Dream Wheels (5 page)

He waited as patiently as he could, but the closeness of the walls and the sickly pale green made him ache for air. His friends had headed across the way to a restaurant, so Birch stepped outside for a quiet smoke. She hated that. Johanna had been raised in the traditions of her people and for her tobacco remained a sacred plant, a medicine as she called it. Birch figured he could use a little medicine right about now. He’d just fired up the cigarette and had a first good long haul when the cab pulled up at the door.

Johanna Wolfchild always made Birch feel helpless. Not helpless like he couldn’t move without her but helpless like the feeling he got the first time he delivered a foal and felt its life warm and wet in his hands. Helpless because the magic in that left him in awe, silenced by its purity and the unrestricted beauty that radiated through his hands and filled his body. That kind of helpless; always. She was regal. Tall, slender but moving with a sure strength that caught a man’s attention and held it. Long black hair, greying some now, framing hazel eyes that Birch called cougar eyes for their mystery and lazy sensuality. Those eyes looked at him now and he ground the cigarette out under his heel.

“You’ll want to pick that up and put it somewhere,” she said over her shoulder as she paid the driver.

“Directly,” Birch said, bending to retrieve the butt.

She walked over and stood in front of him. When he looked at her Birch felt opened up, like any secrets he might have held at all got laid right open in the air. Known. Seen. Appreciated. She held the look a long moment, then offered
a small crinkle of smile at the corner of her mouth before reaching a hand to Birch’s face and laying a palm softly against his cheek.

“How are you?” she asked.

“All right,” he said. “Well, as good as can be expected.”

“It’s not good, is it?”

“No, it’s not.”

Birch put a hand on her elbow and guided her through the doors and down the hallway to the small waiting area. People stopped what they were doing to look at her. They always did. Whether it was in the back lot at a rodeo, a stock auction or a shopping mall in some huge city, Johanna always got their attention. He sat her down in a chair and got her a cup of water. She took a small sip and straightened herself in the chair.

“Okay, so what is it?” she asked.

“It’s his left shoulder and his right leg,” Birch said, and for the next few long, hard minutes he repeated what the doctor had told him. Johanna never moved. She sat and watched Birch as he spoke. When he finished she raised the cup to her mouth and sipped from it until it was empty. Then she placed it delicately in the wastebasket beside her, put her hands in her lap, pursed her lips and looked away across the room to some vanishing point far away.

“Suicide wrap,” she said.

“Yes.”

She nodded and looked at him solemnly. “I’d have gone the same way,” she said. “I’d have made the same choice and so would you.”

“Yes,” Birch said again, quieter, more deliberate.

“So don’t go harbouring any thinking in your cowboy head that you might have changed this or that you’re to blame
because you didn’t talk him out of it. We raised a man, Birch. We raised a cowboy. Joe Willie wanted this as bad as he ever wanted anything and he made the choice. Not you, not me, not anybody. Now he’s gotta heal and we’re going to help him. Simple as that.”

“Yes,” Birch said.

“Where is he?”

“Bed five, in there,” Birch said, pointing.

“I’ll see my boy then,” she said.

“He’s doped out.”

“No matter. I’ll see him anyway,” she said.

He strolled toward the youth centre, catching his image in the storefronts as he passed. A few gangbangers checked him out as he passed. He kept his eyes front, and when they moved he flipped them a sideways look, casual, unperturbed, and they let him pass. He’d had his share of fights and the thought of violence didn’t scare him but he was sure he didn’t want to be swarmed. No one needed that. So he worked on giving off the persona of a stand-up guy. To be known as a stand-up guy, someone who could take care of his own business, who had a mouth, who could fight but take a trimming too, someone who knew the code of the street and stood by it, was all he wanted. That and to be left alone. One of the Asian gang caught his eye and they nodded solemnly to each other and he grinned when he’d passed.

