Dream Wheels (45 page)
Authors: Richard Wagamese
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Indians of North America, #Friendship, #Westerns, #Literary, #Cultural Heritage
Lionel stepped forward. The hood was a deep metallic blue, venturing close to purple but holding itself to blue so that you almost could feel its energy, its wish to linger there, to remain, to not fade or alter, like the line of the sky rich with encroaching darkness. He saw his reflection in the chrome and paint, elongated, so that the fingers he held out to touch her were spindly and long like vines. The metal skin of her was cool, and he closed his eyes as the nub of his fingers grazed her surface. The dog sniffed eagerly about the edge of the tarpaulin, curious at the sharp smell of epoxy and new paint. In the dying light, the chrome took on the orange of the setting sun,
and Joe Willie lit the old hurricane lamps while the old man stood silently looking at the hood of her. As the sun lowered even further the shed took on an antiquated light, the rustic warmth of a barn, a stable, a work shed where pioneers, settlers, ranchers laboured, the fruits of their efforts carried within them, borne into everything they touched—a simple, elegant light. Joe Willie put a hand on his shoulder and his grandfather grinned at him and covered it with his own, patting it gently. Then Lionel stepped closer to the truck and placed his palm on the words curled across the nose of her in unobtrusive burnt-orange script. He traced the edges of the letters with one finger.
“Dream Wheels,” he said.
“Yeah. Look at the rest of her.”
He lifted the edge of the tarp and began to pull it back. They could see the dark blue of it, shiny in the light. He walked toward the cab and pulled the tarp along behind him. It slid up over the cab and dropped along the box, gradually revealing the back end of her, the new tires suddenly squat and firm beneath her, resplendent with flashy aluminum rims. She sat low on the tires, closer to the ground than before, and the tires themselves were wider and Lionel could see how the wheel wells had been scooped out to allow them to fit, the fenders bubbled out impressively. There were lacquered stakes along the length of the box, three high, the thick, round heads of bolts lending it a solidity that spoke of the times it had come from, a craftsman’s time, a time when hands fashioned everything, made them firm, strong, able.
“Birch,” Joe Willie said, laying a hand on one of the stakes. “Like a talking stick. Like the Teaching Scrolls of the Ojibway.”
He opened the door to the cab and they stepped forward to peer inside. He hadn’t changed anything, but it had all been
retooled, refinished so that the seats were plump and full, the dashboard showed all the original gauges in clear, glossy metal and glass. The upholstering was repadded and polished. “Still got all the scars,” he said. He looked at Lionel and smiled. “Scars and breaks make us what we are. Give us character. Make us unique. Make us beautiful. She taught me that.”
They moved from inspecting the cab to look at the new front end. The fender skirts were flared some to accommodate the matching tires to the back. They rose in a sweeping line upwards then downwards to the bulge of the headlamps. As they walked along they could feel the swell of her, the flow created by the chopping, the trimming, and the truck felt even more and more like it wanted to roar along a highway, like it would rear at any moment on its back wheels. Each of them lay a hand on the lacquered metal and felt its cool promise.
“The sum of us,” Joe Willie said and looked at his grandfather. “No matter where we come from, the stories we carry are the sum of us. That’s what Grandma said. I lost that for a while. Lost that tie to tradition. Figured the line ended with See Four. But you know what I learned?”
“What?” Lionel asked quietly.
“I learned that tradition is like the old girl here. She’s got a new heart and a new body but she still carries the stories. She can’t help but do that because we lived in her, all of us, she’s got the juice of our living all over her, in every crease and dent and scar. Our story. Don’t matter that she looks different now. Don’t matter that it’s a different world. Hell, it don’t even matter that I’m different now. Because it’s still the same story. Our story.
“I thought I had to protect her, keep her the same, the way she always was. I thought that if I changed her I’d lose her somehow. Lose me. Lose me even more than I felt like I had
after See Four. But the strange thing is, the change let me keep her. The alteration let me reclaim her, let me reclaim myself, my story, add it to her like a coat of new paint and chrome. Strange, huh?”
“Not so strange,” Lionel said. “Your mother and grandmother knew all along.”
Joe Willie nodded. “They would,” he said.
He handed Lionel the keys. They were held in a small replica of a rodeo buckle. “You told me that she would take me wherever I wanted to go.”
“And where is that?” Lionel asked.
“Here,” he said.
They held each other in the antique light of the lamps. They held each other and breathed deep, slow breaths, patting each other between the shoulder blades and rocking on the balls of their feet, their faces pulled tight. When they separated they looked at each other a moment, then turned to look at the old girl again.
“We need to show the others now,” Lionel said. “And we got a bull rider to train.”
