When We Were Wolves Read online

  This game would be our first-ever night game. Crude portable lights were trucked in along with generators. The steel stanchions were short and the lights yellow and not very bright, creating shadows behind everything. It made possible an incandescent noon at midnight. To folks in those parts, and even to us, a night baseball game was a miracle.

  Farmers and the CCC crews were all off from work and gathered in town at dinnertime to eat and talk about baseball and the possibility of weather. Horses and mules pulled wagonloads of children. A Methodist church had set up an old army tent and a choir practiced and sipped iced tea. Faith had the feel of the chautauqua.

  Drunk on a dram of humidity that some of the old-timers sensed, the crowd watched us take infield practice. Hope and desperation played on their faces—babies crying, mothers crying, fathers cursing and praying in the same breaths. They cheered our mistakes while grasshoppers danced in the dusky light that filtered through the dust. Ministers and deacons in dark suits and straw hats passed walnut collection plates.

  From the tin lean-to visitors’ dugout, we watched the Whiskers take infield. “I have felt weather in my arm all day,” Job said while fishing the June bugs from the water bucket with the drinking gourd. “Tonight there will be weather.” The air was heavy with humidity. Heat lightning flashed to the west. “We will be rewarded with God’s prosperity.”

  In the hazy twilight both teams racked up errors involving lack of sight. As it got darker we played blind to the balls that were hit over the lights, which were many. Line drives hid in the lights and the outfielders had to react to directions from their infielders. We communicated with whistles, growls, and shrieks only the Indians understood. Even Job’s breaking balls were hard to pick up in the shadows, and I had to track them by sound through the batter’s grunts of frustration.

  The Indians hit the ball hard and put runners on base all evening. Except for Job, who seemed to have lost a step in beating the throw to first. But we did score runs, even driving two long balls into the wheat, one with two aboard.

  The umpiring had been stacked against the Indians from the very beginning. The umps were Faith Rotarians who didn’t see any benefit in another Indian coup. Job couldn’t get a called strike, and most of his pitches lacked snap and heat and the Whiskers spent the evening whacking breadbasket strikes into the outfield and sometimes beyond. I knew Job was convinced that throwing the game would be an offering of something more important than the purse money we would never see, a tithe of weather that would bring the Indians something more. Losing would mean rain, a final truce. Job believed he could control the hellish dry spell and its curse on all the land. He was now willing to lose on purpose, a personal sacrifice that he believed with all his soul would bring a saving rain. The other eight of us weren’t convinced and wanted to beat the Whiskers like a drum.

  Job kept shaking off the pitches I called, hurling instead easy fastballs, sliders that didn’t slide, and change-ups that weren’t much of a change. In the fourth I started to the mound to talk some sense into him, but how do you avoid a sermon at a time like that? Our eyes met. He pointed at the storm cell that was building over the Black Hills to the west. I realized I had nothing to say to him that would matter and walked back to my crouch behind the plate. More slow fastballs.

  But the Indians battled hard at the plate as well. A pitching duel this wasn’t. Both teams batted around two innings in a row.

  Indians were up one at the bottom of the ninth, 13 to 12, Whiskers on first and second, two out. From his one-armed stretch Job checked the runners. Then again. He shook off my signs until we agreed on a fastball. His eyes were yellow and sorry, like the chiefs on old tobacco cans. He hadn’t licked his fingers or gone to the rosin bag or the seam of his pants for a phonograph needle all game.

  Then Job put a dull fastball into the wheelhouse of Joe Garner, the Whiskers’ cleanup man. Garner stepped into the bucket, swung through, and massacred the easy mushball. A rainmaker. Otis Downwind in left ran underneath it just to say goodbye. The stitched horsehide that Job had always said possessed the spirit of the horse was still traveling skyward into the humidity when the wind came fast and quiet, ambushing the ball, pulling it down into the surprised glove of Otis Downwind, and ending the game.

  From my knees in the dirt—the knees I can feel the big storms with now—I could hear the wall of wind coming toward the diamond like a night train.

  Loud claps of thunder boomed just west of center field. Lightning struck the prairie with a dozen electric arrow’s, “Smell the rain!” the crowd yelled. “The miracle! Do you smell the rain! At last, thank God, the rain!”

  The crowd stood, noses skyward, mouths open, like baby birds. For a moment, the Indians, too, were transfixed by the rush of wheat under the black umbrella of clouds. Then, silently, eight of us ran off the field to the car, Otis desperately throwing himself into the crank, trying to turn the engine over.

  “Job, come on!” I yelled over the wind, but he didn’t move, didn’t even turn to look at us. By now, everyone but Otis and me were piled in the car.

  The crowd reached to touch the weather, and Job, still on the mound, face to the sky, waved his gloved hand and stump in the air in exaltation. Thunder cracked as the engine fired up and the crowd yelled louder. The car sputtered slowly away from the field, picking up speed toward the dirt highway, as Otis and I ran beside it, still calling for Job.

  The storm rolled eastward across the prairie, onto Faith, with the sound of a thousand horses racing to the river, and the wheat was beaten with hailstones the size of baseballs.

  e’re on top of my aluminum trailer in Hams Fork, adjusting my satellite dish because the earthquake jounced it cockeyed and instead of the French porn channel Wayne showed me I could get, I now have snow. “I got a dad in Preston, Idaho,” says Wayne, pointing to the northwest with a socket wrench, says it like he’s got another in Denver and maybe one in the garage, says it like he’s holding on to this dad because he might come in handy someday and you just never know. “He just bought a new compressor, a real portable job. I’m gonna hook it onto this big brush I got ordered and we’ll be in business.” Wayne’s already in business so I know this new business is recreation, sport, diversion, and maybe he’ll count me in. I am glad his talk is of art. It is late afternoon and the high desert snow is starting to turn purple, like a bruise.

  “What sort of business?” I ask.

  “You’ll see,” he says. And I know he’s right.

  This is the Renaissance man, the Wayne Kerr I used to know, who, when I first came to Hams Fork two years ago, reached out his hand and was the only one to offer me a beer; my friend Wayne Kerr who is passed around here in conversation like so many Bible stories of miscreants and ne’er-do-wells. Wayne believes every creature on land has a counterpart at sea. He’s becoming an artist again since he met Copper, his new model and his new girlfriend.

  It’s colder than billyhell up here, but I’ve got a vista. My trailer sits on the windy east scarp over Hams Fork, so that standing on the roof I am even with the water tower across town behind the school where I teach history. I can sight along U.S. 30 just this side of one of the Mormon ward houses and the port of entry where over-the-road drivers idle their rigs and secure trip permits before driving through Wyoming. Westbound, the cable of asphalt leaves the valley and turns into Utah.

  I can look out over the shiny tops of trailer after trailer set in awkward rows on gritty Old Testament gray, sage and sooty snow lapping at rusty snow machines and four-wheel-drives as if someday the land, with a swarm of locusts and a hurricane wind, might muster up enough force to take back this godforsaken desert. No one wants to live up here. You are exposed and can see too much; I can look right down into the sewage-treatment plant. I see the smokestacks from the coal-burning power plant that lights half of Salt Lake City. There are mine shafts all underneath my trailer and they are on fire from an explosion fifty years ago. You can smell the smoke. It’s March, the temperature does
n’t get above thirty in the daytime, the regional suicide rates rise, and I still have flies.

  If you are not Mormon in Hams Fork, you have a past. I was married. It pushes a man against the wall to come home from work and find everything he owns in the front yard in the rain. I have lived in a car that didn’t run. Slept in libraries.

  My wife was pretty, but now she lives in Illinois. Right now I am content to stand up here and watch.

  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.