He nodded solemnly. “Yeah. I can handle more of that riding.”
“I hope I do better with the saddle,” Claire said. “Maybe they can just tie my feet to the stirrups and my hands to the big knob thing.”
“The big knob thing?” He laughed. “Spoken like a true cowgirl.”
They gathered in the yard as Golec prepared to leave. To Claire he seemed like a different person out here and she wondered if the same held true for her. She hoped so. The city had the power to reduce people to a frenzied sameness, and as she had become more and more locked into her job and the concern for establishing a good, clean, predictable home for Aiden on his release, she’d felt herself slipping more and more into the main stream of city life and it bothered her. It struck her that people didn’t reach out of themselves very often. Not like here. Out here it seemed as though the country gave people an openness like the land itself, and although it was foreign to her, she craved it like an exile craves the language of her homeland. She watched the Wolfchilds express their affection and regard for Golec, and the envy she felt was accompanied by a note of regret that her life lacked the same generosity of spirit. Aiden stood beside her and watched, awkwardly moving one foot back and forth in the dirt.
“Claire,” Golec said.
“Marcel, I don’t know how to thank you.”
“There’s no need. You just enjoy this, that’s all I need.”
“Well, it’s hard not to enjoy. It’s fabulous.”
“You earned it,” he said. “You worked hard. I’m proud of how you handled everything.”
“You got it started.”
“No, that’s not right. You got it started. You got out. I was only around for leverage.”
“Well, thanks for the leverage.”
“Anytime. I mean that.”
“Thank you.” She hugged him.
“Aiden,” Golec said and stepped away from Claire.
“Cop,” Aiden said.
“You did a good thing coming here.”
“Did I?”
“Yes.”
“How so?”
“You gave yourself a chance for something better. And you gave your mother the same.”
“Forking shit’s a better chance?”
“In the long run.”
They stood and looked at each other a moment. Golec reached his hand out toward him and Aiden stared at it. He eased his hands out of his pockets and dropped them to his sides and tilted his head back up to look at Golec again. “Thanks for helping the moms,” he said.
Golec nodded. “Anytime,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“See you.”
“I doubt it,” Aiden said and turned away.
Golec made his way toward the car again, and the Wolfchilds followed him, leaving Claire and Aiden to stand a few yards away. They were chatting by the open driver’s door when Lionel looked up and away toward the pasture across the driveway. “I think there’s someone else wants to say goodbye,” he said, and they all turned to watch Joe Willie stumping his way across the pasture.
“Who’s that?” Claire whispered to Aiden.
“The cripple,” he said.
Joe Willie made his way quickly across the expanse of grass and when he stepped through the gate and across the driveway there was a thin sheen of sweat on his face. He took a handkerchief from his back pocket and mopped it roughly before adjusting his hat and stepping up to Golec, who smiled to see him.
“Marce,” Joe Willie said.
“Joe Willie.”
“Bit off your beat, wouldn’t you say?” He cast a look at Aiden, and Claire could see the same sullen wariness she saw in Aiden’s face.
“Long arm of the law, you know,” Golec said.
“Yeah. Well. Wanted to see you off.”
“I appreciate that.”
The two men looked at each other, and from the distance she stood Claire could sense the weight of words on the backs of their tongues, held in place by a hard unknowing, an uncertainty borne on the back of pain, and the silence sat between them like a wiped-off space on a chalkboard, the sentences halted in their path, broken, awaiting a hand to connect them again, give them flow. “Well, you take care now,” Joe Willie said finally.
“I will. You too.”
They stood there awkwardly until Golec reached out his hand. Joe Willie took it and shook it once, firmly. Then he turned, pushed his hat lower on his head and headed back toward the pasture and the equipment shed. As he reached the gate and unlatched it Victoria called to him.
“Joe Willie. We have guests,” she said.
