Dream Wheels (38 page)

“Which part is that?”

“The part that lets the land fill us. Everyone finds it, or, at least, rediscovers a small part of it now and then. People come here and stand on that veranda and look around at the valley and heave big, deep breaths into themselves and think that they’re just struck by the wonder of it all, the beauty.”

“They aren’t?”

“Yes. Certainly. But there’s the deeper calling going on. The voice in them that says,‘I remember this.’ They forgot how to respond to that voice.”

He chuckled and began to roll a smoke. “It’s beyond me,” he said. “All this talk of voices and remembering. I get where you’re going with it but it’s still beyond me.”

“That’s what everyone thinks, son. That it’s too late now. But we’re all tribal people. Every last one of us living and breathing right now started out as the same kind of people. People who lived in community and together on the land. All the things we call Indian were the same for everybody at one time. The reason we get so far away from each other is because we’ve learned to think we’re different. But we’re not. Take anybody and put them in the middle of something as beautiful as that alpine lake up in the pass over there and they’re going to be touched by it, feel something move inside themselves. Hear that old voice that tells them they remember. It takes time and commitment to remember how to really hear it, but anyone can do it.”

“So sitting around the fire was gonna let Joe Willie and the kid remember how to hear that voice.”

“Not necessarily. But it was gonna make it easier for them to talk to each other, make it easier for them to hear that much, anyway.”

“And that’s not an Indian thing?”

She gave him a firm hug and then let him go. “If you’re an Indian and it makes you feel better, then I guess it’s an Indian thing.”

He finished rolling the smoke and lit up and took a few draws and watched the steers moving in the field and then pinched it out on the top of the fence rail and looked at her. “You and my wife got the market cornered on how to bamboozle a man. But I hear it. That’s the strange thing. Indian or not.”

“I think you’re getting it,” she said, and they both laughed.

Mornings were a small glory. Claire liked the feeling of standing at the edge of the veranda facing the mountains to the west. In the burgeoning early light they seemed magnified, closer somehow, like if she reached out a hand she could touch them,
trace their rippled, jagged outline against the sky, maybe even poke a hand right through them into the cool mystery of their other side, sense the lives there, enchanted and beguiling as the secret lives of dolls. She’d breathe then. Close her eyes, stretch out her arms to their full length, splay her fingers as wide as they would go, then bring them forward slowly like an embrace, inhaling slowly, pulling it all into her until, when her arms encircled her finally, she could feel it enter her, fill her, become her.

She’d taken to rising early as soon as they’d arrived at Wolf Creek, and it had become habit. But more than that. More like a ritual, a small ceremony she practised alone.

Aiden slept later. The work and the fresh air were doing wonderful things for him. She could see it in the glow of him. Excitement. Focus. Joy, almost. She tried to think of when that last shred of imprisonment had dropped from him, that thick, unyielding silence he’d fall into at first, but it wasn’t clear. Mostly it had been a process. Each day had offered him something more, something far removed from the reality of jail life or any of the realities he’d lived up until then. It was the men. Men and bulls. Funny, she thought, but before she came here she likely would have lumped the two together—unpredictable, dangerous, wild, driven by urge. But these men were different. As different as this morning hovered over mountains was unlike a metropolitan morning. Birch and Lionel were laconic and unruffled, a sagacious pair of bookends hewn from the land they occupied. Tough and wiry, they were no-nonsense when it came to the life they’d chosen or the women they’d chosen to live it with. The loyalty amazed her. It wasn’t announced or put on grandiose display. Rather, it lived in the quiet way they moved. They saved their bashing about for the pens and corrals of their livelihood, and when they moved in
the presence of their women they became almost elegant, refined, and pliant. Pliant. She’d met a lot of obdurate men in her time and pliant, bendable, compromising was a quality that was foreign to her. It spoke of respect, and she admired the two grizzled rodeo men for that.

