Dream Wheels (20 page)

A cowboy had come in and slumped down casually on the next stool. Before he knew it Golec was telling him everything about his life and the cowboy had ordered them food and sat and listened and asked questions. It still surprised him after all these years that Birch had so easily got him to talking. Effortlessly. There was something in the languid motion of the man that told Golec that he could be trusted and that there wasn’t a whole lot in the world that might disturb him. They talked for a couple hours, and when Birch asked him to accompany him to the back lot the next night he’d agreed.

“She looks different back there” was all he said. “For me the real rodeo’s always been back there, out of sight, there’s a feel for it there you can’t get in the seats.”

So he’d sat on the railing with Birch and the other cowboys and seen the world of rodeo up close. It had been the start of a great friendship. Golec had eventually met the entire Wolfchild family and visited the ranch whenever he got a chance. When Karen came along Birch and Johanna travelled to his wedding, and whenever Joe Willie had ridden anywhere remotely close through the years the Golecs and the Wolfchilds always met for a reunion. It was a relationship built
on the easy flow of language and talk. Birch could always get him going effortlessly, and through the years had reciprocated in kind so that Golec knew for a fact that there was a man in his corner that he could trust absolutely.

“Are you sure?” Claire asked. “Why would they do this for a complete stranger? Why would they open their home up to a boy getting out of jail?”

Golec looked around at Claire’s new apartment. It was cheerful, and there were tasteful pictures on the wall and a selection of books and music that told him that this woman had refinement built into her, and he was glad to see that she was getting the chance to find it in herself and express it. Golec smiled. “Because he’s a cowboy and because he’s an Indian.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“The ranch is his world. Everything has got to be right in his world. For Birch it means respecting everything, nurturing it, making it grow. If he doesn’t do that he’s not being respectful, and cowboys and Indians pay a heap of attention to being respectful. He’ll help Aiden because I asked. They all will.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

“Amazing,” Claire said, and she felt the warmth of a profound gratitude seep through her and tears slid down her face, and Golec put an arm around her and she let him, lay her head against his shoulder.

“Thank you,” she said softly.

She’d sunk on her springs after all the years of sitting there, and when he shifted his weight around he could feel her sway. Even the cracked-leather seats in the cab were sunken. He could see the depressed imprint of the driver in a perfect horseshoe shape, and as he gazed along the bench seat he saw
the dips where tired legs had rested, and beneath him he could feel the same used and tired hollow against his thighs and buttocks. She’d had her share of passengers, that was sure. And she had the familiar, particular smell of rodeo in her, that pervasive funk of liniment, tobacco, rope, straw, leather, sweat and beer that brought a sudden grin to his face. He rubbed a circle of dust from the dashboard and felt the slight, hard ridges where cigarettes had burned down while cowboys slept before the driver or another passenger had reached over to pick them up and smoke them off. He felt small cuts and abrasions, nicks from the rowel of spurs tossed onto it, and here and there as he looked at the patch he’d cleared, he saw the stain of tobacco juice, wiped hurriedly but not completely after a cowboy’s burst of laughter at a real good one, told as the old truck chased the white line toward another show somewhere down the road. There was history in her, that was sure.

The front end of her curved deeply, diving sharply downward to gather in the twin grilleworks on either side of her nose. She was a pale red, more orange now than the vivid scarlet he imagined her to have been when she was new. The metal of the hood had oxidation marks, the natural wear of age, but she looked solid enough. The shed had kept her safe from snow and rain, and even the west wind that blew through the open door had been gentle to her. Joe Willie closed his eyes to imagine how the rounded nose of her must have looked arrowing down the road, and when he did he saw his mother and his father, young and fresh and vital, laughing as they drove, Birch with one arm flung around her shoulders like he always did and Johanna resting her head on his shoulder, her right hand helping him to steer, singing. Then Lionel and Victoria, tired, worn from the road, sitting stalwart on the seat, themselves young and strong, heading north into the mountains toward the valley
where they’d build a ranch, a home, a future. They were beautiful. All of them. Joe Willie saw it like a vision, like the ceremonial gift his grandmother told him that some young men were given when they sacrificed. It came from somewhere at the back of his eyes as crystal clear as a scene from a movie and it rattled him some with its intensity. He kept his eyes closed to see more of it, to recapture some of the lives before his own, to see history, the line of him begun almost a century before.

Then he saw the bear. It moved slowly out of the draw, the great hump of its shoulders easing over the lip of the rise. It stood there then, stood there against the great blue-grey and green of the mountains, looking at him. Looking and not moving, the feral gaze locking him in the seat of that old truck, watching him, studying him. And then it stood on its back legs, its great front claws draped in front of its chest, its snout rising, pointing into the breeze, and Joe Willie could hear the huff of it like a bellows across the gap of pasture that separated them. Then it dropped to all fours and walked slowly toward him. Thirteen steps. He counted them. Sat there in the truck and consciously counted the steps the bear took with his eyes closed, the scene bright and sharp. Then it stopped, its head lowered to look at him, the eyes more hazel than deep brown, before it turned and began to walk away. Thirteen steps. Then it rose again on its hind legs and walked to the lip of the draw, where it stopped and looked back at him again. It wasn’t a bear’s face. It was the face of the woman, and she gazed right into him with knowing hazel eyes before dropping to the ground in bear shape again and disappearing into the draw toward the mountains.

