler, a third-degree batterer and a second-line wing. “And beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves!” The rest of us just looked at each other with foreheads wrinkled.

The license plates on the bus were yellow and said
Wyoming
JESUS
in black next to a black cowboy on a black bucking bronco. All our games were away games. All games we lost by digits the scoreboards couldn’t handle.

We lost to the Sheridan Savages and the Casper Cutthroat. The Ogden Americans and the Greeley Giants. We got routed by the Vernal Vikings, Rapid City Chiefs, the Fort Collins Grizzlies. Pocatello Roughnecks. Rock Springs Miners, Billings Badgers. And hammered by the Cheyenne Buffalo.

The other teams were manned mostly by Canadian exports: some guys who were maybe on their way up to the NHL, but most who were on their way down from leagues in regions very cold and
dark. Men gaining on thirty, even forty who hadn’t learned enough about anything other than hockey to make a living. Men who weren’t yet willing to give up their game to support themselves as professional cattle thieves or liquor-store robbers. So they found themselves in the Rocky Mountain Oil League, playing in dim and ratty rinks and dodging the beer, the snowballs, and the rotten potatoes that were regularly chucked onto the ice by the Oil League fans—who got into more fistfights than the players. But there were worse places to be, which we reminded them when we rolled into town from Purgatory in the Jesus bus.

Our strong suits did not include puck control or shooting. Or skating. We weren’t native to it, so we didn’t turn or stop much. But we could run. And we could skate fast, as fast and as hard as any team in the Oil League. We had conviction and spirit. And Lord, could we check!

We were the second-hardest checking team in the Rockies, maybe in America, maybe North America. Thirty-five-mile-an-hour, head-on checks. Train wrecks against the boards with a Canadian in between. And the other thing about our checks: we checked as a pack.

Big Jimmy McGhan checked the hardest of all of us and he could call the pack with the look on his face—the way his eyes glassed and sparkled under the black bristle of his eyebrows and the gray shine of his furrowed forehead, the way his neck flexed. He would snarl and light in on a target and hightail it down the ice like a mad monk, and we other Wolves raced and followed Big Jimmy to the kill— “awhooooooooooooo!” The first Wolf, Big Jimmy, would be all their guy saw: Whump! Bless you, brother! Then Whump!-Whump!-Whump! And if Lovelock, our goalie, decided to get into this: Whump! That is to say, if the big check was right at the beginning of a period and no Wolves yet paced the penalty box.

Meanwhile the crowd would be screaming and yelling in language
not Christian in nature and one of the Canadians—looking over his shoulder, tail between his legs—would have nosed the puck into our goal; and the police sirens wailed and the light behind the net flashed red and the organist played a jazzy Bulgar tune that wasn’t at all like a hymn but that all the fans knew the words to, as greasy vendor items rained down on us and the refs escorted the check victim under the boards away on a Big War surplus stretcher. And it would be shoulder slaps and howls on our bench as we changed lines and another five got a shot at them. But no fighting.

Not with the other teams.

Not with each other. Not even a tickle. Not even if it wasn’t initiated by a Wolf. Not even if they well deserved a good ear-boxing or a cuff across the gums. No matter that fighting is part of the game, and every other team in the league would be justified in starting what in prison shoptalk is called a riot. The governor and Warden Gordon wanted no bad headlines in
Time
magazine, no bad what they call in politics public relations. They made it clear that a fight would result in the immediate extinction of the Wolves, to hell with any survival instincts we might possess in our genetic makeups.

The other Oil Leaguers didn’t know we weren’t allowed fisticuffs, and we still intimidated the hell out of them. They just figured the first one in the Oil League to mix it up with us would be the first one in the Oil League to cross the Canadian border in a plywood box. They didn’t know we weren’t that bad. Half of us had never killed anybody. Or that we skated with Jesus, whose game plan didn’t include fistfights. But what they didn’t know didn’t hurt us. So we continued to check like feral dogs, to intimidate the hell out of other teams, to avoid fighting—and to lose games. This in a time when general managers handed players twenty-five bucks under the table for initiating a ruckus. It’s what the legions of Oil League cabin-fever fans paid to see. It’s what the fans
wanted to do to each other, would have done if it were legal. Sometimes they did it anyway.

Photos of the games appeared in the
Cheyenne Eagle
, the
Rock Springs Rocket-Miner
, the
Billings Gazette
, under captions like

PURGATORY PRISONERS PELTED AGAIN
and
WOLF ERADICATION UNDERWAY.
Dirty kids knew us by name. Women with animals and flowers tattooed on their skin wrote us letters telling us where their animals and flowers were. We lost on the radio. Live, following Milton Berle’s
Texaco Star Theater
, on the big Cheyenne tower that broadcast us all over the Rockies and deserts surrounding them: 0-21-0.

Then things started to change. Some of the Wolves were slowly picking up the more tame rudiments of the game. It was as though thirty-five-mile-an-hour checks were beginning to bore them. Belecki’s adolescent puck control really started to come back to him. LeBlanc learned to turn in big arcs to the left and would sometimes even abort checks in favor of following the puck. Lovelock, the goalie, got the hang of staying in the goal crease. Nearly everyone could skate all the way across the ice to the penalty box without falling down. Pastor Liverance became even more inspired and started writing a
book
about Christian prison hockey as if he were writing a sequel to Exodus, a sort of how-to guide, as he was a real pioneer in the sport. I memorized new Revelations dealing with ice and the end of the world. They set one of our Wolves free.

One morning we were just boarding the bus for God-knows-where in the crisp winter sunshine and Big Jimmy McGhan said, “Wait a minute.” The Wolves all looked around and sniffed the air like we knew something wasn’t quite right, who knew what? and Big Jimmy put his finger on it and said, “Where in heaven’s name has Lucky Shepard been? How long we been playing without a
backup goalie?” This is when Pastor Liverance told us Lucky had been paroled, had gone home to his mother in Meeteetse two weeks ago. “Think about the game, will ya?” he advised us.

It was like being born again.

We put extra oil in our hair. We did jumping jacks and push-ups twice a day. We had the boys in License Plate hone our blades after every practice and every game. We learned new verses about hope and heaven and committed them to memory. “The Lord looseth the prisoners, lets hit the road!”

“Okay, who we playing tonight?” we asked Pastor Liverance, trying to enter the world of the profound. The subject of who we played was beginning to matter to us. For the first time we saw that Christian battle had a direct bearing on our sentences as professional Wolves.

Especially if we were battling the Cheyenne Buffalo.

Cheyenne was different. The Buffalo were owned by a guy named Stumpy Wells, a greasy-rich petroleum tycoon who seemed to be forever trying to make up with his billfold for the fact that he was four feet tall. Stumpy always wore a gray eleven-gallon hat (he was bald too) and when he sat on his billfold he was bigger, much bigger, than any man in Wyoming. He recruited the best of the worst, guys actually
banned
from Canada, exiled to Wyoming like it was some Egyptian penal colony. Besides being able to really play hockey, these guys were tougher than harness leather. Maybe they’d beaten a ref to a bloody carcass north of the border. Maybe they’d killed somebody. Maybe they’d spent time in a Yukon hoosegow, busting rocks on the tundra. We could only guess, which we did. What we did know was that these guys were now Stumpy’s toadies, his northern-import goons. They took cheap shots at us—spearing, hooking, boarding, holding, tripping,
high-sticking, elbowing, slashing, spitting, punching. And Stumpy’s refs got paid by Stumpy to let it go.