Dream Wheels

by Richard Wagamese

  “You can quit calling me convict too.”

  They glared at each other. In the light of the fire their faces were hard, set.

  “All right,” Joe Willie said finally. “I’m sorry. I won’t call you that again.”

  Aiden nodded and slowly sat back down. After a moment Joe Willie turned and took a step in the direction of the main barn.

  “Joe Willie,” Victoria said. “Wait. There’s things that need saying around this fire.”

  “Like what?” he asked.

  “Like you owe Aiden an explanation.”

  “About what?”

  “About the truck.”

  “What about the truck?”

  “Everything. Everything you think about it. If the two of you are going to scuttle a deal then you owe it to each other to tell each other why.”

  “It won’t make any difference. He’s leaving.”

  “That may be, but at least give him the dignity of leaving knowing why.”

  “Still won’t make any difference.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  Joe Willie stepped over the log toward the darkness. He took a few steps, then stopped and turned slowly back to face them again. “All he sees is a truck,” he said. “Can’t see nothing other than that. To him she’s just a bucket of bolts.” He stepped back over the log and sat down. “There’s a little depression you can feel with your fingertips on the panel by the passenger side window,” he said. “You wouldn’t even know it’s there unless you ran your hand along the length. But when you feel it, it’s like it talks to you. It says, ‘This is where your grandmother drummed her fingers in time to the songs your grandfather sang.’ Or it says, ‘This is where your mother rested her fingers while she held you in the other arm on dark nights between go-rounds a long, long time ago.’

  “Then there’s the burn mark on the ledge by the steering wheel. It says, ‘This is where your daddy rested a smoke while he drove with both hands and peered through the windshield during a spring whiteout in Nebraska.’ Or the pinholes in the roof above the windshield. They say, ‘This is where Mama hung the maps so they could find their way to those small rodeos off the main circuit, going there to ride because the riding was bigger than the purse.’ There’s nicks and bumps and scars all over that old girl. They all got her a story in them, a story about rodeo, about the west, about my family. Changing it means the stories disappear—and I don’t want that.”

  The fire crackled and hissed and the small breeze coaxed the flames into a lively orange dance. Nothing was said for a good long time.

  Finally, Johanna leaned in from her seat on the log and took the stick from Lionel’s hand. She poked up sparks and watched them scuttle upward to disappear in the dark. She spoke quietly.

  “You could take an ember from this fire, wrap it in damp moss, put it in a sack, carry it somewhere else and start a whole new flame. That’s how fire travelled in the old days. The fire-keeper would wrap it and protect it from the wind, carry it long distances until the people stopped. Then he’d bring it out in this new place and start another fire. But it was really the same flame,” she said. “And as another night moved in around them the people told stories to bring them closer around that flame. Closer like family. Closer like a tribe. That same flame burned and the stories it generated and the stories it held for the people went with them too.”

  “You’re talking about a dream wheel, aren’t you?” Victoria said.

  Johanna looked at the old woman and smiled. “Yes, I suppose I am.”

  “Mama?” Birch asked. “What the dickens are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about us, son. I’m talking about the stories of the lives of a people. Doesn’t have to be a nation. Can be a family or a town, a valley like this or a broken-down old truck like that old girl out there,” she said. “A dream wheel is the sum total of a peoples’ story. All its dreams, all its visions, all its experiences gathered together. Looped together. Woven together in a big wheel of dreaming.”

  “I don’t follow,” Aiden said.

  Victoria stood and placed another two logs on the fire, then took the poker from Johanna’s hand and stirred the flames, sending arching sprites of spark into the night. “The fire was the keeper of the dream wheel. When people gathered around it, the stories came. Even way back when, people were charmed by fire, stared into it like you are now, somehow feeling like it could conjure something, take them somewhere—and truth is, it could. When the stories started they were transported, lifted up and out of their lives and their fears of the night and taken on dream journeys.”

  “To where?” Aiden asked.

