Dream Wheels

by Richard Wagamese

  Birch and Joe Willie spoke to him but he nodded out of rote, not really hearing their words. Slipping down onto the bull, he felt a quickening in his blood, and when it shimmied he was ready for it and had his heels on the rail before it moved. The bull bawled, clacked its horns against the rails and clomped its hooves in the dirt. Aiden allowed himself a small grin and then settled in the rigging. He felt Joe Willie haul on the bull rope, and when he flexed his fingers the pressure in his palm was heavy and with his free hand he tugged on the top of the glove, slipping any wrinkles flat, the rope imprinting itself into his hand. He flexed again and nodded. When Joe Willie’s shadow cleared his field of vision he saw nothing but the bull, the ridge of horn across its head like a long, flat fist. He stared at it. Hard. As he did he drew himself forward, straighter in the rigging, putting himself deep in the pocket and feeling the cleft of shoulder bone with his pelvis, thighs and knees. He slowly raised his free hand up and away, curving his spine and pressing his groin tight to the wrap of the rope. When he felt positioned he scrunched the helmet low on his head so that the edge of it was like an eyebrow, then raised the hand back up clear of the top rail.

  He nodded sharply, and Lionel pulled the chute open.

  The pocket flattened into a run and he spurred the bull out hard into the corral. It launched itself into a wild series of running kicks, high, explosive, the back end of it almost perpendicular to the ground so that when he arched his back into it Aiden lost contact with the horizon. But he held the pocket. The bull spun first left then right in a dazzling change of direction that Aiden felt coming with his knee. It bucked, all four hooves clearing the ground, the impact jarring him, driving his head back into the fat roll of padding, the strain at the shoulder of his wrap hand immense, the weight like pulling up a piano on a rope. The percussive clank of the cowbell filled his ears. The bull gyrated wildly, kicking its back legs and twisting its hindquarters right, left, right, left, and Aiden felt the whip of it on his neck muscles, the helmet slipping down partly over his eyes. There was a slip in the wrap and he squeezed his rope hand tighter, feeling the burn along the cords of his forearm and wrist, the bull kicking out and into another wild spin to the left, and he heard Joe Willie yell, “Time!”

  The pickup riders appeared suddenly, and Aiden reached out with his free arm, snaring the rider’s shoulders and leaning himself out and away from the rigging. He felt himself separate from the bull, and the clanking of the cowbell ceased as the clank belt tumbled to the dirt. Aiden started to run in mid-air as the pickup rider slowed, so that when his feet hit the ground he ran easily, catching his balance with a few strides and jogging to a stop in the middle of the corral. The Wolfchilds were all running toward him, even Joe Willie clumping along at full speed. They swept him up in a full embrace and Aiden lost himself in the hard squeeze of men, the smell of them rich and warm with tobacco, sweat and leather, the hardness of their muscles comforting in their taut joy, and they leaped about yelling in triumph and when they finally let him go he looked at them, their faces shining with a glow in the eyes a part of him knew as respect. Joe Willie stood nodding, tight-lipped, proudly, and he stepped aside to allow Claire to approach him.

  His mother was crying. He reached out to her and she fell against his chest, squeezing him tighter than he could ever have imagined her small body held the strength for.

  “It’s okay,” he said, combing her hair with his ungloved hand. “I’m all right.”

  “I know,” she said. “That’s why I’m crying.”

  When Joe Willie stepped forward to them Aiden looked at him a moment then took his hand from his mother’s head and held his arm out to him. Joe Willie put his arms around the two of them and they stood together in the middle of the arena and let the feel of it touch them.

  “Look at this,” Joe Willie said.

  “What?” Lionel asked.

  The truck was draped with a tarpaulin, and in the shadow of the evening it resembled a sweat lodge. Lionel couldn’t shake the image of it even as Joe Willie lifted the edge of the tarp from the front end and a flare of sunset caught the new chrome bumper. As he eased it up over the grillework the old man raised a hand to his chin in admiration. The metal on the grille was chromed, and he watched as Joe Willie skimmed the tarp back, revealing more of the front end of her. When he’d gotten to the hood he folded the tarp along it and stepped back for the old man to see. “Come look now,” he said.

