Dream Wheels (7 page)

“Joe Willie?”

He should have known that hers would be the first voice he heard. He’d never had the slightest scratch or bruise his entire career without his mother either doing the doctoring or harassing the poor sawbones who was.

“Water,” he said.

She brought the glass to his lips and he sucked through the straw. He moaned. The pressure of drinking that way caused his head to hurt.

“Open your eyes, son.”

He looked at her. She was standing beside the bed as proud and as tall as ever. She moved a hand down to his chest and rested it there, watching him. He couldn’t feel the pressure of her hand but was comforted by the motion nonetheless.

“Hey,” he said, weakly.

“Hey yourself. How do you feel?”

“Not worth a shit,” he said. “I’m broke good, huh?”

“Pretty good,” she said and pulled the chair closer to the bed. When she sat, her face was level with his. They looked at each other, and Joe Willie could feel her worry.

“Well?” he asked.

He watched her gather herself. It was a familiar thing and he’d always been impressed by it. It started somewhere at the back of her eyes, a movement but not really, more like energy pulling itself together like a fist, positioning itself for maximum release. He’d seen it the first time when he was four, and her favourite mare had broken her leg. She’d looked at her
lying in the stall and Joe Willie had seen the same rallying happen before she’d marched to the house and returned with his father’s pistol. Then she’d knelt at the horse’s flank and rubbed her with the flat of one hand, spoken to her calmly, lovingly, before standing straight and strong and shooting her through the head. Her arm had slumped to her side and she leaned into his father, who took the gun, laid it on the stall rail and gathered her in his arms. She’d pulled him close too, and as his face had pressed against his mother’s ribs that day he’d felt the sheer strength of her, the breath huge in its swell of emotion, the hand on his back warm, glowing like a branding iron, searing him with all of her vital energy.

“The bull broke you as bad as I’ve ever seen, son,” she said. “They worked on you a long time and you have a big decision to make in the next while.”

“What kind?”

She breathed out. “The change-your-life kind. And there’s no one can make it for you. It has to be your call.”

“Well? Let’s have her, then.”

She stood and looked squarely at him. He tried to breathe deep to prepare himself but his ribs wouldn’t allow it, so he settled for quick, shallow breaths. She described his injuries and the hard fact of his condition.

“Lord.”

“You’ll limp, son. There’s no getting away from that. It’s broke too bad to fix perfectly.”

“Ride?”

“I don’t know.”

“What’s the decision, then?”

“Your arm is shredded. Some of the muscle is ripped clear of the joint and the tendons are snapped. The muscles that help to hold your shoulder in place are gone and the glue
that keeps the arm in the socket is gone too. They can fix it, but the choice is yours.”

“What choice?”

“They can pin the joint—pin the arm into the socket so it will hang properly. But if they do that it might take away your ability to turn it normally, lift it, use it completely. Or they can let it hang in the socket. You can move it around like normal but it’ll always be pretty much held there by skin. Either way it’ll never come back to what it was, son. Ever.”

He looked away. It took a few moments for the message to sink in. He would never rodeo again. The weight of that thought forced him back into the bed with a groan and he wanted the blackness again. He’d always respected his body, trained it, taken care of it, but now, suddenly, he felt betrayed by it, abandoned. Lying there staring at the wall, he felt a great cold well of lonesome course through him and he wanted away. Her hand on his was steadying and he opened his eyes.

“Morphine,” he said.

She reached for the flow control on the IV.

He waited for the feeling of warm honey on the brain. He felt his limbs grow soft, vague, less defined until his whole body and the whole world was one warm pliant thing and all thought vanished.

He wouldn’t speak to her. In the rare moments when they happened to occupy a room together he pretended she wasn’t there and the weight of that silence hurt her as badly as a punch to the ribs. He came and went from school in silence and she found the words he used to tell her where he was going short and sharp and chopped off and blunted at the ends like corn stalks. They hurt to walk through. But at least the man was pacified. No one spoke of the beating. He seemed content with the situation, and if he
never asked about the boy at all it was okay with her because in an odd way she felt she was protecting him by excluding him from their talk. The two of them only looked at each other when they happened to meet. Aiden was sullen and Eric looked at him wide-eyed, expectant, awaiting any kind of word at all. Aiden merely offered him a flat, unyielding stare that started and ended nowhere. He moved deliberately, and when he crossed the room he maintained the look, never taking his eyes off Eric until the man would throw up his hands, arch his eyebrows and ask, “What? Say it. Whatever it is say it, kid.” But he never did.

Instead he became less and less of a presence.

“Are you okay?” she asked him one day.

“Why?”

