When We Were Wolves (17 page)

“Benjamin! You should have asked these gentlemen if they wanted their picture taken.”

Benjamin smiles wide, eyes big and round. He’s captured us. He’s captured our smugglers’ clumsiness on his Polaroid. The white negative spits out the bottom of the camera and the instant chemicals go to work, Benjamin’s smile turns to a confused frown. Wayne and I take shape on the negative like ghosts. “May I please take your picture?” Benjamin says. Wayne and I look at each other. Wayne shrugs and says, Sure, hell, why not. Benjamin snaps more photos and arranges them on the table like solitaire cards. Wayne sets his cider down and gathers the photos like a folded hand of cards.

The boy walks over to his mother and whispers something in her ear. Margaret nods her head. “Well, I guess you’ll have to ask them, won’t you.”

Benjamin takes a deep breath and raises his chin. “May I please have my picture taken with you?” Wayne and I look at each other.
Margaret raises her eyebrows with pride. Wayne smiles and says, Hell, why not. He has ships in his eyes and nothing else matters. I can tell for the next few weeks, Wayne will be obsessed with working on his masterpiece.

We stand and Benjamin knocks into a chair positioning himself between us. I put my hands in my pocket because I don’t know if I’m expected to put my arm around him. I feel a piece of paper between my fingers, a grocery list Harriet gave me in case we have time to stop off in Logan, but we’re always so full of money, honey, and paranoia that we never stop on the way home.

Margaret aims the camera. “All right, say ‘cheese.’” Out of habit, I almost say “whiskey.”

“Cheese!”

This is the first word I’d said since coming into the Cloud home, and the word felt awkward in my teeth. The battery-powered motor rolls out the negative. Benjamin holds it, hands shaking, while we watch it develop, a face here, another, like children watching chickens hatch.

Yes, it looks like a mug shot—FBI photos in the post office.

“Hey, you’re quite a photographer,” Wayne says. “May we have them?”

“Yes,” Benjamin says and snaps another Polaroid. “I’ll keep this one.”

“Oh, I’m afraid I’ll need to have that one too,” Wayne says. I always knew a time like this was coming. It’s an inevitability in any below-board profession. This is where Wayne and I become Dick and Perry, violence where we hadn’t planned any. “I’ll buy all your photos of us,” Wayne tells him.

“No, sir,” Benjamin says.

“See, Benjamin, we’re like Indians and you’ve captured our souls. You wouldn’t want to keep our souls, would you?” “No, sir, just your picture.”

Wayne lunges for the photo but Benjamin dodges him and shoots out the back door into the Utah night. “Goodness,” Margaret says, looking up from her history book. “He collects Polaroids. Shares them with his friends.” Wayne looks at me and I raise my hands in surrender and thumb toward the door.

And when Benjamin passes the photos around the ward house on Sunday, the men in bandannas will receive visions of these particular pirates and our deliveries will no longer be wanted in Honeyville. I can’t stop thinking about Wayne’s love story—the old man watching his woman pump gas. Our latest career is over but I am thinking of Harriet, imagining I’m sitting at Habaneros watching her deliver steaming plates of greasy enchiladas with lots of Sonoran farmer cheese and onions. I somehow talk Wayne into stopping in Logan and we spend almost an hour wandering through the isles of Smiths, carefully checking off items from Harriet’s list: organic vegetables, special cheese, marmalade made with limes.

The Wagnerian fat lady, the operatic Valkyrie, has sung over this state. It’s over for us here. Like wild yeast, love lives here in the folds of Utah, and love shows itself to be more powerful than mead.

The rest is the scud up the canyon.

Back home Wayne stands at the bowsprit and works from memory, a photograph in his head. He clears the bark first, the Stihl chain saw wound like an eight-day clock, blue two-cycle smoke filling the air. Wood chips fly as he cuts toward the heart of a figurehead with a long, elegant neck, motherly breasts, eyes that are portals to the sea, a sensuous overbite. Hips develop, and strong, slender arms. The morning sun rises higher and brightens the snow on the Tropic of Kerr, though I can feel the barometric pressure drop inside me: a storm is coming. Wayne cuts the engine on the saw. His
hot breath replaces the Teutonic smoke that drifts slowly eastward, toward Illinois. Heck slithers around the ribs, watching Wayne work, hunting for dark meat. With quiet, easy strokes of a rasp, Wayne smooths her full lips, high cheekbones, sharp nose, shoulders, breasts. I watch him work, and this seems to distract him.

