Dream Wheels

by Richard Wagamese

  “Push?”

  “Push back. You can’t approach him so easily anymore.”

  “God.”

  “He’s a kid, Claire,” Golec had said. “He’s coming out of there looking like a man, but inside he’s still the fifteen-year-old kid that got swallowed up.”

  “And you’re sure going to this ranch will help?”

  “Yes.”

  “How?”

  “I worked on a ranch when I was younger. It’s hard work. It might look all romantic and casual in the movies but it’s a hard life. You need an extra gumption gene to be any good at it. It’s like prison that way.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Living in a jailhouse situation, even if it’s a kids’ joint, takes a lot of nerve. If a boy’s going to make it in there he needs an extra serving of grit on his plate. Aiden made it. He reached down inside himself and found the grit and gumption to do what it took to survive. It takes a hard man to do that.

  “The Wolfchilds are rodeo people, have been all their lives, and when he’s out there with them he’s going to see that life. He’s going to see one-hundred-and-seventy-pound men getting up on the backs of two-thousand-pound animals. It takes a hard man to do that. Aiden’s going to want to take that challenge.”

  “Why would he want to do that? He has no idea about rodeo,” Claire said.

  “No. But he has an idea of challenge.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Claire watched him think. The men she’d known had all been slick thinkers, the answers at the ready, the talk glib and casual, and she felt uncomfortable at the depth of thought Golec put into his response.

  “What I mean,” Golec said finally, “is that from what you’ve told me, everything has presented itself as a challenge to Aiden. New schools, new neighbourhoods, new friends and a parade of new men at home. Hell, and I don’t mean this as any sort of put-down to you, Claire, but home itself has been a challenge for him. You said as much yourself. So all he knows is how to step up and greet something head on. It takes a whole lot of nerve to even think about doing what he’d planned with that robbery.

  “It tells me that there’s a whole lot to him. A whole lot that even he doesn’t know. Now you could spend a ton of energy trying to bring him into line, but to my mind it just wouldn’t take. Or you could introduce him to something that will challenge him more than he’s ever been before.”

  “The ranch?” Claire asked.

  “Yes. I know the Wolfchilds and I know their world. I know that it’s their world that makes them what they are. Good people, steady. Aiden would do well to be in that world awhile. So would you.”

  “You’re sure.”

  “Never more.”

  And that had been it. Now, she stood in the middle of the room and wondered why they called it a living room. When you were alone there wasn’t a great deal of living going on. She glanced around at the accumulation of stuff, the small gathering of things that sat on the shelves, hung on the walls and graced the windows. None of it worked. None of it performed a function beyond the filling of space. None of it held any special properties, any attractant energy that could pull life together. None of it mattered in the end. What mattered was the energy of people. People made a living room live. History didn’t lie within the things you kept. History lay within the people who filled the rooms. History was what her family needed now, and she reached down and grabbed her bags and stepped toward the beginning of her history with her son.

  Against the sky the trees looked like fingers stretched upward in something that looked like praise. Joe Willie shook his head. Sometimes a man thought the most amazing thoughts alone on the land. When he used to ride the trails above the ranch he’d find himself drifting from thought to thought like a kid leaping stone to stone across a stream. It was the part of riding he enjoyed the most, the long, uninterrupted musing on horseback that made him feel joined to it, hooked up to the same energy he could feel in the things around him. Kinship. He remembered his grandmother calling it that and telling him how the old people regarded the land as a relative. Nin-din-away-mah-john-ee-dog. That was the Ojibway word. All my relations. He never used the language, only recalled snippets of it now and then when the conversation prompted it, but the word sat on his tongue as he walked. He whispered it. Then, as he got comfortable with the pitch of it he said it louder. It gave him a cool feeling in his head, as if it emptied somehow and there was nothing there but space and time and a rich blankness that he savoured. It’s why he came here. Evenings when there was no one about. It freed him to disappear without questions and he’d taken to walking up the long, steep trail he used to ride, up Iron Mountain.

