Dream Wheels (8 page)

He opened his eyes. His grandfather sat at the table by the window, tapping his fingernails on the tabletop. Click. Click. Click. A thin tendril of medicine smoke rose from a smudging bowl at his elbow. Joe Willie groaned.

“What do you need, boy?” his grandfather asked.

He closed his eyes again and breathed as deeply as he could. Despite the pain it caused him, it felt good, this flood of air. He grimaced and shifted himself as best he could.

“Damn,” he cursed.

“What? What is it?” his grandfather asked, moving closer.

“Damn this place,” he said.

“Yes. It’s surely an uneventful location, that’s for sure.”

Joe Willie tried to move his arm but it was wrapped tight against his side. “This gotta stay this way?” he asked.

“I suppose. That’s how they want you for a while.”

“Pretty snug.”

“Yes. They coulda fit you with a latigo, I suppose, then we could have eased it off some to give you a rest now and again.”

“Sure. And a hackamore to keep me in line.”

“Cowboy needs that now and then.”

“I could get by without it.”

“Yes.”

The two men looked at each other. A quiet ran between them. It was a calmness defined in the bonds formed in the dust and dirt and struggle of the cowboy life. Trust. They wouldn’t have called it that. The world gives outsized names to simple things and, for Joe Willie and Lionel, trust was too big a loop to throw over the horns of what they felt. It was an elbows-on-the-fence-rail kind of thing, all leaned back and casual, existing without definition or borders, a line of certainty that ran from the edges of what they did to the uncertainty of the risks they took.

“It’s done, then? Rodeo?” Joe Willie asked.

“Yes.”

Joe Willie nodded. He could feel a bubble of anger rise in his belly. He tried to shift again but the pain almost made him black out. He settled for lifting his good leg and smacking it
into the mattress, scowling and sneering at the cards and flowers on his bedside table. The anger rose in him and as it gained its height he recognized it as the bear, its great girth something he could fall deeper and deeper into. When he tried to shift his shoulder the burn there tore at his senses and he jerked suddenly, driving a long spike of agony down the line of his fractured thigh. He edged closer to the bear.

“Boy?” his grandfather said, looking down at him.

“Squeeze the damn pump.”

“You sure?”

“Squeeze the damn pump,” he said again.

The rage contracted his stomach muscles and he scowled at the effort but pushed against it as hard as he could. It felt good. He felt a wave of sorrow, deep and hot, building alongside the rage, and as it washed over it and he began to feel the ache of the loss, began to see it framed in his mind, began to see the huge black hole in his life, he squeezed his good hand hard into a fist and pounded it on the rail of the bed. Hard. Hard. And as the drug seeped into him, he was glad for it, grateful for the haze he settled into, and he flexed the hand time and time again, raised it to his face, looked at it and poured all the churning vitriol into its clenched tautness until the drug took over and it fell slowly to his side.

“It’ll be okay, boy. You’ll see,” his grandfather said.

Joe Willie looked at him, numbed by the morphine and quieted by the rage. He turned his head. Something inside him kept right on turning and he followed the bear out of the room.

They walked down the alley and out into the hard flat light of the street. Around them the neighbourhood was thrumming with the afternoon energy of shoppers, buskers, joggers. It was a nondescript avenue, a transition zone between seamy and
trendy, organic food stores next to the pawnshops, headshops and coffee joints. Aiden and Cort melted into the background, a pair of kids at loose ends, traipsing down the street and stopping to lean against a wall to smoke. They had book packs hooked over one shoulder, and nothing in their manner or their dress suggested anything other than teenagers on their way home from school. They stayed where they were for the length of time it took to smoke two cigarettes, then slouched away casually to a small café on the near corner. In their booth they were studious about the menu, quiet and at ease, looking out the window patiently while their burgers were being prepared.

“Not much action over there,” Cort said after they’d been served. “You sure it’s worth it?”

Aiden chewed some fries and studied his friend, pressing one hand downward in the air to quiet his talk. “It’s perfect,” he said.

“How do you figure?”

“Lots of things. But mostly, it’s a family store and the girl works regular evening hours on regular days. She’s in college and she works alone. No extra staff, no surprise arrivals.”

“That’s good?”

“Real good,” Aiden said. “She locks up at ten, walks two blocks down the street to the bank and drops the cash bag in the slot. The drop is next to the alley that leads to the park that leads to the ravine and gone.”