  Lionel stepped forward. The hood was a deep metallic blue, venturing close to purple but holding itself to blue so that you almost could feel its energy, its wish to linger there, to remain, to not fade or alter, like the line of the sky rich with encroaching darkness. He saw his reflection in the chrome and paint, elongated, so that the fingers he held out to touch her were spindly and long like vines. The metal skin of her was cool, and he closed his eyes as the nub of his fingers grazed her surface. The dog sniffed eagerly about the edge of the tarpaulin, curious at the sharp smell of epoxy and new paint. In the dying light, the chrome took on the orange of the setting sun, and Joe Willie lit the old hurricane lamps while the old man stood silently looking at the hood of her. As the sun lowered even further the shed took on an antiquated light, the rustic warmth of a barn, a stable, a work shed where pioneers, settlers, ranchers laboured, the fruits of their efforts carried within them, borne into everything they touched—a simple, elegant light. Joe Willie put a hand on his shoulder and his grandfather grinned at him and covered it with his own, patting it gently. Then Lionel stepped closer to the truck and placed his palm on the words curled across the nose of her in unobtrusive burnt-orange script. He traced the edges of the letters with one finger.

  “Dream Wheels,” he said.

  “Yeah. Look at the rest of her.”

  He lifted the edge of the tarp and began to pull it back. They could see the dark blue of it, shiny in the light. He walked toward the cab and pulled the tarp along behind him. It slid up over the cab and dropped along the box, gradually revealing the back end of her, the new tires suddenly squat and firm beneath her, resplendent with flashy aluminum rims. She sat low on the tires, closer to the ground than before, and the tires themselves were wider and Lionel could see how the wheel wells had been scooped out to allow them to fit, the fenders bubbled out impressively. There were lacquered stakes along the length of the box, three high, the thick, round heads of bolts lending it a solidity that spoke of the times it had come from, a craftsman’s time, a time when hands fashioned everything, made them firm, strong, able.

  “Birch,” Joe Willie said, laying a hand on one of the stakes. “Like a talking stick. Like the Teaching Scrolls of the Ojibway.”

  He opened the door to the cab and they stepped forward to peer inside. He hadn’t changed anything, but it had all been retooled, refinished so that the seats were plump and full, the dashboard showed all the original gauges in clear, glossy metal and glass. The upholstering was repadded and polished. “Still got all the scars,” he said. He looked at Lionel and smiled. “Scars and breaks make us what we are. Give us character. Make us unique. Make us beautiful. She taught me that.”

  They moved from inspecting the cab to look at the new front end. The fender skirts were flared some to accommodate the matching tires to the back. They rose in a sweeping line upwards then downwards to the bulge of the headlamps. As they walked along they could feel the swell of her, the flow created by the chopping, the trimming, and the truck felt even more and more like it wanted to roar along a highway, like it would rear at any moment on its back wheels. Each of them lay a hand on the lacquered metal and felt its cool promise.

  “The sum of us,” Joe Willie said and looked at his grandfather. “No matter where we come from, the stories we carry are the sum of us. That’s what Grandma said. I lost that for a while. Lost that tie to tradition. Figured the line ended with See Four. But you know what I learned?”

  “What?” Lionel asked quietly.

  “I learned that tradition is like the old girl he
re. She’s got a new heart and a new body but she still carries the stories. She can’t help but do that because we lived in her, all of us, she’s got the juice of our living all over her, in every crease and dent and scar. Our story. Don’t matter that she looks different now. Don’t matter that it’s a different world. Hell, it don’t even matter that I’m different now. Because it’s still the same story. Our story.

  “I thought I had to protect her, keep her the same, the way she always was. I thought that if I changed her I’d lose her somehow. Lose me. Lose me even more than I felt like I had after See Four. But the strange thing is, the change let me keep her. The alteration let me reclaim her, let me reclaim myself, my story, add it to her like a coat of new paint and chrome. Strange, huh?”

  “Not so strange,” Lionel said. “Your mother and grandmother knew all along.”

  Joe Willie nodded. “They would,” he said.

  He handed Lionel the keys. They were held in a small replica of a rodeo buckle. “You told me that she would take me wherever I wanted to go.”

