When We Were Wolves Read Free Page B

northwest with a socket wrench, says it like he’s got another in Denver and maybe one in the garage, says it like he’s holding on to this dad because he might come in handy someday and you just never know. “He just bought a new compressor, a real portable job. I’m gonna hook it onto this big brush I got ordered and we’ll be in business.” Wayne’s already in business so I know this new business is recreation, sport, diversion, and maybe he’ll count me in. I am glad his talk is of art. It is late afternoon and the high desert snow is starting to turn purple, like a bruise.
    “What sort of business?” I ask.
    “You’ll see,” he says. And I know he’s right.
    This is the Renaissance man, the Wayne Kerr I used to know, who, when I first came to Hams Fork two years ago, reached out his hand and was the only one to offer me a beer; my friend Wayne Kerr who is passed around here in conversation like so many Bible stories of miscreants and ne’er-do-wells. Wayne believes every creature on land has a counterpart at sea. He’s becoming an artist again since he met Copper, his new model and his new girlfriend.
    It’s colder than billyhell up here, but I’ve got a vista. My trailer sits on the windy east scarp over Hams Fork, so that standing on the roof I am even with the water tower across town behind the school where I teach history. I can sight along U.S. 30 just this side of one of the Mormon ward houses and the port of entry where over-the-road drivers idle their rigs and secure trip permits before driving through Wyoming. Westbound, the cable of asphalt leaves the valley and turns into Utah.
    I can look out over the shiny tops of trailer after trailer set in awkward rows on gritty Old Testament gray, sage and sooty snow lapping at rusty snow machines and four-wheel-drives as if someday the land, with a swarm of locusts and a hurricane wind, might muster up enough force to take back this godforsaken desert. No one wants to live up here. You are exposed and can see too much; I can look right down into the sewage-treatment plant. I see the smokestacks from the coal-burning power plant that lights half of Salt Lake City. There are mine shafts all underneath my trailer and they are on fire from an explosion fifty years ago. You can smell the smoke. It’s March, the temperature doesn’t get above thirty in the daytime, the regional suicide rates rise, and I still have flies.
    If you are not Mormon in Hams Fork, you have a past. I was married. It pushes a man against the wall to come home from work and find everything he owns in the front yard in the rain. I have lived in a car that didn’t run. Slept in libraries.
    My wife was pretty, but now she lives in Illinois. Right now I am content to stand up here and watch.

    The water tower stands like a phallus—Be fruitful!—and is our skyline. It is white and inviting: WELCOME TO HAMS FORK . Without it Hams Fork couldn’t flush. The caged ladder doesn’t begin until twenty feet up a leg, I guess to keep crazies or a dizzy kid from scaling the thing to paint his girlfriend’s name in Day-Glo letters, or hanging himself from a rope halfway down and really giving this town something to see when the sun comes up. I teach U.S. and Wyoming history mostly, where white men put their names on everything, shot rifles at Indians and got their pictures in the textbooks and their surnames on maps. I know it by heart and it bores the hell out of me. The aluminum skin of the roof is thin—no insulation—and under the wind I can hear the faint buzz of the TV that keeps me company. I never turn it off. We don’t have a town square, we have a triangle. Elevation at the triangle is 6,923 feet above sea level. Hams Fork is proud of its elevation, above most, closer to God level. The Mormon ward houses stand guard at both entrances to the valley like Monopoly hotels. They are the size of aircraft carriers and have no crucifixes, just thin steeples, antennae. I’m fighting like