He stopped with his hand on the top rail of the gate and stared upward and away toward the mountains, then traced the line of them back across the long V of the valley until he turned to look back at Claire and Aiden. He thumbed his hat brim up and leaned on the gate with one forearm. The look he gave her was blank and she wondered if he even saw her. But when his eyes met Aiden’s his face became pinched and severe and she looked across at her son. He held the stare with a hard expression of his own and for a long moment the two of them held it, the air between filled with tension. Joe Willie broke it first, nodding his head slowly and tugging his hat back down.
“Good for you,” he said and made his way through the gate.
Lanny and Jess Hairston were the new wranglers at the ranch, brothers who’d never fared well in competitive rodeo but made able and knowing hands for a working ranch. They’d been raised in the life, and if they were rough and coarse as men they were calm and deliberate as cowboys and ranch hands. They’d only been with the Wolfchilds a little more than a week, and after getting their feet under them with their new bosses they’d become their usual tough-talking selves. As Aiden busied himself with preparing for the evening ride, the wranglers were in adjoining stalls grooming and tacking. There was much laughter as they wrestled with latigos and stirrup lengths.
“How about that Johanna?” Lanny said, hiking a look over the top of the stall to be sure he wasn’t overheard by any of the Wolfchilds. “How’d ya like to mount that?”
“Be wild,” his brother said. “Little old maybe, but prime anyhow. What do you figure there, Mundell?”
“She’s very attractive. A real lady,” the other wrangler said.
“Yeah, yeah. But what about the old loose and wild Injun style?” Jess asked.
“Pardon me?”
“Jesus, Earl. Would you jump her?”
Earl cleared his throat. “I suppose,” he said quietly.
“Suppose? I’d take me some of that brown meat anytime,” Jess said.
Aiden walked by their stalls to find another blanket for his horse. He’d heard this kind of talk for a year and a half inside and it tired him. He stared straight ahead and went about his business.
“Hey, Slick,” Lanny said as he passed. “Pretty good ride out there. You figure you could handle that redskin without a saddle?”
The two men laughed. Aiden kept walking in stony silence. The two brothers were nearly forty but they spoke like teenagers, and Aiden held no respect for that.
“Come on, we’re just joking with you,” Jess called. “Guy stuff, you know. We’re all in this together. Might as well have a little fun.”
Aiden swapped blankets in the tack room and made his way back down the barn. He kept his eyes focussed on the door to the round pen and never looked at any of the men as he passed. The Hairstons regarded him coolly.
“Seems the brother’s not the talkative sort,” Jess said and spat behind Aiden’s boots.
“Uppity,” Lanny said. “Hey, kid. You mind if I tell a coloured joke?”
Aiden lay the horse blanket along the top of the stall. When he looked at Hairston it was neutral but steady.
“Do ya? It’s all in fun,” Lanny said.
“Only if you let me tell one first,” Aiden said.
“You’re gonna tell a coloured joke? Sure. Go ahead. Should be good.”
“What’s black and blue and floats
down the river?”
“Damn. I don’t know,” Lanny said. “What is black and blue and floats down the river, Jess?”
“Not sure I know. Tell us, kid.”
Aiden held the level look. “The last guy who told a coloured joke. But it’s all in fun, right?” He smirked and turned into the stall.
“Son of a bitch,” Lanny said. “I don’t think he likes us much, Jess.”
“Don’t sound like it. But he don’t have to. I have nothing to say to him really, but I wouldn’t mind taking a shot at that mother of his.”
“Yeah. That’s some fine black ass,” Lanny said.
“Damn right. I’d take her over the Injun. Especially after she gets finished rubbing up against that pommel awhile.”
Aiden laid the blanket across the horse’s shoulders softly, and gently pulled it into place for the saddle. Then he stepped out into the corridor.
“That’s my mother you’re talking about,” he said.
“Catches on quick, don’t he,” Jess said, taking a step forward.
“Nothing slow about him,” Lanny said.
Aiden could see Lionel and Birch and a couple other wranglers enter the barn from the opposite end and begin making their way toward them. The Hairstons stood oblivious, rocking slowly on the balls of their feet and glaring at him.
