by Jon Billman
Wayne had left the new Foot Joys at home and laced up his weathered Sorel pac boots. By playing in mittens now, he reasoned, think how deft I’ll be in golf gloves come June.
Wayne had long suffered from a chronic bad back. He had thrown it out lifting heavy compressed-air tanks for his portable airbrush. Wayne approached painting with the savvy of the best insurance adjustors—gotta be in the field when the hurricane hits. He hadn’t counted on being in the field all night long, nightfall, and bitter arrows of cold.
“Just a few swings,” he had told his wife, Robin, a bird-watcher and dog-lover and math teacher by nature. “An hour of uncoordinated slogging to knock off the rust.”
When Wayne hadn’t returned home well after dinnertime, Robin took this to mean he would be closing down the Dry Cow or the 189 or the Location, and as she had to get up at dawn to prepare to teach middle-schoolers how to be people, she fell asleep and wouldn’t miss the ruptured artist until morning, then not until after her second cup of coffee.
Wayne kept his eyes snaked downward, watching the frost build in tiny crystalline sculptures on his beard.
“Hello! Hello! Over here!” he shouted. Then, weakly, “Help.” He knew his voice didn’t reach as far as the highway, or even to the Hams Fork River that ran along the west edge of the course.
Wayne tried propelling himself with his heels, like a boat, but moved only a quarter inch with each kick, and each kick caused his pants to pull back in cruel proportion. The pain ripped down his back and into his left leg, which ceased to kick. The artist’s capillaries, now dilated with exercise, transported the heat to his skin. Wayne’s sweat-soaked cotton underwear, flannel shirt, and cotton sweatpants pulled at his core heat and quickly dispensed it into the evening air like a truck radiator. A cold burn marked the spot where his bare maximus touched snow. Sharp pain cut at his wrists where his cuffs didn’t quite reach his mittens. Now the spasm in his back—the ruptured disk swollen like a wet horsehide baseball—wouldn’t allow him any more movement than to touch his nose with his fingertip like a stopped drunk driver. He missed his nose on the first try in the numbing cold and poked himself in the eye.
Full-blown night had fallen on the Hams Fork Valley. The Hale-Bopp comet loomed overhead in the northwest. So dark, so very dark, the light of the comet was brilliant—Wayne could clearly see the comet’s vapor trail. To him it resembled a submerged Alka-Seltzer.
A bark in the far distance. They found him. It was Pete. Lily couldn’t be far behind. “Get help!” Wayne yelled, slowly rolling his head in their direction. They had seen Wayne’s truck, tailgate down, and were now both happily dancing around the bed. Wayne could just make out their furry movements in the security light of the clubhouse parking lot.
Wayne had obtained the dogs, curs mixed with a little Border collie, a little Norwegian elkhound, quite a little something else, when Robins mother in Idaho had moved from the acreage to a facility in town. Wayne kept food and water for the dogs at first, but, over Robins protests, gradually allowed them to set their own boundaries because, as a painter, he had better things to do than shovel dog shit, even though Robin did all of the scooping. “This is open-range Wyoming,” he said. “Besides, fencing is inhumane.”
Some days, when he walked from the IGA parking lot to his pickup, the dogs would spot him and light out for their favorite artist. Wayne would hobble, arms loaded with grocery sacks, to the truck, start the engine, and speed home, the brace of dogs in hot pursuit. At the gas station he’d call, “Lily! Pete! How in heaven are my dogs!” then spin gravel on his way to canine-free 714 Cedar Street.
Sometimes the dogs would follow him all the way home, where Robin spoiled them with hot dogs and elk jerky—Wayne’s private stash—but most often they got distracted by other dogs or wild animals along the way—mice, rabbits, deer, ticks, worms. Folks in town, dog lovers, often fed them, and better than Wayne Kerr ever did with his hard off-brand kibble. The dogs had seen Wayne on his way to the golf course but a stunned mule doe ran in front of them and through the bank parking lot and Wayne was forgotten. What he saved in dog food was now costing him dearly.
Wayne didn’t know that his core temperature had lowered to ninety-seven degrees. The muscles of his upper back, shoulders, and neck had contracted in what researchers call pre-shivering muscle tone.
