Dream Wheels (21 page)

He’d done his time like a man, never backing down from trouble or looking to incite it. He’d learned to move in a calculated quietness, his face emotionless, barely speaking to anyone, and the force of that solitude gained him an edge, a hint
of danger that made drawing himself inward easier, and distance became his greatest ally.

“You’re a tough monkey, Hartley,” Johnny told him his last day in the shop. “Hang on to it. Learn how to use it. Don’t let it use you or you’ll wind up in a place like this that won’t be so con-fucking-vivial.”

Then he’d simply slapped him on the shoulder and wished him luck.

But he could still remember the feel of the pipe in his hand. It had been powerful, solid, the measure of him, and walking with it down that corridor had been both an opening and a closing. It slammed shut on the need of anything or anyone but himself and it had swung open on the knowledge that he had what it took to handle anything. When they came to get him he stood at the door of his cell with the small bag of belongings at his feet holding the bars with both hands. He squeezed them. Hard. He wanted to remember how unyielding and cold and immovable they were. He wouldn’t make a criminal mistake again. He was sure of it. Instead, somehow, he’d do what Johnny said and learn to curb his toughness, make it work for him, use the silence he moved into in the joint to keep people off him until he decided they were solid, loyal, trustworthy. If no one measured up in the end, so be it, he figured. He flexed his shoulders like shrugging off rain and walked out of the cell and down the corridor without speaking to anyone.

Golec was waiting for him in the parking lot.

Turning the wrench was like lighting a fire in his wrist and forearm. Still, Joe Willie gritted his teeth and pushed from the elbow and the shoulder. He felt the nut slip some. The hand shook and he had to use his right hand to guide the wrench
into place. His grip was okay, but the muscles along the length of the arm had shrunk and there was nothing left around the shoulder to aid in lifting or turning. But he did all the work on the truck left-handed. That was a decision he’d made when he first came out to the shed.

It started with the driver’s side mirror. It bothered him the way it threatened to fall off each time the door was opened or closed. He’d sit in the cab relishing the privacy and the mirror would distract him. Eventually, it had driven him nearly crazy and he’d rummaged about and found a toolbox. It seemed like an easy enough procedure to snug the bolt, and with his right hand it would have taken no time at all. But he found himself wondering if he could turn the bolt with the arm. That’s how he referred to it. The arm. Life with the arm. The arm was a curse. Things would be fine if it weren’t for the arm. So he’d taken the cold metal in his left hand and lifted the arm into place with his right. Snugging the bolt took hours, and the burn in his shoulder as bone turned on bone was incredible, but he eventually twisted it tight. With every push, every twist he felt the anger surge out of him. He’d done the passenger-side mirror the next day. After that he’d made it his place. No one but his grandfather was allowed to go out there, and if the old man began leaving tools, manuals, oil, grease and bit parts lying around in the cab after he and the dog had paid their nightly visit, he’d pretend not to notice and not a word was ever said about it.

Instead they let him be and he silently appreciated that. Words had become foreign things. There was no way Joe Willie could figure to say what churned in him most days. It was a heady mix. Days went by when he just flatlined. Zeroed. He moved about the shed like a zombie those days, focussed only on the chore at hand. Other days the rage would seize
him and he’d curse while he struggled with tools and the rusted-on arrogance of metal. Still others he’d feel the lostness the desertion of Darlene had struck him with. She’d never called after that day and she and Smith, the contractor, were the new big thing in town. Smith, after all, had two arms. Joe Willie’s sense of manliness had walked out the door that day and he might have learned to adjust to that if it weren’t for the fact that there was always a mirror, always a reflective surface somewhere to display him to himself and to the world. When he looked at those reflections the first thing Joe Willie saw was the arm. The lack. The deformity. The wrongness. The inadequacy. He hated it. He covered it with long-sleeved shirts whenever people were around. When he had to present himself he took great pains to only be seen from the right side. The left hand was always tucked in a pocket or covered with the right. The hardest thing to cope with was the look the arm always garnered. The look was an irritating mix of pity, sorrow and accusation. Cripple. Gimp. Deformed. Handicapped. He hated every one of those words and every time he passed a mirror they seemed to jump out at him. His dresser mirror had disappeared the same day Darlene had. But there were others everywhere and the shed was his only refuge. He only allowed himself the truck. He’d grown to like sitting in her and he usually ended his day in the shed by having a smoke in her. He smoked more now. It calmed him. The feel of smoke in his lungs made it easier to get past the churning he carried in his gut. It was the ranch. Being so close to the stuff of rodeo without actually being able to live it was the worst kind of torture and only the closing of the shed doors behind him and the flare of a smoke in the darkness could calm him. The shed had become his world, and his surly protection of it kept everyone away. Now, flat on his back on a thin mat beneath her he
stopped to rub the arm. No one was allowed to see him work. No one was allowed to see the fumbles, drops, shakes and general immobility of the arm. It angered him and no one was allowed to see the anger either. Instead, he walked in a calculated quietness, his face emotionless, barely speaking to anyone, and the force of that solitude gave him an edge, a hint of danger that made drawing himself inward easier, and distance had become his greatest ally.

