Dream Wheels (14 page)

Once he was sure she was gone he began to practise. He leaned the crutch against the wall and lay back on the bed, gathering himself, and then recreated the sliding move he’d done the first time and reached out to grab the crutch when he’d returned to the sitting position again. Then he placed it in his right armpit and pushed himself up with his good left leg. He did it over and over until he could feel the move become familiar, and when he’d done it the last time he swivelled on his crutch, wobbling some with the turn, and faced himself in the mirror. He hated how he looked. He hated the crutch stuck under his arm and the invalid look it gave him. The arm hung draped in a sling across his chest, and the thin lump of it looked like the bones of a bird’s wing. It was ugly.
He
was ugly. He met his own eyes in the glass and he stared at himself, stared as deeply as he could and felt rage pooling in the depths of his chest, and he broke the look and sat down on the bed again. He clenched and unclenched his right fist and pounded
it against the mattress. Then he stopped. He heaved a great breath and pushed himself up again and practised moving around the room, from the window to the dresser to the door. He did it again and again and again until the fatigue hit his muscles like a stick on the taut skin of a drum and the resonance made him stop.

He turned and looked at himself in the mirror again. His eyes were hard black pebbles like the bear’s, and he grinned.

No one spoke to him at all. Aiden walked down the long line of the cellblock and felt the weight of the stares. Boys walked up to the bars to gaze at him or stopped the card games they were dealing at the green metal tables and there wasn’t a word. It was noisy in other ranges, and the silence that hung over the corridor as he walked was heavy. But he kept his head up and his eyes straight ahead of him at the officer’s back, making sure not to waver, not to trip or attract any unnecessary attention to himself. When he was shown to his cell he was glad of the slam of the steel closing behind him.

Only when the door closed did the level of sound outside his cell rise to drown out the noise of the neighbouring ranges. It was wild. He’d never heard anything like it. Shouting, swearing, catcalls, taunts and threats snapped across the air and filled it, so that the only place of quiet he could find was within himself. He crossed to the small metal sink-and-toilet combination in the corner, wet his face and looked at himself in the scratched and clouded polished plastic that served as a mirror. He stared into his own eyes. They were hard and black as pebbles and he practised making them flat, unreadable, cold, and the feeling that rose in his chest was hot and bitter and he found himself liking it, craving it. He practised raising his face to the mirror and letting his eyes go blank. He did it again and
again, and when he was satisfied that he could do it on command he began to move around the tiny cell.

He took the lower of the two bunks. As he made it up he watched the boys cruising past his door out the side of his eyes. The population was like the neighbourhood he’d come from, a loose conglomeration of races, sizes and attitudes. The gangs would be here. That would make it tough. But when he finished making up his bunk and stood in the doorway watching, he knew he would cut it. He’d been in a lot of tough neighbourhoods and survived and he’d survive here. He felt the heat of the rage in his chest and it warmed him against the cool of the steel and the concrete and the empty gazes of the boys passing his door.

They came for him in the shower.

The water felt good after the long day of transfer. He closed his eyes and felt the water course over him, leaning one hand against the tiles and breathing deeply in the steam. He heard the splash of their feet and opened his eyes.

“Hey boy.”

There were five of them. Black. They stood there with towels wrapped around their waists, leaning against the wall and looking at him balefully.

“You got smokes?” the largest one asked.

“Some,” Aiden said.

“We’ll be wanting them,” he said.

“I can cut you in if you want.”

“I don’t think he heard you, Julius,” another boy said.

The boy Julius looked along the line at his friends, bobbing his head in agreement. “P’haps we got to help him learn to hear,” he said. “We’ll be wanting them smokes. Boy. Any cutting in goes down around here gonna be a shiv in your ass.”

“Café au lait lookin’ motherfucker gonna cough up,” another boy said, and they all laughed.

Aiden moved out from under the nozzle of the shower and into the middle of the floor, and the five of them sidestepped wider apart and they all stood in the steam and the hiss of the water on the tiles looking at each other. They were all lean and muscular and tattooed, and the steam rising around them gave the room the look of a jungle. Aiden wiped water from his forehead and shook his hand lightly to splatter it around. He looked directly at the big boy Julius and made his eyes go blank like he’d done in the mirror.

