When We Were Wolves (14 page)

Harriet is my girlfriend. She plays the tenor saxophone, and like aging mead, her hair is a slightly different color week by week. She’s British and not a Mormon, though the Mormons are how she landed here. She doesn’t like their rules; they did not tell her in England about their rules when she let them in her front door. Harriet calls them sodding Mormons, which in her British accent almost sounds like a compliment.

Now Harriet has submerged herself in Hams Fork. She waits tables at Habaneros, the Mexican restaurant next to Custer’s Last Strand Beauty Salon on the Triangle downtown. She lives in an old shotgun apartment above the restaurant that she gets rent-free
from the owners. The restaurant vents are near the window and her apartment smells like greasy Mexican cooking and old cigar smoke. The wallpaper is of yellowed Victorian flowers.

Harriet’s hair now is the kind of blonde that is really brown until she steps into the sunlight. When things get slow she trades the ladies at the salon Mexican food for hair and nail jobs. She is beautiful, with sharp European features, and I don’t know why she is my girlfriend or what she sees in me. She is wild and funny and makes me laugh. I sit and listen to her voice for hours and her stories, which are probably nothing more than small anecdotes, sound like high drama to me. Harriet likes to do things like hike up Sarpy Ridge, take her clothes off, and moon the town. She likes to say we were meant for each other, and this is something I truly believe myself, although I never repeat it back to her.

I know, when were all together, Wayne studies Harriet the way an artist studies a still life.

I come from a family of artists. My grandfather was a bootlegger from Watonga, Oklahoma. He had a line of stills out in the red dirt and blackjacks. Once a week he’d load up his old Chrysler with lugs of moonshine and drive—fishing tackle hanging out the window—to Seventh and Broadway in Oklahoma City, where he’d deal them out of the sales manager’s office of McDonald-Scott Chevrolet. Said he got the scar on the bridge of his nose from drinking out of fruit jars. His whiskey was the best that side of Wyoming—no Arkansas bathtub jakeleg. Grandpa distilled a special Christmas hootch for the local sheriff. He knew who to pay.

The Whiskey Road runs from Hams Fork—our town—to Honeyville, Utah. During Prohibition, Hams Fork was the prostitution-and-moonshine capital of the West, and Hams Fork Moon was famous. Now my grandpa is buried in Oklahoma, and Hams Fork
is known only for its huge population of Mormons and its open-pit coal mine. The Whiskey Road is washed out and rutted, but we use it in the warmer months when the Utah State Patrol sets roadblocks on the Wyoming line. We’ve been stuck in the mud. We’ve broken down with a full load of mead. We’ve been shot at by ranchers. But we can always say we’re just hauling honey. This is the can-of-corn part of the job, right down U.S. 30 to our port of call, Hams Fork. If we get stopped, all Wayne has to do is say he likes honey on his pancakes. Wayne loves his pancakes. He catches his breath.
Wastin away again in Honeyville … lookin for my lost three-legged dog
… The Mormons know our mead is the best— the most medicinal, as they say—this side of the Continental Divide: our mead packs 16 percent alcohol. Stand next to the Hams Fork City Limit sign and you can throw a rock almost into Utah. This I have done.

Maybe sailing the Seven Seas is Robin’s dream too, I don’t know. Robin is the wife Wayne married. She’s a bird-watcher and a math teacher. She’s the kind of woman I’d like to marry but Wayne got to her first. The cat’s name is Heck. Wayne says Heck’s job will be to keep wharf mice out of the hold. Wayne says now he just sneaks around the yard and eats birds. Heck was Wayne’s idea.

Like Heck, Wayne prefers the dark meat too. On Thanksgiving and Christmas, after quaffing much morning mead, Wayne jerks the legs off the hot turkey and hoists them in the air like Henry VIII or a Viking.

Late at night in summer we drive the honey truck up-country and poach shipwood on the National Forest. We choose the cleanest, straightest pines and Douglas firs, fell them and deck them, the
hot buzz of the chain saw in our ears. Some of the trees we buck into ten-foot logs and stack inside the truck. Some we leave long and I winch them on top of the truck with a come-along.