The arm was a wreck and so was the old truck. That seemed appropriate somehow. He’d sit awhile in the cab and have a smoke and meditate on the moves he wanted to make, tried to see himself doing it like spurring a bronc on the mark out from the chute. Then he’d settle himself with the tools and try to make it happen. He took all of the pent-up heat in him and put it into the effort. He swore. He cursed. He damned the arm out loud, but he never quit. The pain was the closest thing he could get to the challenge of a bull, and he rode the pain as determinedly as he’d once fought for eight. It was the closest thing he could get to the pain of Darlene’s rejection of him, and the sweat that stung his eyes burned the tears of rage away and he wiped them with a taut, coiled fist. No one could see that. No one could witness his torture. He was ashamed and he was angry and he faced it alone. Only when he’d settled again, calmed himself with a cigarette and a few minutes of relaxing in the seat of the old truck, could he walk across the pasture again and be in that other world.

He could walk strongly now, quickly, and he was gravely intent on making sure to move the arm, swing it into the regular rhythm of walking. He concentrated on that. It made him feel normal. Two arms in motion gave him the semblance of wholeness, and if the stiffened elbow of the left arm coupled with the swivelled swinging step of the right leg gave him a
weird rolling motion through the offset leg and shoulder, he pretended not to care. But his body remembered the lean, sinewy toughness of motion before the ride. That was the tough part, the body memory. He wouldn’t speak of it. He pulled it tight around him and stared outwardly from it, sullenly. He lived alone, drawn inward by anger and his shame and only allowing the truck to let him breathe.

Now he leaned into the turning of the nut again. The clench of his teeth met the rusted hold of the metal, and for a moment there was contest until finally, gradually, the nut slipped and he exhaled and began turning it freely off and into his palm.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Aiden asked.

“We had a deal,” Golec said.

“Yeah, well, unless you hadn’t noticed that deal got fucked when they wouldn’t let me out.”

“That deal got fucked when you beat that poor boy.”

“That poor boy was a fucking rat and he deserved what he got.”

“No one deserves that, Aiden.”

“Maybe not in your shining world, Golec, but it’s a grimmer place back there.” Aiden hooked a thumb back toward the jail.

“Maybe so. Maybe what you did was about honour. Some strange sense of honour. Maybe I can accept it that way, knowing that you had to show honour in order to survive in there. But you know what?”

“What?” Aiden looked around the parking lot, wondering where his mother might be.

“You have to have honour out here too.”

“So?”

“So we have a deal.”

“Fuck that, Golec. I did my time. I got no need for your giddy-up bullshit now. In fact, you got no need to even be talking to me.”

“True enough. Except we have a deal and your mother’s expecting you to honour it.”

“She is?”

“Yes. She is.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I told her myself that you didn’t have to follow through, that you did your time and you have all the right in the world to just walk away and disregard it. But she seemed to think you’d agree. She seemed to think that you’d be man enough to do it anyway. For her. For yourself. Especially for her.”

