When We Were Wolves

by Jon Billman

  “Son of a bitch.”

  I comprehended the very real yellow eyes of the black cow silhouetted against black U.S. 20. The late brakes took maybe thirty miles per hour off our velocity. I’d already resigned to hit the animal in the adrenalined fraction of a second before the sound of the car breaking.

  Bonnie and I—no lap belts—hit the dashboard. Spiderwebbing glass and the crunch of metal as the wheels left asphalt and launched from a shallow ditch, and the two of us getting thumped around before the Matador came to rest in an irrigation canal fifty feet into a beet field. The radio still played … Take good care of you … The radiator hissed. I tasted blood, which I assumed was my own, but in the yellow light of the dashboard I could see it was dripping from the cow, broken like a watermelon, and suspended between the firewall and front seat.

  Bonnie was silent, a line of blood running from her scalp, across the bridge of her nose, to her lips and chin. “Sweetheart, are you okay? Sugar, please say you’re all right.” But what scared me most was that I realized, through my pleading for Bonnie to be okay, that I was really pleading for me to be okay—how much of this steady smear of blood that I prayed came from the heifer was mine?

  I touched my face and looked at my hands.

  “I’m okay I guess,” she said. And part of me was relieved, though part of me remembered that the unhappiness brought on by Jarbidge could have, in a cowy stroke of fate, been laid to rest in this field of sugar beets with the smell of raw hamburger, radiator coolant, and stagnant mosquito water.

  Bonnie’s door was jammed shut with earth. My door opened. I kicked it down on the hinges and it swung hard. I stepped into the shallow water and deep mud. Bonnie slid underneath the bloody cow to my side, her hair slick with wet, wedding dress tainted red. As she pulled herself out the door frame, the animal wheezed. “The cow’s still alive,” Bonnie cried. “It’s suffering. You havta do something quick. Put it out of its misery. Kill it.”

  “How the hell am I gonna do that?”

  “I don’t know, do something. This is your fault. Use your knife.”

  I always carried a pocketknife my grandfather had given me when I was eleven. Blade extended, the thing wasn’t over four inches long and I carried it for luck more than practicality. I walked to the cow and told her I was sorry, knowing this would be charged to my karma debt. “It was an accident,” I said. I poked a little at the hide under her chin.

  God, what a story. I forced the blade into the throat hide. It went in hard—like through a boot sole—and, even sawing, I could hardly move the blade. A new, thin stream of blood painted my shoes. I was thinking of adjectives to describe the scene. I kept sawing and the cow kept not dying.

  The sounds that seemed to escape from the cut were horrible. How could you do this? she said in anguished bovine language. I was only ranging.

  “Is it dying?” asked Bonnie. She’d pried open the trunk and found a sweatshirt to pull on over her dress.

  “Hell, yes, she’s dying, but it might take two fucking days. We’re on open range. That means we just bought this cow.” My fear for myself had surfaced and now went before Bonnie and drama, and she smelled it.

  “What are we gonna do?” she asked.

  “Wait for someone with a gun and a camera, I guess.”

  Things were quiet for a moment, except for the cow. I kept sawing and Bonnie began rummaging in the trunk again. She looked westward.

  “Don’t worry about the wedding—I don’t think it was very official,” she said.

  I collapsed in the dirt and faced the sky. “Oh, this takes the cake. I’m giving up. I’m finished.”

  Bonnie’s shoes clicked as she walked away down the highway, but I pretended not to notice. I was getting good at pretending not to notice.

  How much time passed? A class period, maybe two. “It’s cold.” My arms, neck, and knee had begun to stiffen. “It’s cold, I said. Aren’t you cold? Answer me, Bonnie.” Silence.

  “So you’re selling out that easy. I see how it is now.” But my words were absorbed by the black soil of beet field and she couldn’t have heard me. “Okay, I see how it is now.” A car stopped—old Plymouth with round taillights like rat’s eyes. No Bonnie. No flashlight.

  I limped south, southwest through the volcanic soil, hoping before long to run into U.S. 26, where I could hitch a ride to Idaho Falls. By now Bonnie was in a warm car, talking to her Boise mother on the cell phone. Few things beat the warmth of a car heater, the inane buzz of the AM radio, but you have to be cold first to appreciate it.

