When We Were Wolves (33 page)

There is an old Indian saying that if you stand by the river long enough, sooner or later all your enemies will float by. Joe stays out of the loop of town politics. In the beginning, he had not been aware that an ex-con was back in town. He had not even been aware of who the ex-con was. We met when I rode one of my newer mountain bikes through what I didn’t know was the Jackmans’ vegetable garden.

“See here!” yelled Beth, throwing her sinewy arm in the air. “You’re riding through our fetchin’ vegetable garden!”

I stopped. “Thought it was a weed patch.”

Joe stared at the bicycle and me on it, dressed like a rodeo clown. “Yeah, well we’ve been busy with other things. Nice day for a bike ride, anyway. How many speeds that thing got?”

“Twenty-four.”

“Holy Moses. Where you live?”

“In an army tent down to Oakley. I’m camped on the BLM.”

“Well whatdoyaknow,” said Joe, still studying the derailleurs.

Beth was weeding in the vegetable garden the next day when I floated by on the Hams Fork in a dented aluminum canoe. “Good day for a garden,” I called. She looked up from her work, her thin face frowning as I passed by.

I traded Joe that canoe for a half of venison.

A few days later, while Beth stayed busy inside, I moved into the aluminum snailback trailer that sat on blocks behind Joe’s lopsided double-wide. From the bathroom, Beth’s view of the river was blocked by the trailer. This put her more on edge. “You two are becoming quite a pair to draw from,” I overheard her tell her husband that evening after a meal of venison liver and rice.

Beth was satisfied, though, when I convinced Joe he needed a new house and we could build him one easy as pie. First we tore the old one down, piece by piece, while the family lived in tents by the river. Then I helped Joe frame a new cabin, a modest three-room bungalow tucked back against a wash across the railroad tracks on the scantily industrial, more feckless side of town.

The new home was built from almost-brand-new Highway Department pine snowfence I got a sizable deal on. Joe and I went at the cattle-truck-load of lumber with a skill saw and a claw hammer and had it framed in less than a week. Running water and electricity in less than two. The plumbing is done in copper, the old way, with brazed joints, no plastic PVC pipes.

The roof is aluminum, Lincoln Log green, and coated with a Teflon-type finish so snow won’t accumulate. A Roman archway
crowns the kitchen and small dining area. The fireplace we masoned from stones gathered along the Hams Fork River that runs through the back yard just after the river oxbows at the Hams Fork Sewage Treatment Facility. A cedar sauna. A mudroom.

In a corner of the living room stands a half-scale bronze Benjamin Franklin, a housewarming gift from me. Franklin has long hair down the back of his neck, round spectacles, an inquisitive expression on his face, and a belly hanging over his trouser buttons. Franklin wears a soiled Stetson Open Road and cradles fly rods in his oxidized-green left arm. Beth thinks the statue hideous and often keeps an old cotton sleeping bag draped over it.

The elders admired Joe’s dedication in showing an outlaw the road to reform, to salvation. The whole gesture was so
Christian.
The truth is that Joe didn’t know me from Adam. He only knew that he liked something about me.

One evening a group of church elders paid a visit to Joe—vigilantes in slacks. Beth shooed the kids outside and served the men lime Kool-Aid and brownies while I lay on my down sleeping bag in his trailer and read sporting magazines. In nervous mixed metaphors and confusing analogies, Joe told the deacons that he was making progress with me, that it’s tough to teach a wayward sheep new tricks, that a slick-brand cow can’t be registered overnight.

“Your effort with Mr. Beers is very noble,” said a gaunt man in a bolo tie and a golf shirt, “but perhaps there are times when one simply can’t make chicken salad from chicken droppings.”

“Look,” Joe said, “every time I drive down to the Ben Franklin for a quart of oil, I miss seeing that elk. But the beauty about this land is that you aren’t prosecuted until proven guilty.” He was almost pleading.

“Who shall be prosecuted in the court of the Lord?” said the bishop.

“He’s right,” Beth said in a guttural voice when the mob left. “What are you trying to do, get us excommunicated?”

