Dream Wheels (43 page)

They laughed.

Climbing the rails was like scaling his anxiety. Birch and Joe Willie waited for him, and Aiden stepped carefully, feeling the slats on the instep and pushing purposefully, reaching tentatively with his other foot until it found purchase on the next rail. The trepidation increased with each rail. Unlike
the smaller bulls he’d ridden so far, Aiden didn’t have to step down as far to reach the animal’s back. This bull filled the chute. There was barely room for his legs on either side, and he eased them carefully down around the bull’s great girth. Its stillness unsettled him. When it felt his legs along its ribs it shimmied, and the loose wobble of skin made it hard for him to feel, to grip with his thighs. He stepped up onto the rail again to settle himself. He looked at Birch and Joe Willie for some kind of signal or comment, but they were busy with the bull rope and the clank belt.

“Aren’t you gonna say something?” he asked.

“Like what?” Joe Willie asked.

“I don’t know. Advice.”

“Advice. Hmm. Don’t have any.”

“Birch?”

“Son, you earned the right to be here.” Birch handed him the end of the bull rope. “You rode bulls, worked your butt off, faced off against a grizzly. Any advice I give you now’s gonna be minor.”

“Go ahead.”

“Son?” Birch said, looking at Joe Willie.

“All right. When that chute opens he’s either gonna blow or buck. He blows, he runs out flat a few steps before he explodes. He bucks, he’s taking air right off. You gotta be prepared for either.”

“How?”

“Grit your teeth. Feel him. Don’t let go.”

“That’s it?”

“Anymore’ll busy your head too much. You know what to do. If you didn’t you wouldn’t be here. Trust me.”

“Okay,” Aiden said, and Joe Willie clapped him firmly on the back.

He stepped down and sat. His legs felt stretched way too wide. The bull was enormous. The top of its head between the horns was as wide as a small table, and the pocket behind its shoulders seemed ridiculously small now—the safety zone he would claim as his own when the chute opened was a postage stamp of hide. He settled into it, placed his gloved hand into the rigging, and Birch began to haul on the rope. He felt the tension, the joining to the bull intensified as the rope tautened. “More,” he said through clenched teeth.

He flexed his fingers, felt the downward strain of the rope and the feel of the bull against the flat of the back of his hand. “More. More,” he said, and the rope felt like it welded him to the bull. He flexed his fingers again and nodded sharply. Joe Willie leaned down and Aiden could see his face at the periphery of his vision. He stared intently at the back of the bull’s horns. He felt a hand on his back and one on his chest and he straightened, pushing his seat inward and scrunching the helmet down tighter on his head before raising his free arm high and to the side.

“Everything,” Joe Willie whispered hard in his ear. “Everything now. Pull everything you ever felt down into your gut. All the anger, the hurt, the fucking joy, the tears. Pull it down and feel it. Feel it. When that chute opens, let it fly. Let it fucking fly with this sumbitch and you’ll be his equal. Got it?”

“Got it,” Aiden said, seeing the pale green walls of the joint, the blood, the tears of his mother, the bruises and cuts on her face, the crumpled form of Cort Lehane, and the empty black of prison nights. He leaned his head back until he felt the cords in his neck stretch tight as he grimaced into the clear blue of the sky, then he nodded sharply once, hard, let it all go with a huff and the chute opened.

Detonation.

He felt propelled upward and outward at the same time. The bull launched itself from the chute, and the jarring impact as it landed slammed his head back hard against the padding at his neck and he saw nothing but a flare of sky and felt the incredible tear of his arm in the rigging. His legs thrust out automatically to touch the shoulders with the rowel of the spurs and he felt himself thrust forward over the shoulder. The ridge of horn across the top of the bull’s head seemed inches from his eyes, and he pulled with all his might with his lower back to get into the pocket again just as the bull kicked and spun at the same time. It spun quickly. Like a dervish. He flew off the rigging and felt himself spinning flat, spread-eagled, counterclockwise, once, twice, three times, four, before the hard dirt of the corral slammed into his back and his breath huffed out of him completely.

He lay there stunned. The wranglers chased the bull off to the exit chute, and he groaned as Lionel then Birch and finally Joe Willie arrived in a clomp of boot heels to help him up. The horizon tilted crazily. He leaned on their arms and his breath returned in a cool blue wash.

