Dream Wheels (4 page)

“This,” he said, sliding the shorts down and pushing her to her knees in front of him.

She stared at his engorged need and the revulsion was thick in her.

“Now, be nice,” he said.

“No,” she said in a whisper.

His fist crashed into the back of her head and drove her to the floor. She only had a moment to interpret what was happening before he kicked her in the stomach and hauled her to her feet again in front of him.

“Be nice,” he said again, firmly.

“No,” she said.

The world exploded.

Victoria Wolfchild placed the telephone back in its cradle and walked to the picture window that looked out over the pasture. The horses were looped to the hitching post at the edge of the veranda and the dog lay panting on the step beside them. She could see the back of him, leaned against the rail fence looking across the valley at the mountains. Smoking. She watched his ribs move out with the inhale, then contract slowly as the plume of smoke streamed out in a long, thin cloud, mushrooming at its end and disappearing into the purple-pink scalloped edges of the evening. Right now he was learning to digest the disappointment and the worry. Las Vegas was thousands of miles away and the distance felt even greater when you were landlocked and helpless at home. He’d want to be doing something, anything. Now, as she reached into the closet for her shawl, Victoria Wolfchild knew he’d be more wrought with anxiety once she told him the extent of the injuries. A star had fallen and the sky was suddenly emptier and colder. Joe Willie had ridden higher and further than either he or Birch had ever dreamed, and the old man wanted that championship for him more than he’d wanted anything these past few years.
Still, it was the fact that the boy was hurt, and hurt bad, that agonized him now. As she stepped through the door onto the veranda she heard the faint syllables of the old prayer song they’d learned together many years ago. His face was raised to the sky now and she knew his eyes would be closed and his throat open to beseech blessings for the grandchild far away.

He hadn’t had much use for the old ways when they met. Lionel had been raised in missionary schools. He never spoke of that. Victoria had made it a point to read what she could find of the experience and she’d felt a well of shame for that part of her country’s history. She knew that they had removed the language and the culture from those poor children and that once a tribal person had lost those they were pretty much at sea. So, after they’d been married a few years, she started taking him to local powwows and tribal gatherings. He was reluctant at first, not so much for the encounter with his cultural way but more because, even though Lionel loved her immensely, there was a part of him that felt embarrassed being married to a white woman. A cultural embarrassment that only played itself out when they walked among his people. Victoria sensed it in the way his hand let go of hers some when they walked. Not completely, not in any obvious way, but enough. She knew it in the way he looked beyond her when they talked, as if he needed to see who was looking. She knew it by his retreat into shorter sentences spoken lower than usual or by his rapt interest in the ground. It was something else he never spoke of but she knew it in her bones and she also knew that she didn’t blame him or hold it against him. The world sometimes held a big eraser in its hand and it didn’t care much whose life it skimmed over, didn’t consider the impact of its movements. Those whose lives were smudged by it went on with a hunger for the edges, for definition, for completeness. Lionel needed detail, and she helped him find it.

They’d found an old man and his wife and they’d become regular visitors. The old couple spoke to them of the traditions that had once flourished, told them of the ceremonies and rituals that had once guided the lives of the people. Little by little they had filled out the edges of Lionel’s life. They filled out the edges of their marriage too. Together, they had found a spirituality that fit both of them like an old pair of moccasins: loose, familiar and comforting. She didn’t know when it changed for him, only that there was suddenly a time at a gathering in Montana that he’d stood there in a circle of his people and draped an arm around her shoulders while he sang along with a round dance song. They’d danced the Owl Dance together that night and the Rabbit Dance, and as Victoria looked out at the faces watching the couples step proudly by, she saw only joy and love and acceptance in their faces and on Lionel’s too. By the time Birch came around in 1950 they both spoke a smattering of Ojibway and knew various prayer songs like the one the old man sang now with his face raised to the darkening sky. They didn’t do so much ceremony anymore. The old bones couldn’t take the cramp of the sweat lodge and they’d settled for some time now on smudging with the sacred medicines, prayers and meditation in the morning and the songs they’d sing sometimes with the old hand drum that graced the wall of their living room. She stood on the veranda steps and listened to him sing. The syllables, rich and healing, seeping into the air, the grass and the mountains like blessings.

