Dream Wheels (30 page)

Aiden had never seen anything like it. Every engine he’d worked on had been relatively new, and the vintage block held mysteries he felt keen to explore. The old truck needed a lot of work, but when he pounded the fender skirt some it was amazingly sound. The men gathered around the engine and stared at it wordlessly. Joe Willie was clearly anxious and whenever any one of them reached out to touch part of it, Aiden saw him flinch. Nothing you could call a reaction, just a small tightening around the corner of the mouth. Aiden looked at the arm. At a casual glance you couldn’t really tell there was anything different about it. There was a slackening of material along the entire length of it, and the way the fabric draped off the nub of bone that was the shoulder joint gave it a peculiar hang, but clothed in a long-sleeve shirt and standing the way he did, slumped to the right with his hands on his hips, hid the damage the bull had done. Still, Aiden couldn’t fathom how someone would adjust to that, the sudden ripping
away of a dream and the shrinking of a world. It had to hurt. His eyes flicked back and forth between the right arm and the left as he tried to picture the man he’d watched riding monstrous bulls, an incredibly strong, whole man, a man clumping along in fringed chaps, flinging his hat into the crowd, bristling with life, the dust of the arena like a halo around him and the feel of a behemoth conquered fresh in his chest. He couldn’t see that man here.

When their eyes met Aiden froze but held the look. He felt Joe Willie look right into him, and in the unwavering intensity of that gaze he saw the bull rider.

“What?” Joe Willie asked sullenly.

“Nothing,” Aiden said.

He watched Joe Willie breathe, the slight flare of nostril the only sign that there was life beyond the hard, unyielding force of that gaze.

“You’ve really got to see this kid go,” Birch told Joe Willie after everyone had left the shed.

“Why?” Joe Willie busied himself with the engine.

“When he rides he’s all business. It’s amazing, really.”

“It’s a machine, Daddy.”

“He took it to eight.”

“Seen ten-year-olds do eight seconds on a machine.”

“Level eight.”

Joe Willie slowly set the wrench down on the table. He turned to look at his father. “Green kid took it to eight? Didn’t bail?”

“Didn’t bail. He spurred it too.”

“Why?”

“Don’t know. We only showed him how to hold on. Figured to throw in the legwork after.”

“Jesus.”

“That’s what I said.”

“Still, it’s just a machine. Don’t mean nothing. Not really.”

“Not really,” Birch said. “Anyone can fluke level eight four times.”

Joe Willie looked at him as hard as any man had ever looked at him. “What are you gonna do?”

“Got no choice,” Birch said. “We gotta rig him up.”

“When?”

“No need of waiting.”

Joe Willie scratched at his head beneath his hat and looked up at the rafters of the shed. “Then I guess I’d better see this thing. Let me know when it’s time.”

Aiden found Claire picking the hooves of a gelding in the stable. He watched her go about the chore and talking to the horse, telling it about her girlhood dream of riding in the dappled sunlight of the mountains on a horse just like him. The horse seemed to enjoy the talk, and when Claire changed to another hoof, scuffing around the animal’s body easily and familiarly, he lifted it at the touch of her palm. Aiden smiled. She looked at home around the horse and as he watched her move he wondered at the strange power of time to offer things, choices mostly, that you wouldn’t make in a normal situation, like this journey to a ranch, this way of life so different from the one he knew, the anonymity of the city. She looked nothing like the woman he remembered before the joint. This woman was vital and natural, and he could see her natural grace in the way she scraped away with a hoof pick in a shadowy stall. It was worth it to see this. Worth every second in that place. Worth every lonesome minute of refusal, his sparing her the sight of him in coarse denim surrounded by ghostly
concrete painted a subdued green like the fading memory of grass and lawns and meadows. She caught him looking.

“Chores get done faster by doing,” she said.

“Yeah, well, I’m better at the other end.”

She laughed. “Really? You want to muck out this stall, then?”

“No. I meant the top end.”

“Yeah? How’s it going?”

“I’m going up.”

“Up where?”

“On a bull.”