He tried to meditate. His mind went to a dream state. He reminded himself that he couldn’t sleep, for sleep would result in death. Death would come in the form of warmth, he knew. Wayne was cold to the bone, but cold meant he was still alive, now thankful for the excess body fat he carried. He imagined a New York gallery premiere, a showing wherein he walked, decked in black tie and tails, from painting to painting, one glorious and divine explosion of color to the next, gently spilling champagne from the crystal glass in his palm to the golden carpet, an offering to the gods of inspiration and success. Standing on the carpet were hundreds of polished dress shoes with tassels—art enthusiasts!
“So it wouldn’t be lack of a model that would keep me from painting the best work of my life,” Wayne mumbled through his frozen beard. Golf. Golf will keep me from leaving my mark. And no honorable Grim Reaper—just a visit on the links from Jack Frost himself half a mile from the IGA parking lot. This is the artistic equivalent of coitus interruptus—only to have back all that time wasted in bed!
Why didn’t I bring my cell phone? He remembered reading of a mountaineer who froze to death near the summit of Mount Everest. There was a fierce storm and the man had little hope of being rescued, but he pulled out his cell phone and called his wife and told her good night before he died. Everything was about satellites.
The cell phone sat on the seat of the Apache, now guarded by two sleeping dogs. Instead of putting the phone in the golf bag like so many dentists and CPAs, he had slipped two Wyoming bagels— Pabst Blue Ribbons—into the side pocket where his cell phone wasn’t: dinner.
Half the beer ran through his beard, temporarily thawing some of the ice, then refreezing yellow hoar. Though the beer was cold, desperate respiration had left Wayne feeling dehydrated. The alcohol warmed him temporarily, but he knew the beer would eventually work against him, throwing a monkey wrench at his hypothalamus, his thermostat gone haywire. The cold that he felt on his skin would soon settle in his core. In the dead silence of the night, he could hear the hard slosh of liquid down his throat, the pumping of blood in his ears. He no longer felt the pain in his back.
Wayne needed, while he still had some of his faculties, to write his will. From his jacket pocket he produced a three-inch score pencil that read Eat at Luigi’s in tiny letters and two wadded dollar bills— they would have to work. Everything to Robin. Everything. He gripped the pencil like a chisel, the dollar bills unfolded flat against his mittened right palm. She was good enough for his last donation.
He carefully carved the message with the pencil, concentrating on each letter like the lines of a painting, and resting between words:
MAY YOU MARRY
SOMEONE
WHO APPRECIATES WHAT
YOU HAVE TO
OFFER. SORRY I
DIDN’T, EVERYTHING
IS YOURS.
LOVE
ANYWAY,
WAYNE
Wayne thought about the will for a long time. Here the artist would view his life like a mural. He had been what he thought of as happy—nothing like forced reflection and bleak prospects to show your life really isn’t as great as it seems. There was the temptation to informally will something lewd, a frozen body part, to the Mormon church, the Baptists maybe, but now they were the warm ones in their glowing chapels, and what if such a gesture was the straw that kept him out of one of their heavens? Lying on his back in the snow, Wayne felt only envy toward them, no rancor. He wadded the bills and painfully shoved them back in his pocket.
Fifteen minutes later he pissed his pants.
Wayne didn’t understand the physiology of what was happening. For an hour he had been in the t
emperature range which renders the enzymes in your brain sluggish and inefficient. To Wayne it seemed like alcohol, but without the beautiful warmth that went with it. Wayne’s cerebral metabolic rate now fell 4 percent with every one-degree drop in body temperature. Amnesia would come when his core temperature dropped to ninety-three—good thing the will was finished.
Blood thick as cold olive oil. His oxygen intake had fallen off. Arrhythmic heart. Hallucinations.
One foot in the Mead Hall and Grendel is about to rip the frozen meat from my bones. Heavy breathing. The Donner Party? No. Horses. The mighty Seventh Cavalry has arrived! Corporal, get this man some blankets and build a fire. Well break here for coffee.
Real hypothermia. Just before total loss of consciousness, Wayne felt an intense heat. The constricted blood vessels near his body’s surface dilated suddenly, producing the sensation of burning skin. Not too close to the fire, Corporal, careful!