The man leaned against the fender of his car with his arms folded, and Aiden recognized the insouciant grace of the tough guy in his manner. At that moment Golec reminded him of Johnny Calder, and it was that more than anything that kept him in the conversation. “Why?” he asked again.

“I told you before. She’s all you got, Aiden. You might come walking out of that joint with the attitude that you can handle it all now, you been in max and survived. Hell, from what I hear, you were one of the big boys. That might lend you the thought that you don’t need anybody. But we all need people, Aiden. Even you.”

“Nice speech. But I don’t think so.”

“Don’t think what? That you don’t need anybody?”

“Don’t think I need the Roy and Trigger routine. I ain’t no cowboy. I can get me a job right around here.”

“Can you? You’re an ex-con now. You got a sheet. Maybe a short go on the ranch’ll give you a reference, get you a foot
in the door when you want to apply for a job. Maybe other than a few weeks in the fresh air and sunshine and some hard work you’ll come away with the bricks to build a new foundation for yourself. Unless you don’t give a shit and want this grimmer life.”

Aiden lit a cigarette and looked back at the jail. He was silent a long time while he smoked. He knew he had no plan. When he’d considered his life after he walked out, he’d settled on the fact that he’d have to make things happen for himself. No one was going to walk up and offer him anything, and he was sensible enough to know that it was going to take a lot of hard work to stay straight, to avoid this place and others like it, and that he’d need a break or two, that he’d need to reach for them when they presented themselves. Johnny Calder had told him one day while they were working on footwork that a good fighter never waited for a guy to give him an opening. Instead, a good fighter used the ring and all he knew to create an opening for himself and then drove into it with everything he had. That’s how you won a fight, he’d told him and showed him how to make a man move where he wanted him to move.

“I’ll go for cash. And a reference when it’s over,” he said finally.

Golec studied him. “And your mother?”

“Her too,” Aiden said and ground out the smoke with his heel.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Golec said and reached for his cellphone.

“You do that, cop,” Aiden said.

They were herding a dozen steers down out of the high pasture. The steers were on their way to a rodeo, and they wanted
to give them a day or so in the pens to increase their feed and get them ready for the show. They rode casually, and every now and then Lionel would whistle sharply and the dog would yap a few times, sneak in and nip at the heels of a slower steer and keep them moving down the trail. It wasn’t hard work. Both the steers and the horses knew their way down, and the two men spent a lot of time looking through the trees for glimpses of the valley. They never tired of the view.

“Got a new wrangler coming,” Birch said.

“How’s that?” Lionel asked.

“Remember the kid I told you about a while back? The one Marcel called about?”

“The convict?” Lionel looked at him over the cigarette he was rolling while he rode.

“Yeah. He’s coming. Him and his mother. Marce wants us to give him a leg up getting started again. Kid doesn’t have to come. He’s a free man now but he’s coming anyway.”

“What’d he do anyhow?”

“Marce says nothing.”

“Mighty peculiar to do a bunch of time for nothing.” Lionel lit the cigarette and then chucked to the horse, who kicked a little at the smoke.

“Yessir, it is. The way Marce tells it, the boy had a plan for a heist, even got a gun to do it but his partner pulled it without him, got himself shot and put all the blame on this boy.”

“Still don’t seem worth a stretch out of a young guy’s life. Mother know?”

“She knows. She’s getting Joe Willie’s old room upstairs ready and the extra.”

“The kid’s a handful, is he?”

“Marce says he’s a pretty good kid. Tough, though. Hard to reach.”

“Reckon we got a handle on how to deal with that.”

“I reckon,” Birch said. They rode on silently awhile and then Birch looked over at his father. “Why you figure Joe Willie never says anything about anything?”

“There’s words in Joe Willie,” Lionel said. He looked at the cigarette with dissatisfaction and ground it out against the chest pocket of his jacket. “There’s words and plenty he means to say but he hasn’t been able to fight through to them yet. Everything’s discombobulated. Nothing’s the same as it was, and the way he feels, it never will be. So it’s gotta be hard. Hard enough fighting back from a big hurt to get everything back to normal, but knowing there’s no normal to get back to anymore has got to give the fighting a mighty bitter taste. Hard to talk through that taste, I imagine.”