“I’m your mother.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“My mother was proud. My mother had guts. My mother would never let a man do her bad. I don’t know who the hell you are.”

“Aiden, I—”

“Save it,” he said. “I don’t need any explanations. You said enough already.”

“I haven’t said anything.”

“Exactly.”

She looked at him. She could feel his defiance. It radiated outward from the dark pools of his eyes and from the solid plant of his feet. There was nothing of what she remembered of her son in him now. He’d moved beyond it somehow and she’d missed the passing.

The thought of a stiff, wizened thing dangling off his shoulder incapable of independent motion angered him. The idea of not
being able to rein a horse, curl a rope or even move around a paddock as naturally as he always had frustrated him and he opted for the dangle of an unpinned shoulder. They helped him like they always did. His mother and his father never left him all that time, and when the time for choosing came they went through all the options, all the possible scenarios and all the likely outcomes before they left him holding choice. No matter what, he couldn’t bear the thought of life without movement.

“Let it hang,” he told Foley.

He awoke in the bright sunshine of a desert afternoon in a warm, hazy stupor to see the four of them surrounding his bed. He grinned, more out of disciplined politeness than any degree of pleasure, and the eyes of his grandmother and grandfather filled with silent tears. If it was going to be like this all the time, people getting weepy eyed when they saw him, people constantly mourning the vision of what he once was, what he almost became, what he lost, it would drive him crazy. But for now he allowed them their fuss.

“How are you, boy?” the old man asked.

“Been better,” he said.

“Do you need anything?” his grandmother asked.

“Eight more seconds, different wrap,” he said.

She squeezed his hand. “I know,” she said, and Joe Willie wondered if she did, if anyone really, truly did.

There were cards and gifts from all sorts of people, and for the next while they helped him open and read them. He was awed a little by the display of emotion, especially from the strangers, the fans, the ones who never even had a chance to speak with him, to know him other than as the being aboard the beast a few hundred feet away. He wondered how it felt to them, to have a hero fall, to see the idol bent and broken and busted up before their eyes and whether they’d give any
thought at all to him once the shock of the thing crested and broke. He doubted it. People were fickle. By the time the next go-round came they’d find another hero and Joe Willie Wolfchild would become another used-to-be, another name to be tossed into the air at the tailgate parties when the great names of rodeo were burped and belched for comparison.
Invalid
. The word galloped in like a runaway steer and he turned his head to the window so they couldn’t see the rage on his face. Invalid. In-valid. Not valid any longer, not real, empty, useless. One of the slack-jawed, vacant-eyed hangers-on at the chutes and back lots soaking up with their eyes what they could no longer feel with their bodies. He’d seen them. He’d heard them talked about in tones of pity and sorrow steeped in gratitude that it hadn’t happened to those doing the talking. Joe Willie choked back a curse. He’d believed he’d never live to see the day when “what a gol-darned shame” and “Joe Willie Wolfchild” would occur in the same sentence. In-valid. No longer acceptable, strong, suitable, appropriate, valuable, whole. No longer whole. No longer a man. He groaned against his gritted teeth.

“Joe Willie? Son?” his father asked. “Do you need more?”

He nodded and watched his father dole out a few pumps of painkiller. It’d have to be a wonder drug to take away the feeling he had in his belly and at the sides of his head, but right now he’d settle for the darkness again. He looked at the flowers and cards adorning the small table in his room. Like a memorial, he thought. Here lies Joe Willie Wolfchild, champion cowboy, baddest bull buster and bronc rider in the business, consigned to the ground, never to ride again. A pity, they would say. Pity. He needed that as much as he needed tears. Pity couldn’t grow muscle, and tears could never wash away the taste of loss because there was always going to be a mirror
now, everywhere, to show him as he was. Invalid. Beaten. Defeated. A one-armed cowboy who couldn’t ride. He closed his eyes on the image and waited for the drug to take him out, out of the room, out of the world, out of the vision.

The crack made him forget. For the time it lasted he could slip a shroud over his anger and let the drug take him higher, upward beyond the things that roiled within him on the ground. They’d walk then. They’d walk through neighbourhoods and not worry about the gangs and the threat of violence that came from being a pair of unaffiliated kids. The crack let them forget. The gun, or at least the knowledge of having the gun, let them disregard it. The crack let them laugh. They’d laugh in the face of everything and as they walked they felt as though they radiated, the energy of the high pushing everything back a yard or so, making it visible, clearer, as if they were seeing it for the first time. They’d drift into the youth centre and play ping-pong or shoot hoops at the far end of the court away from the rest of the kids. As the night fell downward, deeper, they made their way through the streets of their own neighbourhood preparing themselves to walk into the vacuums that were their homes. It was then that the crack lost its effect. It was then that Aiden knew that drugs weren’t the answer for him. Being high meant you had to come down, and if all you had to come down to was the same place you left, there didn’t seem to be a lot of point to it. Instead, he became more determined to see his own course through. He’d change the landscape.

