When We Were Wolves

WHEN WE WERE WOLVES /Jon Billman AN 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 Ui ice skates. We did that too. We learned to act and think as a gang, a team ("There is no T in 'team'!"), apostles. And this is what we saw quickly: Christianity in prison carried privüeges. We got what is caUed "good time," time off our sentences, for attending services. We got free subscriptions to National Geographic. We got aU the bad coffee we could drink. Instead of making gravel, bucking grain, peeling potatoes or pressing Ucense plates, we dusted pews and crafted nativity scenes out of plywood and wind chimes out of tin fruit-cocktaü cans and baling twine. As Wolves—we were the Wolves—we were weU 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 heU, 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 smaU congregation of us one early sunny Sunday morning. "Gentlemen: faith and the execution of goodness is your fast ticket out of here." The OU Cup was what the best team in the Rocky Mountain OU League got to keep. The Purgatory Camera ran a photo of our governor BrandaU Owens hoisting the gold OU Cup at a flashy press conference in Cheyenne. Pastor Liverance, an ex-Canadian and an ex-hockey player, wanted that cup on his altar in Purgatory 262 · The Missouri Review Uke it was the Holy Grati itself. The chaplain sat in on parole hearings and his opinion mattered. "Gentlemen, I want that cup," he said every afternoon before practice. He said it like a man possessed, a pirate, Captain Crook, 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 "WhUe the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shaU 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 oU. When it rained we laced up our skates and practiced in the mud, running up and down the greasy yard in 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 waU guards' spit to . freeze when it hit the ground, so Warden Gordon had them hose down a quarter-acre section of hardpan that stayed stick and frozen until April (not counting a brief January or February thaw), wherein we skated in the brown slush. We lifted barbeUs and dumbbeUs. 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 falting down. Our ankles grew strong and knotted. Some days the chaplain would watch the team from the watchtower and yeU encouraging words from above. "That's it boys, that's...