by Jon Billman
Tall and expensive, with giant hands, Abraham Lincoln watches steely-eyed over a deer, an antelope, a wild-eyed mule. A clean-cut cavalry trooper that may or may not have been Colonel George Armstrong Custer fearlessly strokes a little grizzly bear. A mangy gray wolf herds a quarter horse. Several stoic hard-rock miners push an ore car containing a stony mermaid. Jesus Christ, hand held high, waves at a familiar Indian. A shiny green pig noses a miniature tyrannosaurus no bigger than a pony. A puffy Jim Bridger hoists a stringer of trout toward Lewis and Clark, who look lost and worried. Having tumbled into a dogpile are a camel, a black bear, Brigham Young, and Thomas Jefferson waxing confused, and the famous Hams Fork bull elk.
The Louvin Brothers on the AM singing “The Christian Life,” my little Subaru whines through the uranium-rich hills of central Wyoming, halfway to western South Dakota, the easternmost edge of the West. Yessir, there are buffalo there, fat with bronze, and they stampede through the parking lot of the biggest resort/casino this side of Las Vegas. Deadwood will be a walk in the park.
I’ll send Joe a postcard from Gillette and tell him I’ve been thinking we should someday soon go to Mexico, drive and not stop until the beers cost a nickel and the carne asada is free, fish for marlin on the fly. Hope Beth doesn’t get the mail.
n Oregon boot was a heavy iron cuff with an iron brace that ran down your ankle and under your arch. The idea of course was to discourage migration. It was invented by some crackpot warden at Salem with too much free time on his hands. We had Oregon boots in Wyoming in 1949 and walking in them was like walking across the exercise yard in ice skates. We did that, too.
We learned to act and think as a gang, a team (“There is no ‘I’ in ‘team’!”), apostles. And this is what we saw quickly: Christianity in prison carried privileges. We got what is called “good time,” time off our sentences, for attending services. We got free subscriptions to National Geographic. We got Sunday oysters in our gravy. We got all the bad coffee we could drink. Instead of making gravel, bucking grain, peeling potatoes, or pressing license plates, we dusted pews and crafted Nativity scenes out of plywood and wind chimes out of tin fruit-cocktail cans and baling twine.
As Wolves—we were the Wolves—we were well on our way to really good time. We wanted to play hockey, and if we had to attend Pastor Liverance’s Wednesday-night Bible Study to do it, what the hell, so be it. Like the apostle Paul, we were former Commandment breakers on the road to Damascus. And Cheyenne.
The Hole is where you went for fighting. It didn’t matter who started it. We naturally didn’t much care for one another, but we learned to suppress our darker instincts for the greater good of the whole. It was teamwork, sportsmanship, brotherly love out of necessity.
“Behold, happy is the man whom God correcteth: therefore despise not thou the chastening of the Almighty: For he maketh sore, and bindeth up: he woundeth, and his hands make whole,” our chaplain told a small congregation of us early one sunny Sunday morning. “Gentlemen, faith and the execution of goodness is your fast ticket out of here.”
The Oil Cup was what the best hockey team in the Rocky Mountain Oil League got to keep. The Purgatory Camera ran a photo of our governor, Brandall Owens, hoisting the gold Oil Cup at a backroom press conference in Cheyenne. Pastor Liverance, an ex-Canadian and ex-hockey player, wanted that cup on his altar in Purgatory like it was the Holy Grail itself. The chaplain sat in on parole hearings and his opinion mattered.
“Gentlemen, I want that cup,” he said every afternoon before practice. The pastor said it like a man possessed, a pirate, or Captain Ahab, staring past us at the sagebrush sea of opportunity that cup would bring for his advancement. We saw it as our opportunity, too. His advancement was our freedom. The Wolves wanted out.
It reads somewhere in Genesis that “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall not cease,” and the Wolves didn’t either in our efforts to master hockey. Most of the time the yard was dry and dusty and the dirt and sand caked our faces and stuck to our hair oil. When it rained we laced up our skates and practiced in the mud, running up and down the greasy yard in these powerful high-kneeing battle stomps, chasing the makeshift puck we carved out of an old snow tire, then slapping it in the general direction of the chicken-wire goals. In late October it got cold enough for the wall guards’ spit to freeze when it hit the ground, so Warden Gordon had them hose down a quarter-acre section of hardpan that stayed slick and frozen until April (not counting a brief January or February thaw), wherein we skated in the brown slush.