  He’d never made it all the way. The leg generally gave out long before he arrived at the final upward push, and he’d sit in the trees resting before easing back down as the night fell around him. More than anything, Joe Willie wanted to make that journey, wanted to stand in the meadow that faced that sheer face of rock. He knew it took a horse to do it, that walking it was one of the toughest hikes even a two-legged man could attempt, that his pinned and shrunken right thigh would surrender somewhere far below the meadow, but he came anyway. A foot. A yard. Every trip he tried to make it farther, leaning a rock against a tree to mark his distance. He wanted to see that peak again. There wasn’t a reason in his head, nothing he could point to as motivation, only something in him understood that to face the spire of Iron Mountain again under his own power meant something big. Important. More than just the fact that he’d made it there. He’d do it even if it killed him. He’d do it if it took him years, if he had to crawl the last hundred yards. But there was something more there. Something he felt in that rich blankness in his head that came with that old Ojibway word. He wouldn’t give it a name. To name it, to shape it by reason and language might dispel its particular magic and leave him morose at the foot of the mountain, cleared of the feel of the word on his tongue and the taste of the air, the pine, juniper, and the warm, moist fungal smell of the land. That’s what he came for. His senses felt sharper, keener, more attuned. His insides moved out here and he found himself cherishing that and protecting it, stashing it away because its foreign softness felt stolen somehow. He’d never been a spiritual man. Rather, Joe Willie believed that life was about clenching the teeth and making things happen, will bent to power, action spurred by desire. But here he felt pause. Nin-din-away-mah-john-ee-dog.

  The shadows were deeper now and he could tell by the light through the top of the trees that he had about a half an hour before he’d have to turn back. He took a sip of water from the bottle at his belt and looked through the trees. Then he switched his gaze to the bend in the trail ahead of him, focussed on it, measured its slope and pushed off with the good leg, swinging the left around assuredly, feeling the pressure when it planted and gritting his teeth to push off again.

  He’d never seen anything like it. Golec punched him lightly on the thigh and he raised his head and looked out the windshield. The land was rich in dozens of shades of green. The mountains hard against the clear blue sky scalloped the length of the valley, and the variant colours of the rock, the long, V-shaped funnelling of slides, the poked peninsulas of trees and the undulating suggestion of lesser, rounded humps of peaks before them gave it a wild kinetic energy, an intensity humming in the stillness as though all of it, the mountains, the valley, the sky, was vibrating with the effort of holding itself in. To his eyes, used to the dullness of concrete and steel, it was a feast, and Aiden sat straighter, watching it unroll before them. He could feel the openness work against his insides. As his eyes reached farther down the length of the valley he felt smaller and larger at the same time. As the car ate up the distance, he felt less like he was moving through it as he was moving with it, becoming a part of the sage and pasture and draw and the severe slope of the valley, and the feeling crested and broke against his ribs and he exhaled long and slow.

  “Something, isn’t it?” Golec said in a way that wasn
’t a question.

  “Yeah,” Aiden said. “It is.”

  They watched the land in silence until Golec slowed and turned into a long, curved driveway. The ranch sat sprawled in the sunlight like a lazy old dog and there was a contentedness about it that made Golec smile. Aiden drummed his fingers against his thigh. As they neared the main buildings people began to stroll out toward where the driveway spilled into the large rectangle of the yard. Aiden stared straight ahead and Golec felt his intensity, a pushing out, a distancing, a cool barricade of sullen nonchalance that started in the jaw, and Golec could feel him downshifting his face into neutral as they parked. It was a look Golec was familiar with, the look of stern, obdurate men planting their feet in defiance, as cool and unbreakable as the concrete that had forged it.

  “Let’s meet the folks,” Golec said and opened the door.

  Aiden watched as Golec was swept up in welcome. There was an exuberance to it all that seemed false to him, as though they were play acting for his benefit and hadn’t learned the script well enough to play it any better so that you could read the holes in it. No one greeted people like that.