When he finished he put one foot back onto the low rail of the fence and put his hat back on. She walked down the steps and along the crushed-stone pathway. He heard the crunch of her footsteps and turned. When she reached him she took his hand wordlessly and began to stroll along the fence line. She felt his gaze and his anxiety.

“Geezhee-go-kway is happy tonight,” she said.

“Sky Woman?” he asked, looking up and around at the sky. “Yes. I guess she is. It’s beautiful.”

“I never tire of it. This land, this sky, the mountains.”

“No. Me neither,” he said.

“We’ve grown strong here, Lionel.”

“Grown pretty damn old too.”

“Nice when it happens at the same time, isn’t it?”

“What are you telling me, woman?” He looked down at her.

“Joe Willie’s bad,” she said, turning to him and taking both his hands in hers. “He won’t ever ride again. The bull destroyed his shoulder and crushed his thigh.”

She watched his eyes change. He looked up across the valley and heaved a deep sigh. Then he looked at her and nodded.

“He’ll mend here,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Gonna need a lot of mending.”

“Yes,” she said again.

“Bones’ll set,” he said. “Hard work to mend a busted life.”

They walked together back to the house to make a room ready for their grandchild.

He sat on the edge of the bed and watched himself in the mirror. He practised lowering and raising his head, keeping the eyes firm on themselves, then turning slightly to the right and to the left, the eyes, even in the narrowed peripheral field, cold, flat, emotionless, empty of everything but the idle threat, the danger lurking just beneath the surface. When it got so he could sweep the look across the room and not break the intensity he stood and practised leaning. All the weight on the flat of one foot, a hip thrust out and the shoulders canted at an angle to match the hip and the arms dangling loose, casual, and
the hands just slightly to the front of the hip pockets with the fingers cupped inward slightly, just so, the thumbs angled toward each other, giving the impression of fists forming in readiness, the will slouched and insouciant, prepared for battle. Then he walked. He ambled slowly toward the mirror, watching. He kept his eyes flat, his head tilted slightly and walked, rolling the shoulders easily with each step, the hands never moving from their position. The plant of each foot was resolute, as if he was going somewhere important but a place of his own choosing, at his own time, his own tempo, the laziness of it a measure of his purpose.

He walked until he perfected it. Over and over, back and forth, watching himself, the look cast back across his shoulder as he spun slowly toward himself again, catching his own eye and seeing the warrior there, the unyielding ambivalence he needed to carry to the street. He was fifteen but he walked nineteen. That was important. In the neighbourhood she’d moved him to this time he couldn’t afford to be mistaken for a slacker, a mark, an easy number. The boys played rough here. There were four gangs in the area, and as a half-blood he didn’t really fit into any of them: too light for the blacks, too dark for the whiteys and Latinos, and definitely too exotic for the Asians. There were no mulatto gangs. He was alone here, and he felt the weight of his isolation every time he hit the street, the disdain, the anger his obvious mixed blood caused in people. It was a dangerous place to be without backup. But he wasn’t the type to roll over. He’d been alone all his life and he’d come to prefer it that way. Every time there was a man they moved and there was always a man and there was always a new neighbourhood, a new school, a new set of faces and attitudes, a new challenge from the bully of the block or the leader of the local crew. But he’d survived. He’d made it to fifteen in his
aloneness and preferred it to the unpredictable volatility of the gang. So he practised. He taught himself to walk.

He walked to the mirror over and over again. Slouching, the roll of the hips and shoulders less pronounced than the gangbangers, more a suggestion really than a salute, and when he neared the glass he stepped slowly up to it, his face mere inches away and the eyes steady, empty as a promise from the revolving door of instant dads he’d known all his life. When he said his name it was with the coolness of the hoods he’d watched on video, the detachment itself a threat, a devil-may-care shrugging off of responsibility, conscience, association.

“Aiden. Aiden Hartley,” he said to the mirror, his voice low in his throat.

He said it again. Slower. Then he smirked. Just enough.