“It’s beautiful,” I tell Wayne, rubbing the wooden smoothness of Harriet’s cheek. He nods at me apologetically, blood rising to his head.

Like our Utah, the wild honeybees are no more. They have been replaced by domesticated apiary bees. But they too are being killed by the Chinese bee mite that lodges itself in the bee’s breathing tube. The mites came over in ships full of shit stamped
MADE IN CHINA.

Utah has driven me closer to Harriet, and Harriet loves bread. But Wyoming may be a memory for her soon because I have not yet asked her to marry me. What I wish I could brew is a stronger mead, a mead fermented from the blood of an artist. And if I drank this mead I would be the wise one.

Wayne says marriage is an island, and sooner or later even Greenland becomes small. It is Robins spring break and she sits in a chair in the yard reading and watching Wayne.

Sometimes I have nightmares of Harriet playing a blues song on her sax while sailing back to England on a cattle ship. She’s in the pulpit, where she can blow something Leadbelly and raw and tempt fate as if it were icebergs. Sometimes in my recent dreams I’m married to a Valkyrie.

Wayne’s figurehead has the power to determine fate, both mine and Harriet’s, I suppose. Wayne sails on, testing his own, a fearless Leif Eriksson, Jason, Noah, Captain Bly. While my fate seems stuck.

Snow knocks at the window. An April storm. We’re not going anywhere tonight: the roads in and out of Hams Fork are closed. I knead the bread dough. The smell of warm yeast and rye blankets the apartment, fending off the foreign fumes from downstairs. While more dough rises, Harriet makes tea. She knows I take honey in my tea and she sometimes puts in too much. I watch her let the honey drip from the spoon into my cup and I can tell it’s too much but I don’t care. She is so beautiful standing there. I could watch her forever. Let it snow for forty days and forty nights.

ust a boy of seventeen and Four Roses drunk, Romer Meeks had pancaked his father’s Aeronca Chief onto Becky Weed’s front yard, downtown Tea, South Dakota. He’d knocked out his two front teeth against his kneecap and spit a pulpy string of blood on the long grass next to the little airplane, which rested maimed over its buckled landing gear. He’d wanted to impress her. Now he’d have to tell his dad he’d broke his glasses.

Romer limped, casual as a scarecrow, to the porch where Becky and her family stood. Don’t appear messy, he thought, the idea forming like foam in his consciousness. Don’t appear hurt neither. Mostly, though, don’t appear stupid, but it’s maybe a little late for that. “What are you up to?” Romer said as he reached visiting distance, hiding the gap in his mouth with his tongue like an upside-down wolf whistle.

“My God, Romer, are you okay?” Becky asked, standing at the edge of the porch. Romer felt a throbbing in his chest.

“Just turn around and keep on walkin’,” Becky’s father said, staring at the toylike airplane for signs of smoke and fire. “Limp on home.”

“But, Dad, what if he’s hurt?” “He ain’t hurt that bad.”

Romer did limp home, to be rejected by the Air Force and the Navy and the Coast Guard and Jackrabbit Air Freight, for reasons that ranged from arrhythmia to corrective lenses thick as the bottoms of canning jars. After another wrecked airplane he had to have custom-made shoes with the left sole cobbled two inches higher than the right, normal one, just so he could walk in a straight line. Fifteen years later, he wore black lizard-skin cowboy boots, little red airplane hand-stitched into the elkhide shafts, cloud of thread on leather weather, skywritten initials just below:
RM.

Chasing bugs and nightshade up and down the long and short rows of eastern South Dakota, Romer laid malathion and Dibrom 14 fog over small town after small town for an outfit out of Sisseton called Sky Tractor; the poison settled into wells and backwaters, marrow, eddies, aquifers, and fat stores. Romer found himself gypsy-flying over Big Stone City, where, he remembered reading from the Weddings section of the
County Broad-Axe
, Becky Weed had moved (following a honeymoon in Hawaii) with her husband, the quarterback-turned-banker.

Jim Beam his drinking buddy the night before, poison and coffee sloshing in his stomach now, the checkerboard cropland surrounding the airport read like the cloudy irrigated topographical map of his memory. He’d come such a long way, scud-running the 250-horsepower ‘66 Piper Pawnee with a narrow Spartan cockpit like a fighter plane, a long way from the boyhood Chief that would fly backward at full throttle in a stiff headwind.