“Damn. That was a hot three seconds,” Birch said.

“Sumbuck could jump,” Lionel said.

“Kicked like a bastard too,” Joe Willie said. “That spin was crazy.”

Aiden tore the helmet from his head and when he looked at the three of them they could see the fire in his eyes. He shook his head hard, spat into the dirt, then wiped at his mouth with his gloved hand. “Again,” he said and stomped off toward the chute.

She took the engine into her like an ear takes a song. When they eased the block down onto the frame the old truck settled
some on the revamped springs and then sat proudly, the heft of the engine borne easily. Joe Willie stepped back to look. It didn’t look like much to him at that point, just the frame and the new block with the drive shaft and other vital workings still to be installed before the freshly painted body went on. Still, she looked strong.

Aiden slipped down into the pit to look things over and pushed a circled thumb and finger out at him. Joe Willie nodded. Aiden had talked him into allowing a mechanic from town to do the nitpicky work of installing everything, and he saw the sense in it. He was surely lost when it came to this, and Aiden was plum tired from the effect of four bulls on the first day. Besides, he’d sooner have it done right once than mucked about with a dozen times. Getting her on the road was what mattered to him now, and his pride and the anger that drove it in the early days with her had been replaced with a quiet devotion, a yearning to see her free, wide open on another road, gathering another generation of stories into her steel-and-leather bosom. If he had to step aside for a real truck guy to do the intricate work, so be it. He’d be there to watch, to learn, to come to understand how to care for her once she was ready, how to keep her moving. It was a settled feeling in his chest when he thought of it. He reached out a hand to touch the steel of her frame and felt the cool hardness like the granite and iron it had sprung from. She was a marvel. Sitting there, skeletal, the engine shining at her front end, the heart of her waiting to beat.

Aiden climbed out of the pit and stood beside him. He handed him a smoke and they stood there awhile casually examining the work they’d done together. Four bulls, twelve seconds. That’s what Aiden’s first day on the rodeo bulls had earned him. Twelve seconds. They’d been a handful of ornery
and Joe Willie wondered how he might have made out. The smell of them set off pangs of something like jealousy in him, the fight still in him, the reaction to the challenge still able to flare. But watching the kid satisfied that too. He was a rider. Joe Willie could see that. There was a fraction of a second of adjustment each time, a minor shift in approach that told him the kid was thinking it through, learning to see himself out of the chute long before it opened, learning to anticipate, to read the animal beneath him and prepare himself. When the bull erupted he saw the shift play out, saw the kid try another trick, saw him fly out of the rigging, land roughly in the dirt and stand up quicker, angrier, ready for another go. A rider. He looked at him out the corner of his eye. Slouched. Easy with his body. Hurtin’ for certain. But taking it, accepting it, learning from it.

“She’s gonna be hot,” Aiden said.

“Yessir. I changed the order on the paint job, though.”

“What? Thought we agreed on deep metallic blue. Like the sky above the peak.”

“We did. I just added a little something.”

“Jesus. I can’t wait to see what the cowboy mind came up with. Flames and shit. Maybe a cartoon bull? Pinstripes like a lasso curled around the whole body?”

“Never thought of that. Maybe I’ll call back and add some of that. Just wait. You’ll like it.” He punched him lightly on the shoulder. Aiden winced and arched the shoulder around. “Hurt?” Joe Willie asked.

“Some,” Aiden said. “That last bull. Caught me leaning, couldn’t adjust in the air and landed pretty square on it.”

“Could be worse.”

Aiden looked at him. He took a long draw on the cigarette, held it deep in the lungs, then let it go slowly, head tilted
back and watching the smoke plume toward the roof of the shed. “Yeah,” he said. “You still hurt?”

“Some,” Joe Willie said. “That last bull. Caught me leaning.”

They snickered. Aiden scratched at his ear and when he looked at Joe Willie again there was a grave expression on his face. “Was it worth it? Getting busted up like that?”

Joe Willie pinched out the smoke and put the butt in his chest pocket. “Love’ll bust you up sometimes,” he said. “Hurts like a bitch for a spell. Long spell. But in the end you come to prefer it. Knowing that it was love done it to you. Not something else. You can get by knowing that.”

