Dream Wheels (32 page)

He heard it before he saw it. A huff of breath and a low growl.

Joe Willie stopped and raised his head slowly. The bear sat on its haunches in a berry patch a few yards ahead and above the trail, staring at him. Joe Willie’s arms felt leaden at his sides and his legs quivered from the effort of climbing. He willed them to stop. He stared straight at the bear and directed his will to stop the tremor in his thighs. He didn’t want it misread as fear, though fear tickled at his gut. The bear lowered its head and looked at him across the broad expanse of its snout, tilted its head like a curious dog, then clambered up to all fours. Joe Willie stood stock-still, the quiver gone from his legs.

The two of them stood locked together by the eyes, and Joe Willie felt the bear reading him, judging him, measuring him. When it stood slowly, majestically, up on its hind feet, its huge front paws and claws tucked in front of the huge cliff of its chest, rolling its head side to side before raising its snout to sniff at the air, Joe Willie kept his stance, the sweat cool on his face now. The bear growled once and dropped back to all fours. It lowered its head and looked at him awhile, then turned and made its way up the side of the mountain, easing finally through a cleft of boulders.

Mukwa Manitou. Bear Spirit in his father’s language. The bear was a protector, and its medicine power was the power of the warrior and the warrior way. It had been coming to him in his visions to prepare him for the fight, to remind him that he already carried all the arrows he would need, that the power to heal himself lay within himself and that the anger, the rage, were the spurs he needed to coax himself into action. The clarity of those visions had shocked him, awed him some at their intensity and their mystery, but this face-to-face confrontation was harder, less clear. It could mean so many things. He’d need his mother and his grandmother for a proper interpretation. He’d need his father and grandfather to
put it into a man’s perspective. Joe Willie exhaled slowly, looking at the spot where the bear disappeared. When he turned back down the trail he felt silk inside and he smiled.

When he’d asked her out for a walk, Claire had no idea he meant to here. They’d strolled through the stables, visiting the horses and looking at the other rough stock in their pens, and eventually skirted the far side of the main pasture where the land dipped away into the draw. Aiden hadn’t said anything through the course of it and she’d surreptitiously studied him. There was nothing to suggest anything but calmness in him, a satisfaction of sorts, and she was glad to see that in him. When they stood looking westward across the draw toward the mountains, he’d taken her hand silently.

“What scared me the most in there was the crying,” he said. He poked some dirt around with the toe of his boot and looked toward the sunset. “You heard guys cry all the time. Not out in the open. Not for everyone to see. But at night, when the lights were out, nights I couldn’t sleep, you’d hear it. Muffled kinda by pillows but big sobs, big moans. Guys who could take endless amounts of shit without saying anything, gang guys, cold guys, broken down in the night. That scared me, the fact that there was something bigger in the world. Something bigger than tough and hard and violent. Something you couldn’t see but that would come and get you anyway in unguarded moments. That scared me more than anything.”

She put a hand to his cheek. He closed his eyes tight and there was a tremor, brief and hard, and then he looked at her again.

“You could have told me,” she said.

“No. I couldn’t.”

“Then why tell me now?”

“Guess I owed it to you.”

“You don’t owe me anything.”

“Figure I do,” he said.

Now they sat in the darkening equipment shed behind a table with a partially disassembled engine lying on it. The truck was a lumpen shape in front of them.

“What are we doing here?” she asked in a whisper.

“Wait” was all he said.

They didn’t need to wait for long. She heard the door roll open with a creak and the shed was bathed in the dim spray of sunset, everything awash in a pale red light. Joe Willie stepped through the door and eased it half closed behind him. He removed a water bottle from his belt and wiped his brow under his hat with a towel before turning to the truck. She watched him place a palm on the fender and walk toward the front of it, sliding it along, feeling the line of the truck. He stopped to wipe at a spot above the front grillework, then crossed to the driver’s side and hopped up into the cab. For the next while he sat quietly, smoking, looking out the door across the draw and up toward the mountains. He was far calmer than she’d ever seen him, settled, at ease here, and she felt guilty at her silent intrusion. Joe Willie reached his right hand out and rubbed a small circle on the seat beside him, humming. Claire strained to hear. It was an old song, one she recognized from the open kitchen window across the alley. “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” He hummed it slowly, like a hymn, and when he finished he looked up at the mountains again and heaved a deep sigh, then stepped out of the truck. The angular cut of his cheekbones in that fading light was striking.

