When We Were Wolves (39 page)

A bark in the far distance. They found him. It was Pete. Lily couldn’t be far behind. “Get help!” Wayne yelled, slowly rolling his head in their direction. They had seen Wayne’s truck, tailgate down, and were now both happily dancing around the bed. Wayne could just make out their furry movements in the security light of the clubhouse parking lot.

Wayne had obtained the dogs, curs mixed with a little Border collie, a little Norwegian elkhound, quite a little something else, when Robins mother in Idaho had moved from the acreage to a facility in town. Wayne kept food and water for the dogs at first, but, over Robins protests, gradually allowed them to set their own boundaries because, as a painter, he had better things to do than shovel dog shit, even though Robin did all of the scooping. “This is open-range Wyoming,” he said. “Besides, fencing is inhumane.”

Some days, when he walked from the IGA parking lot to his pickup, the dogs would spot him and light out for their favorite artist. Wayne would hobble, arms loaded with grocery sacks, to the truck, start the engine, and speed home, the brace of dogs in hot pursuit. At the gas station he’d call, “Lily! Pete! How in heaven are my dogs!” then spin gravel on his way to canine-free 714 Cedar Street.

Sometimes the dogs would follow him all the way home, where Robin spoiled them with hot dogs and elk jerky—Wayne’s private stash—but most often they got distracted by other dogs or wild animals along the way—mice, rabbits, deer, ticks, worms. Folks in town, dog lovers, often fed them, and better than Wayne Kerr ever did with his hard off-brand kibble. The dogs had seen Wayne on his way to the golf course but a stunned mule doe ran in front of
them and through the bank parking lot and Wayne was forgotten. What he saved in dog food was now costing him dearly.

Wayne didn’t know that his core temperature had lowered to ninety-seven degrees. The muscles of his upper back, shoulders, and neck had contracted in what researchers call pre-shivering muscle tone.

He tried to meditate. His mind went to a dream state. He reminded himself that he couldn’t sleep, for sleep would result in death. Death would come in the form of warmth, he knew. Wayne was cold to the bone, but cold meant he was still alive, now thankful for the excess body fat he carried. He imagined a New York gallery premiere, a showing wherein he walked, decked in black tie and tails, from painting to painting, one glorious and divine explosion of color to the next, gently spilling champagne from the crystal glass in his palm to the golden carpet, an offering to the gods of inspiration and success. Standing on the carpet were hundreds of polished dress shoes with tassels—art enthusiasts!

“So it wouldn’t be lack of a model that would keep me from painting the best work of my life,” Wayne mumbled through his frozen beard.
Golf. Golf will keep me from leaving my mark. And no honorable Grim Reaper—just a visit on the links from Jack Frost himself half a mile from the IGA parking lot. This is the artistic equivalent of coitus interruptus—only to have back all that time wasted in bed!

Why didn’t I bring my cell phone?
He remembered reading of a mountaineer who froze to death near the summit of Mount Everest. There was a fierce storm and the man had little hope of being rescued, but he pulled out his cell phone and called his wife and told her good night before he died. Everything was about satellites.

The cell phone sat on the seat of the Apache, now guarded by two sleeping dogs. Instead of putting the phone in the golf bag like
so many dentists and CPAs, he had slipped two Wyoming bagels— Pabst Blue Ribbons—into the side pocket where his cell phone wasn’t: dinner.

Half the beer ran through his beard, temporarily thawing some of the ice, then refreezing yellow hoar. Though the beer was cold, desperate respiration had left Wayne feeling dehydrated. The alcohol warmed him temporarily, but he knew the beer would eventually work against him, throwing a monkey wrench at his hypothalamus, his thermostat gone haywire. The cold that he felt on his skin would soon settle in his core. In the dead silence of the night, he could hear the hard slosh of liquid down his throat, the pumping of blood in his ears. He no longer felt the pain in his back.

Wayne needed, while he still had some of his faculties, to write his will. From his jacket pocket he produced a three-inch score pencil that read
Eat at Luigi’s
in tiny letters and two wadded dollar bills— they would have to work. Everything to Robin. Everything. He gripped the pencil like a chisel, the dollar bills unfolded flat against his mittened right palm. She was good enough for his last donation.

He carefully carved the message with the pencil, concentrating on each letter like the lines of a painting, and resting between words:

MAY YOU MARRY

SOMEONE

  WHO APPRECIATES WHAT

YOU HAVE TO

OFFER. SORRY I

DIDN’T, EVERYTHING

IS YOURS.

