Dream Wheels (3 page)

She went places after that. She closed her eyes and travelled to the places she’d gone to all her life when the noise and the motion and the vision got to be too much for her. She went to the imagined freedom of the mountains. She went to a splendid day with the wind bringing the scent of juniper and pine and sage to her as she rode along a trail dappled with shadow. She felt the gentle bump of the saddle pommel against her womanhood. She felt the sway and step of the horse’s girth between her thighs. She felt the polished leather rub rhythmically against her rear. She felt all that languid,
sensual motion, the antithesis of this savage pummelling of her vagina. Then she went to the boy’s birth; the joy of it, the agony of bringing him to the light. The terrible hurt followed by the most incandescent beauty lying nestled in her arms. She went there.

The boy was out. He always was. It was an unspoken pact between them that he would stay away until nine or so before phoning and getting her mumbled coded reply that all was settled there. She was glad of that. Glad that they knew enough of survival to engage in this alliance of deception, to allow the venom to spew before coming home to perform the perfunctory roles of home and family for his convenience. She went to the life the boy and she had shared, the measure of his company the benchmark of what she knew as happiness.

The man arched and bellowed like a great whale. He turned her, lifted her into the position he required, slapped, gripped, squeezed, bit and battered her with his penis until the false stamina of booze gave way and he groaned loudly before collapsing on top of her, murmuring gentle noodlings of love in her ear on clouds of boozy vapour. Then he’d sleep. If she woke him he’d be angered and the sullenness would last all evening, taken out on her and the boy in spiteful looks and curses before the booze took over again and he slumped to the bed and gave them reprieve. That’s where she lay now. In the amnesty of orgasm.

Soon, when he made even the smallest of moves, she would rise and repair dinner, serve it to him at the coffee table where he flicked through the channels seeking a ball game or action movie to fill his night. Dinner, laundry, neatening was the dance she did each night. The avoidance dance that got her to the place where he slept and she could relax, think, plot the escape she craved but felt helpless to effect.

But tonight he turned. Turned and slipped a hand to her throat, pushing her back into the pillow and rising like an assassin in the dark. She closed her eyes and waited. Waited for the light of memory to take her back again to sunlight and space and freedom. It never came.

Foley had never seen anything like it. The arm had been torn from the socket and only the strength of the muscles had kept it from being separated from the torso. From the paramedic reports, he gathered that the young bull rider had been unable to free the latching hand from the bull and had been flopped about mercilessly for a good thirty seconds. It didn’t seem like a long time, but when Foley considered the prospect of being whipped about by a ton of animal it must have been an eternity. It must have seemed that way to the young cowboy too. All of the muscles had been ripped savagely. The deltoids, sub-scapularis, subspinatus and infraspinatus muscles were shredded.
Shredded
. The rotator cuff was gone. Just gone. Disappeared. Vanished, vamoosed, as the cowboys would say. Right now the shoulder sat completely out of joint, and Foley suspected that the whiplash effect of the bull’s thrashing coupled with the twisting of the cowboy’s body had done the same to the ligaments as well. But that wasn’t all that worried him.

The young man’s leg was fractured. Not merely broken but stomped, pulverized. Foley suspected the break had happened when the legs had been slammed to the ground and then the bull had galloped over him. The femur was a mess. When they’d rolled the gurney in through the doors the cowboy was conscious. That surprised Foley. Normally people in that much pain went into shock and lost consciousness, but the cowboy gripped his hand when he stooped to look at him and Foley had felt the coiled strength of his grip.

“Bad, Doc? Huh?” he’d asked.

“We’ll see,” Foley had told him.

What he saw he didn’t like. All the normal attachments that connected the arm to the shoulder were gone. The joint could be pinned perhaps, but the pinning could easily render the arm immobile, incapable of the normal round operation that allowed the arm to be lifted, turned inward and outward, swung. The leg would never be the same. He’d walk, but with a severe limp, and Foley knew he’d never ride again. At least, not as a competitive rider, not as rodeo bull rider. From the initial X-rays Foley determined that the only solution appeared to be a rod down the middle of the bone itself and then a series of screws to attach the bone fragments. Six months down the road, after the cast was off, the cowboy could start strength exercises to build back muscle in the thigh, but the leg would never, ever bear the pounding of bull riding, perhaps not even riding a horse easily.