“Well?” Jess asked.
“You just need to shut up about my mother, that’s all,” Aiden said.
“Don’t diss his mama, Jess,” Lanny said.
“Wouldn’t dream of it. Not while I’m fucking her anyway,” Jess said.
He hit them so fast and so hard that it took a moment for the action to register with the Wolfchilds and their men. One sliding step forward with the left foot and a driving, twisting punch to Lanny’s jaw followed immediately by a twisting elbow smash backward to the nose of his brother. They both fell to the floor.
“Lord,” Birch said and ran forward.
Aiden looked down at them calmly, then returned to saddling his horse. Lionel and Birch watched him move quietly around the horse, no emotion, no reaction to the scene that had just transpired, murmuring reassurances to the animal and gently rubbing it.
“Lord,” Birch said quietly again. “Lord, Lord.”
“It’s not his fault. Not really,” Claire said. “You know that he just got out of jail. He’s angry. He’s hurting.”
The trail ride had gone smoothly. Claire had gained a sense of rhythm with the horse. The stirrups helped. They lent her an assurance of balance, of staying put, and by the time they’d reached the turnaround point beyond the creek she’d been comfortable enough to adopt a casual lean in the saddle. Now, she sat on the veranda with the Wolfchilds and another one of the wranglers who’d seen the scuffle.
“They pushed him to it,” Earl Mundell said.
“How?” Birch asked.
“They were talking about women,” Mundell said. “Dirty talk.”
“Which women?” Birch asked.
“Does it matter?”
He looked at the wrangler carefully. “No. It doesn’t.”
“They wouldn’t let it go,” Mundell said. “Wouldn’t stop. When he told them to leave certain people out of it they kept right on. Worse. Personal. So he clobbered them. Mighty well too.”
“Damn straight,” Lionel said. “The boy fights like a man. But coming from where he comes from I guess he’d have to. Sorry to hear about your trouble, Claire.”
“If you want us to go, I understand,” she said.
“Go?” Victoria asked. “Why would we want you to go?”
“Well, I guess because angry, violent young men aren’t exactly the kind of guests you want.”
“Honey, the rodeo world is full of angry, violent men. It’s nothing we haven’t seen a thousand times and will see again as long as we’re connected to that world. Your boy just needs somewhere to release.”
“Yes. He’s so quiet at times,” Claire said. “Like he burrows himself in some dark place I don’t know how to get to. And other times I can look at him and see that he’s just a kid, just my Aiden. The anger scares me, though.”
“You never want to keep a bull too long in the chute,” Birch said.
“Pardon me?”
“In rodeo the stock handlers make sure the bulls get into place fast. They don’t keep them waiting in the chute. They get anxious, edgy, all boxed in. They wait too long and they go beyond being aggravated. They get mean. I’m not saying your boy is mean, I’m saying all his energy’s been shut up too for a long time. Now the chute’s open and he’s got nowhere to put it all.”
“Powerful lot of energy too,” Lionel said.
“Put him on a steer tomorrow,” Victoria said. “The way I see it, the boy’s just like you two were at his age. All spit and yowl like a wet tomcat. Put him on a steer and see how he likes that.”
“Birch?” Lionel asked, thumbing back his hat.
Birch looked out toward the equipment shed. He was quiet a long time. Then he rolled a smoke carefully. “Things sit in a man sometimes,” he said. “Sit all dark and heavy in a place he can’t see. Makes it hard to figure. Most men get rankled at it, take it out on the ones close by, or they just grow dark and heavy themselves. I figure the second kind’s the hardest to watch.
“When you can’t get at it, it starts to drive you crazy. When it’s a big hurt or a loss you can sort them out eventually and move past it. But sometimes it’s just the way life went and that can muddle the smartest of us, like finding yourself somewhere you don’t recall heading for. It takes something special to show you the way back.”
“What are you saying, Birch?” Johanna asked.
