The painting was smaller than you might have expected from Frida Kahlo, who has a larger than life (and death) presence. It was lit by its own little lamp and it glowed with fierce determination. Frida stared at me intensely, eyes hedged by a thicket of barbed-wire eyebrows. A monkey balanced on her shoulder and a banner waved underneath her with the words ARBOL DE LA ESPERANZA, MANTENTE FIRME. Tree of hope, keep firm. It looked like someone had sold off just about everything of value in the house except this painting, which was probably worth more than the rest of the stuff put together and not just monetarily either.
Juan noticed me standing in front of Frida. “You like that picture ?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
He shook his head in disbelief. “So does Jayne. What do people like about it anyway?”
I thought for a moment and remembered something the Kid once said about me. “She had balls.”
“Jayne says its spirit is that if you’re treading on thin ice then you might as well dance.”
“That, too.” Frida, after all, had had numerous affairs with Trotsky and various others in between bouts of rotten health and unimaginable pain.
“Me, I like to see women smiling,” Juan said.
“You’re not one of those guys who stops women on the street and says ‘smile,’ are you?”
“When they look unhappy I do,” he said.
Juan pointed the way down the hall to the guest room. The house was shaped like an L. The living room was at one end of it, my bedroom at the other, the walled courtyard in between. The guest room was spare as a nun’s cell. It was old and neglected, unlike my place which was neglected and new. This floor was bare, mine was yellow shag. This furniture was old and wood, mine was new and laminated. The room probably had its own ghosts but at least it didn’t yet have mine. The window was open; I closed it. I travel light and it took only a few minutes to unpack.
When I got back to the living room three more guests had arrived. Jayne introduced me first to Bob Bartel, a biologist who worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the Soledad area. He was fortyish, well over six feet tall and lanky, with the soft brown eyes of a gentle dog. He wore a short-sleeved pale green polyester shirt, darker green polyester Levi’s, a belt with a silver Indian buckle, a bolo. It could have been a uniform, except for the buckle. “Howdy,” he said to me.
“Howdy,” I replied.
Bartel stood beside a couple whom Jayne introduced as Don and Perla Phillips, owners of the neighboring ranch. “I betcha ‘neighbor’ doesn’t mean here what it does where you’re from,” Don Phillips said affably.
“You’re probably right,” I answered, thinking of my neighbors at La Vista whom I never saw but sometimes heard pounding each other into the wall we shared. The only way you’d hear a neighbor out here would be if they called you on the telephone, the only way you’d see them was if they drove up the road.
“Where are you from?” asked Perla.
“Albuquerque,” I replied. She had the grace not to ask why anybody would want to live there. She was affable, too. Perla was about 5´2˝ and a little on the plump side. He was medium tall, stocky and strong. They were both rosy-cheeked blonds with fine hair who looked like they ate beef and drank milk.
“Jayne’s our nearest neighbor and her house is fifteen miles away as the crow flies,” Don said, “a lot further than that by road.”
Jayne looked at her watch. “Where is Buddy Ohles anyway?” she said.
“Can’t we start without him?” Juan asked.
Jayne shrugged. “He’s the ADC representative; he’ll want to be heard.” She was acting like a conductor who needed to have all her players in place before she could begin the performance.
The ADC or Animal Damage Control, I knew, is a branch of the Agriculture Department. It is known to some as All the Dead Critters because one of its functions is killing animals that are bothering ranchers. Unlike many federal employees, ADC hunters are known for the enthusiasm they bring to their work.
“Mark my words, as soon as you start Buddy will show up,” Bob Bartel said.
Jayne looked at her watch again and stood up. “Well, as you all know, the Endangered Species Act requires the federal government to reintroduce species like the lobo, the Mexican gray wolf, that have become extinct in the U.S. The government has come up with a plan …”
“I hope they printed it on smooth paper,” spoke a voice from the doorway of the living room.
Don Phillips grinned. “Once you start talking about wolf reintroduction, you can count on Buddy.”
