When We Were Wolves (4 page)

The water tower stands like a phallus—Be fruitful!—and is our skyline. It is white and inviting:
WELCOME TO HAMS FORK
. Without it Hams Fork couldn’t flush. The caged ladder doesn’t begin until twenty feet up a leg, I guess to keep crazies or a dizzy kid from scaling the thing to paint his girlfriend’s name in Day-Glo letters, or hanging himself from a rope halfway down and really giving this town something to see when the sun comes up. I teach U.S. and Wyoming history mostly, where white men put their names on everything, shot rifles at Indians and got their pictures in the textbooks and their surnames on maps. I know it by heart and it bores the hell out of me. The aluminum skin of the roof is thin—no insulation—and under the wind I can hear the faint buzz of the TV that keeps me company. I never turn it off. We don’t have a town square, we have a triangle. Elevation at the triangle is 6,923 feet above sea level. Hams Fork is proud of its elevation, above most, closer to God level. The Mormon ward houses stand guard at both entrances to the valley like Monopoly hotels. They are the size of aircraft carriers and have no crucifixes, just thin steeples, antennae. I’m fighting like king-hell to keep my job and, to tell you the truth, I’m getting my teeth kicked in.

VACANCY
flashes over the Antler Motel, just behind the empty-parked Union Pacific coal train from west of here, which sat too long in civilization and now tells a spray-paint story of Vegas or L.A.:
Westside Bombsquad, Gabriel
, city fish, black cartoon people,
Roman, Jessie
, girlfriend hearts. The big brown building southeast of the cemetery is the Afghan Apartments, where a lot of Texas and
California swampers live because they don’t have to sign a lease. I lived there when I first moved to Hams Fork two years ago, and you can hear people fighting and throwing things and crying and dreaming and screwing and laughing at all hours through the thin Sheetrock walls. A lot of babies get made there. It is also where a few heads get blown off with self-inflicted shotgun blasts.

I learned this seven years ago, when I was twenty-two: nothing is easy. Once from up here on my trailer I saw a couple of gray hoboes go by below me. They weren’t doing anything, just drumming through on a noisy coal train. I wonder how I’d do being a hobo, or how the hoboes would do teaching history. I’m watching Wayne work on my antennae because he knows what he is doing. The wind whips our hair like flags.

From here I’ve seen dogs committing intimacy. People in town below are only maybe two millimeters high. You can see the top of Wayne’s house, a not-so-nice older home over on that side of the switchyard, where most of the community pillars and bishops live in very nice newer homes. All of them, actually. His house used to be a hospital when Hams Fork was just a coal camp without a name. Wayne needs to put a new roof on the place this summer— his shingles are spongy—though he probably won’t; but if he asked me, I would help him do it. I would stand shirtless on Wayne Kerr’s roof in our brief summer and not be ashamed. Wayne’s house is close enough to mine that he could hoof it up here, but he doesn’t. It’s got a widow’s walk and a laundry chute.

You cannot see Abraham Lincoln’s head from here. But we’ve got it, down on I-80, a ways east. Just his big traffic-stopping head, like a huge Victorian gazing ball in the world’s biggest rock garden. There are toilets and a gift shop where his boots would be. Abe himself was never west of Missouri, but he gets his head in Wyoming. He looks sort of confused.

A hawk is riding a thermal above the water tower, above the little
brown birds whose names I don’t know, up, around, up, up, over. I came here because in the atlas this seemed the cleanest of slates and it read like starting over. Tens of thousands of years ago, way before the coal was a sulfurous swamp, Hams Fork used to be the bottom of a deep ocean. Now, even in winter, dust covers everything.

“Ouch,” says Wayne. The wrench slipped and he has scraped his knuckle against the rotor bracket, drawing slow blood in the cold. It hurts my hand just to look at it.

“Bet that hurts,” I say. Wayne just looks at me, bent over at the waist. He sorta grunts. I go back to watching, waiting.

“Let’s see if that does it,” says sweaty Wayne. But with my ear to the aluminum, I still hear fuzz from below.

Today, this is what I told my first-hour Wyoming history class: Prairie women, from the East, went crazy out here because they papered their walls with white flour sacks, the snow glared white, the sun was bright, no sunglasses. No perspective. Nothing to keep them grounded. While their husbands were out hunting jackrabbits, they went crazy in a white hell. This happened mostly in Kansas and Nebraska and the Dakotas, but it adds drama to an otherwise damnright boring class.