There was a plate of food on his bedside table. He sat there and ate slowly, watching his movements in the mirror. He always ate later. Once they were tucked away in the bedroom he’d come back and slip up to his room to watch TV late into the night. He hated the sounds, and even the dopiness of late-night TV was better than the slap and grunt and squeaking from across the hall. For a fat fuck the guy could get it going every damn night, and he wondered if she liked his doughy whiteness jiggling above her in the dimness of their room. Probably. Sometimes he carried a wish for his mother. He wished that she could just float away, float right the fuck away from the endless searching and hoping and coming and going: the relentless to-and-fro of her life. Other times, most times, he resented her. She’d stick it out here though like she always did, hoping against hope that this guy was
the
guy and they would have a home and a history. He never could figure that one out. History. She went after it like she believed their life would start when she found it and he figured they’d been
having one all along. Not much of one in the long scheme of things but it was a history nonetheless.

So he found himself hoping that the fat guy with the money, the big car and the nice house would be the one for her. Personally, he didn’t care one way or the other. New guys were like new starts, same old same old, all buddy-buddy in the beginning until they got in her pants, and once the thrill of that was gone the slow downward tilt to the dump that always came. He’d picked himself up off more sidewalks than a wino by fifteen and he was tired of it. All he knew for certain was that this last stop on the long train ride to wherever they were meant to get to was another brief disembarkation, a whistle stop, and he hated it like he’d hated all the others. He ate. Then he switched on the television and sat in its glow and watched one show after another until sleep allowed him a reprieve and he floated away himself.

Birch Wolfchild had never really liked his name. He could see the strength of it. He knew that birch was a sacred thing with his father’s people. He knew that the ancient legends and stories of the Ojibway were inscribed on birchbark scrolls and that the talking stick used in community ceremony came from the birch tree. He knew all of that and appreciated the fact that his was an honour name, but it was still no name to lay on a rodeo kid. Cowboy kids had no head for elaborate ideas, and their guffaws and snickers irritated the hell out of him. He’d even talked of taking on a nickname, something more appealing to a cowboy’s sense of things. Rusty, Slim or Tex would have worked for him, but his mother had told him all his life that Birch was a storyteller’s name and he was meant to bring stories forward. What kind of stories Birch never knew, but now, waiting for Johanna, he hoped that he had a few in store for his boy.

His wife was a Sioux woman, a barrel racer and composed of the no-nonsense way of her people and a competitive rider. She’d brook no stories, and Birch had learned over time to lay everything out simple and direct. It was sure a lot less stressful on him that way. Johanna Wolfchild was a fiercely protective mother, and from the beginning she’d wanted the straight goods on every bump and bruise Joe Willie had suffered. There never had been any way either Birch or his son could “aw shucks” their way past Johanna’s scrutiny. Now, she’d want it as straight as the doc had given it to him, and Birch knew that she would be the one to take it to Joe Willie when it was time. She always had. She’d raised her boy to face life head on and to teach him that she’d never once shrunk from the truth of things no matter how hard that truth might be. That was the Sioux way, Birch figured. Warrior people. The whole “today is a good day to die” thing always puzzled him, but he saw it in his wife and he loved her for it. When you knew who you were, all of it, the good and the bad, the pretty and the plain, you could face anything and never bend, bolt or buckle. She’d taught him that. When it became clear that Birch was never going to live in the big money on the circuit she’d just handed him his bag, got into the truck and drove them home to the valley. Hardly even stopped for gas on the way, Birch joked, and she hadn’t. Their marriage was the same no-nonsense deal. When Johanna knew what she wanted she just roped it, tied it down and took it home. She had with Birch and he was the better man for it. From the moment she’d walked him away from his friends and out onto the dance floor at the cowboy dance in Pendleton, Johanna had moved him and his life onward and upward. He’d always been strong and tough, but Johanna had found a way to make him graceful. Birch grinned at that. Graceful. You didn’t learn to cowboy by being graceful but you learned to be a man
that way. First thing you had to learn in order to cowboy well was how to fall. First thing you had to learn to be a man was how to stand up, dust yourself off and move on. The grace was in the dusting off.