When We Were Wolves (6 page)

The Hams Fork
Gazette
front page called it “Juvenile Graffiti,” but Wayne just called it something for the boys at the bar. “In this place you’ve got to make your own fun,” he says. This is true and I’m glad to see it, and with Copper, Wayne makes much more of his own fun more often. Every once in a while now you’ll see one of Wayne’s words roll through town: plagues, words, if, one, book, God. His new paintings are impressive.

It’s all right to go to the bar more often now that I’m new history, a lame duck soon to be extinct like so many dinosaur birds buried in the high-desert sand. I go with Wayne because he has never bought in to living with someone else’s standards and his attitude gives me a lift. He writes editorials to the
Gazette
(the
Gazoo
, he calls it) under the pen name Stephen Hero, Star Route, Hams Fork, Wyoming. He harangues the mayor, the town council, the school board, the Carmel County sheriff, the bishops, the superintendent, the chief of police. All for fun, he says, all for fun. I don’t really give a shit about any of that, Wayne claims after really throwing the dictionary—sometimes the Bible—at them. All for fun. The thing is, though, he is always dead-on and the written replies in next week’s paper never touch him. But they are keeping score for sure, bet everything they are, a running count. Wayne’s new word, I think he coined it, is “Custerian.”

I don’t sleep well anymore. The alcohol helps. I get recurring nightmares. It’s evening in the dream, summer and green. I’m at the drive-in with friends and peers and most times they have dates. We laugh and drink and make fun of the movies. Between features all the other cars leave but ours. Then the big gray speaker in the window quits working and we only can see the movie, not hear it, but we don’t mind and sometimes don’t even notice. Then the picture gets fuzzy and I guess I must fall asleep. When I wake up in the dream I am alone. It’s cold and the windows are iced over from the inside. I try to start the car from the back seat and the starter just grinds. I get out of the back seat in just my underwear and run around in the snow. No one is here at this boarded-up theater in the middle of nowhere. The marquee out front reads
CLOSED FOR SEASON
. I look back toward the car and my footprints are blown over. I didn’t bring a shovel. I have jumper cables but I’m alone in the world. Every dream it’s a different drive-in.

A while back we worked out a deal. I’m learning to sketch, a first step. Wayne lets me sit in the studio for twenty minutes or half an hour now and then and I sketch from what he has already done, his work with Copper and the unfinished figures and parts on the walls: arms, legs, breasts, hips, faces, sex, and shadows. In exchange for lessons and studio time, I change his oil and wash, sometimes vacuum, his truck. I’m going to run the idea by him of maybe sketching Robin sometime, maybe paint her. If I make it that far. For some Polaroids of Copper I gave Wayne two racks of Heineken.

“Persistence of the New West” he will call his next exhibit, and when he says this he looks a little younger, a little thinner, a little taller. He’s even making his own paints with lead and cadmium, toxins from deep in the ground that Wayne says are truer in color and tell a more accurate story. Copper has been posing in cowboy boots and nothing else, Stetsons, lariats; she has posed with little mini-cigars, a fringed leather jacket over naked skin, a buffalo hide, skis, branding irons, whiskey bottles, Susan B. Anthony dollars, a rawhide whip, nothing, fly-fishing vest, chaps.

I have seen them work when Robin says they’re in the studio and I walk out, not wanting to disturb them, and look through the curtain crack in the little foundation window. There is an energy that fills the air and ground of the studio; art and sex, yes, but also, somehow, magic. The mad, naked nude painter, Wayne Kerr. Copper, like art-history-book prints of Titian’s Mary Magdalene looking to the sky in ecstasy, wraps her long hair around naked shoulders, breasts, sex. He puts his Rockies cap on backwards and a thick black-handled brush crossways in his teeth and bites down on it as color rushes and swirls for minutes at a time until the session is over, until he’s slick with sweat, the pain is gone, the egg is out, the painting is begun; until the mouth brush is splintered, wet with tobacco spit, used. I’ve seen it more than once. Then he’ll take her, most always from behind like a dog, and they’ll scratch and howl and bite and curse, Copper’s white breasts turning red with heat, Wayne’s hairy waist and gut heaving with in-rut, mythical lust, really driving his back into it. He plays a lot of Mozart now. It’s been a long time since Wayne has had one of his landscape-kicking fits.

