When We Were Wolves (19 page)

Mose did magic tricks. He’d sit at the bar and drop a hen’s egg into a milk bottle without it breaking. He could find the one-eyed jack on the first cut in his old dog-eared deck of cards. He could change a dime into a silver dollar, then back into a dime again. Sometimes he would change one of my dimes into a nickel.

A matted cur we called Pennzoil lived in a hole under the boards of the front porch. The dog had tapeworm and he stayed in the damp shade during the heat of the day, and in the evening came out and dragged his hind end across the parking lot. “Where’s the wandering Jew today?” Mose said often. There would be days when
not a single customer pulled in to so much as buy a Coke and walk around the oiled hardwood floor and study the framed black-and-white rodeo photographs of champion cowboys like Toots Mansfield, Harry Tompkins, Buster Ivory, Homer Pettigrew, Dee Burk, Ike Rude, Jess Goodspeed, Shoat Webster, and Casey Tibbs. On these lonely days, Mose would look at his boots and figure the price of diesel fuel to the price of customers’ absence until the shadows crept across the floor and the preachers lit up the airwaves: “And the Lord shall make thee the head, and not the tail, and thou shalt be above only and not beneath.” Like an evangelist, Mose recited familiar passages right along with them while Seldom rocked and nodded her head.

Mose had recently married into Alkali. One afternoon while I fought back the desert at the edge of the parking lot with a sickle, Mose strolled out to see how the battle was coming along. “Man don’t know what he’s doin’, the desert’ll get the best of him,” he said. I asked Mose if Seldom was her real name. “Nope,” he said. “Real name’s Abigail.” I asked him why he called her Seldom. “Because there’s something seldom about that woman,” he said. Wheezing from the heat, he shook his finger at the sky. “She ain’t much to look at, but I have learned that it’s better to dwell in the wilderness than with a contentious and angry woman.” Seldom ate a raw clove of garlic each morning and tended to the town from a rocking chair on the porch while Mose made figures on the backs of old penny stock certificates that weren’t worth a hill of beans. Seldom smiled often, though didn’t much care for dusting. Dust covered everything in Alkali.

Mose was an antique, a product of the old days. He was part businessman, part saddle tramp, part hardrock mucker. In his day you had to be a jack-of-all-trades. Would-be mining brokers might raise
a little capital and birth a mining company on the marble stock exchange floor, then go out into the hills and dirty their hands. Mose had humped a battered alligator-hide briefcase all over the West, not getting rich, more often not breaking even, for a good lot of his many years. He did it all, not having evolved into a specialist, and survived a heart attack, a near-hanging in New Mexico over an asbestos mine gone bad, and a bout with lung cancer to boot.

“Like straw for bricks, uranium is the nucleus of tomorrow,” he said to me and every one of the few customers who came into the Alkali Bar. “Like straw for bricks.” It was something he’d read in the Bible or the
Tribune.
He was going to get rich from ground-level atomic power. “There are folks down in Utah getting dirty rich,” he wheezed between sips of the boiled coffee he called coffin varnish, “and these hills don’t look no different than Utah hills.” Mose had no intentions of breaking rock himself. He was going to booster his way to wealth. I had a feeling the rock-breaking was where I might come in.

Alkali Bar’s daily special consisted of pinto beans in a jalapeño-and-chili-powder sauce Seldom made, every day, and it was the only thing customers could get from the kitchen—breakfast, lunch, or dinner. She never washed the giant cast-iron Dutch oven the beans simmered in, and a black char caked the inside of the big pot. Between bites, chewing and shooing bluebottle flies, customers would reply to Mose, “You don’t say,” or “That’s what I hear.” But most just paid for their gas and bottle of beer and hurried down the road on their way to God knows where.

Sometimes oil men, men who knew geology, would come in and Mose would talk uranium with them. Under the saltgrass and greasewood, there were ancient seas of oil in the Paradox Basin, but uranium was foreign to the oil men, just something they remembered hearing about in chemistry class in high school. Their checks were signed by the oil companies. They were lost in oil the
way a person can get lost in time in Wyoming, and before you know it, an entire life passes by.

Mose and the geologists talked rocks. They talked vein deposits and mineralization. They talked radioactivity and economic feasibility. They talked about the nuclear-age equivalents of “fool’s gold,” radioactive elements that weren’t worth that hill of beans to the Atomic Energy Commission but could excite a money-blind prospector. The men would finish their coffee and beans. Mose would lick a stubby carpenter’s pencil, mumble, and scratch names and figures on the yellowed stock certificates. “For the Lord is my shepherd, but also my rock,” Mose said.

