Dream Wheels

by Richard Wagamese

  “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 thro
ugh 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.

  “This,” he said, sliding the shorts down and pushing her to her knees in front of him.

  She stared at his engorged need and the revulsion was thick in her.

  “Now, be nice,” he said.

  “No,” she said in a whisper.

  His fist crashed into the back of her head and drove her to the floor. She only had a moment to interpret what was happening before he kicked her in the stomach and hauled her to her feet again in front of him.

  “Be nice,” he said again, firmly.

  “No,” she said.

  The world exploded.

  Victoria Wolfchild placed the telephone back in its cradle and walked to the picture window that looked out over the pasture. The horses were looped to the hitching post at the edge of the veranda and the dog lay panting on the step beside them. She could see the back of him, leaned against the rail fence looking across the valley at the mountains. Smoking. She watched his ribs move out with the inhale, then contract slowly as the plume of smoke streamed out in a long, thin cloud, mushrooming at its end and disappearing into the purple-pink scalloped edges of the evening. Right now he was learning to digest the disappointment and the worry. Las Vegas was thousands of miles away and the distance felt even greater when you were landlocked and helpless at home. He’d want to be doing something, anything. Now, as she reached into the closet for her shawl, Victoria Wolfchild knew he’d be more wrought with anxiety once she told him the extent of the injuries. A star had fallen and the sky was suddenly emptier and colder. Joe Willie had ridden higher and further than either he or Birch had ever dreamed, and the old man wanted that championship for him more than he’d wanted anything these past few years. Still, it was the fact that the boy was hurt, and hurt bad, that agonized him now. As she stepped through the door onto the veranda she heard the faint syllables of the old prayer song they’d learned together many years ago. His face was raised to the sky now and she knew his eyes would be closed and his throat open to beseech blessings for the grandchild far away.

  He hadn’t had much use for the old ways when they met. Lionel had been raised in missionary schools. He never spoke of that. Victoria had made it a point to read what she could find of the experience and she’d felt a well of shame for that part of her country’s history. She knew that they had removed the language and the culture from those poor children and that once a tribal person had lost those they were pretty much at sea. So, after they’d been married a few years, she started taking him to local powwows and tribal gatherings. He was reluctant at first, not so much for the encounter with his cultural way but more because, even though Lionel loved her immensely, there was a part of him that felt embarrassed being married to a white woman. A cultural embarrassment that only played itself out when they walked among his people. Victoria sensed it in the way his hand let go of hers some when they walked. Not completely, not in any obvious way, but enough. She knew it in the way he looked beyond her when they talked, as if he needed to see who was looking. She knew it by his retreat into shorter sentences spoken lower than usual or by his rapt interest in the ground. It was something else he never spoke of but she knew it in her bones and she also knew that she didn’t blame him or hold it against him. The world sometimes held a big eraser in its hand and it didn’t care much whose life it skimmed over, didn’t consider the impact of its movements. Those whose lives were smudged by it went on with a hunger for the edges, for definition, for completeness. Lionel needed detail, and she helped him find it.

  They’d found an old man and his wife and they’d become regular visitors. The old couple spoke to them of the traditions that had once flourished, told them of the ceremonies and rituals that had once guided the lives of the people. Little by little they had filled out the edges of Lionel’s life. They filled out the edges of their marriage too. Together, they had found a spirituality that fit both of them like an old pair of moccasins: loose, familiar and comforting. She didn’t know when it changed for him, only that there was suddenly a time at a gathering in Montana that he’d stood there in a circle of his people and draped an arm around her shoulders while he sang along with a round dance song. They’d danced the Owl Dance together that night and the Rabbit Dance, and as Victoria looked out at the faces watching the couples step proudly by, she saw only joy and love and acceptance in their faces and on Lionel’s too. By the time Birch came around in 1950 they both spoke a smattering of Ojibway and knew various prayer songs like the one the old man sang now with his face raised to the darkening sky. They didn’t do so much ceremony anymore. The old bones couldn’t take the cramp of the sweat lodge and they’d settled for some time now on smudging with the sacred medicines, prayers and meditation in the morning and the songs they’d sing sometimes with the old hand drum that graced the wall of their living room. She stood on the veranda steps and listened to him sing. The syllables, rich and healing, seeping into the air, the grass and the mountains like blessings.

