When We Were Wolves (38 page)

The other Buffalo circled and watched, not daring to get involved, as we pummeled the giant’s body and the soon-to-be-ex-chaplain dribbled his skull against the rink, making a slush like cherry snowcone where it dented the ice and where we spoiled our hopes of this lifetime and very probably the next.

A few months later Wyoming went from a black and greasy state to an orange and atomic promised land. They discovered immense uranium deposits in the Bear Lodge area—Devils Tower—and the Uranium Boom was on. Former hockey fans lost interest in oil and took to the hills with picnic lunches and Geiger counters, searching for buried treasure.

Brandall Owens lost the next election to a uranium-fat Republican from Casper, but before leaving the governor’s mansion he saw to it as promised that the Wolves left hockey for good, and that all twelve of us were buried so far under the penal system that Armageddon was a damn sight more probable in our lifetimes than parole.

The Cheyenne Atomics played bush-league hockey in the South for a year or so before fizzling.

As I near my allotted three-score and ten, I think about the Czech every new day of this life. They say his eight-and-a-half-foot skeleton was displayed in a sideshow that traveled eastern Europe in mule-drawn circus wagons. Though I really don’t believe much else, I believe assuredly that when the Wolves fell upon him, he didn’t feel a thing. His eyes just glazed over and his soul just flew out and went where all ghosts of animals go.

I read in an old yellowed
National Geographic
that there are no more wolves in Palestine. I read in the
Cheyenne Eagle
that there are no more wolves in Yellowstone.

The book, Pastor Liverance’s manuscript, is called
Wolves on Ice: Prison Hockey from the Inside Out.
It’s long yellowed, like old teeth, and sits in the corner under a stack of ancient magazines. And every year the parole board refers to the book as “a sad history.”
This morning at breakfast, between stories I’ve heard a thousand times about Maurice “the Rocket” Richard, Liverance asked me, Say, did I suppose they still had Oregon boots in Oregon? “I doubt it,” I told him. In the spirit of progress they have found something else. Our purses have grown old. We are men.

olf for Wayne Kerr was as unnatural as the missionary position. Now, three swings into his pre-season practice session, bad-back Wayne found himself turtled on the ground, night coming on, only a mile from home, mercury dropping fast. At first he didn’t feel anything but surprise—his thick down jacket and store of winter fat had padded his fall. Islands and berms of dirty spring snow decorated the course: Wayne had fallen on a half-exposed sand trap.
My God
, he thought, partly joking with himself,
this isn’t what I meant by wanting to die on the beach.
Pain like a broadhead in the back shot along his spine and down his left leg when he tried to move. He could lift his head, which gave him a good view of the north side of his belly and a short stretch of the willows that lined the Hams Fork River.

He reached for his golf bag, slowly, testing for pain. He’d barely touched it with the blunt of his mitten when he remembered he had left the fucking cell phone on the truck seat.

Early confidence turned to cold fear when he realized he couldn’t get up. The thermometer at the bank had read thirty-nine degrees on his way by—it might easily drop to below zero after dark. So this is how Custer felt, he thought. Wayne Kerr’s Last Stroke. Panicked breaths made dense steam in the air over the artist. His fingers and toes grew numb, a sign that his body had already begun reserving calories to warm his vital organs. First thought:
I can’t move.
Then:
Robin knows I’m here because I told her where I was headed. She’ll be here shortly. Lord, please before the onset of hypothermia.

A solo merganser—little bastard of a duck—descended over Wayne on its way to lighting on the newly open river.

April is still winter in Hams Fork; Easter can’t arrive without a snowstorm. Below-zero temperatures are normal at night. Spring might happen in May, when townsfolk begin to think about gearing up for the new golf season. Now, capsized on the snow, Wayne’s jump on the competition may have cost him his life.

Don’t worry about the problem
, he thought.
Concentrate on the solution.
He stared at a cloudless sky—sure sign of a cold night. He remembered reading that Tibetan Buddhist monks could, through intense meditation, raise their skin temperature by fifteen degrees. But his mind wandered. He thought of how luxurious, how glorious the cab of a pickup truck with a broken heater would be right now. The turquoise truck, a Chevy Apache, sat three football fields away from Wayne, who, on the edge of paralysis, was afraid to move. He realized how cold his fingertips and toes felt, wiggling them until the blood moved back in, a good sign. He shuddered. “Shivering is good,” he mumbled. “Shivering will warm me.”

