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cold but anticipation is warming, so I forget about it. It’s like ice fishing, snow and cold up to my own lounging ass. Waiting for the picture show. Wayne slips inside for more beer and some old doughnuts.
    I use my cordless phone to call in sick from my lawn chair so Wayne cannot hear me apologize. The phone rings in my hand like the last straw before I hit the call button. “Hello?” It is the urgent Mormon accent of my principal. “Sorry, I’m sick today,” I say. “I can’t come in early to meet with you.” Over the phone I hear radiointerference in the background; they’re having hot dogs and green beans at the high school, church bake sale tonight, cattle prices are steady. “I realize it may be important. Put it on a big pink slip. I’ll need a sub.” A guy over in Farson took his head off with a snow machine and a barbed-wire fence. “Yes, lesson plans are on my desk.” Game and Fish will limit deer and elk tags next fall. I fake a cough and hang up. U.S. 30 to Jackson is slick in spots. Geologists found the fault, hooked their equipment up, and named it something I couldn’t make out because of the fuzzy AM reception on this cheap telephone. It sounded like “Bring ’em asphalt,” but that isn’t it.
    The first real daylight to come over the ridge is softened with clouds and light snow. The legs of the tower reach up into the fog and support an ethereal redhead mermaid, an enormous half-trout, tuna-can Copper. Shaking with tired and cold I raise my monocular to her to see the detail. I take a deep breath to steady myself, my vision clears. She is art. Slender, asexual amphibian hips and stiff traffic-pylon nipples. Her fluent hair is the same color as the stripe down her speckled side that makes her a
rainbow
troutwoman.
    She is sitting on a rock just underneath WELCOME TO HAMS FORK. Below the rock, in flowing cursive letters:
Gateway to Zion and the GRAND TETONS.
She is holding a trident and smoking a mini-cigar. She is complete.
    Hams Fork is waking up. Wives and moms are beating pancake mix, scrambling eggs, not making coffee. An occasional orange mine truck rattles along Antelope Street. A four-wheel-drive with whip antennae and a light bar is spinning up the lane, my front yard. It’s Frank Grant, chief of police. Wayne waves with his beer-less wedding-band hand. Frank gets out not smiling and adjusts the equipment belt under his belly. “Let’s see the hands, Hero,” he says. Wayne smiles a doughnutty grin, sets his beer in the snow,swallows, and lays his palms over like a magician. His hands are enameled black, green, Copper-red. My hands are mostly clean and I hold them up like a child counting to ten.
    “I’m an artist, Chief,” says Wayne, voice full of possibility.

    In a couple of days photographs of “Wayne’s Rainbow” will hang in both bars in town, next to bowling trophies and framed black-and-white photos of rodeo cowboys on bucking horses. Pictures will be shown to me at my contract meeting. On Sunday morning, in both Mormon wards, they will talk about us: me, Copper, Joseph Smith, Robin, Jesus Christ, and Wayne Kerr. Next falls school calendar is already printed. Copper will apply for a transfer to the city in Texas. Shell get it. She has ridden Hams Fork to exhaustion. Just up and leaving is acceptable, expected in the West.
    Robin will keep walking, sweating, and making wind chimes for angels. Looking after Wayne. Loving him despite of, and because of, his passion for art and wildlife.
    I’ll get out the atlas I keep in the bathroom with back issues of
Wild West
magazine and a Gideon Bible, though I’m beginning to see that opportunity here runs only so far that way until it turns into California. Tomorrow I will take a Big Chief tablet and a dull number two pencil into my principal’s office, shove them under his gray nose like a divorce, and say, “Excuse me. Put my recommendation here, you no-balls, Diet Coke-drinking, blacklisting, goddamned son of a