  A tall older man walked around the front of the car to Aiden who stood with the door open, one foot resting on the bottom panel and leaning an elbow on the roof watching them. “Aiden,” Lionel said, reaching out a hand. “Lionel Wolfchild.”

  Aiden regarded the old man before finally stretching his hand out to shake. “You’re an Indian,” he said.

  “Last time I checked,” Lionel said. “And as long as we’re noticing, you’re a black fella.”

  “Yeah. I am.”

  “Met a lotta great black cowboys in my time. You could be another one.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ll watch. I’m just here for the work.”

  “Watching’s good and you’re welcome to do all of that you want and this is definitely a working ranch, son,” Lionel said.

  “I’m not your son,” Aiden said.

  “No, you’re not,” another tall, lean man said. “But around here you’ll be treated like family, so get used to it. Birch Wolfchild. This is my wife, Johanna.”

  Aiden stood rigidly looking at the two of them.

  “Son,” Birch said, “it’s customary around here to recognize people when they greet you.”

  Aiden reached his hand out. “You’re all Indians,” he said.

  Birch laughed. It was a great bursting guffaw and his face exploded into a thousand wrinkles and furrows and gullies of pleasure. “As a matter of fact, we are,” Birch said finally. “Indian cowboys.”

  “I didn’t know there was such a thing,” Aiden said.

  “Son, Indian cowboys have been around a good long time and we got a lot of champions come from our stock. You’ll meet a few while you’re here. When you pitch in you’ll get a chance to work side by side with real professional cowboys.”

  “Pitch in how?”

  “Well, there’s more to the business than just riding. A real cowboy does it all, from mucking out the stalls to feeding to moving stock to pulling fence to tending to the tack. It’s pretty much a sun-up-to-sunset proposition.”

  “I’m not afraid of work,” Aiden said.

  “Well, now that’s the funny thing,” Johanna said. “It all sounds like work when you’re standing here thinking about it. But when you start into it, let it sink into you, all the smells, all the motion, all the sounds, it doesn’t feel like work at all. It feels like something you’ve done all your life. I’m Johanna.”

  She was the most exotic woman he’d ever seen. He held her hand momentarily once they’d shaken and stared at her. “Okay,” he said.

  “Good,” Johanna said. “Have you ridden before?”

  “No,” Aiden said.

  “It’s not so hard. Once you’re settled in we can take you to the corral and introduce you to some of them. Tonight you’ll ride.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Yup. Marcel says you agreed to come for three weeks. You don’t want to be wasting any time, do you?”

  “No. Well, yes. I mean, no,” Aiden stammered.

  “Good. We’ll start in the round pen until you’re both used to it—you and your mom when she gets here. We’ll have you feeling like old-timers in no time at all.”

  “My wife has taught a powerful lot of people how to ride,” Birch said. “Used to be one fine barrel racer and she knows horses. People too.”

  The front door opened and Joe Willie stepped out onto the porch. He let his eyes settle on Aiden. The boy felt his measure taken and he stood taller, pressing his shoulders back some, and when he looked back at the man on the porch the look was held and the eyes shone dully, flatly, with a look Aiden recognized immediately. They regarded each other for a long moment, then Joe Willie put on his hat and pulled the brim low down over his eyes. He put his head down and walked slowly off the porch and detoured around the opposite side of the car. He never said a word. They all watched him walk in the direction of the equipment shed.

  “That’s Joe Willie. My grandson,” Victoria said, stepping up beside Aiden.

  “He’s crippled?” Aiden asked.

  When there wasn’t a reply Aiden looked around him. “What?” he said. “He looks crippled.”

  “My grandson was the best rider anyone ever saw at one time,” Victoria said. “He was a champion from the time he was a boy. There wasn’t anything he couldn’t ride. We don’t think of him as crippled.”