Picture a two-horse double-axle trailer full of oil paintings on Masonite. Wayne’s newfound popularity had stemmed from his series of murals featuring buxom, topless nymphs doing Western things:
wade-fishing for rainbow trout, riding bareback, mushing a team of huskies into the frozen Wyoming tundra, fly-fishing while mounted on a quarterhorse standing midstream in a braided river, panning for gold, dealing cards, shooting pool, drinking whiskey Snow-boarding. The paintings were a big hit with the professionals— doctors, lawyers, investors, who could relate so strongly with the paintings’ siren songs—and saloon owners, who found that the murals, when hung behind the bar and billiards tables, kept the rounds coming almost as fast as Wayne could whip the paintings out.

As is the case with painting, proficiency in golf requires practice. Wayne was not, by breeding or finishing, a golfer; he had other motives that he intended would propel him beyond the imminent ego-demolition derby of the art world. Wayne had always thought the whole idea of donning zany trousers, pink shirts, and studded bowling shoes to graze around an overfertilized lawnscape was silly—pedestrian billiards for day drinkers—but he believed he could push his art on the monied set while researching golf culture from the inside. So just because he didn’t know the difference between a baffie and a niblick, why should the only real artist in Hams Fork be woodshedded? After a few preliminary practice sessions he would be ready to participate in the Hams Fork Pro-Am, as well as begin work on the opus that would seal his retirement: a series of life-size, highly authentic topless golfwomen. Only then could he set sail for the world on the boat he was building himself. He would never again return to this ten-cent town and thirty-below winters.

Wayne had left the new Foot Joys at home and laced up his weathered Sorel pac boots.
By playing in mittens now
, he reasoned,
think how deft I’ll be in golf gloves come June.

Wayne had long suffered from a chronic bad back. He had thrown it out lifting heavy compressed-air tanks for his portable airbrush. Wayne approached painting with the savvy of the best insurance adjustors—gotta be in the field when the hurricane hits.
He hadn’t counted on being in the field all night long, nightfall, and bitter arrows of cold.

“Just a few swings,” he had told his wife, Robin, a bird-watcher and dog-lover and math teacher by nature. “An hour of uncoordinated slogging to knock off the rust.”

When Wayne hadn’t returned home well after dinnertime, Robin took this to mean he would be closing down the Dry Cow or the 189 or the Location, and as she had to get up at dawn to prepare to teach middle-schoolers how to be people, she fell asleep and wouldn’t miss the ruptured artist until morning, then not until after her second cup of coffee.

Wayne kept his eyes snaked downward, watching the frost build in tiny crystalline sculptures on his beard.

“Hello! Hello! Over here!” he shouted. Then, weakly, “Help.” He knew his voice didn’t reach as far as the highway, or even to the Hams Fork River that ran along the west edge of the course.

Wayne tried propelling himself with his heels, like a boat, but moved only a quarter inch with each kick, and each kick caused his pants to pull back in cruel proportion. The pain ripped down his back and into his left leg, which ceased to kick. The artist’s capillaries, now dilated with exercise, transported the heat to his skin. Wayne’s sweat-soaked cotton underwear, flannel shirt, and cotton sweatpants pulled at his core heat and quickly dispensed it into the evening air like a truck radiator. A cold burn marked the spot where his bare maximus touched snow. Sharp pain cut at his wrists where his cuffs didn’t quite reach his mittens. Now the spasm in his back—the ruptured disk swollen like a wet horsehide baseball—wouldn’t allow him any more movement than to touch his nose with his fingertip like a stopped drunk driver. He missed his nose on the first try in the numbing cold and poked himself in the eye.

Full-blown night had fallen on the Hams Fork Valley. The Hale-Bopp comet loomed overhead in the northwest. So dark, so very
dark, the light of the comet was brilliant—Wayne could clearly see the comet’s vapor trail. To him it resembled a submerged Alka-Seltzer.