When We Were Wolves (7 page)

My face and fingertips go numb in the sharp midnight cold. The air is thin—another hundred and fifty feet above sea level—and I’m shaky when I get to the top and get the godawful-heavy CO
₂
tanks hoisted up with us. Heights are not as intimidating in the softness of moonlight. I look down. Who has not thought about what jumping into shadow would be like, before you have to be pushed, knowing from cold memory what is there in the daylight? Would you pass out in the air from fear? Would you still be alive after landing? Without the conviction to pull it off, these thoughts
are pretty harmless. I lock the couplings in, adjust the regulator, and Wayne is in business at fifty psi. “I’m cold,” he says. “What took you so long?” But he’s been busy painting in his mind, preparing, sweat beading on his high forehead and breath freezing on his beard in the stinging wind, an athlete. His eyes are dark and intent, pen-and-ink Zeus eyes from junior high textbooks.

I can see the dim reflection on my trailer, across the valley. From here it looks cold and empty, like a beer can in a field, looks like it will blow away and keep blowing and not stop for barbed wire or Nebraska in the western wind. Two window’s are lit at the Afghans, yellow and warm like cabin lanterns. Wayne’s drafty house. Lights are on, Robin is awake, grading papers, pacing, worrying. Coyotes are singing.

The heavy, old, and leaky Paasche airbrush hisses, a high-pressure serpent in Wayne’s hands. His strokes are swift and graceful. He turns his head only to spit over the edge. I watch for police cars and hit him on the back when I see the lights below. We freeze for a moment until the headlights turn away—a bread truck, a mine truck—then he starts in again, blending densities with over-spray, caressing with pressure. His painting becomes a mating dance, which has been rehearsed hundreds of times in his mind. I am cold. Wayne gradually strips as he sweats and soon he’s down to only dark, holey polypropylene underwear and backwards Rockies cap. He pauses, wheezing, only to switch the airbrush tips I retrieve from the rucksack of tools on my back, dump the paint cup, and for me to change colors: True Blue, Grass Green, Spectrum Yellow, Ruby Red. I clean tips and hand the fresh brushes to Wayne like a caddy. It’s hard for me to make out the painting completely. Wayne slows to work in detail. The half hours grow into hours, history.

“You’ll see it when it’s light and it’s finished,” Wayne tells me when I disturb him once to ask what it is. “To tell you now would
be to drain my creative energy, to change what I have, risk killing fruition.”

“Okay,” I say. It is all I say for the next few hours. The painting is coming alive.

The moon has moved across the sky It’s getting lighter out. The hills go from midnight moonlit blue to morning lark. I see deep concern in his face—not panic, but he picks up his pace. I trust in Wayne, though cheating time is something even Wayne Kerr cannot do.

“That’s it,” he says, putting his overalls back on. With the finest brush tip I pulled up here, this is what he signs in black letters too small to see from below:
w. kerr.
I let out the deep part of my breath that I’ve been holding all night. We double-check everything, drop the tanks on the rope, descend the ladder, Wayne first, and hustle to the truck. Wayne gets there before me, cranks the old V-8 over while I collapse the ladder, strap it to the truck, lift the tanks and rucksack in. The cab is warm by the time I open the door, the radio is on, Wayne is whistling.

At my trailer we open beers, unfold lawn recliners in the snow that is my front yard, and wait for sunrise to unveil the nights work. “Apollo, get your dead ass over Sarpy Ridge!” yells Wayne so that the town below might hear. It’s still cold but anticipation is warming, so I forget about it. It’s like ice fishing, snow and cold up to my own lounging ass. Waiting for the picture show. Wayne slips inside for more beer and some old doughnuts.

I use my cordless phone to call in sick from my lawn chair so Wayne cannot hear me apologize. The phone rings in my hand like the last straw before I hit the call button. “Hello?” It is the urgent Mormon accent of my principal. “Sorry, I’m sick today,” I say. “I can’t come in early to meet with you.” Over the phone I hear radio
interference in the background; they’re having hot dogs and green beans at the high school, church bake sale tonight, cattle prices are steady. “I realize it may be important. Put it on a big pink slip. I’ll need a sub.” A guy over in Farson took his head off with a snow machine and a barbed-wire fence. “Yes, lesson plans are on my desk.” Game and Fish will limit deer and elk tags next fall. I fake a cough and hang up. U.S. 30 to Jackson is slick in spots. Geologists found the fault, hooked their equipment up, and named it something I couldn’t make out because of the fuzzy AM reception on this cheap telephone. It sounded like “Bring ’em asphalt,” but that isn’t it.