I traded like Jedediah Smith, Jim Bridger, Jeremiah Johnson. I swapped skis for meat. I swapped skis for fruits and vegetables. I swapped bronze park art for chain saws and skis. I swapped skis for mountain bikes and a kayak. I swapped a canoe for fishing rods and rifles. I swapped rifles for televisions. I swapped an old pedal sewing machine for an antique button accordion I couldn’t play very well. It had been about three years since I’d moved to Hams Fork. Business was good. I swapped televisions, rifles, and skis for cash at one of the few pawnshops in Salt Lake City I could trust.

Joe often gets laid off from his pipe-fitting job for weeks at a time. He fishes. He skis. He hunts. He creates sculptures in the stout log workshop he built from old telephone poles. Joe winces a little whenever I call his creations art.

I tell Joe the two of us are the last of the frontiersmen. “We’re tougher than two-dollar steaks,” I say. Joe makes his own snow-shoes. I was convinced if I didn’t give him new skis every year, Joe would whittle them himself out of a green ash log. He is that much the craftsman.

It’s tradition. On the eve of the first of November of every fall, Joe invites me over for birthday cake. “I’m putting on my winter fat,” he says, something wild in his cheek. “Like an old bear.”

“I’m getting a little thick under the chin myself,” I reply. “But I sure as hell could use a slice of birthday cake.”

“Well, it won’t be from scratch. It’s a mix from a friggin’ box.”

Joe sings old songs with titles like “Joe’s Got a Head Like a Ping-Pong Ball.” He will not eat pork and certain seafood because it says not to in the Old Testament. He won’t eat bear because a bear without its hide looks human, the way the muscles and fat are stretched and layered. Just about everything else, Joe eats.

After chocolate cake, I excuse myself and go out to the trailer for Joe’s birthday present. Back inside the house I hand the gift to my friend. Tears well up behind Joe’s eyes and he says, “Aw, fetch, new skis.” A year ago, as well as skis, I had given Joe a pair of hand-tooled cognac calfskin Paul Bond cowboy boots with cricket-killer toes and a Rocky Mountain elk stitched into the stovepipe shaft. Not once has Joe ever asked me where I got anything.

To Beth, I give expensive appliances she would not otherwise have—a commercial mixer, a nearly new microwave. In the spirit of the season, it is not her place to ask if the gifts were stolen. She has to accept them, which she does. To the kids I give shiny newish pocketknives, compasses, many watches.

The kids clear the table of paper birthday plates and someone pops in an eight-track tape of Freddy Fender or Roger Miller or Abba, and the entire family and myself hop and flail our arms about until after midnight in the little living room that smells like deerhide, used socks, rough-cut pine, and old maps. It is Hams Forks only celebration of winter, only snow dance.

Joe is six three, over two twenty, and quite a little more in the wintertime. I am shorter, and thick like a fighter. I’m not as graceful on skis, but I ski hard and fast.

Working all night most nights, I sleep until midafternoon. I wake, fix coffee, and make the blue trout tattoo on my bicep jump and dance for the smaller kids, who circle me. In the evenings after work, Joe, myself, and the kids ski Sarpy Ridge and Green Hill,
above the Hams Fork valley. They like to climb to the top, take a quick look at the town between their skis, and try to glide their way down, slaloming between the sagebrush, crashing often in the rocks. They hit patches of granite and gravel. “I hit a big flootin’ rock and took a chunk out of my bottoms!” Joe yells to the wind. “Get out the p-tex candle.”

“I bet you have another birthday coming up,” I tell him. Between the two of us, we own a virtual quiver of skis.

Joe and I and the kids will sometimes hike all day, to the tops of the small mountains north of town, and ski the best snow, the powder between the thick groves of pine trees. We wear wool army pants and baggy sweaters, wool Andean mountain caps, and clouded green glacier glasses. We crash through branches and the sound is like bull elk charging through the timber.

We sometimes ski by moonlight the twenty cross-country miles to Cokeville on nights so clear and cold that water bottles freeze solid and it is too painful to stop long enough to eat the peanut-butter-and-serviceberry-jelly sandwiches or the hunk of venison salami we carry on our backs.

But Sunday is His day, Gods day. The family goes to service in the morning, visiting members of the congregation in the afternoon, and are back in evening service before sundown. Joe cannot ski on Sundays. I try to tempt him, but Beth only glares at us both like heaven will thaw before her husband plays on the Sabbath.

On Sunday nights, after the churchgoers begin bedding down, I often stop by to tell him how things were. “The powder was a foot deep if it was an inch,” I tell my friend. Each Sunday it gets better and better.