When We Were Wolves (5 page)

I asked how far to Jackson Hole too, when I came here from the tired Midwest, because on the atlas it’s only an inch, maybe an inch and a quarter, away, but this place is far from anywhere. TV tourism spots for Wyoming do not show Hams Fork. They show natty fly fishermen and chesty cowgirls grilling steaks and dinosaur eggs, Devils Tower, snowy peaks, never the desert. Never a local throwing chunks of sucker meat on a treble hook at a rainbow trout choking in runoff, never a strip mine or a PTA meeting. On TV this place looks like starting over.

Robin’s hair is the color of new motor oil and she smells like apples when she walks by at a crowded district meeting. She is also on the List because of what Wayne did, because of what Wayne does. In their forties, no kids. The wind doesn’t quit blowing in Hams Fork and you can hear the Kerr place all over town.

The administration was not impressed with my lesson about Benjamin Franklin, an artist, and I was called on the rug. Again. My
lecture in question included his rendezvous with concubines, illegitimate children, painting, voyeuristic tendencies. The history books fail to mention those elements that make a man real. The Mormons pretend they never existed.

“What will you tell them in your next Ben Franklin lecture?” they wanted to know.

I answered, “He was a man with poor vision who is engraved forever in the history books but did not get his face put on a rock in South Dakota?”

“Yes,” said the Mormons.

I asked Wayne once how come he doesn’t just fly this place and move to Jackson or Park City and open a real gallery. “Because the tourists there tend to have more taste,” said Wayne Kerr the realist. “Because our tourists are bait fishermen’s wives from Ohio. Besides, I haven’t finished a real painting in twenty years.”

Do the Mormons want truth? “Hell no,” says Wayne.

Through the window I have seen Wayne fly off the handle and just start throwing and kicking maybe three hundred dollars’ worth of landscapes around the studio until he’s so winded and shaky and coughy he can hardly stand, which doesn’t take long. He’s careful, though, careful not to hit the figures, the beautiful almost-finished oil figures he’s kept hanging in gold no-glass frames next to the oil figure studies on cheap gessoed paint-board scraps that form a collage in the studio as a reminder: a reminder of what he used to do, what he has done, will do again. I could feel for Robin.

I wait an hour and call Wayne but he isn’t home yet. It is dinnertime for most people here. Robin checks and says, Yes, their satellite
dish is fine and sure enough their French porn channel— Galaxy 4, Channel 17—is coming in clear as sunshine, but I know she doesn’t watch it and Wayne doesn’t need it, so wouldn’t you know, they’re getting it loud and clear now. She adds that there’s a new crack in the foundation along the side of the garage where the studio is, and wasn’t that quake something. She’ll send Wayne over when he gets in. That is, if he gets in, because Wayne is probably seeing Copper over whiskey sours at the Number 9. This is the most we have ever talked and I don’t say this to Robin, don’t wish to make her sad. But Robin knows Copper will leave and take with her Wayne’s new passion, and passion, she knows, Wayne needs like oxygen, vitamin D, and fat in winter; she tells herself she married an artist and can’t bear a passionless Wayne. We talk about California weather and school. Since the quake I pick up garbled AM radio over the telephone. It’s not real clear but the Jazz game is on and for a minute I listen to the fantasy of professional basketball and Robin’s voice.

He is painting real paintings again. “Pictures,” Copper calls them in her nasal red-haired Montana accent. “Beautiful pictures,” she says in a way that allows for the fact that she’s in them. He’s even growing his beard back, though this time it is streaked with gray. Copper is from Billings, an explosives engineer fresh out of School of Mines where, Wayne tells me, she switched from electrical engineering when she found she had a penchant for blowing things up. She’s with the Wyoming branch of some outfit out of Houston that puts out derrick fires with dynamite. Word of mouth had it that Wayne Kerr used to do figures, nudes, and she approached him at a junior high faculty party where she was a date of one of the assistant football coaches who spent the better part of the party overshaking everyone’s hand and drawing plays on damp
cocktail napkins. “I hear you’re into oils.” she said to Wayne, making a little “o” with her lips on “oils” and sucking the rest of the word in like good cigar smoke. They talked for an hour and a half while Robin ate celery. Copper rides a vintage motorcycle and Wayne says she’s good and wild and narcissistic and that that ain’t easy to please. I see here in the Casper
Star-Tribune
that geologists still can’t pinpoint the fault.

Okay.

So the superintendent and principal are on me. I am a good teacher and that is a problem for them. They make unannounced visits and just sit in my classroom, taking notes and trying to get to me, write me up on trifles they find in dusty policy books, then put the pink slips in my permanent file. It doesn’t matter that I can lecture the hell out of Thomas Jefferson, the Gettysburg Address, or women’s suffrage (Wyoming was the first). They are frustrated because they cannot write
Is a friend of Wayne Kerr
in my file. I buy beer. I like blue movies. They know because they watch. They see. Things are harder for Robin; she has tenure and they must ride her harder, search a little deeper, raise their voices a little more. They just won’t hand me a new contract in May, they’ll have a fat file of why’s, and I’ll be starting up again in another middle of nowhere somewhere else. Though those places are becoming fewer. It isn’t easy but there is a point you have to hit where you quit sweating. With each move I travel a little lighter. I’m just not quite sure which side of that point I’m on.

It is March and not nearly spring, not nearly warm, not nearly the May or June recess we get from winter. But Copper is out there in the night, a whiskey shadow on her old piston-knocking Indian
Chief motorcycle, though it still snows hard and the north winds from Canada and Montana still blow and howl like hell and find every bad rivet and seam on this trailer; out there in her leather jacket and faded jeans with holes and grease and tears all up and down her legs and nothing underneath, long red mane flying behind her. Up and down Main Street. Antelope Street. U.S. 30 and 189; all over Carmel County, miles of black snowdrift backdrop. She leaves a trail in the cold from the bike’s hot exhaust and the breath that comes from deep inside her. I hear the Indian—the Indian!—as I climb onto the roof, and watch her streak through the warm fog of streetlights.

People get a little anxious this time of year. Mormons have turned to coffee. I’ve seen Copper open a beer bottle with her eye socket. The fire of that Indian is rhythmic and steady, something heartening. I hope Wayne will be by soon.

Mormons populate more than half of this town—almost three quarters. They’re on the school board and the town council, and they own the grocery store and all of the gas stations. The Mormon priesthood have visions and see things against their eyelids. What I am going to tell you next is in my file. They know-I helped Wayne one night when he airbrushed Revelation 22:18 and left his mark on thirty-two cars of a Union Pacific coal train that took half an hour to lumber through the switchyard at the center of town that next morning: “I warn every one who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if any one adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book.” On the last car, the one right after “book,” Wayne sprayed this cartoon Joseph Smith hammering away on a laptop computer and the Book of Mormon spitting out of a laser printer. Cartoon Joe had a little name tag above his pocket, just like the guys at the Chevron station:
Joe.
I just carried
the big carbon dioxide tanks and paint—Wayne’s got a bad back— but they knew. Copper kept watch, though it was okay because the train was parked out in the middle of Pratt Canyon, real nowhere. It started getting light and Wayne didn’t get the “Book of Mormon” quite finished, so that it read “Book of Mor,” but everyone got the idea. This made the paper in Cheyenne when the Revelation rolled through on its way to Omaha and power plants farther east. It was the first time I had felt alive and useful since the idea of being married stopped sounding like a good one. I don’t feel that alive now. Wayne’s an atheist, but he knows his Bible.