The first real daylight to come over the ridge is softened with clouds and light snow. The legs of the tower reach up into the fog and support an ethereal redhead mermaid, an enormous half-trout, tuna-can Copper. Shaking with tired and cold I raise my monocular to her to see the detail. I take a deep breath to steady myself, my vision clears. She is art. Slender, asexual amphibian hips and stiff traffic-pylon nipples. Her fluent hair is the same color as the stripe down her speckled side that makes her a
rainbow
troutwoman.

She is sitting on a rock just underneath
WELCOME TO HAMS FORK.
Below the rock, in flowing cursive letters:
Gateway to Zion and the GRAND TETONS.
She is holding a trident and smoking a mini-cigar. She is complete.

Hams Fork is waking up. Wives and moms are beating pancake mix, scrambling eggs, not making coffee. An occasional orange mine truck rattles along Antelope Street. A four-wheel-drive with whip antennae and a light bar is spinning up the lane, my front yard. It’s Frank Grant, chief of police. Wayne waves with his beer-less wedding-band hand. Frank gets out not smiling and adjusts the equipment belt under his belly. “Let’s see the hands, Hero,” he says. Wayne smiles a doughnutty grin, sets his beer in the snow,
swallows, and lays his palms over like a magician. His hands are enameled black, green, Copper-red. My hands are mostly clean and I hold them up like a child counting to ten.

“I’m an artist, Chief,” says Wayne, voice full of possibility.

In a couple of days photographs of “Wayne’s Rainbow” will hang in both bars in town, next to bowling trophies and framed black-and-white photos of rodeo cowboys on bucking horses. Pictures will be shown to me at my contract meeting. On Sunday morning, in both Mormon wards, they will talk about us: me, Copper, Joseph Smith, Robin, Jesus Christ, and Wayne Kerr. Next falls school calendar is already printed. Copper will apply for a transfer to the city in Texas. Shell get it. She has ridden Hams Fork to exhaustion. Just up and leaving is acceptable, expected in the West.

Robin will keep walking, sweating, and making wind chimes for angels. Looking after Wayne. Loving him despite of, and because of, his passion for art and wildlife.

I’ll get out the atlas I keep in the bathroom with back issues of
Wild West
magazine and a Gideon Bible, though I’m beginning to see that opportunity here runs only so far that way until it turns into California. Tomorrow I will take a Big Chief tablet and a dull number two pencil into my principal’s office, shove them under his gray nose like a divorce, and say, “Excuse me. Put my recommendation here, you no-balls, Diet Coke-drinking, blacklisting, goddamned son of a bitch.” And he’ll do it.

The Mormons will talk prophetically of select revelations, earthquakes, and visions. And I will be as alone as I have ever felt.

But if you could have been around Hams Fork a hundred and fifty years ago, and passed through the landscape as a beaver-trapping
tough with Jim Bridger or Jedediah Smith, before coal barons, before Mormons, soda ash, and oil, before you could stand outside and watch satellites pass through the night sky or silhouettes kissing in warm apartment windows, when this history was wild and new, you could have just pointed and named something of permanence, a mountain, a river—at least a creek—after yourself. Or they would have named it for you, a permanent mark, just for being here.

Wayne Kerr will continue to shake this little town like a ball bearing in a paint can.

urt Strain was being sent to a ghost fire. The Monday before Thanksgiving he received orders from the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise to act as Incident Commander on a large project fire in the Sioux Ranger District of the Custer National Forest, Camp Crook, South Dakota. He had just returned home to Wyoming from a controlled burn to manage chaparral in central California, thinking his season over. Global warming, he thought. A swamp fire in the South maybe, but South Dakota? Custer Complex, the fire the computer was sending him to now, had burned two years before. Now the Custer Complex was cold as a file cabinet: sixty thousand acres of charred snags, ash, and snow.

They sent resources anyway; the computer had the final word. Logistical arrangements had already been made before the situation could be confirmed by a staff or committee of human beings
in the brass echelons of Forest Service management, several of whom were halfway through double Johnnie Walker Reds and a tray of stuffed mushrooms at the Occidental Grill in Washington, D.C., when the order went out. Strain was a computer ghost himself now because the computer was the only commander that kept track of his whereabouts. But he was a good firefighter and he had experience. The season should have been over for him, but instead he was being called to an old fire that had burned out two years ago; he didn’t know this, but it wouldn’t have surprised him. Strain wondered how much longer he would be able to put up with the bureaucracy. He repacked his fire gear, including the six-weight Orvis Western Traveler fly rod and box of nymphs and drys; he planned on digging in.