“Damn right,” said Buddy. He was a ferret of a fellow, about 5´8˝, with sharp features and bright little eyes, dressed in camouflage hunting gear and boots, a foot soldier in the war against wildlife.
Jayne ignored him and continued. “The only site that has been offered so far is the White Sands Missile Range. In spite of the testing that goes on there, it is actually not a bad habitat for the wolf. They’ve got thirty-two hundred square miles, there are plenty of elk and other suitable prey, cattle grazing isn’t allowed, there is limited human access.”
“The problem is the wolf’s not gonna stay on the missile range,” Buddy said. “Would you?”
Jayne stared him down and kept on going. “With all due respect to Norm Alexander, Juan has probably spent as much time with wolves as anyone and probably knows as much about the wolf as anyone,” she smiled at Norm and then at Juan. Her smiles seemed softer in the evening light than they had in the afternoon. I wondered if she’d put pink bulbs in her lamps. Dusk wasn’t kind to Southwestern women, but this was a very dark dusk; a summer storm was moving in. I could already hear the distant thunder. “There has been a lot of misinformation about wolves. Since Juan is in Soledad giving his program at the high school anyway, he’d like to share some of his knowledge with us.”
Buddy had moved up closer to Jayne. It’s hard to keep a man who’s been licensed to kill by the federal government in the back row. “There’s only one thing you need to know, a wolf’s gotta eat to live and a wolf don’t know the difference between a fast elk and a slow elk. That’s a cow,” he said to those of us who weren’t ranchers. “A wolf don’t know the difference between the White Sands Missile Range and Don Phillips’s ranch. Now if Don here calls me up and tells me that one of those lobos has wandered down his way and is killing his stock, why I’m gonna have to shoot him, endangered species or no, that’s the law.”
“Is it, Neil?” asked Jayne.
"Yes and no," I replied. "If the lobo is released as part of an experimental population, it is the law. If they come back on their own, it's not. An endangered species that isn't considered an experimental population can't legally be shot for killing livestock without a federal permit. It makes it difficult, if not impossible." I'd been doing my homework.
"You a lawyer?" Buddy Ohles asked.
"Yes."
"Goddamn. You can't even go to the bathroom anymore without a lawyer wanting money to tell you how to do it."
I'm used to hearing my profession maligned, it happens all the time, but by someone who kills wildlife for a living?
The meeting was slipping away from Jayne and she tried to grab it back."Some of the environmental groups intend to put money aside to compensate ranchers for losses."
Don Phillips stood, hitched up his jeans, smiled slowly and said, “I reckon I can speak to that.” He was perfectly at ease, but you’d have to expect that from a rancher. They’re well known for their PR skills. Anyone who has seen them in action knows better than to underestimate their effectiveness. They’re well organized, too. Ranchers turn out for meetings, shuffle their boots, hold their hats in their hands and get what they want. Their percentage of the population is declining—only 4 percent now—but you wouldn’t know it from the impact they have. The mystique endures. “You know my great-granddaddy came to Soledad Country in 1885 and we’ve been ranching here ever since then,” Don said. A rancher can use the word “granddaddy” and get away w
ith it. “A wolf’s got a range of up to a thousand square miles. They’re good travelers and can cover one hundred miles in a day. They’re not gonna stay on White Sands, and I’ve got the statistics to prove it on my computer, if anybody’s interested.”
Juan Sololobo reached for his coffee cup, and I noticed that he had L-O-V-E tattooed on the fingers of one hand between the knuckle and the first joint and W-O-L-F tattooed in the same place on the other. He was guzzling coffee like it was beer. People who drink too much coffee often used to drink too much something else, one rush replaces another. Caffeine is a more socially acceptable addiction, but chugging it didn’t do anything to erase the impression that Juan was a man with errant chromosomes. He was still wearing his Levi’s jacket with the sleeves cut off and his hard-muscled arms exposed, which didn’t help either. The outlaw persona was probably more effective with Upward Bound students than with ranchers. He was about to speak but Bob Bartel beat him to it.
“Those statistics don’t relate to the lobo,” Bartel said. “We’ve never really had the opportunity to study the lobo in the wild.”
