Dream Wheels (15 page)

Golec smiled. His old man would never have stooped for this display, this architectural fawning for attention. The size of it far exceeded the needs of the three people who lived there,
and it sat on a corner lot like some bloated aristocrat demanding to be noticed. It was actually a fucking ugly house when you got right down to it. Pastel. Golec hated pastel. The gleeful coral siding was the antithesis of the atmosphere inside. He found himself growing angry at Eric Bennett. Claire Hartley was a small woman and he’d beaten her like a rented mule. He was a big man too from her description, and there was a part of him that relished the private thought that maybe a quick judgment in the alley would be far better punishment than the rendering of a court. Yes, he thought, looking at the house and waiting for the car bearing Claire Hartley and the social worker, drag the lump outside by the hair and administer justice, fair and fast. It was entertaining to imagine, but he had far too much respect for his position to do it. In fact, the whole reason he was here was to let the asshole slip off the legal hook if he would go for it. Golec knew he would. Any guy who lived in a house like this would take the easy route. Golec was willing to bet on it.

Johanna had never much cared for soft women. It wasn’t an overt feminine softness that rankled her, because a girl couldn’t help but be a girl sometimes. What bothered her more was women with elastic characters, the ones who had never found a moral ground to stand on, never found a principled territory to defend and consequently never found a woman to be. Women like Darlene. She’d never liked Darlene. If the girl would just allow herself to be beautiful, she would be. She had all the attributes: tall, tanned, blonde, with a lean body and dark brown eyes that gave her a perpetual little-girl look. But Darlene was one of those people who absolutely needed the esteem of others to feel it in herself. It meant she had the potential to switch allegiances at any time, and it was this
more than anything that grated Johanna. Loyalty was a trait she took very seriously. You found it in yourself first, found the courage to stay true to yourself through anything, and then, only then, did you become able to stay true to the people in your life. She’d learned that lesson early, been encouraged to it by her people, and the Sioux were a people who lived in staunch loyalty. Darlene had none of that. The girl sought definition but she looked for it in others’ eyes first. Her loyalty was to the belief that something outside herself could shape her world and herself. Johanna had always mistrusted her because of that.

“Darlene,” she said amiably as the girl stepped from her pickup truck. “You’re out and about early.”

“Up with the chickens,” Darlene said.

“Sensible.”

“Yeah. That’s me, though.”

Johanna smirked. “Yes. That’s always been my first thought.”

“Where is he?”

“Darlene …”

“Look, Johanna,” Darlene said, “I don’t care what you think of me right now. I never really did. But I’m Joe Willie’s woman. I been that for four years now and right now he needs me and I mean to see him.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why does he need to see you?”

“Jesus,” Darlene said disgustedly. “Because he’s a man, that’s why.”

“That’s your huge rationale?”

“Yeah,” Darlene said. “He’s a man and I’m a woman and I figure that’s what he needs right now more than anything. A
woman to make him feel like a man, not a little boy with a boo-boo on his knee.”

“Darlene, Joe Willie’s survived a major injury. He’s lucky to be mobile at all.”

“Yeah. I know that, because you told me. But you won’t let me see for myself. Won’t give me a chance to be there for him. But I’m here now and I will see him, I will be there for him now.”

Johanna couldn’t help but feel sorry for her. Not because her man was infirmed but more because Darlene had never grown beyond a girl’s idea of womanhood. She played at being a woman like a girl with a dollhouse, every move imagined in the security of dreams and hopes and wishes. But life occurred beyond the cheerful placing of furniture and people, and a woman needed more than imaginings to shape a home and a family.

“Okay,” Johanna said. “But let me tell you not to expect what you’ve come to expect from Joe Willie. The injury has changed him. A lot.”

“I can deal with that,” Darlene said.

“I hope so, Darlene. Because you and I and all of us are going to have to find a way to cut through the silence he’s fallen into. We haven’t yet. None of us. So I don’t hold out a lot of hope in you getting much of a response.”

“We’ve been together a different way.”

“God,” Johanna said. “Please don’t tell me that you’re going to rely on sweat and passion, or the memory of a real good time.”

“It was more than that.”

“Was it really?”

“Yes.”