The young man slept. The morphine had defeated his gritty hold on consciousness, and Foley’s next move was to call in the bone specialist and prepare him for surgery on the leg. The arm would take some consultation, and Foley suspected the young cowboy was due for a lot of surgery over the next twenty-four hours. It was going to be tough, but from the tensile grip he’d felt earlier he believed the young man possessed an inordinate amount of strength. He’d need it.

A half dozen cowboys milled about in the emergency area. Foley had treated a number of them over the years and was always impressed with the way they shrugged it all off and began healing in their minds even before the necessary surgery. For them, it seemed, a broken bone was a way of life, and even the concussions, the fractured ribs, punctured lungs and assortment of other results of allowing yourself to be thrown
about at will by a wild horse or bull were the price of admission to a lifestyle he couldn’t, with his Ivy League background, comprehend. This was different, however. This was being taken right out of the life. This was the end of the trail.

“Are there family members here?” Foley asked when he approached the group.

“I’m Birch Wolfchild, Joe Willie’s dad,” a tall, lean, dark-haired man said, standing and reaching over to shake Foley’s hand.

“Mr. Wolfchild, your son’s in pretty bad shape.”

“Well, he’s been in pretty bad shape before, Doc.”

“Not like this.”

Birch Wolfchild looked over his shoulder once at the other cowboys and then stepped closer to Foley. He put a hand on his shoulder and began walking slowly down the hallway, and Foley was surprised at how easily the man had gotten him to move along beside him. “Now, Doc, I’m gonna have to tell his mother something and it’s gonna have to be something she can take in. So give it to me straight. No gobbledygook.”

Foley grinned despite himself. “Goobledygook aside, Mr. Wolfchild, I’ve never seen a shoulder so completely devastated. The thrashing of the bull ripped everything, and I mean everything, that once resembled a shoulder and left nothing. His leg is crushed and it’s going to take major surgery just to allow him to walk again. It’s as bad a scenario as I’ve seen.”

It was Birch Wolfchild’s turn to grin. “You give it pretty good when you give it straight, don’t you, Doc? Well, that’s plain enough, I suppose.”

“I’m sorry to be so blunt,” Foley said. “But the truth is, Mr. Wolfchild, your son is going to need a whole lot more than the surgery.”

“Like what?” Birch asked.

“Well, therapy. Physiotherapy—and a lot of it—as well as therapy for the emotional scars of the injury.”

“Emotional scars? Head stuff?”

“Yes. Head stuff. He’s not going to be able to ride rodeo anymore.”

Birch slumped against the wall.

“Frankly, putting that arm back together again is going to require specialized surgery, and right now I don’t know for sure how long it will take to rebuild it or even if it can be rebuilt. The leg needs a steel rod to give it strength and there’s no way it will ever be safe to take a tumble to the ground again. Now, as far as I know you can’t ride anything without strong arms and legs. When Joe Willie comes out of this he’s going to have to learn to cope with not being able to ride again. Can he do that?” Foley asked.

The cowboy stared at the opposite wall for a long moment. Foley could see the mind working at registering what he’d just heard, and then the slow welling of tears at the corners of his eyes.

“He needed three seconds. Three seconds on that bull and he was World Champion. Just a clean ride like the thousands he’s had before. Me, I figured it was a surefire thing. Hell, Doc, I was even helping to spend the money in my head. It’s all we’ve done. All we’ve done since he was three was live for this day. You know what All-Round Cowboy means, Doc?”

“No. I have an idea but no, not really.”

Birch pursed his lips. “It’s like reaching for the hand of the prettiest woman at the dance. A cowboy’s gotta be mighty lucky and mighty good. Joe Willie was mighty, mighty good.”

“I’m sorry,” Foley said, recognizing the emptiness inherent in the words.

Birch nodded solemnly. “I appreciate that. Hardest part for all of us now’s gonna be not being at the dance.”