Just before dark I stand up here with this monocular I ordered from a catalogue. You have to hold the thing very still because even the slightest movement distorts everything and it’s more like looking through a cheap beer glass, but I watch wildlife: moose, deer, antelope, stray dogs, elk, Robin. After work I peer around and think until my stomach hurts or my face gets too numb to feel or both. When lights go on I can see people doing warm things through the windows of the Afghans.

I’m on the Black List right after Wayne, and the commandments of town life don’t pertain to me anymore. They are just holding their breath until my contract runs out in May. I’m a little earwig in their hair, nothing like what Wayne is. A white moon is rising in the east. I wish the monocular was a telescope. No French satellite. It’s getting dark and lights are coming on. I go for beer.

The earthquake caused a lot of reverberations in Hams Fork. “A five-point-five on the old Rectum Scale!” yells Wayne, letting off steam, daring God to do better, a bigger earthquake. Still no Galaxy 4, Channel 17, but I reach Wayne another can of beer, which I guess I shook up on the climb back up the ladder. Half of it runs down his arm as foam and he swallows the other half in two gulps. I tell him I read in the paper even the oil geologists didn’t know about the fault and it doesn’t even have a name yet and Wayne says he’s not surprised and they ought to call it something profound like Kerr’s Fault and I agree that that sounds as good as anything. The surprise quake cracked a hatchery pool up above Lake Viva Naughton, near the epicenter, and knocked a few dishes off shelves, sheared off some rivets on the water tower, cracked the pavement in the IGA parking lot, but did little more than give everyone something to talk about at the Busy Bee Cafe. And see to it that I’m not watching any French huff and puff while I grade bad Civil War term papers tonight. The mountains keep the vibrations in check.

Wayne says he’s not sure just what is the matter. He drops a nut, which bounces once on the roof and lands silently in a scrub pine below. “You’ll never find it in the snow in the dark. I’ll grab one at home and drive it over later,” he says.

“No hurry, I can wait,” which is difficult to say. Wayne leaves.
I stay to enjoy the view for a few more minutes. Robin hikes by but Wayne does not see her. She does not see me as I stand up here, stiff as the water tower, watching. I must look two millimeters tall. I need to tell you about Robin.

Crazy Wayne Kerr, the used-to-be-artist, he’d tell you. His last passion left with the itinerancy of a former model, a traveling nurse; no one beautiful or vital ever stays in Hams Fork long. “The smallness of this town has beaten me into painting goddamn landscapes for goddamn tourists,” he’d say with indifference in his tar-and-nicotine voice, though he makes quite a little cash from these paintings he churns out by the dozens and sells out of the office at the Antler Motel. “Now I just do crafts.” Wayne says “crafts” like a filthy word, coughing it out of the back of his throat and spitting it into the wind. Wayne makes enough to keep imported green bottles of beer with foil over the caps in the old refrigerator in his studio and to pick up a dime bag of Mexican hash whenever he wants, which is quite frequently. He’ll sometimes spend all night in the studio drinking, smoking, chewing, spitting, churning out twenty-minute landscapes with cheap Prang watercolors and a fanbrush, listening to that sixties and seventies music of his: old Stones, Doors, Creedence, Janis Joplin. He works three easels at a time: rock, rock, rock. Cloud, cloud, cloud. No trees. Lots of perspective.

Robin is the wife Wayne’s got. She used to model for Wayne’s paintings before she got to be “hippy,” as he calls it. Now she just teaches math at the junior high and makes little geometrical wind chimes out of monofilament and aluminum conduit that she hangs all over their back porch and eaves. Wayne sometimes takes some to the Antler with a load of landscapes and elbows his friends into buying one here and there to keep her happy, to keep her feeling useful. Angel music, she calls the tinny pings and dings
that fill the air. Music for angels and the ghosts of dead Shoshone, she says. Yes, right, make sure you write this down, Wayne’s wink says.

Sometimes a tourist will want one of Robin’s chimes and the guys will be sitting around drinking coffee or Cokes with morning rum and they’ll look at each other from the corners of their eyes and grin and look outside to check the license plates on the tourist’s car. The tourists always ask How far is it to Jackson Hole from here? Never do they buy anything on a return trip; they’ve already spent their wad, are tired of the excitement of it all, the raree show, don’t need a fish-line wind chime. She was a nurse in Vietnam. We have in common that we both teach and are friends of Wayne Kerr, but that is about it. Robin is pretty in the way wood smoke smells nice.