Dream Wheels

by Richard Wagamese

  The crutches lay canted on an angle at the foot of the bed. He hooked one with his good foot and dragged it to him slowly, deliberately, until he could reach over and grab it with his right hand. He hefted it. The aluminum was cool to the touch, the lightness of it seemingly improbable for the chore he would ask it to perform. He closed his eyes like he always did when he asked his body for something, saw himself turn on his left hip, lift the bad leg with his right arm and spin slowly to the edge of the bed, drape his legs over the edge and ease the crutch under his right arm and push himself upward, taking all the weight on his left leg until he could right himself and try to move. He saw himself do it and when he opened his eyes he made it happen.

  They didn’t even look surprised when he humped into the kitchen doorway and stood looking at them with eyes afire in triumph.

  Golec watched her face change. She’d agreed to meet him at a small café near the courthouse, and when she’d entered she’d looked purposeful, intent, and the set of her face gave it a harder, more beautiful line. But when he told her what the boy had said he watched that line alter. Led by the eyes the plane of it fell slowly, spiralling into something close to defeat but more akin to a deep and immovable sadness. She laced her fingers around her coffee cup and raised it, averting her eyes, fixing them on the tiny case of plastic flowers at the table’s edge. She sipped slowly and her throat worked hard getting the fluid down past the welling of tears he knew was there. But she set the cup down gently in the saucer. She brought her hands down to her lap and looked at him, waiting.

  “It’s not strange to me,” he said. “I’ve seen it before. Guys don’t want their mothers anywhere near a jail. Protecting them, I guess.”

  “How can you reject and protect at the same time?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “All I know is, there’s a lot going on inside them. Inside him. Maybe it’s about shame. Maybe it’s about anger, blame even. I don’t know. But it’s not uncommon for a guy once he’s down to want to cut himself off from everything that’s familiar and represents freedom. Never seen it in a young guy. Not a kid.”

  “He’s not a kid,” she said.

  “Strange you should say so. It’s exactly what he told me.”

  She looked at him and he could feel her reaching, down past the hurt, the rejection, the confusion and the shame into truth, and the effort of it gave the stoic edge back to her features. When she began to talk her voice was controlled and measured.

  “He never had a father. Not really. He’s had to grow up on his own for the most part. The men I was with never seemed to want to have much to do with him, and we moved around a lot.” She took a sip of coffee. “It’s never happened before. This,” she said and touched her face.

  “Never?”

  “No,” she said. “I wouldn’t have allowed it.”

  “What’s different now?”

  She put her tongue against the inside of her cheek but the pain of the bruise made her wince. She put a hand to it and sat there a moment looking down at the table. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I was just too tired. Maybe I held out too much hope that this one would be the one, you know. The one where all the little-girl dreams come true. The one where Aiden and I get to live the kind of life I thought we always deserved. But I don’t know. I never thought I’d be in this position.”

  “Of what?” he asked.

  “Of not having anything else to lose.”

  He drained the coffee in his cup. Then he sat back in his chair, scratching at the back of his head and looking out the window. Claire sat quietly while he thought.

  “I have this friend of mine,” he said. “He says that old-time Indians used to routinely give away everything they had in order to take on a new direction. He had an Indian word for it that I can’t pronounce but it comes down to being disencumbered. According to him it freed you, allowed you to meet the world again square on, like how you got here, he said. And the act of it, the giving away of what everyone else regarded as important, returned you to the humility you were born in. That’s how he said it. And that state, the state of being humble, was a spiritual thing, a powerful spiritual thing that made the new journey stronger, made you stronger.”

  “I’m not an Indian, Detective.”

  “Marcel,” he said.

  She looked at him and her eyes were clear of tears. She was luminous. He knew that a lot of men would gladly get themselves into a lot of trouble for a woman like her.

  “I’m not an Indian, Marcel,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “But you are humble.”

  “I am that,” she said.

  “So what do you want to do?”

  “About Aiden?”

  “That too.”

  She slid the cup back and forth in her saucer, then raised it to her lips and finished it in one long gulp.

  “I don’t understand a lot of things right now, Marcel. I don’t understand how this could have happened to my son. I thought I was doing the best I could for him, for us, for everything. I don’t understand how this could have happened to me. How I could be beaten like this, how I could have allowed it. I don’t understand what Aiden is going through, what he feels for me, for life, for anything. I just don’t understand. But you know what?”

  “What?” he asked softly.

  “I will.”

  “I believe you. Where do you want to start?”

  “Eric.”

  “The guy.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, the clearest way to go is, we pick him up for domestic assault, you get a judge’s order that he doesn’t live at home and can’t go near the place actually. That gives you time to get something together for you and the boy and ride out the process.”

  She shook her head. “I know what that outcome is. A high-priced lawyer gets him a conditional sentence, probation even, and I’m on the street with nothing and still waiting for resolution.”

  “What, then? What’s resolution to you?” Golec asked.

  “Terror,” she said.

  “Terror? What do you mean?”

