Dream Wheels (18 page)

“Because I know a place you could both go.”

“Now?”

“No. After your sentence, maybe during.”

“During?”

“Yeah. I could maybe put in a word to the judge about doing the last part of your sentence somewhere other than the hoosegow.”

“You want to send me and the moms on a vacation instead of the joint?”

Golec sat back down and leaned forward with his palms flat on the table. “It won’t be a vacation. You’ll be working your tail off. Your mom can just kind of relax there. Be with you. You could be with each other.”

“Where?” There was a glint of interest in his eye and Golec could see the fifteen-year-old boy now.

“I have a friend who has a ranch in the west. In the mountains.”

“A ranch? Like cowboys and yippee-cay-yay and all that?”

“Yeah. Yippee-cay-yay.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Maybe. But it’s out of the city, away from all the crap, lots of fresh air and hard work. It would do you good. It would do the both of you a lot of good.”

“How you figure?”

“Because it’s a change, Aiden. I can’t help you in terms of what the court will throw at you. Obviously they’re not terribly impressed by this whole routine or you wouldn’t be sitting here right now. But I can make suggestions for sentencing, and if you finish up on the ranch there’s a chance that maybe you can swing things another way for yourself. Change. A different look. That’s all I’m suggesting.”

Aiden reached for the cigarettes tucked in his shirt pocket and took his time lighting up. Golec watched him unwaveringly, and Aiden liked that. Somehow it made him feel
valuable, like what he would have to say had girth and size and weight. Substance. Like a man.

“How long?” he asked finally.

“I don’t know. It depends on the stretch you serve. The last third of it, likely.”

“What do I do there?”

“Everything, I imagine. It’s like a work placement. You do whatever they need you to do.”

“How come you’re offering me this?”

Golec looked at him hard. “Because you’re on a freight train to nowhere. You’re learning that tough and cool and wise talking can get you places. But it’s nowhere. Your mother wants a life for you, a good life, and even though she might have made some poor choices along the way, it’s always been in hopes of getting a good life for you. I just think the two of you need a break, a chance, a different roll of the dice.”

“So this is all set?”

“If you tell me so, I’ll make the arrangements with my friend and talk to your mother.”

“If I say no?”

“Then you’re on your own. It’s all I can offer.”

Aiden looked around the room and then returned his gaze to Golec. “Hmm. Concrete and barbed wire or pastures and barbed wire?”

“It’s no joke, son.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Aiden.”

They sat in silence. Aiden smoked while Golec waited, unmoving and mindful of the great moment they sat in, one of those defining moments when the universe gathers itself around you in expectation, the choice hovering in the air like lightning waiting to strike. Aiden sensed it too and he looked
anxious for the first time, and when he spoke it was deliberate and measured and strong.

“I’ll do it. I’ll take it. But the same goes about my mother. I don’t want her here or the main joint until it’s all over. She don’t need to see this. Only when I walk.”

Golec nodded and stretched out a hand across the table. Aiden stared at it, then lifted his gaze to meet Golec’s. They studied each other, and Golec felt the full measure of the boy’s resolve. He took the proffered hand and shook it firmly and then stood up and went to rap on the door for the officers and then walked out without speaking again. Golec felt a part of him go with the boy into the darkness and dankness of the world he inhabited.

Birch looked at his father for a good long time, contemplating what he’d just heard. The truth was that he himself was at a loss as to what to do about his son. It cut him to see Joe Willie suffer, but Birch had been around rodeos and cowboys and hurt long enough to know that a man needed mighty big space when the bones let him down. Still, there was a pure need for a plan, and try as he might Birch hadn’t been able to put a thing together that made a whit of sense. Given the circumstances, anyhow—and the circumstances were a cussed mess. He’d settled on just letting the boy get his feet under him on the ranch and taking it from there.

He pulled his tobacco makings from his pocket to give himself time to think. The old man hitched a thumb toward himself and Birch passed over the makings. For the next few minutes the two men busied themselves with building their smokes.

“Parts are gonna be a bitch, that’s sure,” Birch said finally, putting a foot on the bottom rail of the fence and leaning his
elbows along the top rail. “The metal don’t seem all that bad, so she might come up good with a scrape and paint, but that’s the easy part.”

