Dream Wheels (19 page)

“Sure do.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Could be, but we’re goin’ nonetheless.”

“What if I don’t want to?”

Lionel crossed in front of where his grandson sat and leaned against the rail of the porch. He built a smoke and kept his eye on Joe Willie all the while. “Fact is, boy,” he said, pausing to lick the paper, “I don’t much care what you don’t want. There’s something that needs showing and there’s something that needs saying. And it all takes place out to that equipment shed.”

“You’re telling me what to do?”

“I’m telling you. That’s a fact.”

“What if I can’t make it?”

“Then I’ll carry you.”

“You can’t do that.”

“I can and I will. If it takes me all damn day, I’ll get you there.”

“Stubborn cuss, aren’t you?”

“Gotta be,” Lionel said, and they looked at each other silently.

Joe Willie saw his grandfather against the pale blue and green of the mountains to the west. He looked like one of those western portraits, as seamlessly part of that backdrop as the treeline on the mountains themselves. As he bent his head to light the cigarette, Joe Willie saw the wrinkles in his face etched sharply against the harsh flare of the match. He trusted the old man, had always depended on his guidance, his opinion, his experience in everything. Now was no different. Despite the aggravation he felt over the intrusion, he struggled to his feet and waved away the hand Lionel offered. “It’s that blasted important to you?” he asked.

“Surely,” Lionel said.

“Well, let’s go, then,” he said, and they moved slowly off the porch.

It wasn’t easy. He hadn’t tried to walk across anything but floor and pavement, and the uneven ground pitched him off balance, but when Lionel offered a steadying hand Joe Willie ignored it and humped along harder. Even the dog seemed to understand the necessity for focus and padded patiently ahead a few yards, then turned and waited for them to catch up before skipping off again. Joe Willie hitch-stepped awkwardly, yard by yard, and by the time they were three-quarters of the way he was covered in sweat. Neither of them spoke. They stopped so Joe Willie could gather his breath, and when he looked at his grandfather Lionel could see fire in his eyes. The same fire he’d seen in the chute just before he would nod hard to the rope men at the gate, slapping his hat hard to his head, the tendons in his neck stretched to their limit in a deep, hard scowl of concentration and his eyes burning, already seeing the horse or the bull rocketing out of the chute, the energy of him focussed on one tiny pinprick of time. Joe Willie stared at the next fifty yards of ground, heaving deep breaths, then looked at Lionel and nodded. They covered the distance in about fifteen minutes.

Joe Willie hadn’t been in the shed since he was maybe thirteen or fourteen, and as he gazed at the mayhem of artifacts and curios it amazed him that nothing had been moved in all that time. The truck still sat where it had always sat. The dog gave a yip and ran ahead to the driver’s door, where he thumped his tail against the oil-and-grease-stained ground and waited for Lionel to open the door.

“We’re sitting in that?” Joe Willie asked.

“Only place out here,” Lionel said.

“Sure it won’t fall apart with our weight? The three of us?” Joe Willie asked, jutting his chin toward the dog.

“She’ll hold up.” Lionel opened the door for him and Joe Willie leaned his good hand on the old man’s shoulder to get up on the running board. He sidled in and settled himself, then handed the crutch to his grandfather, who leaned it against the front fender.

“I ever tell you about the Ping-Pong Pawnee?” Lionel asked as he stepped around the front and made his way to the driver’s side.

“Don’t recollect it,” Joe Willie said.

Lionel opened the door and the dog sprang in, licking at Joe Willie’s neck as he took his place in the middle of the seat and stared out the windshield. “Your great-grandfather told it,” Lionel said as he pulled the door closed. “Around 1908 it was. Daddy’d been with Pawnee Bill’s Wild West show. He was one of them wild red Indians getting shot off his pony in the big finale.”

“I heard this,” Joe Willie said.

“Not everything,” Lionel said. “Daddy’d been about everywhere he could have imagined with that show, Chicago, New York, Paris even. Thought he’d seen everything there was. But one day as he was crossing the lot to get his horse ready for the show, he saw something that changed his life—and mine, your daddy’s and yours.”

“What was that?” Joe Willie asked, absently rubbing the dog behind the ears and staring out the windshield.

“Well, there were some war chiefs in that show. Real warriors who’d fought the cavalry at the end of it all in the late 1800s. Great chiefs. Great men. Daddy said he was always proud to be around those men because he could feel the history in them. Said it made him feel more Indian. One of them was a great Pawnee chief. Pawnees were tough sumbitches. Fearsome fighters. Daddy said when you looked at that man,
even then, even all painted up and wearing a headdress of painted turkey feathers and galloping a shod horse across an arena, you got a sense of all of it, how it had been one time, how powerful it was, the life our people led.