Claire stood up quickly and the horse shied some. She spoke to it soothingly and stroked its withers. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” she said to Aiden. “Isn’t it dangerous?”

“Getting sent to the joint wasn’t a good idea and it’s plenty dangerous there. I’ll take a bull over two hundred angry dudes any time.”

She looked at him leaning casually against the stall. There was a quietness about him now, not the angry, sullen silence she’d seen before, but more the laconic, bowled-over kind of quiet that settled over men at births and deaths and surprising twists of fate. Awe, almost. But easing closer to respect. He grinned at her and she felt her heart compress.

“Okay,” she said, putting the hoof pick in its place. “But let’s do something first.”

“What?”

“Let’s go blast around in that little convertible. We’ll put the top down and you can drive and we’ll race down the highway and see the sights. What do you think?”

“You want me to drive?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve only driven for short jaunts. Parking. Backing up. Moving cars around.”

“You’ll get the hang of it fast. You get the hang of everything fast.”

“When?”

“No time like the present,” she said and walked out of the stall. Aiden looked at her with surprise and then followed her out of the barn.

He understood what it meant. He understood it fully. There was a charge in the blood that he could feel even now. Even now after these long months of working on the truck and feeling as removed from rodeo as a worn-out bronc put out to pasture, he could feel the heat of it. It had burned in him all his life, and if the kid was as good as they said, then the fire would be in him too. God, he missed fanning those flames. Joe Willie had studied gymnastics for years in order to learn how to control his body in the air. He’d taken judo to learn how to fall and land correctly, absorbing impact in a directed roll of the body. He’d taken yoga for elasticity and breathing during stress and he’d even taken dance classes in order to learn rhythm, timing and control of motion. And he’d learned how to shrug off the pain of impact. It took all of that just to prepare, just to make yourself ready to compete. To stoke the fire that burned relentlessly in the gut. He’d spent hours on the rope barrel and the bucking machine adjusting to the pitch of wild bucking and that eerie sensation in the head when there’s no focal point for balance, when the world and all you knew of it spun and twisted and gyrated wildly and relief was most often found spread-eagled on the hardpack. He’d done all of it out of a pure and unencumbered love. That’s what it took. As he worked his way across the pasture he felt the incredible ache of absence. He’d never felt it for a person in his life and he wondered if that felt anything near as bad as
the longing he carried within him for the arena, the action, the sight and sound and smell of rodeo.

He sneered to see the boy and the woman head into the house. The kid was a fluke. It couldn’t be anything more, some weird combination of balance and timing that grace had given him. He’d rig up on one of the ranch bulls and probably scare himself right back to the city, right back to whatever sad and sorry life had landed him in prison and likely right back into it. Snot nose. If he had some guts and some sand it was because of the same generous hand of grace that gave him the balance and the timing. He’d go. He’d go and watch the kid slam into the dirt, clamber up with a hand to his lower back, limp to the rail and lean there with his head on his forearms, crying at the shock, the brutality, the loss of himself as he flew through the air and the realization that he’d been beaten, good and solid and final. He wouldn’t wish it on him. But he knew it was the only sure end to the fantasy his father and grandfather had. Natural. The kid was no natural, but the ending sure would be.

Aiden drove with a small grin on his face. Beside him, Claire lounged with a map unfolded on her lap, pressing it down against the wind with one hand and brushing at her hair with the other. He’d unlocked the confounding combination of clutch, shift and gas almost immediately and he drove with control. He kept the car at a steady, purring clip, only passing when it mattered, never risking, never taking chances. How he could do that with so little time behind the wheel she didn’t know. There was so much she didn’t know now, so much she wanted to learn about him, and as she stared at the highway ahead of her she was glad of the car.

He twirled the dial of the radio until the car was filled
with a country two-step replete with fiddle and pedal steel guitar.

“There,” he shouted over the wind and the radio. “Mood music.”

She laughed. “I know this song,” she yelled back.

“Sure you do,” he said.

“No, really,” she said and leaned across the console so he could hear her. “When I was a girl we lived in this building with our window facing the apartment across the alley. It was only about ten feet. We never had a radio or a TV, but the man who lived across the alley loved country music. I could hear it through his window. So I sat on the ledge of our window at night when Mom was gone and listened to music.