  I walked all night, fueled by fear and the cold. Millions upon millions of goddamn sugar beets. Enough sugar here to fill every sugar packet in every cafe from hell to breakfast.

  Selling out had long ago become bullshit. Drinking coffee, stories, twelve-year-olds high on sugar and Yellow Number 5—that life didn’t sound so bad now. Weekends driving into the mountains in my Explorer. Seeing friends at the bar.

  I tried navigating by the stars. There were no stars over Boise. I felt as if I was walking in circles and gave up, trusting my instincts.

  Sometime well after midnight it became apparent that a person could die atop all that sugar. Collapse from exhaustion and dehydration. Maybe just lie down and freeze to death on an especially cold August night.

  The thin line of dawn began appearing. I adjusted my direction to walk due west. I could see the lights of a town that might have been two miles away, might have been twenty. Must be Rexburg, I figured. They’ll have eggs in Rexburg. I limped to the beet elevator.

  The letters on the elevator: SUGAR CITY, IDAHO.

  I ran across the highway, not bothering to look even one way

  The Amoco was warm. There was a small convenience store with a bar and a few stools where customers could eat a cold sandwich and drink coffee from Styrofoam cups. I hadn’t noticed the bar part before, when I was borrowing the gasoline. “I’ll have a half dozen eggs over easy, sausage, bacon, hashbrowns, toast, white. Keep the coffee coming.”

  “Might be a ham salad sandwich left,” the clerk, a kid not long out of high school, said without pausing her sweeping.

  I found two sandwiches and unwrapped the cellophane and ate one in three bites without much chewing.

  “Will that do it?”

  “I’m full as a tick. Do you know that I can’t pay for these?” I said, talking with my mouth full. “Guess I’m dining and dashing.” “It’s on me. Actually, it’s on the manager.” “I demand that you call the police.” “Sheriff.”

  “Then I demand that you call the sheriff.”

  “Nope.”

  “But I’m a fugitive! I’m a fugitive from Boise. I drove off with a tank of your gasoline. I’ve killed some guy’s cow. I’ve stolen your sandwich.”

  “So if you drove off with our gasoline, where’s your car?” “I told you. I hit a cow on the highway.”

  The girl kept sweeping. “Sounds like bull. Look, I’m off shift in ten minutes and the sandwiches are free. The gas is free—I don’t care. Now get out or not, but I’m going home in ten minutes, no hassles, okay.”

  Arrest would mean a hot meal and a blanket for a few days. I could sort out my thoughts, my future. Now I had to face all of Idaho with nothing but a windbreaker and a pocket comb.

  She was finished with her shift—the best part of the day. The kind of accomplished tired that feels so good because you’ve put something hellish behind you. I imagine that the reason people run marathons is so they can feel the kind of tired that follows, where nothing in the world, not even Idaho, is bigger than a cold, hard-earned beer—no news.

  My hunger delayed for an hour or two, I walked into the cold morning sun onto the shoulder of the highway. I felt light with nothing but hands in my pockets, no keys, no money, no responsibility. No wife. Nowhere to go but down the road. I could choose anonymity and poverty. I possessed the glorious luxury of choice that made me one of the richest men in the world. Only the beautiful, atavistic need to survive! Here I was
at the crossroads of rock bottom and I could choose not to go up. I might choose to go to Mexico and live vicariously through a song. I could choose to go back to another classroom and tell stories while a real world spun around me.

  I walked northbound, toward Blackfoot—the opposite direction from Boise. I concentrated on my feet, and the walking took my mind off things. A school bus passed without slowing. Maybe twenty minutes down the road, a huge early-seventies Lincoln slowed and wheeled to the shoulder fifty yards ahead of me. The Lincoln was green, patched with rust, enormous snow tires on the rear—reservation car.

  As I neared I could read a bumper sticker: CUSTER WAS A PUNK.

  Heads of long black hair shifted inside. The rear passenger door opened and a signal of smoke caught a breeze and blew toward me. They’d never been to Jarbidge, Nevada. What did I teach? Kids—I taught kids. A farmer in coveralls stood looking into his irrigation ditch as we passed, at his expensive heifer atop Bonnie’s Matador. Friends and brothers, five Indians told stories of an Idaho Falls drunk, the Merit smoke sweet and white as saccharine.