We lifted barbells and dumbbells. We performed sit-ups and jumping jacks. We ran laps in our Oregon boots. We got to where we could skate in a straight-enough line without falling down. Our ankles grew strong and knotted. Some days the chaplain would watch the team from the watchtower and yell encouraging words from above. “That’s it boys, that’s it!” Warden Gordon chose the team color, atomic orange, and our colleagues made our canvas game uniforms in the garment shop.
We got new blue dungarees and striped hickory shirts to wear on the bus. The guys in License Plate honed our blades to razor sharpness. Pastor Liverance passed out brand-new Gideons. We didn’t necessarily like each other, weren’t buddy-buddy. But we kept our eyes on the pastor and stomped and skated together for a greater good—the good time we would get if Liverance got his Oil Cup.
At night in our dim cells we read stories about Cain and David and Max McNab and Gordie Howe and John the Baptist.
In those days geologists here from Texas and Oklahoma had just discovered oil four miles under the earth in the Cambrian Layer, and though it was harder to get at than the shallow seas of crude in the South, oil began spouting up all over our high desert. Rookie crude barons with new mad money thought it might be fun to own restaurants and roadhouses and big new Chryslers and Lincolns and hockey teams, and thought it might be even more fun to sell a lot of tickets and pit their hockey teams against a band of hooligans from the Wyoming State Pen.
Governor Owens was a pale, gaunt fellow who saw Wyoming as a colossal gold mine. Brandall Owens thought a prison team sounded like a good idea; therefore Warden Gordon thought it sounded like a great idea. The Wolves took right away to thinking of the whole shitaree as divine.
Pastor Liverance must have thought he was scoring in some big spiritual face-off because he had volunteered out here, was here because he wanted to be—the Pope of Wyoming himself. A short man. He teetered around the pulpit on stiff new dogger-heel cowboy boots as he spoke, keeping his arms out for balance as he clunked around the wooden platform, like the tall man on stilts at the rodeo circus or a dude from out east. Or like he was wearing hockey skates in church. He never did get used to those boots and the extra two inches of height with which they endowed him.
“What’s your take out here, Pastor?” the Wolves asked at that first Christian rendezvous. No one wants to be here. Permanence isn’t Western in nature. You take what you can get, or get what you have to take, and move on, get the hell out. Vamoose. Looking down and shifting his narrow eyes, he told us: “It says in Luke to sell all that ye have, and give alms. Provide yourselves with purses that do not grow old, with a treasure in the heavens that does not fail, where no thief approaches and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”
“Say, is there a Pope of Wyoming?” I asked one evening during a Bible Study smoke break. “‘Cause if there ain’t this guy’s trying awful goddamn hard for nothing.”
“Yes, there is,” said Belecki. “Like there’s a King of Canada.” Rich Belecki was our forward, our ringer, our finisher, though the Wolves rarely started much in the way of offense that he might finish. Belecki was a white-collar, silver-spoon pretty boy previously from British Columbia, who wound up in prison by embezzling money from some oil company slush fund. He’d grown up with the game, and his family sent him valuable things like a radium-dial watch and spanking-new hockey skates. He was forever rubbing down the
rich black leather with mink oil. The rest of us had never skated in our lives, and some of the figure skates the Salvation Army gave us were white. We supposed Liverance would have to settle for martyrdom or governor. Or they could make him warden. He told us we must protect Belecki on the ice at all costs.
On the chaplain’s desk in his dank little office behind the chapel was a photograph of Maurice “the Rocket” Richard in his Canadiens uniform, his hair oiled down slick and his arm around Liverance in his white chaplain collar and black wool getup, the pastor’s hair slick and greasy too. Pastor Liverance smiled away like Christmas in the photo—teeth a yellowed gray from the Chesterfields and big fifteen-cent Webster Golden Weddings he was forever smoking—like he was thinking, “This shot will soon look great on my desk.” I didn’t know who the Rocket was until Pastor Liverance showed me his Canadiens scrapbook. Richard was the Canadiens’ goal-scoring prima donna and was subjected to many opponents’ illegalities on the ice: bad checks.