“He saw me one night and he walked toward the window. I thought he was going to close it but instead he leaned out, grinned at me, turned the music louder, snapped his fingers and did a little dance step. He’d turn the music up whenever he saw me at the window. We never spoke. I never knew his name. But I sure learned to love that music.”

He drove and they listened to the song until it faded into the next one. It was a different kind of silence. Claire could feel that. Aiden stared ahead at the road but his thoughts were far away, and when he spoke to her again it was in a voice that had a curious overtone, the sound of a boy, a boy’s sense of wonder spoken in the rumbling voice of a man.

“There was this kid in the joint,” he said, “had a guitar. Everyone laughed at him because he only played this kind of stuff. Hillbilly, that’s what we called him. But I used to lay on my bunk and read and listen to him play. He wasn’t bad. Some of those songs would reach out and touch me when he sang them. Real. You know?”

“Yes,” she said. “It’s what got me too.”

“So I’d lay there and pretend not to notice. Made me feel kinda lonesome when I needed to feel lonesome and quiet when I needed that. I never told him. Never thanked him for it.”

“What happened to him?”

“He got out,” Aiden said and lit a cigarette from the lighter and stared harder at the road, smoking. “But he was back in less than a month on a murder beef, coming down off morphine and crack real hard, skinny, all fucked up. Didn’t have the guitar anymore.”

The song ended and Aiden turned down the volume on the commercial that followed. They drove on in the quiet.

“Did you meet a lot of kids like that?”

“Not really. Kept to myself. It was better that way.”

“Yes.”

“But I sure missed that music.”

He turned the radio back up. Out here the land rolled outward, languid as a dream, unfurling itself into gullies, ridges, plains and occasional sweeps of open territory that made a solitary tree magical, fantastic, like something unseen before, and as it opened itself to the sky, Claire could feel the land begin to lull her, easing time and forgetting into something small at her centre, coiled, eased, wrapped about itself, slumbered and gentle to carry. She looked at her son. He drove with the wrist of one hand bent over the arc of the steering wheel, at ease, comfortable with the car, the road, the feel of the land. As he powered the car around a wide, sweeping curve, he reached over and squeezed her hand. Once. Quickly, then released. Wordlessly. Claire felt as though he had spoken volumes.

For Victoria it was always the same. Once the bull fever set into them there was nothing else for her to do but follow along
and wait it out. They’d forget routine things like meals and chores and time itself. Bad enough with the saddle broncs and bareback broncs, but the bulls carried their own mystique, and it was like the air around them became electrified, and the men shimmered around them like iron filings, shaped and defined by energy. She’d seen it forever. It was the same for Birch as it had been for Lionel, and when Joe Willie came along, bull riding was as natural a thing in a day as grits and grease. It was good to see again, though. All of them got that look in the eyes, eager like a pup, hungry and excited all at the same time, and it always made her laugh.

She laughed now as she headed for the main corral. Lionel had stumped through the kitchen on his way to their room and stumped back through again with a pair of his chaps hung over a shoulder and winked at her broadly. She’d known then and she quickly made up sandwiches, gathered some fruit and chocolate, filled a water jug and headed out to where her men, her boys, were getting ready to play their favourite game. The wranglers had shunted a dozen bulls into the back pens and three more were waiting to be pushed up into the bucking chutes while everyone prepared. She set the snacks and water in the shade of the bleachers and sat with Claire and Mundell and the Hairstons.

“Exciting, isn’t it?” she asked.

“Did you ever worry?” Claire asked.

“Always,” she said. “Didn’t matter though.”

She pointed to Birch and Lionel and the wranglers busy near the chutes, laughing and teasing. “See that? How could anything matter seeing something like that? Seeing men as boys. Seeing them alive as alive can be. They never worried. Worry’d take them right out of it, right out of the one place in the whole world they really want to be.”

“Still,” Mundell said, “it’s dangerous.”

“So’s walking. But you never think about it. It’s just something you do.”