“Don’t be giving me no jailhouse eyes,” Julius said. “You got no wingers here, boy. You all alone here. You got no backup. You best come up with them smokes.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Then we got to beat on you till you do.”

“And then?”

“Then we beat on you some more so’s you keep the supply rollin’ every time the moms drops off some coin.”

“Bring it, then,” Aiden said.

“Say what?”

Aiden felt the heat rising in him. It felt good. It roared in him and he wanted to run with it despite the danger. None of them was carrying a knife. This was going to be a beating and he was ready for it, looking forward to letting some of the heat in him dissipate in a flurry of violence. He wasn’t afraid.

“I said bring it, then. If that’s what’s going to happen, let’s get it done. Don’t treat me like a goof. Just fucking do it. I’m going down but I’m making sure I take the first one with me.”

“You fucking kidding me?” Julius said.

“Bring it,” Aiden said again.

Julius laughed and looked at his friends. “This guy’s got some balls.”

“Yeah, but they shrinking,” another said and they laughed.

“We gonna beat on you, nigger,” Julius said. “Don’t you hear that?”

“I hear it.”

“You ain’t worried?”

“Bring it, I said.”

Aiden clenched his fists and moved back against the wall again so they could only come at him from the front. He looked directly at Julius and his eyes stayed flat and cold. The bigger boy studied him and Aiden sensed a shift in the energy. Julius smiled. He smiled and shook his head and looked at the other four and they all began to relax. Aiden kept his eyes on them nonetheless.

“Damn,” Julius said. “That’s some balls. You all right, kid.”

“Don’t call me kid.”

“All right, all right. Don’t get your panties all in a bunch. You all right though.”

“So?” Aiden asked.

“So? So cover up them little raisins before they disappear up your belly,” Julius said, and they all laughed. He raised a hand to the others and they all followed him to the shower-room door. He stopped and looked back at Aiden.

“We got room for a guy like you,” he said, “if you need friends.”

“I’ll think about it,” Aiden said.

“You do that.”

“Julius?”

“Yeah?”

“Drop by my crib. I got some smokes you can have if you’re short.”

Julius grinned. “I ain’t short,” he said. “But I’ll drop by.”

Aiden could see the flatness in the other boy’s eyes, an unwavering stare that spoke of tougher streets and harder encounters than this in a life that ranged further into darkness than he had ever travelled. He thought about Cort Lehane and the fat prick hitting his mother and he matched it and held it and Julius nodded after a moment and threw him a towel.

“Best cover those,” he said. “You’ll need them around here.”

When Aiden walked back down the corridor to his cell the silent challenges from the doorways and the tables had stopped. He stepped into his cell and pulled the door shut behind him, threw the towel down in a lump on the floor and settled on his bunk and stared at a crack in the ceiling. It was deep and took him far away.

The thing about cowboys, Darlene had discovered, was that they were all pretty much the same guy. Once you got past the buckles and the blue jeans, the high-flying attitude and the down-home, folksy charm, they were all still little boys riding the rope barrel in the back yard. Dreamers. Not one of them could live a day in the real world without dreaming about the Big One, the big show, the big ride, the big payout, the big something that was going to make everything, well, bigger somehow. She’d seen them all. They’d amble into her parents’ café all bowlegged and casual, slump into a chair, tuck their hats underneath it and watch her work, heads tilted, eyes aglitter and just a touch of a smirk at the corner of their mouth. They’d give her the “yes, ma’ams” and “thank yous” their mamas had raised them to say, but she always felt their appraisal. It was like being the filly in the paddock.