“It was worth it, then?”

Joe Willie looked at him. “Damn straight,” he said.

He ran across the wide stretch of pasture to the road, climbed through the rails of the fence and continued trotting casually along the shoulder. The dog followed him but turned back once he’d ventured down the road a ways. He waved to it and picked up the pace. The muscles in his legs were tight and sore, but as he loped through the first mile they became more elastic and he held the pace easily. Around him the valley was like a postcard, bathed in an impossible morning light. There were shades of green around him that Aiden had never seen, never known were possible. Against the sky a hawk circled, and he caught the flare of brown at the edge of a hill that marked a coyote’s quick escape from sight. Ground squirrels chattered in the pastures on each side of him, and here and there was the small smudge of cattle or horses against the green. The land was full. He breathed it deep into him and felt his heartbeat in his chest, strong and hard. When he got to the turn toward town he stopped, jogged in place a moment and then turned back down the road toward Wolf Creek Ranch. The valley
plowed an elongated V toward the far horizon, and as he ran he closed his eyes now and again to seal the image of it in his mind. He was sweating now and he rubbed a hand across his brow and back through his hair. He felt the keen sense of his own blood hot in his veins, his breathing hard in his ears and a clarity of vision and thought he’d never had. He shadow-boxed as he ran, flicked out the right and then the left in imaginary jabs and smiled at the feeling of freedom in his limbs.

He’d ride again today. Another four bulls anyway, maybe six. He wanted that feeling back, the feeling he got in the chute when everything had been done that could be done and it was just him and the animal. Waiting. Waiting for the release, the challenge, the answer to the call. He felt alive then, fully and completely alive, and even though the rodeo bulls were winning these initial battles, he got up off the ground with more determination and intensity than before, the ground pounding an education into his bruised muscles. Nine more to ride. Nine more challenges. He sent his mind through the ritual of preparation, seeing himself rubbing rosin into the bull rope, the elaborate pantomime of the ride, lacing his boots to his feet, pulling the chaps snug to his legs, and the weight of focus in his eyes. He ran faster. When he got to the driveway he sprinted full out, kicking up puffs of dust, his arms churning, knees raised high with each stride and the feeling in him, rich and steeped by the run, of aliveness, readiness, certainty. He sprinted all the way to the main barn, where he towelled off some, caught his breath and then picked up the first of the weights Joe Willie had bought for him. He lifted them. Filled with intention.

They were on the veranda shelling peas when they saw him run by. Claire watched him until he disappeared into the black
of the barn and then she shelled solemnly, letting the small marbles roll off her fingers and drop into the bowl at her feet. The Wolfchilds let her be, and for a long while there was nothing but the sounds of the ranch in the early morning and the skreel of hawks in the wind.

“This place has been good for him,” she said.

“Yes. He’s lighter now,” Johanna said. “He doesn’t fill space the same way.”

“I’ve never seen him look so determined.”

“When you find a dream it changes you,” Birch said.

“What do you mean?”

“Bulls,” he said.

“Bulls?”

“He’s a rider. He can feel it. He knows it and he wants it now.”

“We’re only here a short time,” she said. “After that I don’t know what he’ll do. In the city there’s nothing like this.”

“I don’t expect you’ll find that he wants to be back there so much,” Birch said. “There was a cowboy in him waiting to be born, and now that he is there won’t be nothing less than that for him. Can’t be.”

“He’s not a cowboy.”

“Try telling him that.”

“Bill Pickett,” Lionel said. He looked at Claire and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. “He was black. He was the one invented bulldogging.”

“What’s bulldogging?”

“When a cowboy jumps off a horse in full gallop to wrestle a steer to the ground.”

“Why?” she asked, and they all laughed.

“Part of the life,” he said. “Part of the tradition of rodeo now. Probably didn’t look to Bill Pickett’s mama that he was
cut out to cowboy either. But he was. Gave the sport a whole new look.”

“Black cowboys? I had no idea.”

“Been many a good man I knew was black,” Lionel said. “Damn good riders and some damn fine men. Got a book in there tells all about it. There’s a whole history, a whole tradition of black cowboys. He should see that.”