Dream Wheels (10 page)

She sipped from the bourbon and pondered what she might do. There was a knock at the door, and she looked over to the bedside table to check the time and was surprised at the lateness of the hour. There was another knock, more insistent, and she reached for the cold cream and spread it heavily around her eyes and along her cheeks to cover as much of the bruising as she could before she ran in small, mincing steps down the hallway to the door.

“Who is it?” she asked.

“Police” was all she heard.

She leaned against the door frame and closed her eyes. She pulled the robe closer to her. “What is it?” she asked.

“Mrs. Hartley? Please open the door.”

She was surprised to hear her name and she took a deep breath and patted the cream in again before she slid the bolt free and opened the door. A plainclothes officer held up a badge. There were two uniforms with him.

“It’s Aiden, isn’t it?” Claire asked.

“Yes,” the plainclothes officer said. “I’m Marcel Golec, Youth Division. You’re Mrs. Hartley?”

“Miss.”

“Well, Miss Hartley, we need to talk.”

“Now? It’s late.” Claire looked about nervously and hoped that Eric wouldn’t be awakened by the intrusion. She nodded, and Golec quietly told the two uniforms to wait outside.

Claire showed him to a chair. “What is it? What’s happened?”

“There’s been a shooting,” Golec said. Claire slumped down heavily in the chair opposite him and the shock on her face made Golec wish he’d made a more delicate opening. “A robbery,” he continued, “with a handgun.”

“Aiden,” Claire said. She spoke the name with regret and a woe Golec could feel.

“No,” he said. “A boy named Cort Lehane. Do you know him?”

“Cort? Cort is Aiden’s best friend. They met at the youth centre. Cort’s been shot?”

“The boy’s seriously injured. Two officers stumbled on him trying to hold up a girl making a night deposit. He fired at them. There wasn’t anything else they could do.”

Golec watched the news begin to sink in. “Are you saying Aiden was with him? Is that it?”

“No,” Golec said. “He wasn’t there. But the boy claims the gun belonged to Aiden. That he’d given it to him and told him how to do the robbery.”

“No.”

“It’s what he says, and if it checks out we have to charge Aiden with accessory, maybe conspiracy to commit.”

“Conspiracy? He’s fifteen,” Claire said. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Sounds ridiculous,” Golec said, “but the fact is that there’s a kid in intensive care right now with a bullet hole in him, a young girl with a trauma counsellor and two officers mighty shook up about firing at a kid. Ridiculous maybe, but true nonetheless. Where is Aiden right now?”

“In his room.”

“Can you check?”

“Yes.”

Golec watched her walk away. She was small and pretty under the heavy splash of cold cream and he wondered about the bruises. The split lip told him all he needed to know. The outline was always the same and the story of the kids never altered much. Even sumptuous surroundings like this proved to him that all the money in the world couldn’t purchase a safe home or guarantee a child’s immunity from the effects of grown-up immaturity. The non sequitur irked him.

Claire walked back into the living room with a sleepy-eyed Aiden right behind her. He didn’t exactly fit the image of a gangster awaiting the outcome of a heist, and Golec felt encouraged despite himself. But when Aiden saw him standing there the sleepiness was instantly replaced with a wide-awake wariness, a shifting to something he’d seen too often in the kids he dealt with.

“What’s up?” Aiden asked.

“I need to talk to you about Cort Lehane,” Golec said. “He’s your friend, right?”

“Yeah. We know each other.”

“Aiden, he’s your best friend,” Claire said.

Aiden gave her a hard look that Claire didn’t recognize and it worried her. “Well, we hang out but I wouldn’t exactly call him that,” he said.

“Nonetheless, he claims you and he are tight, best buds, partners even,” Golec said and watched him closely.

“Partners?” he asked. “Partners in what?”

“You tell me.”

“I don’t know.”

“I think you do.”

“I think I don’t.”

“Aiden, be polite,” Claire said sharply.