On the side of the bus we stenciled WYOMING STATE PENITENTIARY CHRISTIAN WOLVES. I told the team I read in National Geographic that packs of wolves brought down camels on this very desert just a few million years ago, and it was those camel bones making the oil men rich today.
Rob LeBlanc, who sounded French Canadian but who was really a semi-commercial catfisherman and car thief from Cameron Parish, Louisiana, said, “We have oil in the swamps. We have wolves there too and they eat chickens, ducks, and rats, and sometimes big things like children.”
Big Jimmy McGhan, an ex-marine, ex—horse thief, and the Wolves’ physical leader, said, “Remember, gentlemen, a lion from the forest shall slay them and a wolf from the desert shall destroy them.”
“Yeah,” said Fowler, a third-degree batterer and a second-line wing. “And beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves!” The rest of us just looked at each other with foreheads wrinkled.
The license plates on the bus were yellow and said WyomingJESUS in black next to a black cowboy on a black bucking bronco. All our games were away games. All games we lost by digits the scoreboards couldn’t handle.
We lost to the Sheridan Savages and the Casper Cutthroat. The Ogden Americans and the Greeley Giants. We got routed by the Vernal Vikings, Rapid City Chiefs, the Fort Collins Grizzlies. Pocatello Roughnecks. Rock Springs Miners, Billings Badgers. And hammered by the Cheyenne Buffalo.
The other teams were manned mostly by Canadian exports: some guys who were maybe on their way up to the NHL, but most who were on their way down from leagues in regions very cold and dark. Men gaining on thirty, even forty who hadn’t learned enough about anything other than hockey to make a living. Men who weren’t yet willing to give up their game to support themselves as professional cattle thieves or liquor-store robbers. So they found themselves in the Rocky Mountain Oil League, playing in dim and ratty rinks and dodging the beer, the snowballs, and the rotten potatoes that were regularly chucked onto the ice by the Oil League fans—who got into more fistfights than the players. But there were worse places to be, which we reminded them when we rolled into town from Purgatory in the Jesus bus.
Our strong suits did not include puck control or shooting. Or skating. We weren’t native to it, so we didn’t turn or stop much. But we could run. And we could skate fast, as fast and as hard as any team in the Oil League. We had conviction and spirit. And Lord, could we check!
We were the second-hardest checking team in the Rockies, maybe in America, maybe North America. Thirty-five-mile-an-hour, head-on checks. Train wrecks against the boards with a Canadian in between. And the other thing about our checks: we checked as a pack.
Big Jimmy McGhan checked the hardest of all of us and he could call the pack with the look on his face—the way his eyes glassed and sparkled under the black bristle of his eyebrows and the gray shine of his furrowed forehead, the way his neck flexed. He would snarl and light in on a target and hightail it down the ice like a mad monk, and we other Wolves raced and followed Big Jimmy to the kill— “awhooooooooooooo!” The first Wolf, Big Jimmy, would be all their guy saw: Whump! Bless you, brother! Then Whump!-Whump!-Whump! And if Lovelock, our goalie, decided to get into this: Whump! That is to say, if the big check was right at the beginning of a period and no Wolves yet paced the penalty box.
Meanwhile the crowd would be screaming and yelling in language not Christian in nature and one of the Canadians—looking over his shoulder, tail between his legs—would have nosed the puck into our goal; and the police sirens wailed and the light behind the net flashed red and the organist played a jazzy Bulgar tune that wasn’t at all like a hymn but that all the fans knew the words to, as greasy vendor items rained down on us and the refs escorted the check victim under the boards away on a Big War surplus stretcher. And it would be shoulder slaps and howls on our bench as we changed lines and another five got a shot at them. But no fighting.
Not with the other teams.
Not with each other. Not even a tickle. Not even if it wasn’t initiated by a Wolf. Not even if they well deserved a good ear-boxing or a cuff across the gums. No matter that fighting is part of the game, and every other team in the league would be justified in starting what in prison shoptalk is called a riot. The governor and Warden Gordon wanted no bad headlines in Time magazine, no bad what they call in politics public relations. They made it clear that a fight would result in the immediate extinction of the Wolves, to hell with any survival instincts we might possess in our genetic makeups.