  “Anywhere, but mostly to themselves,” Victoria said. “To every place their people had ever been. To every strange and wonderful event that had ever happened and to every strange and wonderful event they ever dreamed had happened. Legends. Myths. Trickster tales. The whole great wheel of themselves, their lives, their peoples’ lives.

  “Wherever they went, the stories went with them. Even when the time of firekeepers had passed there was always a keeper of the dream wheel. There was always someone or something that held the stories, protected them, kept them safe, held them for sharing on nights like this, around another fire in a new time, in a new place, a new world.”

  “The old girl,” Joe Willie said.

  “Yes,” Victoria said. “That’s what I believe.”

  “But what does it mean?” Aiden asked.

  “It means we got to keep her on the road,” Joe Willie said.

  “We?” Aiden asked.

  “Yeah. We. You’re a snot-nosed little son of a bitch and you got a pile of attitude I don’t really need, but you know how to get this done. Or at least you talk like you do. Maybe it’s time to prove it.”

  The others watched, waiting. Joe Willie stared evenly across the fire, his face betraying no emotion, and in that light he looked strong, warriorlike, timeless. Aiden gave the same unshrinking look in return.

  “Maybe you got some proving to do too,” he said.

  “Like what?”

  “Like proving that you’re not so strong and tough that you don’t need anybody’s help, nobody else’s way of seeing things. Like proving that you can teach me about bulls instead of running me up hills and keeping me knee deep in horseshit.”

  “That’s part of the training, kid.”

  “Oh, cut the crap,” Aiden said, standing. “It isn’t part of the training. It’s you trying to find out how much I can handle. Whether I’m worthy of you. You think I can’t see that? You think I’m just some dummy? Teach me. Teach me what you know without the bullshit and I’ll get your truck on the road for you. Square and simple.”

  “If I push you it’s because what you want to do is the hardest thing in the world.”

  “Yeah, well, the same with me.”

  Joe Willie barked a laugh. “Fixing a truck’s not near as dangerous as riding a bull.”

  “I’m not talking about danger,” Aiden said. “I want to ride bulls because I feel like if I do I can be more than I ever was, more than I ever hoped to dream I could be. You gotta want to work on that truck for the same reason.”

  Joe Willie nodded his head slowly. “Still gotta do the work,” he said.

  “Fine. Just don’t snow-job me about it.”

  “What’s first, then?”

  “You gotta dig a pit so we can get under her to see what needs doing.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. We need a pit about six feet deep and ten feet long,” Aiden said.

  “That’s a lot of shovelling.”

  “Yeah, well, welcome to the fucking club.”

  They laughed.

  “These dream wheels,” Joe Willie said, looking at his grandmother. “They’re ours, right? Ojibway? The Sioux?”

  “In the way we’re talking, yes, but every people has one, or something like it if they look hard enough,” Victoria said.

  “And it’s important?”
/>   “As important as it gets.”

  “Why?”

  She smiled at him across the fire and when she did her eyes glittered magically. “Because we forget,” she said. “Everyone forgets. Forget how a simple thing like coming together around a fire makes all the worrisome things less so. Forget how the simple act of being together is the most important thing.”

  Joe Willie looked over the fire toward the shadowed mountains and scratched his head under the brim of his hat. “I’d best get busy, then,” he said.

  “I’ll help you,” Aiden said.

  Joe Willie crossed his arms on his chest and stared across the fire at him. The two of them measured each other, unblinking.

  “If you like,” Joe Willie said.

  Aiden reached down and gave Claire’s shoulder a squeeze and followed Joe Willie, who had already started in the direction of the shed.

  They made it a half mile farther the next night. When they passed the flag Joe Willie had dropped by the boulders to mark their progress, they looked at each other grimly, then pushed on up the trail, wordless and determined. The trail became more talus and the footing was less predictable. The scree of gravel and rock chunk around a bend slowed them, and their breathing was ragged in their chest. Only Claire on the horse behind them was offered the security of an assured footing. She rode confidently, trusting the horse entirely to navigate the severe slope, and found herself enjoying the climb and the view it provided. Above them the solemn cliff of Iron Mountain seemed to float forward with the tendril of cloud pushed above it by the wind they could not feel on the trail below. The trail wound into trees again and Joe Willie signalled a stop. They leaned against logs and drank greedily from the canteens.