She’d discovered soon enough that they were a randy bunch. They certainly knew how to ride and she liked that.
She liked the sinewy toughness of them, the bandy-legged energy they brought to a bed, and she’d believed that she could just go on picking and choosing. But only the real cowboys. Nowadays kids from middle-class homes in big cities could get a college scholarship in bull riding. Kids who had never set foot on a ranch or a stirrup. Not them. Just cowboys, the ones from real working ranches. Cowboys had a thing about them. Cowboys were strong, resilient, hard and tough, but underneath that was a vein of gentleness, humour and honesty that got her every time. Every time. She adored the image of them bucking away on a barrel slung between ropes over a pad of straw in mama’s back yard, dreaming big and dreaming hard and believing in those dreams. The bottom line was, she supposed, she was a sucker for a dreamer in a cowboy hat.

When Joe Willie came along it was like her world tilted. Suddenly there was a real cowboy. You could feel it in him, this bristling kind of energy that drew you forward. When she saw him ride she saw that energy ignite and explode, as raw and powerful and beautiful as she imagined perfection to be. God, he was gorgeous when he rode. He was tall and lean and hard, and even though Darlene had never had much time for Indians, this Indian was a cowboy and the best damn rider she had ever seen. She’d never heard anyone talked about in such tones before. It was like men lost the top end of their voices when they mentioned Joe Willie Wolfchild, a name reserved for the deep and low end, the murmuring just this side of jealousy. When she finally met him at Calgary he’d shaken her hand and she felt a thrum of energy like a tight rein on a wild horse. He looked at her with those deep, dark Indian eyes and she was thrown, flailing for purchase, bucked right off in seconds. A rodeo man. A cowboy.

She went out of her way to charm him, giving up the others she kept on a string and devoting herself to him. The others complained like the little boys they were, but once they got wind of who their competition was they settled into a begrudging silence. It was amazing the effect he had on people, and Darlene found that the most powerful aphrodisiac of all. One name could throw people like she’d been thrown, and to be the woman at the side of such a man was more than she had ever dreamed for herself and more than she was willing to lose. So when she gave herself to him she gave him the full routine, coaxing him, teasing him, leading him to an expression of the body that the cowboy struggled with at first but then caught the rhythm of and rode. Sex with Joe Willie was like the storm of rodeo itself. She made sure of that.

“You’re a mustang, girl,” he told her, after that first time, and she gave him the untamed, dangerous and free routine every time after. She let him explore her body in whatever way he chose, for however long he chose. And the truth was, he was a wild one himself, and Darlene loved the taut feel of his body, the sinewy, coiled strength of him, the harnessed violence he saved for bulls in the clutch and push and heave of him. He knew how to control his body better than any man she’d ever met, and even though that body was supposed to be broken up pretty badly, there wasn’t a doubt in Darlene’s mind that he’d walk out and mount up again. She’d make sure of that. She’d make damn sure of that. He’d ride and be a champion and she’d be the woman that made it all happen. Not his frigid bitch of a mother. Johanna had refused to let her visit him in the hospital. Family only, she’d been told, like the past four years hadn’t existed, like she hadn’t been a fixture on the family scene all that time. But she’d show her. Darlene would play it to the max. She’d show
his mother how much she cared, how loyal she was, how loving, attentive, supportive and all the other sickly-sweet adjectives they could dream up for one hell of a woman. She’d be there with all the love and adoration and grit and gumption needed to coax that body back. She’d use the physical connection they had to cajole the muscle and sinew back onto a horse and they would continue their ride to the top of the world. Together. Joe Willie was the Big One and she intended to keep him.

“I invested way too much in this already,” she said to herself as she turned onto the Wolfchild property. “Way, way too much.”

The house was pretty much what Golec expected. From what Claire had told him, Eric Bennett kept up a good front. Big-shot account executive. Salesman really, but these days salesman needed the push of a fancier title. Golec’s dad had sold cars all his life and he’d proudly called himself a salesman. Back then, an honest job with honest effort at maintaining it was all a man like his dad needed. Screw the title. Selling cars earned a good life for him and his family, and if the salesman turned out to be the owner of the largest dealership in the area, well, so much the better. Up until the day he’d retired, he’d called himself a salesman, and maybe it was that inherent humility that allowed him to remain grounded; simple, directed, a family man. They’d always had the best, but the salesman taught his children, Golec and his sister, that a simple need met was far more fulfilling than a grandiose desire purchased.