When We Were Wolves (31 page)

It sounded like he felt sorry for me.

Sage gets elderly and brittle when the natural fire cycle is interrupted, and the silver-and-black sage hadn’t burned in years, so it was especially thick that summer. It was reclaiming the narrow two-track we followed to the ghost town some Sundays, so that it brushed at us as we rode by on our mountain bikes and left cat scratches on our arms and legs. But it smelled good, and Ash said it reminded her of some poem I’d never heard of. I said it reminded me of good restaurant chicken that you could get in Denver but nowhere near here. Ash could ride a bicycle like a banshee. It was hard for me to keep up with her.

Sublette, Wyoming, consisted of twenty-five or so limestone foundations with the skeletons of cookstoves, bedsprings, and flue pipes rusting away inside them. Tin cans, old leather shoes, and pieces of broken bottles stained blue and purple by a hundred years of sun. An old car chassis. Several steel mine vents. Tailings, A jail.

“If a town in your dreams looks dilapidated,” she said one Sunday as we pedaled through, “it means that trouble wall soon come to you.”

“I’d say this town looks dilapidated,” I said, “and you’re about as much headache as I want to take on this summer. You might have to slap me just so I can be sure I’m not dreaming.” Ash turned. She looked taken aback, as if the summer were so simple and natural and I had just unloaded something complicated on her that she wasn’t wired to handle.

The jail was the only building relatively intact. Two cells not much bigger than closets. Ash and I sat in one, and I could tell she was wondering what it must have been like a century ago to have
been trapped there. She let me kiss her on the mouth—garlic and marijuana taste. I awkwardly undressed her while licking the salt from her neck and little breasts, going lower to where the taste in the folds was animal.

I carved our names on a pine windowsill with my Swiss Army knife, knowing the wind and rain would sand the names and heart away in a matter of seasons.

In the brown willows along the little dry creekbed, she found a moose antler-paddle a bull had shed. I duct-taped it to my handlebars and we pedaled back to Hams Fork, coasting the gentle down-hills.

On Monday mornings, when I would fill my truck with fuel, coolant, and brake fluid in the gravel parking lot, the Cessna hauling Ash would dip its wings as a goodbye, bank to the northeast, and grow smaller until it disappeared behind Sheep Mountain. I told myself that what I felt for Ash was not love, but I had no other name for it. I realized one Monday as the plane flew north that things weren’t settled and that they probably couldn’t be until October and the end of fire season, when settling things meant packing up and leaving them.

But the summer seemed to warm Ash in a less temporal way. She was a steward, a friend to the land, sure, but without me how could this have been enough? I thought she would have to want me, be grateful for me beyond all hopes. Wasn’t I something out of her most enduring dream? As the summer progressed, it became apparent that she was helping me, showing me things bigger than fire and myself, holding my hand and pointing—see there! did you know that? It’s possible that what she mostly felt for me was sorry.

Ash hated fire duty. It wasn’t her job unless she was available. She called ponderosa pine “weeds.” But though she groused about it,
Cappy made her keep her fire pack with her hard hat and fire-resistant Nomex shirt and pants in her truck. He made her keep her hand-held radio on her belt. If she was close enough to a smoke or if we were down on men, she would have to go. She was certified as a crew boss, certified to be in charge of twenty men, but putting out fire was beneath her. Or she was above it in that the suppression of fires has cause an ecological illness that will take decades of controlled burns to cure.

She would hide. And she would lie. I know this, because I watched her once. We were building water bars on a logging road about a half mile from where Ash was taking silt samples. At break time I grabbed two Cokes from my cooler and set out to take her one. When I got close enough to see her. I stopped and sat down on a stump and just watched her. She knelt as if she was praying in the silt along the little spring creek she was sampling. I watched her for maybe ten minutes. Finally she looked up to the pine crowns and rinsed her hands and washed her face. It was a moment, a time where I didn’t belong.

Without giving her the Coke—I drank hers, too—I returned to my crew. Half an hour later we got a call for an acre-large fire on Commissary Ridge. Cappy called Ash on the radio, asked for her location. She gave him an impossible legal: Township 28 north, Range 117 west. Alice Lake. “Taking tea samples above Alice Lake,” she said. “I’m a good hour’s hike away from my truck. Sorry, Cap. can’t make this one,” she said.

“Roger that,” said Cappy. “Sorry you’ll miss it.”

From where she was praying, it would have taken her two, maybe three, hours to get into Alice Lake. You had to walk.

We returned from that fire sometime well after midnight. Ash was sitting in an old Naugahyde recliner in the crew quarters, wearing her cool-night T-shirt over nothing, drinking a beer, reading
Insects of Western North America.
“I suppose you guys want pancakes,” she said.

The Thursday after Raphael and I finally locked horns, Cappy left the
Gazette
on the kitchen table. He had circled the article in the Police Blotter with a red map pen:
FS MAN IN DRUNKEN RUCKUS.
The reporter used my full name, which seemed foreign to me, the neon details of the fight belonging to someone else. I had already settled with the bar owner, and neither Raphael nor I was about to press charges.

I began watching her wake up again—my left eye half-closed with swelling. And I soaked her pancakes with syrup to soften them up, make them easier to chew.

I worked. I slept. I drank. At night heat lightning ringed the sky around Hams Fork. Several mornings it rained. No fires.

I wrote a couple of long letters, telling Jennifer I missed her and dreamed of seeing her in October. I carved a six-foot-tall pine-log grizzly bear with a chain saw one long weekend and had Harley help me drag it into the crew quarters, where I set it up between my bunk and his. I was glad when Ash said it gave her the willies, like it was staring at her all night.

The better part of August came and went. We had no fires to extinguish so they put us to work stacking slash piles and painting trees for timber sales. We prayed for fire.

One afternoon I ran over Cinder while backing my engine into the shop. I don’t know why he didn’t get out of the way, but he didn’t. The dual tires rolled over him, squashing him flat. We had to use a snow shovel like a spatula to scrape him off the concrete. Cappy said we didn’t need a goddamn cat around anyway. Ash didn’t say anything.

In late August, Raphael abandoned her; he had to get back to Bible school in Nebraska. The way she limped around when he left—in his ambulance, like a portent, kicking up gravel dust in the crew-quarters parking lot—we knew it was over for good. He’d strung her along like any of us would have done, or did.

Ash stopped making pancakes. “Eat some oatmeal for Chrissakes,” she told us the morning after he drove away. She stopped going for long walks in the desert alone. She stopped going to church— Hams Fork New Psalmody Free—on Sunday mornings.

I took to walking in the desert northeast of town by myself. I carried a rucksack and spent a good deal of time thinking thoughts I was later ashamed of.

After work the day before Labor Day, I mixed brake fluid and antifreeze in a Styrofoam cup and set it in the desert near the dump, so we could blame the fire on garbage.