  “And where is that?” Lionel asked.

  “Here,” he said.

  They held each other in the antique light of the lamps. They held each other and breathed deep, slow breaths, patting each other between the shoulder blades and rocking on the balls of their feet, their faces pulled tight. When they separated they looked at each other a moment, then turned to look at the old girl again.

  “We need to show the others now,” Lionel said. “And we got a bull rider to train.”

  “Amen to that,” Joe Willie said.

  the Old Ones say that the path of a true human being is a Red Road. It’s a blood colour. Like blood it flows out of our histories, bearing within it the codes and secrets that shape us, invisible urgings and desires spawned in generations past. Because of that it is a difficult path and only the most courageous and purest of heart have the humility to walk it. It takes great strength, warrior strength, to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing, to wield the power of choice like a lance and probe the way forward to the fullest expression of who you were created to be. To walk the Red Road asks the utmost of us, and there are few who choose it. Those that do are rewarded in the end, they say. They come back as Animals. They return as pure spirits born without question, arriving here knowing wholly and completely who they are. They are spared the agony of the search.

  Joe Willie stood next to the chute and pondered that old teaching. He wondered who the bull might have been in a previous life, what sort of questions he might have struggled to answer, what battles he fought, what troubles rocked his soul. He was a great beast. Probably the biggest bull Joe Willie had ever seen, and over the course of a life in rodeo he’d seen a great many. Tall at the shoulder, muscles in sheets like armour, head as broad as a talus boulder, and the hard nub of horns bunched liked petrified wood at the sides of its head giving it an ancient, brooding look that was magnified by the deep, dull pools of its eyes. The great bull shivered. Joe Willie recalled the feel of that against his thighs. “Hello, old friend,” he said. “Remember me?”

  Behind him he could hear the sounds of the arena. Somewhere in that garbled sea of voices Aiden went through the ritual of preparation. The stock could feel the coming contest, and there was an agitated energy in the chutes and pens. The cowboys had shifted from the garrulous babble of taunt and tease downward into a sombre, reflective half silence punctuated only by necessary speech, the terse language of readiness. The bull sensed it and clomped its heavy feet in the dirt.

  “You do remember, don’t you?” Joe Willie said to it, leaning his face close to the rails. “Well, I sure remember you. I surely do.”

  He rubbed his shoulder, letting the good hand squeeze and massage the ruined joint. The bull cast a look at him out of the corner of its eye. It was a baleful look, the threat of it cool, measured, tempered with the knowledge of power. Joe Willie nodded. He put a hand through the rails and touched the bull’s flank. He heard its voice, low and rumbling, and when it cracked the horns against the sides of the chute, Joe Willie smiled and slapped it firmly, then patted it three or four times. “You’re still a big cuss,” he said. “Still a handful of mean. Still the best damn bull I ever rode. Or almost rode.”

  The P.A. was announcing the final qualifying ride. There was a stir of activity everywhere as people headed for their seats, and the cowboys, rope men, bull fighters, pickup men and clowns made their final adjustments to gear and attire.

  Joe Willie stepped back and assessed the bull. He nodded. “Damn,” he said. “I’d give anything for another go. You asked the best of me and I gave it. I’ll never forget that.”

  He looked up from the bull and off into the background. The arena was lit in the hard glare of spectacle, and he realized how much he’d missed it, how much he’d carried it around within him all that time and how he’d mistaken the weight for loss. He grinned at the folly pain caused him.

  “You ready, boy?”

  Lionel and Birch were standing behind him.

  “Aiden’s about ready,” Birch said.

  “Just renewing acquaintances,” Joe Willie said. “I think I make him nervous.”

  Lionel laughed. “I imagine. He tell you that himself, did he?”

  “Not in so many words.”

  “He’s a big cuss,” Birch said. “Aiden’s got his hands full.”

  Joe Willie turned and looked back at the bull in the chute. It stood there proud and unquestioning, readying itself for the contest it could sense coming, its nostrils flared at the smell of the primal call in the air, the challenge. Joe Willie smelled it too. As he turned to walk with his father and grandfather he could swear the bull looked like a bear in the periphery of his vision.