Joe Willie came from the same stock. You could see it. The surliness seldom surfaced around his grandmother and mother. When it did he clamped it down and went off somewhere else with it. Behind the aloof shield he put up in front of himself, Claire sensed the ripples of Birch and Lionel shimmering just beyond it. It showed in the way he treated horses, quiet, tender. It was a beguiling combination of strength and gentleness she saw in him, in all of them. In Joe Willie it was stunning in its intensity, like he reined in both at the same time, as though he didn’t fully trust either. As though they needed to be saddle broke before he’d let himself relax with them. He was good for Aiden, she could see that. There was enough of the wild in both of them to call to each other and enough of the Indian cowboy sensitivity to calm them when they collided.
Indian cowboy
. She shook her head amusedly. Never in a million years would she have believed that her son carried a cowboy gene, but she was glad he did. If he came away with a shred of what these men carried she would be forever grateful.

“You look as though you almost wanted to laugh.”

Johanna sat on the porch swing wrapped in a blanket.

“Have you been there all this time?” Claire asked.

“Yes. But you looked so entranced I didn’t want to bother you.”

“Good word, entranced. I guess I was. I always am.”

“It’s a powerful valley.”

“Yes. It must be wonderful to call it home.”

Johanna shuffled over on the swing and motioned for Claire to join her, and she spread the blanket out and draped it over the both of them. They sat in the swing and looked out over the valley in silence.

“Did you know? That night? Did you know that they’d break through it and get back to the work?” Claire asked.

“No. It was just important to let him know what they were working with.”

“Joe Willie?”

“Him too.”

“But the truck. How did you come to identify the truck that way? As a dream wheel?”

“Things carry stories, Claire. It’s why we keep things. Because the histories they bear make them precious. There’s no big Indian magic in that, we all know it or feel it. But like Victoria said—we forget. We forget how vital those histories are to us and we get lost in the price of things instead, their worldly value, their cost. That’s what we consider if we lose it.”

A hawk peeled a line across the sky. They watched it as it circled, riding the thermals, dipping and climbing without moving its wings.

“If your life’s been a constant process of losing and starting over, again and again and again, and all the things you ever had are always getting lost, where’s the history in that? What is there to hang on to?” Claire asked. “I’m asking for Aiden.”

“The dream itself,” Johanna said.

“What dream?”

“The one we all carry. Home, belonging, community, stories around a fire.”

“Sounds too easy.”

“Try it.”

Claire looked at her. Johanna sat calmly with the blanket draped over her, like an old woman in her shawl, comfortable in her years, confident in their lessons. “Okay,” she said.

The hawk flew closer and closer to the mountains until it dipped below the edge of the draw, disappeared as quietly as a lost thought. Claire let herself sink deeper into the morning, allowed it to seep into her, find its hollow and gather, pool quietly and follow the hawk into the stark warm breast of the mountains.

They’d pushed the truck forward one length so that the nose of her was stuck out the front of the shed. Then they’d dug the pit. By the end of that afternoon they’d stabilized the sides with boards and timbers so that they could stand in it and reach up with their forearms clearing the edge of it. It was hard work, but they fed off each other, neither one wanting to show any tiredness or discomfort, so that heaving the shovels of dirt and rock up over their heads and clear of the rim of the hole became a contest of silent power. They’d taken turns wheel-barrowing the detritus over to the lip of the draw and tilting it over, making sure the trips and loads were equal. When they pushed the truck back into the shed it nestled perfectly beneath the shed’s main beams.

The next day Birch and Lionel devised a plan for block and tackle using the beams for leverage, and when they lifted her the first time the beams held and the old truck swayed slightly as though she loved the new medium of the air and wanted to test it for speed and traction.

Aiden showed the Wolfchilds the weak points in her structure, the wear of age, the tiny fractures that would split and grow and cause more aggravation if left to carry weight again.

“We strip her to the chassis. The body can stay up while we sandblast it, repaint, and redo the axles,” Aiden said, lost in his study of the truck and not paying attention to the looks the Wolfchilds were giving him. “First thing to take care of really is the leaf springs. Either replace them or take them to a shop to weld. After that we can work on the axles and start thinking about what kind of motor we want to drop in. Dropping in a newer engine will make the work faster. No need to sandblast parts. The body will be easiest. She’s in such good shape we can sandblast and paint pretty fast. Not here, though. Shop in town, I guess. Same with the upholstery. Unless you wanna do it yourself, which in that case will add a hell of a lot of time.”