The UPS driver is a Mormon. Wayne and I are convinced our packages ride around town for a few extra days but what can you do? I’m opening a package of new paints, safe paints, wash-with-water
acrylics, and glance out my front window and see Robin walking. I often see her walking, hiking out her frustrations at having her name uttered in the same sentences as mine when the microphones are turned off at school board meetings and in the lounge before the 8:15 bell rings, where a clique of teachers are taking last hits on their Monday-morning herb tea. She is frustrated from being looked at by housewives when she’s searching— maybe humming a hymn or a folk song—through the cereal aisle, looking for Honeycombs for Wayne.

She takes long, strong strides and stares straight ahead, inhaling, exhaling hard, sweating, her breath trailing behind her, misting her long brown hair until it vaporizes and another puff of breath takes its place. She walks down a stretch of fenced-in yard where a young elkhound is thrilled to be running beside her until the end of his fence, where Robin looks at him like she could be party to every dog wish if only that were in the design of things, and for twenty yards or so it is. She walks past the stockyards and rodeo grounds, up the BLM road that leads to the radio towers and relay station on top of Sarpy Ridge. The snow is deep and less sooty up there, well above me. Through my monocular I’ll see her trudging through thigh-deep drifts, kicking, slapping at the white with her fists, throwing it, daring the earth to move. The snow dampens her screams of anger—anger because she is under fire for what her husband did and anger because she is not an Indian-riding redhead with big tits and shit for morals—until she gradually disappears into the blackening winter sky. By daylight the wind has wiped clean her tracks, footprints that from down here are only sixteenths of an inch, millimeters apart. Wayne says her mind deals in the concrete and they are concretely married and he still comes home most nights and still puts his dishes in the dishwasher.

Up there maybe there’s less chance her prayers get trapped
in the inversion of wood and coal smoke that sometimes hangs over the valley. But maybe those prayers blow to Utah. She copes. Robin is from California, where they have real earthquakes.

I’m grading some horrid red-pen term papers and watching aerobics, which I can still get on ESPN, and drinking a beer. It’s ten o’clock or so now, but I’ll skip the news. Women. The knock at the door is Wayne in overalls. Before I answer he mounts the ladder with the new fifteen-millimeter nut he promised me this afternoon and I’m in my living room with the remote control and the window open. I set the control box to Galaxy 4, Channel 17. Fuzz, snow, snow, okay! “That’s it!” Three French women have cuffed a no-clothes policeman to the radiator and are smearing him with ice cream and licking it off to some kind of psychedelic Wagnerian fugue,
dow daw dowww, whokaneeow, whokaneeow.
Wayne tightens up the nut on the antennae, pounds across the metal roof and back down the ladder. I go outside to meet him, to thank him. He’s breathing hard and looking through the window at the TV. “You know,” he says, “what does this tell you about the state of our nation?”

“This is France,” I say.

“That’s right. Use your phone?”

Wayne checks in with Robin. I can feel the weight of her disappointment on the other end, Wayne’s excitement on this end.

“You still with me here, man?” asks Wayne.

“I thought you were going to get some new equipment. From your dad?” I’m stalling for myself, but I know I’m in. Wayne doesn’t even hear me. The dogs are running tonight.

This is a problem I seem to always have had: How do I know how much I have? And how do I know when I am losing it? I get up and pull my coveralls on, go out to the truck, and we’re off. “Hey,”
says Wayne. “You can hear those UFO freaks from that Albuquerque station on your phone.”

We park in the sage on the other side of U.S. 30. The only traffic is an occasional semi, so there is no real effort involved in keeping unseen. It’s clear and the moon makes it possible to pick up outlines well without being seen from a distance.

“Look at that honey moon,” says Wayne. “Magical.” It creates a shadow over everything we do. A bolt cutter makes short work of the lock on the cyclone and barbed-wire gate. I muscle the ladder off the truck and drag it to the base of the tower. Wayne fixes a bandanna over his face like a nineteenth-century highwayman, turns his cap around, throws a climbing rope over his shoulder, and nods at many quarts of paint, the pressure regulator and tanks—twenty pounds of gas in heavy steel cylinders, three of them—in the rusty truck bed, nothing lightweight from the Idaho dad. I just get the ladder telescoped and steady and, like a kid on a beer buzz hell-bent to spray his girlfriends name on the tank, bad-back Wayne scoots a quarter of the way up, to where the caged ladder starts, before I get to the bottom with the clumsy tanks. Over my breathing I can hear soft pings like hail on aluminum as Wayne takes to the top like a house spider. I look up and can barely make out the
WELCOME
I’ve seen a hundred times. It’s Wayne’s canvas tonight. He drops me the rope.