“Sounds good. Where’s the hitch? There’s gotta be a hitch.”

Aiden sipped at his milkshake. “We gamble on the day,” he said.

“Meaning?”

“What they turn that day. How much business they do.”

Cort took a long look down the street toward the bookstore. “Doesn’t look like much of a business to me.”

“Trust me,” Aiden said. “Bookstore. Never a crush of people, just a regular, steady business. It doesn’t stick out. Not to the cops, not to anybody. They feel safe. Nobody robs a bookstore. It’s always the liquor stores and corner stores.”

“How much?”

“I don’t know. I figure a few hundred.”

“That ain’t much.”

“It’s enough to slide it down the list.”

“The list?”

“The score list. Guys are pulling down scores all the time. Cops are more interested in the big ones, the ones over a grand, the ones with narcotics involved, home invasions, shootings, that sort of stuff. Small jobs like this don’t draw much heat. They’ll investigate it because they gotta but they’re not real hot to trot to solve it.”

“Still.”

“Still what?”

“Still don’t seem like a lot for the effort.”

Aiden nodded. When he looked at Cort he did it squarely and he saw his friend blanch at the directness, lower his head to his food and wait for the next words to release him.

“It’s all safe. It’s way out of our neighbourhood for one thing and nobody knows us around here. It’s fast; show the piece, grab the bag, don’t make a lot of noise and attract attention, gone. It’s a girl so there won’t be a scene. And we’re not walking around with fistfuls of loot after. I seen guys after a score spending money like it was on fire in their hands. We don’t do that. Everything we do is low key. Safe. Unnoticed. No heat. Besides,” he said and grinned at Cort over a mouthful of burger, “I’m just a friggin’ kid.”

Cort smiled back. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m just a friggin’ kid.”

“Who’s gonna figure a kid for a stickup?”

“Not me.”

“Me neither. Are we good then?”

“We’re good. When?”

“Soon,” Aiden said.

Cort looked away down the street, chewing slowly. “Soon,” he said quietly. “I like the sound of that. I really, really like that.”

In the diffused light through the window blinds she could almost convince herself that he was still a small boy. His head turning against the pillow was the same tousled head she’d seen through his door all those nights of his boyhood. Now, though, there was a deep furrow in his brow she’d never seen before. In the light it looked deep as a cut, an untreated gash, and she wondered what territories he navigated in his dreams. She prayed that they took him to happy times. Life as he’d known it, the life that she and Birch had worked hard to provide for him, had been normal—normal as life can be for a rodeo-raised youngster. There was nothing in her experience to equal the intense spirituality that came from the rhythm of horseback. It was where she’d always found proof of God. Something in her blood told her the truth of this, this union of tribal woman to tribal animal forging a bond to everything she moved through, be it valley, mountain, pasture or rodeo arena. Harmony, they called it, the Old Ones. She preferred to call it perfect. One and the same, she imagined, but perfection sat easier in her mind.

She’d tried to pass this on to her son, and in the early years he’d taken to it bright-eyed, attracted by the mystery, the mystical Indianness of it. Later, as he grew more and more into the company of men, the cowboys, he shrugged it off with a grin and a shy “Aw, Mama” before banging his hat against his
thigh and heading off to mount up one more time. Still, she knew it stuck like a burr to a saddle blanket. A mother knew these things about her own, and she understood that deep within her boy, down where it counted, there was a well of spirituality, an understanding of mystery, Wakan Tanka, the Great Mystery that presided over everything. Spirit Dogs. That’s what the Sioux had called the horses in the purely tribal days. Loyal, intelligent, intuitive and capable of guiding you to the spirit coursing through you, the truth of it born in the gift of motion, the pitch and sway of the ride. Now, watching him sleep, seeing the furrow of strain and worry at his brow, was where the faith came in, the belief that he would move through the pain and indecision of the world and drink from that deep, cool well.

“What are you thinking?” Victoria whispered, easing into the chair beside her.

She took the old woman’s hand and they sat looking at him. “I was thinking that it’s going to take him a while to get to where he needs to be with this.”

“Well, truth is that he’s a cowboy,” Victoria said. “He’ll grit his teeth, gather up his gumption and try to move it alone for a spell. But he’ll tire. Eventually.”