Johanna eyed her with a steely look, and Darlene shifted her feet under the weight of it. “I can’t imagine,” she said.

“No. You couldn’t,” Darlene said and flounced past her into the house.

“So you here because of a rat?” Julius asked.

“Yeah,” Aiden said, studying the cards he’d been dealt.

“This rat got a name?”

“Cort Lehane.” Aiden fairly spat the words.

“Kinda name is Cort?” one of the other boys asked.

“Name of the dead, motherfucker,” Julius said.

Aiden looked up at him over his cards and Julius grinned. They were sitting at the middle table in the corridor. It was reserved for the big boys, the ones who ran things, the ones with the power in the cellblock. Julius studied him, and Aiden met his look casually.

“Kinda shit you down on, man?” Julius asked.

“Conspiracy,” Aiden said.

“What the hell is that?”

“We were planning a score. A store. He went ahead and tried to pull it himself, got shot and spilled the beans, put it all on me.”

“Shot, huh?”

“Yeah. I left the piece with him and he went all crazy and tried to do it himself. Guess he fired at the cops and they shot him.”

“Damn. So he dimed you and you in here and he’s walkin’ around out there?”

“That’s about it.” Aiden threw his cards down on the table and lit himself a cigarette. Claire had sent money to him and he’d gotten what he’d needed. The others looked at him and he tossed the pack on the table. Everyone lit up.

“Lehane? White?” Julius asked.

“Yeah. Very.”

They all laughed.

“Who he trip with?”

“Nobody. It’s what I liked about him in the beginning.”

Julius nodded. “How much time you lookin’ at?”

“Maybe two years.”

“Damn. And this Lehane? How much he get?”

“Who knows.”

“But he’ll go down for some. He’ll come here before he gets shipped out to the main joint.”

There was silence at the table as everyone focused on the words. “Yeah,” Aiden said. “I suppose he’d have to.”

“Then you know what you got to do.”

“Even up,” Aiden said.

“Damn right,” Julius said. “Blood for blood.”

“I didn’t get shot, he did.”

Julius smirked and shrugged his big shoulders. “Don’t got to be no real blood. He cut you off from your own, your moms, your family, your blood. He took that away from you. You got to settle up.”

Aiden nodded. He didn’t care so much about the jail. He could handle that. But it was the taking away, the removal of freedom, the excising of his life for something that he’d only ever talked about that stung bitterly, and when he let himself feel it there were a hundred other cuts and bruises that seeped in until he sneered at the acidic taste of it. When he looked at Julius again there was an edge to his eyes that the other boy acknowledged with a firm nod and a raised fist to the chest.

“And if you don’t settle it,” Julius said, “if you don’t put a beating on that rat, I’ll put one on you. Word.”

“Count on it,” Aiden said.

“Don’t got to,” Julius said. “But you do.”

Aiden looked around the table. The others all had the same level, matter-of-fact look. He felt worlds away from what he knew but at the same time felt connected to the vile brew in his belly, the patient, feral look of his new friends and the cold, dank, algae-coloured world of the cellblock. He looked around him and saw dozens of boys lounging along the bars on the upper tier, leaning on the doors of their cells or leaned in with their heads down huddled up close to the telephones, their shoulders hunched up around them like that space, that mere ten inches of world was all the privacy they had anymore. They were all cut off. They had all been bloodied in some fashion and they all bore the pain of those festering wounds here in the clang and crash of steel on steel. He fit here. He gathered the cards from the table in a long, sweeping grab, cradled them in his hands, packed them all in one firm, even lump and slapped them down on the table in front of the boy to his left, looked at all of them one more time with that flat, even stare.

“Deal,” he said.