He reached out and squeezed her hand. “Deal I made with Marce was to work him, show him how hard a guy has to work to make it in the real world, get him ready for his life when he gets back to the city, make him sweat out some of that hardness he found in himself. But I figure putting him on the rope barrel and chucking him in the hay often enough to piss him off should do the trick too. Then we send him out on the rankest little steer we have. From what I seen today he’ll like the tussle.”
“Is it dangerous?” Claire asked.
“Just enough,” Birch said.
“For what?”
“To rearrange the muddle,” Lionel said. “Maybe into something he can figure out. Give him a challenge. A hard one. It’s something we’ve been trying out around here for a while now. Seems to work as far as we can see.”
Aiden watched Joe Willie emerge from the trail. He’d climbed into the hayloft and found the gantry door where the bales were loaded in. He stood there looking out across the ranch and the valley wondering if the crap was ever going to stop. The Hairston brothers were stupid men. He hated stupid men. In fact, he didn’t much like men at all, and except for Johnny Calder none of them had ever given him any kind of template he wanted to use to frame his life. Now, standing in the dark barn, he felt lonely, lonelier than he ever had in stir. It was crazy. He was free. It was over. But he felt a deep, heavy pang for something he couldn’t define, something he couldn’t recognize, something somehow beyond his reach. Standing in the dark watching the night settle on the valley made him feel less like crying.
He watched Joe Willie stump his way across the pasture. The man drove the bad leg forward with each step and in the fading light it gave the impression of a boxer driving the same punch into the air over and over again. As he got closer Aiden began to make out features. There was a hard, downturned scowl on Joe Willie’s face and a faint coating of sweat that gave an odd phosphorescent sheen in the darkness. When he passed directly beneath the gantry door Aiden could hear him breathing, hard and deep and angered, muttering something. He could hear the man below him fumbling around in the darkness. There was just enough light left in the hayloft for Aiden to find his way back to the ladder and down to the main floor of the barn.
There was light coming from a small room at the back, and he walked toward it as quietly as he could
. As he got to the door he heard the sound of water sloshing in a pail, and as he got to the door he saw Joe Willie dousing himself, rinsing the sweat from his upper body. He was lean, sinewy like a cat, and the muscles on his right side were sharply defined and delineated, taut, bulging, rivers down the length of him. But when he turned to grab a towel from a gym bag on the floor Aiden was shocked. The left arm was bone with a slack sag at the shoulder, the joint there jutting like a skeleton’s, and except for surgical scars he might have believed it was fake. He watched Joe Willie reach up to towel his hair, and the difference between the right and left sides of his torso was pronounced. There was no padding around the left shoulder at all. He could see the shoulder bone like a tiny paddle, and when Joe Willie reached the arm up he saw the socket and ball of it separate, grind against each other under the skin, and he grimaced. It was ugly. As sorry as he felt for the deformed man in the room it was still an ugly sight. He turned to go, and as he did his foot connected with pitchfork tines and it tumbled to the floor. Joe Willie spun around and looked at him, quickly draping the towel over his shoulders and covering the arm. He stepped to the doorway, and even in the blocked light Aiden could see the rage in his face.
“What the hell do you want?” Joe Willie asked.
“Nothing,” Aiden said.
“Then what the hell are you doing here?”
“Nothing,” Aiden repeated. “Just walking, that’s all.”
“Well then, keep right on walking.”
Joe Willie took another step forward and Aiden could feel the tension of him. He’d felt it before. There were guys in maximum who gave off the same air-shrinking force, who told you with their eyes that territory was being defined for you and you were trespassing. You respected that and moved on. The look on Joe Willie’s face was harder than any he’d seen before. But he’d also learned that you didn’t just shrink in the face of this, you didn’t leave the perception of fear, you didn’t leave the power in the other guy’s court. So he stayed where he was and looked calmly back at him, his own face betraying nothing. Joe Willie moved another step closer. They stood mere feet apart.
“What are you looking at?” Joe Willie growled.
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