Dream Wheels (13 page)

“That your last word?”

He walked to the concrete ledge that served as a seat around the perimeter of the cell, sat and folded his hands and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and stared at the floor. Golec watched him for a moment, then walked out of the range. He went to the security office and punched up the camera in Aiden’s cell. The kid was sitting in the same position, and as Golec watched he never made another move, not for the longest time, and when he did it was to lace his fingers together and push his arms slowly above his head and twist his trunk at the waist one way and then the other before dropping his arms to his side and slowly bringing his hands clenched into fists together in front of his chest, pressing them hard into
each other. There was a scowl on his face, deep and hard and bitter, and the grained texture of the video gave him the visage of a much older, much more hardened man. Then he cradled his hands in his lap, breathed deep and sat and waited. Patiently as a viper. Golec felt himself shiver.

It didn’t surprise him. There was a consistency to his family that he’d leaned on his entire life, and when they came to announce that they would take him home and care for him he only nodded. There was an ache in him that lay beyond the throbbing shoulder and the dull pain in his leg. It was like a voice that hailed him, and the Indian in him recognized it as the call of the land, and the yearning felt miraculous and displacing as a lost thing that suddenly appears at your feet, stunning in the remembrance of its properties. Through the morphine he felt the chopper lift off, and the sensation of defying gravity, of being pushed upward, reminded him of the bull, and he clenched his teeth and squeezed the rail of the gurney hard with his good hand. As the chopper began its level flight he let himself imagine himself as an eagle soaring across the landscape, and the drug let him envision the changes in the land, and in his mind he saw the buildings relent to the flow of open territories so that eventually he calmed and the drug took him.

As they transferred him to an ambulance he turned his head and he could see townspeople watching and a few waved to him. He kept his eyes on them and he could see them shake their heads and rub their jaws, their lips pursed and a look of sadness on their faces. Beside him his mother walked purposefully, her head up, and the wind blew her long, straight hair around so that she assumed the look of a chieftain returning with her wounded. She took a lot of the looks away and he was grateful for that. He’d always been awed by his
mother as others were, but he knew the strength of her, the grit of her, the sand that gave her beauty power, and he’d always wondered at its depth. Now, she walked proudly, determined to show her ability to transcend even this, and he craved a sliver of that staunch fortitude. She smiled at him when they slid him up into the ambulance.

“See you there,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“Welcome home.”

“Not there yet.”

“You will be.”

Joe Willie got the feeling there was more to her words.

Once they’d arrived, he was introduced to Cheryl, his new physiotherapist, and they settled him into the spare room at the back of the main floor. From there he could see the hump of the mountains above the pastureland, the hazy grey-blue of them like a bruise he felt in the middle of him. He ached to ride them, to feel the balm and salve of their chill winds, the juniper, sage and pine sharp in his nose, and the trees in their thickness closing off the world behind his back, sealing him and the horse into a private chamber where only languid thought and a loose, ground-eating walk existed, carrying them deeper, higher, farther away from anything less. He craved it like a drug and he slapped a hand on the mattress, feeling the familiar air of home around him and angered at the immobility that bound him away from it.

When they left him he focused on the door frame, stared at it hard. Beyond it his focus was drowned in the opaque shadow of the hallway. The world, his room, ended there, and his world, the one he’d known forever, lay just beyond it, and he felt the imprisoning power of that shadow, felt taunted by it, and he closed his eyes and tried to push it down.

And saw the bear.

It rolled its head toward him from the edge of the pasture beyond his window. In the hard black pebbles of its eyes he felt drawn, called beyond the bed and the room. The bear ambled forward a few steps, the roll of its shoulders accentuating its strength, then it turned and looked at him again. He looked straight into the eyes. He felt known then, understood, and when the bear walked away toward the mountains he wanted to call to it, hail it, bring it closer to him one more time. But it walked on, and eventually the hard black dot of it melted into the trees at the foot of the climb and disappeared.

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.”

“What 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.