Dream Wheels (44 page)

“Truth is,” Birch said, “was black men that settled the west. Did all the hard work leastways.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“No, ma’am,” he said. “When he’s riding the boy’s coming from a rich past, a rich history.”

Claire looked at him a long moment. “A tradition.”

“Yes,” Lionel said. “A damn good and proud one.”

“I’ll look at that book,” she said.

He found it on the tenth bull. There was a moment, just before he was launched into the air again, when Aiden sensed the pocket behind the bull’s shoulders, felt if he closed his eyes he could see it, begin to work it like the bull worked it, energy against energy, force against force, that small area the centre of everything. It was a brief intuition. The moment he focussed on the sensory perception of the pocket he lost it and the bull spun into his rigging hand. Picking himself up off the ground and watching the bull kick its way into the exit chute he shook his head and turned to prepare to remount.

“What happened?” Joe Willie asked him when he got to the fence.

“You saw what happened. He spun into my wrap hand and I lost it.”

“That’s not what I meant. You looked different up there.”

“When exactly,” Aiden asked with a grin, “in the three seconds I was up there?”

“It was six.”

“Really?”

“Really. I thought you were gonna break it.”

Joe Willie had limited him to three bulls a day with a day’s rest in between. Five days had passed since he rode the first four bulls. In that time Aiden calculated that he’d spent a grand total of twenty-seven seconds rigged up. The bulls were wild. They blasted out of the chute and into paroxysms of spins and kicks and bucks that had been impossible for him to read, gauge, predict and hold through. For the brief time he was mounted he paid attention to the fine points of riding, the free hand high and wide, the legs spurring the shoulders repeatedly and his upper body leaned with his perception of the bull’s movements. And he paid attention to his landings in the dirt. Each time he sat on the top rail, alone, far away from the Wolfchilds, the wranglers or his mother, whom he could see watching him nervously, checking his condition from a distance, worrying. In those moments he replayed the ride in his mind. He tried to recollect the twists and yanks and crazy elevations of the bull. But now as he looked up at Joe Willie straddling the top rail, he forgot the animal’s moves and imagined the pocket, saw it clearly, felt it in his seat, hips and thighs through the six seconds of recollection. “I’m gonna break it,” he said.

Joe Willie studied him. “Yeah,” he said.

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Fire away.”

“If I do it, if I make eight on the last three, all of the last three, will you get me my permit?”

“You want to rodeo?”

“Not exactly,” Aiden said. “I want to ride bulls. I want to join the professional circuit.”

“The Professional Bull Riders Association? You want to tour?”

“Yes. More than anything.”

Joe Willie shook his head. “Those boys aren’t even cowboys. Not all of them. Hell, they go to school for it. They go to college and then join up. For the TV. For the lights, for the money. It’s all for the money, Aiden, not for the sport, not for the tradition.”

“Still.”

“Still nothing.”

“Joe Willie, I’m not even a cowboy,” Aiden said. “I’m a city kid. But I know how it makes me feel when I’m up there. I know how it makes me feel even when I’m spitting dirt. When I limp around after and every muscle in my body is crying out for me to stop the insanity, I still love it. It’s the only thing that makes sense to me.”

Joe Willie climbed down off the fence. He pushed his hat back on his head, put his hands in the back pockets of his jeans and leaned against the fence. He looked over at Claire, who watched the two of them closely. “If you do it,” he said, “I’ll get you your permit. But to rodeo. You want to tour, you tour the rodeo circuit just like I did, like my daddy and my grandfather did. Like my great-grandfather. You respect the tradition that gave this to you. You respect the tradition that woke up everything you feel inside of you. It ain’t worth it to me any other way.

“Because it’s not just about the ride. Hell, that’s only the smallest part. It’s all of it. Everything. Hitting the road in an old jalopy and watching those miles spin over horizon after horizon. Waking up in a rodeo motel with eight other cowboys and their women, the room ripe with feet and liniment and
bulls and beer. The colour of the talk. Everything coming out like songs. Walking into a back lot and knowing that you know the people you prepare with. Knowing that no matter what happens out there you already won, you’re already safe, you’re already home. Feeling like you’re living in something bigger than bulls, bigger than competition, bigger than you. You live like that and it becomes your heart, Aiden. The way you breathe. You owe it to yourself to discover that.” He turned away. “And you owe it to me.”