  “So what happened?” Aiden asked.

  “He lost a half a second,” Victoria said. She looked directly at Aiden. “It happens to the best of them. But I’d appreciate it if you didn’t bring it up to him and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t use that word again.”

  “Crippled?”

  “That’s right. My grandson’s still a champion to me, always will be. I’ll never see him as any less.”

  “Champion what?” Aiden asked.

  “Champion of the world,” Birch said. “My boy was seconds away from being World Champion All-Round Cowboy. That means he was the best at riding saddle broncs, bareback broncs and bulls. Especially bulls.”

  “Is that what happened to him? A bull got him?”

  There was another long silence.

  “We don’t know yet,” Victoria said finally.

  She had to stop the car every few miles. Claire had rented a sporty convertible, and with the top down and the sun shining out of a hard electric-blue sky the land was invigorating. She pulled over to the shoulder and stepped out and allowed it to envelope her. It felt like it had hands. The breeze that blew across it brought the scent of juniper, pine and sage and animal smells that only served to heighten the sense of open space, so that standing there Claire felt the soul and the spirit of it all and she almost cried. There was a private place inside her that recognized it, and she allowed herself to breathe deeply and fully of it before driving on until the next vista beckoned and she stopped again. There was a song in it. She was sure of that. It was an ancient refrain that resided within everything, and she closed her eyes and let the breeze play across her face and tried to catch it, snare it with all her senses, reaching out even with her skin, so that when she hummed, a low, throaty note that was more moan than melody, it felt right and good and old as the land itself. She let it rise out of her. She stretched out her hands wide at her sides with her eyes closed and her head tilted back and let the note escape her, ragged and bruised and raw, and as it slid into the air she felt the land refill her, nestle into the spot where the note had lived and slake a thirst she never knew she carried.

  She drove casually after that. The little car had pep and she let herself enjoy the thrill of it, the feel of speed on an open stretch of highway another song she felt within her. By the time she made the turn through town toward Wolf Creek she felt ready to greet her son again.

  The ranch pleased her. Nothing ostentatious, merely a comfortable, settled place with two huge weeping willow trees in the front yard that framed a view of the valley
that was as breathtaking as anything she ever imagined possible. Golec was the first to greet her and introduced her to the Wolfchilds. They seemed a very open family, and even though Claire had never had anything to do with Indians before, she felt an instant ease with them. Lionel and Birch were gangly and good-natured, with a shy side that had them scratching at their hat brims at times or simply pursing their lips and nodding toward the ground while they listened to the talk. But the women were amazing. Victoria was a matriarch. Claire could tell that from the bearing she had, walking straight backed and purposefully, speaking directly to her, engagingly, and holding her with her eyes so that Claire felt present and understood. Johanna was spectacular. She was quite likely the most regal-looking woman Claire had ever seen. Johanna was taller so Claire had to look up to meet her look. At that moment Johanna Wolfchild seemed iridescent, shining with a light that seemed pulled out of the valley itself so that when she smiled at her, Claire felt drawn in to everything, made welcome and included and important in one rush of energy. She reached out to shake her hand and the skin was warm and smooth and strong, and Johanna smiled at her again, then pulled her into a deep, full hug and held her a moment before letting her go. Claire felt honoured. Johanna looked at her and she felt known, stripped bare and understood and accepted.

  “Good to see you, sister,” Johanna said.

  “Thank you,” Claire said, and for a moment they all stood in silence looking at each other.

  “They boy’s in the main barn,” Victoria said. “He’s a mite ruffled by all this but those feathers will smooth now that you’re here.”

  Claire looked at her. The old woman bore the same light as Johanna. “I wish I could be so sure.”

  “Go to him,” Victoria said. “I’ve heard it’s been a long time.”

  “It has,” Claire said.

  “Time shrinks all on its own, girl. Go on now.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Johanna said. “Might be good to have another mother around.”

  Claire smiled at her. “Yes. Thank you.”