“Watch,” Aiden whispered.

Joe Willie moved deliberately. He lit an old hurricane lamp and set it on the table beside the engine, then walked to
the other side of the truck and lit another one. The soft, old-fashioned glow was comforting even in a garage, and Claire saw the old truck differently. It pulled the light to it like an embrace, and she was charmed by the wide roll of its fenders, the running board and the scarred and battered bed of it. The truck sat in the light like a proud old woman. Joe Willie saw her that way too. She could tell. He walked around her slowly, admiringly, and Claire saw a softer look on his face, like pride but deeper, more profound. She struggled to name it.

Once he’d made his way around her Joe Willie removed his shirt and prepared to work on the engine. When Claire saw the arm she put a hand to her mouth. She watched as he chose a tool with the arm, lifted it, turned it in his palm, willed the arm to motion. But it was his face that compelled her. As he raised the tool to the engine his features were sharpened by the shadows thrown by the old lamps. It gave him the look of a painter at work in his garret, studious, grim, determined, but hedged with a softness like love that eased all the lines into a seamless portrait of someone bathed in all of it, the work, the light, the encroaching darkness, the hope, the possibility, the timeless energy of art. The arm became unimportant.

He struggled. He scowled and even then she was swept up in it. Wordlessly, he worked, gritting his teeth with impatience, steadying the arm with the right now and then and studying a manual opened up on the table beside him. Joe Willie never once used his good right hand and arm to do the work. He willed the left arm to work and move. He made it beautiful with the effort.

When Aiden spoke it shocked her.

“That’s not how you do it,” he said and stood up.

Joe Willie straightened abruptly and peered into the shadow behind the worktable. He was different immediately,
charged with anger. Aiden stepped into the light. The two of them stood looking at each other, their features a matched set of grim detachment.

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

“Watching somebody screw up a truck engine,” Aiden said.

“Yeah? Well, what would you know, convict?”

“Convict?” Aiden laughed, short and sharp like a bark. He looked to the side, tongue pressed to his cheek, and shook his head. “I’m a branded man,” he said.

“What?” Joe Willie asked.

“Branded man. You oughta know that. It’s a country song. About convicts.”

“I heard it a time or two,” Joe Willie said. “Doesn’t tell me what the hell you’re doing here.”

“I told you. Watching someone screw up a truck engine.”

“And how the hell would you know?”

“It’s what they taught me.”

“Who?”

“In the joint.”

Joe Willie snorted. “Give you a certificate, did they? Send you out with a licence? Made an honest man out of you?”

Aiden stepped closer to the table. “They didn’t make me anything,” he said.

“That shows.”

“Hey, fuck you.”

Claire stepped out into the light and she saw Joe Willie flare. He grabbed his shirt and threw it on.

“Sorry, ma’am,” Joe Willie said, fumbling with the buttons. “Caught me by surprise is all. No one comes here. Not supposed to, anyway.”

“It’s us who should apologize,” Claire said. “Sorry to intrude. And it’s not ma’am. It’s Claire, and this is my son, Aiden.”

They looked at each other, neither one making a move. But she’d opened the door to propriety and they struggled with it, something in both of them recognizing the need to behave with a woman present. As she looked back and forth between them Claire could feel the force of them, the will strong in the air, electric. It began with a nod. One small lowering of the jaw from Aiden followed by the same measured dip from Joe Willie, and the two of them reached out to shake hands, firmly, twice, never once taking their eyes off each other.

“Convict,” Joe Willie said.

“Hack,” Aiden said.

“I’m sorry,” Claire said. “We really shouldn’t be here. It’s your private space. We’ll be moving along now.”

“How long you think it’ll be before you realize you can’t do this job?” Aiden asked.

“I done it this far,” Joe Willie replied.

“What? Got the engine out with help. Maybe done a little work on the undercarriage. A convict could do that.”