  When he finished he put one foot back onto the low rail of the fence and put his hat back on. She walked down the steps and along the crushed-stone pathway. He heard the crunch of her footsteps and turned. When she reached him she took his hand wordlessly and began to stroll along the fence line. She felt his gaze and his anxiety.

  “Geezhee-go-kway is happy tonight,” she said.

  “Sky Woman?” he asked, looking up and around at the sky. “Yes. I guess she is. It’s beautiful.”

  “I never tire of it. This land, this sky, the mountains.”

  “No. Me neither,” he said.

  “We’ve grown strong here, Lionel.”

  “Grown pretty damn old too.”

  “Nice when it happens at the same time, isn’t it?”

  “What are you telling me, woman?” He looked down at her.

  “Joe Willie’s bad,” she said, turning to him and taking both his hands in hers. “He won’t ever ride again. The bull destroyed his shoulder and crushed his thigh.”

  She watched his eyes change. He looked up across the valley and heaved a deep sigh. Then he looked at her and nodded.

  “He’ll mend here,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Gonna need a lot of mending.”

  “Yes,” she said again.

  “Bones’ll set,” he said. “Hard work to mend a busted life.”

  They walked together back to the house to make a room ready for their grandchild.

  He sat on the edge of the bed and watched himself in the mirror. He practised lowering and raising his head, keeping the eyes firm on themselves, then turning slightly to the right and to the left, the eyes, even in the narrowed peripheral field, cold, flat, emotionless, empty of everything but the idle threat, the danger lurking just beneath the surface. When it got so he could sweep the look across the room and not break the intensity he stood and practised leaning. All the weight on the flat of one foot, a hip thrust out and the shoulders canted at an angle to match the hip and the arms dangling loose, casual, and the hands just slightly to the front of the hip pockets with the fingers cupped inward slightly, just so, the thumbs angled toward each other, giving the impression of fists forming in readiness, the will slouched and insouciant, prepared for battle. Then he walked. He ambled slowly toward the mirror, watching. He kept his eyes flat, his head tilted slightly and walked, rolling the shoulders easily with each step, the hands never moving from their position. The plant of each foot was resolute, as if he was going somewhere important but a place of his own choosing, at his own time, his own tempo, the laziness of it a measure of his purpose.

  He walked until he perfected it. Over and over, back and forth, watching himself, the look cast back across his shoulder as he spun slowly toward himself again, catching his own eye and seeing the warrior there, the unyielding ambivalence he needed to carry to the street. He was fifteen
but he walked nineteen. That was important. In the neighbourhood she’d moved him to this time he couldn’t afford to be mistaken for a slacker, a mark, an easy number. The boys played rough here. There were four gangs in the area, and as a half-blood he didn’t really fit into any of them: too light for the blacks, too dark for the whiteys and Latinos, and definitely too exotic for the Asians. There were no mulatto gangs. He was alone here, and he felt the weight of his isolation every time he hit the street, the disdain, the anger his obvious mixed blood caused in people. It was a dangerous place to be without backup. But he wasn’t the type to roll over. He’d been alone all his life and he’d come to prefer it that way. Every time there was a man they moved and there was always a man and there was always a new neighbourhood, a new school, a new set of faces and attitudes, a new challenge from the bully of the block or the leader of the local crew. But he’d survived. He’d made it to fifteen in his aloneness and preferred it to the unpredictable volatility of the gang. So he practised. He taught himself to walk.

  He walked to the mirror over and over again. Slouching, the roll of the hips and shoulders less pronounced than the gangbangers, more a suggestion really than a salute, and when he neared the glass he stepped slowly up to it, his face mere inches away and the eyes steady, empty as a promise from the revolving door of instant dads he’d known all his life. When he said his name it was with the coolness of the hoods he’d watched on video, the detachment itself a threat, a devil-may-care shrugging off of responsibility, conscience, association.