When We Were Wolves (37 page)

Though the Buffalo played in the seedy Bull Barn downtown, Stumpy Wells bought a genuine used blue-smoke-belching Zamboni with working headlights so that their ice was the smoothest and blackest and also the slickest in the Oil League.

And this: The Buffalo had cheerleaders. Stumpy owned a couple of steak houses named Jugs where the waitresses were all very busty and wore lots of bright makeup and tight, pink-fringed cowgirl outfits. The Jugs girls became the Buffalo Gals on their nights off. They tapped out onto the ice in pink cowboy boots between Zamboni swaths and bounced up and down to some Bob Wills 45 that Stumpy picked out himself and played over the fuzzy public address system. There wasn’t a Wolf alive who didn’t think about what it would be like to begat with one of the Buffalo Gals just once.

They also had a tame buffalo cow, a mangy hoof-and-mouth victim named Petey some guy in Wild Bill getup led slithering around the ice between periods. She drank beer and ate corndogs and dropped steaming cow pies on the ice. It was all pretty much a two-bit circus, including the games. The Buffalo checked harder than we did.

The bus ground out of the prison gates and rumbled through downtown Purgatory before turning east onto the highway for Cheyenne. “We’re on our way to Boomtown, gentlemen,” said Pastor Liverance through the sports page of the
Cheyenne Eagle
, and the bus got really quiet except for the buzz of tires on asphalt and the whirr of the heater fan blowing out cold air. “Aaaaaahaaaaa,” whined Pastor Liverance, imitating Bob Wills in a mousey falsetto, which he did when he was excited—a more frequent phenomenon
now that his hockey team had players who could turn. Pastor Liverance’s
V
was beginning to stand less and less for
volunteer
and more and more for
victory.
“Gentlemen,” he said, waving his pencil like a staff, “I want that Oil Cup on my desk. I want it
next
year. I want to be the spoiler
this
year, tonight. I want the lousy end to the Buffalo’s season to be because of Wolves.”

We still didn’t like him. We still didn’t much like each other. We still didn’t quite trust him the same way we didn’t quite trust each other. But we saw that the pastor could help us, and we hated the Buffalo at a primitive level, someplace down deep where we couldn’t help what we felt. And as Wolves, we tried our damnedest to love each other the way it says to in John, Peter, Colossians, Thessalonians, and Romans. We liked seeing the parole-board-sitting chaplain in high and gracious spirits.

Our pre-game Bible-and-prayer meeting in the locker room was attended by various walleyed members of the sports-page press. Our locker room still smelled like cigarettes—and hot urine since our last limp through town when Big Jimmy McGhan pissed on the radiator. The reporters snapped bright photos of us Wolves drinking reconstituted orange drink and chewing ‘Nilla Wafers while LeBlanc cited the First Samuel he committed to memory on the bus trip to Cheyenne: “And the behemoth said to David, ‘Am I a dog that you come to me with sticks? Come to me and I will give your flesh to the birds of the air and the beasts of the field.’”

“Amen, brother,” the pack howled in rough unison to the snap-snap-snap of bright flashbulbs.

The multitudes had come from the jerkwater towns and down from the hills and we could hear the crowd amassing in the smoky arena. They were already booing. “This evening the Lord will deliver you into my hand, and I will strike you down, and cut off your head; and I will give the dead bodies of the host of the Philistines
this day to the beasts of the earth; that all the earth may know that there is a God in Wyoming.”

The reporters scribbled on their notepads like crazy men. One of them in an expensive Stetson porkpie said, “It mentions Wyoming in First Samuel?” and Lovelock told him, “Well, hell, yes.”

“Gentlemen, let us pray,” Pastor Liverance said. We looked at the reporters from the corners of our eyes until they took the signal and bowed their heads and held their hands together in front of them. “Dear Heavenly Father, for it was you who brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death, and break their bands in sunder. You who heareth the poor and despiseth not your prisoners. And though the rebellious dwell in a dry land, you bringeth out those who are bound with chains.”

Real somber, as if our old backup goalie had died and gone to heaven, Lovelock broke the post-prayer silence and said, “Remember Lucky.”

“All right, everyone on the ice,” Pastor Liverance said.

We skated a couple of laps and, sure enough, were pelted with the Lord’s deep-fried bounty as well as cigarettes and other smoking curses from above.

Stumpy stood low in a high VIP box with Governor Owens, in his silverbelly stingy-brim Stetson, and Warden Gordon, who drove over in his long gray 1950 Lincoln Continental with license plates that read
Wyoming WARDEN.
The three of them smoked twenty-five-cent cigars and laughed and elbowed each other, and the Buffalo Gals brought them drinks and lit more cigars with lighters shaped like oil derricks.

The three refs warmed up to an up-tempo organ version of “Three Blind Mice.” Cheap bottle rockets and Roman candles popped and fizzled dimly above the dark coliseum ice. We skipped
last laps and went straight for the bench to avoid getting peppered in the smoky dimness with an airborne something big and hard. “Ladies and gentlemen,” said the announcer, “please note that these athletes skate at speeds of up to fifty miles per hour, and at these speeds a penny from the stands can put an eye out.” It began hailing nickels. “Now, please welcome your own Cheyenne Buffalo!” The Buffalo skated by in a yellow-and-brown streak and rapped the boards in front of our bench with their sticks. The crowd made a pretty impressive stampede sound by stomping on the wooden seats with the leather heels of their boots.