He walked slowly back to the group of cowboys, and Foley watched them talk. Foley could see the shock register but become replaced almost instantly with a collective look of hardened composure—grit, Foley thought. They circled around Wolfchild, and Foley knew that the family would have the support it needed to get through this. And they’d need a lot.

Silence was the rule. She knew that. She knew that passage through moments like this, moments when his lust was a raging thing, his need for control, dominance and authority drove him to gripping, twisting, hitting, meant she needed to lie back and suffer it. Suffer it so it would end. So he could spend himself, roll off and move into the stilted semblance of home life that he pulled around himself for the community’s eyes. Why she spoke suddenly she never knew. Only that for the briefest of instants she saw herself beyond this, beyond the city, the routine, the performance piece her life had become and the freedom, maybe, of a horse on a trail in the mountains. Back to the dream she’d once held out for her life. The word spilled from her from her like dream words do, all languorous and distracted sounding.

“Eric,” she said.

He froze. “Shut up,” he said and continued his humping.

“Eric, no.”

He froze. Slowly, he pulled himself out, got off her, then stood above the couch, slid his shorts over his thighs and stood there looking down at her. Then he lit a cigarette, took a swallow from his glass on the coffee table and sat down at the edge of the sofa. He smoked and she wondered what this turn of silence from him might mean.

“No,” he said in the darkness as if the word puzzled him. “You tell me no. Funny. I thought you loved me.”

“I do, Eric,” she said. “I do love you.”

“Do you?” he asked the darkness. “Do you?”

He walked over to the small lamp stand and clicked the light on. The room was bathed in a soft yellow glow. He walked to the window and drew the shades across, walked back toward her, and stopped to drain the glass before he spoke again.

“Love says no?”

“Sometimes.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes. Sometimes it’s not nice what you do.”

He grinned. “It’s not supposed to be nice.”

“That’s not love then,” she said.

“It’s called making love,” he said, stepping closer. “Making love. It’s how a man does it and you … Well, you just have to learn to like it.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t.”

He sat on the edge of the couch. She felt the weight of him, the bulk, the heft and girth of him and she swallowed hard. He poured another shot of whiskey and held it up to the light and gazed at it, studying its amber colour, swirling it a little. Then he tilted it back and swallowed it. All of it.

“Nice,” he said. “Hmm.”

He reached back and slipped one large hand around her neck, not gripping, not squeezing, just placed it there while he put the glass on the coffee table with the other. “How’s that? That nice?”

“No,” she said.

“There’s that word again.”

The grip tightened. He turned as he increased the pressure, and Claire’s hands went to his thick wrist. He brushed them off with the other hand, grabbed her around the neck with both and pulled her toward him. She was small. Five foot
two, a shade above a hundred pounds, and he hauled her like a toy. He stood and dragged her across the couch backwards so that her feet slumped to the floor and he pulled her to stand in front of him, his hands still clenched about her neck. “There,” he said. “That’s nice.”

She looked at him. Steadily. Don’t show fear, she thought, even though the tentacles of it snaked through her belly. Whatever he wanted she would do. Quietly. Wordlessly. Just to get it over with and out of the way. Just so she could move on to the zombie dance, the ritual evening, just so she could get to the sleeping part of her life, the normal part. He smiled at her and she saw the man she’d run into at Smokey’s Bar and Grill, the smooth talker with the laugh lines that punctuated his talk. The salesman that talked her into this new and better model of a life. The one who’d told her that she needed a businessman and not the run-of-the-mill tradesmen and workaday slackers she’d run with until him. The one who’d promised her and the boy a shelter and a rest from all of the endless, tiresome searches she’d been on for love and home and belonging. The one who dressed her up and moved her through her life like a doll in a fancy doll’s house, placing her here, placing her there, telling her how it was going to be until the lights went down and he threw her wherever he wanted. They weren’t laugh lines after all. She saw that now in the light and the strain of his anger. They were wrinkles. Old, tired wrinkles, and he was an old and tired man struggling to stay young through this staged life with a beautiful younger black woman. She saw that clearly right then.

“You know what else is nice?” he asked.

She shook her head.