  “I mean, it’s terrifying to be the brunt of a beating from a man over twice your size. It’s terrifying to have to lay there not knowing if he has enough control to stop himself, to pull the anger back, to wonder if you’ll survive. It’s terrifying to see your own blood sprayed across your furniture and to think that your son might have to come home and find your broken body. It’s terrifying to not have an ounce of control. He needs a taste of that. He really needs a good fucking taste of that.”

  “And how do you propose to do that? Legally?”

  “Rape.”

  “Rape?”

  “Yes. He’s been raping me for a while now. Taking me whenever he wanted. However he wanted. Forcing me to do things I didn’t want to do but did anyway because I needed to keep things together for my boy.” She looked at Golec, and there was a blaze in her eyes that was extinguished quickly and she averted her eyes and touched her face with the tips of her fingers.

  “Hard to win in court.”

  “I don’t have to win,” she said, leaning forward in her chair. “He just needs to think I want to and that I’ll do every possible thing in order to achieve it.”

  “Pardon me?” Golec asked.

  “He just needs to think that I would charge him with the rape and the assault and bring his little kingdom to the ground. Publicity. Screaming headlines about the big rich white businessman and the poor black single mother. He needs to feel his reputation shredding, his image fading, his power leaving him, his business life and his money beginning to fall through his fingers. He just needs to think it’s all at risk now, that because of what happened I have control of it, that I can take it all away.”

  Golec looked at her. “The threat of charges? How is that going to help?”

  “I want out, Marcel. I want away. That’s all I want. He’ll pay me what I want to keep his face out of the papers and his ass out of court.”

  “W
hat do you want, then? What’s enough for this?”

  “I want the car I drove down here in and I want ten thousand dollars to start my life over,” she said simply.

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s enough.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. With the car I can get around to job interviews or training. The money will get us a nice place when I find work. Carry us for a while.”

  “That’s all you want out of this. A fresh start.”

  “That’s more than enough.”

  “Most people wouldn’t think so.”

  “Most people haven’t lived my life, Detective.”

  She’d said it so directly that Golec felt no need to press for details. He simply looked at her and saw the set of her. She sat there upright, focused, her hands folded on the table, and even with the effect of the beating there was a solemn regality to her. The discoloration lent her eyes depth, and the swell of her jawline accentuated its determined jut. This was no slouching, beaten woman bent by shame and humiliation. This woman was angry, but it wasn’t an anger steeped in vitriol or a distorted need for vengeance. It was a quiet, determined, focused fury. She’d get what she wanted and she’d make it work for her. He saw that. He understood where the kid had come by his resolve.

  “Okay,” he told her. “We’ll give it a shake and see what falls.”

  The pain under his left shoulder was too much. She showed him how to move around the house with one crutch, how to hitch-step, putting the weight forward firmly on the good left leg before swinging the crutch and his right leg up and ahead of it. It took some doing, but she was a good physiotherapist and a good teacher and he soon got the rhythm of it. Joe Willie resented being shown. She knew that, could read him, was used to the anger and resentment patients felt on the first steps of their recoveries. They didn’t speak to each other beyond the necessary talk, and when she left him sitting on the edge of his bed he offered no parting words of appreciation. He just sat there staring into the mirror at himself.

  Once he was sure she was gone he began to practise. He leaned the crutch against the wall and lay back on the bed, gathering himself, and then recreated the sliding move he’d done the first time and reached out to grab the crutch when he’d returned to the sitting position again. Then he placed it in his right armpit and pushed himself up with his good left leg. He did it over and over until he could feel the move become familiar, and when he’d done it the last time he swivelled on his crutch, wobbling some with the turn, and faced himself in the mirror. He hated how he looked. He hated the crutch stuck under his arm and the invalid look it gave him. The arm hung draped in a sling across his chest, and the thin lump of it looked like the bones of a bird’s wing. It was ugly. He was ugly. He met his own eyes in the glass and he stared at himself, stared as deeply as he could and felt rage pooling in the depths of his chest, and he broke the look and sat down on the bed again. He clenched and unclenched his right fist and pounded it against the mattress. Then he stopped. He heaved a great breath and pushed himself up again and practised moving around the room, from the window to the dresser to the door. He did it again and again and again until the fatigue hit his muscles like a stick on the taut skin of a drum and the resonance made him stop.

  He turned and looked at himself in the mirror again. His eyes were hard black pebbles like the bear’s, and he grinned.

  No one spoke to him at all. Aiden walked down the long line of the cellblock and felt the weight of the stares. Boys walked up to the bars to gaze at him or stopped the card games they were dealing at the green metal tables and there wasn’t a word. It was noisy in other ranges, and the silence that hung over the corridor as he walked was heavy. But he kept his head up and his eyes straight ahead of him at the officer’s back, making sure not to waver, not to trip or attract any unnecessary attention to himself. When he was shown to his cell he was glad of the slam of the steel closing behind him.