  Aiden perched on the top rail and watched the action in the arena. There was always such excitement and energy in the air that he swore it rubbed against his skin. When he arched his back and stretched he could feel it press against his muscles, compress nerve and sinew so that the feeling of readiness was a coming together, a gathering, a mélange of light, sound, colour, smell and the faintly metallic taste of dust in the teeth. Another cowboy plumed into the dirt. The crowd groaned and the applause lapped around the fallen rider like surf and bore him up onto his feet again. He lifted his hat and waved his appreciation. In the background the bull fighters chased the bull off into the exit chute and there was a brief respite of calm in the infield. He loved that moment, that lull, that break in the sheer exuberance everyone came together in and that made rodeo less a true spectacle than a communal joy. The let-up of energy punctuated all of it, and he breathed it in, filled his lungs with it and felt it enter his blood, enliven and become him.

  He’d been bucked off his share in his rookie year. There’d been a dry spell of a month and a half when he couldn’t buy eight seconds, and if not for Joe Willie he might have given it up, surrendered to the shame of slapping the dust from his chaps and hobbling to the rail again. But there was no quit in Joe Willie. Together they’d go over the tapes of the rides and Joe Willie was able to give him a vision of it he was incapable of discerning for himself. He played them over and over in his mind and he sharpened his intuition, his feel of the bull. Soon, he’d begun to appear in the money rounds and he had a handful of buckles now. The cash wasn’t great, it wasn’t a living, not yet anyway. But the payoff was the indisputable feeling of rightness he carried slung across his shoulders with his rigging. He jumped off the rail and walked over to the chute area.

  He’d drawn See Four. When they told him, he could only stand and look at Joe Willie, who nodded grimly, squeezing his hands together. Now he could see them shunting the great bull into the chute, and the size of him was shocking. Aiden had seen him before but he’d never had to look at him as a challenger. That perspective changed everything. He went over his gear one last time, checking the bull rope especially for tackiness and grip, retying the thongs around his boots and tightening the Kevlar vest around his ribs. Then he made
his way to the chute, where Lionel would act as rope man and Birch and Joe Willie would be in the chute with him.

  “Ready?” Joe Willie asked.

  “Guess.”

  “No time to guess. This is a mean mother.”

  “You should know. Anything you wanna tell me?”

  Joe Willie turned to look at See Four. “He kicks hard. He’ll go high and kick out and you’re gonna feel like you’ll backflip into the crowd. When he does that you push hard into the pocket with everything you got because when he lands he’ll spin into your latch hand. It’ll be fast so you gotta be square when he lands because he’ll spin away from it just as fast. Got that?”

  “Yeah,” Aiden said. “Anything else?”

  “Yeah. This sumbitch only been rode three times. But you don’t think about that. It takes the best to beat him and you gotta give him your best. All of it. Right now. No holding back. If you do that you’re his equal. But it takes everything.”

  Aiden looked at the bull in the chute. See Four stood there quietly, and Aiden could see him breathing, could hear the great bellows of his lungs hauling air. “Did you?” he asked. “Did you give him everything you had.”

  Joe Willie looked up into the arena and scanned the crowd. He put his hands on his hips and turned to face Aiden. “I still am,” he said.

  The great bull stamped his feet in the dirt. The men at the top of the chute were moving deliberately now, their voices carrying that sharp edge of nerves. The sound of the arena was like a giant waterfall, the voices of all the men beings gurgling over top of each other so that the bull became agitated, anxious, wanting this over with and yearning for the quiet and the shadow of the stock pens. There was a slithering along his flank as one of the men attached the heavy rope bearing the noisemaker, and another at his shoulder when the thick rope scratched his hide and was pulled tighter and tighter around his girth. Then the feet stepping cautiously down on each side. This would be the young one, the one who stared fixedly when the bull had entered the chute. As the cowboy eased himself down onto his back the bull stepped from side to side, trying to press the man’s legs against the rails hard enough to convince him to climb off. There was a short clamour of voices and the man on his back scrambled up quickly but settled back down again once the bull ceased rocking. The bull bawled and rattled the sides of the chute with his horns. He could hear the crowd in the arena grow excited and he rattled the chute again in excitement. The men above him shouted quickly at each other and the one on his back rocked into position. The bull settled.