“Eventually?”

“It’s a cowboy word. It means worn down to the last notch in the belt. Then you can start to see the sense of things.”

Johanna smiled. “Damn cowboys,” she said. “You just have to love them though, don’t you?”

“Can’t help it, really. I never could.”

“So what do we do?”

Victoria turned in her chair until their knees touched. She leaned forward and put her hands in Johanna’s lap, cupped the younger woman’s hands in her own. They sat silently, watching Joe Willie.

“I’ve never been on a bull,” Victoria said. “But I watched enough to learn something about it. There’s a secret to bull riding that only the good ones really ever get. The secret is that you can never beat the animal. You can only beat yourself. For eight seconds you stare down fear, doubt and indecision. That’s what you ride. That’s what’ll buck you off long before the bull does. You can teach them how to stick and stay. You can teach them how to make eight. Give them all the tools, all the tricks, all the tips, I suppose you can even give them the blood for it, like this one here. But you can’t give them the secret. They only ever learn that from the ride. At least the good ones do.”

“He was the best,” Johanna said and she felt the sorrow crease her face.

“Yes. And it’s just another ride, Johanna. Maybe a bigger, badder bull than he ever rode before, but it’s just another ride.”

“Mankiller,” she said.

“What?”

“Some bulls are mankillers. Maybe this is one of them.”

The old woman squeezed her hands. When Johanna met her gaze she felt the uncompromising steel of her. “You listen to me, girl. You listen hard and you listen well. There’s no room for that here. So you just shoo it right out of your head. You raised a champion. You raised a no-holds-barred, spit-at-the-devil roughneck. You raised a
cowboy
. He’s got the blood of three proud peoples running through that body—Ojibway, Sioux and Irish—tribal people, all of them. Not a one of them ever ran from a fight. And on top of that he’s got everything that you or I or Birch or Lionel ever gave him. I don’t know about you, Johanna, but I figure love’s a pretty tough hombre and we filled that boy up with it. Now you be doubtful, you be afraid, you be sorry, but don’t you ever let him see that. You
don’t ever let him see nothing but the love you always showed him. If we have to teach him to ride this big, bad bull here, then that’s exactly what we’ll do. It’s gonna take some doing on his part, a powerful lot of doing, but it’s him that’s gotta do it. It’s him that’s gotta find the peace with it. It’s him that’s gotta want to settle it. The rest of us are leaning on the gate here. Whatever it takes to get him past this is what we have to allow him. Whatever that may be.”

“I ever tell you about Mesquite in ’42?” Lionel asked.

“Only a few thousand times,” Birch said.

“Well, you know that Mesquite in them days was the daddy of them all?”

“Yeah. I know that.”

“And you know that that old bangtail I drew was a handful and a half?”

“Yeah. That’d be old Prairie Fire.”

“Old Prairie Fire. That’s right. And you know that I got me a real fine pair of shotguns, them fancy step-in kind of chaps I used to love?”

“I heard that.”

“And I told you that my sweet Victoria was mightily impressed with my look that day, standing at the gate eye-balling me like the coyote at the chickens?”

“Yessir, I surely heard that too,” Birch said with a grin.

“Well, let me tell you that I was primed and ready that day. That bangtail had been around the circuit awhile and all I needed was a clean ride. I coulda told you every move he was gonna make once I marked him out. Winning Mesquite was a mighty big thing then on accounta every sumbitch worth his salt was there.”

“Daddy of them all,” Birch said.

“Damn straight,” Lionel said. “Glad you’re following along. Anyhow, it couldn’t get any better for making the money. Horse I rode before, spanking-new broke-in chaps, a hot an’ ready woman waiting for me and ten days off before the next draw. I was ready. I told you this, right?”

“Yessir, you did.”

“Well, the truth is that that old bangtail had a few more tricks up his sleeve than anyone figured. I mark him out and we’re frying the breeze, riding fast and wild, and he’s doing everything I expected him to do. It’s looking good. Then about four seconds in he throws me a loop. Right when he normally gathers up for a big leap and kick he almost comes to a standstill. Well, I’m right over his shoulders leaning pretty good when he starts to crow hop around, and that kills all my timing. Then as quick as he does that he springs straight up and comes down spinning. I do the face plant and the crowd groans. I feel crapped out, but when I go to stand up I know it’s bad.”