He walked a few steps off and then turned quickly on his heel. “One other thing,” he said, so quietly Aiden had to strain to hear. “The ache I felt when it was gone? It wasn’t in my bones. You owe it to yourself to feel that too someday. Busted or just plain old, you owe it to yourself to feel that.”

Aiden watched him walk away. When Joe Willie reached the end of the corral, he shouted after him, “You got a deal.”

Joe Willie walked through the gate, one fist raised high in the air.

She found him in the small room at the back of the barn. It was evening and he was washing the dust of the day from him and whistling. She stood in the doorway and watched him. He had a bowl set on a small table and he sloshed his hands about while he lathered the soap and then raised his palms to his face to spread the lather around and then slopped water over his face and hair. Shirtless, he looked lean and lithe from her vantage point, until he turned and made a grab for the towel that hung off the back of a chair. The arm. It still shocked her. Against the rest of him it hung like a crooked afterthought and she stared at it until she felt his stillness and realized he was watching her. He slowly draped the towel over his left shoulder and and waited for her to say something.

She carried the book Lionel had given her and she walked to the table and laid it there. Then she turned to him and very slowly reached for the towel. He let her. It slid off his shoulder and she hung it off the chair back. She pressed her lips together and reached her hand up to his left shoulder and traced the narrow blade of bone to where it dropped off at the ruined joint. She let her fingertips slide into the small depression between the nub of the upper arm bone and the pocket of the shoulder and then traced the line of his arm over the region of the bicep down to the elbow. He didn’t move. She formed a cup with her palm and fingers and rubbed the length of it down to the wrist and back up again, and when she reached the shoulder joint again, she looked at him and smiled softly.

“It’s beautiful,” she said.

“Never much thought so,” he said.

“It is,” she said. “It makes you beautiful.”

He laughed then, one short, sharp bark of laughter, and then he reached for the shirt that hung against the back of the door. “Most women wouldn’t think so,” he said.

“Most women aren’t me.”

He slipped into the shirt and looked at her carefully. “What do you mean?” he asked.

“I mean we all have flaws. But most of us keep them a secret, or at least we spend an awful lot of time and money learning how to hide them. The men I’ve known have all kept the dark parts of themselves away from me—their hurts, their pain, their rage, their shame, their shattered dreams. I never knew who I was dealing with until it was too late.

“But your arm is a testament, Joe Willie. It speaks of everything you’ve gone through and it’s a plain and direct and honest voice. That’s what makes you beautiful,” she said and rubbed his arm through the shirt again.

“Always seen it as a testament to failure,” he said.

She laughed now. “You couldn’t fail anything if you tried.”

“You neither.”

“I failed my son.”

“Bullshit. Where do you think he got the gumption?”

“He went to prison, Joe Willie.”

“He walked out whole, Claire. He got that ability from you. He got that from watching you tussle with all the crap you endured. You taught him how to carry on, no one else.”

“And the anger?”

“Same place.”

“Me?”

“Yeah. But you took it to eight. You rode it out. You made it work for you. He saw all that and it made him different.”

“You’re saying that I’m a good mother?”

He started to button the shirt. He watched his hands while he did and made the fingers of the left do the delicate threading of the button through the hole. When he finished he gave her a tight-lipped little grin.

“Can’t say about that,” he said. “I was just saying that you’re a real good woman. Most times they’re one and the same. From my experience, anyhow.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“No,” he said. “Thank you.”

It was a brindle bull with a full rack of horns, and Aiden could feel it before he lifted a leg to the rail. It filled space like a mountain, seeming to pull all available light into it so that it drew your eye even from a distance. It stood quiet in the chute, and when he did begin to climb he could feel it pull its own energy tight, draw itself down into its centre, gather itself like a storm front. Readying itself. He pinched his lips together,
flexed his shoulders a tad and began to focus his own energy so that when he straddled the top rail, then stepped over and crossed his leg over top of the bull his face was composed, stern, hardened, like a mountain.