The youth centre was tucked in at the far edge of a large park. Generally, it was a neutral zone, and since none of the gangs claimed the park as their own it was a family place with dogs and strollers and games being played. He watched the people as he passed and wondered what the glue was that made them all fit together, to stick, to stay and be a predictable
thing. It was a mystery to him, and when he felt a longing rise in him he lit a cigarette and clamped it down firmly. The longing always made him mad and the anger had a bitter taste in the back of his throat. He didn’t trust that. It was dark there and the darkness held things, ill-defined things, scary things, and he had no time for being scared. Instead he had a plan. A plan for moving beyond the gypsy life of tagging along behind his mother, a plan that would show her and everyone that he had the balls and brains of a stand-up guy, standing on his own and calling his own shots and definitely someone who did not need anybody. Ever. When the time came they would all know that he was no one to mess with, the gangs, his mother, the school and all the hollow men who’d come and gone leaving nothing behind them but the stale smell of their cigars and booze and sex. Especially them. He’d show them. He’d show them all.

The youth centre was less than a hub of activity. Inside a handful of kids played basketball and ping-pong while another clump of them sat twitching anxiously in front of a large-screen TV where some action movie played. He watched for a while from behind them but the movie didn’t hold his attention for long and he opted for roaming about idly. The staff members merely nodded to him and no one approached to introduce themselves or to make him feel any sense of welcome at all. Eventually he wandered out back to where four picnic tables made up the smoking area.

“Got a smoke?” a lanky kid asked.

“Yeah,” he said and flipped him the pack.

“You’re new here.”

“Yeah. Kinda dead though,” Aiden said.

“Get used to it. Anyone who comes here’s not hooked up. It’s the only place that’s not someone’s turf,” the kid said.

“So what’s to do?” Aiden asked.

“Ah, they give us passes to the movies, bowling, sometimes coupons for the arcade, lame shit like that.”

“How long you been coming here?”

“About a month.”

“Long time to be bored shitless.”

“Any time’s a long time for that.”

“You know it. I’m Aiden.”

“Cort,” the kid said.

“Cort?”

“Yeah. Funny, eh? Gave me a name for the place I’d spend most of my time.”

Aiden sat on the picnic table beside Cort and they smoked without speaking, settling for watching the young kids playing on the swings and jungle gym. “You got a beef? Is that why you’re in court?” Aiden asked.

Cort blew a smoke ring up into the air and they watched it swirl away. “Nah. The old lady. Her and the old man are scrapping all the time. He hits her, we go to the shelter, he comes around whining and snivelling to get her back and we’re doing the fucking courthouse two-step trying to keep me and my sister out of foster care. It’s bullshit. Sometimes I wish they’d just take us. Make more sense to me.”

“Sounds tough,” Aiden said.

“What’s tough is moving all the fricking time. It’s like they think a new worker’s gonna make different moves. A new fucking flop is gonna make everything different. I hate that shit.”

“I hear you,” Aiden said.

“You too? The pop’s an asshole?”

“Yeah. But not like that. We just move a lot. I had a lot of different pops. But yeah, they were all assholes.”

Cort sniffed. “Having an asshole for a pops makes me ashamed that I gotta be a friggin’ man someday, you know? I don’t wanna be anything like the shithead.”

Aiden shot him a sideways look. “So what’s to do around here?” he asked.

“You asked me that already,” Cort said.

“I know but I mean, what’s to do?” He gave Cort a cool look.

“Oh. Okay. Well, I got a little hash. You into that?”

“It’ll do,” Aiden said. “For starters.”

It was starting to look like a better place already.

They sat together in the chapel. Neither of them was particularly religious but they felt a need for the solace of a space beyond the austere brightness of the hospital. Johanna sat with her hands folded together in her lap and Birch slumped in the pew beside her, one arm slung around behind her, fiddling with his hat with the other hand. The chapel was spare, as though its designers had not wanted to offend anyone’s religiosity by including any iconic reference at all. There was just a fake stained-glass window on one wall with a light placed behind to pretend the light of the world. Birch stared at it with mild curiosity. There wasn’t a lot of pretend in his world and for the life of him he couldn’t understand how people so desperate for some sort of salvation could find comfort in a pretend chapel. Neither could he figure the absence of stuff. Stuff defined things for him, let him know where he was and who ran the show. Here, you couldn’t tell what cloth God was wrapped in, and Birch found it real hard to hold out any trust for a God that couldn’t make up his mind about furniture. He supposed, if there really was any figuring out to do about it, that God was probably happier out where Birch had always found him or her or whomever—out among the hills and trees and rivers where
the great spirit of it was all the furnishings a believer like him had a need or a hankering for. All the deep ideas about it were for bigger and busier heads than his. Still, the chapel was peaceful enough and he was grateful for the break.