“What can’t I do?”

“Can’t do what you’re thinking of doing.”

“And what would that be?”

“Well, you’re tinkering with the carburetor. But they don’t make that kind anymore. Even if you could score a part from some specialty place you’d have to replace the rest of the innards too. It’s too old. It’s sat too long. Rust. Not to mention the block you want to put them all in is shot.”

“And how the hell would you know that?”

“Shit, even in this light you can see the cylinders are cracked.”

“So? I’ll weld ’em.”

Aiden laughed. “Weld? You can’t weld smooth enough. You’d have to fix them with a sleeve.”

Joe Willie looked at him with narrowed eyes. “You sure?” he asked.

“Word,” Aiden said.

Joe Willie nodded, bit down on his lower lip and turned to lean on the table. Aiden moved with the break and leaned against the fender of the truck. “Okay to smoke?” he asked.

When Joe Willie nodded, Aiden pulled a cigarette from the pack and tossed it to him. The two of them busied themselves with lighting their cigarettes.

Joe Willie tossed back the cigarettes. “You know how to do that job? The sleeves?”

“Maybe,” Aiden said.

“Maybe what?”

“Maybe if we make a deal,” Aiden said.

“Aiden, I don’t think—” Claire started to say.

“No, no. Let him finish,” Joe Willie said.

“I figure we could trade,” Aiden said. “I can show you how to get this truck up and on the road and you could show me something.”

“What exactly?” Joe Willie asked.

“How to ride a bull.”

Joe Willie smiled, shook his head, took a haul on his smoke and looked up at a point on the ceiling. “Ride a bull? What makes you think you can do that job?”

“I done it this far,” Aiden said.

Joe Willie laughed again. “You rode a machine, boy. Then you rode a tame bull. You rode a bull that’s as shot as this engine. You rode a bull that anyone could ride. A spinner. That’s all he did was spin, few bucks, one leap, that’s all he had in him. There’s a world of difference between a ranch bull and a rodeo bull. Trust me.”

“There’s a world of difference between a truck that runs and one that doesn’t. Trust me.”

“You got lucky, kid. Pure lucky. You need to face that, swallow it, learn to live with it.”

“I rode the damn thing,” Aiden said. “No matter what you say, I rode it.”

“All right. You rode it. Be happy. Call it value for your dollar. Go home and make it a memory, a story you tell sometime.”

“It’s bigger than that,” Aiden said.

“How?” Joe Willie asked.

“I don’t know. Ever since all the shit came down in my life I’ve been looking for something to make it all matter. Like it led to something. That it wasn’t wasted time. At first, tinkering round with engines and cars made it go away and I felt good. But not like this. Not like I feel when I ride.”

Joe Willie was looking at him now. “Go on,” he said.

“Up there it was like everything that ever happened, everything I went through, everything that ever mattered one way or another came down to one tiny single point in my belly. One tiny pinprick. Like fire. A point of fire in my gut. And when I sat there and I gathered myself, it all coiled around that point, collected there, and I could feel it in my breathing, at the sides of my head, in my eyes, in every muscle in my body. Everything went away then. Everything. All that was left was that point. That’s where I lived—and when that bull came out of the gate I exploded along with him. Boom. I never felt as free as that. Free of everything.
Everything
. I wanted it to last forever.”

“I hear that,” Joe Willie said.

“That’s why you gotta show me what you know,” Aiden said. “Because you gave me that much already.”

“What?”

“I watched you. I watched the videos of your rides. I played them all back in slow motion and I did what you did. You got me this far. But I can go further. I know it. I don’t know how I know it but I do.”

Joe Willie turned to Claire. He ground the smoke out on the side of the table and exhaled the last draw. “There’s a lot more to this than guts, kid. Any fool can screw up enough nerve to try it, but it takes a precision not many have. You gotta straddle the border beyond common sense and crazy every moment. You gotta not only deal with pain, you have to accept it like breakfast. You have to push yourself harder than anyone’s called to do because there’s a ton of crazy waiting for you all horns and hoofs and cussedness. It ain’t easy to watch. It’s harder to do.”

“I can do it.”

“Can you?”