Don Phillips continued. “Bloodlines are very important to us. I’ve got cows that are worth $20,000 and we inseminate them with bulls worth a million. Those cows contain genetics that are not reproducible and have taken us fifty years to achieve.”
“Now how are you going to compensate a rancher for a loss like that?” barked Buddy Ohles. “Those cattle are an investment in the future. You gonna compensate for the offspring and the offspring’s offspring?”
Perla Phillips had her say. “You know, the wolves were removed once before because they were a problem. If the city people had to live out here with young children like we do, they wouldn’t be so eager to bring them back.”
“There has never been a documented case of an unprovoked wolf attack against a human being in America,” Juan said. “The wolf’s got millions of years of genetic coding not to kill humans and it’s spent a lot of those years learning to fear ’em, too. It’s not gonna start killing now. What animal would want to eat a human anyway? They’re the dirtiest, smelliest critter around.”
Perla ignored him. “Once those things start roaming around you never know what’s gonna happen. Man’s got the responsibility to manage the resources God gave us. It says so in Genesis 1:26.”
It was getting to be too much for Juan. “You know, the Indians lived in harmony with the wolves and all living creatures until your granddaddies came here with their goddamn bibles.”
“You don’t believe in the bible? I bet you don’t believe in God or the devil either,” said Perla.
“I believe in the interrelatedness of all living things,” said Juan.
I believed in looking out the window. Wrangling was lawyer’s work, but on this trip I’d been hired to take care of a permit, not to settle unsettleable disputes. I tuned out Buddy Ohles’s invective, Don Phillips’s self-serving propaganda, Perla’s preaching, Juan Sololobo’s defense and thought about God and the weather. It’s no secret that man creates God in his own image. Since the symbol of power in America is a late-middle-aged white man you’d have to expect God to be, too. That’s the kind of God who knows all the answers, gives all the orders, expects them to be obeyed and pulls out the thunder and lightning and high-tech weapons when they’re not. As for the weather, it happened to be getting a lot darker outside than it ought to be at this time of day and year. Given the kind of fuss the prevailing winds were making, they had to be whipping the road into dust devils, crashing against the Soledads, turning back on themselves like riptides and making a whirlpool around the house. The house seemed agreeable—a place that was accustomed to being trashed by the elements. The occupants were at each other’s throats. It made you wonder what purpose could possibly be served by bringing together such disparate points of view about anything, especially the wolf. There didn’t seem to be any meeting ground when it came to wolves. Either you loved them or you hated them, either you believed in the devil or you didn’t, either you faced your own internal mess or you projected it onto something else and declared war. The wolf was a handy target for man’s darkness—it had been for millenniums—but getting rid of them hadn’t gotten rid of the darkness.
The windows were open to the restless wind and the velvet drapes shifted arthritically like an old lady trying to get comfortable. A flash of lightning x-rayed the tree outside the window, overexposing its forked limbs. Thunder rumbled. I wondered idly whether this was going to be a rainstorm or hail. Either one is a force to be reckoned with. Rain pelts with a sharp sting, reactivates waterfalls and gets the diversion channels churning, stops cars dead in the road where those CAUTION WATCH FOR WATER signs are located. Hail comes in the size of a pebble or a golf ball. Hail turns heat to hypothermia. Hail flattens gardens, dents cars, causes automobile dealers to sell whole lots cheap. It’s fun to watch, if you’re inside and don’t have a garden or a new car.
Lost in my weather reverie, I was as startled as everyone else when a loud howl came from just outside a velvet-draped casement window. “Aaahoooo,” it went, sounding to me like the wolf was at the window. In the circumstances I should have feared more for the wolf than for myself, but I couldn’t stop the lizard that clawed up my spine.
“What the…” Juan said as he jumped out of his chair.
The curtains parted and something shaggy and human-sized stepped into the room. It stood on two legs, wore a carefully crafted papier-mâché mask with pointed ears and yellow eyes, and had a piece of ratty gray fur with a long tail hanging down its back. It made a shadow on the wall much larger than human-sized. The ghost of a Pawnee scout? A Navajo skinwalker? The bogeyman? A sheep in wolf’s clothing? It shook its shoulders and the fur shimmied, revealing a pair of Reebok running shoes.