“I hear ya,” Lionel said.

“The boy ain’t much for engines. Never was. Never seen much use beyond the usual. Rebuilding’s a whole other tune.”

“Go on,” Lionel said.

“Well, the fact of the matter is, Daddy, that Joe Willie don’t come across as being too partial to much right now. Mystifies the shit right outta me how you figure on getting him off the porch.”

“I’m gonna tell him he can’t.”

“Can’t?”

“Can’t do it.”

Birch smoked awhile and gave his father a sidelong glance. “You got a mighty peculiar way with motivation,” he said.

“Maybe,” Lionel said. “But think about it. Other than the back lot and the chutes, where does a cowboy spend most of his time?”

“On the road, I suppose.”

“On the road in what?”

“In a truck.”

“Exactly.”

Birch nodded. “All right, but that still don’t get the boy off the porch.”

“Maybe not. But, son, if you couldn’t have the whole deal, what would you want?”

“Well, sir, I reckon I’d want me a little of it.”

“Exactly. I mean to give Joe Willie a little of it back. See, right now he’s pining away for the whole deal because that’s all he can see he’s deprived of. Not being able to have it all hurts
like a son of a bitch, and I figure the only way to ease that misery is by giving him a piece of it to hold on to. Trucks’n cowboys been one and the same for as long as there’s been a highway to a short go, and that old truck carried the three of us to a lotta shows in its time. Recollect?”

“That I do,” Birch said. “But she was a clunker when I had her. There’s a lot of road under her. Maybe too much.”

“Maybe. But I don’t think so. The road and all them miles is the whole deal now.”

“I don’t follow.”

Lionel smoked and looked across the ranch and valley toward the mountains. “When you hang ’em up finally, whether it’s hurt or old age, you find out that all you have left is the stories. You got Yuma, Yakima, Laughlin River, all them grand old names, all the people you met when you were there. But you got the stories of getting there too. Damn, I still recollect nine of us all piled into that old girl. None of us did a lick at Abilene and we pooled whatever slim pickins we had for gas and growlies and headed up the line the only way we could. We took turns sleeping in the box with all the gear and riding and driving up front. You get hold of people in times like that, get hold of them firm, in ways that most people never get a chance to and wouldn’t understand. The story of them times is what makes you who you finally become, and that old truck got a lot of stories in her. Not just yours or mine or my daddy’s. That old girl got the taste of every tale that was ever told in her along whatever stretch of highway she ever drove. She carries the story of our lives, son. That’s why I go and sit in her every night and it’s why I wanna turn the boy loose on bringin’ her back. She’s the little part of rodeo he can have still.”

“But you’re gonna tell him he can’t.”

“That I am.”

“Why?”

“What’s the easiest way to get a cowboy to do something?” Lionel asked.

Birch laughed, took off his hat and slapped it on his thigh. “Tell him he can’t,” he said. “Tell him he surely can’t.”

“Cowpoke’ll move mountains even when he don’t know it’s a mountain that he’s moving,” Lionel said.

Birch ground out his cigarette with his boot heel. “It’s a mountain,” he said quietly. “It sure enough is a mountain.”

They found a small two-bedroom apartment in a neighbourhood where Claire had never lived. It was a working-class neighbourhood, and the sounds of daily busyness rose off the sidewalks like a melody hummed in a low register and the sounds of children playing eased upward from the small park across the street in small waves so that the area became the wash of pale sunlight that fell through her living-room window. Claire loved it immediately. Lisa Keenan arranged a reduced rent in exchange for painting, and Claire fell into the work with a fervour she hadn’t experienced before. She chose a pale yellow for the kitchen and bath, a bluish green for the living room and bedrooms.

“It’s the colour of sage in the mountains,” she told Lisa. The social worker had been drawn to Claire and her story and now that she had reclaimed her independence Lisa had become a friend and an ally. “I want to wake up to that colour. It makes me happy.”