  Only when the door closed did the level of sound outside his cell rise to drown out the noise of the neighbouring ranges. It was wild. He’d never heard anything like it. Shouting, swearing, catcalls, taunts and threats snapped across the air and filled it, so that the only place of quiet he could find was within himself. He crossed to the small metal sink-and-toilet combination in the corner, wet his face and looked at himself in the scratched and clouded polished plastic that served as a mirror. He stared into his own eyes. They were hard and black as pebbles and he practised making them flat, unreadable, cold, and the feeling that rose in his chest was hot and bitter and he found himself liking it, craving it. He practised raising his face to the mirror and letting his eyes go blank. He did it again and again, and when he was satisfied that he could do it on command he began to move around the tiny cell.

  He took the lower of the two bunks. As he made it up he watched the boys cruising past his door out the side of his eyes. The population was like the neighbourhood he’d come from, a loose conglomeration of races, sizes and attitudes. The gangs would be here. That would make it tough. But when he finished making up his bunk and stood in the doorway watching, he knew he would cut it. He’d been in a lot of tough neighbourhoods and survived and he’d survive here. He felt the heat of the rage in his chest and it warmed him against the cool of the steel and the concrete and the empty gazes of the boys passing his door.

  They came for him in the shower.

  The water felt good after the long day of transfer. He closed his eyes and felt the water course over him, leaning one hand against the tiles and breathing deeply in the steam. He heard the splash of their feet and opened his eyes.

  “Hey boy.”

  There were five of them. Black. They stood there with towels wrapped around their waists, leaning against the wall and looking at him balefully.

  “You got smokes?” the largest one asked.

  “Some,” Aiden said.

  “We’ll be wanting them,” he said.

  “I can cut you in if you want.”

  “I don’t think he heard you, Julius,” another boy said.

  The boy Julius looked along the line at his friends, bobbing his head in agreement. “P’haps we got to help him learn to hear,” he said. “We’ll be wanting them smokes. Boy. Any cutting in goes down around here gonna be a shiv in your ass.”

  “Café au lait lookin’ motherfucker gonna cough up,” another boy said, and they all laughed.

  Aiden moved out from under the nozzle of the shower and into the middle of the floor, and the five of them sidestepped wider apart and they all stood in the steam and the hiss of the water on the tiles looking at each other. They were all lean and muscular and tattooed, and the steam rising around them gave the room the look of a jungle. Aiden wiped water from his forehead and shook his hand lightly to splatter it around. He looked directly at the big boy Julius and made his eyes go blank like he’d done in the mirror.

  “Don’t be giving me no jailhouse eyes,” Julius said. “You got no wingers here, boy. You all alone here. You got no backup. You best come up with them smokes.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “Then we got to beat on you till you do.”

  “And then?”

  “Then we beat on you some more so’s you keep the supply rollin’ every time the moms drops off some coin.”

  “Bring it, then,” Aiden said.

  “Say what?”

  Aiden felt the heat rising in him. It felt good. It roared in him and he wanted to run with it despite the danger. None of them was carrying a knife. This was going to be a beating and he was ready for it, looking forward to letting some of the heat in him dissipate in a flurry of violence. He wasn’t afraid.

  “I said bring it, then. If that’s what’s going to happen, let’s get it done. Don’t treat me like a goof. Just fucking do it. I’m going down but I’m making sure I take the first one with me.”

  “You fucking kidding me?” Julius said.

  “Bring it,” Aiden said again.

  Jul
ius laughed and looked at his friends. “This guy’s got some balls.”

  “Yeah, but they shrinking,” another said and they laughed.

  “We gonna beat on you, nigger,” Julius said. “Don’t you hear that?”

  “I hear it.”

  “You ain’t worried?”

  “Bring it, I said.”

  Aiden clenched his fists and moved back against the wall again so they could only come at him from the front. He looked directly at Julius and his eyes stayed flat and cold. The bigger boy studied him and Aiden sensed a shift in the energy. Julius smiled. He smiled and shook his head and looked at the other four and they all began to relax. Aiden kept his eyes on them nonetheless.

  “Damn,” Julius said. “That’s some balls. You all right, kid.”

  “Don’t call me kid.”

  “All right, all right. Don’t get your panties all in a bunch. You all right though.”

  “So?” Aiden asked.

  “So? So cover up them little raisins before they disappear up your belly,” Julius said, and they all laughed. He raised a hand to the others and they all followed him to the shower-room door. He stopped and looked back at Aiden.

  “We got room for a guy like you,” he said, “if you need friends.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Aiden said.

  “You do that.”

  “Julius?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Drop by my crib. I got some smokes you can have if you’re short.”

  Julius grinned. “I ain’t short,” he said. “But I’ll drop by.”

  Aiden could see the flatness in the other boy’s eyes, an unwavering stare that spoke of tougher streets and harder encounters than this in a life that ranged further into darkness than he had ever travelled. He thought about Cort Lehane and the fat prick hitting his mother and he matched it and held it and Julius nodded after a moment and threw him a towel.

  “Best cover those,” he said. “You’ll need them around here.”