Johanna thought about her pregnancy. Joe Willie was the only child she ever had. When she learned about the impending arrival of her child she’d gone to see the old women. Victoria and she had travelled to South Dakota to hear the motherhood teachings of her Sioux tradition. Her mother-in-law was steadfast in keeping the flame of tribal fires alive in her family, and Johanna had loved that about her from the beginning. A lot of white women either wanted their Indian husbands to become less so or else they busied themselves with recreating themselves in an Indian motif, totally abandoning their white history and beginnings. Victoria did neither. Instead, she was the force behind the presence of ceremony and ritual and the tribal way in the Wolfchild family. The only nod to adopting a tribal persona was the old, worn moccasins she wore, a present from the early days of her life with Lionel. So they’d set out together to discover what Johanna needed to do to honour the old way in her motherhood.

They’d camped out with a trio of grandmothers. She’d heard amazing things. She’d heard that a pregnant woman was not supposed to see fresh blood, nor was she to kill anything, in order to honour the life she was carrying. She’d heard that she was always to go completely through a door or completely down a set of stairs, never to turn back halfway. The child within her would see this and might decide to stop halfway down too. A pregnant woman was to rely on her man to help her. A new mother should walk purposefully and in as straight a manner as possible to any destinations she set out for, to not deviate or change plans. She heard many such things and they
puzzled her. To Johanna they smacked of old wives’ tales, charming folksy bits of whimsy and not anything like what she had expected to hear.

So she asked them. Directly.

“You don’t do those things for your baby,” she was told. “You do them for yourself.”

She learned. She learned that if she was willing to carry through and do all the things suggested to her to do while she carried the baby, as farfetched as they might seem, she would cultivate the necessary willingness to be a good mother. If she could learn to set aside her rational thinking and do these things willingly, she would learn to set aside her rational thinking when the child arrived and learn to exercise her woman’s gift of intuition in raising that child. If she could learn to become more intuitive in her responses to that child, she could learn to teach the power of strong choice in directing its own life. If she could allow her child to choose strongly, she could learn to give that child back to Creator each and every day of its life. When she learned to do that, they told her, she would be a good mother.

Most of all, she supposed, she’d learned that there is a backbone in life, a spiritual spine that undercut everything, and that finding it in yourself, learning to feel its pulse, was salvation in its purest sense. She’d listened intently as the words rolled easily and eloquently from those old women and she had found her strength and she’d done all that they asked.

Her child lay in a bed two floors above her. When he came to he would need her, all of her, and she would be there. She looked at Birch, his lanky frame slung casually in the pew, and knew that he would be there too. The thing with cowboys was, that in the laconic, ambling, shrugging casualness of them, there was backbone too, a grit-your-teeth tenacity joined
with a wild, wide-open lovingness. She saw it in the way they treated animals, the way they moved on the land, in the way they loved their families; everything equal and deserving.

She squeezed his hand and he broke off whatever reverie he was engaged in and they rose without speaking and headed back upstairs.

When the phone rang Darlene thought it was a joke. Smith and his friends at the Longhorn knew she’d tied it on pretty good that night and that she started her regular shift at the Valley Grill at six a.m. Smith was cute enough. Smart too in a cagey sort of way, and it’s what made him a good contractor, but he had a heap of learning to do about what was funny and what was not.

“This ain’t terribly humorous so get it on over with,” she said, sitting up, wrapping the sheet about her and reaching for her cigarettes.

“Darlene, it’s Johanna Wolfchild.”