When We Were Wolves (26 page)

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 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.”

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 Bulldogs 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.

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.

“If you were captured by the Sioux, the idea was to shoot yourself before they had a chance to torture you.” The actor steers with his knees, making finger pistols in the air over the steering wheel. “Troopers kept one round, their last round, for just that purpose. Shoot yourself in the head before they could cut your heart out while you watched.”

The road is rough here and cuts through the charcoal remains
of a forest fire that burned most of the salable Northern Cheyenne Reservation, but it gets better when they hit Ashland, back to everyone’s Montana.

“Private,” says the Colonel, not shouting over the rattle and thunk of the car so that his words are lost in the noise and it appears that he is just moving his lips, “know what the slowest thing in the world is?” The warm July wind rushes through the open windows and the gaps in the brittle rubber gasket surrounding the windshield. The Private is used to this Maverick lip-reading.

“Besides us right now?” says the Private. The muffler and tailpipe have a few holes in them, like tin whistles, and the sunflower seeds taste like exhaust. “It’s either us right now or a reservation funeral procession with only one set of jumper cables,” says the Private. The speedometer needle is shaking at around fifty-one miles an hour.

The Private isn’t laughing. Charley Reynolds isn’t laughing. The Colonel’s eyes glass over at the humble recognition that he’s just told a joke everyone heard many campaigns ago. But as you get older—he is forty-one, nearly past his Custer prime—you forget. Everything turns to history with daguerreotype eyes and brittle, yellowed edges.

Charley Reynolds stands on the Private’s lap and sticks his nose into the fifty-one-mile-an-hour prairie wind. The Private lets his palm ride on the stream of air and dreams of becoming a scout. The Colonel talks numbers. Bag limits. Length, girth, weight. Hook size. Tippet strength. Rod action. He talks of the beefiest brown in Montana, the heftiest rainbow in Dakota Territory. “Pleistocene man used shards of bone for hooks,” he says.
“Indians used rock-hard spirals of rawhide until we traded steel hooks with them. Custer used steel.”

What is different about Sue’s flies, different from the flies tied by hundreds of nimble-fingered Western women for pennies apiece, is that they are tied for fish, not for fishermen and their aesthetics. Unless, that is, they are true fishermen and know the difference deep inside, like right and wrong.

Her flies have something of the ancient in them, borrowing from her ancestors on the frontier, as well as from evolution: her Darwinian ancestors, the fish. Sue tests her flies in an old aquarium in her workroom. The aquarium is stained, filled with the murky water of the Little Bighorn. With a pair of fencing pliers, she cuts the hook off at the bend and ties it onto a length of leader attached to a two-foot-long willow branch and flings it into the tank from across the small room. Weight. Aerodynamics. Flight. She is looking for balance. In the aquarium are several small rainbow and brown trout. Sue gets on her back, crawls underneath the aquarium stand, and studies the trouts’ reactions to the new insects through the tank’s glass bottom.

After only a week she throws a burlap water bag over her shoulder and walks to the river to turn the trout back into the Little Bighorn. “Thank you,” she tells them, “thank you. Goodbye.” She then unfolds the little pack rod from her day pack and ties on one of her new and experimental flies. She casts and catches new fish to help her with her work. Though it rarely happens, if she does not catch new helper-fish, she walks back to the trailer with the empty burlap bag, thinking about how she is going to adjust the new patterns. She enjoys being outsmarted now and then.

What matters is what an imitation looks like on the water, in the water, not warm and dry in a tackle shop that smells like chicken livers and epoxy. Sue’s workroom smells like old wool, spruce, and duck feathers. Damp dog, river water, coffee. She rendezvouses
with Ben Fish at the river and bails the aquarium out once a week, trout or no trout.

If it is late and he is drunk, the Colonel may tell you Sue ties the most beautiful, most perfect trout flies in the Louisiana Purchase. The Colonel calls them bugs.

Mr. and Mrs. Owen Doggett celebrated their three-year anniversary by getting a six-pack of Heineken instead of Rainier and toasting the event at home while watching
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
on video.

A week later, that belly-dancing night at the Mint, Sue said only this: “Three strikes, you’re out.” The faraway look in the Colonel’s eyes was a sure sign he knew she meant it and he didn’t shoot back, didn’t ask about strike one, strike two.

Sue calls the legal papers the treaty. She’ll get the waterbed and the microwave. The banana boxes of Harley Davidson parts. The eight-track player and turntable. The veneer bedroom set. The Toyota Corolla and the single-wide.

The third strike is named Salome.

Salome told the Colonel and the Private about the real live camels in the Passion Play on her breaks at the Mint. She is an actress. She works the Passion Play during the week and the Mint most Fridays and Saturdays. She also told the Colonel she could arrange a private audition for him because she happened to know for a fact that Pilate was moving to Florida and the director owed her a few favors that she’d probably never get a chance to cash in on anyway.

Belly dancing is hard work, she also said. So she took lots of breaks. She was not taking a break when Sue walked in after one of the battles to find her Colonel. Sue found him. The Colonel pleaded that it was all part of the act and belly dancing was an art form going back to biblical times and that it should be respected.

Horses, too, they have horses. Doves. Sheep. Donkeys.

They stop in tiny Alzada for Cokes, oil, gas, beef jerky for Charley Reynolds, brake fluid, more sunflower seeds. The Colonel says to the Private, “You want to scrub them mustard bugs off the windshield?” It is Sunday afternoon when they cross the twenty or so miles of the townless northeast corner of Wyoming. Yes, the Colonel is trying out for Pontius Pilate, but they will fish, too.

“Nothing between this car and the North Pole but a barbed-wire fence,” the Private tells the Colonel.

“Nothing between this car and the South Pole but Mount Rush-more and a fistful of gold mines,” the Colonel tells the Private.

They cross the Belle Fourche River and see the Black Hills, the sacred land the Indians were afraid of.

“They heard thunder in there and thought it was the Everywhere Spirit,” says the Colonel.

“Maybe they were right,” replies the Private. “This wind does blow.”

Spearfish, Dakota Territory. The sign at the edge of town has a trout with a spear sticking through it. “Trout are not indigenous to the Black Hills,” the Colonel says to the Private and Charley Reynolds. “They were stocked, all of them. The Indians speared chubs and suckers. That’s all there were.”

The sun is shining and the summer school coeds are not wearing much. “Welcome to Calvary,” says the Colonel.

The Colonel tells Charley Reynolds to stay in the car. The dog jumps onto the gravel parking lot of the Shady Spot Motel (phone, free coffee) and hightails it to a bush, which he immediately sniffs, then waters. The Private tackles him and lugs the hound back to the car.

The Shady Spot rests near the Passion Play amphitheater. Families here enjoy the steady increases in the value of their ranch-styles and don’t mind the flash and rumble of the Crucifixion and Ascension three nights a week. There are coffeehouses and bookstores and no bad neighborhoods in Spearfish. No railroad tracks. No reservations. The Passion Play is here because the Mount Rush-more tourists were here first, and the Black Hills seem a fitting place for Christ to appear, should he visit America.