  SUNDAY WAS A BATTLE

  unday, June 25, was a battle. The last of the smoke cleared in the afternoon, the dust settled in the barley field, and the Sioux, Arapahoe, Cheyenne, Crow, and Seventh Cavalry called the horses, picked up the arrows, dusted themselves off, and headed downtown together for cold beers at the Mint. Most of the chiefs and officers had planes to catch in Billings, but the group got on without them. They’d pick up the Indian Wars again at next year’s Reenactment of Custer’s Last Stand.

  On Monday morning, June 26, the day after the big battle, Owen Doggett came home from the Mint to find he was now trespassing on the dirt half acre he used to almost own. Everything the actor now owned formed a crude breastwork ten yards from the chipped cinder-block front step that led to the single-wide he also used to almost own. A buckskin shirt. A few T-shirts. Some socks. A faded union suit. A broken AM radio with a coat-hanger antenna. His Sage fly rod. An empty duffel bag. A brick of pistol rounds, and the title to the 76 Ford Maverick.

  Charley Reynolds, the basset hound, was off chasing rabbits in the cheatgrass; he belonged solely to Owen Doggett now. Owen Doggett banged on the window of the locked trailer house with his gloved fists and yelled, “Sweetheart, I’ll make you eggs!”

  His wife had already begun her day’s work, tying flies for an outfitter in Sheridan. Her fly patterns were intricate, exacting, and held the subtle variances of nature usually reserved for spider-webs, mud-dauber nests, and snowflakes. Through the cloudy window of her workroom, Sue Doggett looked up from her vise and out at her husband in his riding boots and dirty wool tunic. She mouthed, “Read my lips: I am not acting.”

  THE SIOUX

  Mr. and Mrs. Owen Doggett were married three years ago on a moonlit Monday midnight in Reno, Nevada, after meeting at a Halloween party and dating for exactly sixteen days. The engagement lasted an afternoon and a dinner. They took the red-eye out of Billings and stayed drunk for the entire two-day trip. They were married in the same clothes they met in—his custom Custer buckskin, her star-spangled Wonder Woman bustier. The wedding cost exactly twenty-seven dollars, bourbon and snapshots included.

  Sue is a full-blooded Crow. Owen Doggett calls her The Sioux. And sue is what she is doing; she’s suing the trooper for all he’s worth. No negotiations. Sue gave him an old government Colt revolver as a wedding present. She wanted the valuable relic back. “Indian-giver!” he called her. He cannot afford a lawyer.

  THE COLONEL

  Owen Doggett is a local, an extra, a private. But Owen will tell you he’s a trouter by heart, an actor by trade, and he has faith he will one day soon be the hero, the star, the colonel in the Hardin, Montana, Reenactment of Custer’s Last Stand. “Call me Colonel,” he’ll tell you. He has to stay in character. “I’m an actor from Hollywood. Bred-in-the-bone.” Right now he, his trouting buddy, and Charley Reynolds are on their way east so Owen Doggett the actor can audition to be the Black Hills Passion Play’s substitute Pontius Pilate. The Colonel will not tell you he is only a private. He will tell you he may soon be cast as Pontius Pilate in a large-scale production of the second-greatest story ever told, the story of Jesus’ last seven days in South Dakota. He will not tell you he is from Hollywood, Pennsylvania, and that he has to rent a nineteen-year-old grade horse when he wants to ride.

  Hardin’s current Custer is a Shakespearean-trained actor from Monroe, Michigan. He looks like Colonel George Armstrong Custer, owns a white stallion like Custer’s, pulls a custom four-horse trailer, does beer commercials for a brewery out of Detroit, and calls his wife Libbie. It will not be easy. The Colonel is torn between what he wants to do, what his heart tells him—goddammit, you’re an actor!—and what is to be done. “History is the now of yesterday,” he says. In his own recent history, the Colonel has caught some nice fish, drunk a few beers, cheated on his wife, and watched some movies. He sees himself on the big screen—not in a factory, not in an office. He hasn’t paid many bills, but “hell,” he says, “we don’t have a satellite dish and we don’t get cable. That’s a big savings right there.”

  Libbie Bacon Custer wanted her husband to be President of the United States of America. Sue Doggett wanted the Colonel to get a not-always-have-to-tenderize-a-cheap-cut-of-beef job. Not fulltime necessarily, just something where the trooper worked more than one day every two weeks. But that would mean giving up a few Mondays—and Tuesdays. Wednesdays, and the like—of sore-lipping fish.