  “Done?” he asked Aiden.

  “No way. You?”

  “Not hardly if you ain’t.”

  “Not hardly.”

  So they pushed on again. Despite the lazy roll the shadows gave it, the trail still climbed, but they gave in to the illusion and climbed harder, faster, side by side now and staring down at their feet, arms swinging high behind them. Their steps cracked branches on the trail, and the staccato snap of them echoed off the wall of rock around them, giving them an off-tempo beat to pace to, and they stepped quick and lively, surrendering now and then to the compulsion to peek over at the other, measure him and push upward harder still.

  They arrived at a small clearing that offered a view to the west, and this time Aiden signalled the stop.

  “All right,” he said.

  They drank. In that mauve light of near dark there was no clear defining line between distance and closeness so that the face of the mountains to the west across the valley seemed touchable, the valley below it hidden by the height. The sun was a smear of orange along the tops of the trees. Claire dismounted, handed fruit and water to them, and together they stood looking out from the clearing. When their breathing slowed they ate the fruit and rested on logs while the horse grazed lightly on the scrub grass. No one spoke. The land lulled them, and when the shadow became thicker Joe Willie nodded to them and they began preparing for the walk back down the mountain.

  He moved to help lift Claire into the saddle and she smiled. She put a hand on his shoulder for balance while she reached for the stirrup with her lead foot. They glanced at each other before Claire swung herself up to find her seat, and it was only then that Joe Willie noticed that it had been his left shoulder she’d cupped with her palm for balance. He rubbed it lightly.

  “Thanks,” she said quietly.

  “Ma’am,” he said, touching the brim of his hat and grinning.

  She laughed. “Oh god. Doomed to ma’am already.”

  “Claire,” he said, nodding.

  “Joe Willie.”

  Aiden came and handed the canteen back to his mother. “I could use a wash,” he said. “And some grub.”

  Joe Willie motioned Claire to let the horse lead the way again. She nudged it forward, and they fell in a few steps behind.

  “Helluva spot,” Aiden said.

  “Yeah,” Joe Willie said. “Ain’t it?”

  “How did you know?” Birch asked. They were standing together in the fading evening light watching the land as it changed shape and substance in the lengthening shadow.

  “About what?” Victoria asked back.

  “About the fire. About the two of them hashing it out like that.”

  “I don’t know. Women’s intuition, maybe.”

  He laughed and pulled at the brim of his hat. “Come on, Ma. What’s the deal here?”

  She laughed too. “It’s a fundamental thing, fire. Got its own particular kind of magic. Just like everything else we take so much for granted. Water, air, the land. They all heal us in their way. If you learn to trust the fundamental things they’ll always bring you to where you need to be, help you find out what you need to find out about yourself.”

  “That’s not an Indian teaching,” he said.

  “Not especially. Everyone who has a tie to the land and the wide openness of it all carries that kind of knowing. Trouble is, the world changed and a lot of people changed with it, left the land and its teachings behind them. I always held that reclaiming that part of ourselves would show us better how to heal ourselves.”

  “Which part is that?”

  “The part that lets the land fill us. Everyone finds it, or, at least, rediscovers a small part of it now and then. People come here and stand on that veranda and look around at the valley and heave big, deep breaths into themselves and think that they’re just struck by the wonder of it all, the beauty.”

  “They aren’t?”

  “Yes. Certainly. But there’s the deeper calling going on. The voice in them that says,‘I remember this.’ They forgot how to respond to that voice.”

  He chuckled and began to roll a smoke. “It’s beyond me,” he said. “All this talk of voices and remembering. I get where you’re going with it but it’s still beyond me.”