The two of them painted the apartment, and while it dried they shopped for used furniture. By the time Claire had outfitted her new apartment with the essentials it was a bright, charming, casual home. When she stood in the middle of it
and looked around, Claire felt proud, strong and resilient. For the first time in her adult life she had built a life, or at least the foundation of a life, on her own initiative and drive, and the feeling within her was as close to freedom as she imagined that feeling to be. She sat on the window ledge and looked out over the neighbourhood and felt a sense of being set down somewhere, placed intentionally like a precious thing, a keepsake perhaps, and she found herself shedding silent tears in the sunlight of that window.

“Don’t be sad,” Lisa said. “It’s wonderful. You have a wonderful new home.”

“I know,” Claire said. “I’ve never had one all my own before.”

“Never?”

“No. There was always a man.”

“Well, there’s just you now.”

“That’s what makes me sad. I wish my son were here.”

“He will be. But use this time, Claire. This apartment gives you a base. From here you can find a job, get some training, maybe take some college courses. Anything. You can choose anything now. By the time Aiden comes home you’ll be amazed how far you will have come.”

“Really? It seems impossible.”

Lisa sat on the window ledge beside her and took her hand. “You’re a very strong woman. No one could live the life you’ve led without an incredible amount of strength. You’re a survivor. And I know a place that’s looking for a woman who knows how to survive.”

“A job, you mean.”

“Yes. It’s a women’s centre. They do a lot of peer counselling and I think you’d be perfect for it.”

“I have no training,” Claire said.

“Are you kidding me? You have a master’s degree in survival, girl. Sometimes life gives you a better training, prepares you far better to reach people, touch them, affect them, than any other kind of schooling does. I’d trade my pieces of paper for half of what you know any day of the week. I’ve spoken to them already and they want to see you.”

“No!”

“Yes. I’ve given you a strong recommendation. They owe me a few actually, and I think you’d be wonderful. It doesn’t pay much. You wouldn’t have a whole lot after the rent and food here but they pay for training, college, and the pay goes up the more training you get.”

Claire laughed. “College? I barely made it out of high school and that was years ago.”

“You’ll do fine,” Lisa said. “If you put yourself into this with half the grit you showed me at Eric’s that morning, you’ll sail, girl. Trust me.”

“I do,” Claire said.

“Then trust yourself.”

The two women sat on the window ledge in the sunshine and held hands. Around them they could hear the sounds of the neighbourhood through the open window and it mingled with the smell of fresh paint and sawn wood from the new baseboards so that there was a keenness to the air, sharp, redolent with energy and what Claire believed was possibility. She closed her eyes and drank it all in, filled herself with it.

“I can do that,” Claire said. She stood and faced Lisa. “Now, let’s go and fill that refrigerator. I’ve got things that need doing.”

Joe Willie moved to the front porch and settled himself on the swing seat. The easy back-and-forth motion took the feel of
the weight of his leg away, and as he drifted into the sway it lulled the ache in his shoulder too. It was late morning and the brightness of the day irritated him. He clenched and unclenched his good hand and thought about all there was to do on a day like this. For a working ranch and a working cowboy there generally was never enough daylight to accomplish everything that needed tending to. But as he watched his mother work a colt in the round pen, the wranglers shifting stock from graze to corral and his father busy loading square bales into the barn, he knew there was nothing he could contribute. No one needed a hobbled-up, one-armed cowboy. Hell, he couldn’t even sit a horse to bring in steers. All he was good for was sitting in an old man’s porch swing watching life happen and waiting for someone to throw him a morsel of talk. Truth was, he didn’t even want that. He had nothing to say. Nothing that would fill an empty sleeve or the gaping hole in the centre of him.

“Boy,” his grandfather said from behind him in the house. “You busy?”

Joe Willie closed his eyes. “No,” he said. “I’m not exactly what you’d call frantic right now.”

“Good,” Lionel said. “Let’s take a walk.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“I’m not kidding. It’ll do you good.”

“Where?”

“I want to show you something out to the equipment shed.”

Joe Willie stared at him a moment, then shifted his gaze across the main pasture to where the shed sat a few hundred yards away. “You expect me to walk out there? With this?” he asked, pointing to the crutch.