“God bless you, brothers!” we howled as the Buffalo sped past. The organist played a bouncy barroom tune, and the Cheyenne crowd howitzered more food aimed at our bench. The Buffalo Gals bounced in rare form. Petey dropped another steaming buffalo pie onto the ice. We were wet and sticky with Cokes and beer and mustard. All this before a covey of Cub Scouts ran around the ice with the American flag and the Wyoming buffalo flag and the dumb bunny behind the organ pumped out “The Star-Spangled Banner” at polka speed.

“Let’s play the spoiler tonight, gentlemen,” said Pastor Liverance, dodging a corn dog. Meaning of anybody in the Oil League he would like to see not make it into the playoffs because of the Wolves, it was these goons.

And for almost an entire period we
were
spoilers. The spoiler part happened when the puck landed in front of Belecki after the face-off and he shot from mid-ice. It hit their goalie’s chest pad and dropped to the ice, and as the goalie, Guy Somebody, was about to be checked hard by LeBlanc, he panicked and fumbled it with his glove and it fell to the ice again, where he kicked it into his own goal with the heel of his own skate. There was a vast silence in the crowd that turned to awkward boos and hisses. The Wolves
had scored their first goal ever in their last game against the Cheyenne Buffalo, a feat that would make the sports pages across the West and that everyone in Cheyenne would damn well know about. The Wolves were
winning.

We circled the goal, raised our sticks in the air, and howled at the top of our lungs. This is when the Buffalo began to act like the earwigs in the mess hall when we dropped Tabasco on them.

The Buffalo coach, a former Kamloops goon named Carl Carlsbad, whose nose pressed flat across his face to the left, nearly touching his ear, like it was Scotch-taped, sent in a hand-picked line of superenforcers, guys designed to inflict pain and bodily harm. They wanted to hurt us, and they did. We weren’t checking—we were
being
checked. We’d gotten a taste of scoring. We liked it. We tried to do it again. We linked passes together. We set up an actual and sincere power-play offense that Pastor Liverance picked from a book. We
turned
and
stopped
and the ice sprayed from under our skates like pine whittle chips. We got the wind knocked out of us against the board lettering—
EAT AT JUGS
, in fat red letters. We took advantage of four of their goons sitting in the penalty box, and we scored again.

And all this without so much as a single rabbit punch—2 to 0, Wolves—and yes, it was something while it lasted. And yes, we could almost believe the Lord was skating with us on the frozen field of battle.

It didn’t last, though. After two periods of play, the scoreboard high above read like this through the smoke of free cigarettes and blue Zamboni exhaust:

BUFFALO 27

WOLFS 02

EAT AT JUGS

But we’d scored two goals. Warden Gordon visited the locker room between periods to call us
his boys
and say, “This will indeed look good on your records.” We taped our cuts and faced off and began the last period of our season, hell-bent on scoring again.

We did score again, and that is when they brought out the Czech, and our lives as semiprofessional hockey players came to a headlong end.

The Buffalo came out at the beginning of the third period performing crowd-pleasing, boredom-induced stunts like honest-to-God double axles. They also came out checking particularly hard, and, while four Buffalo sat in the penalty box, LeBlanc snuck the puck into their net, bringing on the howling for the third time in our lives.

We’d caught a rumor the week before of a Cheyenne giant everyone thought was a janitor who spoke rough English in grunts and growls, and who caught mice in the rink with his bare hands and skinned them. And of course a reporter asked him what the hell he was doing and he said, “Making a hat.” The rumor, apparently, was true. I swear the giant was nine feet tall on skates and five hundred pounds. He stomped out of the Zamboni gate wearing goalie gear—like a dinosaur or a gladiator—but he didn’t go to the goal crease.

The Cheyenne crowd went crazy; this would be better than Big Time Wrestling or
Texaco Star Theater
any day of the week. The organist pounded out a very bad “King Porter Stomp” as the giant in skates skated in awkward, taunting circles, flicking his stick like a blackjack while the Wolves on the bench watched with gums showing. A
very
fit five hundred pounds. He left half-inch-deep troughs in the ice where his skates had been. Our Big Jimmy McGhan didn’t seem so big anymore.

And he scored goals. This was mainly because we kept well out of his way. We skated around him, watching our backsides, knowing
that one mighty swing of that stick would amputate a limb or land us with the Lord or maybe even somewhere else, depending on other systems of judgment outside of Wyoming State Penal. Lovelock stayed with the net until the very last minute before bailing, but it was shameful what we were letting the Czech do to our pride. Within five minutes of his appearance they scored another ten goals, making the score 37 to 3. This was the score when time ran out on Belecki, and he became a martyr.

The Buffalo paraded in circles behind the Czech when the puck squirted out of the herd and Belecki danced it down the ice and into their net for goal number four. The Czech, in awkward pursuit, let out a grunt that raised the hair on the backs of our necks and checked our Canadian Wolf into the boards with a sickening thud that echoed over the crowd. Belecki just lay there, an unconscious pile of pads and blood, helpless in his white-collar naïveté, and something inside all eleven of us—something natural, but from a place deep and dark and forbidden—snapped.

The Wolves’ gate swung open and Liverance stepped onto the ice and calmly walked across the frozen water in his black suit and cowboy boots. Instinctively, we knew where he was headed. The look on his face was peaceful, knowing, as he loosened his tie and unbuttoned his collar. And not even waiting for Jimmy McGhan to call the attack, we all fell upon the Czech, a thread of black and a pack of atomic orange, in what we called in grammar school a dog-pile. My hands and fists felt disconnected, working on their own without conscience, directed from that heart of wildness and boiled instinct all of us possessed.