Birch and Joe Willie spoke to him but he nodded out of rote, not really hearing their words. Slipping down onto the bull, he felt a quickening in his blood, and when it shimmied he was ready for it and had his heels on the rail before it moved. The bull bawled, clacked its horns against the rails and clomped its hooves in the dirt. Aiden allowed himself a small grin and then settled in the rigging. He felt Joe Willie haul on the bull rope, and when he flexed his fingers the pressure in his palm was heavy and with his free hand he tugged on the top of the glove, slipping any wrinkles flat, the rope imprinting itself into his hand. He flexed again and nodded. When Joe Willie’s shadow cleared his field of vision he saw nothing but the bull, the ridge of horn across its head like a long, flat fist. He stared at it. Hard. As he did he drew himself forward, straighter in the rigging, putting himself deep in the pocket and feeling the cleft of shoulder bone with his pelvis, thighs and knees. He slowly raised his free hand up and away, curving his spine and pressing his groin tight to the wrap of the rope. When he felt positioned he scrunched the helmet low on his head so that the edge of it was like an eyebrow, then raised the hand back up clear of the top rail.

He nodded sharply, and Lionel pulled the chute open.

The pocket flattened into a run and he spurred the bull out hard into the corral. It launched itself into a wild series of running kicks, high, explosive, the back end of it almost perpendicular to the ground so that when he arched his back into it Aiden lost contact with the horizon. But he held the pocket. The bull spun first left then right in a dazzling change of direction that Aiden felt coming with his knee. It
bucked, all four hooves clearing the ground, the impact jarring him, driving his head back into the fat roll of padding, the strain at the shoulder of his wrap hand immense, the weight like pulling up a piano on a rope. The percussive clank of the cowbell filled his ears. The bull gyrated wildly, kicking its back legs and twisting its hindquarters right, left, right, left, and Aiden felt the whip of it on his neck muscles, the helmet slipping down partly over his eyes. There was a slip in the wrap and he squeezed his rope hand tighter, feeling the burn along the cords of his forearm and wrist, the bull kicking out and into another wild spin to the left, and he heard Joe Willie yell, “Time!”

The pickup riders appeared suddenly, and Aiden reached out with his free arm, snaring the rider’s shoulders and leaning himself out and away from the rigging. He felt himself separate from the bull, and the clanking of the cowbell ceased as the clank belt tumbled to the dirt. Aiden started to run in mid-air as the pickup rider slowed, so that when his feet hit the ground he ran easily, catching his balance with a few strides and jogging to a stop in the middle of the corral. The Wolfchilds were all running toward him, even Joe Willie clumping along at full speed. They swept him up in a full embrace and Aiden lost himself in the hard squeeze of men, the smell of them rich and warm with tobacco, sweat and leather, the hardness of their muscles comforting in their taut joy, and they leaped about yelling in triumph and when they finally let him go he looked at them, their faces shining with a glow in the eyes a part of him knew as respect. Joe Willie stood nodding, tight-lipped, proudly, and he stepped aside to allow Claire to approach him.

His mother was crying. He reached out to her and she fell against his chest, squeezing him tighter than he could ever have imagined her small body held the strength for.

“It’s okay,” he said, combing her hair with his ungloved hand. “I’m all right.”

“I know,” she said. “That’s why I’m crying.”

When Joe Willie stepped forward to them Aiden looked at him a moment then took his hand from his mother’s head and held his arm out to him. Joe Willie put his arms around the two of them and they stood together in the middle of the arena and let the feel of it touch them.

“Look at this,” Joe Willie said.

“What?” Lionel asked.

The truck was draped with a tarpaulin, and in the shadow of the evening it resembled a sweat lodge. Lionel couldn’t shake the image of it even as Joe Willie lifted the edge of the tarp from the front end and a flare of sunset caught the new chrome bumper. As he eased it up over the grillework the old man raised a hand to his chin in admiration. The metal on the grille was chromed, and he watched as Joe Willie skimmed the tarp back, revealing more of the front end of her. When he’d gotten to the hood he folded the tarp along it and stepped back for the old man to see. “Come look now,” he said.