Wayne’s painting studio has become a workshop. An edger, a planer, a table saw, drill press, lathe. Sawdust covers the floor, the easels, the framed figures of buxom models. Sketches of boats are taped to everything. The log that will become the boat’s prow is solid European maple, from a 150-year-old tree we felled at two
A.M
. in the bishop’s front yard.

“A good boat is like a woman,” Wayne says. “The malty smell of warm wood, the sanded lines of the bow, curves you can get lost in. You can fall in love with a boat.” Wayne says that someday he’s going to capture love in his art. He says “love” like it’s the rarest of wild animals, never been snared before, and this boat is the most cunning of traps. I help Wayne with the heavy wooden pieces because Wayne has a bad back and cannot lift anything heavier than a camel-hair paintbrush.

A wooden fence surrounds the
Cuba Libre’s
skeleton in the back yard Wayne now calls the Tropic of Kerr. In winter, like now, the boat’s backbone and ribs stick out of the snow like giant wishbones on a white beach, a whale beached in snow. I stand inside what will be the
Cuba Libre
’s doghouse and I’m like Jonah, Jonah of Hams Fork. You can tell the temperature by the sound your boots make— the colder it is, the louder the crunch.

Lot Young, next door, pretends to do yard work—raking snow, shoveling frost—so he can watch Wayne Kerr build his dream. Lot is caught in a role with many kids and one wife and can no longer have dreams. “Say, Noah!” calls Lot. “How long ‘til it starts raining?”

“Not long now!” yells Wayne. “Just time enough for me to finish building and collect two of each kind!”

“How’s that?”

“You know: two blondes, two brunettes, two redheads!”

When the Vikings died and went to Valhalla, the warrior maidens served them horns of mead: when the battles ended, the Valkyries became waitresses. Four o’clock is tea time. I’m on the tea standard now. Before I met Harriet, four meant a Coke and two cigarettes. Now, no matter, four means tea.

Our meadery is in Wayne and Robins basement, where everything is safely hidden from taxes and regulations. Heck and I sleep in the basement. I keep a cot in what used to be Robin’s sewing room. Every Saturday Robin changes my bedding. Harriet’s futon is warm and her sheets are flannel, but I like the independence of being able to stay in the meadery sometimes, where I drift off to sleep to the smell of honey and yeast, and not enchiladas.

But in the afternoon—after checking thermometers, hydrometers, fermentation locks, sterilizing barrels—when the winter sun has started to drop behind Utah, I stroll over the Tropic of Kerr, through the gate, across the alley and the Coast to Coast parking lot, to Habaneros on the Triangle. Robin will be there, grading papers, forever grading papers, and we’ll tear open little restaurant packets of artificial creamer and honey and drink tea with Harriet and eat sugared little greasy things Alex the cook fries up for us between real orders. It’s in the four o’clock hour that it just doesn’t matter that I have a chimichanga haircut, need some dental work, have no health insurance. I’ve lived here long enough to know this Wyoming wind could bring a tempest, could bring anything. The honeybees came on ships from Europe almost four hundred years ago. Now the bees are the figurehead of a state that doesn’t even allow mead.

Sometimes I picture them on the
Cuba Libre
—Wayne in the pulpit, a mad Viking, gray hair and beard in the wind like an unfurled
jib, spray over his bow. Robin is grading papers. Wayne could rape and pillage all of Great Britain while Robin stayed aboard to finish red-penning eleventh-hour geometry quizzes.

The only thing I remember about geometry class is that you are allowed one “given.” This is my given: I know how to make mead.

The legend is that mead is an aphrodisiac, so in a way what I do is ferment love. The Mormon men drink mead for virility and fertility: It is believed that mead drinkers father more sons.

In the days of the Norsemen, when great men were made from the spit of gods, dwarfs brewed a magic mead from the blood of a poet. The dwarfs lured the poet into their caverns and ran him through with swords. They poured his blood into three jars and mixed it with honey. From this wort they brewed the magic mead. Anyone who drank the mead could have wisdom.