He looked at her again and Claire felt herself pull back from the intensity and the anger in his eyes. “He’s doing his job, Aiden,” was all she could say.

“Guess a cop doesn’t need to be polite to do his job then.”

“Aiden.”

“It’s all right,” Golec said, standing. “We can finish this conversation down at the station if you like, Aiden, because I need answers and I need them tonight.”

“Are you arresting me?”

“Not yet.”

“So what’s the big concern? So what if I know Cort? Big deal.”

“It’s a big deal because Cort’s been shot. Shot during the commission of an offence. A robbery, to be precise. An armed robbery. Been to many bookstores lately, Aiden?”

Golec watched his face register surprise despite his efforts to keep it calm. He was still just a kid playing a man’s game and even though he’d learned some street sense somewhere in his travels, he hadn’t learned enough to lift him over the fact that he was still just a kid in over his head. This was no criminal. Not yet anyway.

“Is he gonna be okay?” Aiden asked finally.

“We don’t know. It’s touch and go right now,” Golec said. “Cort says the pistol he used was yours. He says you gave it to him and told him how to pull the robbery. He says it was your score all the way.”

“My score? I was here. I was in bed.”

“True enough. But if the gun was yours I’ve got you for accessory and conspiracy to commit a felony.”

“You got nothing.”

“I’ve got a kid caught in the act who claims you got the gun.”

“He’s lying.”

“I’m not so sure.”

“Mom?” Aiden asked, downshifting into fifteen again, and Golec watched her. “You believe me, don’t you?”

“Tell Detective Golec the truth, Aiden,” Claire said quietly.

“You don’t believe me?” he asked.

“Tell the truth, Aiden, that’s all.”

“You don’t believe me. You’d rather believe the cop. Well, fuck you, then.”

“Aiden,” Golec said sharply. “You don’t speak to your mother like that.”

“Who the hell are you to tell me how to talk to her? You’re not my father. You’re just a cop.”

“I’m a cop who holds your future right here, boy,” Golec said, bringing the cuffs out from behind his back.

Aiden faced him directly and cocked his head slightly, and in the stance Golec could see a future hardcase. He’d seen enough of them in his time to know. Aiden had enough of the young turk in him to not back down easily, enough to make him a candidate for a lifetime of these scenes, enough to not hear the fifteen-year-old speaking under the visage of a
tougher, older man and enough to guarantee his mother one huge load of grief and guilt and shame. Golec held the look and waited.

“I got nothing to say,” Aiden said.

“Fine,” Golec said. “You’re under arrest.”

“Aiden, for god’s sake, tell him!” Claire grabbed at her son. “Tell him you had no part in this. Tell him it’s a tall tale. Tell him, Aiden.”

The boy looked at her blankly, and Golec could see him steeling himself, pulling himself back and away like they all did, getting ready for the game to come. Claire was weeping now, and as she stepped toward her boy he retreated the same number of steps. The cream was dripping onto the collar of the robe and she made no move to dab it and Golec could see the whole visage of bruises on her face. There was another story here and he’d be sure to tell the uniforms to return to check it out. Her shoulders shook and Golec could see the collapse coming, the fall to the floor that would follow their retreat into the hallway. He wouldn’t cuff him. Not in front of her now. This was enough of a shock. Aiden just stood there looking at him blankly, waiting.

“We need to go, Miss Hartley,” he told her.