“Charlie Clark,” Bob Bartel chuckled, “I’d know you anywhere.”
4
CHARLIE CLARK TOOK off the wolf mask, tucked it under his elbow and grinned at us. Once the mask was off, his hair sprung loose. Another mophead, he had hair as curly as the Kid’s, but lighter and finer. He looked about the same age, making him mid-twenties, but he seemed younger than that in spirit. The Kid has an old soul—the price you pay for growing up in Mexico. The price you pay for growing up in the U.S.A. may be a soul that is permanently imprinted sixteen. The wolf boy’s gray eyes shone brightly behind his granny glasses and he seemed quite pleased with the effect he was having. “Howdy, folks.” Charlie said. Perla Phillips, who didn’t look the least bit pleased, got up and left the room.
“And now I suppose we gotta listen to the opinion of the goddamn Sahara Club,” grumbled Buddy Ohles, “who don’t give a damn about our national defense or our mission. Don’t give a damn about economics, jobs or anything else that matters to real people.”
“Wrong again, Buddy. I’m with Wolf Alliance.”
“Why don’t you just wag your tail and go on back where you came from?” Buddy asked. “We don’t need your people down here no more than we need wolves.”
“I’m a native New Mexican,” Charlie replied, “got no other place to go back to.”
“Goddamn environ-meddlers. You know the wolves ain’t gonna be hanging around White Sands on Sundays waiting for city people to come by and take pictures of ’em. If people want to look at ’em they can go to zoos. That’s where they belong. They never were smart enough to survive in the wild anyway.”
“The reason they didn’t survive in the wild is because you guys did everything but nuke ’em. You would have done that, too, if you’d had the weapons,” said Charlie.
“Well, the coyote survived, didn’t it?” asked Buddy. Coyote is a two-syllable word in Soledad, pronounced ki-oat.
“With no help from the ADC. You guys killed 86,000 of ’em last year.”
“And we performed a real service to the citizens of this country, too.”
“Right. What you got for your trouble is a smarter coyote whose litters get bigger every year to compensate for the losse
s. You keep this up and the coyote will get so smart, it will pick up your guns and fire back. Ranchers could practice some husbandry techniques: guard dogs, better fencing, night herding, night corralling. They can’t go on turning livestock loose forever and expect the rest of us to pay for the losses.”
Buddy squinted his eyes and looked close at Charlie Clark. “You got that pale, unhealthy look of a veterinarian. I bet you wear leather shoes, though, don’t you?”
“I’m wearing running shoes, Buddy, see?”
“Why don’t you run on home?”
Bob Bartel chuckled to himself while this dialogue went on. Norman Alexander looked at his watch. Juan Sololobo stared with dazed disbelief, shifting his coffee cup from one tattooed hand to the other. He was used to being the center of attention and this meeting had taken a turn he hadn’t anticipated, although he may have been relieved to see someone else taking the heat. Hail began to fall, bouncing hard as it hit the roof and the ground like golf balls from heaven.
“Shut the windows,” Jayne demanded of someone, anyone.
Juan got up, bumped into the coffee table and sent a cup of coffee tumbling to the floor.
“Shit,” said Jayne.
“Sorry,” mumbled Juan, bending over to pick up the coffee cup.
Don Phillips got to the windows first and wrestled them shut, but not before some hail bounced in. I went over, picked an ice ball off the floor and cradled it in my hand. It took a powerful high-altitude storm to produce something as big and cold as that when it had been a hundred hot degrees a few minutes ago. It was tempting to run outside and cool off, but the hail was hard and would hurt like the ice balls little boys threw at little girls where I grew up. I watched it fall and in a few minutes the ground was white. As soon as it stopped the kids around here (who may have never seen snow) would probably figure out how to put socks on for mittens and start throwing it. Perla Phillips came back into the room, went to her husband’s side and whispered in his ear. Don listened carefully and put his arm around her.
The Wolf Path Page 4