A week after I arrived in Alkali and learned to pump gas from the pump that was set to give three quarts of watered-down Fire Chief for every gallon that rolled over on the register, Mose’s Buick, towing a rusty open-top two-horse trailer, came rattling through the parking lot on its way back from Riverton. He sprang out of the driver’s side, slammed the heavy door, and stomped over to the porch, where I was pretending to sweep. “Take a look-see at my new business card.” He poked a small gray business card at me and Seldom, who was rocking in the shade of the porch and whistling through her teeth.

POISON SPIDER URANIUM CO., INC.
EXPLORATION AND DEVELOPMENT
J. MOSES DOGBANE, JR., PRESIDENT
RURAL ROUTE BOX I-A
ATOMIC BAR, WYO.

“Our uranium is the nucleus of tomorrow.”

Alkali didn’t have a phone.

“You’re living in Atomic Bar. Wyoming, now. I’ve already notified the postman. I don’t want to hear any word about Alkali except in the history books. And there’s no sense thumbing through the history books unless backward’s where you want to go.”

He pointed toward the Buick. “Here, son, help me with this.” He wheezed several notes, like an accordion, and started back for the car. I followed him, studying the mule and the wild-eyed horse in the trailer. A spirited mare, coat slick brown, not bay, but dark— almost greenish in the sunlight, like crude oil. She was blocky, with fox ears and a bowed Roman nose, big feet, and long, shaggy hair on her fetlocks. Her matted croup and thigh had been firebranded and cross-branded several times into an illegible maze of scars. She bucked hard in the trailer. “Here,” said Mose. A wooden crate took up most of the back seat. Stenciled on the crate in black letters:
NEON, FRAGILE, THIS SIDE UP.

We left the animals in the trailer while we hung Alkali Bar’s new neon sign atop the corrugated-tin roof in the afternoon sun. “Beasts’ll be fine,” Mose said. “They can wait.” Once in a while the mare would snort and kick against the tailgate. I worked without a break until just about dusk, when we finished jack-wiring the livewire into the hotbox in the mop closet, my room. Mose climbed down the rotting ladder, stuck his head through the east window, and said, “Okay, hit the switch.”

Full dark sat on the desert and we had gone through a box of fuses by the time we got it wired right. Out of fuses, I replaced an element on the last fuse with a shiny new 1950 copper penny and flicked the switch again. The hotbox made a faint hum in the evening quiet. I ran outside toward the pump and looked up. In bright orange letters surrounded by a cartoonish outline of the bomb we dropped on Japan, it read:
ATOMIC BAR
. Mose stood erect in the glow, chin high, and struggled to contain his pride. His eyes reflected the neon like two new dimes at the carnival midway.

Early the next morning, with difficulty we untrailered the mare and turned her into the corral. “You can just starve today if that’s your attitude, you glue-bound fleabiskit!” Mose yelled. The mare ran tight circles along the rail, catching up again to the dust clouds behind her.

He turned the mule and me into the hills to stake our fortunes. I knew nothing about uranium or prospecting, though Mose told me that didn’t matter—he would teach me all I needed to know. He gave us a pick, a shovel, a rock hammer, a couple of cold fried-egg sandwiches, a case of beans, an aluminum surplus mess kit, two tin canteens, three full canvas water sacks, a bedroll, an old United States Geological Survey topographical map, boundary stakes, a shiny chrome Precision Radiation Geiger counter Mose’d ordered from a catalogue, a surplus compass, a battered Mexican straw hat, and a weathered copy of the General Mining Law of 1872.

“Don’t I get to ride the mare?” I asked.

“Oh no,” laughed Mose. “That gal is bronc stock. There’d be something seldom about you after I turned you out in the desert on that devil. She’s gonna subsidize our uranium riches until those checks clear.”

“Well, what’s her name?”

He watched her gait around the corral, kicking dirt, snorting, and butting her breast and throat latch against the top rail in anger. Mose studied her tantrum with pride, like he’d made her himself. “Atomic Bomb, starting today.”

Mose stayed at the bar because, he said, he only had one lung left and the walking would do him in. Besides, I was man enough for the job, he told me, and he had a rodeo to run. “That hinny gives you any trouble,” Mose said, “go ahead and beat him within a miner’s inch of his life.”

The mule was probably near the same age as me and was almost as rank as Atomic Bomb. A hinny is a cross between a stallion and a jenny. This one had white patches around his eyes, like a clown, and, like Atomic Bomb, had been cross-branded so many times that his ass-end read like history. The first time I pulled the latigo he jerked around, honked, and bit me on the arm. I fell to the ground, holding the wound with my glove hand, fingers inking red at the edges.

One-handed, with my bloody hand still holding my throwing arm, I hitched down my gear and threw a moldy canvas manty over the bulging panniers. Still not trusting him, the mule, I took the lead rope in my right hand and jerked him forward. He followed, slowly. We cleared the first rise and I might as well have been on the moon, alone with the wind and this goddamned beast. I figured since it was just him and me, I had the right to give him a name. I named him Asshole.