The other Oil Leaguers didn’t know we weren’t allowed fisticuffs, and we still intimidated the hell out of them. They just figured the first one in the Oil League to mix it up with us would be the first one in the Oil League to cross the Canadian border in a plywood box. They didn’t know we weren’t that bad. Half of us had never killed anybody. Or that we skated with Jesus, whose game plan didn’t include fistfights. But what they didn’t know didn’t hurt us. So we continued to check like feral dogs, to intimidate the hell out of other teams, to avoid fighting—and to lose games. This in a time when general managers handed players twenty-five bucks under the table for initiating a ruckus. It’s what the legions of Oil League cabin-fever fans paid to see. It’s what the fans wanted to do to each other, would have done if it were legal. Sometimes they did it anyway.
Photos of the games appeared in the Cheyenne Eagle, the Rock Springs Rocket-Miner, the Billings Gazette, under captions like
PURGATORY PRISONERS PELTED AGAIN and WOLF ERADICATION UNDERWAY. Dirty kids knew us by name. Women with animals and flowers tattooed on their skin wrote us letters telling us where their animals and flowers were. We lost on the radio. Live, following Milton Berle’s Texaco Star Theater, on the big Cheyenne tower that broadcast us all over the Rockies and deserts surrounding them: 0-21-0.
Then things started to change. Some of the Wolves were slowly picking up the more tame rudiments of the game. It was as though thirty-five-mile-an-hour checks were beginning to bore them. Belecki’s adolescent puck control really started to come back to him. LeBlanc learned to turn in big arcs to the left and would sometimes even abort checks in favor of following the puck. Lovelock, the goalie, got the hang of staying in the goal crease. Nearly everyone could skate all the way across the ice to the penalty box without falling down. Pastor Liverance became even more inspired and started writing a book about Christian prison hockey as if he were writing a sequel to Exodus, a sort of how-to guide, as he was a real pioneer in the sport. I memorized new Revelations dealing with ice and the end of the world. They set one of our Wolves free.
One morning we were just boarding the bus for God-knows-where in the crisp winter sunshine and Big Jimmy McGhan said, “Wait a minute.” The Wolves all looked around and sniffed the air like we knew something wasn’t quite right, who knew what? and Big Jimmy put his finger on it and said, “Where in heaven’s name has Lucky Shepard been? How long we been playing without a backup goalie?” This is when Pastor Liverance told us Lucky had b
een paroled, had gone home to his mother in Meeteetse two weeks ago. “Think about the game, will ya?” he advised us.
It was like being born again.
We put extra oil in our hair. We did jumping jacks and push-ups twice a day. We had the boys in License Plate hone our blades after every practice and every game. We learned new verses about hope and heaven and committed them to memory. “The Lord looseth the prisoners, lets hit the road!”
“Okay, who we playing tonight?” we asked Pastor Liverance, trying to enter the world of the profound. The subject of who we played was beginning to matter to us. For the first time we saw that Christian battle had a direct bearing on our sentences as professional Wolves.
Especially if we were battling the Cheyenne Buffalo.
Cheyenne was different. The Buffalo were owned by a guy named Stumpy Wells, a greasy-rich petroleum tycoon who seemed to be forever trying to make up with his billfold for the fact that he was four feet tall. Stumpy always wore a gray eleven-gallon hat (he was bald too) and when he sat on his billfold he was bigger, much bigger, than any man in Wyoming. He recruited the best of the worst, guys actually banned from Canada, exiled to Wyoming like it was some Egyptian penal colony. Besides being able to really play hockey, these guys were tougher than harness leather. Maybe they’d beaten a ref to a bloody carcass north of the border. Maybe they’d killed somebody. Maybe they’d spent time in a Yukon hoosegow, busting rocks on the tundra. We could only guess, which we did. What we did know was that these guys were now Stumpy’s toadies, his northern-import goons. They took cheap shots at us—spearing, hooking, boarding, holding, tripping, high-sticking, elbowing, slashing, spitting, punching. And Stumpy’s refs got paid by Stumpy to let it go.