    LOVE

ANYWAY,

WAYNE

Wayne thought about the will for a long time. Here the artist would view his life like a mural. He had been what he thought of as happy—nothing like forced reflection and bleak prospects to show your life really isn’t as great as it seems. There was the temptation to informally will something lewd, a frozen body part, to the Mormon church, the Baptists maybe, but now they were the warm ones in their glowing chapels, and what if such a gesture was the straw that kept him out of one of their heavens? Lying on his back in the snow, Wayne felt only envy toward them, no rancor. He wadded the bills and painfully shoved them back in his pocket.

Fifteen minutes later he pissed his pants.

Wayne didn’t understand the physiology of what was happening. For an hour he had been in the temperature range which renders the enzymes in your brain sluggish and inefficient. To Wayne it seemed like alcohol, but without the beautiful warmth that went with it. Wayne’s cerebral metabolic rate now fell 4 percent with every one-degree drop in body temperature. Amnesia would come when his core temperature dropped to ninety-three—good thing the will was finished.

Blood thick as cold olive oil. His oxygen intake had fallen off. Arrhythmic heart. Hallucinations.

One foot in the Mead Hall and Grendel is about to rip the frozen meat from my bones. Heavy breathing. The Donner Party? No. Horses. The mighty Seventh Cavalry has arrived! Corporal, get this man some blankets and build a fire. Well break here for coffee.

Real hypothermia. Just before total loss of consciousness, Wayne felt an intense heat. The constricted blood vessels near his body’s surface dilated suddenly, producing the sensation of burning skin.
Not too close to the fire, Corporal, careful!

Wayne threw off his mittens and tore at his down coat. He unzipped it and began to unbutton his flannel shirt, but his plastic fingers were so stiff he could only rip the buttons off. Legs on fire,
he tried kicking at his sweatpants, the snow, sweat, and piss frozen stiff hours ago, but his back wouldn’t allow it. Burning to death, Wayne screamed a banshee scream.

Dead silence.

He watched the breath of scream rise and vaporize in the night air. Was he dreaming? Was this hell? A test before heaven? In a way, this exposure was more like painting than anything else he’d experienced. Wayne had created the situation for himself, a universe of his own making. He would suffer through this canvas of elements, then seal the experience with a signature. Years ago, when Wayne’s painting had been real, paintings would sometimes take him in, shake and threaten him, but always throw him back, which was a relief—and often enough to keep him from painting again for months at a time. This time the signature would be the county coroner’s.

Wayne, sure now he heard heavy breathing and footfalls, tried to muster up all his attention and focus on reality for just a few seconds. A brief period of lucidity. Yes, very real breathing and running.

The dogs drew up on top of Wayne and, taking turns standing on their master, commenced to lick the frost, frozen spittle, beer, and snot from Wayne’s beard.

Pete brought a mouse and dropped it on Wayne’s chin, an offering of food as genuine and generous as anything ever given to Wayne. The dogs circled and pawed the artist in his down coat, now ripped. Tiny goose feathers floated in the air. To a would-be rescuer it might have appeared the dogs had happened upon a giant pigeon.

The dogs settled in, one on each side atop their master. Wayne lay there staring out the round hole his hood made against the night sky. He could see the comet between the dogs’ muzzles, Hale-Bopp, and its vapor trail. Mars was brighter than it would be
for the next several centuries. Orion, virile as ever, three stars in his belt. Venus, close to the morning horizon. I
could paint her
, thought Wayne.
I could have her in my studio and paint her.
The Big Dipper might have been full of hot coffee, the Little Dipper a splash of Jim Beam.

Now a kind of numb peace eased him into sleep, remembering how Custer’s dogs kept the Indian fighter warm on high plains winter nights. At times Wayne would wake, but just long enough to tell himself he was alive, beating back the black wolf of hypothermia that would have eaten a skinny man hours ago. He could feel the canine heat from both sides. If he got hungry enough he had a mouse, which he clutched like a teddy bear against his chest.

Wayne, bourbon-warm through his core, fell asleep hard and slept through the coldest hour, early morning, just before dawn. He slept through the bread trucks grinding up 189 and out of the Hams Fork Valley. He slept past the shift change at the coal mine, when a steady convoy of pickup trucks and old cars whine up and down the highway and cross the river at the bridge just below the golf course. He slept through the spring morning song of tough Wyoming robins. Eyes closed, he slept through the warming sun, his bodyguards pressed close as the subtle heat reached the three of them from ninety-two million miles away and cast a small shadow on the sand and snow behind them, behind the dogs and still-life mound of Wayne.