Wayne threw off his mittens and tore at his down coat. He unzipped it and began to unbutton his flannel shirt, but his plastic fingers were so stiff he could only rip the buttons off. Legs on fire, he tried kicking at his sweatpants, the snow, sweat, and piss frozen stiff hours ago, but his back wouldn’t allow it. Burning to death, Wayne screamed a banshee scream.
Dead silence.
He watched the breath of scream rise and vaporize in the night air. Was he dreaming? Was this hell? A test before heaven? In a way, this exposure was more like painting than anything else he’d experienced. Wayne had created the situation for himself, a universe of his own making. He would suffer through this canvas of elements, then seal the experience with a signature. Years ago, when Wayne’s painting had been real, paintings would sometimes take him in, shake and threaten him, but always throw him back, which was a relief—and often enough to keep him from painting again for months at a time. This time the signature would be the county coroner’s.
Wayne, sure now he heard heavy breathing and footfalls, tried to muster up all his attention and focus on reality for just a few seconds. A brief period of lucidity. Yes, very real breathing and running.
The dogs drew up on top of Wayne and, taking turns standing on their master, commenced to lick the frost, frozen spittle, beer, and snot from Wayne’s beard.
Pete brought a mouse and dropped it on Wayne’s chin, an offering of food as genuine and generous as anything ever given to Wayne. The dogs circled and pawed the artist in his down coat, now ripped. Tiny goose feathers floated in the air. To a would-be rescuer it might have appeared the dogs had happened upon a giant pigeon.
The dogs settled in, one on each side atop their master. Wayne lay there staring out the round hole his hood made against the night sky. He could see the comet between the dogs’ muzzles, Hale-Bopp, and its vapor trail. Mars was brighter than it would be for the next several centuries. Orion, virile as ever, three stars in his belt. Venus, close to the morning horizon. I could paint her, thought Wayne. I could have her in my studio and paint her. The Big Dipper might have been full of hot coffee, the Little Dipper a splash of Jim Beam.
Now a kind of numb peace eased him into sleep, remembering how Custer’s dogs kept the Indian fighter warm on high plains winter nights. At times Wayne would wake, but just long enough to tell himself he was alive, beating back the black wolf of hypothermia that would have eaten a skinny man hours ago. He could feel the canine heat from both sides. If he got hungry enough he had a mouse, which he clutched like a teddy bear against his chest.
Wayne, bourbon-warm through his core, fell asleep hard and slept through the coldest hour, early morning, just before dawn. He slept through the bread trucks grinding up 189 and out of the Hams Fork Valley. He slept past the shift change at the coal mine, when a steady convoy of pickup trucks and old cars whine up and down the highway and cross the river at the bridge just below the golf course. He slept through the spring morning song of tough Wyoming robins. Eyes closed, he slept through the warming sun, his bodyguards pressed close as the subtle heat reached the three of them from ninety-two million miles away and cast a small shadow on the sand and snow behind them, behind the dogs and still-life mound of Wayne.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JON BILLMAN has worked as a wildland firefighter and seventh-grade teacher. He is now at work on a novel. He lives in Kemmerer, Wyoming.
ABOUT THE TYPE
This book was set in Fairfield, the first typeface from the hand of the distinguished American artist and engraver Rudolph Ruzicka (1883–1978). Rudolph Ruzicka was born in Bohemia and came to America in 1894. He set up his own shop, devoted to wood engraving and printing, in New York in 1913 after a varied career working as a wood engraver, in photoengraving and banknote printing plants, and as an art director and freelance artist. He designed and illustrated many books, and was the creator of a considerable list of individual prints—wood engravings, line engravings on copper, and aquatints.
Copyright © 1999 by Jon Billman
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Some of the stories in this work were originally published in Ascent, Esquire, High Plains Literary Review, Missouri Review, Owen Wister Review, Paris Review, Redneck Review, Scribner’s Best of the Fiction Workshops 1997, South Dakota Review, Zoetrope, and ZYZZYVA. In addition, “Calcutta” appeared on the Sam Adams Web Page.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Billman, Jon.
When we were wolves: stories / Jon Billman.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-56851-9
1. Country life—West (U.S.) Fiction. 2. West (U.S.)—Social life and customs Fiction. I. Title.
PS3552.I472W48 1999 813’.54—dc21 99-14952
Random House website address: www.atrandom.com
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