“But as he walked across that lot that day he saw that great war chief all decked out in his regalia holding a ping-pong paddle and batting that ball back and forth with another chief while people laughed and pointed and someone took a picture. It changed it all for him. That scene. That image.”

“Changed what?” Joe Willie asked.

Lionel began to build another smoke. “Changed how he looked at himself, I guess. He couldn’t stomach being a cartoon Injun anymore. He walked out on old Pawnee Bill that day and rode his first rodeo a week later. Made the short go with the broncs and a fistful of cash and that was the start of it all for us. If Daddy hadn’t seen the Ping-Pong Pawnee none of us would’ve rodeo’d. Who knows what we mighta been.”

Lionel finished twisting his cigarette and held out the makings to his grandson. When Joe Willie nodded he began building one for him too.

“Coulda told me on the porch,” Joe Willie said.

“Coulda,” Lionel said. “But I wanted you to see the truck.”

“I seen her before.”

“I know. But I never told you how she come to be.”

“Still coulda told me on the porch.”

Lionel handed Joe Willie the finished cigarette. He lit both for them and they sat there awhile, smoking.

“Well?” Joe Willie said finally.

“In them days it wasn’t easy for us. Big-money rodeo was a white man’s game. The idea of an Indian cowboy seemed as off centre to them as it did to us. Daddy was one of the first to make a dent in it. When I come along all I knew was rodeo.
Grew up with it. Got my schoolin’ in it. There was nothing else for me when I got to be old enough to choose and Daddy understood that—that it was my blood. I got to be a regular at the
pay
window and it was starting to look like I was on
my
way to the top. Course then there was no jetting or airplane riding around from show to show, a cowboy had to drive, and I had no wheels. Been bumming rides all along but that was mighty unpredictable at the best of times, and Daddy wanted to see me make it, wanted to see me be a champion. Only way was to have your own ride. This’d be the middle of ’41, the year I met your grandmother.

“Anyhow, Daddy’d been saving up money for years and keeping it on the sly. One day he just drives this old girl up and hands me the keys. She was a beat-up and sorry-looking mess. Rancher’d used her for pretty much everything and she was covered in mud, dented up from wrangling steers, busted-off tailpipe so there was smoke curling up around both sides of the box and the inside smelling like old horseshit and wet cow dog. But she drove good.

“I stood there with my eyes bugged out and he hands me the keys and says, ‘Well, she ain’t exactly dream wheels like the young bucks say, but she’ll get you where you wanna go.’ And she did. I fixed her up with winnings and we drove the hell out of her for two full seasons. When I got busted in Mesquite your grandmother and I drove here in her. She built this ranch. Everything that’s part of what you see was hauled here in this old girl, and when Birch went pro he took her on the road with him. She’s been to every place with a name that rings in a cowboy’s heart and she’s been sung in, puked in, slept in, cried in, celebrated in and likely or not had some damn good lovin’ made in her too.”

“She’s butt ugly,” Joe Willie said.

“She deserves to be. She earned it.”

“And you wanted me to see her why?”

“Because she’s still dream wheels, boy. She can still take you where you want to go.”

“I don’t want to go anywhere and besides, this old heap’d never turn over even if there was a place I wanted going to.”

“She’s your history,” Lionel said.

“She’s a piece of shit.”

“History don’t necessarily gotta be pretty for it to be your own.”

“It’d help,” Joe Willie said, and the two of them laughed.

“Course, it’d be way too much for you,” Lionel said.

“What?”

“The truck.”

“Whaddaya mean?”

“I mean she’s yours now. Long as you don’t mind me’n the pooch still coming out to sit in her and smoke and watch the sun go down.”

“I don’t want this heap,” Joe Willie said. “What would I do with it?”

“Rebuild her, I was figuring,” Lionel said.

“You’re crazy.”

“You’re right.”

“What?”

“You’re right, I’m crazy. It’s the years, I guess. Don’t rightly know what I was thinking. It took you almost twenty minutes just to get out here and you needed my shoulder to get up into her. No way you could find your way around her well enough to find a way to fix her up.”

“Damn straight,” Joe Willie said.

“Shame, though.”

“What’s that?”

“Shame to see the line get broke. My daddy, me, Birch. All of us got a stake in this old truck. Got our blood in it, our gumption, our grit. Got rodeo in her, all over her. Shame to see her sit and crumble. Still, she’s yours now,” Lionel said and tossed the keys on the seat beside him.