“Whoa, boy,” Birch said, laying a hand on his shoulder. “A little at a time now.”

“You sure know your way around a vehicle, Aiden,” Lionel said. “Never would have seen any of this myself.”

“Well, there was an old guy who ran the shop in the joint. Old Navy guy who knew engines and trucks inside out. Taught me a lot.”

“Wasn’t easy, was it?” Lionel asked.

Aiden looked up at the underside of the truck. “You don’t do time, you lose it. You spend all of it remembering, recollecting or dreaming of how you want it. You’re never in the moment you’re in. You lose all those.”

“I hear that,” Joe Willie said.

“Still, you learned something, didn’t you?” Lionel asked.

“Engines,” Aiden said. “That, and that I won’t go back again.”

“Powerful education, then,” Birch said. “Never been to jail myself. Never seemed a likely choice for success. But you come out okay.”

“Yeah?” Aiden asked.

“Mistakes are like bulls that throw you,” Lionel said. “You can never ride ’em different. You just learn from how you fell and climb back up there.”

“If you can,” Joe Willie said. “If you’re damned lucky you can climb back up again. Some mistakes change everything.”

“Some do,” Lionel said. “I guess the only thing you got control over is how you handle the change.”

“Yeah. Right,” Joe Willie said. “Now are we gonna actually do some work on this truck or are we going to talk about it all day?”

Claire was working on tack when she noticed Joe Willie leaning in the door of the tack room.

“Has he ever been hit? Hit hard?” Joe Willie asked.

“Aiden?” she asked, setting down the rag.

“Yeah. Like boxing. Or in a real fight. A mean one. One where he got pasted good?”

“I don’t know. I wouldn’t want to think so. And I don’t think he’s ever boxed. Why?”

“I need to ask you if I can put him in a ring.”

“What on earth for? He wants to ride a bull. Call me a city girl, Joe Willie, but I don’t think bulls wear boxing gloves.”

“They don’t. But they hit awful hard and he needs to know how to react when he gets clobbered.”

He stepped into the room and sat on a sawhorse they draped saddles on. When he looked at her she could sense the seriousness of his question. “When a man gets hit, square and flush and hard, there’s a fraction of a second of fear. Real deep, hard fear. In that fraction of a second the old flight-or-fight thing comes screaming to the surface. Most try to backpedal, run off, get out of the way of the next one because getting smacked hard isn’t an everyday thing. It takes some severe
gumption to shake it off and stand up to it. He’s gotta learn to take a good solid shot without backing off. In eight seconds he’ll get clobbered like no man’s capable of hitting him and there’s no time for wanting off, for running. He needs to learn that. You gotta say it’s okay.”

“He’s big enough and old enough to choose,” she said.

“Sure. But this is your deal too. You’re the one that needs to be standing there when he lands. You gotta get used to seeing him take a lick. Gotta know you endorsed it.”

“It’s a tough business, isn’t it?”

“The toughest. Tougher than any jailhouse fight he ever had. These ones you gotta choose to take on. There’s one other thing.”

“God. You just asked me to okay my son taking a beating. There’s more?”

He grinned. “Nothing so tough. I want him to work with a gymnastics coach.”

“Well, that sounds a little more peaceful, something I could get used to watching. But it seems like a strange combination.”

“Not really. He needs to learn how to move. How to always be in balance. How to control his body in the air. How to be graceful.”

“You’re kidding me.”

He looked at her seriously. “No. I’m dead serious. You look at a bull blowing out of the chute and you think it’s all mayhem, all violence and spur-of-the-moment action. But there wasn’t a bull I ever rode that didn’t think about what he was gonna do once he left the chute. Spin, blow or kick out. They choose that, and you never know coming out what to expect, how you’re gonna get hit. You need balance, you need rhythm and you need grace. Especially when you get thrown.
You gotta be able to find your balance in the air, and nothing’ll teach you that like gymnastics.”

“Grace?”

“Grace.”