  “Do I not bless you with much fish and bread?” the Colonel asks his wife.

  “Whitefish and Wonder Bread every day isn’t my idea of heaven,” says Sue.

  THE PRIVATE

  The Colonel calls his trouting buddy Ben Fish, Private. They might be knocking back a few Rainiers at the Mint. They might be boning up on the Black Hills Expedition of ‘74 over morning coffee at the B-I. They might be casting the Little Bighorn for browns and rainbows on a Monday. They might be, as they are now, rumbling down U.S. 212, on their way only a few hours after dawn, with Charley Reynolds in the middle and the Private riding shotgun. Just the three of them in the old oil-burning baby-blue Maverick, their forage caps cocked back on their heads, spitting the hulls of sunflower seeds out the windows. For the Private this trip is a chance to scout some new country, cast some new water.

  The Private is a teacher. He has taken stitches in the back of the head where the heel of his pregnant ex-wife’s cowboy boot caught him from point-blank range. He has lived in a U-Store-It shed for an entire January. The Private has slept in libraries and eaten ketchup soup and melba toast for breakfast. He has talked with lawyers he couldn’t afford. He has lived in Wyoming.

  The Private is learning not who he is but where he needs to be. It’s a process of elimination. Sue gives him flies for simply appreciating them and showing her the little spiral-bound steno pad in which he logs which fly caught which fish under which conditions. The Private is growing older, which means to him that it’s harder to have fun.

  “One week,” he tells the Colonel. “One week and you’ll have to find another couch to sleep on.”

  HARDIN, MONTANA

  Every now and then responsibility picks up an ax handle and knocks the Colonel into government service. He delivers mail in Hardin on a substitute basis. “It’s a job,” he would tell Sue. It’s a job.

  Hardin is a rough town because it is one thing but also another. Most of it is not part of the reservation. But some of the town, across the Burlington Northern tracks, rests on the Indian land. You can see cattle over there grazing their way through the front and back yards of the trailer homes. The government prefabs are a little more in need of things—a window that isn’t cardboard, siding that doesn’t slap in the wind. The roads are mostly gravel and dust. There is the beef-packing plant, where many townspeople, mostly Crow, work. The Crow kids go to school where the Private, Mr. Fish, teaches history: Hardin Intermediate. The Bulldogs.

  Every May the B
ulldogs take a field trip to the Little Bighorn Battlefield. The Little Bighorn draws people from all over the country, from all over the world. Some of the students live less than ten miles from the national monument, and they’ve never been to it. Mr. Fish wears his wool Seventh Cavalry uniform, riding boots and all, and acts as if he were there on June 25, 1876, taking fire from all sides.

  “Company dismount!” he calls, and the students file off the bus. “Form a skirmish line on the west flank of the bus and hold your ground. Any horseplay and you’ll be back in second-period study hall so fast your head will spin.”

  Mr. Fish and the campaign-hatted guides lead the students around the grounds among the signs that read WATCH FOR RATTLESNAKES and METAL DETECTORS PROHIBITED. The spring wind whips their hair and makes it difficult to hear, though they understand. There are many questions. Sharp notes fill the afternoon like gun smoke as Mr. Fish bugles the students back on the bus. They talk motives and strategy, treaties and tactics, on the short bus ride back to Hardin.

  The Colonel doesn’t get called to work much. The Private has summers off and many sick days during the year. On Mondays they go fishing. Sometimes the Tongue River down in Wyoming. Sometimes the Powder River over to Broadus. Sometimes the Bighorn. But most often the Little Bighorn. They take sandwiches and keep a sharp eye out for rattlesnakes, Indians, and landowners. And it’s often hot. Very hot. They fish other days, too, but always Mondays.

  A SUNDAY DRIVE THROUGH CUSTER’S MONTANA

  Driving east—going backwards—down U.S. 212, over the Wolf Mountains, through Busby and Lame Deer, the Colonel, Charley Reynolds, and the Private study through the yellow-bug-splattered windshield the country where Custer and his men camped on their way to the last campaign from Fort Abraham Lincoln, Dakota Territory. It’s probably how the outfit would have retreated, if there had been a retreat.