Joe Willie gasped and opened his eyes. He smelled the rich old smell of the truck, rubbed a hand along the dashboard again, exhaled deeply through puffed-out cheeks and pushed
the door open. There was something here. He knew that for certain. He didn’t know what but he knew that he’d come back to get more of it. Maybe it was nothing, maybe it was all the product of hurt and loss and anger, but it was something, and it was his. He grabbed the crutch and struggled out of the cab. When he got to the door he turned to look at the old truck again. Dream wheels. The damnedest thing. There might be something to it after all.

h
e could still remember the feel of the pipe in his hand. It was a mop bucket handle and he’d wrapped it in a towel and stuck it down his pants and walked down the corridor behind Julius and another boy toward the cell where they’d put Cort. It felt solid, the heft of it assuring him of the rightness of things, the necessity to order things in his world where he’d been sentenced to spend the next two years. Cort had drawn six months. He’d written a blistering statement about how Aiden had forced him into the crime through threats against his family. It played so well that even Claire had looked over at him speculatively and he’d squeezed the railing of the prisoner’s box hard to avoid screaming. Like he’d squeezed the pipe. They’d walked down the corridor and all around him he could hear the deadening of sound, the strange half-muted drawing in of breath and conversation that happened when something was about to go down in the joint, when the population intuited energy transferred into fists or
blades or pipes and waited for the release, the solid pop of wills broken or proclaimed and the silent thrill of blood. The tiny hairs had stood up on his arms and he felt his throat constrict and dry.

Julius and the other boy had taken positions outside the door and he just walked into the cell and up to Cort, who was sitting at the small metal desk with his back to the door. The first blow felt justified. The thwack of it sent a jolt up his arm. The towel cushioned the shock and there was blood only after his head slammed down on the desk and he tumbled to the floor and split his chin. The second, third and fourth blows were just for effect and he avoided the head, settling for the ribs and arms before dropping to one knee and cradling Cort’s head in his hand and looking straight into his drooping eyes.

“Rat,” he’d said and then laid the boy’s head down on the cold concrete floor. He wondered why he hadn’t just let it fall.

They’d made him for it. Even though Cort in his heightened state of fear refused to say anything, the fact that they were co-accused made Aiden the logical fall guy. So he’d drawn Southwood, the maximum-security joint for youths with management problems. He’d laughed at that. The only management problem he’d had up until then had been in trusting someone other than himself. He wouldn’t make that mistake again. He was rightly pissed to have to go down on someone else’s stupidity and weakness, and the act of vengeance, of putting things right, had gotten around quickly. So he’d walked into Southwood as a kind of celebrity. First because the word
conspiracy
lifted him over the break-and-enter, car theft, assault, possession of stolen property and small-time drug beefs other guys walked in with. It gave him status. It smacked of style. It made him a
criminal
. Plus, getting even with the rat meant he was solid, he stood by the inmate code and he took no bullshit.
Julius had people there, so he was known before he even walked in, and he’d had no problem getting accepted and drawn into the best clique in the joint.

They were called Johnny’s Crew. Johnny Calder was an old Navy mechanic who’d worked in corrections for about twenty years. He was a bowlegged stump of a man, every line of him rounded by muscle, and his face bore the scars of a lifetime of wild brawls. Calder only liked tough guys around him, and the auto shop was where the solidest of the solid worked. No one without status had a chance to get in there. Calder handpicked his crew. He read the sheets of every boy coming into Southwood and he could be seen at the edges of the athletic fields and the classrooms, watching, gauging, reading. When he rolled into your cell to add you to his list you knew you’d made the best grade in the joint.

“Way I figure it is, we’re all doing time here,” Johnny would say. “Might as well shake it with good people.”

He had a small ring set up at the back of the shop and it was where management disputes got settled. There’d been a huge farm boy named Jurgens once, a monster in strength and rage who’d made the mistake of trying to run Johnny’s shop. The fight between them was a piece of prison legend and Jurgens had been dispatched so quickly, so efficiently that no one was willing to make that choice again. Instead, they drank coffee all day, smoked, listened to good music and learned engines and boxing.

He drove them hard. But he did it man to man and Aiden appreciated his no-bullshit attitude, and when the old guy bent over an engine to show him how to adjust or replace something, Aiden felt as though he wasn’t so much teaching him something new as reminding him of something he’d just forgotten. It was the same in the ring. Calder liked Aiden’s natural
athleticism and he taught him very deliberately, making him throw two hundred jabs at a time with each fist and skipping rope endlessly. He showed him the feints and the footwork and combinations, made him repeat them over and over before he ever allowed him into the ring.

“Life ain’t fair, Hartley,” he said. “Truth is, it ain’t about being fair. You got to be ready for the fight before it ever happens.”

It was the same with the cars. No one stayed in the auto shop if he couldn’t figure his way around an engine. Aiden found that he could lose himself in the tinkering under the hood, and spending time in the shop made time disappear altogether. After a year had passed he could pretty much determine what a car needed by the sound of it. When the assault on Cort sabatoged his early release and his deal with Golec, it was Calder who channelled his anger, put him in the body shop where he could spend less time in population and more time working on the staff cars and joint vehicles.

There was a life force to automobiles that Aiden could feel, and he knew what they needed by running his palms along the fenders, hoods and side panels. Once he’d tuned the engines he’d focus on the bodywork. He’d concentrate. He’d close his eyes and try to envision the finished project, see himself doing what needed to be done, watch himself bring that life force back, and he would. Slowly but surely he would, and the solitary pursuits of mechanical work and workouts on the heavy bag made time disappear. Aiden sometimes missed entire days that way, and eighteen months were over before he knew it and he was finally released. He was almost seventeen.