“Amen to that,” Joe Willie said.
t
he Old Ones say that the path of a true human being is a Red Road. It’s a blood colour. Like blood it flows out of our histories, bearing within it the codes and secrets that shape us, invisible urgings and desires spawned in generations past. Because of that it is a difficult path and only the most courageous and purest of heart have the humility to walk it. It takes great strength, warrior strength, to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing, to wield the power of choice like a lance and probe the way forward to the fullest expression of who you were created to be. To walk the Red Road asks the utmost of us, and there are few who choose it. Those that do are rewarded in the end, they say. They come back as Animals. They return as pure spirits born without question, arriving here knowing wholly and completely who they are. They are spared the agony of the search.
Joe Willie stood next to the chute and pondered that old teaching. He wondered who the bull might have been in a
previous life, what sort of questions he might have struggled to answer, what battles he fought, what troubles rocked his soul. He was a great beast. Probably the biggest bull Joe Willie had ever seen, and over the course of a life in rodeo he’d seen a great many. Tall at the shoulder, muscles in sheets like armour, head as broad as a talus boulder, and the hard nub of horns bunched liked petrified wood at the sides of its head giving it an ancient, brooding look that was magnified by the deep, dull pools of its eyes. The great bull shivered. Joe Willie recalled the feel of that against his thighs. “Hello, old friend,” he said. “Remember me?”
Behind him he could hear the sounds of the arena. Somewhere in that garbled sea of voices Aiden went through the ritual of preparation. The stock could feel the coming contest, and there was an agitated energy in the chutes and pens. The cowboys had shifted from the garrulous babble of taunt and tease downward into a sombre, reflective half silence punctuated only by necessary speech, the terse language of readiness. The bull sensed it and clomped its heavy feet in the dirt.
“You do remember, don’t you?” Joe Willie said to it, leaning his face close to the rails. “Well, I sure remember you. I surely do.”
He rubbed his shoulder, letting the good hand squeeze and massage the ruined joint. The bull cast a look at him out of the corner of its eye. It was a baleful look, the threat of it cool, measured, tempered with the knowledge of power. Joe Willie nodded. He put a hand through the rails and touched the bull’s flank. He heard its voice, low and rumbling, and when it cracked the horns against the sides of the chute, Joe Willie smiled and slapped it firmly, then patted it three or four times. “You’re still a big cuss,” he said. “Still a handful of mean. Still the best damn bull I ever rode. Or almost rode.”
The P.A. was announcing the final qualifying ride. There was a stir of activity everywhere as people headed for their seats, and the cowboys, rope men, bull fighters, pickup men and clowns made their final adjustments to gear and attire.
Joe Willie stepped back and assessed the bull. He nodded. “Damn,” he said. “I’d give anything for another go. You asked the best of me and I gave it. I’ll never forget that.”
He looked up from the bull and off into the background. The arena was lit in the hard glare of spectacle, and he realized how much he’d missed it, how much he’d carried it around within him all that time and how he’d mistaken the weight for loss. He grinned at the folly pain caused him.
“You ready, boy?”
Lionel and Birch were standing behind him.
“Aiden’s about ready,” Birch said.
“Just renewing acquaintances,” Joe Willie said. “I think I make him nervous.”
Lionel laughed. “I imagine. He tell you that himself, did he?”
“Not in so many words.”
“He’s a big cuss,” Birch said. “Aiden’s got his hands full.”
Joe Willie turned and looked back at the bull in the chute. It stood there proud and unquestioning, readying itself for the contest it could sense coming, its nostrils flared at the smell of the primal call in the air, the challenge. Joe Willie smelled it too. As he turned to walk with his father and grandfather he could swear the bull looked like a bear in the periphery of his vision.
Aiden perched on the top rail and watched the action in the arena. There was always such excitement and energy in the air that he swore it rubbed against his skin. When he arched his
back and stretched he could feel it press against his muscles, compress nerve and sinew so that the feeling of readiness was a coming together, a gathering, a mélange of light, sound, colour, smell and the faintly metallic taste of dust in the teeth. Another cowboy plumed into the dirt. The crowd groaned and the applause lapped around the fallen rider like surf and bore him up onto his feet again. He lifted his hat and waved his appreciation. In the background the bull fighters chased the bull off into the exit chute and there was a brief respite of calm in the infield. He loved that moment, that lull, that break in the sheer exuberance everyone came together in and that made rodeo less a true spectacle than a communal joy. The let-up of energy punctuated all of it, and he breathed it in, filled his lungs with it and felt it enter his blood, enliven and become him.
He’d been bucked off his share in his rookie year. There’d been a dry spell of a month and a half when he couldn’t buy eight seconds, and if not for Joe Willie he might have given it up, surrendered to the shame of slapping the dust from his chaps and hobbling to the rail again. But there was no quit in Joe Willie. Together they’d go over the tapes of the rides and Joe Willie was able to give him a vision of it he was incapable of discerning for himself. He played them over and over in his mind and he sharpened his intuition, his feel of the bull. Soon, he’d begun to appear in the money rounds and he had a handful of buckles now. The cash wasn’t great, it wasn’t a living, not yet anyway. But the payoff was the indisputable feeling of rightness he carried slung across his shoulders with his rigging. He jumped off the rail and walked over to the chute area.