She looked at him, trying to comprehend it all. The cold cream was a dripping mess and the tears shone in her eyes against it so that for a moment she looked like she was melting right in front of him. Then she looked at her son. The two of them stood mere feet apart. Claire reached out one hand toward him and Aiden still would not take his eyes off Golec. Her hand shook, the fingers aching for contact, and Golec could see the miles and miles of separation that was happening invisibly between mother and son. As he put a hand on the boy’s shoulder and eased him toward the door he saw the light
dim in her eyes like the sweep of a lighthouse beacon turning outward and away across the solemn, empty sea. It saddened him. It always did.

t
he light breaking through the window and the feeling in his head seemed one and the same. Both were diffuse, and there was a sense of timelessness about it so that staring across the slope of his chest and down the line of his body to the cast on his leg and the small tent of sheet that was his other foot gave Joe Willie the feeling of emerging into a dream, the usual benchmarks of time passing lost in the cottony numbness of the drug. He was alone. He was glad of that. There was a cup of water on the table beside him and he turned his head to look at it. The morphine dried him out and he felt parched and flattened as if everything vital had been drained out of him. The water was on the swing-out table to his left and as he stared at it now he knew he’d have to reach across his body with his right arm to get it. He tried, and he almost screamed with the sudden flare of pain in his left shoulder. The water sat there and he could taste its sweetness and he gritted his teeth and made the same move again. There was a searing flame
where the fullness of his shoulder used to be and the weight of him felt like something would snap like kindling, and he rocked back to the flat of his back before throwing his right arm across his chest. He knocked the cup off the table and it clattered across the floor and he almost screamed with rage. He settled on his back and stared at the light easing higher into a soft yellowish sheen against the far wall of his room. He couldn’t even get himself a drink of water, and the hard fact of that made him angrier and he could feel the heat of it burning in the hollow of his chest so that when the nurse appeared he could only stare at her balefully while she retrieved the cup and filled it and held it to his lips so he could sip at it until he was satisfied. She mopped his brow with a cold, wet cloth and he closed his eyes and tried to immerse himself in the relief that brought. But when he opened them again he could see her look of concern and it enraged him again. She asked if he needed anything and he only shook his head vacantly, and she moved the table over to his right side and left the room. He felt trapped, pinioned to the bed, and his eye drifted over to the crutches they’d left him the day before.

They wanted him to move. They wanted him to make small excursions down the hallway. He almost laughed. All his life he’d been able to envision his body doing the things he asked it for beforehand, like a dream, a vision, a prophetic glimpse, so that when he swung into the motion it looked like second nature to those watching. They called him a natural, and he supposed there was some truth to that. But in the bed, staring at the crutches and being incapable of seeing himself perform the feat of humping down the hallway, however slowly, he felt nothing natural about his body at all. The crutches were symbols of how far he’d fallen, and he wanted nothing to do with them.

The sun climbed higher on the wall and he watched it, remembering how he’d loved the light of morning on the ranch. It never failed to give him a sense of melancholy so deep in the bones that he could swear purple was a feeling. He’d loved sitting on the porch in the early morning, enjoying a coffee and watching the tricks of the light as it broke over everything. It was an old light, ancient and powerful, rich with stories, and sometimes he believed it spoke to him. There was a voice in the cackle of the ravens, the wacky wobbled call of the loons, the hushed whisper of the breeze and the soft moan of cattle. It was a voice he recognized but couldn’t put a name to. The Indian in him, he reckoned. The Indian in him heard all of that and it reminded him of something gone but not forgotten, something in the background of everything he knew, something relevant to everything but remaining unseen, unheard except for fleeting moments in mornings when the quiet peeled back slowly to allow it a vague undertone, a beckoning he assumed was something of the Sioux and the Ojibway spirit of things moving through all of it, himself included. He never told anyone that. It was hardly the kind of thing you could bring up in a back-lot conversation with men who were three-quarters grit and one-quarter gumption. But he’d always loved the cool edge of the air and the look of the sky in the early mornings.

This morning was different.

It was the crutches. In his mind he could picture the ride and he could pinpoint the exact moment when he lost it. He could feel the separation between the bull and the seat of his pants and he knew that one slight twist of his trunk the opposite way had caused it. One fraction of an inch to recover balance, a smidgen, a tad. That’s what this boiled down to. Nothing big. No huge, looming mistake. Just a point of the
shoulder the wrong way. His whole world had spun on a small twist. That’s what the crutches represented.