The first thing she saw was the empty sleeve. She stood in the doorway watching him examine himself in the mirror, catching him so totally immersed that he didn’t see her standing there. Darlene barely breathed. Across the room Joe Willie sat at the edge of his bed running his right hand slowly across his torso, from his ribs, along the line of his chest, then upwards, left, toward the shoulder. Or where the shoulder used to be. Darlene stared hard at the slackness of the sleeve there. He’d always worn his shirts tight to the body as though he wanted to always feel the taut strength of himself, using the cloth like a second skin to gather muscle and sinew into a compact, coiled spring of force. This shirt hung in draped flaps of material off the left side of his neck. She watched as the hand
moved across the ridge of collarbone, halting for a second while he scrunched his eyes tight together before inching slowly, spiderlike, to the flat of the shoulder. Joe Willie dropped his head to his chest. It hung like the head of a saint in penitence while the tips of his fingers moved along the shoulder, probing, pushing, pressing until at the cliff of the arm they stopped and she saw him grimace. He pushed downward with his palm. Darlene put a hand to her mouth when she saw the cloth compress flat to the touch. His shoulders trembled as his hand made the journey to the elbow, and she watched a hard scowl tear at the corners of his mouth. The fingers clenched about the elbow joint while his thumb traced a light line along the absent bicep before nestling into the crook of the joint. He grabbed it. Hard. She saw the force of him in the tendons of his right hand and the arm shook as he squeezed as though trying to move muscle from the good arm to the empty sleeve of the other by sheer force of will. Joe Willie’s face was pressed together at every angle, and as she looked at him Darlene realized that she was looking at the face of rage stoked by an unbelievable sorrow. It scared her.

When Joe Willie slid the material of the shirt up along the narrow, withered arm, exposing it to the air and to her, Darlene was shocked. It was like the arms of kids in the starvation commercials, nothing but bone and skin and a sick jut of angles. There was no trace of the long ropes of muscle that had held her, lifted her, only a thin, withered, ugly stick. Ugly. Darlene saw Joe Willie’s eyes open as he grabbed his left hand. He lifted the forearm and it rose slack and lifeless. As he turned it over so the palm faced up, Darlene saw hatred in his eyes, a look hard and cold and bitter all at one time. The arm was ugly and she couldn’t stand the thought of touching it, or having it touch her. She backed slowly through the door. The
movement alerted him and his eyes flicked up to the mirror. She could only stare.

“Darlene,” he said, quickly rolling the sleeve back down.

“Joe Willie, I …”

“Where you been, darlin’?”

“Joe Willie, I gotta go. I gotta …”

He reached for the crutch beside him and slowly pushed himself to his feet, half smiling through the effort. It gave him the look of a crazy man. As he hitch-stepped along the side of the bed, the toe of the crutch slipped on the carpet. He lurched sideways and fell awkwardly against the side of the mattress. The crutch fell to the floor and he landed on one hip on the side of the bed. When he caught himself he looked up into the mirror again, and Darlene saw the face of an invalid: embarrassed, pitiful and scared.

“Sorry,” he said quietly. “Don’t exactly have the wheels yet.”

“God.”

“It’s all right. Give me a second here.” He reached for the crutch.

“No. Joe Willie, I gotta go. I gotta get back. I gotta …” Darlene fumbled for her keys.

“Hey, hey. Relax. It’s me, darlin’.”

He stood again awkwardly and turned to face her, leaning harder on the crutch this time. Darlene fought to control the muscles in her face. She wanted to cry, she wanted to scream. But more than anything she wanted out of that doorway and out of the house. She found herself staring at the empty sleeve despite herself, as though she could still see the wizened stick of an arm it contained. Joe Willie followed her line of sight and looked down at the arm dangling off the shoulder. When he raised his eyes to look at her again she could see the rage in him.

“Joe Willie, I …”

“Go,” he said. “Just go.”

She felt a tremor in her legs and she reached one hand up to her cheek. It shook. He stared at her. She couldn’t meet his gaze and her eyes darted back and forth across the room until finally she pursed her lips, rubbed them with two fingers and a thumb, turned and walked quickly down the hallway. When she stepped out onto the veranda again she leaned hard against the wall, closing her eyes and heaving a deep, silent breath. She breathed out in a long, slow exhale. When she opened her eyes she saw Johanna watching her from the round pen where she was training a colt. The two women looked at each other across that space and it was like there was no space at all between them. Darlene felt herself leave long before she climbed into the cab of the truck and drove quickly down the driveway, disappearing in a long plume of dust toward town.

Johanna looked toward Joe Willie’s window before turning to the colt again.

“No more Ken and Barbie world, I guess,” she said to the colt and chucked at it to get it moving around the pen.