  “That’s what everyone thinks, son. That it’s too late now. But we’re all tribal people. Every last one of us living and breathing right now started out as the same kind of people. People who lived in community and together on the land. All the things we call Indian were the same for everybody at one time. The reason we get so far away from each other is because we’ve learned to think we’re different. But we’re not. Take anybody and put them in the middle of something as beautiful as that alpine lake up in the pass over there and they’re going to be touched by it, feel something move inside themselves. Hear that old voice that tells them they remember. It takes time and commitment to remember how to really hear it, but anyone can do it.”

  “So sitting around the fire was gonna let Joe Willie and the kid remember how to hear that voice.”

  “Not necessarily. But it was gonna make it easier for them to talk to each other, make it easier for them to hear that much, anyway.”

  “And that’s not an Indian thing?”

  She gave him a firm hug and then let him go. “If you’re an Indian and it makes you feel better, then I guess it’s an Indian thing.”

  He finished rolling the smoke and lit up and took a few draws and watched the steers moving in the field and then pinched it out on the top of the fence rail and looked at her. “You and my wife got the market cornered on how to bamboozle a man. But I hear it. That’s the strange thing. Indian or not.”

  “I think you’re getting it,” she said, and they both laughed.

  Mornings were a small glory. Claire liked the feeling of standing at the edge of the veranda facing the mountains to the west. In the burgeoning early light they seemed magnified, closer somehow, like if she reached out a hand she could touch them, trace their rippled, jagged outline against the sky, maybe even poke a hand right through them into the cool mystery of their other side, sense the lives there, enchanted and beguiling as the secret lives of dolls. She’d breathe then. Close her eyes, stretch out her arms to their full length, splay her fingers as wide as they
would go, then bring them forward slowly like an embrace, inhaling slowly, pulling it all into her until, when her arms encircled her finally, she could feel it enter her, fill her, become her.

  She’d taken to rising early as soon as they’d arrived at Wolf Creek, and it had become habit. But more than that. More like a ritual, a small ceremony she practised alone.

  Aiden slept later. The work and the fresh air were doing wonderful things for him. She could see it in the glow of him. Excitement. Focus. Joy, almost. She tried to think of when that last shred of imprisonment had dropped from him, that thick, unyielding silence he’d fall into at first, but it wasn’t clear. Mostly it had been a process. Each day had offered him something more, something far removed from the reality of jail life or any of the realities he’d lived up until then. It was the men. Men and bulls. Funny, she thought, but before she came here she likely would have lumped the two together—unpredictable, dangerous, wild, driven by urge. But these men were different. As different as this morning hovered over mountains was unlike a metropolitan morning. Birch and Lionel were laconic and unruffled, a sagacious pair of bookends hewn from the land they occupied. Tough and wiry, they were no-nonsense when it came to the life they’d chosen or the women they’d chosen to live it with. The loyalty amazed her. It wasn’t announced or put on grandiose display. Rather, it lived in the quiet way they moved. They saved their bashing about for the pens and corrals of their livelihood, and when they moved in the presence of their women they became almost elegant, refined, and pliant. Pliant. She’d met a lot of obdurate men in her time and pliant, bendable, compromising was a quality that was foreign to her. It spoke of respect, and she admired the two grizzled rodeo men for that.

  Joe Willie came from the same stock. You could see it. The surliness seldom surfaced around his grandmother and mother. When it did he clamped it down and went off somewhere else with it. Behind the aloof shield he put up in front of himself, Claire sensed the ripples of Birch and Lionel shimmering just beyond it. It showed in the way he treated horses, quiet, tender. It was a beguiling combination of strength and gentleness she saw in him, in all of them. In Joe Willie it was stunning in its intensity, like he reined in both at the same time, as though he didn’t fully trust either. As though they needed to be saddle broke before he’d let himself relax with them. He was good for Aiden, she could see that. There was enough of the wild in both of them to call to each other and enough of the Indian cowboy sensitivity to calm them when they collided. Indian cowboy. She shook her head amusedly. Never in a million years would she have believed that her son carried a cowboy gene, but she was glad he did. If he came away with a shred of what these men carried she would be forever grateful.