They came to the doorstep of the building where Cort lived. Around them there were the usual sounds of the city night. People called to each other from their doorways, laughing between the easy distances, and there were the sounds of music from sidewalk cafés and the clatter of dishes and the slushy
sound of passing cars and a levity that made the dimming of the light and the approaching darkness easier to enter somehow. They looked at each other. Aiden hooked a thumb toward the cement steps and they sat there together watching it all. He lit a cigarette and passed the pack to Cort. He could tell by the way Cort settled into the smoke, inhaling deeper, holding it longer, that he was flattened out, the drug easing off and the reality of the walk upstairs looming like an unwelcome labour.

“Shit when it ends, huh?” he said.

“The stone?”

“That too.”

They laughed.

“Feels freer out here,” Aiden said after a moment.

“No shit. It’s never Howdy Doody time up there. Ever,” Cort said.

“Fucker beat my mom.”

Cort looked at him. Then he looked back out over the street and thought a long while before looking at the trees and the sky beyond. “It eats me up that she stays,” he said.

“Me too. Can’t figure that. No way.”

“Me neither. I had my way the miserable pricks’d get a little of their own, you know?”

“I hear you. Maybe they will.”

Cort looked at him again. He nodded. “Maybe they will,” he said.

“We can change things,” Aiden said.

“Yeah.”

“All it takes is the jam.”

“I got that.”

“Yeah.”

They looked around them at the street. Everywhere they could see the shape of people wending their way toward their
homes, a casual slouching about them that spoke of a desire for predictability, for rest, for the safety of routine. The moon was a slip of light above them. Aiden grabbed the pack of smokes and handed Cort the unopened half, then stood up and leaned on the handrail. He moved aside to let an old couple shuffle past them. The old man and old woman held hands and when the man reached out to open the door for her he let his other hand rest against the small of her back. Both boys watched them enter the building and disappear slowly up the stairs, the man still guiding her with that light palm. They looked at each other.

“Chivalry,” Aiden said.

“What’s that?”

“It means being a warrior with class.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Honour, man. Stand-alone honour.”

“I could handle that.”

Aiden gave a small grin and clapped him firmly on the back. “It’s the only way to fly, my friend.”

The bear walked right through the crowd and people stepped aside easily to let it through. No one screamed and there was no stampede of people trying to get away. Joe Willie wondered how that could be. The bear was immense. A silvertip grizzly like they saw every once in a while in a mountain valley, five feet tall at the shoulder and as heavy as any rodeo bull. But it strolled through the crowd toward him like any other partygoer and people nodded politely and stepped aside. There was a band playing somewhere and the bear moved in counterpoint to the lilt and jump of the two-step they played. It kept its eyes on him as it approached and Joe Willie felt only a deep curiosity watching it watch him. He could hear the sharp click of claws on the floor. Each step it took was accompanied by a metallic rolling
tap of claw. Slow. Solemn. There was a smell in the air. Bear smell. Rancid, foul. But above it, mingled with it, were the twin odours of smoke-tanned buckskin and medicine smudge. Sweetgrass, sage, cedar and tobacco rolled all around him, grew thicker, sharper, more poignant as the bear neared him. Click. Click. Click. The tap of claws continued as the music died and the bear came to within three feet of where he stood. Staring. Silent. Then it stopped. The smell of the old healing medicines was rife in the air, and the bear swivelled its great head around as though smudging itself, snorting smoke and huffing with the feel of it in its lungs. Then it rose, stood up with a tremendous lurch, wavered slightly on its hind legs, caught its balance, spread its front paws wide above Joe Willie, who stood rapt in curiosity. All he could see was bear. All the light in the room was absorbed into the immense wall of fur and he felt that if he let himself he could fall right into it and keep on falling, falling, falling, falling, deeper and deeper into this strange and utter mystery. The bear dropped down onto all fours, shook its head and turned back in the direction it had come. People simply stepped out of its way again, laughing, enjoying themselves. The bear took four steps and turned to look at him, took four steps and turned to look at him, the click of its claws rattling on the floor. When it got to the door it turned its head and Joe Willie saw the face of the old woman again. The smell of the medicines and the buckskin swirled about him again and he shook his head to clear it. The bear was gone but he could hear the claws as it walked away beyond the door. Click. Click. Click.