Joe Willie didn’t make a move to pick them up. He sat and stared at them. Finally, he shook his head slowly and gave an exasperated little breath.

“I know you can’t fix her, boy,” Lionel said. “Sorry for even thinking that. It’d take a hell of a lot of work and there’s purely no way you’d be able to do it. But she’s your history. She’s rodeo. She’s the Wolfchild story. That’s why I kept her here pointed at those mountains all these years. Kinda hoping I guess that she’d pull another load some day, haul another of us toward wherever it was we wanted to go. Dreaming, though, I guess. Only dreaming. Just a part of being old myself.”

Lionel opened the door and got out. The dog jumped out after him and he walked around the front of the truck and opened the door. Joe Willie just sat there.

“Coming?” Lionel asked.

“No,” he said, flatly. “You go on.”

“You want me to get the pickup and come back for you?”

“No. I’ll get there.”

“You’re sure? No trouble.”

“I’m sure. You go on.”

Lionel studied him for a moment. Joe Willie sat straight in the seat, his eyes looking out toward the mountains, and Lionel recognized the quiet he’d slipped into. It was like the quiet after a competition and the noise, when the road stretched out in front of a man like a whispered promise.

“Okay,” he said and closed the door gently. “Call if you need me.”

Joe Willie looked at him briefly, nodded and drifted back into his silence.

“Watch this,” Julius said.

“What?” Aiden asked.

“The corridor. Right now.”

They stepped out of Aiden’s cell and leaned against the bars. Julius nodded toward a line of five boys walking insolently down the corridor. When they got to the front of a particular cell the last two boys in line took up positions on either side of the door and the other three stepped quickly inside. There was a short yelp of surprise and then the solid thwack of punches and the lower, softer thud of kicks to the body and the rattle of metal and the grim silence of the cellblock as boys raised their heads from card games or rested their elbows on railings to listen to the sounds of the beating. It was over quickly. The three boys emerged from the cell and the five of them ambled off in different directions, losing themselves at tables or in other cells within seconds. There was only silence from the cell they’d been in.

“What the fuck was that?” Aiden asked.

“Justice,” Julius said. “It’s called the blanket treatment.”

“What’s that?”

“You throw a blanket over the rat’s head so he don’t know who you are, then you square the fucking deal. This boy got lucky.”

“That’s lucky?”

“Yeah. He didn’t get shivved. Only took a beating. Most rats get a blade in the belly, but he’ll remember this. Fuckin’ rats. I hate ’em. That’s what’s gotta happen with your rat when he gets here.”

“Knife him?” Aiden asked.

“Knife him, pipe him, beat on him, I don’t give a damn either way it goes down. Just so long as it does,” Julius said.

“Why should it matter to you?” Aiden asked.

Julius stood up to his full height and looked down at Aiden. “It’s my world, man. All things gotta be right in my world. If it ain’t then things go all to hell. Your world too now. You got to keep it right. You got to maintain the respect. Rat got no respect so he gotta pay, pay large. If you don’t square it means you got no respect either and you gotta go down too. That’s just the way it is, man. It’s a fucking jungle an’ you gotta be Tarzan.”

Aiden thought of Cort Lehane, and that thought led him to other thoughts, of his mother, of the fat prick beating on her, of all the rooms in all the houses he’d occupied, all the bullshit men, all the new starts with all the same old endings and how now, this cold, grey, opaque world was all he was left with, all he had to frame a life with, and he squeezed the bars in his fists until he could feel the tendons start to strain, then he turned wordlessly and left Julius standing at the front of his cell.

For Golec home was a feeling you carried inside you. It had always seemed to him that he’d found that feeling first and then the wheel of life had brought him Karen, then the job, then the kids and lastly the brick building on the cul-de-sac where he’d laid everything out like unpacking luggage, ordered it, stored it and learned its rhythms through the soles of his stocking feet. Before all that, before he’d found the force and the calling he still felt after all these years, he’d been a rambler and seen his share of menial work in diverse places. It’s how he’d met Birch Wolfchild. He’d been pulling fence in Wyoming for a rancher who favoured whiskey over work and was rich
enough to hire out everything when it became necessary. Golec had been there a week when the old man asked for a ride to Gillette for the rodeo. He’d put them both up in a good hotel, paid for Golec’s ticket to the show and given him day money over and above his wages in return for driving him around town to wherever there was a party to be had. He hadn’t minded the rodeo, but driving a half-drunk old man around Gillette all hours of the night grated on his sensibilities. He’d been sitting in an all-night café waiting for the club to close, drinking coffee and planning his next move once he’d been paid off for the fencing.