He’d drawn See Four. When they told him, he could only stand and look at Joe Willie, who nodded grimly, squeezing his hands together. Now he could see them shunting the great bull into the chute, and the size of him was shocking. Aiden had
seen him before but he’d never had to look at him as a challenger. That perspective changed everything. He went over his gear one last time, checking the bull rope especially for tackiness and grip, retying the thongs around his boots and tightening the Kevlar vest around his ribs. Then he made his way to the chute, where Lionel would act as rope man and Birch and Joe Willie would be in the chute with him.
“Ready?” Joe Willie asked.
“Guess.”
“No time to guess. This is a mean mother.”
“You should know. Anything you wanna tell me?”
Joe Willie turned to look at See Four. “He kicks hard. He’ll go high and kick out and you’re gonna feel like you’ll backflip into the crowd. When he does that you push hard into the pocket with everything you got because when he lands he’ll spin into your latch hand. It’ll be fast so you gotta be square when he lands because he’ll spin away from it just as fast. Got that?”
“Yeah,” Aiden said. “Anything else?”
“Yeah. This sumbitch only been rode three times. But you don’t think about that. It takes the best to beat him and you gotta give him your best. All of it. Right now. No holding back. If you do that you’re his equal. But it takes everything.”
Aiden looked at the bull in the chute. See Four stood there quietly, and Aiden could see him breathing, could hear the great bellows of his lungs hauling air. “Did you?” he asked. “Did you give him everything you had.”
Joe Willie looked up into the arena and scanned the crowd. He put his hands on his hips and turned to face Aiden. “I still am,” he said.
The great bull stamped his feet in the dirt. The men at the top of the chute were moving deliberately now, their voices
carrying that sharp edge of nerves. The sound of the arena was like a giant waterfall, the voices of all the men beings gurgling over top of each other so that the bull became agitated, anxious, wanting this over with and yearning for the quiet and the shadow of the stock pens. There was a slithering along his flank as one of the men attached the heavy rope bearing the noisemaker, and another at his shoulder when the thick rope scratched his hide and was pulled tighter and tighter around his girth. Then the feet stepping cautiously down on each side. This would be the young one, the one who stared fixedly when the bull had entered the chute. As the cowboy eased himself down onto his back the bull stepped from side to side, trying to press the man’s legs against the rails hard enough to convince him to climb off. There was a short clamour of voices and the man on his back scrambled up quickly but settled back down again once the bull ceased rocking. The bull bawled and rattled the sides of the chute with his horns. He could hear the crowd in the arena grow excited and he rattled the chute again in excitement. The men above him shouted quickly at each other and the one on his back rocked into position. The bull settled.
He felt the slap of a hand on his back and he reared a little. He caught the high, ancient smell, like blood but older, more insistent. It had been some time since the bull had sensed that irrevocable call and he bawled again, louder, and rattled the sides of the chute hard with his horns. The manspeak above him cut the air like knives, and the bull was pleased. He could sense their sharpened unease. He could feel a slight tremor in the legs of the man on his back and he knew what he would do once the chute blasted open. He would run. He never ran. He had always exploded out of the chute in a billow of strength. But this time he would run out fast and straight,
and when he felt the man weight shift with the charge he’d wheel into a spin to find the pressure point that would tell him which side the man clung to him from, and he’d spin into that point, making it harder for the man to sit there. Then he’d buck. Once he felt the weight shift he’d buck high and hard and land in a tight spin into the hand. The bull shimmied, felt the man’s legs grip for him and prepared himself for the battle.
Joe Willie pressed a hand to each side of Aiden’s chest to steady him. The young man’s face was set in a determined scowl. In the background they could hear the arena announcer.
“Coming out of chute number three, a young cowboy who’s been lighting up the rookie circuit this year. Aiden Hartley. Trained by the legendary Joe Willie Wolfchild. There’s three generations of Wolfchilds in that chute tonight, ladies and gentlemen. That’s granddad Lionel on the chute rope and daddy Birch in the chute along with Joe Willie. That’s a ton of experience in there with him and Aiden Hartley is a cowboy to watch. Chute number three, Aiden Hartley, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls.”
“Guy’s got a lot to say,” Aiden said through clenched teeth.
“That’s why they pay him the big bucks,” Joe Willie said. “You ready?”
“Almost.”
“Almost?”
“Yeah. There’s just one thing.”
“What?”
Aiden looked up at him and pinched his lips together. “This ride’s for you.”
He pressed his hat down low on his head and stretched his head back until he was staring at the beams and struts of
the ceiling. He felt the hard pull of tendons in his neck and the scowl on his face felt gruesome as he slowly raised his free hand up above the rails and nodded sharply to Lionel, who pulled hard on the chute rope.
And the world exploded.
